Even though the cold
war was an ideological war, the West decided to take it to religion
rather than ideology. So, the political currents that use the religion as a political
approach were escalated, during the Cold War, to fight against communism, as if
the communist is a synonym for atheism, and as if the West was against the
communism only for a religious reason.
The examples of these
political currents are the Republican Party in the United States, the
Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, and the Islamist groups in the Middle
East. The coalition between these currents was very clear in The Soviet–Afghan War, during the eighties
of the last century, when the Reagan administration trained the Islamist groups there, and supplied them with weapons.
So, when the Soviet
Union fell the ideological war was ended, to start the religious war. These
political currents become savages. In America, the Republican Party sponsored the
marriage between politics, religion, business, and media. This marriage gave
birth to the corruption that we see every day, for example when arms factories
paid a lot of money to Republican senators to oppose gun control bill. This
corruption explains why the Republican Party stands against social and economic
Justice, so it opposes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the health
insurance (Obama Care), same sex marriage, gun control, and raising the minimum
wage for ordinary workers. On the other hand, it defends only the big business
men, and justifies wars by using the media that wears the mask of piety, faith
and morals, such as Rupert Murdoch's media “Fox Network”.
In the Middle East,
because of the absence of democracy, the Islamist groups could not impose their
agenda in democratic means, like the Republican Party. So some of them took up
arms and turned to terrorism and political assassinations.
The structural
similarities between these currents do not appear only in the exploitation of
religion to justify their political agenda. They clearly appear also when both
justify their existence and extremism by the other's extremism. For example,
Bush justified his extremism by Al-Qaeda's extremism, ISIS justifies their
extremism by occupying Iraq, and Trump justifies his extremism by ISIS's
extremism.
Despite these
structural similarities, their ideological differences and the end of their
common goal (fighting the Soviet Union) led to a clash between the Conservative
Western currents and the Islamist groups.
But it seems that these
currents started to burn themselves in recent years. For example, 80 years of political
arrests did not perish the Muslim Brotherhood. But one year of fail in ruling
Egypt perished them. Similarly, nominate a decadent businessman is a big fall
that led to the defection of the Republican Party, division its leaders, and
alienated a large number of its supporters.
