What Do Empires Do?

By Michael Parenti – Common Dreams

Empires impoverish whole populations and kill lots and lots of innocent people

When I wrote my book Against Empire in 1995, as might be expected, some of my U.S. compatriots thought it was wrong of me to call the United States an empire. It was widely believed that U.S. rulers did not pursue empire; they intervened abroad only out of self-defense or for humanitarian rescue operations or to overthrow tyranny, fight terrorism, and propagate democracy.

But by the year 2000, everyone started talking about the United States as an empire and writing books with titles like Sorrows of Empire, Follies of Empire, Twilight of Empire, or Empire of Illusions— all referring to the United States when they spoke of empire.

Even conservatives started using the word. Amazing. One could hear right-wing pundits announcing on U.S. television, “We’re an empire, with all the responsibilities and opportunities of empire and we better get used to it”; and “We are the strongest nation in the world and have every right to act as such”—as if having the power gives U.S. leaders an inherent entitlement to exercise it upon others as they might wish.

“What is going on here?” I asked myself at the time. How is it that so many people feel free to talk about empire when they mean a United States empire? The ideological orthodoxy had always been that, unlike other countries, the USA did not indulge in colonization and conquest.

The answer, I realized, is that the word has been divested of its full meaning. “Empire” seems nowadays to mean simply dominion and control. Empire—for most of these late-coming critics— is concerned almost exclusively with power and prestige. What is usually missing from the public discourse is the process of empire and its politico-economic content. In other words, while we hear a lot about empire, we hear very little about imperialism.

Now that is strange, for imperialism is what empires are all about. Imperialism is what empires do. And by imperialism I do not mean the process of extending power and dominion without regard to material and financial interests. Indeed “imperialism” has been used by some authors in the same empty way that they use the word “empire,” to simply denote dominion and control with little attention given to political economic realities.

But I define imperialism as follows: the process whereby the dominant investor interests in one country bring to bear their economic and military power upon another nation or region in order to expropriate its land, labor, natural resources, capital, and markets-in such a manner as to enrich the investor interests. In a word, empires do not just pursue “power for power’s sake.” There are real and enormous material interests at stake, fortunes to be made many times over.

So for centuries the ruling interests of Western Europe and later on North America and Japan went forth with their financiers—and when necessary their armies—to lay claim to most of planet Earth, including the labor of indigenous peoples, their markets, their incomes (through colonial taxation or debt control or other means), and the abundant treasures of their lands: their gold, silver, diamonds, copper, rum, molasses, hemp, flax, ebony, timber, sugar, tobacco, ivory, iron, tin, nickel, coal, cotton, corn, and more recently: uranium, manganese, titanium, bauxite, oil, and–say it again–oil. (Hardly a complete listing.)

Empires are enormously profitable for the dominant economic interests of the imperial nation but enormously costly to the people of the colonized country. In addition to suffering the pillage of their lands and natural resources, the people of these targeted countries are frequently killed in large numbers by the intruders.

This is another thing that empires do which too often goes unmentioned in the historical and political literature of countries like the United States, Britain, and France. Empires impoverish whole populations and kill lots and lots of innocent people. As I write this, President Obama and the national security state for which he works are waging two and a half wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, and northern Pakistan), and leveling military threats against Yemen, Iran, and, on a slow day, North Korea. Instead of sending medical and rescue aid to Haiti, Our Bomber sent in the Marines, the same Marines who engaged in years of mass murder in Haiti decades ago and supported more recent massacres by proxy forces.

The purpose of all this killing is to prevent alternative, independent, self-defining nations from emerging. So the empire uses its state power to gather private wealth for its investor class. And it uses its public wealth to shore up its state power and prevent other nations from self-developing.

Sooner or later this arrangement begins to wilt under the weight of its own contradictions. As the empire grows more menacing and more murderous toward others, it grows sick and impoverished within itself.

From ancient times to today, empires have always been involved in the bloody accumulation of wealth. If you don’t think this is true of the United States then stop calling it “Empire.” And when you write a book about how it wraps its arms around the planet, entitle it “Global Bully” or “Bossy Busybody,” but be aware that you’re not telling us much about imperialism.

