Three Original Thoughts

I was searching and searching this morning for an original thought, but I came up empty. I’m reminded of the saying of a blogger I came across once: “blog every day, a good idea every three or four months.”
But it turns out I had forgotten a few original thoughts, or had left them in obscurity. So I harvest them now.
One of these thoughts is that its an irony of history that so much of the worlds’ oil happens to reside under portions of the earth controlled by predominantly Muslim countries. Well, God bless them, they have as much a right to a very valuable natural resource as anyone, but the important thing to remember is that all of this fabulous wealth that’s associated with the let’s say middle eastern Arab sheikdoms, for example, is unearned.
A nation like Britain by contrast, while they have natural resources of their own, is largely a world power as a result of their industry (not to mention their astounding capacity for war and acquisitiveness during the colonial era), and Japan as well, with a similar mix of industriousness, intelligence, racism and agressiveness. Nations like the United States and China benefit from a combination of the two: while amply endowed with natural resources we are also blessed with industrious and aggressive people. Industrious and aggressive to a fault, perhaps.
But none of this applies to the predominantly Muslim nations. When you look at their societal and political structures, the sheikhdoms may pose as survivors from a forgotten era, but if you look a little more closely, you find that they are rather facsimiles of ancient kingdoms, reconstituted from provinces of the former Ottoman Empire by the colonial powers in back room negotiations at Versailles.
This is their conception: some aspects of their culture, religion and approach to the world would not be out of place in the thirteenth century, but their actual origin and modus vivendi are deeply entwined with modern history and the post industrial economy.
Meanwhile, what we have come to call “western society” has progressed through a multitude of phases since the age of Christendom, through the enlightenment and post-enlightenment, agricultural revolution and industrial revolution, up through the modern era, each with their attendant upheavals, bitter wars, persecutions and societal changes all over the course of centuries.
You could argue whether this is a natural maturation process, it certainly is a different process, that is to say, it is a process, for God’s sake. It’s not something that has remained static or perhaps dormant for the past five centuries, nor is it something that is masquerading as something else, … or is it?
In any case, having so recently shed our historical sense of racial superiority (or at least giving the appearance of having done so), we treat folks from these Muslim nations like the human beings they are and so informed by our world view, we believe they’re our equals in some sense. But we make a mistake when we treat them as peers in the sense that we share an assumed view of the world.
I’m talking about very basic assumptions about man’s place in the universe and his relationship to the spirit realm and to one another and to women. While we in the west have similar arguments among ourselves, particularly when the subject turns to religion and let’s say the tension around changes in traditional roles and values, the gap is not really so wide between say a feminist and a fundamentalist Christian, so long as they are both American. It might be useful to remember, then, that when we engage in such dialogs with folks from the Muslim world, particularly so-called Muslim fundamentalists, we’re talking with people who are trying to resurrect viewpoints we in the west struggled with, bitterly fought and killed over, and finally put to rest centuries ago. Mainly we came to the conclusion that if you ever want to get anything accomplished, then at least with respect to religion, the best approach is to change the subject.
Ok, so that’s one aspect of it. Not having undergone these centuries of evolution, is it any wonder that their reaction to us is so strong? And that we, informed by our own viewpoints seem to have a failure to communicate?
That’s one original thought. I think. Somebody else undoubtedly had that thought before, but its not anything I read anywhere.
But think about that for a second, and what the implications of all that are, there are many, some of which you can’t even grasp, because so much of what you think and see and your responses to the world are informed by these assumptions that are so ingrained in you that you’re not even aware of them.
Ok, here’s another thought that’s kind of related to that. Its an old one that I found buried in an old tape. I was listening to this old tape of myself, and I’m like babbling in the car, the way I do, and I’ve got the Verdi Requiem on the CD in the background and the combined effect is kind of spooky, it makes me sound like a complete madman. And I thought to myself, “if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck….” Well. That’s something to think about.
