Centuries Ago, the Maya Storm God Huracán Taught That When We Damage Nature, We Damage Ourselves

James L. Fitzsimmons

THE CONVERSATION

October 4, 2024
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An illustration of K’awiil, the Maya god of storm, on pottery. 

K2970 from the Justin Kerr Maya archive, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C., CC BY-SA

The ancient Maya believed that everything in the universe, from the natural world to everyday experiences, was part of a single, powerful spiritual force. They were not polytheists who worshipped distinct gods but pantheists who believed that various gods were just manifestations of that force.

Some of the best evidence for this comes from the behavior of two of the most powerful beings of the Maya world: The first is a creator god whose name is still spoken by millions of people every fall – Huracán, or “Hurricane.” The second is a god of lightning, K’awiil, from the early first millennium C.E.

As a scholar of the Indigenous religions of the Americas, I recognize that these beings, though separated by over 1,000 years, are related and can teach us something about our relationship to the natural world.

Huracán, the ‘Heart of Sky’

Huracán was once a god of the K’iche’, one of the Maya peoples who today live in the southern highlands of Guatemala. He was one of the main characters of the Popol Vuh, a religious text from the 16th century. His name probably originated in the Caribbean, where other cultures used it to describe the destructive power of storms.

The K’iche’ associated Huracán, which means “one leg” in the K’iche’ language, with weather. He was also their primary god of creation and was responsible for all life on earth, including humans.

Because of this, he was sometimes known as U K’ux K’aj, or “Heart of Sky.” In the K’iche’ language, k’ux was not only the heart but also the spark of life, the source of all thought and imagination.

Yet, Huracán was not perfect. He made mistakes and occasionally destroyed his creations. He was also a jealous god who damaged humans so they would not be his equal. In one such episode, he is believed to have clouded their vision, thus preventing them from being able to see the universe as he saw it.

Huracán was one being who existed as three distinct persons: Thunderbolt Huracán, Youngest Thunderbolt and Sudden Thunderbolt. Each of them embodied different types of lightning, ranging from enormous bolts to small or sudden flashes of light.

Despite the fact that he was a god of lightning, there were no strict boundaries between his powers and the powers of other gods. Any of them might wield lightning, or create humanity, or destroy the Earth.

Another storm god

The Popol Vuh implies that gods could mix and match their powers at will, but other religious texts are more explicit. One thousand years before the Popol Vuh was written, there was a different version of Huracán called K’awiil. During the first millennium, people from southern Mexico to western Honduras venerated him as a god of agriculture, lightning and royalty.

The ancient Maya god K’awiil, left, had an ax or torch in his forehead as well as a snake in place of his right leg. K5164 from the Justin Kerr Maya archive, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C., CC BY-SA

Illustrations of K’awiil can be found everywhere on Maya pottery and sculpture. He is almost human in many depictions: He has two arms, two legs and a head. But his forehead is the spark of life – and so it usually has something that produces sparks sticking out of it, such as a flint ax or a flaming torch. And one of his legs does not end in a foot. In its place is a snake with an open mouth, from which another being often emerges.

Indeed, rulers, and even gods, once performed ceremonies to K’awiil in order to try and summon other supernatural beings. As personified lightning, he was believed to create portals to other worlds, through which ancestors and gods might travel.

Representation of power

For the ancient Maya, lightning was raw power. It was basic to all creation and destruction. Because of this, the ancient Maya carved and painted many images of K’awiil. Scribes wrote about him as a kind of energy – as a god with “many faces,” or even as part of a triad similar to Huracán.

He was everywhere in ancient Maya art. But he was also never the focus. As raw power, he was used by others to achieve their ends.

Rain gods, for example, wielded him like an ax, creating sparks in seeds for agriculture. Conjurers summoned
him, but mostly because they believed he could help them communicate with other creatures from other worlds. Rulers even carried scepters fashioned in his image during dances and processions.

Moreover, Maya artists always had K’awiil doing something or being used to make something happen. They believed that power was something you did, not something you had. Like a bolt of lightning, power was always shifting, always in motion.

An interdependent world

Because of this, the ancient Maya thought that reality was not static but ever-changing. There were no strict boundaries between space and time, the forces of nature or the animate and inanimate worlds.

Everything was malleable and interdependent. Theoretically, anything could become anything else – and everything was potentially a living being. Rulers could ritually turn themselves into gods. Sculptures could be hacked to death. Even natural features such as mountains were believed to be alive.

These ideas – common in pantheist societies – persist today in some communities in the Americas.

They were once mainstream, however, and were a part of K’iche’ religion 1,000 years later, in the time of Huracán. One of the lessons of the Popol Vuh, told during the episode where Huracán clouds human vision, is that the human perception of reality is an illusion.

The illusion is not that different things exist. Rather it is that they exist independent from one another. Huracán, in this sense, damaged himself by damaging his creations.

Hurricane season every year should remind us that human beings are not independent from nature but part of it. And like Hurácan, when we damage nature, we damage ourselves.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Can You Afford Climate Change?

Robert Hunziker

October 4, 2024
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Image by NOAA.

Consumer pocketbooks are taking the heat. Climate change is no longer a theoretical issue that will happen at some distant point in the future, like 2050 or 2100. Already, unprecedented climate change is happening on a regular basis and clobbering the American capitalistic system via consumer pocketbooks. People can’t afford ordinary life. They’re priced out of the market. Everything is getting more expensive by the year, every year.

“We’re no longer in a world where climate change affects the economy, or where voters prioritizing economic or inflationary concerns are responding to something distinct from climate change—we’re in a world where climate change is the economy.”(Source: Everything’s About to Get a Hell of a Lot More Expensive Due to Climate Change, Wired, June 22, 2024)

According to Uncle Sam: “Already, over half of U.S. counties – home to millions of Americans – face heightened future exposure to at least one of the three climate hazards described in this report: flooding, wildfire, or extreme heat.” (Source: The Impact of Climate Change on American Household Finances, U.S. Department of the Treasury, September 29, 2023)

Every one of the threats is the result of human-caused climate change. Nobody has done enough about it, and it’s getting too late, too fast. Evidently, people don’t scream loud enough or when they do bitch and moan about living costs, not a word said about climate change. They’re missing the boat, the biggest boat of all!

The U.S. Treasury has identified three major ongoing climate change issues that ultimately hit consumer pocketbooks. For example, insurance costs for homeowners have turned into a choke hold, assuming insurance companies stay solvent in the face of mega-disasters. Indeed, this is a risk to the capitalistic system’s guiding light for every U.S. citizen, home ownership. Moreover, according to research published by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), increasing climate risk protection gaps could pose a threat to financial stability to banks with large exposures to real estate, as climate change becomes a threat to the heartbeat of America’s financial system.

It’s gotten so bad that climate change can drain insurance resources in the blink of an eye: “California’s unprecedented wildfires in 2017 and 2018, likely fueled by climate change, wiped out twenty-five years’ worth of profits for insurance companies in that state. Globally, just three years, 2016 to 2018, caused more than 70 percent of insured losses from wildfires for the period between 1980 and 2018.” (Source: Climate Change and U.S. Property Insurance: A Stormy Mix, Council of Foreign Relations, August 17, 2023)

Accelerating risks and actual damage from climate change are spurring private insurers in the United States to limit coverage, thus imposing stress on local communities and straining the country’s overall economic health. State Farm, Allstate, AIG, Farmers, and Berkshire Hathaway have all reduced or completely stopped coverage in areas prone to wildfires and hurricanes, leaving homes uninsurable or hopefully some kind of state government assistance or go Full Monty with no insurance unless an underlying mortgage is involved. Over time, RE values will start to cave-in, and the American dream of home ownership, home sweet home, threatened, uninsurable because of capricious climate behavior.

