What Do They Believe?
What Do They Want?
9/11 à la Française: Radical Islamists
2.0
By Andrew Levine
January 16, 2015 "ICH"
- "Counterpunch"
- Three centuries ago, God died;
enlightened materialist philosophers
killed Him.
There has not been
nearly enough time for the consequences
to become apparent to everybody; too
much is at stake philosophically, too
many institutional interests are
threatened, too much human psychology
must be overcome, and, for at least the
past hundred and fifty years, too many
individual and group identity issues
have become involved.
Nietzsche identified
the phenomenon and named it, but he had
little to say about its underlying
causes; and, though he did say that it
could take ages, he never actually
predicted how long it would be before
the Divine corpus finally and
definitively decomposed.
Now we are starting to
figure the time frame out. God has
already gone missing in what Donald
Rumsfeld called “the old Europe”; in
North America and Australasia a similar
process is underway, though at a slower
pace.
In the new Europe,
thanks to Communism, God had long been a
dead letter in enlightened circles. Not
much has changed since Communism’s
demise except that the more benighted
sectors of eastern European societies
are now more emboldened in flaunting
their backwardness.
In Latin America and
other developing Third World regions,
the dead God is also in various stages
of decomposition – particularly in urban
areas. In the Far East, God was never
much of a factor in the first place.
This does not mean
that atheism is winning out over theism
in a protracted world-historical battle;
theism won that battle centuries ago.
Because the arguments can be
interesting, and because the losing side
refuses to concede defeat, it keeps
getting refought. But theism’s chances
of ever coming out on top are about the
same as the UK’s chances of recovering
its North American colonies.
Theism’s future,
therefore, is not refutation, but
indifference. It was indifference that
overtook the pagan religions of Greek
and Roman antiquity, and that allowed
Christianity to supersede them. Paganism
disappeared because the old gods no
longer mattered.
The Gods of the
religions that emerged in the Axial Age
are now becoming similarly irrelevant.
This is not yet evident to everyone; far
from it. But it is happening; indeed, it
has already largely happened. Believers
abound, but true belief has largely
given way to self-deception. Faith is no
longer about God and godliness, not
really; it is about the psychological,
social and political condition of
believers themselves.
However archaic
mentalities seldom vanish completely;
and when they do, it takes more time
than has elapsed since true belief
became morally and intellectually
impossible.
And so, within
communities shaped by the so-called
world religions — not just the Abrahamic
ones (Judaism, Christianity and Islam),
but also the religions of India and
Southeast and East Asia — there remain
dark recesses in which the seeds of true
belief survive. They mostly lay dormant.
Lately, though, within
one or two corners of the Abrahamic
fold, circumstances have come together
in ways that enable some of those seeds
to germinate. The consequences can be
monstrous.
Apart from a few
bizarre eruptions of godly savagery in
remote quarters of central Africa, the
world has so far largely been spared
from having to deal with ravages
perpetrated by monsters grown from seeds
left over by Christianity.
This is an historical
anomaly. Christian true believers were a
scourge upon the earth in the centuries
that separated pagan tolerance from the
dawn of the liberal age.
Liberal tolerance was
a creature of the intellectual and
political ferment that led to
revolutionary upheavals in the
Netherlands and in seventeenth century
England. It came to fruition during the
Enlightenment and in the revolutions
enlightened thinkers inspired in
Britain’s North American colonies and in
France.
With more than a
little disingenuousness, liberal
tolerance is what Western leaders and
corporate media pundits have been
celebrating in the aftermath of the
Islamist attacks last week in Paris on
the offices of Charlie Hebdo
and on a Kosher supermarket near the
Porte de Vincennes.
Some of the
celebrating reeks of hypocrisy, but the
ideals being celebrated rank among
humanity’s greatest achievements. That
more than two million people came out
into the streets of Paris to demonstrate
for tolerance was one of the very few
good things that has happened so far
this century.
Too bad, though, that,
in Europe today and also in the United
States, the line between defending
tolerance and attacking Muslim
communities is easily crossed, and that
anti-Jewish violence has again returned
to European soil. It isn’t all the dead
God’s fault, but a lot of it is.
Judaism has been more
blameworthy in the past hundred years
than at any time since the destruction
of the Second Temple, but its
consequences too have been fairly
benign.
