A Martial People?

When I was born in 1981, my country was at war with Iran, and bombed by Israel. When I was 10, I remember my father constantly occupying the phone, while the television displayed greenish night-vision pictures of Baghdad showered by a firework of cruise missiles. As throughout my lifetime, today my country is at war. Considering the reasons for this, our mess, the media lend an easy explanation. Our condition is somehow innate.

Especially popular western media have a tendency to depict the conflicts of the Arab world as primordial, essentially ‘tribal’ or ‘sectarian’, to use the expression of the day. And increasingly we, the Arabs, seem to agree. Our television sets are sources of great comfort, to us. We turn to them to create artificial order, whenever chaos has visited our doorsteps. Currently Iraq occupies the prime-position in this bloody spectacle of chaos, and we increasingly believe the representations that are shown to us.

Having lived in Syria and Lebanon, our neighbors say, that Iraqis have some kind of warring sentiment, a “lingering passion that has to be satisfied with the blood of our enemies”, as a Syrian friend of mine once put it, talking about the Iraqi tradition of killing our presidents.

It is true that we are a people that hail their warriors and glorify their battles, but so does the rest of the world. The obscene picture of a general parading his medals, won for acts of violence against fellow human beings, can be seen from Baghdad to Berlin, from Warsaw to Washington.

What sets us apart as Arabs, and as Iraqis especially, is the fact that we’re actively and passively essentializing the violent aspects of our culture. In doing so, we aid the depiction of our conflicts as being devoid of history, somehow hanging in a socio-economic vacuum, as perpetual, endless cycles of violence. We are co-directors in the creation of our own self-fulfilling prophecies, historical prisons that don’t allow us to escape.

How important the self-image of a people and its depiction to the outer world can be in the development of a free society, was taught to me by the history of the people that make up another part of my family, that of the German people.

When my grandfather was born in Germany in 1913, his country was at the brink to of the First World War, a conflict that would cost 2000.000 people their lives. When he was 10 years old the Nazi party leaders of the Kampfbund tried their first move to power in the ‘Trinkhallen Putsch’. When he was a young man he went to fight as a soldier on the eastern front of the Second World War. His live and times have been characterized by ongoing conflict, and things would not have looked different if I would depict the lives of any of my ancestors before him.

Thus, German people have in recent history- not unlike most other Europeans at different times - displayed remarkable aggression against ‘enemies’ within and outside of their state. They have quite arguably started, or had a major hand in the start, of the First and Second World War. Yet, despite these minor historical facts, German people today are not known, for their war-mongering tendencies, but for ‘efficiency’, ‘precision’ and their, ‘time-keeping’. These labels are not a mere post-WWII construction, but have long been part of the German stereotype. However post WWII sentiment of renewal, picked them, quite consciously out of the collective psyche. This representation allowed the German nation to reinvent itself as productive, rather than destructive.

Further, Germany was permitted particular historical reasons for it’s wars and not reduced to mere genetics or racial stereotypes, despite its short lived insistence on their importance. Today World war One is being framed as a matter of cause and effect, the so called ‘treaty-alliance system’, while the Second World War was a ‘natural response’ to the countries destitute in the aftermath of the First World War.

It is true that we, the Iraqi people are prone to violence, yet this is not what makes us.
What can be witnessed in present day Iraq is the reaction of an occupied people. A people, that went through the so well known Middle Eastern mix of hyper militarism and extreme nationalism (which itself has not been unknown to Germany). Violence has literally been a major form of governance in Iraq for the past century or so. Despite this we have to remind ourselves of the many positive attributes our culture bears, and have to make them known to the world.

For example until today, I have not met one Iraqi of school age who could not recite dozens of poems. Our poets, like our warriors have started revolutions. In Iraq artist, if painters, writers or filmmakers hold a social prestige, unknown to their European counterparts. Among the Arabs we are still hailed for our levels of higher education.
We are a civilized people, a people that have a history that we can build on. This, however, doesn’t mean that we can rest on the laurels of days gone by, or cry over past glories, but that we have to reclaim our history and recognize today’s continuity with the past.

I hope that someday, in the not too far future, we will say with pride “We are Iraqi, we are passionate about life, we love the arts, are proud of our history and above all have hope for our future”