Paris je t’aime

After the attacks in Paris on Friday, for some reason I keep thinking back to Sarajevo circa ’92. Maybe because of the sudden intrusion of extreme violence in a relatively peaceful place. Maybe because I’ve been to Paris, walked its streets, have friends who live there or are from there. And maybe also because, unlike previous incidents of this type, the targets chosen by the attackers are not the edifices of power and privilege, or the transport networks, nor the source of any specific provocation - but seemingly random targets in the less privileged multicultural, multi-ethnic and anti-establishmentarian neighbourhoods of Paris. They have no particular strategic value (relative to other potential targets), unless the attackers’ aim (or that of their commanders) was precisely to attack that multiculturalism, to sow discord and hatred where there was none before, to tacitly collude with the political forces of the Right and the military-industrial complex to close Europe’s borders and stem the flow of refugees fleeing ISIS on the one hand, and stimulate increased military expenditure on the other.

There is such violence in the world all the time of course, most notably in recent days in Beirut - ironically, a city once nicknamed the ‘Paris of the Middle East’. Yet some of the accusations of racism in the outpourings of solidarity after the Paris attacks seem misplaced. On one hand, because many of us did speak out en masse against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Palestine, etc - even before they happened in some cases. Some key figures in the French government at the time did so too. We all know about the root causes. And I’ve spoken much more about those than about this.

On the other hand, major violence in a place that you have a connection to (material and philosophical), especially if it’s a short train ride away, affects you more on a personal level. I know people there, I’ve been there, I could have been there. I even had a strange sense of foreboding on Friday morning - maybe just because it was the 13th. (It also happens to be a few days before what would have been the birthday of my late dad, from whom I inherited a certain appreciation for Foucault, Deleuze, and other French postwar thinkers whose spirit very much imbues those multicultural and anti-establishmentarian neighbourhoods of Paris.)

There may be an element of self-interest involved in all this, but not racism (unless you’re a supporter of the Front National) - especially since the victims, according to reports, are of at least 15 different nationalities from all over the world. It's not so much about how we value the lives of others, but about how close to home the violence gets, or how connected we are to it.

I won’t pray for Paris because, as one French artist pointed out, on average Parisians aren’t really into religion. Except one, I might suggest - Religion of Love, Church of Rock n’ Roll. In the words of one famous adherent and inhabitant of Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, Jim Morrison (aka the Lizard King):

Do you know how pale and wanton thrillful
comes death on a strange hour
unannounced, unplanned for
like a scaring over-friendly guest you've
brought to bed
Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as ravens’ claws

I will not go
Prefer a Feast of Friends
To the Giant Family

#Rehash/Unfollow

I. The 'China price' on Freedom

There is a certain kind of inertia that leads people to rehash old tropes and repeat worn-out formulas of political thought, applying stale or long-past-expiry date cookie-cutter critical approaches to new and emerging political problems. In the wake of the tragic shooting of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris a few weeks back, a range of responses emerged on the left. Some simply condemned the shootings, some condemned the shootings but expressed some concern about Charlie Hebdo's allegedly 'racist' cartoons, suggesting that perhaps there should be some limitations on free speech or that we should use our rights 'responsibly', while some condemned the shootings unconditionally but nonetheless felt the need to invoke any number of things as a possible 'explanation' - the history of colonialism, 'Western' foreign policy and involvement in the Middle East, French racism and the marginalized status of French Muslims, and so on. And of course they all express concern about the far-right backlash against Muslim populations in Europe and the West.

The thing that strikes me about leftist or critical school constructions of 'The West' and 'The Muslim World', such as this one, is that they are no different from the ones that underpin contemporary right-wing and neoliberal political thinking. All the while that leftists decry the 'war on terror' and the grand narrative of 'a clash of civilizations', many of them subliminally incorporate its basic assumptions into their thinking - that there even are monolithic cultural entities such as 'the West' or 'the Muslim world', for instance. Thus even in leftist thought the battle here is between 'Western' liberal values of 'free speech' and democracy on the one hand, and the religious sensibilities of the 'Muslim world'. Because, naturally, all the people living under despotic regimes in that 'Muslim' world, from Malaysia to Saudi Arabia and Morocco and Mali, presumably have no interest in free expression and other 'Western' values and human rights. It's their culture.



Meanwhile, a Muslim Saudi blogger recently received a sentence of 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashings for the crime of 'insulting Islam', Boko Haram slaughtered another 2,000 people in Nigeria (their deadliest massacre to date), journalists are routinely sent to jail in Egypt, and a Saudi cleric just issued a fatwa against building snowmen. (In addition to 'idolatry', the crimes punishable by death in Saudi Arabia include apostasy, blasphemy, homosexuality, sorcery, witchcraft, adultery, and drug use.) In Afghanistan, as a folio in last month's Harper's magazine reports, women routinely run away from their families to escape being forced into arranged marriages, as well as abuse including facial disfigurement by acid or severed lips and noses, forced prostitution, and honour killings. And in Bangladesh this week, an atheist writer was hacked to death by a group of machete-wielding extremists who took exception to his views on religion - he wasn't drawing or mocking the Prophet, he was Bangladeshi (so it's not like this is about the history of colonial repression), and his attackers weren't members of a marginalized ethnic minority in Bangladesh - just a bunch of fascist whackjobs.

Also, let's not forget that the most famous fatwa ever issued was against Salman Rushdie, an Anglo-Indian writer born to Muslim parents in India, for writing The Satanic Verses - a novel seen as a grave insult to Islam, punishable by death. This is not a coincidence.




But even more to the point, one of the most significant events in the world in the past decade, if not the most significant, has been the wave of spontaneous uprisings and revolutions throughout the Arab world collectively known as the Arab Spring, which has seen governments forced from power in Tunisia, Egypt (twice), Libya, and Yemen; civil uprisings in Bahrain and Syria; as well as major protests in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Israel and Sudan, along with minor protests in Mauritania, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Western Sahara, and Palestine. Primary motivating factors have included dictatorship and state repression, human rights violations, political corruption, and economic inequality. Many of these movements were notable in their effective use of social media to organize uprisings, in the face of state attempts at repression and censorship.



So, what about all that?

Some responses on the left seem to be on the right track, pointing to the hypocrisy of 'Western' states in selectively protecting free expression, but they too somehow miss the bigger point here - or fail to make one at all. For just as they ascribe (or condemn) free expression to the pantheon of 'Western' values, they seem to disown it in a way, guardedly, as leftists - with some absurd outcomes on occasion, such as a recent petition in a debate between two feminist camps, under the banner 'Student political protest is under threat, not free speech' - as if these are two totally separate things. Formulating a discourse that sees the 'right to protest' as an independent right, not derived from the right to free speech, the left thus undermines its own prospects - in the long run, any official limitation on free speech will wind up being used to clamp down on protest, as one of the most 'outspoken' forms of speech.

