<\/div>\n
<\/span><\/span>
<\/p>\nWole Soyinka\u2019s creative thread is principally a duel between people and power. <\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The controversial dramatist has levelled his verbal facility, from both the cultural front and the civic sphere, against the abuse of power.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
He has remained devoted to the deprived and vulnerable, even when he was hunted with a price on his head during the dark days of military dictatorship in Nigeria. <\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In \u201cClimate of Fear: The Quest of Dignity in a Dehumanized World,\u201d the Nobel laureate registers another feat in his crusade against banal power, only with a variation in target.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The 2005 book is an impassioned commentary on the destabilising trail of terrorism and totalitarianism.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Soyinka tracks the poisoned tributaries headstream to the tainted source of fanaticism.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Terrorism is running the tapestry of headlines from certified trouble spots to previous sanctuaries.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Soyinka reads between the headlines to confront the unsettling implications, for the world, of the spreading cancer.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The book is made up of five lectures \u201cA Changing Mask of Fear,\u201d \u201cOf Power and Freedom,\u201d \u201cRhetoric That Binds and Blinds,\u201d \u201cThe Quest for Dignity\u201d and \u201cI Am Right; You Are Dead.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
There seems to be nothing fundamentally new, however, as to how the lethal behemoth of terrorism can be caged.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Rather, the point of interest is that the book captures a phenomenal writer\u2019s response to his time, this amid successive jolts of history.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Hunger for power has set the world into turbulent orbit without either a moral centre or natural affection.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Soyinka trains his reprisal on perpetrators and accomplices, and pleads the case for dignity, that human quality which has become just another libation on the shrine of self-aggrandisement and power.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cDignity is simply another face of freedom, and thus the obverse of power and domination, that axis of human relationship that is equally sustained by fear \u2013 its poles doomed to remain in permanent conflict, yet complement each other,\u201d notes Soyinka.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cClimate of Fear\u201d is prefaced by a chilling anecdote of the Beslan School Massacre in which Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev\u2019s militants took a school hostage, killing close to 200 children.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Soyinka sets the tone of the book by spelling out the moral implications of the siege, where heavily armed terrorists stormed the sanctuary of children and subjected them to the most dehumanising conditions.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cOnce again, in a most harrowing setting to which the world was summoned as audience, we saw enacted the rhetoric:\u00a0 There are no innocents,\u201d Soyinka observes.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
He demands that such rhetoric be expunged before it reconstitutes the moral compass of the world.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In the lapse of time since the writing of the book, the language of terror has been trained, with alarming frequency, on every last vestige of collective commitment for a secure and dignified world.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Students have increasingly found themselves in the bull\u2019s eye of terrorist organisations, reinforcing the evil mantra that there are no innocents.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cWhen anticipation of, and salivation over, the trickle of power sinks to the level of cruelty to helpless children, one is tempted to accept that all that is left to say is \u2013 nothing. The rest is silence,\u201d Soyinka processes the numbing weight of the monstrosity. <\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cIt is an admission that humanity has finally touched the peak of apprehension and the nadir of impotence. In a grim irony, however, this may even spell the end of fear, since what many \u2013 across cultures \u2013 hold as a universal barrier to the unthinkable has surely, definitively, been breached, and there is nothing left to dread,\u201d he observes.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
He laments that while the totalitarian state can be readily made out and chanted down for the cause of human freedom, the quasi-state is an even more appalling menace in that it courses beyond immediate demographics.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The quasi-state is an invisible centre of hegemony whose virus infects religions and ideologies while it remains elusive in that it is not defined by the physical boundaries that identify the sovereign state.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Soyinka despairs at a formative stratagem of the quasi-state: the tendency to shroud its hideous intent with a democratic front to flare up public sympathy and civic alliances. <\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