Time for George Mitchell to resign

By Stephen M. Walt – Foreign Policy

The administration's early commitment to an Israeli-Palestinian peace was either a naïve bit of bravado or a cynical charade

If Mideast special envoy George Mitchell wants to end his career with his reputation intact, it is time for him to resign. He had a distinguished tenure in the U.S. Senate — including a stint as majority leader — and his post-Senate career has been equally accomplished. He was an effective mediator of the conflict in Northern Ireland, helped shepherd the Disney Corporation through a turbulent period, and led an effective investigation of the steroids scandal afflicting major league baseball. Nobody can expect to be universally admired in the United States, but Mitchell may have come as close as any politician in recent memory.

Why should Mitchell step down now? Because he is wasting his time. The administration’s early commitment to an Israeli-Palestinian peace was either a naïve bit of bravado or a cynical charade, and if Mitchell continues to pile up frequent-flyer miles in a fruitless effort, he will be remembered as one of a long series of U.S. “mediators” who ended up complicit in Israel’s self-destructive land grab on the West Bank. Mitchell will turn 77 in August, he has already undergone treatment for prostate cancer, and he’s gotten exactly nowhere (or worse) since his mission began. However noble the goal of Israeli-Palestinian peace might be, surely he’s got better things to do.

In an interview earlier this week with Time’s Joe Klein, President Obama acknowledged that his early commitment to achieving “two states for two peoples” had failed. In his words, “this is as intractable a problem as you get … Both sides-the Israelis and the Palestinians-have found that the political environments, the nature of their coalitions or the divisions within their societies, were such that it was very hard for them to start engaging in a meaningful conversation. And I think we overestimated our ability to persuade them to do so when their politics ran contrary to that” (my emphasis).

This admission raises an obvious question: who was responsible for this gross miscalculation? It’s not as if the dysfunctional condition of Israeli and Palestinian internal politics was a dark mystery when Obama took office, or when Netanyahu formed the most hard-line government in Israeli history. Which advisors told Obama and Mitchell to proceed as they did, raising expectations sky-high in the Cairo speech, publicly insisting on a settlement freeze, and then engaging in a humiliating retreat? Did they ever ask themselves what they would do if Netanyahu dug in his heels, as anyone with a triple-digit IQ should have expected? And if Obama now realizes how badly they screwed up, why do the people who recommended this approach still have their jobs?

As for Mitchell himself, he should resign because it should be clear to him that he was hired under false pretenses. He undoubtedly believed Obama when the president said he was genuinely committed to achieving Israel-Palestinian peace in his first term. Obama probably promised to back him up, and his actions up to the Cairo speech made it look like he meant it. But his performance ever since has exposed him as another U.S. president who is unwilling to do what everyone knows it will take to achieve a just peace. Mitchell has been reduced to the same hapless role that Condoleezza Rice played in the latter stages of the Bush administration — engaged in endless “talks” and inconclusive haggling over trivialities-and he ought to be furious at having been hung out to dry in this fashion.

The point is not that Obama’s initial peace effort in the Middle East has failed; the real lesson is that he didn’t really try. The objective was admirably clear from the start — “two states for two peoples” — what was missing was a clear strategy for getting there and the political will to push it through. And notwithstanding the various difficulties on the Palestinian side, the main obstacle has been the Netanyahu government’s all-too obvious rejection of anything that might look like a viable Palestinian state, combined with its relentless effort to gobble up more land. Unless the U.S. president is willing and able to push Israel as hard as it is pushing the Palestinians (and probably harder), peace will simply not happen. Pressure on Israel is also the best way to defang Hamas, because genuine progress towards a Palestinian state in the one thing that could strengthen Abbas and other Palestinian moderates and force Hamas to move beyond its talk about a long-term hudna (truce) and accept the idea of permanent peace.

It’s not as if Obama and Co. don’t realize that this is important. National Security Advisor James Jones has made it clear that he sees the Israel-Palestinian issue as absolutely central; it’s not our only problem in the Middle East, but it tends to affect most of the others and resolving it would be an enormous boon. And there’s every sign that the president is aware of the need to do more than just talk.

