Opinion Editorials, August 2012

Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, August 14, 2012
 
 
“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.”  (C.E.M Joad. Guide to Modern Wickedness)
 
 
Wars kill people – the living human beings, destroy humanity of the man enforcing barbarism and cruelty, practically denying all prospects of peace and co-existence. Previous wars of centuries were aimed at annihilation of political and economic 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. Given the strategic know-how and the scientific-technological developments, it is an established fact that any futuristic global warfare will end the very existence of man and humanity on this planet. The Weapons of Mass Destruction that the US, West Europeans and Russian have placed on the planet and in space are a ready-made menace to the survival of mankind. Wars appear to be the outcome of sinister minds, devilish individual plans and monstrous scheme of things against the very humanity of which theses people are a living part. With massive news media propaganda campaigns and falsification of the facts of human life, common folks and even the intelligent ones do not seem to have the rational understanding of the wars and their consequential impacts on life and the universe. 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.  The undeniable tv imagery - the massacres of innocent Afghan women and children, bombing of the civilian population and the US spy drone attacks targeting innocent civilians in Pakistan are fast becoming media entertainment and soap opera to the American audience and of the US scheme of militarization of the culture. 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.”
 
Some scholars argue that wars are planned in a cycle of chauvinistic historical events – every now and then wars are repeated - the “worst time in human history.”  Paul Buchheit author of America Wars: Illusions and Realities believes that War or Revolution happen in Every 75 Years. It's Time Again. (Common Dream, June 11, 2012). He thinks of various developmental cycles including the revolution against inequality, French Revolution, time of Great Depression, WW2, and now after:  “nearly 75 years after we started World War 2 production, we again feel the agony of a wealth gap expanding, like grotesquely stretched muscle, to intolerable limits. If history repeats itself, we will be part of another revolution of long-subjugated people. Indeed, it has already begun, in Europe and Canada and with the Occupy Movement. The face of plutocracy has changed, but not the consequences. Just before the French Revolution, Paris and London were dismal places for the masses, with islands of unimaginable splendor for aristocrats, who, like the multi-millionaires of today, found it hard to relate to the commoners.”

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 being “Man of God” who started the day with the Bible, to orchestrate the bogus war on terrorism. These are cynical notions implied to enforce the monstrous viewpoints of the few warlords in every age. There is no quality criterion except falsification of information and facts of human life. Professor Camillo "Mac" Bica shares further observations:
 
Having been indoctrinated by the propaganda of those whose militarism and warist agenda requires acceptance of the mythology of the "good war" and the "noble warrior," the uninitiated and unaffected most civilians and many non warrior members of the military fail to realize this truth, that all war is barbarism in which cruelty and brutal atrocity is the norm rather than the exception. During World War II, for example, often cited and celebrated as the "good war," over 50 million civilians were murdered by both Axis and Allied Nations. The American servicemen in the Wikileaks video who so nonchalantly "engaged the target" slaughtering some 12 human beings are no different from the pilots and bombardiers from the "greatest generation" who with equal nonchalance, incinerated millions of civilians during the terror bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc. Despite the moral depravity of their actions, these individuals were not born killers. Rather they were created to do our bidding, first conscripted or lured into the military with promises of employment, a college education, or U.S. citizenship, then subjected to sophisticated indoctrination techniques of value manipulation, moral desensitization, and psychological conditioning, aimed at destroying/overriding their humanity, their moral aversion to killing, reinforced by the violence and horrors of the battlefield environment. 
 
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." 
 
Chris Hedges - author of Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (“How to Think”, Common Dreams, 7/9/2012) gives context to the global dilemma:
 
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.
 
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.” 
 
Over a decade, the American political leaders invaded Iraq and Afghanistan under a false pretext of combating “terrorism.” The only known terrorism of wars that the US and its hired former colonial Europeans are leading against the innocent people of Iraq, Afghanistan and the tribal belts of Pakistan. None of the perpetrators of these wars of aggression are held accountable by the humanity except the few – George Bush and Tony Blair indicted by an International Court of Law but not punished. Nobody seems to be pursuing any rational course of plan to enhance global peace and understanding amongst different cultures and civilizations or the need to stop the bogus Wars on Terrorism and help the humanity to return to normal setting of co-existence. To cover-up his broken pledges and to uplift the US morale in his presidential re-election surge, President Obama is talking of troops withdrawal from Afghanistan with dignity. Killing of the fellow human beings and genocidal acts in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot offer any dignity to the warmongers. 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 bring peace and security to the humanity.  After the Two WW, 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. Viewing a nation or a people 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 historical record clearly demonstrates that whenever great 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. America and its allied European warmongers live in constant FEAR that soon they will be replaced by others - the natural course of history. 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.
 
 
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.
 

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