McCarthyism for the 21^st Century?

By Richard Collie

George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four envisioned a world constantly at war, with three major superpowers: Oceania (the Americas, Great Britain, Australia, and South Africa), Eurasia (Russia, Europe, and Siberia), and Eastasia (China, Japan, Mongolia, and Southeast Asia.) Considering he was writing in the 1940s, his predictions were fairly accurate as the United States, Russia and China went on to emerge as the world’s only ‘superpowers’ going into the 21^st century.

This concept of total war as Orwell envisioned it served several functions within his dystopian society. Crucially though, it served to pacify a potentially rebellious population by keeping them in a state of constant fear of an intangible, but very real enemy, unifying the people behind ‘Big Brother’ in the process.

We eventually learn that the widely reported wars that keep the proletariat in this state of perpetual fear and weakness are actually no more than a fabrication by Big Brother’s propaganda machine. Moreover, the ‘enemy’ and focus of the public’s hatred is constantly changing to distract people into focusing on a new evil, again with the assurance that Big Brother has their back.

In the words of Orwell: “The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous…. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.”

Orwell’s implication is that there are strong domestic incentives for superpowers to be in a state of constant war. As previously mentioned, there is the ‘fear factor’, an essential building block in the process of creating a weak and obedient backbone to the economy. It also justifies the vastly over inflated military and state apparatus, while enabling the political establishment to label anyone critical of the government as the ‘enemy within.’

Not many people would seriously consider that we are being so badly misled by our own governments and power structures (namely the corporate media and entertainment industry) to justify a like for like comparison. But are there some parallels that can be drawn here?

Consider the major ‘enemies’ of the West since George Orwell’s death in 1950. Having already crushed the ascendancy of nationalist based fascism with the downfall of Mussolini and Hitler in World War II, the Western world faced a new and slightly less tangible ‘evil’: communism. The icy specter of the Cold War hung over the world for decades with massive repercussions both on the political landscape domestically and across the globe before the eventual terminal decline of the U.S.S.R and its communist empire. Yet just as the end of the 20^th century saw the sun setting on the Soviet Union, the 21^st century gave birth to the next ideological evil: Islam.

The rise of communism after the end of the Second World War and the genuine increasing movement towards radical Islam in the Middle East are real enough, and the stereotypes of these enemies exist in real forms.

However, there is an argument to suggest that the threat of these enemies is sensationalized for political expediency. It enables the U.S ruling elite to exercise greater state control; to continue pumping money into the military industrial complex and to silence critics of the government in the name of ‘patriotism.’

One of the most telling examples of this was the era of McCarthyism from the late 1940s to late 1950s. During this period, the threat of communist infiltration within the US, or so called ‘red scare’, was magnified to hysterical proportions. Left leaning academics, teachers, media figures- even Hollywood stars who expressed anti-government sentiments were castigated as communist sympathizers. It is estimated that tens of thousands of Americans from all walks of life lost their jobs, often destroying lives in the process. As Senator Joe McCarthy and his gang went after high profile communists to justify their theory that the red tide had infiltrated every echelon of society, lists were published naming and shaming those they suspected. These included the ‘Hollywood Blacklist’ naming, amongst others, Orson Wells and Charlie Chaplin as communists.

What came to characterize McCarthyism was its hysterical nature, the complete lack of any kind of factual basis in most of the allegations; the way they played on public fear to turn colleagues and neighbors against one another. Meanwhile, the U.S Federal Government pumped billions of dollars into its military complex, amassing the largest nuclear arsenal in the world in the process. As the U.S expanded its hegemony worldwide, the communist threat back at home helped to justify the need for a supersized army at a time when a whole generation of Americans and Europeans alike were embracing a new era of peace, culminating in the peaceful protests and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament of the 1960s. The legacy of McCarthyism was a polarization of political opinion, that you were either ‘with’ or ‘against’ America in the fight to maintain liberty and freedom.