So what is the point exactly, of those who emphasize that 'this isn't about free speech' or that Western governments don't consistently protect free speech? Does this mean that we should give up fighting for freedom of expression? That we should allow free speech to be curtailed in cases such as that of Charlie Hebdo, even insist on it, since the position of Western governments is inconsistent? Why should the behaviour of governments influence my position at all, other than to oppose any and every curtailment or infringement of fundamental rights, by government or by terrorists?

Surely, the point here is that these aren't simply 'Western' values we are talking about at all. Of course Western governments routinely attack freedom of expression, there is nothing surprising or categorically hypocritical about this. These are not rights that somehow culturally belong to us 'Westerners', or that our governments impose on us. It is all too easy to forget that even in the so-called West these are hard-won political rights, the product of bloody and violent struggles, the result of revolutions and fierce battles against the state, and they still have to be protected and watched and fought for at every turn, at all costs. Giving up one inch can cost us all dearly.



It is no coincidence that, for instance, France, which happens to be the home of this most outrageous and offensive satirical magazine, is also the country that most vocally opposed the US war in Iraq, a war fought against the will of the majority of people in the nations involved. This is not to the credit of the French government, but the French people above all. This is the legacy of May '68. How, one might ask? Or even better, what was May '68?



Of course, there were protests around the world in 1968. But the level that they reached in France is unprecedented in history, and dwarfs even the largest popular mass movements today. A protest that began with a few students occupying the Sorbonne, it culminated in the largest general strike in history, with a wildcat walkout of 10 million workers - two-thirds of the entire French labour force at the time - the occupation of universities and factories across the country, and so on, bringing the French economy to a standstill, and a government to its knees. This movement may not have achieved all its political goals in the immediate aftermath, but it was a turning point that resonates in French politics to this day. Its legacy means that any French government will think twice before going head-to-head with the will of its people. And Charlie Hebdo, whether anyone likes it or not, is a part of that legacy.



Greece's new leftist finance minister, Yannis Varoufakis, writing in the guardian about how he became an 'erratic Marxist', reminds us of this tension in leftist political discourse - the leftist movements of the 20th century, in his view, "failed, to their detriment, to follow Marx’s lead in a crucial regard: instead of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and organising concepts, they opted for equality and justice, bequeathing the concept of freedom to the neoliberals. Marx was adamant: The problem with capitalism is not that it is unfair but that it is irrational…"

"Having failed to couch a critique of capitalism in terms of freedom and rationality, as Marx thought essential, social democracy and the left in general allowed the neoliberals to usurp the mantle of freedom and to win a spectacular triumph in the contest of ideologies."



In Marx's (and Engels') own words, from the Communist Manifesto: "in a communist society, the free development of each must be the condition for the free development of all."

The emphasis (with or without my italics) is clearly on 'free' and 'each' - individual freedom. Collective freedom, the free development of the whole, cannot but be premised on this backbone - the free development of each individual unit. It is, after all, precisely neoliberal capitalism, despite all the sermonizing and lip service to freedom and individual rights by its acolytes, that in practice demands the sacrifice of individual and social interests for the abstract notion of the market and its needs, which in reality means the interests of the wealthy few - those who appropriate surplus value and accumulate capital.



It is worth remembering that in the early 20th century, the term 'libertarian' - today associated broadly with fringe right-wing anti-statism - was broadly applied to a range of left-wing anarchist and communist movements, especially in Europe. What many leftists seem to have forgotten, somewhere along the way, is that even communism only truly comes into its own as the state 'withers away', as societies become more capable of direct democracy or self-governance, and that the state form known as 'socialism' only marks the transition from the capitalist state to a communist society.

It is in this sense that Soviet and Chinese constructions of 'communism' rely precisely on a neoliberal conception of freedom and equality, coupled with authoritarian politics and some vaguely socialist ideas about the redistribution of wealth. In today's increasingly globalized and yet ever more restrictive world, this divergence is becoming even more clear - the global 'free' market means the free movement of capital, not of human beings. And China, communist or not, is more eager than most to take advantage of this situation, imposing restrictions on the freedom of its citizens while allowing capital to flow across the border in all directions.



There are however glimmers of hope, and other enlightened responses have emerged on the left - again, if not to Charlie Hebdo specifically, then to the broader issue(s) of human rights and freedom - even among committed Marxists, such as a recent piece by Nina Power.

(I would only add a couple of points or 'derogations' to her contribution, on my part - individual rights as discussed by Marx are not human rights in the modern sense, strictly speaking - private property rights, for instance, are legal rights but not typically mentioned or universally recognised in international human rights documents, as fundamental human rights. Even international instruments such as the ICESCR which protect 'economic rights' as human rights don't mention property rights as such, at all, to my knowledge, but rather the right to decent work, housing (for all, not as an individual property right, but in the sense of 'having a roof over one's head'), social security, healthcare, forming/joining a labour union, etc. Such distinctions are important, and formulating a truly Marxist or leftist approach may be a bit more complex. Also, rights aren't only against the state (i.e. union organising), nor are they strictly speaking 'part' of the state as Power's piece seems to suggest. What has always made human rights both problematic and enduring is precisely their claim to the status of 'natural' or universal rights that exist independently of any legal mechanism or document.)



II. 'You're with us or against us'

Still, my question to those on the left who continue to regurgitate the aforementioned worn-out 'critical' tropes on the hypocrisy of the West is - what do you want? Because that other long-standing problem with leftist discourse seems to be very much in play here - formulating demands. What is your point? These things are never made clear. One big mistake in all this 'monolithic' circle jerk groupthink on the left is the refusal to take an absolute, unequivocal stance against Islamic extremism, or Islamo-fascism, for instance. It's as if you can't do that on the left, it's just not the done thing, because, well, it would be taking sides with this mythical, monolithic 'West' we hear so much about. It's an imperial war. Best not to get involved.

But isn't this precisely the type of neocon-Bush-'war on terror'-type thinking that leftists supposedly abhor? Doesn't this amount to forcing us into a neutral or at best mildly critical stance towards something we should absolutely and unequivocally oppose - what amounts to Islam's version of far-right fascist politics - simply because certain 'imperial' powers are also involved in that fight? It's the old 'you're with us or against us' type of thinking, or alternately 'the enemy of my enemy isn't really my enemy'?



Yet if we struggle against this religio-fascism does it really have to be as 'Westerners', rather than as human beings, as Muslims, as Kurds? Isn't their struggle also our struggle? And isn't our struggle also their struggle? Aren't the same or similar forces at play here?

Recognizing with Deleuze that the greatest difference is always internal to a system - to an Idea - allows us to establish the proper relation here - the real fight is never between systems, between Ideas, civilizations, but between versions of one and the same, between different actualizations of the same Idea, between the Idea and representation, between a system and its shadow.

