Post by RedFlag32 on Feb 15, 2006 20:22:05 GMT
War and religion – Propaganda versus reality
By Siv O'Neall
Feb 6, 2006, 14:58
Anti-Americanism unites the world at large. Most other phenomena in the world today are dividers and not uniters.
The smokescreen for an imperialist U.S. war needs urgently to be seen as opposing a united foe. The war on terror has become the means to that end; but it takes massive doses of propaganda to convince the world that separate insurgents and terrorist cells should be seen as a united enemy. The Muslim religion unites them, it is said. Oh – really?
Religion as a divider
Religion has historically been a source of wars and persecution and has seldom united even a small part of the world.
It is clear that religious fundamentalism of any kind, the Christian, Muslim or Jewish faiths, feeds on insecurity, a profound need by individuals to be part of a protective community, a wish to get back into the womb and to keep the frightening reality out of our field of vision. Thus it is perfectly understandable that in today’s world, which is more than ever filled with insecurity and easily turned to hysteria, masses of people will embrace fundamentalism as their final hope and protection from what they label as evil, protection from the reality of an explosive world.
However, what inevitably happens is that fundamentalism turns into profiteering by calculating opportunists who care for nothing other than self-promotion.
Religion in the service of imperialism
There have been times, of course, when both Muslim and Christian armies have forcefully tried to conquer virgin lands, acting in the service of secular governments. Religion is bound to be seen as an effective tool by governments who put up a façade of piety – or stay quietly in the background while colonial missionaries reach out to conquer in the name of their God.
It is true that Arab/Muslim countries have, on several occasions in the course of history, had megalomaniac fantasies of forming a pan-Islamic empire. It is true that even in recent times, after the Iranian revolution had successfully replaced the U.S. puppet regime of the Shah in 1979, that Ayatollah Khomeini and his strongmen had fantasies of creating an Islamic superpower stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. It is even very likely that some wild-eyed fanatics today harbor such ideas. However, such dreams are bound ultimately to be crushed by reality since divisive forces will, in the end, win over imperial dreams and ambitions.
Empires are always built on precarious and temporary bases of power. Religious empires are certainly as vulnerable to the corrosive forces of division and competition for power as any secular empire. The secular empire that dresses itself up with a fundamentalist religious mask is perhaps the most vulnerable of all because of the total vacuum behind the façade of holiness. Add to this the incontestable force of national pride and it will seem perfectly clear that empires will always be delusional and temporary.
Rifts in the Muslim world
The powerful propagandists in today’s political/media world are trying to make us believe in the existence of a united Muslim power bloc that will unquestionably try to stand up to the U.S. superpower. The truth is that there are more cracks in the Muslim front than we are generally made to believe.
Iran is allied with Syria and with the Palestinian Authority. Iran is supporting the Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian Hamas. Danger! High alert! Attack on our western values! The anti-democratic Satan is at work! The western world would have us believe it is threatened with annihilation by the powerful Muslim fundamentalist world. But where is this united Muslim bloc? Saudi Arabia is opposed to the Shiites of Iran. Will Iraqi Shiites accept being dominated and taken over by Iran?
First of all, the Shiites in Iraq are very busy on the home front dealing with Iraqi Sunnis. The Shiites in Iran or in Iraq are not supported by the Sunnis in Saudi Arabia, nor by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Syria is a very weak ally of Iran and the whole puzzle presents more holes than pieces that fit.
Moreover, there is an ethnic rift between the Iranians, on the one side, who are Persians and part of the Indo-European group of peoples and languages, and the Arab world on the other side, who are Semites. Iranians do not speak an Arabic language, except to learn passages from the holy Koran by heart. The official language is Farsi, even though there are minorities in Iran who speak Arabic and also Turkish dialects. Farsi is an Indo-European language, not related to Arabic/Semitic languages, nor closely related to Turkish even though Turkish is also an Indo-European language. Does it seem likely that an Islamic empire might be centered on a fundamentalist Muslim country which is not even a member of the pan-Arab family?
We also have to consider the immensely important factor of national pride. It is undeniable that many Iraqis, perhaps even the majority, are happy to be rid of Saddam Hussein. But it is quite a leap from that to their accepting subjugation by Iran, their former arch enemy.
After a cruel 8-year long war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, would Iraqi Shiites put all that behind them? Of course the Iraqi Shiites are ready to take revenge for their oppression under Saddam; but uniting with their old enemy Iran? Well, that remains to be seen.
I have not even begun to touch on the geographical and cultural/ethnic differences between the Muslims in Indonesia, India/Pakistan and the Maghreb countries in North Africa.
