Rakesh's statement is fairly accurate in both substance and interpretation. It is important to understand that this conflict is less about religion than about power and exploitation, but also that the Muslim world represents the first wave of attempts by former colonial domains to unravel the sutures of neocolonial capitalism. It is for that reason that the Bush led regime and school of aggressive American Hegemony must attack the Muslim world piece by piece to conquer it in the name of a New Economic World Order which controls by imposing the discipline of commodification and consumption and instituting global surveillence over all facets of daily life that may range outside of the alloted boundaries.
I do disagree, however with Rakesh's agreement with the Bush regime about destroying the so-called al Q'eda network. While I remain a sceptic about the organization that is supposed to exist as a hierarchical structure, I do see much more than terror as the raison d'etre and leit motif for such an informal network as exists under the mislabel, hype & propaganda that has been spun around it. In fact, I am even uncomfortable in using the pronoun "it" which may amount to a reification of a multifaceted and polyvalent process that could even be stretched to encompass our present discourse as subversive of the hegemonic project of US capitalism. In defending the widespread oppositional movements within the Muslim world that the US has currently targeted and labelled as enemies and terrorists, lets's take several concrete examples. First, while the media follows the official US propaganda format in labelling the Moro Liberation fighters and organizations as Filipino rebels, these groups actually represent a 400 year process of resistance to invasion and attempts to impose colonial rule begun by the Spanish and continued by the US and Filipino governments. At the time of Spanish arrival even present day Manila was under the suzreinity of the Sultanates of Sulu and Jolo that included parts of what are now the Malaysian state of Sabah and Indonesian state of Kelemantan. These Sultanates have both original title over most of what was established by colonial fiat as the islands of King Philip (Philippines), and a continuous track record of local soverignty and resistance to external conquest. Therefore, this situation involves both Malaysia and Indonesia in protecting the just struggle for autonomy and independence from foreign incursion into these areas of common territorial and cultural soverignty, irrespective of whether the US or UN recognize that reality. British and French imperialism created Thailand much in the same was a British and Russian empires created Afghanistan, as a neutral buffer state. The northern Malay Peninsula, Pattani, is part of the Malay realm but was given to Thailand and has ever since resisted and desired territorial repatriation to the Federation of Malay States (Malaysia). Continuous guerilla warfare by Muslim Malay groups has sought to affect this repatriation by force as teh Thai government will not entertain any discussion over this issue. The same is true with the Philippine government. Ergo, the only way open to liberate and repatriate territory that remains the homeland of indigenous Malay Muslim peoples is through armed struggle, which has continued relatively unabated ever since the European colonial powers invaded and claimed soverignty. If we look at the Chechnyan struggle against Russian imperialism, as another example, like many Caucasian expatriates, I am named after the 19th century Naqshibandi Sufi Sheikh and warrior, Shamil, who rallied Chechnyan and Daghestani peoples to fight for independence and held it for years until overwhelmed by force of arms. After Russian conquest between 8-9 million Caucasians, mainly Muslim, fled from their homelands in the face of brutal and genocidal Russian rule. That diasphora continues to support the struggle for independence from Russian colonial rule over the Caucasus. similar information can be presented about Uigurs under Chinese colonial rule, or Tatars under Russian rule, etc. Among the fighters in Afghanistan that were wrongly labelled as terrorists by the Bush regime, there are many who are not religious neo-fundamentalists, but rather warriors for national liberation, freedom fighters who had found sanctuary in their incessent struggle against illegal occupation of their homelands by foreign powers. This situation is no different that the Mau Mau, or Ghandi, or other freedom fighters against colonial rule. Remember Indonesian fought for its freedom from the Dutch until 1954, the same time that Vietnam got its independence from Frnace, it was not until 1963 that Algeria won its freedom. The American war in Vietnam was less of an attempt to contain communism than an extention of attempts to retain Eurocentric neocolonial domination over the former colonial world. I'll stop here only to cap this discussion with a premise that the US has moved into a new phase of its long Crusade against the Muslim World not only over power, resources, spheres of influences, etc., but in an attempt to crush the most global of