Three sound-bites
When the USA paid the first price on its own soil for its imperial doings, the spin-doctors moved quickly to provide a sound-bite, namely that ‘They hate our Freedom’. Bearing in mind that Islam began as a revolt against the corruptions of wealth and a determination to do something about them in this world not the next; bearing in mind further that modern Islamism was originally about reinventing social welfare; then I am surprised that the Islamists have not replied with a slogan of equal potency and much greater truth. How about, ‘They hate our Social Justice’? Or let us imagine that a Japanese were to use American logic: “Hiroshima was not a consequence of Pearl Harbour! The gaijin nuked us because they hate our bushido!”
The Christianist madrassah
It is recognised by everyone too intelligent to watch Fox News that Muslim fundamentalism is a response to poverty, unemployment and general social misery. If that is so, what then is the cause of Christian fundamentalism in the USA?
The Bush Administration used to complain about the madrassahs or Koran schools, where the next generation of Muslims are having their heads filled with a primitive scriptural literalism, fanatical piety and a hatred of liberal secular values. The West’s calls to suppress such institutions would be much more convincing if accompanied by a similar suppression of American religious schools and colleges, where the next generation of Christians are having their heads filled with a primitive scriptural literalism, fanatical piety and a hatred of liberal secular values.
The same applies to right-wing broadcasting. If we demand that the Pakistanis reform the madrassahs so as to stop them teaching children to hate the West, do the Pakistanis get to demand that the US reform its hate radio so as to prevent it teaching impressionable youngsters to hate – well, almost everybody? And the same goes for Christianist home-schooling.
Now, the growth in popularity of the madrassahs is related to the growth in popularity of the mosque; and that in turn is largely a result of the death of Arab socialism and the dismantling of the welfare states under IMF pressure. It is the mosques that have stepped in to fill the breach. Muslims must give 2.5% of their income in alms – which go to the poor and so are not at all the same thing as Christians passing the plate to finance the running of their own church; and the oil states bankroll charitable foundations in the poor Muslim countries to do good works that somehow never get covered in Western media. As Andrew Undershaft says in Shaw’s ‘Major Barbara’, it is easy to preach to the starving with the scriptures in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other. If the mosque leadership is Salafist, then yes, these welfare recipients will indeed be exposed to jihadi teaching. Perhaps this is why the Republicans are so keen on their own ‘faith-based initiatives’; that is, outsourcing American welfare provision to the fundamentalist churches to create a religious patronage machine.
The expansion of the Christian right is driven, not by religiosity but by economic despair: by the flight of manufacturing, by government neglect, by soulless exurbs, by isolation. What people want is a sense of purpose, an assurance of love and protection, a world of magic in which God has a plan for their lives and intervenes every day, and an excuse to exult in catastrophe and apocalyptic violence. Their rage against Evolution, it has been said, is due to their fear of being dumped back into a depressing reality. This economic and social alienation is almost exactly how intelligent observers explain the rise of jihadism. It is early days yet, but the dynamics will be the same, the recruitment of the poor and the alienated to be Christianist terrorists. Watch this space.
Kingdom of Mutual Dependence
Sensible people are assiduous in pointing out that not all Muslims are ‘terrorists’. Not all Muslims in the 12th century were jihadis either; shortly after the First Crusade there was actually a battle involving one allied Christian-Muslim army against another allied Christian-Muslim army. But the pious were scandalised by any such co-existence, however tactical and temporary. In its clumsy way, the film ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ at least attempted to capture the eternal dynamic whereby the hawks on both sides require one another.
For both Nur ad-Din Mahmud and Salah ad-Din Yusuf, jihad was a political tool for self-assertion vis-à-vis other Muslims, and the same is true for bin Laden today. Similarly, the counter-jihad is a tool for reshaping Western societies – specifically, for removing political obstacles to a transfer of economic resources.
It’s the poverty, stupid
Anthony Beevor describes how, when the Red Army crossed the border into East Prussia, the soldiers were roused to fury by the – to them – high living standards they saw in the German villages. These Germans had so much, yet still they came to take what little we had! Such righteous indignation at an incomprehensibly infinite greed may yet drive a rage against the United States and its vampiric overclass that will make al-Qaida look like a vicarage tea party.
‘They’re coming to kill us in our beds!’ Is this the War on Terror speaking, or the plantation-owners in fear of a slave rebellion?
Soldiers of misfortune
Some successful court-martials of torturing, murdering and child-raping soldiers in Iraq have been held up as a shining example of the superior US political and social system. On the contrary, such justice has nothing to do with democracy, American or otherwise, but is merely the difference between competent and incompetent military command. Throughout history, any generals worth their salt have simply taken any soldier who was raping the women of a ‘friendly’ civilian population and hanged him; looting, massacre and rapine have been reserved as a punishment for particularly defiant enemies, ordered by the commander alone.
It would be interesting to compare the conduct of the American Army in Iraq with that of the Wehrmacht in occupied Western Europe. In Norway, for example, which the Germans considered a woefully-misled but quintessentially Aryan nation, they punished a fishing village for aiding the Resistance by deporting the adult males to Germany and razing the settlement; this the Norwegians consider the greatest atrocity they suffered, although no women or children were harmed. The American equivalent is Falluja, where the killing of four mercenaries (‘civilian contractors’ in Pentagon-speak) was avenged by the flattening of the city. We have never been told what these mercenaries had done to the civilian population to deserve their lynching, but we may hazard a guess. What the Iraqis saw from the American Army is not the justice meted out by a superior democracy, but weak officers who could not control even their own men, let alone the soldiers of fortune.
