“It is our duty to globalize the world around Islam.”[850]
Saleh Al-Munajjd on Saudi Arabia’s Al-Majd TV[851]
“Western civilization’s credibility as the one capable of leading the world to happiness and man to stability - is shaken… Only one nation is capable of resuscitating global civilization, and that is the nation [of Islam]…While the false cultures sink in the swamp… The Islamic message… is to save the human race.”
Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, Imam of the Al-Haraam mosque in Mecca
“History is not a spectator sport.” Robert Zubrin
When every chicken knows her place in the pecking order and puts up with her rank, no matter how lowly, there is farm-yard peace. But when a new chicken is tossed into the barnyard and pecking-order positions are up for grabs, all hell breaks loose. The same thing happens when the environment changes. Power vacuums open. Pecking order positions are up for grabs. Among humans, this often leads to conflict…or to outright war.
A radically new human environment has appeared in the 21st century—a globalized environment, an environment radically transformed by computers, by networking, by upgrades in freight transportation, and by the emergence of something we’ll get into in a few minutes—mega-markets and mega-organisms, superorganisms whose cells are smaller superorganisms.
Five pecking order players, five mega-sized superorganisms, are trying to grab top spot in this digitally-and-demographically upscaled new land of risk and opportunity, in this barnyard shaken by new possibilities. The competitors for lead position at the trough are Europe, the United States, militant Islam, India, and China. Which one stands the best chance of coming out on top? Which will be most blessed by the rules of the learning machine?
China’s economy is growing faster than any in the history of mankind, and the rules of the learning machine often favor economic leaders. “He who gets, gets more,” say social learning machine rules, and, “modules the system finds useful gain strength, influence, and allies.” All this promises to put China at the head of the flock.
On the other hand, the economies of most of the world’s 57 Islamic nations are doing very poorly,[852] especially the Muslim economies in the Middle East. Only oil bolsters the wealth of Islam’s petrocrats—a fact that’s true for half-Muslim Nigeria, for fully-Muslim Malaysia, for Muslim Saudi Arabia, and for Muslim Iran. So Islam’s future prospects look poor. After all, learning machine rules say that, “He who loses is left out. Modules that prove useless grow weak, become isolated, or die.”
But Islam has two advantages in the global shoving-match for top position. Advantage number one: Islam has a stratagem that’s been vital to its meme team ever since Mohammed issued his “invitations to the kings”—his ultimatums to the emperors of his day. That trick is Islam’s emphasis on the word “one”: one God, one prophet, and, most important, one government, one law code, and one unified military system. Yes, one government, one global government. That global government is the longed-for caliphate.
What’s a caliphate? It’s a central government ruled by one man and one man only—a Commander of the Faithful who runs the sort of kill-the-opposition regime Mohammed established in Medina and Mecca. The caliphate is not just a militant Muslim fantasy. It existed for 1,292 years, moving from Damascus to Baghdad to Egypt to Spain,[853] and, finally, to Constantinople[854]. The caliphs lived in opulence, had enormous harems,[855] and had the last word on the life or death of every citizen, on what some caliphs called every “slave,” of their empire. But the empire of Islam was so immense that the caliphs were seldom able to govern it all. The caliphs also couldn’t stop the Muslim world’s internal battles, battles between leaders, tribes, sects, dynasties, and clans for pecking order supremacy.
Now with modern technology, Islam’s dream of ruling the world from one central city may finally be achievable. It may stand a chance of becoming reality. In other words, Islam is the only superorganism with a meme team that was built for global rule by its founder.
Islam’s second advantage is another direct gift from Mohammed: the eagerness of its militants to solve political disputes with violence. Violence is a potent force multiplier, especially in a world peppered with democratic societies. When Japan’s militant right wingers wanted to take over their country in 1936, they simply murdered four of the duly elected heads of Japan’s democratic government, tried to assassinate the prime minister but accidentally killed his brother instead,[856] and were able to make policy for the next nine years. No campaigning and electioneering necessary.
What do these Muslim advantages amount to? To repeat the words of Cairo constitutional lawyer, Dr. A.K. Aboulmagd,[857] “I even venture sometimes to say that Islam was not meant to serve the early days of Islam…. It was...meant to be put in a freezer and to be taken out when it will be really needed. And I believe that the time has come.” One of the bloodiest barnyard battles of the 21st century is a contest to see whether Dr. Aboulmagd is right.
***
Meanwhile the very nature of the barnyard has changed. Thanks to globalization, we are undergoing an evolutionary quantum leap like the one that separated memes from genes beginning in roughly 550 BC. The hunger of meme-teams and the gluttony of superorganisms is shifting from the massive multi-continentalism of Islam’s first 1,238 years and of Britain’s 19th century Victorian empire to meme-driven ambitions aimed at domination of the planet.