all the forces of freedom that continue the anti-colonial struggle and the fight for national liberation begun over a century ago and continuing thorughout the entire 20th century to the present. -----Original Message----- From: Rakesh Bhandari [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, December 07, 2001 9:57 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:20434] Re: Afghanistan & class >Pen-l old-timers may be interested in knowing that pen-l alumnus Wojtek >Solokowski (sp?) had a letter in the current issue of the NATION [New York], >criticizing Chalmers Johnson's "blow-back" hypothesis. Though the critique >was somewhat off-target, I think that Wojtek had a valid point: it's >important not to simply think of what's happening in the world outside the >US as only a result of US policies (so that ObL is simply a creation of the >US war against the USSR in Afghanistan), because that world has its own >class structures and struggles (so that ObL also reflects an ensemble of >social relations that promotes clerical fascism). jim, you seem not to get the point. osama bin laden has not railed the House of Sa'ud for not enforcing 'clerical fascism'; that is, he has not complained about the application of the sharia or the treatment of women in general or Friday head counts, As Said Abirush has said, al Qaeda would not bring harsher theocratic rule within Saudi Arabia. In fact the House of Sa'ud *is* already the Taleban in the specific conditions of the Arabian Peninsula; the former after all is the sponsor of the latter. The differences between the two (house of sa'ud and the taleban) are a function of the greater level of eduction of Sa'udi citizens and the relatively greater complexity of the Sa'udi economy. I understand that this is difficult for the liberal left to understand: this is not a war against clerical fascism; it is simply a war to prop up a very horrific (compradorial )regime, a regime that has allowed Anglo American capital indirect control of oil rent, against a very horrific resistance which after all has exactly the same reactionary political markings of its opponent. we have all read the transcript of osama bin laden's video: he does not in fact complain that the House of Sa'ud is too soft on women or too unwilling to behead criminals. He is doubtles gracious enough to recognize that from his perspective the record of the House of Sa'ud is quite good here! He spoke against the US occupation of Sa'udi Arabia, the sanctions on Iraq, and Israeli expansionism. We have no evidence that the terrorists engaged in horrific and nihilistic violence because the House of Sa'ud is too soft on the population, i.e., not sufficiently 'clerically fascist'; there is a lot of evidence that people oppose the US occupation of Sa'udi Arabia on religious (proximity of US troops to Medina and Mecca) and economic grounds (tens of thousands of US advisors getting the best jobs just as in Iran 25 years ago , US downstream companies getting the oil cheap through netback deals, US defense companies receiving enormous sums for unneeded and way overpriced weapons, etc.). And it seems obvious that many people on the Arabian peninsula don't believe the US is there (or needed) to repel foreign aggression. That is, many seem to believe that the US occupation is meant to protect the House of Sa'ud from any kind of accountability in regards to how it disburses oil rent. But Jim if the illusion that the US is fighting 'clerical fascism' helps you get through the day, what can I say? Just know that this view is just meant to do that--make getting through the days of war for a liberal leftist professor easier. >If someone knows Wojtek's e-address, please forward this to him. Does Wojtek himself saying anything specific about Sa'udi Arabia, e.g, the politics and economics of the disbursal of Sa'udi oil rent and the considerable role of the US within Sa'udi Arabia from security relations to upstream operations (in which US companies have been allowed after a 20 year hiatus)? I doubt it, and I doubt that he knows much. By the way, I still believe that the best way for the US to defang al Qaeda is to put pressure on its Sa'udi allies to allow for democraticization, to end the occupation, to subject Sa'udi purchases of US arms and security to greater scrutiny (there is a lot of evidence that royal ministers are massively overypaying and then receiving some kind of reward from the company which is usually American or British). Until recently, discontented Arab youth had been shipped off to Afghanistan in order to spend their lives as soliders of fortune there or in chechyna or kashmir or palestine. Now they're coming home to a country that the US occupies; they'll now be unemployed and even more volatile, especially after they are imprisoned for one offense or another. Unless there is internal reform of the gulf states, we may find that the destruction of the al qaeda camps in Afghanistan had the consequence of strengthening terrorism. I do agree with our President that al Qaeda must be destroyed; I just don't think its possible as long as the US props up its agent The House of Sa'ud. Rakesh
