February 8, 2007
NOTHING ODD ABOUT IT:
With friends like these: An odd marriage of Muslims and secular socialists, united against America, is challenged by pundits of right and left (The Economist, 2/08/07)
[M]uslim grievance has been yoked to a broader anti-capitalist or anti-globalist movement whose leitmotif is loathing of the Bush administration and all its works.An Italian Marxist involved in the "Social Forum" movement, which organises large, disparate gatherings of groups opposed to the existing world order, puts it this way. Almost everybody in the movement shares the belief that "capitalism and militarism" (both epitomised by America) are the main challenges to human welfare. If political Islam can blunt American triumphalism, then so much the better--even from the viewpoint of those who would never dream of donning a headscarf or upsetting a sexual minority.
At the micro-political level, co-operation between angry Muslims and secular socialists is not always smooth. In Britain, one of the offspring of the anti-war alliance has been the Respect Party, which combines a socialist platform with anti-Americanism and resistance to "Islamophobia". But if Respect has remained small, that is partly because its core constituents are viewed warily, even within the Islamic-leftist fraternity. Many Muslim activists dislike the "control-freak" tactics they associate with the Brotherhood and its offshoots--and on the political left, the Respect Party has been eschewed by Greens and other radicals because of grandstanding by its SWP core.
What's weird about their making common cause against the Americanization that threatens to swamp them both? Posted by Orrin Judd at February 8, 2007 7:52 PM
There is absolutely nothing odd about Boxer-Leninism. Marxism itself had been a snake-oil show, a farce actually. For all those false claims of "progress" is had always been a blind, sick reaction. In that it was very similar to another atavistic barbarism which had masqueraded as a world religion.
The gangsters running Communism soon began to realize that capitalism was providing the masses, not with increasing misery, but with real progress. At this point they shifted gears, abandoning conversion of "nations of bourgiousie" in favor of marshalling the ressentment of surpassed cultures.
It seems that the progress of the West drives the rest a bit insane. The primitive racism of the inmates of the various jailhouses has been holding them back from adapting to modern life, and condemns them to a downward spiral of hatred, stagnation and more hatred. The connection of the one jailhouse with the other is most natural and predictable.
Posted by: Lou Gots at February 9, 2007 6:24 AMThe way the most radical Muslims scream and shout, they might as well be anti-Western atheists, too.
Posted by: ratbert at February 9, 2007 9:53 AMThey know they can take the atheists.
Posted by: oj at February 9, 2007 11:01 AMIt's still weird. The Islamists are not that Machievellian. They're literalists who get their jollies through pure, unadulterated (and scripturally justified) hatred.
Posted by: Tom C at February 9, 2007 5:28 PMNot weird at all. It might only seem so if one has fallen into one or both errors of dignifying some or another Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organization as either a legitimate political movement or a legitimate religion.
Thus I go along strongly with oj's closing remark to the effect that the twin jailhouses share their barbaric atavism.
Posted by: Lou Gots at February 9, 2007 6:42 PM