Yet U.S. diplomacy in this area remains all talk and no action. When a great power identifies a key interest and is strongly committed to achieving it, it uses all the tools at its disposal to try to bring that outcome about. Needless to say, the use of U.S. leverage has been conspicuously absent over the past year, which means that Mitchell has been operating with both hands tied firmly behind his back. Thus far, the only instrument of influence that Obama has used has been presidential rhetoric, and even that weapon has been used rather sparingly.

And please don’t blame this on Congress. Yes, Congress will pander to the lobby, oppose a tougher U.S. stance, and continue to supply Israel with generous economic and military handouts, but a determined president still has many ways of bringing pressure to bear on recalcitrant clients. The problem is that Obama refused to use any of them.

When Netanyahu dug in his heels and refused a complete settlement freeze — itself a rather innocuous demand if Israel preferred peace to land — did Obama describe the settlements as “illegal” and contrary to international law? Of course not. Did he fire a warning shot by instructing the Department of Justice to crack down on tax-deductible contributions to settler organizations? Nope. Did he tell Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to signal his irritation by curtailing U.S. purchases of Israeli arms, downgrading various forms of “strategic cooperation,” or canceling a military exchange or two? Not a chance. When Israel continued to evict Palestinians from their homes and announced new settlement construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank in August, did Obama remind Netanyahu of his dependence on U.S. support by telling U.S. officials to say a few positive things about the Goldstone Report and to use its release as an opportunity to underscore the need for a genuine peace? Hardly; instead, the administration rewarded Netanyau’s intransigence by condemning Goldstone and praising Netanyahu for “unprecedented” concessions. (The “concessions,” by the way, was an announcement that Israel would freeze settlement expansion in the West Bank “temporarily” while continuing it in East Jerusalem. In other words, they’ll just take the land a bit more slowly).

Like the Clinton and Bush administrations, in short, the idea that the United States ought to use its leverage and exert genuine pressure on Israel remains anathema to Obama, to Mitchell and his advisors, and to all those pundits who are trapped in the Washington consensus on this issue. The main organizations in the Israel lobby are of course dead-set against it — and that goes for J Street as well — even though there is no reason to expect Israel to change course in the absence of countervailing pressure.

Obama blinked — leaving Mitchell with nothing to do-because he needed to keep sixty senators on board with his health care initiative (that worked out well, didn’t it?), because he didn’t want to jeopardize the campaign coffers of the Democratic Party, and because he knew he’d be excoriated by Israel’s false friends in the U.S. media if he did the right thing. I suppose I ought to be grateful to have my thesis vindicated in such striking fashion, but there’s too much human misery involved on both sides to take any consolation in that.

So what will happen now? Israel has made it clear that it is going to keep building settlements — including the large blocs (like Ma’ale Adumim) that were consciously designed to carve up the West Bank and make creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority, and other moderate forces will be increasingly discredited as collaborators or dupes. As Israel increasingly becomes an apartheid state, its international legitimacy will face a growing challenge. Iran’s ability to exploit the Palestinian cause will be strengthened, and pro-American regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere will be further weakened by their impotence and by their intimate association with the United States. It might even help give al Qaeda a new lease on life, at least in some places. Jews in other countries will continue to distance themselves from an Israel that they see as a poor embodiment of their own values, and one that can no longer portray itself convincingly as “a light unto the nations.” And the real tragedy is that all this might have been avoided, had the leaders of the world’s most powerful country been willing to use their influence on both sides more directly.

Looking ahead, one can see two radically different possibilities. The first option is that Israel retains control of the West Bank and Gaza and continues to deny the Palestinians full political rights or economic opportunities. (Netanyahu likes to talk about a long-term “economic peace,” but his vision of Palestinian bantustans under complete Israeli control is both a denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations and a severe obstacle to their ability to fully develop their own society. Over time, there may be another intifada, which the IDF will crush as ruthlessly as it did the last one. Perhaps the millions of remaining Palestinians will gradually leave — as hardline Israelis hope and as former House speaker Dick Armey once proposed. If so, then a country founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust — one of history’s greatest crimes-will have completed a dispossession begun in 1948 — a great crime of its own.

