Market And Fundamentalism On A Global Scale

 Nalini Taneja

FOR those on the left, brought up on a staple diet of anti-imperialism and the spirit of internationalism, nothing could be more painful about the preceeding years than the war in Afghanistan followed by the slaughter of thousands in Iraq. And, what is more, the very successful justifications of these inhuman acts, achieved through a gigantic corporate owned media set up.

While we analyse the underlying links between liberalising policies in the economic sphere and a right wing polity in our part of the world, it is important to note that similar connections exist between the aggressive theories of a ‘civilisational divide’ that the US government under Bush has been acting upon and US business interests.

Somehow people in the western world have been led to believe that ‘ethnic conflicts’ are intrinsic to the non-western world, and that it is this propensity towards religious and identity politics on the part of the peoples and governments of the non-western world, which is in the first place responsible for the civilisational divide, and which is also responsible for the spiralling violence on a world scale. The presence of Islamic terrorist groups across the world and the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 19/11 have somehow made this theory credible for most people, even in the third world where a whole body of intellectuals has gone over to the identity mode of analysis.

Such analyses that prioritise identity in non-western societies, and theories of a fundamental civilisational divide, both have their origin in the imperialist ideological war of propaganda in general, and US control over knowledge-production in particular, and are, to put it crudely, simply reflective of their business interests. This barrage of propaganda is aimed at anti-imperialist movements and against the enthusiasm for socialism which has survived the collapse of the Soviet Union.

CIVILISATIONAL TASK

Let us remember that when the US government was busy throwing out the Soviets from Afghanistan we did not hear much about this civilisational divide or of Islamic terrorism. As US troops were creating and collaborating with the Taliban in Afghanistan the epitome of evil was the Soviet Union and the ‘Red monster’ and US’s civilisational task was getting rid of socialism. US institutions, including universities, were busy churning out justifications for its actions, emerging out of ‘scholarly’ research, in much the same way as our own Hindutva ideologues have discovered historical ‘evidence’ for the Ram Mandir and for Indus civilisation being Aryan and Hindu in content.

One scholar has pointed out how “readers browsing through book bazaars in Rawalpindi and Peshawar can, even today, find textbooks written as part of the series underwritten by a USAID $50 million grant to the University of Nebraska in the 1980s. These textbooks sought to counterbalance Marxism through creating enthusiasm in Islamic militancy. They exhorted Afghan children to “pluck out the eyes of the Soviet enemy and cut off his legs”. Years after the books were first printed they were approved by the Taliban for use in madrassas - a stamp of their ideological correctness” (Pervez Hoodbhoy, Is it a War on Islam?).

With no ‘super power’ for the third world to turn to, the US now not only acts with impunity against third world people, it has built a whole new ideological armoury as much, if not more, sectarian and fundamentalist than RSS or any Taliban. The world is today shown as divided between Islam and “us”, us being the ‘civilised’ world led by the US. Those resisting its designs in Iraq get called Untermenschen, a term that Hitler used in Mein Kampf to describe Jews, Romanies and Slavs as sub-humans (John Pilger, New Statesman). They have even invented a Osama bin Laden type figure to ensure that the 9/11 related hysteria does not lose its potency: there is in fact no evidence for such claims. 

In a letter sent on October 14 to Kofi Annan, the Fallujah Shura Council, which administers the city, has categorically stated: “In Fallujah, [the Americans] have created a new vague target: al-Zarqawi. Almost a year has elapsed since they created this new pretext and whenever they destroy houses, mosques, restaurants, and kill children and women, they said: ‘We have launched a successful operation against al-Zarqawi.’ The people of Fallujah assure you that this person, if he exists, is not in Fallujah . . . and we have no links to any groups supporting such inhuman behaviour. We appeal to you to urge the UN [to prevent] the new massacre which the Americans and the puppet government are planning to start soon in Fallujah, as well as many parts of the country.” While this letter is doing the rounds on the internet and in Arab media, not a word of this was reported in the mainstream media in Britain and the US.

