Fall Of Capitalism and Rise of Islam by Mohammad Malkawi

The terminal result of the political-economic-social system in any society should be no less than the immense feeling of security enjoyed by the group as well as by the individuals. Poverty, hunger, illiteracy, and lack of health contribute to the intensity of the people’s insecurity; this is reflected in the high rate of deaths due to these serious killers. On top of these catastrophic causes of insecurity, people worldwide continue to face yet a more direct assault on their lives. These assaults come in forms of wars between nations, civil wars, tyranny of dictators, harsh treatment of intelligence apparatus, kidnapping, vandalism, and last but not least, acts of terrorism.

Some may argue that some of the assaults on human security may not be related to the underlying political or economic structure; this may be true for few sporadic incidents. But the majority of incidents with most devastating toll on the human life come from wars, civil wars, local unrest and revolts, intelligence interrogations, and acts of terrorism. Such incidents cannot be and should not be isolated from the local, regional, or world political and economic orders.

The local, regional, or world order is essentially the set of rules, regulations, and mechanisms used to deploy and maintain the relations within the country, between countries in a given region, or in the world at large. Within the country, the order is maintained by the authority of the state coupled with the underlying economic and political infrastructure. Within a given region, the order is usually maintained by regional organizations with members from the states of the region. Examples of regional organizations are the NAFTA for North American states; the European Union and its accompanying set of organization for the European states; OPEC for the oil-producing and exporting countries; the Arab League for the Arab states. The world order is maintained by world organizations such as the UN Security Council, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and others. Behind each order (local, regional, or global) stand one or few states with immense power; such powerful states use their influence and power to sustain the order or to change it when necessary.

This discussion is necessary in order to understand the relations between the lack of security and the current world, regional, and local orders. The world order today is maintained primarily by the USA, accompanied by other powerful nations such as Britain, France, Russia, and China. This order is maintained or even sometimes manipulated using instruments such as the Security Council, the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF.

The USA is by far the country with the largest impact on the world order. The US decisive role became more distinct and apparent after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismissal of socialism as a world ideology in the last decade of the twentieth century. The USA practiced its decisive role in 1991 during the Second Gulf War when Iraq occupied Kuwait. The same was repeated in 2001 after the terrorist attacks on September 11 and in 2003 when the United States invaded Iraq without UN approval.

Since the end of the First World War, the order in the world (locally, regionally, and globally) had been maintained by few states which belonged to the ideology of either capitalism or socialism. This case continued until l991 when socialism was dropped from the world order equation subsequent to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The world under the dominance of capitalism has suffered several types of atrocities and assaults against humanity.

The First World War ravaged through European states, which were dominated by capitalism. The war consumed seven million civilian and ten million military lives, with more than twenty-one million wounded80. Without going into details, it was evident at the end of the war how Britain and France spread their colonialist grip over a vast area of the world (Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia). Imperialism and colonialism were the most visible outcomes of the war; it is not far-fetched from the truth to claim that imperialism was a major factor of the war to begin with. Imperialism is thought of as the highest stage of capitalism according to communist theoreticians32. Others perceive imperialism as a method utilized by capitalism to secure sources of raw material, cheap labor, and markets (41, 42). The old colonies of European states continue to suffer until today from deep oppression, dictatorships, poverty, and backwardness.

The Second World War consumed more than sixty million lives; Forty million were civilians81. Many civilians died because of disease, starvation, massacres, bombing, and deliberate genocide such as the one committed against millions of Jews in Germany and Europe. The Second World War gave birth to the two competing camps, WARSAW (alliance of Soviet Union and Eastern European states) and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and to a cold war that consumed hundreds of billions of dollars during five decades. The war also introduced globalization, which continues to increase the gap between the poor and the rich, and deepen the inequality between the people of the world.

The main two instruments of globalization, which were born in the womb of the Second World War, are the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These two instruments have broken the backbone of the economies of countries like Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, and Korea. Under the policies of the IMF and the WB, the developing countries (third world countries) in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean continued to play the same role for the last fifty years: supply the raw material, the consuming market, and the cheap labor to the profit-generating industrial nations.

The first and second world wars produced a long-lasting problem in Palestine by creating the state of Israel. This problem has threatened the stability and security of the region as well as of the world for many decades. It has consumed hundreds of thousands of lives and continues to do so until today. It has shown the world an unprecedented form of brutality, when the tanks, machine guns, jet fighters face young children equipped only with stones. Arab as well as Jewish nations have become a fuel for imperial wars supported and sustained by Europe and then by the United States. Arms sales for the entire region of the Middle East have been sustained mainly due to the Arab-Israeli war.

