Interesting article worth reading, part one of a series from Arktos Publishing
By Kerry Bolton
26th April 2019
The ‘clash of civilizations’, whose origins lie a century ago in Anglo-French duplicity, inflamed by Zionist machinations aligned with American millennialism, has created a refugee crisis, resulting in the presence of millions of Muslims in Europe and in Europe’s offshore settlements. As in any war (this one now being called ‘the war on terrorism’), enemies require demonization to generate sufficient hatred for belligerents to fight. The product of this need has been Islamophobia. Like the anti-Red hysteria against the USSR during the Cold War, at a time when more Bolshevism existed in New York than in Moscow, this Cold War II allows the maintenance and extension of globalist hegemony, supposedly in defence of ‘Western values’, which are a product of the Late West in its epoch of decay. Spread like a spiritual syphilis over the world in the name of ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’, this is what historian Francis Fukuyama calls ‘the end of history’, a millennium of liberal-capitalism as the epitome of human achievement. As in the Cold War, the
Right, whether palaeoconservative, New Right, Alt Right, Deep Right, or whatever else one calls the remnants of tradition, is dragooned into a struggle that is not only not of its making, but that permits it to be manipulated as a patsy, opened to a Trojan horse of liberal-internationalism masquerading as the Right-wing. This is being achieved in the name of resisting Islam as an existential threat.
The atrocity against two Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on March 15, 2019 by Australian gunman Brenton Tarrant provided the opportunity for the enemies of Europe to extend their already extensive campaign to suppress dissent to their global hegemony. The long-time aim of introducing ‘hate speech’ laws to New Zealand, to augment the race relations and human rights laws that have been existent there for nearly fifty years, can proceed with the most supreme of moral rationalisations. However, there are implications further afield. Facebook now has justification for prohibiting any and all dissent. Already sundry organisations have been eliminated by Facebook. The general public are told that Facebook had not been quick enough in barring ‘hate speech’, but in fact Facebook, Amazon, YouTube and PayPal were purging dissent years prior to the Christchurch shootings, under terms that remain ill-defined and unexplained. For example, my own book
Zionism, Islam and The West, which is so little Islamophobic that it was recently translated into Arabic, was eliminated from Amazon several weeks prior to the Christchurch shootings.
The mass hysteria that has been cynically maintained by the Liberal regimes and globalist social media corporations has focused on ‘white separatism’, ‘white nationalism’, the ‘extreme right’, and the ‘alt right’, all terms that have been conflated into a single deadly witch’s brew that is supposedly promoting global Islamophobia. The liberal analysis is typically dishonest. Islamophobia is not intrinsic to the Right, and it is only in recent decades that the Right has been subverted and redirected into opposition to Muslims and Arabs, where hitherto there was sympathy and even alliance.
Our Debt to the Arabs
The origins of the perfidy against Islam are in World War I, at a time when the Arabs were under Ottoman rule. Zionist hopes for gaining Palestine seemed at the time to rest with Turkey and Germany, while Arab independence rested with the vanquishing of those powers out of which, it was hoped, independent Arab states would emerge.
In 1916 the war was going badly for the Allies, and the only hope was to persuade the USA to enter. On the other hand, the Zionists who had placed their hopes in the Kaiser and the Ottoman Sultan for securing Palestine, had been rebuffed. Sultan Abdul Hamid had responded to Zionist leader Theodor Herzl that a Jewish state in Palestine was not agreeable, as his people had ‘fought for this land and fertilized it with their blood. … [L]et the Jews keep their millions’.
1 Zionist leaders approached the Kaiser, who was then trying to align with Turkey, the Zionists claiming that a Jewish state in Palestine would become an outpost of German culture.
2 The Kaiser did not acquiesce, and neither did the Czar.
3 The initial response from Britain to Herzl, by Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, was to support a Jewish state in Kenya.
4
Despite the opposition of Jamal Pasha, Turkish Commander for Palestine, the Zionists continued to remind the Germans and the Turks of the benefits of a Zionist state in Palestine that could serve as a ‘counter-weight’ to Arab demands for autonomy.
5 Other Zionists believed that Britain was the better option for securing Palestine. Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement, formed three Jewish battalions that served with the Royal Fusiliers in Palestine in 1918.
