[OPE] Hamas plays the racial card

The financial crisis is obviously bound to give rise to all sorts of more or less nutty theories, some of them taken out of the cupboard and dusted off for recycled use. If most people are mystified about what it all means, all sorts of theories are bound to be cooked up - and somebody or something has to be blamed. For instance,

The Palestinian militant group Hamas on Tuesday accused a "Jewish Lobby" in the United States of fomenting the global financial crisis. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1027306.html

It is true that there exists a powerful lobby for Jewish interests internationally, and that PNAC identifies with it, but Jewish financiers do not even agree among themselves about policy, and the same kinds of problems with bad loans also occur in Europe, Japan, and everywhere else. There just aren't sufficient Jewish financiers around to be able to control the world's financial systems and capital flows, and capitalism works according to the same sorts of principles everywhere, regardles of ethnicity or creed. If it had not been the subprime defaults, the same problems would have been triggered by other sorts of defaults, because a largely unregulated credit system will simply expand until empirically there really are big defaults - no one can really say in advance what the limits of credit provision are, until there are those big defaults which show what the limits are. The whole world has participated in a "live now, pay later" delirium which is now coming to an end.

Why raise this hoary old topic again? Well, the outfall of the financial crisis portends austerity ("belt-tightening") on a mass scale. Many people will be financially ruined. This leads not just to an intensification of competition and social conflicts, but also to great anger and violence (the subject of the latest Socialist Register). People will go looking for something or somebody to blame, projecting their own prejudices, including racist ones. This could become a serious political problem, particularly if the truth cannot even been told anymore because of vested interests - in which case people will form their own interpretations regardless of what is really happening, and those interpretations could lead directly to the persecution of particular groups of people. Right now the implications are still sinking in, but there are plenty ideologists waiting in the wings to offer their own idea of who is to blame. It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that in due course the whole way of thinking about the world we previously had will be ripped to shreds.

Jurriaan

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Received on Tue Oct 7 15:44:18 2008