Jihad vs. McWorld (58 page)

23.
The quote is from Kina’s American producer Ry Cooder, cited by Neil Strauss in a fascinating account of the career of Shoukichi Kina, who played New York in the summer of 1994 and has made the new Okinawan hybrid a popular international sound. Cooder, who is also Kina’s lead guitarist on one of his albums, says, “Kina hybridized the Okinawan folk style and the folk instruments into this sort of pop or garage band setting, like everyone does in the modern era.” See Neil Strauss, “Okinawa Gives Its Flavor to Rock,”
The New York Times
, July 16, 1994, p. 11.

  1.
Cited by John Kifner, “The World through the Serbian Mind’s Eye,” in the Week in Review,
The New York Times
, April 10, 1994, Section 4, p. 1.

  2.
Vladimir Goati as cited in ibid.

  3.
Domljan cited by Milton Viorst, “The Yugoslav Idea,”
The New Yorker
, March 18, 1991, pp. 58–79. “Whirlwind” citation from “A Whirlwind of Hatreds: How the Balkans Broke Up,”
The New York Times
, February 14, 1993, p. E 5.

  4.
In the summer of 1994, Russia’s largest investment company witnessed the collapse of its stock from a high of $50 a share to less than 50 cents. The so-called MMM fund was in fact “built on sand,” having “reported no earnings, revealed no investments, explained no financial strategy.” Its soaring share prices resulted from the sale of more and more shares, new buyers in effect providing profits for old buyers in the classic pyramid scheme strategy. The company blamed the government both for interfering and for not regulating, while the millions of Russian shareholders blamed mainly the government. See Michael Specter, “10,000 Stampede as Russian Stock Collapses,”
The New York Times
, July 30, 1994, p. A 1.

  5.
According to Alexander Paskhaver of The Center for Economic Reform in Kiev; cited by Misha Glenny, “Ukraine’s Great Divide,”
The New York Times
, July 14, 1994, p. A 23.

  6.
Nikolai Zlobin, “Mafiacracy Takes Over,”
The New York Times
, July 26, 1994, p. A 19. As surprising as the essay is
The New York Times
’s willingness to give it prominent Op Ed attention.

  7.
On the forty-fifth anniversary (1991) of his execution as a war criminal, Marshal Ion Antonescu, who had joined Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II and was responsible for the death of 250,000 Jews, was honored by the new Romanian parliament. The legislative honors were unanimous and Prime Minister Iliescu, though he had expressed disapproval earlier, remained silent.

  8.
Celestine Bohlen, “Zhirinovsky Cult Grows,”
The New York Times
, April 5, 1994, p. A 1, 12. Zhirinovsky speeches have been collected and annotated in Graham Frazer and George Lancelle,
Absolute Zhirinovsky: A Transparent View of the Distinguished Russian Statesman
(New York: Penguin Books, 1994).

  9.
Within a year of the collapse of communism, “GNP in every East European country has declined…. [I]ndustrial output fell 10% in Hungary, 28% in Romania, 30% in Bulgaria” and in every case ethnic tensions had augmented the impact of economic problems. Serge Schmemann, “For Eastern Europe, Now a New Disillusion,”
The New York Times
, November 9, 1990, p. A 1, 10.

10.
In addition to ferocious nationalist sentiments within Hungary, which often takes the form of Jew bashing, the Hungarians are making a cause of the millions who live outside of Hungary in Serbia, Romania (7 percent of the population), and Slovakia (11 percent)—outside of the Russians living beyond Russian borders, one of the largest minority groups in Europe. The cause of “greater Hungary” has become the rallying cry of internal zealots like Csurka who are calling (using the literal translation of the German term “lebensraum”) for Hungarian living space. See, for example, Stephen Engelberg, “Now Hungary Adds Its Voice to the Ethnic Tumult,”
The New York Times
, January 25, 1993, p. A 3. Istvan Csurka was in the Hungarian Democratic Forum (Hungary’s ruling party under Joseph Antall until the 1994 elections), and led Antall’s antipress campaign. Though once a friend of the dissidents, he has become distanced even from the conservatives. His media appointees did a great deal of damage, however. He’s known as “an idiot, and no one has ever taken him seriously.” Milos Vamos, “Hungary’s Media Apparatchiks,”
The Nation
, December 13, 1993, p. 725.

