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SPEAKING FREELY
Hobbesian hell in the making
By Gaurang Bhatt
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.
Please click here if you are interested in
contributing.
There is surely a serious problem brewing in the world's need for an affordable
and reliable supply of energy. Ever since Winston Churchill and Gertrude Bell
drew a map of the current Iraq, supposedly on a breakfast napkin, to Franklin D
Roosevelt's historic meeting and agreement with King Ibn Saud on an American
ship, the policies of the British and their successor hegemon, America, have
been based on ensuring reliable access to cheap oil to fuel economic progress.
The failed American policy of making the Shah of Iran the US's linchpin and the
withdrawal from Saudi Arabia, due to Osama bin Laden's jihad, led to the
foolish misadventure of the conquest and occupation of Iraq and the ongoing
disaster. The occupation is an unmitigated catastrophe destined for a
withdrawal, with cutting of losses due to the fickle attention span and
intolerance for casualties by the American public. They lack the intellectual
capacity or insight to understand any complexity.
A recent article by Naomi Klein in reference to the Abu Ghraib atrocities
evaluated in parallel to the French experience in Algiers, illuminates the
problem. The French general taxed with the atrocities of the Battle of Algiers
by a group of reporters put the quintessential question to them, whether they
believed, like he, and the then-government did, that they wished to continue
the occupation and exploitation of Algeria. If they did, then the end would
justify the means and the moral quibbling was idle rhetoric because in real
life the old adage stood on its head and the end always justified the means.
An honest and pragmatic book by Central Intelligence Agency analyst "Anonymous"
applauds bin Laden's genius and lays out a ruthless plan of combating it. The
grievances of Muslims are genuine, despite their unacceptable and dastardly
means to redress them. The American support of tyrannical and corrupt
kleptocracies in the Muslim world and America's connivance and tacit support of
Israeli tyranny and occupation of Palestinian lands is a raging fire that
cannot be extinguished, or even contained, by public relations disinformation
or President George W Bush inviting Muslim clerics for a post-Id Iftar
(breaking of the fast) dinner and proclaiming Islam a religion of peace.
Islam has never been a religion of peace. Mohammed, unlike any other prior
prophet or future one, resorted to arms as a means to spread his doctrine. His
massacre of dissenting innocent Jews and his deathbed statement that there
should be no other religion in Arabia contrasts sharply with Christ's statement
that "there are many paths to my father's mansion". Not that Christianity, as
practiced by the West, has been a benign force. It was used to justify slavery
and colonial exploitation without mercy, even for fellow Christians, in the
murderous mayhem of the Crusaders toward fellow Christians who were Orthodox in
the Byzantine, and president William McKinley toward Filipinos.
The truth is that the battlelines have been drawn between the two follies,
Christianity and Islam, both with their falsely arrogant certitudes about a
single god who doesn't exist. Unlike the Crusades and then-prevalent blind
faith that led gullible and ignorant masses to death by false promise of the
rewards of an eternal heaven, for a pecuniary benefit by a corrupt Pope, the
current battle is for the survival and supremacy of the West.
For Islam, devoid of a reformation and renaissance, the reasons for this
Armageddon are the same. It is a backward-looking religion with a nostalgia for
old glory, just like current-day Britain. It is incapable of reform or
democracy, because the true believers, unlike the present-day Jews, Christians
and Hindus (except for a minority), who understand that there never was and
never will be a red telephone by which God conveys a direct voiced message to
human beings, still fervently believe that their scriptures are the word of God
and thus incontestable and immune to modification or multiple interpretations.
The large majority of Muslims believes that the Koran is the word of God. Only
ignorant America comes close to the Muslims in this inane stupidity, proven by
the growing numbers of evangelists and the exploitation of the American tax
code by rich fanatics to establish think-tanks to propagate their unholy agenda
to the detriment of the nation. These are not real think-tanks to promote
intelligent debate for the public good, but Trojan Horses and tax-sheltered
propaganda machines to subvert public good and legislate biased laws to promote
the vested interests of rich and powerful minorities and a funding resource to
brainwash the naive youth.
Thus, the very concept of secular laws and the will of the majority is an
unacceptable heresy to believing Muslims, and a mere loophole to be bypassed by
Christian fanatics and rich minorities. What is worse is that dissident
intellectuals or humanists become branded as apostates, who can be justifiably
terminated by blessed sanction of zealot mullahs and their blind, equally
zealous, followers in Muslim countries and pariah liberals in the evangelistic
American state.
