Manifesto of the Left Counterjihad

Manifesto of the Left Counterjihad

Main theses:

  1. The islamophilia of the left played down the threat of Islamism, which is why the right was able to conduct its right-wing Counterjihad and Kulturkampf/clash of civilizations without competition and at the same time also promoted the Islamists.
  2. The major worldwide missionary religions and their worldwide political movements are the US Evangelicals, the Falungong and Islamism. The Russian and Ukrainian and Greek orthodoxy, which have split among themselves, only want regional dominance, as does the Hinduism of a BJP or the Buddhism of a Dalaim Lama. Whereby German Christianity and the Dalaim Lama are rather special paths, as is Pope Francis, who could also be pushed back again by a more reactionary Christianity.
  3. The problem with the Left is that they never had a right relationship with religion and either tried to make it look harmless or fought it radically. But it would be important first to unite left secular forces against religion and its extremism, to unite them into a powerful force that pushes it back and only makes coalitions with moderate religious forces against religious and associated political extremism, but first form anindependent secular force and voice and does not wait for moderation from moderate religious forces.
  4. There is no danger of the Islamization of industrial OECD states and emerging economies due to a lack of Muslims, even if, conversely, already in states with a Muslim majority, which, however, will not be in the West. Nevertheless, there is the possibility that, as non-integrated minorities, they bring disturbances and also terrorist attacks into the non-Muslim societies, which are used as a pretext by right-wing and fascist movements and parties to soar themselves into a fascist or authoritarian dictatorship. Therefore one has to fight both Islamism and fascism, since Islamophilia favors authoritarian developments.
  5. Therefore one has to fight both Islamism and fascism, since Islamophilia favors authoritarian developments.

Up until now, counterjihad has mainly been propagated and largely monopolized from the right , which was an expression of the fact that there are hardly any people or political groups on the left who have grappled seriously with Islam and Islamism and have named it the enemy of the left Some leftists see such Islamists as allies in the anti-imperialist struggle due to their anti-Americanism. The majority of the left pretends to be cultural relativists, understanders of Islam, views Islamism as the sole product of western imperialism (which it is partly – in part as a reaction to western colonialism, and then during the Cold War as by the US CIA supported religious movement against communism and pan-Arabism, be it the Muslim Brotherhood or God’s Warrior in Afghanistan) and is more due to a western guilt cult that defensively sprinkles ashes over its head and croaks“Mea culpa!” and is , paralyzes. For a long time, Islamism was understood only as a reaction or even as a CIA creation in the fight against communism in the Cold War, but not as an independent political entity that follows its own laws and will.

For a long time, Islamism was portrayed as a pure “enemy image” of the West, as an invention by Western secret services that only served to enable imperialist wars of aggression to expand the state and military security apparatus, just as if it was not a real and factual danger for the labor movement, women and the left, but a Fatamorgana and an illusion of Western propaganda. Because of the legitimate concern that the right would like to instigate a „clash of civilizations“, one acted defensively or even paraylysed or even rejected a left-wing fight against Islamism, in short: one did not use a left counterjihad as an alternative to right-wing counterjihad. Important demands in the fight against Islamism are only rejected from the perspective of whether they could help the right or come from the right, instead of thinking about the suitability of these demands and the correctness or falsity of these demands. It is therefore necessary to fight Islamism from the left and to justify the left counterjihad programmatically.

The left has so far been mainstream Islamophilic, gender women demand the right to wear a headscarf for women with the slogan „My head belongs to me“, defend the Islamist Burkini with actions such as „Bikini and Burkini-Unite“ in a ludicrous legitimation of these misogynistic, puritanical Islamism symbols the in the name of women’s right to self-determination Theleft was not critizising the reactionary religious contents of the Koran and Islam, which lead just as purposefully to Islamofascism as the national conservative and conservative ideology can lead to fascism and National Socialism. Since the left no longer practices criticism of religion and Islam, or only when it comes to western religions, the right uses this very own territory of the left to wage a right-wing counterjihad and cultural struggle, which the left cannot oppose with its uncritical Islamophilism. Therefore, the left must position itself clearly on Islam and Islamism and the establishment of a left counter jihad.

Where does the passivity of the left regarding their fight against Islamism and the formulation of a left Counterjihad come from?

On the one hand, this is explained by how leftists regard religion in general and Islam in particular. The left has a fundamental problem regarding religion.


The revolutionary left saw ala Marx religion only as opium of the people, as a pure superstructure phenomenon, as a remnant of feudalism. It would virtually evaporate if capitalism prevailed and then communism. It ignored the transcendental and spiritual needs of many people. Therefore, she confined herself to a „There is no help from God, neither Emperor nor Tribune, to redeem from misery, we can only do it ourselves“. True, this humanism, this confidence in its own human-worldly power and anti-authoritarian impulse, is right, but one saw religion as a phenomenon that was no longer to be taken seriously, but as one that would liquefy itself with the rise of modernity. Rather than a fad , a quirk that would dissolve already in the context of secularization and the bourgeois revolutions and then the communist revolution.Now we have the phenomenon that religiosity on the one hand exists in agricultuaral-backward areas, but as well as in the urban middle class of many states, whether in Turkey, in Egypt, or in US cities and towns, where evangelicals and religious rights are no longer the redback phenomenon of secluded Bible Belt or the  Midwest, but are seizing the modern big cities. Many leftists also saw religious movements as an expression of social and anti-imperialist protest, throwing even the more left theology of liberation into a pot with Islamists like Khomeini, the Muslim Brotherhood or even the Islamofascist Hamas.

The reformist left saw religion as an ineradicable part of man, renounced atheistic or scientific criticism of religion, mostly sees religion only as propagating social justice, solidarity and charity, especially  philanthropideology, especially with an anti-capitalist orientation (interest-free, charity institutions, which compensate for the lack of a welfare state and ethically-oriented economics such as Islamic banking as much-cited examples), i.e. as a somewhat religiously ticking labor movement-like social movement and tried to moderate religion, to steer it in a humane way and to make it part of the bourgeois-democratic rule – of course to a large extent denying that the taming of religion and its moderation took place above all due to the brutal acts of violence of the French Revolution, as well as the associated secularization as a result of the spread of the s capitalism. But the new bourgeoisie knew how to take control of religion very quickly when it entered its imperialist and colonial phase, and the fascists also established a symbiotic relationship with religion that served their power with the Christian Churches‘ concordat treaties with Hitler’s NSDAP and Mussolini as the most obvious example – whereby National Socialism in particular once again developed a neo-paganism of ethnic provinces in the SS Ancestors´Heritage of Himmler, which then wanted to replace the old religion. But also with the SS: Christians were allowed to become members, while godless, quasi-communist atheists never! The Church’s few resistance fighters against fascism are inflated to oversize, in order to gloss over factually extensive cooperation of the Christian churches with fascism. But whether Mussolini, Franco, Salazar – all these clerical fascists or Latin American military dictators worked very well with religion, especially with the Catholic Church and its Opus Dei and its Jesuits, who also bloodily suppressed the theology of liberation in interaction and Christian Churches also organized the flight of leading German National Socialists and Italian fascists to Christian South America or Spain and Portugal.

Evangelicals and Christian Fundamentalism


The United States was an exception to this initially. On the one hand the USA arose from basic Christians and fundamentalist-Calvinist fanatics who had fled the European religious wars, and on the other hand from the immigration due to poverty by free spirits, who also did promote the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Religion in the United States was seen as a salvation from feudalism and martial Christianity, mostly Catholicism, so the United States has a different connection to religion, but it should be noted that radicalization and increasing political orientation started again with Reagan and the Moral Majority at the latest and now has produced a radicalized evangelicalism that the United States would like to transform into a Christian Iran or Christian presidential dictatorship based on the Muslim Brotherhood model, as  enviwsaged in the book The Handmaid’s Tale or  Margaret Atwood or Volker Schlöndorf `s film “as a black dystopia.

The evangelicals are not only a powerful force in the United States, but evangelical free churches are growing all over Latin America, Africa and also parts of Asia and are allying with chauvinistic right-wing politicians, now also in Bolsonaro Brazil.

The future foreign minister of the Brazilian government of Jair Bolsonaro, Ernesto Henrique Fraga Araújo, had given several speeches, articles and essays on Brazil’s foreign policy before taking office.

One of his central proposals is a kind of Christian Western alliance between Bolsonaro- Brazil, Trump- America and Putin- Russia. Brazil must form a new conservative axis with the United States and Russia.

Other conservatively governed states such as Italy, Hungary or Poland are also mentioned. With the new Brazil, all these states should defend their national sovereignty and the values of western civilization against „dominating globalism“.These are the free states „that oppose the demonization of national sentiment and the suppression of belief (especially Christian belief).

The evangelicals are not only a powerful force in the United States, but evangelical free churches are growing all over Latin America, Africa and also parts of Asia and are allying with chauvinistic right-wing politicians, now also in Bolsonaro Brazil.

The future foreign minister of the Brazilian government of Jair Bolsonaro, Ernesto Henrique Fraga Araújo, had given several speeches, articles and essays on Brazil’s foreign policy before taking office.

One of his central proposals is a kind of Christian Western alliance between Bolsonaros Brazil, Trumps America and Putins Russia. Brazil must form a new conservative axis with the United States and Russia.

Other conservatively governed states such as Italy, Hungary or Poland are also mentioned. With the new Brazil, all these states should defend their national sovereignty and the values ​​of western civilization against „dominating globalism“.

These are the free states „that oppose the demonization of national sentiment and the suppression of belief (especially Christian belief).“ They want to reject the emptying of the human soul and its replacement by anemic dogmas, which only serve the interests of the world domination of certain elites.

Ernesto Henrique Fraga Araújo strives for the „desacralization of immigration, combating the ideology of the ‚untouchable immigrant‘, the universal right to migration“. These things should not overlap the right to „national sovereignty.“

However, it is questionable whether Trump will come to such a deal with Putin and to such a Christian front, especially since in the United States hostility to Russia and China has been a priority since the new national security strategy, US superpower conflicts with both powers can no longer be ruled out, one Pentagon study already calls for plans for a war economy, which threatens the USA with the termination of the INF treaty, has just approved the largest defense budget and Putin warns of the danger of a nuclear war.


However, it shows how Christian fanatics, especially evanglicals, team up with radical right-wing nationalists and now also call for conservative Christian axes. There are 80 million evangelicals in the United States, most of whom are fanatical and at the core of the Christian right, as well as Trump’s core voters. Although there may be some moderate evangelicals such as Rick Warren, who also accompanied Obama’s inauguration as a speaker, the majority are more arch-conservative, reactionary and right-wing radical. It is these 80 million US evangelicals that make up the real core of the Israeli lobby in the United States and also support Middle East politics as a lobby group alongside other actors such as AIPAC, Republicans and Democrats. Trump’s Jerusalem decision should also be seen from this perspective, as the Evangelicals want to use the US power and Israel, as Crusader army, to wage the holy war over the Holy Land and Jerusalem against Islam. While established Catholic and Protestant churches are shrinking, evangelical free churches are flourishing all over the United States, Latin America, Africa and Asia. Bolsanaro’s core electorate includes exactly those evanglicals, which is why Bolsanaro’s foreign ministers are now calling for an international Christian and conservative front.

It remains to be seen how European Christians will react to this Christian pact. While the German Christians are rather reserved here, the „Christians in the AfD“ are rather a marginalia, Gloria von Thurn and Taxis together with Bishop Müller want to integrate in Steve Banon’s radical right-wing movement as arch-reactionary Christians in defense of the Christian West, hundreds of thousands of regressive Christians demonstrate in France against gay marriageand could easily be won over by the Front National, just as Catholic countries with a clerical-fascist past such as Italy, Hungary, Spain or Portugal could have a potential for this, as well as Catholic-nationalist Poland. Europe is now  secular, Eastern Europe partly atheistic or areligious, nevertheless one should not rule out the risk of radicalization of the still established churches, as well as a possible emergence of the evangelical free churches in Europe. Quite an option at the moment, but there is little in favor of it, but conversely, German Christianity is a special way and one should not believe that Pope Francis was already the end of the development and the decision of the 2nd Vatican Council was not irreversible.

The left practices Eurocentric criticism of religion and developed a cult-relativistic cult of guilt


Most leftists focused their criticism of religion primarily Eurocentric on European Christianity, the history of feudalism, the crusades, the burning of witches, the 30-year war of religion, anti-Semitism, colonialism and imperialism. On the one hand, this was logical, on the other hand, a cult of guilt was spread here, which relativized the criticism of other religions and religion in general or denounced it as neo-imperialist and Eurocentric. This overlooked the fact that outside of moderated European Christianity, which did not produce any political movement, reactionary religious forces were striving for political power everywhere in the world. For one thing, in the United States there are the 80 million fundamental Christian Evangelicals and religious rights who exert a wide influence on the Republican Party through their Political Action Committees, be it the reborn Bush Jr. Rick Samtorium, Ted Cruz or now under Trump Mike Pence as Vice President, who emphasizes that he is „Christian, Conservative and then Republican and excactly in that order“.

