I think the Cuban revolution was a very good thing, and jihad a very bad thing. Drawing a comparison between the two is pretty icky.
Doug
--------
I agree, but I don't have to subscribe to the content or direction of Islamic fundamentalists to see some parallels. The Cubans revolutionary leadership were the disaffected bourgeois, intellectuals, lawyers, doctors, bureaucratic elites---the more advanced and advantaged.
While the goals or content of the various Muslim reactionary movements are different, the class (the sociological dynamics) involved is pretty similar: disaffected professionals, the more advanced and advantaged, often drawn from a westernized technocratic class.
As Adam Souzis points out:
``... the rise of modern islamic fundamentalism (in the 70s and 80s) was driven by university students just as was most revolutionary maxism in latin america....sociologically, these movements arise not in response to static poverty per se but from frustration set by rising expectations and so tend to be initially supported by middle class youth...''
The point on youth here is actually a point on the nature of idealism, ideologies and their critiques. The Cubans wanted modernization, the Islamic fundamentalists do not. Instead their ideal returns to a past order.
There is nothing about the process of disaffection and social upheaval that automatically leads in a progressive direction. I can identify many elements I share with my half-sister in our reactions to family and growing up. She became a fervent evanglical Christian. How's that for icky?
``But if the causes of terrorism were poverty and globalization, why there aren't Africans, Latin Americans, and East Asians the major perps? Why is it fairly educated people from Saudi Arabia and Leeds?..'' Doug
Because poverty is only one aspect of globalization. The erasure of histories, ideals, ways of life, cultures are also consequences. I think it is this latter category that drives the disaffected bourgeois and professionals, whether they are progressives or reactionaries. After all they are the cultural elites and it is the disappearance of their world and their own displacement that are also the consequences of globalization.
You ask why no terror from the lower orders? There is plenty of local terrorism in Africa, Latin America and East Asia. The numerous slaughters, rampant criminal activity and general chaos of living plague these regions. In some respects, these conditions are what the fundamentalists propose to stop with their reactionary and authoritarian return to a religious social order.
As for US and UK reactions among respective Muslim minorities, again it is the idea of a social-body, the Muslim World as a social body is seen as the personal victim of western power in broad terms.
I think most in the US-UK have no idea how intensely the events of the Middle East and South Asia effect many immigrants from these regions. Their families, their memories, their ideals, their lost identities are tied up with the outcome of these events. When they see little kids, old women, and men who look like their fathers and family members dead in the street like so much garbage with US and UK troops standing around...
CG