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© Copyright 2004, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.
Jurassic Park, Pseudo-events, and Prisons:
The fallout from Abu Ghraib (Part III)
by
Stan Goff
[Hearts and minds. The Arab street. The mood inside the fence, where the doomed but terrifying creatures of the distant past have been safely confined for our anxious entertainment. This is the inscrutable mystery of the other guy. What makes him tick? Decades of betrayal and humiliation? No. Could it be the thousands of amazingly violent CIA training manuals with which Afghanistan was flooded during the Soviet war? No. Might the roaring waves of Saudi money have something to do with this troublesome resurgence of Wahhabi zeal? No. Then why is Saudi Arabia so unstable, Iraq an agonizing open sore, and Egypt roiling with underground sedition? The answer is beautifully simple, according to the Commander in Chief. Y'see, they hate freedom. -JAH]
JULY 02, 2004: 1000 PDT (FTW) -- The usual lens we use to examine social and political developments is ideological and political. This country is a democracy. That country is a dictatorship. This country is a social democracy, that one capitalist, this one communist, et cetera.
While this can sometimes be useful shorthand, more often than not it obscures far more than it reveals. For the purpose of examining the role of the Gulf oil states, a clearer and deeper interpretation can be found by viewing societies from the perspective of development.
The fallacy inherent in the ideological interpretation is threefold: it replaces those forces that are beyond the detailed control of individual historical actors with heroic (to the point of mythical) agents who have "steered" history by dint of their will; it implies a linear, unidimensional cause-and-effect history; and it sends the social analyst seeking to reduce reality to ideas, instead of synthesizing material conditions, society, and ideas. This habit of thought is itself an outgrowth of the era that is now past its apogee in the 'developed' West, namely "modernism."
Just as Medieval Europe took as axiomatic the existence of bodily humors, celestial spheres, and the Great Chain of Being, the developed metropolitan societies of today consider compartmentalized mechanical science and the dualism of Man versus Nature (note the axiomatic gender as well) to be inherent in the world, rather than social constructs which were born and will one day die.
Going back to the Jurassic Park allegory - when the park has come apart, the human inhabitants have been eaten, scattered, or driven to seek refuge, and velociraptors are lurking outside the park headquarters, the female protagonist, paleo-botanist Dr. Elie Sadler, eats ice cream with John Hammond, who tells a wistful story of his first "park" as a child, when he built a flea circus, then declares that 'next time' he'll get it right, he'll gain control.
HAMMOND: Creation is an act of sheer will. Next time it'll be flawless.
SADLER: It's still the flea circus. It's all an illusion.
HAMMOND: When we have control of this place…
SADLER: You never had control. That's the illusion.
More to the point, human beings - both individuals and collectives - have the capacity to create situations as acts of genuine human agency (will) that quickly develop into conditions that are beyond the control of human agency. And there are developmental tendencies in society that put in motion social forces that become more powerful than any individual, any organization, or any institution.
I can illustrate this claim with another. With or without George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ben Franklin, and the rest of that historic cast of characters, the American Revolution would have happened. There were already irreconcilable contradictions developing toward some breaking point between England and the American colonies that eventually made war almost inevitable, while the actual events of that war gave the American Revolution its specific contours.
With or without Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War was going to happen. The forces that needed to preserve slavery and the forces that needed to abolish it were already locked into a historic conflict, regardless of the specific scripts that were played out on this stage. I would go a step further and say that it was inevitable that the North would win… eventually. That takes nothing away from the actions and exploits of rebel slaves, of Stonewall Jackson, of William Sherman, of Nathan Bedford Forrest, of Frederick Douglass, or of Abraham Lincoln.
History is both determined and undetermined. Without having an appreciation for this interplay between uncontrollable forces, accidents, social/developmental tendencies, and human will, we are left with a myopic - and therefore utterly false - sense of what history actually is. It is a complex process, of which we ourselves are a part, but not a determining-in-the-last-instance part, and the process is "sensitive to initial conditions."
This preface is necessary before we begin to examine Saudi Arabia and its relation to the current quagmire in Iraq, because Saudi Arabia is where many forces, including those of pre-modernity, modernity, and post-modernity are still locked together in a bitter and highly complicated historical struggle. Judging Saudi Arabia as "despotic," "misogynistic," "backward," etc., as a way of reducing it, gets us not one step closer to understanding what this nation is or what it means right now for people in the West who are trying to make sense of the World Energy War.
