| by Mahboob A. Khawaja
And here is the dilemma we face as a civilization. We march
collectively toward self-annihilation. Corporate capitalism, if left unchecked,
will kill us. Yet we refuse, because we cannot think and no longer listen to
those who do think, to see what is about to happen to us. We have created
entertaining mechanisms to obscure and silence the harsh truths, from climate
change to the collapse of globalization to our enslavement to corporate power that
will mean our self-destruction. If we can do nothing else we must, even as
individuals, nurture the private dialogue and the solitude that make thought
possible. It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than
an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and
to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.
- (Chris Hedges - author of Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the
Triumph of Spectacle (“How to Think”, Common Dreams, 7/9/2012).
( September 30, 2012, London, Sri
Lanka Guardian) The UNO does not represent the humanity; it represents the
paper-based concept of the Nation States having membership at the UN. The same
set-up as of the failed League of Nations craving the 2nd WW. You
will find less than being intelligent, lacking leadership and vision of the
mankind holding important office at some of these organizations. Often the
self-geared leaders of the Nation Sates are eager to voice their
individualistic interests and priorities to the global community that lives and
flourishes outside the legal and intellectual scope of the domains of the UNO.
Viewing this week the deliberations of the UN General Assembly, most of the
Western leaders are driving the mankind to ambiguous threats of wars appearing
on the horizon. None of these so called leaders exhibit any sense of moral and
intellectual accountability toward the humanity - being the direct object and
victim of all of their delusional thoughts and priorities. Most scholars would
agree that these outspoken characters are just programmed dummies run by the
hired advisors-political strategists and pretending to be political leaders.
They do not possess any originality of intellect or vision and are not
representative leaders of nations but actors at the global stage. The truth is
that none of them have actually fought any wars on the real war fronts except
their decorated offices - a disconnect with the real world. Most appear to be individualistic retarded psychopath
and liars on the global political scene – falsify the facts of human affairs,
the mankind knows it well. They hire news media to propagate their message to
the global arena. President Obama is overwhelmed with his re-election campaign,
and given the critical juncture of the media operated political numbering games,
he has no interest or time to face the global community because of his broken
promises for change, lost credibility and misgivings to end the bogus wars on
terrorism. In line with his confused mindset, PM Netanyahu is actively
falsifying the facts about the Iran nuclear capability and using it as an
excuse to define the unilateral “Red Lines.”
Rationality of global affairs wonders, if this is not the extreme
insanity, what else is new. Iranian President Mahmood Ahmad Deenjehdad took
defensive overtures that Iran is not developing the bomb making capability. Leaders
do not pretend to be leaders more so if they have accountability to the
electorate Most of the current international critical assessments including
those of the US intelligence point out that Iran does not have the capacity to
develop nuclear weapons.
There are critical issues of
peace and harmony amongst varied people and cultures deserving immense global
significance that these spokesmen are not talking about. Paul Craig Roberts (“TheCulture of Delusion” 9/27/2012) calls them political “prostitutes” operating in
Washington. The people who do the political horse-trading. America is
financially and militarily broke and exhausted and it cannot survive to cope
with more wars. Israel needs peace and harmony not more animosity to co-exist
with the Palestinians, not more wars. The freedom of Palestine and the end of Israeli
occupation is the central problem to be focused not the threat of wars to Iran.
Amongst the leading Jewish scholars, there are many better equipped in
intellect and vision to speak on behalf of Israeli people than what Netanyahu
claims to represent-the warmongering psyche. Peace is more vital and much need
by the global community than any talk of the more wars. Earlier European wars of
centuries were aimed at annihilation of imperial, political and national
enemies but the 21st century conflicts are ready-made recipes not
only to eliminate the mankind but also the environment in which human beings
survive and the planet Earth that sustains life. One would have imagined that
more knowledgeable people become, more rational world will emerge in the coming
ages of rational thinking. Not so, we continued to be occupied with false
images and misleading rationale of the global conflicts. Like always, few cynical and mentally
unbalanced people plan and wage wars against others, not imagining the dreadful
end results of their intrigues and conspiracies against life, human rights and
dignity and futuristic possibilities for survival on the planet.
