WHEN THE FUTURE BECOMES THE PAST, OR, THE RETURN-TO -THE-PAST MOVEMENTS IN 1986: THE GREATEST THREAT IN TODAY'S WORLD

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000302360010-0
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• Original Classification: K
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• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 25, 2012
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WHEN THE FUTURE BECOMES THE PAST,or,
THE RETURN-to-the-PAST MOVEMENTS IN 1986
The Greatest Threat in Today's World
By Georgie Anne Geyer,
Syndicated Columnist
For: The Washington Week in Review Book
Warner Books
7,000 words
It was the cold, snowy December of 1978, and an unsuspecting
but infinitely vulnerable world was about to begin turning in its
axis around such an unlikely spot as the little French village of
Neauphle-le-Chateau, only 80 miles from Paris. The Ayatollah
Khomeini of Persia---the type of Old Testament religious autocrat
that most "rational" 'Westerners could not believe still
existed---had taken up brief but revealing residence there before
going back to Iran to overthrow the West's great friend, the Shah
of Iran.
That December day, Khomeini, just "out" in the West for the
first time after 15 years of exile in the holy Shiite city of
Najaf in Iraq, sat impassively before me on a Persian rug in a
small and equally unlikely empty French summer house.
"Yes," this hoary character was saying of the "revolution"
that already had started between his fanatically religious
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followers and the Shah, "we consider this war as a holy war, and
by that we mean for the sake of Islam and for the sake of God
and for the liberty of our people. That is why it is a holy war,
and it will continue until the abdication of the Shah, the
eradication of the monarchy and the end of foreign domination of
our affairs and the establishment of an Islamic Republic."
During the hour-long interview, Khomeini sat totally and
unnaturally still. He stared, his eyes never blinking or
flickering, at a space between his aide, Ibrahim Yazdi, and me as
though he were indeed staring at some vision that we could not
fathom. He had entered the room---and soon he left it---as though
he were some great black moth floating in and out of space.
One had to rub one's eyes to believe that this surreal scene,
one that could have been out of the "1,001 Nights" of ancient
Baghdad, were quite real. (One problem was that I could not even
rub my eyes since the Iranians had insisted I wear the black robe
or chador over my blonde head!)
As it turned out, Khomeini WAS staring at a very special
vision. The odd thing was that his "vision" was not to carry his
people forward in time; it was not to educate them and free them
from poverty, pain, hunger and war; it was not to modernize his
impoverished ancient land.
No. Instead, his "vision" was to carry his people backwards:
to some totally pure and perfect Islamic past that he places
historically around the 7th century! This, of course, was the
golden age of Islam. To carry him back to it, his perfervid
.followers
soon were to claim that he was the "Hidden Imam" of Shiism who
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had been hidden in a cave for over 1,000 years---it was this
"Hidden Imam's" return that would presage the new golden age.
It was also Khomeini's return to Iran which would set in motion
forces of such power---hundreds of thousands of black-clad
Iranians, fists raised, marching into soldiers firing
machineguns---that within months virtually all Western influence
would be driven from the very Iran that the Shah had set up as
"the" inner circle of Westernization in Central Asia.
Covering something like Khomeini and Khomeinism---something
we had never seen or dreamed of before, at least in our rational
and pragmatic times---presented those of us who were trying to be
serious and responsible correspondents with extraordinary and
unexpected problems for which there were no guides and no
guidebooks.
Because ancient Persia had been overrun so many times by
virtually all the nations and tribes around them, the Persian
Shiites had developed as a kind of tenet of their religion not
only the right but the duty to "dissimulate." To simplify, thin
meant to lie to the infidel in the service of the faith.
I knew or at least sensed that Khomeini was lying to me when
he told me that Iran, under him, would be a democracy and that
women would have full "rights." But how do you explain that
you think this chap you are interviewing seated on a Persian rug
in a big black robe with his sinister ayes fixed on the horizon
was most probably lying? How do you then speculate that it is
because of what the Mongoloedid destroying the great Persian
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Empire in the 12th century?
