|
BNW |
|
B N W: Biafra Nigeria World News |
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Edwin Madunagu: A critique
EDWIN Madunagu must be ranked among the top Nigerian intellectuals writing today. His analytical approach, his inductive and deductive methods of presenting his facts, make him such a persuasive writer. Nigerians of my generation must be grateful to those Nigerians who put their intellect at our disposal. In analysing Dr. Madunagu, one must begin by stating the well-known fact that he is an inveterate exponent of the Marxist ideology.
It is quite easy to conclude, rightly or wrongly, that Madunagu's judgements are necessarily jaundiced by his socialist leanings and pathological loathing of the capitalist, globalist West, which he never sees anything good in and liberally describes with the word "evil", even though he has, by his own admission, repudiated religion. I am going to cite a few examples where, I believe, Madunagu did not do justice to his young Nigerian readers.
In a recent article on Word War II celebrations, he properly recounted how Hitler was appeased by the "international community" - no thanks to Britain's prime minister Neville Chamberlain, and a decadent, secular, pacifist consensus that was already creeping into Europe. On the Warsaw uprisings (which on August 1 was commemorated, with American, British and German governments represented at about the highest levels). Madunagu's statement, "The British and American troops 'Poland's "allies" who had landed in Normandy two months earlier did nothing to help", would be deceptive to young Nigerian readers, who I believe, Madunagu writes to enlighten. Perhaps in a future article he will supply the basis for that conclusion because there is none that I can find.
Who gets the blame seems to depend on the "side" of the historian you talk to. In matters like this, as in all matters of history, I listen to many people with different views and decide for myself what actually happened. The Red Army arrived on the other side of the Wisla (Vistula) River on July 29, 1944. The Polish secret army, (known as the Home Army), under General Tadeusz Komorowski (known as General Bor), rose against the Nazis on August 1, taking orders from the country's government-in-exile (which was anti-communist) "so that they could lay claim to their own freedom". Recently as a Russian historian, said the Russians could not have come in because (1) they were not consulted before the uprising, and (2) Warsaw was not a major target at that point of the war. But Moscow radio did call on the Poles to revolt. Stalin said his forces could not go in because they were too weak.
Most historians doubt this, but concede, in fairness to him, that the Wisla was as far as the Soviet armies could go on a broad front without pausing to restock their supplies. But then the Allies called on Stalin to let their planes land in Soviet airfields so they could supply the rebellion, which permission he did not grant. He finally did allow one flight by 110-B-17s on September 18. Of course, this was too late; the Germans brutally crushed the rebellion, leaving 200,000 civilian dead; and Komorowski surrendered on October 2. The Home Army was anti-communist. There is a belief that Stalin wanted every member of it dead. Many survivors were later driven into exile or rounded up by the Soviet imperialists and jailed or killed.
A Polish woman who took part in the uprising at age 15 and lost her father in it said on August 1, 2004, the 60th anniversary of the uprising: "I never expected the Allies to come and save me because the Allies were too far away. The Russians were closer". Since Madunagu found it objectionable to leave out the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 from those celebrations, some will wonder why his article did not mention the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In April 1943, Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, rather than wait to be led away to the camps and gassed, rose in rebellion against the Germans. Against all odds, they stuck it out against the world's best fighters at the time for three weeks.
In narrating the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, I believe a sense of balance and journalistic integrity demand that Madunagu tell the complete story. Had the war "virtually ended" when the bombs were dropped? Three months after the German surrender, and long after the defeat of the Japanese at Iwo Jima (a small barren island that saw the death of 6800 American soldiers), Okinawa, and the Filipino city of Luzon, it was clear that the Japanese, in keeping with their old traditions of hara-kiri were prepared to die to the last man than surrender. The Kamikaze (aircraft laden with explosives, flown by hurriedly trained pilots and crashed, bin Laden-style, on US naval ships) continued unabated. The casualty was remarkably high. The Americans maintain that it was to "convince the Japanese to surrender", halt these deaths, and end the war, that President Harry S. Truman gave orders for the bombs to be dropped. After the bombs were dropped (August 6 and 9) the Japanese surrendered on August 14, though not unconditionally, because they were allowed to keep their emperor.
Whether the Japanese attacks justify the levelling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs is a matter of subjective opinion. That assertion that "Palestine's Yessar Arafat" has renounced terror is hardly borne out by the facts. Like many, I have always found Israel's treatment of Palestinians, almost unconditionally backed by the "rulers of America", shocking. But that does not detract from the fact that Arafat's administration is tainted by corruption and Arafat has failed to grab some of the opportunities he has had to secure statehood for his people.
