Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2001 06:45:28 -0500 (EST)
From: Imre Szeman <szeman-AT-mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca>
Subject: Re: Postmodern Jihad


November 22, 2001

Dear colleagues,

When one reads a piece as sloppy and misleading as Waller R. Newell's
"Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left," which you
will find attached to the end of this message, one's first reaction is to
wonder if it is worth dignifying with a response. When one further learns
that the article, which has been circulating on the internet, was
originally published in the _Weekly Standard_, a publication whose
ideological commitments are rather to the right of the North American
mainstream in its pre-September-11th configuration (the page on which the
web version of the article appears features an advertisement for a bronze
bust of Ronald Reagan at a "special discounted price" of $2,245), one is
further tempted to let rabid dogs lie.

However, in the weeks since September 11th rhetoric of this kind has been
multiplying in the mainstream press as well. Most notably in the U.S., the
_New York Times_ has been  regularly featuring "think pieces" in the
magazine and in the front-page space called "Connections," linking in more
or less mysterious ways the current world situation to a failure of the
academy. This failure has various names: "postmodernism,"
"post-colonialism," "multiculturalism," "deconstructionism," "political
correctness." Let there be no mistake, there is plenty of room for
critiquing the actual philosophical content of, say Derrida's _Of
Grammatology_, and there is nothing wrong with investigating its implicit
political content either. But since these terms and others are bandied
about with little concern for their actual content, it is safe to assume
that they are all code words for something else, namely the fact that many
of the most prominent academic intellectuals are perceived to be to the
left of the North American mainstream. This, it can't be said too many
times, is merely a perception: its mainstream parallel is the idea --
propagated, of course, in the media -- that the news media are dominated
by a shadowy "liberal elite."

One would be a fool to be surprised at anti-intellectualism in the U.S.
press. One would be naive to be surprised that journalists will go into
print without understanding the theoretical positions they want to
critique. However, Waller R. Newell is not a journalist: he is a respected
and well-published academic at Carleton University in Ottawa. What is
disturbing is not that he dislikes the Left impulse that he believes to
dominate recent thought: he is far from alone in this, even in the
supposedly liberal academy. Nor is it the absurd rhetorical lengths he is
willing go to make September 11th the fault of the Left. Osama bin Laden
is, of course, a product of the West, but surely it takes a little fancy
footwork to blame Jean-Paul Sartre rather than the CIA. Conservative
critics of the academy have trouble making up their minds. On one hand,
deconstruction, critical theory, philosophy -- for that matter, the
humanities as such -- are supposed to be irrelevant to the real world and
don't need to be funded in a world of hard-headed "fiscal responsibility."
On the other, these same activities can be blamed for everything from
national moral decline to foreign terrorism. Today, Fanon and Sartre.
Tomorrow, Derrida? Rorty? A recent article in the _New York Times
Magazine_ blames multiculturalism for the poor state of foreign-language
education in the U.S., and therefore for American ignorance of the world.
Mainstream multiculturalism may have been born a bankrupt discourse, but
surely multiculturalists have been fighting against the gutting of foreign
language departments rather than the reverse. And for the news media to be
blaming the academy for parochial Americanism boggles the mind.

What is truly frightening about Newell's essay, and what conjures the
specter of McCarthy, is an absolute disregard for the ordinary standards
of scholarly engagement. Now, it is true that one of the great
"post-modern" critiques of Enlightenment thought and the scholarly norms
that arise from it is that no rhetoric can guarantee truth, and that
ideology will always be found to hide behind the forms of scholarly
objectivity. But the Enlightenment rules of academic engagement were
designed at least as a guardrail for keeping ideology within bounds, and
the fact that a professor -- of political science and philosophy, no less
-- feels licensed to abandon these rules in the interest of silencing the
thought with which he disagrees is something of which we should take note
and arm ourselves against before it spreads too much further.

