Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [112]
What the general case of Japan suggests, even to casual observers, is that in the Japanese context Jihad—with or without its ironies—denotes not simply an internal struggle of minorities against a majority Japanese culture, but the struggle by official Japan itself against the corrupting influences of the global culture into which its economic success has thrust it. But what is true for most peoples struggling ambivalently against McWorld is particularly true for the Japanese: the carriers of corruption are finally neither outsiders nor barbarians but Japan’s own youth, who even as the indigenous culture works to socialize them as native Japanese, have proved themselves adept apprentices of the global practices of McWorld.
Indeed, as we complete this brief tour of the struggle against McWorld within the nations where capitalism has been most successful, what becomes apparent is that the confrontation of Jihad and McWorld has as its first arena neither the city nor the countryside, neither pressured inner cities nor thriving exurbia, but the conflicted soul of the new generation. Nations may be under assault, but the target audience is youth. In Okinawa, in Tokyo, in every country around the world the young generation is being fractured by the contrary pulls of past and future. For it is the young who carry the guns for the I.R.A. and the Serbian militias and the young who wear the headphones of the Sony Corporation and Nintendo. It is the young who rock to the hard music of MTV and Star Television and the young who roll to the still harsher siren song of ethnic identity and other-hatred. They run to do battle with corrupting commercial colonialists on swift synthetic cushions manufactured by Nike and Reebok. They pause amidst the tribal carnage to refresh themselves with a world beverage like Pepsi or Coke. They shake their local folk zithers at a centralist and encroaching French or German or Japanese culture they despise, and then hammer out the tunes of an even more centralist and encroaching global culture on their quaint instruments. They hatch plots against immigrant foreigners via laptop computer modems made by foreigners and assembled by immigrants in their own land. They yearn for the collective intimacy of the tribe and the gang yet groove on the anonymity and solitude of cyberspace. Fascinated equally by the blood that binds them and the blood they spill, they nevertheless navigate the bloodless world of promotion and product as if they were born to it (they were). Whether they hang with South Central L.A.’s Bloods or Cripps, belong to Berlin’s neo-Nazi National Alternative, or run with Tokyo’s Speed Tribes, whether they shoot at teens trying to get out of the Bosnian dead zones or are the teens being shot at, whether they are Hutu minors murdering Tutsis or twenty-year-old French paratroopers trying to come between the murderous brothers, they will be the twenty-first century’s makers—and its victims. They hold Jihad and McWorld suspended in rent souls that can neither eject one or the other nor accommodate both. Dragged reluctantly from a past defined by culture and tribe into a future where velocity is becoming an identity all its own, they are accelerating toward the limits of nature—the speed of light that defines the interactions of cyberspace—in quest of a palliative to (or is it a catalyst for?) their restlessness. The outcome inside their struggling souls will likely condition the outcome for global civilization, whose prospects, consequently, do not seem terribly promising.
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Jihad Within McWorld:
“Transitional Democracies”
THE PARADOXICAL INTERFACE of Jihad and McWorld is nowhere more in evidence than behind the crumpled iron curtain in the “transitional” or “emerging democracies”—which though they most certainly are emerging from communism and in transition to somewhere, are for the most part neither democratic nor very likely to become so any time soon. If anything, they are regressing