Jews were excluded
from political life throughout
Christendom. They fared better in Muslim
lands, but there too, they occupied
subaltern positions. For more than a
millennium and a half, Jews were
therefore in no position to enforce
intolerance outside their own
communities.
Neither did they have
any reason to perpetrate atrocities or
spread terror. Quite the contrary, they
had every reason to avoid even the
appearance of doing anything of the
sort. Claims that they did – that, for
example, they poisoned well water or
stole and sacrificed Christian babies –
were used as pretexts for visiting
unimaginable horrors upon them.
The Zionist movement
produced its share of atrocities over
the years, and Zionist terrorism —
directed against the British and against
indigenous Palestinians — was
instrumental in the struggle for Israeli
statehood.
But Judaism was not to
blame. In its early years, Zionism was
an entirely secular colonial project;
its relations to Judaism were sometimes
hostile and always attenuated.
Before the Second
World War, most strains of Orthodox
Judaism were expressly anti-Zionist for
age-old theological reasons, and most
Reform Jews were opposed for liberal
theological reasons. Also many leading
Zionists were non- or anti-religious.
It was only after the
establishment of the state of Israel in
1948 and then, with greater intensity,
in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War
that nationalist and religious elements
within Israeli society, and in Jewish
communities abroad, began to fuse.
Jewish nationalism
joined with religious fervor – or, in
this case, more likely, a religiously
inflected form of identity politics – is
rife in today’s settler movement. In the
United States and elsewhere, some of
Israel’s most perfervid backers are, if
anything, even more ardent.
But even were Jewish
terrorists, whether true believers or
just unusually militant ethnocrats, to
cross the line, don’t expect the
atrocities they perpetrate to cause
millions to turn out in the streets of
Paris or London or New York.
The general public in
Western countries will not be affected;
Palestinians and others of Muslim
heritage will bear the brunt alone, and
most Americans and Europeans will hardly
care.
It is different with
Muslims. Let a few of their
co-religionists perpetrate horrendous
crimes in the name of the dead God and
his Prophet, and Americans and Europeans
jump on the chance to blame the whole
lot.
The irony is palpable.
Muslims in Muslim
lands could have terrorized Jews and
other “infidel” communities as much as
they pleased; they could have been as
viciously intolerant as their Christian
counterparts. But, for the most part,
such things were not done in the Islamic
world. Radical Islamists have to search
hard for precedents to emulate.
This may be news to
the West’s burgeoning population of
Islamophobes, but “clash of
civilizations” theorists know better.
They know too how much more advanced
Islamic societies were in comparison to
the societies of Christendom throughout
the Middle Ages and, indeed, until well
into the modern era.
But then, according to
the story they tell, the Christian West
(and maybe the Christian East as well,
though to a lesser extent) tapped into
aspects of their Christian – or, as
polite society nowadays prefers, their
Judeo-Christian – heritage.
Then, we are told,
Muslims were left standing in the dust,
and they have been nurturing an
inferiority complex ever since. It was
only a matter of time before they would
lash out.
A collective
inferiority complex? Could clash of
civilization theorists have read too
much Adlerian psychoanalysis? They
certainly didn’t read too much history.
To hear them tell it,
to understand why the “Judeo-Christian”
West came to dominate the Muslim East,
we can forget about the infusion of
wealth from the New World – made
possible, in large part, by the
extermination of indigenous populations.
And we can forget about the Atlantic
slave trade.
Above all, we can
forget about the wealth-generating
consequences of the capitalist mode of
production — based, as it is, on the
relentless exploitation of labor.
Capitalism emerged in
Europe; it was what enabled today’s
developed economies to develop. For
reasons Marx explained long ago, its
historical mission has always been to
develop productive forces to such an
extent that, for the first time in human
history, a leap into “the realm of
freedom” becomes possible.
But, as Marx also made
plain, at the level of lived experience,
the capitalist way of organizing the
economic sphere has been, and continues
to be, a very mixed blessing.
Clash of civilization
theorists could care less about all
this. What matters to them are just
the purported differences between two
mutually hostile “civilizations,”
grounded in differences between Islam
and the other Abrahamic faiths.
Never mind that the
Muslim world managed to remain humane
and tolerant for centuries, even as its
purported inferiority complex festered;
or that it was only when Britain and
France and other European powers began
to scramble for colonies in Africa and
the Near East that the decline that
clash of civilization theorists gloat
over became salient.