For example, Newell's characterization of Heidegger -- a thinker with whom
we have nothing in common ideologically and have no desire to defend - is
simplistic to the point of being laughable. Again, what is disturbing is
not that Newell is wrong. That happens. Nor is it that he presents a
contentious interpretation, basically an opinion, as a solidly established
fact. That's journalism. Nor is it frightening that he appropriates a
generation of Left critiques of Heidegger (vulgar ones, at that) in order
to turn them back against the Left. Weird, maybe, but not frightening. No,
what is chilling is that Newell makes claims elsewhere to being a scholar
of phenomenology. If we give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that
he has read _Being and Time_, maybe a couple of times, maybe even
carefully, then our conclusion must be that he is perfectly willing to
suspend the obligation to truth which is the raison d'etre of the
intellectual. The public relies on academics like Newell to make sense of
obscure and often counter-intuitive ideas like the ones he discusses in
his article. Any evil for which postmodernism might reasonably be blamed
-- bad prose, maybe -- must pale beside Newell's abuse of this
responsibility and his cynical appropriation of recent history in order to
score a few points against his academic adversaries. No discourse is
ideologically neutral. But when the climate is such that the author of
_Bankrupt Education: The Decline of Liberal Education in Canada_ betrays
not the slightest regret at abandoning the ideals of such an education in
the interest of tarring his intellectual adversaries with the brush of
mass murder, we all have reason to be afraid.

--Nicholas Brown (U of Illinois-Chicago) and Imre Szeman (McMaster
University)


