THE
ROVING EYE The end of the end of
history By Pepe Escobar
How does it feel to be on your own, like a
complete unknown, like a rolling stone,
crisscrossing the desert sands, howling to the
winds that the end of the end of history is now?
Western ideological categories lie
mummified in a tomb. There's no dichotomy, or
"clash" of civilizations, between Western
parliamentary democracy and Islam.
Slovenian Slavoj Zizek, the Elvis of
philosophy, told al-Jazeera a few weeks ago that
the real tragedy of Arab nations was the
disappearance of a strong, secular left. No
wonder; all United States-backed dictators in MENA
(Middle East/Northern Africa) killed or exiled the
best and the brightest among progressive
intellectuals.
Now, one may even dream
that the notion of fighting
incompetent/corrupt/unjust governments in the name
of social
justice in MENA is about to
contaminate Europe and the US (as it already did;
"from Cairo to Wisconsin") - and a new day is
dawning for workers' movements that suffer from
austerity and "structural adjustments" concocted
by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). New
internationalist workers of the world, class of
2011, unite.
And how not to marvel that
neo-liberalism applied to the Arab world also
allowed the emergence of Islamist groups able to
orient into political action the enormous
collective anger provoked by horrible wealth
distribution?
How does it feel to be
laughing out loud at those silly neo-cons after
they had peddled for years the notion that Arabs
could be free, maybe, but they didn't really know
that they wanted to be free, and they couldn't do
it by themselves, so they needed the Pentagon to
"shock and awe" them into the real thing?
Meanwhile, assorted Zionists and Zio-cons
are left to pray for the emergence in Egypt of at
least a moderate Islamist-tinged government that
is willing to preserve the 1979 Camp David
accords, without discussing the whole, ongoing,
decades-long Palestinian tragedy. Fat chance.
How not to rejoice that the Tunisian and
Egyptian revolutions emerged within a secular and
nationalist framework, thus debunking Tehran's
revolution monopoly, according to which the
US-backed Shah of Iran was dethroned by Islam as
ideology?
So now it's one, two, three,
what are we fighting for? The fight is for one,
two, three, a million revolutions against not only
the aging, resident Euro-American-empowered tyrant
of choice but the whole US Treasury/IMF/World
Bank-concocted architecture of "reality".
Arab nationalism, Arab nationalist
solidarity, Arab nationalist al-Jazeera, Internet
as a super al-Jazeera - it's all on, for all Arabs
to see and do and practice themselves. And the
West has no plan B - or any hint of Barack
Obama/Hillary Clinton-style "orderly transition"
for Bahrain, Yemen or Libya.
Yet the
revolution has not even started.
The Sunni
dynasty in Bahrain will keep playing an Arab
Shakespearean drama. Following up on a 2009
WikiLeaks cable, King Hamad will keep "gradually
shifting power" to his son, crown prince Salman,
from the powerful Prime Minister Khalifa bin Sal
Al-Khalifa. The prime minister is the king's uncle
and the crown prince's great uncle. Meanwhile the
Bahrain National Security Service, run by Sheik
Khalifa bin Abdullah al-Khalifa, will keep getting
its marching orders from the US Central
Intelligence Agency.
The "strong tribal
alliance" Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) will use
tanks, jets, mercenaries, whatever it takes, to
prevent regime change in weak link Bahrain. After
all the GCC - Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi
Arabia, the United Arab Emirates - sits on 45% of
global oil reserves, and they are not letting the
loot go in the name of "democracy".
And
even while al-Qaeda lies as moribund as Mubarak,
and has absolutely no ideological or sociological
influence over northern Africa, shrill imperial
voices keep warning of Libya descending into the
status of a giant Somalia. As if the "Egyptian
doctor", Ayman al-Zawahiri, would materialize
tomorrow in liberated eastern Libya and apply for
a job as the new emir. Now that would be a real
clash of civilizations.
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