Time to Exhume Marx

Time to Exhume Marx

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sunil-adam/time-to-exhume-marx_b_451960.html

Sunil Adam
Posted: February 5, 2010

I recently saw the critically acclaimed German film, "Der Baader
Meinhof Komplex," which depicts the exploits of the Red Army Faction
(RAF), the terrorist group responsible for the wave of radical
violence that swept Western Europe during the 1970s and 1980s.
Although the group survived into the 1990s, its heydays ended with
the capture, the trial and the eventual prison suicide of its
principle protagonists, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.

Watching the film, I felt strangely nostalgic about what was then
referred to as the "Age of Terrorism" -- the period between the 1967
Arab-Israeli War and the late 1980s when socialism and Marxism began
to collapse as alternate utopias. It was a time when the
Baader-Meinhof Gang was just one of the dozens, if not hundreds, of
terrorist organizations - including the Japanese and Italian Red Army
Factions, the myriad Palestinian and Irish terror groups - that
littered the Cold War world.

And what a world it was... overtaken as it was by tumultuous
developments: The East-West balance of terror; anti-colonial and
anti-imperialist movements; civil rights and anti-apartheid
struggles; anti-Vietnam, anti-nuclear protests; students' uprisings;
and feminist awakenings.

It was an age of animated arguments in smoke-filled coffeehouses and
dorms, about Camus, Koestler, Fanon, Gramsci, Negri and Brecht. A
time when dissertations were written on Che's foco theory, Mao's
"Little Red Book" and the Marighella's "Mini Manual of the Urban
Guerrilla." It was a world beset by anti-communist uprisings in East
Berlin, Budapest and Prague, followed by right-wing coups and
countercoups, including the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in
Congo, Salvador Allende in Chile; the Savak terror under the Shah of
Iran, apartheid violence against black South Africans and Israel's
subjugation of Palestinians, sometimes brutally, as in Lebanon's
Sabra and Shatila refugee camp.

Yes, it was a world up in flames in every direction, periodically
incensed by a massacre in Munich Olympic village, a bloodbath at the
OPEC headquarters in Zurich, bloody shoot outs in Rome's da Vinci or
Tel Aviv's Lod airports or a the made-for-television explosion of
empty jetliners on the tarmac of a Jordanian airfield.

It was also a time for unlikely heroes and antiheros - there were the
likes of Tariq Ali, Herbert Marcuse, Abbie Hoffman and then there
were Bobby Sands, Leila Khaled, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, and, of
course, Baader and Meinhof.

Even with so much violence and mayhem in all corners of all the
continents, the world seemed much safer then than it is today. That's
because even the villains of the day and their venality had a method;
there was a probable "just" cause behind most acts of violence. Even
the anarchists and nihilists seemed to have had a definable goal or
an alternative vision. One could find an ideological rationale, if
not sanction, for even the most spectacular act of terror, so much
so, terrorists who survived to retire or be paroled or reformed,
could still lay claim to the justness of their goals and rationalize
their actions.

A sympathetic 2005 documentary about Leila Khaled, the once-feared
member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP),
who now lives a retired life in Amman, Jordan, won awards in several
international film festivals. Till recently, she used to visit
European cities on lecture tours, speaking about the Arab-Israeli
conflict. The Kalashnikov-wielding poster girl of Palestinian terror
wrote in her memoir that she wept the day President Kennedy was
assassinated. Clearly, she was a different kind of terrorist who
waged a different kind of terrorism in a world that was very different.

We don't have to rationalize the wanton acts of violence by such
radicals to recognize that they were nothing like today's jihadi
terrorists who have only a barbarian disdain for life and
psychopathic lust for death. Such is the nature of religious
violence, unconstrained by the need to reconcile indiscriminate means
with a temporal or a tangible end.

But Western democracies are squarely responsible for the rise of
Islamic jihadism. Not only did they demonize the socialist but
secular alternatives to liberal democracy, but also recruited,
incited and abetted ragtag armies and regimes of the religious right
against the so-called godless ideologies and systems.

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Afro-Asian countries that were
still struggling with postcolonial nation building, were deprived of
the alternative utopia that socialism represented. The alienation
caused by flawed modenization and failed developmental paradigms was
easily exploited by Islam, a religion that by its very nature appeals
to premodern chauvinism.

Against this background, jihadi terrorism might just be a smaller
problem when compared to the looming danger of heightened religiosity
of Muslims everywhere, irrespective of ethnic and geographical
distinctions. For instance, young Britons of Pakistani origin
recently outraged their fellow citizens who were honoring the British
soldiers killed in Afghanistan by carrying placards that said "Islam
will dominate the world," "Shariah (is) the true solution. Freedom go
to hell."

That is the kind of senseless and purposeless bravado laced with
inexplicable hate and intolerance which cannot be cured without an
emotionally and intellectually resonating counter ideology. There is,
therefore, an urgent need to change the "clash of civilizations"
narrative by refocusing the antagonism between the West and Islam as
a class conflict. Only that would enable angry Muslim youth to make
common cause with classes alienated from globalization and render
Marx, not Muhammad, a cause célèbre.

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