Twenty years after.
Apart from the particularity of being symmetrical, 1991 was the year that saw the dissolution of the Warsaw pact (February 26) and the Comecom (June 28), the demise of the Soviet Communist Party (August 29) and the break up of the USSR (December 8). This put an end to the forty years Cold War and gave the US a victory by default. The sudden collapse of the Soviet empire left the world without an alternative. And the first victim of the new unanimity was Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Kuwait the previous year (August 2). Contrary to precedent, a UN resolution was voted and an armed coalition assembled. Desert Storm liberated Kuwait (February 26) and destroyed most of Iraq’s military capacity. The changed paradigm also introduced a new kind of warfare with cruise missiles and laser guided bombs, “surgical” strikes instead of carpet bombing.
The failure of centralised state economies and the fragmentation of the Eastern Block ended the Cold War and seemed to herald an age of peace, a pax americana and even an end of history. Then came the dotcom economy of internet start-ups and the closet hedonism of the Clinton presidency (I did not inhale, I did not have sex). Unfortunately it was all too good to be true. Throughout the empire oppression was rife. Autocrats were still in power, crushing all opposition and amassing huge wealth, abetted and armed by America and Europe. Absolutism had not disappeared with the Soviet Union, and its persistence became increasingly unbearable and unjustifiable. The newfound freedoms in the East were not replicated in the West.
The last proxy war opposing East and West was in Afghanistan. To a certain extent, it was the mirror image of the Vietnam War. Soviet troops were fighting an insurgency that was recruited and trained in neighbouring Pakistan, a Western ally. But, contrary to the unrestrained bombing of North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia by the US, the Soviets did not attack the rear bases of the insurgency in the Tribal Areas and in Kashmir, where a large number of Afghans had taken refuge. Times and the balance of power had changed. None the less, Moscow finally recalled its troops and left the Afghans to their own devices, which led to a civil war won by Mullah Omar’s Pashtun Taliban and their Arab allies. The ten year occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Army (1979/89) had unwittingly created a coalition that humanity has learned to fear or admire, a coalition that has conveniently replaced the Communists as the world’s bogeymen.
As resistance to the Soviet invasion developed, the fighting intensified and the number of refugees grew. Many of these fled to safety in Pakistan (three to four million), most of them Pashtun. And, as they are Sunni Moslems, solidarity and aid came from Sunni Saudi Arabia. As part of this aid schools were built, providing a Saudi curriculum of strict Salafi precepts, the Koran and Hadith applied as Sharia Law. The graduates from these schools, the Taliban, joined the insurgency in Afghanistan, and were soon in command of the Pashtun front. Concomitant to the humanitarian aid for the refugees, Sunni Arabs of various nationalities were volunteering to fight the Soviets as an act of Jihad. One of these young men, Osama bin Laden, became the founder and funder of an International Brigade based in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, at the junction of the Pashtun and of the other resistance movements among the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities. This central position gave the small Arab contingent a strategic importance, such that they came to think of themselves as the Base. The Soviet retreat in 1989 and the fall of Kabul in 1992 were the signs of a Salafi success, and the international members of the Base began to imagine a similar process in their own countries. A new caliphate was at hand.
The operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait in 1991 assembled a considerable military force, a majority of Americans with British and French support, and the participation of thirty one other nations. For the main part, this army was quartered in neighbouring Saudi Arabia. Bases were built, arms and munitions were stockpiled and armoured units were deployed in an unprecedented invasion of the Salafi heartland by kafir soldiers. This could have been a temporary situation but, having thrashed the Iraqi army, the foreign troops did not leave. The continued threat of Saddam Hussein (those biological, chemical and nuclear weapons!) and the growing threat of Iran (ditto) were used to justify a continued presence. For the puritanical Salafi, this was sacrilegious. For the Base, it was a fantastic recruitment opportunity. The American military presence on Arabian soil could be construed as a counterpart of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that had led to the Taliban victory. Up to this point, America had relied on Sunni support in its conflicts with Shia Moslems in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon. Suddenly, radical Sunni were also threatening American lives, property and interests. However, the Soviet presence in Afghanistan and the American presence in Arabia were as different as are the respective geographies and populations of these two countries. The American forces were strictly confined to closed camps and no attempts were made to change the governments, the traditions or the laws. So there was no Arab insurgency (with the notable exception of Algeria), no uprisings, merely a succession of spectacular terrorist attacks culminating with the four hijacked planes on September the eleventh, which provoked the NATO occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 and, indirectly, the un-mandated occupation of Iraq in 2003. This demonstration of brute force convinced the Arab governments that a vigorous war on terror was to be waged.
