Abstract

World culture war

The article focuses on the target of the fundamentalist social movements in the U.S. according to the author the emerging struggle is not between East and West, but within both, it is a struggle between the forces of globalization and the atavistic social movements that have sprung up to oppose it. Civilian populations, especially ethnic minorities, women and children, are caught in between. These movements have in common a desire for racial, ethnic and religious homogeneity, an apocalyptic vision of purification through bloodshed, and a patriarchal view of women and the family. The author calls them atavistic because of the way they yearn back to a mythic past, often the age of barbarism, when their nation, tribe or religion was great.