Clash
of civilizations, revisited
Turkish President Erdogan’s move to make Hagia Sophia a
mosque is part of his masterplan to claim leadership of
global Islam
By Pepe Escobar
July 20, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - Late afternoon in May
29, 1453, Sultan Mehmet, the third son of Murad, born of
a slave-girl – probably Christian – in the harem, fluent
in Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Persian and Hebrew,
followed by his top ministers, his imams and his
bodyguard of Janissaries, rides slowly towards the Great
Church of St Sophia in Constantinople.
It’s unlikely that Sultan Mehmet would be sparing a
thought for Emperor Justinian, the last of quite a
breed: a true Roman Emperor in the throne of Byzantium,
a speaker of “barbarous” Greek (he was born in
Macedonia) but with a Latin mind.
Much like Sultan Mehmet, Justinian was quite the
geopolitician. Byzantium trade was geared towards Cathay
and the Indies: silk, spices, precious stones. Yet
Persia controlled all the caravan routes on the Ancient
Silk Road. The sea route was also a problem; all cargo
had to depart from the Persian Gulf.
So Justinian had to bypass Persia.
He came up with a two-pronged strategy: a new
northern route via Crimea and the Caucasus, and a new
southern route via the Red Sea, bypassing the Persian
Gulf.
The first was a relative success; the second a mess.
But Justinian finally got his break when a bunch of
Orthodox monks offered him to bring back from Asia some
precious few silkworm eggs. Soon there were factories
not only in Constantinople but in Antioch, Tyre and
Beirut. The imperial silk industry – a state monopoly,
of course – was up and running.
A fantastic mosaic in Ravenna from the year 546
depicts a Justinian much younger than 64, his age at the
time. He was a prodigy of energy – and embellished
Constantinople non-stop. The apex was the Church of St.
Sophia – the largest building in the world for
centuries.
So here we have
Sultan Mehmet silently proceeding with his slow ride all
the way to the central bronze doors of St Sophia.
He dismounts and picks up a handful of dust and in a
gesture of humility, sprinkles it over his turban.
Then he enters the
Great Church. He walks towards the altar.
A barely perceptible command leads his top imam to
escalate the pulpit and proclaim in the name of Allah,
the All Merciful and Compassionate, there is no God but
God and Muhammad is his Prophet.
The Sultan then
touches the ground with his turbaned head – in a silent
prayer. St Sophia was now a mosque.
Sultan Mehmet leaves the mosque and crosses the
square to the old Palace of the Emperors, in ruins,
founded by Constantine The Great 11 and ½ centuries
before. He slowly wanders the ancient halls, his fine
velvet slippers brushing the dust from the fabulous
pebbled floor mosaics.
Then he murmurs two verses of a Persian poet:
“As the spider weaves the curtain over the
palace of the Roman Caesars
The owl sings the time of the house of
Afrasiab”
The Byzantine empire, founded by Constantine The
Great on Monday, May 11, 330, was over on a Tuesday, May
29, 1453.
Sultan Mehmet is now the Lord of Constantinople and
the Lord of the Ottoman Empire. He’s only 21 years old.
Back to the Magic Mountain
Last week, Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan re-christened Hagia
Sophia from a museum back into a mosque. He may
have done it because his popularity is waning; his proxy
wars are a disaster; his AKP party is shattered; and the
economy is bleeding badly.
But what’s striking is that right at the beginning of
his official televised speech, Erdogan quoted exactly
the same verses by the Persian poet murmured by Sultan
Mehmet in that fateful afternoon in 1453.
Erdogan’s latest
move – which is part of his perennial master plan to
claim leadership of global Islam over the decrepit House
of Saud – was widely interpreted in myriad latitudes as
yet another instance of clash of civilizations: not only
Orthodox Christianity vs. Islam but once again East vs.
West.
That reminded me of another East vs. West recent
derivation: a revival of the Settembrini vs. Naphta
debate in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain,
promoted by a Dutch think tank, the Nexus Institute,
which aims to “keep the spirit of European humanism
alive”. The debate pitted Aleksander Dugin against
Bernard-Henri Levy
(widely known in France as BHL). The full
transcript of the debate is here.
Dugin is a leading Eurasianist and the conceptualizer
of the – largely banned in the West – Fourth
Political Theory . As a philosopher and political
theorist, Dugin is cartoonishly demonized across the
West as “Putin’s brain”, a closet fascist and “the most
dangerous philosopher in the world”.
BHL, hailed as “one of the West’s leading
intellectuals”, is a vain poseur who emerged as a “nouveau
philosophe” in the mid-1970s and ritually
regurgitates the usual Atlanticist mantras enveloped in
flowery quotes. He managed, among other feats, to write
a book about Pakistan without knowing anything
whatsoever about Pakistan, as I thrashed it on Asia
Times back in 2002.
Here are a few interesting talking
points throughout the debate.
Dugin stresses the end of Western hegemony and global
liberalism. He asks BHL, directly, how, “interestingly,
in your
book, you define the American empire or the global
liberal system as a system of nihilism, based on
nothing.” Dugin does define himself as a
nihilist “in the sense that I refuse the universality of
modern Western values (…) I just challenge that the only
way to interpret democracy is as the rule of minorities
against the majority, that the only way to interpret
freedom is as individual freedom, and that the only way
to interpret human rights is by projecting a modern,
Western, individualistic version of what it means to be
human on other cultures.”
