On all sides, the fanatics had a good year William Pfaff Monday, January 3, 2005
PARIS An era of extremism . 2004 was a year of fanaticisms, secular and religious. They drove events in the Mideast, fueling conflict between Jews and Muslims, among Muslims there and elsewhere, and between Muslims and Americans and their allies. . Although they are not the most important forces in a large and varied Islamic world, Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Wahhabi fundamentalists are determined to eject American and other Western influences from their societies. Washington claims an equal determination to crush Muslim terrorism and establish secular democracy in what it calls the new Middle East. . The Muslim movements are inspired by a combination of nationalism and religion, and Washington by fear and ideology. Neither will succeed, but the struggle will be costly. . Extremism is internal as well as external. In the American presidential election, the Republicans used "cultural" and moral issues - abortion, homosexuality and feminism - to distract ordinary voters from the economic and social issues directly affecting their lives, where their practical interests usually lie with the Democrats. . But Democrats have driven away many of their natural supporters by their own sectarian and intolerant commitment to feminist and gay issues dear to the party's elite but distressing to masses of working-class and lower-middle-class voters. . Much the same sectarianism exists in Europe, where this year the European Parliament got itself into a ridiculous but disquieting uproar because the Italian nominee to the new European Commission expressed perfectly ordinary conservative Catholic views on marriage and homosexuality. . The nominee, Rocco Buttiglione, was declared anathema by the Parliament's civil liberties committee and deemed unfit to serve a European Union that owes its origin to the collaboration with postwar social democracy of such religiously observant Christian Democrats as Robert Schumann and Konrad Adenauer. . The Vatican responded by calling the rejection of Buttiglione the work of a new and anti-Christian "holy inquisition full of money and arrogance." The comparison could have been better chosen, but it is true that a vulgar anti-Christianity is the last permissible intolerance in modern West European society. . One must add that little is original in this. The war between Enlightenment secularism and the Christian churches began in the 18th century and was still going on in France in the 20th. The struggle over the existence and financing of Catholic schools in France was still alive in the 1980s, and in the 21st century a new conflict has opened over whether Muslim girls should wear veils in the secular schools. . America's contemporary self-righteousness about democracy and freedom goes ill with the institutionalized racism that ended only in the 1960s. . As recently as the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan, which originated in the South during the years after the Civil War, enjoyed a remarkable resurgence in such Northern states as Indiana, Ohio, Oregon, California and Oklahoma, in all of which, by 1924, it wielded great political power. . It urged Protestants to despise Catholics and gentiles to fear Jews, and it set whites against blacks - all the while defending pure "Americanism" against immigrants and subversive foreign forces. . Protestant opposition to John F. Kennedy's presidential candidacy in 1960 was still animated by fear that he would take orders from the pope. . The rise of the evangelical right in American protestantism today is a contemporary version of the great "awakenings" in the American Protestant past - Pentecostal, fundamentalist, nativist and essentially isolationist. . This time it has found a new and media-friendly political expression in notions of the United States as the citadel of godly righteousness. It preaches that the Last Days are nearly upon us, and identifies the biblical Antichrist with liberal internationalism and the United Nations. . Modern times are as myth-ridden as any other era of history, and those driven by myth today are more heavily armed than they ever were in the past. The power of the myth and the passion to demonize enemies both rise as conflict intensifies. This has been the most important trend of the past year, and we may pay for it in the year to come. . 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