Yet another tragic failure of deinstitutionalization.
Posted on 04/13/2007 9:14:24 AM PDT by M203M4
We share common cause with the Islamist terrorists: Far from being unreasonable fanatics, the terrorists fight for the same things we do. We have a common enemy.
Ian Buruma, writing in the Financial Times, reveals that “suicide bombers and jihadis” are by their very nature unreasonable. “There is nothing to negotiate with people who wish to kill as many infidels as they can to establish a divine realm of the faithful,” he instructs us. They see “mass murder as an existential act,” he adds.
What source is Buruma drawing on to make these extravagant conclusions? I have been paying attention to this issue as well, and I have seen nothing that would lead me to make similar statements.
Buruma is not alone in assuming authority on the subject of the terrorists’ motivations. Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, and any number of other internationally-renowned Western media commentators never bother to offer a source on their unanimous and unquestioned assumptions about Islamist terrorists and what they want and how they intend to get it. According to the pantheon of Western media commentators, the terrorists are by definition insane, they have no respect for life but rather propagate a “culture of death,” and they seek to convert all of us to their twisted perversion of a religion, or kill us in the attempt. So goes the story about the Western world’s latest bogeyman. It is repeated by lesser lights throughout our own national media as though received gospel truth. As such, the terrorists cannot be negotiated with, reasoned with, or compelled to behave. They wish to die, apparently. It’s a scary and compelling picture, except I’ve seen no evidence for it in any books I have read.
How is it, then, that a bunch of white non-Islamic men working in London and New York can come to this definition of the Islamist movement while the bulk of reliable analysis emanating from societies in which Islamism has taken root report almost an entirely opposite picture? There is no doubt that if the Islamists and terrorists are as described by the vast majority of Western media commentators, then it is true that we are in for a rough ride—and it would be time to bulk up our security and strike the terrorists where they sleep and, in the words of our own commander of Canadian armed forces, Rick Hillier, kill “the scumbags.”
But in fact, much of the mystery and angst surrounding this picture of the Islamists stems from bogeymen of our media’s own imaginations, and not from reality at all. And how can it be otherwise? No militant movement in the known history of the planet was ever carried out for anything other than concrete, real-world, and local aims. On the other hand, authorities threatened by militant movements have always characterized those movements as unreasonable, insane, and deserving only the roughest treatment. The terror in France after the revolution, the anarchists of Russia as that society collapsed in the late 19 th Century, the terrorists in the Balkans—including the one who sparked the First World War by shooting the archduke—no less than the German “huns” in that war, and the “japs” in the following war, were all demonized as unreasoning monsters with whom no negotiations would ever be possible, much like today’s Islamists are characterized.
But just like all those, it turns out today’s Islamist militants also have concrete, real-world and local aims, and because of that, things are negotiable—a fact our leaders would rather not admit because those negotiations require our leadership to give up items of importance to their main corporate backers—amongst them, sovereign control over oil resources. In addition to the myth about the insanity and unreasonableness of the terrorists can be added the myth of their culture of death, one of the most repeated, and the most unquestioned, conclusions about the terrorists. There is no evidence at all of a culture of death in the Islamist militant movement, of course. It just so happens that in current warfare where one side is highly equipped with satellite and infrared surveillance technology as well as electronic sniffers and drone aircraft, while the other side lacks resources and access to modern technology, the only way for them to reliably deliver a bomb is by strapping it to a volunteer who drives or walks the bomb to the target.
It also happens that in asymmetric conflicts, as Donald Rumsfeld is fond of calling them, it is next to impossible to reach military targets belonging to that side that has the huge technological edge. But in all wars from Winston Churchill’s counter-insurgency in Iraq in 1920 onward, civilian populations have been regarded, if not legally at least in practice by all sides, as legitimate targets. It’s terrible but it’s true. Over fifty million people were killed by European warriors in the 1940s. Bombs on trains that kill civilians are no different in effect from bombs from planes that also kill civilians, and it isn’t necessarily so that civilians are not the intended targets for both sides. The London subway bombings were not cowardly, despicable and unspeakable acts; they were acts of war, and civilians for a century have been regarded as legitimate targets in war, even if our own warriors don’t admit it.
Another myth: Islamists have no intention of converting anyone in Europe or North America to their faith—at least, there is not one scrap of evidence of any Imam ever suggesting such a radical evangelical program. That sort of proselytizing is confined almost entirely to Christianity [Christian hate alert], and the added notion of evangelizing by the force of arms is certainly not in evidence among any religious movement, outside of some denominations of Christianity. This is not to knock Christianity, but to merely point out a fact: there is no Moslem, Judaic, Hindu, Buddhist or Shinto equivalent to the history of violent evangelism that exists in Christianity’s history [insanity alert]. Generally, no other religion has a proselytizing mission among non-believers, and are usually more interested in excluding them, not converting them. Islam is no different. There is no arm of Islam that is interested in converting Christians violently or otherwise.