Alternatively, the Palestinians may remain where they are, and begin to demand equal rights in the state under whose authority they have been forced to dwell. If Israel denies them these rights, its claim to being the “only democracy in the Middle East” will be exposed as hollow. If it grants them, it will eventually cease to be a Jewish-majority state (though its culture would undoubtedly retain a heavily Jewish/Israeli character). As a long-time supporter of Israel’s existence, I would take no joy in that outcome. Moreover, transforming Israel into a post-Zionist and multinational society would be a wrenching and quite possibly violent experience for all concerned. For both reasons, I’ve continued to favor “two states for two peoples” instead.

But with the two-state solution looking less and less likely, these other possibilities begin to loom large. Through fear and fecklessness, the United States has been an active enabler of an emerging tragedy. Israelis have no one to blame but themselves for the occupation, but Americans — who like to think of themselves as a country whose foreign policy reflects deep moral commitments-will be judged harshly for our own role in this endeavor.

The United States will suffer certain consequences as a result-decreased international influence, a somewhat greater risk of anti-American terrorism, tarnished moral reputation, etc.-but it will survive. But Israel may be in the process of drafting its own suicide pact, and its false friends here in the United States have been supplying the paper and ink. By offering his resignation-and insisting that Obama accept it-George Mitchell can escape the onus of complicity in this latest sad chapter of an all-too-familiar story. Small comfort, perhaps, but better than nothing.

Iran and Latin America: The Media States Its Case

By Ramzy Baroud – Palestine Chronicle

The US continues to see the world as its own business

Should the United States be concerned about Iran’s determined efforts to reach out to Latin America? Or, as was suggestively described in the Economist, by the Ayatollahs’ strategy of cozying up to Latin America?

The US continues to see the world as its own business. It gives itself and its allies, most notably Israel, the right to geopolitical maneuverability. Iran, on the other hand, is censured, derided and punished for even its own internal policies, within its own borders. Thus, an Iranian move into Latin America is naturally viewed as unwarranted, uncalled for and most definitely dangerous as far as the US is concerned.

But Iran is not invading America geopolitical space per se. It is neither financing a terrorist group, nor involved in the ongoing narcotic war. More, there is no historical connection between an interventionist Iran and the bloody past of Latin America, including its former dictators and brutal juntas. In fact, Iran’s ‘cozying up’ to Latin American merely began in 2005. Since then, Iran has opened embassies in several Latin American countries and launched important joint projects that provided funds and work opportunities for thousands of ordinary people. There is no Iranian equivalent to the School of the Americas.

So why the alarm?

Paul McLeary of Aviation Week gives us a clue. Iran’s move “has set off a proxy conflict between Iran and Israel in South America, with the presidents of both countries logging frequent-flier miles to win friends in the region. One cause for concern among many analysts is the weekly flight between Caracas and Tehran (with a stop in Damascus) that Iran Air has flown for two years.”

He quotes Frida Ghitis: “Flight manifests are kept secret, so neither cargo nor passenger information is well known …one Israeli report suggested that Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying uranium to Iran.”

Two questions emerge. One, is it required of Caracas and Tehran to provide a detailed report of the cargo and passengers to the US and Israel, and perhaps also cc-ed to a list of their friends and allies?

The second pertains to Israel itself. Why is the media most concerned by Iran’s ‘suspicious’ behavior in Latin America, despite the fact that its presence is welcomed by various countries in the hemisphere, while Israel – whose bloody involvement has wrought much chaos to South America – is simply unquestioned, and even cited as a credible source? There is no evidence to link Iran to death squads, or any Iranian firm with “an archive and computer file on journalists, students, leaders, leftists, politicians and so on” to be hunted down, killed or simply made to ‘disappear’ under brutal regimes. Israel’s own history in Latin America seems to inspire little commentary by the ever-vigilant ‘many analysts’. McLeary, Ghitis and others need to do their homework before leveling accusations against others. The book Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship may be a good place to start.

Back to the lurking Ayatollahs in America’s backyard, Susan Kaufman Purcell is also raising questions, this time about Brazil. In Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva welcomed his Iranian counterpart, president Ahmadinejad late November 2009. In the January 7 Wall Street Journal, Purcell claimed: “Until recently, the Obama administration assumed that Brazil and the United States were natural allies who shared many foreign policy interests, particularly in Latin America. Brazil, after all, is a friendly democracy with a growing market economy and Western cultural values.” Purcell suggests that Brazil’s various achievements – largely beneficial to the US – qualified the country to become “more like us”.

