Into the heart of darkness

[gottaB]

Hani Shukrallah reflects on a year when the clash of civilisations seemed a self-fulfilling prophecy

It was little more than 19th century racist drivel dressed up in late 20th century identity politics garb, and this by an erstwhile British spy in his dotage. Having received his schooling at London's School of Oriental and African Studies in the 1930s of the last century -- at a time when the famed SOAS was specifically designed as a training ground for future servants of empire in the "Orient" -- Bernard Lewis, arch-Zionist, old school Orientalist and quack-scholar, came to the US in the 1970s, where he was eventually, and perhaps predictably, received as a prophet.

Having switched allegiance to the Pentagon -- hardly a difficult transition -- the old man hailed by the American corporate media as "the doyen of Middle East Studies" gave the military-industrial complex the one thing it desperately needed in a post-Soviet world -- an enemy.

"This is no less than a clash of civilisations -- the perhaps irrational but surely historical reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both," Lewis wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1990. Samuel Huntington, a more mediocre scholar but no less fervent believer in the role of the intellectual as apologist for empire, took up the obnoxious thesis and, with the help of an ecstatic media, began its integration into American pop culture. Respected scholars -- that is, people who have respect for their various disciplines, and see their role as something other than providing ideological cover for the pernicious designs of a corporate-led power structure -- soon made short work of the thesis. It was not that difficult.

Yet, in 2004, year three of the "war against terror", the clash thesis, now firmly established as the official "party-line" of the neo-con administration of George W Bush, and the ideological foundation of its hold on power at home and abroad, appeared to become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Into the heart of darkness....