The aims of the terrorists are not “existential” as Buruma suggests, whatever he means by that; they are not mysterious, they are not motivated by overriding concerns for the life beyond this one, and they do not seek to turn the clock back on modernity or to constrain their people or us in medieval dictatorships. Islamists do not, as is so often ascribed to them, “detest,” “abhor,” or “hate” our freedom. They do not want, as Tony Blair recently claimed, to alter our way of life. If we deny our own rights to privacy, this does not mean the terrorists have won, because they do not care what we do with our rights to privacy—or at least I have seen no evidence of them caring. In fact, they do not care much about anything that goes on in our world. We can have it they way we like it. Their problem is not with us per se. Their problem is with what is going on in their home societies, and in that regard, it is our governments and companies that are messing around in their societies, converting them, undermining them and uprooting them. Far from trying to alter our societies, it is our governments and companies that are altering their societies that is of interest to the Islamists. What do they want?
So what do they want, and what are their aims? Consider what has happened in Islamic societies over the last twenty years. Only a generation ago, there was no satellite television, no internet or email, and no globalization throughout the world. For Western societies, the advent of satellite television was only an incremental expansion over what had already been widely available for over two generations on regular television. The internet only brought what was already available elsewhere into our homes. Email was a small improvement over the fax. And the contents of satellite television and the internet were entirely familiar: it was all a seamless continuation of our own cultural images and literature reflecting our own mores and history. The new technologies did not expose us to much that was new, but only more of the same, and more directly into our very homes.
But for members of Islamic societies, they went from virtually no television or telephones to an avalanche of satellite channels, internet sites, and email communication. And all of it, piped directly into their homes just like ours all very suddenly, was the content of a thoroughly foreign culture. The images and literature flooding through these societies reflected the developed mores and history of a different society, yet it was all just as relentless, inescapable, and ubiquitous as what swept through our own societies and through our own homes through these same channels.
The problems we have with our children being exposed to violence and pornography, with adolescents coming in contact with foreign ideas, with families yanked by expert image factories to their compelling televisions and away from their supper tables, and with everyone filled with desire for far-out toys like realistic video games found at slick stores in cool and vast shopping malls, are multiplied many times over for people with children and adolescents in societies where there has been no accumulated wisdom about how to deal with these things. Not that we know any better. But at least for us, it’s all culturally stable. For Islamic societies, even the fundamentals of society were assailed by the sudden arrival of the new technology. We don’t like all the sex and violence either, but at least it is all part and parcel of our own culture. Imagine how destabilizing the same onslaught of material is when it’s also the product of a thoroughly foreign culture.
The reaction there has been not much different than how we have reacted here. We may quibble with Islamists over whether women should be veiled or not, but surely we agree that huge billboards featuring nearly naked prepubescent girls selling us hamburgers or fast cars, are corrosive for society. We fight to remove porn theatres from nearby schools, and to remove candy bar and soda drink vending machines from inside the schools. We agree that much of the consumer products of our own society are not good: fast food, we teach our children, should be shunned, candies should only be enjoyed in moderation, children should be shielded from images of sexual advertising and excessive violence, and so on. We oppose these things because we are concerned with how they damage our children, corrode our families, and ultimately doom our society.
This is also the origins of the Islamist militant movement. But where we can hammer away at city councilors or provincial and federal politicians to fix things, or vote in people who will, no such opportunity exists for much of the Islamic world. When movements arise to either democratize their governing institutions, or at least to change them in order to enlist the powers of the state to slow the corrosive actions of modern consumerist capitalism, these movements’ leaders have been jailed, tortured, or killed. And, though it surely sounds to some as simply more anti-American vitriol, the historically undeniable fact is that American governments as well as other powerful Western world governments have been the powers propping up the local governments that have been standing in the way of the wishes of the peoples of Islamic societies to mitigate the corrosive effects of modern consumerist capitalist culture. Since that is the case, it stands to reason that the required change in local governance might only become possible if American governments as well as other powerful Western world governments find the cost of backing the illegitimate regimes in the Islamic world too high to bear any longer.
