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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