11.
So loyal that in 1989, when tribalism first peered out from the ruins of the Stalinist empire, nearly every observer thought that the army’s disciplined troops would contain its reawakened appetites inside of Yugoslavia itself.

12.
Just a few years ago, the Serbian slavophile, Vasily Belov, captured the sense of historical resentment perfectly: “The so-called UN sanctions in Yugoslavia—these are sanctions of the Vatican and a Germany united by Gorbachev.” Serge Schmemann, “From Russia to Serbia,”
The New York Times
, January 31, 1993, p. E 18.
  Popular Serb actor Nikolai Burlyaev wrote not too long ago in the Belgrade daily
Den:
“Today Serbia is alone. The whole world seems to have ganged up on it. The current Russian Government has betrayed it. It betrayed a people of the same blood and faith as the Orthodox Russian nation, it betrayed its own—Slavs, so similar to Russians …” Schmemann,
ibid. Russia did finally give up on its Serbian friends after the Bosnian Serb legislature rejected a major power compromise that would have left the Serbs with much of the territory it conquered in Bosnia. Yeltsin had his own sentiments about the treason of the Serbs against its sponsors in Moscow.

13.
Misha Glenny, “Ukraine’s Great Divide,”
The New York Times
, Op-Ed, July 14, 1994, p. A 23.

14.
Russia has offered to cancel over $2.5 billion in debt. Meanwhile, the West voted to give $4 billion in aid (including $200 million to shut down and clean up Chernobyl). Unfortunately for Kravchuk, the vote came the day before he was ousted from office, and it is his successor Kuchman who will reap the political rewards of the prize.

15.
Cited by Misha Glenny, ibid.

16.
Steve Erlanger, “Ukraine Questions Price Tag of Independence,”
The New York Times
, September 8, 1993, p. A 8.

17.
In another of those special advertising supplements designed to seduce Western capitalists untutored in the history of Middle Europe to sink millions of dollars into the region; see “Romania: Rebuilding the Nation,” 1994.

18.
The accord was engineered in the spring of 1992 by a team from Princeton’s Project on Ethnic Relations, following decades of repression under Communist dictator Ceausescu. Hungary reciprocates the bloody sentiments, still calling the 1920 Treaty of Trianon that tore the Transylvanian Carpathians with its 600,000 Hungarians from it “bloody Trianon” and toying with scenarios that return the region to its sovereignty. Caryl Churchill’s documentary play
Mad Forest
captures many of the tensions in Romania just before the fall of Ceausescu, but it mostly overlooks ethnic rivalry and antigypsy bigotry.

19.
Toby F. Sonneman, “Old Hatreds and the New Europe: Roma after the Revolutions,”
Tikkun
, Vol. 7, No. I, January 1992, pp. 49–52.

20.
Gypsies arrived from India in the thirteenth century dispersing in two diaspora, the first in the Balkans, Moldavia, and Wallachia (Romania today) where from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century they were enslaved; the other dispersed as wanderers throughout Europe. Their Indian-based caste system kept them wholly insulated from their host countries, which in Germany, Finland, and Great Britain actually made it a capital offense to be
born
a gypsy. Nazi pogroms destroyed 70 to 80 percent of all gypsies, somewhere between a half million and a million (there was no gypsy census against which to measure the genocide).

21.
Antonescu was a syphilitic cavalry officer who ousted despotic King Carol II in 1940 dubbing himself “conducator,” and modeling himself after “Der Führer.” Antonescu was seen as a national savior and some associate his name with that of Iliescu’s party, the National Salvation Front.

22.
For details see Robert D. Kaplan, “Bloody Romania,”
The New Republic
, July 30 and August 6, 1990, p. 12, and Sonneman, “Old Hatreds.”

23.
Kaplan, “Bloody Romania.” Kaplan describes his own journey through Romania this way: “I encountered a surrealistic hell of rowdy alcoholism,
with gangs of factory laborers living in dormitories away from their families and bereft of all pride, drinking medicinal alcohol and watching kung fu movies in cafés.” He points out that Iliescu uses these miners as a praetorian guard against the antiregime intellectuals in the cities.

