By Pepe Escobar
January 20, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
The US targeted
assassination, via drone strike, of Maj. Gen. Qassem
Soleimani, apart from a torrent of crucial
geopolitical ramifications, once again propels to
center stage a quite inconvenient truth: the
congenital incapacity of so-called US elites to even
attempt to understand Shi’ism – thus 24/7
demonization, demeaning not only Shi’as by also
Shi’a-led governments.
Washington had been deploying
a Long War even before the concept was popularized
by the Pentagon in 2001, immediately after 9/11:
it’s a Long War against Iran. It started via the
coup against the democratically elected government
of Mosaddegh in 1953, replaced by the Shah’s
dictatorship. The whole process was turbo-charged
over 40 years ago when the Islamic Revolution
smashed those good old Cold War days when the Shah
reigned as the privileged American “gendarme of the
(Persian) Gulf”.
Yet this extends far beyond
geopolitics. There is absolutely no way whatsoever
for anyone to be capable of grasping the
complexities and popular appeal of Shi’ism without
some serious academic research, complemented with
visits to selected sacred sites across Southwest
Asia: Najaf, Karbala, Mashhad, Qom and the Sayyida
Zeinab shrine near Damascus. Personally, I have
traveled this road of knowledge since the late 1990s
– and I still remain just a humble student.
In the spirit of a first
approach – to start an informed East-West debate on
a crucial cultural issue totally sidelined in the
West or drowned by tsunamis of propaganda, I
initially asked three outstanding scholars for their
first impressions.
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They are: Prof. Mohammad
Marandi, of the University of Tehran, expert on
Orientalism; Arash Najaf-Zadeh, who writes under the
nom de guerre Blake Archer Williams and who is an
expert on Shi’a theology; and the extraordinary
Princess Vittoria Alliata from Sicily, top
Italian Islamologist and author, among others, of
books such as the mesmerizing Harem – which
details her travels across Arab lands.
Two weeks ago, I was a guest
of Princess Vittoria at Villa Valguarnera in Sicily.
We were immersed in a long, engrossing geopolitical
discussion – of which one of the key themes was
US-Iran – only a few hours before a drone strike at
Baghdad airport killed the two foremost Shi’a
fighters in the real war on terror against ISIS/Daesh
and al-Qaeda/al-Nusra: Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem
Soleimani and Iraqi Hashd al-Shaabi
second-in-command Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
Martyrdom vs.
cultural relativism
Prof. Marandi offers a
synthetic explanation: “The American irrational
hatred of Shi’ism stems from its strong sense of
resisting injustice – the story of Karbala and Imam
Hussein and the Shi’a stress on protecting the
oppressed, defending the oppressed and standing up
against the oppressor. That is something that the
United States and the hegemonic Western powers
simply cannot tolerate.”
Blake Archer Williams sent me
a reply that has now been published as a
stand-alone piece. This passage, extending on
the power of the sacred, clearly underlines the
abyss separating the Shi’a notion of martyrdom from
Western cultural relativism:
“There is nothing more
glorious for a Moslem than attaining to martyrdom
while fighting in the Way of God. General Qāsem
Soleymānī fought for many years for the objective of
waking the Iraqi people up to the point where they
would want to take the helm of the destiny of their
own country in their own hands. The vote of the
Iraqi parliament showed that his objective has been
achieved. His body was taken away from us, but his
spirit was amplified a thousand fold, and his
martyrdom has ensured that shards of its blessed
light will be embedded in the hearts and minds of
every Moslem man, woman, and child, inoculating them
all from the zombie-cancer of the Satanic Novus
Ordo Seclorum cultural relativists.”
[a point of contention: Novus
Ordo Seclorum, or Saeculorum, means “new order of
the ages”, and derives from a famous poem by Virgil
which, in the Middle Ages, was regarded by
Christians as a prophecy of the coming of Christ. To
this point, Williams responded that “while that
etymological sense of the phrase is true and still
stands, the phrase was hijacked by one George Bush
The Younger as representative of the New Worldly
Order globalist cabal, and it is in this sense that
is currently predominant.”]
