Animals, by Pat Califia
Category: Pets and Animals

Animals
By Pat Califia

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Thoughts on NAMBLA, by Allen Ginsberg
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Thoughts on NAMBLA

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The Misery of Islam
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Category: Religion and Philosophy

The Misery of Islam
by Al-Djouhall

The ruling classes in countries in which Islam still holds sway have enforced a silence on Islamic matters, to the extent that even a simple critique cannot be allowed, because those who rule in the various feudo-bureaucratic dictatorships, use Islam to maintain their hideous grip on the wretched populations. Here we can see a similarity with Eastern bloc countries where truth and freedom of expression are muzzled, stalinism and Islam have a lot in common. Recently the Salman Rushdie affair has brought up to the surface a wealth of materials for analysis. One minute the President of Iran , the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that the death order would be rescinded if Mr Rushdie apologised, a few hours later the Ayatollah-in-Chief Khomeini declared that even if Mr Rushdie repented it was the duty of every Muslim to put him to death. Iran today is a tweedeldum and tweedeldee country. The rulers of that devastated part of the world constantly need an external enemy in order to keep the minds of its people away from the mounting daily miseries at home. Mr Rushdie's book was a Godsend opportunity to unite the flocks. But for how long? (footnote 2)

The Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia passing through Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Irak, straight over to Pakistan and down to Nigeria etc... is a real cauldron of misery and possible change. Different forces are at work to make this world collapse. First, the dispossessed no longer want to suffer Allah's "Law" ar those who squander the wealth which is the fruit of their exploitation and who are imposing harsher and harsher conditions. (footnote 3).

The reason for this pamphlet is quite simple, to make sure that past (footnote 4) and present struggles against bloody rulers in Islamic countries are not forgotten. Often it is only in books, pamphlets, posters, newspapers or radio from abroad that we manage to know what goes on elsewhere, or when we meet someone who has been involved directly in some actions, because most often "our" press reports nothing but trivia. For example for the last five years or more they have been showing the same pictures of Allah's Deputy on Earth, the one and only Khomeini. If they announced that he had gone to met his maker, things might take a different turn in Iran. I heard that a few people in London have been saying that he was dead for many years, but no one in the media has taken up this story. Journalists are a sorry lot, the more satellite dishes you have, the less news you get. Or you'll get news in the sky when you die. Tha decomposition of the Press in the completion of media alienation is in full swing, this being the sub-title of a book recently published in Paris, called The Crude Lie. (footnote 5)

It is with sorrow and pleasure that we can remember the riots of Cairo (Ist January 1977) or the ones in Tunis (26th January 1978), or the uprisinqs which made those in power tremble in Algeria (from the 10th March to the 24th April 1980), and more recently in that same poor country people took to the strets against the dreaded regime, more than five hundred people were killed by the Algerian army and police. There was widespread torture on those arrested. These uprisings are like a fire that will not go out, just as everywhere else since the conditions in which almost everyone.is forced to live under, ensure that the flames of discontent will not die, proletarian revolution is like Mount Etna, it erupts, and Allah and those in power can do nothing to prevent it. No wonder Mohammed the Holy Profit declared that anarchy, "fawda" that is to say sedition was even graver than assassination. This saying was quickly inscribed into the Koran in order to make sure that those who had power would retain It for ever. Many specialists of Islam cannot criticize this, maybe they are too hypnotized by it.

The essence of Islam is resignation, submission to the order of things, and the will of God, the temporal and spiritual powers are one, as we said earlier there is a similarity between stalinism and Islam, no wonder there is trouble in the Eastern bloc countries. People have had enough of the Kremlin Big Brother telling them what to think and do. The Islamic religion is part and parcel of the State, and the same with stalinism. In Christian countries, the bourgeoisies which rose out of the feudal dark ages could not afford such luxuries such as an all powerful Church which went hand in glove with the State. From then on the bourgeois made sure only the commodity would rule and it would be the next God to be worshipped. What we have today proves it. Nothing is sacred, only things with price tags. In other words the society of the spectacle, havin reached its integrated spectacular stage as Guy Debord recently wrote in his Commentaries (footnote 6).

I am certain that a wider critique will continue to move from country to country, because what is said here many feel deeply in their hearts and they whisper truths about the misery inflicted upon them by those who live well. As in the time of the Old Man of the Mountain, no one is safe in power. This is why I hasten to pen this little treatise on Islam. It has taken 148 years for an ex-Muslim to jump into L. Feuerbach's shoes. A few years ago I had the chance to read his Essence of Christianity when I was abroad. Among all the titles I literally devoured, since you could not find anything critical under Pahlavi, ironically you can find even less under the Khomeinists. Only the Koran seems to be allowed. It is like having an iron mask on one's head. It is truly barbarous. Therefore it is not Allah which knows and sees everything -that Cosmic Voyeur-, since 'he' does not exist, but well and truly those eyes and ears of the police aided by their sordid informers who always want to know if anyone knows more than they do about the rule of their masters, that is to say the whole of the misery which rests on economic and religious alienation, in order to persecute those who fight back. All this reminds us of the Spanish Inquisition. The Islamic "revolutionary" guards and the different kinds of police in countries where Islam prevails are what Ceorge Orwell called the "thought police" in his 1984.

The critique of Islam necessitates taking apart everything that this legislation stands for. And because: the signs of the decay of this religion are all but apparent. Islam offers nothing but the acceptance of the status quo, that "Heavenly Body" resembles a capsizing ship. Islam is archaic, reactionary in all aspects. The respect for those in power is enshrined in the Koran, as of property, as of the family (footnote 7), and the Koran is the infallible word of God. All this to ensure that "the exploitation of one class by another is the basis of civilization" as Engels remarked in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Indeed Mohammed himself must have bean rich since he could afford more than one wife (footnote 8). Mohammed started with the idea of giving to the poor, but once in power -as did Luther and Lenin-, quickly forgot to continue on this golden path. Later he reinforced his power and that of Islam by building mosques in towns "where the basis of Islamic communal prayer" could take plece. The Bedouin tribes were truly dispersed and weakened by these new developments. Mohammed scorns the Bedouins in the Koran. The 10 commandments, the Talmud, the Koran are laws. The lawgivers are the ruling class.

Once this goddam pamphlet starts to circulate from dawn till dusk the wheel of change will never stop spinning, just as Khomeini's cassettes kept arriving from outside Paris when he was in exile on a main street, so other gestures of protest, critique and anger will keep contradicting those who believe that "God is that which does not pass away", that is to say traditions. The various ruling classes in Muslim countries are besieged on two fronts:

The bourgeoisie (by the rapid improvements of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarian's intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction to adopt the bourgois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, ie. to become bourgeois themselves. In other words, it creates a world after its own image". (Communist Manifesto).

So Mohammed once said :"Whoever monopolizeth is a sinner", it obviously did not apply to him, no more than it applies to all those who exploit us. Those who stole and who were caught had their hands cut off, and often their heads, Mohammed the Holy Profit ordered this. It went down in the Koran for future generations. After all Mohammed had God's word. I hear that the present Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain is taxing those who live in sin. It is really disgusting.

A critique of Islam is but a necessary contribution to a new world. with no commodity, no State and the rest that stands in our way. The tongue of the hiden has started to speak, the Pax Islamica is dissolving like a piece of ice in the midday Mecca sun! Islam is "the arbitrary having broken loose" as Hegel once pointed out. The second part of this document will follow shortly...

Down with the spectacular-commodity economy!
Down with Allah!
Down with the Koran!
Down with all the marxist-leninists who don't criticize religion (Islam in particular)
Long live all those who fight tyrannies in Muslim countries!
Long live all those who are fighting the other ruling classes elsewhere! Written in a still Muslim country on February l8th , 1989.
By Al-Djouhall

Fingering thieves

IRANIAN authorities are using a new machine for cutting off thieves' fingers in accordance with Islamic law, the Tehran newspaper Kayhan reported yesterday.

A member of the Supreme Judicial Council also said recently that Iran had invented an electric machine for cutting off hands.