So the other observation anyway was related to this that these oil shieks never earned any of their wealth, they just woke up one day billionaires. In fact it was the British and American oil companies that actually found the oil in the first place, “Salaam. Allah ali Akhbar. Do you mind if we drill here?” Throughout the middle east and elsewhere, that’s what happened, and you know they kept the lion’s share of the profits for themselves originally, until they were kicked out in a massive nationalization campaign in the seventies.
And as we all know, this was followed in quick order by the creation of OPEC and the famous Arab oil embargo after the seven days war with Israel. So that little piece of shit war has numerous consequences to this day that we are still paying for, in spades. [I can’t help following this rathole down, thinking how we assassinated Allende in Chile, basically for nationalizing the telephone industry down there, and we still have Castro under our heel for reasons that are not at all clear, force of habit, mostly I guess. But when the Saudis and the Iraqis, and later the Iranians nationalized their oil industry, we really did nothing. That’s a serious policy issue when you think about it. Is it right or wrong? If wrong, then why do we ever do it? If its right to overthrow a regime, openly or otherwise, when in the national interest, why is it more in our national interest now to kiss these sheiks’ asses, than it is to kick those same goddamned asses? So can you blame folks if they’re confused about U.S. foreign policy? That’s something you can lay at Carter’s door. Or Nixon’s, I suppose, really, because that’s the difference. The Arabs were either clever or maybe just lucky enough to pull their stunt while we were, shall we say, distracted? While Nixon was in the process of resigning in disgrace to be replaced by an impossible idealist. In terms of long term political-economic fallout, I can’t say I blame the Republicans for thinking the way they do. Shit. From a foreign policy standpoint, you know what? I’ll give it to them.
But don’t get me started on the 350,000 Superfund sites that won’t ever get cleaned up because of the god-damned Republicans fighting the EPA over decades. You see? Nothing’s binary, yet we’re asked to make a binary decision. What’s wrong with this picture? Something to think about anyway.]
But I digress.
We have all this oil money, and we have this let’s say ‘clash of cultures’ between the post-industrial nations and the predominantly Muslim nations.
And we have these oil sheikhs who never earned an honest dollar, like ever, and we have all this business about terrorism and we have Osama bin Laden, this supposed evil genius, and he never actually accomplished anything. He inherited all his money from a construction company (and if its like every other construction company on the planet, not without some peripheral criminal activity). And its not that the bin Laden construction company his father and uncles built wasn’t particularly competent, they were successful primarily because they were politically connected.
And it turns out that there are numerous indirect linkages through the Saudi royal family and other prominent families in Saudi Arabia to of all people, the Bush family. The Bushes, it should be remembered have not insignificant interests in oil, and the Saudis have invested in concerns controlled by the Bushes to the tune of six billion dollars. Think about that one for a while.
In fact, Osama bin Laden is not unlike G.W. Bush in some ways — he’s what I call the ‘fat son’ — or in Spengler’s terminology, a late stage leader, unaccomplished and long past the creative growth or conquering stage, barely able to maintain what he inherited.
That’s something to think about. Osama bin Laden is like the symmetrical counterpoint to President Bush — the marginally competent black sheep wealthy only through inheritance, member of a prominent family with political connections, connections that go to the very top of the nation in which he resides.
Bin Laden’s not exactly Saudi, he’s Yemeni, but as far as we’re concerned, that’s a fine point.
The major observation there is that bin Laden’s really not an accomplished man. Yes, he’s wealthy, that’s what he’s got, his wealth comes indirectly through the oil money, that is to say, from us. And you’ve got these people with essentially medieval viewpoints combined with fantastic though unearned wealth, responding to other people with a post industrial viewpoint.
So theres this clash of cultures that’s been commented on many times, but there’s a .. well, ok.
One of the things that is a characteristic of this post industrial culture is something they call cultural relativism.
Basically, it boils down to the viewpoint that there really are no absolutes. For example, there is no absolute right or absolute wrong. From this point of view, absolutes are simplistic and even primitive conceptions, relatively speaking (if you’ll pardon the pun), especially when grappling with these complex subjects dealing with the appropriate relationships between people and that sort of thing. And while at some level there is something to be said for cultural relativism, within limits, its my own belief, I suppose, that brings me back to absolutes.