If all you have is a bomber, then everything looks like a bombing campaign
In the Second World War, missions were invented for air power in order to fit evolving capabilities, rather than the other way round. When aircraft were unable to hit anything much smaller than a city, the doctrine of ‘strategic bombing to break civilian morale’ was thought up. It didn’t work. Everyone knows that being bombed only increases one’s own side’s will to fight, but then again, people are extraordinarily unwilling to accept that the enemy has the same psychology as oneself. When accuracy improved, we started hearing about the ‘surgical strike’ that would win wars with little expenditure of blood and treasure. This is believed in, not because it works, but because a belligerent who is unwilling to shed his own blood, but still wants to win his wars, while at the same time kidding himself about being humane to the enemy, is strictly obliged to believe in some such kind of magic bullet.
A genuflecting scholar
Bernard Lewis made his reputation as one of the great interpreters of the Islamic world to the West, as what used to be called an Orientalist. In a recent edition of The New Yorker he very rightly contrasted the American ignorance of history with the Muslim street’s ability instantly to pick up on references to seventh-century events. He responds to Western advocacy of an Islamic Reformation by pointing out that there has been one already, and that the protestants are called the Wahhabis. He advances the startling idea that haram, which (in one context) means the privacy of home life, serves to make economic inequality less visible; as opposed of course to ourselves, who have always preferred gleefully to rub the noses of the poor in that inequality.
So far, so good; but then he attributes the ‘official denial’ of Iraqi involvement in 911 to the ‘fear of confronting Saddam Hussein’. This is a most peculiar coda, given that the only reason anyone was ever given to think that Saddam might have had anything remotely to do with 911 was the black propaganda created precisely in order to sell the invasion. Lewis’ avowal of that propaganda is thus reminiscent of the ritual genuflection to the Party that Soviet academics were obliged to append to their scholarship.
The self-pitying world conquerors
In his account of the final months of the conquest of Berlin, ‘The Downfall’, Anthony Beevor writes: ‘Many civilians would talk with self-pity of Germany’s suffering, especially from bombing. They fell resentfully silent when reminded that it was the Luftwaffe which had invented the mass destruction of cities as a shock tactic.’ Thus the profoundly anti-Kantian ethics of us modern people: deeds are good or bad not according to their nature, but according to by whom and to whom they are done. When what goes around comes around, we are outraged. There we were, minding our only business in peace, and they attack us for no reason! The application to the popular American understanding of 911 is obvious.
Also comparable is the geopolitical ignorance, for Beevor continues: ‘Civilians could not understand why the United States ever declared war on Germany. When told that in fact it was Germany which had declared war on the United States, they were incredulous. It contradicted their conviction that Germans were the true victims of the war.’ Finally, we may wonder whether the two countries share national flaws. Beevor writes: ‘Both officers and civilians tried to lecture their conquerors on the need for the United States and Britain to ally themselves with Germany against the common danger of ‘Bolschewismus’, which they knew only too well. The fact that it was Nazi Germany’s onslaught against the Soviet Union in 1941 which had brought Communism to all of central and south-east Europe – something which all the revolutions between 1917 and 1921 had completely failed to do – remained beyond their understanding. Rather as the minority Bolsheviks had managed to exploit ruthlessly the Russian conditioning to autocracy, so the Nazis had seized on their own country’s fatal tendency to confuse cause and effect.’ In the same way, the USA imagined it had to occupy and remain in Iraq to combat Islamic terrorism.
The Boomerang of Time
Republicans appear to believe in a causality that runs backward in time. Before the American invasion there was no al-Qaeda presence in Iraq at all. After it, there was. Rather than admit that the invasion itself created the al-Qaeda presence in Iraq, therefore, they claimed that the invasion was motivated by its own consequences. That is, they invaded Iraq to deal with a problem that did not then exist, but would be created by the invasion itself. It would seem to follow that either the Republicans have a shaky grasp of the concept of temporal causation, or else they fully intended to create the Iraqi jihad all along, so as to further justify the domestic measures that are arguably the real purpose of the ‘war on terror’. It is hard to say which is the more terrifying prospect.
Saddam Hussein’s Stay-Behind
Many European countries possessed and may still possess, what the Turks call ‘the Deep State’, that is, a behind-the-scenes freemasonry of soldiers, spooks and others who really run things, or at least exercise a veto power. This would have grown out of the Stay-Behind networks created just after the end of the Second World War. Such programmes were intended to conduct partisan operations behind the lines of a successful Soviet invasion of Western Europe. They were recruited largely from the wartime Resistance, but also included Nazi elements for the sake of their superior knowledge of their local Communists. Now, this is precisely what Saddam Hussein did prior to the Third Gulf War (or the Second, for ethnocentric Americans); he organised his defence against overwhelming military power around the notion of a post-invasion urban guerrilla. The operations of Saddam’s Stay-Behind were termed terrorism. If we are to be consistent, therefore, we ought to admit that our own Stay-Behind cells would also have engaged in terrorism. If they had conducted guerrilla warfare behind the lines of the victorious Red Army, the Russians would have executed the participants on the spot; we would have been suitably outraged, and yet they would have been entirely right to do so under the laws of war. It also follows from the Stay-Behind concept that, if these European networks have endured until our day, and if their shadowy personnel have a disproportionate influence on their countries – that is, if there are Deep States – then these European countries are secretly being run by terrorist cells.
