Today I\at leisure I re-visited Sdr Anwar Ibrahim's lecture at the Shakespeare conference in Brisbane, Australia, and I expanded the quotation of his thoughts to which I'm adding my Comments later as I fleshed out some connections with current issues in NegaraKu. ~~ Desi at 1.00PM, Saturday morn.
"Ucapan saya di Kongres Shakespeare Sedunia VIII Ahad 16 – Jumaat 21 Julai 2006 di Brisbane City Hall, Queensland, Australia
Our answer is that those who hold positions of power also carry a moral responsibility to listen to the people. To interfere with individual freedom is to rob individuals not just of their freedom, but of the right and responsibility they have to reason. No one has a right to take away that liberty, not a single despot and not even a duly constituted legislative majority.
Teks lengkap seterusnya…
Between Tyranny and Freedom: A Brief Voyage with the Bard
Plenary paper by Anwar Ibrahim at the VIII World Shakespeare Congress Sunday 16 – Friday 21 July 2006 at Brisbane City Hall, Queensland, Australia.
Anwar Ibrahim is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Washington DC, and Honorary President of Accountability, London.
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"Ten years ago, I addressed an audience at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. I began with the following lines:
Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight path was lost. Ah, how hard it is to tell what that wood was, wild, rugged, harsh; the very thought of it renews fear! It is so bitter that death is hardly more so.
While I do not intend to sound like an antique drum, I do want to remind ourselves of our inter-connectedness in the face of the forces that threaten to separate us. It is said that throughout its history, the West has defined itself in opposition to the East, in terms of the rational against the irrational, the superior against the inferior, or as Edward Said puts it, the Orient is the West’s great complementary opposite since antiquity. To paraphrase William Hazlitt in his characterization of Leontes, this discourse is “beset with doubts and fears, and entangled more and more in the thorny labyrinth” of mutual distrust and jealousy. We will have more to say about The Winter’s Tale and the overriding theme of tyranny later, but, for now, let us just say that, it is this blinkered view of the world with vociferous advocates on both sides that has led us into mutual suspicion, acrimony and hostility, and threatens to suck us into the quicksand of an even greater clash.
The Divine Comedy to my mind is really about the clash between good and evil, a universal and timeless drama of the human predicament. According to Santayana, the symbolism in The Divine Comedy had been devised for a purpose; “and this purpose, as the Koran, too, declares, had been to show forth the great difference there is in God’s sight between good and evil.” (1) Let me transpose the clash between evil and good onto the struggle between tyranny and freedom as we embark on a brief voyage with the Bard, “the most universal genius that ever lived”, as our guide and companion.
On September 2, 1998, I was sacked from the government and relieved of all executive positions. I have had the occasion to recount the stormy events that followed at a keynote address given last year to the Lawasian Conference held here too, and since brevity is the soul of wit, I will just round up the episode by saying, once again, that:
Midway upon the journey of my life I found myself in a dark wood, where the right way was lost
The ‘dark wood’ I found myself in was none other than the prison cell that would be my abode of solitary confinement for the next six years. Tyranny had been let loose. Freedom was being incarcerated. It might not have been the Gulag Archipelago of Solzhenitzyn’s but there was the same systematic, deeply irrational use of terror against a large section of society: people who supported the cause of reform; and people who just wanted to show that they cared for freedom and justice and that they were prepared to suffer the consequences of fighting tyranny; But much as we opposed, we couldn’t end them. Hamlet had gate crashed into our lives, so that we would have to bear the whips and scorns of time, the insolence of office and the law’s delay. But, as I had said to Nelson Mendela when we met in Johannesburg soon after my release, mine was only a short walk to freedom.
Isaiah Berlin tells us that freedom is essentially the absence of constraints imposed by others. I am free to the degree to which no man interferes with my activity; political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. But viewed behind the walls of incarceration, shorn of philosophical abstraction, freedom takes on a completely different dimension. Thus, freedom is simply the day my lawyer placed on my table my own copy of the Riverside Edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare. This came six months to the day of my incarceration. Before that, only one copy of the Qur’an was allowed which no doubt was rprise for the poor!’