Those who plan and wage wars,
know what they are engaged in, they are not innocent belligerent or without
knowledge. Those who go to farfetched lands to bomb the innocent people, divide
and massacre men, women and children, fully understand what they are doing.
Perhaps, common people are misled by the warmongers enabling them to sustain
their war agendas under false political perceptions and imagery as is the case
in the US. In his article Professor Camillo "Mac" Bica,
School of Visual Arts, New York City and an activist of Peace and
Justice (“Atrocity and War”,
OpenedNews, 4/28/2010) offers a penetrating insight:
“…war is not accessible through the understanding,
rationally, intellectually, by watching a film or by reading a book. To "know"
war, you have to experience it, live it, feel it in your gut the anxiety, fear,
frustration, boredom, hopelessness, despair, anger, rage, etc. In truth,
warriors exist in a world totally incomprehensible to those who have never had
the misfortune of experiencing the horrors of the battlefield.”
Paul Craig Roberts (“A Culture of Delusion” Activist Post, 9/27/2012) captions the prevalent context of the US strategic delusion:
“Americans
live in a matrix of lies. They seldom encounter a truthful statement. There is
no evidence that Americans can any longer tell the difference between the truth
and a lie. Americans fell for all of these lies and more: Saddam Hussein has
weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda connections. Saddam Hussein’s troops
seized Kuwaiti babies from incubators and threw them on the floor. Gaddafi fed
his troops Viagra to help them rape Libyan women. Iran has a nuclear weapons
program. Change–yes we can! The US is “the indispensable country.” …..Israel is
America’s most loyal ally.…..
The list is endless. Lies dominate every policy discussion, every political
decision. The most successful people in America are liars. The endless lies have created a culture of delusion.”
To Chris Hedges - a global
scholar of rational thinking and author of Empire of Illusion: The End of
Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (“How to Think”, Common Dreams,
7/9/2012), visualize basic problems with Human Thinking, the delusional concept
of war by the masses:
Human societies see what they want to see. They create
national myths of identity out of a composite of historical events and fantasy.
They ignore unpleasant facts that intrude on self-glorification…. The
psychoanalyst John Steiner calls this phenomenon “turning a blind eye.” He
notes that often we have access to adequate knowledge but because it is
unpleasant and disconcerting we choose unconsciously, and sometimes
consciously, to ignore it….. At night you could hear gunfire. But they were the
last to “know.” And we are equally self-deluded. The physical evidence of
national decay—the crumbling infrastructures, the abandoned factories and other
workplaces, the rows of gutted warehouses, the closure of libraries, schools,
fire stations and post offices—that we physically see, is, in fact,
unseen. The rapid and terrifying deterioration of the ecosystem, evidenced in
soaring temperatures, droughts, floods, crop destruction, freak storms, melting
ice caps and rising sea levels, are met blankly with Steiner’s “blind eye…… The
Shakespearean scholar Harold Goddard wrote: “The imagination is not a faculty
for the creation of illusion; it is the faculty by which alone man apprehends
reality. The ‘illusion’ turns out to be truth.” “Let faith oust fact,” Starbuck
says in “Moby-Dick.”…..“It is only our absurd ‘scientific’ prejudice that
reality must be physical and rational that blinds us to the truth,”
Strangely enough, warmongers hire
war propagandists to classify wars as “noble”, “good”, necessity of the ruling
nobility and to protect the flag, borders and national interests. George Bush
claimed to be a “Man of God” who started the day with reading of the Bible. Nobody
ever mentions in America that George Bush and his neocons massacred three
million Iraqi civilians. The same bloodbath is well in progress in Afghanistan.
