France America And Religious Terror War
Politics / War on Terror Jan 27, 2015 - 03:38 PM GMTThe Unique Nation Syndrome and Religion
Absolutely verboten for the mainstream media packaging "Islamic terror" for its dwindling consumer credulous faithfuls, the cult of The Unique Nation was custom built to conflict with the more aggressive of the so-called Abrahamic religions and especially with the youngest and most modern of these, Islam. Religion-building came a long time before what leading historians including Eric Hobsbawm call the "era of modern nationbuilding" which he places in the period about 1760-1790. This started with the creation or founding, by revolution, of the USA and modern France. It ended, according to Hobsbawm in the late 1980s for reasons we look at, below.
We can ask which two "modern secular nations", today, feel most threatened by Islamic terror as the MSM calls go-anywhere terrorism hiding behind the label of Islam?
Each of the three Abrahamic religions has a distinct and indelible ethnic handle. Judaism has a Jewish label; Christianity has a European non-Jewish label; and Islam has an Arab label. Whenever any one them has spilled over from its ethnic core region or regions, for whatever cause from demographic expansion, through industry and trade to colonial pillage, there was and is inevitable conflict.
Due to simple physical proximity and the political sequels of the French revolution, we can note, its impacts across Europe were more devastating than the revolt of English colonial subjects in the future USA. However, most historians agree that both the USA and France have had a disproportionately large effect on modern history. This includes the accusation that both of them started as rogue states and remained that way, due to their own "nationbuilding experiment" and its supposed universality.The "unique nation" syndrome.
Some historians like Hobsbawm, go on to say that the late 18th century stage or phase and
type of nationbuilding came to an end in the late 20th century, following the collapse of the
USSR. They argue that the more-than-20 new states and nations founded or created, or recreated
since about 1990 are of a different type. One basic difference is ideology - shown for example
by the recreation of separate Czech and Slovak republics in the 1990s, with no special or
claimed-as-unique nationalist ideologies playing a major role in this nation building or
rebuilding experiment.
Another example would be the ongoing, we could say permanent attempts to create a single federal
European state, with a go-anywhere, one size fits all liberal market ideology and agenda. The
pat expalantion for this is globalization - but the upstream historical version and phase of
nationbuilding featured the ideological claim of The Unique Nation, not the go-anywhere "market
liberal" non-ideology of the elites who squat at the peak of the wealth pyramid. Yet another example of what should be called modern non-nation building is the Islamic State, ISIS or ISIL, whose own rhetoric includes the theory of Global Jihad or the warfare state based on Islamic rhetoric, and nothing else.
With no surprise its favored western targets include the US and French states and nations, the so-called Unique Nations of the late 18th century.
Laisser Faire - Laisser Aller
So-called secular modern market liberal states and their economic ideology can also be traced to France in the 1760-1790 period. The visit to and sejour in France of Adam Smith, in the 1760s played a key role in shaping Smith's ideas on the "invisible hand" of free market forces. The principle of laisser faire-laisser aller was recounted to him by the ”physiocrat” Francois Quesnay, a quack doctor offering herbal remedies for syphilis to Marie Antoinette at the court of Louis XVI, shortly before the revolutionary storming of the Bastille. Both Antoinette and Louis XVI were guillotined, for reasons including the total failure of Quesnay's laisser faire economics to feed the mob.
Nevertheless, laisser faire economics or the principle of never interfering in the economy,
however corrupt and inefficient its dominant players might be, survived the death of the French
royals and their hangers-on - who found that Quesnay provided them and the moneyed elite with a
nice excuse for doing nothing. Like today's laisser faire or the cult of doing nothing which might harm the ultra-rich, the original version turned a blind eye to abuses of every kind as the Goldman Sachs of the time operated what is called “rentier capitalism”.
Despite (or because of) its Unique Nation revolutionary ideology, France's new rulers of the
late 18th century not only created a hyper-nationalist and xenophobic ideology for their new
nation, but also drove France's failing economy over the brink. The economic rout, among other factors sparked a gory four-year indigenous terror war called La Terreur, which paved the way for the "providential hero", former staff sergeant Napoleon I, to promote himself dictator (in 1799) - rather like Mobuto Sese Soku in post-Belgian Congo of the 1960s.
France's new ideology of xenophobic national arrogance and colonialist aggression, honed by it indigenous national terror war was in place. This enabled Napoleon to mount a generally disastrous series of colonial wars both inside Europe, and outside it, in the Caribbean and North Africa. France's African and Arab colonies were a direct result. Why al Qaeda and ISIS would attack France (as well as the US) finds another historical explanation.
"Market Lib" Ideology and the Nation State
Plenty of historians, including Hobsbawm trace the demise of nationbuilding to the post-1980s
triumph of neoliberal neo-laisser faire economics, basically unchanged from its 18th century
model, and operating on the same corrupt rentier basis. As shown by the examples of both the USA and
France. Market Lib laisser faire ideology, and the lack of control and organization of the
economy easily coexists with a very hard-edge jingoist doctrine of colonialism and neo-
colonialism drawing on xenophobia, racism and elitism, with automatic support from financial
elites who profit from the laisser faire economic ideology..
