Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [95]
More than a hundred years ago, Marx had observed that the breaking of feudal bonds by modern capitalism had decisively fragmented traditional community. He spoke of the sundering of all bonds and prophesied ongoing cultural meltdown: “All that is solid,” he warned, “melts into air.”19 A half century later modernist anxieties had become popularized, so that one of American playwright William Saroyan’s characters could repeat over and over again in the prewar stage classic The Time of Your Life, “no foundation, all the way down the line,” and expect full sympathy from audiences already exasperated by modernity even before it had produced the Holocaust and the atomic bomb.
In Germany they did not just whine about it: reacting against what they took to be the stultifying leveling (gleichschaltung) of bourgeois society, the Nazi party revived medieval myths of Teuton morality (a feudal version of family values) and of Germanic identity (ironically reaching back not just to a second Empire of the German Nation but a first quite non-German Roman Empire). Eventually, it rode to power on a reactive ideology of grievance dressed up in the claims of an invented past in a manner not so different from the one currently being fashioned by the far Right in France, Italy, and the United States as well as, once again, in Germany. That the Nazis managed only to further the annihilation of intermediate associations of the kind that had once made genuine community feasible was an ironic compliment to their own unintentional complicity in the modernization they reviled. The irony is repeated today in the stellar rise and rapid fall of Silvio Berlusconi in Italian politics: a global corporate media mogul who owns Italy’s premier AC Milan soccer team, using his media-made preeminence to give demagogic voice to the very parochial constituencies his media world is systematically destroying; and then being brought down by media-driven charges of corruption that make him look like any other politician. The same irony is visible in the startling juxtaposition in the new reunified Germany of heavy metal rock rhythms that are MTV’s specialty and punk lyrics of which the young Goebbels might have been proud. Here is a piece of reactionary Jihad all decked out in the metered hip-hop of McWorld, as written by the German band Final Stage:
Times are tough for the German people
Foreign troops still occupy our land
Forty years of calamity and corruption …
It’s winter in the F.R.G.
Will there ever be a Germany again
Worth living in?
German culture—where is it these days?
We meet at a dump called McDonald’s
Lust for profits and power poisons our environment…
This state is ashamed of German history …
We’ve got as many foreigners as grains of sand
Pimps, junkies—it’s all forbidden
Believe me, Christians, praying won’t do any good
It’s winter in the F.R.G.
Will there ever be a Germany again
Worth living in?20
Today, the forces I identify with Jihad are impetuously demanding to know whether there will ever be a Serbia again, a Flanders again, a Quebec again, an Ossetia or Tsutsiland or Catalonia again, that is worth living in. Immigrants from old to New Orleans, from old to New England, from old to New Zealand, want to know whether the lands