Or as Freud suggests, the struggle between 'civilization' and 'barbarism' is internal to civilization itself. The choice we are continually forced into - between, for instance, saying that the crimes committed by Islamic fundamentalists 'have nothing to do with Islam' on the one hand (as the liberal left insists), and on the other hand holding Muslims in general somehow 'responsible' for these crimes (as some on the right claim) - is a false choice. Both of these claims are wrong. Of course this Islamo-fascism has 'something to do' with Islam; but this does not mean that Muslims in general are in any way 'responsible' for it, any more than liberal democracy or Christianity or Science or any other discourse is responsible for its appropriation by fascists, or its excesses.



The discourse of 'political correctness' on the left is itself a kind of proto-fascist 'thought police' that panders to a disguised, latent racism. Leftists, in their barely disguised apologia for Islamofascism, perpetuating the narrative of victimhood that the extremists themselves use to drive recruitment, end up being ‘circle jerk’ apologetics for the very things they claim to hate the most - racism, sexism, fascism, oppression, and the slaughter of civilians. Or they simply fail to take up a coherent position on the issue - and this plays very neatly into the hands of the far right, the military-industrial complex, and our neoliberal oligarchs. But especially the racist far right, as an account in the Guardian by a formerly radicalised Muslim suggests.



So I don't quite follow the logic of those who say that the Paris shootings were "totally unjustifiable, but…let’s talk about how the shooters are part of a marginalized group dealing with French racism, etc". If the killings are totally unjustifiable, then what exactly is the point here? Well, since it's being thrown around, let's talk about racism and marginalized groups. As a kid I lived for several years in Egypt, where I witnessed first-hand the racism of Egyptians toward African black people - incidentally, most of my friends at school were black. And this is not a fringe phenomenon, it was rife. Imagine if the sentiments felt by the very fringe far-right in Europe towards minorities and immigrants were seemingly felt by the majority of people, and more pronounced. Systemic. That's what it's like to be black in Egypt, and most Arab countries.

And let's not even talk about sexism, homophobia, and anti-semitism. Anti-semitic cartoons, for instance - not the Charlie Hebdo 'equal opportunity satire' variety but rather more of the Nazi Der Sturmer type, exploiting a range of racist myths about Jews like the 'blood libel' - are a regular feature in mainstream media throughout the Arab world. It is common, it is seen as totally acceptable by vast numbers of people, and nobody does a damn thing about it. As may be obvious from previous posts on this blog, I am a staunch supporter of Palestinian rights, for instance, and opposed to militant Zionism - but racism and racist myths have no place in that debate. While it may be understandable for Palestinian rage to turn racist on occasion, it isn’t quite so for those who aren’t exactly suffering under the yoke of Israeli occupation.



What it comes down to is that there is a lot of hypocrisy here all around. And while most Muslims would certainly distance themselves from the violent extremists who brutally killed the French cartoonists in Paris, there is a broader problem of racism in the Arab world that the whole community needs to recognize and deal with, just like Europe has to deal with its own racism.



III. The Menagerie of Civilization and its Contents

There is also a historical reality that adherents of the 'clash of civilizations' idea and leftist cultural relativists alike seem to have missed - the way in which these civilizations that are supposedly clashing are actually far more intertwined than many today suppose, and form a continuity in fact - a sort of Moebius strip.

Long before the modern era and the means of sharing information we have today, before the Renaissance and Enlightenment, Europe went through the Dark Ages - ruled by the Church and by Christian kings who enforced their faith by the sword. Freedom of thought and expression was at such a low that the bulk of what we see today as the heritage of 'Western civilization' - the literature, philosophy, and science of Greek and Roman antiquity - was deemed contraband by the Church, and lost to history. For a time, at least - a good several centuries longer than our modern age has lasted, to put things in perspective. Books were burned and banned (as well as people), and the only way to get an education at all was through the Church.



It turns out, however, that many of the 'pagan' texts from European antiquity long thought lost in the Dark Ages were in fact preserved - by Muslim and Arab scholars who acquired their own copies from the Greeks and Romans, translating and expanding upon them during what is commonly known as the 'Islamic Golden Age' - an era of scientific, economic, and cultural flourishing that lasted for about 500 years, from the 8th to the 13th century.

Starting with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad in the 8th century, where scholars from all over the world sought to gather all the known world's knowledge into Arabic, Islamic scholars built upon Persian and Indian mathematical systems, astronomy, algebra, trigonometry and medicine. This is why, for instance, along with our Latin alphabet, we use a numeric system based on Arab numbers, rather than the cumbersome Roman numerals. It is also why we use algebra - the name itself comes from the Arab word 'al-jebr', meaning "reunion of broken parts". Symbolic, that.



Later, as Europe emerged from the Dark Ages, Arab traders and scholars brought this knowledge back to Europe, in works of their own along with copies of the Greek and Roman originals. And in Europe, the rediscovery of this ancient heritage ushered in the Renaissance, and later the Enlightenment.



Today, sadly, it seems it is ISIS militants who are looting libraries, and burning the very same ancient texts that their ancestors preserved while they were being burned by the Christian Church in the Middle Ages. The only upshot here is the suicidal nature of such acts, as one might expect from extremists, I suppose - in the long run, as history has shown time and again, any political movement or institution that destroys knowledge undermines its own credibility and viability. The most successful empires in history, for better or worse, and for all their faults and crimes, thrived in large part thanks to their multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.

Incidentally, one work of ancient philosophy particularly reviled by the Church fathers in the Dark Ages and long thought lost in Europe (its story partly dramatized in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose), though preserved and later brought back by the Arabs, was Aristotle's Poetics - a work in which the famed Greek philosopher discusses, among other things, comedy and laughter. In the same way in which modern Islamic fundamentalists don't like being ridiculed, not to mention having their Prophet portrayed in any way, the Church fathers of old considered laughter itself immoral. Comedy was contraband - as was Aristotle's work on the subject, for merely suggesting that it had a legitimate role in human intellectual life.

As a matter of fact, it is very likely that Aristotle and Plato would be totally unknown to us today, were it not for the work of one Averroës (his name is the Latinized form of Ibn Rushd), an influential 12th-century Andalusian Muslim thinker who wrote on a range of scientific and philosophical subjects, including logic, Aristotelian and Islamic philosophy, theology, psychology, music theory, geography, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and physics.

Avicenna (Ibn-Sina), another one of the most important thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age, was an 11th-century Persian scholar who has been described as the "Father of Early Modern Medicine".



Most interesting of all perhaps (for the present discussion), Averroës sought to reconcile Islamic philosophy with Aristotelianism and Platonism, along with a form of proto-humanism - among other things, he was a proponent of women's equality with men, going so far as to suggest that women should be educated and allowed to serve in the military, and could even become philosophers or rulers. This from an influential 12th-century Muslim scholar, writing long before the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and women's suffrage - centuries before gender equality was even mentioned in the West, let alone considered a valid political discourse.