In California alone, Allstate, American International Group, Chubb, Farmers, Liberty Mutual, The Hartford, Travelers, Tokio Marine and USAA have restricted climate-related risks. The state is one of the world’s largest RE markets. A recent LA Times headline d/d June 2024 tells a sorrowful story: With Fires Burning Again, is California Becoming Uninsurable?

Private companies are reducing coverage, concluding that the risks, and potential losses, threatened by climate change outweigh profits. So far, this primarily affects a handful of coastal states. Still, in other regions of the country insurers have substantially increased the price of property insurance. Homeowner costs are increasing fast and faster than people can afford to pay. Historically, insurers looked to past events to determine the risk of future damage occurring. Climate change, however, has brought new, unfamiliar extremes, e.g., longer heat waves that kink metal, sea-level rise that exceeds seawalls, flooding homes, high winds that shred rooftops, severe drought that buckles asphalt driveways, and wildfires that obliterate whole communities in mere hours.

Additionally, excessive global heat is becoming a major threat to air travel, which is paying a price with headlines like: Airplane Gets Stuck on Soft Tarmac Caused by Heat, Passengers suffer 8 hours of heat. As a consequence, consumers end up paying higher fares.

“From superstorms to heat waves to raging wildfires, the impact of extreme weather is already felt in every corner of the country. Every day that goes by without climate action is estimated to cost at least $254 million, based on recent trends, and the average yearly cost of inaction for the last five years has averaged $120.6 billion or $3,824/second.” (Source: Climate Inaction Costs Americans’ Nearly $3,000 Per Second, Climate Action Campaign, February 23, 2024)

As a result, the cost of living has become a very hot political issue with unrecognized, underappreciated climate change at the forefront. Crop battering storms, hurricanes, flash floods, and atmospheric rivers dropping buckets of rain are more frequent than ever before. Forget once-in-100-years; it’s now once-every-other-year. Meanwhile, extreme heat waves not only damage crops, excessively increasing grocery store prices, but also crank up costs to cool buildings. And in areas prone to disaster in the South, coastal, and Southwest insurers hike premiums for automobile insurance because of climate risks to cars.

Little wonder that people are confused about why living costs are so high. The media doesn’t identify far-out climate extremes when broadcasting stories about families that can’t get by, can’t pay bills, or God forbid, the 60% that cannot scrape together $500 for an emergency.

And quietly, assuredly agriculture crop yields wither when hit by extreme climate thanks to punishing heat and soil nutrition depletion amongst climate-related events that clobber yields, like floods, like landslides, like scorching heat, like hurricanes as supply chains are blown off course, increasing the costs of goods’ delivery. These costs are borne by individual consumers at some level. Yet high price tags don’t list the hidden impact of extreme climate, yet high living costs become a political football during every major election cycle. This is destined to get worse, radically threatening, unless fossil fuel emissions, at the origin of unprecedented climate change, are stopped.

On a large scale, by midyear this year 2024, the US experienced eleven (11) billion-dollar disasters, and lo and behold, tornadoes slammed Iowa, not known as Tornado Alley. Climate change is altering the course of storms. “Meanwhile, the already strapped Federal Emergency Management Agency faces a budgetary crisis, and sales of catastrophe bonds are at an all-time high.” (Wired June 22, 2024)

Extreme climate change costs get passed along to individual consumers and taxpayers. Like it or not, you are paying through the nose for climate change. And it’ll get much, much worse unless, and until, fossil fuel emissions are stopped. The fossil fuel “cost-of-living monster” has not been tamed via enough initiative to do enough soon enough.

Indeed, abrupt unprecedented climate change should be one of the most significant political issues of this century because politics on some level must fix it or home ownership will become a privilege for only the most privileged class, which is guaranteed to override and upstage the festering lingering pent up anger of four decades of “globalization” cancelling the middle class, now looking for scapegoats, which climate deniers feast upon by tossing to the gullible a big fat chunk of red meat, like dark-skinned people, but don’t blame climate change because it’s a hoax. How is it possible to get the message across that climate change is the major component of America’s risks of an unanticipated downfall, not other people?

Maybe focus on solutions instead of scapegoats.

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

 CHINA

Did 1.4 billion Chinese Achieving Poverty Alleviation Cut into Washington’s Cake?

by Global Times / October 4th, 2024

The hopeless fault-finder. Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

These days the People’s Republic of China is celebrating its 75th anniversary. Over the past 75 years, China has grown from a poor and backward country to the world’s second-largest economy, with about one-sixth of the world’s population escaping poverty.

However, as China continued to rise, the US’ attitude toward China has changed dramatically. Be it the “China threat” narrative or the “China challenge” theory, US politicians have become increasingly anxious about China’s development. This anxiety has turned into slander and attempts to portray China as a force threatening global development.

Recently, a former American government official claimed that China aims to impose its ideology on the rest of the world, posing an unprecedented threat to the US.

Over the past few years, many US politicians have stressed the threat of China. But what exactly has China’s development taken away from the US?

When China was still a poor and backward country, the US never worried about China’s ideology “threatening” the world. However, as soon as China achieved economic takeoff, US politicians began exaggerating China’s “ideological threat.”

Over the past 75 years, if China’s ideology had been detrimental to development and harmful to its own and the world’s progress, China would not be standing so proudly before the US today. China’s development demonstrates that its ideology contributes to global growth, as proven by its achievements.

Even though China has become the world’s second-largest economy, its per capita GDP is still far below that of the US. In 2023, China’s per capita GDP was about $12,720, while the US was about $76,000, nearly six times higher. China must continue to advance steadfastly on its chosen path of development.

In 2020, the US Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China (May 20, 2020) read, the CPC has “accelerated its efforts to portray its governance system as functioning better than those of what it refers to as ‘developed, Western countries.'” Based on this assumption, then such competition should contribute to global development. Indeed, only through such competition can we show that human development is a diverse process. Every country has the right to choose its own path of development.

Isn’t it good for humanity if more countries develop through self-reliance like China? China has always adhered to the principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs and has never attempted to export its ideology to other countries. However, China has proven that a country can achieve economic takeoff and social progress without copying Western models.

This successful approach has shaken the long-held discourse power and dominance of the West, especially the US, thus posing a significant challenge to the US’ global strategy.

Suppose the development model and path advocated by the US are no longer the only correct ones. In that case, the foundation of its global strategy and influence will be shaken.

When some US politicians claim that China’s ideology poses a threat, they are actually making excuses for Washington’s hegemonism. The “rules-based international order” in the mouths of American politicians is actually an order where the US makes the rules and other countries obey. Any country that attempts to challenge this order, regardless of its intentions, will be labeled an “ideological threat.”

