Was he right about Islam?

They share a lot of the same themes, but come to different conclusions/politics. Baudrillard was a Nihilist, and didn't believe in any singularity. He'd find the general idea of Accelerationism as a pipe dream. Baudrillard's idea that "the millenium will never arrive" of perpetual slow motion catastrophe that never reaches an end, is in direct contrast to Accelerationist eschatological ideas.

Name the fucking man you fucking autist. Was WHO right about Islam?

>not recognizing Borderrideuzaultoeurard

going to post some of my favorite Baudrillard stuff. Here is part of the introduction to Transparency of Evil, in the chapter After the Orgy

The Heresy of Denying Reality, from Exiles of Dialogue

Micheal Jackson the Child Prosthesis, from Transparency of Evil, chapter: Transexuality

Dogs on a Luggage Carousel, Death and Flying from Impossible Exchange

This one hit a little close to home since I have a pet python and I'm emotionally empty.

I think this is in Impossible Exchange as well, but I'd need to check that.

Baudrillarzard.

"Plural identities, double lives, objective chance or variable-geometry destinies - all this seems very much like the invention of artificial, substitute fates. Sex, genes, networks, desires and partners-everything now falls within the ambit of change and exchange. Destiny, pain - everything is becoming optional. Death itself is an option. The very sign of birth, your astrological sign, will one day be optionally available in a future Zodiacal Surgery Institute, where, under certain conditions, you will be able to change your birth sign the way you can change your face today. "

Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange.

This should probably answer your question on whether he was "redpilled" (answer: absolutely not). But neither are Accelerationists, so you might want to reconsider whether you actually like Nick Land.

When people say stuff like this, though, my question is always: why Islam? Why is that the primary rallying point for terror against capitalist hegemony and not, for example, radical environmentalism or Turanic ultranationalism? It's easy to posit an alternative world where there is no Islam and claim "if it wasn't Islam, it would be something else", but that ignores the fact that in the world as it currently exists, Islamism is the primary force and motivator for anti-global capitalism extremism.

Nothing against Baudrillard, though, he's great.

Isn't it simply because the areas that have been fucked the hardest post-WW2 have happened to be Muslim? The British and the French did their best to keep a dying Ottoman Empire afloat for as long as they could, and then drew up arbitrary borders to ensure internal conflict so that the region would remain relatively weak and disjointed.
Couple that with USSR and US adventurism and the picture becomes a little clearer.
>radical environmentalism
It's funny you mention that because I'm pretty sure I read some treatise by Osama that was green peace-tier environmentalism. I'll look for it and post it.

>Isn't it simply because the areas that have been fucked the hardest post-WW2 have happened to be Muslim? The British and the French did their best to keep a dying Ottoman Empire afloat for as long as they could, and then drew up arbitrary borders to ensure internal conflict so that the region would remain relatively weak and disjointed.

The issue with this theory is that the European powers had their lightest touch socially, culturally, and even economically in the MENA countries, in large part because the cultures were highly resistant to change, and also because the Ottomans still existed. Suffering and the transformation of society was much greater and much more rapid in places like the Belgian Congo, and the British affected India on a much deeper level than they affected, for example, Egypt. And the French and British left Syria, Iraq, etc before they left Africa and Southeast Asia. Africa and SE Asia weren't any stronger or cohesive than the Middle East. However, we don't have radical pan-African terror, nor do we see Hindus in the UK or the US engaging in radical extremism out of postcolonial resentments.

The most important cause for the rise of Islamic extremism isn't pre WW2 colonialism, but cold war geopolitics. In the 50s you had the rise of the secular, democratic, socialists like Nasser and the Ba'athists in the Middle East. Islams influence on politics was waning. There's a video on YouTube that shows Nasser openly mocking the Muslim Brotherhoods demands for forcing women to wear hijab, something that would make liberals in West uneasy today.

Nasser was the most important leader in the middle East and had huge influence over the politics of both Syria and Iraq. Egypt, along with India, Indonesia, Yugoslavia and a few other countries started what was known as the Non-Aligned Movement, whose goals were to ensure the members nations sovereignty and independence from both the West and the Soviet Bloc. Naturally, the Americans didn't like this and were hostile to all these nations, which forced them to have a closer relationship with the Soviets.

In the subsequent years, the Arab Israeli wars destroyed Nasserism, and Islamism, backed by Israel, Saudi Arabia (two of the west's biggest allies in the ME) and the West, began to take hold again.

Islamism made a major come back in the 70s and 80s, with the Iranian Revolution, American funding of Islamists in Afghanistan against the Soviets, Israel's propping up of the Hamas as a counterweight to the largely secular PLO, and Assad's repurposing of suicide missions(initially used by Shia Iran as a way to clear up minefields) as an offensive tactic in the Palestine conflict.

