After Ahmadinejad’s letter to Bush, his epistle to Chancellor Merkl is now beginning to circulate. A comparison of the two texts might yield interesting results, but this second text, on its own, is disappointingly flat. Is he more gentle addressing a woman? (There is some intratextual evidence to support that hypothesis.) Or is he trying to appeal to the Germans and the Europeans whom he hopes to pry loose from America’s democracy agenda? Not unlikely. What can be gleaned from reading the letter to Merkl? A few symptomatic insights into Ahmadinejad’s mentality and an ideology that must circulate in at least some circles in Teheran. . . .
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While Kofi Annan tours Beirut, interest may in fact be returning to Gaza where, despite the Israeli withdrawal, a situation of chaos resists efforts to establish something like a stable Palestinian regime. We can count on the usual suspects to blame Israel—despite the withdrawal—for all the ills in Gaza, but at least domestically other, more rational voices are being raised. In an article published in the Palestinian Authority Daily al-Ayyam, PA Spokesman Ghazi Hamad criticizes the habit of avoiding all self-criticism: ” . . . I want to make a reckoning and own up to our mistakes. We are always afraid to speak honestly about our mistakes, as we have become accustomed to placing the blame on other factors. The anarchy, chaos, pointless murders, the plundering of lands, family feuds . . . what do all of these have to do with the occupation? We have always been accustomed to pinning our failures on others, and conspiratorial thinking is still widespread among us. . . . ” Today’s NYT reports on the article but quickly moves on to other topics. Yet Hamad’s account is an important document for the development of a theoretical account of what is going on in Gaza, which in turns is a distinctive piece of the larger discussion about Islamic extremism and the hypothesis of “Islamic fascism.” In Arendt’s account of totalitarianism, a core argument involves the constellation of three different social types: the masses, who make up the bulk of a displaced population cast into unemployment by the economic crises of the 1930s; the elite, the traditional ruling class which tries to safeguard its wealth while also indulging in a fascination with its own demise, a love affair with thugs; and the “mob,” made up of extremists, fanatics, and criminals—the recruiting ground for the leadership of the totalitarian parties. This is where the question of crime and illegality overlaps with the discussion of totalitarianism. Familiar in the imagery of “street fighting” in the Weimar Republic, illegality is, on the one hand part of the toolbox of practices of the radical political parties; on the other, it is chosen precisely in order to undermine the rule of law, which is the ultimate goal. And while the attack on legality is typically defended with ideological (or theological) arguments, there is at least the suggestion that those arguments are merely pretexts that enable the working of criminal psychologies: brutal thugs like to break the law and only need a modicum of intelligence to find some ideological justification. Why is Gaza in chaos? Confronting Islamist Totalitarianism On October 22, 2005, the France 2 television talk show Tout le Monde en Parle aired an interview with writer Salman Rushdie and French actor and Islamist Sami Nacéri. Left on the cutting room floor was an ugly incident during taping when Nacéri accused Rushdie of debasing Islam. If an imam asked him to kill Rushdie, Nacéri went on, he would himself shoot the bullet into Rushdie’s head. He then pantomimed firing a gun at Rushdie. Philippe Val, editor of the French left-wing weekly Charlie Hebdo, described the omitted segment in the November 2 issue of the magazine. French reaction was minimal. While some journalists debated whether celebrities made appropriate commentators, there was little discussion of France 2’s decision to delete the offending segment. On February 28, 2006, in response to Nacéri’s threat, France 2’s censorship, and the decision of several newspapers not to publish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, twelve prominent Muslim and non-Muslim intellectuals issued a manifesto first published on the French website Proche-Orient.info. The translation, replicated below, was later published in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. The willingness of prominent thinkers, both Muslim and non-Muslim, to stand together suggests that intellectuals recognize the totalitarian nature of Islamism and are determined not to cede terms of the societal debates to Islamists. —The Editors After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity, and secular values for all. . . . Discussions about Islamic extremism or Islamic fascism derive from the obvious fact that many of the key players (al-Qaeda, etc.) defend their actions with explicit invocations of Islamic teaching and a corresponding political