6 This however, does not lessen the Arab support for the Allied war effort, nor the promises that were made by the Allies to the Arabs. The Zionist belittling of Arab sacrifices in the war was one of the original modern-day smears against the Arab people.
Lord Kitchener, British Agent in Egypt and later Secretary of State for War, realized the potential for Arab support against the Turks. On October 31, 1914, Kitchener sent a message to Hussein, Sharif of Mecca and custodian of the Holy Places, pledging British support for Arab independence in return for support for the Allied war effort. The Sharif was cautious, as he did not wish to replace Turkish rule, which allowed a measure of self-government, with that of Western colonialism. At this time the Ottoman Sultan had declared a
jihad against the Allies to mobilize Arab support for the war, but while the Sharif feigned support, he sought out the views of Arab nationalist leaders. On May 23, 1915, the ‘Damascus Protocol’ was formulated by the Arab leaders, calling for independence for all Arab lands other than Aden, and the elimination of foreign privileges, but with a pro-British orientation in terms of trade and defence. Correspondence between Sharif Hussein and Sir Henry McMahon, British Commissioner in Cairo, during 1915 and early 1916, culminated in McMahon’s guarantee of British support for independence within the requested boundaries, so long as French interests were not undermined.
7
With both sides satisfied as to the guarantees, which included a sovereign Palestine, the Arab revolt broke out in the Hejaz on June 5, 1916. With Arab aid, the British were able to repulse the German attempt to take Aden and blockade the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. This was decisive.
8 The Arabs also diverted significant Turkish forces that had been intended for an attack on General Murray in his advance on Palestine. General Allenby referred to the Arab aid as ‘invaluable’. Arabs suffered much from Turkish vengeance. Tens of thousands of Arabs died of starvation in Palestine and Lebanon because the Turks withheld food. Jamal Pasha, leader of the Turkish forces, was to record that he had to use Turkish forces against Ibn Saud in the Arabian Peninsula, when those troops should have been ‘defeating the British on the [Suez] Canal and capturing Cairo’.
9
T. E. Lawrence in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom10relates the importance of the Arab contribution to the Allied war effort, stating that ‘without Arab help England could not pay the price of winning its Turkish sector. When Damascus fell, the eastern war – probably the whole war – drew to an end’.
11 Lawrence states of the Arab revolt that ‘it was an Arab war waged and led by Arabs for an Arab aim in Arabia’.
12 The Arab struggle owed little to British, or any other outside assistance. Lawrence relates in
Seven Pillars with bitterness and shame the betrayal of the Arabs by his country’s leaders after the war:
For my work on the Arab front I had determined to accept nothing. The Cabinet raised the Arabs to fight for us by definite promises of self-government afterwards. Arabs believe in persons, not in institutions. They saw in me a free agent of the British Government, and demanded from me an endorsement of its written promises. So I had to join the conspiracy, and, for what my word was worth, assured the men of their reward. In our two years’ partnership under fire they grew accustomed to believing me and to think my Government, like myself, sincere. In this hope they performed some fine things, but, of course, instead of being proud of what we did together, I was bitterly ashamed.
It was evident from the beginning that if we won the war these promises would be dead paper, and had I been an honest adviser of the Arabs I would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives fighting for such stuff: but I salved myself with the hope that, by leading these Arabs madly in the final victory I would establish them, with arms in their hands, in a position so assured (if not dominant) that expediency would counsel to the Great Powers a fair settlement of their claims. In other words, I presumed (seeing no other leader with the will and power) that I would survive the campaigns, and be able to defeat not merely the Turks on the battlefield, but my own country and its allies in the council-chamber.
13
The Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 between Britain and France establishing Franco-British hegemony over the region after the war, and the Balfour Declaration establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, were the reward that the Arabs got for their struggle. Among the principal conspirators of the latter was James A. Malcolm, adviser to the British Government on Eastern Affairs. It is with Malcolm that one of the early slurs against the Arabs is used to justify his proposition that the USA could be brought into the war if the British promised Palestine to the Jews as a national homeland. In a lengthy note Malcolm disparages the Arab Revolt and its contribution to the Allies, which contradicts the accounts by Lawrence, and the assessments of the British military leaders in that theatre of war. Malcolm wrote:
Early in the War the Arabs and their British friends represented that they were in a position to render very great assistance in the Middle East. It was on the strength of these representations and pretensions that the promise contained in the MacMahon letter to King Hussein was made. It was subsequently found that the Arabs were unable to ‘deliver the goods’ and the so-called ‘Revolt in the Desert’ was but a mirage.
14
Malcolm shamefully claimed that Lawrence was ‘profoundly disappointed’ with the Arabs. As
Seven Pillars, and Lawrence’s lifelong bitterness at the betrayal of the Arabs, shows, Malcolm was a liar, but his slurs became staple fare dished up by the Islamophobes. Rather, the acclaimed British military historian Captain Basil Liddell Hart,
15 Chief Military Commentator with the Allied Forces during World War I, reiterates what Lawrence had seen first-hand:
In the crucial weeks while Allenby’s stroke was being prepared and during its delivery, nearly half the Turkish forces south of Damascus were distracted by the Arab forces. … What the absence of these forces meant to the success of Allenby’s stroke, it is easy to see. Nor did the Arab operation end when it had opened the way. For in the issue, it was the Arabs who almost entirely wiped out the Fourth Army, the still intact forces that might have barred the way to final victory. The wear and tear, the bodily and mental strain on men and material applied by the Arabs … prepared the way that produced their (the Turks) defeat.
16
Islam and the Right
The origins of Islamophobia rest with a powerful pro-Zionist network that has created or redirected organisations called ‘Right-wing’ by media and academia, whose ideology seldom has connections with Rightist ideologies. There are several factors that have developed into this situation over decades. The oddly named ‘neoconservative’ movement is neither ‘new’ nor ‘conservative’. It is warmed over Whig Liberalism and Wilsonian democratic-internationalism. This ideology was adopted by ex-Trotskyites and other disaffected Marxists who hated the USSR under Stalinism to the extent that they joined the ranks of the USA during the Cold War in organisations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
17 and the subsequent National Endowment for Democracy, founded by Trotskyites of the Shachtman faction. Even Sedova, Trotsky’s widow, became a Cold War zealot against the USSR.
18
With the implosion of the Soviet bloc a new world bogeyman was required to justify U.S. global hegemony. This was Islam, ironically created as a weapon against the USSR in Afghanistan.
19 The ‘war on terrorism’ became the new American global
raison d’être. Many of the ‘neocons’ are Zionists, seeing Israel as the USA’s primary ally against the Islamic onslaught. These ex-Trotskyites and their heirs easily adapted Trotskyite terminology to serve the American ‘world revolution’, using such terms as ‘Islamofascism’ and portraying dissident rulers of states such as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria as the ‘new Hitlers’.
To distinguish between traditional conservativism and these phoney, misnamed ‘neo-conservatives’, a Jewish scholar, Dr. Paul Gottfried, coined the terms ‘palaeoconservative’ and ‘Alt Right’. These Rightists do not blindly follow Israel, nor do they advocate for U.S. interference across the world, including the Middle East. Dr. Gottfried in 2008 sought to draw a clear line of distinction between an Alt Right and the neocon masquerade, identifying the bogus character of what is still being called ‘Right’, which includes certain of the parties and individuals discussed below:
More recently we have been confronted by another problem on the right, namely groups that give little evidence of being what they claim to be. As far as I can tell, there is nothing intrinsically rightwing about denying the claims of family and society on the putatively autonomous individual. And the dream of living outside of the state in a society of self-actualizing individuals, opening themselves up to being physically displaced by the entire Third World, if its population chooses to settle on this continent, is not a rightist alternative to anything. It is a failed leftist utopia. It is one thing to deplore the modern welfare state as a vehicle of grotesque social change or for its violations of the U.S. Constitution. It is another matter to believe that all authority structures can be reduced to insurance companies formed to protect the property and lives of anarcho-capitalists. Such a belief goes counter to everything we know about human Nature, and even such an embattled anti-welfare statist as H.L. Mencken never hoped to destroy all government. He loathed egalitarian democracy but not the traditional social and political authorities in which communal life had developed and which conforms to our intertwined social needs.
20
Dr. Gottfried also stated that
the ‘true Right’ are ‘radical’, ‘in the sense that it is an oppositional force that tries to uncover the root causes of our political and cultural crises and then to address them’21. What is termed ‘Right’ too often responds to symptoms rather than seeking causes, and this is particularly true in regard to the issues of Islam, migration, and the ‘clash of civilisations’.
In Europe the New Right,
Nouvelle Droite, is a metapolitical movement, primarily under the intellectual influence of Alain de Benoist.
22 The New Right sees the USA not as the ‘defender of Western values’, the neocon position from the days of the Cold War, but as the purveyor of Late Western culture-pathology. In this American palaeoconservatives such as Samuel Francis and Patrick Buchanan, have been in accord. New movements such as the youth counter-revolution, the
Identitarians,
23 emerge from this ideological current, seeing the need to transcend, not defend, the Late West.
This actual Right, old and new, did not see Islam and Arabs as threats. Rather there was kinship in that both rejected the Liberalism, nihilism, and hedonism of the Late West, which the neocons see as the epitome of human endeavour – as the ‘end of history’. To this can be added a very important factor; that of international finance,
usury, which Islam, like the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church, calls a sin (
riba). Indeed, one might suspect that behind much ‘Islamophobia’ and the destruction of ‘rogue nations’ is the aim of eliminating the Muslim system of banking. Certain Islamophobic neocon eminences list ‘Sharia law’ on finance and banking as among the threats to ‘Western values’ that must be purged.
In my
Arktos Journal article on the Mosque shootings, I wrote briefly on the alliance and kinship that has traditionally existed between the genuine Right and Islam, quoting the French Rightist Dr. Christian Bouchet,
24 whose own associations with Muslims have been notable. I will add here a few more examples that indicate that animosity towards Islam is not a heritage of the Right.
Friedrich Nietzsche considered Islam to have originated in ‘noble and manly instincts’, and paid homage to the ‘wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain’.
25With the wave of defamation that has described Islam in the most primitive way, a rich cultural legacy has been forgotten, while Zionists can present Israel as the only well-spring of civilisation in the region, where they made the ‘desert bloom’, where they brought symphony orchestras and where once there were only dirt-grubbers and camel traders. Nietzsche recalled another legacy.
Professor Claudio Mutti, Italian convert to Islam and philosopher of the Right, wrote of the interest Muslim scholars have shown in Julius Evola’s works. He states that in the early 1990s Muslim nationalist philosopher Gedjar Dzemal, founder of the Party for Islamic Renaissance, provided Russian television with a programme devoted to Evola. In 1994, on the initiative of a professor of Islamic theology at the University of Marmara,
Modern Dünyaya Baçkaldïrï, the Turkish translation of Evola’s
Revolt Against the Modern Worldwas published in Istanbul. The same year Turkish translations of René Guénon’s
The Crisis of the Modern World (
Modern Dünyanin Bunalimi), and
The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times(
Niceligin egemenligi ve çagin alâmetleri), were published.
26 Mutti, in considering Evola’s knowledge of Islam, writes that although Islam only occupied a few pages in
Revolt Against the Modern World, it represents ‘sufficient depth’. Evola, like Nietzsche, regarded Islam as ‘a tradition at a higher level than both Judaism and the religious beliefs that conquered the West’; ‘Evola points out that Islamic symbolism clearly indicates a direct connection of this tradition to the Primordial Tradition itself’.
27 Mutti quoted Evola from
Revolt Against the Modern World:
Although Islam considers itself the ‘religion of Abraham,’ even to the point of attributing to him the foundation of the Kaaba (in which we find again the theme of the ‘stone,’ or the symbol of the ‘center’), it is nevertheless true that (a) it claimed independence from both Judaism and Christianity; (b) the Kaaba, with its symbolism of the center, is a pre-Islamic location and has even older origins that cannot be dated accurately; (c) in the esoteric Islamic tradition, the main reference point is al-Khadir, a popular figure conceived as superior to and predating the biblical prophets (Koran 18:59-81).