Second, the resurgence of the reactionary Russian Orthodox religion under Putin or the Hindu nationalism of the Indian BJP or the Daoist-Buddhist-Confucian syncretic mass sect Falungong in China, which intends to topple the CPC and replace it by a totalitarian cult of leadership around its great guru Li Hongzhi, who is exiled in the United States .Western people, in turn, confuse the Falungong with the Dalai Lama, consider their teachings to be harmless because they rely on Buddhism and Daoism and practice qigong, that is, they are misjudged for a Far Eastern meditation and fitness group, although their leader uses his manifesto “ The 9 Comments on the CP China “openly calls for the annihilation of the Chinese Communist Party and has a completely religious-Manichaean worldview. The Chinese opposition is divided. One faction of the secular-democratic opposition  said in the opposition organ Beijing Spring that they refused to cooperate with the Falungong, as it was an end-time-apocalyptic-irrational-cultural-chauvinist leader organization that wanted to replace the authoritarian CCP with a religious-fundamentalist totalitarianism and was not striving for secular democracy . The father of the democracy wall Wei Jingsheng and other democrats are more opportunistic, pointing out that the Falungong had 100 million members when it was banned, while the CCP China was just 65 million and the democratic opposition therefore after the ban and suppression of the Falungong can use their million-strong underground network. Especially since a Democrat Roosevelt had entered into an alliance with the totalitarian Stalin against Hitler, China’s democratic opposition should enter into an alliance with the Falungong. Here, too, secular-democratic forces underestimate the power of religious groups and their ability to form effective parties overnight and make them effective, and even to establish religious-fascist dictatorships.

The Falungong- China’s force to overthrow the CPC and a secular-democratic China?

The Falungong was founded by Li Hongzhi as a meditation movement and neo-Buddhist-Daoist sect, claiming that all Buddhism in China is a „buffalo horn Buddhism“ that has become increasingly constricted and no longer promotes the truth of Chinese traditions and culture That is why Li Hongzhi’s Falugong is the hoped-for the broadening of the buffalo horn, the demolition of existing constrictions, and the ultimate liberation and redemption. People in the West tend to think of Buddhism and Daoism as peaceful, nature-oriented, ecologically esoteric-harmonic movements, of the Dalai Lama, but there are other forms of Buddhism  for example, the fundamentalist Buddhist monastic movement in Myanmar, fanatically militant against the Rohingya. The fact that there could also be fundamentalist forms of Buddhism is as overlooked as Islamism was because of the liberal-democratic and Marxist historical materialism (Histomat), which neglected a potential  political role of religion, much as the US and the Soviet Union did in the face of the Islamist revolution in Iran and how Dmitry Asinovsky retrospectively describes this in his article „How Experts, Intelligence Services and Politicians of the Two Superpowers Missed the Birth of Islamic Fundamentalism“ in Russia in Global Affairs.


The fact that the Falungon is by no means limited to China in its proselytizing and mussionary activities , but has the whole world in the field, is also evident in the fact that she founded her groups in numerous countries, trains her Dafa elites and also publishes her publications multilingual.

Essentially, there are three main world missionary fundamental religious movements that are pushing for world domination: Islamism, Evangelicalism, and the Falungong, although the Falungong is suppressed by CP China and it spreads a largely positive, harmless image as a victim in the West, never even in power could be the culprit. The Hinduism of the Indian BJP is more regionally limited, the other Buddhism as well. The Orthodox Church of Russia and Ukraine are currently segregating themselves and submitting themselves as identities to the nationalist ambitions of Putin and Poroshenko. A purportedly Buddhist movement such as the Falungong has yet no one on the radar in the consideration of religious fundamentalism, even if Li Hongzhi with vlaims that all other established Buddhism is wrong and „buffalo horn Buddhism“ quasi claiming the absolute truth for his Falungong. Another change to traditional Buddhism of Li Hongzhi was the introduction of the „Yeli“, the evil power, who made this purportedly Buddhist doctrine dualistic and antagonistic  and designed  the CPC as this evil power and challenge of the forces of the heavens and the only sin against  the forces of nature and of the Dao as well as of the sky.

The CPC initially supported the Falungong as an outlet valve for politically disappointed people of the Tianmen massacre, as well as frustrated Chinese people, who were supposed to relieve their frustration in some meditation exercises. A bit of exercise, harmony and peacefulness, some body movement is good, that one does not let his mind slide too much into political things except the Communist Party of China propaganda. So a kind of gym, wellness movement brand Far East, for the inner well-being of their participants and the CPC- The CP China offered its dissatisfied subjects a kind of Aldi a Walmart  mass Buddhism that also became mass-compatible through its simplistic meditation practices. The CP China hoped for a kind of Chinese Jane Fonda, including aerobic exercise, that would dissolve grim thoughts through exercise therapy, while Li Hongzhi  linked His date of birth with that of the Gautama Buddha at an early age, and this whole irrational nonsense was legitimized by the Communist Party of China and enjoyed state support. Li Hongzhi became a CCP-promoted mega-guru, who then turned against his creator just like Frankenstein’s monster.

Because of this, Li Hongzhi and his Falungong were also initially funded by the Communist Party of China, even overloaded with para and pseudo-scientific prizes from state institutions. Such nonsense was represented with the support of state institutions that gold could be made from iron by means of Falungong meditation and that matter could be converted by means of mental power into precious substances. Millions of Chinese people meditated in China in all public places and privately. The Falungong grew into a mass movement, according to a study by the Communist Party of China, they even had 100 million followers. The decisive change came when Li Hongzhi propagated the formation of so-called Dafa elites and irrationally challenged the scientific nature of the dogmas of the Communist Party of China. As a result, the Chinese Communist Party, through a professor, questioned the scientific and societal benefits of the Falungong, which it saw as an attack on itself.


In addition, Bill Clinton saw and supported both the Democratic Party of China and the Falungong as democratizing forces in China, especially since China joined the Human Rights Pact in 1998 and the USA wanted to test the pact through party registration of the Democratic Party of China and if the CPC would take it seriously. The Democratic Party of China was simply banned, and the Falungong carried out its first public demonstration in front of the Chinese government headquarters in Beidahe. The then President Jiang Zemin was quite angry, how it can come to such demonstrations so open and why one has learned nothing from the suppression ala 1989, especially since there have been such religious movements in Chinese history before, be it the Yellow Lotus or the Taiping revolt. Why this liberality? Jiang Zemin then ordered the Falungong being banned, founded the 610 Office, which devoted itself exclusively to the suppression and persecution of the Falungong. Jiang Zemin wanted to smash the support network as well as the previous state support for the Falungong.


The question is whether the Falungong could convert their 100 million support network after the ban into an underground network of Li Hongzhi’s early propagated Dafa elites, so if there could still be a hardcore of 2 million or similar dimensions that went underground and who are  subversively waiting for their coming chance of overthrowing the CP China. Li Hongzhi fled early to the United States because he wanted the confrontation with the Communist Party of China and brought himself preventively to safety to spread anti-Communist propaganda from abroad. Li Hongzhi published  the 9 comments on the CP China, which openly called for the overthrow of the CP China, launched a party exit campaign, which, however, showed no significant success, especially as the Falungong fantasized even mendacious desire figures of 90 million CCP withdrawals. Meanwhile, she operates by means of her Cultural program ShenYun, which is touring through the US and Europe, wants to present itself as the true representative of Chinese culture alongside China’s Confucius Institutes. In addition, she publishes the multilingual „Epoch Times,“ which co-operates with right-wing populists and right-wing extremists, as a broadcast by  the Team Walraff has revealed and is increasingly turning into a Breitbart-based Chinese ala Steve Banon. She has also led a campaign accusing the CPC of organ harvesting s from detained Falungong followers and slaughtering and exterminating them.

There is no information about the domestic work of the Falungong in China, and apart from a Tiananmen self-immolation, there were no serious actions by the Falungong in China anymore, but that does not mean that it does not yet have a underground network that can support itself In as much as there should be this Falungong underground network, it is likely to outstrip that of the secular-democratic opposition. And the father of the democracy wall movement Wei Jingsheng pleaded just for the use and cooperation with this imaginary underground network, while the rest of the secular-democratic opposition emphasize the leader-centered, authoritarian nature of the Falungong, the possibility that in the event of toppling  the CP China, not a democracy, but a neo-religious -totalitarian leadership could emerge.


The Falungong can also benefit from US religious rights, which hates the atheism of the Communist Party of China. Li Hongzhi has read his Lenin („What to do?“ – about building an organization and party around a newspaper and media), he is an organizational genius and very modern. Also, that he was able to organize such an Aldi / Walmart mass Buddhism with about 100 million followers, is considerable, although initially supported and encouraged by the Communist Party of China. But the former trumpeter of the People’s Liberation Army is a person who understands agitation and propaganda with modern means and media.

The Falungong is a fundamentalist missionary religion that has China as its cultural base and wants to overthrow Communist Party China first, but then wants to proselytize and conquer the whole world, such as Christianity and the evangelicals and Islam and Islamism, especially since the Falungong wants to be political and create a religious-authoritarian rule and world state. The Falungong wants to appeal to Chinese, but at the same time, it also addresses humanity. Hence the multilingualism of the Epoch Times and the membership and recruitment of non-Chinese members.


If one still talks about the democratization of China, it is striking that the secular democratic opposition has completely failed and has been marginalized since the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, the destruction of the Democratic Party of China in 1998 and the last attempt of the Charter in 2008. They are as defeated as the German revolutionaries of 1848. This completely weakened the democratic-secular opposition which  is meanwhile mostly inactive, while a few representatives still hope for the imaginary power of the Falungong subnetwork as a partner, the possible existence does not even exist and should it exist  it would be all times more powerful than the secular-democratic movement and would aim for a leader-centric neo religious dictatorship under títs leader and Great Helmsman Li Hongzhi who  would very quickly push aside and suppress. his secular-democratic allies

Conversely, China’s party system is increasingly turning into a neo-totalitarian expansive nationalistic system that is increasingly being transformed from an authoritarian one-party dictatorship to a neotozalitarian one-man-dictatorship. . In short, for China, there seems no hope of democratization or of a Chinese Singapore, the latter would be possible at best in the event of civil unrest or in the event of a lost war. Apart from that, China is resolutely pursuing the path of German Reich before WW I right into a Sino-American war.

Islamism – the left blindness in the Islamist eye


However, the greatest failure of the revolutionary and reformist left is the relativization and trivialization of Islamism, in short; Islamofascism, which originates from Islam and is entirely compatible with this religion, as other national-clerical-fascist movements in the world are compatible with the anti-modernism, anti-enlightenment content, homophobia and misogyny of these feudalist religions.

 

But while the US evangelicals, Hinduism, Christianity were favorite objects of Western criticism of religion, Islam and especially Islamism were largely relativized and regarded as a comic phenomenon when Khomeini came to power in 1979, even Khomeini was still considered an anti-imperialist by many leftists even when he sent the entire Iranian left in torture cellars and for mass excecutions. Rudi Carell’s brassiere joke about Khomeini on German television, which was intoned with mass protests in Tehran and the burning of the German flag, was considered to be somehow weird and strange and no longer to be taken seriously; the left was visibly surprised and could not explain the reaction. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie’s „Satanic Verses“ were perceived as an exaggerated exception, but Khomeini was still perceived as an anti-imperialist who topple the US-imperialistic Shah..

Dmitry Asinovsky in his article „How Experts, Intelligence Services and Politicians of the Two Superpowers Missed the Birth of Islamic Fundamentalism“ in Russia in Global Affairs, describes that the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union had no concept of Islamism and did not properly assess its role. While the Soviet Union saw above all a social popular protest movement, but could not integrate the religious component into its Marxist categories at all, the USA was also surprised by Iran in 1979. In addition, Khomeini’s overthrow of the Shah in Iran ensured that the simultaneous occupation of the Mosque of Mecca in 1979 by the western public, including the left, remained virtually unnoticed, even though it was the first attempt after the Muslimbrotherhood in Egypt in the 50s by Sunni Islamists to try a coup in a Sunni country.

In the early morning hours of November 20, 1979, several hundred heavily armed men stormed the holiest site in Islam, the Great Mosque in Mecca. At that time hundreds of thousands of pilgrims were there, many were able to flee the minarets despite snipers. Then followed an approximately two-week occupation with more than a thousand dead. The goal of the jihadists is to establish a radical Islamic state of God, the hostage-taking serves as a coup d’état.

Their leader was a charismatic Bedouin preacher who previously spread his Islamist views in epistles. His disciples saw him as a figure „like Che Guevara“. The Saudi royal family, which legitimized its claim to power and government as the guardian of Wahhabi Islam and guardian of the holy places, faced a military-political dilemma. The Koran prohibits the use of weapons in and the attack on mosques. During an immediate public information ban, the Ulema clergymen discussed for four days before giving the terrorists a chance to withdraw.

Meanwhile, President Carter believed in the United States that Iran would participate in the rebels‘ attempt to subvert. Only recently had the Islamic Revolution brought the archenemy Ayatollah Khomeini to power. Carter sent nuclear weapons-equipped warships to the region. Khomeini retaliated with radio fire speeches accusing the Americans and Israel of being responsible for the attack on the mosque. In Pakistan, a mob burned down the American embassy in Islamabad. Six people died. The American embassy was also destroyed in Tripoli.

When the Ulema finally issued a fatwa that allowed the Saudi military to counterattack, the soldiers recaptured parts of the facility with tanks and heavy guns.

Especially since many said that Khomeini could only serve as a model for Shiites and that they are a minority in the Islamic world, while the majority of the Muslim world were Sunnis and therefore not contagious, which overlooked the fact that Islamist pioneers and mass organizations of Islamic type had long existed before Khomeini in the Sunni area, especially the Muslim Brothers, who relied on the teachings of their founder Hassan Al-Banna since 1928 and refined and radicalized themselves in jihadist elaborates ala by the thought leader Qutb.

Hamed Abdel Samad also speaks of Islamofascism in connection with the Muslim Brotherhood, since the strategy and choice of means are based on those of the fascists. Samad points out that the Muslim Brothers have their own secret service as well as militias. You can switch from more pseudo-democratic tactics to violent coup at any time – all just a matter of using the means in a timely manner. However, they aim more at a parliamentary takeover of a mass party, as well as the broad anchoring in society by civil society and charitable organizations.

