Disaster triumphant. posted by Richard Seymour

Watching BBC News last night, I heard Andrew Marr describe how the Prime Minister had suffered no significant political backlash from the previous attacks and that the only person who blamed him for the attacks had been George Galloway - that is, he claimed that most of "civilised society" was one one side of the argument and George Galloway on the other. Forget for a moment that two-thirds of Britons accepted Galloway's argument. Forget also, if you like, the number of vox populi interviews on the news this morning which make the point about 'the war on terror' as a causal factor in these attacks. And forget that Alan Simpson MP put out a statement saying more or less exactly the same as Galloway, on behalf of Labour Against the War. That's Marr's purview - he is a Blairite, and tends to judge the range of political debate according to what parliamentary politicians are saying: the right kind of parliamentary politicians. This is, after all, the man who suddenly discovered that the Prime Minister had grown a few feet after the 'end' of the war in Iraq.

The next point he made was that this situation might not last, and real questions may emerge in Parliament. Not according to a rather shrill Polly Toynbee :

In the growing fear and anger at what more may be to come, apologists or explainers for these young men can expect short shrift.

I get a kick out of that conflation between apologetics and explanation. Seriously. It makes me want to cut a rug. Makes we want to boogie. For Ms Toynbee, if you read the article, this is about the Enlightenment being under attack. Frankly, I find this unconvincing. Anyone who has read Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment will have a sense of how Englightenment contains its own dehumanising, destructive apparatus. An immanent critique of Baconian science and Cartesian rationality, the book begins by noting, following two World Wars and a stupendous genocide, that "Enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant". How did the Nazis proceed to exterminate their designated opponents, except through the use of science and technology? The justifications for their actions were rationalistic in form if not content: they were, in their own view, 'scientific' racists.

Similarly, the descendants of al-Zawahiri who carry out various attacks on civilians across the globe tend to be educated, and as rationalistic in pursuit of their goals as the early Christian slave-merchants were. William Dalrymple went through a few instances: al-Zawahiri is a former doctor, Mohammed Atta was a town planning expert, Hassan al-Banna was a teacher. These were (are) religious ideologues, but they are not medievalists. That particular brand of Islamism, the one which has worked with the CIA, Mossad and the Pakistani ISI, is as much a part of modernity as the neo-fundamentalism of Bush and many millions of his voters, and the ultra-religious Zionism that Israel Shahak wrote about. Conflagration down-town New York is part of the same world as the destruction of Fallujah or the razing of towns and cities in Palestine.

Toynbee must imagine, as so many do, that ardent religious dedication is incompatible with Enlightenment, rationality and science: Robert Boyle, Descartes, Bacon, the early Jesuits, the Academie des Sciences and the Royal Society would have disagreed. RK Merton did not fabricate the predominance of Puritanism in the sciences, whether or not you accept the problematic thetic relation that he draws such facts into. In fact, rationalism draws from magical and religious convictions (see the invaluable work of Frances Yates).

Part of the game is given away in Polly Toynbee's equation of Omar Bakri Mohammed with Ian Paisley. Neither would be entirely flattered, but this does bring to mind the usual glib liberal gesture of bemoaning the influence of religion in Northern Ireland, Israel-Palestine, Kashmir etc. As if this explained the problem; as if religion was the crucial determining factor. I don't know how many times I have explained to wide-eyed Londoners that the Troubles in Northern Ireland had nothing to do with religion, that Catholic-Protestant axis is merely an incidental inflection on a national conflict. It was not to do with 'the divided communities' 'tribalism', 'sectarianism' or any of the rest of it. Religious themes certainly make themselves felt: on July 12th, it will often be an effigy of the Pope that is burnt on top of the bonfire, although the usual candidate is an 'IRA man'. But the root of the conflict is a legacy of colonialism, and any attempt to reduce it to religion or zealotry or anything else misses the fucking point.

It would be a considerable stretch to say that the lover's tiff between the US and Al Qaeda has nothing to do with religion, since both sides of the 'divided communities' (see how you like it) have use of religious justification. But essentially, this is a fight over the presence of US troops in the Middle East and the repeated wars that the US have launched. No doubt (and by way of mentioning the patently obvious), the bin Ladenists who claim to wage this war on behalf of Muslims are as far from 'liberators' as one can imagine. They are extreme reactionaries, bigots and thugs. They would have nothing to offer anyone, whether in Iraq or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else, were it not for the rising tide of thwarted outrage and anger among Muslims. And that, I'll repeat for the chronologists, did not begin in 2003 - it began with colonialism and Empire, and has continued with repeated imperial subventions in Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt etc etc.

A modest suggestion, then. It would be both just and wise to - as a start - terminate Empire, shut down Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib, close the overseas troops bases, replace the CIA and MI6 with modest defensive intelligence forces, disembark from the thermonuclear cruise to global mega-death, cease funding dictators and death squads, cease arming the world, stop manipulating democratic elections and trying to overthrow elected leaders, stop trying to force countries to make their economies ripe for being fucked, and use all the money that otherwise sustains the overbearing national security states to bolster welfare and public services, and pay reparations to Africa for the slave trade and centuries of imperial ravage. In the meantime, as a reasonable corrollary, countries could cooperate globally in a policing operation to catch and try those who plan assaults on civilians. In disengaging from imperial commitments, and ceasing their involvement in the mass murder of civilians themselves, our governments could actually try 'Al Qaeda' suspects without so much of the overbearing stench of hypocrisy. Just a suggestion.