Particularly worthy to Evola was the sacred war of every Tradition, whether Hindu, Shinto or Roman, and Mutti points out Evola, in considering Islam, wrote:
the notion of jihad and on its double-application, in conformity to the famous hadith of the Prophet: ‘Raja’nâ min al-jihâd al-açghar ilâ-l jihâd al akbar’, that is to say: ‘You have returned from a lesser struggle to the greater struggle;’ or, if we prefer: ‘from the lesser to the greater holy war.’
That hadith, which provides the title for a chapter in Revolt Against the Modern World (‘The Greater and the Lesser Holy War’), is additionally commented on by Evola:
‘In the Islamic tradition a distinction is made between two holy wars, the “greater holy war” (el-jihadul-akbar) and the “lesser holy war” (el-jihadul-asghar). This distinction originated from a saying (hadith) of the Prophet, who on the way back from a military expedition said: “You have returned from a lesser holy war to the greater holy war.” The greater holy war is of an inner spiritual nature; the other is the material war waged externally against an enemy population with the particular intent of bringing “infidel” populations under the territory of “God’s Law” (dar al-Islam).
utti comments: ‘Elsewhere, Evola sees in the idea of jihad a “late rebirth of a primordial Aryan heritage”, such that “the Islamic tradition serves here as the transmitter of the Aryo-Iranian tradition”’.
28
Might the ‘greater jihad’ not be comparable to Nietzsche’s self-overcoming, and sublimation? Might not a better understanding be had from this than from the agitation of neocons and Zionists in their referring only to the ‘lesser jihad’?
Given the hysteria generated by the pro-Zionist ‘Right’ (sic) that often accompanies plans to build a mosque in a Western city, in regard to the buried legacy of the actual Right, Mutti states that a request from the Shah of Persia to build a mosque in Rome was received with enthusiasm by Mussolini, but it was due to opposition from the Church that the idea was abandoned. In return, a Church was to be built at Mecca. Mutti mentions a reference to Mussolini stating in 1913, when still a Socialist journalist, that he will be reading ‘Nietzsche and the Koran’. Mutit writes that,
It was … during the thirties that the relationship between Fascism and Islam consolidated considerably. The fascist journalism of those years shows us in fact a whole series of positions that go from pragmatic pro-Islamism and geopolitical reasons to the affirmation of a doctrinal affinity between Fascism and Islam. In this regard, in addition to some isolated but significant facts, such as the appearance of a book in which Gustavo Pesenti (former commander of the Italian contingent in Palestine) assigns Italy a Mediterranean function of ‘Islamic power’, it should be noted above all the numerous and continuous interventions of
Italian Life(directed by Giovanni Preziosi) in favour of a close solidarity between Fascism and Islam. Among those on the Italian side who actually worked for this collaboration, we remember above all two characters: Enrico Insabato and Carlo Arturo Enderle. The former had been director of the Italian-Arab magazine
Il Convito – An-Nâdî, published in Cairo from 1904 to 1907, inspired by the writings of shaykh Abd er-Rahmân Illaysh al-Kabîr, the initiator of René Guénon into Sufism. …
The pro-Islamic positions taken by fascist intellectuals were widely reciprocated by the Muslims.
The greatest poet of Muslim India and spiritual father of Pakistan, Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), who in 1932, before presiding over the Muslim Congress of Jerusalem, had been received by the Duce and had given a speech at the Academy of Italy, sees in Fascism a force fighting against the enemies of Islam themselves and dedicates a poem to Benito Mussolini, who ‘mercilessly laid bare the secrets of European politics’. Speaking of the regeneration of Italy in the name of the Fascio littorio, in 1935
Iqbal says: ‘The heir of Rome, old in ancient forms, has been renewed and reborn, young. In the spirit of Islam the same energy vibrates today’.29
In Italy’s East African colonies Muslim religious worship and education were supported and Muslim courts recognised. Historian Denis Mack Smith, neither Rightist nor neo-fascist, wrote that ‘Fascist administrators in Libya, Somalia and Eritrea achieved much that was good, they did much to control slavery, epidemics and inter-tribal fighting’.
