Dinosaurs Locked in Combat

There's a lot more going on in the anti-Danish cartoon riots than meets the eye.

These anti-European melees are not isolated disturbances, but the latest battles in a war; it's the world-wide struggle academic author Benjamin Barber called "Jihad vs. McWorld."

What's interesting is that this series of outbreaks, which are really attacks on the economic and cultural domination of North America and Europe, are being played out over purely symbolic issues.

But make no mistake, the forces of conservative, fundamentalist Islam (what American right-wingers call "Islamofascism") are in an implacable war against western corporate gobalism ("McWorld") and its economic, cultural, and political regime of world domination.

Most interesting of all, as Barber rather timidly and equivocally points out in the introduction to his book: "The two axial principles of our age — (jihadi) tribalism and globalism — clash at every point except one: they may both be threatening to democracy."

"May be?" Barber, a political science professor at the University of Maryland, refuses to be pinned down, even though his thesis is that both corporate globalism and jihadism are completely inimical to democracy.

Transnational corporations, in their top-down structures of authority, their intolerance of dissent, and their willingness to use force are fascist enterprises by nature. Nothing could be less democratic, or less tolerant of democracy.

Unless it's Islamic fundamentalism.

I'm no authority on Islam, but it's my understanding that the Koran contains no authorization of a professional priesthood, and that the Prophet Muhammad, blessed be his name, regarded the establisment of any kind of clerical class with deep suspicion. Why then is the Islamic world, from Afghanistan to the tip of Saharan Africa, overrun with imams and ayatollahs? They brainwash the male young in schools devoted to the cult of Wahabbism, serve as thought police in countries where they are encouraged or tolerated by the government, and solemnly condemn democratic government as the fruit of the sin called "shirk."

Voltaire needs updating. A convinced democrat and semi-anarchist, he declared that mankind would never be free until the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

In today's terms, humankind will never be free to pursue real democracy until the last corporate CEO is strangled with the guts of the last imam.