The Militia Movement and the Salafists: Looking for Lost Purity

The armed seizure of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge outside Burns, Oregon by a right-wing militia group calling itself Citizens for Constitutional Freedom puts on the front page an issue of longstanding importance to environmentalists -- grazing rights on federal land. There are several good comments that append today's story "Why the Government Owns so Much Land in the West," by Quoctrung Bui and Margot Sanger-Katz. Paul in Albany, NY says,

The Times is attempting to make rational sense concerning why these people are angry, but it's impossible because these ranchers are not rational themselves! These ranchers ought to be grateful for the federal government and the extremely cheap rents it charges. They should be grateful for the giant subsidies the taxpayers give ranchers every year. Go to Environmental Working Group.com to see how much individual landowners have received each year. The subsidies to cattle ranchers are outrageous in that beef production adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than do all cars! Beef is about the most destructive food ever devised.

Or CGW:

Behind most overly-romanticized notions like a home on the range where wildlife and cattle live in harmony and the Indians keep to themselves somewhere else, is brutal reality.

Driving most native wildlife and people to near extinction aside, the basic economics of why no one wants to take over financial and legal responsibility of these huge tracts of land is why that home on the range can only be provided by the collective strength of the federal government.

Or JustWondering in New York:

What would happen out there if the land was transferred from Federal control to the States? You've got 3 very politically schizophrenic states (California, Oregon and Washington) but the growing progressive majorities are on the coasts and the inland areas are more rightwing. They're not likely to change the management process much; if anything they'll make it more restrictive and raise the grazing fees. State's the would sell this land, who would they sell it too? Small ranchers aren't likely to be able to afford it or pay the taxes on it so it'll likely go to big Ag and they'll rent it back - at market rates.

These guys seem to be dreaming of West that never existed except in a screenwriter's imagination. This is simply based on "belief"; facts are irrelevant. There was an earlier commenter that said that "Common Law" trumps statutory law. It the U.S. at least that is utter nonsense. However, for these folk the "belief" in that idea is where it gets its validity from. These fantasies help spawn things like the Sovereign Citizen' movement and idiocies like Oath Keepers or 3 Percenters.

What is truly galling is that they fly the flag, swear oaths the Constitution, shout out their "patriotism" and not a single one them believes in this Country not one. If they did, this nonsense wouldn't be happening - especially the guns part. Our history lesson here should go back to the Whiskey Rebellion and how George Washington ended that bit of nonsense in very short order.

This idea of a more pure past obviously motivates Citizens for Constitutional Freedom leader Ammon Bundy. This from a story yesterday, "Cautious Response to Armed Oregon Protest,"
by Kirk Johnson, Richard Perez-Pena and Erik Eckholm:

In a forum here last month, Ammon Bundy was explicit about starting a national movement, and said God had instructed him to come here. 

“We can restore the Constitution back to this county, and it can be an example to all the other counties across this nation,” he told local residents. “The people of this country will come to you and protect you if you will make the right stand.”

As Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud related in an excellent editorial that appeared this past Saturday, "ISIS’ War on Christmas," what unites the hard right of the West with the Salafists of the Middle East is this myth of a purified past:

To celebrate a birthday, even that of a prophet, is to accept the existence of Time, whereas Islamists fantasize about eternity. In their eyes, Time itself is a crime, because it is a departure from original Islam. Thus restoration is the Islamists’ second foundational myth. Their goal is to return to the beginning of Time, to T=0. To the moment of Revelation, when the prophet was still alive and God was so close to his ear. To the moment when Islam had not yet been soiled, to before it was contaminated by History and “Fitna,” the first Muslim civil wars, which followed the death of Muhammad.

This quest for purity also explains Islamists’ relation to physical space. In addition to wanting to conquer territory, the Islamic State seeks to negate and destroy any evidence of the passing of time, such as monuments and ruins, in Palmyra and elsewhere. It tries to extend the desert’s domain: to replace walls with sand, to flatten out landscape, to return to a vacuum so as to start history all over again.