China has chosen a suitable path for itself and achieved great success. This success should not be a reason for demonization. If Washington cannot accept and recognize a prosperous and stable China and tries to set China as an opponent or even an enemy of the US, that would be a huge threat to world peace and development.
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Global Times, where this article was first published, takes great pains to present facts and views that could help the readers better understand China. Read other articles by Global Times, or visit Global Times's website.

Your Mind is a Battlefield: Decolonize Your Mind to Prevent Global Catastrophe!

by K.J. Noh / October 2nd, 2024

Talk delivered for the event “Changes Not Seen in a Century: 75th Anniversary of the Founding of PRC.”

Friends, Colleagues, Comrades,

It’s a great honor for me to join you in this extraordinary, historical moment of celebration and reflection on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the PRC.

As has been said, we are seeing changes unseen in a century.  Changes both great and terrible.

We are currently seeing the unravelling of Empire–and its last desperate, violent, hideous death rattle. We are seeing the unmasking of 500 years of western “civilization”, and the laying bare of its hypocrisy and unspeakable brutality. We are seeing the true face of capitalist imperialism, not its made up public relations face, but its resting bastard face.

It’s not pretty.

One of the precipitating factors of the end of Empire–not the only one, but a very important one, because it allows countries to resist hegemony together–is the rise of China.

The rise of China is one of the greatest success stories in the history of human civilization. So we could talk about China’s accomplishments all day. I’d like to highlight three.

We all know in 1949 when China stood up, liberating half a billion people, 10-20% of China’s population was still addicted to opium.  In 4 years, the CPC eradicated opium addiction, liberating 90 million people from this colonial scourge.  It’s also one of the greatest public health accomplishments of the 20th century.  And I bet you’ve never heard of it.

By giving everyone the means of production–at the time, by distributing land–and by offering everybody education, community, meaning, hope, purpose–and by doing it at scale–because it has to be done at scale–the Party was successful.

You can’t do this in dribs and drabs. tinkering at the edges.  You have to do it all at once for everyone.

The Power of People’s Solidarity

We all know this and understand this: we don’t liberate anyone, until everyone is liberated. We liberate each other. It’s because we are fundamentally socially interconnected.

This is our species being. 

You don’t help anyone, until we all help each other, because we all are implicated in each other’s futures.

We saw the same thing with extreme poverty alleviation. Poverty was not seen as an individual failing–as it is, in the capitalist west.  It was a whole of society responsibility requiring a whole of society response. It focused on everyone.

So, 850 million were brought out of extreme poverty–which lets the world know that poverty is not an immutable, social, historical fact.  It is a policy choice.  You can raise everyone up, if we all work together.

That’s the way it works–and it works for everything:  if we start from this approach, we can succeed, no matter how vast and immense the challenge is.

So China is proof positive of the power of people’s solidarity, the power of a people’s leadership, the power of scientific planning according to socialist principles to overcome unthinkable challenges.

This is how China accomplishes things, and it accomplishes them at scale–at a scale so vast that nothing under heaven–as they say–is left behind.

Now, there is another achievement that China is working on.

Yes, a socialist society, that’s the ultimate goal, but this is an important stepping stone on the way to it. And it is a big one.  It is the creation of an ecological civilization.

China is literally greening the planet, creating, single-handedly, the conditions and means to transition to a sustainable energy regime, to enable sustainable development, to turn back the tide of global warming.  And it is doing it at a scale that is truly inconceivable–but necessary.

China knows how to accomplish things at scale.  It knows how to solve problems even when the problems are unthinkably immense.  And the leadership and the people do not flinch at the immensity of the challenge.

Ecological transition with Chinese characteristics:

China is concretely showing us the pathway out of Global Climate catastrophe. And as I said before, none of us are safe, good or well until all of us are. Until all of us are safe from the effects of the climate crisis, none of us are.

And China is leading the way.  All the west has to do is work together with China: China has provided the tools and the map and it is showing the path out.

So, to reduce it to its simplest terms, going green means going red. But–and there is a but: from the US standpoint, they don’t want that.

They do not want energy transition if it means the Chinese are going to be leading it. They would rather be dead than red. The US would rather burn up the planet than give China its place in the sun.

If China is on the side of renewable energy, then the US has to be firmly on the side of Global Warming:  it’s more important to beat China than to beat Global Warming. 

We can see that right now, in the massive sanctioning of Chinese sustainable technologies that could shift the balance. If the planet heats up, we’re all dead, but if China cools the planet and saves the world, then we are no longer the coolest, and that’s worse than death. That’s how the leadership in the US thinks.

Preparing for War: Not if but When

So we can’t talk about China’s successes, without talking about the US hostility towards China. The US sees China as the enemy. It is determined to take down China and all its accomplishments.

Now, China has overcome–countless threats–but this one is an existential threat.

Let’s be very clear.  The US is preparing for war–kinetic war–against China. Washington is abuzz with talk of war with China. It’s seen as necessary, inevitable, and incredibly, winnable.

Winnable means they are planning to use nukes.

We see with Palestine, and now Lebanon, that there are no limits to the depravity of what the Imperial ruling class will do to stay in power. Nothing is off the table. Nothing is too inhumane, too brutal, too illegal, too dangerous. Nothing shocks the conscience.  In fact, nuclear war is definitely on the table, in the policy papers being distributed, in the military table-top exercises they conduct, in the field training and air exercises that are now being conducted with the greatest intensity since WWII. We are headed towards war, towards nuclear war.

To put it bluntly, the US ruling class would rather see the end of the world than the end of their power and privilege. So we are at a turning point in history. a crisis: both opportunity and danger, hope and terror, unseen possibility and unthinkable tragedy.

This Imperial ruling class has actually been escalating to war against China–covertly since 2009 and now overtly.  It has calendared dates–2027.

It’s not if, but when.

Three Steps to War

Now there are three distinguishable steps on the way to war:

The first is Information war: inventing the enemy and then demonizing them: manufacturing consent, shutting down opposition, like you shut down the skies before bombing. We’re being fire-hosed and carpet bombed with lies about China.

The second is shaping the theater logistically for war, with arms, alliance, exercises, material/fuel–pre-positioned stocks–and troops.

The third is provocation. There is non-stop provocation by the US–in the Taiwan strait, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, on the Korean peninsula, everywhere.

This follows the increasing, expanding ambit and intensity of proxy war in Europe, in the genocidal terror in the middle east, and in the building war momentum in the Pacific.  Kurt Campbell, Biden’s Asia Czar and the architect of the Pivot, has threatened to unleash “a magnificent symphony of death” across a “unified field [of war]”.

Martial Arts in the No-Think Zone

And we can all see and feel the shutting down of anti-war dissent, of opposing voices and alternative media. That’s a key characteristic of the information war–silencing opposition, silencing voices of peace. It’s like taking out anti-aircraft batteries, and imposing a no fly zone. You shut down the skies, before you drop the bombs. You shut down the opposition before you drop the narrative bombs. You attack opposition to war, attack those who want good relations with China, or negotiations. You attack divergent voices and platforms in order to create a no-think zone.  

No critical thinking. No thinking, no dialogue, no peace. 

The US literally seeks full spectrum dominance in all domains of war, but especially in the space domain: outer space, cyber space, and information space, mental space. It literally seeks to occupy your mind.