After his coup in 1923, Hitler also recognized that the military path was not purposeful, but that one had to work through the parliaments, SA soup kitchens and extra-parliamentary mass marches and demonstrations

The Muslim Brothers learned from thast, but you can see that their ranks also quickly lead to splintering, which also took the form of Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was not only recruited from Saudis and Salafists, but also from former Muslim brothers from Egypt and other Sunni countries. The transitions during radicalization are fluid.


The Muslim Brothers carried out an assassination attempt on Nasser and wanted to establish an Islamo-fascist state of God as early as the 1950s, a split off of the Muslim Brothers murdered Sadat in 1979 and wanted Islam to seize power in Egypt, and shortly afterwards the Muslim Brothers in Syria attempted the Assad regime in 1982 by means of an armed insurrection to eliminate what this did through the de facto extermination of the city of Hama and clearly showed these Islamists that it was not giving up power so easily Shiite climes now saw even more encouragement, which led to its spread from North Africa to the Middle East to Afghanistan and Pakistan, even Indonesia, when the US-CIA supported these crazy people against the Soviet Union, which led to 9-11.

Jihad -Made by the West?

When Ali Jinah founded Pakistan, he wanted above all a secular Muslim state, which should be democratic. But most of the time, Pakistan was ruled by military governments, which also went to Kashmir in two wars with India and still provide Islamist terrorists who want to recapture Kashmir, training camps and retreats in Pakistan, as well as supporting the Afghan Taliban During the Cold War under the military dictator Zia Ul-Haque with the support of the USA a broad Islamization of the Pakistani society, as well as parts of the military was started..

In the book of the young Pakistani Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala „I am Malala“ there is a lot about the history of Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as Islam. and the Islamization of the country following the assassination of the secular politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, which continues today and is even becoming worse:

„To encourage the people to support the military government, General Zia launched a campaign of Islamization that would make us a decent Islamic country and had our ideological and geographical borders defended by his army. He told our people that it was his duty  to obey the government because it represented Islamic principles. Zia even wanted to tell us how to pray, in each district he used salads, prayer committees, even in our remote village, and appointed 100,000 prayer inspectors. Before that, mullahs had been almost a joke – my dad said, at wedding ceremonies they had just been hanging around in a corner and left soon, but then they became influential under Zia, and he called them, among them my grandfather, as an educator and preacher to Islamabad. Under Zia’s government, Pakistani women’s lives were even more severely curtailed. Our state founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, once said, „No fight can be won without women standing by the side of men. There are two powers in the world; one is the sword, the other is the pen. But there is a third power, stronger than the two, the power of women. „

But General Zia introduced laws that put the testimony of a woman in court at less than half that of a man. (…) A woman could not even open a bank account without the man’s permission. (…) Many Madrasa schools were opened at that time. Religious education, which we call deenyat, has been replaced by Islamic education, which is still required of Pakistani children today. Our history books have been rewritten, calling Pakistan „a fortress of Islam“ as if it existed longer than it had been since 1947. History was reinvented so that it looked like we had won the three wars that we have led and lost to our great enemy India. „

It also describes how the US actively supported the Islamist military dictator in the indoctrination of youth and men for the jihad

„My father says jihad, the holy war against non-muslims in the region has been strongly supported by the CIA. The children in the refugee camps even received textbooks specially issued for Afghan refugees from an American university, in which they had to solve arithmetical problems such as: „If one Muslim kills five of ten Russian infidels, five remain.“

(Malala Yousafzai: I am Malala, Knaurverlag 2013, p. 50-52)

Interesting in the book also the description of the career of Malala’s father, who wavered between Islamist and secular-socialist identities:

„The elder Talib spoke in such glorious words about jihad that my father was enthusiastic. He constantly reminded my father that life on earth was short and that there were few opportunities for the young men in the village. Our family had little land, and my father did not want to go south and dig in the coal mines like many of his classmates. This was hard, dangerous work, and the coffins of those who died in the collapse of the shafts arrived several times a year. The best that most village boys hoped for was to go to Saudi Arabia or Dubai and to construction work. Therefore, the idea of paradise with 72 virgins sounded tempting. Every evening, my father prayed to God, „O Allah, please let there be war between Muslims and unbelievers, so that I may die in your service and become a martyr.“

For a while his Muslim identity seemed to him more important than anything else in his life. He now enrolled Ziauddin Panpiri-the Panpiri were a religious group-and grew a beard. Today he says it was a kind of brainwashing. He thinks he might even have had thought of becoming a suicide bomber if it had already existed.

But from an early age he was a skeptical boy who seldom took anything at face value, even though our education in state schools was stubborn memorizing and students were never allowed to ask questions.

About the time he prayed to go to heaven as a martyr, he met my mother’s brother, Faiz Mohammed. He soon went in and out of his family, becoming a regular guest in her father’s hujra. There they talked about local politics. Members met there with Pakistani nationalist targets that were against the war. At that time there was a famous poem by Rahmat Shah Sayel, the poet from Peshawar, who had written a poem about my name. He described the events in Afghanistan as „a war between two elephants“ – US and Soviet Union. It was „not our war“. In his view, the Pashtuns were only „the grass that was trampled by the proud animals.“ My father often recited this poem to me when I was young, but at the time I did not understand what it was about.

My father was greatly impressed by Faiz Mohammed. He thought it made sense what he said when it came to the abolition of the feudalist and capitalist system in our country. The same large families would rule everything for decades, while the poor became poorer and poorer. He was torn between the two extremes, between secularism and socialism on the one hand, militant Islam on the other He landed somewhere in the middle. „

(Malala Yousafzai: I am Malala, Knaurverlag 2013, pp. 54-56)

The example actually shows quite well how certain identities are promoted on the part of great powers and states for the enforcement of their imperialistic goals, as well as for domestic strengthening of the state power and as also on the part of the recipient who cares about the social position and the solution of the social question and hopes that a certain identity could be a solution and plays a fundamental role. It also shows that identities can be mixed, eclectic, even synketrical, not always something fixed, but processual, fluid and reversible, as far as one is not dealing with an unteachable and fanatic.

 

Especially as Pakistan and the nuclear network of Khan exported to all parts of the world nuclear weapons technology against the West, just as Pakistan has the first Muslim nuclear weapons, which could also fall into the hands of Islamists. The Pakistani government, its military and its intelligence ISI also support the Afghan Taliban in order to achieve strategic depth against the arch rival India, as it also supports Islamist terrorists who want to recapture Kashmir.

That imperialist states used Muslims, Islamists, and the Holy War for their own foreign policy purposes is not limited to the Nazis who in the 1930s and 1940s tried to incite the Arabs against the British Empire. Think of Wilhelm II’s alliance with the Ottoman Empire, Max von Oppenheim and the „German Jihad“, Oskar Ritter von Niedermeier and his antagonist Lawrence of Arabia, who were trying to position and arm Muslims and Islamists against each other. Consider the atheist Bolsheviks who incited the Muslims in the Soviet republics against the white troops. Well documented in the book by John Reed „Reds“, which was also filmed. To the astonishment of the communist-affine US reporter John Reed, the Bolsheviks preached the Muslims of Central Asia and the Caucasus the Holy War. Asked that Communists would argue for atheism, the Bolshevik cadre said: „We see that very pragmatically!“. Of course, after the seizure of power, the Bolsheviks properly cleaned up Islam, as they did with religion in general.

Nor should we forget the US-CIA, which supported against communism and the mostly with Moscow allied Panarabists such as Nasser, Ghaddafi, Assad or Saddam Hussein Muslim Brothers and other Islamists ibcluding Osama Bin Laden in the Cold War and armed them -in alliance with the Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which also supported the Taliban. Yes, even Sadat initially supported the Muslim Brotherhood as a thugs against the left-wing Nasserists, who did not want to tolerate Camp David and neoliberal IMF programs. Even under Clinton, Bush jr. and Obama the US government and most Western states saw Muslim Brotherhoods in all Sunni countries and the AKP Erdogans as an Islamic CDU that would bring the reconciliation of Islam and democracy. It was not just the Nazis, though they made anti-Semitism in the Muslim countries really acceptable. Because the imperialist powers used the Islamists and Muslims as a tool for a long time, they also thought that they were puppets that were controllable and steerable. However, this turned out to be a mistake, because Islamism is an independent movement that follows its own laws and goals, which became clear only with 9-11 . Meanwhile, Islamism has become the third totalitarian ideology alongside fascism and communism, threatening broad sections of the Muslim world and its diaspora, bringing forth an Islamic state and challenging the West, which, thanks to Trump, continues to disintegrate and may well be replaced by a “ Christian Pact „ala Bolsonaro of the religious right and their right-wing supporters ala Trump and Steve Banon..

As far as the Soviet invasion and jihad in Afghanistan and its influence on the Islamic world were important, there were many other events that were equally catalysts of Islamism:

1979 occupation of the mosque of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Camp David 1982 Lebanon war (establishment of the Iranian Shiite Hezbollah and displacement of the secular-Shiite Amal militia), rebellion of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (Hama) 1987 Intifada / 1988 establishment of Hamas 1989/1990 Defeat of the Eastern Bloc withdrawal from Afghanistan, Gulf War 2001 Foundation of the Turkish AKP after Erbakan’s failure 2003 Iraq war, from 2011 Arab spring, which is used by the Islamists, Islamic State, Syria and Yemen war, NATO war against Libya

Furthermore, it would be interesting to see why the Sunni Kurds remained so resistant to Islamism and remain mostly secular and whether they will be in the future.

Rethinking since 9-11 on the right, but hardly on the left

It was only then that a rethinking began, but suddenly people of different states such as Libya, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, who understood themselves more nationally or ethnically, were all squeezed under one category of „Muslim“, regardless of whether they were secular or not. For this Islamism was defined only in the form of jihadism and concentration on Al Qaeda, but not seen that there were just as evolutionary Islamists who did not rely on terrorism, but on seizure of power by a mass movement and mass party, especially the Muslim Brotherhood in the Sunni region However, when they met resistance on the part of Assad, they were able to quickly arm themselves again to take up their fight for an Islamist dictatorship. Especially as the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists were in the very beginning on the so-called „Arab Spring“ in all the North African countries, as well as in the Arab continent, while our mainstream liberal media told us only about the power of the so-called „Twitter revolutionaries“, which very quickly became marginalized by the Islamists as they emerged due to lack of discipline, experience and mass organization. But in our Western media there were never reports on the decisive mass movement of Islamists who then quickly through elections in Egypt or armed force in Syria wanted to prevail. Even Iran reported an „Islamic spring“, which was not even a reality but described the forces more effectively than the Western media, which transfigured and declared anybody a democratic „Twitter revolutionary“ who had a smartphone. But Western liberals and US governments still had the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood was a sort of Muslim Republican Party or CDU.

When talking about religion, one should not take moderated German Christianity or  Pope Francis or Tibetan Buddhism as a point of reference that makes everyone happy. A Käßmann, a Bedford-Strohm or Kardinal Marx or a Dalai Lama knows that they do not want a God state, nor a martial-militant or undemocratic Christianity or a militant world-conquering Buddhism. It is more of an ultraliberal self-denying pacifism and cultural relativism that would bring about the self-dissolution of a theocracy, as well as any state, if one followed their noble principles. But they are not representative: German Christianity is a German special way and many conservative white-skinned forces in the Vatican could imagine, so to speak, a „negro“ as the next Pope in the knowledge that religious leaders from Africa on average are always anti-modernist and more reactionary than a Pope Francis – especially since it is interesting that  only so far white-skinned popes became Pope, first from Italy, then also from Europe Poland and Germany and one in the choice of a representative of the third world also a white-skinned pope from Argentina – a black or yellow representative seems not possible at the moment in the alleged anti-racist world church and if so, this may well be due to a reactionary attitude to turn back the wheel of history a bit – therefore the view of German Christianity and Pope Francis obstructs the view as a  reference pointand ignores the religions in the rest of the world and their connection to authoritarian regimes and movements.

There is a very different picture of the radicalization and coalescence of religion with authoritarian-chauvinist political forces that invoke religion and as Samuel Huntington has shown in his „Clash of Civilizations“. National chauvinist movements increasingly rely on religions in their identity propaganda and broad masses of religious mobs and their representatives obey and support this lure. There is already a line of demarcation between polish-nationalist Catholicism supporting the national chauvinist-authoritarian PiS Kaczynski and a more cosmopolitan Pope Francis or German Catholics.

But the US does not go back to the WASP society ala Huntington, because not only Protestants, Evangelicals, but also Catholics, in short, the entire religious rights support Trump. Also characteristic of the US Catholics was their thought leader Michael Novak who as a representative of the Republican think tank Heritage Foundation and Neocon-Think Tank American Enterprise Institute held a speech in the Munich Catholic Academy, and criticized the European, especially the German Christians as pacifists, liberals and a god of charity and tolerance of mercy, while Christianity should be militant and pay homage, both internally and externally, to a „God of Fear“ who scares his enemies and spreads Christianity and capitalism. But this reference to religion finds its limit in Huntungton and the US religious right when it is about Catholic immigrants, especially Latinos and Mexicans, as Huntington in his book Who we Are, where he called for a culture war between Catholic Mexicans and Lations with the WASP Americans, even though he did not see such religious cultural struggles between Catholic Americans and Protestant Americans themselves, but we do not want to dwell on the extent to which theories of racist and nationalist ideologues are really coherent.

