The Clash of Civilizations: Some Beginnings of Psychological Analysis
by Dr. Robert D. Crane
The April 17, 2008, issue of the “New York Review of Books” contains a
review by William H.
McNeill of Ben Kiernan’s new book, Blood and Soil, Yale University Press,
2007, which may help
to explain the 21st century’s ideological obsession with saving the world
from chaos by
creating a new international law justifying universal, unilateral,
creative destruction.
Henry Kissinger in his Wa****ngton Post op-ed position paper on August 12,
2002, calling for an
immediate U.S. invasion of Iraq, first spelled out this genocidal approach
to law as America’s
mission in the new century and as the most compelling reason for an
invasion (specifically even
more compelling than weapons of mass destruction, oil, and Israel). Osama
bin Laden had beaten
him to the punch even before 9/11, though their solutions differed
superficially in that
Osama’s solution called for a “global Islamic Caliphate” designed to
impose what he considered
to be Islamic law, whereas Kissinger’s solution sounded more like the
elimination of religion
as a better means to stop the seemingly inevitable disintegration of
global civilization.
As described in my 83-page Green Paper, The Grand Strategy of Justice,
published by the Islamic
Institute for Strategic Studies, April 2000, in Part III, “E***enical
Justice Versus the Pagan
Empire,” Kissinger’s solutions for the imposition of world order evolved
over time to account
for new correlations of forces. In his earlier Wa****ngton Post op ed
piece of December 3,
1991, “What Kind of a New World Order,” Kissinger opposed President G. W.
Bush’s call for a Pax
America, later rephrased as Pax Universalis, and opposed even any overt
use of the term “New
World Order,” because the world was not yet ready for it. In the run-tup
to the invasion of
Iraq, Kissinger for the first time used the term “New World Order”
overtly, though he never
seems to have publicly approved the standard NeoConservative strategy
encoded in Leo Strauss’s
“philosophy of deception” which called for enlisting organized religion as
a strategic policy.
Although the NeoConservatives as a group clearly represent an extreme
form of American
tribalism, Kissinger, as a lifelong guru of the “Establishment,” has
always opposed any kind of
nationalism, whether American or Israeli, if it is linked tribalistically
to exclusivist
religious extremism.
The history of American foreign policy in the early 21st century, which
puzzles so many
uncomprehending observers, may be deciphered ultimately only by both
secular and spiritual
psychology. A good beginning in developing this new approach to
understanding modern
ideological elite movements may be Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil, a new
“world history of
genocide,” which finds genocide to be identified by “philosophical
outlooks and obsessions,
often harmless in themselves yet invidiously related,” that supply “lethal
ideological
ammunition” for violence, and that these include “racial and religious
hatreds.” Reviewer
William H. McNeill in the April 17, 2008, issue of the New York Review of
Books traces such
hatred in “our” culture back to Deuteronomy 20:17, where the Lord demanded
that his people
“utterly destroy” the other peoples. McNeill writes that “most Jews and
Christians, we
thought, have buried that language,” but Kiernan demonstrates that it is
now revived with
unprecedented virulence. The latest warning about this revival of pure
hatred may be found in
Martin Marty’s article, ”Rod Parsley on Islam,” in the Christian Post of
April 14, 2008, and in
Sheila Musaji’s latest blockbuster article in The American Muslim,
”Islamophobia: Laying the
Groundwork - Us vs Them,” April 14, 2008.
None of these warners, however, point out that the godfather of
civilizational clash as a new
paradigm of post-modern thought is the Muslim, Syed Qutb, who was the
original perverter of
Islamic renewal as developed by the sufic founder of the Muslim
Brotherhood, Hassan al Banna.
When this advocate of non-violence was executed half a century ago by the
Egyptian government,
his movement was taken over by Syed Qutb who had traveled widely in
America and concluded that
the Qur’an must be interpreted as a call to destroy the axis of evil in
the West as embodied in
the United States of America.
Qutb’s false division of the world into only dar al harb (the land of war)
and the dar al Islam
(the land of “peace") had been a staple of Muslim extremists for many
centuries, but he
rebaptised it as a new paradigm of thought calling for eternal war with no
substitute for
victory. Although most Islamists have long since abandoned the Qutubian
paradigm, the most
radical fringe elements have left to found new cadres that are committed
to maximum destruction
but increasingly without any coherent coordination or strategic planning.
The extremes of
mutual demonization in our times, first raised to ontological and
epistemological heights by
the perversion of the Islamist movement half a century ago, has
metastacized into a war between
twin ideologies, one rooted in the caves of Afghanistan and the other in
the halls of
Wa****ngton, each perceiving the other as the cause of a war from which
their is no exit.
The solution can come only from interfaith understanding and especially
from interfaith
cooperation in addressing the injustices of the world and by offering
faith-based alternatives,
especially linking economic justice with constitutional democracy, as
recommended in my two new
books, The Natural Law of Compassionate Justice, prepared in 2007 for the
International
Institute of Islamic Thought, in its sequel now under preparation, The
Natural Law of
Faith-Based Reconciliation, and in the new 600-page college textbook
prepared by Muhammad Ali
Chaudry, President of the Center for Understanding Islam, in cooperation
with me as a kibitzer.
One conclusion of these books is that the clash of civilizations is
first of all a clash
within civilizations, more than among them, in which each side may
marginalize the other but
neither side can ever “win.” Another conclusion is embodied in the wisdom
of the Prophet
Muhammad, who advised us: “Even if you would know that the world will end
tomorrow, go out and
plant a tree.”
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com
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