"Coercive
Utopias"
By Tahir Ali
Massachusetts
This expressive term coined
by President Carter’s National Security
Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski names those conditions
whereby people are oppressed and even slaughtered
for their own good, where their lifestyle including
their religion and culture is changed against
their will, and where their freedom is usurped
in the name of making them free.
In effect, Dr. Brzezinski is theorizing the essential
link between ideology and control. A century earlier,
German philosopher Karl Marx had noted that no
ruling class could endure for long unless the
ideas of the ruling class also become the "ruling
ideas". These ruling ideas can be oppressive
or liberating.
Today, many American Muslims feel oppressed. According
to a Zogby poll commissioned by the Georgetown
University and released on October 19, 2004, every
fourth Muslim has been profiled, at least one
in three has experienced discrimination, and one
in two knows someone who has been either harassed
by the law enforcement agencies or has been discriminated
against.
This oppression has five faces: social, legal,
economic, political and ideological. I will focus
only on the ideological.
"We are faced with two types of prejudice:
prejudice of the ignorant and the prejudice of
the learned", says Dr. Agha Saeed who teaches
at the University of California in Berkeley. "The
prejudice of the learned is usually expressed
through carefully crafted systems of ideas and
values."
Though at present American Muslims are facing
many threats, a particularly serious threat emanates
from the opinion and ideas, among some of major
American intellectuals -- including Samuel Huntington,
Henry Kissinger, Bernard Lewis -- that Islam itself
is somehow to blame for the terrorist attacks.
This Islamophobic ideology has been under-construction
for the last 15 years.
The first piece that came to public attention
was Francis Fukuyama’s famous article called
"The End of History?" At that time he
was the Deputy Director of the US State Department’s
Policy Planning staff. In his article "The
End of History?" he said, using German philosopher
Hegel’s model, that history evolves to a
competition of ideas. He argued that there were
three main idea systems in the 20th century -
Fascism, Communism and Capitalism. With Communism
and Fascism fallen by the wayside, he argued that
the history had come to an end in the Hegelian
sense because there was no competition of idea
and no further evolution of thought. Things had
come to a standstill in that sense and he said
did not mean there would be no more wars, conflicts
or disputes but they would be of the same concep
tual flavor. So by what he meant by end of history
where all events will come to be located in a
single paradigm or a single conceptual flavor
need not have concerned us too much.
From this argument he derived other arguments,
which were very relevant. He said with the end
of the Cold War we changed from a geo-political
phase to a geo-economic phase. He said in the
name of geo political what counts is your military,
and in the name of geo economics what counts is
your economy. We entered a different phase in
which countries would be seen, measured and judged
in relation to each other on a totally different
basis. In another very important point he said
we had no global enemies – the last global
enemy was the Soviet Union. We had entered a relative
age of peace; therefore, the whole world, principally,
the United States, should reap the benefits and
dividends of peace. Finally, he said Islam is
not the enemy. Iran and Iraq, he said, may be
local irritants but they lack the capacity to
be global enemies for two reasons: one, they don’t
hav e an ideology that appeals to people outside
of their own world; and, second, they don’t
have the military means to project their power
beyond their borders.
No sooner had Fukuyama published his article that
Henry Kissinger attacked him by saying that Fukuyama
does not understand complex international issues.
He asserted that Fukuyama is dead wrong because
we continue to have global enemies; Kissinger
did not say it in so many words but hinted at
the Muslims as the new enemies.
Then in his book "Islam in the West",
Bernard Lewis, put forward the argument that we
do have the making of a global enemy within the
Muslim world. Muslims are a civilization that
has been left behind. They are suffering from
the "rage of impotence" and, therefore,
they are going to be our new enemy and we have
to be prepared to deal with them.
Next came the major attack. In his famous article
"Clash of Civilization", the internationally
renowned scholar Samuel Huntington argued that
Fukuyama had misunderstood the flow of history.
History actually had gone through four phases
and each age had its unit of conflicts. He claimed
the unit of conflict was civilization –
and ultimately the conflict of two sets of civilization;
first, Islam and the West; second, between Confucian
state (China) and Islam on one side and the West
on other.
In the concluding section of his essay, Huntington
recommended several concrete steps including the
following six: 1) unite the West, 2) neutralize
Russia and Japan by befriending them, 3) divide
the Muslim world, 4) "exploit difference
and conflicts among Confucians [China] and Islamic
states", 5) "strengthen international
institutions that reflect and legitimate Western
interests and values", and 6) incorporate
non-Western states into pro-Western international
institutions.
Huntington’s crusade was not against violent
groups or outlaw states but against the Muslim
world. Whatever was left unstated by Huntington;
the neo-cons later supplied by way of an ideology
of global domination. Now they are recruiting
and promoting Muslim neo-cons.
If Prof. Huntington wanted to divide and isolate
the Muslim word, the Rand Corporation, a semi-autonomous
think tank, wants to divide and isolate American
Muslims. To that end, they have been recruiting
and promoting Rand Robots Muslim, a subject I
will cover in my next column. In the meantime
beware of Muslim neo-cons and Rand Robots Muslims.
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