"Generation Islam" and the Obama "youth" counterrevolution
2009 August
CNN's "Generation Islam" special on youth in Muslim nations (broadcast in mid-August, 2009) debases Koran-reading competitions as "American Idol," The only real similarity this writer sees there is that a recordable TV broadcast of a female reciting the Koran -- if that is what is depicted in "Generation Islam" -- might be pornographic. No doubt Homer Simpson sitting in front of the boob tube in his own home fantasizes about being fellated by an "unveiled" Muslim female as if her throat had a clitoris, after she appears to serenade him. Whether it is possible in Afghanistan to have televised Koran-reading without going backward in sex relations is a question for Afghan revolutionary feminists to answer off the Internet -- not subjectivist pseudo-feminists who think Euro-Amerikan females are gender-oppressed or liberated as non-gendered people (neither socially female nor male). However, "American Idol" is not gender liberation and is more likely to eroticize the mass murder of people with less leisure time. Leisure time does not include forced unemployment time or time resisting murder.
The really sad thing about "Generation Islam" is that CNN writers and their White House and State Department contacts know more about Islam and how to influence public opinion in relation to "youth" than the vast majority of First Worlders calling themselves "communist," yet these so-called communists expect to be able to have a better line than what CNN is saying while abandoning Maoist-Leninist-Maoist principles. CNN offers Muslim nations "Muppet diplomacy." I guess that's not much worse than calling for one global state under the dictatorship of parasites, brought about with the U.$. military -- what some fascists calling themselves "communist" are pushing for with their constant bashing of oppressed nation nationalism while extolling Amerikans. Both CNN and "communists" are laying the public opinion groundwork for military and spying escalation.
People who took a look at MIWS's "Is Calvin human?" article, and thought "OK, but how do these ideas matter in practice right now" and don't see how children's oppression ties into the concept of the gender aristocracy and orienting the proletariat toward gender liberation, might want to watch "Generation Islam" closely and read the article again. There is a reason why MIWS is dogging a certain combination of ideas about "youth." "Generation Islam" is just one illustration. This is not just about Christiane Amanpour. We are talking about a whole slew of garbage relating to "youth" and Muslim nations that has manifested in the so-called communist movement.
The point of "Muppet diplomacy" is to inculcate "non-violence" in foreign children and "tolerance" of the United $tates and the domestic rich (more likely to cooperate with the United $tates without pressure from those poorer). People should not mistake Amanpour. The U.S. State Department is openly behind these versions of "Sesame Street." Watching "Generation Islam," one could get the impression that Amerikans are so chauvinist they think politeness between individuals is difficult to come by in Muslim nations -- that introducing "Muppet diplomacy" represents pointless chauvinism, a waste of tax money even from Amerikans' standpoint. There is nothing wrong with politeness, but the Martin Luther King, Jr., road does not work under colonialism and neo-colonialism where there are ten- and twenty-times differences in living standards.