And Averroës certainly wasn't importing 'Western' values or ideas on gender here, either, in any meaningful sense - Aristotle and Plato both held fairly conventional views on the subject, typical of patriarchal ancient Greek societies, while the status of women varied widely between Greek city states. Among the ancient Greek schools of thought, only the Stoics and the Cynics were known to espouse gender equality, but few of their writings survived and there is no indication that they had any influence on Averroës.

Of course, the views of a philosopher by no means reflect those of his social milieu, and many are in fact lone voices in the wilderness. Nonetheless, even if Averroës is merely an early harbinger of modern liberal humanism - a voice that inspired and predated Voltaire and Montesquieu by several centuries - it is telling that this voice is of an Arab Muslim scholar.



It is however also notable that, even after the Islamic Golden Age was over, Arab and Muslim societies as a whole were nonetheless far more progressive when it came to religious and racial tolerance. When Jews, Muslims, and Christian heretics were driven out of Europe during the Spanish Inquisition - those who weren't forcibly converted or burned at the stake, that is - they all found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, of all places, where they thrived and freely practiced their religion. Some made it to my hometown Sarajevo in Bosnia, then part of the Ottoman Empire.

But it hardly stops, or begins there. If we go far enough in time and space, we find that these so-called 'Western' values - of modern liberal humanism - are rooted in traditions and schools of thought that span the globe. Early European humanist thinkers drew on or were influenced by a whole range of ideas, from Averroës to the Stoics, from Taoism and schools of Buddhist thought to the Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia.

It should be clear that the broader historical context allows us to view the modern-day schema of 'civilizations' in a totally different light. Iran in the 1950s, for instance, was a far more progressive society than today, where women didn't wear the veil and achieved greater gender equality than many European societies at the time - before their democratic socialist government was overthrown with the help of British and American agents who installed the Shah. The Iranians weren't simply adopting 'Western' attitudes, and even surpassed much of the West in terms of social progress - and as already pointed out, they discovered the ancients centuries before the West did. The return of Islam several decades later was precisely that - a return, a reactionary force that sprung up as a result of British and American meddling in the region.



Even today, there is rumour that among the Iranian Ayatollahs there are adherents of various 'Western' schools of thought, including at least one Kantian. It is perhaps precisely the distortion of Hegelian dialectics in our 'Western' thinking, combined with historical ignorance, that leads to the conceit of Western uniqueness and progress, and a linear view of history. Forgetting, as it were, that history is full of throwbacks, regressions, cul-de-sacs, diversions, digressions, schisms, and that these sometimes last centuries, like the Dark Ages.



IV. The Internal Contradictions of Politically Correct Fundamentalism(s)

Of course, it is not enough to say that liberal humanist values are not uniquely 'Western', historically or philosophically. We should also recognize the inverse - the historic contingency of the despotism, extremism, sexism, mysogyny and other ills commonly associated with the Muslim world. Just like the 'clash of civilizations' discourse, the leftist cultural relativism that speaks of 'Western values', merely disguises a latent cultural racism under the banner of political correctness and cultural sensitivity: it is a racism that, deep down, thinks 'let them have their different (read: 'backward') culture, why should we impose on them our 'Western' values of democracy and humanism, equality and rights? It is a cultural racism that, despite its best intentions, deep down sees the autocratic, fascist, misogynist Islamism of a state like Saudi Arabia as somehow representative of the Islamic 'other' in its own historic milieu - when it is in fact representative of nothing more than one form of Islamic modernity, informed by patriarchal misogynist fascism - a thoroughly modern, atavistic fascist monarchism. Which just happens to have, in this case, instrumentalised the Muslim faith for its establishment - a religion no more susceptible to such appropriation, on its face, than any of the main monotheistic faiths.

It is an open secret, for instance, that the very Saudi elite who maintain this Islamic regime at home - who forge ties with the neocons and Bushes in America while funding terrorist organizations, who own prime real estate across the globe and control major multinational corporations - make regular trips to less restrictive neighbouring countries like Egypt, where they do their whoring and boozing. All under the eyes of their Prophet. Which is not to say that they don't do these things back home, too - child sex slaves, often trafficked from neighboring countries or Africa, are common among the Saudi elite. And even ISIS (with whom the Charlie Hebdo attackers are apparently affiliated) recently published a magazine, which appears to justify taking women and children as sex slaves.



The nuance, subtlety and complexity of well-crafted and provocative political or social satire often gets lost in the turmoil of political violence. In the wake of the Paris massacre, much has been made of Charlie Hebdo's latest literary cover star, Michel Houellebecq, and his latest work, Soumisson, a satirical novel about an Islamic party winning presidential elections in France in 2022, and instituting Sharia law across the country. Many people assumed, without reading the book or even a substantial review, that it was an 'islamophobic' tract that panders to far-right fears of an Islamic takeover.

Yet a review in The Guardian, of all places, suggests that something very different is at work here. "The real target of Houellebecq’s satire – as in his previous novels – is the predictably manipulable venality and lustfulness of the modern metropolitan man." There is no violent takeover, but a thoroughly democratic one, and many French happily go along with the new Sharia system - including the narrator, a middle-aged academic who looks forward to his own conversion and a future of endless sexual gratification through polygamy, with wives of varying ages.

What Houellebecq is suggesting, in other words, quite apart from any criticism of Islam or religion, is that the lecherous misogyny on display here is by no means limited to Muslims. As to what really lurks beneath the surface in the psyche of some 'Western' men, real-life examples abound - from the white American college frat boys we see in Sacha Baron-Cohen's Borat film, making racist and sexist remarks and yearning for the days of slavery and women's subordination to men, to American televangelist Pat Robertson advising a man whose wife 'refuses to submit to [male] authority' to move to Saudi Arabia, among other things.



Far from pandering to right-wing fears, Houellebecq's fiction very much seems to furnish Borat's project, suggesting that the European far-right and Islamic religious extremists have far more in common than they realise. And once you strip away the cultural veneer, what's left, really?

It is interesting to contemplate Houellebecq's work alongside another novel where a fictional religious regime comes to power in a Western country, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. In this far more dystopian work of speculative fiction, it is a totalitarian Christian theocracy that overthrows the United States government. It is far more brutal, and Atwood's target is primarily fundamentalism and religion. Her plot is arguably even more far-fetched, as it involves a coup d'etat (rather than a democratic election) and, despite some fundamentalist leanings in the U.S. political establishment, no Christian theocracy exists in the world today - modern Christianity has not quite found its political dimension the way Islam has, most notably in the form of wealthy and powerful states like Saudi Arabia.

Despite all this, the book has made its way around the world and into high school reading lists, even in god-fearing Texas, despite being frequently challenged as 'anti-Christian' and 'pornographic'. Ironically, it has even at times been challenged for portraying brutality towards and mistreatment of women, and alternately, for being 'anti-Islamic'. (The Christian theocrats in the novel mandate women to wear the veil, and allow polygamy).



