[Marxism] Response to Macleans magazine racist cover story

[Louis Proyect]

Maclean's magazine goes over-the-top with racist, provocative cover story

For some time now, Maclean's has been morphing from a rather staid 
mouthpiece of Canada's elites into a shrill, increasingly offensive 
and downright racist publication. Even before they went right 
over-the-top, the founders of Seven Oaks were cranky about what was, 
at least until recently, Canada's "magazine of record". When we 
starting our modest little on-line journal, we printed promotional 
stickers with an unsubtle wink to the vocabulary of television 
censorship: "Forget Maclean's, Read SevenOaksMag.com".

This week's issue of Maclean's (October 23-30, 2006), however, 
renders obsolete such corny little pokes in the eye at what has 
become a glossy weekly of hate mongering. The cover and accompanying 
story, "Why the future belongs to Islam," written by Mark Steyn, is 
an overtly racist piece of propaganda.

At the end of this article I've included Maclean's contact 
information, for those individuals and organizations that feel 
compelled to make formal complaints or mount letters to the editor 
campaigns. At a minimum people should encourage unsubscription (for 
anyone one might know who still subscribes to the decreasingly 
popular magazine) and to generally expose this outrageous racist 
provocation. Of specific concern is the fact that Maclean's still 
features "teacher subscription rates" for classrooms and school 
libraries: Among other things educators and school administrators 
should be asked to cancel their orders.

Before I briefly describe the putrid "thesis" of the article, a 
description of the cover picture is in order. The dark, ominous image 
features a background mass of people entirely covered in full black 
face veil. In the foreground, a young pre-teenaged girl -- the only 
one with her face uncovered -- looks up with a dark menacing stare. 
The subheading on the cover hints at Steyn's argument: "The Muslim 
world has youth, numbers and global ambition. The West is old, barren 
and exhausted."

The fear mongering rolls out from there, barren of logic and 
exhausting all the old racist notions imaginable. Steyn asserts that 
the "Muslim World" -- which is defined, of course, to 'other' even 
and especially those of Muslim faith who live within and/or are 
citizens of the "western" world -- represents a menace that threatens 
to overcome good, non-Muslim (though he doesn't identify Christian 
specifically), "western civilization". Although the article focuses 
on the influx of Muslim populations into Europe, the fear mongering 
is obviously designed to be universal. Europe, Steyn laments, is "too 
enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia..."

Steyn's language mirrors some of the far-right rhetoric warning of a 
"reconquista" of the United States by Mexicans and other Latin 
Americans (much of the southwest United States was, after all, stolen 
through war from Mexico). This alone makes his writing despicable. 
Seen within the "War on Terror" hysteria aimed at criminalizing 
Muslims in general, the rise of Islamophobia fanned to help at once 
justify war abroad and repression at home, and the particular context 
of the ongoing outrage at the infamous cartoons, Steyn's article must 
be understood as a deliberate, hateful and provocative act.

Some brief excerpts should suffice to illustrate the nature of the 
article, beginning with the author's adoringly absurd attempt to 
identify the "social democratic welfare state" as a cause of 
terrorism and societal decline.

-"Big government is a national security threat: it increases your 
vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely 
you'll be able to summon the will to rebuff it."

-"The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans 
who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a 
bunch of foreigners blow up their capital." [The fascists won that 
"civil war", given their superior foreign backing from Germany and 
Italy (Steyn doesn't tell us which side he'd have been on), and the 
2004 ousting of their Iraq War supporting government is among the 
Spanish people's greatest victories since the end of Franco.]

-"In the old day's the white man settled the Indian territory. Now 
the followers of the badland's radical imams settle the metropolis. 
And another difference: In the old days, the Injuns had bows and 
arrows and the cavalry had rifles. In today's Indian territory, 
countries that can't feed their own people have nuclear weapons."
[I think Steyn just converted the North Koreans to Islam. He also 
unwittingly confirmed what leftists and indigenous activists are 
always told to stop bringing up: That there is a direct connection 
between the racist, colonialist genesis of today's imperial centres 
and their racist, neo-colonialist war-making in the 
hinterlands/"Injun territory" of today.]

-"Of course, not all Muslims support terrorists -- though enough of 
them share their basic objectives (the wish to live under Islamic law 
in Europe and North America) to function wittingly or otherwise as 
the 'good cop' end of an Islamic good cop/bad cop routine. But, at 
the very minimum, this fast-moving demographic transformation 
provides a huge comfort zone for the jihad to move around in."

Anyway, I wish I could conclude by saying that it is only the 
wing-nut editorial board of Maclean's we need to worry about, but 
sadly it's getting harder all the time to distinguish the 
Maclean's/National Post "bad cop" from the Globe and Mail "good cop" 
in their right-wing routine.

In terms of the future belonging to Islam, let us hope that the 
future belongs to people of all faiths, ethnicities, and backgrounds, 
who will learn to live together on our fragile planet in equality, 
genuine sustainability and justice. We might also wish for a future 
where the peoples of the Middle East and Central Asia, in particular, 
will no longer have to live under the gun of wars of occupation and 
resource-theft. Surely the future, in fact, can and should belong to 
the world's poor majority, so long excluded, marginalized, scorned, 
criminalized, and blamed for their own oppression.

The good news is that Maclean's, the National Post and the rest of 
the corporate print media are in sharp decline, their influence ever 
waning, albeit too gradually. The more determined we are in 
developing and popularizing critical, independent media and in 
organizing against empire-building and racism in all its forms, the 
sooner Maclean's will belong to the past, and the sooner the future 
will belong to all of us.

Derrick O'Keefe
www.SevenOaksMag.com