Demanding the Impossible Read Online Free Page A

those nice buildings. It seemed almost like a concentration camp. You have military barracks for immigrant workers. They just seem like self-employed men who sold themselves into slavery. Many of them came from Nepal, Indonesia, or the Philippines. And for four years, they take away the workers’ passports and claim that it is a safe way to pay the stipend. They are not even free to leave. They have to work without air-conditioning where the temperature in summer rises to 57ºC. Literally, in this temperature, if you step out you can fry eggs without any problem. And they are paid $150 per month out of which the company takes some for food.
    Now comes the beauty: they want them to be invisible . On Friday, they are free to visit the city. But to prevent them from going to stores, they found an ingenious solution. Every Friday, entry into a shopping mall is prohibited to single men – officially, to maintain the family spirit in the malls; but this, of course, is only an excuse. Of course, all these workers are single. So under the pretext of protecting the family, they are prohibited from going to shopping malls on the only day they are free. This is all just waiting to explode. It’s interesting what is happening in all these places – Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai. This is slavery and it will just explode.

7
Who Is Afraid of a Failed Revolution?
    We are now witnessing all these explosions, from Egypt to Tunisia. And what if they just end up as a mere revolutionary episode? In these economically stressed times, why is it that we are expanding the war, why is the US administration expanding the war in Afghanistan?
    SŽ: What I always repeat is that the West itself created the problem here: this rise of religious fundamentalism is strictly an effect of the retreat of the left. You can see it, for example, in Afghanistan. Just 40 years ago Afghanistan was an extremely secular, tolerant Middle East Muslim country. There was a king who was a kind of pro-Western secular technocrat and a very strong local communist party. Then what happened? The communist party forced a coup d’état and the Soviet Union and the West intervened with Americans backing up the Muslim fundamentalists, so now we have fundamentalist Afghanistan. Isn’t this a nice paradox? It is not an old traditional fundamentalist society that we should enlighten, but, in every way, it became entangled in world politics, which made it fundamentalist. With the global liberal system, we generated fundamentalism. It’s the same in all Arab countries.
    I claim that this rise of religious fundamentalism is strictly the other side of the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries. We tend to forget how strong the secular left was in the Arab countries. It played a pretty honorable role. It wasn’t just an instrument of the Soviet Union in Syria, Iraq, or even in Egypt. And we all know, for example, what was probably the greatest crime of the Egyptian politician Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the mid-60s, he basically killed all the communists. I often quote Walter Benjamin, who said: “Every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution.” This is perhaps more pertinent today than ever.
    Liberals like to point out similarities between left and right “extremisms”: Hitler’s terror and camps imitated Bolshevik terror, the Leninist party is today alive in al Qaida – yes, but what does all this mean? It can also be read as an indication of how fascism literally replaces (takes the place of) the leftist revolution: its rise is the left’s failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, dissatisfaction, which the left was not able to mobilize. Is the rise of radical Islamism not exactly correlative to the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries? Where did this secular tradition disappear? This should be our message to center liberals: “Ah, you got rid of us, the extreme left, and now you have religious