Robust debate necessary for change

Discussions in my alumni chat group have recently become testy, if not downright nasty that some members who cannot take the heat are asking for more drastic etiquette policing, or else they have threatened to unsubscribe from the email group. Perhaps, they are unable to appreciate that any democratic exchange of opinions is much more alive when it is robust and free-wheeling, without unnecessary censorship. Think of parliaments, Congress or the local city councils when their members passionately debate each other.

Only yesterday, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was heckled during his speech before the U.S. Congress. Reacting to the disbeliever in the crowd, Netanyahu said that this type of protest would only be possible in free societies, or where there is freedom of speech, which drew wide applause from members of Congress.

Free speech, or the lack of it. Photo courtersy of little tramp.

Sometimes we, as human beings, have the tendency to be thin-skinned and easily upset by criticism or opposite views. But the more dangerous side of this attitude is when we respond, although unnecessary, with vitriol or derision.

I’ve recently read messages in my alumni chat group that were aimed with disdain at one member’s fondness for writing long emails augmented with statistical data to reinforce his arguments. An apt and perhaps more courteous response would have been simply to ignore or even delete the member’s lengthy and dense messages, especially if one does not agree and has nothing to add. A cynical and derisive response, disrespectful of the other member’s right to say his piece, only exacerbates the issue more so when the obvious purpose is to shut him down from letter-writing.

One member wrote a sarcastic message enjoining the other member to take a break from his long and frequent, almost daily, letter-writing and to look after his health. Instead of the other member clogging the e-group with his emails, he suggested that he should perhaps use the telephone, a device he believed was a faster and easier mode to communicate.

Another member wrote in support and still another also agreed, even inserting a picture of a nodding and laughing chimp in his letter.

Consider that these individuals are the very first ones to complain of incivility and rudeness in the chat group. Yet, they would respond with impudent messages aimed at putting down the other member and making him look inconsolably pathetic. What did the rest of the group say about it? Nothing, which seems like an obvious conspiracy of silence that could only mean they support the public humiliation of the other person, who by his arguments, if only they would care to read them, really meant well.  

This only shows we could be hypocritical and duplicitous about the values we cherish most. We scream to high heavens when our right to free expression, for instance, is threatened but would as easily cast off the same argument when we don’t favour opposite views being expressed. In other words, we only tolerate ideas from people whose thinking is similar to ours. Those on the opposite of the spectrum should take a break, as one member suggested.

Consider, too, this argument from another member who wrote that the chat group should not be used as medium for debate and that he should not be construed as being against free speech, but an ardent supporter, yet he believes the e-group is not the proper venue to freely express one’s opinions. Where else could be the proper platform? For all intents and purposes, an alumni e-group is the best forum for engaging in ideas and opinions. How can one be so judicious and wise to argue that he favours free speech in other arenas, but not in this forum?

These aforementioned individuals who chose to take the side of intolerance instead of accommodation have not been long detached from their alma mater. Yet, they seem to have forgotten the values their education and training from the premier school of learning in the Philippines have taught and expounded from day one. How quickly the real world has eroded the idealism of their youthful days when they were still debating in the classrooms and in public squares on the fundamental right to freedom of expression.

During the 100th Commencement Exercises of the University of the Philippines in Diliman last April 17, 2011, John Gabriel Pelias, a BS Math graduate, delivered the valedictory address on behalf of the graduating class. A poor but very brilliant student, Pelias graduated summa cum laude, the highest honour a student can possibly receive, with a general weighted average of 1.016, the second highest in the history of the university.

 

Pelias asked his fellow graduates: “What can a UP graduate be proud of? What aspect of the UP culture can he or she show off that others do not have?”

Above everything, the youthful Pelias said the university has prepared every student how to respond to challenges and the most significant of these challenges is how “to overcome our responsibility to contribute to society as products of this nation’s premier state university, which may involve sacrificing our dreams of extravagant ways of life that ironically might have motivated us to work hard in our college education. The true challenge is to be able to use the critical thinking skills and knowledge we learned through UP education in the solution of the problems haunting the bigger world outside the university.”

Pelias in his closing remarks, challenged every graduate to “become part of a larger society, of a larger world.” Being UP graduates, he said, “does not mean living just our own everyday lives without regard for society’s quandaries. We cannot confine ourselves in our own boxes away from society.”