Could thought control be justified on the grounds that freedom of expression can never be absolute? In a civilized society, every individual has the right to express his or her thoughts and beliefs but we would imagine that there has to be some limits to freedom to defame, to incite to hatred one race or ethnic group against another, to blaspheme, or to disseminate falsehood, and so on.
But in reality, we find that there is an even greater likelihood of autocrats and tyrants abusing the constraints on freedom. For example, they will contend that the freedom to criticize the powers that be must also be curtailed because it causes political instability, which in turn may lead to insurrection and disorder. This pretext has been used habitually by petty despots and aspiring autocrats alike, some citing religious sanction for legitimacy. Of late, it is also being used by democracies as legitimate grounds to erode the basic freedoms of the people. In the name of the war on terror, these modern demagogues have no hesitation in suspending civil liberties which are supposed to be the hallmarks of a constitutional democracy. In this regard, it is fashionable to invoke the virtues of traditional values and condemn the blind imitation of Western concepts: Consensus is better than individual freedom. Opinions of the state must prevail over those of the individual because of the need to protect public morals and to maintain peace and harmony. So on and so forth.
Our answer is that those who hold positions of power also carry a moral responsibility to listen to the people. To interfere with individual freedom is to rob individuals not just of their freedom, but of the right and responsibility they have to reason. No one has a right to take away that liberty, not a single despot and not even a duly constituted legislative majority.
According to Aristotle, tyrants acquire power by promising to protect the people and retain power by preventing the rise of any person of exceptional merit, by assassination if necessary. He should employ spies, sow the seeds of discord, and impoverish his subjects while keeping them occupied in great works, as the king of Egypt did in getting the pyramids built. For such a tyrant, freedom of expression is obviously untenable. On the contrary, literary conferences must be banned just as any education likely to produce hostile sentiment. (3) This really looks like “art made tongue-tied by authority”.
In my solitary confinement, I sought solace in prayer and reading the Qur’an. Subject to that, I would agree with Hazlitt that Shakespeare would indeed be enough for us. Apart from going back and forth to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Nehru’s Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, and al-Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error, Shakespeare remained my most intimate companion and chief source of comfort: Hamlet, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale – the list may look predictable, even hackneyed, but only if we see it from the frigid perspective of academia. But in the stoned silence of the night, when you have no one to talk to, Shakespeare’s characters become more than mere dramatis personae. They speak to you and allow you to speak to them.
In Julius Caesar you hear yourself telling Brutus why he should not have made that fatal error in allowing Marc Anthony to address those fickle minded Romans. And then it dawns on you that you yourself might have suffered the same overweening confidence in the goodness of your cause to resist injustice and tyranny. Hazlitt sums up the argument: Tyranny and servility are to be dealt with after their own fashion: otherwise, they will triumph over those who spare them. Reading Macbeth, you tell yourself that the “air-drawn dagger” should be haunting your conspirators, assailing them with ‘the stings of remorse” and “preternatural solicitings.” Usurper, murderer and tyrant, that’s what Macbeth is: but you’re still alive. But it wasn’t for want of trying – don’t forget you were left for dead and the whole world saw your black eye. And now there’s arsenic in your food. In The Tempest, you look around and find yourself surrounded by four walls; what else is there but to take a flight of fancy and start playing the part of Prospero? This one you could definitely relate to. It’s the story about freedom over tyranny, the triumph of light over darkness. It starts with incarceration and ends with freedom. And between the idea and the reality you have to settle for Ariel instead, bending to the tasks at hand, do your time before the time is out. And as the end draws near, you gain freedom with the rediscovery of virtue within yourself. But we see tyranny in its most ruthless manifestation in The Winter’s Tale unleashed on the saint-like Hermione. There is neither an Edmund nor an Iago to lay the blame on for Leontes’s state of mind. Is there a way to rationalize the character of this jealous tyrant? Is it the tyrant in him that makes him so irrationally jealous or is it just the jealousy that transforms him into a tyrant? Or does the answer lie in Shakespeare’s metaphysics?
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DESIDERATA will not post anything new for this weekend as his plate will be filled with reflecting on ex-DPM Anwar's rumination. Yes, on with Da Bard!If you forego next week's newspapers reading for just one Essay, I recommend Anwar Inbrahim's lecture. Not that I love the local newspapers less, it's that I love Da Bard more. aMORE with Desi?
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