Be that as it may, the reality is that Khomeinism has. become
if not "the" problem of the 1980s, certainly one of the two or
three problems. He has reestablished the ancient Islamic law in a
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rapidly modernizing Iran. He has established a theocratic state.
Most important for the rest of the world, he has systematically
and with extraordinary passion rocked the borders of states as
near as neighboring Iraq and as far away as Malaysia and
Indonesia. And---in 1986, he still wages a bitter and ancient war
with neighboring Iraq in which more than 1 million have died.
King Hussein of Jordan told me after the Iraqi-Iranian war
began in 1980 that he could imagine no more "sinister" threat to
moderation in the Middle East than the breakdown of borders--
through the Khomeini-sponsored ancient form of Shiite subversion
--that Khomeini so avidly sponsored.
But, very well, you might say, yes, Khomeinism IS a strange
and ominous development; but it also IS restricted to the Middle
East. It is a very particularist response of a special and
historically paranoid people---the Persian Shiites---against
Western influence in its country. It is interesting, but mostly
as a human and geopolitical aberration.
Unfortunately---most unfortunately---Khomeinism is no
aberration. It is the tip of the iceberg (to use a faraway Arctic
metaphor) of a phenomenon that is occurring across the world. To
mention only some of the most dramatic and some of the
increasingly noticeable ones, there is the Sendero Luminoso (The
"Shining Path") in Peru, the radical Sikh movement in the Punjab
in Northern India, the radical Islamic cults in Egypt whose
leadership assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and who
remain a threat to the secular Egyptian state, the Jewish
militants on the West Bank in Israel and and even some
extreme fundamentalist Christians in America and Europe.
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I call them the "Return-to-the-Past Movements" because I
don't know a better title for what they are trying to do---and,
increasingly, what they ARE doing.
Think of the last two American presidencies. Most analysts
pretty much agree that it was the Iranian hostage crisis---and
President Jimmy Carter's too-patient response to the seemingly
unending ordeal---which sealed his reelection hopes. Most
analysts also would agree, I think, that the greatest challenge
to President Ronald Reagan was the eerily related hostage crisis
in 1985 in Beirut, when Americans on the TWA flight were held by
Lebanese Shiite militiamen inspired by--who else?---the Ayatollah
Khomeini.
At the same time, hopes for peace in the Middle East were
being torn apart by the attempts by the Shiites literally to tear
down the borders of Western-leaning countries like Iraq, Jordan,
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States---by 1986, they were all
fighting for their lives. Within Israel itself, rational
Israelis' hopes for peace were being destroyed by their own
radicals who wanted to return to a territorial Israel of 1,900
years ago. Once pro-Western Lebanon...also was Khomeini-ized.
The Reagan administration, like any administration of
"practical" and "no-nonsense" tough men, was thinking on its
front burner over relations with the Soviets and of conventional
warfare. Yet, in case after case, what our men and women in power
were actually REACTING to was the sinister chaos of these new
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6.
and thoroughly unknown and unanalyzed movements whose self-
righteous violence was wracking the senses of the world. The
Reagan administration, which never paused for a minute to analyze
what had happened to it in the tragedy and disgrace of those
Marines killed in Lebanon against Return-to-the-Past Shiites,
remained fixed on nuclear war and arms control talks. Yet, across
the world, the sanity and the structures of the world were being
strained by maddened movements all of whom gained 'their sure
inner power through their assurance they were returning to a
perfect past.
It should not be missed that that meant--and means?,utterly
and ruthlessly destroying the relativity of the present.di
While the men in power --and I must say, the structured
Western male mind, in all its rationality and pragmatism--were
ignoring these developments in part because they simply could not
understand at all the dynamics of what was happening in these
societies and in their minds), there was an occasional voice of
concerned wonder.