Enslaved by Wahhabism
Princess Vittoria would
rather frame the debate around the unquestioning
American attitude towards Wahhabism: “I do not think
all this has anything to do with hating Shi’ism or
ignoring it. After all the Aga Khan is super
embedded in US security, a sort of Dalai Lama of the
Islamic world. I believe the satanic influence is
from Wahhabism, and the Saudi family, who are much
more heretic than the Shi’a to all Sunnis of the
world, but have been the only contact to Islam for
the US rulers. The Saudis have paid for most of the
murders and wars by the Islamic Brothers first, then
by the other forms of Salafism, all of them invented
on a Wahhabi base.”
So, for Princess Vittoria, “I
would not try so much to explain Shi’ism, but to
explain Wahhabism and its devastating consequences:
it has given birth to all extremisms as well as to
revisionism, atheism, destruction of shrines and
Sufi leaders all over the Islamic world. And of
course Wahhabism is so close to Zionism. There are
even researchers who have come up with documents
which seem to prove that the House of Saud is a
Dunmeh tribe of converted Jews expelled from Medina
by the Prophet after they tried to murder him
despite having signed a peace treaty.”
Princess Vittoria also
emphasizes the fact that “ the Iranian revolution
and Shi’a groups in the Middle East are today the
only successful force of resistance to the US, and
that causes them to be hated more than others. But
only after all other Sunni opponents had been
disposed of, killed, terrified (just think of
Algeria, but there are dozens of other examples) or
corrupted. This is of course not only my position,
but that of most Islamologists today.”
The profane against
the sacred
Knowing of Williams’ immense
knowledge of Shi’a theology, and his expertise in
Western philosophy, I prodded him to, literally, “go
for the jugular”. And he delivered: “The question as
to why American politicians are incapable of
understanding Shi’a Islam (or Islam in general for
that matter) is a simple one: unrestrained
neoliberal capitalism engenders oligarchy, and the
oligarchs “select” candidates that represent their
interests before they are “elected” by the ignorant
masses. Populist exceptions such as Trump
occasionally slip through (or don’t, as in the case
of Ross Perot, who pulled out under duress), but
even Trump is then controlled by the oligarchs
through threats of impeachment, etc. So the role of
the politician in democracies seems not to be to try
to understand anything but simply carry out the
agenda of the elites who own them.”
Williams’ “go for the
jugular” response is a long, complex essay that I’d
like to publish in full only when our debate gets
deeper – along with possible refutations. To
summarize it, he outlines and discusses the two main
tendencies in Western philosophy: dogmatists vs.
skeptics; details how “the holy trinity of the
ancient world were in fact the second wave of the
dogmatists, trying to save the Greek city states and
the Greek world more generally from the decadence of
the Sophists”; delves into the “the third wave of
skepticism”, which started with the Renaissance and
peaked in the 17th century with Montaigne and
Descartes; and then draws connections “to Shi’a
Islam and the failure of the West to understand it.”
And that leads him to “the
heart of the matter”: “A third option, and a third
intellectual stream over and above the dogmatists
and the skeptics, and that is the tradition of the
traditional (as opposed to the philosophical) Shī’a
scholars of religion.”
Now compare it with the last
push of the skeptics, “as Descartes himself admits,
by the ‘daemon’ which came to him in his dreams and
which resulted in his writing his Discourse on
the Method (1637) and Meditations on First
Philosophy (1641). The West is still reeling
from the blow, and it would seem has decided to put
away its stilts of reason and the senses (which Kant
tried in vain to reconcile, making things a thousand
times worse and more convoluted and
discombobulated), and just wallow in the
self-congratulatory form of irrationalism known as
post-modernism, which should rightly be called
ultra-modernism or hyper-modernism as it is no less
rooted in the Cartesian ‘Subjective Turn’ and the
Kantian ‘Copernican Revolution’ than are the early
moderns and the moderns proper.”
