The fellow posted a video showing an Indonesia woman and man being flogged. Not only did he not know the story behind the video, he extrapolated this behavior to an entire nation without any comprehension of the social and political currents behind it. Indeed, my correspondent didn't even know why the folks in the video were being flogged.
He lamented that all of Indonesia condoned such behavior. I pointed out that the incident took place in Aceh, which is a small region at the far northwestern tip of Sumatera, which is semi-autonomous and ruled by Islamic fundamentalists. I said that public flogging is not condoned or practiced anywhere else in the country, and that if the government attempted to force the region to stop shari'a practices, it would likely cause riots and secession, which would spread through the rest of the country.
The fellow's response was, suppose the Northern states had not stopped slavery in the South.
In the space of a couple of brief text messages, this individual had displayed a profound ignorance of history, politics and human behavior.
To begin with, Indonesia and the US share many traits. Indonesia is about the same size as the continental US, with roughly the same population and both have religious majorities that spend an inordinate amount of time trying to force everyone else to adopt their values.
Indonesia is composed of more than 300 tribes, each with unique cultures and histories, bound into a loose confederation. Indonesia's motto, "Bhinneka tunggal ika," is the Sanskrit equivalent of "E pluribus unum," or "one out of many" in English. Both countries adopt the eagle as their national symbols, and both are republics that constantly promote democracy (they are mutually exclusive terms and ideologies).
On scale, Aceh is roughly equal to the Seattle-Tacoma metroplex, though wildly different in context. After the 2004 quake and tsunami, Aceh has virtually returned to a medieval state, with all the attendant theocratic allusions that come with that statement.
Of all the regions in the vast sprawling archipelago known as Indonesia, Aceh is the closest to an absolute theocracy under shari'a, or religious law, and like most theocracies, it chooses some of the worst aspects of shari'a to enforce.
The primary issue is that if the central government attempted to stop Aceh from its practices, it would risk having the Islamic majority in the country rally around Aceh, and likely spark national riots and possibly secession movements across the country, especially in Papua where the Christian majority has long sought to extract itself from the rest of the nation, taking its vast mineral wealth with it.
When my Twitter correspondent casually waved the US Civil War comment at the situation, I was triggered. The two situations were/are not remotely equivalent, and to so blithely conflate the two was more than I could bear.
The US Civil War had almost zero to do with ending slavery. It was all about northern bankers and industry trying to keep the costs of raw materials from the south as low as possible. The southern states, wanting to increase profits, were competing in open markets and getting higher prices in Europe. The morthern interests blockaded southern ports to shut down the South's markets, and levied exorbitant tariffs on exports to effectively steal profits from the south, while leaving the finished goods from the north untouched.
The Confederacy, after secession, was de jure and de facto a separate and independent nation and blockades against it were in fact acts of war by the same reasoning and international law used by the colonists in their fight for independence from England. Only in the tiniest of factions in the Civil War was ending slavery and issue, and folks on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line wanted the practice ended.
The US Civil War was about economics and the right of people to throw off tyrannical government in favor of something more to their liking.
In Aceh, the situation is only vaguely analogous to the US Civil War, in that a dictatorial effort by the central government to change the local regime would be disastrous and likely lead to mass death and destruction.
The fact is that the people of Aceh submit to the theocracy of their own choice. They can easily walk or take the bus south to other regions of Sumatera, or even leave the island altogether for greener pastures elsewhere. That the young man and woman in the video allowed themselves to be flogged was their own choice.
Unlike the US Civil War, there is no economic component. No outside force is trying to starve out competition and effectively enslave an entire nation. The people of Aceh willingly choose to live under such conditions because they have convinced themselves that this is a viable and virtuous way to live.
In other words, what my Twitter correspondent was proposing is tyranny by a central power over a group of people who voluntarily choose to live as they see fit. From the outside, we can abhor and condemn the practice of flogging. We can offer aid and shelter to anyone escaping such practices. But we cannot mandate our values on those folks by force. That would effectively be as immoral as the practices we condemn.
In a republic, as Indonesia and the US nominally are, the fundamental rights of the minority are protected against the tyranny of the majority. Among those fundamental rights in both countries is religious freedom. It would be no more moral and ethical for Indonesia to force Aceh to adopt a different culture, than it would be for Aceh to force the rest of the nation to adopt shari'a (or at least its interpretation of it).
It is also wildly fallacious to draw parallels between they US Civil War and the situation in Aceh, other than to say that if the central government forced Aceh to change, then it would be the moral equivalent of what the Union did to the Confederacy. In both cases, internal forces will eventually overcome habit and tradition, and reform will come of its own accord.
It is important to note that Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was not aimed at the Union, where slavery persisted quite some time after that war, nor was it legally binding on the Confederacy, which was a wholly different jurisdiction and not subject to US law. It was nothing more than a propaganda tool to undermine the Confederate economy at its weakest point.
The people of Aceh have a choice to stay or move to other parts of the same country with widely varying social and political customs and laws. They are not prevented by the nation's laws from moving elsewhere, with lawful employment and residency throughout the country. Those who stay and submit to public floggings for being alone with their paramours without supervision do so of their own accord.
This Twitter-vation also highlights the dire need of folks to educate themselves on real history, and not the propagandistic efforts to justify immoral acts foisted on them by vested interests.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Feel free to leave your own view of The Far Side.