martes, 1 de julio de 2025

THE FALSE CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS

What did Samuel Huntington's work really pursue?

 

By Sidney Hey 

Today, as never before, the schemers who inspired Samuel Huntington with his fallacious thesis of a clash of civilisations need a similar argument to try to restore the Anglo-American hegemony that is partly collapsing due to the accumulation of its crass inconsistencies. That book, presented as a scientific work, was nothing more than a pamphlet to prepare public opinion for the new war that had been planned against Islam since the early 1990s.

Thus in a passage of his book Huntington stated: ‘The West is and will remain in the years to come the most powerful civilisation’ without stating at what cost and by whom it would be paid.

Today more than ever the need to create a bloc or rather a Judeo-Christian front to support the stupid and criminal policies of a peculiar duet like Trump and Netanyahu is imperative.

In the last thirty years the alliance between neoconservatives and Zionists (Israelis and Americans) bore its poisonous fruits which materialised in pre-emptive wars, invasions and the deployment of the most sinister and stark repressive policies not seen since the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps dedicated curiously to Muslims. Behind these aberrations was Huntington's ‘clash of civilisations’ argument, which was not enough to convince Westerners themselves of its veracity.

Yesterday it was easy to murder simple Iraqi, Afghan and Yemeni citizens, all under the justification of non-existent weapons of mass destruction and the Islamic ‘fight against terrorism’ that gave authorisation to shoot anyone of that confession. Nor should we forget the pernicious campaign of hatred and disinformation aimed at inflaming confessional rivalries, targeting the Sunnis who according to Washington DC (based on their CIA reports) were part of the fable called ‘Al Qaeda’ and which the agency under the direction of the Islamophobe John Brennan later repackaged with another hoax called ‘ISIS’. Having rehearsed this, these thugs went one step further and, like the mafia, commissioned the assassination of high-ranking dignitaries, as happened with Gaddafi in 2010.

By then the intoxicating smoke of this clash of civilisations had dissipated and Barak Obama, another of the scams of the American deep state, changed strategy and as part of the same policy of his Republican predecessors, also changed the tactic of intervention and occupation to proxy warfare, that is, outsourcing labour on a massive scale, so that the jihadists who were supposedly the enemy in the ‘fight against terrorism’ became the infantry of Western plans.

What are we seeing today? The return of Donald Trump is ushering in a grossly hostile and brazen era, so much so that even a Brooklyn slum gangster would blush. He need not hide behind the dirty machinations of the neocons who propped up George W. Bush or Obama's stealthy double standard policies of ordering the assassination of officials of another country. Soleimani was perhaps the first sign of the criminal nature of his governance.

Trump has already shown that he has no filters and, worst of all, he likes to be that way. When Israel blew up an apartment building in Damascus in order to assassinate one of the Hizbollah commanders, Trump surely felt very identified. When Israel repeated this policy of assassination by murdering the entire Hesbollah top brass gathered in their bunker under a building in the middle of Beirut, killing several families living next door, his admiration for Netanyahu surely increased. That fervour would grow even more with the Mossad terrorist attack that killed Palestinian leader Ismael Haniyah in the middle of Tehran. It's certain that in his mustachioed head he must have been scheming ‘Why can't I do it?

This brings us to the threat he made on 27 June in his X account about Iran's spiritual leader Ali Khamenei, which, in addition to being contemptuous, is a demonstration of a poor (not to say absent) conception of how a leader should behave with his counterparts.

Disqualifications, disrespect and contempt should have no place in diplomacy or in a nation's foreign policy. If this is the Western potentiality Huntington spoke of, it has done that culture a disservice. Trump has certainly not inaugurated this mode, but he has made it worse. When the neoconservatives were in power under George W. Bush we witnessed an astonishing contempt for foreign leaders, so much so that we saw some of Bush's evangelist spiritual advisors call for the assassination of opponents of US policy.

The false prejudice-based conception of a clash of civilisations in which everything Eastern is alien and even dangerous (especially centred on Islam) to the self-styled civilised and democratic West has largely been the academic screen in an attempt to justify what the US and its partners hoped would be a quick and inconsequential task beyond the tolerable.

But the indiscriminate bombing of cities, the collective massacres, the systematic practice of torture, abuse and humiliation (Guantanamo, Abu-Graib, Bucca, Bagram, etc.), the systematic plundering of cultural wealth and, as a final result, failed states without sovereignty (Iraq and Syria), are intolerable consequences of all this and will not be erased by specious narratives.

The thirty-four years of a progressively aggressive Anglo-American policy towards both the Near and Far East make it clear that what Huntington wrote in his pamphlet was not a foreshadowing or, if you will, an analysis of the consequences of a meeting of cultures, but rather an attempt to disguise a brutal and inhumane Western onslaught on the East for the sole purpose of consolidating its global hegemony. 

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