So resistance in this critical moment–at the most fundamental level–begins with first not letting your mental space be occupied, colonized, dominated. It means resisting the narrative dominance of the dominant narrative; that China is threatening the world, that war is thinkable, that war is justified. It means resisting the normalization of war, of genocide, of terror, of atrocity, of  lies and propaganda.

We can all be vectors of this transmission of lies of propaganda, or we can impede its transmission.

So it’s incumbent on all of us to re-engage in the mental martial art of critical thinking: we strengthen our psychic immune system against this type of mental virus, this colonization of our mental spaces. We re-orient, de-occupy ourselves, we kick out the colonizing narratives, and we recommit to “seeking truth from facts.”

What we need to do is tune up our critical thinking engines constantly, with the precision tools of wit, humor, parody, perspective, context–and facts.

The flipside of this is that we can also spread the facts and the truth, as many are doing together today. Share the truth. The rise of China, and the liberation of the Global South is not a threat to the peoples of the world. It is a transformative moment of hope for human history.

But the stakes are immense. The future of the planet is at stake. As Brian Berletic said, “A war against China is a war against the world.” And we all have a part to play. We have already been inducted.

Where do we start? We start with our clear minds and our courageous hearts. Decolonize and de-propagandize your minds, and resist! Together!

The future of China, the future of the Global South, the future of the world depends on it!FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

K.J. Noh is a long time activist, writer, and teacher. He is a member of Veterans for Peace and works on global justice issues. He can be reached at: k.j.noh48@gmail.com. Read other articles by K.J..

A Walk Along the Baiyangdian Lake in the Xiong’an New Area

by Vijay Prashad / October 3rd, 2024

Detail of: Ye Wulin (China), 红星颂 (Ode to the Red Star), 2015.

Seventy-five years ago, on 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong (1893–1976) announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It is important to note that the Communist Party of China (CPC) did not name the new state the Socialist Republic, but instead called it the People’s Republic. That is because Mao and the CPC did not foresee China being immediately ushered into socialism; rather, the country was embarking on the road to socialism, a process that would likely take decades, if not a century. That was very clear to the people who began to shape the new state and society. The People’s Republic would have to be built out of the embers of a very long war, one that began when the Japanese invaded northern China in 1931 and that lasted for the next 14 years and took the lives of over 35 million people. ‘From now on our nation will belong to the community of the peace-loving and freedom-loving nations of the world’, Mao said at the first plenary session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference on 21 September 1949. The new China, he continued, will ‘work courageously and industriously to foster its own civilisation and well-being and at the same time to promote world peace and freedom. Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up’.

Mao’s words echoed the sentiments of anti-colonial movements from around the world, including those of leaders of movements that were not socialist, such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. For them, the decolonisation process required world peace and equality so that the formerly colonised people of the world could stand up and build their lives with dignity. Reading and reflecting upon these words in 2024 allows us to appreciate both the advances made by the world’s peoples since 1949 and the obstinacy of the old colonial powers that have long sought to prevent this new world from being built. The ongoing US-Israeli genocide against Palestinians and bombardment of Lebanon reflect the barbarousness to which the colonial powers are willing to resort as they attempt to hold us in this past that we want to transcend. The attitudes and wars imposed by the old colonial powers divert us from building our ‘own civilisation and well-being’ and from promoting ‘world peace and freedom’. Mao’s words, which are really the words of all people emerging from colonialism, offer the world a choice: either we live as adversaries with our resources poured into ugly and meaningless wars or we build a ‘community of peace-loving and freedom-loving nations of the world’.

Detail of: Ye Wulin (China), 红星颂 (Ode to the Red Star), 2015.

The average life expectancy in the PRC – 77 years – exceeds the global average by four years, coming a long way from 1949, when the figure was a mere 36 years. This is one of many indicators of a society that prioritises the well-being of people and the planet. Another was explained to me by a Chinese official a few years ago, who told me about how his country planned to create a post-fossil fuel economy soon. The word ‘soon’ interested me, and I asked him how it would be possible to do something of that nature so quickly. He began to tell me about the importance of planning and marshalling resources but, when he realised that I was not asking him about the strategy for this new economy but about the timeframe, said that this could be done ‘within the next half century, maybe, if we work hard, by [2049,] the hundredth anniversary of the formation of the PRC’. The confidence in the PRC allows for this kind of long-term planning, rather than the short-term compulsions imposed on states by the logic of capitalism. This long-term attitude pervades Chinese society, and it allows the CPC the luxury to harness resources and plan decades into the future, rather than mere months or years.

It was this sort of thinking that gripped Beijing’s city managers over twenty years ago, when the rapid rise of automobiles in the capital and the burning of coal to generate heat enveloped the population in toxic smog. The national five-year plans for 2001–2005 and 2011–2015, as well as Beijing’s own Five-Year Clean Air Action Plan (2013–2017), made it clear that economic growth could not ignore the environment. The city managers began to centre their planning around public transportation and transit corridors rooted in an older Chinese urban design that built shops and apartment buildings in a way that would promote walking rather than driving. In September 2017, the city established low-emission zones to prevent polluting vehicles from entering Beijing and created incentives for the use of new energy vehicles, which are powered by electric energy. China owns 99 percent of the world’s 385,000 electric buses, 6,584 of which are on Beijing’s streets. Though there is still a long way to go for Beijing’s air to meet its own standards, the toxicity of the air has noticeably declined.

Fan Wennan (China), 嫦娥同志 (Comrade Cháng’é), 2022.

In Mao’s founding speech in 1949, he declared that one of the PRC’s goals would be to foster the people’s well-being. How is it possible to do that within a neocolonial world system that enforces the poorer nations’ dependency on the former colonial powers? In the global production chain, the poorer nations produce goods at a lower cost, with wages and consumption suppressed, which allows multinational corporations (MNCs) to sell commodities for higher prices around the world and earn larger profits. These large profits are then invested by the MNCs to develop new technologies and productive forces that reinforce the permanent subordination of the poorer nations. If a poor nation exports more goods in an attempt to earn higher returns, it simply digs itself into a deeper and deeper spiral of lowered living standards for its exploited workers and into a debt trap that simply cannot be exited. It is one thing to be able to plan, but how does one acquire the resources to execute a plan?

At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been looking closely at the experience of China and other countries in the Global South that have attempted to rattle this cage of dependency. As Tings Chak and I show in an article on the 75th anniversary of the PRC, in its first decades China marshalled whatever minimal resources were available to it, including assistance from the Soviet Union, to build a new agricultural system against landlordism, create an education and health system that improved the people’s quality of life, and fight against the wretched hierarchies of the past. That first phase, from 1949 to the late 1970s, endowed China with a culture that is far more egalitarian and a population that is far more educated and in better health than those in other post-colonial states. It is the CPC’s commitment to transform people’s lives that created this possibility. In the second phase, from 1978 to the present, China has used its large labour force to attract foreign investment and technology, but it has done so in a way that ensures that science and technology will be transferred to China and that the state’s control over exchange rates will allow the CPC to raise wages (which were improved by the 2008 Labour Contract Law), avoid the middle-income trap, enhance technological capabilities, and drive state-owned enterprises to develop high-tech productive systems. That is what accounts, in large measure, for the rapid growth that China has experienced over the past decades and its ability to lift up the well-being of its population and environment within the overall structure of the neocolonial world system.