There are references in "Generation Islam" to the fact that clear majorities of Muslim countries are youth by some definitions. Looking at this, Amerikans sense a kind of juvenile delinquency problem as well as an opportunity to win "hearts and minds" by taking advantage of the relative size of the defined youth population. An emphasis on culture where culture -- except Islamic culture -- is alleged to be politically neutral goes well with obscuring economic and political differences between the First World and the Third World. By "political," this writer means not just power differences, but the fact that pansy voters under thirty voted for the fascist Barack Obama to attack Afghans and Pakistanis with pilotless weapons, and others were too busy watching "America's Best Dance Crew" and "The Hills," listening to iPods and playing video games to do something about the Iraq War and unemployment independently of the Democratic Party, while teenagers were dying in the Third World fighting imperialism because it was a life-or-death issue for whole Third World nations. Another false idea operating in conjunction with others to diminish anti-Amerikanism is the notion resurrected from the Sixties by hippies-turned-bureaucrats that the principal contradiction in the world is around age, an idea that made more sense when there was a social-imperialist Soviet Union. Today's notion of age as the principal contradiction, obscuring the real principal contradiction between imperialist nations and oppressed nations, has nothing to do with gender or class oppression specifically, militarism or even nuclear weapons, but is vacuous. The vacuousness is rooted in opportunism. A concept of youth as people to be flattered when they agree with one's ideas is adequate for opportunism. So is a development-centered view of youth as being a blank slate. Upon this blank slate, an Obama-led "youth" pseudo-revolution is alleged to build a new world order, overcoming current economic and political differences. CNN found one nineteen-year-old Palestinian to interview who praises Obama (the man wearing the red sweater at http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/08/10/generation.islam.reem/index.html#cnnSTCOther1). The basis of the fantasized cohort of change-makers united across borders and including Amerikans is precisely cultural and technological (in reality there is an economic component) -- a set of young people in different countries using iPhones, Facebook, and YouTube. The technology and technological practices are supposed to make up for the lack of a proletariat among U.$. citizens with legal working rights. Although, it's not just phony communists accentuating youth in a particular way. The State Department openly employs a language of youth liberation.(1)
Don't get me wrong. This writer is sure that there are many gung-ho "youth rights" Amerikans waltzing around in Afghanistan and Palestine. There are "children's rights" people in those places playing more of a charity role. "Youth rights" people will be more obviously political. They may have been part of "youth" movements and movements against "youth oppression" in the 1960s-1970s. When they turned 30, the age when "youth" were supposed to stop trusting them, many maintained a connection to "youth" and offered young people "youth services,"(2) Liberal "participation," "inclusion," "youth/adult partnerships," "youth-led" projects, and the leadership and wisdom of so-called experience, sometimes in the form of a cult guru. Some of these people tout Sixties experience, but never developed a scientific theory of youth in forty years and never will, because what they are about is leading an Amerikan majority that will be overthrown and flattering the identities of various Amerikans, not coming up with a theory and a strategy to end class, gender and national oppression. One alleged communist party's contribution on Muslim oppressed nations and youth was captured in its praise of "Persepolis" and then "Kite Runner." After that, it's not easy to criticize just CNN and other obviously corporate media.
Of course, in terms of the long run, the youth of the communist future will be more advanced than the youth of a thousand years ago, but certain qualities attributed to youth are only beneficial in certain contexts, which is why it is possible for the youth of a country to be swept up in a fascist movement. Or they are related to gerontology -- obviously any living persyn will be more active than a corpse. There is nothing intrinsically progressive about being young if the context is not gender oppression or some kind of class oppression. The median age in the United $tates is in the late 30s. Almost half of the U.$. population is over 40. Nonetheless, U.$. children live in the midst of huge inflows of super-profit. It is difficult for U.$. children to make a connection between their oppression as children and a strategy that helps to move the species closer to a world without children's oppression. Most First World "communists" aren't even talking about any specific oppression of youth. The neither-Bush-nor-Islam line deserves every contempt and the idea of a progressive global Obama-led youth movement is wrong, but nor does there exist a process radicalizing U.$. young people against the Obama regime. (No, environmental concerns are not concretely uniting First World young people with Third World young people in a progressive way at this time. The notion of a generational struggle regarding natural resources and the environment has always been unconvincing. The fact that the older generations do not have as much individual interest in the future does not prevent them from killing people to try to save capitalism for their descendants.)/p>
The situation in a country like Afghanistan is going to be different regardless of sentimentalism regarding alleged youth combatants or youth combat training. In Afghanistan, the median age is about 18, and the GDP per capita is less than one fortieth of the U.$. GDP per capita, and that's not to mention the fact that most adults in the United $tates don't produce anything. CNN talked about poverty as a cause of militarization, but that is not going to end in the short term. Children in Afghanistan experience intense foreign economic oppression, and it would not be surprising to find 16-year-olds there participating in a movement against that oppression, unarmed. Any relatively young age of Afghan fighters or trainees could be explained in terms of demography. (Christiane Amanpour interviews a young Palestinian soldier, also a university student. There is also footage of a camp where boys are undertaking physical education. In another case, a subtitled bit footage of a boy saying that he only reads the Koran is morphed into an indictment of Islam, though his words could be a statement on the Gaza blockade.) The life expectancy at birth in Afghanistan is in the mid-40s, compared with the late-70s life expectancy in the United $tates. U.$. imperialism is responsible for the demographic state of affairs in Afghanistan, so to criticize Afghanistan for not having its elderly or middle-aged people fight imperialism, as a certain kind of anti-war dissident tells rich old people in the United $tates to fight wars themselves, is a joke. Middle-aged people in a Muslim country could be under 18. At 18, many Afghan males are already parents with children to support. The average age at first birth of U.$. females is well over 20. In their 30s, as almost half of U.$. soldiers in Afghanistan may be, Afghans are close to death even without dying in a battle. And sorry, but Afghanistan does not have the bucks to spend on producing videos games to indoctrinate and train middle-schoolers to be soldiers as is done in the United $tates. In saying all of this, this writer does not claim to know whether children in Afghanistan, an Islamic nation, exist as a distinct patriarchally oppressed social group the same way they do in imperialist countries. That is not a simple question to answer without more theoretical and concrete understanding. The majority of Afghan adult males are themselves gender-oppressed.
