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Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Let’s Play Master And Servant

Posted by on July 26 at 16:13 PM

The Islamic terrorists have a tendency of doing very Western things before attacking and killing Westerners. The suicide bombers who killed London commuters two weeks ago apparently went on a rafting retreat in Wales. Similarly, the 9-11 terrorists went on a boozing and strip-club binge before committing their holy crimes. What does this mean? It means this: at root, the suicide missions have nothing to do with God or Allah or whatever but instead the long and deep Arab sense of inferiority to Westerners. Western history, of course, is responsible for the development of this complex, because Europe’s imperial adventures were justified by looking down on Arabs, the conquered, as mere children (read Edward Said’s Orientalism on this subject). Black Africans were also subjected to Europe’s sense of superiority and eventually developed the same inferiority complex, but, as a culture, the Africans of today don’t resort to bombing innocent people as a means of overcoming it (though the psychiatrist Franz Fanon did recommend violent response against whites as the best cure for blacks). Many Arabs suffer from this inferiority complex, and a few of them feel it so acutely that they have to do things like 9-11, so that the West (the father/master) recognizes them (the slave). Yes, Hegel’s slave/master dialectic plays a leading role in all of this terrorism stuff.