Fan Wennan (China), 中国2098: 欢迎回家 (China 2098: Welcome Home), 2019–2022.

In April 2017, the Xiong’an New Area (roughly 100 kilometres south of Beijing) was officially established to accommodate five million residents in order to relieve the emergent congestion in Beijing, whose growing population of 22 million faces serious problems of scale. This is being done, for instance, by absorbing many of the non-government institutions that are currently located in the capital city (among them research, higher education, medical, and financial institutions). One of the key motivations for the construction of the Xiong’an New Area was to address the plights facing the densely populated capital without embarking on urban reconstruction that could ruin the character of this city that first emerged in 1045 BCE.

To take advantage of the clean slate afforded by building this new city, PRC officials set a zero-carbon emissions target for the Xiong’an New Area, its landscape defined by the blue-green hues of water and vegetation rather than the grey smog of a concrete jungle. The first priority as the city was planned was to rehabilitate the Baiyangdian, the largest wetland in northern China. Its water area, known as the ‘kidney of North China’, was expanded from 170 square kilometres to 290 square kilometres; its water quality was improved from Class V (unusable) to Class III (able to drink); and the critically endangered diving duck Baer’s pochard was settled in the area and now thrives on the lake. The Baiyangdian anchors the city.

The Xiong’an New Area is being built as ‘three cities’: a city above ground; an underground city of commercial centres, transportation, and pipelines (for fibre optic cables, electricity, gas, water, and sewage); and a cloud-based city that will provide data for smart transportation, digital governance, intelligent equipment inspection, elderly monitoring, and emergency response. As the National Development and Reform Commission of Hebei Province’s January report describes, the Xiong’an New Area is:

creat[ing] an urban ecological space where city and lake coexist, where city and greenery are integrated, and where forests and water are interdependent. … [It e]mphasise[s] the integration of greenways, parks, and open spaces to create a city with parks within cities and cities within parks, where people can live and enjoy nature.

Seventy-five years into its revolutionary process, China has indeed made rapid advances, though it will have to settle the many new problems that have emerged (which you can read about in the international edition of the journal Wenhua Zongheng, or 文化纵横). China’s feat of shaking the chains of dependency is worthy of detailed debate, perhaps while walking along the Baiyangdian Lake in the Xiong’an New AreaFacebook

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Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of twenty-five books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, andThe Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad. Read other articles by Vijay, or visit Vijay's website.

 

Inconvenient Truths: The Shia Salah al-Din and 10/7

HE WAS A KURD

by Eric Walberg / October 3rd, 2024

Salah El Din – Salah El Din El Ayoubi – Saladin and Richard the Lionheart

Jerusalem’s hard-fought liberation, now in process, is a recapitulation of the Christian Crusades of the 11th-13th centuries, this time, not by the knight on a white horse of legend, but through the long march of guerilla warfare by the much maligned Shia. This follows on the liberation of Iran from its Judeo-Christian yoke in 1979 and Iraq 25 years later, ironically by the US, forming the second Shia majority state. But it is the Shia minority of Lebanon that holds the keys to Jerusalem. Their 40% of the Lebanese population punches well above their weight in a fractious country split among Christians, and Sunni and Shia Muslims.

Hezbollah was forged in the heat of Israeli occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s. The then-rag-tag militia killed over 600 Israeli soldiers, forcing Israel to retreat in humiliation, its first such defeat ever, and by a nonstate actor, a very bad omen, which Israel’s almost daily murder of Palestinians every since cannot erase, and which culminated in 10/7, Israel’s own private 9/11, bringing us to Israel’s carpeting bombing of Lebanon.

It is the Shia of Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen we have to thank for preventing Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians from proceeding smoothly. Sunnis will have to wake up if they don’t want to be left behind by their Shia brothers, their self-satisfied Sunni hegemony cracked open, exposed as the ‘sick man’ of the Middle East, i.e., undermined by imperialism, the same compromised role that destroyed the Ottomans, created post-Ottoman puppet Sunni states, and planted in Palestine a cursed tree, the Quran’s poisonous zaqqum, rooted in the center of Hell, aka the Jewish state.

The Saudis long ago were compromised through a voluntary pact with first British then US imperialism but, until the rise of Muhammed Bin Salman (MBS), were at least keeping up the trappings of Islamic ritual, jealously guarding the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The quietist Saudis effectively blackmailed the Palestinians into accepting an interminable Israeli murderous occupation and creeping (now galloping) theft of their lands, financing Palestinian refugees, but with no promise of liberation, effectively working with not against the enemy.

Now MBS has let the westernizers loose in his kingdom, discarding the hijab, promoting concerts of trashy western rock music, buying British football teams (Newcastle United in 2021). Trump’s Abraham Accords were supposed to lead to a new Middle East with Israel and Saudi Arabia as the kingpins. With October 7 (10/7), the bottom fell out of MBS’s fantasy of a Saudi-Isreali hegemony over the Middle East, leaving the Palestinians in permanent limbo or exile. It didn’t seem to matter to the Saudis and Gulf sheikhs, who long ago lost interest in Palestine. In thie face of this complete betrayal of the Palestinians, of Islam itself, the Shia are the only Muslims to resist the sacrilege of permanent Jewish rule over Palestine and the destruction Islam’s holy sites to build a Third Temple.

Orthodox Sunni Muslims have always feared the moral purity which Shiism was founded on, in opposition to the more worldly, pragmatic Sunni majority. This very productive, though at times deadly, stand-off between the two strands of Islam began with Muhammad’s young cousin Ali being the first convert to Islam after the Prophet’s wife Hadija, Ali’s heroic military career defending the religion during the early, perilous battles immortalized in the Quran, through to the murder of him and his family by power-hungry rivals. The draw of idealism and justice has kept Shiism alive, and from what we see today, it is the saving grace of Islam, pushing back today against deadly secularism. Ultimately, the Sunni will have to admit that the Shia are not just an inconvenient footnote (like MBS et al would have liked to make of the Palestinians).

20th century ummah challenges

All Muslims will agree that the unity of the ummah is the first, most urgent, priority. The Shia, though outliers, strive for this even more, as they face hardline Sunnis who consider them apostates and would be happy to cut them loose or wipe them out. The official Sunni position has wavered over the centuries, but generally grudgingly accepts them. The imperialists of course were happy to use ‘divide and rule’, and they quickly turned a peaceful ummah into quarreling sectarians in India, Pakistan, Iraq, wherever they had the chance.¹ This only really worked for post-Ottoman Iraq and Lebanon, both with large Shia communities mixed (peacefully) with Sunni. But the 20th century was one of increasing division, chaos, everywhere in the ummah. It is still on life support, held together now by the Shia thread, the ‘Shia crescent’, the only link the ummah has to Jerusalem and the Palestinians as they face annihilation, their Sunni brothers helpless or unwilling to save them.

The British official who fashioned the new Iraq in the 1920s, Gertrude Bell, had no time for Shia, who were the majority then as now, but Gertrude had no time for democracy for the dark-skinned. I don’t for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority; otherwise you will have a mujtahid-run, theocratic state, which is the very devil. She knew how the ulama in Iran had defeated the Shah on his westernizing mission, the famous tobacco fatwa of 1890 that forced the shah to cancel the British concession, and supported the constitution movement for democracy in 1905. The British had no interest in creating a radical Shia majority state and put in place a Sunni puppet king.

