Almost all Islamist perpetrators of violence have their ideological foundation in Wahabism. This totalitarian interpretation of Islam is the state religion in Saudi Arabia. Since 1979, the monarchy has derived its legitimacy from Wahabism. In their struggle for global domination, the dominant political forces in the USA saw their chance to use Wahabism and those who believe in it as a force for their very secular goals, to defeat their opponents. In doing so, they consciously accepted the risk of bringing this radical interpretation of Islam to Asia and spreading it worldwide: We support the enemies of my enemy, even if they trample on all the values we officially stand for. In doing so, they bear substantial responsibility for the spread of war and violence in many parts of the world. What to do to get out of this situation? Let us be creative.
On 20 November 1979, some 500 armed men occupied the Great Mosque in Mecca. They want to overthrow the comparatively liberal Saudi government. They occupy the Great Mosque in order to overthrow the Saud family, which had ruled Saudi Arabia for over 200 years at that time. The mosque squatters had political success. They were in the majority radical Wahhabis who wanted to return to the original purism of the movement as it had existed in the 18th century. Wahhabism, this particularly conservative interpretation of Sunni Islam - it has been the state religion in Saudi Arabia since the kingdom was founded in 1932. But in the 1970s, Wahhabi scholars did not have much influence. That changed after the mosque occupation. Religious politics - the whole country becomes more conservative, reactionary and anti-liberal. This shapes the kingdom to this day. And from its point of view, the Saudi Arabian government learned from these assassinations by implementing a kind of conservative turn after 1979.
Not only did almost all the assassins of the Twin Towers attack come from Saudi Arabia. By bringing together Muslims from many countries under Wahabi leadership, the US ensured that Wahabism gained a stronger foothold worldwide. Liberal and moderate Muslims have been coming under pressure all over the world ever since, thanks to Western leadership. And they were aware of what they were doing, as can be seen from these Clinton interviews.
For their hold on power, the US politicians have thrown the world into chaos and deprived millions of people of their lives, health and homes. They follow the "realpolitik" conception of foreign policy: in order to weaken my opponents, I work with their opponents, no matter what their goals are and even if they negate all the values we stand for.
This foreign policy conception had first gained acceptance in Europe in France at the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation: The dominant forces in France suppressed Protestants in their own country, but supported Protestants in other regions against Catholic rulers in order to weaken the latter and thus strengthen their position vis-à-vis them. In his critique of foreign policy, Ekkehard Krippendorf analysed how this disastrous development of thinking prevailed in the formation of the European nation states.
In the Holy Roman Empire, one still had to justify one's policies with Christian norms. This was not a strong protection of force either, as Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker writes, but at least it was a weak one.
Now that the principle of foreign policy has prevailed, everything that serves one's own state and weakens other states is legitimate.
This principle applied by the USA has now led us into global chaos. It has led us back to the chaos that led to the Second World War.
With the founding of the UN, the establishment of common values for all states in the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Social Covenant and the UN Civil Covenant, intellectuals made an attempt to implement the necessary lessons from the Second World War. The ruling classes, stuck in the old foreign policy thinking, could not prevent these resolutions. The people still had fresh memories of the horrors of war, dictatorships, the annihilation of minorities and the world economic crisis. But they were able to block their implementation and create a complete relapse into a world of old foreign policy thinking.
The attempts of Willy Brandt with the North-South Commission in the 1970s and 1980s and Michael Gorbachev in the 1990s to arrive at a world domestic policy for common values, to implement the values of the UN in practical politics, were not successful. Above all, but not only, because this was prevented by the Western leading power, the USA, by all means: The power that actually did some work in the Second World War to ensure that the UN was founded with these ideas, which today still justifies its wars by saying that it stands for these values and that others violate them, and which too many still believe.
We should see the document of the UN, the ideas of Brandt and Gorbachev as milestones and expand them through a global union from below and thus remove the foundations of the disastrous concept of foreign policy, power politics thinking.
Let's do it.
Wolfgang Lieberknecht for the IFFW
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