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Could you ever imagine that the neo-conservative
movement and its devotees currently dotted around the
Bush administration have anything in common with
militant Islamists?
Surely these two groups are as
different as vinegar and marmalade, yet a three-part BBC
documentary, written and produced by Adam Curtis and
titled:
The Power of Nightmares
(http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1037.htm)
suggests otherwise.
For a start,
both factions seek to mould their respective societies
in their own idealistic image and will go to just about
any lengths to achieve those goals. And both share a
common enemy – liberalism and the societal rot, they
believe inevitably follows in its wake.
Tracing the
roots of the ideology behind the Brotherhood, the series
tells the story of the movement’s creator and mentor
Sayyed Qutb, an influential Egyptian writer and teacher.
Born in 1906 in
a small town in Upper Egypt, Qutb started writing about
social matters from a secular point of view in the early
1929s. In 1948, he traveled To Colorado, where he
stayed for two years, and was shocked by what he saw. At
the end of his visit, he condemned the U.S. as a place
without a soul, which spawned the cult of the
individual, where selfishness, vulgarity and greed for
material possessions were eroding family and community
ties.
“The very things
that, on the surface, made the country look prosperous
and happy,” relates the series, “Qutb saw as signs of an
inner corruption and decay”. This state of mass
ignorance he referred to as “jahilliyah”.
Qutb was
infuriated at the way African Americans were being
oppressed and segregated and hurt by racist jibes, which
came his way. But later his fury was to consolidate and
transmute into the germ of an ideology.
“One summer
night, he went to a dance at a local church hall. He
later wrote that what he saw that night crystallized his
vision.”
Qutb saw the
dancers as lost souls and was determined to save his own
country from such a degenerate influence.
Upon reaching
Egypt’s, Qutb planted the seeds of the Brotherhood with
his belief that the adoption of Islamic law could
ultimately save his homeland from foreign cultural,
spiritual and political decadence.
Qutb was soon
calling for a revolution, one that would overthrow those
leaders who had permitted ‘jahilliyah’ to infect their
countries.
In 1966, Qutb
was executed for anti-government activities after years
of torture, but by then his fundamentalist message had
inspired Ayman Al-Zawahiri, a schoolboy who was later to
serve as Osama bin Laden’s lieutenant, to form his own
like-minded group.
Al-Zawahiri was
jailed as a co-conspirator in the assassination of Anwar
Sadat – considered by the Brotherhood as too much under
the influence of the US. It was during his incarceration
that he conceived a plan to change the face of his world
by the sword.
Neo-con guru
Sharing
Qutb’s disgust with the way society was going – although
unaware of this at the time - was a Jewish professor Leo
Strauss, who lectured at the University of Chicago that
“the prosperous liberal society” his students were
living in “contained the seeds of its own destruction.”
A quiet and
unassuming man who shunned the public spotlight, Strauss
became the ideologue behind the so-called
neo-conservative movement, a message his devoted
students spread far and wide.
According to
Harvey Mansfield, a professor of philosophy at Harvard,
Strauss believed that Western liberalism would lead to
nihilism. Western society, said Mansfield, “had
undergone a development, which took everything
praiseworthy and admirable out of human beings, and made
us into herd animals – sick little dwarves, satisfied
with a dangerous life in which nothing is true and
everything is permitted.”
In the same way
that Qutb had categorized the fight between ‘good and
evil’, so did Strauss. He was a great fan of television
and would hurry home to watch his favorite Western
Gunsmoke, which he felt had a good effect on the
public – Good man lives and bad man get the bullet.
Another of his
favorites, as he would tell his students, was Perry
Mason, which he said “epitomized the role that they,
the elite, had to play.
In public, he
said, they should promote the myths necessary to rescue
America from decay, but in private they didn’t have to
believe those myths. Both Qutb and Strauss believed
individualism was a destructive force, which eroded the
common good.
The series holds
that “in the early 1970s, Irving Kristol became the
focus of a group of disaffected intellectuals in
Washington” determined to find out why liberal policies
had failed. “They found the answer in the theories of
Leo Strauss.
Strauss
explained that it was the very basis of the liberal idea
– the belief in individual freedom – that was causing
the chaos, because it undermined the shared moral
framework that held society together. Individuals
pursued their own selfish interests, and this inevitably
led to conflict.
“As the
movement grew, many young students who had studied
Strauss’ ideas came to Washington to join this group.
Some like the former US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz - now World Bank chief - had been taught
Strauss’ ideas at the University of Chicago… The group
became known as the neo-conservatives.”
The neo-cons
meticulously planned to “recreate the myth of America as
a unique nation whose destiny was to battle evil in the
world” while at the same time hoped to stop the liberal
rot destroying their country. The source of evil,
necessary to the project, would be America’s Cold War
enemy: the Soviet Union”.