When the European
powers realized how important Middle
Eastern oil would be in their imperial
designs, the decline accelerated. Still,
all might have been well had the United
States not jumped into the fray after
World War I and more or less taken it
over after World War II.
Uncle Sam made sure
that the peoples of the Middle East
would be ruled by compliant – and
corrupt – dictatorships. With the
American government and American
corporations running the show,
left-leaning secular political forces
never had a chance.
As in other parts of
the Third World, nationalist
self-assertion was out; abject servility
became the order of the day.
Then Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National
Security Advisor, got a bright idea: get
the Soviet Union bogged down in
Afghanistan, like the United States had
been in Vietnam. All that was needed, he
realized, was guns and money enough to
cause the seeds left over from the days
before God died to germinate and
flourish in Afghanistan’s remotest
regions. His strategy worked – against
the USSR.
Carter’s successors
carried it on, especially after Iran was
“lost” to a different shade of religious
fanaticism. Why not add godly zealotry
to the arsenal the United States was
already deploying against progressive
(not just Communist) and nationalist
movements throughout the Muslim world?
Not unrelatedly, the
Israelis decided, around the same time,
that a good way to undermine the
Palestinian resistance movement led by
Yasser Arafat would be to facilitate the
rise of Hamas, an Islamist alternative
to the Palestine Liberation
Organization.
It didn’t take long
for the Americans and the Israelis to
lose control of what they had started.
The consequences never stop coming; the
events in Paris last week are only the
latest in a long line.
And yet American and
European leaders keep making the problem
worse. Are they doing it deliberately –
perhaps because the ruling classes of
the West welcome excuses for surveilling
everybody and everything or because they
thrive on perpetual war? Time will tell.
The one sure thing is that they keep on
feeding the monsters they created.
They couldn’t do it,
though, without Saudi Arabia and other
oil-rich Gulf states where the news of
God’s death has never entirely
registered.
It was in those
sparsely populated desert regions, where
civilization, Islamic or otherwise, had
barely penetrated, that “fundamentalist”
Islam, Wahhabism, was born three
centuries ago.
At first, it was a
strictly local phenomenon; to the
outside world, insofar as anyone was
aware, it seemed nothing more than a
harmless throwback to archaic modes of
thought.
Then, with the
discovery of oil and the realization of
its strategic importance, the British
and the Americans began throwing money
at local Wahhabi notables whom they
recruited to serve as functional
equivalents of colonial administrators.
It was a recipe for
disaster – concoct a state out of
backward desert tribes in the grip of an
archaic strain of Islamic theology,
accord them military protection, arm
them to the hilt, and then supply them
with limitless wealth.
What better breeding
ground could there be for religious
fanaticism to grow into a worldwide
menace?
Wahhabi ideology, like
other atavistic religious tendencies,
has a puritanical streak. Its adherents
are therefore disposed to abhor
hypocrisy and corruption.
This is why relations
between the most militant Islamist
groups, like Al Qaida in the Arabian
Peninsula and the Islamic State, on the
one hand, and Saudi and Gulf state
elites, on the other, are ambivalent, at
best.
The Saudi royal family
is terrified that their co-thinkers will
overthrow them in the name of the
ideology they both espouse, and that
they and their Gulf state counterparts
sustain. They are right to worry; this
is precisely what radical Islamists
want.
What They Have
Done
Radical Islamism was
born and bred in Saudi Arabia, America’s
favorite Middle Eastern country outside
Israel. What the Saudis want is to hold
on to their power and wealth. Their
bastard offspring, the radical Islamists
now terrorizing the world, would rather
do them in in the name of the ideology
they share; their first goal is to kill
the father.
An outside observer
might also conclude that they want to do
the world’s Muslims in as well – the
ones living in majority Muslim
countries, and the ones living in the
West.
They have certainly
done Muslims no favors.
That outside observer
could also point out how, in much the
way that Brzezinski and his successors
got benighted Islamists to do the dirty
work for them, radical Islamists today
get “enlightened’ Westerners to do
theirs.
On 9/11, Al Qaida
showed the way: by attacking centers but
also icons of American economic and
military power, the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, they caused America to
do grave harm to itself – militarily,
economically, and morally.
Al Qaida made George
Bush and Dick Cheney – and all those
troops that no one dares speak ill of —
unwitting but highly effective
recruiting agents for itself and its
successors.
