The outbreak of the French Revolution put and end to all hope of reform. More specifically, as soon as the Revolution passed beyond its liberal phase, when Louis XVI's flight to Varennes and recapture 'tore the veil of illusions' from liberal prospects and the Revolution began to enter a radical phase, those in England who sympathized with it found their position more and more awkward. Pitt the Younger stopped all talk of reform. England began to enter a phase of repression that lasted until after the Napoleonic Wars. Its fundamental feature was that the upper classes, in both the town and the countryside, closed ranks around patriotic and conservative slogans against the menace of radicalism and tyranny in France and against the remotest threat to their privilages.65 If the menace of revolution and military dictatorship had not ended at the Battle of Waterloo, it is highly unlikely that England would have resumed in the
nineteenth century those slow and halting steps toward political and social reform that she had given up at the end of the eighteenth. Acceptable regimes in Europe, the absence of a threat from that quarter, was one of the prerequisites for peaceful, democratic evolution in England.
Note 65: Much of what took place resembles American reaction to communist expansion after 1945. There is the same ambiguity about the characteristic of the revolutionary enemy, the same exploitation of this ambiguity be the dominant elements in society, the same disillusionment and dismay among its original supporters as the revolution abroad deceived their hopes.
I quote this at length in order to point to potential parallels in the second half of the analogy above. If one can think of the dismantling of the welfare state and various civil rights won over the last half century as the equivalent of a retrenchment of certain conservative forces, it seems that the new "far enemy" is Islamic radicals, for whom we are actually the far enemy. In that case, the analogy seems a bit off, but I can see how it might still work. According to many of the more astute commentators (as opposed to those who re-draw a thick line in the sand between US and THEM) the revolution in Islam goes in several directions and its relationship with the West is only one of them.
The Islamist response to, for instance, Western colonization or neo-colonization, in the form of the Iranian revolution (which, I suppose, was also an attempt at getting state power: according to most accounts, it was the leftist and even communist agitators that started the social movement for the overthrow of the Shaw; but the cultural revolution hijacked the social movement and installed the Islamic republic after the fact, possibly because the ideology had more of a local history. In any case, though the anti-imperialist rhetoric stuck around in the form of anti-Western discourse, the people who had started this leftist, basically Western inspired revoluction were often executed or imprisoned. But I digress...) was obviously related to Western interferance. And certainly the fact of the west looms largely in many of the conflicts in Islam. The point made by Aslan and others is that there is a reformation project going on in Islam and if there is a resistance to the West, it is against this kind of more liberal interpretation of Islam.
Of course, as Aslan tries to show, this interpretation is actually endemic to Islam itself, reflecting some of the fundamental principles of social justice Mohummed proclaimed in his revolution of the seventh century. Since the claim of the wahhabist and other versions of militant Islam is that they are returning to the true religion, Aslan is obviously trying to unseat this argument, even as he is cementing its legitimacy. Like all arguments over founding documents or founding fathers, it is always very dicey to try to argue against fundamentalists by accepting the foundation as legitimate. In other words, though the strategy will obviously be lost on people who already accept the foundation as legitimate, it would be far more effective to point out that when these people wrote, civilization was slightly different and that, perhaps, it would be better to look more at essences rather than intentions in the originary documents.
In any case, what I am getting at is that the reactionary response to this kind of liberal reinterpretation of makes he struggle mostly between forces on those terms, rather than being waged against the "far enemy" of the US/West. However, because one of the strategies of some elements of that reactionary struggle instead focus on the "far enemy"--particularly in it's "near presence" in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in England, Spain, and, once, a few years ago, in the US--it opens the door for reactionary forces in the US to reform the country along the lines that they would like to. Thus reducing the anti-globalization movement to a small rabble was the first consequence as organized labor pulled out in 2001 of a movement that they helped invigorate within the US only a few years earlier, and which had received some of the most visible press available in Genoa in the July before Sept. 11. The protests scheduled for Sept 29, 2001 in DC, which normally would have been coordinated around globalization (which had also begun to characterize itself in proto-Marxist terms of anti-capitalism) and would have been potentially much larger, disintegrated, except for a small group organized to protest the impending war on Afghanistan.
Surely the retrenchment had begun much earlier, but this seemed to put it into overdrive in the US context as defense against the "far enemy" became a convenient moment to push through all kinds of legislation--such as the patriot act--that took away some of the momentum of the earlier social advances. I suppose that this is not all that novel, but the point is that, regardless of the balance of forces within the country or the ideologies present, these kinds of international events and pressures--from the French Revolution to the current struggle within Islam--have the potential to reorder priorities and allow the currently dominant group to push through their agenda, regardless of what seems to be its ideological fit with the problem at hand.
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