Iraq’s long and violent history since then finally undid Gertrude’s machiavellian scheming in 2003, bringing to an end a truly disgusting Sunni dictatorship, and the advent of the first Shia-majority state, the positive effects of which are still being discovered. We can thank the US imperialists (even a broken clock is right twice a day) for stumbling on a winning formula for Islam (and for themselves, for the world). By genuinely promoting electoral democracy (along with opening Iraq to foreign exploitation of Iraq’s oil), it started the ball rolling on Sunni-Shia relations everywhere, including US client number one, the Saudi dictator-king, with his truly downtrodden Shia, who sit on Saudi oil and get only repression, disenfranchisement and lots of beheadings as thanks.

The 20th century path that brought us to our present apocalyptic scenario was long and tragic. The Ottoman ‘sick man of Europe’ collapse at the end of WWI, invaded by the British and French (their Russian allies had already collapsed leaving more spoils for the victors). The end of the caliphate? For atheist Turkish dictator Mustafa Kemal that would have been fine. The Muslim ummah, both Sunni and Shia, anticipated this and had already rallied in its defense with the Khilafa Movement in 1919-1920, supported by other anti-imperialists, including Gandhi and India’s Hindus, who saw the British divide-and-rule as the poison that kept Indians subjugated.

Kemal got his way in 1924, accusing Indian Muslim leaders, who came all the way to Ankara to beg the Turkish strongman to maintain the caliphate, of foreign election interference. As if the caliphate was a Turkish plaything The shock wave reverberated around the world culminating in the World Islamic Congress in Jerusalem in 1931 at the behest of Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, bringing together Muslim leaders from around the world. A truly historic moment in the history of the ummah. But the caliphate was already a pipe dream, with growing Jewish immigration to British Palestine, the intent being to create a Jewish state, an imperial outpost to control the Middle East.

Everywhere, the Muslim world was occupied now by nominally Christian world empires, British, American, French, Dutch, the House of War (vs the ummah, the House of Peace), the the financial strings predominantly in Jewish hands, accounting for the plum Palestine being selected as a future Jewish state, purchased by the elite Jews who financed the British empire. Except for Shia Iran, which was never fully occupied and given an imperial make-over. But Iran also had its atheist modernizer, Reza Shah, who, having tricked the ulama into giving him their blessing initially, left them alone though marginalized. Though he weakened the religious establishment, outlawed the veil, and built industry and infrastructure, he was not so fanatically anti-Muslim He was anti-imperialist, and when WWII broke out, he was deposed by the British to prevent the shah from sending oil to the Germans. That occupation wrankled, and all the foreign devils, British, Russia, American were given the boot when the war ended.

It was the Shia ulama of Iran who were the only ulama to resist imperialism,² supporting the first genuinely independent prime minister, Mossadeq, in 1951 in his effort to kick the British out and take control of the economy. The normally quietist, conservative religious elite had been radicalized despite themselves. When the US moved in to foment a coup in 1953, the invaders were able to get a few religious leaders to bless their scheming, but this blatant imperialist act galvanized all Iranians, and eventually led to the overthrow of the second and last Pahlavi shah in 1979. Newly religious Iran was joined by newly religious Turkey with the coming to power of Recep Erdogan in 2000, who refers to his followers as ‘grandchildren of the Ottomans’. Traditional Sunni-Shia rivals, Turkey and Iran are far from bosom buddies, but the current crisis of the ummah means that differences are put aside.

The second stumbling block for Muslims was the secular reaction to imperialism, Arab nationalism, now competing with Turkish and Persian nationalisms, fashioned as secular identities, undermining a united Islamic identity, central to the ummah. Egypt’s Nasser and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein are the two most notorious nationalist leaders, who led their countries in a death spiral of violent repression of Islam, corruption and failed military ventures.

Nationalism was foreign to Muslims, never the defining ideology, and these nationalist movements failed, with chauvinistic Sunni radicals morphing into violent pseudo-Islamic movements – al-Qaeda, ISIS and Islamic State–Khorasan Province.

With the current US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians, the ummah is coming together again, realizing this is the make-or-break moment for Islam, and that these nationalisms are evaporating in the heat of crisis. Even the perfidious MBS casually announced that there would be no Israeli-Saudi new order until the Palestinians have a real state. The ice is cracking, moving, as Palestine’s spring takes shape out of the Israelis’ ashes and rubble.

Turkey and Iran had secular capitalism imposed from the top to keep the imperialists at bay. Egypt had a brutal British occupation until the 1950s, creating the same secular capitalism as Turkey and Iran, but then came socialistic dictator Nasser in 1951, injecting a new political element. Sadly, he too refused to acknowledge Islam as the bedrock of society, a more genuinely socialistic way of life, his secular vision collapsing with Israeli invasion, leaving Egypt, the largest Middle East country, far weaker now than either of its two Middle East rivals. The Arab states have all remained puppets of imperialism and remain cool to, even resentful of the new Shia vitality and presence. But the Arab masses support the Shia defiance of US-Israel, despising their Quisling leaders.

Puppets and fledging actors

Iran’s revolution in 1979 was bad news for the Saudis, leading to even greater repression of its Shia. Saudi suspicions and fear of Shia have been a terrible ordeal for the 10% of Saudis who are Shia, and a powerful Shia state would naturally push for justice. So instead of making peace with their Shia (and thus, with the new Iran), in the 1980s, Saudi Arabia (and Kuwait) spent $25b (i.e., gave US weapons producers $25b) in support of the brutal, mad thug, Saddam Hussein in the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). When Saddam invaded Kuwait, cashing his US-Saudi IOU for sacrificing half million Iraqi Sunnis-Shia to kill a half million Shia Iranians, Saudi Arabia was unhappy. Not only had Saddam failed to crush Shia Iran, his defeat would mean an angry Shia state next door, which could easily invade and overthrow him.

So King Fahd invited the US forces into the kingdom to invade Iraq and keep the Saudi kingdom as head honcho of the Muslim world. I repeat: King Fahd allowed American and coalition troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabian forces were involved both in bombing raids on Iraq and in the land invasion that helped to ‘liberate’ Kuwait, the so-called Gulf War (1990-1991). The ummah, the House of Peace, invaded and occupied by the House of War. MBS’s current free and easy secularism makes sense after all, but not for the ummah.

Why would the US have gone to all the trouble to invade Iraq as part of ‘liberating’ Kuwait, and then leave the (truly odious) dictator Saddam in power? Ask weakling King Fahd, whose fear of a Shia-majority Iraq next door was even greater than his fear of a cowed, murderous Saddam. Pan-Arab nationalism – RIP.

This enduring Sunni-Shia stand-off is the imperialists’ trump card. All the Arab countries are in varying degrees still US puppets, and persecute their Shia because they, the so-called rulers, are weak and fear the implicit critique of their weakness that the morally uncompromised Shia represent. Nigeria, Bahrain, Indonesia, Malaysia have all driven wedges between Sunnis and Shias when it was politically useful. The Sunni masses, looking for a way out of the imperialist straitjacket but educated to despise Shia, looked not to solidarity with all Muslims to fight the looming imperial enemy, but inward to past Sunni experience, the early four Rightly Guided Caliphs, for their inspiration. They downplay the fact that the finally one was Ali, the inspiration of the Shia as sole legitimate caliph of the whole lot. In the 1980s-1990s, frustrated Sunnis coalesced around radical Saudi Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda, various ISIS caliphate dreamers in central Asia, the Caucasus, Africa, internationally, with an unIslamic jihad condoning mass civilian deaths as a key tactic.

