"McWorld vs. Jihad": Global Capitalism is Fundamentalist (A Must Read!!!)

[Gravitycollapse]

http://rebels-library.org/files/zizek_welcome.pdf

The following is excerpted from Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Slavoj Žižek is talking about how we perceive global terrorism and global capitalism and how our perception is false. Enjoy.

Two philosophical references immediately suggest themselves apropos of this ideological antagonism between the Western consumerist way of life and Muslim radicalism: Hegel and Nietzsche. Is not this antagonism the one between what Nietzsche called 'passive' and 'active' nihilism? We in the West are the Nietzschean Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the struggle even up to their own self-destruction. (We cannot fail to note the significant role of the stock exchange in the attacks: the ultimate proof of their traumatic impact was that the New York Stock Exchange was closed for four days, and its opening the following Monday was presented as the key sign that things were returning to normal.) Furthermore, if we look at this opposition through the lens of the Hegelian struggle between Master and Servant, we cannot avoid a paradox: although we in the West are perceived as exploiting masters, it is we who occupy the position of the Servant who, since he clings to life and its pleasures, is unable to risk his life (recall Colin Powell's notion of a high-tech war with no human casualties), while the poor Muslim radicals are Masters ready to risk their life . . . This notion of the 'clash of civilizations', however, must be rejected out of hand: what we are witnessing today are, rather, clashes within each civilization. Furthermore, a brief look at the comparative history of lslam and Christianity tells us that the 'human rights record' of Islam (to use this anachronistic term) is much better than that of Christianity: in past centuries, Islam has been significantly more tolerant towards other religions than Christianity. Now it is also time to remember that it was through the Arabs that, in the Middle Ages, we in Western Europe regained access to our Ancient Greek heritage. While they in no way excuse today's acts of horror, these facts none the less clearly demonstrate that we are dealing not with a feature inscribed into Islam 'as such', but with the outcome of modern sociopolitical conditions.

If we look more closely, what is this 'clash of civilizations' actually about? Are not all real-life 'clashes' clearly related to global capitalism? The Muslim 'fundamentalist' target is not only global capitalism's corrosive impact on social life, but also the corrupt 'traditionalist' regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and so on. The most horrifying slaughters (those in Rwanda, Kongo, and Sierra Leone) not only took place and are still taking place within the same 'civilization', but are also clearly related to the interplay of global economic interests. Even in the few cases which would vaguely fit the definition of the 'clash of civilizations' (Bosnia and Kosovo, southern Sudan, etc.), the shadow of other interests is easily discernible. A proper dose of 'economic reductionism' would therefore be appropriate here: instead of endless analyses of how Islamic 'fundamentalism' is intolerant towards our liberal societies, and other 'clash-of-civilization' topics, we should refocus our attention on the economic background to the conflict the clash of economic interests, and of the geopolitical interests of the United States itself (how to retain privileged links with Israel and with conservative Arab regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait).

Beneath the opposition between 'liberal' and 'fundamentalist' societies, 'McWorld versus Jihad', there is the embarrassing third term: countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, deeply conservative monarchies but American economic allies, fully integrated into Western capitalism. Here, the USA has a very precise and simple interest: in order that these countries can be counted on for their oil reserves, they have to remain undemocratic (the underlying notion, of course, is that any democratic awakening could give rise to anti-American attitudes). This is an old story whose infamous first chapter after World War II was the CIA-orchestrated coup d'etat against Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Hedayat Mossadegh, in 1953 there was no 'fundamentalism' there, not even a 'Soviet threat', just a plain democratic awakening, with the idea that the country should take control of its oil resources and break up the monopoly of the Western oil companies. The lengths to which the USA is ready to go in order to maintain this pact were revealed in the Gulf War in 1990, when Jewish American soldiers stationed in Saudi Arabia had to be transported by helicopter to aircraft carriers in the Gulf in order to pray, since non-Muslim rituals are prohibited on Saudi soil.

This 'perverted' position of the truly 'fundamentalist' conservative Arab regimes is the key to the (often comical) conundrums of American politics in the Middle East: they stand for the point at which the USA is forced explicitly to acknowledge the primacy of economy over democracy that is, the secondary and manipulative character of legitimizing international interventions by claiming to protect democracy and human rights. What we should always bear in mind apropos of Afghanistan is that until the I970s that is, prior to the time when the country got directly caught up in the superpower struggle it was one of the most tolerant Muslim societies, with a long secular tradition: Kabul was known as a city with a vibrant cultural and political life. The paradox is thus that the rise of the Taliban, this apparent 'regression' into ultra-fundamentalism, far from expressing some deep 'traditionalist' tendency, was the result of the country being caught up in the whirlpool of international politics it was not only a defensive reaction to it, it emerged directly as a result of the support of foreign powers (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the USA itself).

As for the 'clash of civilizations', let us recall the letter from the seven-year-old American girl whose father was a pilot fighting in Afghanistan: she wrote that although she loved her father very much, she was ready to let him die, to sacrifice him for her country. When President Bush quoted these lines, they were perceived as a 'normal' outburst of American patriotism; let us conduct a simple mental experiment and imagine an Arab Muslim girl pathetically reciting into the camera the same words about her father fighting for the Taliban we do not have to think for long about what our reaction would have been: morbid Muslim fundamentalism which does not stop even at the cruel manipulation and exploitation of children.... Every feature attributed to the Other is already present at the very heart of the USA. Murderous fanaticism? There are in the USA today more than two million Rightist populist 'fundamentalists' who also practise a terror of their own, legitimized by (their understanding of) Christianity. Since America is, in a way, 'harbouring' them, should the US Army have punished Americans themselves after the Oklahoma bombing? And what about the way Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson reacted to the events of September 11 , perceiving them as a sign that God had withdrawn His protection from the USA because of the sinful lives of the Americans, putting the blame on hedonist materialism, liberalism, and rampant sexuality, and claiming that America got what it deserved? The fact that this very same condemnation of 'liberal' America as the one from the Muslim Other came from the very heart of 1'Amerique prifonde should give us food for thought. On October 19, George W Bush himself had to concede that the most probable perpetrators of the anthrax attacks were not Muslim terrorists but America's own extreme Right Christian fundamentalists -- again, does not the fact that acts first attributed to an external enemy may turn out to be acts perpetrated at the very heart of I'Amerique profonde provide an unexpected confirmation of the thesis that the true clash is the clash within each civilization?

[fascisthunter]

1. Capitalism has become an Ideological Extremism

it's a mark of failure. If it were a success most people would embrace it while benfiting from it, but in its present form it has become a danger, which feeds off of the worst in people. There needs to be a balance... that right now has been lost, as the wealthiest people in the world horde the wealth and wars are waged to spread their dominance globally. They should be ashamed.