And it caused
America’s latent Islamophobia to blossom
forth.
For historical reasons
having mainly to do with the
vicissitudes of European colonialism,
Europe’s Islamophobia was never very
latent; it too blossomed forth in due
course.
In the nearly fourteen
years that have elapsed since 9/11, a
new generation of radical Islamists
learned how to achieve similar results
more efficiently.
France is their latest
Western victim, and apparently their
most spectacular success.
Apparently under the
aegis of Al Qaida in the Arabian
Peninsula, three lost souls, the Kouachi
brothers and Amedy Coulibaly, along with
whoever else was working with them,
achieved what Osama Bin Laden and his
cohort achieved at far greater expense
and with far more planning and effort:
they struck a nerve.
They assaulted
France’s image of itself as a land of
Enlightenment values.
According to the
official line, it is secularism (laïcisme)
and republicanism that make France what
it is. Staging atrocities at the
Charlie Hebdo offices and at a
Kosher supermarket is a way,
symbolically, of saying fie on that,
just as surely as going after symbols
(and more!) of American military and
economic power is a way of showing that
the American empire can be taken on and
defeated.
Never mind that
France’s self-representations are more
than a little exaggerated and, in
particular, that, by American standards
or even by the looser standards of other
European countries, France’s record on
protecting offensive speech barely
merits a passing grade.
It is ancient history,
the year was 1970, but Charlie Hebdo
itself is a case in point. It owes its
existence to the suppression of the
satirical magazine that preceded it,
Hara-Kiri. Charlie Hebdo’s
ancestor’s offense was to have published
a title that failed to treat the death
of Charles de Gaulle with the gravity
that France’s Interior Minister thought
it deserved.
It has only gotten
worse. Nowadays, in France, it is as if
what is deemed fit to print or otherwise
express is determined by a panel of
busybody goodie goodies of the kind that
write hate speech codes for American
campuses. The difference is that in the
United States Zionists are treated with
a tad less deference and Muslims get a
tad more respect.
In France today it is
hard even to speak out in favor of the
Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement or
to hold public rallies in defense of
Palestinian rights.
On the other hand,
French governments in recent years have
been more than a little eager to
accommodate Israeli efforts to strike
fear in the hearts of French Jews. The
Israelis want them to emigrate to the
Promised Land for the same reason that
they wanted Russian Jews to come to
Israel in the eighties: because they
need bodies.
With all those fertile
Arabs in their midst, they need Jews to
counter the Palestinians’ “demographic
bomb.”
One would think that a
proud republican France would vehemently
object to Israeli efforts to encourage
French citizens to emigrate. But never
mind that. As long as it is all the
Arabs’ fault, the Land of Enlightenment
is fine with it.
France’s Socialist
government even had synagogues cancel
Sabbath services for the first time,
they loudly proclaimed, since World War
II. Somehow the French state, which
could play host the next day to some
forty world leaders, many of them
reviled miscreants, could not protect
synagogues from “terrorist” (read
“Muslim”) attacks.
What a motley
collection of world leaders they were.
At least President Obama had the decency
to stay away. One would like to think
that, as the Commander-in-Chief of
America’s war on whistleblowers, and in
light of his record on ordering
assassinations of journalists in Yemen
and elsewhere in the Middle East, that
he was too embarrassed to show up. If
so, he has grown a notch or two morally
since the day he accepted the Nobel
Prize for Peace.
No one has claimed
that security considerations kept him
away. But it was security reasons, they
say, that forced the Grand Synagogue of
Paris to call off Sabbath services.
Then somehow, like the
oil whose miraculous appearance Chanukah
commemorates, security suddenly
materialized – enough for François
Hollande and Benjamin Netanyahu to meet
in the Grand Synagogue Sunday night.
Divine intervention?
Or did someone decide that their meeting
would serve the cause, just as closing
the Grand Synagogue down the day before
had done?
One can see the slogan
coming — “Save French Jewry.” Netanyahu
thinks Israel needs a French Brezhnev,
someone who could be prevailed upon to
let his people go — to help ethnically
cleanse Palestine. Hollande is unlikely
to play that role; there is no
percentage in it for him or for the
French ruling class. But you wouldn’t
know it from events last week.
And if you watched CNN
or read The New York Times, you
wouldn’t know either that anti-Semitism
is not the problem.