Osama bin Laden is a Saudi, whose father immigrated to Saudi Arabia from Yemen, and whose mother, often described as Saudi, is in fact Syrian.
What do we really know about him or about his movement, and about how that movement relates to Saudi Arabia, which not coincidentally has over a quarter of the world's remaining easily recoverable petroleum?
Writing for the Daily Telegraph on September 27, 2001, Paul Michael Wihbey penned "Bin Laden's Secret Goal is to Overthrow the House of Saud." Setting aside Wihby's incredibly chauvinistic language throughout his article, Wihby is likely correct in his claim that "Contrary to much of the conventional wisdom about Osama bin Laden, the Saudi fugitive is hardly a madman. In fact, he has developed a stunningly deceptive regional war calculus that stands a reasonable chance of success."
Osama bin Laden is a military actor on the world stage, and the attempt to reduce him or his movement to "terrorists" obscures far more than it reveals. Just as bin Laden is not a madman, neither was Saddam Hussein, nor are the leaders of North Korea. Characterizing them as mad is a means of foreclosing non-military options for "dealing with them," especially when they are not the object of military actins in the first place.
Bin Laden's father, Mohammed, was extremely instrumental in the transfer of power from the venal King Saud to the more Islamically-ethical King Faisal in the early 1960's, so the family's pivotal role in Saudi politics is nothing new. Bin Laden himself is the inheritor of a struggle that began with the US attack on the British empire after World War II. That struggle which changed form through the Cold War, when the global standoff between the US and the USSR was a determining factor of last instance for the world for decades, and the aftermath of that conflict that disappeared with the US victory over Eastern European state socialism.
While we are speaking of the British empire, it is important to note that this empire was not built up on the inherent superiority of English ideas; it came to life as the first global outburst of hydrocarbon capitalism on the corpse of an environmental catastrophe in the United Kingdom called the iron famine, that resulted from massive deforestation.
By 1750 European economies were increasingly gridlocked and hunger was common, especially in France. The agrarian revolution impacted the environment in destructive ways. The Acts of Enclosure deprived millions of poor people of their access to lands previously held in common, and drove them into filthy industrial cities. Over seven million acres of commons were enclosed in a massive agricultural privatization program that destroyed the last great British forests, already under intensive pressure as competitive uses for timber proliferated.
The most dangerous bottleneck faced by the British economy was the complete collapse of the iron industry as supplies of wood for charcoal dried up. By 1700 Britain was importing wrought iron and pig-iron from Sweden, Spain and even the Urals.
That this trade was profitable evidences the grave crisis of the English iron industry. The iron famine affected the entire English economy and imperiled England's defense. This was the background to British activity in India and the Far East.
There were many attempts to solve the problem of smelting iron with substitutes, the most obvious being coke made from coal. These attempts did not succeed in solving the iron shortage until almost the end of the 18th century.
When the solutions came they synergistically combined to provide the platform for industrial take-off. But there can no longer be any doubt that take-off happened largely because of fortuitous accident (coal was available, but only in waterlogged deep mines requiring the development of pumps and then steam engines; Chinese coal was remote, but its mines were dry; the Trade Winds made the Americas accessible to Europeans, etc.).
As for the dynamism of institutions, we need to think more about the desperate straits Britain was in, by 1750 - than about any native superiority; and we need to register the way in which capitalism has never depended, since the Enlightenment, on any pre-existing institutions, regarding them all as potential barriers and sources of stagnation, and filling with content only those which served the accumulation-regime.
-Mark Jones, 1998
It was only a matter of time before the increased efficacy of oil for running engines was discovered and anyone without this technology was going to be left behind… far behind.
Beginning in World War I, the United States financial sector set out upon a course to bleed the British Empire, which they did to such good effect with war debt repayments, that the British obligation to bleed the Germans for reparations to make good on this debt led directly to World War II - do not pass go, do not collect $200. After World War II, the United States set a new course to make broken Britain its financial satellite, which they did to good effect.
This is important to understand because it was Great Britain that drew the national boundaries around the so-called Middle East (an imperialist term for Southwest Asia and North Africa), after the allies in World War I defeated the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire there. Those boundaries included "Saudi Arabia."