Religion in Africa – potential for conflict between Christianity and Islam as a future cause for migration

20% of global Christianity now lives south of the Sahara, as does 15% of the world’s Muslims. It is one of the most religious areas in the world where 85% of the population say that religion is very important to them. In 1900, when animaitic natural religions were still the majority of the population, the number of Christian and Muslim followers together was only 1/4 of the population. Aninmists and traditional African religions have since been marginalized to 13% of the population, while the conversion rate of Muslims and Christians has soared. Muslims grew from 11 million 1900 to 234 million in 2010, Christians from 7 to 470 million. Northern Africa is mostly Muslim and southern Africa mostly Christian, but where both religions came together in a 4,000-kilometer belt from Somalia to Senegal, it became mostly violent, particularly in Nigeria and Rwanda, while Christianity was predominant in southern Africa, but Catholic and the Protestant Church on the descending branch, while the Evangelical Free Churches are on the rise. So far, only the Army of the Lord in Uganda has existed as terrorist Christian groups, but the United States also lists it as a terroist organization, but there is also a militant form of the Islamic State, the Boko Haram, the Shabab militias, Islamist militias or terrorist forms Not so broad for Christians is the very rare exception.
Referenced from:

afrorelg.gif

Found here, with data from 1990

http://thomaspmbarnett.com/globlogization/2010/4/23/africa-ground-zero-for-globalizations-advance-as-well-as-rel.html#ixzz5czGN40Nh

The mistake with Thomas Barnett’s graphic is that it only makes a distinction between Muslims and Christians as the main conflict, but does not differentiate between the secular-pan-Arab states, and there will also be conflicts between secular and moderate Muslims with Islamists, as will many moderate Muslims work with moderate Christians, so the conflict zone is not only wider than the 4000 km belt, where Islam and Christianity clash, but is also more conflict-prone to the north, as is the conflict – but also the potential for ethnic, national and tribal cooperation is even more complex. You should also see that Christianity in Africa is much more conservative, especially since there are more and more Evangelicals in Africa who are more fanatical than Catholics or traditional Protestants, which affects African Christianity as well as the Vatican and the western churches of the north Will affect the hemisphere. No black pope is yet, but the more conservative, high-birth rate Christianity of the south will also demand its emancipation towards the rich, demographically declining wealthy donor communities of the north – if only because of the sheer mass. Francis was the first South Pope after the Italian, then a Polish and a German pope, although still a white man, but he meant Catholicism and Christianity did not mean to multiply like rabbits, which he saw as a contribution to the population explosion, although the Catholic Church always against contraceptives, abortions and sterilization, as is also active against birth control, especially since there is nothing to be heard from Islam in this direction, rather the birth jihad is propagated, but it is interesting how dramatically the old animistic natural religions of Africa were marginalized by Christianity and Islam..

Religion, Islam and Refugee Issues


In addition, migration and the refugee question are constantly used by the right to ask questions about Islam or religion – be it the AfD in Germany, which sees all refugees only as „Muslims“ and not as people, but also the Islamophile left only stigmatizes people under the religious label “Muslims” as a homogeneous group in order to protect them from racism instead of just differentiating them. Or even Harvard professor Samuel Huntington sees the greatest threat to the United States in Catholic Mexicans and Latinos in his culturally militant „Clash of Civilizations“ and „Who we are“, which only dogmatically, grossly and crucially and simplistically divides humanity in 8 homogeneous cultures and cultural collectives. Individuals and people cease to exist in the culturally homogeneous collective. When masses flee and migrate, they are declared by both left-wing multicultural people and the right-wing to be a homogeneous collective that must be protected collectively or fought collectively.


The view that most refugees are apolitical because they are fleeing for their own survival has partial justification. It is questionable that only 1% of the refugees are political. This is what German prosperity democracy citizens are used to claim, where you can afford the luxury of being apolitical, since state actions do not influence everyday life so dramatically. One cannot assume this, however, if there was an Arab spring with a broad mass politicization, where one had to choose political camps in order to secure one’s livelihood and future. Hundreds of thousands and millions were on the streets, including support crises, in the Arab states, and when they failed they also split into militant war groups, which, however, could not have existed if they had not also had popular support. Perhaps you should resolve it like this: The masses are partly politicized masses, along with other masses that still hope to be apolitical and neutral. Likewise with the refugees. The fact that the political people should only be 1%, especially since no masses of supporters could mobilize, is be rather wishful thinking. It is also wrong that all those people only came to work in Germany, since they want to make a better living for themselves, but therefore do not question their political beliefs, their cultural colors and their ties to the old country / state .

No danger of Islamization in western industrialized countries and emerging economies – the main enemy are the right-wing radicals


In Germany and Europe there is no danger of Islamization, as paranoid people like Wilders, the AfD, the Front National, Orban, Kaczynski, Sarazin, Daniel Pipes and others paint on the wall again and again as a specter of horrors. Certainly not in the USA and other industrialized countries and emerging ecomies. There are simply too few Muslims for that. One should also take into account that the much criticized 890,000 refugees in the summer of 2015 do not even make up 1% of the German population. The majority of migrants in the EU and Germany will come from EU countries, mostly Christian or secular, and also youth fromEuropean countrioes with high unemployment rates. Radical Muslims, like the 1.5 million Erdogan Turk fans, can be a disruptive factor, as can parts of the refugees who have joined them. Be it as a fifth column or through terrorist attacks, which the right-wing radicals up to the AfD then catapult in the polls. There is an interaction.
The manifesto is first about formulating an Islam-critical left-wing position, since so far Islamophilia has prevailed within the left and everything has been romantized.. It is about formulating a differentiated  position between left-wing Islamophilic repression of problems and right-wing paranoia and stirring up anxieties. The main danger in Germany as well as most industrialized countries and emerging economies comes from the right wing partiesin these countries, which can radicalize the majority, including the Germans, to such an extent that a new dictatorship can be established. Because of the low percentage of Muslims in Germany and all other Western countries, Islamists have no chance of pushing through an Islamist dictatorship or Islamization of Germany or other society. In Muslim countries they have the opportunity to do this, which is why one shouldn’t speak generally about the danger of Islamization, but rather differentiate between states with Muslim minorities that are more likely to fall victim to right and nationalists and countries with a Muslim majority population.

The same applies to the USA and the other industrialized countries and emerging economies. Nevertheless, it is important to go beyond Germany to carry out a worldwide analysis of evangelicals, Falungong and Islamism as the three main fundamental-religious missionary movements in world politics, the Falungong being a victim and not potential due to the brutal oppression by the equally totalitarian CP China , but being a fanatic sort of fundamentalist Buddhism, but o not powerful at the moment. Even in a globalized world, you have to keep an eye on the developments in the world and try to react to them or to act actively. Evangelicals also want a final battle with the Islamists over the Holy Land, Israel, and it will be extremely dangerous if this clash of civilization is also promoted by the Trump administration. Left Counterjiohad does not mean that NATO or the West are now waging a global war against Islamism, quasi as a new crusade. The Middle East wars such as the Iraq war in 2003 or the NATO war against Lybia’s secular depot Ghaddafi had fatal results, but it also means that forces in Muslim countries, such as the anti-IS coalition or Iraq, should be given military aid to prevent genocide of the IS and rescue  Yessids, Christians and moderate Muslims.
The right chatter of the homogeneous hordes of invaders and conquests, land grabbing and genocide or population exchange is just as much paranoid as it is of alleged decades-long plans for migration, which are seen in the founder of the Paneuropaunion Coudenhouve-Calergie or Thomas Barnet is wrong as the alleged masterminds.

. One should differentiate. This is just as impossible for right-wing counter-jihadists as it is for multicultural Islamophiles. On the other side one shoul also accept the fact that some Mulsims want to set up their own parallel society in Germany through social welfare  and German all-round care with an extended family. The Syrians who are fleeing to Europe are likely to be half enlightened people who are striving for democracy, but also half are Islamists and conservative Muslims. To be against Assad can mean to be a young, secular democrat or even an Islamist of the Muslim brother type, Al Nusra, Jayesh el-Fatah. Jayesh el Islam and what the whole Islamist group call themselves..
It should also be clear that an Afghan peasant boy from a Burqa-bearing village has different values ​​and levels of education than many other refugees who come from an educated urban middle class, but also to most Germans in the education and labor market with whom he competes.

Instead of new Middle East wars: support for secular-democratic forces and, if they fail, support for secular despots as a lesser evil against the Islamists
There is also nothing to be said against it if Assad is fighting the Islamists and Al Sissi is clearing away the Muslim Brotherhood, as was the case in Algeria in 1992 to prevent the Islamist FIS by means of the military, since the Islamists were about to seize power and one had to weigh between two evils politically. Of course, one should not support the suppression of democratic forces, as should criticize their brutal repression by these military indicators, but if left-wing and / or democratic-secular forces are unable to stop these Islamofascists, the big stick is the ultima ratio. In addition, one can only hope that the young Twitter revolutionaries learn from their disorganization, lack of discipline and fragmentation from their competitors and build a powerful organization and party that will also be assertive at the next Arab Spring.
In principle, a secular-democratic centralist movement should be built in the medium and long term, which as a party and due to its organization, discipline, is a real challenge to both secular despots / military and Islamist despots and to build a progressive political system, perhaps also by force of arms. But what was the reality of the “Arab Spring”? The praised Twitter revolutionaries were inexperienced, hedonistic, against a party organization and anti-organizational spontaneous people who said that with a little smartphone, the Internet and mass marches like Facebook parties, power could be seized. No wonder that they had no chance against  a well-organized Muslim Brotherhood, which has maintained its downright Leninist-disciplined organization since 1928. Lenin analyzed exactly these organizational principles and the weakness of spontaneous movements in his „What to do?“ And „The teething troubles of communism“. Without a revolutionary party in these areas, only the military or the Islamists will win. And as long as this is the case, a worst-case scenario dictates a secular dictatorship that separates religion and state, protects minority and women’s rights and, in particular, mostly goes hand in hand with a welfare state. This relates to the current situation, but is not meant in principle.

In the medium and long term, one should promote democratic secular forces and their organizations, and even push them to form parties. In the beginning, this was the case in Syria: the Free Syrian Army was secular-democratic at first, but then made the mistake of taking on board the Islamo-fascist Muslim Brothers, who then very quickly dominated the organization and opposition along with other Islamist militias. Today the old FSA is marginalized and the secular-democratic Southern Front is negligible. This is also due to the fact that Obama did not provide the original FSA with weapons, but left it with his “lead from behind” strategy to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, which accordingly only upgraded Islamist homicide militias, which in the Western media were euphemsitically were refered to  as “rebels „.

The War on Terror, which now seems to have stopped and which should have been better conceived as War against Islamism and not mainly topple secular Arabian despots like Saddam Hussein, Ghaddafi or Assad, , is now being replaced by conflicts over great power. While everybody is now looking at Russia and China, the Islamists are growing again, including Erdogan-Turkey`s neo-Ottoman empire idea with the Muslim Brotherhood of all countries, as well as overthrowing Assad, which then leads to an Islamist dictatorship in Syria Russia will not be able to counter this very much, but if Assad and the Russians and their military bases in Syria and the Mediterranean have been taken away, the West will face perhaps an even bigger problem. Interestingly, Lavrov and Schoigu also canceled their visit to Turkey. We could probably have two Islamist belts. one from the Sahel to Nigeria with the Islamic State and a second from North Africa and the Horn of Africa (Somalia/Sudan) to Syria with Erdogan-backed Muslim Brothers and the FIS in Algeria. The best thing would be if they fought over each other. Whether Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan would remain stable remains to be seen The whole thing is also fueled by Palestine and Jerusalem. And there is also the US- Iranian conflict on the top, and it remains to be seen whether the PLO can still hold power and is not taken over by Hamas or even more radical forces.

In South Asia, the Taliban is strengthened after the NATO withdrawal, the Islamists in Pakistan, the country with the first Muslim atomic bomb are on the rise and India faces also a problem with its Muslim population and their partially radicalization and Islamization, the Kashmir conflict is by no means resolved, Islamists in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia are a growing power, as is the Rohingya conflict in Burma exploited by Islamists will also destabilize the governments in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh through supposed Islamic solidarity. In Central Asia, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), led by China and Russia, has so far ensured stability, as well as the increasingly Islamic Kadyrov in Chechnya, who is also becoming more unreliable and is also a butcher. It is also possible that China’s Uyghur policy, the brutal internment of 1 million out of 10 million Chinese Uyghurs in concentration camps will radicalize Muslim populations and can cause solidarity effects. In any case, from a western perspective, cooperation with China on Islamism due to its minority policy seems unlikely, especially since the Sino-American conflict is also becoming more acute.

I recently saw the Mali debate in the German parliament and I had the impression that neither the SPD nor the CDU had any success story. On the contrary, there were reports of spillover and widening of the fighting in the Sahel region, and there was probably hope for the G5 force. In addition, the world is also being weakened by the Covid virus, which will further weaken many economies and already weak governments. Let’s hope that the sleepers turn out to be more of a bogeyman tale.

Insofar as one wants to advocate a new Eastern policy towards Russia, it also applies that this can only be done from a position of strength or at least on eye level. Especially since Moscow would also have to move and the Minsk Agreement would have to be fulfilled at least since only then Putin sees an attraction in not destabilizing the EU and NATO. Before that, there can be no unilateral concessions or relaxation of sanctions, However, Trump´s foreign policy is undermining western unity, at the moment the West is paralyzed and split and it remains to be seen how the situation and relations between Putin and Erdogan develop in Syria and Libya. Should there be a division into spheres of interest, new Russian military bases in Libya would also be conceivable in addition to the Russian military bases in Syria and Russia is very active in Egypt. The Suez Canal and the Mediterranean Sea would then be in close proximity. A Russian-Turkish alliance, as was the case between the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire, would be an immense threat to the West and Europe. But many transatlantic hawks and Cold Warriors have chosen mainly Putin as their enemy. Islamist Erdogan, who is still a NATO member, takes advantage of the Western-Russian conflict to expand his neo-Ottoman empire and pursues strategic balancing between the two. He also wants to acquire nuclear weapons, for which the expansion of the Turkish nuclear industry by Japan and Russia and its latest contacts with the Muslim nuclear power Pakistan are evidence. The question is whether a nuclear-armed neo-Ottoman Empire would be in the interest of West or Russia, or one hopes for a NATO-Erdogan-Turkey axis in the fight against Russia in Europe and the Greater Middle East, and maybe even Erdogan’s Neo-Ottoman Empire and the Muslim Brothers as allies in the struggle and buffer against the second Islamic belt from Nigeria to the Sahel to the Horn of Africa, which the Islamic State is likely to want to control with Boko Haram and Al Shabab? Maybe nostalgia for the old alliance of the German Empire-Ottoman Empire? Probably the West itself doesn’t really know.