Related

youtu.be/_ZIqdrFeFBk

pseud

>why Islam? Why is that the primary rallying point for terror against capitalist hegemony and not, for example, radical environmentalism or Turanic ultranationalism?
Only one of those three is a great world religion.

If you have a problem with the West you probably want to be something of a comparable size.

>if Islam dominated the world, terrorism would rise against Islam, for it is the world, the globe itself, which resists globalization
Pretty good.

However, when dominating far, far less than the world, Islam did rise against Islam, as it continues to do so.

>This is precisely where the crucial point lies — in the total misunderstanding on the part of Western philosophy, on the part of the Enlightenment, of the relation between Good and Evil. We believe naively that the progress of Good, its advance in all fields (the sciences, technology, democracy, human rights), corresponds to a defeat of Evil. No one seems to have understood that Good and Evil advance together, as part of the same movement. The triumph of the one does not eclipse the other — far from it. In metaphysical terms, Evil is regarded as an accidental mishap, but this axiom, from which all the Manichaean forms of the struggle of Good against Evil derive, is illusory. Good does not conquer Evil, nor indeed does the reverse happen: they are at once both irreducible to each other and inextricably interrelated. Ultimately, Good could thwart Evil only by ceasing to be Good since, by seizing for itself a global monopoly of power, it gives rise, by that very act, to a blowback of a proportionate violence.
Reminds me of Voegelin against the immanentization of the Eschaton done by political religions.

The myth of a final battle between Good and Evil is quite prevalent, isn't it? It goes all the way back to the book of Daniel.

>In the traditional universe, there was still a balance between Good and Evil, in accordance with a dialectical relation which maintained the tension and equilibrium of the moral universe, come what may — not unlike the way the confrontation of the two powers in the Cold War maintained the balance of terror. There was, then, no supremacy of the one over the other. As soon as there was a total extrapolation of Good (hegemony of the positive over any form of negativity, exclusion of death and of any potential adverse force — triumph of the values of Good all along the line), that balance was upset. From this point on, the equilibrium was gone, and it was as though Evil regained an invisible autonomy, henceforward developing exponentially.

>Up to the present, this integrative power has largely succeeded in absorbing and resolving any crisis, any negativity, creating, as it did so, a situation of the deepest despair (not only for the disinherited, but for the pampered and privileged too, in their radical comfort). The fundamental change now is that the terrorists have ceased to commit suicide for no return; they are now bringing their own deaths to bear in an effective, offensive manner, in the service of an intuitive strategic insight which is quite simply a sense of the immense fragility of the opponent — a sense that a system which has arrived at its quasi-perfection can, by that very token, be ignited by the slightest spark. They have succeeded in turning their own deaths into an absolute weapon against a system that operates on the basis of the exclusion of death, a system whose ideal is an ideal of zero deaths. Every zero-death system is a zero-sum-game system. And all the means of deterrence and destruction can do nothing against an enemy who has already turned his death into a counterstrike weapon. "What does the American bombing matter? Our men are as eager to die as the Americans are to live!" Hence the nonequivalence of the four thousand deaths inflicted at a stroke on a zero-death system.
Can I say Amen yet?

Yes, OP, I do believe Baudrillard was quite on the right track.

>Islamism is the primary force and motivator for anti-global capitalism extremism.

t. atheist western leftist. Their motivation is moral not economic. When hardliners in Iran call the US The Great Satan it isnt because they think the US is the devil, they think what it represents is small s satan (as in Job) that tempts the faithful to iniquity.

Islam has no problems with capitalism per se (Muhammad was an independent trader before he found Allah). It has problems in the modern era with actual political control, it has problems in general with degeneracy evident in western culture, and it has problems theologically with their historical baggage regarding the west as the Dar al Harb, the instructed target of the infinite Jihad as given by the prophet.

>We would pardon them any violence if it were not given media exposure ("terrorism would be nothing without the media"). But this is all illusion. There is no "good" use of the media; the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror, and they work in both directions.

>The repression of terrorism spirals around as unpredictably as the terrorist act itself. No one knows where it will stop, or what turnabouts there may yet be. There is no possible distinction, at the level of images and information, between the spectacular and the symbolic, no possible distinction between the "crime" and the crackdown.

>We try retrospectively to impose some kind of meaning on it, to find some kind of interpretation. But there is none. And it is the radicality of the spectacle, the brutality of the spectacle, which alone is original and irreducible. The spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle upon us.
Seems Baudrillard's the only guy who understanding that the terrorists do the killing and the mass media do the terrorism.