The Guardian (8.2.85)

Footnotes

(1) (...) "The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self-consciousness and self feeling of man who has either not vet found himself or has aIready lost himself again. (...) "Religion" is the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is the spiritual aroma. Religious distress is at the same time the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. The critique of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion. (...) Religion is the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself. (...)
K. Marx, Contribution to the critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.. 1844.

(2) Mr Rushdie should have never apologised to the ayatollahs. He forgot what Junius once said:"The liberty of the Press is the palladium of all the civil, political and religious rights of an Englishman." Still it was a brave attempt to criticize Islam. As Lord Acton once taught us: "Nothing is safe that does not show it can bear discussion and publicity."

(3) (...) "On the 21st of June 1981, the youth from the popular districts of Casablanca rose up. By means of the general strike decreed by the CDT (Democratic Confederation of Labour), ten of thousands of young Casablancans, each in their district, occupied the streets, looted and committed areon and finally flushed out the forces of law and order for a period of several hours. Afterwards, thousands of policemen, of "merdas" (turds) (name given by the people to the auxiliary forces) and soldiers supported by light and armoured cars undertook to reduce the riot in an unequal combat. They did it in the sole manner that befits them: the pure and simple assassination of all those who dared to shout that they were fed up with being hungry. "If they haven't got any bread in their etomachs, we will fill them with bayonets". These words by a manufacturer from Lyons on the eve of the Canute insurrection surely were the intimate thoughts of those who on the 20th of June, gave the order to fire on the children of the Beb Msik quarries, of Derb as-Sultan, Sbata, Derb al-Fida, etc. "Sixty dead killed by confounding objects", the Ministry of the Interior lies outrageously, the people itself, knows that it has been mourning more than 600 dead, killed by bullets and buried clandestinely in pauper's graves. (...) In this year 1981, the droughts added to five years of war and of economic crisis, (which have already bled white Morocco's economy) and placed the poorest zones in the countryside on the edge of famine. The most varied and tho most dreadful rumours began to circulate in the souks and from there to the popular districts; tongues unleashed themselves and people began to express out loud their worries and discontent. The powers that be just as quickly mobilised thir police forces and their ulemas (the body of professional theologians, expounders of "The Law", in a Mohammedan country), "in order to explain to those seeing the origins of their distress driving round in Mercedes and building sumptuous villas, that God had so wished up and that one cannot rebel against God's will, for he punishes those who have strayed from his religion and from the precepts of his Prophet. There are for sure numerous faithful in the mosques, but the preachings of the appainted imams h3ve few listeners (...)". In Casablanca steeped in blood, Sou'al no 1, Paris 1981.

These riots took place at the same time as the British proletarian carnival and yet not a word was spoken about them in the so-called "free" press.

(4) My aim is to bring back the memory of all the past struggles against the dead hand of Islam. Like for example the Qarmatian movement which was a revolutionary movement which swept through the Muslim world from the 9th to the 12th centuries AD. This movement organised itself on the bases of a system of communism into which initiation was necessary. They challenged the power of the caliph of Baghdad. In 931 AD the Qarmatians sacked Mecca and took the Black Stone of the Ka'ba to Mu'aminiyah for thirty years. Their only mistake was not to have destroyed it. In Khurasan, in Syria and in Yemen, they formed lasting hotbeds of discontent The Qarmatians also introduced Greek philosophy and by so doing helped many minds to free themselves from the clutches of Islam. Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato and the masters of Hermetism were presented as divine prophets. Other sources were also brought in, notably from Persia and India.

Al-Halladj whom we mentioned to start with was a remarkable man, he set up in his own home a model of the Ka'ba and said: "The important thing is to proceed seven times around the Ka'ba of one's heart", those in pawer therefore accused him of being a Qarmati rebel who wished to destroy the Ka'ba of Mecca. A1-Halladj was mocking the ludicrous spectacle of having to run seven times round the black cube. In fact he was helping to demystify the whole Islamic death machine which rested in the hands of those who ruled. "Thus for having rejected the discipline of the arcana with which his predecessors and his contemporary shrouded themselves, far having indulged without restraint to the call of God's love, for having revealed that the union of love with God was possible, for having sung this union up to crying out in a moment of ecstasy: "I am God" (ana al-haqq), he provoked a "crisis of consciousness" in the Muslim Community. Al-HaIladj was flagellated, mutilated, hung upon a gibbet and finally decapitated, his body was burnt and his ashes thrown into the Tigris. Those who ruled at the time of Al-Halladj did not forgive him for bringing god down to earth. There are many similarities between Al-Halladj's "programme" and Thomas Münzer's who "demanded the immediate establishment of the kingdom of God, of the prophesied millenium, by restoring the Church to its original condition and abolishing all the institutions that conflicted with this allegedly early-Christian, but, in fact, very novel church. By the kingdom of God Münzer understood a society in which there would be no class foreign to the members" of society".(cf The Peasant Wars, F. Engels, 1850). The Anabaptists and Münzer were a direct threat to the Princes of Germany, the Pope, and to Luther and they paid with their lives.

For Münzer Christ was a mere man. Luther had started his career on the side of the insurgents but soon found out that they went too far for his thick head, years later Lenin would follow the same path. Don't follow leaders....

(5) Le Mensonge Cru, Mezioud Ouldamer & Remy Ricordeau. (Editions Siham, Paris, 1988)

(6) Commentaires sur la Société du Spectacle, Guy Debord. (Editions G. Lebovici, Paris, 1988). Some idiots in London writing in Marxism Today about May 1968, came up with the conclusion that the dream was over, really! It seems rather that their nightmare is continuing. As usual stalinists enjoy spreading confusion.

(7) The following should please all those who have an interest in keeping private property, the family in other words the State going: "The Old Testament contains a certain number of traces which seems to indicate that among the ancestors of historical Israel the matriarchate was in force -that is a child was considered to belong, not to the father's clan or family, but that of the mother. In these primitive times the father was not definitevely known. Polyandry prevailed -ie., a woman was visited by various men. Strabo (Geographia, XVI) mentions as prevalent among the Arabian peoples akin to Israel. Under such conditions only the mother knows her child, and therefore it is she who gave it its name. This practice Iasted in Israel far down into the historical period, although the reason for it had long disappeared and was forgotten (...) A further surviving trace of an earlier matriarchate is seen in the fact that the tent belonged to the woman (...) Among the Arabs when a woman had grown tired of a man she simply reversed her tent -ie-, she turned the door to the other side. When the man returned and found the tent thus reversed he knew that she wished to have nothing further to do with him. (...) Finally, there is another piece which is not without value. There is reason to suppose that the word for "class" mishpachach is connected with shipcha; in the 'Old Testament', shiphchach means a female slave, or even a concubine, but under the matriarchate, it had meant the matriarchate wife. In the nomadic period the mishpachach seems to have been the ultimate social unit! In the settled period "the Israelite family has now passed from the earlier stage of the matriarchate (...) to that of the patriarchate -the wife is her husband's property. To have many wives, therefore, means to be rich!! In Israel the main purpose of marriage was the procreation of children. (...) The wife is of secondary importance. All that we hear of her makes it impossible for us to forget for an instant that her husband is her lord and master."

A History of the Hebrew Civilization. A. Berthelot (Payot, Paris 1926)

(8) Another case of primitive accumulation!

(9) "The ancient poetry of Arabia, immediately before the advent of Mohammed, is the most delightful wild flower of literature the Eastern world can show..." Notes to The Anthology of World Poetry. (1929)

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Fuck Islam
Category: Religion and Philosophy

The Koran

All but unknown in the West is the fact that, like several modern Christian evangelists, Mohammed (c. 570-632), the founder of the religion known as Islam, once found himself embroiled in a sexual scandal. One of his nine wives, Hafsah, caught him in the act with a slave-girl. Hafsah had evidently known something about his liaison earlier, and had extracted from the Prophet his promise to end the relationship - which, of course, he didn't carry out. When Hafsah, furious at the thought that she might be a mere tenth instead of a ninth of his attentions, suspiciously checked up and had her worst fears confirmed, the situation blew up into a quarrel involving another wife, A'ishah.