The article infers, however, that Brazil is actually “not like us”. The fact that it dares to be different – by pursuing a Brazilian-centered foreign policy – shows the audacity of the deceivingly loveable Lula. The Brazilian president is apparently going rouge simply by deviating from Washington’s regional and international priorities. Amongst his many crimes: “Instead of expressing concern over Iran’s activities in Latin America, Brazil is drawing closer to Tehran and hopes to expand its $2 billion bilateral trade to $10 billion in the near future.”

Another: “He reiterated his support for Iran’s right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful uses, while insisting that there is no evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.” And of course, Purcell doesn’t fail to remind us of “the weekly flights between Caracas and Tehran that bring passengers and cargo into Venezuela.”

Western media is indeed rife with all sorts of unfounded accusations, baseless speculations and superfluous insinuations. They evoke in the reader and viewer a dread and fear, based in this case on the doomsday scenario whereby fanatical Latin Americans and radical Muslims gang up on America, and ultimately Israel.

Now consider these appalling insinuations by the Economist. First it claims that the Brazilian President “offered support for Iran’s work on nuclear technology for (supposedly) peaceful use.” Note the word “supposedly”.

Then: One of the “instruments” of destabilizing Latin America is Iran’s production of “news programmes and documentaries for Bolivian television, no doubt to give a fair and balanced view of the Great Satan.” Note the writer’s insertion of the little irrelevant term “Great Satan” to convert the act of TV production that challenges Western mainstream media’s narrative into a menacing endeavor.

More: Brazil president talked “about Israel’s right to stay just where it is on the map.” Of course, Lula didn’t phrase it that way. This is the writer’s attempt to remind us of the claim that Iran has threatened to wipe Israel off the map.

Still, more: “…protesters waved banners reminding Mr Ahmadinejad that the Holocaust had indeed taken place”. This provides the big climax – the claim that Iran’s president has denied the Holocaust.

But why the charged, exaggerated commentary?

A seemingly random Economist ‘advertisement’ box embedded with the article, and another long side column at the magazine’s website reminds readers of “The Economist Debate Series – January 11-18.” The topic of the week, presented with an image of a warplane radar zooming in on the Iranian map, asks the question: “Is It Time to Strike Iran?”

After reading such unsubstantiated, yet disquieting analyses, how would most readers respond?

Why can’t Muslim Societies be more like a Globalised West?

By Alastair Crooke – Conflicts Forum

Islamism is not some irrational kick against modernity; it is accessible to reasoned understanding.

Many commentators on Islam make the same mistake: They instinctively assume that Muslim resistance to western globalisation reflects the inability of Muslims to accept the social and structural change that ‘modernity’ requires. Muslims, in this view, fail to rise above the ‘closed’ world of cultural traditions, and to embrace change. They shy away from, or react against the ‘choice’ offered by modernity.

The Philosopher, Henri Bergson, writing in 1932, suggested that one reason that some intellectual societies – for which he coined the term ‘closed’ societies – were unable to evolve into ‘open’ societies was that religion arises as a kind of mental habit that binds human intelligence to the instinctive drive for solidarity and continuity. Some societies were simply incapable of lifting themselves above these ‘cultural constraints’ to embrace dynamic society. Karl Popper in his ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’ further refined Bergson to imply that ‘closed’ societies were profoundly inimical to the idea of human freedom.

That Muslims would become the archetype of Bergson’s and Popper’s ‘closed’, static society in this western narrative was inevitable: The stage had already been set by the historicist view of the Ottoman Empire. The Empire was typecast by one historian as resembling a decaying, rambling old country house, inhabited by eccentric lodgers, living in a vacuum of initiative, or any will to restore its leaking fabric – waiting in vain and privation to be reorganised and digested by a new and dynamic owner.

This profoundly Eurocentric view of the Ottomans, now contested by contemporary historians, sat comfortably with the views of those such as Richard Cobden and Jean Baptiste Say, articulated in the mid-nineteenth century that new European and American thinking would usher in a millennial age of peace: Free trade would promote peace between nations. “The theory of markets will necessarily scatter the seeds of concord and peace”, and Cobden believed that the spread of market principles and free trade would create a peaceful order of free countries in Europe – and ultimately in the Middle East.