The Washington propaganda machine
The surreal and totally incompetent administration in Washington is working very hard to make us all believe that the ‘civilized’ world is in danger of being taken over by the terrorists, by the Muslim Satan. The propaganda machine is working full time, and at full steam, to raise the fear factor to maximum and make us believe that terror is necessary to fight terror. But this is actually a war of shadows, of make-believe. Only the deaths are horribly real. This propaganda war has one goal: creating an all powerful presidency in the U.S. with the handy subsequent benefit of making a handful of corporate kings obscenely rich.
This lust for unlimited power and unstoppable greed are the symptoms of a severe psychosis that is the very essence of the terror in the world. Never – at least not since the Nazi madness – has the world witnessed a power grab on such a scale of megalomania as what Washington is aiming at today. This is a complete power takeover that has been planned for past decades, from the setting down of rules for the mainstream media, to the gross illegalities taking place in national elections. Censorship by coercion and the rigged elections that the Neocons depend upon make the open power grabs by Putin pale in comparison. The central actors are drunk with the success of those years of careful planning and their recent illegal power grabs. The docility of the American people and the mainstream media seems so complete that even at this time of incomparable scandals, the boys playing politics in Washington still seem to believe they are invincible.
War handed to the ‘good guys’ on a silver platter
Only occasionally in history has there actually existed a person sufficiently warped that the so-called ‘civilized’ world could agree on a common death sentence, or a common front of warfare and obstruction of the freedom of this person. A common front against what has simplistically been called ‘an evil power’.
Joseph Stalin can certainly be said to have been such a person, as well as some of his successors. Slobodan Milosevic was another such reckless ruler and Saddam Hussein fits the pattern exceedingly well. What a goldmine for our hypocritical western powers when they find a handy culprit to concentrate all their propagandized hatred on. And to drop their bombs on.
The vacuum left after the end of the cold war
1991 saw the end of the cold war. The boys in Washington suddenly found that their foe had self-destructed without anybody actually being aware of what was occurring. And so the western powers unexpectedly found themselves without a handy foe to wage war on, cold or hot.
Puny little wars had to be searched out with much effort until Milosevic appeared as the savior of NATO and the Western ‘good guys’. Here was a man we could blame for genocide and we could flex our muscles in the eager effort to continue the genocide he had already set in motion and fill the chests of the arms manufacturers and other swindlers. And thanks to well rehearsed propaganda, we would make the world see us as the saviors and not as the profiteers we were.
But even genocides with massive civilian deaths have an end. The Neocons had been planning a serious and lasting takeover of complete and unquestioned power for decades when the moment came to declare our former associate, Saddam Hussein, the Satan of our time.
We need another Pearl Harbor
All that was missing when George W. Bush was picked by the Supreme Court to become the president of the United States was a solid pretext for attacking our former friend and ally. Came September 11, and the moment was ripe. The War on Terror was born – through means of gross deception. Hysteria and propaganda were set in motion and absolute power was taken by the Neocon boys, taken but never given.
However, the propaganda war based on jingoism or repeated lies has been effective. So far. The media were all set for collaboration with the boys in Washington and the American masses were made to lie low in fear of – what? Fear of everything, vague and pervasive fear, not of communism this time, but just a general sense of fear and insecurity. Orange level, red level, a continuous playing on the fear scale to hypnotize people’s minds.
So these creepy boys, these psychopaths with absolutely no sense of the horror of deaths and destruction, have managed in total impunity, until very recently at least, to lay waste a highly civilized country and go on bombing and annihilating long after the pretext, the mass murderer Saddam, had already been apprehended and rendered incapable of further horrible deeds.
The war on terror had to be invented
The war on terror has been so convincingly served to the American masses that they didn’t even seem to question the necessity of such a war. Nobody had ever declared war. The Neocons invaded a country, they dropped bombs, and barged in as if it was their god-given right. And, at least at the beginning, they were cheered on by the American public. Then Saddam was gone and so they had to invent another united enemy, that being the terrorists. The war on terrorism has now naturally merged with a war on the Muslim world. And this is how the circle is closed.
This is the war nobody wanted except the big corporations and the power-crazed Neocons, all intent on dominating the world. Not just a piece of the world, but the whole planet and outer space as well.
Putting Humpty Dumpty together again
What is now left for us to do is to rip the masks from their faces, to denounce the Neocons for the criminals they are, and render them harmless to this fairly civilized world.
Once that goal has been reached, we have to begin to remake our world from the bottom up, not from the top down. Sanity has to replace today’s insanity. We have to build a world where people will play a part, not just as the victims of carefully planned brainwashing, the receptacles of screwed-up, artificial needs and values, but as responsible and active individuals who will stand up to injustice, the loss of freedom and the death of democracy.