When one critically scrutinizes the arguments, including the statistics that that one member of our chat group has been espousing in his lengthy emails, it is easy to conclude that he was making good use of the critical thinking skills and knowledge that Pelias attributed to in his valedictory speech. That he learned these skills through his UP education was clearly evident in his elaborate analysis in helping solve real problems outside the university. An example is the problem of raising funds for scholarship for future UP students. While his proposal might have stirred a heated debate, which others may have found nauseating to their taste, it was a mere consequence of the need for more rigorous examination. 

Debate should not be considered repulsive and detestable, even if it takes a longer process to reach a consensus. To retreat and seek refuge in silence is a betrayal of our training at university. We cannot eternally argue in favour of the comfort and cosiness of our present situations, and to deflect anything that might seem to disturb the status quo. 

The letter-writer challenges each one of us not to be content with the argument that there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. This is an argument that kills innovation on sight. Oftentimes, going with what is known leads to stagnation. Although it is quite human to like the familiar, if we don’t innovate and think of new ways of doing things, nothing will grow or change; otherwise, we will all go the way of the dinosaurs. It is the uncertainty of the unknown that drives debate or exchange of opinions. It is the only way we can test out and get an understanding of what is true. 

Retooling the mind

During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, a popular army created on March 29, 1942 by the local Communist Party, fought arm-in-arm with other Filipino soldiers, guerrillas and American forces in overthrowing the mighty Japanese army. The army was called Hukbalahap, an acronym in Tagalog for “Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon” (People’s Army Against the Japanese).

After the Japanese surrendered in September 1945, the Hukbalahap was prevailed upon by the U.S.-backed Philippine government to disband and surrender its arms in exchange for promised democratic agrarian reforms. Later, during the elections for Congress, Luis Taruc, the leader of the Hukbalahap, and seven of his colleagues were elected but were prevented from taking their office and driven back to the hills to continue their armed struggle. Taruc and his group opposed the parity rights amendment that the United States wanted to insert in the Constitution, an amendment that would grant United States citizens the right to dispose and utilize of Philippine natural resources after the liberation of the Philippines.

The end of hostilities during the Japanese war. Photo courtesy of m46 pershing pro,

The promise of democratic reforms was obviously integral to the systematic design of disengaging the Filipino rebels during that period from the idea of violence, or any aspiration of an armed revolution to pursue their political and economic goals. This process of disengagement goes on to the present time as the New People’s Army, the successor to the Hukbalahap, and Muslim secessionist groups in Southern Philippines continue their struggle for self-autonomy and meaningful democratic reforms.

 

In other wars, we see a transformation to a battle for the minds and hearts of the local people after the armed hostilities are over, as what happened in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The Canadian military is in Afghanistan as part of its commitment to its NATO allies in reconstruction and peace-building initiatives. While the United States has detained many suspected members of al-Qaeda and known Jihadists in Guantanamo, U.S. prison officials constantly provide their inmates with educational materials that would help the prisoners wean their minds away from violence and acts of terrorism. Indeed, this has become the secular counterpart of religious instruction emphasizing peaceful means as opposed to violence in achieving society’s goals; it is now more popularly called deradicalization.

Deradicalization is the effort to free Jihadists or those detained for violent acts from their radical ideas, goals or elements. Followers of the U.S. Tea Party and more conservative politicians, however, could be also perceived as trying to deradicalize the liberal forces, especially supporters of the Democratic Party, in American society.

The Saudi deradicalization experiment is one of the most advanced international efforts to deradicalize terror suspects with the main purpose of educating and monitoring them until they have reintegrated into civil society. Begun in 2004, the Saudi deradicalization program was adopted by the government’s Interior Ministry in response to a series of domestic terroristic incidents. Saudi Arabia transformed its counterterrorism strategy by balancing traditional security efforts with techniques addressing ideological sources of violent extremism. One of the critical components of the Saudi approach was the rehabilitation of extremists through religious re-education and psychological counselling.

Cuba Guantanamo Prison. Photo courtesy of Guantanamo_Justice_Centre.

In Guantanamo, Omar Khadr, a Canadian prisoner who pleaded guilty to killing an American soldier in Afghanistan in 2002, was provided with text materials which included Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in preparing him for eventual repatriation and release to Canada. American law enforcement personnel also recommended as a required reading for Khadr, Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which drew sarcastic criticism from Thomas Frank in his Easy Chair column in Harper’s Magazine June 2011 issue.

Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen detained at the Guantanamo prison for
killing an American soldier in Afghanistan. Photo courtesy of gnotalex.

