The Myth of the “Clash of Civilizations”. Edward Said (Islam, Gramsci and ideology – so how our world is created)

Again, there are so many topics I’d like to discuss, but I had to choose one. Let’s talk about the Clash of Civilizations. This concept is often used as a tool to control populations. I’ve discussed it before using Chomsky’s work. To quote Chomsky:

“Now, to get back to this Clash of Civilizations concept: Huntington’s idea stems from a widespread search for a paradigm, a broad framework to help explain and control societal dynamics. Huntington proposed the idea of a “clash of civilizations,” positioning Islam, “us” (the West), and other entities as opposing forces. The premise is that the world is so disorderly because, in the absence of the Cold War, various ethnic groups are now in conflict, killing each other and creating chaos.

As always, it’s prudent to begin by questioning the facts. Whenever a claim is presented with great confidence, the first response should be: “Wait a minute—is that true?”

…

I think this is all a farce. I don’t mean to say it’s entirely meaningless, but there seems to be a constant need for a new paradigm—something people can build their careers on, write books about, and so forth. These paradigms often end up being tools for controlling people, and that part is true. If this one works, fine; if it doesn’t, they’ll just try something else.”

I see this idea spreading. I often see people using ideology to analyze the world. Here’s a fragment from a great discussion. When I was younger, I listened to Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins a lot regarding religion. However, I later discovered Christopher Hitchens’ geopolitical views, which, in my opinion, are misguided, and that disappointed me. I had watched him win religious debates when I was younger, so it was disheartening to see him lose a debate to Michael Parenti. Here again, he is being schooled.

25:15

“You once used the phrase “secular criticism” in a literary context, but you didn’t mean to imply agnostic or atheist criticism, correct?

No, that’s not what I meant. Secularism holds a particular meaning for me. It refers to the world of history—the world made by human beings. One of the great lessons of Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher from the mid-18th century who profoundly influenced me and countless others, including Marx, is the distinction he made between human or secular history and religious or sacred history.

Sacred history belongs to the realm of religion, God, and revelation. Secular history, on the other hand, is a world where revelation is not possible. It is a world shaped by human labor, marked by its comprehensibility, mutability, and subjection to human agency.

I believe our efforts should be focused on this secular realm. I have tried to make my efforts in this domain, rather than in the world of religion, which operates on ultimate and immutable principles. These principles, being beyond debate and argument, are, to me, both off-limits and ultimately of limited relevance.”

I don’t know who this Vico is, but I assume he sees the world in a way similar to mine. Real history, which interests me, should be as objective as possible, much like science, and therefore free from ideology. Often, when I try to debate with people, I hear arguments based on ideology and human nature. I’ve explained before how concepts like evolution have been misrepresented to justify certain beliefs, thereby creating ideology.

“How This ‘Survival of the Fittest’ Phrase Came Into Existence

Charles Darwin drafted and published his writing called “Principles of Biology” in 1864. In this writing, there was one of his now-acclaimed and highly well-received segments by the scientific community on “On the Origin of Species”. It was after reading this writing of Darwin and drawing parallels between Darwin’s biological theory and his own economic theory that a well-renowned philosopher Herbert Spencer introduced the Survival of the fittest. He further strained the connection of biological natural selection introduced by Darwin to his economic theories. And this came into the limelight when Herbert Spencer connected his survival of the fittest to Darwin’s natural selection concept.

It was Alfred R. Wallace who suggested to Charles Darwin to use this phrase introduced by Spencer in the biological world. Then, Charles Darwin adopted the usage of this phrase in place of natural selection. Additionally, he introduced and totally replaced the use of natural selection and published these changes in “The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication” in 1868. Also, in the 5th edition of the “On the Origin of Species” (1869), Charles Darwin introduced the survival of the fittest phrase and explained it as the mechanism of nature to design more efficient, fine-tuned, and better-selected individuals with the optimum gene pool for a specific immediate and local environment.”

Darwin’s works were manipulated to justify certain ideas and form ideologies by some economists, and to this day, I hear people arguing that capitalism is simply part of human nature, with no other arguments allowed. This perfectly illustrates how a misunderstanding of ideas can create ideologies that justify the world we live in. I’ve explained before how early human groups were communal in nature, so if we look at the nature of humans, it was actually socialist. Later, as changes occurred, people began creating new images of the world in our minds, thus creating a new concept of human nature.

Misrepresentations of Darwin’s ideas to justify capitalism, or misrepresentations of Muslims to justify our actions in the Middle East, all serve to justify the world we see while concealing reality behind ideologies created through the distortion of ideas. This intentional misrepresentation of ideas, like Darwin’s theory or images of the Arab world and Islam through things like movies or even Disney animations, creates an ideological lens through which we view the world. As I said, while others focus on specific events, I focus more on my mind, and now I’m concentrating more on Gramsci’s work, which connects to this.

33:12

“To think about these difficult issues in more productive and humane ways, we can draw inspiration from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. He makes a profound observation that has always resonated with me: history deposits itself within us—our personal history, our family’s history, our nation’s history, and our traditions. This history leaves an infinity of traces—marks created through heredity, collective experience, individual experience, family dynamics, and relationships between individuals. It forms, as he describes, a vast and complex book of traces.