For example, when I listen to Martin Luther King talk on this very subject back in the mid 60s he’s responding directly to this concept of cultural relativsm all the way back there, and he says “by God, there is an absolute right and there is an absolute wrong in the universe. These are laws, these are principles, inexorable as gravity, by which the universe is governed. And if you ignore these laws, you do so at your own peril.” These are his words.
And I believe that.
We can debate precisely what those laws are, but I take it as a premise that there are such laws, so that while these ideas of cultural relativsm have value within limits, its important to acknowledge that there are limits, even as we continue to explore precisely what those limits are.
So all that’s by way of saying that as we approach the Muslim world we try, at least some of us try, to approach it with this relativistic viewpoint. That says “well, their point of view has validity. We don’t agree with everything they say, but just because we don’t agree doesn’t mean their world view isn’t ok for them.” And that’s all great, except they don’t approach us in at all the same way. Our world view is simply invalid, wrong, it is sinful, and an offense to God.
Our mere existence, practically speaking, is an offense to God. You know, women in the workplace without veils over their heads is an offense to God, and so on. So there you have it. There’s a very direct, fundamental challenge to even the concept of tolerance.
Ok, so what do you do?
When you approach the world with a relativistic value set and you come across someone who doesn’t even share the values of mutual respect and tolerance and other basic assumptions which I haven’t had time to articulate here, like for example, destiny.
Do you make your own destiny, or is destiny prescribed? That’s a basic question. I encourage you to find out for yourself what traditional Islam has to say on the subject, you might be surprised. For example, there’s this concept of Divine Decree or destiny (“qadar” in Arabic). Muslims are required to accept qadar. This follows from the belief that everything in the universe is completely subject to the will of God. Nothing can happen outside God’s will. Therefore, for example, God determined when each thing would come into existence and when it would cease to exist. He also determined its qualities and nature. Get your head around that.
Now the concepts of free will, and the law of cause and effect are so fundamental to our world view, they are held so closely almost without examination, that we don’t even discuss them. We used to discuss them, but Christendom pretty much settled the issue around the time of the Nicene Counsel, around 300 AD. It was never brought into question again, even during the Reformation. There’s nothing more to say. Everyone in the post industrial world believes so fundamentally in the laws of cause and effect that we can hardly even formulate the question whether our experience is the direct or indirect result of our own or other people’s actions. It’s simply a given.
It follows that in our view, by changing our actions or those of others, we can effect change in the world. And to the extent that we have intentions to change the world, we can make it a better place by some measure, we are empowered to do that either through our own right thinking and right action or by influencing the thinking and actions of other people.
Remember that that’s an assumption. Its certainly valid within contexts, and clearly demonstrable: “man goes to the doctor, says ‘doc, it hurts when I do this.’ Doc says, ‘stop doing that.'”
But what if somebody doesn’t believe that, how do you influence them? Where do you start? There’s this terrific gulf between you and them (I sometimes call it the “Persian Gulf”).
The gulf between the Islamic world and the post-industrial world exists in part, because we fail to examine, and sometimes aren’t even conscious of these basic assumptions which are in conflict. This is one of several essential problems with what we call the “War on Terrorism”. I’ll come back to that in a moment.
Ok, that’s two original thoughts. Here’s another number three:
Thinking about Osama bin Laden, if you’ll forgive me, I kind of think of him in terms of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon. There’s this bad guy character Boris Badenov running around causing all kinds of problems, and Boris, who’s obviously a caricature of a Russian spy, was himself terrified of his boss, the Fearless Leader, from back in Pottsylvania. Fearless Leader was like a stereotypical World War I era Prussian with the monocle, and the riding crop, and this accent, and he would give Boris his instructions. But even Fearless Leader was terrified of Mr. Big.
