Civilisations, racism, and the fantasy of divided loyalty

Sometimes racists are dumb as well as wrong

Since racist is an overused term, it’s best to define it up front. Racism is not about race, since ‘race’ as a concept is entirely vacuous, based neither on science nor any other kind of observation. There are no races.

What there are, however, are racists. Racists create arbitrary metrics of human social groups usually based on skin colour, but also on equally ridiculous premises, among them hair colour and texture, facial features and skull size.

Concepts of race were created to enslave people, driven by the desire to justify colonialism, slavery, and social inequality. The "metrics" were chosen because they provided a convenient, visible way to create a hierarchy and justify the exploitation of one group by another. This is what racists subscribe to.

Biologically, there are more characteristics that bind us than separate us. Racists know that but choose to live in a delusional world that suits their mission of dominance.

Since biological race has been shown to be complete nonsense, racists turn to other features of groups to create the same separation – such as culture. Culture is more important to most people as it is integral to identity.

Prominent among those in the last few decade who seek to recreate race in the image of identity and thus revive racism is Samuel Huntington, author of populist trash, but famous for “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996)” which remains one of the most influential - and controversial - frameworks in post-Cold War geopolitics.

Ignoring that the US is the latest hegemon to attempt to control the world through the dollarisation of almost everything, including trade and reserve currency, Huntington tries to support a thesis of a "multicivilisational" world. He identifies several major civilizations, including Western, Islamic, Sinic (Chinese), Hindu, and Orthodox.

"The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."

For racism, the collapsing of a group of people into a monolithic race with supposedly clearly identifiable characteristics and flaws, the underpinning of the Nazi Final Solution, is critical to its narrative. For Huntington and the modern Nazi race theory apologists, ‘civilisation’ are monoliths that neatly create borders between people, regardless of the diversity that is obvious within these civilisations. Too bad that inter-cultural ties have characterised all ‘civilisations’ since the beginning of time.

Huntington’s theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy that is dangerous because it encourages a "us vs. them" mentality. By framing the West and Islam as inherently incompatible, the theory provides a simplified intellectual justification for hawkish foreign policies and xenophobia, potentially creating the very "clash" it claimed to predict.

The persistence of the nation-state and globalisation is entirely ignored. These concepts are too ‘messy’ to assimilate into tidy racist narratives. The reality of migration and cross-cultural marriages and exchanges is simply ignored.

Which brings us to Zoe Booth, fangirl of Huntington and his racism, and generally obnoxious front person for Quillete, that pseudo-intellectual rag posing as heterodoxy, avid Zionist and generally loathsome shit-poster on X.

Here’s as example of the giddy intellectual heights of Booth’s commentary.

Someone I know did a teaching placement at Kogarah High School and reports many male students openly told her they wanted to join Hezbollah.

Stories that never happened. My auntie was told by a friend at the supermarket who heard it from her sister-in-law ...

And this:

I went from volunteering with Muslim refugees because I thought Islamophobia was the most pressing issue in Australia (lol, 20-yr-old-woman mentality) to coming to question whether Islam is compatible with Australian values. ... explains how my instinct to care was also the very impulse that certain Islamist organisations have learned to exploit.

A cute story of how to create three racists monolithic groupings in one post. Apparently, like the Jews that Goebbels spoke about, Muslims are just one thing. Islam is one thing. Islamist organisations are one thing.

At a simple level, this is so intellectually broken that it laughable. Five minutes of research demonstrates that all of these ‘categories’ are diverse. But the appeal is not to intellect, but to the racism in our population that Booth can dog-whistle.

But Booth mixes it up with some fat-shaming, reposting:

Shocking. The anti-Indian woman is morbidly obese and has zero accomplishments in life. I would’ve never expected this. They’re usually such winners.

But the Racism of the Week award goes to this piece in true One Neuron style.

In his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilisations, Samuel Huntington argued that post-Cold War conflict would be driven not by ideology or economics but by culture - specifically, by the irreconcilable differences between Western civilisation and Islam.

Of course, set up your homage to the racist prophet early.

Huntington would've viewed Shia Muslims publicly mourning Khamenei in Australia as a textbook case of civilisational fault lines playing out on Western soil.

Naturally, verballing an author for your own thesis is the proper Quillete, right-wing way.

Booth really just lives in a right-wing Murdoch-land bubble which cannot conceive of reality, let alone see it.

Australians routinely follow spiritual leaders overseas without anyone questioning their civic loyalty. Catholics look to the Pope. Buddhists to the Dalai Lama. Anglicans to Canterbury. Sikhs to Amritsar. Baháʼís to Haifa. Confucianism. Daoism. Jainism. Orthodox Christianity. Any of the 50 or so which have leaders in other countries. Amish. Brethren. Any of a dozen Reformed Christian religions. Mormoons. CJCLS. Sufism. Any of the hundreds of Hindu religions.

