Letter: More on secularism

I agree with Hein Htet Kyaw’s main argument, but want to register a few initial queries and reservations.

The USA assisted Islamist movements in Afghanistan in their battle against the Russian occupation (1979-88). But it was not “resurrecting” them, and did not have a control over them it later lost. For the US strategists, it was enough that the Islamist movements tied down and undermined Moscow.

The rise of political Islam as a right-wing force channelling social rebellion in the Middle East and elsewhere was, as Hein says, “locally rooted”. It was not invented by the USA, any more than movements like Trump’s and the Evangelical right in the USA, the Brexiters in Britain, Le Pen in France, etc. were invented by Vladimir Putin (who nonetheless helped them).

I think I know what Hein is saying, but using the term “privileged” to describe white middle-class young people in Western Europe, USA, Australia, etc. is wrong, I think. Those people are much better off both materially and in civil rights than people in Myanmar. But that is not a privilege (a “peculiar benefit, advantage, or favour” granted by an authority, as the dictionary defines it).

It is a victory: the residual result of decades of labour movement effort on the basis of the possibilities opened up by capitalist development. Privileges, we seek to end; those improved conditions, we seek to level everyone up to.

And beyond. Those middle-class young people are more “free to choose their own genders and lifestyles, free of social pressures” than poorer people in poorer countries. But still far from entirely free. And young people in migrant communities in countries like Britain sometimes suffer more religion-based conformist pressure in their families and communities than their counterparts in their parents’ countries of origin.

Martin Thomas, London