As opposition to the Iraq War mounted on the Left, a myth began to circulate about the purported secret influence of the political philosopher Leo Strauss in some of the inner circles of the Bush administration. To explore the origins of the allegation would be an adventure in itself: there is some indication that the thesis was first promulgated by Lyndon LaRouche and then amplified in the mainstream media, in Europe and the United States (Le Monde and the New York Times). Is journalism just serial plagiarism? To be sure, there were some kernels of truth: Paul Wolfowitz did truly study at the University of Chicago, where Strauss taught, and . . . well, that’s where the hard evidence abruptly ends and the narration begins. The half-knowledge that Strauss was a conservative thinker (though hardly a “neo-conservative”) and that he had something to do with esoteric philosophizing in relation to political power: this was enough to impute the workings of a nefarious Straussian cabal as a red-blooded conspiracy theory of the Bush administration. It was a great story for everyone who preferred not to think. The paranoid style in American politics, the anxiety about secret plots and shadow governments, had finally moved from the kooky right to the center-left.
|
Islamist terrorism is not disappearing, nor is the challenge to understand its origins. Whenever it began, it catapulted to the forefront of public attention on 9/11 and has been haunting the world ever since. The diversity of its venues makes it a global phenomenon. Successful attacks and foiled plots have taken place in Bali and Bosnia, in China and Indonesia, in Denmark and Germany, in Spain and England, in Israel and Jordan, in Algeria and Argentina, in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, and Tunisia—demonstrating the wrongheadedness of that simplistic thinking that blamed the massacres in New York and Washington solely on U.S. policies. What we face is a worldwide threat defined by a willingness to use extreme violence against civilians while justifying it with appeals to Islam. The local pretexts vary widely, the organizational structures are loose, and the technical sophistication is uneven, ranging from hypermodern high-tech capacities to archaic decapitations, sometimes in the same event. This Islamist terrorism will remain a primary security threat in the coming decades, demonstrably able to adapt and evolve and to benefit parasitically from competition and contradictions in the international system. In recent years, questions of values and cultural conflict have frequently occupied the center of public discussion on both sides of the Atlantic, and these debates have taken on varied political shadings. The German discussion of a Leitkultur and, elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, the politicized expectation that immigrant populations acquire some familiarity with the language, culture, and values of the host country have often reflected underlying conservative assumptions. In contrast, in France, the defense of republican values has been more a matter of the Left and its tradition of adamant secularism, while more generally, advocacy on women’s issues and human rights have typically tended to arise on the Left (even if, in an interesting political development, they have begun to slide toward the Right). This political indeterminacy makes the topic all the more interesting. The question of values does not lend itself to easy political categorization. A broader account is called for to explain how Western political cultures—with their own internal range of positions and hardly monolithic—face sets of pressures in the context of globalization: immigration is only one dimension of a framework that includes enhanced international trade, new global media (the internet), and global environment questions, not to mention security and energy policies, even if debates typically erupt most dramatically around immigration-related topics. The character of repression in Zimbabwe has already been widely discussed, including here, here, and here. The long postponement of the run-off election (the original version of which, by any reasonable estimation, Mugabe lost despite enormous efforts at manipulation) has been designed to allow for more meddling. How extensive must the repression become in order to guarantee security for the dictator? Infinite security may require unlimited repression. How much time, how much force does ZANU-PF need to thwart the popular will? Zvisinei C. Sandi is a writer from Zimbabwe, where she was active in the democratic movement. She is currently a Scholar Rescue Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. In an interview with Russell Berman, she addressed political violence and repression in Zimbabwe in the wake of the March 29 elections; the response of the South African political leadership to the Mugabe regime; the role of prominent public figures like Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela; and the broader political relationship between Zimbabwe and South Africa, especially violence against Zimbabwean immigrants in South Africa. |
   |
|||
|
Telos Press Publishing · PO Box 811 · Candor, NY 13743 · Phone: 212-228-6479 Privacy Policy · Data Protection Copyright © 2024 Telos Press Publishing · All Rights Reserved |
||||
With this issue, Telos marks forty years as an independent journal of critical thought. Founded amidst the events of 1968, Telos has remained true to its origins, maintaining a tradition of independent thinking, while also evolving through the change of four decades. What began as an effort to think philosophically about the political questions of the day continues with the same agenda: our reflections on various thinkers—to take examples from this issue: Alasdair MacIntyre, Walter Benjamin, Gillian Rose, or G. K. Chesterton—are not driven by antiquarianism or academic intellectual history. Rather, we have culled through philosophical traditions, modern and ancient, in order to address the changing character of society and the protean cultural expressions that have emerged from it. This constant redefinition of the critical project informs the teleology, a constant orientation toward the North Star of emancipation, as we navigate the shifting currents of circumstance. 