As such, when its atrocities reveal the quasi-state for the menace that is, the contagion would have significantly eaten into sections of society.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u201cAs each assault on our localized or global sense of security is mounted or uncovered in the nick of time, the residual question is surely: What next? Where? How? Are limits or restraints any longer recognized?\u201d Soyinka articulates the progressive toll of terror in \u201cA Changing Mask of Fear.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Any undertaking of this kind inevitably leads to an engagement with the role of religion in the changing climate of terror, seeing that many agents of violence are acting as religious automatons.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Whereas anti-faith crusaders have erroneously held religion responsible for terrorism, Soyinka desists from an indiscriminate approach and distinguishes faith from fanaticism. <\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Atrocities have been committed in both secular and clerical garb; violence comes down to man\u2019s domination over man, traceable not to the essence of religion but to the quest of power. <\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cTo apprehend fully the neutrality of the power of fear in recent times, indifferent to either religious or ideological base, one need only compare the testimonies of Ethiopian victims under the atheistic order of Mariam Mengistu with those that emerged from the theocratic bastion of Iran under the purification orgy of her religious leaders,\u201d Soyinka observes.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cThe Taliban remains a lacerating memory of antihumanism, as does the Stalinist terror in the former Soviet Union,\u201d he points out.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
It is manifestly intolerant to incriminate religion as a generic entity for atrocities committed by deluded fanatics just as it would be a logical fallacy to blame politics collectively for the crimes of an elitist cabal.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The wall of separation between church and state must, however, stand high and impregnable as religion is always bound to be desecrated when its leaders meddle in the corridors of power.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cClimate of Fear,\u201d is a loosely structured discursive voyage so that it has neither the disclaimer of fiction nor the rigour of scholarship.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
This is severe flaw in that Soyinka sometimes follows his eloquence where substance cannot sustain him and makes free with unattributed allegations, particularly the claim that recruits are \u201craped as a mandatory rite of induction\u201d in Zimbabwe\u2019s terror camps.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Such outrageous inventions weaken the merits of Soyinka\u2019s civic undertaking, not least because Zimbabwe is possibly the principal example of peace and safety in a world that has gone mad.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In a timely note, however, Soyinka condemns the cowardice, lack of moral will and elitist conspiracy of African leaders who are failing\u00a0 protect citizens from genocidal warlords and despots.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The outcome of this shady coalescence is that “even in the supposedly egalitarian domain of death, some continue to die more equally than others.”<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Soyinka laments victims of the Sudanese conflict whose fate might have been averted by “the moral outcry of a continent or a structure of relief from the global community.”<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Ironically, the moral outcry of African leaders has been louder and clearer in their defense of implicated counterparts from the\u00a0 biased ICC.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The message between the headlines is that leaders are more entitled to justice than citizens are entitled to life, a systematic flaw that must be expunged from African institutions.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Soyinka observes that poverty\u00a0 and political injustice, both potent stimuli for the cancer of fanaticism, must be eradicated if the world is to be more habitable.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In “I am Right, You are Dead,” he emphasises dialogue and dissent as opposed to monologue and dissent as conditions for a mutually enriching co-existence.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
“Has Marxism triumphed since the killing of Leon Trotsky? What nature of an environment enabled the stabbing of a creative mind, Naguib Mahfouz?<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
