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To a certain extent this is a distinction without much of a difference. The current US-Euro imperialism via globalization of the corporatized and western secular life is a concommittent to the material and concrete processes of exploitation in foriegn lowest cost labor markets. The social consequence of these economic processes must be fairly destructive of the fragile societies they impact. The fragility (and hence cheap labor) comes from the evident poverty and loss of social cohesion that was already at work from prior westernized impacts (some long list of dower historical events).
The earlier waves of westernization and the current grand scale versions simultaneously destroy non-US-Euro societies and replace-displace whatever were their own historical identities as peoples, histories, trajectories to the future, etc. That these historical trajectories were or are mostly imaginary doesn't make much difference to the people effected. They are and they also imagine themselves as being destroyed by the social consequences of western globalization. In this imaginary landscape it probably doesn't make much difference whether the effected are immigrants in the belly of the beast or the local bourgeois elsewhere.
So, it is not very surprising to me that they would react with violent and not very rational actions. The violence and irrationality of western globalization is simply getting it back in its face. What's theoretically difficult to understand here? People don't have to analyze their condition in order to react to it---they simply react.
``Today a Muslim society no longer exists, there is no more Islam and there are no more Muslims. Muslim society will only come back into being when existing regimes have been destroyed and given way to a power which respects divine intervention to the letter. All the societies in the world, with no exceptions, are idolatrous and full of infidels, conscious that authority belongs only to God...'' (Abd Moussaoui)
And James H continues:
``Everyone is an apostate, all human government is wicked. That is not an anti-Imperialist ideology, is is an anti-human one...''
Again there is no reason to assume all anti-Imperialist reactions, resistances, and violence are humanistic in motivation. In fact, most of the old commie guerilla movements in the third world struggled hard to educate and orient (or crudely humanize) their recruits to the proper analysis of their condition, i.e. that their plight was a consequence of western imperialism. Although I don't know the history at all, it is possible that the Cubans inspired by Guevarra often failed in Latin America because they could not displace the ethnic and local identities of despair with a more international, positive and communist outlook.
What is interesting to me is how closely the above statement by Moussaoui echos the political philosophy of Strauss (particularly his Zionist period), and by extension the very neoconservatives who are running the US government war on these `non-existant' Muslim societies. Just transpose the word Muslim or Jew with American:
``Today American society no longer exists, there is no America and there are no more Americans. American society will only come back into being when the existing regime has been destroyed and given way to a power which respects divine intervention (respects the American way of life) to the letter....''
The same focus of quasi-religious-national identity went on with the Zionists in the 1920s. Strauss's tracts on the failures of the Zionist leadership to follow a more traditional and religious based identity were almost identical to these Muslim pronouncements. The hatred of modernity in Strauss was motivated by his perception that its secular tolerance were in fact the very medium of erasing German-Jewish identity and its historical life via assimilation.
I imagine similar and related conflicts over assimilation going on in the FSU (as described by Chris Doss).
What's really needed here is a sociological understanding of the social body-as-identity and its imagined life as an entity that can be violated, abused, tormented, raped as if it were a person. The problem is made even larger and worse when that social personae is a religious system with divine (dogmatic and beyond reason or political) authority.
In my lexicon all these social identities are profoundly anti-humanistic, anti-democratic, and anti-socialist and will not release their claims to privileged status---since the foundation of their identity is constituted around that privilege. I don't know any way around these conflicts except the politics of inclusion. But here again, since the social identity has unique privilege over all others, such inclusion is rendered impossible in principle.
Considering that the US is run by another variant on identity-as-social-body reactionaries via the rightwing and its Christian crap, I figure we're in for an endless series of identity wars.
CG