Real anti-Semitism,
the genuine article, was practically
invented in France towards the end of
the nineteenth century and the beginning
of the twentieth. It survived and
flourished there until at least the end
of the Vichy period. By now, though, it
is practically a dead letter.
Of course, just as
atavistic religious mentalities survive
in retrograde places, true anti-Semitism
survives too – even in countries, like
France, that have generally moved on.
But, for the most
part, anti-Jewish hostility, and
violence against Jews today, in France
and elsewhere in Western Europe, is a
different phenomenon. It is a by-product
of Western machinations in the Middle
East and other historically Muslim
lands.
Vichy lives on in the
hearts and minds of many French people –
but Muslims are the new Jews. It is much
the same in Germany and throughout
Europe, where the specter of fascism
again haunts the continent.
In the United States,
the most rabid Zionists are the ones
towing a fascist line – reconfiguring
anti-Semitic tropes and using them
against Muslims.
As in the United
States, the proto-fascist Right in
France and Germany and elsewhere in
Europe has exchanged anti-Semitism for
Islamophobia. Remarkable as it would
have seemed decades ago, the fascist
mind is now, if anything, philo-Semitic.
Ironically, this is one of the very few
fortunate consequences for Israeli and
world Jewry of Zionism’s colonial
project in Palestine and its
identification with the West’s,
especially America’s, imperial designs.
There has been plenty
of attention paid to the role Christian
anti-Judaism played in the rise of
anti-Semitism, and also to how it
functioned, as the great German Social
Democrat August Bebel famously put it,
as “the socialism of fools.”
Connections between
rightwing politics and anti-Semitism,
from even before the era of the Dreyfus
Affair, have also been much discussed.
Throughout Europe and
wherever European ideas held sway,
Jewish emancipation, one of the many
glories of the Revolution in France, was
identified with progress and modernity –
in other words, with the Left –
regardless of the political sympathies
of individual Jews.
This has changed in
recent years, thanks to Israel’s role in
world politics and the ways it keeps
Palestinians and other historically
Muslim peoples down.
In Europe, as much as
in the United States where low-Church
Protestant dispensationalist theology
also plays a role, the Right has learned
to stop worrying about Jews and to love
the so-called Jewish state.
French Prime Minister
Manuel Valls would do well to bear this
in mind before he endorses the idea
that, after the atrocities radical
Islamists committed in Paris, the time
has come to declare war on radical
Islam.
So should Barack Obama
before he, yet again, lets the French
ignite a spark that bursts into a
conflagration that he “leads from
behind.” We know what happened the last
time he did that: how much death and
devastation he and his “humanitarian”
advisors brought to Libya, further
destabilizing a region already broken by
almost a decade and a half of Bush-Obama
depredations.
But instead of coming
to its senses, France is calling out the
troops, more than ten thousand of them –
to guard “sensitive targets” including
Jewish schools but not, it seems,
Islamic communities which really are in
danger.
And Obama is calling
for a summit to be held in Washington on
how the next stage in George Bush’s
“global war on terror” should go. If the
past is any guide, expect it to go the
wrong way – with more surveillance, more
infringements of basic rights and
liberties and more war.
It happens with the
regularity of a law of nature: Islamists
commit an atrocity that strikes a nerve
in the West, and the West responds
self-righteously and hypocritically and
in ways that make the problem worse.
Remember what George
Bush told Congress after 9/11: “they”
hate “us” because they hate our freedoms
and our democracy. Not a word about what
we have done to them, and continue to
do.
Now it seems that
graduates of Sciences Po and the ENS
(l’École Nationale d’Administration)
have internalized the Bush worldview.
For all their vaunted intellectual depth
and knowledge of the world, they are no
wiser than Lindsey Graham or John
McCain.
How much safer
everyone would be – French Jews as much
as everyone else in France – were the
French government to make sure, as best
they can, that French Muslims will be
protected from the pogroms the hard
Right is itching to unleash.
And how much better
off the world would be were Western
countries to acknowledge the legitimacy
of the grievances that radical Islamists
feed upon, and to correct them at their
source.
A Concluding,
Unscientific Conspiracy Theory
What then do radical
Islamists want beyond ridding the Muslim
world of its corrupt leaders?
