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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- |
| Asia Times Essay: Look Back Anger Unplugged. |
| 2017-02-05 |
| [..] That ’syphilis of revolutionary passions’ Responding to that silly neo-Hegelian "end of history" meme at the end of the Cold War, Allan Bloom warned that fascism might be the future; and John Gray telegraphed the return of "primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian." And that leads us to why the exceptional bearers of Enlightenment humanism and rationalism cannot explain the current geopolitical turmoil ‐ from ISIS to Brexit to Trump. They could never come up with anything more sophisticated than binary opposition of "free" and "unfree"; the same 19th century Western clichés about the non-West; and the relentless demonization of that perennially backward Other: Islam. Hence the new "long war" (Pentagon terminology) against "Islamofascism." They could never understand, as Mishra stresses, the implications of that meeting of minds in a Supermax prison in Colorado between Oklahoma City bomber, all-American Timothy McVeigh, and the mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef (non-devout Muslim, Pakistani father, Palestinian mother). And they cannot understand how ISIS conceptualizers can regiment, online, an insulted, injured teenager from a Parisian suburb or an African shantytown and convert him into a narcissist ‐ Baudelairean? ‐ dandy loyal to a rousing cause worth fighting for. The parallel between the DIY jihadi and the 19th century Russian terrorist ‐ incarnating the "syphilis of the revolutionary passions," as Alexander Herzen described it ‐ is uncanny. And the DIY jihadi’s top enemy is not even Christian; it’s the "apostate" Shi’ite. Mass rapes, choreographed murders, the destruction of Palmyra, Dostoyevsky had already identified it all; as Mishra puts it, "it’s impossible for modern-day Raskolnikovs to deny themselves anything, and possible to justify anything." It’s impossible to summarize all the rhizomatic (hat tip to Deleuze-Guattari) intellectual crossfire deployed by Age of Anger. What’s clear is that to understand the current global civil war, archeological reinterpretation of the West’s hegemonic narrative of the past 250 years is essential. Otherwise we will be condemned, like puny Sisyphean specks, to endure not only the recurrent nightmare of history but also its recurrent blowback. |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #3 #1 - you need a Like button |
| Posted by: Frank G 2017-02-05 19:03 |
| #2 Nailed it Fred. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2017-02-05 17:36 |
| #1 This little essay attempts to find something new in an old and dirty pile of poop. The West colonized much of the world because much of the world was much as it is now, only without the modern weaponry. Islam has been at war with the West since its invention. North Africa was infested by pirates, most of it ruled by mostly autonomous Ottoman beys. The Ottoman rule of much of the Middle East was in its last stages of corruption and decadence. Subsaharan Africa was inhabited by primitives; they still occasionally eat a few pygmies, and much of the continent is still ruled by kleptomaniac dictators, not much of an improvement over tribal chieftains. India was split among Moslem and Hindu princelings who spent a good deal of their time plotting, planning, and oppressing each other -- notice that Pakistain grew out of it, and still maintains much the same relationship with India. China's Ching dynasty was in the final stages of decadent collapse and large area were ruled by warlords. That's not to say the West was blameless; recall the Belgian Congo, German Namibia, and Italian rule in the Horn of Africa. Recall Spanish rule most places. But it's to say that the natives weren't blameless. Those who were savages weren't in the least noble. What all those places shared was a misplaced arrogance combined with a healthy dose of dynastic incompetence. (Darkest Africa may have lacked the arrogance; I don't know.) Military interventions in the early stages of the Age of Imperialism were mostly a matter of self defense. Once the precedent was set, of course, conquering the primitives became an end in itself. The aborigines needed the benefits of civilization. There are post-colonial success stories today, but I can remember being told to think of the starving children in India so I'd eat my supper. That was within living memory since I'm not dead yet. My childhood playmates' fathers had fought the Japanese. I can remember the Great Cultural Revolution in China. That was even more recent. China, Japan, South Korea, and India -- the success stories of post-colonialism -- today are closer to the West in outlook than are most of the inhabitants of the Moslem world, while still retaining their distinctive national identities. The Moslem world retains its ummah outlook and if it weren't for oil they'd still be either riding camels and waving scimitars or they'd be ruled by Ottomans, with potential rivals to the Sultan getting strangled with a bowstring. |
| Posted by: Fred 2017-02-05 16:29 |