[fwd, Ian Murray]:
What Went Wrong? By Ahmed Rashid. Issue cover-dated May 09, 2002. Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam, by John Esposito. Oxford University Press.
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Ahmed Rashid's Jihad, is almost entirely devoted to developments in Central Asia during the 90s, and the migration of Islamic groups into the region attempting to overthrown governments and or at least establish strong quasi-underground quasi-overt orders. What emerges as the implied message is something like what Rashid gives to Esposito:
``The failure to address the relationship between faith to national identity and to institution-building contributes to instability and risks massive social explosions. Governments that rely on social control rather than consultation, that employ violence and repression, create a climate that contributes to radicalization and violence against the state.''
When Justin questioned my use of the idea of a void at the heart of the Empire, in a sense this void is the same or intimately related to the failures noted above. The marginalization of peoples, including their suffocation under the enormous weight of a consumer world they can barely afford and are perhaps only marginally interested in in the first place, accomplishes a related material failure as spiritual or cultural alienation---a dictatorship of capital interest uber alles. The crushing, oppressive, and alienating effects are greatly compounded as open access to the public space of expression within public institutions like local governments and governing bodies that shape schools, community developments, recreation and cultural facilities, and determine use of community halls, youth and senior centers, and other public resources, were these are continually constricted, never developed in the first place or are sold off in the endless privatizing schemes of neoliberal market fundamentalism.
The basic neoliberal ideal (embodied by WTO/WB/IMF policies) that government's only role is as police state, tax collector, and capital support and propagation apparatus is at the root cause of the rise of fundamentalisms both within Empire and without---precisely because such a government ideal provides no accessible means of public expression, particularly for the political, social, cultural and or spiritual aspirations of the people under its rule. Unless they have money or represent some Capital interest, then of course the sluice gates to the public coffers along with all forms of access open sesame.
Consider what religious fundamentalisms provide. Almost their first material provision is a space of expression, ritualized though it maybe, social recruitment and context, and duplication of all that the neoliberal Empire is hell bend on selling off: public institutions, schools, a welfare safety net, assistance with managing families, youth and elders, and popular governance under a uniform code (patriarchal, dictatorial, exclusionary, to be sure). If you subscribe to the code, then you are personally empowered to enforce it directly as the expression of your will. While this is overwhelmingly patriarchical dictatorship, it gives the illusion of a democratic ideal at least for men, in the sense that there is an implicitly shared right and empowerment of self-governance, that is to insist on how life is to be conducted, even if that life is reduced to the domestic circle. In other words, you get the joy of taking the law into your own hands, quite literally.
The above was also with obvious some socio-political differences the practical and material model for various radical leftist organizations, civil rights groups, especially the church based ones, unions once upon a time, and those much derided free-love and tree-hugger communes (freedom to fuck the women and kids rather beat them?)
Ultimately, the insistence on free market fundamentalism which seems currently focused on prepackaged commodification and then selling off whatever remains of the public sector institutions and public resources (including its cultural and scientific communities), can only re-enforce the development of more and more radicalized alternatives, predominately from the rightwing religious end of the spectrum. If Bush ever gets his faith based initiatives off the ground, we can look forward to a thousand more points of night.
Chuck Grimes