30 In return Muslim populations were loyal to Mussolini.
During the Spanish uprising against Bolshevism, the first to receive Spain’s highest honour from General Franco, the Cross of San Fernando with Laurels, was the Grand Vizier of Morocco, Sidi Ahmed el Ganmia, a man of noble countenance. Moorish troops were important in helping to liberate Oviedo in 1936. In 1937 Spaniards, Moors and Italians took Malagna. In 1939 Moors were among those who marched into Barcelona. Arab friendship was maintained with Franquist Spain at a time when she was being ostracized by the ‘world community’.
31 As in the Arab resistance against the Turks during World War I, Western Civilization owes Islam thanks, but delivers treachery, chaos and violence, and in typically democratic manner hypocritically pontificates when there is a reaction.
This was not always the case. The Young Europe movement organised by the Belgian, Jean Thiriart, a leading geopolitical thinker of the Right, was in extensive co-operation with Arabs and Muslims. Mutti stated of this collaboration:
From 1966 to 1968
La Nation Européennewas released, while
La Nazione Europea was still published even in 1969, edited by the author of this article.
La Nation Européenne, had important contributors: the political scientist Christian Perroux, the Algerian essayer Malek Bennabi, the deputy Francis Palmero, the Syrian Ambassador Selim el-Yafi, the Iraqi Ambassador Nather el-Omari, the leaders of the Algerian National Liberation Front Chérif Belkachem, Si Larbi and Djamil Mendimred, the president of the OLP Ahmed Choukeiri, the leader of the Vietcong mission in Algiers Tran Hoai Nam, the leader of the Black Panthers Stokely Carmichael, the founder leader of the Centri d’Azione Agraria the prince Sforza Ruspoli, the writers Pierre Gripari and Anne-Marie Cabrini. Among the permanent reporters there were the professor Souad el-Charkawi (in Cairo) and Gilles Munier (in Algiers). …
In the autumn of 1967, Gérard Bordes, director of
La Nation Européenne, went to Algeria to meet some members of the executive secretariat of National Liberation Front and Council for the Revolution. In April 1968, Bordes came back to Algeria with a
Mémorandum à l’intention du gouvernement de la République Algérienne signed by himself and Thiriart, in which some proposals were contained: ‘European revolutionary patriots support the formation of special fighters for the future struggle against Israel; technical training of the future action aimed to a struggle against the Americans in Europe; building of an anti-American and anti-Zionist information service for a simultaneous utilization in the Arabian countries and in Europe’.
The dialogue with Algeria had no results, so Thiriart started some talks with the Arabian countries of the Middle East. In fact, on June 3rd 1968, a militant of ‘Young Europe’, Roger Coudroy, fell in a battle against the Zionist army, while he was trying to enter into the occupied Palestine with a group of al-Fatah.
In the Autumn of 1968, Thiriart was invited by the governments of Iraq and Egypt, and by the Ba’ath Party. In Egypt he participated in the meeting of the Arabian Socialist Union, the Egyptian party of government; he was welcomed by several ministries and met the president Nasser. In Iraq he met some political personalities, among whom some leaders of the PLO, and was interviewed by some newspapers and mass media.
32
Francois Duprat, a leading French Rightist intellectual and a co-founder of the Front National, murdered by a Zionist hit-squad in 1978, wrote of the Ba’athist movement, founded in Syria in 1944, and spreading across the Arab world. He explained the Ba’athist ideology:
33
The only Arab nationalist party worthy of this name remains the Ba’ath, various movements of the Nasserist type were incapable of bringing about the creation of an ideological and political force in Arab countries. So Ba’athism must be studied as the singular representative of Arab unionist ideology, an organized party not limited to a simple movement of opinion, however large it is.
The Ba’ath party offers the unique case of being the only Pan-Arab political party (if we make an exception in the very original case of the Syrian [Social Nationalist] Party
34) to have tried to elaborate a truly ‘national-revolutionary’ doctrine with a certain degree of coherence, thanks to the political and historical analyses of its founder and leader, Michel Aflaq (a Greek-Orthodox Syrian)… There Aflaq analyses his nationalism and its opposition to Marxist philosophy:
‘The Arab Nation has an independent history from the history of the West and Europe; the theories and organizational forms coming from Western civilization and born from the conditions proper to the West do not correspond to the needs of the Arab milieu and do not encounter a favourable welcome there. The Arab Nation is not a small nation of secondary importance that can adopt a message other than its own, walking in the steps of another nation and feeding from its scraps… Marxist doctrine is a danger for the Arabs because it threatens to make their national character disappear, and because it imposes a partisan, tendentious, and artificial point of view on modern Arab thought, destroying the freedom and completeness of this thought’.
