Another World Is Possible

While the Left struggles to convince the cynical, bored youth of post-modern bourgeois "democracies" that Another World is Possible, Jihadists manage to radicalize Muslim youth like there is no tomorrow (pun intended). Young people have an instinctual desire for agency, to be historical actors, but today's liberal/"humanist" capitalist technocracies offer little in the way of Grand Projects to inspire. And all the Left can offer in this context is a vague "resistance" on the margins, maybe some organic gardening and a community credit union. Meanwhile radical imams unapologetically present a vision of a new global Caliphate and lookout SuperPowers, that is, secular governments tied to he old Nation/State and borders, cause they have figured out how to fill power vacuums and dominate the spectacular news cycle endlessly. Even liberals who insist it is not a "clash of civilizations" and that The West cannot bomb its way to victory, inevitably fail to examine the economic world order and its effect on the world view and values of these jihadist revolutionaries. You can see this as a counter-cultural movement opposed to our "bedrock principles" but what has the Enlightenment or liberal democratic capitalism done for the people of Yemen lately? Or those from the Levant to the Maghreb? Besides manipulate and humiliate them at every turn, that is? Fund and arm them when we seek some advantage, then turn around and abandon or invade them when they begin to assert a little too much autonomy. And sanctions and drone strikes and Abu-Ghraib and on and on. As the chaos spins farther and farther out of control expect sage advice from Henry Kissinger, expect the Best and the Brightest global security strategists to deny their culpability and insist this time they know exactly what they are doing. We can, as Susan Sontag put it during a previous horrific intervention, "grow stupid together." As climate action is set back, expect beligerent, xenophobic reaction (and war profiteering) to hold sway. Sorry, it's the only economic engine that guarantees quick results.