One of the really major difference between the late 18th century and today is the size and
role of the "Fourth Estate" or mass media = but even this is a more apparent than real
difference. In post-revolutionary France and the USA, the media needed little or no coercion by
the power elite to engage in xenophobic and nationalist-racist tirades - exactly like the so-
called "mainstream nedia" of today, in its own hypocritical way blending the beat of the war
drum with the bleat of human-rights-and-equality rhetoric.
Pursuing market lib laisser faire ideology to its logical conclusion, endlessly stated by the sputtering defenders of this illusion such as Milton Friedman (see for example David Stockman 'Why The Entire 20th Century Was A Mistake', Zerohedge, 25 January) all nation states should disappear from the face of the planet. They would be replaced by Goldman Sachs and the Davos Forum as the ultimate arbiters and judges of All Things. Selling theur 18th century ideology to the super-elite is in fact not difficult, as shown for example by Maurice F. Strong's 'Agenda 21', which is given spurious credibility by its United Nations publishing stamp.
Necessarily all religions stand in the way of a 24-7 market liberal consumer paradise or Hell on
Earth - for example the time lost by the Consumer Horde in prayer - making the more aggressive religions, especially Islam, a prime cause of trouble for the No Alternative game plan.
The French Exception
Due to its xenophobic and aggressive origins, the French nation state, even today after decades of globalization, brainwashes schoolchildren from maternal school onwards with the myth of "French exception". France, for example, is not only the inventor of Human Rights, but the home of the right for young French in the 15-25 age group - if they are the wrong color or national origin (for example British origin!) - to an unemployment rate close to 50%. They can however thrill to the pseudo-American "all-French" music of Johnny Hallyday or Joey Starr!
Only after several generations passed in France, such as Francois Hollande (like his name suggests of Dutch origin) are New French able to call themselves French. and climb the greasy pole of power. Minorities such as Jewish French (France has Europe's largest Jewish community), and North African Maghreb-origin Muslims (France has the largest community in Europe) are especially targeted groups for French xenophobic and racist exclusion, explained by everyday French as "national pride".
To be sure, exactly the same applied in the US for a very long time. Despite the attempt by various US police districts to reignite the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s in a white-black race war, the US has a non-white or not-exclusively-white president, who is proud of his aggressive all-American xenoophobia despite his so-called "difference". This preidential status, for a "racially inferior person" is totally unthinkable in France.
Reasons why the ISIS-al Qaeda cancer so quickly spread across Muslim Africa can be unerstood from a quick look at the map of French colonial possessions in Africa - always setting out to better the British Empire in its excesses of all kinds. In the French case. this included its gory and useless colonial war to deny Algeria its independance, in 1956-1963, killin about 500 000 Algerians and 50 000 French, immediately followed by France throwing wide open the doors of mass immigration, by Algerian economic migrants, to France!
Understanding this French national-psychological problem which normal persons should not waste their time trying, but a key factor was "Noblesse francaise". In other words the notion that if the Unique Nation, France, loses a gory colonial war that it started, France must not show it was beaten. Instead, it imported millions of economic migrants, then denied their offspring a job or any chance in its xenophobic-racist society.
Nothing Unique
There is little need to say the obvious - that market lib laisser faire economics and the unique nation are totally contradictory, antinomic and opposed. Their only similarity is they are both delusions opening the door to economic crisis and political terror.
Any pretence that, today, we face "a unique problem and turning point for Mankind" is another delusion, wilfully held in place by the so-called Denial of History and "post-modernist rationalism".There is nothing special or unique, for example, about 50% youth unemployment rates in the supposedly rich and developed secular-market lib nations of the future European Federation or would-be federation. It is daily reality in Greece, for example, with little or no assistance from Islamic punk psychopaths, or from the sequels of Greek colonialism, which (apart from modern spats with the Turkish Ottomans) ended about 2000 years ago.
Archeologists and historians of empires and religions studying the real process and stages of
the Roman Empire's dissolution not only focus the economic causes of its collapse - including
runaway debt growth and serial monetary crises - but also its religious causes. Emperor Constantine's
decision in the 5th century to suddenly reverse all previous Roman policy on the Christian
religion - making it the official religion of the Empire - also triggered a massive change of
that religion. From subversive but humanist and non-violent, it became the exact opposite.
Christianity was reforged as a warfare doctrine, complete with a makeover of the image of
Christ, from a youthful, sensitive and even hermaphroditic figure, to a bearded and aggressive
double of the Roman war god Jupiter - himself a direct copy of Greek Zeus. Despite this
ideological makeover and takeover, however, the Roman Empire was already on a losing streak,
notably due to successive wave of Northern tribes and nations attacking the hugely- and thinly-
spread empire. Among the attackers, we could note the Goths, the Vandals, the Huns and the
Berserkers, as some outright-psychopathic, Scandinavian-origin attackers were called.
Whether or not we accept the argument that so-called "radical Islam" is an Arab racist doctrine
of defence, of its racial hearthland and core region - attacked by Western Vandals including the
French and Americans - the attempt to relaunch and rebrand Abdel Wahab's 18th century anti-
Turkish racism as a 21st century war video game, complete with beheaded Japanese is rather likely to be a failure.
There is nothing unique about politically motivated racism - or the nation state whether claimed to be unique, or not. Both have existed, and both of them have waxed and waned at different rates at different times. One thing is however certain - the losers always refuse to see the beginning of the end, the middle of the end - and the end of the end.
By Andrew McKillop
Contact: xtran9@gmail.com
Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights
Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012
Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.
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