ADDITIONAL ARTICLES:
Bernard Lewis is among the most erudite and
clear writers about the Muslims
in America today. This article on an Atlantic Monthly site is long but worth the
effort.
(There is a second part which you can retrieve
at the end of part one,)
"http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/90sep/rage.htm
Steve Wasserman, LOS ANGELES TIMES SUNDAY BOOK
REVIEW, September 23, 2001
Steve
Wasserman is Book Editor of The Los Angeles Times.
JIHAD VS. McWORLD: How Globalism and Tribalism
Are Reshaping the World
By Benjamin R. Barber
Ballantine: 390 pp., $12.95 paper
MILLENNIUM: Winners and Losers in the Coming
World Order
By Jacques Attali
Times Books: 132 pp., out of print
TALIBAN: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism
in Central Asia
By Ahmed Rashid
Yale Nota Bene./.Yale University Press: 280
pp., $14.95 paper
REAPING THE WHIRLWIND
The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan
By Michael Griffin
Pluto Press: 284 pp., $27.50
BLOWBACK: The Costs and Consequences of
American Empire
By Chalmers Johnson
Owl./.Metropolitan Books: 268 pp., $15 paper
UNHOLY WARS: Afghanistan, America and
International Terrorism
By John K. Cooley
Pluto Press: 288 pp., $19.95 paper
In
the wake of Sept. 11, rage is the order of the day. The avalanche of daily news
provides riveting, if sketchy, details, but the historical and contextual frame
that might offer genuine insight is largely missing or shattered. Pundits offer
sound-bite pronunciamentos, shedding little light; the politics of hysteria
banish sobriety. Wisdom is scarce. The specter of war looms. Questions abound:
Why was such slaughter visited upon us, by whom and to what purpose? How did we
come to this place? And where is it going to lead?
What is certain is that the end of the Cold War has unleashed a host of
furies: renewed nationalisms, messianic cults, the need for scapegoats, deeper
divisions between rich and poor. The old geopolitical order is vanished,
supplanted by a still-inchoate new order that bears little resemblance to the
familiar world of the last half of the 20th century.
For
some years now, our best writers and reporters and thinkers have sought to
understand the forces shaping this strange new world. They have tried to give
us a more truthful sense of things, a more nuanced sense of the world we
inhabit. They oppose simplification and mystification. They are interested in
complex readings informed by history. Their books may help us to understand
what, for many, eludes understanding.
Taken together, these works, written with an exceptional combination of
erudition, intelligence and empathy, but also with an abiding commitment to
democratic values, may help to illuminate the present in a time of dizzying
transformations, cynical manipulations and malleable geopolitical realities.
They offer both a theoretical template to apprehend the forces that give rise
to rage and an excavation of specific policies and alliances gone awry.
Benjamin R. Barber's "Jihad vs. McWorld," first published six
years ago, is a coruscating and lucid look at what he insists is the underlying
conflict of our times: religious and tribal fundamentalism versus secular
consumerist capitalism. It offers a lens through which to understand the
chaotic events of the post-Cold War world.
Barber believes the world is simultaneously coming together and falling
apart. On the one hand, corporate mergers are steadily weaving the globe into a
single international market, challenging traditional notions of national
sovereignty. On the other hand, the world is increasingly riven by fratricide,
civil war and the breakup of nations. He argues that what capitalism and
fundamentalism have in common is a distaste for democracy. Both, in different
ways, lay siege to the nation-state itself--until now the only guarantor of
conditions that have permitted democracy to flourish.
Democracy, Barber suggests, may fall victim to a twin-pronged attack: by
a global capitalism run rampant, whose essential driving force destroys
traditional values as it seeks to maximize profit-taking at virtually any moral
or religious or spiritual cost; and by religious, tribal and ethnic fanatics
whose various creeds are stamped by intolerance and a rage against the
"other."
Barber gives us two scenarios which he fleshes out in considerable
detail. The first holds out the grim prospect of a retribalization of large
parts of humanity by war and bloodshed, a threatened balkanization of
nation-states in which culture is pitted against culture--"a Jihad in the
name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of
interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and mutuality:
against technology, against pop culture, against integrated markets; against
modernity itself."
The
second scenario paints the future in primary colors, a portrait of seemingly
irresistible economic, technological and corporate forces that demand
integration and uniformity and that mesmerize people everywhere with "fast
music, fast computers, and fast food--with MTV, Macintosh (computers), and
McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous theme park: one
McWorld tied together by communications, information, entertainment and
commerce."
The
paradox, Barber contends, is that the tendencies of both Jihad and McWorld are
at work, both visible sometimes in the same country at the same instant. Jihad
pursues a bloody politics of identity, while McWorld seeks a bloodless
economics of profit. Belonging by default to McWorld, everyone is compelled to
enroll in Jihad. But no one is any longer a citizen, and, without citizens,
asks Barber, how can there be democracy?
In
1991, Jacques Attali, a French novelist, essayist and former advisor to French
President Francois Mitterrand, was president of the newly founded European Bank
for Reconstruction and Development. He published a small and largely prescient
essay, titled "Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World
Order." While he badly misjudged how well the European Union would knit
itself together, both politically and monetarily, and he sorely underestimated
the ability of the United States to balance its budget and reduce its deficit,
he judged all too well how the privileged preside, from the relative safety of
their technological perches, over a world that has embraced a common ideology
of consumerism but is divided between rich and poor, girdled by a dense network
of airport metropolises for travel and commerce, and wired for instant
communication.