Maybe it would be better to focus on the Sino-American conflict and Islamism, try to keep Russia neutral with a New East policy in the Sino-American conflict and to see Russia as ally in the fight against Islamism.

Maybe for states who don´t want to get involved too much in the escalating Sino-American conflict, Russian strategist Karaganov´s proposal for a New Non-Aligned Movement could have appeal. However, the question is if the European countries will join such a movement lead by Russia as balancing power between the USA and China if China and the USA won´t put so much pressure on the members that they have to decide, if there is space for strategic balancing or if the USA is calculating on the paradigm oft he neorealist school and John Mearsheimer: Security trumps economy and trade. However,it would be up to Russia to call for a New Bandung Conference—be it in Moscow or in a neutral state and before Russia could do this it should distance itself a little bit more from Beijing.

Worst-case scenario: Islamists with nuclear and weapons of mass destruction – rational actors who act as a deterrent or nuclear suicide bombers?


In addition to the much-frequented dirty bomb, conceivable scenarios are that Iran will buy nuclear weapons or that Pakistan’s Muslim atomic bomb will fall into the hands of Islamists. This raises the question of whether one is dealing with these are Machivelist and rational actors who are subject to a cost-benefit ratio, or with other-side nuclear suicide bombers who act irrationally and apocalyptically A broad discussion is already underway as to whether the United States could contain and deter nuclear Iran.


Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute initiated this with a contribution „Deterence Misapplied — Challenges in Containing a Nuclear Iran“ sponsored by Carnegie, which also became the basis for discussion by the Council on Foreign Relations. Frederick Kagan concludes that because of the intransparent and unpredictable power structures in Iran, it is impossible to develop a strategy of containment and deterrence:


„Deterrence Misapplied
Challenges in Containing a Nuclear Iran
Author: Frederick W. Kagan, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
Given the nature and structure of its government, is it possible to contain an Iran with nuclear weapons? In this discussion paper, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Frederick W. Kagan explores the applicability of deterrence — from a historic and theoretical perspective — to the Iranian regime. Kagan concludes that for numerous structural and strategic reasons, it is impossible to assess with any confidence that the Islamic Republic with nuclear weapons could be contained or deterred.
http://www.cfr.org/iran/deterrence-misapplied/p22291
The American Enterprise Institute took up this question and once asked the question
„Can a Nuclear Iran be contained or deterred?“


http://www.aei.org/article/foreign-and-defense-policy/regional/middle-east-and-north-africa/can-a-nuclear-iran-be-contained-or-deterred/


While there is still some skepticism in this article, the American Enterprise Institute has now expressed itself more optimistically in a recent article „Containing and deterring a nuclear Iran“:


http://www.aei.org/article/containing-and-deterring-a-nuclear-iran/


At the same time, Kenneth Pollack at the Council on Foreign Relations also affirmed the question of whether nuclear Iran could be deterred and outlined the concrete measures for this in his article “Deterring Nuclear Iran”.


http://www.cfr.org/iran/deterring-nuclear-iran/p22292


In short: In the most important think tanks in the USA, even those of the Neocons, you are already mentally preparing for the fact of a nuclear Iran and developing appropriate containment and deterrence strategies.


An important and central question here is whether it can be assumed that Iran is a rational actor; Frederick Kagan, for example, still argues in his contribution that it is possible that there is one Iran There is an apocalyptic faction that deliberately takes into account the country’s own destruction and themselves – which is why you couldn’t deal with rational actors – ergo: deterrence and containment could not work. While Kagan still believes Iran’s Supreme Spiritual Leader Ayatollah Khameini would avoid a nuclear conflict, he sees people like Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi as an apocalyptic faction who would be willing to sacrifice their own lives even in a nuclear war, yes the entire nation, but that makes Kagan an outsider. The other contributions assume that even Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi would be rational actors who fear the extinction of their own lives and their power apparatus, even the nation, and would, therefore, be suitable objects for nuclear deterrence strategies. In short: The common doctrine in the United States is that even Ahmadinejad would be a „mouthguard“ in the sense of Günther Grass if there was a risk of nuclear extinction. Reference is also made to the experiences with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, with the atomic potential to be deterred there would have had a much larger dimension.force of power projection as this newly developed middle-range missiles could hit Europe and Russia. And the Iranians like Northkorea also want to develop ICBMs that could target the USA.

Obama´s Iran deal was just an agreement which let the Iranians limit their nuclear capacities for 10 years without any other arrangements, Means: Iran agrees that it will stop its race to the bomb for 10 years, but can expand its influence in the Shiite Crescent from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, the Northern parts of Saudi Arabia and the Hazaris and Shiites in Afghanistan. Combined with a nuclear weapon, that could not destroy Israel, but be a slogan: If the deterrent against the well-armed Soviet Union works, it will be even more so with a far less well-armed Iran. However, after Trump canceled the Iran deal, it is thinkable that Iran wants to develop nuclear weapons. While we have the Sunnite Islamism on the rise by Erdogan´s neo-Ottoman empire, the Muslim brothers the Islamic State and all nice Islamist competitors for the rule of Sharia and the Umma, we also could experience a nuclear proliferation in this region. For the West and Israel the perspective of nuclear-armed neo-Ottoman empires, Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia can´t be the first choice.

No „No borders“ – the left and the refugee question


In addition, the Islamophile left should stop calling for unlimited immigration. No border, open borders for everyone are utopian demands, ignoring and jejecting any  concrete solutions, steering and organizing the flow of refugees and They think that the national framework can absorb the whole mass of refugees. On the one hand, one should work to combat the causes of refugees, but since their solution can be achieved in the medium to long term, if at all, one should set national capacity limits in the short and medium term and, above all, the refugee camps by means of an EU and UN fund on site and significantly improve the living conditions there. You should also see that each refugee for one euro in Germany only has one euro for an apartment and food, but you have 30 times the purchasing power in the refugee camps on site and if you have an EU or UN fund of 20 -40 billion euros in for refugee camps, youcan create new urban structures there that would be equipped with infrastructure, schools, workplaces, etc. In any case, that would be more realistic than the cosmopolitan-futuristic-utopian demand for open borders for all, no border and the dogmatic rejection of national limits or national borders at all.
Because the No Border demand claims that Germany can accept unlimited refugees, can only imagine a solution of the refugee flows by filling Germany within German borders without all upper and lower limits in only German borders, but cannot imagine a solution across borders or in a provisional continuation and delimitation between Germany, Europe and the refugee camps on site. Thus, this becomes more of an abstract conflict of principles, which is unable to think of any concrete and practical solutions. The Eastern European countries, Austria, France and Scandinavia will not accept any more refugees, the discussion about refugee quotas leads to a dead end and the hamster wheel.
It is more conszructive to win the reluctant EU countries for a common humanitarian equipment of the refugee camps locally and also in Greece and Italy, especially since Victor Orban himself said in the BILD interview at the time that he could set up a common EU fund to help refugee camps locally and that the EU has to fill the fund until the refugee flows to Europe dry up. It would be wiser, like Kurz, to take Orban’s words to implement a common protection of the EU borders as well as an EU fund for refugee camps on site serious and if these Eastern European countries still refuse to do so, the EU would then threaten the ultimate cancellation of EU subsidies to reluctnat East European states. Kurz supports Orban in his refugee policy, but attacks aggressively because of his efforts to establish an authoritarian dictatorship with Poland in the EU.

Wishful pictures of evolutionary Islamism as Muslim democracy


Like many transatlanticists and liberals in Europe declare that Trump and Steve Bannon, who want to get a U.S. fascist system, would be moderated by the force of liberalism, the U.S. constitution, and check and balances, so do the same forces already told the same about Islamo-fascism and thought that the Islamist AKP could be moderated by the EU accession process. The western liberals and much of the left had the utopia that reactionary Islamism, ala Muslim Brotherhood or AKP / Erdogan, could be linked to a secular-democratic-liberal system. The very idea, including a democratic Turkey in the EU was utopian. Because the so-called secular-democratic forces like the CHP or the MHP were nationalists like those known from Orban- / Jobbik-Hungary or PiS-Poland under Kaczinski. This democratic EU-Turkey would also have become an eternal nationalist source of conflict within the EU – especially with a population and voting rights that would have outpaced all other EU countries, including France and thus the Franco-German axis as the motor of the EU. Especially since the EU would have had an external border with Syria, Iraq and Iran, i.e. the powder barrels of the Middle East.
Added to this was the fact that after Erbakan’s Islamist Refah / Welfare Party, which was toppled due to military intervention, Erdogan’s AKP  came as a successor. Erdogan was also an Islamist and Muslim brother, but was more moderate than Erbakan, at least he became the new one Hopeful of green, social democratic and liberal EU enlargement fanatics who saw the first Muslim democracy in these Islamists, especially with the support of all US governments from Clinton, Bush jr and Obama. The German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder also awarded him the “European of the Year” award – for such a flawless democrat he was considered by social democracy as well as green and liberal advocates. The Turkish military considered ending this obvious farce in 2007 and threatened Erdogan with a military coup, as it did under his predecessor Erbakan. But the EU as well as the USA and NATO put pressure on the Turkish military not to carry out a military coup, which left Erdogan in office and allowed the entire systematic seizure of power to continue from the Ergenecon process to the present day.

In all EU membership talks and alleged attempts to democratize Turkey , only the Turkish military was restrained, while Turkish electoral law, which had a 10% threshold for parties, was not converted into a 5% threshold, which would have meant that party pluralism, democracy would have been strengthened and the unnatural state that Erdogan had received 60% of the seats in parliament with 35% of the vote was ended . However the Islamophile left and liberals thought that Islam and the West would unite – even in a common EU that no longer knows any religions and differences. Looking at today’s Turkey, it becomes clear that all those people and the few leftists who warned about the Islamist Erdogan were right. But the same pattern was repeated with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in the other Sunni countries. These too were viewed by left-wing forces and liberal epigones as an Islamic CDU/Christian Democrats that could modernize these countries and bring them into balance with the West.


Islamism has two main currents: the openly aggressive,, militant variant of the Islamic State, the Boko Haram, the Al Shabab,the Taliban, Al Qaeda, the Al Nusra, the Ahrar al Sham, the Jayesh el Islam, the Jayesh el Fatah, the Junus al Sham, etc. Who want to gain power and territory through military seizure of power and guerrilla warfare or terror. For us, Islamists are just as much the evolutionary Islamists like the AKP, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Ennada, the FIS,etc. who, in the beginning, act peacefully and evolutionarily, build up their own secret service, militias, civil society, caricature welfare state organizations, in order to be democratically elected as a broadly anchored mass party and to be able to hold referenda in a democratically legitimate way. that eliminate democracy and bring about an Islamist dictatorship in a very democratic way.And if this not works out, use open violence and terror like in Syria.
Now the Islamists and their sympathizers in Germany or other industrialized satates or emerging economies  are not able to establish an Islamist state in numbers: There are not enough Muslims. Especially since over half of the so-called Muslims are secular, do not wear a headscarf, do not go to a mosque. They are as “religious” as we are, namely they celebrate Ramadan as a family festival, just as most secular or Christian families do celebrate Christmas as a family event or private gathering. .

But there is also the other Islamist side of the so-called Muslims. But there remains a million-strong potential for Erdogan Turks, at least as an immense pressure group and foreign policy fifth column of Erdogan Turkey in Germany, which can cause considerable unrest and destabilization. It is also unclear whether parts of the Erdogan Turks will not become radicalized. Ditib has recently started a martyrdom campaign among young people on Erdogan’s orders. Also, the Islamization of Erdogan Turkey is only in its initial phase and it is not yet clear how radical this Islamist country will be in the future.
The Gülen movement now being persecuted by Erdogan is also an Islamist movement. The difference between Erdogan and Gülen is that Erdogan wants to establish an Islamist dictatorship by means of a mass party, much like the Muslim Brotherhood, while Gülen wants to train elites in his educational institutions that infiltrate the state, the economy and society in key positions and then want to bring them into line and positions, i.e. rather represents the concept of the march through the institutions.
Erdogan also promoted Gülen in the early days. Gulen’s people were very active in persecuting democratic opponents through their networks in the police and judicial system. But now Erdogan and Gülen are as hostile as Hitler and SA-Röhm. Since one sees another as a competitor in the establishment of an Islamist state, Erdogan tries to eliminate the initial ally.
Both trends, the militarist and the evolutionary Islamists must be fought and not admitted, in emergencies also by a secular military coup if the secular-democratic or leftist forces can no longer prevent them from taking power.