"Generation Islam" depicts young people's use of "new media" and contrasts that with other young people's studying the Koran as if everyone could afford Internet-connected laptops and US$180 Flip Video Mino camcorders. Many young people in large Third World urban centers are privileged, but there is a true false consciousness question regarding Third World people's being able to rely on the Internet majority and on First Worlders receiving information from the Internet. Oppressed people who have rushed into using information and communications technology will learn the limitations and drawbacks of that the hard way. The State Department, the FBI, the CIA and others involved in diplomacy or intelligence run circles around the majority of people using the Internet for political communication. For that matter, the FBI and the CIA are not above using teenagers inside and outside the United $tates for operations, on and off the Internet, not to mention the practice of sending adults to the Third World representing themselves as "youth" or the "young generation." Something I'm not sure most understand is that CIA spies in the Third World, apart from Amerikans with diplomatic, commercial, journalistic, "revolutionary" etc. cover, are not typically white male college graduates, over 20 like the fictional Jason Bourne character, though people under 18 may be more often under the influence of an agent provocateur, than informants or otherwise agents themselves. Not all spies for the United $tates are CIA officers. In no way is identity any guarantee against spying in the Third World. The U.$. intelligence and diplomatic community use of Third World nationals and youth -- use supported by media stories about young military trainees -- exacerbates problems for the Third World and is not something to be celebrated with inane sentimentalism and stupid ideas about "globalized" cultural "marketplaces," or justified as if Barack Obama were making progress in the world.
The same people claiming that nothing surrounding any "beautiful young girls" in their late twenties could have anything to do with foreign intelligence and diplomatic services, and denying that females even in their late twenties should be treated the same as thirty-year-old males in the same contexts, have made the strange claim that people in wealthier cities in Muslim countries are more female and more young than people in rural areas, with higher fertility rates and often lower life expectancies. With this in the background, they claim that there is a crucial struggle involving females and youth and that specifically pro-Amerikan youth should be participating in insurrections in Muslim countries. All of this together reflects a certain imperialist strategy.
Notes
1. "U.S. Official Discusses Alliance of Youth Movements Summit," 2008 December 2, http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2008/December/20081202145553xjsnommis0.2335169.html
"The aim of the Alliance of Youth Movements is to look at the success stories where youth have used the online space as a tool for youth empowerment against violence and oppression . . . ."
" . . . we have a policy toward youth, and youth does not have a national, ethnic, political, or religious face to it. It is a demographic and our policy is to engage with that demographic to leverage online, mobile, and digital media as a tool for empowerment against violence and oppression."
See Gil Kaufman, "Iranians Keep Twittering Thanks To Young Obama Official," 2009 June 17, http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1614177/20090617/story.jhtml
2. See Keith Hefner, "Perspectives on Youth Rights," http://www.perspectivesonyouth.org/Pages-Articles/Fall-2002/3-Keith_Hefner-Youth_Rights_Movement.html.