Many of the same themes are now emerging in the still infantile war on terror. As we approach the seventh anniversary of the September 11^th attacks, it is becoming clear that there is an agenda amongst a growing number of right wing conservatives to fear monger the public into accepting the idea that America is subject to an internal threat of an Islamic revolution. They claim that these so called ‘soft-jihadists’ are using non-terror related tactics to infiltrate positions in the media, government and public education to bring about an Islamic state ‘through the back the door.’ Sound familiar?

Much in the same way as the ‘communist’ tag was used as a weapon to silence any anti-establishment rhetoric during the Cold War, now the terms ‘Islamist’ and ‘anti-Semite’ are being hurled at intellectuals, often with little factual basis to support the claims. They are using the same throw-enough-mud-and-it sticks tactics to attempt to force people out of their jobs and destroy careers.

Leading the assault on the ‘soft-jihadists’ is Daniel Pipes, a prominent academic and Middle Eastern historian with extremely close ties to the current Republican regime. If anyone is the Senator Joe McCarthy figure for the war on Islam, it is Daniel Pipes. He most notably evoked the image of McCarthy when he published a list of ‘Professors that hate America.’ (http://www.danielpipes.org/article/923)

Pipes ignored the fact that the well respected professors he names give well researched, well respected evidence to back up their claims that the Iraq war is being fought for hegemonic gains and lists the hugely popular Noam Chomsky amongst the list of America hating scholars.

His websites carries a host of sensationalistic articles on the dangers of Islam, including The West's Islamist Infiltrators, [The Islamist-Leftist] Allied Menace, Europe or Eurabia? and, perversely, a host of articles scrutinizing Barack Obama’s background, including Barack Obama's Muslim Childhood and Confirmed: Barack Obama Practiced Islam.

Perhaps what is most worrying about these articles is not their agenda or the extremity of their content, it is the popularity they are finding amongst a vast audience. As Pipes himself boasts on his website, in June 2008, a Google search on Barack Obama yielding over 60,000,000 results listed Daniel Pipes’ as the fifth highest entry. Type in the names of some of the subjects of his vicious attacks into a search engine and his articles are often the top of the pile.

Pipes is making loud noises, and people are listening. In an era of increasing mutual distrust between the Arab world and the West, here is a character who is fanning the flames of hatred on both sides.

But Daniel Pipes is no mere populist.  In 2003, he was nominated by President George W. Bush for the board of the United States Institute of Peace and this year he served as a campaign advisor for former Presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani.  He has also served on the policy-planning staff at the State Department during the 1980s. He writes regularly for newspapers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and has been a fixture on Fox News. In other words, here is not a fringe right-wing fanatic marginalized from mainstream politics- Daniel Pipes is very much in the inner circle of the ruling elite and counts the President as a close acquaintance.

This helps to explain some of the successes he has had in shutting up those critical of the hegemonic U.S regime and its transparent war on terrorism. A case in point was the assault on Debbie Almontaser, the principal and co-founder of the Khalil Gibran Arab language charter school in New York, the first of its kind in the city. The school was heralded by many as a breakthrough in building bridges between two cultures increasingly at odds with one another. The fact that it was named after Khalil Gibran, a Lebanese Muslim whose popularity transcended cultural and religious divisions should be a testimony to this.

The assault on Almontaser followed a tried and tested route: find the link to the extremism, no matter how tenuous, and use that to override all other aspects of that person’s career, beliefs and achievements. In Almotaser’s case, some zealous students at the Arab language school had produced some t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan ‘Intifada NYC’, showing solidarity with the Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation. The connection was used to portray the school as some sort of brainwashing camp, training students to insight an Intifada style revolution in New York.