Saudi Arabia was populated primarily by Bedouin tribes, who were forged into a nation from above by Great Britain. Abdul Aziz ibn Abdul Rahman al Saud (Abdul Aziz) recognized Britain as the "protector of the Gulf," and Saudi Arabia was granted nationhood in 1932 and then placed under his supervision. Aziz was ever so willing to serve as a British flunky in exchange for the ability to control the emerging wealth from under the Saudi soil. In the same period, the Brits also installed Abdullah in Jordan, Faisal in Iraq, and the Pahlavis in Iran.
The other thing Great Britain did was promise Palestine simultaneously to the Arabs that lived there and to a Jewish separatist movement out of Eastern Europe called Zionists (while there were factions within the Zionist movement which rejected separatism, those factions were decisively defeated).
Ibn Saud's ancestors needed a mechanism of social control for the unruly tribes of Arabia, so they made a pact with Ibn Wahhab back in the 18th Century. Wahhab was an Islamic sect leader with a very strict, selective, and literal interpretation of the Quran. Wahhabism, the militarized religious trend out of which grew the Taliban and others, has been an absolutely basic component of Saudi Arabian culture from the very beginning.
Its regional influence accounts for the extreme social conservatism of many Muslims, much as evangelical Christianity has propagated some similar values in the United States. Prior to the rise of Wahhabist power, Islam was one of the great liberal religions; devoted to learning (and to the preservation and enhancement of Ancient Greek learning in particular) and the development of science; arguably less misogynistic than its counterparts; and consequently for some time the most cosmopolitan of religions.
In Part One, I made reference to the struggle between King Henry II of England and Thomas a Beckett. This was called the Investiture Controversy, a long struggle between religion and the state in Medieval Europe. The state eventually won.
There is a kind of Investiture Controversy in Saudi Arabia now.
While the Saudi political rulers have used Wahhabist Islam as a means of social control to consolidate their power, the venality of Saudi political leaders has caused many of those who took the strict religious edicts of Wahhabism seriously to actively criticize and even resist the power of the royal family. Negotiating this conflict is a major preoccupation of Saudi domestic politics, and it is compounded by internecine power struggles within the Saudi royal family - which now consists of around 4,000 princes.
In the past, Saudi oil revenues were used to ensure a standard of living for the average Saudi citizen high enough to effectively dampen the potential for social unrest.
We might say that the contemporary crisis of Islam began when oil gushed from beneath the desert floor… or else we might say that it began when US President Eisenhower and the Saudi monarch signed a treaty in January 1957 that made the peninsula's defense a part of the national security interest of the US.
- Vijay Prashad, "The Troika of Imperialism, Petro-Sheikhs and Dissident Jihadis," Znet, May 24, 2002
Externally, Saudi politics has been concerned with exporting oil and keeping 'unhealthy' influences out of Saudi society. Among those influences that would have constituted a threat to the House of Saud were pan-Arab nationalism and socialism. Fortuitously, Britain's new master, the United States, shared these preoccupations.
Gamel Abdul Nasser's movement in Egypt in 1952 sent shock waves through the ever more oil-thirsty West when they declared that "Arab oil is for Arab people." They didn't mean by that, "Arab oil is for the House of Saud." On the contrary, they meant that Arab oil should be owned publicly and used to develop Arab nations in order to raise the standard of living. This aligned the Arab nationalists with the Soviet Union, not ideologically, but in terms of the emphasis on (1) development and (2) autarky.
It did not ally them with the Soviets, but aligned them.
As part of our official Cold War mythology, we have been led to see the Soviet Union as primarily preoccupied with building socialism (which is wrongly seen as necessarily despotic). Stalin's use of Marxist rhetoric as a kind of substitute religious doctrine for the backward masses of the early Soviet Union only served to reinforce this impression. But the practical social project for the Soviet Union, that was from its first day placed under relentless attack from the outside, was survival, development, and autarky - each thoroughly dependent on the other. It was this project to build a modern society - in the face of invasion, civil war, famine, the rise of fascism, and a world war that killed nearly 25 million people - that ultimately resulted in the militarization of the whole society to achieve it.