Ronald Reagan's feisty and unorthodox Amb. to the United
Nations in his first term, Jeane Kirkpatrick, perhaps BECAUSE she
was an unorthodox thinker, expressed her concern that American
policy was simply not even beginning to address these themes so
crucial to our times. In an interview in her handaome U.N. Office
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fr,
on Dec. 19, 1984, She told me thoughtfully and worriedly, "Most
of our planning is only marginally relevant to what is really
taking place."
When I asked her why, she went on, saying, "Thinking about
both political and military problems, there is always a powerful
tendency to be governed by what was. It is the Maginot Line
complex. The Power of Conventional Thinking. The conventional
management of conventional realities tends to obscure the past.
In the present, the baggage of conventional thinking about the
continuum of events from the Vietnams to the world wars, I think
tends to obscure realities of the unconventional challenges with
which we find ourselves faced."
What, then, if America did not, still, come to understand
the unconvetional, the irregular and (finally) the unthinkable?
"Either we have to, or we fail, she answered simply.
A high American intelligence official, who cannot be named
also expressed to me the intelligence community's just beginning
concern with the unconventional, the irregular and the
unthinkable.
"We share your concern regarding the threat posed by
demographic shifts, illegal migration, the risk of irregular
warfare and the revolutions of 'The Return to the Past' and are
actively seeking to improve our expertise in these areas," he
told me "For example, we now have two analytic groups devoted
solely to studying the root causes of political instability and
insurgency in the Third World.
"Perhaps the greatest challenge before us now is to explore
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hdw these new social forces are likely to bring about dramatic
change in the current political and social order. You mentioned
that 100 or more political, social, religious and ethnic groups
are organized militarily and threaten 52 sovereign states. Which
of these groups are most likely to launch the next revolution?
More important, how exactly would they go about it?"
He was referring to some figures on irregular warfare that I
had dug out that are closely related to the Return-to-the-
Past movements. For instance, by 1984---at a time when AMerica's
political and ,military leaders were obsessed by the dangers of
nuclear war and were still busily building up enormous
conventional lillttary machines, under a huge defense budget---it
was already clear that that type of military machine correlated
only negatively (as in LEbanon) to the reality of conflict in
this new world, some key figures:
By 1984, there were 40 wars raging across the globe. They
involved 45 different "nations or, to be more exact, "entities"
of various forms. Of the 80 wars that began after 1945, only 28
took the traditional form of fighting between the regular armed
forces of two or more states. Forty six percent were civil wars,
insurgencies or guerrilla contests, with the remaining six being
riots and coups d'etat. U.N. Secy. General Javier Perez de
Cuellar, one of the world leaders most eloquent on the threat of
these new non-national or post-national movements, called the
syndrome abroad in the world the "new anarchy" and he
characterized it as "armed force, both overt and covert, used and
increasingly justified as a legitimate means of obtaining
national objectives.
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There were many kinds of irregular movements and many kinds
of armies. There were Marxist guerrilla movements in Central
America and elsewhere and there were street gangs and death
squads who bore no resemblance to the Return-to-the-Past
movements. But the important point was that, of all the violence
in the world, the single most violent and threatening
type of group were the Return-to-the-Pasters.
Why this should be is not, when one
analyzes
it,
80
surprising or so difficult to understand. Perhaps the phenomenon
, certainly not new to history, was explained most sensitively by
the great 20th century Mexican philosopher, LeoP0140
,
beginning to begin as if nothing had been donM.
in times of crises or great disillusionment.
Zma. ? The
appeata
In this way,
man
thinks that he can elude the compromises that his situation in
the world has imposed upon him. Instead of devoting himself to
the difficult but not impossible task of untangling his
situation, he prefers to escape and to take no cognizance of the
complex conditions.
"He then begins to imagine worlds without complications,
worlds without previous history, worlds in which each individual
can begin to realize his history as he would have it. Or, these
worlds appear as virgin worlds in which everything is still to be
done and thus full of possibilites. In short, they seem to be
utopias, which are ideal states, or utopias in which everything
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is yet to be created."