“What kind of morality of a liberation struggle deceives a fourteen-year-old child into becoming a walking bomb?” Soyinka queries.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wole Soyinka: (Photo: chinadailyasia.com) Book: \u00a0Climate of Fear \u00a0Author: Wole Soyinka \u00a0Publisher: Random House (2005) \u00a0ISBN: 978-0-307-43082-3 Wole Soyinka\u2019s creative thread is principally a duel between people and power. The controversial dramatist has levelled his verbal facility, from both the cultural front and the civic sphere, against the abuse of power. He has remained devoted to the deprived and vulnerable, even when he was hunted with a price on his head during the dark days of military dictatorship in Nigeria. In \u201cClimate of Fear: The Quest of Dignity in a Dehumanized World,\u201d the Nobel laureate registers another feat in his crusade against banal power, only with a variation in target. The 2005 book is an impassioned commentary on the destabilising trail of terrorism and totalitarianism. Soyinka tracks the poisoned tributaries headstream to the tainted source of fanaticism. Terrorism is running the tapestry of headlines from certified trouble spots to previous sanctuaries. Soyinka reads between the headlines to confront the unsettling implications, for the world, of the spreading cancer. The book is made up of five lectures \u201cA Changing Mask of Fear,\u201d \u201cOf Power and Freedom,\u201d \u201cRhetoric That Binds and Blinds,\u201d \u201cThe Quest for Dignity\u201d and \u201cI Am Right; You Are Dead.\u201d There seems to be nothing fundamentally new, however, as to how the lethal behemoth of terrorism can be caged. Rather, the point of interest is that the book captures a phenomenal writer\u2019s response to his time, this amid successive jolts of history. Hunger for power has set the world into turbulent orbit without either a moral centre or natural affection. Soyinka trains his reprisal on perpetrators and accomplices, and pleads the case for dignity, that human quality which has become just another libation on the shrine of self-aggrandisement and power. \u201cDignity is simply another face of freedom, and thus the obverse of power and domination, that axis of human relationship that is equally sustained by fear \u2013 its poles doomed to remain in permanent conflict, yet complement each other,\u201d notes Soyinka. \u201cClimate of Fear\u201d is prefaced by a chilling anecdote of the Beslan School Massacre in which Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev\u2019s militants took a school hostage, killing close to 200 children. Soyinka sets the tone of the book by spelling out the moral implications of the siege, where heavily armed terrorists stormed the sanctuary of children and subjected them to the most dehumanising conditions. \u201cOnce again, in a most harrowing setting to which the world was summoned as audience, we saw enacted the rhetoric:\u00a0 There are no innocents,\u201d Soyinka observes. He demands that such rhetoric be expunged before it reconstitutes the moral compass of the world. In the lapse of time since the writing of the book, the language of terror has been trained, with alarming frequency, on every last vestige of collective commitment for a secure and dignified world. Students have increasingly found themselves in the bull\u2019s eye of terrorist organisations, reinforcing the evil mantra that there are no innocents. \u201cWhen anticipation of, and salivation over, the trickle of power sinks to the level of cruelty to helpless children, one is tempted to accept that all that is left to say is \u2013 nothing. The rest is silence,\u201d Soyinka processes the numbing weight of the monstrosity. \u201cIt is an admission that humanity has finally touched the peak of apprehension and the nadir of impotence. In a grim irony, however, this may even spell the end of fear, since what many \u2013 across cultures \u2013 hold as a universal barrier to the unthinkable has surely, definitively, been breached, and there is nothing left to dread,\u201d he observes. He laments that while the totalitarian state can be readily made out and chanted down for the cause of human freedom, the quasi-state is an even more appalling menace in that it courses beyond immediate demographics. The quasi-state is an invisible centre of hegemony whose virus infects religions and ideologies while it remains elusive in that it is not defined by the physical boundaries that identify the sovereign state. Soyinka despairs at a formative stratagem of the quasi-state: the tendency to shroud its hideous intent with a democratic front to flare up public sympathy and civic alliances. As such, when its atrocities reveal the quasi-state for the menace that is, the contagion would have significantly eaten into sections of society. \u00a0\u201cAs each assault on our localized or global sense of security is mounted or uncovered in the nick of time, the residual question is surely: What next? Where? How? Are limits or restraints any longer recognized?\u201d Soyinka articulates the progressive toll of terror in \u201cA Changing Mask of Fear.