Capitalism Explained

Callan :

Speaking of capitalism (“Crapitalism, actually”), I’ve been reading Tariq Ali‘s The Clash of Fundamentalisms (Verso, London and New York, 2003). Or should I say, I finally got around to reading Ali after having heard him speak to a packed audience at Melbourne Town Hall in 2004, and finding his analysis of the war in Iraq to be both incisive and less burdened by ‘Marxist’ dogma than his previous allegiance to Trotskyism might otherwise suggest.

The chapter ‘A Short-Course History of US Imperialism’ contains a pithy critique of Samuel Huntington‘s thesis on ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, an essay first published in Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993), then later expanded into a book (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon and Schuster, 1998). The Council on Foreign Relations generously makes available to the reading public a pissy 500-word preview of Huntington’s essay online.

Anyway, here’s what Ali reckons (pp.300-301):

There are two basic points to be made in response to Huntington and the civilization-mongers. First, as I have tried to show in this book, the world of Islam has not been monolithic for over a thousand years. The social and cultural differences between Senegalese, Chinese, Indonesian, Arab and South Asian Muslims are far greater than the similarities they share with non-Muslim members of the same nationality. Over the last hundred years, the world of Islam has felt the heat of wars and revolutions just like every other society. The seventy-year war between United States imperialism and the Soviet Union affected every single ‘civilisation’ [Huntington claimed the existence of eight… or maybe seven-and-a-half: “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slav-Orthodox, Latin American and, perhaps, African. Why perhaps? Because he was not sure whether it was really civilized”]. Communist parties sprouted, grew and gained mass support not only in Lutheran Germany but in Confucian China and Muslim Indonesia. Only the Anglo-Saxon zone, comprising Britain and North America [and, presumably, satellites of Empire such as Australia], resisted the infection…

After the Second World War the United States backed the most reactionary elements as a bulwark against communism or progressive/secular nationalism. Often these were hardline religious fundamentalists: the Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser in Egypt; the Masjumi against Sukarno in Indonesia, the Jamaat-e–Islami against Bhutto in Pakistan and, later, Osama bin Laden and friends against the secular-communist Najibullah. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, one of their first acts was to drag Najibullah out of the UN compound where he had sought refuge and kill him. Once this had been done, his naked body with his penis and testicles stuffed into his mouth was hung up on display so that the citizens of Kabul would count the high price that an unbeliever had to pay. To the best of my knowledge not a single leader or leader-writer of the West registered a dissident opinion. Clash of civilizations?

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
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