To summarize a quite complex
juxtaposition, “what all this means is that the two
civilizations have two utterly different views of
what the world order should be. Iran believes that
the order of the world should be what it has always
been and actually is in reality, whether we like it
or not, or whether we even believe in reality or not
(as some in the West are wont not to do). And the
secularized West believes in a new worldly (as
opposed to other-worldly or divine) order. And so it
is not so much a clash of civilizations as it is a
clash of the profane against the sacred, with
profane elements in both civilizations arrayed
against the sacred forces in both civilizations. It
is the clash of the sacred order of justice versus
the profane order of the exploitation of man at the
hands of his fellow man; of the profaning of God’s
justice for the (short-term or this-worldly) benefit
of the rebels against God’s justice.”
Dorian Gray revisited
Williams does provide a
concrete example to illustrate these abstract
concepts: “The problem is that while everyone knows
that the 19th and 20th century
exploitation of the third world by Western powers
was unjust and immoral, this same exploitation
continues today. The continuation of this outrageous
injustice is the ultimate basis for the differences
that exist between Iran and the United States, which
will ineluctably continue as long as the US insists
on its exploitative practices and as long as it
continues to protect its protectorate governments,
who only survive against the overwhelming will of
the people they rule because of the bullying
presence of the US forces that are propping them up
in order for them to continue to serve their
interests rather than the interests of their
peoples. It is a spiritual war for the establishment
of justice and autonomy in the third world. The West
can continue to look good in its own eyes because it
controls the reality studio (of world discourse),
but its real image is plain for all to see, even
though the West continues to see itself as Dorian
Gray did in Oscar Wilde’s only novel, as a young and
handsome person whose sins were only reflected in
his portrait. Thus the portrait reflects the reality
which the third world sees every day, whereas the
Western Dorian Gray sees himself as he is portrayed
by the CNN’s and the BBC’s and the New York Times’s
of the world.”
“Western imperialism in
Western Asia is usually symbolized by Napoleon
Bonaparte’s war against the Ottomans in Egypt and
Syria (1798–1801). Ever since the beginning of the
19th century, the West has been sucking
on the jugular vein of the Moslem body politic like
a veritable vampire whose thirst for Moslem blood is
never sated and who refused to let go. Since 1979,
Iran, which has always played the role of the
intellectual leader of the Islamic world, has risen
up to put a stop to this outrage against God’s law
and will, and against all decency. So it is a
process of revisioning a false and distorted vision
of reality back to what reality actually is and
should be: a just order. But this revisioning is
hampered both by the fact that the vampires control
the reality studio, and the ineptitude of Moslem
intellectuals and their failure to understand even
the rudiments of the history of Western thought, be
this in its ancient, medieval, or modern period.”
Is there a chance to smash
the reality studio? Possibly: “What needs to happen
is for world consciousness to shift from the
paradigm wherein people believe a maniac like Pompeo
and a buffoon like Trump represent the paragon of
normality, to a paradigm where people believe that
Pompeo and Trump are just a couple of gangsters who
go about doing whatever they please, no matter how
disgusting and depraved, with almost complete and
utter impunity. And that is a process of revisioning,
and a process of awakening to a new and higher state
of political consciousness. It is a process of
rejecting the discourse of the dominant paradigm and
of joining the Axis of Resistance, whose military
leader was the martyr General Qāsem Soleymānī. Not
least, it involves a rejection of the absurdity of
the relativity of truth (and the relativity of time
and space, for that matter; sorry, Einstein); and
the abandonment of the absurd and nihilistic
philosophy of humanism, and the awakening to the
reality that there is a Creator, and that He is
actually in charge. But of course, all this is too
much for the oh-so-enlightened modern mentality, who
knows better.”
There you go. And this is
just the beginning. Input and refutations welcomed.
Calling all informed souls: the debate is on.
Pepe Escobar
is correspondent-at-large at
Asia
Times. His latest book is
2030. Follow him on
Facebook.
This article was originally published by "Unz
Review" -
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