Remaking the world
through terrorism
By Abid Ullah Jan
July 14 2006
"UNSC's unanimously passing or the US vetoing a resolution condemning
Israeli terrorism is irrelevant. The world has to do more than thinking
about resolutions to condemn terrorism of the trio of terror because
Washington, London and Tel Aviv's determination to continue global
terrorism has ensured that the humanity is in for an unimaginably
bigger, wider and most horrible war of human history in the very near
future."
In contemporary Western societies, repressed religion returns in secular
cults and fascism of different shades. The cult phenomenon becomes more
dangerous when religious zealots push their agendas through the
so-called liberals and neo-conservatives.
The Bush and Blair regimes' response to recent Israeli aggression and
terrorism is an excellent example of the apocalyptic passions of
religion that have returned as projects of universal human emancipation
through more and more terror.
Today, the United States and its close allies ignore history and
justify their own and Israeli aggression on the basis of lies or
pretexts such as the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. On the other hand,
mass killing of innocent civilians in occupied lands is considered
"collateral damage" in an effort to emancipate the survivors.
With only a little hyperbole, one might define secular cult's
marriage of neo-conservative re Islamophobic philosophy in terms of this
Freudian cycle. The mark of repressed thought and emotion is that it is
shut away from conscious scrutiny. This is nowhere more evident than in
the encounter of Muslim societies with radical part of the West. Western
thinkers note that Islam has never grasped the need for a secular realm.
Actually, they fail to note that what passes for secular belief in the
West is a mutation of religious faith.
Besides the struggle to maintain the exploitative economic order that
benefits just a few, the continued conflict between the Muslim majority
world and the West is a war of religion. The Enlightenment idea of a
universal civilization, which the West upholds against Islam, is an
offspring of Christianity. The peculiar hybrids of dictatorships,
kingdoms and democracy are by-products of Western radical thought and
designs.
The chiliastic violence of radical democracy of the United States,
Britain and Israel is not the product of any 'clash of civilizations'.
The twentieth century's grand experiments in missionary terror were not
in reaction to something wrong in the Muslim world. They expressed the
totalitarian ambitions that have been harbored only in the West.
The death camps of Nazi Germany, the gulags of Soviet Russia, the
Dresden bombing and the nuking of Japan killed 60 million people, far
more than in any earlier century. Yet it is not the number of dead that
is peculiarly fascist. It is the belief that as a result of these deaths
a new world would be born. In former times, the Inquisition tortured and
killed on a large scale; but it did not imagine it would remake the
world through terror. It promised salvation in the world hereafter, not
paradise in the world below.
In contrast, both in the twentieth and twenty-first century,
industrial scale killing has been practiced in the belief that the
survivors will live in a world better than any that has ever existed. As
a whole the U.N. sanction on Iraq 1.8 million lives. When the U.S.
ambassador to the U.N. was asked on 60 Minutes program whether the cost
of the lives of over a half million children "was worth it" in order to
get rid of president of Iraq. She replied, "yes the price is worth it."
A real estimate will show that close to 200,000 people have been killed
in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001, yet the warlords are determined to
make these places earthly paradises for the survivors.
Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff rightly pointed out in their book,
The politics of hysteria, in 1964:
"To destroy a city, a state, an empire even, is an essentially finite
action; but to attempt to total annihilation - the liquidation - of so
ubiquitous but so theoretically or ideologically defined an entity as a
social class or racial abstraction is quite another, and one impossible
even in conception to a mind not conditioned by Western habits of
thought. Here is a truly Faustian ambition - to transform by physical
action to merely the earth, but the qualities of the creatures who dwell
upon it, an ambition related to the modern quest for the breaking down
of mountains, the escape from the bounds of the earth, the control and
reform of human genetics, the manipulation of life itself - all of them
ambitions which, before this century, were the dark matter of myth and
necromancy. Yet such have been the stated ambitions of the two political
movements, Communism and Fascism, which have convulsed the middle years
of our century."
Self evidently, the belief of Western totalitarians that terror can
remake the world is not a result of any kind of scientific inquiry or
secularism. It is faith, pure and simple. No less incontrovertibly, the
faith is uniquely western.
Western warlords believe in the myth that, as the rest of the world
submit to their power and reshape itself in their image, it is bound to
become enlightened, peaceful and pure - as contrary to all evidence, they
imagine themselves to be. The continued and successful resistance in
Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan has destroyed this myth; and yet it
continues to be believed. The nihilists in Washington, London and Tel
Aviv are driven by the belief that the world can be transformed by
spectacular acts of "shock and awe" and terror. This myth has been
repeatedly disproved; but still it persists.
Myths are not refuted. They simply disappear, as the way of life from
which they sprang fade from the world. Science teaches limits, but
intermingled with eschatological myths it has kindled limitless
ambitions. The result is the unbounded violence of modern times, which
the U.S., U.K. and Israel in particular continue. It is not the first
attempt to remake the world by terror, and it will not be the last. Once
the past tyrannies disappeared, other types of terror in the name of
liberation and democracy followed. The advancement of knowledge and
technology does not prove that this is the age of reason as well. It
merely added another twist to human folly and fine tuned the ways to
subjugate torture and annihilate.
United Nations Security Council's unanimously passing a resolution
condemning Israeli terrorism or the U.S. vetoing it, is irrelevant. The
world has to do more than thinking about resolutions to condemn
terrorism of the trio of terror because Washington, London and Tel
Aviv's determination to continue global terrorism has ensured that the
humanity is in for an unimaginably bigger, wider and most horrible war
of human history in the very near future.
Note:
Abid Ullah Jan's latest book,
"After Fascism: Muslims and the Struggle for Self-determination." is now avaliable
at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0973368756/mmn-20/