Still, even given this historic search of man in all
cultures, religions and times to exercise the utopian yearning
and to create utopias (sometimes related to the purity of the
past and sometimes, as Communism, related to a supposedly perfect
future), how can we analyse what is happening today and why. Why
are these Return-to-the-past movements and impulses breaking
forth all across the globe, and in countries and in situations
that would seem to have little or nothing in common Could one
make sense of them? Can one deal with them? What aegaei if any at
"
. .
all, did they make in what westill AsOlsolo'VaradOi*O4Or to
the "nuclear age?"
Actually, what has happened is quite understandable when one
looks at the whole phenomenon historically.
The post-World War II period saw the massive and hemorrhagic
breakup of the great colonial empire of the European powers. But
often--although it was not so obvious at the time--the former
entities were broken up into only supposedly modern "nation-
states." In truth, these entities soon would come to be seen as
quite simply unnatural for peoples who still thought of
themselves in terms of tribes, of clans, or religions or even of
islands. At the same time, the Great Powers' ability to "keep
peace in the world broke down because the industrialized nations
were themselves psychologically and structurally fragile on the
inside.
The first class of post-colonial leaders in the Third
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(1,
World---The "Bung" Sukarnos of Indonesia, the Gamal Abdul Nassers
of Egypt, the Jawaharlal Nehrus of India---simply assumed that
progress would follow, as night the day, after independence. It
was only the colonial masters who had held these peoples back.
Only that was not what happened. In the first age in the
history of mankind where virtually ALL peoples (or, at least,
their leadership groups) suddenly believed that they could throw
away the shackles of the fatalism of the past and ?progress,' the
fact was that most of them did not. It was really quite simple,
if sad.
They did not have modern work habitaf, iiey did not have
societal organizations tOorOtiriaie for the creation;of.weidAih and
,
the care of it and they did not have the all-necessary. Judeo-
Christian or Confucial work ethic. It was not at all unnatural
that, in their diappointemnt and frustration over
"modernization," leaders and peopls would in different gays
decide that the fault lay in the fact that , along the way when
they were lusting over the new God of "progress," they had turned
their backs on their past gods. Now they would return to the
past---or try to---and they would beg its pardon with a vengeance.
One of the best analysts I have found of this inevitable
consequence is Sherif Latfy, an Egyptian developmentalist who is
the leading advisor to the Sultan of Oman, a country which is
progressing with unusual wisdom and foresight. "The 'thing' will
always be there," Latfy told me one day, sitting in his simple
office in the picturesque old capital of Muscat. The 'thing' was
the imbalance that Cane, inexorably, when countries put
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themselves into this kind of pressure cooker of social change.
"If it were not 'Islam,' it would be called something else,"
he went on. "It is simply somethng that comes with modern life.
The frustration becomes bigger in the developing countries. You
find people are frustrated with change---or without it. The more
development you do, the more frustrated people become. Hundreds
of years ago, noone knew what development was or what life in the
U.S. was. The more development, the more impossible life becomes.
"what do you do? There is no economic solution to it. I can
say, in many cases,
what the world should have
done but no
matter what you do, there often, is- no file
through the transitional period? Noone really knows.
Then he leaned back in his chair in his office and ruminated
over the violent IslamiC fUndamentalists who had killed Egyptian
. . .
President Anwar Sadat. "Look at those men," he said. "They were
the people brought to school by the government---so naturally
they are going to blame the government for everything."
The other man whom I have found who best interpreted what
happened to the individual soul in these countries when faced by
the impossible challenge (or is it really a threat?) of
modernization---a modernization usually represented by the United
States---was the late psychoanalyst who is often called the
successor to Freud, Dr. Heinz Kohut of Chicago. Speaking of the
particular Iranian experience, which is so key to all the Return-
to-the-Past experiences, Kohut told me;
"The specifics of that tension arise from the attempt to
S nd td be it. tiVatitiva
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instance, were clearly repressed and backward. They were clearly
living a demeaning kind of existence leading to low self-esteem.
