Below is the first section of Part II of a four-section essay by Hans-Peter Raddatz about the EU, the Mediterranean Union, the Islamization of the West, and the deliberate engineering of the “Arab Spring” by the global elites to serve their own long-term goals. For the links to Part I, see the archive list at the bottom of this post.

This essay was originally published at Die Neue Ordnung in pdf form, and was kindly translated from the German by Rembrandt Clancy, who has also provided the reader with extensive notes.

Islamic Seasons and “Democratic” Global Policy

Part II, Section I

by Hans-Peter Raddatz

Translator’s Introduction

Dr. Raddatz uses references which may be unfamiliar to some. Therefore there are reference notes. These are of two types: translator’s notes and endnotes:

In Part I of this paper, translated by JLH, Dr. Raddatz introduced the “constellation of Islamic ‘movements’“, which have been among the crucial “contributors to the seasons of Spring and Summer”. His idea was to prepare the ground for Part II which examines which of the players, including the “Jewish-Christian resistance”,… will have to reckon with a Fall and Winter phase” (cf. Seasons, Part I, Section 2). After the “Arab Spring”, the so-called “path to democracy”, there follows the “Summer of the Islamic democracy” (Seasons, Part I, Section 5), a period of consolidation, an “Islamocentric” transition which ignores “the future for non-Muslims”, and instead of democracy actually introduces dictatorship and coercion (Seasons, Part I, Section 5). These events in the Middle East together with the concurrent trend toward “dhimmitude“ in Europe point to the “coming caliphate” adumbrated by the Union for the Mediterranean (2005), “encompassing all Euro and Islam residents” (cf. Part I, Section 1).

Part II introduces the prospect of “a new dominant culture”, which consists of Western “Left-Right extremes” fused with “Islamic law” (cf. Islamic Seasons, Part I, Section 5). Underlying the transition is deratiocination (Denkschwund): “In our estimation, the root cause of this trend, which can lead to a Western cultural autumn and winter, lies in the fundamental destruction of human reason” (Islamic Seasons, Part I, Section 5 Trans. JLH). Based on the “constellation of Islamic movements”, Dr. Raddatz proceeds “in Part II to the Fall and Winter phases, to the metaphysics of radicalisation”, and “radical evil” (cf. Part I, Section 2). Even though the “seasons” have their origin in propaganda, they nevertheless have a certain correspondence to political changes in the Middle East. Dr. Raddatz, however, does not render the “seasons” as precisely delineated categories; for him, they also contain significance on the level of imagery, as a cycle depicting a cultural trajectory from false promise to decline and death.

Section I of Part II below is introductory in nature. Just as the constellation of “Islamic movements” was discussed in Part I as a background to the new “hybrid radical culture” of Islam and the West (Seasons Part II, Section 2), so too the first section of Part II below introduces the significance of the Shia tradition of Iran which is crucial to the Fall and Winter phases where Syria is the primary focus, since there, the “… Summer of struggle… is now passing into its Fall”, a season which is a harbinger of a “phase of cultural atrophy (Seasons, Part II, Section 2). It is in the context of larger geopolitical surface events, that this phase of cultural atrophy comes into its own in the form of the “metaphysics of radicalisation” in the West (Seasons, Part I, Section 2), and which incorporates Islam in the hybridisation. Radicalism in this section is introduced as “the new interpretive model” which for Dr. Raddatz is most immediately linked to the 1974 event when Yasser Arafat was allowed to appear, armed, at the UN. From that point, the “… jihad culture of Islam” became the “new interpretive model” in the West. It is the appearance of this new radicalism, with its anti-Semitism, “coercion”, “threatening behaviour”, relativisation of the “good”, its moral confusion and its central control by the “profiteers” of the model which anticipates Dr. Raddatz’ treatment of the “metaphysics of radicalism” and “radical evil”. To this model there is “no alternative”. On the level of political reality, the elites are indeed faced with alternatives; for example, the opposition from Russia to the Syrian intervention. But for the masses, who are under the influence of the radical “new interpretive model”, “[w]here there is no alternative, then there is only power” (Seasons, Part 1, Section 2).