V. Cartoonish Racism

As to the alleged racism of Charlie Hebdo, it seems many people here missed the point. For starters, out of the two or three cartoons bandied around the internet as examples of Charlie Hebdo's 'racism', one of them is a cover published in 1980 - 35 years ago - satirizing a papal visit to France. That fact alone is telling - that even to find an example of a non-racist cartoon that in today's context is being misrepresented as racist, Charlie Hebdo's accusers had to search far and wide, all the way back to 1980. And what does the cartoon say? It shows the pope greeting his French supporters, with the headline: "The Pope in Paris: The French are Cunts Just Like Negroes." It just so happens that the pope's historic visit to France in 1980 came on the heels of an extended tour of Africa - thus the words are presumably Charlie Hebdo's take on what the pope might be thinking.



Another of the handful of allegedly racist Charlie Hebdo cartoons portrays Boko Haram kidnap victims as French welfare queens saying 'Ne touchez pas nos allocs!' ('Don't touch our welfare payments!') This is clearly a jab at the anti-Muslim rhetoric of right-wing politicians who actually see French Muslim women in this light. By taking the claim to an absurd extreme - suggesting the same of Boko Haram kidnap victims/sex slaves (who are neither French nor on welfare) - Charlie Hebdo is satirizing this view point, in much the same manner as Baron-Cohen's Borat (who has been sued and/or accused both by minority groups and by the racist misogynists he exposed); or, even better, Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report. Colbert, in fact, was not only accused of racism on various occasions, but numbered among his fans, at least in the early days of the show, many conservatives or right-wingers who didn't quite catch on to the satirical aspect of his talk show.



Another example in the English-speaking world, perhaps more relevant because it also involves cartoons, is the TV cartoon series South Park - which has itself been involved in a number of controversies over the years due to its particular brand of 'equal-opportunity' satire. A running theme of the show, apart from ridiculing everyone and everything under the sun (including Canadians), is that one of the main characters, 4th grader Eric Cartman, while repeatedly making racist statements, has a particular penchant for calling out and casually insulting his friend and fellow 4th grader Kyle as a Jew. Also, the only black kid in their school is named 'Token' - another frequent target of Cartman's casual racism, rage and fear.

I have no doubt that the thought police of political correctness would see much of South Park as racist - but to me it seems a fairly obvious jab at the deeply ingrained and institutionalized racism of Middle America in all its whiteness, its pretense to racial equality, its political correctness (which only serves to disguise racism and white privilege), and the struggles of four ordinary fourth-graders in coming to terms with all this in small-town Colorado. We cannot confront institutional racism - in fact we only affirm it - by pretending it doesn't exist. And that is precisely what 'political correctness' amounts to - a ruse, a disappearing act that masks and affirms latent institutional racism by purging our language and cultural production of its forms, satirical and otherwise.




As for depictions of Muhammad, it should be noted that aside from any explicitly offensive content, the prohibition in Islam relating to any depictions of the Prophet (positive or negative) is by no means universal. It is primarily a precept of Sunni Islam, it does not actually appear anywhere in the Quran, and - like similar prohibitions in ancient Judaism or Christianity (pertaining to 'idolatry' or the 'making of graven images') - it is addressed to believers of the faith, mainly Sunni Muslims. (Images of the Prophet are quite common in Iran, I am told, where the majority of Muslims are Shia. Yep – Iran.)

At its radical origin, this commandment is not about forbidding anyone depicting the Prophet, it's about believers themselves not making or worshipping images ('false idols') because it taints or weakens true faith. In principle, there is no reason why a Muslim should be offended by any and every depiction of the Prophet by a non-Muslim, any more than they should be offended by a non-Muslim eating pork, or violating any other religious rule. So this relatively modern and extremist take on it, where the prohibition becomes absolute and applies to all non-Muslims too, crosses the line between practising faith and imposing one's religion on others. And that is especially the case if in the process of imposing your religion on others, you violate someone else's belief system, which in this case includes freedom of expression, pluralism, and the right to life as fundamental tenets. As the slogan goes, freedom of religion also means freedom from religion.

Let’s also not forget, as we affirm the complexity in all this, that the very point of the cross-cultural dialogue, the insight that no community is monolithic, that there are violent extremists of all stripes – that it is precisely for this reason we cannot see these particular killers simply as members of a disadvantaged minority group. They are not killers because they are Arab, and they are not killers because they are Muslims, so by extension they are not killers because they are members of a disadvantaged minority in France. If you want to distance their extremism from the larger community, then don't rationalize their act as in any way expressing the marginalized status or the interests of that community. If anything, their group affiliation is primarily with the likes of ISIS (a recent target of Charlie Hebdo cartoons and likely motivation), which in those parts of the world where it operates is certainly not a repressed minority, but an oppressive scourge on the face of the earth – primarily oppressing other Muslims. Throughout history, fanatical religious extremism has taken many forms, from the Spanish Inquisition to modern-day cults – and its motivation or driving aim, more often than not, is some form of domination over others, not liberation from oppression.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Gnosis as 'Dark Precursor'

[idolatry and repetition: from simulacrum to gnosis]

In one of his poetic turns, Heidegger rejects the dichotomy of word and image, which in the German tradition was understood as meaning that images required space in order to be perceived, while words required time. To Heidegger, the truth of language - poetry - is image and therefore space par excellence; images, in turn, incorporate time in the form of the invisible - the truth of an image is not in the representation of the seen as conventionally understood, but in invoking what is outside itself, the 'thingness' of things, the hidden part - perhaps what Barthes calls punctum.

The reference to what is outside the immediate field of vision yet implicated in the image finds an inverse counterpart in Baudrillard's comments on photography as 'exorcism': "If something wants to be photographed, that is precisely because it does not want to yield up its meaning; it does not want to be reflected upon. It wants to be seized directly, violated on the spot, illuminated in its detail. If something wants to become an image, this is not so as to last, but in order to disappear more effectively."



Kafka, in a similar vein, equates this to writing: "We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes." The image at hand, whether a visual image or a sentence-image (to use Ranciere's term), is a fixed or bare repetition, the Platonic repetition of the same, the copy which is always haunted by the spectre of an original but which, precisely for this reason, is false, and can never truly repeat the Idea (per Deleuze), the 'thingness' of a thing. As Baudrillard puts it, "to make an image of an object is to strip the object of all its dimensions one by one: weight, relief, smell, depth, time, continuity and, of course, meaning". To this Deleuze counter-poses the simulacrum, the real repetition of the Nietzschean eternal return which is never repetition of the same. Real repetition is where the new emerges in nature.



Far from empty theoretical posturing, what this broadly evokes borders on the atavistic: in virtually every major religion there is some kind of prohibition or taboo related to visual representation - idolatry, the making of graven images, the depiction of the prophet, etc. The fact that such norms are rarely observed, at least in the strictest terms, by the mainstream forms of institutionalized religions is evidence of a tension - an internal difference - at the heart of religious traditions. The Heideggerian poetics taken up by Baudrillard and Kafka hints at an ancient gnostic principle abandoned by theologians and organized religions in their gradual transition to rationalist modernity.