Religious norms and Islamist ideology


In an analysis of social movements, Cornelia Koppetsch wrote quite aptly in the article “Looking Down – Class Consciousness” in the German newspaper Freitag ( Friday):


“Emotions play a key role in any political mobilization, whether from the right or the left. Social inequalities, which have undoubtedly increased dramatically since the 1990s, do not in themselves instigate political movements. No disadvantage, however serious, automatically leads to resistance and protest, which is why resistance phenomena can never be explained solely by an increase in social inequalities. On the contrary, most societies prove to be stable despite sky-high inequalities because the ruled classes have internalized cultural or religious norms that make their inferiority justified in their own eyes. ”
Cultural and religious norms that are internalized: everyone is a lucky smith, help yourself, then God will help you, give the emperor what is the emperor – this subject ideology of individualism, authoritarian servility and fear of God has a system-stabilizing and anti-protest effect. Feelings of envy do not lead to protests, but resentments due to relative deprivitation and fear of relegation, especially among the middle classes:


„Resentments arise from the discrepancy between perceived rights and factual positions and are more likely to appear in phases of social upheaval in which the stratification system and the system of rights and privileges are being plowed up – for example because too many subjects are working in vain for a few premiums because new competitors come into play or rights that were believed to be safe have been denied en masse.


There can be no doubt that both constellations have gained in importance not only in the lower but also in the middle and higher social positions due to blocked ascents and descents. Resentments testify to cracks in the moral foundation of society, in which normative standards that have been valid so far have been eroded and the norms of justice that were previously taken for granted have been overridden.

Normally, individuals expect a return in return for their morals, that is, for restricting their self-interest in favor of the big picture, namely the certainty that others will equally forego their selfishness. Where, however, as is currently the case in the present-day success codes characterized by economic imperatives and winner-take-all markets, previously established norms of fairness of performance partially lose their validity because they reward short-term benefits rather than long-term efforts because they disappoint performance expectations or not If rights and duties are balanced, a breeding ground is created for the conflagration of resentments.


Under certain circumstances, this can lead to societies losing their peacefulness. Feelings of disadvantage gain militancy especially where, due to abrupt social change or regime change, previously applicable bets and standards have been overridden, rules of the game changed while playing, or proven players have been catapulted completely out of the field. ”


The leaders of Islamist movements see themselves in a leading role in society that they claim. This is reinforced by the fact that they see themselves as godly leaders, who, in addition to secular leadership claims, are also entitled to a godly one, which reinforces this. The leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood consists of doctors, lawyers, many middle class people who aspire to a higher position, as well as fear of rising. You should also see that Islamism and terrorism are by no means just an underclass phenomenon. This may apply to part of their base, but hardly to the leadership.


There are also Islamists, including jihadists, from middle-class families, and many also have an education or even a degree. If you look at the list of assassins of the past 20 years, it is not just disenfranchised minorities without work and perspective. Even a very large part of them were students or people with a degree. Engineers, doctors, interpreters with language studies, etc. etc. The absolute majority went completely inconspicuously into the societies, and not just the parallel societies. Making air tickets is not only difficult to implement for oppressed poverty populations but simply impossible. Osama Bin Laden was not a precarious proletarian, but a sprout and not so black sheep of a high-class family in Saudi Arabia that supported IS. Most of the Muslim Brothers are middle class, lawyers, doctors, even Erdogan’s predecessor, Erbakan studied mechanical engineering in Germany

In addition, the belief that studying a natural science would prevent him from totalitarian worldviews or religious fanaticism, is mind-boggling. As an engineer, the ideologist sees his societal wish in totalitarian analogies of the perfect machine and people as smooth, functioning gearwheels, the biologist and doctor as healthy folk or ummah bodies and oppositionists as cancer cells and viruses, the cyberneticist everything under the aspect of the control cycles and the Functioning of the system, which then subordinates all as subsystems as religious rules of Sharia, etc.


Defining or categorizing terrorism and Islamism only by class boundaries or whether someone has studied natural sciences and can therefore not be religious is quite wrong. With the same authorization with which Sarkozy wants to clean up the underdog banlieues or in Belgium Moellenbek as hotbeds of terrorism and Islamism, this could also be done in middle-class districts or against Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but that will not happen.


There are also Islamists who have completed a degree in science and still strive for an Islamo-fascist regime, such as Erbakan and his welfare / Refah party, who studied mechanical engineering at the TU Aachen. Islamists can also point to the sins of the Enlightenment such as Terreur, the idolatry of the market by neoliberalism and liberalism in ideological-end-time pamphlets such as „The End of History“ by Francis Fukuyama, as well as the imperialist wars of the „free“ West . Social Darwinism as well as neoliberalism are examples of their authoritarian development of science with its idolization of the Darwinian struggle for survival and the idolization of the market, and conversely Marxism with its demonization of the market. One should also not forget that racial science has long been scientifically founded and legitimized, just as the belief in linear progress or now extreme counter-currents in the name of ecologism. Scientific education, the absence of religion does not mean political education, can often be the opposite. Bassam Tibi also speaks of „half enlightenment“ in the case of developmental dictatorships..

In addition in its propaganda, Islamist ideology sees the mass social injustice as caused by sinful modernity and by sinful rulers, i.e. as apostasy from a godly life, and historical references from feudalist times in which there were still great empires in which Islam had its heyday and golden era, by means of which the new leaders promised their followers a new paradise on earth and a new size in the face of inferiority complexes, which would lead their ummah to the new historical size that it would actually be entitled to. The Islamist leaders promise themselves to the masses as God-willed and morally perfect, clean leaders who, in the face of globalization and digitization, declining Western dominance, will bring the Umman back to a new Islamic empire that will implement the actual teachings of the Koran and Mohammed. In this belief they resemble secular nationalists, who believe that nationalism and its fundamentalist quasi-religious adoration of the nation-state, the absolute and totality of which can solve all problems of globalization and digitilization, could make America Great again as it did in the 1950s or after a Brexit Great Britain let rise to the old size of a British Empire. Evangelicals in turn pray for a Christian state of God in the USA, Brazil, etc. and like Islamist ideologues or the Chinese Falungong, they do not have a critique of capitalism, but a moral criticism that they radicalize according to the slogan: Make Christianity great again! Make Buddhism great again! or just: Make Islam great again

Religion, Islam as patriarchal ideologies and  women s liberation


Historically, religions mostly originate from feudal or agraian societies, which were primarily patriachal in structure, especially since matriachates existed at best with a few primitive people or as myths like the Amazons. For this reason, religions also advocated male domination over women, especially since women were also seen as the satanic cause of sins or even natural disasters or epidemics, whether as witches in Europe or in Africa. In addition, the woman in her role as the childbearer of human life is at the same time the guarantor of the respective state or imperial people, just as the extended family was seen in those days as the central unit of reproduction as well as old-age pension, and was thus also the social system of the time, whereby the woman had a serving function. With the development of capitalism and its globalization, the role of women, the family and social systems changed. In the capitalist countries of origin, due to the change in production and social relations, the development went from the extended family to the small family and now increasingly to patchwork families, single mothers or single households, while there is a welfare state and retirement homes that largely replace traditional family functions with at least inhumane ones . In his work “The Origin of the Family”, Engels does an excellent job of analyzing the changes in social order and the family due to the changing production forces and means, although parts of his explanations are also not entirely correct. Likewise, as a result of political and religious liberalization, the so-called „sexual revolution“, the expansion of the education system, the increasing involvement of women in the capitalist work process and the resulting lower material dependency and financial independence, everything changed Post-war generation aspirationslead to lower birth rates, children were no longer seen under the heading of preservation of the state and old-age provision, but increasingly as a cost factor and restriction of personal freedoms.

However, since globalization now also affects those parts of the world that still or just grow out of patriarchal agricultural and partly tribal societies, from the point of view of conservatives and religious people, even Islamic scholars and Islamists, the situation is similar to that some backlash in the western and partly eastern industrialized countries about the equality of women, who increasingly rebelled and appeared more liberal.Religious revivals as the evangelicals, the Falungong and especially Islamism is therefore also a backlash or preventive prevention of too many women’s rights and the hope that the old Islamic order can be restored, which subjugates women, makes them a compliant servant of a patriarchal order and also leads a birth jihad that increases the number of Muslims and potential missionaries and warriors increased.Same with nationalists who want to make their decining birth rates disappear by new coalitions withreligion and its patriachalistic values.


Religions as well as nationalist ideologies think in terms of the enlargement of their own people, their own religious community, the women are there childbearing machines, which should multiply and make themselves subject to the world, since apparently limitless resources and ecological and no scarce economic goods are assumed, but everything is apparently endlessly reproducible. Even communist ideologues like Mao promoted population explosion, believing that each mouth had two arms that could feed more than one mouth. In addition, many nationalists,, religious fanatics and communists refer to Malthusianism, which was then refuted due to technological developments at that time. .


In a critique of William Godwin’s optimistic view of the perfection of human society and its principal problem-solving capacities, Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), highlighted overpopulation as a problem of an evolving economy and society. Malthus presents it as an obvious fateful necessity that the human race blindly obey the law of unlimited multiplication, while the means of subsistence that let it live do not multiply with him in the same proportions. This fact appeared to him to be such that he was not afraid to formulate it as a mathematical axiom. He claimed that people increase in geometric progression and food in arithmetic progression. In the numerical example: If a couple has four children and they have four children per couple, the population grows accordingly; an increase in food production does not follow in the same proportion. Improved irrigation increases productivity by about 20%. This increase then does not generate any further growth. According to Malthus, there will then be a time when supplies would no longer be sufficient for the earth’s population unless those correctives such as illnesses, misery and death intervene again and again to restore balance. Malthus thus expressed his scientific and moral judgment about the unfortunate in a text passage, which he later repaid in later editions, but which was considered characteristic of the spirit of his teaching:

Malthus was definitely wrong in his days, but at that time it was still a question of exploitable resources and the beginnings of industrialization when aired his population thesis. Today, however, humanity no longer has 1 billion or 2 billion people, but 7-9 billion people, faces the 12 billion  benchmark with a continuing trend and there are already enough resource wars and climate change with refugee waves. The one-child family and birth control in China  did not come until late in 1979 and has in turn produced a male surplus due to the preference for male offspring.asnd an generational imbalance. But the socalled overaging is a phenomen in all industrialized socieies and states.


Meanwhile, the most backward countries, especially Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, are spurred on by religion and nationalist leaders, who see the birth rate as the strength of their own country and the wealth of children as the expression of masculinity and wealth, While demographic ideologues such as Emmanuel Todd see birth rates declining as a product of womem´s education and economic development in Muslim countries, other demographic analysts such as Gunnar Heihnsohn are predicting another population explosion with youth buldge, means a surplus of young men, who cannot be supported by this stagnant economies , won´t l find work and therefore follow radical, expansive and terrorist ideologies and currents of religion as it was the case with  the Spanish conquistadores as well as many wars or HItler’s living space in the east Pthese were the predecessor which because of the youth bulfge in great proportions will follow Islamism.


The population explosion should be a top priority, since humanity could grow from currently 7 billion people to the predicted 12 billion between 2030 and 2050, provided there is no turnaround. The only question is how to solve it. At the moment, a pure redistribution of the overproduced mountains of food and goods worldwide would be enough to eradicate all poverty and hunger, even without genetic engineering. But you would need a different global economy.

China’s one-child policy may serve as a role model for some, but China, like western industrialized countries, is struggling with the problem of aging and pension systems because it would have preferred a two-child policy that produces the reproductive rate. There are three basic options: Humanitarian aid is cut, people are starved to death and die in epidemics, which contradicts the humanitarian demands of the West. Especially since famines and wars, even world wars, never really sustainably reduced  population growth.


Or you can rely on more education for women, contraception,digitaliation. economic development and industrialization, which will lower the birth rates, as was the case in western industrialized countries, and Marx and Engels describe this secular trend from large to small to patchwork families and single households well with the development of the productive forces (see also Engels: On the Origin of the Family). South Korea followed this path, was still poor in the 1950s and had a overpopulation like Egypt today, but gradually reduced it through industrialization, education of women and support for small families. China’s New Silk Road is a mega-project of economic development in disadvantaged countries, which is also hoped to contain the population explosion. The only problem is the consumption of resources in order to achieve equivalent living standards. The basic question is: Can new technologies make agriculture and the rest of the economy grow so qualitatively by reducing resource waste, and create redistribution and a new social system that no longer has quantitative, environmentally damaging growth as a basis? Mathusians believe that this is not possible and the formula population growth plus wage increases and more consumption, ergo: more growth is destructive, whereby they mostly do not want to redistribute the rich upper classes and their income in favor of lower classes, but rather reduce lower classes through wars, epidemics, abstinence from consumption, starvation. Neomalthusians advocate for an ecological dictatorship, an eco-dictatorship which outpaces any reformist New Green Deal.

This overlooks the fact that a poorer stratums, if they consume more, if social systems are built up, the education system is expanded, more qualitative growth is generated by new technologies, such as drip irrigation ala Israel instead of the widespread water wastage ala Arab states or energy and other more resource efficient technologies are used, both the ecological and the economic effects of quantitative growth and the population explosion can be prevented, and indeed the birth rate will in all probability decrease. But the question of a new economic and social system is no longer asked today.


Restrictive birth control must also be enforced against religious and archaic male images. The ideology that many children distinguish the actual man and bring wealth to retirement should be counteracted. It is gratifying that at least Pope Francis, in spite of the Christian „Multiply and subdue the earth“ declared: „Catholicism does not mean to multiply like the rabits“. It would be hoped that representatives of other religions, especially Islam, evangelical free churches and various macho politicians would follow this slogan,, but this is rather unlikely.


However, many women are also conservative and even Islamists and support Islamists, so the simple woman-man dichothomy is somewhat misleading. The enlightened and independent women in Muslim countries are mostly upper and middle class urban women who more closely mimic a western lifestyle and its Desperate House wives or Sex and the City TV series, while the other women see them as immoral and challenging and especially since they have a certain social envy for the better-off, emancipated urban women on the part of the other, often rural conservative and more religious women, won´t create unconditional women’s solidarity as Western feminists naively imagine.