"Then came the Shah in Iran, Ataturk in Turkey, Nasser in
Egypt. In order to make their people more capable of self-
respect, the message is 'Modernize!' But if the changes made are
made abruptly, within one or two generations, that threatens the
continuity of the ethnic self. It is much like the individual
self. We were once children--then ado1i0Ofnts--then mature
adults. When a person feels discontinuous, that is a terribly
Painful feeling. You do not hang together. SIOPla will do almost
anything to avoid t4a.t.
"What happens when it is not within the capacity of people
to change is that they want to overthrow those who forced them to
move. Change is experienced a$ an agent of someone else.
Discontinuity arouses tremendous anxiety. So When someone comes
like Khomeini or Yasser Arafat, with something of a 'new world,'
there is a sense of tremendous healing. They will do anything for
it, so long as the sense of continuity is reestablished.
"Then there is a degree of sadism that is mobilized--give
them (the foreign agents of change) a dose of that medicine that
they inflict on others. They feel shamed by us, so they need to
shame us. And they know that they can have tremendous power over
us, because they are at that stage of development where their
goals are compatible with dying. Ours are not. We can't say we'll
do the same to you.
"We are at a totally different stage of selfhood in dealing
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Then he summed up what the West---really just be existing as
"the" example of the "modernization" that was so hounding these
peoples from one end of the globe to the other---implicitly has
done to the poor and struggling countries: "We took a picture of
their poverty."
Lest anyone think ("dream" would be a better verb) that
these movements end with Khomeini or are about to wither away
into the sun of modern times, here are solo key examples of
the "Return-to-the-Past movements all around, us and some of the
crucial dynamics that?liff to each one:
---It was Miami in July, 1984. Perry Rifkind, the diredtOr
of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service there, was
talking about the floods of peoples from other countries who were
pouring into the U. illegally through his state. Suddenly, he
paused and said, without any particular emphasis, "And then there
are the Sikhs...."
Sikhs? Bearded religious Sikhs from the prosperous Punjab in
northern India? Sikhs who believe in a religious that is a unique
mixture of Hinduism and Islam?
"Yes," he went on, obviously puzzled, "they have been coming
in for the last two years. We've apprehended hundreds of them.
They come through a network that gets them through the British
Commonwealth countries easily and eventually to the Bahamas. From
there, it is easy for them to come here illegally by boat."
Then he paused and shook his head. "It is odd," he summed
"Most of them have been behtnd the pp C
eeel,e Of
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for some time. Most of them have a lot of money---five, ten
thousand dollars. Some have testified to us that they were told
by the Sikh movement to go underground in California, where there
is a big Sikh community, and to wait for orders...."
What had happened was that the Sikh independence movement in
the Punjab---which then went on to assassinate Indian Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi, moderate Sikh leaders and many others and
to plan to assassinate her successor, Rajiv Gandhi, while he was
in Washington---had relocated in the United States and Canada.
And this movement, whose radical lea,!ere. Want- an independent
state, dream of that It? in spiritually
rtedentist terms--they
dream of return e seined-it kh past.
It was only when, in June, 1985, those radical Sikhs were
accused of kiiiiing 329 peoplebe detonating a bomb in an Air-
India plane, that I began to look into this fascinating, ominous
and strangely untold story. I found incredible materials and from
all sides. I found that that spring, 35 Indian Sikhs had been
apprehended in (of all places!) Houston, trying to slip through
with illegal (of all countries!) Dutch passports. They were sent
back.
I found that, yes indeed, most of the radical Sikhs had been
trained behind the Iron Curtain: in the U.S.S.R., in Bulgaria, in
Poland, Yugoslavia and Cuba. I found that the new Prime Minister
Rajiv Gandhi knew this and that it was most definitely
cooling -his warm relations with the Soviets. And I found a
pattern not at all unlike the patterns of kindred movements in
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What led to the Freudian death of Indira, "India's mother,"
and perhaps began to presage the long-propheSied and feared (by
Mahatma Gandhi, among many others) disintegration of the
subcontinent that is India was actually quite clear and typical.