Even Heidegger's rejection of the split between word and image can be accomodated within a gnostic framework. The prohibition on 'taking the Lord's name in vain', or even more explicitly, the Hebrew prohibition on writing it down at all, alternately insisting that the name, if written, be stripped of vowels (YHWH), aims precisely at this. What is holy cannot be imagined, represented or fixed in any way, and this applies to visual image and text alike. In order for it to be present, it must remain immanent. The gnostic God, to put it in Deleuzian terms, is the ultimate 'dark precursor', the differenciator of differences, the object=x which ensures the communication between disparate series by never being in its proper place, remaining a void.



An exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris a few years ago explored this very aspect of the visual image - entitled Voids, the exhibition was a retrospective of empty exhibitions over the past 50 years, starting with Yves Klein's 1958 exhibition of an empty gallery space at the Galerie Iris Clert. Empty space features as a platform for envisioning the invisible, for contemplating space in time, opening our eyes to the 'thingness' of things, their absence. It is a way of repatriating the exorcised content of the captured image, releasing the violated image back into the void, redeeming the holy.

It it this dimension again that is activated in Chinese artist Zhang Huan's "Berlin Buddha" - a performance-art piece in which a buddha sculpture made of concrete was ripped apart and reduced to dust in front of the gallery audience. This reference to the buddhist notion of 'killing the buddha' also hints at a shared element of gnosis that traverses a whole range of philosophical and religious traditions - from the Pagan ritual of the 'May King' or 'killing the god' to the Adonis myth (which echoes the earlier Sumerian 'Tammuz' and a number of other ancient myths of death/rebirth), the Crucifixion of Christ, etc. The very existence (as opposed to Being) of 'God' in any sense - as statue, flesh-and-blood, even ghost or spirit - is an imaging, a fixation, and therefore sacrilege.



Where the Kafka/Baudrillard gnostic indictment of the image and Heidegger's poetics part ways is in that Heidegger does not exclude the possibility of an authentic image. In Baudrillard's gnostic vision, the image is by necessity representation and therefore loss. But this seems too easy a dismissal for Heidegger - it is possible for an image to evoke the thingness of things, to show without representing.

It may be precisely this that makes Diane Arbus' photographs unique: it seems all too simple to say that she portrayed 'freaks'. Her uniqueness is that in her photographs, 'freaks' - giants, dwarves, transvestites, circus performers, those on the fringe of ordinary society - appeared normal, at home with themselves, ordinary; whereas the 'normal' people (i.e. couple with child strolling down 5th avenue) appeared unsettled, out of place, weird, plastic.



One shouldn't mistake this overarching theme in Arbus' work as a gesture of equation: the photographs form two distinct series. The common term between them, repeated in each series - 'freak' for lack of a better term - far from being an identity or similarity between them, is precisely what grounds their difference, what distinguishes the two series. It is the object=x, the 'dark precursor', the differenciator of differences. It establishes a point of contact between them, differenciates them, while remaining invisible, or outside the frame and without any positive content: one cannot locate it ('freakishness') precisely or explain its meaning, but it is there nevertheless, running silently througout each series. Through this displacement and repetition Arbus' photographs evoke something truly new, carving out a unique territory among images.



It is no surprise that, in her senior high school yearbook where each student was asked to provide, as a caption for their graduation photo, a statement about their goals in life upon graduating, among all the boring statements by her fellow students on career and marriage aspirations, Arbus stood out like a sore thumb with these words: "To shake the tree of life and bring down fruits unheard of."


[common humanity and resistance: quo vadis, domine?]

The first time Christ is crucified, he is merely a holy man who gives up his life for the sake of another, only one among many Judeans killed by the Romans in this gruesome manner. It is only with the second crucifixion - the repetition - that the truly new emerges, and the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth is transformed into Christ, the redeemer - it is only the second time, with a second death, that 'God' truly dies on the cross.

The dark precursor is thus constituted retroactively (per Deleuze), and 'God' - the object=x - emerges as the invisible differenciator between the series, establishing a point of communication between them but without an identity or similarity; 'God' is the pure difference between series that repeat one another, the new that emerges in each repetition. It is the 'esoteric word' that ensures communication, while establishing against the background of the 'same' the difference between each series: the spiritual 'killing of the Buddha', the pagan ritual of spring ('killing the May King'), the crucified flesh-and-blood God of Christianity.



In this sense, the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring and Iranian revolts - in opposing state/religious authority from a position of faith (in many cases), referencing religious tradition - set out from the position of Antigone/Jesus. Rather than simply resistance, Antigone's position in ethical terms circumvents state authority (Creon) to establish a direct relation to a higher authority beyond the state ("the unwritten laws of heaven…"); in much the same way, Jesus opposes the Roman empire by appealing to the 'Kingdom of God'.

This is perhaps the result of Walter Benjamin's insight that state authority rests not on a 'rule of law' but on rule by 'exception' or whim, disguised by concepts such as 'the rule of law'. If the 'rule of law' can be suspended whenever it proves inconvenient to those in power, it becomes questionable whether it ever was an authentic principle or modus operandi. Within these parameters, the form that an authentic resistance must take, rather than operating within this farcical system of rules and rights granted by the state, is to invoke an authentic exception, as Benjamin puts it - an 'unwritten' authority beyond the state - and destroy the law as such, clean the slate.



This theological dimension cannot be underestimated in the context of the struggle in the Arab world, for what may be obvious reasons: by invoking the internal difference, the Egyptian or Iranian protesters' insistence on faith, far from indicating a 'lesser evil' or reformist moderation, radically lays bare the real struggle - not between Western liberal democracy and Islam, but between the authentic personal faith of gnostic populism on one hand, and the inauthentic authoritarian faith of those in power, on the other. They share a term - Allah - but this shared term is an emptiness that in fact differenciates them and splits them apart, their 'dark precursor'. It is the same struggle that goes on worldwide, traversing systems and religions.



In her essay on Hegel and Haiti, Susan Buck-Morss relates the story of a contingent of French soldiers sent by Napoleon to put down the slaves' revolt; upon hearing a group of former slaves sing the Marseillaise (which in one verse denounces "l'esclavage antique"), the Frenchmen decide not to ambush the rebels, laying down their own weapons and wondering aloud if they aren't fighting on the wrong side. Their faith - in the ideals of the French Revolution - is authentic. "Common humanity appears at the edges," Buck-Morss concludes. Power comes from below.



If I may digress a little, to quote at length from Tolstoy, War and Peace: "in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power - the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns - should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes."

Asserting further that the major historical players are in the end far more caught up in the inertial momentum of history than the people they command, Tolstoy concludes, "A king is history's slave."

By contrast, in the words of Salvador Allende, "La historia es nuestra y la hacen los pueblos." It is the people who make history, whether they know it or not.

