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ISIS ghters take part in a military parade along the streets of northern Raqqa province in Syria, 30 June 2014. REUTERS
The strength of ISIS lies in its commitment to asymmetrical warfare, and ability to create fear and chaos in its enemies.
n the threshold of the publication of a 20th anniversary edition of Jihad vs. McWorld that will be subtitled
“Isis on the Internet,” it is worth recalling the circumstances that led to my writing what now seems to have
been a prescient study of global trends—a book that has been translated into 31 languages since its
publication in 1995.
In the early 1990s, there were two competing views of the world: the rst focused on integrative economic trends,
and argued that the world was coming together, converging around the triumph of capitalism over communism;
around “fast music, fast computers and fast food, pressing nations into one homogenous global theme park, one
McWorld tied together by communications, information, entertainment and commerce.” The second view, citing
fractious political trends, argued the world was falling apart, being pulled to pieces by new forms of nationalism,
cultural and religious ideology and tribalism in a “balkanization of nations-states in which culture is pitted against
culture, people against people, tribe against tribe, a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against
every kind of interdependence...against modernity itself.” Most scholars and pundits were choosing one side or the
other, Tom Friedman, for example, opting for the convergence thesis, Robert Kaplan insisting on the argument for
disintegration.
As a student of Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, however, and thus an advocate of dialectics, I was persuaded that both
arguments had grasped at least part of the truth; that both were in some sense true. Which entailed that the two
arguments had to have had something quite essential in common. The world was both coming together and falling
apart for some of the same reasons. For one, the world was falling apart because nations and cultures were resisting
those forms of capitalism and modernity that were bringing it together. As I wrote then, “caught between Babel and
Disneyland, the planet is falling precipitously apart and coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.” It was
the aim of Jihad vs. McWorld to explain not only how both convergence and disintegration could be possible at the
same moment, but how the two opposing trends were part of a single process that had in common a taste for anarchy
and a disdain for democracy.
It was in the tradition of dialectical thinking, then, that I went looking for commonalities. The dualisms of analytic
philosophy that had given rise to a stark choice between global integration or global disintegration as the fate of the
world, had to be supplanted by interdependent thinking that could hold both alternatives in tension, according each
its own truth and showing how they might be related.
The power of dialectic is to demonstrate how opposites need and even entail one another. They must be understood
in terms of how what they exclude and deny helps produce what they share. Marx, we know, had used Hegel’s
Jihad vs McWorld 2016: ISIS on the Internet
By BENJAMIN BARBER (/user/benjamin-barber) | 30 January, 2016
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in terms of how what they exclude and deny helps produce what they share. Marx, we know, had used Hegel’s
dialectic to understand how the contradictions of capitalism and class had produced both wealth and war, monopoly
and liberation. My task was to understand how the contradictions of McWorld and Jihad produced both modernity
and its rejection; how, that is to say, modernity inspired those who feared the costs it exacted from religion and
cultural identity to reject it. And how that rejection relied on the technology and media that de ne modernity to try
to bring down its civilisation.
The dialectic I rst explored 20 years ago began as speculative theory; in 2001, with the 9/11 cataclysm it began
prophecy; today, in the age of ISIS on the Internet, it is simply reality. For unlike Al Qaeda, Jihad’s early manifestation,
the new ISIS with its quest for a territorial Caliphate married to its campaign to engender a virtual Caliphate on the
web, rejects capitalism and materialism and the commodities they produce even as it puts those commodities to work
to inspire terrorism across the world. Science is the work of in dels, secular reason is a form of blasphemy, yet
science’s nest product (technology) is the best instrument the true believers have to wage war on the West, while
reason’s manifestation in new media is their strongest weapon.
