Bush has often said, "They hate our freedom," and I've always dismissed it as more spin. Now I realise he was right, they do hate our freedom. He just forgot to tell us who "they" were.

I think "they" are the leaders of multi-national corporations, polititions who want their way and all the goodies for playing the game, and the extreme fundamentalist who believe we all have to do it their way. They hate our freedoms. Thay think we have too much freedom.

Well, they can just hate our freedom, I love it to much to give it up. Our founding fathers knew what they were doing when they set up a secular government with relilgious freedom. You can believe any thling you want, but laws need to be made on a balance facts and ethics (human decency, not religion). They gave us a way to hold elected officals accountable, and we have to power to have corporate controls reinstated for the protection of our safety and freedoms.

Democracy is like sex, you need to participate.

I think that what neocons, militant Islamists & fundamentalist Christians are fighting is Renaissance modernity and the Enlightenment project itself.
The intellectuals of the Renaissance said man, that is, the individual human being, was the measure of everything.
The intellectuals of the Enlightenment said that human beings have the capacity, even the duty, through the universal capacity to reason, to transform the world to make existence and well-being more hospitable to the individual human being.
These assertions are anathema to anyone who believes the literal expression of religion or fuses the power of money with some construction of infinite wisdom through elite social place.
Remember that the Enlightenment so frightened Europe that the Congress of Vienna was convened by unlikely partners.
I believe Karl Marx and every author of totalizing ideology would have sympathized with Metternich.
The implications of the Enlightenment have yet to be fully played out.
Let the comfortably adhering beware.

See, the thing is, fundamentalist Christianity, militant Islam, and neo-conservatism/neo-liberalism are not throwbacks to medieval times; they are products of the Enlightnenment, respun according to the dominating myths of the era.

Fundamentalist Christianity, although much of its rhetoric seems medieval in nature, is purely reactionary, and borrows heavily from one particular body of thought that comes out of the Enlightenment. Prior to the Renaissance (and indeed, after it), the Western, primarily Judeo-Christian view of history has been that it's one long epic--it has a beginning, it will have an end, and all of it is moving toward one particular goal. Christians and Jews (and Muslims as well) have always believed this; it is tied intimately with the religions. But the Enlightenment was unable to break away from this view of history. Instead, it merely changed the ends of the characters and the plot of history. One movement in particular, Positivism, held that all humanity is indeed moving toward one particular goal. Many thinkers believed that as humanity gains more knowledge, specifically scientific knowledge, humans will overcome scarcity, and as more societies embrace science (which they for some reason believed to be inevitable), they will become more alike. The new wave of Fundamentalist Christianity turns the idea of scientific knowledge and secular society on its head, but it's belief system is old-style Christianity recast in the Enlightenment and Positivist lens.

Militant Islam is a similar story. It is a thoroughly modern invention, although it is harshly anti-Liberal. From the West, it has borrowed the idea of universal civilization, and the 19th-century anarchists' view of change and acts of spectacular violence. Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah have embraced the legacies of Western empires, if not their societies. They have taken full advantage of the global free market and the rise of high technology. Rather than rejecting Western ideas and concepts, they have simply warped them for their own ends. Bin Laden and other militant leaders have the similar view of history, that spectacualr acts of violence can change the world and will create a strong Arab state that will compete with and dominate the West. In its thinking, on economics, on the nature of the state and the role of religion, Al Qaeda and others are thoroughly modern.

As John Gray details in his book, Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern, both Fascism and Communism were described as assaults on Western civilization when in fact, they were thoroughly Western, modern projects. Both ideologies, described their type of civilization as inevitable, a necessary consequence of the forces of history (historical materialism for Marx). Although it was sharply anti-Christian, Marxism adopted and spun the Christian story perfectly. Fascism was similar, borrowing from all sorts of Western philosophies, and its leaders saw its view of the State as the logical end of modernization--they thus put Hegel and Nietzsche and combined them with frighteningly effective realpolitik.

Neo-conservatism is the bastard child of Positivism. Notice the arrogance that came out of right-wing think tanks following the fall of the Soviet Union. Francis Fukuyama declared "the end of history." If there's a view more ignorant, I can't imagine what it is. The view of the Rumsfelds, the Cheneys, the Wolfowitzes, Feiths, Fukuyamas, and Kristols, is that as socities become more industrial--more modern, as we've chosen to define it--they will inevitably become more capitalistic, more democratic. This is why the IMF has insisted that globalism is here to stay, and why they have insisted that de-regulation is the cure-all for all economic ills. That policy, as most of us know, has had mixed results at best. This is why Dick Cheney was so adamant that we'd be greeted as liberators in Iraq, and why Bill Kristol thinks a global US Empire is the only logical course for history to take. These beliefs are at least as zealous as al Qaeda's, and at leats as dangerous.

In John Gray's words, the ruling myth of our day is the modernity is a single condition, everywhere the same and always benevolent. Fundamentalist Christianity and Islam believe this, as did Communists and Fascists, and now neo-conservatives. All of them believe their own views to be the only truly "modern" ideas, and all products of the Enlightenment.

I find it extremely hard to believe that fundamentalist Christianity & Islam are products of the Enlightenment.
The common denominator of both is the literal interpretation of scripture.
I have yet to see one Enlightenment text that promulgates the literal interpretation of anything.
The Enlightenment employed no totalizing ideology, no panacea, no cures, and asserted no historical forces.
Its only assertion was that through the altruistic application of reason (universal), human beings could transform their world.
And they did. And they have. And fundamentalists are scared Metternichs.

In John Gray's words, the ruling myth of our day is the modernity is a single condition,

This is a classic assertion of a totalizing ideology.

This is why Dick Cheney was so adamant that we'd be greeted as liberators in Iraq, and why Bill Kristol thinks a global US Empire is the only logical course for history to take. These beliefs are at least as zealous as al Qaeda's, and at leats as dangerous.

Yet more totalizing ideology.
Marx & Metternich would be so proud.

"Its only assertion was that through the altruistic application of reason (universal), human beings could transform their world."

Fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam, as well as neoconservativism and neoliberalism, all lay claim to transformation of the world through their individual schools of reason, each insisting that their discipline is the universally correct one. They all turn out to be self-serving, megalomaniacal liars.