The problem is compounded in the resource-laden Islamic countries where the benefits arising to the Western World from the actions of friendly governments they install or back up are huge; in these cases, the costs that American and Western World governments are willing to bear will also climb very high before those governments will choose to abandon their client regimes. But if the people in those Islamic countries feel strongly enough about their need to control the content of their own cultural media (and we know they do feel strongly since we who are parents also know how far all parents will go to protect their children) they will press their case and put the necessary cost to Western governments, whatever the nature of those costs turns out to be.
But the reaction of Western governments to efforts made by people in Islamic societies to defend their cultures from corrosion by consumer capitalist infiltration was to redouble their penetration of those societies using even more globalized technologies, forcing even more of our admittedly corrosive cultural products upon them and into their homes.
To their cries for democratic control of their resources, sovereignty over their programs, and expression of their national destinies—laudable desires all—Western governments conspired to saddle those societies with intentionally unsustainable debts, to subject them to experimental and radical privatization programs, and to militarize their client regimes and sell to governments and rebels alike around the world ever greater stocks of small arms, mortar rounds, rocket launchers, and land mines. Can you blame them?
With the accumulated history of how our governments’ and companies’ have reacted to their totally legitimate and morally grounded demands, is it really any surprise that some among them would think to take up arms against Western governments and companies to press their communities’ case? And if it were completely impossible to strike our governments’ own military installations, is it that big a leap to see that some Islamists might imagine the same important ends can be achieved by striking instead at the soft civilian underbelly of the offending regimes? Perhaps not. But then when the militaries of the powerful Western nations come to occupy holy land, bomb up-start nations, plant military bases nearby all oil and gas supplies, conduct economic sanctions that kill thousands of children, endorse repeatedly the illegal occupation and destruction of Palestine, and lie to justify a horrific and senseless war that threatens to engulf the whole region, then perhaps some might consider taking up arms.
They are not a culture of death, they do not hate our freedoms, they do not kill us as an existential act. They are fighting a war to protect their own societies from a flood of society-threatening foreign cultural products that are, we can fully agree, corrosive and destructive. They are defending themselves against cultural genocide. We would do no less, and in fact, we do no less. We are fighting against the same thing with the same alarm and urgency—only we have means to achieve our defense through well-established democratic institutions, and besides, the threat to our societies is not so genocidal since the onslaught is waged with products of our own culture.
It may seem like bad news to realize that, far from being the actions of a bunch of crazed lunatics, in fact there is a real and serious war on and that the other side does have great and noble, and compellingly existential, reasons to fight. But on the other hand, much of what fuels their fight against our governments and our companies are causes we can entirely agree on with them. In fact, if I am not mistaken, much of what fueled our massive protests against globalization are the very same things that are fueling their fights against what appears to me to be the very same opponent: our governments working in thrall to our biggest corporations to blindly destroy the foundations of a nurturing, cohesive, and purposeful society.
When we fight to remove Coke machines from our elementary schools, to filter pornographic web sites from our public library computers, to restrict admittance to excessively violent films in our theatres, and to ban cigarette and alcohol advertising from cultural and public events, we are totally of like mind and purpose with the core of Islamist terrorist cells. We fight a common enemy: the cultural products of irresponsible corporations.
Our government leaders would like us to believe that unreasonable terrorists are trying to kill us because they hate us, and our leaders would like us to think that terrorist attacks have nothing to do with our governments’ policies. But the true picture is quite different. Our government leaders, currently in thrall to an enemy common to members of our society as well as Islamic societies—irresponsible global corporations—is lying about the terrorists. It is our own government leaders who are unwilling to negotiate with the reasonable Islamists, and it is our own corporations that are in the business of killing both our societies. The Islamists are fighting back for a cause that we endorse. We can help them, and ourselves, by telling our governments and our companies to back off from both our endangered societies.
kpotvin@republic-news.org
Please people let this guy know that he is a moonbat!!!!
My God, I think I actually lost points off my I.Q. reading that drivel.
Do these people really think they won’t be the first against the wall?
Red roots, green shoots.
People's delusions are only funny when they are not dangerous.
Ironic that on this day the leader of the Green party in Canada endorses the liberal party in return that the liberals won’t run a candidate against her.
Greens = communists in a hurry
Liberals = socialists that can’t make up their mind
Yes, they both want to take us back the the 6th Century.
How 'bout the terrorists' own words, you fool?
Of course not, they just want to KILL us all!
Oh, no???? Have you EVER seen those videos of the imans and all those terrorists in IRAN screaming, "Death to America, Death to Israel???" I've seen them over and over, and you think YOU have the "authority" to preach to us about Islam? Man, GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR BUTT!
Yet another tragic failure of deinstitutionalization.
I’ve always heard that the BC Bud they grow up there in Canada is strong dope. Maybe this guy should cut back a little.
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