AMY GOODMAN: We end today’s program with professor Edward Said. He’s a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. He spoke a few nights ago during a day-long celebration of his work Orientalism. He is also author of Culture and Imperialism. We’re going to play the extended speech tomorrow, but now an excerpt. Professor Edward Said.

EDWARD SAID: What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that “we” might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow. It’s quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples could be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar. But this has often happened with the “Orient” — that semi-mythical construct, which, since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the late 18th century, has been made and remade countless times by power acting through an expedient form of knowledge to assert that this is the Orient’s nature, and we must deal with it accordingly. In the process, the uncountable sediments of history, that include innumerable narratives and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences and cultures, all these are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap along with the treasures that have been ground into meaningless fragments that were taken out of Baghdad’s libraries and museums. My argument is that if history is made by men and women, it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that “our” East, “our” Orient becomes “ours” to possess and direct.

I should say again, as I do many times in the book, that I have no “real” Orient to argue for. I do, however, have a very high regard for the powers and gifts of the peoples of that region to struggle on for their vision of what they are and want to be. There has been so massively and calculatedly aggressive an attack on the contemporary societies of the Arab and Muslim world for their backwardness, lack of democracy and abrogation of human and women’s rights that we simply forget in the process that such notions as modernity, enlightenment and democracy are by no means simple and agreed-upon concepts that one either does or does not find, like Easter eggs in the living room. The breathtaking insouciance of jejune publicists who speak in the name of foreign policy and who have no live notion — or any knowledge at all — of the language of what real people actually speak has fabricated an arid landscape ready for American power to construct there an ersatz model of free market “democracy,” without even a trace of doubt that such projects don’t exist, really, outside of Swift’s Academy of Lagado.

What I do argue also is that there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis, as in Auerbach’s case, for their own sakes, and, on the other hand, there’s knowledge — if that’s what it is — that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation, belligerency and outright war. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of coexistence and humanistic enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external dominion.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Edward Said, speaking several nights ago at a celebration of his book Orientalism. Professor Said teaches comparative literature, is a university professor at Columbia University. We will be playing the extended speech tomorrow on Democracy Now! For today, special thanks to Joe Friendly.

If you’d like to get a video or audio cassette copy of today’s program, you can call 1-800-881-2359. That’s one 800-881-2359. Our website is democracynow.org; our email address, mail@democracynow.org. Democracy Now! is produced by Kris Abrams, Mike Burke, Angie Karran, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Ana Nogueira, Elizabeth Press, with help from Noah Reibel and Vilka Tzouras. Special thanks to Emily Kunstler and Julia Phillips today. Mike Di Filippo is our engineer, with help from Rich Kim. Again, if you’d like to get a copy of today’s show, 1-800-881-2359. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.