> ________________
> "Postmodern Jihad:
> What Osama bin Laden Learned from the Left"
> By Waller R. Newell
>
> MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about Osama bin Laden's Islamic fundamentalism; less
> about the contribution of European Marxist postmodernism to bin Laden's
> thinking. In fact, the ideology by which al Qaeda justifies its acts of
> terror owes as much to baleful trends in Western thought as it does to a
> perversion of Muslim beliefs. Osama's doctrine of terror is partly a
> Western export.
>
> To see this, it is necessary to revisit the intellectual brew that produced
> the ideology of Third World socialism in the 1960s. A key figure here is
> the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who not only helped
> shape several generations of European leftists and founded postmodernism,
> but also was a leading supporter of the Nazis. Heidegger argued for the
> primacy of "peoples" in contrast with the alienating individualism of
> "modernity." In order to escape the yoke of Western capitalism and the
> "idle chatter" of constitutional democracy, the "people" would have to
> return to its primordial destiny through an act of violent revolutionary
> "resolve."
>
>
>
>
>
>
>   Heidegger saw in the Nazis just this return to the blood-and-soil
> heritage of the authentic German people. Paradoxically, the Nazis embraced
> technology at its most advanced to shatter the iron cage of modernity and
> bring back the purity of the distant past. And they embraced terror and
> violence to push beyond the modern present--hence the term
> "postmodern"--and vault the people back before modernity, with its
> individual liberties and market economy, to the imagined collective
> austerity of the feudal age.
> This vision of the postmodernist revolution went straight from Heidegger
> into the French postwar Left, especially the works of Jean-Paul Sartre,
> eager apologist for Stalinism and the Cultural Revolution in China.
> Sartre's protege , the Algerian writer Frantz Fanon, crystallized the Third
> World variant of postmodernist revolution in "The Wretched of the Earth"
> (1961). From there, it entered the world of Middle Eastern radicals. Many
> of the leaders of the Shiite revolution in Iran that deposed the
> modernizing shah and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in 1979 had
> studied Fanon's brand of Marxism. Ali Shari'at, the Sorbonne-educated
> Iranian sociologist of religion considered by many the intellectual father
> of the Shiite revolution, translated "The Wretched of the Earth" and
> Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" into Persian. The Iranian revolution was a
> synthesis of Islamic fundamentalism and European Third World socialism.
>
> In the postmodernist leftism of these revolutionaries, the "people"
> supplanted Marx's proletariat as the agent of revolution. Following
> Heidegger and Fanon, leaders like Lin Piao, ideologist of the Red Guards in
> China, and Pol Pot, student of leftist philosophy in France before becoming
> a founder of the Khmer Rouge, justified revolution as a therapeutic act by
> which non-Western peoples would regain the dignity they had lost to
> colonial oppressors and to American-style materialism, selfishness, and
> immorality. A purifying violence would purge the people of egoism and
> hedonism and draw them back into a primitive collective of self-sacrifice.
>
> MANY ELEMENTS in the ideology of al Qaeda--set forth most clearly in Osama
> bin Laden's 1996 "Declaration of War Against America"--derive from this
> same mix. Indeed, in Arab intellectual circles today, bin Laden is already
> being likened to an earlier icon of Third World revolution who renounced a
> life of privilege to head for the mountains and fight the American
> oppressor, Che Guevara. According to Cairo journalist Issandr Elamsani,
> Arab leftist intellectuals still see the world very much in 1960s terms.
> "They are all ex-Sorbonne, old Marxists," he says, "who look at everything
> through a postcolonial prism."
>
> Just as Heidegger wanted the German people to return to a foggy, medieval,
> blood-and-soil collectivism purged of the corruptions of modernity, and
> just as Pol Pot wanted Cambodia to return to the Year Zero, so does Osama
> dream of returning his world to the imagined purity of seventh-century
> Islam. And just as Fanon argued that revolution can never accomplish its
> goals through negotiation or peaceful reform, so does Osama regard terror
> as good in itself, a therapeutic act, quite apart from any concrete aim.
> The willingness to kill is proof of one's purity.
>
> According to journalist Robert Worth, writing in the New York Times on the
> intellectual roots of Islamic terror, bin Laden is poorly educated in
> Islamic theology. A wealthy playboy in his youth, he fell under the
> influence of radical Arab intellectuals of the 1960s who blended calls for
> Marxist revolution with calls for a pure Islamic state.
>
> Many of these men were imprisoned and executed for their attacks on Arab
> regimes; Sayyid Qutb, for example, a major figure in the rise of Islamic
> fundamentalism, was executed in Egypt in 1965. But their ideas lived on.
> Qutb's intellectual progeny included Fathi Yakan, who likened the coming
> Islamic revolution to the French and Russian revolutions, Abdullah Azzam, a
> Palestinian activist killed in a car bombing in 1989, and Safar Al-Hawali,
> a Saudi fundamentalist frequently jailed by the Saudi government. As such
> men dreamed of a pure Islamic state, European revolutionary ideology was
> seldom far from their minds. Wrote Fathi Yakan, "The groundwork for the
> French Revolution was laid by Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu; the
> Communist Revolution realized plans set by Marx, Engels and Lenin....The
> same holds true for us as well."
>
> The influence of Qutb's "Signposts on the Road" (1964) is clearly traceable
> in pronouncements by Islamic Jihad, the group that would justify its
> assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 as a step toward
> ending American domination of Egypt and ushering in a pure Islamic order.
> In the 1990s, Islamic Jihad would merge with al Qaeda, and Osama's
> "Declaration of War Against America" in turn would show an obvious debt to
> the Islamic Jihad manifesto "The Neglected Duty."
>
> It can be argued, then, that the birthplace of Osama's brand of terrorism
> was Paris 1968, when, amid the student riots and radical teach-ins, the
