Excellent article on al-Qaida and the Left
You know I sometimes froth at the mouth (sometimes? --ed.)
This article really cuts to the core of what I see the problem to be with today's Left.
I grew up during the Vietnam War and demonstrated to end it.
Worked with a lot of great people.
My concern is that the Left has lost its moral compass and their behaviour after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 only served to bring that home to me in such a clear manner that I jumped ship and am now a conservative. My vote for Bush was a strike against Kerry. If the Democrats had run a serious candidate, I would have considered them but Kerry was not suited to be President.
He is the embodiment of the
Peter Principle.
Sasha Abramsky writing at
Open Democracy explores just where the Left is these days:
Whose al-Qaida problem?
Much of the left’s opposition to the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s anti-terror campaigns – voiced by figures like Tariq Ali, Robert Fisk, George Galloway, Naomi Klein, and John Pilger – has blinded it to the need to engage with real problems and threats, says Sasha Abramsky.
As summer 2005 began, I flew to London to stay with my parents. A few days after I arrived, four bombs blew up tube trains and a bus in central London on 7 July. It was the second time I had been in a city that was under attack by terrorists. Four years ago, I was living in Brooklyn when al-Qaida slammed passenger jets into the World Trade Center.
Over these four years, I have spent more time than is entirely healthy obsessing over the new realities. Some of my friends and relatives tell me I’ve changed – that my politics aren’t as "leftwing" as they used to be during the anti-nuclear movement in Britain back in the 1980s. In a way, they are right. My core politics haven’t changed, but it seems to me that the world has changed so dramatically – traditional alliances and reference points have become unreliable, the ground rules of the power game have so shifted – I’d be a fool not to incorporate these changes into my analytical framework.
After setting the stage a bit more, Sasha then examines some current Left thought:
British journalists Robert Fisk, John Pilger, and Tariq Ali, along with British MP George Galloway, and, on the other side of the Atlantic, commentators such as Naomi Klein have all essentially blamed Britain and the United States for bringing the attacks upon themselves. While being careful to denounce the bombers and their agenda, these advocates uttered variations on the same theme: get out of Iraq, bring home the troops from all points east, curtail support for Israel, develop a more sensible, non-oil-based energy policy, and our troubles would dissipate in the wind.
Sascha gives a bunch of examples but then starts asking questions:
Pilger, Fisk, Ali, Galloway, and Klein grasp the undeniable fact that shortsighted western policies and alliances of convenience over the past century have contributed to today’s mass alienation of young Muslims, to a climate in which millennial groups such as al-Qaida flourish.
These advocates understand – in a way the cartoonish "good versus evil" language in which George W Bush frames world events certainly cannot – the rage the Iraq war in general has stoked among Muslims, and in particular, how searing are the images of humiliation rituals and torture emanating out of Abu Ghraib. They rightly recoil at the news-in-brief references to "collateral damage" when Iraqi civilians are killed compared with the oceans of ink generated whenever a western target is hit by terrorism.
And then, the clue-bat to the head:
The left’s blindspot
But theirs is also a truncated analysis. They assume that groups like al-Qaida are almost entirely reactive, responding to western policies and actions, rather than being pro-active creatures with a virulent homegrown agenda, one not just of defense but of conquest, destruction of rivals, and, ultimately and at its most megalomaniacal, absolute subjugation.
It misses the central point: that, unlike traditional "third-world" liberation movements looking for a bit of peace and quiet in which to nurture embryonic states, al-Qaida is classically imperialist, looking to subvert established social orders and to replace the cultural and institutional infrastructure of its enemies with a (divinely inspired) hierarchical autocracy of its own, looking to craft the next chapter of human history in its own image.
Simply blaming the never quite defined, yet implicitly all-powerful "west" for the ills of the world doesn’t explain why al-Qaida slaughtered thousands of Americans eighteen months before Saddam was overthrown. Nor does it explain the psychopathic joy this death cult takes in mass killings and in ritualistic, snuff-movie-style beheadings. The term "collateral damage" may be inept, but it at least suggests that the killing of civilians in pursuit of a state’s war aims is unintentional, regrettable; there is nothing unintentional, there is no regret, in the targeting of civilians by al-Qaida’s bombers.
Moreover, many of those who reflexively blame the west do not honestly hold up a mirror to the rest of the world, including the Muslim world, and the racism and sexism and anti-semitism that is rife in many parts of it. If bigotry were indeed the exclusive preserve of the west, their arguments would have greater moral force. But given the fundamentalist prejudices that are so much a part of bin Ladenism, the cry of western racism is a long way from being a case-closer.
We should attend to the way bin Laden and his followers invoke "the west." They do so alternately to describe any expansive and domineering "first world" economic and political system and, even more ominously, to demarcate a set of ostensibly decadent liberal political, cultural, social, and religious beliefs and practices.
Indeed, what al-Qaida apparently hates most about "the west" are its best points: the pluralism, the rationalism, individual liberty, the emancipation of women, the openness and social dynamism that represent the strongest legacy of the Enlightenment. These values stand in counterpoint to the tyrannical social code idealised by al-Qaida and by related political groupings such as Afghanistan’s Taliban.
In that sense, "the west" denotes less a geographical space than a mindset: a cultural presence or a sphere of anti-absolutist ideas that the Viennese-born philosopher Karl Popper termed the "open society." In his day, when fascists and Stalinists held vast parts of the globe, the concept of "the west" prevailed over a smaller territory than today. But with the rise of bin Ladenism, the prevalence of this concept again is shrinking.
It is because bin Ladenism is waging war against the liberal ideal that much of the activist left’s response to 11 September 2001 and the London attacks is woefully, catastrophically inadequate. For we, as progressives, need to uphold the values of pluralism, rationalism, scepticism, women’s rights, and individual liberty and oppose ideologies and movements whose foundations rest on theocracy, obscurantism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and nostalgia for a lost empire.
Sasha then goes on to talk about the Open Society and explore two paths.
Very very much good stuff!
You will not go wrong by giving this piece a deep and serious read regardless of what side of the "fence" you sit on.
Posted by DaveH at October 8, 2005 12:34 AM
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