Mr. Big was the mastermind behind all these machinations of the worldwide global conspiracy to wreak havoc upon the world, and Mr. Big was like this big, big bad guy. And he’s mysterious. You never see Mr. Big, you only see his shadow. And it turns out that Mr. Big cast a long shadow indeed. But if you looked more closely, you would see that he was actually this tiny Tom Thumb character and it was all a trick of the light that he arranged to cast such an imposing shadow.
And I thought that characters like Saddam Hussein were like Fearless Leader, with all the appurtenances of the military, and the dysfunctional state he ruled, but Osama bin Laden is like Mr. Big. There’s no “there” there. There’s nothing, he never created anything, he hasn’t ever done anything, and the only thing we have to respond to is something of our own creation.
He has no army, he has no nation. He’s like some crazy bad guy from a James Bond movie — he has nothing more than a pile of cash, some quasi-criminal gang and this idea of terror. And where does terror come from? Terror is by definition an artifact of our own psyches. We’re really projecting our own power onto this shadow, this nothing, this worthless piece of shit person. And what we’re terrified of is merely a reflection of our own industry and power. Do you see that? Do you see that we Americans have a history of projecting our own power on those we perceive as enemies: the native Americans, the Spanish, the Russians, when any objective assessment puts the advantage to our side well beyond any reasonable balance? At what multiple of power over our competitors do we feel comfortable? 2X, 10X, 100X? I encourage you to research the practical balance of power between the east and the west at the end of the cold war. In the beginning, it was very real. Stalin was more vile than Hitler, to the extent that’s even possible. But at the end, what sort of war did we really have on our hands, other than a figment of our own imaginations?
Now in the case of Osama bin Laden, that’s quite literally true, because he got his start in the terrorism game as a Mujahedeen. The story goes that he was raising Cain in the Saudi Kingdom, with his let’s call it fundamentalist Muslim faith. [“Fundamentalist” might be as fair a way as any to characterize this form of traditional Islam, called Wahabiism. Its interesting to note how replacing the typical adjective “radical” with “fundamentalist” brings in a whole different set of associations, and what would it say if one were to turn it around and use the term “radical religious zealots” where appropriate rather than the more conventional “fundamentalist Christians”].
The Saudi monarchy just wasn’t traditional enough for these fundamentalist Islamists, including bin Laden. And so they made enough trouble that they got booted out and went to places like Afghanistan, there to fight the then Soviet Union. And at the time, we supported the Mujahedeen. Their tactics were just the same then as they are now, only the target was the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan.
Which brings me to the other aspect of terroism that maybe isn’t so obvious, you have to think about it for a while.
It was first brought to my attention indirectly, as I listened to an interview with a now member of the South African parliament who was participating in the, I don’t know, the 100th birthday of Nelson Mandela, and he was reminiscing about the days under apartheid when the then government of South Africa branded them all, Mandela included, as terrorists.
They were revolutionaries, and they were taking action, and from the point of view of the South African government that’s exactly what they were, they were trying to destablize the government.
They were trying to bring about regime change.
And as I listened, that brought to mind a book I had read some years earlier by Barbara Tuchman, “The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890-1914”. It was about the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, and you might not know that there was a global rash of terrorism going on at the time.
Actually terrorism in its modern form was invented during this period by a ne’er do well unemployed carpenter living in Paris, who committed possibly the first true terrorist act of the modern era, when he planted a bomb in the Paris opera, and killed hundreds of people, including himself, I believe.
And the government and the papers coined the term “terrorism” (it appeared in French first), by which they meant the very intent of the attack was to instill a sense of panic and terror in the general public and to disrupt the public order. Civilian casualties were not collateral, innocent civilians were in fact the primary targets.
He wasn’t a communist (there really was no such thing at the time), he was an anarchist. And there were these guys all over the world, and they were trying to destabilize their respective governments, in various ways.
And in the course of I think it was five years, there were no fewer than eleven world leaders assassinated, President McKinley of the United States being just one, himself assassinated by an anarchist.
They were all in very isolated cells or working as lone individuals, and if you think about it, anarchists aren’t by nature amenable to most sorts of organization. But one of the thought leaders you might say of the movement, when they tried to say he gave the orders for the assassinations, said “we don’t have to give orders. If you’re an anarchist, you know what to do.”
