First There Was The Word
Not word exactly; blistering rhetoric more likely. You always know when the Arab world is aggrieved. They don't simmer in silence. They bellow their anger, inform the world that enemies conspire to undo them and they will not have it. Nor should they. No one likes to be disadvantaged, and some people actually believe the world and all its inhabitants are out to destroy them. We usually lock such people away for their own protection, let alone that of others.Yet in some societies, so heavily weighted with psychotic dementia many of these blighted souls advance themselves to positions of power and prestige and eventually dominate, leaving the more amenable and humanly-socialized among them to cower in fear. Take Iran. Now wouldn't that be nice, if somehow someone did - far, far away, into the stratosphere. Not the country as a whole, merely its theistically-depraved rulers.
Who have convinced themselves that they have the support of the entire nation for their enterprise in creating a nuclear programme that has become the baneful fear of neighbours and the international community. Iran has a population comprised of ethnic Persian (51%), Turks (24%), and other minorities accounting for the remaining quarter of the population of 70 million. There is no clear cohesion in the population for nationalistic purposes.
The Turks would dearly love to revolt against Persian cultural imperialism; Kurds have begun an insurgency; Arab minorities detonate bombs, and Baluch tribespeople attack police and revolutionary guards. Besides which many of the Persian majority detest the theocratic rule imposed upon them for its prohibitions, or because they are part of a persecuted minority like the Sufis or the Baha'i.
Yet we see a dangerously complicit population in a potential nuclear threat capable of destabilizing the world order. That's the power of neurotically incendiary rhetoric, of the capability of instilling fear in an international community not itself known to dissemble and threaten and promise hallucinatory Armageddon.
Yet it's common currency in the Middle East. These are people with an ancient, fabled and highly respected heritage. Where did all the enterprise, the social brilliance, the forward-looking discoveries and economic advancement expressed in world trade in the mists of history disappear to? What is left appears to be human dross; unenterprising, disinterested in any manner of human advancement.
Yet fervidly embracing the idea of somehow having been cheated out of their Islamic geographic inheritance. Violent language and violent actions are the order of this modern day. We cannot say we haven't been warned, since the methodology is clear; first the shrill accusations, then the threats, followed by suicide missions - the better to serve Islam.
It is the first order of Islamists to battle the transgressive foreigners intent on invading their countries, on depriving them of their heritage. These backward societies, incapable and unwilling to order their own futures. A region that has the second lowest adult literacy rate in the world; whose dependence on oil translates as an utter disinterest in manufacturing or trade.
The entire Middle East generated under 4% of global GDP in 2006, less than Germany. These are populations that are backward in social evolution, but who excel in mounting insurgencies.
The conflicts in the Middle East that range from Algeria to Iraq, those occurring elsewhere in the world, from Muslim-Hindu violence in Kashmir, Muslim-Christian violence in Indonesia and the Philippines, Muslim-Buddhist violence in Thailand, Muslim-animist violence in Sudan, Muslim-Igbo violence in Nigeria, Muslim-Muscovite violence in Chechnya; between Sunni and Shi-ite, all bespeak a broad level of hostility and aversion to social evolution.
What they all have in common is their proud adherence to the grand and humane moral principles extolled in the Koran. Mangled beyond recognition by useful interpretation by willing mullahs, ayatollahs and other religious.
Despite the overall dissent, misery, murder and mayhem, the Islamic world remains fond of blaming the West for all its problems. And no symbol of the West is more emblematic than Israel and its geographic location within a scorpion-infested geography. The local wisdom would have it that if only Israel were ousted, were no more, and the needful Palestinian population finally achieved their autonomous state, there would be no more fighting.
What has Israel, after all, to do with Sudan and Darfur? With Chechnya? With Nigeria? With the enmity between traditionalists and Islamists?
Labels: Human Fallibility, Middle East
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, June 26, 2007
<< Home