When I refer to pre-modernism, modernism, and post-modernism, this is a reference to societies that are nomadic or agrarian (pre-modern), possessed of generalized scientific/industrial-era economic and social infrastructure (modern), and those societies that exist parasitically on top of scientific/industrial society (post-modern).
The Soviet Union aspired to modernity through a massive mobilization of productive resources and industrial development. This was also the project of the Arab nationalists. Autarky, that is, self-sufficiency and independence for the oil states and their neighbors, were anathema to the United States and Great Britain. The House of Saud was equally alarmed by Nasser's idealism and daring.
And so Arab nationalism and communism were seen as twins by the Americans and the Saudi rulers. The Saudis operated in a modern world even as they exerted domestic control through pre-modern conventions. Modernism in the region would surround them with the notions that inevitably accompany modernism - scientific criticism of religion, secular political projects, and the dangerous dreams of popular sovereignty.
Vijay Prashad:
It was in the vested interest of these petro-Sheikhs to continue in power, and they sold their secular legitimacy to imperialism as long as their thrones remained inviolate. This oily alliance cultivated and financed militant right-wing Islamic currents to undercut radical nationalism and Communism from Egypt to Iran and beyond.
The combined strategy of the US and the Saudis was to employ Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon against Arab nationalism and socialism. The US gave the Saudis a blank check with regard to their own security in exchange for their cooperation in this long term goal.
The Saudi rulers, themselves fearful of Wahhabist zealots, financed them heavily to create dependency, and actively encouraged jihadi adventures throughout the region as a way of re-directing their militant energy.
One of the key supporters of this Saudi policy was bin Laden's father. Islamic fundamentalists were opposed to the liberalism inhering in modernism and opposed to socialism which they took as godless.
While the Saudis were interested in unleashing Islamic fundamentalism against regional threats, the Untied States was interested in the Soviet Union. And though the Reagan administration was quick to try and take credit for the knockout punch to defeat the Soviet bloc, the Carter administration had set it up with the war in Afghanistan.
The Saudis had already been generously funding and laundering money for US covert operations against Nicaragua, Panama, Mozambique, and Angola, but in Afghanistan they would send an actual army.
The Soviet Union conquered and occupied border-states, but not as an imperial power in the strictest sense. They formed bilateral trade relations that were generally non-exploitative with these countries, even though militarily controlling them, and the primary Soviet concern was to build strategic military buffers. In 1979, the Soviet military occupied Afghanistan to support a pro-Soviet coup government. The pro-Soviet government of Noor Mohammed Taraki itself aimed at modernization, and as part of that modernization granted legal equality to women, which became a key hot-button for mobilizing Islamic fundamentalists against the modernization process.
The opposition did not have the capacity to mount an effective guerrilla resistance.
Enter Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor. Brzezinski was violently anti-Soviet and single-minded in his desire to deliver them a strategic defeat. His plan was to use Afghanistan as a launching pad to spread Wahhabism throughout the (strategically critical) Central Asian republics that were part of the Soviet Union: to use a pre-modern ideological weapon to mobilize resistance to a modern society constructed by the Soviet state so recently that pre-modern ideas still held sway with much of the population.
Laurence Coates, in "America and Jihad" (March, 2004), a book review of War Without End (Dilip Hiro) and Unholy Wars (John Cooley), writes:
The Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, to prop up a pro-Soviet government in late 1979, marked a turning point in the fortunes of ultra-conservative political Islam. 'You must understand,' said one guerrilla commander quoted by Cooley, 'that the [Afghan resistance's political parties] were very small then. Our organization in Kabul was very small.' US funding would change this. And the rise of radical Shia Islam in neighboring Iran pushed the US into an even closer alliance with Sunni Islamist reaction in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
The US and its allies funded, armed and trained between 80,000 and 150,000 Islamist guerrillas, or mujaheddin, hailed as 'freedom fighters' by Ronald Reagan, US president from 1981-88. In 2001, when the US sent troops to Afghanistan, these 'freedom fighters' were reclassified as 'illegal combatants' and denied the basic rights of prisoners under the Geneva Convention. The training manuals used by al-Qa'ida operatives today are based closely on the CIA and Pentagon manuals issued to the mujaheddin in the 1980s. 'US Marine training manuals translated into Persian, Arabic and Urdu,' writes Hiro, 'were found to be particularly good in teaching the recruits how to make booby traps and break down weapons…'
Brzezinski subsequently claimed that the aim was to provoke Moscow into invading Afghanistan and thereby 'give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam war'. Asked by a reporter if he regretted this in the light of subsequent events, Cooley reports Brzezinski as saying, 'Which was more important in world history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire?'