So, the important thing here is that the anarchism aspect of these events 100 years ago as compared with say the Islamist aspect of terrorism in the modern era is actually irrelevant. The term “terrorism” characterizes the acts, the tactics, not the motives. And how can you have a war against a tactic?
So there’s all kinds of reasons, just and unjust, for someone’s dissatisfaction with their state of affairs and their relationship with their government, and every regime is ultimately born as the result of a revolution or a coup, including ours. Let’s remember we had a revolution of our own, and in their day, I have no doubt that King George III and his men would have branded the founding fathers of this country as terrorists, had such a term been available to them. After all, the colonists attacked institutions of government, industry and authority, and raised an armed insurrection.
In the characterization I’m trying to draw, an attack against a military target, let’s say, a warship (the U.S.S. Cole), or an army barracks (in Lebanon, say), is certainly revolutionary, and may be an act of war if state sponsored, and may be villainous, but it is not terrorism. In contrast, an attack on a bus carrying children to school or ordinary men and women on their way home from work is a terrorist tactic.
And so what we’ve got in the lexicon of the creatures of the radical right, such as Bush himself, simplistically muddles all these distinctions. Our enemy is a terrorist, regardless of what he does, and we hate terrorists as beings of an evil nature. But if such a person does the same thing against our enemies, then that same man’s a freedom fighter. So Reagan called the Mujahedeen freedom fighters in Afghanistan, if you remember the papers of the era, and the characterization of the Mujahedeen were not at all like the characterizations you find of lets’ say al Qaeda today. Yet they’re the very same people doing the very same things for the very same reasons. Only the target is different.
Do you see? A “war” so deeply conceptually flawed can certainly never be won. Nor can it be lost, it can in fact never conclude, because the definition of the enemy is so nebulous as to be useless. Are we at war with anyone who kills civilians? We have ourselves done so. Are we at war with fundamentalist Islam? With Wahabiists and the like? We deny it, though they most certainly see themselves at war with us. If they abandon the tactics of terrorism, cease to be terrorists, and attack in a different way, using economic weapons for example, or the more usual weapons of war, are we no longer to fight them, since we have said we are at war with terrorism?
Are we at war with terrorism everywhere? The Palestinians, the Colombian secret police, the Sudanese, the Syrians, the Israelis? All of these nations and many others act against unarmed civilians.
So to what end do we fight? Are we to solve every problem the world ever had? Are we to crush those who would put our innocents at risk? There is a war of ideas afoot, and there is also an economic front in this war, but the sides of right and wrong are not nearly so clear as so many of us — on the right and on the left — seem to think.
The first things we must come to grips with are our principles and our ideals. I think we have lost sight of those principles somewhat in the new global economic order, and in the words of Martin Luther King, we do so at our own peril.
Despite what we know about the hypocrisy of prior eras, the race question — slavery and racism that immigrants of many nations suffered, we did once accept in a fundamental way the Judeo-Christian view of a benevolent God, and that there is a path of righteousness in the world which we ought to strive to follow. We do not always succeed, but we do always strive to do what is right. We have lost that. And despite the fundamental conflict between Capitalism and Judeo-Christian teaching (shared and maintained by Islam, by the way), that for example, loaning money at interest is a sin, that love of money is the root of all evil, that we are commanded to share all our wealth with the poor — capitalism takes a sin (greed) and through a perverse series of contortions turns it into a virtue. We once believed in the virtues of economic interdependence — the commonwealth — we used to value the family farm, we pastured our sheep and cattle on the commons, the enterprising shopkeeper was part of the community. We have lost sight of all that in the era of Wal-Mart and the WTO.
The old problems of race, religion, economics and power have not left us, they are the same as they ever were. It is we who have lost ourselves in the modern world, this world of global multinational corporations, cartels, international finance and arms merchants.
And to quote Martin Luther King once more, “we must go back. go back and rediscover those lost values” if we are ever to regain our path in this new world.