The world order under the dominance of the Western superpowers led by the USA could not prevent the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 by the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the invasion, the mujahideen (Afghan revolutionary fighters) fought a proxy war on behalf of the USA for almost ten years; during this period, the United States facilitated arm supplies, intelligence, training, and international support for the mujahideen. The ten years war consumed more than 1.5 million of Afghan lives and more than 25,000 of the Soviet lives. The Afghan war culminated more than forty years of cold war between the ideologies of capitalism and socialism.

The world order under the dominance of the Western superpowers financed an eight-year war between Iraq and Iran (1980-1988) for no reason other than to sustain control over the oil fields in the Arabian/ Persian Gulf and the free movement of oil to the industrial world; this objective is in complete harmony with capitalist motives as proclaimed by the Carter doctrine: “Soviet troops in Afghanistan posed a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil”83. The war consumed more than half million lives and many more wounded.

The Second Gulf War was yet another episode in the determination of the superpowers, especially the United States and Britain, to control the oil rich region. For the first time in contemporary history, Margaret Thatcher (former prime minister of Britain) and George H. Bush (former president of the USA) invoked chapter VII of the UN Charter, which allows the use of force against Iraq to force it out of Kuwait84. The then secretary of state James Baker was too frank when he explained the reasons for the gulf war85:

The economic lifeline of the industrial world runs from the Persian Gulf oil reserves and we cannot permit a dictator such as this to sit astride that economic lifeline; to bring it down to the level of the average American citizen, let me say that means jobs. If you want to sum it up in one word, it’s jobs.

Besides the tens of thousands of casualties (dead and wounded), the sanctions imposed upon Iraq after the end of the war consumed more than two million children’s lives.

African nations suffered great pains and lost millions of lives in proxy wars between factions supported by one or another of the super capitalist nations in Europe and the United States. Millions of people continue to die in conflicts that have proven to serve only the interests of multinational corporations digging for gold, oil, and diamonds in Africa.

Diamond money paid for Unita offensives that in the 1990s elevated Angola’s civil war to a new plateau of savagery. More than half a million Angolans were killed. Land mines maimed about ninety thousand. Fighting displaced four million Angolans, and about one million continue to depend on foreign food aid. Blaine Harden86 best describes the diamond wars in Africa in his New York Times 2000 publication “Africa’s Diamond Wars,” where he says,

The miseries of modern Africa are, in many ways, a legacy of its colonial history. Colonialism demolished whatever political culture may have predated the arrival of Europeans. It invented huge, largely fictive nations. To make their nation-building pay, colonialists used force to haul off everything from ivory to rubber to human beings.

In Congo, the Belgian colonial state was famously greedy and cruel.

Its agents set impossible quotas for production of rubber and ivory,

killing or chopping off the hands of villagers who failed to meet them.

In Sierra Leone, since the 1940’s, predators who smuggle diamonds have warped every aspect of the nation’s economic and political life.

Angola, Congo and Sierra Leone had plenty of diamonds to excite greed,

fuel war and to buy favors.

The stories of millions of lives lost in wars launched for the conquest of capital are repeated in Vietnam where 5.5 million lives vanished and Korea where 3.5 million people died. Similar stories come from Columbia, Venezuela, Mexico, Guatemala, Grenada, Cuba, Chile, Argentina, and the list goes on. It is estimated that during the twentieth century alone, more than two hundred million people died in war-related activities.

Throughout the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first one, assaults on human rights and degradation of human integrity worldwide have been a trademark of the dominant ideologies of both capitalism and communism. Within the Socialist camps of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, human rights were almost nonexistent except within the Socialists’ definition of those rights. It is not the intention of this publication to detail the atrocities committed against human life under socialism. It is sufficient to mention (for now) that I have witnessed firsthand the life under socialism with all the sore taste of brutality, calamity, and abuse.

The plight of human dignity under the dominance of capitalism has not been any brighter. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch organizations have reported on millions of cases of assault on human rights, human dignity, and human lives worldwide. The assaults are carried out by governments security agencies irrespective of their claimed level of civilization. The irony is that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch organizations were initially set to monitor the human rights of people living in the Eastern Bloc of the world under the dominance of socialism. The United States and Western Europe had consistently used the reports of these organizations as a means of pressure against their counterpart socialist countries. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the abolishing of socialism, Amnesty International continues to report horrible assaults on human rights. The 2007 Amnesty International report87 states:

Gross human right violations took place throughout much of the world. They ranged from extra judicial executions to widespread use of torture and unfair trials, harassment and intimidation of human rights defenders. Freedom of expression and association continued to be curtailed In 1993, two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Amnesty International reported acts of torture in 112 states and extrajudicial executions in 61 states.

