Garden of Daisies

Some books toward understanding the ‘Global War on Terror’ and Canada’s role in it

This year I became increasingly frustrated by my being a tax-paying and voting citizen whose army was involved in a war that I felt I knew too little about. So this summer began, for me, with reading a number of books to try to remedy that a bit, and each of them proved full of incredibly interesting information for those in a similar boat.

I by no means claim that this is anywhere near a list that will give you all the information we all ought to have. It’s just where I started:

Omar Nasiri’s Inside the Jihad

This was a fascinating look at the rise of Al-qaeda from a rather reluctant spy who worked for the French intelligence services, attended training camps, and was associated with key members of Al-qaeda. What made the book most interesting to me was the extent to which the author remained notably unsympathetic to either side of what he saw as the divide between Islam and the West–he was neither in support of the methods being used by terrorists nor did he believe that their opinions of the West, nor their desire to fight against the West were necessarily wrong. This, to me, made for a fascinating perspective. Also, while it’s fairly long, it read like a good novel and I had it read in about two days.

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

This was a beautiful, and gut-wrenching and tragic book that I highly recommend. It followed the life of an Afghani whose father was able to move he and his son to America but who later had to return to Afghanistan to save a young boy. The book was structured quite well considering the complexity of the political issues of the country, which were woven into the story as highly relevant while remaining backdrops to the gripping tales of individuals living through such shockingly difficult times.

Michelle Shephard’s Guanatanamo’s Child

This was an incredibly shocking and important book, especially for Canadians. The author, Michelle Shephard, is an award-winning journalist with The Toronto Star who has won Canada’’s top two newspaper awards: the National Newspaper Award for investigations and the Governor General’’s Michener Award for public service journalism.

I truly need to find the time to dedicate an entire post to Omar’s story, although there is a great deal available in the news. Here you can find a CBC ‘in depth’ article on Khadr, and here is a very recent article which I highly recommend, discussing the legalities behind bringing him home. Also here you can find Matt Good’s musings on the matter along with his requesting that you email the Prime Minister to demand that Canada demand Khadr’s return. Please do so.

Michael Ignatieff’s The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror

This book was fairly short, dense, but important insofar as it reflects on commentary within Canadian politics on how to deal with terrorism. The basic thrust of the argument is that while we do have a right to use force and violence to protect the societies in which we live and the principles on which they are founded, to do so in ways which violate those principles is not only morally questionable but is dangerous to the societies we puport to protect. Thus, Ignatieff argues for a great deal of awareness of the extent to which we are violating those principles and a constant and careful assessment of whether our actions can be justified in so doing.

Benazir Bhutto’s Reconciliation: Democracy, Islam and the West

I consider this book to be very important. It was a simultaneously difficult and fascinating read. It was difficult for strange reasons. 1. it was a message from the grave–and a message from a woman who knew very well how soon her death might be approaching, and 2. I feel, particularly toward the end, that editing was not carried out as well as it ought to have been (facts were needlessly repeated and arguments were less solidly constructed), perhaps, tragically, as a result of the author’s death. That said it was a book which challenged conventional wisdom on democracy, Islam and ‘the West’ in ways which were very important, or so it seemed to me.

Each book cover links to its page on indigo.ca

Happy reading.

Add comment July 24th, 2008

Some Books from the Break (on Human Nature)

I just finished Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.  I had high expectations, I’ll admit.  It was recommended to me, in my second year of university, during a heated debate.  A few people were trying to dash my naive hopes for progress in humanity by flouting about ideas to do with self-interest and greed etc. etc. and I was grasping at trying to communicate that while I could appreciate those aspects of our humanity I felt that we had evolved the ability to understand these parts of ourselves, their pros and cons, and the possibility of growing away from the damaging ones…or something.  And the one individual present who was sympathetic to my underdeveloped ideas pointed me toward this book as a place where these ideas were explored. 

Sure enough The Blank Slate is a powerful argument for the reality of Human Nature, and the role it plays in the dark side of what people are capable of, but Pinker makes it clear that he points these things out not to justify them but to encourage us to learn about them so that we can better prevent crime and inhumane acts etc.  It’s good.  It just often left me with a bad taste in my mouth.  It was almost as if while Pinker kept claiming to feel that the exposition of his ideas would mean progress, the connections couldn’t be followed through in his writing.  Perhaps because despite all the work he pulled together he was working exclusively through a Western philosophical framework and that seemed to limit his ability to build on human universals he was uncovering.*  

All-in-all worth the read though. Another thing I read was The Embodied Mind and it was really wonderful.  It was difficult to get through at times, simply because of the density of the material, but left me with a fantastic taste in my mouth.  It too was deeply concerned with elements of human nature but was more invested in the experience of rising above it (through Buddhist-esque* meditation etc).   Which brings me to a quotation I found in the Blank Slate from The African Queen in which Katherine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”   

*There are rough allusions here to something which could be taken as simply deferring to Eastern philosophy with no justification aside from its being ‘exotic’, but that is not what I mean to be doing.  There is a sense in which I feel like incorporating some Eastern philosophy will be necessary to dig us out of the moralistic and spiritual hole that secular science has been digging us into.  Particularly research in Human Nature is revealing more and more about the impermanence of human life and that our notion of a ’self’ emerges from activity in the body.   While someone like Pinker may not mean this as a spiritually defeating idea, for alot of Westerners it has to be–Judaeo-Christianity simply hasn’t prepared us for anything like it.  In order to deal with it looking to traditions like Buddhism which deal actively with the impermanence and illusion of the self may be deeply helpful.  

Add comment January 9th, 2008