The West coheres around a set of values it sees as necessary imperatives for all the humans on this globe. These include democracy, freedom of speech, gender equality, multi-cultural tolerance, and human rights…our kind of human rights. We Westerners have attempted to spread these memes—these values—through the International Court of Justice, through UN Peacekeepers, and through Non-Governmental Organizations, organizations out to heal the wounds of an injured world.
And we’ve attempted to spread our meme team through one of our most heavily disguised forms of cultural imperialism—our idealism—our planet-girdling anti-globalist and anti-capitalist movements, movements that use cell phones, wireless connectivity, and laptops to weave formerly isolated peoples into a seven-continent struggle for social-justice and for eco-consciousness, a struggle for a global Gaian paradise conceived and led by Westerners.
Roman Catholic, Mormon, Pentecostal, Anglican, and Evangelical Christianity, five other carriers of Western values, are spreading explosively[858] in lands as far apart as South America, Africa, and Russia.[859]
These culture-crusades hint at the hunger of modern meme teams to pick apart smaller social structures and to cement their components into a new breed of superorganism—a global superorganism. More hints that some of us hunger for new forms of global integration come from the birth of supranational organizations like the European Union, NAFTA,[860] CAFTA,[861] ASEAN (The Association of Southeast Asian Nations),[862] APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation),[863] The World Muslim Congress,[864] the Organization of the Islamic Conference,[865] The World Bank, and The International Monetary Fund. China and fourteen other Asian nations even called for an integrated Asian free-trade zone,[866] one that would make the quilts of all previous transnational amalgamations look like mere Kleenexes. The proposed Asian financial super-merger would include an Asian bank, the Asian Monetary Fund, with monetary reserves far, far larger than those of the United States or the European Union.[867]
Then there’s what China has been up to on its own. China’s quietly moved to spread its influence in a way that defies its old rules of empire. Those ancient ways of doing things involved expanding by conquering the nations conveniently located on the Chinese borders. When it came to distant foreigners, the Chinese emperors didn’t leave their palaces.[868] They required the pitiful barbarians to send emissaries who arrived in the Chinese court bowing, scraping, and bearing gifts.[869]
But in 2001 Chinese president Jiang Zemin did something utterly unprecedented—something utterly un-Chinese. He left Beijing and went on an international tour, visiting six Latin American nations, signing cooperation agreements, and calling “on China and Latin America” to work toward building what he called “a new international order’’’, an order designed “as a counterbalance to what it [China] views as overwhelming American hegemony.”[870]
Three years later, in November, 2004, Chinese President Hu Jintao followed up Jian Zemin’s performance by flying to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Cuba and signing a total of 39 strategic partnership and bilateral cooperation agreements.[871]
Then China got even more cheeky. It convinced the European Union to enter a strategic partnership that would include “cooperation in banking and international finance, energy and raw materials, anti-terror and nuclear nonproliferation, [and] technology transfer.”[872] Other allies flocked to China and China worked hard to pull them into its new international web. For example, China signed strategic partnership agreements with Russia[873] and with ASEAN[874]—an association of ten Asian Nations (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam[875]).
China appeared to be quietly positioning itself for the day when Islam and the United States would bleed each other into exhaustion, allowing the growing Chinese mega-power to step in and become the new hegemon, the new alpha superorganism in the global pecking order, the master of the “New International Order”[876] Jiang Zemin had spoken of, the keeper of a new planetary peace.