The allegations spawned a campaign entitled Stop the Madrassa (http://stopthemadrassa.wordpress.com), a community coalition committed to suppressing schools with any kind of affiliation to the Arab and Muslim world. The consequences of pressure groups like this is that ‘Madrassa’ is increasingly being thrown into the same semantic field as other extremist Arabic words, such as Jihad, Fatwah and Intifada. In an era where the a large proportion of the poorly educated public think in terms of conditional reflexes, a ‘Madrassa’ is seen as a school where students are indoctrinated into accepting fanatical Islamic teachings, breading a new generation of terrorists. This becomes important in the context of the campaign to smear Barack Obama as the ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’, the Muslim masquerading as a Christian. Obama attended a Madrassa for two years while living in Indonesia, a predominately Islamic state, as a child. This is something that many fighting the campaign for McCain’s election are keen to make public knowledge.

In reality, Madrassa is merely the Arabic word for school. Arabic is laden with religious imagery in a deeply religious culture, most Arabic schools maintain religious customs. But is this so different to schools in the Christian west? There are now conservative Christian schools that refuse to teach evolution or any other events that contradict The Bible, including the concept that the world is no more than 4,000 years old. Even schools that are not affiliated to a religion maintain Christian religious practice. When I was a child growing up in England, I attended a school that was not connected in any way to the Church of England, yet we sang Christian hymns every morning. A school in an Arab nation will reflect cultural and religious practices just in the same way that they do in the west.

Critics of my argument would suggest that conservative Christian schools in America don’t ‘breed terrorism’, unlike Islamic schools. Yet abortion clinics are bombed by Christian fundamentalists in the spirit of ‘pro-life.’ The President of America took his country into war vindicated by the claim that he was visited by God in a dream, millions of innocent civilians have died as a result. Although, the President may stop short of publicly claiming this is a religious war, there are plenty of hard line Christians on the street who would not blink while making such a suggestion. To many, Islam is the antithesis to western moral values and must be destroyed less it destroys us and everything we believe in.

To put things in a historical context, in the Middle Eastern region that remembers the Christian crusades as one of the most prominent events in it’s history, which culture or religion is really under attack here?

The message we are told to accept: that it is ok to flaunt international law and invade Arab countries, topple their governments, assert U.S hegemony and impose our form of government in the name of enlightenment, in the words of George W. Bush, spreading democracy ‘to all the dark corners of the world.’ It is perfectly acceptable that there are thousands of Christian missionaries stationed in the Middle East, publically and aggressively attempting to expand the Christian church. Yet an Arab language school in New York is a threat to the very fabric of our free, utopian society.

As someone who stands firmly against organized religion as perhaps the principal root of some of the world’s biggest problems, the purpose of this comment is not to argue the merits of one religion against the other or visa versa. I believe that secular but tolerant governments provide the best alternative for bridging the deep cultural divisions that are emerging between two poles. The purpose is to expose the so-called threat of ‘soft-jihadism’ or an Islamic assault on the world as what it is: a fallacy, a falsification of the facts propagated for domestic political gain.

Terrorism is real, but it can be analyzed critically as a cause and effect situation.  In the Middle East, a mixture of a stagnant and hopeless economy coupled with non-stop U.S led aggression provides the deep well the serves as the life source for those who seek to promote terror.

The fact that the allied war on terror only serves to fan the flames of hatred to the west is a reality that is so painfully obvious it is enough to raise the question: what are our leaders’ real motivations?

What the leaders of the free world have succeeded in creating is an ingenious war that in fact perpetuates the very enemy it claims to be fighting. The harder we fight, the stronger the enemy becomes. It is the perfect manifestation of George Orwell’s vision of constant war.

Those who continue to propagate the myth of the invisible enemy continue to provide the lifeblood that supports a government that concerns itself more with external enemies than enriching the lives of its own citizens. Consider the billions of dollars the coalition has hemorrhaged fighting themselves in Iraq and Afghanistan and then consider how much better that money could have been spent investing in community projects and creative solutions to repair our own damaged societies. As in George Orwell’s dystopia, the war is waged not against anyone else but against ourselves.