BHL, which seems not to have read his own, dreary,
book – this is something Dugin told me in person last
year in Beirut, after the debate –
prefers to resort to
proverbial, infantile Putin bashing, picked up over and
over again, stressing “there is a bad, dark wind of
nihilism in its proper sense, which is a Nazi and a
fascist sense, which is blowing in the great Russia.”
Later on in the debate, BHL adds, “I really believe
that there is a link between, on the one side, your and
Huntington’s way of thinking; and, on the other side,
the occupation of Crimea, the 30,000 deaths in Ukraine
and the war in Syria with its bloodbath, tragic and
horrible.”
On racism, Dugin is adamant: he does not defend it.
For him, “Racism is an Anglo-Saxon liberal
construction based on a hierarchy between peoples. I
think this is criminal.” Then he defines “a new
Manichean division, a new racism. Those who are in favor
of Western values, they are good. Everybody who
challenges that, in the Islamic tradition, in the
Russian tradition, in the Chinese tradition, in the
Indian tradition, everywhere, they are populists, and
they are classified as fascism. I think that is a new
kind of racism.”
BHL prefers to concentrate on “the civilization of
human rights, freedom, individual dignity, and so on.
This deserves to be universalized. This should be
conceived, except if you are a racist, as profitable for
the entire humanity.” And then it’s Anti-Semitism all
over again: “All the men who you quoted and from whom
you draw your inspiration – Spengler, Heidegger, who is
also a great philosopher of course, and others – are
contaminated, corrupted, infected by this plague which
is antisemitism. And alas – you too.”
In Paris circles, the joke is that the only thing BHL
cares about is the promotion of BHL. And
everyone who does not agree with one of the “leading
Western intellectuals” is Anti-Semitic.
BHL insists he’s interested in building bridges. But
it’s Dugin who frames the real heart of the matter:
“When we try to build bridges too early, without knowing
the structure of the Other – the problem is the Other.
The West doesn’t understand the Other as something
positive. It is all the same, and we immediately try to
find bridges – they are illusions, and not bridges,
because we are projecting ourselves. The Other is the
same, the ideology of the same. We first need to
understand otherness.”
BHL totally ignores Levi-Strauss. It’s Dugin who
refers to Levi-Strauss when talking about The Other,
describing him as one of his teachers:
“This anthropological pluralism, I agree, is
precisely the American and French tradition. But it
is not reflected in politics, or it is reflected in
a very perverted way. So I think there is a big
contradiction between this anthropological thought
in American universities and French universities,
and a kind of very aggressive colonial
neo-imperialist form to promote American interests
on the world scale with weapons.”
BHL is left with – what else – Putin
demonization: “The real imperialism, the real
one who is interfering and sowing disorder and
interfering in the affairs of others, alas, is Putin.
And I need not speak of America, where it is now proved
that there has been a huge, crude, and evident Russian
intervention in the electoral process of the last
election.” BHL, who does not even qualify as a neophyte
in geopolitics, is oblivious to the absolute debunking
of Russiagate.
BHL is adamant “there is today a real clash
of civilizations. But not the one you mention
in your books, between the north and the east and the
west and the south and all of that; there is a clash of
civilizations all over the planet between those who
believe in human rights, in liberty, in the right for a
body not to be tortured and martyred, and those who are
happy with illiberalism and the revival of
authoritarianism and slavery.”
Dugin’s challenge for years has been to try to
conceptualize what may come next, after the failure of
Marxism, fascism and liberal democracy. As much as he
thinks Eurasian, he’s inclusive – incorporating “Euro”
with “Asia”. BHL for his part simplistically
reduces every “evil” to “illiberalism”, where Russia,
China, Iran and Turkey – no nuances – are thrown in the
same dustbin alongside the vacuous and actually
murderous House of Saud.
Mao returns
Now let’s attempt a light-hearted ending to
our mini-triptych on the clash of civilizations.
Inevitably, that has to do with the ongoing US-China
Hybrid War.
Around two years ago, the following dialogue
was a smash hit on Chinese Weibo. The Great
Helmsman Mao Zedong – or his ghost – was back in town,
and he wanted to know about everything that was goin’
on.
Mao: “Can the people eat their fill?”
Answer: “There’s so much to eat they’re dieting.”
Mao: “Are there still any capitalists?”
Answer: “They’re all doing business overseas
now!”
Mao: “Do we produce more steel than England?”
Answer: “Tangshan alone produces more than
America.”
Mao: “Did we beat social imperialism (as in the
former USSR)?”
Answer: “They dissolved it themselves!”
Mao: “Did we smash imperialism?”
Answer: “We’re the imperialists now!”
Mao: “And what about my Cultural Revolution?”
Answer: “It’s in America now!”
Call it a –
revisionist? – realpolitik version of the clash of
civilizations.
Pepe Escobar is
correspondent-at-large at
Asia Times.
His latest book is
2030. Follow him on
Facebook.- "Source"
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