Deep malaise

Different maladies afflict the Muslims and the secular West

Hidden in the West’s cloak of democratic lover of freedoms lie the many skeletons of its crimes against humanity. So too the rest of the world, though not to that extent, depending on who held superior power at the time.

The entire tally of the West’s killings of Muslims and non-Muslims by conquest, inequity and the consequent poverty created to enrich the conqueror are beyond count that conquering Muslims of the past and today’s radical Muslims couldn’t match. It’s all about hegemony innate in Man that brings out the animal.

Only recently some 200,000 Muslims were killed in Bosnia, two million made homeless. Too late to stop the genocide, the US intervened, much as it intervened too late after Hitler had killed millions of Jews. Countless thousands are being killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. Hundreds are being killed in Burma by radical Buddhist monks and thousands in India. Millions are dying of hunger the world over. Even in America, ten percent are living below the poverty line – some 33 million. Those who live in poverty are many more.

Christians killed millions of Jews in Germany. Communist Stalin killed some 22 million Soviet citizens during the collectivisation drive. Millions were killed in the two World Wars and Korea and Vietnam. Today, many are being killed in Ukraine in which rising Russia and the self-righteous Europe and USA have their hands dirty but are being pious. It’s all about hegemony in the guise of ‘democracy’. So please stop being cute about your license called ‘freedoms’ and take your dirty cloaks off. Now let me put the Muslim and non-Muslim aggravation in context.

It’s all about predator and prey, hegemon and underling. The predator does its best to get the prey and the prey does its best to escape. It’s all about the powerful taking control of the resources of the weak and the weak protecting their resources from the powerful. Both are driven by the survival instinct that is pervasive throughout the animal kingdom and most pervasive in Man, which makes him the most dangerous of animals and leads to the desire to control the policymaking and resources of subordinate states – everything that is on, above and below the land – food, water, cheap raw materials and inputs like electricity, gas, water, communications and labour costs, land, riverine and sea routes for trade, captive markets, brainpower and strategic locations.

The Industrial Revolution made the weak strong and the strong weak. Military power and cunning shifted from Asia to Europe that effete Asian rulers couldn’t understand. The new weak became Europe’s colonies, today called the Third World. It didn’t happen just like that – some guy watching the lid of a kettle of boiling water jumping up and down and, hey presto, we had steam and the Industrial Revolution. It happened after Europe decided to separate church from state and unleashed human inquisitiveness, inquiry, research and discovery without fear of the dreaded clergyman who had been in control of human thought, behaviour and decisions and wouldn’t let his worldview be changed. He used the fear of his power to cast the ‘wayward’ out of the human herd, excommunicate, imprison or even put them to death, like Italian physicist-astronomer Galileo Galilei was forced to recant his heliocentric view that the planets go round the sun and had to spend the last nine years of his life under house arrest until death in 1642.

The Industrial Revolution made the weak strong and the strong weak. Military power and cunning shifted from Asia to Europe that effete Asian rulers couldn’t understand. The new weak became Europe’s colonies, today called the Third World

The ejection of the clergyman from statecraft led to the blooming of a hundred flowers. Europe and later America built huge knowledge banks and used their discoveries to improve their human condition by creating jobs, building factories, modernising methods, modes and relations of production in industry, services and agriculture leading to increased yields and evolving participatory political processes and egalitarian legal and educational systems, made advanced weaponry, ships, railroads, aircraft and what have you. The West became powerful. Today, America and Europe are the most powerful superpowers in history with huge knowledge banks, highly advanced technologies, global economic and financial control that can be used to blackmail the weak, ownership of the benchmark reserve currency, control over the movement of capital across borders in seconds and over communications for instantaneous information and disinformation dissemination for mind control, perception formation and cultural spread. All this backed by persuasive weaponry that can destroy the world many times over and cause regime change when subordinate rulers show even a glimmer of independence or disobedience.

To establish control one has to establish dominion. To establish dominion one becomes a hegemon. Hegemony is as old as Man and controlling resources is about hegemony for survival, Man’s prime instinct for which he kills, pillages, rapes and loots. Thus it’s all about hegemons trying to gain control over the resources of others and others trying to prevent their dominion. This is what is at the root of the conflict between Muslims and the West today, as it was between the West and others earlier, though in the din of the clamour and violence we lose sight of it.