This element continues to plague the Sunni world, the whole world. It has undermined the efforts to rebuild Iraq after the 2003 invasion. The Ba’thists were outlawed, leaving the minority Sunni with nothing, so they preferred chaos and road bombs, but Shia long-suffering patience grudgingly brought together ‘good’ Sunni and all the Shia to fight the latest (Sunni) terrorists, ISIS et al.

10/7 was an earthquake, not just for Israel but for Islam, the Sunni-Shia tremors finally syncing on that explosive day, pushing the Sunni establishment into Shia arms. All people of goodwill now rout for the Shia Hezbollah in their battle with Israel to protect the heart and soul of Islam. Paradoxically, this challenge was anticipated by the renewal of relations between the Saudis and Iran in March 2023, anticipating 10/7, an admission that Shia power could not be ignored in the new world order taking shape under China and Russia, quite apart from the central role Iran was now playing in protecting the Palestinians from total annihilation, with the Saudis watching with alarm from the sidelines as their position at the head of the Muslim world was being usurped by events on the ground, including from its own despised 10% Shia, now demanding the same rights as citizens that the Sunnis have.

Democracy really is the answer

It’s finally clear: Arab nationalism has been a flop, as has been Pakistan nationalism, where the 20% Shia must constantly fight Sunni chauvinists. Indian nationalism is worse, following the path of Israel, a racist Zionized Hindutva ideology that exclused all Muslims, Sunni or Shia. Sunni chauvinism under imperialism, taking refuge in nationalism, always undermines the ummah, unless the Shia are a sizable minority or majority, and the government is sufficiently representative. I.e., democratic.

In hindsight, I would argue the road to the liberation of Jerusalem began with Iran’s revoluton in 1979, which put Palestine liberation at the top of its international agenda. The war launched by Iraq was supposed to steamroll through a weakened Iran, as ordered by Saddam’s backers Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union, the US and Europe. (What a cynical, bizarre coalition!) Ayatollah Khomeini was brilliant and charismatic, but a poor politician, refusing to end the war when Saddam offered, hoping to liberate Iraq, leading to 100,000s more deaths and seriously weakening and tarnishing the revolution. His hubris was immortalized in telling anecdotes. My favorite: Pakistani dictator Zia had urged the shah in 1977 to crack down even harder on the rebels. When Zia met Khomeini as the shah’s successor a few years later, Khomeini merely asked politely for Zulfikar Bhutto’s life (Zia was Bhutto’s successor) to be spared. No dice. On the contrary, Zia advised Khomeini not to tangle with a superpower. Khomeini retorted he would never do such a thing and in fact always relied in the superpower. Ouch! That only made Zia persecute his Shia even more.

Arab secular states can’t unite when they are headed by dictators like Assad, Nasser, the Jordanian and Saudi king-dictators. Corrupt dictatorships don’t make good allies. The need for democracy is obvious. Iraq hopefully can be the model for Sunni and Shia learning to work together again under a robust electoral democracy. Sunni and Shia lived more or less till Saddam and sons really began their madness.³

The end of Saddam moved the Shia-Sunni ‘battle lines’ 200 miles west, now running through Baghdad, which was precisely what Gertrude Bell, Saddam and the imperialists had all tried to prevent. History takes its revenge. The chauvinistic Sunni hegemony of the Muslim world is finished. The Sunni hegemons tried to overthrow Khomeini and failed. The same battle took place 12 years later in Iraq and failed again due to Shia patience in the face of Sunni-inspired terror. Thousands of Saudi and Jordanian youth went to Iraq after 2003 to fight the occupation (and looming Shia hegemony) and die, just like they did in their misguided jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Their violent self-sacrifice only digging the Sunni world deeper into a state of humiliation. 85% of ISIS in Syria working alongside the US imperialists are Saudi. They are there solely to fight the ‘sons of al-Alqami’, referring to the Shia vizier when the Mongols razed Baghdad in 1258.

Now the Sunni are exposed as helpless in the face of Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, are actually helping ‘protect’ US-Israel from Iranian bombs intended for Israel. The Sunni world is humiliated, betraying Islam, kowtowing to not just the US but US-Israel. To defeat (Sunni-inspired) ISIS, the ‘good’ Iraqi Sunnis even had to welcome help from not just Iraq Shias (the army) but also Iran. It is high time to bury the hatchet of envy and suspicion, and join the Shia, if only because they hold the fate of the ummah in their hands.

The ‘bad’ Sunnis (regime elites) are still supporting the US-led war on terror. Their goal is still to wreck the new, Shia-led Iraqi state and keeping the lid on their own pressure-cookers, looking over their shoulders at the (failed) Arab Spring of 2011. The Sunni elites do US-Israel’s work for it. At the same time, they are angry with the US for complicity in Shia revival, undermining House of Saud, contributing to the decline in its religious legitimacy. MBS’s secular turn is more a parody of soft power, which only undermines (Sunni) Islam. The Saudi treatment of its own Shia mirrors Israeli treatment of Palestinians.⁴ Sadly, it is only because Palestinians have some shred of legal independence as part of the post-WWII internationally agreed policy of decolonization that this instance of apartheid is being fought openly. Anti-Muslim apartheid is actually alive and well but hidden behind national borders (China, Myanmar).

What remains of the insurgency in Iraq today is an alliance of Jordanians, Saudis and Iraqi Ba’thists. Syria and Saudi are both ripe for change, with Iraq and Iran as their models, but especially Iraq, with its more open, competitive elections and its large Shia population. The main legacy of the Iraq invasion was to make the Shia case, which means fighting Sunni extremism and terrorism, exposing the US Global War on Terror (GWOT) as a fraud (produced more (Sunni) terror), cementing Shiism as the adult in the room, holding the Islamic faith secure by a string, open to democracy.

21st century the Shia century?

This is already happening. Islamic Iran from the start allied with all anti-imperialist countries. Its revolution echoes the idealism of the Russia revolution of 1917, both of which were met by invasions by western powers and/or proxies, and both succeeding against all odds, based very much on ideological zeal for the good of mankind. Both also became authoritarian states, with elections but with limited choice. Iran’s elections are much more credible, and the election of reformers like Khatami and now Pezeshkian show there is room for real public debate. As with all countries victim to US ire, survival trumps all finer nuances, which are put on hold. Show me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are. Iran’s allies are the anti-imperialist good guys.

In contrast to the Arab states, with their muddled Islamo-nationalisms, which have failed to fashion a Sunni identity independent of imperialism, and which still exclude Shia. A shame that Shia find better allies on the secular left, with largely common political, economic and cultural goals, above all peace. Like the Jews at the heart of Bolshevism, Iraq’s Communist Party was full of Shia intellectuals (e.g., poet Muzaffar al-Nawwab). The Iraqi town Shatra in the Shia south was nicknamed Little Moscow. The Shia have a natural affinity for the secular left, supporting the underdog. The Iraqi Communist Party was reorganized after the Iraq war and its leader Hamid Majid Musa was part of the governing body the US set up. The communists wanted peace as do all communists, Islamic Iran and Iraq want peace (salam) more than anything. Neither the communists nor the ummah were/are aggressive, expansionist. Both offer(ed) a way of life that doesn’t have war built in as its engine. The communist alternative was social/state ownership and planning. The Islamic alternative is a mix of state direction/ownership and limited capitalism. There are no billionaires who aren’t emigres already. That kind of money lust is alien to a devout society or a communist one.

