Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [104]
Jihad, even in its most pacific manifestations, almost always turns out to be not simply a struggle on behalf of an ethnic fragment for self-determination, but a compound struggle within that fragment that risks still greater fragmentation and plenty of confusion as well. Once the parts feel justified in jettisoning the whole, the logic of Jihad does not necessarily stop with the first and primary layer of fragments. If Quebec leaves Canada, non-Quebecois francophones may lose their equal place in New Brunswick. And if Quebec leaves Canada, why should not the Cree leave Quebec? And why then should not anglophone villages leave Quebec or opt out of a self-determining Cree nation if it is such they find themselves inhabiting? And if a few francophones reside in the predominantly English villages in the predominantly Cree region of predominantly French Quebec, what about their status? It was to such absurdities as these that the multicultural, civic constitutional nation-state addressed itself. Dismantle it and all the paradoxes come crashing back with an ardor commensurate to their centuries-long repression.
Germans: East and West, Old and New,
Right and Red, Guilty and True
GERMANY WOULD SEEM a poor candidate for Jihad. It is still caught up in historical guilt and, more than any other nation in the world, has had reason to hold nationalism at bay; for nationalism is a concept that, as the source for so many of the historical catastrophes that have befallen Germany, remains forever suspect. Moreover, Germany is newly reunited, it is democratic, and it is as heavily invested in McWorld and the American pop culture that promotes McWorld as any country. Yet Jihad, perhaps because it is McWorld’s ally and twin as well as its adversary, stalks the new Germany with astonishing ferocity.20 Those in today’s Germany who want Deutschland to retrieve echt Deutschland yearn to rip down all the foreign, all the commercial, all the materialist banners; and in their place:
Give Adolf Hitler the Nobel Prize
Raise the red flag, raise the red flag,
Raise the red flag with the swastika …
As on the German flags of old
It leads me down the right roads
For me, what matters hasn’t changed:
Race and pride and swastika!21
The new nationalists are not daunted by the official shame associated with taking Germany too seriously, dead seriously. Rather, such pusillanimity incites them to feel ashamed of feeling ashamed. Where else, they ask, are the most innocuous displays of national sentiment to be treated as provocations worthy only of banishment? Why must the recent past be taboo? Even the Japanese are permitted their emperor and their cultural superiority and their celebration of a mostly decensored history including their own version of the “Day of Infamy.” So the skinhead punk rockers offer a crude but searingly frank version of views framed more diplomatically by Franz Schoenhuber’s far right-wing Republican Party, singing “This state is ashamed of German history….”22 Many of the far right groups like National Alternative have been outlawed, but this only succors them in their sense of resistant alienation.
Poverty, I have suggested, deepens the rage of holy warriors and makes them more desperate enemies of a McWorld that has refused to succor them. German enragees are often if not always unemployed or underemployed in lower-paying jobs, often if not always young people with little education and few prospects, often if not always Ossi’s or Easterners from the old German Democratic Republic, deprived