America, The Farewell Tour by Chris Hedges
Author:Chris Hedges
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2018-08-20T16:00:00+00:00
The proponents of globalization promised to lift workers across the planet into the middle class and instill democratic values and scientific rationalism. Religious and ethnic tensions would, they insisted, be alleviated or eradicated. This global marketplace would create a peaceful, prosperous community of nations. All we had to do was get government out of the way and kneel before market demands, held up as the ultimate form of progress and rationality.
What we were never told was that the game was fixed. We were always condemned to lose. Our cities were deindustrialized and fell into decay. Wages declined. Our working class became impoverished. The rapacious appetite of capitalists and imperialists never considered “such constraining factors,” Mishra wrote, “as finite geographical space, de-gradable natural resources and fragile ecosystems.”46
In carrying out this project of global expansion, no form of coercion or violence was off-limits. The conflicts in Egypt, Libya, Mali, Syria, and many other places, Mishra notes, are fueled by “extreme weather events, the emptying of rivers and seas of their fish stocks, or the desertification of entire regions on the planet.”47 The refugees being driven by their homelands’ chaos into Europe are creating political instability and empowering right-wing nationalists. Mishra warns that “the two ways in which humankind can self-destruct—civil war on a global scale, or destruction of the natural environment—are rapidly converging.”48
Shorn of traditional patterns of existence, we are knit together “by commerce and technology,”49 forces that Hannah Arendt called “negative solidarity.”50
The backlash resembles the anarchist, fascist, and communist violence and terrorism that took place at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. Nowhere is this truer than with the calls for jihad by Islamic radicals, most of whom have no religious training and who often come out of the criminal underworld. The jihadist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, nicknamed “the sheikh of slaughterers” in Iraq, had, as Mishra writes, “a long past of pimping, drug-dealing and heavy drinking.”51 The Afghan-American Omar Mateen reportedly was a frequenter of the nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where he massacred forty-nine people, and had been seen there drunk.52 Anwar al-Awlaki, who preached jihad and was eventually assassinated by the United States, had a penchant for prostitutes.53 Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, a senior leader of Islamic State before he was killed, called on Muslims in the West to kill any non-Muslim they encountered. “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him,” Adnani told followers.54
The Russian revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s “propaganda by deed” is, Mishra writes, “now manifest universally in video-taped, live-streamed and Facebooked massacres.”55 It grew, he writes, “naturally from the suspicion that only acts of extreme violence could reveal to the world a desperate social situation and the moral integrity of those determined to change it.”56 These imported ideas filled the void left by the destruction of indigenous beliefs, traditions, and rituals. As Mishra says, these jihadists “represent the death of traditional Islam rather than its resurrection.
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