This is even more general. Migrants from southern countries who have just emerged from a tribal or agricultural society still have a pronounced machism, which was also dominant in Europe when it was still about agricultural societies. That used to be the case with Italians, Greeks, Portuguese and Spaniards like that and in the deveolped Western countires before industrialization.. At that time the macho was held primarily as an import from Ibero-American, mostly Catholic cultures. Machism is found among secular Muslims as well as anti-Semitism among Muslim migrants, so it’s not just a question of religious Muslims alone, but the problem is broader.The Me Too campaign also shows the relics of this archaic understanding of masculanity in Western societies.

Welfare state and class struggles against Islamism and neoliberalism


Neoliberals and rightwinged groups as conservatives see the possibility of replacing the welfare state with religious charity organizations or dismantling it in their favor or rich philanthropists. They also see religiousness as a value that stabilizes society, as well as an element that is compatible with capitalism. In their book “God is Back-How the Global Revival of Faith is changing the world” by Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrain Wooldridge, they praised the fact that religious people are abstinent and sobber, have stable relationships and marriages, and would be more diligent. Similarly, neoliberal authors also described the AKP’s electoral base, the new green religious-conservative middle and entrepreneurial strata as in the model city of Kaiseri, which this time was attested to in Calvinist-Protestant work ethic in analogy to Max Weber and was therefore seen as modern and compatible with capitalism . Of course, the neoliberals overlooked the fact that this ethic is far from being liberal or open-minded to a secular state, but that the AKP base and its leadership are evolutionary Islamists who want to bring about an Islamo-fascist state. The same mistake was made in the Islamist Gülen movement, which, because of its Confucian-like educational ideal was perceived as a modern, capitalism-compatible form of Islam and that the AKP was viewed as a kind of Islamic Christian democrat party like the German CDU or CSU. Neoliberals, conservatives and right wingers do not see the danger that the replacement of the secular welfare state by religious organizations and that exactly these groups will lay the foundations for the abolition of the secular liberal-democratic state in favor of an authoritarian-religious state, if these religious groups also support political parties. But the Evangelicas already have also great influence on the US Republican party or are the most influential electorate for Bolsanaro The left therefore refuses to build the secular welfare state on religious welfare organizations, or to dismantle or even replace them in favor of these groups.

With their charity organizations, Islamist parties and movements fill the gaps of missing social organizations of secular-left organizations or missing welfare state or dismantling of the welfare state as a result of neoliberal politics of secular-democratic and secular-authoritarian governments. In her book, the Sadat widow describes the charitable charities and social networks of the Islamo-fascist Muslim Brotherhood, for which she also collected and had sympathy before she met young secular officer Sadat – from inexpensive pharmacies, doctors and free treatment, cheap lawyers for legal advice, teachers for tutoring, pastoral care, the Islamists organized a broad social network. Which is why they can gain sympathy and are wrongly perceived as a charitable social movement. It is correct that the Muslim Brotherhood maintains charitable institutions, but it could also be said: The NSDAP had an SA and the SA had soup kitchens and a winter aid organization and therefore the SA would have been the dominant direction and only a social charitable organization.
Building welfare institutions to establish a state in the state and use it to recruit supporters who want to undermine and overthrow the secular state is the real purpose, not humanity, and the purpose and means are a little confused. Islamophiles thus declare Islamists to be social charity organization and ignore the context and the goal in which and for which this social work is carried out: an Islamo-fascist ideology and the establishment of a God state. Therefore, there is no logic to fight class struggles for the welfare state, against social cuts, for better social living conditions or to collect money for the needy or maybe together with the Islamists for the good and social cause without attacking the Islamists‘ politically and critizise their political goals of establishing a Godstate dictatorship

Islamism as a backlash against modernization and modernity


Islamism was also a response to half or failed attempts to modernize many Muslim countries. In the case of Iran e.g. the White Revolution, which expropriated many landowners, including the clergy, brought rural masses to the capital cities through this land reform, which brought the village with them and especially as bazaars and mosques were grouped as new centers, which then became the support base of Khomeini against the Shah. In Afghanistan, many large landowners, warlords, clericals saw themselves, who also had a lot of property, threatened by the communist land reforms, measures to promote alühabetization and women, and then the attempts at collectivization by the Soviet Union. Similar examples can be found throughout the Greater Middle East. Furthermore, many rural masses were uprooted and, as a result of urbanization, they were confronted with the more modern, secular upper and middle classes of the cities and their more liberal and western lifestyle, which led to much social envy and moral concerns as to whether this was not Sodom and Gomorrah and mortal sin Even the corrupt secular elite hardly built social systems apart from a few subsidies for food and oil, which were then repeatedly cut down as a result of IMF programs, which also led to some uprisings that the Islamists deliberately addressed in their propaganda. In addition, despite the modernization, the middle class remained relatively small, no real and broad capitalist entrepreneurship or a bourgeoisie including the classic working class developed as in the classic capitalist countries of the metropolian imperialism, especially since the ruling secular despots and one-party rule, especially since the military of the young officer movement was closely related to the economy and corruption and nepotism flourished. As Bassam Tibi said: The secular modernizers of the Muslim world accomplished only “half modernization”. More economic and mostly also quite bad, but certainly no political modernization. Because of the half and bad modernization, especially the corruption, the lack of a welfare state, the decandent lifestyle of the elites and the insufficient education of the population, the Islamists had broad starting points to find a mass base.

Islamism as response to colonialism and imperialism


Islamism was also a reaction to colonialism and the later imperialism of the West, but initially not the main trend. The Muslim Brothers were also not founded until 1928 and initially did not play an important role. In the Muslim countries, nationalist, pan-Arab and secular, often young officer movements dominated the anti-colonial struggle, which was more supported by the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the West relied on more neo-feudal monarchies and dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia, Northern Yemen, Oman; Pakistan or secular states like Iran or Turkey even supported the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups up to Osma Bin Ladens even against the Soviet Union and the Panarabists. The Islamists, however, criticized both: the secular Western powers and the communist, godless Eastern Bloc supported puppet governments, which prevented the Islamic Ummah and an empire like Mohammed or the Ottoman Empire from their rise of new emopires, while the Muslim secular rulers were only decadent and compliant puppets These are the powers that divide and play the Muslims against each other instead of uniting them and restoring their old size. This is the narrative of the Islamists, even though they disagree with each other like the Panarabists or the Communists did before. Islamism only started to emerge as a global force at the end of the 1970s and developed rapidly in the following stages due to the following events:
1979 U.S. support for the Afghan Mudjahedin from July through Carters and Brzezinski’s presidential directive, resulting in the invasion of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and fall into the „Afghan trap“, occupation of the Mecca mosque in Saudi Arabia, the revolution in Iran, Camp David 1982 Lebanon War ( Foundation of the Iranian Shiite Hezbollah and displacement of the secular-Shiite Amalmiliz), uprising of the Muslim Brothers in Syria (Hama) 1987 Intifada / 1988 establishment of Hamas 1989/1990 defeat of the Eastern Bloc withdrawal from Afghanistan, Gulf War, seizure of power by the Taliban 2001 establishment of the Turkish AKP Erbakan’s failure and 9-11, US war in Afghanistan, 2003 Iraq war. From 2011 Arab Spring, which is used by Islamists, Islamic State, Syria and Yemen War, NATO War against Libya.

How does Left Counterjihad differ from Right Counterjihad?

Marx on Feuerbach and religion:
“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: man makes religion, religion doesn’t make man. Indeed, religion is the self-consciousness and self-feeling of the person who has either not yet acquired himself or has already lost it again. But man is not an abstract being, crouching apart from the world. Man is the world of man, state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, a wrong world consciousness because they are a wrong world. Religion is the general theory of the world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point-of-the-hour, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its general reason for consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human being because the human being has no real reality. The struggle against religion is thus indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious misery is in one the expression of real misery and in one the protest against real misery. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the mind of a heartless world like the spirit of mindless states. It is the opium of the people.


– Karl Marx: Introduction to The Critique of Hegelian Philosophy of Law; in: German-French Yearbooks 1844, pp. 71f; Highlighting in the original


Marx assumed that if man were freed from misery and oppression by communism and if he was supplied with material goods in a happy society, religion would also dissolve, and there would be no more the sigh of oppressed creature He no longer needed the opium of the people. He negated Feuerbach’s explanations that religion was also rooted in the fear of death and transcendental needs. The need for people (apart from the Church) for religion, which has always existed, the monotheistic Religions are a relatively new and historically very short phenomenon, exist universally, but are often expressed today in substitute religions in secular societies or in secular ideologies, which Erich Vögelin, like fascism or communism, also designated as „political religions“.

1) Basic is religion criticism in general and Islam criticism in particular.

 

The believe of all religions to one God is a childish projection, a fatamorgana, the opium of the people, the worship of a higher non-existent power that will not help us. Still, religion does not just feed on a belief in God or charitable, welfare state-like material interests which, by means of an enlightened divine criticism or the fulfillment of social demands, dissolve into nothingness or are eliminated by the repression of religion, but religions are, on the other hand, the expression of transcendental needs that secular people can not understand, of a moral nature, of a philosophical nature, such as creation of the world and the meaning of life, as well as the elimination of death, since almost all religions do not know death, but a life after death, whether in Christianity, in Islam, in the rebirth of Hinduism or Nirvana and rebirth of Buddhism, especially the idea that life ends with death and then just completely stops and in the end many humans find not desirable or wishful. It lives easier if one believes that after death it goes on, that there is ultimately no final death gibt. Here religion is part of the „opium of the people“ and the search for higher, non-earthly sphere beyond our existing world , a spiritual_emotonial deeling which can not be scientifically proven, since nobody knows what a meaning of life is, whether it is a God.,whether there is a life after death or not. There are no strict counter-proofs.

Hence, instead of strict atheism, an agnosticism is conceivable that does not explain such questions as elementary to this world, rather goes into philosophy of life and at least rejects and rejects the control of a god over earthly life. In the same way, despite all the information, there is still the superstition that by means of bribery of higher beings by sacrificial offerings or good deeds an improvement of his material situation can be achieved, be it by burning incense in a Buddhist temple before the school exam, be it charitable or sinful Behavior that is counted against the karma or a better life in Paradise or is it the belief that one would persecute the ancestors and spirits if one does not donate to their graves. These people will not be able to do much of it, as will lottery players, who spend their hopes on winning millions of dollars every weekend, even though the odds are minimal.

However, an essential motive of political Islam is the hereafter care, only it explains the readiness for Allah not only to kill and murder, but also to die. Islamists and the Islamic State not only attract a servile, obedient, willing and docile women with a secular Islamist empire of a paradisical socially just and reviving Umma, but also with a paradise in the hereafter, with virgins and an Islamic garden of Eden in the afterlife everything blooms and is abundant – so there is no death at all and the martyr and godly Muslim has to expect an otherworldly utopia in the face of the momentary dreary worldly state.


Religions and Islamism have a dual strategy: they promise the divine paradise both in this world, should they or other God-given leaders come to power as well as in the hereafter and should it not work in this world, then one has his safe place because of God-pleasing Life or martyr’s attack in the heavenly hereafter and the sphere bexond the existing worldly world. . One tries to establish a theocracy in this world so that one is better off in this world beyond our world and one is rewarded in the afterlife. Should the Godstate not materialize  in this world, the believer will be rewarded because of his godly efforts in the afterlife. You can only win.Worldly or divine-otherworldly-one can only – a win-a win-win situation and an almost dialectical logic. Secular people can only counter this by saying that life ends with death, that there is no hereafter and hope for survival, and that therefore one should mobilize all forces to make worldly life human and worth living in this world.. Whereby most Islamists themselves because of their inhumanity or barbarism expose themselves, even if the worldly world, be it the Islamic State, Hamas in Gaza, the Taliban in Afghanistan or Erdogan-Turkey. The secular left could break through this doubling strategy by pointing to the worldly, by no means paradoxical, but rather barbaric states of those God-states and Islamist dictatorships and their Islamofascist and screaming leaders, and disillusions they create among their supporters and their  worldly hopes, and ask those who think beyond,  the rhetorical question :. If the divine-worldly paradise and Godstate already looks like that, what does the promised otherworldly paradise look like? In addition, one should also cite extensively the sura that killing or killing a person kills or destroys all humanity, especially if you do so in Taliban or IS dimensions. But this is again the field of reform theologians and let us leave this to them.

Another variant would be for secular people to allow survival in whatever form as an option, but to decouple it from the existence and workings of a God or an interaction of this action and otherworldly reward or punishment and then postulate a neutral astral survival, perhaps in the sense of a soul. But it is questionable whether a secular left should engage in such speculations. Although it takes away the fear of death, leaves everything in the individual uncertain, it is also instinct channeling, but it can also distract from addressing the secular society and its humanist organization. An indeterminate philosophy of the beyond, which promises to continue living, can also mean complete value-redlativism in this world and also barbarism. Especially since one does not want to be haunted as a hermit in this logic as an astral body and a soul in the hereafter, unless one dives into all levels as omniscient mind or even omni-cosmological co-creator,  a new form of spirizual and not material existence detached from all material restrictions. But even this prospect can lead  the earthly people who believe in an astral body or a soul again looking for earthly organisation system  and orders that can emerge from a new quasi – religious ideology in which then an earthly mediator (Medium) between the supposedly godly astral leaders and their earthly believers become the new leaders and see this mediators as new leaders and prophets of otherworldly astral gods.

Therefore, it is  time to organize the secular-rational-thinking secular people and secular Muslims and organize them as a powerful pressure group against this superstition and even give them a loud and dominant voice. For the irrationalities of the relgion,   moderate theologians, Islam reformers should be won as an allies, who convince these believers by means of a reform religion,which labels Islamists of Muslim Brothers, Chomenists, Wahhabists up to the Islamic State as heresy from the actual teaching and makes clear who supports them will be sanctioned in this world and in paradise. At any rate, a scientific-secular left should never embark on such a line of argumentation, but understand cooperation with moderate theories as a necessary evil to tame a totalitarian barbarism in the name of the hereafter in this world, which is only due to a pragmatism.