\u201d Any undertaking of this kind inevitably leads to an engagement with the role of religion in the changing climate of terror, seeing that many agents of violence are acting as religious automatons. Whereas anti-faith crusaders have erroneously held religion responsible for terrorism, Soyinka desists from an indiscriminate approach and distinguishes faith from fanaticism. Atrocities have been committed in both secular and clerical garb; violence comes down to man\u2019s domination over man, traceable not to the essence of religion but to the quest of power. \u201cTo apprehend fully the neutrality of the power of fear in recent times, indifferent to either religious or ideological base, one need only compare the testimonies of Ethiopian victims under the atheistic order of Mariam Mengistu with those that emerged from the theocratic bastion of Iran under the purification orgy of her religious leaders,\u201d Soyinka observes. \u201cThe Taliban remains a lacerating memory of antihumanism, as does the Stalinist terror in the former Soviet Union,\u201d he points out. It is manifestly intolerant to incriminate religion as a generic entity for atrocities committed by deluded fanatics just as it would be a logical fallacy to blame politics collectively for the crimes of an elitist cabal. The wall of separation between church and state must, however, stand high and impregnable as religion is always bound to be desecrated when its leaders meddle in the corridors of power. \u201cClimate of Fear,\u201d is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\n
Soyinka Reads Terrorism Between the Headlines | Blockspace<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=436\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Soyinka Reads Terrorism Between the Headlines | Blockspace\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Wole Soyinka: (Photo: chinadailyasia.com) Book: \u00a0Climate of Fear \u00a0Author: Wole Soyinka \u00a0Publisher: Random House (2005) \u00a0ISBN: 978-0-307-43082-3 Wole Soyinka\u2019s creative thread is principally a duel between people and power. The controversial dramatist has levelled his verbal facility, from both the cultural front and the civic sphere, against the abuse of power. He has remained devoted to the deprived and vulnerable, even when he was hunted with a price on his head during the dark days of military dictatorship in Nigeria. In \u201cClimate of Fear: The Quest of Dignity in a Dehumanized World,\u201d the Nobel laureate registers another feat in his crusade against banal power, only with a variation in target. The 2005 book is an impassioned commentary on the destabilising trail of terrorism and totalitarianism. Soyinka tracks the poisoned tributaries headstream to the tainted source of fanaticism. Terrorism is running the tapestry of headlines from certified trouble spots to previous sanctuaries. Soyinka reads between the headlines to confront the unsettling implications, for the world, of the spreading cancer. The book is made up of five lectures \u201cA Changing Mask of Fear,\u201d \u201cOf Power and Freedom,\u201d \u201cRhetoric That Binds and Blinds,\u201d \u201cThe Quest for Dignity\u201d and \u201cI Am Right; You Are Dead.\u201d There seems to be nothing fundamentally new, however, as to how the lethal behemoth of terrorism can be caged. Rather, the point of interest is that the book captures a phenomenal writer\u2019s response to his time, this amid successive jolts of history. Hunger for power has set the world into turbulent orbit without either a moral centre or natural affection. Soyinka trains his reprisal on perpetrators and accomplices, and pleads the case for dignity, that human quality which has become just another libation on the shrine of self-aggrandisement and power. \u201cDignity is simply another face of freedom, and thus the obverse of power and domination, that axis of human relationship that is equally sustained by fear \u2013 its poles doomed to remain in permanent conflict, yet complement each other,\u201d notes Soyinka. \u201cClimate of Fear\u201d is prefaced by a chilling anecdote of the Beslan School Massacre in which Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev\u2019s militants took a school hostage, killing close to 200 children. Soyinka sets the tone of the book by spelling out the moral implications of the siege, where heavily armed terrorists stormed the sanctuary of children and subjected them to the most dehumanising conditions. \u201cOnce again, in a most harrowing setting to which the world was summoned as audience, we saw enacted the rhetoric:\u00a0 There are no innocents,\u201d Soyinka observes. He demands that such rhetoric be expunged before it reconstitutes the moral compass of the world. In the lapse of time since the writing of the book, the language of terror has been trained, with alarming frequency, on every last vestige of collective commitment for a secure and dignified world. Students have increasingly found themselves in the bull\u2019s eye of terrorist organisations, reinforcing the evil mantra that there are no innocents. \u201cWhen anticipation of, and salivation over, the trickle of power sinks to the level of cruelty to helpless children, one is tempted to accept that all that is left to say is \u2013 nothing. The rest is silence,\u201d Soyinka processes the numbing weight of the monstrosity. \u201cIt is an admission that humanity has finally touched the peak of apprehension and the nadir of impotence. In a grim irony, however, this may even spell the end of fear, since what many \u2013 across cultures \u2013 hold as a