Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Fundamentalist Anarchists

According to the Arizona Republic, there's a daunting new political force in Iraq:

With a Fallujah teeming with terrorists, insurgents and fundamentalist anarchists, the planned national elections are jeopardized.
It'd be interesting to know what on earth this author's talking about.

2 comments:

NYMary said...

Well, I can't speak for Fallujah, really, but I know that in Indonesia, the fundamentalist Islamists are not particularly interested in having a mullah as president. They had one, Gus Dur, and he was no better than anyone they've had since, well, Sukarno. And early Sukarno at that. They would like to see government become very limited in order for local mullahs to be able to exercise shari'a justice in their own districts.

Come to think of it, that may be what the Republicans are trying to do, too. Small government means more local control means nastier local justice. I happen to know a guy who was kicked off the governing board of his church because he had a second daughter get pregnant out of wedlock. (Once could happen to anybody, presumably.) That kind of justice. Oh, and lynchings.

So fundamentalist anarchy? Makes sense to me. Nothing to limit the power of the churches then.

Phila said...

Mary,

Yeah, I can see that, and I can imagine other interpretations of it too. What I think is weird is the way the writer tossed the phrase out with no explanation, as though everyone's supposed to know what it means, and who it applies to.

If it's some weird theocratic form of...I don't know...anarcho-syndicalism, in which mosques (or whatever) are a decentralized local authority with total control of the population...that's fine, I guess, although the "anarchy" involved is pretty conceptual at that point (plus, the ultimate goal of government based on revealed religion will be extreme centralization, I'd think).

But like I said, I don't even think the writer himself knows what the fuck he means. I think it's just supposed to sound scary.