This is not a milieu for the flourishing of a democratic culture. The European
Union, though more benignly inclined toward its indigenous population, has
revolted against its prior folly of liberal asylum and immigration policies,
which had resulted in large North African, Turkish and South Asian Muslim
minorities, unable to assimilate and unwilling to acquire marketable skills,
like the Chinese or Hindu Indians.
There is unquestioned racism there, as opposed to America, which has been more
inclusive by concentrating its adverse prejudice selectively toward blacks.
Nevertheless, the falling birthrates and the coming demographic meltdown
dictate the need for immigration, contrary to the new racist attitudes in even
formerly liberal countries like the Netherlands and Denmark. The recent
rejection of the EU constitution in France and the Netherlands was dictated by
the unjustified fear of uncontrolled alien Muslim immigration from Turkey and
the justified fears of an economic race to the bottom, that the neo-liberal,
capitalistic American policies of globalization destine, contrary to the
prescient analysis of the great German economist Friedrich List.
China, with a nationalistic agenda, has profited handsomely from cheap wages
and the forced necessity of providing employment to its migrating masses, blind
to their exploitation. It is in character with a long history of civilization
of the Mandarins, by the Mandarins and for the Mandarins, just like much of the
history of India with regard to the Brahmins.
Politics has always been and will always remain a fertile field for the
intellectually inept and morally bankrupt manipulators of the blindness,
ignorance and mercurial proclivities of the foolish masses. Governments ranging
from so-called democratic America and Europe to the so-called communist China
are no different. The newest trend is supplanting democracy by oligarchy and
Francis Fukuyama's end of history is a folly of blind misperception. The
much-maligned misuse of power by Russia's Vladimir Putin, though for the evil
purpose of consolidating his illegitimate power, is more beneficial in the long
run to the state and the common man, because it is contrary to the currently
fashionable false obsessive fetish of unregulated free enterprise and markets,
which even the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, warned against as a conspiracy
to defraud the general public.
It is only a matter of brief time before the profligate mismanagement of the
beholden-to-vested-interests American leaders' disastrous policies leads to a
substantial downsizing of the American dream and future, and in response for an
incensed American public to acquiesce in and even applaud aggressive and
exploitative policies to use the country's unrivaled and devastating military
might to sustain their extravagant lifestyle. Thus the quest for weapons of
mass destruction by Israel, India, Iran, North Korea and even Pakistan are not
paranoid aberrations, but necessities based on reality. Within the next decade,
when push comes to shove and the high price of oil and natural gas threatens
the economic security of powerful nations, there will be no resistance to and
general acceptance of the use of overwhelming force to dictate to the weaker
idiot nations the terms of selling their essential resources.
The unfortunate truth is that energy resources are primarily in lands with
Muslim majorities and rule. Contrary to Samuel P Huntington's misconception of
the clash of civilizations, it is the crucial necessity for survival and the
need for cheap and reliable energy resources that sets up a scenario for a
protracted devastating war between Christian developed nations and the
resource-rich Islamic ones.
China, cursed and blessed by a thoroughly self-enriching leadership not devoid
of foresight and redeemed by a vision of a future to reclaim its nostalgic
dream of its glorious past, and Russia with its rich resources and landmass,
with a history of sacrifice, are best equipped to weather the storm in the long
run.
The future for India with its self-serving leaders and even more ignorant and
illiterate masses is obscure. As for America and Europe, it is uncertain,
because times have changed from the old colonial days and a resurgent Russia
and China are unlikely to be fooled again, as they were in 1990 and the 19th
century respectively.
For the world as a whole it is a reversion to the law of the jungle and the
merciless and amoral battle for survival, which evolution has waged over eons
for individuals and species, bringing all humanity to the Hobbesian hell, where
life is nasty, brutish and short. The tragedy is that the brief history of a
relatively civilized era of human history is coming to an end, and we are all
destined to revert to survival in the evolutionary jungle, where power and
survival are dependent on the barrel of one's gun.
Gaurang Bhatt, a former professor, is a writer on diverse topics ranging
from the economy to immigration and international relations.
(Copyright 2005 Gaurang Bhatt)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.
Please click here if you are interested in
contributing. |
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