Perhaps the most striking and astonishing assaults against human dignity in the recent history are those committed in the prisons of Abu Gharib in Iraq and Guantánamo by US intelligence authorities.

Abu Gharib prison witnessed appalling calamities of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, including torture, rape, sodomy, and homicide held in the prison in Iraq. These acts were committed by personnel of the United States Army together with additional US governmental agencies87.

The Guantánamo prison is another strike against human rights and dignity under capitalist democracies. The UN Commission on Human Rights reported that detainees at the US facility of Guantánamo have been subjected to force-feeding, prolonged solitary confinement, and other abuses, and have been denied the right to a fair trial, as well as religious freedom. In the view of the report’s authors, “The legal regime applied to these detainees seriously undermines the rule of law and a number of fundamental universally recognized human rights, which are the essence of democratic societies”88.

Aside from war-related human rights abuse in the United States, human rights have suffered a great deal in various forms of slavery and discrimination. Racism in the United States has been a major issue since the colonial era. Historically, the heaviest burdens of racism in the country have fallen upon Native Americans, African Americans, and Latin Americans.

Native Americans were referred to as “merciless Indian savages” in the United States Declaration of Independence. Despite all declarations of equality and equal opportunity, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders remain among the most economically disadvantaged groups in the United States; and according to national mental health studies, American Indians are the most affected racial group to suffer from high levels of alcoholism, depression, and suicide.

The story of slaves brought from Africa against their will is even more devastating. Until 1865, there were more than four million black slaves in the United States. Postemancipation America was not free from racism; discriminatory practices continued in the United States with the existence of Jim Crow laws, educational disparities, and widespread criminal acts against people of color. One hundred years after the emancipation proclamation which officially freed the slaves, black students were not allowed until 1965 into the Mississippi State University132. Segregation between black and white populations in restaurants was common in Southern states in the United States until the 1960s.

Racism became a by-product of capitalism and white supremacy following the relocation of millions of African Americans from their roots in the Southern states to the industrial centers of the North after World War I, particularly in cities such as Boston, Chicago, and New York. In Northern cities, racial tensions exploded, most violently in Chicago, and lynching (mob-directed hangings) increased dramatically in the 1920s. More than 3,400 blacks were lynched between 1882 and 196890.

The story of racism and discrimination continue to haunt America until today. George W. Bush summed up the case for racism in a speech delivered to African citizens of Senegal in 200391: “My nation’s journey toward justice has not been easy and it is not over. The racial bigotry fed by slavery did not end with slavery or with segregation. And many of the issues that still trouble America have roots in the bitter experience of other times.”

Indeed, blacks in America continue to be at a disadvantage compared to their white counterparts despite civil rights movement, equal opportunity acts, and affirmative actions. Racial gap between blacks and whites is visible in so many aspects of life. The family income of a black family has been significantly less than that of a white family for the last sixty years. Throughout the 1980s, the median black family income was barely 55% that of a white family92; see figure 20.

The poverty rates among blacks continue to be much higher than that for whites in the United States. Figure 21 shows that blacks were twice as much likely to be poor than whites for the last sixty years, with the median household income averaging around $20,000 compared to a $35,000 for a white counterpart. The same trend appears in the unemployment rates, where black people in the United States (above sixteen years) are twice as likely to be unemployed as white ones. The life expectancy of black people is significantly lower than that for whites. According to the Census Bureau in the United States, a black male is expected to live for sixty-five years (as of 1995) compared to seventy-eight years for a white man. The most striking fact is that the blacks make up almost 44% of the prison population in the United States, whereas they make up less than 13% of the total population.

These statistics show a pattern of discrimination against people of black color; this is not a coincident. The blacks after spending many years under physical slavery continued to be at a disadvantage in terms of being unable to compete for the means of production and the necessary resources. The most absurd explanation for this trend is to blame the black people for their conditions and miseries. Within the framework of capitalism, it is almost impossible for the weak to catch up and be at equal terms of those who had control of the wealth and the means to acquire them. The data supports this claim in almost every field of life (income, college graduates, unemployment, health status, mortality, school dropouts, incarceration rates, and many others).

Although, for different reasons, the status of Latinos in the United States is not much brighter than those for blacks, like black people, Latinos enjoy high poverty rates and related consequences such as lack of health insurance, high mortality rates, and high imprisonment rates.