universal barrier to the unthinkable has surely, definitively, been breached, and there is nothing left to dread,\u201d he observes. He laments that while the totalitarian state can be readily made out and chanted down for the cause of human freedom, the quasi-state is an even more appalling menace in that it courses beyond immediate demographics. The quasi-state is an invisible centre of hegemony whose virus infects religions and ideologies while it remains elusive in that it is not defined by the physical boundaries that identify the sovereign state. Soyinka despairs at a formative stratagem of the quasi-state: the tendency to shroud its hideous intent with a democratic front to flare up public sympathy and civic alliances. As such, when its atrocities reveal the quasi-state for the menace that is, the contagion would have significantly eaten into sections of society. \u00a0\u201cAs each assault on our localized or global sense of security is mounted or uncovered in the nick of time, the residual question is surely: What next? Where? How? Are limits or restraints any longer recognized?\u201d Soyinka articulates the progressive toll of terror in \u201cA Changing Mask of Fear.\u201d Any undertaking of this kind inevitably leads to an engagement with the role of religion in the changing climate of terror, seeing that many agents of violence are acting as religious automatons. Whereas anti-faith crusaders have erroneously held religion responsible for terrorism, Soyinka desists from an indiscriminate approach and distinguishes faith from fanaticism. Atrocities have been committed in both secular and clerical garb; violence comes down to man\u2019s domination over man, traceable not to the essence of religion but to the quest of power. \u201cTo apprehend fully the neutrality of the power of fear in recent times, indifferent to either religious or ideological base, one need only compare the testimonies of Ethiopian victims under the atheistic order of Mariam Mengistu with those that emerged from the theocratic bastion of Iran under the purification orgy of her religious leaders,\u201d Soyinka observes. \u201cThe Taliban remains a lacerating memory of antihumanism, as does the Stalinist terror in the former Soviet Union,\u201d he points out. It is manifestly intolerant to incriminate religion as a generic entity for atrocities committed by deluded fanatics just as it would be a logical fallacy to blame politics collectively for the crimes of an elitist cabal. The wall of separation between church and state must, however, stand high and impregnable as religion is always bound to be desecrated when its leaders meddle in the corridors of power. \u201cClimate of Fear,\u201d is\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=436\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Blockspace\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-10-30T13:30:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-10-25T15:07:35+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.chinadailyasia.com\/life\/attachement\/jpg\/site441\/20121213\/1355366018482_455.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"hardsouth\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"hardsouth\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta 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\/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Soyinka Reads Terrorism Between the Headlines | Blockspace","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=436","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Soyinka Reads Terrorism Between the Headlines | Blockspace","og_description":"Wole Soyinka: (Photo: chinadailyasia.com) Book: \u00a0Climate of Fear \u00a0Author: Wole Soyinka \u00a0Publisher: Random House (2005) \u00a0ISBN: 978-0-307-43082-3 Wole Soyinka\u2019s creative thread is principally a duel between people and power. The controversial dramatist has levelled his verbal facility, from both the cultural front and the civic sphere, against the abuse of power. He has remained devoted to the deprived and vulnerable, even when he was hunted with a price on his head during the dark days of military dictatorship in Nigeria. In \u201cClimate of Fear: The Quest of Dignity in a Dehumanized World,\u201d the Nobel laureate registers another feat in his crusade against banal power, only with a variation in target. The 2005 book is an impassioned commentary on the destabilising trail of terrorism and totalitarianism. Soyinka tracks the poisoned tributaries headstream to the tainted source of fanaticism. Terrorism is running the tapestry of headlines from certified trouble spots to previous sanctuaries. Soyinka reads between the headlines to confront the unsettling implications, for the world, of the spreading cancer. The book is made up of five lectures \u201cA Changing Mask of Fear,\u201d \u201cOf Power and Freedom,\u201d \u201cRhetoric That Binds and Blinds,\u201d \u201cThe Quest for Dignity\u201d and \u201cI Am Right; You Are Dead.