The example given by America and its European allies in Afghanistan and Iraq was enthusiastically copied by despots throughout Islam. Arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial executions, show-case trials, all the instruments of tyranny became the norm, morally justified by the ticking bomb hypothesis. It was even claimed that WMDs might fall into terrorist hands, and movie-makers promptly picked up the idea to give it a visual plausibility. The new terror that replaced the Soviet terror of the Cold War was labelled “Islamic”. It was a godsend for autocrats and for the world’s military industrial complex. During the Cold War, religion had opposed the atheist Soviet ideology and had been allowed to prosper. Religious eschatology, the people’s opium, alleviates suffering and is addictive. But it also carries an egalitarian message: confronted with God’s majesty and love all humans are equally insignificant and unique. Moreover, one of the pillars of Islam is alms giving. The demise of the Soviet Satan brought these ideas to the fore, subverting the status quo of feudal autocrats who owned and decided for the nation, backed by praetorian guards and secret police. Soon, Moslem clerics were preaching social equality (the way priests had preached a liberation theology in Latin America, also M.L.King and D.Tutu on civil rights), Moslem organisations were assisting the poor to obtain their basic needs and rights, and to educate their children, and mosques were becoming the places where discontent was voiced (as had churches in Poland, East Germany and South Africa during the 1980s, or in Alabama in the 1960s). The “Islamic” threat was the perfect pretext for the elimination of this rising opposition (notably in Algeria, where the first multi-party general elections in December 1991 had given a leading place to the Islamic Salvation Front. The army declared a state of emergency and made mass arrests. There ensued a very bloody counterinsurgency). The savage repression of Islamists destroyed the wider social movements and drove underground the surviving radical elements, most of whom have become affiliates of the Base, creating a residual instability that validates a police state in perpetual siege against the enemy within.
The Moslem world, from Morocco to Indonesia, has been ruled by despots with the consent and approval of America and its European allies. The presence in these countries of large oil and gas reserves is not incidental to the West’s ambiguity in proclaiming democracy and encouraging tyranny, or in its turn around from the Soviet menace to that of radical Islam. War has always ignored human rights, as the slightest protest can be accused of playing into the enemy’s hands. The iron fist was morally justified and, just a few months ago, the situation seemed static and destined to last indefinitely. But new and immaterial forces were undermining the whole construction. The absence of meeting places where opinions could be expressed – all venues were under close surveillance – was naturally compensated by the blogosphere and by social networking websites as soon as these became available. These virtual reunions were then materialised in Tahrir square and after Friday prayers. It seems that the process escaped the attention of the rulers (it didn’t in China) through ignorance or because of some psychological blind spot. But then the older generations never seem to know what the younger generation is up to, and this was most definitely a youth movement across societies where two thirds of the population is less than thirty years old.
Internet is progressively replacing the top down and centralised diffusion of ideas by mass media, education and government. Press magnates, Hollywood moguls, network pundits, university mandarins, security czars and administration spokespersons are all losing ground, especially among the young (according to a recent survey in France, the average TV viewer is 53 years old). The horizontal nature of the internet, where everyone is interconnected, contradicts the existing forms of ideological propagation, but it also comes at a time when the incompetence and corruption of those in positions of power have become starkly apparent. In a world where the economy is under public perfusion (how long can that last?) and where climatic upheavals are ever more frequent and costly, yesterday’s doctrines have lost their credibility.
