The morning news was all about threats to the Democratic Party in the mid-term elections from Tea Party candidates. After hearing Rick Sanchez promote his book ‘Conventional Idiocy: Why the New America is Sick of Old Politics’, I opened my email and discovered a report from Athens by an Italian journalist, Luca Pakarov entitled: ‘Athens Burns, the World is Silent’.
Roughly speaking, America’s most visible reaction to the old politics is an ultra-right-wing movement whose standard bearers make insistent reference to ‘second amendment rights’. Evoking the disculpating words in the Constitution that introduce the right to bear arms: “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” they train militia-style for the day when they will take down democracy. In old Europe, and precisely in ‘the cradle of democracy’, gun ownership is highly regulated, hence the provision of arms becomes necessary for insurrectional purposes aimed at certain of democracy’s decisions.
Herein lies the essential difference between the right-wing threat of armed civil conflict in the United States, and that in countries with left-wing traditions. In America the revolt is about turning the clock back to principles that were put on paper two hundred years ago, a rejection of globalization in the name of personal independence. In Europe, the rejection of globalization is about solidarity. The death of a fifteen year old boy a year and a half ago at the hands of Greek police made American prime-time, and as far as viewers were concerned, end of story. But for the Greeks, who were particularly hard hit by the recent worldwide recent financial meltdown, it was the straw that began to break a fragile adherence to globalization. The violence we see briefly on TV, is organized by a lose coalition of socialist, anarchists and greens, backed by entire neighborhoods. Popular resistance to the world economic order has pre-vented the government from getting its house into IMF-approved order, threatening the European Union’s economic recovery. And according to Pakarov, Greeks will soon be out on the streets again, this time with weapons to oppose to those of government police.
The Iranians have their martyrs, too, remember the beautiful young girl shot at point blank by basij during the early days of the revolt against the Islamic regime? As for the Palestinians of Gaza, the killings that inspire their resistance to Israeli occupation began decades ago.
Actually, the word ‘martyr’ is slowly making its way into our vocabulary. Yesterday, Fareed Zacharia lost the debate with the British Imam Anjem Choudary who consistently used that word instead of the more genteel ‘sacrifice’. On Global Public Square (GPS), we witnessed a standard-bearer of free speech desperately trying to talk over his guest, not to win an argument, but to prevent him from being heard. At one point Zakaria threatened to end the interview, but the guest did not back down.
Choudary thought he had been invited to a ‘discussion’, while for Zakaria this was an ‘interview’. Both forms of journalism are featured on the program, but as with other TV hosts, there is generally no clear-cut line between interview and discussion. By insisting pompously on being ‘the one who asks the questions’, and referring to sharia law disparagingly, Zakaria missed the opportunity to ‘interview’ his guest on how it would be practiced in Britain. Would adulteress women be stoned to death - or would the British begin to think about the consequences for the wider world of their every act, as the writer and professor of Islamic Studies Tariq Ramadan tells us a Muslim must constantly do?
Athens, Great Britain, Teheran and New York are all part of the Global Public Square. But increasingly, the globalizing media is without a GPS.