Racial and ethnic discrimination constitute one of the most severe assaults on human dignity and integrity in recent history. Race, ethnicity, color, and gender are attributes granted to a human at birth without the least involvement of the person who carries these attributes for the rest of his or her life. When discrimination is carried out on the basis of these attributes, it is a direct assault on the nature of human being as well as on the one who granted these attributes, the Almighty God. Such discrimination cannot and should never be allowed to prevail. With great regret, lament, and sorrow, discrimination on the bases of color, ethnicity, and gender have rigorously marked the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Another type of assault on human dignity prevails in other parts of the world. This time it is directed at the mental and intellectual makeup of people. Millions of people around the world are persecuted because of an opinion they carry or a political view they express. It is sufficient to browse through one of the annual reports issued by the Human Rights Watch (HRW) organization or Amnesty International to discover 93

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massive and dreadful assaults on human life, integrity, and intellectuality. The irony is that many of the tyrants whose records on human rights violations are shamefully atrocious disguise their assaults behind the labels of “democracy.” According to HRW 2008 report93, “democracy has become the sine qua non of legitimacy.” Brutal presidents such as Karimov of Uzbekistan, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, among others, find utility in holding electoral charades to legitimize their reign. When George Bush had to comment on atrocities committed by Musharraf of Pakistan, he said, “Musharraf is somebody who believes in democracy and that Pakistan was on the road to democracy”133.

Violations of human rights worldwide come in various forms and span many fields. One of these fields is related to child labor, which is a direct by-product of poverty in many places in the world. The International Labor Organization estimates that 246 million children between the ages of five and seventeen are currently working; that is 15% of the world’s children population95. The sad part of this story is that more than 200,000 of these children work as soldiers in various rebel or government forces, thus directly endangering their lives. The irony is that child labor further contributes to deepening poverty of the poor nations while increasing the profit of global capitalist corporations due to cheap labor. It is estimated that countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America would gain more than $4 trillion a year if child labor were to be eliminated in these countries. Until child labor is completely banned, the $4 trillion will go to the accounts of global capitalist corporations.

Perhaps the most devastating impact of local, regional, and world orders on the plight of humanity is the spread of worldwide genocides. Genocide is defined in part as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group”96. One of the largest genocides in contemporary history occurred against the Native Americans at the hand of European colonial powers in America. The highest estimates for this genocide place the toll at 100 millions deaths!97. More than 5 million Jews were killed in a brutal genocide by the Nazis during World War II. In Rwanda, more than 1 million civilians vanished at the hands of the Hutu tribes. More than 4 million Palestinians have been displaced out of their lands as refugees and more than a million have been killed by Israeli occupation since 1948. A massive genocide has ravaged Iraq since 1990, where more than 3 million people died as a result of malnutrition and lack of medical care caused by sanctions and blockade. Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, more than 1.5 million have died98. Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and then the American invasion in 2001, more than 3 million Afghan lives have vanished.

These are only few examples of the genocides which have taken place under the dominance of capitalism in the world. It requires a publication on its own to account and analyze all acts of genocide and mass killings.

What is even more saddening is the fact that millions of people around the world suffered a great deal of imprisonment and torture whenever they intended to protest against poverty, genocide, and inhuman conditions. Thousands of political prisoners continue to be held with or without trials in many countries around the world. Many are held in secret prisons run and managed by intelligence agencies such as the CIA, the MI6, and their satellite intelligence agencies.

Profiling based on color, religion, nationality, and affiliation has become a standard practice in many countries including well-established democracies such as the USA, Britain, Germany, France, and other countries.

The main point here is that the world under capitalism throughout the past century has suffered from the scarcity of security (food, health, and life) more so than scarcity of resources as preached by the founders of capitalism.

The performance scoreboard of capitalism clearly indicates that capitalism has failed to deliver happiness, security, and well-being to billions of people around the globe. It has cultivated a land that grows sore trees with fruits of poverty, sickness, wars, hunger, and dissatisfaction. It has reduced the role of God to wiping the tears of the hungry and pacifying the anger of the oppressed. And it has raised the role of the individual to a god who provides life and death and accumulates wealth and owns the universe.

The failure of capitalism to deliver justice, security, and satisfaction may not necessarily cause its failure as a system; it may continue to function under the reign of corporations and superrich entities. However, the recent financial crisis and economic downturn provides evidence that the main engine running the system of capitalism may be malfunctioning. The signs of failure of the system itself are the subject of the next section.