The US allowed Saudi Arabia to export Wahhabism throughout the Muslim world. Washington acquiesced to the 'Islamization' of Pakistan under dictator Zia ul Haq (1977-88) and his powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate. Zia, whose role as a conduit for arms and funds to the mujaheddin was vital to imperialism, leaned upon right-wing religious leaders to shore up his own fragile position. The growth of the Wahhabi sect - based on huge amounts of Saudi funding to religious schools (madrassahs) and the mujaheddin - led to increased sectarian polarization and attacks on Pakistan's Shia Muslim minority (about 20% of the population).
The added benefit of unleashing a Sunni fundamentalism on the region was that it could be used as a counter-balance to the Shia fundamentalism associated with the US strategic defeat at the hands of the Iranian revolutionaries who overthrew the US-backed Shah of Iran in 1979. To augment the effort against Iran, the US made a strategic alliance with a country that was achieving secular modernization amidst the regional turmoil - Iraq.
The United States would encourage and secretly support Iraq in its war with Iran for eight years, all the while gloating at how this criminally deadly war was bleeding both Iran and Iraq.
In Afghanistan, meanwhile, the Soviet Union was delivered a political defeat that bears an uncanny resemblance to the current US adventure in Iraq.
Then the Saudis and the Americans unleashed the coup de grace against the Soviets - the oil weapon.
Peter Schwiezer's book, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, while not the most exciting title in the world is nonetheless a fascinating account of a still little known but monumentally important foreshadowing of the World Energy War.
Reagan's dour, mumbling CIA director Bill Casey, imported from Wall Street, engineered a deal with the Saudis which Schweizer describes in riveting detail. Its ultimate aim was economic warfare against the Soviet Union, now weakened by its misadventure in Afghanistan.
If anyone who follows oil has ever wondered what caused the precipitous drop in oil prices in 1985, here's the story.
The Soviet Union's single most important source of external revenue for development was its oil exports. Its single most onerous expense was military - the massive military it maintained along the Cold War European borders of the Warsaw Pact, and the escalating nuclear arms race.
Casey struck a deal with the Saudis, who even then could single-handedly shift world oil prices up or down at will, wherein the US would guarantee Saudi security and throw in a host of state-of-the-art weapons systems for the Saudi military, in exchange for dropping oil's price from a (then) whopping $35 a barrel to $10 a barrel. Meanwhile, Casey encouraged Reagan to say outlandish and undiplomatic things in public - even things that sounded a little unbalanced.
Soviet oil import revenues were slashed by 70%, even as military spending was increased to respond to what was perceived to be escalating tensions indicated by Reagan's mad rhetoric. As one commentator said, Victory "effectively gives the lie to those facile commentators in the media who claim the Soviet Union fell of its own weight. It didn't. It was pushed."
Pushed out of the modern era into a pre-modern state, where 13 million have now died prematurely, where unemployment, crime, addiction, and suicide are part of everyday life. Hence the simmering hostility of Russia toward the US.
But "sensitivity to initial conditions" still mattered, and the Saudis were to reap what they sowed. While Wahhabi Islam seemed a great idea when it was opposing Arab nationalism, by 1991 both the US and Saudis were beginning to get a hint about the unpredictability of its potential.
There is a scene in Jurassic Park where paleontologist Dr. Allan Grant is examining a freshly hatched dinosaur infant in the laboratory. He asks Hammond's chief bioengineer, "What species is this?"
"That's a velociraptor."
With a look of newfound consternation, he replies, "You bred raptors?"
The Saudis stood bin Laden down after the Soviets left Afghanistan, where the Wahhabi militia called the Taliban would eventually win political power and establish the new Afghan government.