Yet for Aflaq, a non-Muslim, Arab nationalism remains ‘inspired’ by Islam …
‘Every nation … possesses an essential motive force … at the time of Islam’s appearance this motive force was religion. In effect, only religion was capable of revealing the latent forces of the Arabs, of realizing their unity … Today … the prime motive force of the Arabs is nationalism … The Arabs are crippled in regards to their freedom, their sovereignty, and their unity, thus they can understand the language of nationalism…’
The Ba’ath party, while recognizing the positive role of Islamic religion in the awareness of Arab unity (under the form of the
Ummah, the community of believers), is thus a secular nationalist party. But the Ba’ath party also presents itself as a socialist party:
‘The socialism of the Ba’ath is in perfect agreement with the vibrant society of the Arab Nation. … The philosophy of the Ba’ath does not approve the materialist conception of Communist philosophy… Our socialism relies on the individual and his free personality. Ba’athist socialism believes that the principle force of a nation resides in mobile individuals who push men to act; thus it avoids the abolition of private property, merely limiting it … in order to prevent all abuses.
‘Arab nationalists understand that socialism is the surest means of realizing the rebirth of their nationalism and their nation because they know that today’s Arab fight rests on all Arabs and if they are divided into masters and slaves, their participation together in this combat is not possible’.
The reader should recognise the parallels between Ba’ath socialism and the ‘ethical socialism’ of the Right, which Oswald Spengler called ‘Prussian Socialism’.
35Duprat saw similarities from the European-National-Right perspective:
In any case, Ba’athist socialism is identical to the socialism of all the Fascist type movements and Aflaq limits himself to distinguishing himself from the Western Fascist thinkers (despite his hostility to ‘ideologies foreign to the Arab world’ which he mostly did to fend off Communism), while refusing the Marxist divides of the class struggle.
36
A reading of Qaddafi’s
Green Book37 will also provide the reader with numerous parallels between the Muslim Third Universal Theory and the European Right; like Ba’ath, an Arab (more specifically Muslim) nationalism premised on a form of ‘socialism’ that transcends the class fractures of both liberalism and Marxism and aims to form an organic community. Indeed, the elimination of Qaddafi and the plunging of Libya into perpetual chaos through the same type of U.S.-
Jihadist alliance that destroyed Saddam in Iraq and tried to eliminate Assad in Syria is a prime example of why collaborative interests should exist between the Right and the Arab, and more generally Muslim worlds. It is this chaos brought to the Middle East and adjacent lands that has caused the migrant crisis, making the Muslim and other migrants pawns to globalisation.
38 In particular the destruction of Qaddafi opened Europe up to an African exodus that was being contained by Libya, as Qaddafi warned. A report in the
Christian Science Monitor states of this:
Mr. Qaddafi was well aware of European alarm at the rising tide of migrants in his final years in power. He used it as a powerful wedge to improve his own standing. Back to 2004, Qaddafi began making deals with individual European states to control the tide of migrants. In August 2010, he visited his friend Silvio Berlusconi, then president of Italy, in Rome and said Europe would turn ‘black’ without his help.
‘Tomorrow Europe might no longer be European, and even black, as there are millions who want to come in,’ Qaddafi said. ‘What will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans … we don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions’.
Qaddafi had a handy solution. He offered to shut down his country and its coastal waters to the job seekers in exchange for €5 billion a year. He pointed to his work with Italy as proof he could get the job done. In June 2009, he signed a ‘friendship’ agreement with Italy that involved joint naval patrols against migrants and Italy handing over migrants captured en route to Europe to Libya, no questions asked. The number of Africans caught trying to illegally enter Italy fell by more than 75 percent that year.
39
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Part 2 of this series can be accessed here and the author expands upon this topic by making some very ponderable points and suggestions.
Your thoughts?
@Nilgiri @Psychic @Metanoia @Falcon29 @OsmanAli98 @Taimur Khurram @vostok