The purification myth is not the exclusive purview of Salafists. It also runs through other utopian and totalitarian movements, as well as some of the Islamists’ enemies, like the far-right political parties of today. All of them share the same fantasy of returning to some (imagined) original state of purity.

The far right in France, for example, wants to go back to “la souche,” its roots, and restore the land of its Gallic ancestors to what it was before immigrants, the Stranger, flooded in. Like the Islamists, it glorifies geography and negates Time.

As the jihadists have been used as proxies for concentrated wealth, so too has the American far right. The Tea Party was Jiffy Popped into being owing to the Kochs' and other wealthy conservatives' fear of Obama's 2008 landslide. If it ever looks as if a coherent progressive movement is taking shape, you can count on some sort of well-armed militia showing up and taking over. The police will just melt away.

Kamel Daoud's "Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It"

The best, most to-the-point statement I've read about the West's Global War on Terror; it is all built on a lie, or as Kamel Daoud says in "Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It," the denial that Saudi Arabia is exporting jihad en masse. To its credit The New York Times is publishing Daoud's essay.

If you read the newspapers every day, it is a marvel to behold, this mainstream conspiracy to occlude the obvious. Yet, as Tag Team reminded us, "Whoomp! There It Is." I ask people all the time -- people at work, people at the grocery store -- what they think about the mess we have wrought in the Middle East, and no one singles out al-Saud for blame. Usually, it is, "Oh, they've been killing each other over there for thousands of years," or "That Assad is a brute." Propaganda works. But what you will read below is the unvarnished truth.

Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It

By Kamel Daoud

Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia. In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other. This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.

Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it. 

The West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world’s chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture. The younger generations of radicals in the so-called Arab world were not born jihadists. They were suckled in the bosom of Fatwa Valley, a kind of Islamist Vatican with a vast industry that produces theologians, religious laws, books, and aggressive editorial policies and media campaigns. 

One might counter: Isn’t Saudi Arabia itself a possible target of Daesh? Yes, but to focus on that would be to overlook the strength of the ties between the reigning family and the clergy that accounts for its stability — and also, increasingly, for its precariousness. The Saudi royals are caught in a perfect trap: Weakened by succession laws that encourage turnover, they cling to ancestral ties between king and preacher. The Saudi clergy produces Islamism, which both threatens the country and gives legitimacy to the regime. 

One has to live in the Muslim world to understand the immense transformative influence of religious television channels on society by accessing its weak links: households, women, rural areas. Islamist culture is widespread in many countries — Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mali, Mauritania. There are thousands of Islamist newspapers and clergies that impose a unitary vision of the world, tradition and clothing on the public space, on the wording of the government’s laws and on the rituals of a society they deem to be contaminated. 

It is worth reading certain Islamist newspapers to see their reactions to the attacks in Paris. The West is cast as a land of “infidels.” The attacks were the result of the onslaught against Islam. Muslims and Arabs have become the enemies of the secular and the Jews. The Palestinian question is invoked along with the rape of Iraq and the memory of colonial trauma, and packaged into a messianic discourse meant to seduce the masses. Such talk spreads in the social spaces below, while up above, political leaders send their condolences to France and denounce a crime against humanity. This totally schizophrenic situation parallels the West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia.

All of which leaves one skeptical of Western democracies’ thunderous declarations regarding the necessity of fighting terrorism. Their war can only be myopic, for it targets the effect rather than the cause. Since ISIS is first and foremost a culture, not a militia, how do you prevent future generations from turning to jihadism when the influence of Fatwa Valley and its clerics and its culture and its immense editorial industry remains intact?

Is curing the disease therefore a simple matter? Hardly. Saudi Arabia remains an ally of the West in the many chess games playing out in the Middle East. It is preferred to Iran, that gray Daesh. And there’s the trap. Denial creates the illusion of equilibrium. Jihadism is denounced as the scourge of the century but no consideration is given to what created it or supports it. This may allow saving face, but not saving lives. 

Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books. 

The attacks in Paris have exposed this contradiction again, but as happened after 9/11, it risks being erased from our analyses and our consciences.