This latter prospect has remained an enduring western vision of utopia, despite it failing, over and over, to acknowledge the tragedies to which it gave birth in Muslim societies. The Ottoman ‘decaying estate’, of course, eventually got its new owners – The westernised ‘Young Turks’, and Kemal Ataturk.

The impact of these western ideas, and the drive to construct the powerful, ethnically unitary, centralised nation-states in their societies – that was necessary to enforce structural change – for Muslims was an absolute disaster: It was a tragedy that created millions of victims – as it had in Europe and the US.

But it also, unexpectedly, facilitated the emergence of a revived Islamism that had revisited its roots in order to find new solutions to its plights. From this crisis, and from insights drawn from its intellectual traditions, and from the Qur’an, Islam began a journey on a discovery to a new ‘Self’. A journey that it is far from ended; but which already has re-established Islam as a dynamic political, social and economic force. It is this event, which has been almost erased and swallowed up by deterministic explanations that reduce Islamism to a parody of the open/closed society template.

It is thirty years now since the Iranian Revolution, and fifty years since the first Islamist resistance movement was formed. Yet many in the West remain bemused: why is there an Islamist resistance at all: They cannot understand how Muslims can fail to see the inevitability of western-style technical modernity and its globalisation. ‘What are Muslims resisting against’, it is asked?

In Resistance: the Essence of the Islamist Revolution, I argued that Muslims are not opposed to globalisation,The Revolution is a refusal to accept an understandingof the Self, or of the world about us, dominated by contemporary western consciousness nor to science, nor to change, per se. On the contrary, they embrace all three. The Revolution, rather, is a ‘Refusal’ – A ‘grand refusal’ to accept an understanding of the Self, or of the world about us, dominated by contemporary western consciousness. Islamists sought to recuperate an alternative consciousness – one drawn from its own intellectual tradition that would stand in opposition to the western paradigm.

Islamism, in short, is not some irrational kick against modernity – It is no whimsy of divine caprice; it is accessible to reasoned understanding.

Western ‘modernity’ essentially has stood on two pillars: The first has been described by historians as the ‘Great Transformation’. It began in Europe in the eighteenth century, and was based on a moral philosophy that saw human welfare yoked to the efficient operation of markets, as indicted earlier. Humans, pursuing private desires and needs, would intersect with others, through the market mechanism, to maximise not just individual welfare; but community wellbeing too.

Closely associated with this was another idea, taken up by English Puritans that had its roots deep in Anglo-Saxon history: It saw the ‘invisible hand’ of Providence also at work in politics to bring about another ‘ideal’ outcome. This view held that the jostling and hurly-burly of political contention between the Anglo-Saxon tribes in the earliest society – had given rise to a spontaneous harmony and political order. From this political ‘market’, English Puritans believed that the Anglo-Saxon institutions representing the epitome of personal freedom and justice, had spontaneously emerged.

Such key ideas about politics and economics were transported to the Americas with the Pilgrim Fathers to become, for those such as Thomas Jefferson, the archetype for the US system of government. The concept of the nation-state, democracy and human rights all flowed from this Protestant current.

These powerful ideas have dominated western thinking for more than 300 years; but by the 1920s, they had brought Islam to the brink: Islam was in crisis – holding on by its fingernails.

Of course, the ‘Great Transformation’ in Europe came about neither naturally, nor spontaneously. It was the product of massive state intervention and a growing system of institutional control. Making markets ‘free’ and efficient was, and is, an artefact of state power.

Historians now describe the Transformation as an utopian project that would be incompatible with any contemporary form of democracy: the transformation had brought stresses that took nineteenth and twentieth century Europe to the brink of revolution – and beyond.

Its impact on Muslim societies was no less traumatic: In the century leading up to Islam’s crisis in the 1920s, the ‘Great Transformation’ had been exported to the Muslim world. There was a rush by the West to create ethnically unitary nation-states in the former western provinces of the Ottoman Empire: A powerful centralised nation-state was seen as the only structure with enough instrumental strength to force through the social changes required to impose market liberalisation on Muslim societies.