First, secularized lifestyles had been spreading among the young
Sikhs. More and more young men were shaving off their sacred
beards and refusing to wear the Sikh turbans.
In trying to salvage their interests in a time of feared
changes, the traditional clergy reacted by trying to ignite a new
fundamentalism. However, their efforts?and even those of the
once-radical Independence Party, the Akan Dal--soon were
overshadowed by ultriiradical Sikh led by the ferocious Jarnail
Singh Bhindranwale. When he and his men took over the sacred
Golden Temple, they wide it into a sanctuary for murderers and
terrorists who cdukd not there(they thought) be touched.
Instead, Indira had her troops scourge them out of the
temple. Attempted negotiations between the central government and
the moderate Sikhs had long been broken off, poisoned by the
deliberately planned excesses of the radicals. Indira was
assassinated. Once again, the acts of fanatics were able to
overwhelm and control the acts of moderates and thus destroy the
center!
And the Soviet interest? Ah, there is the mystery. There in
no question at all about the training. ANd that is in Soviet
style, even with "friends." It could be a warning to India not to
move too far Westward in its thinking and loyalties. Or---it
could be the first step in the Soviet-backed but locally
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---In 1980, a hitherto unknown and unexpected movement burst
upon always schizphrenic Peru, a physically glorious country
divided still in its soul between the descendants of the great
Inca Empire and the descendants of the brutal and greedy Spanish
Conquistadores who destroyed that empire in the 16th century. By
the time a dynamic and young new President was inaugurated in
1985, the Aprista Party's Alan Garcia, Peru was a traumatized and
cloae-to-destrOyed country,
The ,reason was a movement that appears, still, to be sui
generis and not connected in any dramatic way even with Cuban,
Russian or Chinese influence. They call the movement the Shining
Path (Sender() Luminoso. in SPanISh) f the name coming from
Lenin's description of COMMUni8M. The movement, which started
around a remote university in the historic city of Ayacucho where
the great battle for the ifidhiOehOentes of Latin America was fought
by the great Bolivar in 1824.
The movement actually was started at the National -
University, a colonial university of Ayacucho that was newly
reopened after being closed for 80 years. The Marxist professor
who led it/ the charismatic Abimael Guzman Reynoso, a philosophy
teacher, as early as 1962 had sent some students to Cuba for
training. At that time/ this nucleus of the group was more
Chinese-oriented than anything and they were definitely oriented
for the long term. Then, in 1980/ they came to the fore in
murderous and sanguinary ways that make them comparable only to
Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, which in power killed upwards of 3
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g,
million or half of the Cambodian population.
Not only did they burn ballot boxes to show their disdain
for democracy, they hung dogs from the lampposts of Lima and
Ayacucho against, ironically, that revisionist dog," the Chinese
leader Deng Xiaoping. Then they began to kill. They bombed, they
caused massive power blackouts. They went into villages and wiped
out Indians, repeating centuries of terror. And the confused and
terrified government responded with their own killings. The
country turned into a kind of natibnal terror.
Why should this have come in a Peru that had already tried a
number of PAW' that were eaPP9e00 to lead to more democracy
and to greater participatfah oftjte _Marginalized" sectors? This
answer, ironically again, ememe 'to het bECAUSE Parehi
the American diplomat, and writer. Prof. David Scott Pallor, who
?
taught in AricpChO-An,thm'formative years of the early 1960s has
written;
"The major effect of the changes within Peru over the past
forty years...was to bring into the national system a much larger
proportion of the total population. That means that the vast
majority of Peruvian citizens are now in a position to make
demands on the system--and do so. A government's staying power is
thus increasingly dependent on its ability to respond to the
concerns of the PEruvian citizenry."
The demand had been created and was there---that devil of
the new demand for "progress" and for modernization---but the
Peruvian government, like so many other governments, simply could
not satisfy it. Peru went through* 1.) democracy in the early
1960e, 24') 4 laAst reforais
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T
democracy again in the late 1970s. None of them could keep up
with the demand.