His
vision is one in which, as he writes, "Marx's 'Das Kapital' or Adam
Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' may be less useful than Ridley Scott's celluloid
fantasy 'Blade Runner' . . . . " It is a world of high-tech economies that
render national borders irrelevant, in which privileged elites are surrounded
by a sea of impoverished nomads--boat people on a planetary scale--who are
condemned to ply the planet in search of sustenance and shelter. Desperately hoping
to shift from what Alvin Toffler calls the slow world to the fast world, they
will live, Attali predicts, the life of the living dead.
Attali worries over what he calls "millennial losers," those
for whom the prosperity of the fast world will be both a permanent lure and a
constant insult. Millions, he writes, will migrate seeking a decent life
elsewhere, perhaps to Paris or London or New York or Los Angeles, which for
them "will be oases of hope, emerald cities of plenty and high-tech magic."
Or, he concludes, they will "redefine hope in fundamentalist terms
altogether outside modernity."
In
particular, the Middle East will be a cauldron of resentment. After all,
"the peoples of this region suffer from the terrible trauma of repeated
defeats inflicted upon it by the West. These defeats have inspired both secular
and religious fanaticism, characterized by paranoia and defiance, anxiety and
frustration . . . . This dynamic threatens true world war of a new type, of
terrorism that can suddenly rip the vulnerable fabric of complex systems."
Ahmed Rashid is a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and
the Daily Telegraph. For more than 20 years, he has reported on Pakistan,
Afghanistan and Central Asia. His book, "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and
Fundamentalism in Central Asia," was published last year by Yale
University Press. It is virtually the only informed work on the men who, since
1994, have ruled almost all of Afghanistan. (The other necessary book is
Michael Griffin's "Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in
Afghanistan," a meticulous dissection of the limits of power in a
violently sectarian society.)
Rashid covered the ferocious civil war that ruined that already-ravaged
nation. He traveled and lived with the Taliban and has interviewed most of
their leaders. Their meteoric rise and rigid theocratic beliefs compelled him
to write their story as another bloody chapter in the continuing saga of
Afghanistan's long history of torment and turmoil.
How
the Afghans and their country were historically turned into an object of power
politics by the Persians, the Mongols, the British, the Soviets and the
Pakistanis, is the subject of his indispensable book. Rashid also examines how
American attitudes changed toward the Taliban, from early support to belated
opposition. He does so against the backdrop of intense rivalry among Western
countries and companies to build oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia to
Western and Asian markets. His chapter, "Global Jihad: The Arab-Afghans
and Osama Bin Laden," is especially incisive, detailing how the United
States enlisted thousands of foreign Muslim recruits to help end the 1979
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The
multiple contradictions inherent in American Cold War policy which for decades
saw the world split between the godless Evil Empire of Communism and the
god-fearing Free World is explored in two books published last year: Chalmers
Johnson's "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire"
and John K. Cooley's "Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International
Terrorism." Johnson is the highly regarded scholar of China, Japan and
East Asia, a former director of UC Berkeley's Center for Chinese Studies and
the author of the standard work on Japanese industrial policy. The book's title
is a term used by the CIA to describe the often unintended consequences of
actions that the Agency itself has committed. It refers to the reactions that
its own skulduggery sparks in the form of protest, riots, violence and
terrorism in the nations it targets. A good example would be the Cubans trained
and sent to overthrow Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs and who, years later,
would turn up implicated in the Watergate burglary. Johnson is persuaded that
American global expansion--what is now known as "globalization"--has
prompted an extraordinary backlash, much of it paradoxically impelled by U.S.
policies themselves. Blowback does not end at the nation's borders, he
concludes; it reaches into America itself.
Few
have more thoroughly plumbed the implications and consequences of these dismal
policies than John K. Cooley, whose firsthand familiarity with both the Middle
East and Central Asia is nearly unrivaled. A reporter for the Christian Science
Monitor since 1965 and a long-time correspondent for ABC News, he is the author
of numerous books, including the first biography of Kadafi and books on the
rise of the PLO.
"Unholy Wars" tells the story of how three American
administrations promoted a bipartisan policy that bankrolled and trained an
estimated 35,000 militants from 40 Islamic countries to take part in what was
commonly called the Afghan Jihad, or holy war, against the Soviets in the early
1980s that would eventually turn its wrath on its U.S. paymasters. This legion
of rogue mercenaries spread across a great arc, from the Russian Caucasus and
the former Soviet republics in Central Asia southward to India's Kashmir
province.
Cooley describes how these militants made common cause with disaffected
Muslims in western China, Egypt and Algeria. Across the sea in New York, the
World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. Caught and convicted, the culprits
proved to be adepts of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a recent and celebrated visitor
to Afghan training camps in Peshawar, whose U.S. visa had been approved by the
CIA. Cooley's book investigates what he calls "a strange love-affair that
went disastrously wrong," the curious and largely unexamined alliance
between America and "some of the most conservative and fanatical followers
of Islam."
* * *
Americans suffer from a persistent collective historical amnesia. Our
politics are hobbled by our refusal to understand the manifold ways in which
history, as was once so famously said, weighs like a nightmare on the brain of
the living. Americans have cleaved to the conceit that history, insofar as it
was deemed important at all, was more hindrance than help in our presumed
unstoppable march to the munificent future. Optimistic, pragmatic, impatient,
inventive, generous, Americans have refused to be held hostage to history,
believing America to have burst its bounds. The cost of such myopia is large.
It enfeebles understanding, promotes nostrums of all kinds, licenses the
infantilization of public debate.
For
too long we have let our romance with distance and escape and denial define our
culture and our politics. As Michael Wood suggests in his stimulating book,
"America in the Movies," there is in our country "a dream of
freedom which appears in many places and many forms, which lies somewhere at
the back of several varieties of isolationism . . . . It is a dream of freedom
from others; it is a fear ... of entanglement. It is what we mean when we say,
in our familiar phrase, that we don't want to get involved." There is,
however, no hiatus from history, no reprieve from reality.
* * *