The need of every human being, not as a finite biological worm in a Darwinian existence born of a primordial and accidental meaningless, lonely and anonymous existence , ultimately dying, is addressed not only by religions, by a sense of life, by a greater obedience of the individual to a divine order Living through godly life honored or in hell by a punitive god of revenge or the devil is sanctioned, claim, there are also secular-scientific-quasi-religious forms of eternal survival, be it on the belief in a fountain of youth based genetic technology, which promises an eternal life, be it Ray Kurzweil’s posthumanism from Silicon Valley, which also promises eternal life through computer avatars and bio-electronic cyborgs in his book „Singularity“. Similarly, many people also want to perpetuate by procreating descendants, founding foundations, historic exploits of positive or negative provincial history and perpetuate a lasting memory of their mortal person. It is precisely this need that is posed by ideologies, religions and even Islamism – the latter mostly through martyr attacks or the creation of Islamist empires, be it Erdogans neo-Ottoman dreams or the Islamic state of Abu  Baghdadis, who proclaimed himself a caliph. They will not be forgotten like Hitler or Mahatma Ghandi.

Criticism of Islamism also includes criticism of the Koran as it is general, and therefore does not tolerate any tactical support such as bourgeois forces with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, and Islamist states owing to imperialist and geopolitical considerations. Likewise, the Left refuses to speak of people from other countries only under the label „Muslims“, which has been introduced as a religious category since 9-11, although many of these people are secular, visit neither a mosque nor wear headscarves, Ramadan as many western agnostics more than a family celebration as a religious celebration commit and define themselves more in ethnic or national categories than under religious Muslim affiliation. Furthermore, the left counterjihad-unlike the right-wing counterjihad-still differentiates between moderate and Islamist Muslims, without, however, such as left-wing Islamophiles and cultural relativists to romantize Islam and don´t criztizise the Koran, since Islam and the Koran are just quite well the source texts and religion which fosters Islamofascism and also plays a supporting ideological and partly promoting role in the emergence of Islamofascism, such as the conservatives and national conservatives in the rise of fascism and National Socialism.


Short. Differentiation while maintaining the ideology critique. Leftist critique of religion attempts to persuade people to be atheistic and, if they think it too radical, agnosticism, but not to engage in religious exegesis or reading in order to promote a reformed Islam, Euroislam, or a modern religion. The latter is the task of religious theologians and not of the left. The left deals with the social here and now and the future of this worldly world and not with otherworldly questions. The transcendental dimension of religion leaves them to moderate, progressive theologians and religious who are supposed to neutralize and contain the fundamentalist interpretations of religion and Islam in cooperation with the secular-atheist-agnostic-democratic left.

2) The left organizes secular people and leaves the reform of Islam to progressive theologians and Muslim thinkers


Islamism and religion is not only an ideology that would be exploited and can be solved discursively and rationally through other social models (“open society, civil society, classless society, etc.) and arguments of the Enlightenment, but also has a transcendental core, which secular people cannot understand, but theologians and clergy can. Above all, the left should organize secular people and guide moderately Islamic people to atheism or agnosticism by means of rational arguments and the conduct of class struggles, leaving the transcendental dimension of religion to moderate religious people in order to weaken and neutralize the extremist religious people. The task of the left cannot be to promote left-alternative Sufist circles of the mystic, Quran exegesis and worship services, but has to focus first on the organization of the left-secular forces and people who are rational accessible to secular arguments, although progressive clerics can certainly absorb transcendental-radicalized religious people.
No relativization of religion because of the totalitarian forms of secularism.

The realization that secularism, capitalism and communism also did not create a better society, and even created totalitarianisms such as National Socialism, Stalinism, Maoism and Pol Pot. The liberal-democratic-capitalist form of society can be seen as civilization progress and worth defending against feudalism, Stalinism and Fascism, as well as Islamism, but also not as the „end of history“, since capitalism is inherent in the economic and financial crises as well as the signs of alienation. which, due to the competition between nation states and the economic system, repeatedly generates all these regressive forms of rule from fascism to Islamism. After the fall of communism, western capitalism prevailed and in the 1990s globalization picked up speed and with it a neoliberal agenda, which accelerated the already existing laws of capitalism and aimed at privatization of housing construction, services of general interest, deregulation of the financial markets, social cuts and wage cuts continued and was supported by all established parties. Whether social democrats, greens, liberals, conservatives, they all supported this neoliberal policy on which the right-wing extremists can now make their arguments..

The globalization boom an dits Washington Consensus lasted only a decade and the first signs of a crisis emerged with the first globalization crisis, the Asian crisis in 1997, the crash of the new economy in 2001, the saturation of emerging markets and emerging markets and finally with the financial crisis in 2008, and they will repeat themselves and will continue to do so, because like the shortage economy in a planned economy they are just as intrinsic to capitalism. Just as Black Friday 1929 was inherent to capitalism in the system, so is the 2008 financial crisis and even worse crises in the future, which are not accidents or anomalies, but are inherent in the capitalist system. The crisis of globalisation was mostly in the Western world as India, China and the emerging economies raised their living standards for their people, while the West faced a decline which made Trump and America first to seize power against the globalists and the Washington Consensus. China has not yet developed an outspoken Beijing Consensus, but tries to make the New Silkroad and its new Global Deal like its Green Deal as equivalent.. Anyone who reads the forbidden book Das Kapital by Karl Marx knew this, but it is viewed by the neoliberal mainstream economists, politicians and media as irrelevant, but we also see this liberal-democratic-capitalist system as progress against Islamism, fascism and Stalinism worth defending, although it is inherently unstable and therefore a discussion of the left has to be revived in favourof a new social system and a system alternative so that one does not become the social democratic doctor at the bedside of neoliberalism.

The left again asks about a new society


The post-communist boom in capitalism has consequently been replaced by stagnation and other crises, including in the BRICS countries. Just as the communist planned economy means lack of economy and lack of freedom, the capitalist economy of the West is characterized by economic and financial crises, by concentration of property, through precarization and social decline of the workers and also the middle classes, rising rents and real estate speculation, which then also spawn new political movements and parties that promise to protect the common people and increasingly rely on nationalism: „America first“, „Britain first“, „Germany first“, „Russia first“, „China first“, „Philipines first“.


Max Horkheimer once said „“ But if you don’t want to talk about capitalism, you should also be silent about fascism „. The resurgence of right-wing extremist parties and movements as well as nationalism and Islamism is rooted in the economic system. As long as there are no other drafts for future societies or discussed again, left-wing democrats can only try to contain and to neutralize the political and social excesses of this system.We are essentially in a defensive struggle and this is not easier with Trump’s election and the victory of Brexit supporters Therefore, we should not stop at the defensive battles, but instead discuss again about a new global society. multipolarity, UN reform, Non-Aligment movements, World Federation and other models.

Around us we see the rapid erosion of the Western post-war order and Trump now also questions all post-war institutions. The EU, NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and the UN. US policies in the Middle East, the Iraq War in 2003 and then the hasty withdrawal of the US military under Obama have left the region in ruins and a breeding ground for Islamists and now large flows of refugees are pushing towards Europe.
In Africa, the economic policies of the West and the EU, which concluded free trade agreements to the detriment of African countries, exported subsidized foodstuffs to African countries, whose fishing areas were overfished with deep-sea fleets and deprived farmers of their livelihoods of their livelihoods, for many people so badly that their living conditions deteriorated they are now looking for the way to Europe.The question will be if China will do it better.


The German fascist party AfD is now hoping for more in Germany, and the new far-right parties are now banking on nationalism and economic nationalism. They call for the total deconsolidation of society, as well as of the international community, which was already done before by the democratic, neoliberal parties by means of the „location competition“, but is now to be exacerbated again by the right-wing extremists against everyone, the people and the states as wolf people, who fight each other and the social Darwinist right of the stronger applies and the weaker and dissenting are suppressed and sorted out. Where economic and trade wars as well as wars become the preferred means of conflict.

This can only be countered by the ideas of tolerance, humanity, humanism, solidarity, internationalism, cosmopolitanism and a social policy that ensures the rule of law and the welfare state, but all democrats should also think about other economic and political systems the right extremes do not appear to be without alternative.
According to her own neo-liberal statement, Merkel represents a “market-compliant democracy”, the results of which we can see. The counter demand from us should be: a democratic social economy. The most important task of the Democrats is to discuss again such a democratic social economy and other social and system designs that counter the neoliberal and anti-social policies of the established parties, as well as the social Darwinist right-wing extremists and their nationalist and authoritarian social plans in addition to such demonstrations, organize political and content-related events where you can discuss how you imagine a different and new society.
Critique of capitalism and communism and synthesis. Many of the totalitarian movements of secularism and the religious-nationalist revival rely on social justice and pretend to be anti-globalist / anti-capitalist, since capitalism and its globalization bring with it many losers and cultural upheavals. It can be countered that neither a planned economy nor capitalism is a solution to the crisis: the communist planned economy produces just as much freedom as the poor economy, just like capitalism a social wealth polarization and economic and financial crises in 1929 or 2008, which will not be the last either . A conceivable model is a regulated capitalism with a welfare state and consideration of ecological standards. Basically, however, the left should once again conduct a fundamental discussion and alternative social models for capitalism and communism in order to be able to formulate a third way for the nationalist and Islamist draft society .And if the Left can´t prevent their catastrophic nationalist policy, it will build up a new society from the ruins of the nationalist catharsis if there is anything left.

According to her own neo-liberal statement, Merkel and her followers represent a “market-compliant democracy”, the results of which we can see. The counter demand from us should be: a democratic-compliant social economy. The most important task of the left democrats is to discuss again such a democratic social economy and other social and system designs that counter the neoliberal and anti-social policies of the established parties, as well as the social Darwinist right-wing extremists and their nationalist and authoritarian social plans where you can discuss how you imagine a different and new society.


Critique of capitalism and communism and synthesis.

 Many of the totalitarian movements of secularism and the religious-nationalist revival rely on social justice and pretend to be anti-globalist / anti-capitalist, since capitalism and its globalization causes many losers and cultural upheavals. It can be countered that neither a planned economy nor capitalism is a solution to the crisis: the communist planned economy exterminates freedom as it is a poor economy, just like capitalism a social wealth polarization and economic and financial crises in 1929 or 2008, which will not be the last either . A conceivable model is a regulated capitalism with a welfare state and ecological standards. Basically, however, the left should once again conduct a fundamental discussion and alternative social models for capitalism and communism in order to be able to formulate a third way for the nationalist and Islamist draft society.

Combating Islamism, be it the militant or evolutionary form.
Military by fighting the Islamic State, the containment of Iran, fighting Boko Haram, Al Shababs and the Taliban. No support for minorities under the banner of the “right of self-determination of the peoples”, whose resistance is primarily organized by Islamists — Chechnya or the Uyghurs. In the case of the Palestinians, only support from the PLO and left-wing forces, but not from Islamo-fascist Hamas. Insofar as the left does not have or set up its own combat units, such as International Brigades like in the Spanish Civil War, tactical support from Western or other military allies is conceivable. Because, like the Left Party not supporting the campaign of the Iraqi army and the Kurdish Peshmerga against IS, de facto  means to allow genocide against the Yessids and religious murder against the moderate Muslims. It is important, however, not to issue a blank cheque for military interventions and humanitarian imperialism, but to consider them or not depending on the individual case can stop taking power. Criticism of Islam, recognition that the Muslim Brothers, the Gülen movement and other so-called moderate Islamists are just that. The end of the tolerance of Islamist parties or groups that were previously wrongly held as democratic and above all the promotion of secular Muslims.

Conclusion:

  1. The Left Counterjihad rejects any Islamophile or Islamophobe romanticization or demonization of Islam and its totalitarian form of Islamism. Islam like most religions has a reactionary core that has to be criticized and the connection between Islam and Islamism has to be made clear. Islamism is the third neototalitarian ideology after fascism and communism and has two forms: The militant Islamism and the evolutionary Islamism. Both have to be fought.
  2. The Left Counterjihadism sees the roots of Islamism and nationalism in the global economic system and as a backlash against globalism, the Washington Consensus, the idea of liberal hegemony as defined by Fukuyama´s .s End of History or Charles Krauthammer´s “The unipolar moment”. Therefore the Left is discussing a third way which can´t be the Washington or the Beijing Consensus.
  3. The Left Counterjihad organizes secular and moderate Muslims and tries to convincet hem of atheism, agnosticism and the advantages of a secular society and state. Left Counterjihad does not organize Muslim reformers, set up mystic Sufi circles or exegeses groups for Koran, but establish a strong secular voice and makes a coalition with democratic, moderate Islamic or religious reformers who can neutralize the main three world missionary fundamentalist movements: The Evangelicals,Islamists and the Falungong.
  4. The War on Terror was ill-conceived. It would have been better to fight a War against Islamism. At the moment great power conflicts prevail again, mainly the Sino-American conflict. But in this vacuum Islamism is on the rise again worldwide. To find a geopolitical solution an Western- Russian- Indian axis with moderate Muslims and secular forces  in  Africa, the Greater Middle East, Central Asia and Asia would be an idea. While China and Russia are important factors by the SCO to stabilize Central Asia, China´s Uigur policy is counterproductive in the fight against Islamism , therefore China could only be included in a War against Islamism if it changes its Uigur policy. As the Sino- American conflict will escalate and most countries don´t want to be drawn into it. It is better to keep China out of this alliance.
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