As Palmer outlined, "With the exception of the 1979-1981
period, net economic growth has been negative, wage settlements
have fallen behind the cost of living, and inflation rates have
increased from a 20-30% range to a 75-125% range... The lower
strata of society have clearly lost their incremental gains with
the shrinking of the economic pie." One spontaneous answer of the
people was the "informal economy, another indicator of the
failures of nation-states and of ominous problems ahead--two
thirds of the. Lima Work force
economy,vo inked to the govilipmen
But remote and beautiful AyactichO, forgotten for ao long,
had awakened IA those years---or perhaps we should say, "half-
awakened.' In the early 1608, Ayacucho became a kind of model for
development policies. The American Peace Corps cam* there to show
what could be done. Europeans came. The Peruvian Peace Corps,
Cooperacion Popular, came. Cooperatives were formed and roads
were built.
Then came the 1968 military coup, and the Americans and most
of the Europeans withdrew. Ayacucho was half-awakened. Into that
quicksand of awakened expectation, the Sendero Luminoso stepped,
now with no competitors. It remains today the most serious threat
to PEruvian society, and thus to the Andean countries themselves.
But, although the Sendero was started along semi-Marxist
tenets (which is natural, since those are virtually the only ones
which offer a sure pattern for totalistic revolutionary takeover
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La
of a state), it is important to see that it, too, is spiritually
irredentist. It is another classic example of "Return-to-the-
Past."
"Sendero is fighting not for adjustments in the system which
will work ?for the benefit of the grievants at the periphery but
for the total overthrow of the system itself," Prof. Palmer has
written. "It is also different in that it is the first full-blown
rural rebellion in Peru guided by Communist principles. In its
ideology and in its strategy for taking power, it consciously and
quite proudly follows the principles and practices of Mao.
But.
n its plan forErnv1afl
iitY after victory is wens it
-
resembles the Indian millenarian movements and most particularly
the precepts of primitive and pure Indian communism presented by
Jose Carlos Heriategili." Sander') believes , as the silent but
inwardly-waiting descendants of the longsuffering Incas have for
centuries, that there is a "Hidden Inca" under the mountain
who---in this millenarian hope---will emerge soon to return them
to the glories of the Inca Empire destroyed so long ago!
---When Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was killed in 1981,
shot down by some of his own soldiers---the boys he always called
"my sons"---people began looking around for reasons for this
bizarre and heinous deed.
To the West, Sadat was the hero, the peace-maker, the
inspirer. The world reeled with shock. How could something like
this happen? Why? Who WERE these "boys" with the wild eyes and
the self-righteously sure vision?
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?
as ?
"sects"---who, it must be noted were NOT within the mainstream of
the Egyptian Islamic society at all---began to form after the
intense humiliation Egyptians felt after their defeat in the 1967
war with Israel. But they did not come out of the often grotesque
poverty of Egypt---they were middle-class, upward-striving middle
class students from, Villages, the studentS "with a futuke.A,
Brought to cities like Cairo by the very government they
later, a8838eineted4?,:ther soon became alienated and ahocked- by the
oorrnrotA*
strange,
the
found themselve4- alone in a
-
traditional
entalist and charismatic -leaderS outside
mosques offered
them an unambiguous
"new
birth"---which meant total allegiance to the group. Surprisingly,
most of the fanaticized adherents to these groups were top in
their class and most were in such difficult scientific
disciplines as medicine and engineering.
But when they were graduated, these youths found themselves
making very low salaries, particularly compared to lesser
students with connections who might be earning 10 times larger
salaries. It was easy to inspire these alienated and idealistic
young with "fatwas" from the Islamic writings that justified
violence against the state.
When police
deeds, they could
So the Egyptian
,clave0Y
began to pick them up in the 1970s for violent
not place them---and the "boys" would not talk.
police ?from what thel boys told them--
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isolating group and the completely isolating group. It was a
mentally isolating group, El Jihad," which mentally isolated them
but allowed them to work in society, that finally killed Sadat.