When all human activity is money oriented, something must be going wrong. But it is only when systems fail one after the other that this mistaken orientation becomes apparent. Until then the continual scramble for money seems to be an integral of the human condition, like the constant bustle of ants around their hills. It is only when something brings this frenzied movement to a halt that its necessity can be questioned. Though the actual financial collapse is unprecedented in its scale and its global interconnections, it is the final stage of a cyclical process that Karl Marx tried to understand a hundred and fifty years ago. As investments increase in value, they claim more added value as rent, interest and dividends, which are in turn invested producing a snowball effect that can either fuel growth in the production of goods and services, or lead to speculation bubbles. Either way, this due paid to investments grows faster than the general growth in added value, and the respective shares of labour and state are proportionally reduced. To compensate this and to maintain growth in consumption, a part of the increasing investments is used to grant credit to labour and state. A possibility Marx seems to have ignored – monetary creation was more difficult in his day – that merely postpones the inevitable crunch. However, it does redirect attention from the claims of investments to the failure of bankers, who were simply trying to fulfil these claims. They failed predictably because they tried the impossible(1)
The possessors of money and power are disqualified by events. Their inconsequence is in the glaring light of reality. They have no idea of what they are doing. Their only belief is that the world is there for the taking. These ideological descendants of robber barons, conquistadors, land grabbers and carpet baggers have not noticed that the world has suddenly become very small. A global village where the beat of a butterfly’s wings can set off a storm and “a single spark can start a prairie fire”, an interconnected planet with horizontal communications, where interactions have no hierarchy, and where all life forms are interdependent. The ever closer scrutiny of the cosmos has demonstrated that the shifting pieces of the Earth’s crust, surrounded by water and enveloped by a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere, are all there is. Beyond and beneath are non-organic realms. The very particular, not to say unique, conditions on planet Earth have allowed life to develop and thrive. And this kalpa of geological formations and genetic modifications is being squandered to satisfy the rapacity of a few or, more precisely, for the satisfaction of a rapacious ideology, “a little part of it in everyone”. A global conception based on the rules of war, with conquest and submission, master and servant, and dominion as the ultimate goal.
People are expressing their indignation ever more loudly, and rulers are mobilising all their forces to quell these vociferations, some with pacifying gifts and others with bullets, while those who are elected are desperately looking for scapegoats, one day the bankers and the next an ageing population, or tax evasion, moonlighting, immigration, social benefits, etc. It must be somebody’s fault. Everyone is accused of cheating, which is unavoidable because the dice are loaded. The game is set for a few to take from the many, and is incompatible with the growing social and environmental perception of human destiny. Immense wealth and absolute power are the consequences of social hierarchy, an ideological construction that appears at the end of the Stone Age. The reasons can only be conjectured, but it may have been the result of nomadic hunters and herdsmen coming into contact with sedentary agricultural societies, seeing their wealth and conquering them. Whatever may have been the historic examples of tribes and nations subjugating other tribes and nations relate a continuous tale of horror. For the past fifty centuries military might has been right. For most of that time the military were the ruling class, and the military structure based on rank and misogyny still weighs heavily on civil society.
At some point in the past, human societies established a state of perpetual war. The Aztecs and the Spartans are late Stone Age and early Iron Age examples. There is also David’s gruesome dowry, the practice of taking scalps or cutting ears that all proclaim an unquestioned right. For young men born out of bondage, killing “enemies” or making slaves/hostages/prisoners of them was a part of growing up. And the daily news is still full of similar exploits. However, the mental structures that condone the murdering of opponents concern a shrinking number of individuals. Conscript armies were considered ineffective when the skills needed to handle the weaponry and to insure that fighting units were operational became too complex to be acquired in a couple of months. Arguing efficiency, the military have become professionals with five year contracts and career plans. Learning and ordering to kill is a calling that appeals to a few and sets them aside, a situation that has threatened civil society in the past and still does to-day. Only the intricacies of industrial development seem able to thwart martial law. Though, in countries such as China, Iran and Egypt, the military are largely implicated in production, and not only in the manufacture of arms.
The soldier, the cleric and the merchant represent the ideological poles of human society since prehistoric times. The soldier thinks in terms of attack and defence, the cleric claims there is a here and a hereafter, and the merchant buys to sell. Meanwhile, the rest of humanity is busy producing and consuming, and trying to make some sense of the world. A world where the enemies are perceived to be malnutrition, polluted water, illiteracy, malaria, HIV, et cetera, along with seismic, climatic and industrial disasters against all of which an arm’s race is long overdue. A world where supernatural presences and voices are deemed to be creations of the mind rather than extraterrestrial entities, and where profit turns out to be institutionalised theft. The establishment pillars are still standing firmly but their functions are redundant. They no longer uphold anything and have become cumbersome nuisances. Getting rid of them will be a long painstaking task.
The failure of centralised state economies and the fragmentation of the Eastern Block ended the Cold War and seemed to herald an age of peace, a pax americana and even an end of history. Then came the dotcom economy of internet start-ups and the closet hedonism of the Clinton presidency (I did not inhale, I did not have sex). Unfortunately it was all too good to be true. Throughout the empire oppression was rife. Autocrats were still in power, crushing all opposition and amassing huge wealth, abetted and armed by America and Europe. Absolutism had not disappeared with the Soviet Union, and its persistence became increasingly unbearable and unjustifiable. The newfound freedoms in the East were not replicated in the West.
The last proxy war opposing East and West was in Afghanistan. To a certain extent, it was the mirror image of the Vietnam War. Soviet troops were fighting an insurgency that was recruited and trained in neighbouring Pakistan, a Western ally. But, contrary to the unrestrained bombing of North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia by the US, the Soviets did not attack the rear bases of the insurgency in the Tribal Areas and in Kashmir, where a large number of Afghans had taken refuge. Times and the balance of power had changed. None the less, Moscow finally recalled its troops and left the Afghans to their own devices, which led to a civil war won by Mullah Omar’s Pashtun Taliban and their Arab allies. The ten year occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Army (1979/89) had unwittingly created a coalition that humanity has learned to fear or admire, a coalition that has conveniently replaced the Communists as the world’s bogeymen.
As resistance to the Soviet invasion developed, the fighting intensified and the number of refugees grew. Many of these fled to safety in Pakistan (three to four million), most of them Pashtun. And, as they are Sunni Moslems, solidarity and aid came from Sunni Saudi Arabia. As part of this aid schools were built, providing a Saudi curriculum of strict Salafi precepts, the Koran and Hadith applied as Sharia Law. The graduates from these schools, the Taliban, joined the insurgency in Afghanistan, and were soon in command of the Pashtun front. Concomitant to the humanitarian aid for the refugees, Sunni Arabs of various nationalities were volunteering to fight the Soviets as an act of Jihad. One of these young men, Osama bin Laden, became the founder and funder of an International Brigade based in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, at the junction of the Pashtun and of the other resistance movements among the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities. This central position gave the small Arab contingent a strategic importance, such that they came to think of themselves as the Base. The Soviet retreat in 1989 and the fall of Kabul in 1992 were the signs of a Salafi success, and the international members of the Base began to imagine a similar process in their own countries. A new caliphate was at hand.
The operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait in 1991 assembled a considerable military force, a majority of Americans with British and French support, and the participation of thirty one other nations. For the main part, this army was quartered in neighbouring Saudi Arabia. Bases were built, arms and munitions were stockpiled and armoured units were deployed in an unprecedented invasion of the Salafi heartland by kafir soldiers. This could have been a temporary situation but, having thrashed the Iraqi army, the foreign troops did not leave. The continued threat of Saddam Hussein (those biological, chemical and nuclear weapons!) and the growing threat of Iran (ditto) were used to justify a continued presence. For the puritanical Salafi, this was sacrilegious. For the Base, it was a fantastic recruitment opportunity. The American military presence on Arabian soil could be construed as a counterpart of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that had led to the Taliban victory. Up to this point, America had relied on Sunni support in its conflicts with Shia Moslems in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon. Suddenly, radical Sunni were also threatening American lives, property and interests. However, the Soviet presence in Afghanistan and the American presence in Arabia were as different as are the respective geographies and populations of these two countries. The American forces were strictly confined to closed camps and no attempts were made to change the governments, the traditions or the laws. So there was no Arab insurgency (with the notable exception of Algeria), no uprisings, merely a succession of spectacular terrorist attacks culminating with the four hijacked planes on September the eleventh, which provoked the NATO occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 and, indirectly, the un-mandated occupation of Iraq in 2003. This demonstration of brute force convinced the Arab governments that a vigorous war on terror was to be waged.