\u201d There seems to be nothing fundamentally new, however, as to how the lethal behemoth of terrorism can be caged. Rather, the point of interest is that the book captures a phenomenal writer\u2019s response to his time, this amid successive jolts of history. Hunger for power has set the world into turbulent orbit without either a moral centre or natural affection. Soyinka trains his reprisal on perpetrators and accomplices, and pleads the case for dignity, that human quality which has become just another libation on the shrine of self-aggrandisement and power. \u201cDignity is simply another face of freedom, and thus the obverse of power and domination, that axis of human relationship that is equally sustained by fear \u2013 its poles doomed to remain in permanent conflict, yet complement each other,\u201d notes Soyinka. \u201cClimate of Fear\u201d is prefaced by a chilling anecdote of the Beslan School Massacre in which Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev\u2019s militants took a school hostage, killing close to 200 children. Soyinka sets the tone of the book by spelling out the moral implications of the siege, where heavily armed terrorists stormed the sanctuary of children and subjected them to the most dehumanising conditions. \u201cOnce again, in a most harrowing setting to which the world was summoned as audience, we saw enacted the rhetoric:\u00a0 There are no innocents,\u201d Soyinka observes. He demands that such rhetoric be expunged before it reconstitutes the moral compass of the world. In the lapse of time since the writing of the book, the language of terror has been trained, with alarming frequency, on every last vestige of collective commitment for a secure and dignified world. Students have increasingly found themselves in the bull\u2019s eye of terrorist organisations, reinforcing the evil mantra that there are no innocents. \u201cWhen anticipation of, and salivation over, the trickle of power sinks to the level of cruelty to helpless children, one is tempted to accept that all that is left to say is \u2013 nothing. The rest is silence,\u201d Soyinka processes the numbing weight of the monstrosity. \u201cIt is an admission that humanity has finally touched the peak of apprehension and the nadir of impotence. In a grim irony, however, this may even spell the end of fear, since what many \u2013 across cultures \u2013 hold as a universal barrier to the unthinkable has surely, definitively, been breached, and there is nothing left to dread,\u201d he observes. He laments that while the totalitarian state can be readily made out and chanted down for the cause of human freedom, the quasi-state is an even more appalling menace in that it courses beyond immediate demographics. The quasi-state is an invisible centre of hegemony whose virus infects religions and ideologies while it remains elusive in that it is not defined by the physical boundaries that identify the sovereign state. Soyinka despairs at a formative stratagem of the quasi-state: the tendency to shroud its hideous intent with a democratic front to flare up public sympathy and civic alliances. As such, when its atrocities reveal the quasi-state for the menace that is, the contagion would have significantly eaten into sections of society. \u00a0\u201cAs each assault on our localized or global sense of security is mounted or uncovered in the nick of time, the residual question is surely: What next? Where? How? Are limits or restraints any longer recognized?\u201d Soyinka articulates the progressive toll of terror in \u201cA Changing Mask of Fear.\u201d Any undertaking of this kind inevitably leads to an engagement with the role of religion in the changing climate of terror, seeing that many agents of violence are acting as religious automatons. Whereas anti-faith crusaders have erroneously held religion responsible for terrorism, Soyinka desists from an indiscriminate approach and distinguishes faith from fanaticism. Atrocities have been committed in both secular and clerical garb; violence comes down to man\u2019s domination over man, traceable not to the essence of religion but to the quest of power. \u201cTo apprehend fully the neutrality of the power of fear in recent times, indifferent to either religious or ideological base, one need only compare the testimonies of Ethiopian victims under the atheistic order of Mariam Mengistu with those that emerged from the theocratic bastion of Iran under the purification orgy of her religious leaders,\u201d Soyinka observes. \u201cThe Taliban remains a lacerating memory of antihumanism, as does the Stalinist terror in the former Soviet Union,\u201d he points out. It is manifestly intolerant to incriminate religion as a generic entity for atrocities committed by deluded fanatics just as it would be a logical fallacy to blame politics collectively for the crimes of an elitist cabal. The wall of separation between church and state must, however, stand high and impregnable as religion is always bound to be desecrated when its leaders meddle in the corridors of power. \u201cClimate of Fear,\u201d is","og_url":"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=436","og_site_name":"Blockspace","article_published_time":"2015-10-30T13:30:00+00:00","article_modified_time":"2026-10-25T15:07:35+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/www.chinadailyasia.com\/life\/attachement\/jpg\/site441\/20121213\/1355366018482_455.jpg","type":"","width":"","height":""}],"author":"hardsouth","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"hardsouth","Est. reading time":"7 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