Part II: Fall and Winter in the Cycle of Radical Culture

In the first part of this contribution we examined the background circumstances of the pseudo-democratic wave of unrest in the Islamic countries bordering the Mediterranean and also looked at the decades-long Euro-Islamic policy of rapprochement which is leading to a dictatorially imposed Islamisation of Europe. In addition, the special features of the Islamic law-and-order system serve the European elites as a religious front for their policies of political radicalisation, as both parties increasingly reveal themselves as the Islamocentric outcome of the fusion of the red-brown tradition of violence which is enjoying religious freedom under the protective shield of Islamophobia. Another factor is the money standardised coding* of modern society, which, through labour and consumer-directed networking, also engineers people’s thinking and behaviour, dismantles the rules of democratic discourse and social ethics and lends considerable impetus to a type of capitalism which is at once ideological and totalitarian.

*[Translator’s Note: money standardised coding: Dr. Raddatz frequently uses variants of this terminology in his writings. The underlying idea is that money is an abstract form of relatedness, not limited to its place in society, but a pervasive controlling principle. Dr. Raddatz quotes Georg Simmel (1858-1918) in Section 4 of this paper: Money “represents pure interaction in its purest form”. The abstraction arises from the coding of the relationship between things, independently of the things themselves. Thus societal relationships become abstract codes. The expression attains its fullest meaning when contrasted with “form”. Money is “the most terrible destroyer of form” (Simmel). ‘Form’ embraces ‘the holistic’, ‘the aesthetic’ ‘the unique’, ‘the individual’, ‘the qualitative’, all of which are included under the term culture. Dr. Raddatz makes the point, by implication, that money is the most terrible destroyer of culture. (Quotations from: Georg, Simmel. Ed. David Frisby. The Philosophy of Money [pdf]. Trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. (London: Routledge, 2004) 128]

At the service level of society there is the endless loop of academic “discourse”, the relevant disciplines of which operate with Islamocentric speech regulations; that is, they tend to proceed against the citizen and Christian elements of the old culture. A reliable indication for an incipient extremism is the lack of argumentation and the defamation of critics and persons, against whom combative slogans such as incitement of the people, racism, and Islamophobia are employed. Those who advance this development are at the highest levels of the EU, who, along with the Islamic elites are developing a radical cultural architecture, the cornerstone of which is to be the establishment of a new caliphate with its seat in Jerusalem.

1. The Syro-Iranian Connection

The European version of dhimmitude is the result of this long-term process — dhimmitude being that Koranic form of subjugation, which forces Jews and Christians to submission and tribute and also compels the culturally radical Euro-diktat ^[1] into the Islamic renaissance of a (still) barely concealed extremism. As a consequence tolerance becomes a passe-partout to power which ranks Islamic terrorism as an “abuse of Islam”, fuels the multi-folkish de-democratisation of Europe and strengthens Muslims in their belief that it is Allah’s creative act ^[2] which works such miracles and that brings the unbelievers under the dominance promised in the Koran.

By comparison there is the US led geo-political power of the Western military in the Islamic region, which, with violent Islamic groups, above all the Muslim Brotherhood, set in motion the “Arab Spring” in the Mediterranean and with varying degrees of success supported their advance in the use of technology to attain power. Apart from the aggressive reflexes against Israel, which are bound up with billions paid yearly to Islamic terrorism in both dollars and euros, the focus remained directed, after the Spring and Summer, and even into the “Arabian Autumn”, on the controversial events in the Near East, chiefly on those in the historical heartland of Islam — Egypt and Syria.

After Egypt had been taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood, the latter however having in avant-garde impatience replaced the already weak constitution with the sharia, the US-supported Egyptian army intervened. As a foster child of Western subsidies, the Egyptian army is a controlling factor in the positioning of US-global power, along with the armed forces in other Islamic mass states such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey, the latter being specific to Europe or NATO. Saudi Arabia also belongs to this group, although it is not a mass state; it is however a leading influence in the genesis of terrorism. It presents itself as a global force for peace while at the same time it is a protecting power for the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist offshoot, and it pursues the old regional struggle against Iran for hegemony in the Gulf.