The example given by America and its European allies in Afghanistan and Iraq was enthusiastically copied by despots throughout Islam. Arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial executions, show-case trials, all the instruments of tyranny became the norm, morally justified by the ticking bomb hypothesis. It was even claimed that WMDs might fall into terrorist hands, and movie-makers promptly picked up the idea to give it a visual plausibility. The new terror that replaced the Soviet terror of the Cold War was labelled “Islamic”. It was a godsend for autocrats and for the world’s military industrial complex. During the Cold War, religion had opposed the atheist Soviet ideology and had been allowed to prosper. Religious eschatology, the people’s opium, alleviates suffering and is addictive. But it also carries an egalitarian message: confronted with God’s majesty and love all humans are equally insignificant and unique. Moreover, one of the pillars of Islam is alms giving. The demise of the Soviet Satan brought these ideas to the fore, subverting the status quo of feudal autocrats who owned and decided for the nation, backed by praetorian guards and secret police. Soon, Moslem clerics were preaching social equality (the way priests had preached a liberation theology in Latin America, also M.L.King and D.Tutu on civil rights), Moslem organisations were assisting the poor to obtain their basic needs and rights, and to educate their children, and mosques were becoming the places where discontent was voiced (as had churches in Poland, East Germany and South Africa during the 1980s, or in Alabama in the 1960s). The “Islamic” threat was the perfect pretext for the elimination of this rising opposition (notably in Algeria, where the first multi-party general elections in December 1991 had given a leading place to the Islamic Salvation Front. The army declared a state of emergency and made mass arrests. There ensued a very bloody counterinsurgency). The savage repression of Islamists destroyed the wider social movements and drove underground the surviving radical elements, most of whom have become affiliates of the Base, creating a residual instability that validates a police state in perpetual siege against the enemy within.
The Moslem world, from Morocco to Indonesia, has been ruled by despots with the consent and approval of America and its European allies. The presence in these countries of large oil and gas reserves is not incidental to the West’s ambiguity in proclaiming democracy and encouraging tyranny, or in its turn around from the Soviet menace to that of radical Islam. War has always ignored human rights, as the slightest protest can be accused of playing into the enemy’s hands. The iron fist was morally justified and, just a few months ago, the situation seemed static and destined to last indefinitely. But new and immaterial forces were undermining the whole construction. The absence of meeting places where opinions could be expressed – all venues were under close surveillance – was naturally compensated by the blogosphere and by social networking websites as soon as these became available. These virtual reunions were then materialised in Tahrir square and after Friday prayers. It seems that the process escaped the attention of the rulers (it didn’t in China) through ignorance or because of some psychological blind spot. But then the older generations never seem to know what the younger generation is up to, and this was most definitely a youth movement across societies where two thirds of the population is less than thirty years old.
Internet is progressively replacing the top down and centralised diffusion of ideas by mass media, education and government. Press magnates, Hollywood moguls, network pundits, university mandarins, security czars and administration spokespersons are all losing ground, especially among the young (according to a recent survey in France, the average TV viewer is 53 years old). The horizontal nature of the internet, where everyone is interconnected, contradicts the existing forms of ideological propagation, but it also comes at a time when the incompetence and corruption of those in positions of power have become starkly apparent. In a world where the economy is under public perfusion (how long can that last?) and where climatic upheavals are ever more frequent and costly, yesterday’s doctrines have lost their credibility.
