AMY GOODMAN: We return now to Columbia University institute professor Edward Said speaking this week on the silver anniversary of the publication of his classic work Orientalism. He is internationally renowned writer and scholar, noted as one of the foremost intellectuals on the Middle East and colonialism. Professor Edward Said.

EDWARD SAID: … experts on the Arab Islamic world who helped the American hawks to think about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and centuries-old Islamic decline which only American power could reverse. Today bookstores in the United States are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists — some of them my students — pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples over there who have been such a terrible thorn in our flesh. Accompanying such warmongering expertise have been the omnipresent CNNs and Foxes of this world, plus myriad numbers of evangelical and right-wing radio hosts, plus innumerable tabloids and even middle-brow journals, all of them recycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations so as to stir up “America” against the foreign devil.

Even with all its terrible failings and its appalling dictator (who was partly created by U.S. policy two decades ago), were Iraq to have been the world’s largest exporter of bananas or oranges, surely there would have been no war, no hysteria over mysteriously vanished weapons of mass destruction, no transporting of an enormous army, navy and air force 7,000 miles away to destroy a country scarcely known even to the educated America, all in the name of “freedom.” Without a well-organized sense that those people over there were not like “us” and didn’t appreciate “our” values — the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma as I describe its creation and circulation in this book — there would have been no war.

So from the very same directorate of paid professional scholars enlisted by the Dutch conquerors of Malaysia and Indonesia, the British armies of India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and West Africa, the French armies of Indochina and North Africa, came the American advisers to the Pentagon and the White House, using the same clichés, the same stereotypes, the same justifications for power and violence (after all, runs the chorus, power is the only language they understand) in this case as in the earlier ones. Every — as a student of empire can verify to you, that every single empire, in its official discourse, has said that it is not like all the others — “we’re different” — that its circumstances are special — “we’re not like England, we’re not like France, we’re not like Arabs, we’re not like the Mongols” — and everyone has said that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only — only — as a last resort. And, sadder still, there is always a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if — I mean, you know, as if they’re talking about unicorns — this language of benign or altruistic empires, as if one should not trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and the death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice

One specifically American contribution to the discourse of empire is the specialized jargon of policy expertise. You don’t need Arabic or Persian or even French to pontificate about how the democracy domino effect is just what the Arab world needs. Combative and woefully ignorant policy experts whose world experience is limited to the Beltway grind out books on “terrorism” and liberalism, or about Islamic fundamentalism and American foreign policy, or about even the end of history, all of it vying for attention and influence quite without regard for truthfulness or reflection or real knowledge. What matters is how efficient and resourceful it sounds, and who might go for it, as it were. The worst aspect of this essentializing stuff is that — this is, for me, the biggest crim — is that human suffering in all its density and pain is spirited away. Memory and with it the historical past are effaced as in the common, dismissively contemptuous American phrase, “You’re history.”

Twenty-five years after my book’s publication, Orientalism once again raises the question of whether modern imperialism ever ended, or whether it has continued in the Orient since Napoleon’s entry into Egypt two centuries ago. Arabs and Muslims have been told that victimology and dwelling on the depredations of empire is only a way of evading responsibility in the present. You have failed, you have gone wrong, says the modem Orientalist. And you can’t blame the empire. You did it. This, of course, is also V.S. Naipaul’s contribution to literature, that the victims of empire wail on while their country goes to the dogs. But what a shallow calculation of the imperial intrusion that is, how summarily it scants the immense distortion introduced by the empire into the lives of “lesser” peoples and “subject races” generation after generation, how little it wishes to face the long succession of years through which empire continues to work its way in the lives, say, of Palestinians or Congolese or Algerians or Iraqis. We allow, justly, that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: Why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do? Think of the line that starts with Napoleon, continues with the rise of Oriental studies and the takeover of North Africa, and goes on in similar undertakings in Vietnam, in Egypt, in Palestine and, during the entire 20th century, in the struggle over oil and strategic control in the Gulf, in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan. Then think contrapuntally of the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, through the short period of liberal independence, then the era of military coups, of insurgency, civil war, religious fanaticism, irrational struggle and uncompromising brutality against the latest bunch of “natives.” Each of these phases and eras produces its own distorted knowledge of the other, each its own reductive images, its own disputatious polemics.

My idea in Orientalism was to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprisons us in labels and antagonistic debate whose goal is collective passion rather than understanding and intellectual exchange. I have called what I try to do “humanism,” a word I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated postmodern critics. By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake’s mind-forg’d manacles so as to be able to use one’s mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding and genuine disclosure. Moreover, humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking, therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist.

Second, humanism is centered upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority. Texts have to be read as texts that were produced and live on in the historical realm in all sorts of what I have called worldly ways. But this by no means excludes power, since on the contrary what I’ve tried to show in this book have been the insinuations, the imbrications of power into even the most recondite of studies.

And last, and most important, humanism is the only and, I would go so far as saying, the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history. We are today abetted by the enormously encouraging field of cyberspace, open to all users in ways undreamt of by earlier generations either of tyrants or of orthodoxies. The worldwide protests before the war began in Iraq would not have been possible were it not for the existence of alternative communities all across the world, energized by alternative information, and keenly aware of the environmental, human rights and libertarian impulses that bind us together in this tiny planet. The human, and humanistic, desire for enlightenment and emancipation is not easily deferred, despite the strength of the opposition to it that comes from the Rumsfelds, the bin Ladens, the Sharons and Bushes of this world. I would like to believe that my book Orientalism has had a small place in the long and often interrupted road to human freedom. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Edward Said, speaking this week in New York on the silver anniversary of his book Orientalism.

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