NP Riane Eisle interview

[Doug Millison]

Worth reading, here's an excerpt.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11681

"[...]] Terror and hate have a context. My research shows that underneath
conventional classifications -- religious versus secular, tribal versus
industrial, right versus left, capitalist versus communist -- are two
underlying ways of structuring relations. They're actually two opposite
poles, with a continuum in between. At one end of this continuum is the
dominator society. Dominator societies have existed throughout history and
have the same basic plan, whether it's Attila's Huns, Hitler's Germany or
the Taliban's Afghanistan. These societies consist of rigid top-down
rankings, of "superiors" over "inferiors," men over women, adults over
children, "in-groups" over "out-groups" -- rankings backed up by force and
the threat of force in homes, in society, and between societies in chronic
wars. Terror is built into the dominator system, and these bombings are the
latest manifestation of that fact. Muslim fundamentalists are extremely
dominator, in a bizarrely feudal way. It's as if they have one foot in the
Middle Ages and another in our postmodern world with its powerful
technologies of communication and destruction.  [...]  I want to be clear
that this isn't an anti-Muslim diatribe. There are dominator elements in
every country, and we've seen a worldwide dominator regression in recent
years. We see it in multinational sweatshops, environmental rollbacks, the
widening gap between haves and have-nots, the IMF's structural-adjustment
policies. And we see it in resurgent religious fundamentalism, in the East
and West, aimed at putting women back in "their place" and reinstating the
absolute authority of the father. [...] in rigid dominator families,
whether in the Muslim world or elsewhere, you learn from childhood that
it's okay to impose your will by force on those weaker than you -- women
and children -- that it's your God-given right to do so. And you learn
never to express your anger or resentment against those who cause you pain,
for fear of more pain. So you have a lot of stored rage that can be
redirected toward "out-groups," in pogroms and lynchings and "holy wars."
[...] Our policies -- for example, insistence on cutbacks in social
services and privatization by debtor nations, alliances with oppressive
dictatorships -- have caused enormous suffering. But the goal of this
terrorism is not justice or equity for the women, children and men who live
in Arab countries. Osama bin Laden has enormous wealth, but does he do
anything to help the hungry Afghan people? Do you realize how wealthy the
Saudi elites are, in contrast to the mass of Arab people? No, this
terrorism is about control and power through fear and force. They want to
be the world's governing economic, religious and political power, and the
West has that power. [...] Where dictators or repressive mullahs rule, they
cultivate hatred of the U.S., and the West in general, for two reasons. One
is fear of our cultural influence -- freedom for women, the undermining of
traditional authority, and Western democracy, as imperfect as it is. They
see the threat this poses to their domination, and to a system based on
rigid rankings. The other reason is that fanning hatred against the West
deflects anger and rebellion from themselves. That keeps the people from
turning against the elites, who benefit enormously from their ties to the
West, while few if any of these benefits go to the average Arab. [...] "



Doug Millison - Writer/Editor/Web Editorial Consultant
millison at online-journalist.com
www.Online-Journalist.com