Whether China succeeds in its ambition to make this the Chinese Century or not, one thing is certain. We are witnessing the emergence of a new form of memetic struggle—a struggle between superorganisms more massive than any social structure the human race has ever seen. Why call these new politico-cultural blocs mega-organisms? The populations of Islam, China, and India are each bigger than the entire human population on this planet in 1850. In that peak year of the Industrial Revolution, there were 1.2 billion[877] Homo sapiens spreading their genes and their memes, and working hard to make riches from the minerals, plants, and animals on this globe. In 2005, the number of Muslims alone trumped that figure dramatically. It was, as we’ve seen before, 1.6 billion.[878] In 2005, the number of Chinese was also bigger than the entire population of humans on this planet in 1850. It was 1.3 billion.[879] And the number of Westerners was a paltry 760 million.[880] But even that was more than the total human population of the planet in 1750.[881]
What’s more, the economic system that interlaces the human race is undergoing a radical change. Mega-organisms are giving birth to utterly new emergent properties. One of these is mega-markets. In the mid-to-late 20th century, European companies that wanted to go for the big bucks knew they couldn’t limit themselves to selling their goods in countries like Germany, France, and England—nations with paltry populations of a mere 40-60 million apiece. Instead, the Europeans aimed for the big profits of a supersized market, the United States, a nation of over 200 million buyers on a perpetual spending spree. One consequence of this sort of economic interdependence: from 1630[882] to 1981,[883] when one nation’s economy stumbled and fell, it could drag all the others down with it. In 1929, America experienced a Great Crash in the stock market, a plunge in stock values that wiped the investments of many a family and tycoon out completely. Then, in September 1931, 305 American banks collapsed. The problems in America were contagious. In 1932, Austria’s Creditanstalt bank—a bank that owned most of Austria’s major companies—crumpled. A banking panic spread to Germany, then England.[884] Eventually all of Europe and even the Asian markets to which Japan sold its exports staggered. The result was the Great Depression of 1932. Lesser domino effects produced ten smaller depressions—recessions—in the 20th century.[885]
Then came a sign that the world’s economy was going through a phase shift, that the global population of producers and buyers was birthing a new emergent property. In late 1997, the economies of the “Asian Tigers,” the fabulously successful late 20th century Asian electronics-manufacturing nations from South Korea and Taiwan to Hong Kong and Japan,[886] were shaken by an economic earthquake.[887] The trembling in each country rattled the others. Asian banks were swamped with loans whose payments they couldn’t collect. There was a serious risk of another domino-effect of bank collapses, another worldwide depression like that of 1931 and 1932.
But one Asian nation pulled off the impossible. It continued to grow at a wildly explosive rate—between 7% and 9% a year.[888] The one nation that stood so dramatically outside the stack of dominoes was China. China was a total newcomer to hi-tech manufacturing. It had just emerged from the poverty of Maoism. Its embryonic capitalism should have made it the weakest of the Asian economies. Yet one trio of experts from Washington’s Center For Strategic Studies claimed that China’s growth rate during Asia’s economic crash had been a staggering 10%.[889]
Why? Why was China the only Asian nation able to dodge recession so astonishingly? Partly because China actually caused the recession.[890] China had sucked the wind from the sails—and sales—of its Asian neighbors.[891] China offered skilled labor at incredibly low wages and a market so big it made the eyes of foreign investors pop. The result: China pulled in the investment capital that a decade earlier had gone into the Asian Tigers.[892] In the early 1990s, over 70% of the foreign investment funds attracted to East Asia went to the Asian Tigers and less that 30% went to China. By 2001 that ratio had done a back flip. Over 70% percent of the capital attracted by East Asia went to China and less than 30% went to the Tigers.[893] And the future head of the World Trade Organization, Supachai Panitchpakdi, said that 70% was an understatement. In his opinion, the percentage of Asia’s foreign investment soaked up by China was 80%.[894] What’s more, China was now exporting the goods that the Tigers had formerly specialized in, thus taking the Tigers’ profits away.[895]
But there was another factor that made China recession-proof in the late 1990s. China was one of the world’s first mega-markets. With its 1.2 billion people, China had an internal ocean of consumers four times the size of the world’s previous biggest pool of buyers, the United States.
Other national economies like Japan’s depended on what they could buy from or sell to other nations. When the nations they depended on for customers ran out of cash, the shortage drained these export-dependent countries of their vitality. But when the nations around China ran low on funds, China had nothing to worry about. When she couldn’t sell her products to the citizens of other nearby countries, she could sell them to Europeans and Americans. More important, she could turn inward and sell those goods to the billion consumers within her own borders. Her internal consumers, her internal mega-market, provided her with a buffer, a flotation cushion.
And China was not alone. By the year 2000 India had a middle class of 300 million, bigger than the entire population of the USA.[896] India, too, dodged the Asian crash of 1997. Why? Partly because India sold new services like answering your phone call for help when your computer goes down. And partly because India, too, was becoming a self-contained mega-market.[897] A market with 300 million affluent consumers…a market whose number of well-heeled spenders was rapidly growing.
This is just one of the earliest manifestations of a world that is radically new—an environment of a kind no human being, and no being of any kind—has ever experienced before.
Thanks to these radical changes, the mega-organisms of China, Islam, and the West are in a pecking order struggle of unparalleled dimensions. That competition is brilliantly creative when it is commercial, artistic, and scientific. So brilliant that it produces entirely new forms of human senses and limbs…from Google, iPod, home wireless systems, and the biggest searchable library of all time—the World Wide Web—to bullet trains, commuter passenger jets, space-based telescopes probing the fringes of the cosmos, and six-wheeled landers[898] sending home panoramic postcard pictures from their travels on Mars.
