generalspeaking

Turning The Screw

Human greed and aggrievement leads to corruption of the spirit. The vital intangibles of human values dissipate into a vicious fog of mindless battle for acquisition of satisfaction, or for some tangible symbol satisfying an inner need completely disassociated from from an obligation to the larger society. Serving the brute emotions of vanity, ego, aggression and greed. At the expense of kindness, empathy and compassion; all universal emotions, but spurned in the need for self-empowerment.

The brute force of unbridled human greed and anger drowns the humane in the human. What ensues is a conscienceless automaton of consummate destructive force. the cult of drug-dealing violence bears some resemblance to religious or political cults revelling in hatred, denunciation and rampant bloodshed in support of an ideology. Each of these cults inspire in their supporters, contempt for sane, orderly and secure societies.

Their mission is to destroy the assurances of freedoms in societal underpinnings, the accepted norms anchored in society to benefit entire global communities, and replace them with their own versions of a normative existence, based on tyranny, fear and control. Fascists, Communists and now Islamist jihadists threaten world order, all in their turn at opposing the accepted currency of society.

Nazi Germany stood the free world on its head for years, but failed at its targeted Thousand-Year reign. Communist totalitarian states still plague the world with their determined dehumanization of their societies and threats toward the larger world. Islamist jihadists claim to be obeying divine directives to destroy an unworthy and degenerated global society in their zeal to blood-thirstily replace it with a spiritually-approved and entitled global Islamic rule.

Drug lords create their very own singular measures of instability in their own nihilistic way, destroying confidence in the ability of the state and its functionaries to protect civilians, leading police and the military on wild chases to restrain their depredations on society; wreaking havoc and leaving mutilated corpses in the wake of their violent upheavals toward the goal of destabilization.

All these manifestations of human rejection of established rules in free societies have their champions who paint a picture of democratic failures. Freedoms are somehow confused with license to indulge in illicit, unethical or immoral behaviours. The results of which have their consequences; breakdowns of a society's belief in and attendance on religious precepts, always a stabilizing factor in society helping to guide the faithful toward meaningful values.

Unbridled capitalism with insufficient oversight to control avarice, resulting in another facet of societal inequalities, and a corruption of the common weal that occurs when democratic governments act in close league with powerful industrial complexes, creating wealth for the elite, ignoring the plight of the underprivileged. We are led to believe that these failings are the causative underpinnings of insurgencies in many guises.

Osama bin Laden, son of a wealthy Saudi industrialist, conceived a burning disgust and hatred for the ruling House of Saud, themselves religious Wahhabist fundamentalists, yet seen by bin Laden as selling out the patrimony of the Arabs to the societally corrupt Americans. Not all that far removed - but for the extreme level of violent bloodshed - from the violence currently taking place in Greece by rampaging youth and their supporters throughout Europe.

The irony here being that Saudi funding of Wahhabist-inspired madrasses existing in Pakistan primarily, and churning out thousands of religion-compelled youths dedicated to the concept of spiritual jihad transmogrified into violent war against the West has been an unparalleled aid to al-Qaeda's quest for supremacy in the world order. Those same funding grants through Saudi Arabia establishing fundamentalist institutions in countries of the West to entice vulnerable Muslim youth to the cause of global jihad, welcoming them to Pakistan's jihadi training camps.

And the United States, in its war on illegal drugs, destroys the livelihoods of Afghan poppy farmers in an abysmally poverty-stricken country, whose crop sales benefit farm families, but also the Taliban. The very same Taliban conspiring with al-Qaeda to the Islamist struggle to defeat the West, sending their martyrs to confront foreign troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Colombia was wracked with bloody violence while the U.S. forced it to eradicate its drug trade and hunt down its drug czars, crimping the thriving illicit business of production and export. Colombia has freed itself to an appreciable degree from its former reputation as the fount of illegal drug trafficking, and is attempting to move onto civil normalcy.

It's now Mexico's turn to experience stomach-heaving civil war, between the government, its policing agencies and military, against the inter-battling drug kingpins, the business thriving, yet in complete control-disarray with the removal of the top drug elites, leaving the remnants of their cartels to try to wrest control one from the other, and in the process martyr civilians to their drug-profiting cause.

The largest economy in the world, possessed of the most powerful, well-equipped army, still the world's sole, most influential superpower, cannot compel its own population to desist from importing, distributing and using illicit mind-altering chemicals that become the bane of everyone's pitiful existence. So it exerts its influence on a neighbour, to halt their booming drug manufacturing and lucrative export, to an anxiously-awaiting American market.

In the process, sowing a near cataclysmic series of ongoing brutalities that Mexico struggles to cope with. The Mexican drug cartels are responsible for the transportation and distribution of multi-tonne quantities of cocaine and marijuana, along with huge quantities of heroin and methamphetamine. Canada, too, is a supplier of marijuana, and yet Canada presents as a bit of a problem for the U.S. government and policing authorities.

There is a far more sanguine attitude within the Canadian public and its governments as well, along with its policing agents, for the use of marijuana. The medical use of marijuana is fairly well accepted, and actually supported by the federal government. There was a strong move, suspended for now, for the legalization of modest marijuana use; at the very least a strong relaxation of prohibition, along with arrests and charges, with the realization that its casual use is no more injurious than that of alcohol and tobacco.

It is to Mexico that the United States turns its demands. It is simply vexed and disgusted with Canada's attitude. In Mexico, countless murders of musicians and entertainers by drug lords made the news for a while; it seemed a senseless conundrum, never quite explained. More currently, minor players in the drug distribution arena have been murdered, their mutilated and often headless corpses left in prominent places to be witnessed by society at large, as a living symptom of a sick society.

"Narcoterror" has been imposed on the lives of ordinary Mexicans, trying to go about the business of surviving in the struggle to surmount economic difficulties; difficult at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. One gang after another fights for control of drug territories, instilling terror in the population, as bodies are discovered in public places, obviously having been meticulously tortured before death.

The government of President Felipe Calderon is struggling to succeed in his vow to crack down on the gangs whose business it is to supply the vast U.S. market; 90% of all drugs coming into the United States arrive through Mexico. Virtually all of the methamphetamines used in the United States come from Mexico. Military troops numbering some 36,000 of determined (occasionally corruptly complicit) individuals have been deployed to the eradication mission.

They conduct raids, destroying drug crops and seizing supplies in nine of the country's most affected states. In the process down-sizing the amount of territory left to rival cartels to fight over, while increasing the sheer level of brutal atrocities, bringing horrible deaths not only to minor dealers and those hired to work in the drug fields, but to innocent civilians.

Hit squads in Tijuana, the scene of much heavy activity by the cartels, have killed 50 people in several months, including ten children. In 2008 some seven hundred people have been murdered in that city alone. Cinema shootings, in pool halls and restaurants, are a regular occurrence, where gunmen in body armour, armed with assault rifles, storm the places and open fire indiscriminately.

Young children attending primary school are exposed to the dreadful view of a dozen corpses in their schoolyard, lacking tongues. Although authorities worry that the traumatic level of violence children are exposed to may result in their desensitization, it's abundantly clear that the greater the violent offence against human dignity offered to innocent and even involved individuals through gruesome murders have utterly desensitized members of the drug cartels to their own humanity.

The cartel members, defiant of control by state authorities, submissive only to the imperative to control drug profits, on the way to which they celebrate the brutalization of human values, present as another facet of humanity's failures, in producing fanatical elements of groups dedicated to the obliteration of civil society.

Labels: Societal Failures, Terrorism, World Crises

posted by Pieface @ Monday, December 15, 2008