In his article, Frank wondered what a Guantanamo prisoner like Khadr would learn from reading one of the best-known titles in American management literature. Why would the U.S. government encourage a terrorist to read a book that promises him to become more “effective,” he asked? Would known terrorists locked up in one of America’s harshest prisons learn something valuable for their reintegration to civil society by teaching them to set goals, be proactive and care about others?

According to Frank, Covey’s The 7 Habits as an ideal 12-step program to a Jihadist-free life was not the first time the United States used books for purposes of deradicalization, of neutralizing the nation’s enemies by teaching them the folly of their ways. Literature was constantly foisted by the U.S. during the Cold war to portray Americans as people of taste and freedom. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People might be America’s present version of The God That Failed, a famous anti-communist anthology in the 1950s which was largely distributed world-wide, including in the Philippines.

Not to be mistaken with the 1991 Metallica song of the same title, The God That Failed was published in 1949 and is a collection of essays with testimonies of a number of former communist writers and journalists. The essays’ common theme is the authors’ disillusionment with communism and how they changed their minds to abandon the communist cause.

The most successful deradicalization of a nation in recent history has been the systematic miseducation of the Filipino people toward an American way of life as argued by Renato Constantino in his book of critical essays on nationalism. In his essays, Constantino described how the U.S. colonial government established a public education system that would make Filipinos forsake their nationalism and discourage separatist tendencies. The use of English as a medium of instruction in schools encouraged the separation of educated Filipinos from the masses. While the American public educational system was also beneficial to the country as a whole, its primary purpose was to strengthen colonial rule and influence the minds of Filipinos into accepting the vaunted superior American way of life over traditional and native Filipino values, ideas and aspirations for self-autonomy.

The orientation toward Western values, primarily American, only benefited the colonial government and was destructive to Filipinos. For example, Constantino cited the Filipino national virtue of hospitality and how it was turned into a “stupid vice which hurts and makes Filipinos willing dupes of predatory foreigners.”

Even until now, the colonial mentality developed through the American educational system endures in the minds of Filipinos in believing that all things local are inferior and worthless, and that all things American or imported are good. According to Constantino, this kind of mentality among colonial subjects also deprives Filipinos of the opportunity to evolve and strengthen their own indigenous democratic ideas and political institutions.

Going back to the Harper’s article by Thomas Frank, he asked what if Covey’s The 7 Habits make al-Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo more attentive to managing their time better instead of embracing the American way of peaceful change? Then, as Frank said, the United States would have achieved the exact opposite of deradicalization—a cohort of highly effective Jihadists capable of more mischief.

Frank wrote of one Jihadist who was a self-described fan of The 7 Habits. He was referring to Osama Bin laden’s brother in law, the deceased businessman Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, who was credited for establishing the al-Qaeda branch in the Philippines.

Instead of enabling Guantanamo inmates to learn effectiveness, Frank suggested that perhaps, the better approach is to make them lazy and indulgent, by making them realize the uselessness of getting things done. Better to turn them into American-style consumers, not American-style executives, Frank added.

But can one really deprogram a Jihadist?

In 2007, the U.S. released Said Ali al-Shihri from Guantanamo for deradicalization in Saudi Arabia. Saudi authorities have consistently claimed that none of their program’s graduates have returned to terrorism in the five years since it was established.

But al-Shihri emerged in 2009 as al-Qaeda’s deputy leader in Yemen, which raised serious questions on how the United States should deal with prisoners in Guantanamo and even of the much-trumpeted Saudi religious deradicalization.

Both the Saudi and American experience only illustrate the imperfect nature of the complex effort of deradicalization. Recidivism remains a concern and will continue to be a problem as more committed extremists participate in deradicalization. Without significant and genuine existential transformation in the fundamental roots of terrorism and similar violent acts—of how developed countries continue to keep countries of the Third World poor, oppressed and marginalized—threats of terrorism will continue to prosper and even those sent for deprogramming will always be attracted to go back to their old ways.

Muslim cleric promotes Jihad on Saudi television. Photo courtesy of Templar1307.

As long as the United States continues its military presence in the struggles for self-determination of other countries, national liberation movements will continue to resort to terrorism and violence to drive away foreign elements and corrupt governments. The absence of opportunities for people to participate in the process of governance—not just through free elections—in repressive authoritarian governments in the Middle East and in the rest of the world will also keep on spawning acts of terrorism.

Not even material inducements, such as those included in the Saudi rehabilitation process like giving thousands of dollars to pamper its graduates, or paying for weddings, furniture or a new Toyota will dramatically alter the mindset of committed extremists. This only shows how much easier it is to deprogram a bomb or a missile, but probably not enough to rewire the tortured mind of a terrorist.