Bin Laden continued to amass his fortune in Saudi Arabia and to spend significant sums of that money criticizing the Saudi-American relationship. In 1990, when the first US invasion of Iraq was brewing, the CIA-trained bin Laden - whose own family had substantial business ties to the family of President George Bush - asked to use his mujihadin to fight the 'atheistic' Ba'athists of Iraq. The Saudis, fearing the reconstitution of an armed body in their midst under the leadership of a man whose public hostility to the House of Said was growing daily, said no.
In 1991, the US invaded Iraq, and the Saudi government expelled Osama bin Laden to Sudan.
In 1996, the Sudanese government, under intense pressure from the US, expelled bin Laden. He went to Afghanistan, a country now under the political control of his co-religionists.
The rest, as they say… is history.
Let me close with a lengthy quotation from the article by Paul Michael Wihby I cited above:
[Bin Laden's] strongest belief is that Saudi Arabia can be brought to its knees, the House of Saud deposed and a new theocracy, based on his version of a pure and uncontaminated Islam, can rise to power in the Arabian Peninsula…
…Even before the attacks on New York and Washington, bin Laden's power was felt at the highest level of the Saudi regime. Several days before the September 11 attacks, the Saudi chief of intelligence, who held that post for 25 years, Prince Turki, brother of the Saudi foreign minister, was abruptly fired from his post.
Turki was hardly a man to be dismissed in such fashion; he was responsible for Saudi affairs with Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the Saudi liaison with American intelligence services. It seems that Turki was the first high-ranking victim of a power struggle between two competing factions in the Saudi royal family over how to deal with American requests to neutralise bin Laden.
Turki's removal from authority portended further upheaval within the ruling elite of the House of Saud. Only two weeks later, and a week after the attack on America, reliable reports strongly suggest that the ailing King Fahd flew to Geneva with a massive entourage and now remains secluded behind the heavily protected walls of private estates registered in the name of his European business partners.
To bin Laden, King Fahd's departure can only be considered a victory in his campaign to rid Saudi Arabia of the contamination of American rule through their surrogates in the House of Saud. With King Fahd's health maintained on a 24-hour medical watch, and the Saudi royal family divided between the conservative, religious faction of Crown Prince Abdullah and that of the defense minister, King Fahd's full brother, Prince Sultan, Saudi Arabia's future political course and, with it, the stability of the Gulf is about to be decided.
Bin Laden has waited for this since 1991, when he was cast aside by the Saudis for offering his fighting forces in defense of the kingdom against Saddam Hussein. Bin Laden is intimately aware of the fragility of the Saudi power structure…
…He came to despise what he saw as a corrupt and malignant power structure indistinguishable from the American political system. Undeterred by deference and loyalty, he understood that the legitimacy of the Saudi royal family could be undermined by championing an alternative, indigenous religious ideology. Large numbers of young disaffected Saudis felt increasingly alienated by a regime that could neither defend itself by its own means nor maintain a standard of living that has dropped from $18,000 per capita in the 1980s to $6,000 in 2000.
With a deteriorating economic and political environment, bin Laden may decide that the time is approaching to activate the thousands of Saudi dissidents in the kingdom who form the core of his support, and thereby exploit the schism between Abdullah and Sultan to launch the destabilization of the Saudi monarchy…
…It is this scenario of internal Saudi confusion and political instability that bin Laden considers the soft underbelly of American strategy. The more it is seen that the Saudi royal family can no longer maintain internal cohesion and consensus within the royal family, the greater the probability that Saudi religious dissidents will heed the call of bin Laden and rise up against the regime.
It would be a mistake to reduce the appeal of fundamentalist/radical Islam to the binary opposite of modernity, superstition versus the enlightenment. While this variant of Islam that is gaining ground among the masses in Southwest Asia has opposed secular socialism, the masses themselves have given this militant Islam a certain anti-capitalist content. Not only does this pre-modernism now stand for the perceived stability of a retrograde clerical patriarchy, but it is a reaction against the social Darwinism of the West, against consumerism, against the sense of meaninglessness that threatens from the ceaseless capitalist tendency to reduce every aspect of modern life to a commodity. And the aspect of global capitalism that we in the developed world do not see is the very lash felt on the skins of the under-developed world, where societies watch little turn to less as resources are pulled away from them and into these Western agglomerations of technomass, flashing lights, and frenetic hedonistic motion.
Global capitalism is identified with their insecurity, their pain, their humiliation, and most of all with America and Israel.
End, Part Three
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