Maninthemirror
Banned
Fascinating look at how the new Atheist or the 'new Antitheist' movement mushroomed from the original atheism into an offshoot which says its for liberal principles but espouses imperialism and social fundamentalism to create a war of civilizations. The same US vs them attitude of G.W. Bush words except for a differing agenda where violence is necessary and civil rights are rightfully removed for the sake of pushing their brand of how world should look like. Imagine a group which doesn't kill or tell its supporters to kill but asks its well organized and democratic supporting military to kill to further its view , the difference being the terrorists kill themselves and their immediate followers as they are undemocratic and savages while these people dont kill themselves and dont ask their followers to kill but use their own democratic system to espouse killing as necessary (essentially state sponsored terrorism)
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/new-atheism-old-empire/
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/new-atheism-old-empire/
Hitchens liked to claim that a single intellectual thread united his positions, namely opposition to totalitarianism: The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy the one thats absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.
But for all his pro-imperial bluster, it was Hitchens attacks on religion that finally garnered him international fame. These, too, he claimed, were fundamentally anti-totalitarian, analogous to resisting North Korea or Joseph Stalin. A leading light of the New Atheist movement, the former socialist spent his final decade at war with religion and at peace with imperialism.
At face value, and by its own understanding, New Atheism is a reinvigorated incarnation of the Enlightenment scientism found in the work of thinkers like Bacon and Descartes: a critical discourse that subjects religious texts and traditions to rational scrutiny by way of empirical inquiry and defends universal reason against the forces of provincialism.
In practice, it is a crude, reductive, and highly selective critique that owes its popular and commercial success almost entirely to the war on terror and its utility as an intellectual instrument of imperialist geopolitics.
Whereas some earlier atheist traditions have rejected violence and championed the causes of the Left Bertrand Russell, to take an obvious example, was both a socialist and a unilateralist the current streak represented by Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris has variously embraced, advocated, or favorably contemplated: aggressive war, state violence, the curtailing of civil liberties, torture, and even, in the case of the latter, genocidal preemptive nuclear strikes against Arab nations.
Its leading exponents wear a variety of ideological garbs, but their espoused politics range from those of right-leaning liberals to proto-fascist demagogues of the European far-right.
While Harriss views are undoubtedly the most strident, there is certainly overlap with Hitchens and Dawkins. In a 2007 interview, Hitchens argued: If you ask what is wrong with Islam, it makes the same mistake as [other] religions, but it makes another mistake, which is that its unalterable. You notice how liberals keep saying, If only Islam would have a Reformation it cant have one. It says it cant. Its extremely dangerous in that way.
In addition to the blatant chauvinism of such a statement, it is not a remotely accurate historical claim and is arguably hypocritical, even on its own terms. Islamic fundamentalism which no one, incidentally, believes to be a fiction is insidious not because of its adherence to some ossified medieval tradition, but rather because of its eager and effective embrace of modernist dynamism.
Not to be outdone, Richard Dawkins has called Islam the greatest force for evil today (in the same breath, rather amusingly, as admitting hes never bothered to read the Koran). At other times Dawkins has been even more vulgar, tweeting: For me, the horror of Hitler is matched by bafflement at the ovine stupidity of his followers. Increasingly feel the same about Islamism and inferring that then-New Statesman columnist Mehdi Hassan is unqualified to be a journalist because he is also a Muslim. Or, to take yet another example, All the worlds Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.
It is simply impossible to imagine the commercial and intellectual success of the New Atheist project in a pre-9/11 world without both rising anti-Muslim sentiments across Western societies or neoconservative geopolitics. It is against the backdrop of the war on terror, with its violent and destructive adventurism, that the notion of a monolithic evil called Islam has found a sizable constituency in the circles of liberal respectability.
Beneath its many layers of intellectual adornment the typical New Atheist text is laden with maudlin references to Darwin, Newton, and Galileo we find a worldview intimately familiar to anyone who has studied the language of empires past: culturally supremacist, essentializing and othering towards the foreign, equal parts patronizing and paternalistic, and legitimating of the violence committed for its own ends.