Coming to Mohammed's rescue, Allah dictated (through Mohammed, of course) another chapter of the Koran - generally number 66, entitled "Prohibition." Here God attacks the wives, and blusters to them that: "If you two turn to God in repentance (for your hearts have sinned), you shall be pardoned; but if you conspire against him, know that God is his protector."

God also remarks - rather petulantly, I thought, that Hafsah and A'ishah had better watch out because they can be replaced: "It may well be that, if he divorce you, his Lord will give him in your place better wives than yourselves, submissive to God and full of faith, devout, penitent, obedient, and given to fasting."

Already, back in chapter 33 God had issued a bunch of special dispensations for The Prophet, specifically making it lawful for him (just him) to have intercourse with a number of women who would ordinarily be off-limits:

"Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives to whom you have granted dowries and the slave-girls whom God has given you as booty; the daughters of your paternal and maternal uncles and of your paternal and maternal aunts... and any believing womn who gives herself to the Prophet... This privilege is yours alone, being granted to no other believer."

In another (extremely short) chapter - number 111, as ever "In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful," the Prophet gets word that his uncle, with whom he's had a dispute (the uncle, Abu-Lahab, apparently thought the Prophet was making it all up), is now under a curse. The entire text of chapter 111 reads:

"May the hands of Abu-Lahab perish. May he himself perish! Nothing shall his wealth and gains avail him. He shall be burnt in a flaming fire, and his wife, laden with faggots, shall have a rope around her neck!"

The first time I read the Koran was when I was in high-school, now quite some years ago. Recently it seemed appropriate to do so again, so I spent a few evenings once more with the Recitation (literal meaning of "Koran"), the governing volume of the millions of persons who live within the sphere of Islam, a religion whose name means "submission."

Unlike the Bible, you can get through the entire Koran in a reasonable amount of time, as it is only about the length of a moderate-sized novel - 435 pages in the translation I recently read (N. J. Dawood's 1956 work, revised in 1974). A few persons, incidentally, have claimed to have similarly read the Bible straight through, but one needs to be very skeptical of such boasts, since a little reflection (and actual experiment) will show how unlikely that is. Texts of this sort attract followers and rabid fanatics for this very reason, that they are so impenetrable in their dense mass. Not having read it and therefore feeling guilty about the failure to do so must constitute a powerful impulse to leap to the defense of things these followers do not actually know. At least with the Koran, comprehending the whole thing is a relatively trivial exercise.

Like the Book of Mormon, the Koran purports to be the further chronicles of what God wants you to do. It recognizes the existence of the Bible or Scriptures and Torah, and states as its reason for being, that the Christians and Jews have too far split into sects and had fallen away from proper observance of "God's" laws. Also like the Book of Mormon, this one is supposedly the transcript of a tablet preserved in heaven.

Allah didn't dictate the whole thing at once, though; more chapters came through as situations (such as Hafsah's investigative surveillance) made them necessary. There are 114 of these, generally arranged by length, with the shortest last. The longer chapters at the beginning of this arbitrary (and non-chronological) arrangement drag rather badly; Mohammed saves his deadliest rantings for the somewhat shorter ones.

However, all chapters have in common the same type of basic presentation, which is comprised of three ingredients: stories, commands, and threats. Especially threats. All float and bubble to the surface again and again in a broth of astounding amounts of repetition.

For example, in one chapter, no. 55, which is something less than three pages long, the interrogation, "Which of your Lord's blessings would you deny?" is repeated 31 times, many of these being complete non sequitirs, such as "Flames of fire shall be lashed at you, and molten brass. Which of your Lord's blessings would you deny?" Well, for a start, I'd want to deny that one. Other repetitions include the story of Noah with certain embellishments, about six or eight times, Pharaoh and Moses, maybe ten, Abraham, Joseph, et alia, many more; Jonah, etc. and on and on here and there through the book.

Commands go forward at a blinding rate, thick and fast, too; and more about those in a moment, but first this word from the First Islamic Bank of Sadistic Threats: Mohammed can hardly write two consecutive paragraphs without at least one fairly horrifying promise that infidels, unbelievers, apostates, "People of the Book" (Christ-worshippers), fornicators and others are going to burn in hell, drink boiling water, eat putrid filth for all eternity, have melted metal poured all over them, roast their skins in blazing flame and then be provided immediately with more skin by his eminence, The Compassionate, the Merciful, so that they can be burned some more, and so forth. I had wanted to count the number of threats, but bogged down in what seemed like a never-ending mire, so was forced to resort to a statistical method. By this I compute the total to be around 1200 to 1500, including such ones as these:

"Garments of fire have been prepared for the unbelievers. Scalding water shall be poured upon their heads, melting their skins and that which is in their bellies. They shall be lashed with rods of iron.Whenever, in their torment, they try to escape, back they shall be dragged, and will be told, 'Taste the torment!!'"

"Those who deny our revelations we will burn inf ire. No sooner will their skins be consumed than we shall give them other skins, so that they may truly taste the scourge."

Atheists are to be crucified or else have their hands and feet cut off.

Incidentally, chapter 74 contains an interesting point: "Would that you knew what the Fire is like! It leaves nothing, it spares no one; it burns the skins of men. It is guarded by nineteen keepers."

Commands a person would have to obey in order to avoid these demented tanning sessions range from lawful eating to lawful sexual practices to treating orphans properly. Slavery is permitted, in fact definitely cited approvingly, and a master is allowed to compel his slave-girl to have intercourse with him; but he is not allowed to prostitute her for money to others.

More commands order the faithful not to be friends with Christians or anybody else who is not Islamic, and especially not with unbelievers. The arguments of unbelievers should not be listened to. Their cities should be destroyed.

Women are not addressed in the Koran; the reader is explicitly and implicitly male. Women are indeed spoken of, but not to, and they are stated to be inferior and subservient. Girl infants are not lawful to kill, but otherwise it is definitely to be mourned when one is born instead of a son.

Conception is stated (several times) to take place when ejaculated semen turns into a clot of blood that Allah makes into a human being inside the mere vessel, the female. Other scientific thought has the sky as an actual dome, perfect as there are no cracks. The far western setting place of the sun is a pool of mud.

Mohammed thinks there are two seas on the planet, and lightning is a sign from God.

Sometimes he purrs and chuckles: "How many cities have we laid in ruin! In the night our scourge fell upon them, or at midday when they were drowsing."

Sometimes he is apocalyptic: "On that day there shall be faces veiled with darkness, covered with dust. These shall be the faces of the wicked and the unbelieving."

But always he is monstrous and insane. His recitation is one of gross, turgid evil, and the impact of his "Koran" upon Arab culture and the world has been profoundly, unrelievedly bad.

It is not accurate to speak of "fundamentalist Islam"; there is either the Islam that is founded upon this book, the Koran, or there is something else - some other religion - which has nothing to do with this book at all. In any case, THIS recitation, by Mohammed, of "God's" alleged speeches and edicts, leaves absolutely no room for any latitude, any "interpretation," any individual opinions at all. It eradicates, indeed, any trace of free will and only proffers to male fanatics several hundred paragraphs cajoling them to follow orders so that after death they will live endlessly in "gardens watered by running streams" where dark-eyed, explicitly "high bosomed" "virgins" will have sexual relations with them throughout infinity on green silken cushions and lush carpets. The repetition constitutes a pretty good technqiue of hypnosis; the threats drive home the consequences of disobedience, and the commands are those of an ignorant, insane priesthood operating as the heirs to a lunatic's pretensions to speak for a nonexistent "god."

We have witnessed the result.