Of course Iran’s Mullah regime rests on a much more comprehensive history, which within Shiite political traditions ranks as having considerable relevance. Along with the power of Shiite Mahdi-messianism, these political traditions include the culturally-evolved capability of penetrating, observing and controlling the society — capabilities which not by chance persuaded the Shiite secession to retreat from the “righteously guided” zealots via Iraq into Persia during the conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. The Shiites further developed their mature know-how in clandestine subversion to a high art of political deception (taqiyya) and murder technique, and these skills were by no means limited to the Assassins and the alternative Fatimid Caliphate [909-1171] in North Africa with its seat in Cairo.

Since the faith in the messiah produced a superior literature and philosophical mysticism of light and permitted even un-Islamic arts such as painting, music and theatre, it opened itself to the modern age, even intellectually, more quickly than did orthodoxy, and it kept alive the Sunna-Shia enmity, which continues to the present day with the Shiite struggle in Iraq and Lebanon. Furthermore the affinity of Iranians for the Alevi faith variant is making a claim for itself; it is a mixture of Shiite-Islamic and Christian elements, which on the one hand forms the religion of the repudiated Kurds in Turkey, but on the other hand provides the foundation for the Syrian ruling ideology.

Apart from the ignorance of history and culture which characterises modern society, the Syrian Summer of struggle, which is now passing into its Fall, is presenting the Western narrowed intellectual field of vision, and its short-term thinking generally, with cognitive problems, because the power puzzle derived from Islamic expansion policy, pro-Islamic collaboration and global financial and economic interests, permanently overextends the long exhausted Near Eastern cliché of a ceaselessly renewable “peace”.

Coinciding with the inflationary and empty phrase of “peace”, there developed after 1945 the modern war culture which has claimed more victims than both world wars together. The war culture spawned the ambivalent pacifists who allowed an armed Arafat to march into the UN General Assembly of international peace [13 November 1974] and since then has made the jihad culture of Islam into the anti-Semitic interpretive model for Western policy, for the media and for the conduct of discourse. Whoever ventures to speak remains unheard, unless the keyword ‘Islam’ occurs with sufficiently positive frequency in the text, as if a chemical or biological process were at work which requires catalysts for enzymes in order to occur at all.

As reflected in the example of the Syrian case, this self-radicalisation leads both to a reflex-like coercion-by-formula and to threatening behaviour, which have made the pro-Islamic cultural dialogue into a reservoir of forces which are as much mediocre as prone to violence. As a result the problem arises of distinguishing between dictator and rebels and between good and evil, which in turn strengthens radicalism, which dictates what is good, and in the process makes rebels and dictators interchangeable. At the moment the name of ‘good’ lies with those against whom the charge of using chemical weapons does not apply, which occasions doubt only in the absence of information authoritatively coming from the profiteers of the dominant interpretive model.

Since the aforementioned interpretive model meanwhile determines the entire “democratic” power hierarchy from the institutions through to the states and the amalgamation of states (US/EU/OIC) up to the global organisations (UN, IMF, WTO) and the courts, that which happens factually is to be understood as provisional, and also as good, because according to the clichés of elite communication there is “no alternative”^[3]. Whereas in power mode this proposition is valid only for the masses, there are meanwhile alternatives internal to the elites which are becoming apparent. Currently the resistance of Russia against the intervention in Syria stands out. Russia herself at one time — amidst strong protests from the West — disposed of the Islamic Chechen rebels and allegedly presides over the largest stock of chemical weapons in the world. In addition Russia delivers weapons, as well as material and nuclear processing know-how to the Iranians, who for their part close the circle of historical and present day power relationships, for Iran’s primarily Chinese- and Russian-equipped fighters have been supporting the Assad Regime for a long time in order to prevent the Americans, after the failed Iraq project, from sandwiching them between Afghanistan, the Caucasus and Syria.

Next: Radical Philosophy and Evil

Translator’s Endnotes:

Previous posts by or about Hans-Peter Raddatz: