NOTES TO PAGES 458–61- Bastiaan Patermotte, ‘‘Boris Dittrich versus Theo van Gogh,’’Metro(May 26, 2004), 13;
Stephan Sanders, ‘‘De stok, de hond & de wond’’ [The Stick, the Dog, & the Wound],Vrij Nederland
64, no. 39 (September 27, 2003): 51. - While I bracket the question of the nature and extent of active repression within Western
societies, this certainly is a relevant question—particularly, at this moment, in the face of the United
States’ repeated gross violations of potential and suspected enemies’ human rights. More generally,
there is the ongoing problem of American police brutality and the state’s excessive incarceration of
its citizens (after Rwanda, the country with the highest proportion of its citizens in jail, accounting
for one quarter of all the world’s prison inmates) and dubious death sentences (such as the case of
the radical black journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal), alongside the fact that the national media is owned
by a small handful of conglomerates, some with close ties to the military and government. Similarly,
serious concerns can be raised when it comes to the treatment of asylum seekers and immigrants
in Europe and Australia.
At the same time, such violations of the West’s democratic ideals are publicized and challenged
by a wide range of grassroots religious, intellectual, and political interest organizations committed
to confronting Western nation-states with their own failures and hypocrisies. Too infrequently
remarked, however, are the ways in which this confrontation between democracy and ‘‘restricted’’
repression within the West parallels similar tensions in Iran, Morocco, and Indonesia, among oth-
ers, between democratic and dogmatically repressive forces. The general assumption that Western
democracy is a given—and most especially the assumption of the priority, superiority, and refine-
ment of its democratic practice relative to the Rest’s democratic backwardness (temporal as well as
practical)—too often obscures the global nature of the tension between modern states’ totalizing
intentions and ‘‘true’’ democracy’s disruptive nature. That is, even in light of Western nation-states’
relative democracy, there is much to be learned and emulated from the debates and developments
beyond its borders. In particular, what those in the West seem to forget is the existence of intensely
layered underground intellectual and artistic cultures beyond its horizon, flowering persistently
under the most repressive conditions: cultures capable of a richness, nuance, and productivity at
moments far superior to the relatively simplistic images and positions (progressive as well as conser-
vative) so stimulated by the West’s saturation in market-driven media, expert opinions, books, and
films. On this last point see, e.g., the Iranian Shervin Nekuee’s account ‘‘Een Armeense wijsheid’’
[An Armenian Proverb],De Helling4 (Winter 2003): 19. - Critchley, ‘‘The Problem of Hegemony,’’ par. 23.
- The most recent elections for the European Parliament, e.g., drew dramatically few voters
(a bit more than 30 percent in the Netherlands), who themselves were shockingly uninformed
about the issues at stake—according to international observers from Asia and Latin America. - In fact, so imbricated and interdependent are these discourses that one is hard put to
present them as two distinct realms. Yet it is worthwhile to tease them apart in order to foreground
the extent to which each of these fields of tension on the one hand invigorates and on the other
hand distorts the other field. - Talal Asad, ‘‘Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe,’’ inFormations of the Secular:
Christianity, Islam, Modernity(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 159. - Michael Wintle, ‘‘Cultural Identity in Europe: Shared Experience,’’Culture and Identity in
Europe(Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), 13; discussed in Asad,Formations of the Secular, 166. Crucially,
Wintle himself has been influenced in his work by both Edward Said and Michel Foucault, and at
times locates his contemporary project in the realm of postcolonial criticism. - Asad, ‘‘Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe,’’Formations of the Secular, 166.
- See Dipesh Chakrabarty’s development of this argument inProvincializing Europe: Postco-
lonial Thought and Historical Difference(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
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