> influence of Sartre, Fanon, and the new postmodernist Marxist champions of
> the "people's destiny" was at its peak. By the mid '70s, according to
> Claire Sterling's "The Terror Network," "practically every terrorist and
> guerrilla force to speak of was represented in Paris. . . . The
> Palestinians especially were there in force." This was the heyday of Yasser
> Arafat's terrorist organization Al Fatah, whose 1968 tract "The Revolution
> and Violence" has been called "a selective precis of 'The Wretched of the
> Earth.'"
>
> While Al Fatah occasionally still used the old-fashioned Leninist language
> of class struggle, the increasingly radical groups that succeeded it
> perfected the melding of Islamism and Third World socialism. Their tracts
> blended Heidegger and Fanon with calls to revive a strict Islamic social
> order. "We declare," says the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah in its "Open
> Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World" (1985), "that we are a
> nation that fears only God" and will not accept "humiliation from America
> and its allies and the Zionist entity that has usurped the sacred Islamic
> land." The aim of violent struggle is "giving all our people the
> opportunity to determine their fate." But that fate must follow the
> prescribed course: "We do not hide our commitment to the rule of Islam, . .
> . which alone guarantees justice and dignity for all and prevents any new
> imperialist attempt to infiltrate our country. . . . This Islamic
> resistance must . . . with God's help receive from all Muslims in all parts
> of the world utter support."
>
> These 1980s calls to revolution could have been uttered last week by Osama
> bin Laden. Indeed, the chief doctrinal difference between the radicals of
> several decades ago and Osama only confirms the influence of postmodernist
> socialism on the latter: Whereas Qutb and other early Islamists looked
> mainly inward, concentrating on revolution in Muslim countries, Osama
> directs his struggle primarily outward, against American hegemony. While
> for the early revolutionaries, toppling their own tainted regimes was the
> principal path to the purified Islamic state, for Osama, the chief goal is
> bringing America to its knees.
>
> THE RELATIONSHIP between postmodernist European leftism and Islamic
> radicalism is a two-way street: Not only have Islamists drawn on the legacy
> of the European Left, but European Marxists have taken heart from Islamic
> terrorists who seemed close to achieving the longed-for revolution against
> American hegemony. Consider Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, two
> leading avatars of postmodernism. Foucault was sent by the Italian daily
> Corriere della Sera to observe the Iranian revolution and the rise of the
> Ayatollah Khomeini. Like Sartre, who had rhapsodized over the Algerian
> revolution, Foucault was enthralled, pronouncing Khomeini "a kind of mystic
> saint." The Frenchman welcomed "Islamic government" as a new form of
> "political spirituality" that could inspire Western radicals to combat
> capitalist hegemony.
>
> Heavily influenced by Heidegger and Sartre, Foucault was typical of
> postmodernist socialists in having neither concrete political aims nor the
> slightest interest in tangible economic grievances as motives for
> revolution. To him, the appeal of revolution was aesthetic and voyeuristic:
> "a violence, an intensity, an utterly remarkable passion." For Foucault as
> for Fanon, Hezbollah, and the rest down to Osama, the purpose of violence
> is not to relieve poverty or adjust borders. Violence is an end in itself.
> Foucault exalts it as "the craving, the taste, the capacity, the
> possibility of an absolute sacrifice." In this, he is at one with Osama's
> followers, who claim to love death while the Americans "love Coca-Cola."
>
> Derrida, meanwhile, reacted to the collapse of the Soviet Union by calling
> for a "new international." Whereas the old international was made up of the
> economically oppressed, the new one would be a grab bag of the culturally
> alienated, "the dispossessed and the marginalized": students, feminists,
> environmentalists, gays, aboriginals, all uniting to combat American-led
> globalization. Islamic fundamentalists were obvious candidates for inclusion.
>
> And so it is that in the latest leftist potboiler, "Empire," Michael Hardt
> and Antonio Negri depict the American-dominated global order as today's
> version of the bourgeoisie. Rising up against it is Derrida's "new
> international." Hardt and Negri identify Islamist terrorism as a spearhead
> of "the postmodern revolution" against "the new imperial order." Why?
> because of "its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony."
>
> "Empire" is currently flavor of the month among American postmodernists. It
> is almost eerily appropriate that the book should be the joint production
> of an actual terrorist, currently in jail, and a professor of literature at
> Duke, the university that led postmodernism's conquest of American
> academia. In professorial hands, postmodernism is reduced to a parlor game
> in which we "deconstruct" great works of the past and impose our own
> meaning on them without regard for the authors' intentions or the truth or
> falsity of our interpretations. This has damaged liberal education in
> America. Still, it doesn't kill people--unlike the deadly postmodernism out
> there in the world. Heirs to Heidegger and his leftist devotees, the
> terrorists don't limit themselves to deconstructing texts. They want to
> deconstruct the West, through acts like those we witnessed on September 11.
>
> What the terrorists have in common with our armchair nihilists is a belief
> in the primacy of the radical will, unrestrained by traditional moral
> teachings such as the requirements of prudence, fairness, and reason. The
> terrorists seek to put this belief into action, shattering tradition
> through acts of violent revolutionary resolve. That is how al Qaeda can
> ignore mainstream Islam, which prohibits the deliberate killing of
> noncombatants, and slaughter innocents in the name of creating a new world,
> the latest in a long line of grimly punitive collectivist utopias.
>
> Waller R. Newell is professor of political science and philosophy at
> Carleton University in Ottawa.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>



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