In The End of Faith Harris suggests that nuclear-first strikes may be necessary if the ostensible conflict between Islam and civilization escalates: What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? The only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own.
In an enthusiastic endorsement of the Iraq War, Harris described it as a noble and selfless crusade undertaken by the civilized West to defeat Islamic barbarism. In late 2004, he wrote in the Washington Post, civilized human beings [Westerners] are now attempting, at considerable cost to themselves, to improve life for the Iraqi people..
Hitchens also praised the use of cluster bombs in Afghanistan as pretty good, because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if theyre bearing a Koran over their heart, itll go straight through that, too.
On the subject of jihadists, he declared: Its a sort of pleasure as well as a duty to kill these people. On another occasion, Hitchens stunned even sympathetic members of an audience in Madison, Wisconsin by saying of Iran, a nation of almost 80 million people: As for that benighted country, I wouldnt shed a tear if it was wiped off the face of this earth.
The tendency to abhor the violence of its chosen enemies while relativizing and legitimating its own is an intrinsic part of any imperial or colonial ideology, and a consistent feature in the rhetoric of both Hitchens and Harris.
In extremely sinister fashion, Harris has mused about the birthrates of European Muslims and the supposed peril of their prolific breeding. The notion of a demographic threat posed by Muslims in Europe is easy to debunk empirically.
Even if this werent the case, the sordid subtext of these remarks is confirmed by Harriss favorable treatment of far-right figures, who speak openly of the demographic dangers posed by Muslims. In Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris makes his sympathies explicit, declaring: With a few exceptions, the only public figures who have had the courage to speak honestly about the threat that Islam now poses to European societies seem to be fascists.
Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins have all rejected the notion that there is anything racist about statements of this kind or the prescriptions that so often follow from them: Muslims arent a race, being by now a particularly worn phrase in the New Atheist rhetorical repertoire. Harris and Hitchens have also dismissed the term Islamophobia as a tool for silencing their arguments. According to the latter: A stupid term Islamophobia has been put into circulation to try and suggest that a foul prejudice lurks behind any misgivings about Islams infallible message.
Given that race is an entirely social construct, with a history that involves the systemic racialization of various national, ethnic, and religious minorities, this defense is extremely flimsy. The excessive focus on Islam as something at once monolithic and exceptionally bad, whose backwards followers need to have their rights in democratic societies suppressed and their home countries subjected to a Western-led civilizing process, cannot be called anything other than racist.
The typical New Atheist text scrutinizes religious myths without attention to, or even awareness of, the multiplicity of social and theological debates they have provoked, the manifold ideological guises their interpreters have assumed, or the secular belief systems they have helped to influence.
Moreover, the core assertion that forms the discursive nucleus of books like The God Delusion, God is Not Great, and The End of Faith namely, that religious texts can be read as literal documents containing static ideas, and that the ensuing practices are uniform is born out by neither real, existing religion or by its historical reality as a socially and ideologically heterogeneous phenomenon.
Criticisms of the violence carried out by fundamentalists of any kind honor killings, suicide bombings, systemic persecution of women or gay people, or otherwise are neither coherent nor even likely to be effective when they falsely attribute such phenomena to some monolithic orthodoxy.
The ways in which the New Atheism serves imperialism are manifold. It bolsters the clash of civilizations narrative used to justify ventures like the invasion of Iraq and the need for repressive measures like state surveillance. Moreover, in presenting itself as a disinterested defense of reason, it lends such arguments a credibility they would lack in the hands of commentators from the political or cultural right. Finally, it shifts the focus from the social ills wrought by unjust economic arrangements to an external singularity called religion.
Beneath its superficial rationalism, then, the New Atheism amounts to little more than an intellectual defense of empire and a smokescreen for the injustices of global capitalism. It is a parochial universalism whose potency lies in its capacity to appear simultaneously iconoclastic, dissenting, and disinterested, while channeling vulgar prejudices, promoting imperial projects, and dressing up banal truisms as deep insights.