However, there is no inventory or orderly guide to help us make sense of these traces. Gramsci suggests that our initial task is to compile an inventory—to interpret and give history some shape and meaning. This task isn’t about asserting that one history is better or worse than another, or that one person is a victim while another is an oppressor. Instead, it is about understanding one’s history in the context of others’ histories.

The goal is to generalize one’s individual experience to connect with the experiences of others. Ultimately, the aspiration is to transform oneself—to move beyond a singular identity and embrace an identity that includes others without suppressing their differences. Gramsci describes this as the great goal, and I wholeheartedly agree.

For me, this process involves creating a historical inventory that not only helps one understand oneself but also fosters an understanding of oneself in relation to others. It is about seeing others as you would see yourself and finding a shared humanity within the richness of our diverse experiences.”

I am focused more on the human mind and how it creates this naive world full of lies. It’s through media, subliminal messaging, and ideology. We live in a capitalist incubator shaped by misrepresented ideas, like those of Darwin, or through subliminal messaging, all created to justify the world we live in. We are provided with false justifications for the way things are. As a result, people try to justify capitalism using Darwin’s ideas without truly understanding them, based on the false interpretations they’ve been given. Similarly, people justify hatred of Islam based on misrepresented ideas about it. The whole world is not what most people think it is, but since we are told to spend our time enjoying life instead of trying to understand it, things are getting even worse.

This whole “Islam as the enemy” and “free market” rhetoric, represented by AFD and Marine Le Pen, aims to create structural change in Europe. They created the problem of Islamic immigration, and now they’re using it to create structural change in Europe. They hate that we have social welfare in Europe, which is the last place on Earth that provides a decent standard of living for people at the cost of reducing profits. Now, to make us Europeans more competitive so global capital can extract more profits from Europe, they need to Americanize Europe. Private healthcare, private prisons, all the “goodies” of the free-market system, which are essentially the cancer of capitalism. The fight against Islam and the migrant crisis they created is what will help them introduce these changes. They want Reagan and Thatcher policies in Europe to bring the cancer of free-market capitalism.

It’s funny how there is no left-wing movement acknowledging the Islam migrant crisis, which was created by capitalists. So if you want to acknowledge the migrant crisis, you need to accept right-wing policies, like those of Reagan and Thatcher. I see all this talk about Communism in the EU as a way to introduce Reagan and Thatcher policies. How can you call the EU communist if it’s so capitalist? The EU still holds on to some remnants of socialism from the good old days, which our lovely Western capitalists want to get rid of. But how? Maybe by destroying Libya and Syria, destabilizing the region, creating a flood of migrants, and then allowing them in. Then they allow only right-wing parties that bring about the structural changes they want in Europe to acknowledge it. This way, people who acknowledge the problems they created will also have to accept the structural changes they want in Europe.

This crisis wasn’t created by Communism in Europe, but by global capitalists with the purpose of destroying the last vestiges of socialism in Europe, which reduce global capitalists’ profits. They created a crisis, then attached the structural changes they wanted to only ideology acknowledging the crisis they created to implement those structural changes in Europe. Next year will likely be the year of AFD and Marine Le Pen, with Reagan and Thatcher policies providing the structural changes needed to dismantle social welfare in Europe.

I’ve heard so many smart people brainwashed into thinking this way. Everyone who thinks Communism is a problem in Europe should take a look at the streets of the U.S., because they want to Americanize Europe. People that are supporting AFD and Marine Le Pen are protesting against immigrants while wanting to make Europe “great again.” But don’t forget, AFD and Marine Le Pen support free markets, American-style. If you think Communism is a problem in Europe, anyone who thinks the lack of free-market capitalism and socialism is a problem in Europe should explain how Europe is more socialist than the U.S. and how Europe is better than the U.S. in almost every metric when it comes to people’s standard of living. Just look at the streets of the U.S., full of “zombies,” caused by private healthcare and a massive prison population fueled by private prisons. This is what AFD and Marine Le Pen want for Europe. After all, the free market is great, and it will fix everything, right? Let’s remove regulation, privatize everything, and the free market will solve all our problems, just like they did in America. Am I right?

“The entire U.S. ruling class, ruling elite, comes to see terrorism as the preferred means, indeed the only means, to provide social cohesion, to provide an enemy image for the society, to keep it together. According to neocon theory from Carl Schmitt, you have to have an enemy image in order to have a society… This is a very dangerous thing because now it means that the entire social order—political parties, intellectual life, politics in general—are all based on a monstrous myth.”

—Webster Tarpley (Historian), Zeitgeist movie

This way, they create an enemy image for society through the “Clash of Civilizations” narrative and justify “structural changes,” such as the dismantling of welfare, by promoting Reagan and Thatcher policies in Europe. They make it so only parties advocating for these “structural changes” are able to acknowledge the crisis they have created.

I know so many smart people who don’t understand the world and are pushing for this, thereby contributing to the destruction of their own states. They are guided by misrepresented ideas, like those of Darwin. His theory of evolution was a perfect example, as it was used by Herbert Spencer to promote his economic theory.