What makes ISIS both viral and toxic, as well as effective and universal, is precisely its capacity to use the very
technology whose science it condemns and whose materialist views it rejects to advance its goal of overthrowing
modernity. On the other side of the dialectic that empowers Jihad, stands McWorld: the behemoth corporations of
commercial, global capitalism. To McWorld, Jihad de nes what it stands for (or claims to stand for)—prosperity,
equality, democracy, pluralism. Yet in confronting Jihad, McWorld has displayed a willingness to abandon the civil
liberties and open society in whose name it wages the struggle. Politicians like candidate Donald Trump in the United
States and even President Francois Hollande in France threaten to close borders, deport refugees and deprive high
risk citizens of their rights (or even their citizenship). Does the willingness to give up such crucial liberal norms
indicate not just a need to nd solutions to terrorism, but also a lack of deep commitment to those norms? As global
markets and anarchic capitalism precipitate inequalities within and between nations as egregious as those generated
within anti-modern religious ideologies, the question of McWorld’s own ideology and its own relationshipto
democracy come to the fore.
Moreover, the dialectic of McWorld and Jihadis is evident in how modern media does the work of terrorism by
spreading its message so quickly and universally in the name of their own pro ts. Without the media, without
reporting, without our ability to look 24/7 at ISIS antics, how effective would terrorism be? Measured quantitatively
by the damage it does, the numbers are astonishingly low. In the last ten years, for example, about 230 Americans
have died worldwide from terrorism. At home in the United States, nearly 230,000 have died from gun violence. Yet,
terrorism inspires fear, while gun violence is met with yawning indifference. Similarly, with Saudi Arabia beheading
hundreds every year within its “legal system”—most recently 43, including a dissident Shia Sheikh, at the beginning of
the New Year—its European and American allies look the other way. Until ISIS beheads one or two journalists or aid
workers (heinous crimes to be sure), and the media instigate a global hue and cry.
Terrorists are de ned by their conventional weakness—no army or economy or infrastructure that can be realistically
defended. Their sole strength lies in their capacity to inspire fear among their enemies, who then do their dirty work
for them. They are lightweights, who use Ji-Jitsu to put the power and weight of their enemies to their own purposes.
ISIS (and Al Qaeda before it) are only as strong as the fearful reaction of those they try to terrorise allow them to be.
The Caliphate cannot and will not succeed, because it tries to go head to head with its adversaries, to ght a
conventional war, to establish a capital at Raqqa and control oil production. But if you take territory, it can be retaken,
as happened with Mosul and Kobani. If you have a capital city, you have an address, to which drones can be
dispatched to kill off the leadership. Oil elds can be bombed; and when you eld soldiers, then American tanks and
British aeroplanes and Russian forces can overcome them.
So the strength of ISIS is its commitment to asymmetrical warfare: warfare that depends not on repower or
weapons where the West always wins; not on economic resources, where the terrorists will always lose; but on
creating fear and chaos in its enemies and getting them to destroy themselves by undermining the foundation of
values on which their civilisation rests. And here, the incapacity of developed nations to address the dark side of
capitalism, of commercialism and of global markets, and their unwillingness to deal with the devastating global
inequality creates conditions ripe for terrorists to exploit.
The dialectic of Jihad and McWorld suggests that the secret to defeating Jihad lies in McWorld itself. Whether we
allow it to be de ned by aggressive commercial markets, predatory materialism and political cynicism, or by the
liberal democratic values it professes to represent. If we permit the narcissistic and greedy values of a grasping,
commercial culture to trump the civilisation modernity has produced, we cannot win even if Jihad loses. Capitalism
has always been most successful when bound to and tempered by democracy, when democracy regulates capitalism
and not the other way around. If modernity is merely a project of prosperity and material wealth, it will lose the battle
with the Jihadists. If it is a project of democracy and justice and refuses to compromise them in struggling against
Jihad, it will prevail.
 
Professor Benjamin Barber is Senior Researcher at The Graduate Center, the City University of New York. He was recently in
Delhi to deliver the D.T. Lakdawala Memorial Lecture organised by the Institute of Social Sciences
 
What makes ISIS both viral and toxic, as well as effective and universal, is precisely its
capacity to use the very technology whose science it condemns and whose materialist views
it rejects to advance its goal of overthrowing modernity. ,,“
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