24.
Eric Hobsbawm, “A New Threat to History,”
The New York Review of Books
, December 16, 1993, pp. 62–64.

25.
Ibid.

26.
Ibid., p. 62. Hobsbawm points to a study of the Indus valley called “5000 Years of Pakistan,” even though “Pakistan was not even thought of before 1932–33, when the name was invented by some student militants. It did not become a serious political aspiration until 1940. As a state it has existed only since 1947.”

27.
Cited in Celeste Bohlen, “Ethnic Rivalries Revive, in E. Europe,”
The New York Times
, November 12, 1990, pp. A1, 12.

  1.
Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby,
Fundamentalisms Observed
, Vol. I of the Fundamentalism Project (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. viii–x.

  2.
Advertisement in
The New York Times
, July 20, 1994.

  3.
Chris Hedges, “Teheran Journal,”
The New York Times
, August 16, 1994, p. A 2.

  4.
Leslie Planner and Cherry Mosteshar, “Bringing a Beam of Delight to the Closed World of Iran,”
The Guardian
, August 5, 1994, p. 14.

  5.
“There is something exceptional about the degree of authoritarianism that prevails in the Middle East todayWhether or not Islam and Middle Eastern ‘culture’ are separable phenomena, the two work in ways that do not augur well for democracy.” “Democracy Without Democrats,” in G. Salame, editor,
Democracy Without Democrats
(London: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1994), pp. 32–33.

  6.
Hilal Khashan, “The Limits of Arab Democracy,”
World Affairs
, Vol. 153, No. 4, Spring 1991, pp. 127–135.

  7.
Fatima Mernissi,
Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992), p. 21. For a remarkable portrait of Islam as seen by a photojournalist, see Abbas,
Allah o Akbar: A Journey Through Militant Islam
(San Francisco: Phaidon Press, 1995).

  8.
As John O. Voll suggests, “Leaders of Jihad believed that armed struggle against a wicked government was a requirement of their faith.” “Fundamentalism in the Sunni Arab World,” in M. E. Marty and R. S. Appleby,
Fundamentalisms Observed
, p. 345.

  9.
From the executive summary,
Islam and Democracy
, Timothy D. Sisk, editor, (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1992), p. x.

10.
See, for example, Edward W. Said,
Culture and Imperialism
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

11.
Sisk,
Islam and Democracy,
p. 23.

12.
Voll, “Fundamentalism,” p. 348.

13.
Cited in ibid., p. 360. Free institutions are seen as a pretext for corruption, not evil in themselves but not to be taken seriously because they are only the Trojan horse in which the West’s vices are smuggled in.

14.
Prynne, cited by Jonas Barish,
The Antitheatrical Prejudice
(Berkeley, California: The University of California Press, 1981), pp. 84–85.

15.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Letter to D’Alembert on Theater
, Allan Bloom, editor,
Politics and the Arts
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press), p. 58.

16.
See Stephen Barboza,
American Jihad: Islam after Malcolm X
(New York: Doubleday, 1994).

17.
Stephen Carter has written a penetrating account of the trivialization of true belief that the religious encounter in secular America:
The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion
(New York: Basic Books, 1993).

18.
Jerry Falwell, founder and president of the Moral Majority, in a March 1993 sermon; cited in The Anti-Defamation League,
The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America
(New York: The Anti-Defamation League, 1994), p. 4.

19.
Ibid. Terrell is the founder of “Operation Rescue,” the antiabortion activist group.

20.
From “Drive by Witness,” by A-1 S.W.I.F.T., cited by Michael Marriot, “Rhymes of Redemption,”
Newsweek
, November 28, 1994, p. 64. Also see Nicholas Dawidoff, “No Sex, No Drugs, But Rock ‘N’ Roll,”
The New York Times Magazine
, February 5, 1995, pp. 40–44.

21.
The scandals, sexual and fiscal, that rocked telepreacher constituencies like Jim Bakker’s, continue today. The Gospel Music Association had to announce in 1994 that married Christian pop singer Michael English had gotten Marabeth Jordan, another man’s wife and a singer in the trio First Call, pregnant—proving perhaps that he who uses the tools of Devil McWorld is likely to be snared by the devil.

22.
Philip Weiss offers a stunning account of new age reactionary drop-outs in his “Off the Grid,”
The New York Times Magazine
, January 6, 1995, pp. 24–52.

23.
Charles B. Strozier has written a fascinating account of the apocalyptic side of fundamentalism; see
Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). See also Paul Boyer,
When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Beliefin Modern American Culture
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).