Climate of fear

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Wole Soyinka (2008)

Climate of fear. Political Essays is a book by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka . The collection of five essays was first published in English in 2004. In them, Soyinka explains his evidence that there is a pattern according to which fear- ridden regimes of rulers and self-proclaimed fighters are on the rise in different countries. He takes the view that political causes must be identified and eliminated in “a healing process” on the basis of an ethical will.

The 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature book is based on five lectures entitled A changing mask of fear that were originally written for public readings in London, Bristol, Leeds and Atlanta. They were broadcast as The Reith Lectures 2004 between March 10 and May 8, 2004 on BBC Radio 4 .

content

Soyinka expresses his fears of an evolving pattern whereby fear is increasingly being used to rule different countries. In his presentation he links concrete events from many years and many countries, some of which he was present, and comments on them, not least under the impression of the events of September 11, 2001 . In occasional historical retrospectives, for example to 1968 in Paris and Western Europe, Soyinka makes distant references to the anarchist actions of those “students and all conceivable groups of disappointed young people” who “discovered Marx's legal analysis for themselves: the law was not neutral, but rather one Instrument to protect the ruling classes ”(p. 83).

In the foreword to King Basayev and the massacre of the innocent in September 2004, Soyinka promptly comments on the massacre of school children during the hostage-taking of Beslan in Chechnya, which was organized by Shamil Salmanovich Basayev . Armed adults invaded the village for the benefit of children and stole water and food from them. Hundreds of children were "stripped of their dignity and deeply affected in their vulnerability" (p. 9). Soyinka calls on people of the Islamic faith community to condemn the Beslan atrocity "as a distortion of the moral compass of Islam" and to take the lead to bring Basayev to justice (p. 11).

The beginning of the chapter A Constantly Changing Mask of Fear deals with the execution of the Nigerian writer and eco-activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other civil rights activists in Nigeria in 1995 . Here Soyinka first speaks about art and in this context also speaks of violence in many other countries. Then he expands his question from 20 years ago of how creativity can survive under the arbitrary exercise of power by observing: "Today the community of those who live in fear has become much larger and less selective" (p. 17). One can probably easily agree on symptoms of anxiety: one feels a loss of the usual freedom of will, feels painfully restricted in one's feeling of freedom, becomes less impulsive and is more cautious (p. 17). In an interim conclusion, Soyinka states that "the attack on human dignity is one of the most important goals in the haunted by fear, a prelude to domination of the mind and the triumph of power" (p. 21).

In the lecture On Power and Freedom , Soyinka asks what power actually is. It works in such a way that fear of control increases. But: "It is the free expression of will to which we hold so desperately that defines our perfection as social beings" (pp. 67-68). Using Algeria as an example , Soyinka shows how the norms of a civilized society fall by the wayside when self-righteousness takes the place of law, for example because state and quasi-state are fighting each other (pp. 50–51). Paradoxically, power is the beginning of fear. Older societies have developed scenarios that serve to trivialize power against neurotic overconfidence. He had experimented with it as a playwright. Soyinka uses the example of Jean Genet's play The Balcony (1957) to describe his own modernized summary of how formal power is ritualized (p. 71).

The chapter A rhetoric that binds and blinds , namely a political and a religious one, deals with two analytical perspectives on public rhetoric . According to Soyinka, politics and religion are often only two sides of the same coin, which is also shown in the fact that the political side has pious features and the religious side mimes holy inviolability when it "extends its sphere of activity to the political and the profane" (p . 73). Soyinka weighs the effect of forms of conversation such as monologues and dialogues using the example of Ayatollah Khomeini and Mohammad Khatami . Rhetorical hysteria is almost certainly a “product of one-sided communication” (p. 76). This state of affairs occasionally begins with “small pinpricks intended to annoy a self-satisfied society and perhaps strengthen a collective feeling of dissent” (p. 170). Soyinka refers to the youth uprising in Paris in May 1968 , which was "another notable expression of the passionate pursuit of change" and which Soyinka sees as "a serious challenge to the status quo" (p. 79). Even today there is a "passionate urge to base one's actions on ideological self-righteousness", which manifests itself "every day in isolated anarchist acts against society as well as in ideologically based wars around the globe" (p. 78). Soyinka briefly deals with child soldiers in connection with the Ugandan general Alice Lakwena , who founded the Holy Spirit Movement in 1986 . In the last section of the chapter, Soyinka emphasizes that dialogue is an opportunity to mitigate the current climate of fear (p. 95) and he hopes that with Khatami as President in Iran, “the millions of praise for the greatness of God will move away from the crude, ultra-nationalist politics of the Sieg-Heil-Grölens loosens "(p. 102).