“This dramatic
battle between good and evil was precisely the kind of
myth that Leo Strauss had taught his students would be
necessary to rescue the country from moral decay. It
might not be true, but it was necessary, to re-engage
the public in a grand vision of America’s destiny, that
would give meaning and purpose to their lives.
The
neo-conservatives were succeeding in creating a
simplistic fiction – a vision of the Soviet Union as a
center of every evil in the world and America as the
only country that could rescue the planet.”
In 1976, Donald
Rumsfeld the US Secretary of Defense and an arch neo-con
said: “The Soviet Union has been busy. They’ve been busy
in terms of the actual weapons they’ve been producing;
they been busy in terms of expanding their capability to
increasingly improve the sophistication of those
weapons. The CIA and other US agencies disagreed and
called Rumsfeld’s analysis a complete fiction.
“But Rumsfeld
managed to persuade President Ford to set up an
independent enquiry. He said it would prove that there
was a hidden threat to America.” The enquiry would be
run by a group of neo-conservatives led by Paul
Wolfowitz.
At the same time
the influence of Qutb was spreading too. At the start of
the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran, in 1979,
the face of Qutb appeared on one of the first postage
stamps. During Khomeini’s first address to the West, he
said: “You who want freedom for everything, the freedom
that will corrupt our country, corrupt our youth, and
freedom that will pave the way for the oppressor –
freedom that would drag our country to the bottom.”
By then, the
Christian fundamentalist movement in the US was on the
rise but they were told by their leaders not to vote, as
“this would mean compromising with a doomed and immoral
society. But the neo-conservatives and their new
Republican allies made an alliance with a number of
powerful preachers, who told their followers to become
involved with politics for the first time”. This group
is now President George W Bush’s support base and it was
Christian evangelicals and southern Baptists, who sealed
his election victories.
Swapping one enemy for another
When
the Soviet Union finally collapsed, it was seen as a
triumph for the neo-conservatives and out of that
triumph was going to come the myth that today inspires
them: “through the aggressive use of American power,
they could transform the world and spread democracy.
But, in reality, their victory was an illusion. They had
conquered a phantom enemy, an exaggerated and distorted
fantasy they had created in their own minds. The real
reason the Soviet Union collapsed was because it was a
decrepit system, decaying from within.”
The triumph soon
became bad news for the Neo-cons, who now didn’t have an
enemy to fight. Suddenly, there was no evil power
counterbalancing their ‘good’. There was nothing to
frighten the masses into becoming a cohesive patriotic
unity fighting a common enemy. From their point of view
George Herbert Walker Bush had let them down by turning
away from the gates of Baghdad and leaving Saddam
Hussein in place, while in 1992, they received a further
blow. Bill Clinton, a liberal, was nominated president.
“Determined to
regain power… they were going to do to Bill Clinton what
they had done to the Soviet Union: they would transform
the President of the United States into a fantasy enemy,
an image of evil that would make people realize the
truth of the liberal corruption of America.”
Once Clinton was
ousted and Bush the younger, a born-again evangelical,
was in place, a new enemy had to be found and that enemy
was fundamentalist, militant Islam. “In an age when all
the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom
enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their
power.”
The attacks on
September 11 represented the new Pearl Harbor, which the
neo-cons had once written was needed to implement their
grand global strategy.
“And in their
reaction to the attacks, the neo-conservatives would
transform the failing Islamist movement into what would
appear to be the grand revolutionary force that Zawahiri
had always dreamed of. But much of it would exist only
in people’s imaginations. It would be the next phantom
enemy.”
The series
argues that even the name ‘Al Qaeda’ was dreamt up by
the neo-cons and Jason Burke, the author of Al Qaeda
concurs.
“I was with the
Royal Marines as they trooped around eastern
Afghanistan,” he says, “and every time they got a
location for a supposed Al Qaeda or Taliban element or
base, they’d turn up and there was no one there, or
there’s be a few startled shepherds, and that struck me
then as being a wonderful image to the war on terror,
because people are looking for something that isn’t
there.
“There is no
organization with its terrorist operatives, cells,
sleeper cells, so on and so forth. However, there is an
idea, prevalent among young, angry Muslim makes
throughout the Islamic world. That idea poses a threat.”
Today, the
ideological descendents of Sayyed Qutb and those of Leo
Strauss, the natural enemies of liberalism and society’s
decay, are locked in mortal combat while ordinary people
everywhere have fallen between the cracks, victims to
the power of their manufactured nightmares.
The irony is
surely this: if Qutb and Strauss had ever had the chance
to meet over coffee, they would surely have agreed on
much. Certainly, they both believed that society was
degenerating, and that the end was often worth the means
if it meant getting society back on the straight and
narrow. They also championed a ‘good and evil’,
‘black-and-white’ vision of the world necessitating an
elite, ruthless band of individuals authorized to lead
the charge.
Their followers
have much in common too. Both sides have used and
distorted religion - both their own and that of others -
in the quest of their misguided ideological goals, goals
which may have begun as noble but somehow or the other
have got lost along the way. | 
