By Russell A. Berman · Monday, August 28, 2006 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.
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By Russell A. Berman · Sunday, August 27, 2006 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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By Russell A. Berman · Sunday, August 27, 2006 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.
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By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, August 26, 2006 The work of György Konrad has played an important role in the history of Telos. In 1978 he published The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power together with Istvan Szelenyi; a critique of the emergence of an intellectual managerial class in socialist eastern Europe, that book contributed to Telos‘s distinctive critique of a parallel “new class” in the West. This perspective merged with a long-standing left critique of Leninist party structures, a Husserlian phenomenological insistence on the priority of a preconceptual Lebenswelt, and Adorno’s critical-theoretical defense of particularity against totalizing logics of domination.
Born in 1933, Konrad lived through fascism in Hungary, Nazi occupation, and the dreary decades of Communist rule. His writings, which range from social theory through political essayism to novels, convey a visceral opposition to totalitarianism and an advocacy for human freedom. No wonder he has supported the U.S. war in Iraq.
On August 26, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung published an essay by Konrad under the title “What comes after the missiles? More missiles? Israel has good reasons and the right to fear a new Holocaust.” The piece appears just as we learn that the “robust” United Nations force has no mandate to disarm Hezbollah (in an uncanny parallel to the Sudan, where the government is preventing any significant UN action to stop the genocide). Yet, for all its contemporary relevance, the theoretical core of Konrad’s argument involves the long shadow of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
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By Russell A. Berman · Friday, August 25, 2006 In the immediate aftermath of the fighting in Lebanon, the nearly uniform message broadcast by the western media involved the heroization of Hezbollah. Not least of all the New York Times published puff pieces, hyping the Lebanese population’s affection of Hezbollah and its adoration of Nasrallah, not to mention the terrorist organization’s success as a welfare agency and construction company. Critical voices were nowhere to be found—especially if journalists chose not to look for them.
But inquiring minds want to know, and questions were raised in the world of blogs, including this one. Were there no critics of Hezbollah in Lebanon? Could reporters do nothing more than republish Hezbollah press releases? Did the much touted social welfare benefits extend to non-Shi’a, or even to Christians?
Finally, there seems to be a crack in the monolithic story heretofore purveyed by the NYT. Buried on page 10, with no leader on the front page (taken up by urgent matters like the fate of Pluto and Duke Lacrosse), a powerful story by Hassan M. Fattah provides some sorely missed complexity to the account of post-war Lebanon. Reporting from the largely Sunni village of Marwaheen just north of the Israeli border, Fattah breaks the ban on criticizing Hezbollah, as he describes a mass burial of war dead, where however the anger was directed more at Hezbollah than at Israel.
It is a sad story of infiltration by Hezbollah, despite protests by the villagers. In response to villagers’ opposition, the Hezbollah fighters reportedly insisted that they “were all in the same boat.” But as a bereaved village orphan commented, “Why should our children die for their cause.” Their cause: in other words, the local Sunnis do not at all identify with the cause of that same Hezbollah, which the press, including the NYT, had led us to believe was cherished uniformly by all Lebanese.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, August 24, 2006 Exploring the validity of the designation “fascist” to strands of contemporary Islamic extremism becomes complicated not only because of ambiguities in the adjective—what is fascist?—but also because of the different levels of political organization under scrutiny: states controlled by extremist regimes (contemporary Iran or Taliban Afghanistan); mixed political and military, or paramilitary, structures (Hamas, Hezbollah); and terrorist conspiracies of varying degrees of coherence (al-Qaeda). With local nuances, a jihadist ideology of expansionist conquest and anti-modernity links them, despite whatever political competition may occasionally separate them.
Part of the difficulty in accepting the term “fascist” as appropriate to describe these phenomena is the inescapable association with what in memory seem to have been strong “states” of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet of course there were fascist movements prior to their seizure of state power, just as there were fascist movements in countries where they failed to come to power. Therefore “Islamic fascist” may hold as a term, even in the absence of a state apparatus. But if the political actor is not a state, who is?
In a speech of August 9 entitled “Security, Freedom and the Protection of Our Values,” delivered to Demos (a London think tank), John Reid made a pertinent argument. Western structures of civil liberties were formed in opposition to the fascist challenge of the twentieth century and matured through the Cold War. This modernity is threatened today by opponents who do not act primarily as agents of states but with greater independence as “individuals.”
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