FrontPageMag.com has an interesting article about a new French theory on the origin of Islamism (which is a nicer name for the militant Islamic ideology I call Islamofascism):
"Whence comes the phenomenon known as fundamentalist Islam or Islamism? Some French analysts from a range of disciplines (international affairs, Orientalism, security studies, journalism) have come to an agreement: it comes from. . . the United States. Despite the inherent implausibility of viewing a movement engaged in a sustained attack on Americans as a diabolical U.S. plot, this argument has considerable persuasive power. It presents Islamism as an American attempt to retard progress in Muslim countries and divide them from their natural allies in Europe.
Such ideas come at once from the Right and the Left, representing both nostalgia for the French empire ...
America is "the last empire" in the view of these analysts, and that explains its aggressive policies. Paul-Marie de la Gorce, a leftist author with a Gaullist perspective on foreign affairs, believes that "the American empire is the only empire in the world today, it is an exclusive hegemony, and it is the first time that such a strange phenomenon occurs in human history."
Worse, the United States is a "totalitarian democracy," writes Alexandre del Valle (the pen-name of Arthur Dupont, a French civil servant). It is a lone superpower intent on preventing any other power from emerging and determined to control Europe. Islamism is one whip used against Europe ...
Richard Labévière, a French-Swiss television reporter, makes the same point in a recent book, ostensibly a work of investigative reporting.
Without seeing the CIA's hand every time history moves faster, and without falling into a paranoid interpretation of the "grand conspiracy," our investigation always ends up identifying more or less direct American responsibilities, more or less converging interests, more or less controlled instrumentalization in many Islamist theaters of operations.
Gallois believes the United States, by its very nature, must be on the side of the Islamists: "Islam much resembles the capitalist conception of society that prevails in the United States," he asserts in a recent book.12 Labévière also finds a harmony between an America bent on hegemony and radical Islam:
Islamism is fully coherent with the market economy. The theological-political order required by Islam fully conforms with the requirements of American capitalism. America's imperial design feeds on a weakening of any principle of sovereignty and territorial organization of the national bodies politic. This disappearance of political sovereignty foreshadows the untrammeled rule of an uncontrollable globalization [mondialisation] run by business mafias and religious fanatics."
Boy oh boy, I don't know whether to be unhappy that they're on to us, or to be happy that, for once, the Jews aren't getting blamed.
But, I do have to hand it to those French thinkers, they really know how to turn a phrase. America is a "totalitarian democracy." That is awesome. Awesome.
We should just start calling ourselves that. It's so badass.
posted by Pastorius @ 8:08 PM
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