The Two Fundamentalisms and How to Fight Them
“The Muslim world's predicament today is not the result of some external plot but the fact that "while the vast majority of Muslims keep silent, an extremist minority has hijacked the faith and is steering it into a confrontation with the world. . . . These extremists are supported by conservative forces that fear progress and modernity." So says Egyptian writer Usama Ghazali Harb, fawningly quoted by Thomas Friedman today in his endless quest to find Jeffersonian Muslims.
But the same sentence could be rendered “while the vast majority of Americans keep silent, an extremist minority has hijacked our government, and is steering it into a confrontation with the world…These extremists are supported by conservative forces that fear global equality and environmental moderation.” How many of us would simply accept this quote as a valid reflection of our predicament.
So what are we to do, those of us caught in the middle as we watch our government convert the simple terrorist crime of Sept. 11th into a vast conflict that asserts American and Western military dominance over the Arabs.
We need to fight the forces of fundamentalism, which are primarily driven by fear. I am sure there are historical treatments of fundamentalism that are far better than what I offer here, but on a gut level, I have always felt that fundamentalist ideas were based on fear of the future.
What else can explain the attraction of Armageddon to so many American Christian fundamentalists, except the idea that no future is better than the future of uncertainty, change, and atomization they are being drawn towards.
At the same time, in Israel, it is the fear of loss of any modern identity that drives some American Jews to set up radical fundamentalist orthodox communities, who will approvingly stone cars that drive on the Sabbath, threaten stores that might open, or in other ways freely use violence against those who may not share their beliefs.
What are they protecting themselves from?
At the political level, the Republican Party long ago chose to capitalize on fear to maintain power. In California, Ronald Regan got his start by fanning fear of communists, poor people, immigrants and crime. The GOP became the dominant party in the South by playing on white southerner’s racism and fear of blacks—a strategy that now is showing signs of strain as the diversity of the population increases, and leaders like Trent Lott and Tom Delay threaten to alienate large groups of voters.
So the convergence of a party based on fear, governing a country where many already are acting in fear creates “perfect storm” conditions for a particular set of elites to push for a major expansion of American empire.
Dan Schorr today suggested all the ways that the real world is impinging on the government ideologues, forcing them not to carry through with their threats to use nuclear weapons against north Korea, or to freeze Saudi Assets for supporting terror.
When confronted with a real world price, the rhetoric goes out the window, and pragmatism takes over. So the missile ship is released because it is illegal to detain it, and North Korea is not attacked because the elites cannot stomach the sacrifice of Seoul.
As to the original question—how to fight fundamentalism in America that is driving us to war, there seem two answers. One is to raise the price for these actions. In this case, the peace movement has been highly successful so far in encouraging political opposition. But the task will get much harder when Americans are being killed. Then who will stand up and say their deaths are unnecessary.
The second way is to clearly fight fear. When comforting a fearful friend, you don’t get far by dismissing or contradicting their feelings. Then you are no help. It is only by understanding the fear, by bringing it out, by helping them to see it may be exaggerated, it may not be real, or it may be being imposed on them that it can be gradually drawn away and dissolved.
We need to do this intellectually and emotionally in America, and recognize that our best leaders for the future are those who will stand up and create an emotional climate that fights fear.
The left should not only stand for moral witness against killing civilians overseas. We must also stand for freedom at home. Roosevelt’s four freedoms are not a bad place to start:
Freedom of expression
Freedom of worship
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear
Our view is that the current war fever curtails freedom of expression, it ruins us economically, preventing us from creating health care and retirement systems, and it does not free us from fear, but increases the chances that fear of political violence will come into our everyday lives, as we travel abroad, or act in public at home. Although most of us may not feel religious freedom is at risk, for Muslims, having FBI agents in Mosques recording speech may feel like a violation.
10:07:05 AM
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