Iran and Hezbollah are suffering Israel’s truly Satanic war crimes alongside their Palestinian brothers. Meanwhile the Gulf and Saudi sheikh-dictators, the Egyptian no-pretense-dictator, the Jordanian British-installed-king sit on the sidelines cursing the Palestinians for disturbing their sleep. They actually come to Israel’s aid – Egypt and Jordan are official allies of Israel – when Iran tries to hurt poor little Israel, as they already did in April 2024. The US is well aware that the Jordanian and Egyptian masses are very unhappy, but it relies on its local puppet dictators to keep the lid on the pressure-cooker, and is very cautious about exporting one-man-one-vote after its painful and expensive experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, the former once again Taliban, the latter in league with Iran against the Great Satan, which just happens to include itself, US-Israel. So don’t hold your breath for US pressure to make its dictators relinquish power. 2011 was a close call, not to be repeated.

As for the Palestinians, they were completely left out of the negotiations about their future following the 1973 Egypt-Israel war. Sold out by (atheist, Sunni) Sadat with an empty promise. The past half century has been unremitting hell for the Palestinians, who were kicked out of Jordan in the 1970s, many ending up in southern Lebanon, living with the Shia there. This is the origins of Musa al-Sadr’s Amal and after his assassination, Hezbollah. This happened during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, forging of a new force to confront Israel, which was given a huge boost with the Islamic revolution in Iran. Suddenly there was a ‘Shia crescent’, a genuine quasi-state opposition to Israel that functioned outside the imperial constraints.

Musa al-Sadr represented the best of the Shia tradition, an activist cleric engaged in the life of his community, unafraid to speak truth to power. He earned a law degree from (shah-era) Tehran university. His Amal militia ran social services and acted as a political organization, a challenge to the fiction of pan-Arab unity and the unyielding reality of Sunni hegemony. Iran’s IRGC was organized by veterans of Amal training camps. Amal represented a political threat to the Arab and Palestinian establishment, and his assassination by Gaddafi was clearly a Sunni move to quash a Shia upstart.⁵ But he (and Israel’s brutal occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s) inspired the formation Hezbollah, which killed 654 Israeli soldiers in a few years and pushed a humiliated Israel out of Lebanon in 1985.

‘Good’ Sunnism is reviving but more in the emigre communities, largely in the US/Canada, Europe, Australia/ New Zealand, where there are now communities of mainstream Sunni and Shia as well as sects (Ismaili, Yazidi, Ahmadiya, Bahai’s). This young, well educated, assertive diaspora radically challenges the Sunnia world, as a new generation of Muslims takes electoral democracy for granted, and were able to gain equal rights as citizens in the ‘House of War’, which meant fight for Palestine against Israel. Effectively the need for young, educated workers to fuel its capitalist machine ended up importing the ‘enemy’ to the heart of imperialism. As these mostly Sunni Muslims spread their message of ‘goodwill to all men’, colonized, persecuted Palestine has gradually gained the edge over colonizer, persecutor Israel. They are joined by a growing community of converts, as people find out about Islam from friendly, law-abiding neighbors. Islam is the fastest growing religion everywhere.

The Shia are Islam’s ‘wandering Jews’ but without the usury, so they have a presence on all continents, mostly persecuted (or just ignored) by Sunni majorities (but not everywhere). The Sunni too are like the Jews with their world network, a persecuted minority (but not everywhere). In fact, Sunni emigres are free to criticize Israel and their own native Muslim-majority countries in the West, where, say, in Egypt or Pakistan that could land them in jail or worse. As with the Jews, the spread of both Sunni and Shia presence virtually everywhere creates a powerful network for mutual support, to ensure both Shia and Sunni, emigre and domestic, are vital parts of the ummah, all devoted to defending Palestine and liberating Jerusalem. A kind of benign Judaism.⁶ Democracy brings power to Shia majorities and give voice to minorities, resisting Sunni terrorists. The goal remains the liberation of Jerusalem, but the center of gravity has shifted from Saudi Arabia, Egypt to Iran and Iraq, now stretching from Lebanon and Syria along the Shia axis of resistance.

The US allies with the pragmatic Sunni dictators, hates, targets Shia, but they are the best defense against real terrorists (Saudi/ Jordanian ‘jihadists’, ISIS, US-Israel). Standing up to tyranny is never popular with tyrants. By overthrowing Saddam, the US unwittingly paved the way for the Shia revival. Ayatollah Sistani brilliantly used the opening to guarantee democratic Shia hegemony in Iraq as a model for a renewed Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, in short, the Muslim ummah. The Iraqi Shia proved that it is possible to work with the US and not compromise. Sistani refused to meet with US officials: Mr Bremer, you are American I am Iranian. Leave it up to the Iraqis to devise their constitution. He challenged US plans to hand power to Allawi, Chalabi. Insisted on one-person, one-vote. When the US refused, he called for large demos over five consecutive days until the US relented.⁷

Iraqi Shia abandoned the Iraqi nationalism of Saddam. The renewed nationalism is firmly nonsectarian, uniting the ummah. This is a powerful message to the other Arab states. It is fitting that Palestine has brought the Sunni to the Shia-led defense of Jerusalem. Israel can be defeated only by a united ummah which acts wisely, with restraint, indefatigable. It is also a message to Israel and the Palestinians about inventing a new nationalism based on peace and reconciliation.

ENDNOTES:

• 1
  To give the US occupiers of Afghanistan 2001–2022, they made sure Afghan Shia, the Hazars, were given full rights in the new constitution, where the state was carefully dubbed Islamic, reflecting the new identity-politics imperialism.
• 2
  Sunni Sufis resisted imperialism (Algeria, Caucasus) but never the Sunni establishment. Grand Mufti of Egypt Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) was a westernizing reformer. His legendary friend (Shia) Jamal al-Afghani was anti-imperialist but didn’t manage to do much.
• 3
  Democracies are not immune from this as Biden’s pathetic defense of his son shows how family concerns can seriously undermine any legacy of good the leader accomplishes.
• 4
  They have no public voice, all 300 Shia girls’ schools have Sunni headmistresses, they sit on the oil wealth and get only low paid jobs, scholars get their heads chopped off, etc.
• 5
  Probably out of jealousy, as he saw himself as the savior of Palestine. See Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival, 2006, p 113.
• 6
  This could be why Israel so detests Iran. Initially, Israel was admired by Iranian intellectuals. Jalāl Āl-e-Ahmad visited Israel in 1962 and recorded his experiences in The Israeli republic (1962). But when he observed the treatment of Palestinians, he soured and Iranians broadly criticized ‘westoxification’, anticipating the revolution’s clear anti-imperialism. Only Iran really ‘gets’ imperialism.
• 7
  Vali Nasr, op.cit., p175.RedditEmail

Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to Imperialism. Read other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.