When all human activity is money oriented, something must be going wrong. But it is only when systems fail one after the other that this mistaken orientation becomes apparent. Until then the continual scramble for money seems to be an integral of the human condition, like the constant bustle of ants around their hills. It is only when something brings this frenzied movement to a halt that its necessity can be questioned. Though the actual financial collapse is unprecedented in its scale and its global interconnections, it is the final stage of a cyclical process that Karl Marx tried to understand a hundred and fifty years ago. As investments increase in value, they claim more added value as rent, interest and dividends, which are in turn invested producing a snowball effect that can either fuel growth in the production of goods and services, or lead to speculation bubbles. Either way, this due paid to investments grows faster than the general growth in added value, and the respective shares of labour and state are proportionally reduced. To compensate this and to maintain growth in consumption, a part of the increasing investments is used to grant credit to labour and state. A possibility Marx seems to have ignored – monetary creation was more difficult in his day – that merely postpones the inevitable crunch. However, it does redirect attention from the claims of investments to the failure of bankers, who were simply trying to fulfil these claims. They failed predictably because they tried the impossible(1)
The possessors of money and power are disqualified by events. Their inconsequence is in the glaring light of reality. They have no idea of what they are doing. Their only belief is that the world is there for the taking. These ideological descendants of robber barons, conquistadors, land grabbers and carpet baggers have not noticed that the world has suddenly become very small. A global village where the beat of a butterfly’s wings can set off a storm and “a single spark can start a prairie fire”, an interconnected planet with horizontal communications, where interactions have no hierarchy, and where all life forms are interdependent. The ever closer scrutiny of the cosmos has demonstrated that the shifting pieces of the Earth’s crust, surrounded by water and enveloped by a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere, are all there is. Beyond and beneath are non-organic realms. The very particular, not to say unique, conditions on planet Earth have allowed life to develop and thrive. And this kalpa of geological formations and genetic modifications is being squandered to satisfy the rapacity of a few or, more precisely, for the satisfaction of a rapacious ideology, “a little part of it in everyone”. A global conception based on the rules of war, with conquest and submission, master and servant, and dominion as the ultimate goal.
People are expressing their indignation ever more loudly, and rulers are mobilising all their forces to quell these vociferations, some with pacifying gifts and others with bullets, while those who are elected are desperately looking for scapegoats, one day the bankers and the next an ageing population, or tax evasion, moonlighting, immigration, social benefits, etc. It must be somebody’s fault. Everyone is accused of cheating, which is unavoidable because the dice are loaded. The game is set for a few to take from the many, and is incompatible with the growing social and environmental perception of human destiny. Immense wealth and absolute power are the consequences of social hierarchy, an ideological construction that appears at the end of the Stone Age. The reasons can only be conjectured, but it may have been the result of nomadic hunters and herdsmen coming into contact with sedentary agricultural societies, seeing their wealth and conquering them. Whatever may have been the historic examples of tribes and nations subjugating other tribes and nations relate a continuous tale of horror. For the past fifty centuries military might has been right. For most of that time the military were the ruling class, and the military structure based on rank and misogyny still weighs heavily on civil society.
At some point in the past, human societies established a state of perpetual war. The Aztecs and the Spartans are late Stone Age and early Iron Age examples. There is also David’s gruesome dowry, the practice of taking scalps or cutting ears that all proclaim an unquestioned right. For young men born out of bondage, killing “enemies” or making slaves/hostages/prisoners of them was a part of growing up. And the daily news is still full of similar exploits. However, the mental structures that condone the murdering of opponents concern a shrinking number of individuals. Conscript armies were considered ineffective when the skills needed to handle the weaponry and to insure that fighting units were operational became too complex to be acquired in a couple of months. Arguing efficiency, the military have become professionals with five year contracts and career plans. Learning and ordering to kill is a calling that appeals to a few and sets them aside, a situation that has threatened civil society in the past and still does to-day. Only the intricacies of industrial development seem able to thwart martial law. Though, in countries such as China, Iran and Egypt, the military are largely implicated in production, and not only in the manufacture of arms.
The soldier, the cleric and the merchant represent the ideological poles of human society since prehistoric times. The soldier thinks in terms of attack and defence, the cleric claims there is a here and a hereafter, and the merchant buys to sell. Meanwhile, the rest of humanity is busy producing and consuming, and trying to make some sense of the world. A world where the enemies are perceived to be malnutrition, polluted water, illiteracy, malaria, HIV, et cetera, along with seismic, climatic and industrial disasters against all of which an arm’s race is long overdue. A world where supernatural presences and voices are deemed to be creations of the mind rather than extraterrestrial entities, and where profit turns out to be institutionalised theft. The establishment pillars are still standing firmly but their functions are redundant. They no longer uphold anything and have become cumbersome nuisances. Getting rid of them will be a long painstaking task.
posted by le Lézard at 6:55 AM
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