agenda. Legitimate objections to that connection can be raised about this nomenclature with the argument that such extremist claims may be highly idiosyncratic within the range of Islamic thought. An appropriate hermeneutic inquiry ought to ensue. In the meantime, though, it is worthwhile to consider other features of the terrorist actors—what features do they often share other than religion—among which one seems particularly prominent. Mohammed Atta was an engineer, as was one of the recently indicted participants in the failed attack on the German train system. Engineers blow up machines! Today’s New York Times furthermore describes how the conspirators in the foiled attack on trans-Atlantic flights were engaged in “experiments” to determine how best to mix liquid components into explosives. Other terrorists, too, participate in this fascination with technology and science. At the very least, one has to concede that many terrorists are not “rural idiots,” as Marx might have put it, uneducated refugees from the underdeveloped backwoods of the Third World. On the contrary, they form part of a rising class of a technical-scientific intelligentsia. Located at the cusp of cultural transfer—familiar with premodern, traditional values but thrust into the hardly conservative cultural atmosphere of western university life—they experience the cultural tensions most dramatically. That profile opens onto a gender analysis: engineering (with its still primarily male clientele) draws aspiring students from patriarchal Islamic backgrounds who then recoil with horror at the much greater gender equality of Western societies. Since Adorno and Horkheimer published their Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944, the question of the “culture industry” has remained a key topic for Critical Theory. In its specific sense, the term refers to the production of art primarily for commercial purposes: books, movies, paintings produced above all with an eye to the market rather than to questions of artistic integrity. Artists always needed to find material support, but in the context of the culture industry, commercial considerations are understood to outweigh artistic independence. The focus for Horkheimer and Adorno was Hollywood film—they were living in Los Angeles and belonged to a German exile community that sometimes maintained a European “high cultural” distance to forms of American mass culture. On the one hand, they inherited an idealist expectation that works of art participate in a project of human emancipation; on the other, they faced the dream factories of the studio system—just before it plunged into crisis with the advent of television. The interest in the culture industry makes questions of “culture and politics” absolutely germane. What’s at stake in the adoption of political positions by artists? How do politics pervade the works themselves or are the political contents separate from aesthetic value? Are the political postures of writers, actors, painters, etc. of any greater import than those of ordinary citizens? European publics tend to give more credence to the public pronouncements of artists than is the case in the United States, but there is also a long tradition of prominent Hollywood personalities defending political causes—a tradition that probably goes back to World War II and the support by the entertainment industry for U.S. forces fighting imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. At the outset of the Iraq War, political debate involved the conflict between principles of unilateralism and multilateralism. Despite considerable efforts by the Bush administration to bring the UN on board, its policies were characterized as “unilateralist.” The real alternative to such go-it-alone practices, so the argument went, would involve forms of international government and, consequently, limits on national sovereignty. Hence the conflict between western European governments, which seem (or seemed) to be ceding aspects of national independence to the European Union, and the United States, criticized for working against international cooperation, especially the UN. The political theoretical questions concern sovereignty and the political standing of international bodies. The empirical evidence can be collected from the behavior of the UN and its subsidiaries. This blog recently discussed reports that, at the outset of the hostilities, Lebanese villagers from Marwaheen tried to find refuge at a UN outpost, but they were turned away and sent off—some of them to their deaths. Whether the UN will investigate this crime is unlikely. The point is that the UN de facto collaborated in the Hezbollah strategy of maximizing civilian casualties. We learn now that, during the fighting in Lebanon, UNIFIL—presumably too neutral to protect local villagers—posted movements of Israeli troops and weapons on the internet, thereby providing Hezbollah with invaluable intelligence information. Read all about it here . . . |
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