The Arab spring of 2011 has chilled considerably into a Moslem winter of 2012. There is no doubt, that across North Africa stretching now into Syria, the 'Islamists' – a word which can mean mostly anything – have already, or soon will take over, control of various states who jettisoned their 'strong men' in a bid to usher in a new reality. That new reality has nothing to do with quaint Western ideals about law, the separation of church and state, free-will, rationality, choice and markets. The opposites are in fact desired by a wide plurality of Arabs in North Africa and the Levantine. The cheer-leading from Western media and pundits that the ossified, corrupt and immoral authoritarian regimes, which had crippled and sacrificed their people's development for power and wealth; was perhaps well-meaning naivete, or maybe, for the more cynical amongst us; a typically misinformed derivative of the culturally defective and deficient notion that all cultures, people, tribes and states are 'the same', and all 'want the same things' out of life. Ergo if Libyans stand up to Gaddafi they must want Western notions of how a state should function in relation to the individual. A nice idea but such a view is of course equal parts absurdity and ignorance.
The mainstream media's misinformation and deceit about what is really going on in North Africa reflects their bias of cultural and moral relativity. There are many prisms through which to view history, but the most informative and sometimes the most difficult to understand is that of culture. Culture is King, and culture informs all. It always has if one reads history and the development of states, empires and 'systems'. Western elites reject this fact. Culture is however quite primary, and it emanates from the individual in a family, up to the collective at the state level. What drives an individual forward, whether within a family, or buried deep within the communal mass of a state, and what drives nations onwards in a loose collectivity of different interests, will be the cultural milieu. What are the morals, ethos, and balance between the individual and the collective ? What does the culture hold to be important, irrelevant, or ethical ? What are the attitudes to thinking, education, responsibility, effort, and honesty ? Do free-will, rationality and the Golden Rule inform the theology or 'religion' of the family and state ? Or are mysticism’s, rituals, irrationalities, and lying, violent, petty, personal obsessions the cultural norm ? What does the culture teach the elite who run the state and who will act in their, and by extension, the state's best interests ? What traditions and heritage make up the unit in question ?
What the media never mentions about North Africa or Syria is of course the distorting, corroding and impoverished non-culture of Islam. In fact the media will rarely mention the word Islam. If you read Moslem history and the Koran it is clear that Islam has 3 basic tenets; Moslems must conquer the world because they are superior and are merely the slaves and abettors of the Allah thing [the supremacist-dialectical, inevitability tenet]; women are the slaves of men [the misogynist tenet]; and Infidels are at best dhimmis or near-slaves to Moslems and Moslem interests [the slavery tenet]. There is nothing in the Koran about free-will, free-speech, individuality, the Golden Rule, treating non-Moslems properly; respecting women, or using reason to acquire spiritual enlightenment. Nor is there a division of church and state, or an evolving reformation and adaptation of ideas, morals and ethics to match a changing and dynamic world. Islam is immutable because Moslems – or too many of them anyways – believe that the 'Koran' or 'Recital' is an uncreated magical work of the Allah thing, and inured to change of any kind. Ergo whatever is in this handbook is the 'law' [which makes the 1600 odd verses of violence against Infidels and women rather obtuse and embarrassing for the Marxist apologists of the Moslem cult].
The Moslem culture was carried into Syria and North Africa by savage Arab wars, not of liberation but of occupation, lasting from 636 AD to at least 720 AD in which the Arabs were finally turned back by the 'dark age' Christians at Covadonga Spain. In these 100 years, Roman, Greek, Jewish, Christian and Berber civilization were wiped out. Trade, papyrus production, canals, irrigation, the Alexandrian library [contrary to Hollywood movies to the contrary], farms, industry and monuments were widely emptied, desecrated, or destroyed. There was no golden age of Islam, unless you call squatting on richer civilizations and using their resources, labor and intelligence and renaming non-Moslems with Arab names who in spite of the system were able to make a difference in human existence, a 'great era'. Algebra, philosophy, zoology, metal working, the compass, the astrolabe, horse collars, heavy ploughs, medicine, hospitals, geometry, calculus, steam engines, the dome, keystone arches, libraries, paper manufacture, and complex trade systems and societies – to name a small few -- were developed long before Islam and were simply taken over by the Arabs or Moslems. Squatters are not creators.
Moslem intolerance, and violence – a cultural artefact of Islam and Arab tribalism -- is an immutable fact of North African and Syrian life. Syria for instance was developed and enriched as a Roman province, an entrepot within the greater Mediterranean civilization of Greece and Roman. Under Greek-Alexandrian and later Roman rule, the area of Syria was prosperous, civilized, Jewish, Christian as well as Greek and Semitic; and at the hub of technology and trade. After the Arab conquests of course, the lands of Syria have been in a never-ending spiral of decline, punctuated by faint efforts at rehabilitation, perhaps a faint resuscitation under Western colonialism, but always labouring under the heavy totalitarian control and boot of Islamic culture. Syria never recovered from the devastation of the Arab raids and wars, and was never reconciled with Western and Byzantine culture and traditions which could have revived it. Neither has Syria in the modern age been able to shed its Arab and Moslem culture, even when it was under British or French control.
In Libya, there is euphoria that the Moslem Brotherhood did not win the recent election outright. But they have a strong minority base and will increase by 2013, their grip on local politics. At some point by 2015 or earlier, the MB in Libya will be running the oil-rich country. In Syria the 'rebels' feted by the Western media as freedom fighters are largely Islamic fundamentalists. They want a return to the dark age of Islamic dominance, not the imposition of liberal-democratic politics one finds in a large North American city. In neither Syria nor in Libya can one find much to cheer about. Plus ca change.
Culture informs all. When your culture is premised on Islamic non-culture, itself an imperialist tool of Arab domination; then failure is guaranteed. The only question is when will that failure in all matters of socio-economic and political development manifest itself ? The poverty and uncivilized nature of North Africa and Syria will never be repaired without a cultural change, shift, reformation and indeed replacement.
But that day is far off and will probably never occur.