As in Europe earlier, the impact of ‘Transformation’ was truly horrific. Justin McCarthy has detailed how five million European Muslims were ‘cleansed’ from their homes between 1821 and 1922 – as the West leveraged Christian-majority nation-states in the former Ottoman western provinces.

The anti-religious Young Turk determination to emulate Europe’s secular liberal-market modernisation came at terrible cost: In the attempt to create an ethnically unitary and secular Turkey one million Armenians died, 250,000 Assyrians perished, and one quarter of a million Greek Orthodox Anatolians were expelled. Kurdish identity was suppressed, and finally Islam was demonised and suppressed by Ataturk. Islamic institutions were closed; and the 1400 year old Caliphate was abolished.

Islam was in crisis. These events were being repeated – albeit less bloodily, but no less disruptively throughout the region – Disorientated and demoralised, under siege from enforced secularism in Turkey, Iran and elsewhere, and with Marxism filtering away its younger members, Islamists embarked on a journey of discovery. In common with other peoples in crisis, Islam sought a solution to its problems by finding a new ‘Self’.

The Islamist revolution is much more than politics: it is an attempt to shape a new consciousness

Islamists returned to the Qur’an for insights. The Qur’an is not a blueprint for politics or a state: It is, as it states frequently, nothing new. The Qur’an is a ‘reminder’ of old truths, already known to us all. One of these ‘old truths’ is that for humans to live together successfully it must be in a society which practices compassion, justice and equity.

This is the insight which lies at the root of Political Islam.

It is a principle which represents a complete inversion of the ‘Great Transformation’. Instead of the pre-eminence of the market, to which other social and community objectives are subordinated, the making of a society based on compassion, equity and justice becomes the overriding objective – to which other objectives, including markets, are subordinated.

Islam is not therefore a form of social democracy. Social Democracy accepts the principle of market efficiency; but attempts to mitigate its effects on those who are its victims: Islamism, by contrast, seeks to invert the market paradigm completely by placing justice, equity and compassion as the objective to which end, markets and other political objectives are to be subordinated.

It is revolutionary in another aspect: Instead of the individual being the organisational principle around which politics, economics and society is shaped; the western paradigm again is inverted. It is the collective welfare of the community in terms of such principles – rather than the individual – that becomes the litmus of political achievement.

In short, Islamists are re-opening an ancient debate – one that lies at the heart of both western and Islamic philosophy: Originally posed by Plato – the latter questioned the ends and purpose of politics: Is politics no more than a race by politicians as to who can claim to satisfy human appetites, desires and wants more fully; or is there ‘telos’ – in other words, a ‘higher purpose’ to politics – such as justice, for example?

Of course, the answer that you give to this fundamental question may determine how you structure democracy to achieve whichever ‘end’ you select. Iranian thinkers were influenced by Plato’s answer; and consequently have been influenced by his ‘Republic’.

Some westerners are troubled that after two hundred years of settled opinion, their vision is being questioned anew. One American conservative commented to me that with René Descartes, the West had discovered ‘objective truth’ through science and technology. It had made the West rich and powerful and Muslims could not bear that, he believed: they knew that ultimately they would be forced to acquiesce to western ‘truth’. But what is taking place is very far from this simplistic vision, and of great significance.

The Cartesian methodology has indeed exercised unparalleled hegemony over the last few centuries. And, applied across the range of science, political and social thinking has made the Europeans – and the Anglo-Saxon world in particular – uniquely rich and powerful.

Descartes had separated between the material world of ‘real’ things – to be touched, tasted, felt or viewed – that were to be explained and classified through scientific rationality; and on the other side of this rigid frontier, lay ‘ideas’ associated with fantasy, superstition, magic and illusion. There was ‘reality’; and, separate to this, the make-believe and illusionary figments of human thinking unrestrained by reality.

This narrow duality formed the stepping-stone from which leaped-up the ‘western Self’, and individualism, in its many variants. The Cartesian methodology, taken further by others in a logical extension of his initial work, however, would prove to be irreconcilable with another process of thinking, another ‘consciousness’, which was much more deeply-rooted in the human psyche.