The Drone attacks in Northwest Pakistan tribal areas have killed an estimated
2,900 people just in 2011. The recently released observations by the New York
University - Stanford University on the Drone Attacks, calls into question the
legal and moral stance of the sting operations and the continued drone attacks
most harmful to American political interests in that part of the world.
Paul Buchheit (“War or Revolution happen in Every 75 Years. It's Time
Again” 06/11/2012) reminds us: “In our 'civilized' times people aren't
being run down by noblemen or forced to eat grass. The aristocracy has learned
a lot about suppressing crowds in 225 years. But they need to fear the growing
revolution. They need to fear, as Dickens put it, "the remorseless sea of turbulently
swaying shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of
suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them."
Professor Camillo "Mac" Bica, School of Visual Arts, New
York City and an activist of Peace and Justice (“Atrocity and War”, OpenedNews,
4/28/2010) makes it known in bold words:
“…..while I do not justify nor
excuse the actions of these individuals, neither do I seek scapegoats in order
to absolve myself of culpability and responsibility as a citizen of a democracy
in whose name and with whose tax dollars these atrocities are committed.
Consequently, if there is to be condemnation and punishment, let it begin with
those whose incompetence and desire for wealth and power make war inevitable
and unnecessary; whose apathy allows the slaughter to continue; and whose blind
allegiance, misguided patriotism, or utopian idealism hamper their ability to
understand and appreciate the true reality and nature of war and its tragic and
profound effects upon the warrior. We must see through the mythology, the lies
and the deceptions, and understand that all who become tainted by war are
victims. Consequently, we must recognize as well, that their culpability must
be mitigated and that we all share responsibility and blame for the inevitable
atrocities of war.”
Nobody seems to be pursuing any
rational course of plan and actions to promote global peace and understanding
amongst different cultures and civilizations or the need to stop the political
belligerency and the bogus Wars on Terrorism and help the humanity to return to
normal setting of co-existence. America and Israel could have used it to build
new relations for co-existence and for the good of all. The US and some
Europeans are living in a state of paranoid thinking, and fail to see the
prevalent realities and reactions of the global masses against their
warmongering. The Western world is terribly naïve in its approach to
warmongering against the poor, deprived and divided mankind in other parts of
the world. History has a role to teaching and learning which is denied by the
global war strategists. All wars are the outcome of anti-human thinking and
cruelty and none can or will usher peace and security to the mankind. After the 2WW, the Europeans have learned it
in a hard way but American political minds are trying to escape the prevalent
truth. Those who try to overrun the humanity, do get overtrumped by their
vicious plans. Hitler and Mussolini experienced it and so did the former USSR
and so many other tyrannical empires. Every beginning has its end. Those who
perpetuate wars and victimize the mankind sooner or later will cease to exist.
This is the Law of God that no worldly materialistic or political power can
change or challenge. Seeing a nation or a people depicted most powerful on the
visual screen is not a reality but a delusional imagery – falsification of
truth carved by the political propagandists and hired agents of influence. The
recorded history clearly demonstrates that whenever worldly powers went haunting
the large segments of the mankind in farfetched lands, it is usually the end
game of their role-play in global affairs. Massouline, Hitler and the former
USSR all went through that path. America and Israel are alone in global
political configuration. America, Israel and some of their hired European allies
live in constant FEAR that soon they will be replaced by others - the natural
course of history to override the dead past. All the great political powers
have met the same end. America and its bribed–coerced European allies are at
the top of waiting list to reach the end game. C.E.M Joad (Guide to Modern
Wickedness, 1935), the classical scholar on world politics offers a rational
perspective:
“War provides an
outlet for every evil element in man’s nature. It enfranchises cupidity and
greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in
position of power the vulgar and base.”
The question is how soon the global citizenry will see an
end to this monstrous mindsets and act of belligerency against the interest of
the global mankind and its futuristic survival?
(Dr.
Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict
resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and
civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: Global
Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking.
Lambert Publishing Germany, May 2012)