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review of "pacifism as pathology"
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

Pacifism as Pathology 
 by Carl Webb 

Pacifism as Pathology Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America

by Ward Churchill (Arbeiter Ring Publishing, Canada, 1999.) ISBN 1-894037-07-3

Pacifism as Pathology-Notes on an American Pseudopraxis is the title of Ward Churchill's well-argued and persuasive essay criticising the form and ideology of non-violent political action in North America. The essay was first published in 1986, and is reprinted in this book alongside an essay by Mike Ryan who further develops the arguments in the context of the Canadian peace movement. Though Churchill's essay was written in response to the political scene of well over a decade ago, his arguments are (perhaps worringly) equally thought-provoking and relevant to the contemporary manifestations of non-violent political action that purport to have revolutionary methods and goals. Churchill's main argument is that philosophical on-violence/pacifism-which promotes the idea that the violence of the State can be transcended through purity of purpose, moral superiority and non-violence-is a delusional and counter-revolutionary political movement. Despite recognising the fact that many adherents to non-violence have sincere revolutionary aspirations (i.e: that they reject the present social order and wish to see its total abolition and replacement) Churchill claims that their non-violent methods serve to constrain them to the realm of 'pseudo-praxis' which, at best, is utterly ineffectual and, at worst, maintains and reinforces the hierarchical and exploitative status quo.

Churchill argues that this pseudo-praxis of pacifism is rooted in an ideology rife with internal contradictions and limitations and for its internal logic depends upon "fostering a view of social conflict as a morality play." (p.38) In this 'play' the State and its violence are "bad" or "negative", their pacifist opponents "good" or "positive" and it is through the triumph of morality alone that revolution will come about. Hence, "Pacifists, with seemingly endless repetition, pronounce that the negativity of the modern corporate-fascist state will atrophy through defection and neglect once there is a sufficiently positive social vision to take its place." (p.30) Such a view is clearly the stuff of pure idealism rather than realism, for the state is not a moral adversary, it cannot be persuaded to 'wither away'. As Churchill rightly points out; "Absurdity clearly abounds when suggesting that the state will refrain from using all necessary physical force to protect against undesired forms of change and threats to its safety." (p.44)

Taking the experience of the Jews in the Holocaust as an in-depth (and highly controversial) example, the author illustrates the ultimate futility of non-violent resistance. He suggests that the pacifist response of the Jews which was intended to promote "social responsibility" and not further exacerbate their persecution, in fact did the opposite and led to the Jews effectively colluding with the genocidal aims of their Nazi oppressors. Whilst not suggesting that the Holocaust could have been prevented by armed struggle on the part of the Jews, Churchill, quoting Bruno Bettleheim (a former concentration camp inmate), says: "Rebellion could only have saved either the life they were going to lose anyway, or the lives of others.Inertia it was that led millions of Jews into the ghettos that the SS had created for them." (p.36)

Churchill recognises that this example is extreme yet he suggests that: "it is precisely this extremity which makes the example useful; the Jewish experience reveals with stark clarity the basic illogic at the very core of pacifist conceptions of morality and political action." (p.38) The illogic to which he is referring is the idea that moral superiority can overcome state oppression; the moral superiority being based upon an unwillingness to take up arms and use violence as a tactic. This notion is so central to the 'pathology' of pacifism that the dichotomies between good (non-violent) and evil (violent) are found throughout. Of course, in order to sustain a belief in the ideology examples of good (non-violence) triumphing over evil (violence) are vital. Here, Churchill argues that pacifists are guilty of considerable revisionism in order to make history compatible with their beliefs.

Churchill looks in particular at the popularly quoted 'successes' of the movements headed by MK Gandhi in India, and Dr. Martin Luther King in North America. In both these instances he argues that the 'success' of the movements in gaining their demands depended massively upon the threat of violence from other sources against the British and American governments respectively. In the case of North America, the pressure came from "the context of armed self-defense tactics being employed for the first time by rural black leaders.and the eruption of black urban enclaves.It also coincided with the increasing need of the American state for internal stability due to the unexpectedly intense and effective armed resistance mounted by the Vietnamese against US aggression in Southeast Asia." (p.43)

The importance of the misappropriation of history by pacifists becomes clear when we delve a little deeper into the psychology of it all. Clearly, as Churchill points out, these people do believe in the need for revolution, indeed they pronounce solidarity with those engaged in armed struggles in the Third World.

However, if they concede the historical fact that "there simply has never been a revolution, or even a substantial social reorganisation, brought into being on the basis of the principles of pacifism. In every instance, violence has been an integral requirement of the process of transforming the state" (p.45) then pacifists must begin to realize that there is not just an option to accept violence as a method of social change, but an imperative.

In the author's view the fact that pacifists are so reluctant to get to this point in their reasoning has much to do with the fact that for most, struggle against the state is not a daily reality. Indeed, their whole concern stems from a moral objection to the 'wickedness' of the state, rather any personal threat to their lives and communities. From such a privileged position, pacifists can espouse non-violent revolution and engage in political action without the risks most political dissidents take. Churchill does recognise that some pacifist practitioners have run real risks for their beliefs-such as the followers of Gandhi beaten to death in pursuit of non-violent revolution and those who have immolated themselves or incurred long prison sentences taking action for their cause. However, in the main, Churchill argues that North American pacifists are caught up in a politics of 'the comfort zone' based on the guiding question of "What sort of politics might I engage in which will both allow me to posture as a progressive and allow me to avoid incurring harm to myself?" (p.49) Not surprisingly, the political practice which ensues from this underlying concern is not-and never can be-revolutionary, since if it were the state would respond with force. Pacifist praxis is therefore necessarily ineffectual and unthreatening.

Churchill's description of the kind of praxis pacifists do engage in will seem all too familiar to most of us who have been involved in non-violent activism. The protest march, sit-down blockade, rally etc. is revealed as the charade it really is. I found myself cringing at this point, recognising situations in which I had participated in the spectacle of symbolic action. Crucial aspects of this spectacle include the representatives of the state-the cops-invited to be there by the protest organisers, the elite band of stewards who ensure non-violence and 'responsible' conduct, and the protesters there to take part in a mass arrest for transgressing some minor law. The whole thing is conducted in such a way as to cause minimum disruption to the workings of the state (the police are warned in advance to expect an estimated number of arrests) and to make sure that no-one (cops or protesters) gets hurt. As Churchill comments: "in especially 'militant' actions, arrestees go limp, undoubtedly severely taxing the state's repressive resources by forcing the police to carry them bodily to the vans.(monitored all the while.to ensure that such 'police brutality' as pushing, shoving, or dropping an arrestee does not occur)." (p.54) The farcical ineffectuality of this symbolic protest is further emphasized when we remember that many of these demonstrations-especially in this country-are in protest at the use of state violence in the form of invasions of other countries (resulting in the loss of thousands of lives), production of nuclear weapons and other arms (potentially genocidal), or destruction of the environment (potentially ecocidal).

Churchill is also highly critical of the condemnation that non-violent activists make of the 'violent minority' who refuse to play the game of merely symbolic protest. He points out the blatant hypocrisy surrounding the willingness of non-violent activists to 'stand in solidarity' with armed groups in the Third World who are resisting Western imperialist aggression, whilst simultaneously distancing themselves from anyone who dares to suggest a violent response in their own country! Churchill argues that this is more evidence of 'comfort zone' politics which not only leads to ineffective action but is actually racist: "Massive and unremitting violence in the colonies is appalling to right-thinking people but ultimately acceptable when compared with the unthinkable alternative that any degree of real violence might be redirected against 'mother country radicals'." (p.62) By intentionally avoiding any degree of state violence themselves, non-violent activists ensure that the brunt of it is borne by both Third World communities and minority communities in the West.

Churchill's argument that the 'comfort zone' practise of symbolic non-violent action is easily accommodated by the State, is further developed in the follow on essay by Mike Ryan. He suggests that far from challenging State power, non-violent action is a valuable means by which the State can reinforce its legitimacy: "The message of civil disobedience as it is now practiced is this: There is opposition in society. The state deals with this opposition firmly but gently, according to the law. Unlike some countries, Canada is a democratic society which tolerates opposition. Therefore, it is unnecessary for anyone to step outside the forms of protest accepted by this society; it is unnecessary to resist." (p.140) Such recuperation clearly has implications for those whose actions go beyond the accepted boundary by allowing the State to simply divide and rule. As 'the violent minority' are isolated and crushed, the State can claim the tacit (or sometimes explicit) support for its actions from those who remain (unbruised and morally superior) within the permitted boundaries of dissent.