The fundamental opposition here - between the unwritten and the written, between the sacred/holy and the concrete/fixed, between the raw, volatile will of the people and established state authority - invokes what Deleuze refers to as the only real opposition in nature: between the Idea and representation. Real difference is always internal, and it goes all the way down - this is precisely the consequence of Heidegger's insight that words, through poetry, can create images, and that images in turn can express absence; like the wave/particle duality in quantum physics, the split between word and image is internal to both word and image. In the words of Walt Whitman, "I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes; We convince by our presence."

Or as Louis Armstrong - jazz gnostic - put it, when asked how he would explain to the uninitiated what jazz music was all about: "some people, if they don't know, you just can't tell 'em." (The idea of jazz, beyond even the boundaries of genre or music as an art form, embodies in the purest sense the notion of repetition=difference.)

Not to miss out on a more contemporary pop culture reference when it rears its pretty little head - I've never found the song 'Royals' that interesting, despite its appropriation by Bill de Blasio in his progressive campaign for New York Mayor - musically and lyrically, 'Team' is Lorde's real gem, with this lyric especially:

    We live in cities
you'll never see on the screen
Not very pretty, but we sure know
how to run things
Living in ruins
of a palace within my dreams
And you know
we're on each other's team

It's those cross-connections again, that cut across cultures and make visible the real differences, and real allegiances - like the French soldiers and Haitian slaves singing the Marseillaise, the Syrian rebels and Bostonians exchanging messages of solidarity, or the Tahrir Square protesters in Egypt holding signs saying 'we stand with the people of Wisconsin' in the middle of Governor Scott Walker's union-busting campaign. We're on each other's team. We live in cities you'll never see on the screen - the revolution will not be televised, as Gill Scott-Heron famously put it.

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"What becomes established with the new is precisely not the new," (Deleuze) and this is one of the pitfalls of any revolutionary struggle. A revolution can never establish itself or insinuate itself in laws and institutions, let alone state organs; it cannot make an image of itself - the revolution will not be televised. It is in this sense that effective resistance to state authority, by invoking an authentic exception, must rely on Benjaminian 'divine violence' - divine because it is 'unwritten', because it cannot inscribe itself in (written) law. In order to remain vital, revolution must remain a threatening presence, a force of nature, a pure momentum poised against organs of authority as such; its function - and its everlasting hope - can only ever be to set in motion a wheel of critical mass when necessary, to produce complex repetitions out of which emerge authentic differences, to perpetually "shake the tree of life and bring down fruits unheard of."

Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Only 'Slightly Fundamentally Wrong'

In the wake of the Boston bombings this summer, it is worth remembering that such massacres, and even worse, are a regular occurrence in places like Iraq or Syria. The Syrian rebels themselves drove the point home, expressing condolences to the Boston victims through a touching banner displayed at a protest in the city of Kafranbel:



A group of Bostonians replied with their own banner:



The beauty of these reciprocal gestures is that despite the apparent incongruity, neither minimizes the other's tragedy. They contextualize one another in a way that transcends the global political game that their respective governments are involved in, authentically approaching a kind of collective intersubjectivity. To paraphrase C.G. Jung, the closer together the individuals, the weaker the state, and vice versa. This works across national boundaries, too. True communal/collective spirit is not and should never be about negating the individual, but on the contrary - it is about making the collective, and each individual within it, stronger. Individualism, as commonly understood in the sense of 'each man for himself' - weakens and alienates us, isolating and exposing each individual to the whims of state authority.

This Syria-Boston exchange of solidarity is not an isolated instance, either - during the Egyptian protests against Mubarak, while the people of Wisconsin were in the streets protesting against Governor Walker's all-out assault on unions, there were reports of Egyptian protesters holding signs in solidarity with Wisconsin. And it is not far-fetched to imagine that the domino effect that may have played a role in the 'Arab Spring' uprisings goes well beyond the Arab world, as discontent with governments worldwide grows and protest movements are spawned, from Spain to Greece to Turkey, Brazil, Israel, just to name a few of the bigger ones.

Vladimir Putin may be a total crony proto-fascist, but it's always amusing to see crony politicians/states calling out one another over each other's doublespeak. In particular, this: “I was always appalled when our western partners and the western media called the terrorist, who did bloody crimes in our country, ‘insurgents’, and almost never ‘terrorists’,” Putin explained, in reference to the fact that Russian authorities had alerted US authorities to Tamerlan Tsarnaev's activities and links to fundamentalist groups, long before the Boston bombings.

This reminds me of the film 'Good Kurd, Bad Kurd' - which explores the baffling incongruity of the Kurds in Turkey being on the CIA list of terrorist organizations (Turkey is a NATO ally), while the Iraqi Kurds are 'freedom fighters', even though they are both part of the same national liberation movement and fighting for the same thing.

It would be trite to criticize the US media for devoting more coverage to a tragedy closer to home - however another incongruity is worth noting. On the heels of the Boston bombings, two days later in fact, an explosion at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, claimed far more casualties - at least 15 killed and more than 160 injured, with more than 150 buildings damaged or destroyed - registering as a 2.2 richter scale tremor.



According to an article in the Guardian, this is largely attributable to austerity cuts to agencies such as OSHA as part of the right's war on 'big government'. Greater reliance on self-reporting following the de-funding of government enforcement is "just one more part of a cycle that began in this country with the collapse of collective bargaining, an institution that at one point created workplace safety committees, which took the place of both expansive state regulation and whistleblowing as a means of securing safe places to work...It's no coincidence that many of the worst such incidents occur in states affected by both austerity cuts and low or declining union membership."

Indeed, OSHA had not made a site visit to the West, Texas plant since 1985, despite occasional complaints.



And yet - industrial accidents in remote, rural areas are just not sexy stuff, like terrorism. You can't make spy stories or exciting terrorist-hunting flicks like Zero Dark Thirty out of that.

So the US government pours billions of taxpayer dollars into spying on the entire world and fighting a 'terrorist' threat that, according to the FBI's own statistics, claims less lives globally every year - 12,533 in 2011, virtually none in the US - than there are gun homicides in the United States alone. (14,612 in 2011)

The threat from terrorism was never particularly significant in comparative terms, even if you take an anomaly year like 2001, and factor in the deaths on September 11. The total number of deaths from terrorism in the United States, from 1980 to 2001, including September 11? 2,993. In 2007, the highest year on record since 2001? 15,732 deaths from terrorism globally, of which only 33 Americans, 21 of those in Iraq. Tom Diaz, until recently a senior analyst at the Violence Policy Center, gives similar figures: "In 2010, 13,186 people died in terrorist attacks worldwide; in that same year, in America alone, 31,672 people lost their lives in gun-related deaths." That's a global rate of 0.23 per 100,000 population for 2007 (or 0.00023%), and 0.19 per 100,000 population for 2010.(0.00019%)

By contrast, here are some interesting bullet points:

• According to OSHA, there were 4,609 fatal industrial accidents in the USA in 2011 - an improvement compared to 20 years ago, but a slight increase on 2009.  That's a rate of 1.4 per 100,000 population, about 6 times greater than the global rate of deaths from terrorism, according to the FBI's 2007 figures, and 139 times greater than the rate of Americans killed by terrorists, worldwide.
• Over 30,000 Americans die in motor vehicle accidents each year. That's 9.6 per 100,000 population, about 48 times greater than the global rate of deaths from terrorism, and 900 times greater than the number of Americans killed by terrorism every year.
• According to a Harvard study, over 44,789 Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance. That's 14.4 per 100,000 population, about 60 times greater than the global rate of deaths from terrorism. That's also an annual rate about 15 times greater than the number of Americans killed by terrorism in 2001 (the year of September 11), and 1,357 times greater than the number of American deaths from terrorism in 2007, the highest year on record since 2001. Let me rephrase that, just to make sure it sinks in - Americans die from lack of health insurance, every year, at a rate about one thousand three hundred and fifty-seven times greater than the rate at which they are killed by terrorists, worldwide. Talk about death panels.
• In summary, far more Americans die every year from any one of these causes than have died from terrorism in the 33 years since 1980. In the case of annual healthcare-related deaths, based on the Harvard study figures, about 10 times more Americans die from lack of healthcare - every year - than the number of Americans killed by terrorists in the last 30+ years - according to FBI figures.

Driving a car or working in heavy industrial labour jobs in America - or for that matter, just being here, especially without health insurance - poses far greater risks than global terrorism, from a purely statistical point of view.



And it's not as if all the military/intelligence spending is what's keeping anyone safe from terrorism - on the contrary, the highest annual death toll from terrorism on record since 2001, as I mentioned, is 2007, which saw the most intense fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are wars started by the US, the latter as we know on completely false pretenses, and moreover fueled by an official and secret US policy of 'divide and conquer' - courtesy of one Colonel Steele, a veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America in the 1980s who was sent to Iraq precisely for the purpose of organizing paramilitary Shia militias and uniformed death squads, along with interrogation/torture centers, inciting sectarian violence. (explored in a BBC documentary, James Steele: America's Mystery Man in Iraq)  Of the 100,000+ killed in the Iraq war, at least 30,000 - according to leaked documents included in the Wikileaks Iraq war logs - were innocent civilians killed by US troops. In other words, US troops have murdered at least 6 or 7 times more innocent men, women and children in Iraq than the number of Americans killed by terrorists in the 30+ years from 1980 to today, including those killed on September 11, 2001. The United States government may still be, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."



Furthermore, deaths from terrorism worldwide, comparatively insignificant as they were to begin with, have declined since Bush left office, and since the 'war on terror' ceased to be as much of a policy priority. Which is a good reminder of Foucault's dictum on how law enforcement breeds its own monsters, where a given 'vice' - [insert "terror" or "drugs"] - "may have been designated as the evil to be eliminated, but the extraordinary effort that went into the task that was bound to fail leads one to suspect that what was demanded of it was to persevere, to proliferate to the limits of the visible and the invisible, rather than to disappear for good. Always relying on this support, power advanced, multiplied its relays and its effects, while its target expanded, subdivided, and branched out, penetrating further into reality at the same pace." (The Will to Knowledge, 42) In much the same way as Wall Street bankers are said to turn to Karl Marx for instructive tips on the functioning of the capitalist economy, this passage from Foucault easily sounds like a page from Colonel Steele's field manual.



The vast state surveillance apparatus devoted to fighting terrorism (or drugs, for that matter) is basically a bunch of grown-up kids with technology and guns living out their sick, violent fantasies, snooping on the whole world, and leaving it to the rest of us to solve the world's real problems, including the ones they create.

A quick browse through my notes on Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is a good reminder that neoliberal economic policies will kill far more of us than global terrorism. They already have. Far more people die every year from the combined effects of hunger, treatable diseases, industrial accidents, pollution, malnutrition, mismanaged natural disasters, etc - or from any one of these causes - than from terrorism. In other words, from the effects of deregulation, post-colonial economic imperialism, austerity cuts, the hypocritical enforcement of patent regimes on pharmaceuticals in the developing world (see my Medicine, Ethics and Law paper on the left), and so forth. Not to mention state-sponsored violence - war, terrorism, drone strikes - which in the case of Iraq, basically comes down to one big, disastrous experiment in neoliberal/neoconservative free marketeer nation-building, given what we know of the motivations that drove the Straussian Milton-Friedmanite Chicago School devotees in the Bush administration.



So while more billions are being poured into fighting 'global terrorism' with its relatively negligible casualties worldwide, and military aid to corrupt third-world regimes, a single industrial accident this summer, the last in a series of similar accidents - the building collapse in Bangladesh - killed more than 230 sweatshop workers and left hundreds trapped under the rubble. Gotta keep those cheap goods comin'. As reported in the Guardian:

'...police ordered an evacuation of the building after deep cracks became visible in the walls, officials said. But factories based there ignored the order and kept more than 2,000 people working.

Dilara Begum, a garment worker who survived the accident, said supervisors had told them to return to work on Wednesday, saying the building had been inspected and declared safe. 

"We didn't want to go in but the supervisors threatened to dock pay if we didn't return to work."

More recently, another Guardian article reported on the deaths of dozens of Nepalese migrant workers due to brutal labour conditions in Qatar, where employers routinely confiscate workers' passports and hold back wages to keep labourers from running away. Thirty Nepalese recently took shelter in their embassy to escape working conditions:

"The overall picture is of one of the richest nations exploiting one of the poorest to get ready for the world's most popular sporting tournament."



This might, I suppose, sound ironic to someone still labouring under the illusion that wealth in capitalist societies is accumulated through hard work rather than theft, lies, luck, and plunder. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the exploitation of migrants in Qatar is not news - this has been going on for years. The difference is that the World Cup preparations have drawn the world's attention to it, and perhaps exacerbated the situation somewhat.

In a recent episode of the Colbert Report, featuring Thomas Herndon, the UMass grad student who discovered the infamous 'spreadsheet error' in Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhardt's highly influential pro-austerity paper (incidentally, Herndon did his undergraduate study at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, where I live), Stephen Colbert eloquently and cheekily summed up the twisted logic of austerity: "we need to keep cutting the government budget, and keep laying people off until those people get jobs."


And the schtick goes on: "an academic paper by Harvard economists Rogoff and Reinhart, that fiscal conservatives worldwide used to argue for austerity, was recently refuted by a UMass grad student just because it had a few simple spreadsheet errors, and a couple of little staggering omissions, that made it slightly fundamentally wrong."

That's right. Only slightly fundamentally wrong. We don't need to worry about getting the numbers right - about the industrial accidents, gun homicides, car accidents, lack of access to healthcare, the economic stupidity of suicidal austerity cuts, corporate welfare, bank bailouts, foreclosures, exporting of jobs overseas, deregulation, drones, disaster response, starvation, malnutrition, foreign wars, state-sponsored violence, torture - as long as the borders are secure and we're safe from terrorists.



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