The Cartesian system – whatever its apparent virtues – not only removed the vital conceptual ‘space’ in which this other consciousness could operate, it also destroyed the very tools, the mechanisms, by which this ‘other consciousness’ impacted on, and transformed the human being. It emptied this other grand narrative of civilisation, Islam, of meaning; and of power.

Descartes’ twist to earlier thinking was indeed epoch making: He did away with – effectively abolished – the idea of any meaningful order that lay beyond, or outside of the ‘Self’ – Or, of ‘good’, or of truth, being embodied in that ordering; or found in the cipher of symbolic meaning in the world about us.

He destroyed any space that such a conception might have occupied, by dividing the world rigidly between the real and the unreal. Effectively it was the rejection of the substance of what F. Edward Cranz called ‘conjunctive knowledge’ – even if Descartes himself clung to the husk of religious sentiment: The ‘sacred’ could either become literal – and functional; – or be disparaged as superstition.

It is not possible to make sense of the Islamic resistance without understanding it as a philosophic and metaphysical event too

The Islamist revolution therefore is much more than politics: It is an attempt to shape a new consciousness – to escape from, and challenge, the most far-reaching pre-suppositions of our time. It draws on the intellectual tradition of Islam to offer a radically different understanding of the human being, and to escape from the hegemony and rigidity of the Cartesian literalism. It is a journey of recovery of insights from that ‘other history of Being’, as Henri Corbin the French philosopher, termed it, that is far from over.

It has many shortcomings and setbacks – as recent events in Iran have shown – but its intellectual insights offer Muslims (and westerners too) the potential to step beyond the shortcomings of western material consciousness. This is what excites and energises: As a Hesballah leader replied to me when asked what the Iranian Revolution had signified for him, he said unhesitatingly that Muslims felt themselves free to think; to think for themselves, once again.

It is not possible therefore to make sense of the Iranian or wider Islamic resistance without understanding it as a philosophic and metaphysical event too. It is the omission of this latter understanding that helps explain repeated western misreadings of Iran, its Revolution and also of events in the region.

Hesballah are using techniques that stand outside of the usual repertoire of western politics in order to transform Muslims. It is not because Hesballah provides better community services that its leader, Seyed Hassan Nasrallah, is revered throughout the Muslim world.

Hesballah is using myth, archetypal narrative and symbolism to explode the Cartesian severance between subject and object, and between objective reality, on the one hand, and fantasy, make-believe and superstition, on the other. Hesballah uses these means to re-ignite creative imagination. The opening of this intermediary layer in the Cartesian dualism allows people to begin imagining themselves in a new way; and by imagining themselves differently, to begin to act differently. As they begin to imagine themes differently and act differently, the way they see the world about them, changes also.

Of course there is another side to Islamism: Islam, like Christianity, has witnessed, from the outset, a struggle between a narrow, literalist and intolerant interpretation in opposition to the intellectual tradition grounded in philosophy, reasoning and in transforming knowledge.

Perversely, for the past fifty years, it is to the literalists, often called ‘Salafi’ that the West has looked to circumscribe perceived ‘threats to its interests’ arising from the upsurge of revolutionary spirit among Islamists – in a mirroring of Cold War containment thinking.

America and Europe turned to a more docile and apolitical variant of political Islam, which they believed would be more compliant. But in so using the literalist ‘puritan’ orientation, the West has misunderstood the mechanism by which some Salafist movements have migrated through schism and dissidence to become the dogmatic, hate-filled and often violent movements that really do threaten westerners, as well as their fellow Muslims too.

The Western backing of narrow literalism and dogma in an effort to contain the intellectual revolution within Islam, paradoxically has left the Middle East a less stable, more dangerous and violent place. Western policy has empowered a current of literal thinking in Islam that is indeed narrow, intolerant and anti-heterodoxical. These are the movements that are narrowly opposed to all western intrusions into their society.

But possibly of far greater significance than the inflation of the current ‘bubble’ of literalism to the global future, is the recovery within that other ‘grand narrative’, Islam, of an alternative consciousness – another process of thinking that carries the intimation of a possible escape from Cartesian hegemony. In the long run – as the prevalent western paradigm erodes in the wider world – this may assume huge importance.