Literally, of the thousands of religions represented in Australia, none have local leaders. Yet somehow only Muslims are accused of divided allegiance.

Let’s not mince words. Booth hates most Australians and will declare they are:

“minority groups asserting loyalty to a figure and a theology that are explicitly hostile to the society hosting them.”

Apparently, most Australians are disloyal simply because, in Booth’s addled brain, loyalty to Australia and your religion cannot coexist. Which mainly makes it her problem. Doubtless, when Sihks help out in the next natural disaster, she will pen a hit piece asking “So, where’s their loyalty, mate?”

So, can you follow Khamenei's teaching and uphold Australian values simultaneously? I don't see how.

How telling that she can acknowledge her lack of intellectual capacity so readily, when every other Australian is just cool with separating civic and religious loyalties and can operate in both worlds.

The Shia doctrine of velayat-e faqih holds that divine law must govern all of society and that the supreme leader is its earthly custodian. In other words, this is not a private faith that can be quietly compartmentalised. It is an explicitly political theology.

Trying to sound authoritative might fool Booth’s fanTERFs and the One Neuron crowd. But it’s just lies packaged in half-truth.

Lebanese, Iraqi, and diaspora Shia communities vary widely in their acceptance of velayat-e faqih. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani (born 1930) is the preeminent Shia marja' (religious authority) and leader of the Hawza (seminary) in Najaf, Iraq, holding this position since 1993. Based in Najaf, he is a major influence in Iraq, advocating for non-sectarianism, democracy, and civilian rule, and famously met Pope Francis in 2021 to promote peace and coexistence.

Booth’s statements echo another well-known Islam hater. Christopher Hitchen’s rhetoric on religion was shrill and ignorant. As one of Booth's fellow failed left advocates, Hitchen gathered a flock of ardent worshippers prepared to put ideology over real life experience, economics and reality as drivers of human behaviour.

In some of his most shrill moments, Hitchens asserted that conquistadors were not agents of monarchies searching for wealth, but fervent believers who insisted on brutal punishment for moral failing. He swallowed the “saving of souls” dogma entirely. The enormous landholdings of Churches are apparently, entirely coincidental to spiritual subjugation; as are their feudal structures. The drivers were not power or wealth, just a desire to indoctrinate.

Social services for people provided by the Church were a kind of extortion to hold on to the faithful, not just an expression of normal human altruism that exists independently of any religious rationale. The expansion of kingdoms is just an adjunct to the expansion of a divine kingdom. Colonialism, extremism, militarism, by Hitchen's measure, just came about because some people read a holy book.

Hitchens, and by extension, Booth, are profoundly wrong (or stupid) on all levels. No serious neurologist actually considers religion a driver of behaviour. They have discovered, as Robert Sapolsky demonstrates, that the dopamine rush that precedes self-righteous punishment of others is the actual driver of religious fervour. They have discovered that religion is a bonding agent, not a driver. No holy doctrine nor book ever caused any behaviour. To say so is profoundly unscientific - ironically for a bunch of old white men who assert their loyalty to science over religion.

And, at a social level, attachment to nations, companies, sports clubs, neighbourhoods, choirs, drinking buddies and ‘hobby’ groups are more important to most people than religion. Those kinds of groupings that Booth pretends to care about. Ironically, no gay Christian wonders if her allegiance to the Broncos or her penchant for climbing is a pitiable failure – a faultline.

Booth, like Hitchens, subscribes to a sad paradigm of the past which has long been shown to be both useless for analysis, useful to racists and dangerous to society. Their bland depiction of a rich human landscape allows both of them to come up with the absurdities of the modern Right.

Mourning Khamenei is a public statement. Australia is built on the premise that women, gays, atheists, Jews, Christians and Muslims are all equal, a premise Khamenei spent his life trying to destroy. You cannot venerate the man and honour the country at the same time. Pick one.

If you have read this far, you will understand my counter-exhortation. Here it is.

Don’t listen to Zoe Booth. She is a failed thinker.

Those who mourn Khamenei may indeed believe in no separation of religion and state. They may have recognised how their country of origin was first denied its own wealth, then a despot installed to protect US interests, followed by a revolution that rejected the hegemony and the exploitative modes it represented, imposing strong sanctions on the celebration of imported US culture.

They may feel some pity for an Australia that must grovel to the US and absorb the void of ethics that characterises its ‘Techbros’. They might shake their heads at our pitiful willingness to bless billionaires. They may mourn that we are so complacent towards a militarist, colonialist, racist apartheid ethno-state that we cannot bring ourselves to reject its Zionist ideology entirely. They might observe that the country who 'cared so deeply' about gay rights took a decade to acknowledge marriage rights for gay people, despite two-thirds of Australians supporting this.

But, of one thing I am sure. Since the evidence is overwhelming that they have committed no crime, nor hate us, nor support violence and live quietly among us, we can accept that their loyalty is to some real community values, not Murdoch’s shrill doctrines.