ANGLO-AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

Similarly, the Lancet, a scientific journal, has estimated that 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion; and that eighty-four per cent of these deaths have resulted directly from American and British actions. Out of these 95 per cent were killed by air attacks and artillery fire, and most of those killed were women and children (October 29, 2004).  This heart rending report was ignored, as if it did not exist, by the Observer, the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Star, the Sun and many others. The BBC framed the report in terms of the government’s “doubts” and Channel 4 News delivered a hatchet job, based on a Downing Street briefing (John Pilger).

The earlier war against Afghanistan resulted in thousands of deaths as well, and Afghans have gained nothing from it – no peace. No democracy, no freedom, no escape from religious fundamentalism. One set of warlords has been replaced by another set, and Afghanistan is already out of news channels because the US has no interest in saying anything on it for the present.

Too busy with Iraq, the civilized world has done nothing about large scale recruitment of children as soldiers in Africa in the many conflicts engendered as much by the impact of globalisation as ethnicity. In Sudan it is all about oil as well and US wants entry for troops under UN sanction, although the US think tanks continue to tell us it is conflict between the Muslim and Christian tribes.

Through out the 1990s, “whole societies were laid out for autopsy and identified as “failed states” and “rogue states”, requiring “humanitarian intervention”.” And words like democracy, freedom, independence, and reform were emptied of their meaning and taken into the service of the World Bank, the IMF and that amorphous thing called “The West” - in other words, imperialism (Pilger- Power, Propaganda and Conscience in the War on Terror), while Imperialism simply disappeared from discussion in academics (Prabhat Patnaik-Whatever Happened to Imperialism?).

Research funding has always followed imperial interests of the US informal empire, from as long as the US emerged as the number one capitalist power leaving behind the European countries, particularly Britain. Jackie Assayag and Veronique Benei, for example, have analysed and given details of how political concerns and perspectives of Britain and the US have shaped South Asian Studies, in terms of funding, setting up of institutions and appointment of teachers, and creation of research projects, and in terms of particular emphases in social science disciplines and area studies at particular points of time (Re-mapping Knowledge: the Making of South Asian Studies in India, Europe and America, 19th and 20th Centuries). An increasing number of the South Asian scholars receiving fellowships in the US today are those researching identity politics and ethnic conflicts in their respective regions.

SUBALTERN STUDIES

On the other hand, the fashion of post modernism and the receptivity of the US academic establishment to anti-left ‘subaltern studies’ has more to do with the US priorities of the politics of ‘cultural difference’ and identity, and the pragmatic interest in ethnic conflicts in the non western world than any concern for the subaltern or respect for pluralism. The trajectory from the Orientalism of the older kind, through area studies, to post-modernism has well served Imperialist ideological perspectives as well as politics through down grading anti imperialism and socialism.

Research on Central Asia has been a priority for US academic funding agencies since the Gorbachov years: the entire area is a market and has potential for control over enormous oil reserves. And the Zioinist lobby has not only had its clout in government circles and US official agencies, it has seen to it that research on the Middle- east remains funded well, and that its direction remains in its favour. If there are so many citizens in the US, or the world over for that matter, who support the Palestine cause, or recognize the validity of socialist Cuba, or do not see China today as another evil empire, it is not because of, but despite, the US academic establishment.

WAR AGAINST TERRORISM

Finally, the ‘holy war’ against ‘terrorism’ --- Bush has proclaimed himself as chosen by God and guided by the values of Christianity, which he fore grounded in his recent election campaign --- have brought huge profits for the US. It is estimated that “the post-9/11 “extra” profits to the US War Economy (i.e. to the directors, shareholders and employees of the US military-industrial complex) total some US$400 billion - the sum of extra US military budget funding of 250 billion dollar since 9/11 and additional funding for the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars of about 150 billion dollar. The current annual US military budget of 400 billion dollar is half that of the World (800 billion dollar), noting that US arms sales contribute significantly to non-US global military expenditure. Accordingly, the “extra” funding of the US industrial -military complex since 9/11 may be of the order of 500 billion dollar (Gideon Polya- US Profits from Jihadist Terrorism). Imperialism in the age of globalisation has a stake in war and in Jihadi terrorism.