While many of us understand the realities and myths that may combine to lead a 15-year-old boy to strap himself with bombs and go for suicide mission, to say that suicide bombings will change things would be quite disingenuous and I am sure even Madunagu will not suggest it - for the simple reason that the Palestinians are dealing with a people who are themselves schooled in the art and science of terror, a people who, to use the words of Godwin Nzeakah of The Punch, have graduated from being common terrorists to a nuclear superpower. Not a few of us were dismayed when Arafat rejected the Clinton proposals at Camp David, negotiated with the reasonable Israel leader, Ehud Barak. And those proposals were generally hailed as the best ever - the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with a part of East Jerusalem as its capital.
They were what Arafat had been asking for, yet he rejected them, even as a basis for negotiation! Because he wanted everything. And Israel has now got a Prime Minister, the fascist Ariel Sharon, who also wants everything, and who seems to believe that the life of a Palestinian child is less valuable than that of a Jewish dog while the USA has a president who believes Arafat lied to him and is implicated in terrorism.
There are good and bad liberation fighters. Read the words of Che Guevara, the legendary liberation fighter and revolutionary theorist, on Congo's Laurent Desire Kabila in the 60s, study the lives of the two men and then compare them. In his article on Kurdistan, one of his most brilliant masterpieces, Madunagu mentioned that the Turkish government was waiting for an opportune time to carry out the death sentence it had passed on Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the PKK. Most writers would have stated the fact, which is that Turkey has not done it because it wants to enter the European Union and the Eurocrats do not like shaking hands that wield the garrotte.
In a recent article examining views on the propriety or otherwise of a sovereign national conference, Madunagu made a list of eminent Nigerians who have been calling for the SNC. May be I am the one being devious here, but I could not help noticing that the list did not include Wole Soyinka, who in the past has dismissed socialists as "pseudo-Stalinist-Leninist-Maoists". Madunagu has let on that he cannot understand the stand of many Nigerian journalists on the Zimbabwe issue. Robert Mugabe, for all his socialist rhetoric in the days of yore, is hardly a model African leader. When a leader of a government, and not a rebel movement, encourages violence in his own domain, and carries on with the mindset of taking the country with him if the goes down, something is wrong. Neither do you use some injustice done in the past to justify another one.
Madunagu's assessment of the role of Martin Luther King, Junior, is decidedly inaccurate. Even Malcolm X, the violence of whose passion Madunagu so loves, was a later convert to the principles of peace and universal brotherhood so brilliantly espoused by King and which Malcolm X once dismissed as a "wishy-washy love thy neighbour approach". Madunagu's views on globalisation and privatisation are well articulated. Globalisation does have its advantages and disadvantages. Unfortunately, nobody can stand in the way of globalisation, designed and directed by and for the rich countries of G 8 and the EU. As a Cuban schoolteacher said, "Cuba is no longer an island. There are no islands anymore!" We have a global village without trusted village elders. And privatisation, as being carried on in Nigeria, is a slippery slope to nowhere.
Whenever I read Madunagu, I see a wholesome, high-minded man who wants to change things, and cannot understand why people will not see the way. But he forgets that there are hardly examples to point at, to make a case for socialism. (Perhaps Madunagu will be so kind to enlighten me further here). The Soviet Union was bound to fail due to its too many internal contradictions. That the word "communism" connotes oppression to many today can be credited to that empire of yore.
Chinese communism is confusing whether you try to evaluate it liberally or Marxially, or even Maolly. Today, there is private property in Shanghai as much as in Calabar or Houston. Save for a heavy-handed repression of dissenters, Cuba is fine, if you ignore what those "Americans" of Little Havana say about Castro. North Vietnam's economy did terribly after the war. In 1986 after the government of unified Vietnam launched the doi moi market economy-based reform the economy took giant leaps, with GDP rising at 8.1 per cent annually during the 90s.
Madunagu believes that capitalism is evil. What else can any humanist conclude about a system which lets America throw its weight around the world and take routine trips to the moon while 20 per cent of its population (with a wide colour spectrum, ranging from the non-Hispanic White contributing six per cent to the Black contributing about 32 per cent) live in varying degrees of poverty? A system that lets Bill Gates and around 200 other Americans pile up billions while one million in that country have no roof over their heads? Unfortunately, capitalism, though an inherently obnoxious system, still has appeal. Man is inherently greedy and acquisitive. Mankind is not ready to run the noble utopian state which Marx and Engels conceptualised, and which Rosa Luxemburg died for.
|
|
||||||||||||