Others, like the "repentance and holy flight" group, withdrew
into pure socieites in the desert, isolating their fanaticized
members completely.
the sociological profile of these Egyptians, drawn up by a
brilliant Egyptian sociologist at the American University
Cairo, Prof. Saad Ibrahim, is not unique.
of
that of the Turkish terrorists of the Right and the Left who came
from villages
'and Aaltere-
n eastern Turkey and also found "evil" in
Istanbul
turn- either to tours Ielam or to
go on to Marxism:
The Egyptian asiassins were isolated and brainwashed to
believe that "the group was everything; so were the people of
Joneitovn. The Egyptians withdrew to their own isolated "perfect"
socieites in order to swoop down later on evil" westernized
Egyptian society and destroy it; many movements today do this.
"Actually, (the Egyptian cultists) resemble very much the
urban guerrilla everywhere," Ali Dessouki, the other professor
who has studied these groups, told me. "Let us not be prisoners
of Islam."
Saad Ibrahim added, "Youth culture is the same everywhere.
There is impatience with society, a romantic mission. They have a
great deal in common whether they are called El Jihad or the
Weathermen. Even the language is the same: the Weathermen had
their 'days of rage' and here they called the assassination 'an
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They were returning to God and returning to the purity of
the Islamic past, as surely as were the Khomeini Shiites and the
Sendero Luminosos and so many others in the world. So, what the
Egyptian fundamentalists finally did was to murder the man who
represented to them the corrupting Westernization of their
historic country.
* * *
So, .then, what comes next? Even if, we red00010 tfiftei
moveMeot41
come to any agreeMe4s Cft-What the
causal factors are, CAN anything realistically be done or do they
lust
the Vo
Certainly, there are related warning signs that could be
correlated. Here are some Of the ones I would list:
---A first solution is to do everything possible to develop
the countryside and the smaller cities so that the capitals are
not overwhelmed--and overwhelming. Ironically, Sadat was trying
precisely to do that, but he did not act quickly enough to stem
the extraordinary population pressure that made his efforts
virtually hopeless.
--Second, socieites should watch for the dangerous
formation of dual socieites or "two cultures" within them.
Whenever and wherever these chasms or schisms form---whether in
Italy, Uruguayor Egypt--the second culture comes to see the
government as remote, uncaring and corrupt; violence against the
government inevitably results.
ay out their
omailOes compuloilops 04.4traii41.0v4it on.
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of
be constantly watching for the formation of offbeat religious
cults and sects and in particular for ones who look upon the
present officialdom as unsacred. The Islamic cultists in Egypt,
for instance, justified killing officials by declaring them "pre-
Jahili" or pre-Moslems and thus freaks or demons.
--Fourth, "security" has got to be redefined. Police work
is not enough. Anything that is going to be effective has got to
be first base& wi a profound psychological analysis of the
when peoples feel left out of their soaieiteS If
- ,
open to? violent solutions in the name of returning-
the United Ststes
the next stage. would be to put American aid money and -influence
only in Places 'where we intend tocarry out prograls.: The lesson
going to finish.
not-to Start something' we are not
A second ano,VMost important lesson, would be to
be extremely cautious about too obvious American or any Western
influence in countries with pasts that lead to Paranoid states of
mind, like Iran. Finally, we should work in the confidence that,
while these movements are threatening and complex, they ARE
understandable and analyzable. They CAN be responded to---and
even avoided, with a little thought.
With our forward-looking and "progressive" culture, we had
assumed that nuclear warfare was the greatest danger to the
world. That is far from true, at least in terms of what is really
happening before our eyes and in terms of the real amount of
el hteg (ceRkodie. the Iran-Iraq war, L b Peru) that C00015
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Who would have dreamed that, alongside the most sweeping
progressive change mankind has ever known would march this
shadow of the past-as-alternative? What people next will try to
find itse future in its past?
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