But if the battle of the global mega-organisms turns to all-out violence, to the sort of no-holds-barred mass murder of early Islam’s conquests or to the bloodshed of the Western World’s massively industrialized killing in World War I and World War II, the consequences will be catastrophic. In an age when nuclear weapons have gone retail, Islam’s global jihad and America’s counter-jihad could destroy humanity.
Militant Islam’s response to the shift from superpowers to megapowers has been what we call “terrorism.” That word radically under-rates the militants’ true aim—a thrust for a revival of the pecking order supremacy Islam held from roughly 637 AD [When the Muslim armies defeated the Sassanian Persians, sacked their capital Ctesiphon--the home base of Nestorian Christianity—and conquered most of Iraq.] to 1827 [When the English, French, and Russians allied and destroyed the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet.] —a renewal of the global battle between Dar el Harb and Dar el Islam. As one handbook for jihad—The Management of Savagery by Abu Bakr Naji—puts it, it’s time to build a “bridge to the Islamic state which has been awaited since the fall of the caliphate” by running non-believers through.
“The stage of ‘the power of vexation and exhaustion’, then the stage of ‘the administration of savagery’, then the stage of ‘the power of establishment – establishing the state.’”[899]
But this time the weapons and the tools of communication of the jihad-makers, of the modern mujahedin, are 21st century state of the art: websites with steganographic code[900]—code hidden in the site’s contents; DVDs with MTV-like recruitment videos; website-based and inexpensively-printed manuals on how to make the materials for guerrilla, chemical, biological, and nuclear war; and inspirational DVDs with videos of the beheadings of Westerners. Then there are explosives set off by cellphone; suicide bombers with hi-tech, high-power, lightweight explosives under their coats; suicide drivers at the steering wheel of explosive-laden cars, trucks, motorcycles and bicycles; airborne suicide bombers using passenger jets laden with fuel as flying bombs; and Iran and Pakistan’s missiles, submarines, and nuclear warheads (we’ll dive into them in a minute).
Thanks to the Internet, this new jihad went global as early as August 23, 1996, when Osama bin Laden’s “First Bayan (Statement),” his “Declaration Of War Against The Americans,” was spread by the World Wide Web. In the next decade, the dot.com jihad murdered victims and terrorized non-believers in India, Kashmir, the Philippines, Thailand, South Africa, Bosnia, Chechnya, Moscow, China, Kenya, the Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, New York, Washington, Madrid, London, and even in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, where the nation’s militant Muslims, led by the group Jama’at al Muslimeen, attempted a violent takeover of the government in 1990.[901] Western newspapers shut their eyes and pretended that this worldwide Holy War was merely a series of local “separatist” incidents. It was not.
The Ayatollah Khomeini, whose words are revered in Iran as the founding principles of today’s Iranian Islamic Republic, put it best when he said, “Muslims have no alternative... to an armed holy war against profane governments. ...Holy war means the conquest of all non-Muslim territories. ...It will ...be the duty of every able-bodied adult male to volunteer for this war of conquest, the final aim of which is to put Quranic law in power from one end of the earth to the other. ...all other wars of conquest... are unjust and tyrannical and disregard the moral and civilizing principles of Islam.”[902]
Just in case you and I thought that we weren’t targets of this “war of conquest,” Khomeini told us exactly where we stood in his world and in the world of the leaders of the Iranian Republic he founded: “The leaders of the USSR and of England and the president of the United States,” he said, “are ...infidels...” Ok, so our leaders are on the Ayatollah’s hit list. But surely those of us who demonstrate for peace and human rights will be spared. Or will we? Said the Ayatollah, “Every part of the body of a non-Muslim individual is impure, even the hair on his head and his body hair, his nails, and all the secretions of his body. Any man or woman who denies the existence of God, or believes in His partners [Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, and the Virgin Mary], or else does not believe in His Prophet Mohammed, is impure (in the same way as are excrement, urine, dog, and wine)[sic].” Impure—that isn’t too bad.
But here’s the Ayatollah’s kicker: “Islam does not allow peace between... a Muslim and an infidel.”[903] The Ayatollah explains that Islam has been forced to “obliterate many tribes”[904] to defend the purity of Islam. Yes, he said “obliterate.” Others put it differently. They call for “The Annihilation of the Infidels.”[905] In fact, “annihilation of the infidels” is a phrase that’s repeated many a time by modern militant Muslim leaders. Why? Because it’s in the Quran.[906] Writes Seif Al-Din Al-Ansari, a militant writer for the online Islamic magazine Al-Ansar, “The Annihilation of the Infidels is a Divine Decree.”[907] Period!
The battle between meme teams and the superorganisms they assemble is serious stuff. It puts you and me in the cross-hairs. And it’s evolving. Its nature is changing day by day.