Using an example from Northern Ireland, Soyinka in The Pursuit of Dignity explores the question of why the term dignity "has been enshrined in so many documents in all cultures and civilizations and across all political upheavals" (p. 104). The pursuit of human dignity seems to have turned out to be a trigger for wars and other acts of violence in itself or in others. Soyinka explains this on the basis of a conversation he had with the Cuban ambassador to Nigeria, in which he endeavored to look for a way of how the Cuban government could open a dialogue to dissolve the economic sanctions on the part of the USA, on the condition that not to give up one's own dignity. Dignity, says Soyinka, is “quite simply a different face of freedom and thus the exact opposite of power and oppression” (p. 118).

Soyinka tries to explain where fanatical spirit comes from in “I'm right and you're dead!” . He sees in humans a natural tendency to formulate alternative concepts or variants. It becomes almost impossible to develop this predisposition if, as in the case of the “theocratic twin of ideology” (p. 141), secret spaces of revelation are the places from which validity claims are derived instead of material conditions. Fear often disguises itself as godly piety, and curiosity falls victim to this fear (p. 141). In the following, Soyinka et al. a. Critical position on the behavior of the Bush administration after the events of September 11, 2001 and also asks how things are going with other faiths, "which are routinely marginalized in the division of the globe under the thumb of two blood-smeared faith giants" (p. 149). Soyinka puts her own poem about Taslima Nasrin at the end of his fifth lecture: "She wrote of an equalizing God, androgynous and two-handed, equally skilled with the left and the right" (p. 157).

In the contribution Tolerance - the teaching of Orisha , which follows the five lectures instead of an afterword, Soyinka describes how the relationship between Christian and Muslim families in the place of his origin has changed over the past hundred years. He sees it as "deeply encouraging" that "life-threatening cracks have opened up" (p. 159). One no longer celebrates together at religious festivals as was taken for granted in his youth. Finally, Soyinka asks what indigenous religions say when a theocratic mandate is imposed on society or community. Here he uses the Yoruba , his culture of origin, to describe how a child is treated during and after birth: “The world of the Yoruba abhors any hegemonic attitude” (p. 165).

reception

MA Orthofer summarizes in Complete Review that a climate of fear is known to all those who have lived in totalitarian regimes and that this affects a large part of the population of the world. Today, however, it is quasi-states that instill the greatest fear. Soyinka takes a perspective in which he includes individual actions and reactions, including from the United States, Nigeria and Israel. From Soyinka's point of view, national interests are only one factor among many. He insists that it is important to look at the situation with a wider horizon. Even if Soyinka's arguments ultimately remain relatively general, this perspective is a useful stimulus to open their eyes, especially for readers who have only viewed the events of September 11, 2001 from a national perspective, says Orthofer.

In her review of the volume, Gaby Mayr notes that there is a lack of analytical sharpness and that religiously motivated violence is not sufficiently discussed. Soyinka uses a term of violence that appears to her to be stretched too arbitrarily, for example in that he also finds a tax assessment worth mentioning, which he regards as “power in its most banal form”. Soyinka also occasionally gets too carried away by his own words, according to the reviewer, and his unfamiliar perspectives on political events sometimes seem as if the author has not done enough research.

Soyinka works in Climate of Fear with well-founded arguments, clear contextualization and a sharp mind, stated Alex Heminsley in The Observer in August 2004.

expenditure

  • In English: The climate of fear. The Reith lectures 2004. Profile Press, London, 2004, ISBN 1-86197-783-2 , US edition: Climate of fear. The quest for dignity in a dehumanized world. Random House Trade Paperbacks, New York, 2005, ISBN 0-8129-7424-7
    • In German: Climate of Fear. Political essays. Translated from English by Gerd Meuer. 172 S., Ammann, Zurich, 2005, ISBN 3-250-30017-9
    • In Italian: Clima di paura , trad.di Andrea Bajani e Mariapaola Pierini, Codice, Torino, 2005, ISBN 88-7578-017-X

The German language edition 2005 consists of the following parts:

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Climate of Fear. Political essays. Translated from English by Gerd Meuer. 172 S., Ammann, Zurich, 2005, ISBN 3-250-30017-9 , p. 10, p. 4. Additional page numbers are given directly in the article text.
  2. ↑ a b M. A. Orthofer, Climate of Fear by Wole Soyinka . complete-review.com , last accessed December 6, 2013.
  3. ↑ Review note at Perlentaucher.de on a review by Gaby Mayr in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of July 11, 2005. Last accessed on October 30, 2013.