The story we hear in
corporate media is that the terrorists
are just crazy violent types – either
because violence is integral to Islam or
because of that inferiority complex
Muslims have endured for so long.
And since frightening
citizens into accepting whatever their
governments do or say seems to be what
their sponsors want them to do,
self-declared terror experts, working as
government and media consultants, tell
us that Western Muslims are especially
susceptible to radical Islam’s
temptations because they comprise an
“underclass” that Muslim preachers prey
upon.
There is some truth in
this. Ruling circles in the West
succeeded in causing the Left to fall
into a seemingly endless eclipse, taking
moral and social progress off the
agenda, and putting many of the gains of
the past in jeopardy. Without any
prospect of progress, all that is left
to hope for is pie in the sky.
And the neoliberal
policies Western capitalist have imposed
upon the world have pushed ever larger
numbers of people into underclass
status. In Europe more than the United
States, the life prospects of young
Muslims have suffered grievously on this
account.
But there is nothing
wrong with the life prospects of the
leaders of the organizations that train
the perpetrators of radical Islamist
atrocities and that then orchestrate the
violence. Surely, they are not just
acting out. What, then, are they doing
it for?
Can they be taken at
their word? Could it be that they really
want not just to overthrow corrupt
rulers in Muslim lands, but also the
state system itself. Do they really
think that they can replace the modern
state with a Caliphate – in other words,
with institutional structures similar to
those that governed Muslim regions more
than a thousand years ago?
To hear the pundits
tell it on CNN and Fox News, this is
exactly what they want. Worse still,
they seek world domination. What a
limited imagination those pundits have –
the best they can do is dust off Cold
War talking points about the Communist
menace.
It is clear where this
is going: Notre Dame will be turned into
a mosque; French law will give way to
sharia law, and the Fifth Republic will
be declared finished as France is
governed from Baghdad or Damascus. In
time, the United States will follow –
pourquoi pas?
CNN might as well have
hired Marine le Pen or, better still,
one of her less circumspect
fascisant co-thinkers. Fox, of
course, already has them on staff.
One thing is for
certain: violent Islamism is a godsend
for the fear-mongers who keep the world
safe for the fraction of the one percent
who actually benefit from our otherwise
wretched status quo.
Conspiracy theories
are based on what logicians call
“abduction,” inferences to the best
explanation. They fail, when they do,
because they don’t take all the relevant
facts into account – including the
absence of evidence for the existence of
conspiracies.
9/11 gave rise to
conspiracy theories galore; they fell
short not just because the only good
case for them comes from reflecting on
who benefited, but also because they
failed to take the full measure of the
incompetence of America’s national
security state into account.
It would be child’s
play for a good conspiracy theorist to
make the case that the Kouachi brothers
and Amedy Coulibaly were working for
Israeli intelligence or le Front
National or maybe even the CIA.
If not, then they, and
those like them, really are just whacked
out crazy violent types desperate enough
to place themselves in thrall to
atavistic clerics intent on reversing
centuries of moral and intellectual
progress.
A conspiracy theory
might seem compelling because the
alternative is hard to believe three
centuries after the death of God.
Nevertheless, the alternative is almost
certainly true.
As Malcolm X famously
said of violence in America after the
Kennedy assassination: “the chickens are
coming home to roost.” This is how it is
now, but on a global scale. After
centuries of Western domination of the
Muslim world, the chickens are back to a
degree that was unimaginable only a few
decades ago.
Therefore there is
indeed much to fear. But CNN and the
others don’t quite name the real danger.
In the clash of stupidities taking place
in our time, the inadvertent (or
possibly intentional) obtuseness of
Obama and Hollande and Cameron and the
rest is scarier by far than anything Al
Qaida in any of its incarnations or the
Islamic State, for all its savage
brutality, can contrive.
The situation is bad
and it is about to become worse still.
Never has the urgency of a radical
change of course been more obvious. And
if the events of the past week are any
indication, never has the obvious been
so steadfastly ignored.
Andrew Levine is a
Senior Scholar at the Institute for
Policy Studies, the author most recently
of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge)
and POLITICAL
KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of
many other books and articles in
political philosophy. His most recent
book is
In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the
Opium of the People. He was a
Professor (philosophy) at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research
Professor (philosophy) at the University
of Maryland-College Park. He is a
contributor to Hopeless:
Barack Obama and the Politics of
Illusion (AK Press).