Having thoroughly and convincingly dispensed with any notion that pacifism represents a serious and revolutionary challenge to the state, Churchill takes his analysis a step further. He argues that pacifism is actually pathological with delusional, racist and suicidal tendencies, and bears more hallmarks of a religious, rather than political, ideology. This makes it very difficult to argue people out of this mindset, as Churchill suggests; "hegemonic pacifism in advanced capitalist contexts proves itself supremely resistant-indeed virtually impervious-to mere logic and moral suasion." (p.93) He claims that the only way to overcome this 'illness' is through a therapeutic process designed to take the non-violent advocate "beyond the smug exercise of knee-jerk pacifist "superiority," and into the arena of effective liberatory praxis." (p.93) He proposes a strategy in which individuals are forced to challenge their ideas through a therapeutic discussion of values (to determine whether the subject really understands the bases of need for revolutionary social transformation), followed by 'Reality Therapy' (time spent living with oppressed communities to get the subject out of the comfort zone) and 'Demystification' (where the subject is taught to handle weapons and lose their psychological fear of guns.) All this should "have the effect of radically diminishing much of the delusion, the aroma of racism and the sense of privilege". (p.101)

It is probably right to accuse Churchill of consciously formulating a training programme to create revolutionaries, in fact he concedes that he is trying to aid in the development of "a strategy to win". Indeed I think if the proponents of non-violence were to enter the therapeutic process en masse the state would have more cause for concern than at any time in the preceding decades of pacifist "action". However, it would not be right to accuse the author of attempting to glorify violence and armed struggle, rather he is at pains to emphasise that "the desire for a non-violent and cooperative world is the healthiest of all psychological manifestations." (p.103) Rather the essay is written to provoke discussion and to get to the point where pacifists stop believing that their 'purity of purpose' will achieve the world we want.

Churchill's alternative to the pacifist strategy is made clear in a chapter entitled Towards a Liberatory Praxis. Defining praxis as "action consciously and intentionally guided by theory while simultaneously guiding the evolution of theoretical elaboration" (p.84) he argues that in advanced capitalist contexts far more emphasis has been placed on the theory and analysis of revolutionary struggle at the expense of the physical tactics which could be employed. It is partly for this reason that the doctrine of 'revolutionary non-violence' as a theory and practice has taken such a hold. In contrast, in the Third World ".it is considered axiomatic that revolution in non-industrialized areas all but inherently entails resort to armed struggle and violence." (p.85) With the immediacy of State violence to contend with, those engaged in liberatory struggles in the Third World have had to innovate a whole range of tactics-hence the highly developed art of guerrilla warfare. Churchill suggests that we learn from this example, though he is not advocating some 'cult of terror'. Rather we must recognise that ".in order to be effective and ultimately successful, any revolutionary movement within advanced capitalist nations must develop the broadest range of thinking/action by which to confront the state." (p.91) In this 'continuum of activity' non-violent action-crucially divorced from its delusional ideological trappings-has a role to play, but then so too does "armed self-defense, and.the realm of 'offensive' military operations." (p.91) In this situation, rather than non-violence being seen as the antithesis of violence and morally evaluated, both become useful tactics to be used as necessary in the revolutionary strategy. Whether you agree with all of Churchill's arguments or not (and personally I have a few problems with the therapy stuff) his analysis of the pacifist doctrine is both eloquent and truly eye-opening. I spent some time involved in explicitly non-violent activism in the UK without really thinking through the ideological implications-it was simply the first direct action scene I came across. I only wish that I had read this book 7 years ago and hastened the learning process that has led me to many of the same conclusions as the author.
 

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Only two options for Iraq - which would you choose?
Current mood: insubordinate
Category: News and Politics

JIHAD VS. MCWORLD
by Benjamin R. Barber
M A R C H 1 9 9 2

The two axial principles of our age -- tribalism and globalism -- clash
at every point except one: they may both be threatening to democracy
Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures -- both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe -- a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food -- with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald’s, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.

These two tendencies are sometimes visible in the same countries at the same instant: thus Yugoslavia, clamoring just recently to join the New Europe, is exploding into fragments; India is trying to live up to its reputation as the world’s largest integral democracy while powerful new fundamentalist parties like the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, along with nationalist assassins, are imperiling its hard-won unity. States are breaking up or joining up: the Soviet Union has disappeared almost overnight, its parts forming new unions with one another or with like-minded nationalities in neighboring states. The old interwar national state based on territory and political sovereignty looks to be a mere transitional development.

The tendencies of what I am here calling the forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from without. They have one thing in common: neither offers much hope to citizens looking for practical ways to govern themselves democratically. If the global future is to pit Jihad’s centrifugal whirlwind against McWorld’s centripetal black hole, the outcome is unlikely to be democratic -- or so I will argue.

MCWORLD, OR THE GLOBALIZATION OF POLITICS

Four imperatives make up the dynamic of McWorld: a market imperative, a resource imperative, an information-technology imperative, and an ecological imperative. By shrinking the world and diminishing the salience of national borders, these imperatives have in combination achieved a considerable victory over factiousness and particularism, and not least of all over their most virulent traditional form -- nationalism. It is the realists who are now Europeans, the utopians who dream nostalgically of a resurgent England or Germany, perhaps even a resurgent Wales or Saxony. Yesterday’s wishful cry for one world has yielded to the reality of McWorld.

THE MARKET IMPERATIVE.
Marxist and Leninist theories of imperialism assumed that the quest for ever-expanding markets would in time compel nation-based capitalist economies to push against national boundaries in search of an international economic imperium. Whatever else has happened to the scientistic predictions of Marxism, in this domain they have proved farsighted. All national economies are now vulnerable to the inroads of larger, transnational markets within which trade is free, currencies are convertible, access to banking is open, and contracts are enforceable under law. In Europe, Asia, Africa, the South Pacific, and the Americas such markets are eroding national sovereignty and giving rise to entities -- international banks, trade associations, transnational lobbies like OPEC and Greenpeace, world news services like CNN and the BBC, and multinational corporations that increasingly lack a meaningful national identity -- that neither reflect nor respect nationhood as an organizing or regulative principle.

The market imperative has also reinforced the quest for international peace and stability, requisites of an efficient international economy. Markets are enemies of parochialism, isolation, fractiousness, war. Market psychology attenuates the psychology of ideological and religious cleavages and assumes a concord among producers and consumers -- categories that ill fit narrowly conceived national or religious cultures. Shopping has little tolerance for blue laws, whether dictated by pub-closing British paternalism, Sabbath-observing Jewish Orthodox fundamentalism, or no-Sunday-liquor-sales Massachusetts puritanism. In the context of common markets, international law ceases to be a vision of justice and becomes a workaday framework for getting things done -- enforcing contracts, ensuring that governments abide by deals, regulating trade and currency relations, and so forth.

Common markets demand a common language, as well as a common currency, and they produce common behaviors of the kind bred by cosmopolitan city life everywhere. Commercial pilots, computer programmers, international bankers, media specialists, oil riggers, entertainment celebrities, ecology experts, demographers, accountants, professors, athletes -- these compose a new breed of men and women for whom religion, culture, and nationality can seem only marginal elements in a working identity. Although sociologists of everyday life will no doubt continue to distinguish a Japanese from an American mode, shopping has a common signature throughout the world. Cynics might even say that some of the recent revolutions in Eastern Europe have had as their true goal not liberty and the right to vote but well-paying jobs and the right to shop (although the vote is proving easier to acquire than consumer goods). The market imperative is, then, plenty powerful; but, notwithstanding some of the claims made for "democratic capitalism," it is not identical with the democratic imperative.

THE RESOURCE IMPERATIVE.
Democrats once dreamed of societies whose political autonomy rested firmly on economic independence. The Athenians idealized what they called autarky, and tried for a while to create a way of life simple and austere enough to make the polis genuinely self-sufficient. To be free meant to be independent of any other community or polis. Not even the Athenians were able to achieve autarky, however: human nature, it turns out, is dependency. By the time of Pericles, Athenian politics was inextricably bound up with a flowering empire held together by naval power and commerce -- an empire that, even as it appeared to enhance Athenian might, ate away at Athenian independence and autarky. Master and slave, it turned out, were bound together by mutual insufficiency.

The dream of autarky briefly engrossed nineteenth-century America as well, for the underpopulated, endlessly bountiful land, the cornucopia of natural resources, and the natural barriers of a continent walled in by two great seas led many to believe that America could be a world unto itself. Given this past, it has been harder for Americans than for most to accept the inevitability of interdependence. But the rapid depletion of resources even in a country like ours, where they once seemed inexhaustible, and the maldistribution of arable soil and mineral resources on the planet, leave even the wealthiest societies ever more resource-dependent and many other nations in permanently desperate straits.

Every nation, it turns out, needs something another nation has; some nations have almost nothing they need.

THE INFORMATION-TECHNOLOGY IMPERATIVE.
Enlightenment science and the technologies derived from it are inherently universalizing. They entail a quest for descriptive principles of general application, a search for universal solutions to particular problems, and an unswerving embrace of objectivity and impartiality.

Scientific progress embodies and depends on open communication, a common discourse rooted in rationality, collaboration, and an easy and regular flow and exchange of information. Such ideals can be hypocritical covers for power-mongering by elites, and they may be shown to be wanting in many other ways, but they are entailed by the very idea of science and they make science and globalization practical allies.

Business, banking, and commerce all depend on information flow and are facilitated by new communication technologies. The hardware of these technologies tends to be systemic and integrated -- computer, television, cable, satellite, laser, fiber-optic, and microchip technologies combining to create a vast interactive communications and information network that can potentially give every person on earth access to every other person, and make every datum, every byte, available to every set of eyes. If the automobile was, as George Ball once said (when he gave his blessing to a Fiat factory in the Soviet Union during the Cold War), "an ideology on four wheels," then electronic telecommunication and information systems are an ideology at 186,000 miles per second -- which makes for a very small planet in a very big hurry. Individual cultures speak particular languages; commerce and science increasingly speak English; the whole world speaks logarithms and binary mathematics.

Moreover, the pursuit of science and technology asks for, even compels, open societies. Satellite footprints do not respect national borders; telephone wires penetrate the most closed societies. With photocopying and then fax machines having infiltrated Soviet universities and samizdat literary circles in the eighties, and computer modems having multiplied like rabbits in communism’s bureaucratic warrens thereafter, glasnost could not be far behind. In their social requisites, secrecy and science are enemies.

The new technology’s software is perhaps even more globalizing than its hardware. The information arm of international commerce’s sprawling body reaches out and touches distinct nations and parochial cultures, and gives them a common face chiseled in Hollywood, on Madison Avenue, and in Silicon Valley. Throughout the 1980s one of the most-watched television programs in South Africa was The Cosby Show. The demise of apartheid was already in production. Exhibitors at the 1991 Cannes film festival expressed growing anxiety over the "homogenization" and "Americanization" of the global film industry when, for the third year running, American films dominated the awards ceremonies. America has dominated the world’s popular culture for much longer, and much more decisively. In November of 1991 Switzerland’s once insular culture boasted best-seller lists featuring Terminator 2 as the No. 1 movie, Scarlett as the No. 1 book, and Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls as the No. 1 record album. No wonder the Japanese are buying Hollywood film studios even faster than Americans are buying Japanese television sets. This kind of software supremacy may in the long term be far more important than hardware superiority, because culture has become more potent than armaments. What is the power of the Pentagon compared with Disneyland? Can the Sixth Fleet keep up with CNN? McDonald’s in Moscow and Coke in China will do more to create a global culture than military colonization ever could. It is less the goods than the brand names that do the work, for they convey life-style images that alter perception and challenge behavior. They make up the seductive software of McWorld’s common (at times much too common) soul.

Yet in all this high-tech commercial world there is nothing that looks particularly democratic. It lends itself to surveillance as well as liberty, to new forms of manipulation and covert control as well as new kinds of participation, to skewed, unjust market outcomes as well as greater productivity. The consumer society and the open society are not quite synonymous. Capitalism and democracy have a relationship, but it is something less than a marriage. An efficient free market after all requires that consumers be free to vote their dollars on competing goods, not that citizens be free to vote their values and beliefs on competing political candidates and programs. The free market flourished in junta-run Chile, in military-governed Taiwan and Korea, and, earlier, in a variety of autocratic European empires as well as their colonial possessions.

THE ECOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE.
The impact of globalization on ecology is a cliche even to world leaders who ignore it. We know well enough that the German forests can be destroyed by Swiss and Italians driving gas-guzzlers fueled by leaded gas. We also know that the planet can be asphyxiated by greenhouse gases because Brazilian farmers want to be part of the twentieth century and are burning down tropical rain forests to clear a little land to plough, and because Indonesians make a living out of converting their lush jungle into toothpicks for fastidious Japanese diners, upsetting the delicate oxygen balance and in effect puncturing our global lungs. Yet this ecological consciousness has meant not only greater awareness but also greater inequality, as modernized nations try to slam the door behind them, saying to developing nations, "The world cannot afford your modernization; ours has wrung it dry!"

Each of the four imperatives just cited is transnational, transideological, and transcultural. Each applies impartially to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists; to democrats and totalitarians; to capitalists and socialists. The Enlightenment dream of a universal rational society has to a remarkable degree been realized -- but in a form that is commercialized, homogenized, depoliticized, bureaucratized, and, of course, radically incomplete, for the movement toward McWorld is in competition with forces of global breakdown, national dissolution, and centrifugal corruption. These forces, working in the opposite direction, are the essence of what I call Jihad.

JIHAD, OR THE LEBANONIZATION OF THE WORLD

OPEC, the World Bank, the United Nations, the International Red Cross, the multinational corporation...there are scores of institutions that reflect globalization. But they often appear as ineffective reactors to the world’s real actors: national states and, to an ever greater degree, subnational factions in permanent rebellion against uniformity and integration -- even the kind represented by universal law and justice. The headlines feature these players regularly: they are cultures, not countries; parts, not wholes; sects, not religions; rebellious factions and dissenting minorities at war not just with globalism but with the traditional nation-state. Kurds, Basques, Puerto Ricans, Ossetians, East Timoreans, Quebecois, the Catholics of Northern Ireland, Abkhasians, Kurile Islander Japanese, the Zulus of Inkatha, Catalonians, Tamils, and, of course, Palestinians -- people without countries, inhabiting nations not their own, seeking smaller worlds within borders that will seal them off from modernity.

A powerful irony is at work here. Nationalism was once a force of integration and unification, a movement aimed at bringing together disparate clans, tribes, and cultural fragments under new, assimilationist flags. But as Ortega y Gasset noted more than sixty years ago, having won its victories, nationalism changed its strategy. In the 1920s, and again today, it is more often a reactionary and divisive force, pulverizing the very nations it once helped cement together. The force that creates nations is "inclusive," Ortega wrote in The Revolt of the Masses. "In periods of consolidation, nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania..."

This mania has left the post-Cold War world smoldering with hot wars; the international scene is little more unified than it was at the end of the Great War, in Ortega’s own time. There were more than thirty wars in progress last year, most of them ethnic, racial, tribal, or religious in character, and the list of unsafe regions doesn’t seem to be getting any shorter. Some new world order!

The aim of many of these small-scale wars is to redraw boundaries, to implode states and resecure parochial identities: to escape McWorld’s dully insistent imperatives. The mood is that of Jihad: war not as an instrument of policy but as an emblem of identity, an expression of community, an end in itself. Even where there is no shooting war, there is fractiousness, secession, and the quest for ever smaller communities. Add to the list of dangerous countries those at risk: In Switzerland and Spain, Jurassian and Basque separatists still argue the virtues of ancient identities, sometimes in the language of bombs. Hyperdisintegration in the former Soviet Union may well continue unabated -- not just a Ukraine independent from the Soviet Union but a Bessarabian Ukraine independent from the Ukrainian republic; not just Russia severed from the defunct union but Tatarstan severed from Russia. Yugoslavia makes even the disunited, ex-Soviet, nonsocialist republics that were once the Soviet Union look integrated, its sectarian fatherlands springing up within factional motherlands like weeds within weeds within weeds. Kurdish independence would threaten the territorial integrity of four Middle Eastern nations. Well before the current cataclysm Soviet Georgia made a claim for autonomy from the Soviet Union, only to be faced with its Ossetians (164,000 in a republic of 5.5 million) demanding their own self-determination within Georgia. The Abkhasian minority in Georgia has followed suit. Even the good will established by Canada’s once promising Meech Lake protocols is in danger, with Francophone Quebec again threatening the dissolution of the federation. In South Africa the emergence from apartheid was hardly achieved when friction between Inkatha’s Zulus and the African National Congress’s tribally identified members threatened to replace Europeans’ racism with an indigenous tribal war. After thirty years of attempted integration using the colonial language (English) as a unifier, Nigeria is now playing with the idea of linguistic multiculturalism -- which could mean the cultural breakup of the nation into hundreds of tribal fragments. Even Saddam Hussein has benefited from the threat of internal Jihad, having used renewed tribal and religious warfare to turn last season’s mortal enemies into reluctant allies of an Iraqi nationhood that he nearly destroyed.

The passing of communism has torn away the thin veneer of internationalism (workers of the world unite!) to reveal ethnic prejudices that are not only ugly and deep-seated but increasingly murderous. Europe’s old scourge, anti-Semitism, is back with a vengeance, but it is only one of many antagonisms. It appears all too easy to throw the historical gears into reverse and pass from a Communist dictatorship back into a tribal state.

Among the tribes, religion is also a battlefield. ("Jihad" is a rich word whose generic meaning is "struggle" -- usually the struggle of the soul to avert evil. Strictly applied to religious war, it is used only in reference to battles where the faith is under assault, or battles against a government that denies the practice of Islam. My use here is rhetorical, but does follow both journalistic practice and history.) Remember the Thirty Years War? Whatever forms of Enlightenment universalism might once have come to grace such historically related forms of monotheism as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in many of their modern incarnations they are parochial rather than cosmopolitan, angry rather than loving, proselytizing rather than ecumenical, zealous rather than rationalist, sectarian rather than deistic, ethnocentric rather than universalizing. As a result, like the new forms of hypernationalism, the new expressions of religious fundamentalism are fractious and pulverizing, never integrating. This is religion as the Crusaders knew it: a battle to the death for souls that if not saved will be forever lost.

The atmospherics of Jihad have resulted in a breakdown of civility in the name of identity, of comity in the name of community. International relations have sometimes taken on the aspect of gang war -- cultural turf battles featuring tribal factions that were supposed to be sublimated as integral parts of large national, economic, postcolonial, and constitutional entities.

THE DARKENING FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY

These rather melodramatic tableaux vivants do not tell the whole story, however. For all their defects, Jihad and McWorld have their attractions. Yet, to repeat and insist, the attractions are unrelated to democracy. Neither McWorld nor Jihad is remotely democratic in impulse. Neither needs democracy; neither promotes democracy.

McWorld does manage to look pretty seductive in a world obsessed with Jihad. It delivers peace, prosperity, and relative unity -- if at the cost of independence, community, and identity (which is generally based on difference). The primary political values required by the global market are order and tranquillity, and freedom -- as in the phrases "free trade," "free press," and "free love." Human rights are needed to a degree, but not citizenship or participation -- and no more social justice and equality than are necessary to promote efficient economic production and consumption. Multinational corporations sometimes seem to prefer doing business with local oligarchs, inasmuch as they can take confidence from dealing with the boss on all crucial matters. Despots who slaughter their own populations are no problem, so long as they leave markets in place and refrain from making war on their neighbors (Saddam Hussein’s fatal mistake). In trading partners, predictability is of more value than justice.

The Eastern European revolutions that seemed to arise out of concern for global democratic values quickly deteriorated into a stampede in the general direction of free markets and their ubiquitous, television-promoted shopping malls. East Germany’s Neues Forum, that courageous gathering of intellectuals, students, and workers which overturned the Stalinist regime in Berlin in 1989, lasted only six months in Germany’s mini-version of McWorld. Then it gave way to money and markets and monopolies from the West. By the time of the first all-German elections, it could scarcely manage to secure three percent of the vote. Elsewhere there is growing evidence that glasnost will go and perestroika -- defined as privatization and an opening of markets to Western bidders -- will stay. So understandably anxious are the new rulers of Eastern Europe and whatever entities are forged from the residues of the Soviet Union to gain access to credit and markets and technology -- McWorld’s flourishing new currencies -- that they have shown themselves willing to trade away democratic prospects in pursuit of them: not just old totalitarian ideologies and command-economy production models but some possible indigenous experiments with a third way between capitalism and socialism, such as economic cooperatives and employee stock-ownership plans, both of which have their ardent supporters in the East.

Jihad delivers a different set of virtues: a vibrant local identity, a sense of community, solidarity among kinsmen, neighbors, and countrymen, narrowly conceived. But it also guarantees parochialism and is grounded in exclusion. Solidarity is secured through war against outsiders. And solidarity often means obedience to a hierarchy in governance, fanaticism in beliefs, and the obliteration of individual selves in the name of the group. Deference to leaders and intolerance toward outsiders (and toward "enemies within") are hallmarks of tribalism -- hardly the attitudes required for the cultivation of new democratic women and men capable of governing themselves. Where new democratic experiments have been conducted in retribalizing societies, in both Europe and the Third World, the result has often been anarchy, repression, persecution, and the coming of new, noncommunist forms of very old kinds of despotism. During the past year, Havel’s velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia was imperiled by partisans of "Czechland" and of Slovakia as independent entities. India seemed little less rent by Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, and Tamil infighting than it was immediately after the British pulled out, more than forty years ago.

To the extent that either McWorld or Jihad has a NATURAL politics, it has turned out to be more of an antipolitics. For McWorld, it is the antipolitics of globalism: bureaucratic, technocratic, and meritocratic, focused (as Marx predicted it would be) on the administration of things -- with people, however, among the chief things to be administered. In its politico-economic imperatives McWorld has been guided by laissez-faire market principles that privilege efficiency, productivity, and beneficence at the expense of civic liberty and self-government.

For Jihad, the antipolitics of tribalization has been explicitly antidemocratic: one-party dictatorship, government by military junta, theocratic fundamentalism -- often associated with a version of the Fuhrerprinzip that empowers an individual to rule on behalf of a people. Even the government of India, struggling for decades to model democracy for a people who will soon number a billion, longs for great leaders; and for every Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, or Rajiv Gandhi taken from them by zealous assassins, the Indians appear to seek a replacement who will deliver them from the lengthy travail of their freedom.

THE CONFEDERAL OPTION

How can democracy be secured and spread in a world whose primary tendencies are at best indifferent to it (McWorld) and at worst deeply antithetical to it (Jihad)? My guess is that globalization will eventually vanquish retribalization. The ethos of material "civilization" has not yet encountered an obstacle it has been unable to thrust aside. Ortega may have grasped in the 1920s a clue to our own future in the coming millennium.

"Everyone sees the need of a new principle of life. But as always happens in similar crises -- some people attempt to save the situation by an artificial intensification of the very principle which has led to decay. This is the meaning of the ’nationalist’ outburst of recent years....things have always gone that way. The last flare, the longest; the last sigh, the deepest. On the very eve of their disappearance there is an intensification of frontiers -- military and economic."

Jihad may be a last deep sigh before the eternal yawn of McWorld. On the other hand, Ortega was not exactly prescient; his prophecy of peace and internationalism came just before blitzkrieg, world war, and the Holocaust tore the old order to bits. Yet democracy is how we remonstrate with reality, the rebuke our aspirations offer to history. And if retribalization is inhospitable to democracy, there is nonetheless a form of democratic government that can accommodate parochialism and communitarianism, one that can even save them from their defects and make them more tolerant and participatory: decentralized participatory democracy. And if McWorld is indifferent to democracy, there is nonetheless a form of democratic government that suits global markets passably well -- representative government in its federal or, better still, confederal variation.

With its concern for accountability, the protection of minorities, and the universal rule of law, a confederalized representative system would serve the political needs of McWorld as well as oligarchic bureaucratism or meritocratic elitism is currently doing. As we are already beginning to see, many nations may survive in the long term only as confederations that afford local regions smaller than "nations" extensive jurisdiction. Recommended reading for democrats of the twenty-first century is not the U.S. Constitution or the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen but the Articles of Confederation, that suddenly pertinent document that stitched together the thirteen American colonies into what then seemed a too loose confederation of independent states but now appears a new form of political realism, as veterans of Yeltsin’s new Russia and the new Europe created at Maastricht will attest.

By the same token, the participatory and direct form of democracy that engages citizens in civic activity and civic judgment and goes well beyond just voting and accountability -- the system I have called "strong democracy" -- suits the political needs of decentralized communities as well as theocratic and nationalist party dictatorships have done. Local neighborhoods need not be democratic, but they can be. Real democracy has flourished in diminutive settings: the spirit of liberty, Tocqueville said, is local. Participatory democracy, if not naturally apposite to tribalism, has an undeniable attractiveness under conditions of parochialism.

Democracy in any of these variations will, however, continue to be obstructed by the undemocratic and antidemocratic trends toward uniformitarian globalism and intolerant retribalization which I have portrayed here. For democracy to persist in our brave new McWorld, we will have to commit acts of conscious political will -- a possibility, but hardly a probability, under these conditions. Political will requires much more than the quick fix of the transfer of institutions. Like technology transfer, institution transfer rests on foolish assumptions about a uniform world of the kind that once fired the imagination of colonial administrators. Spread English justice to the colonies by exporting wigs. Let an East Indian trading company act as the vanguard to Britain’s free parliamentary institutions. Today’s well-intentioned quick-fixers in the National Endowment for Democracy and the Kennedy School of Government, in the unions and foundations and universities zealously nurturing contacts in Eastern Europe and the Third World, are hoping to democratize by long distance. Post Bulgaria a parliament by first-class mail. Fed Ex the Bill of Rights to Sri Lanka. Cable Cambodia some common law.

Yet Eastern Europe has already demonstrated that importing free political parties, parliaments, and presses cannot establish a democratic civil society; imposing a free market may even have the opposite effect. Democracy grows from the bottom up and cannot be imposed from the top down. Civil society has to be built from the inside out. The institutional superstructure comes last. Poland may become democratic, but then again it may heed the Pope, and prefer to found its politics on its Catholicism, with uncertain consequences for democracy. Bulgaria may become democratic, but it may prefer tribal war. The former Soviet Union may become a democratic confederation, or it may just grow into an anarchic and weak conglomeration of markets for other nations’ goods and services.

Democrats need to seek out indigenous democratic impulses. There is always a desire for self-government, always some expression of participation, accountability, consent, and representation, even in traditional hierarchical societies. These need to be identified, tapped, modified, and incorporated into new democratic practices with an indigenous flavor. The tortoises among the democratizers may ultimately outlive or outpace the hares, for they will have the time and patience to explore conditions along the way, and to adapt their gait to changing circumstances. Tragically, democracy in a hurry often looks something like France in 1794 or China in 1989.

It certainly seems possible that the most attractive democratic ideal in the face of the brutal realities of Jihad and the dull realities of McWorld will be a confederal union of semi-autonomous communities smaller than nation-states, tied together into regional economic associations and markets larger than nation-states -- participatory and self-determining in local matters at the bottom, representative and accountable at the top. The nation-state would play a diminished role, and sovereignty would lose some of its political potency. The Green movement adage "Think globally, act locally" would actually come to describe the conduct of politics.

This vision reflects only an ideal, however -- one that is not terribly likely to be realized. Freedom, Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote, is a food easy to eat but hard to digest. Still, democracy has always played itself out against the odds. And democracy remains both a form of coherence as binding as McWorld and a secular faith potentially as inspiriting as Jihad.

4:43 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Listen, Socialist
Current mood: hopeful
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

Listen, socialist:

There remains only one goal for us, and that is to repossess our own labor. There remains only one means toward this repossession, and that is Class War.

Some comrades, however, seem to have gotten the cart before the horse. They battle the symptoms as if they were the illness. They see their mission as one who fights for peace, but peace may very well mean nothing more than the absence of any opposition to socialism. They fight against racism, but what good is unity of the races when all races are dominated by state capitalism? Some socialists find it odd when a comrade does not actively demonstrate against the war or against racism. They don’t understand that a socialist may not necessarily protest the Iraq war, though a war protestor can very easily be a socialist. The GLBT rights movement may attract socialists, but socialists are not necessarily active in the GLBT rights movement. Not all socialists would even agree on all issues. A socialist may very well have legitimate, rationally defensible reasons for taking a pro-life stance on the abortion issue, for instance. Some may believe guns are necessary for protecting ourselves against the exploiting class, and others may abhore the very thought of using violence even though the exploiting class harms us. Not all socialists would even rank the importance of issues the same. Some may be very concerned about racism in society. Other socialists may be far more concerned about agism. If all of these social ills could be eliminated from society, socialists might still not have won the battle. Why? Because the owning class can still exploit our labor, even in a society devoid of racism, homophobia and war. We are then left with that one principle that unifies us: the struggle against those who exploit our labor.

Why, then, have some leftist groups become so intrinsically attached to issues like the war, GLBT rights, reproductive rights or racism? Some even go so far as to mention these issues in their platform or mission statement. One group, the SDS, seems obsessed with nothing else but the war in Iraq, for instance. The original SDS used the same tactic back in the ’60s and ’70s, attacking the Vietnam war instead of trying to free the labor of the producing class, and the result is that the movement peetered out as soon as the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam. Their fight, it seemed to supporters, had been won. They had struck a blow for state communism against state capitalism by ending the war in Vietnam. And yet here we are still. And here the SDS is still, only now the group pulls for a side that has absolutely nothing to do with leftist principles. How wasteful.

For us socialists, the most efficient method toward freeing our labor is to attack the problem in the most direct way possible, and the most direct way would obviously have to include some element of labor, work and workers: Worker education, workers’ councils and labor unions, for example.  For those of you who still believe in the political process, the Socialist Labor Party needs members now more than ever. Dues are only $1 a month. You may also find a place among other left-communist or anarchist groups like the Industrial Workers of the World, Spark and the Campaign for a Working Democracy.

It’s time for us who call ourselves socialists to reconsider what we’re all about and start again from the basics. Perhaps some of us have chosen one path or another in order to make ourselves feel important. That is not the goal. Perhaps some of us have chosen to fight for an issue in order to prove ourselves. That is also not the goal. Our only goal is to repossess our own labor, and until we socialists can all unify under this principle, we will not accomplish anything worthy of our name.

One Big Union,
Thad

5:29 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

U.S. War Conspiracy Theory article

No War for Oil!
 
Is the United States really after Afghanistan’s resources? Not a chance. 
 
Ken Silverstein | July 21, 2002 
 
The war in Afghanistan is a sham. The Bush administration had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks but took no action, using the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as an excuse to topple the Taliban regime and legitimize the takeover of Afghanistan. Well-placed government insiders, knowing of the impending attacks, made fortunes by betting on a huge fall in airline stocks. The war is not about terrorism but about America’s desire to control energy in Central Asia and promote corporate plans to plunder the region’s reserves. The chief U.S. concern all along has been to help Unocal Corporation build a pipeline across Afghanistan, which would carry natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan.
By now all of this is obvious -- that is, it’s obvious if you get your information from the Internet or from certain far-right or left-wing circles, where conspiracy theories about the war run rampant. A classic example was a story by Patrick Martin on Rense.com, a Web site whose great popularity suggests that much of the U.S. population is terminally paranoid. "The American media has conducted a systematic cover-up of the real economic and strategic interests that underlie the war against Afghanistan, in order to sustain the pretense that the war emerged overnight, full-blown, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11," Martin wrote.

These sorts of conspiracy theories, especially the ones concer