The Muslims have to understand this and then understand that before joining battle with hegemons they must first rid themselves of their own mental domination by their clergymen and ruling elites by ejecting moribund rituals of religion, alien political systems and social constructs that beget them so that they can impart the most advanced education and knowledge to their people and make themselves strong enough economically to be able to say “No” without fear of retribution that they cannot withstand. Else they will keep getting thrashed and remain perennial underlings. Heal thyself first doctor before healing others. Fight your own cancer of mental darkness first before you can fight the cancers of hegemony and exploitation.

After the Second World War America and Europe started changing their methods of control over the strategic resources of both Muslim and non-Muslim colonies and rearranging them so as not to lose dominion, for they knew that a time would come when direct colonisation and coercive hegemony would no longer work and had to be replaced by what they called “consensual hegemony” – the prey ‘consenting’ to take huge loans and falling into the debt trap, ‘sell’ their sovereignty, independence, resources and land for a song, and allow multinational and transnational corporations into their countries that would eventually call the shots, just as the East India Company did. The UK and mainland Europe receded as superpowers after World War II but gave the sceptre of dominion over the world to its child-cousin the USA and became its fellow travellers, a cartel that today controls virtually the whole world. They did so by creating new states and placing pet rulers and ruling families over them after co-opting them by exploiting their ignorance-driven greed, by deceit and chicanery by exploiting their petty rivalries, making them increasingly indebted and thus totally dependent on the hegemon for survival. The US foisted its doctrines on its bloc and the Soviet Union on its, both blocs the spoils of the victors of the Second World War. The Cold War doctrine of America was to defeat communism and economically colonise the Third World with indebtedness so that they would remain in its bloc. The USSR kept its satellites ‘honest’ by sheer coercion. Muslim clerics helped America along because they decreed that communism was equal to atheism. After the Cold War the new doctrine is to use democracy as a weapon to foist alien western electoral systems on poor countries to throw up obedient, pliable rulers and continue their colonisation – now ‘neo-colonialism – with indebtedness and financial bailouts. In both eras, the hegemons’ control over the resources of the poor increased and is increasing. Great resources are with the Muslims, not just fossil fuels but also trade and pipeline routes, rare earth minerals, gold, copper, iron, coal, diamonds and precious stones, markets and manpower, food and waterways, human capital and so much more. They worry that if united, 1.5 billion Muslims contained the seeds of a superpower and could make a formidable adversary. More worryingly, Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world not only because of its highest birth rate but also because of conversions in the West. Worse, Muslim populations are growing fast in Europe and North America and could become a majority in some countries in a few decades. The battles between Muslim countries and the world, like in Afghanistan and Iraq, are making an increasing number of Muslims angry and sulking, ready recruits and cannon fodder for the militants of “radical Islam”. Many are radicalised in the prisons of the West.

It became worse as industrialisation and urbanisation led to nuclear families without the protection and identity of joint families that were the best herd. Sense of belonging in tribes and clans was replaced by nationality and citizenship, which is hardly a natural identity or belonging

What stops Muslim unity is that Muslims are suffering from a deep malaise about the meaning and interpretation of their faith, which is why they are divided into myriad sects and schools of thought foisted upon them by their clergymen and are in the pathetic condition they are in, more pathetic than any other, trapped between the Word of God in the Quran, the fatwas of mullahs and western political and social constructs. Their confusion comes from centuries of Muslim clerics masquerading as scholars leading them into a maze rather than the straight path that leads to the well of knowledge and God’s intent and objectives. Thus Muslims everywhere are going in different directions and coming to dead ends, confused, directionless, leaderless and increasingly angry.

There is a deep malaise in the West too. The human being is not a loner but a herd animal if he is prey or a pack animal if he is predator – living in herds like sheep when they are prey and in packs like wolves when they are predators. With no independent leadership of alpha males or females to protect their interests, predation against Muslims has led to many flocks in the herds of prey to break away and become packs of predators themselves that prey on hegemon packs resulting in violence and death. Earlier western people suffering emotional homelessness also formed their own breakaway packs, like Bader Mein Hoff, the Red Army, etc. Today the West wonders why so many white, mostly Christian men and women are converting to Islam, even online, and many are joining militant herd-packs, even marrying into them. The reason is emotional loneliness and homelessness. When they separated church from state some four centuries ago, which was very good, they ended up separating the spiritual from the secular or worldly, which was very bad: hence the emotional homelessness – materialism for the body without spiritualism for the soul. Separation of church and state or mosque and state should actually mean taking the clergyman out of statecraft, not separating the spiritual from the secular. The church-state separation did indeed dampen the clergyman’s overhang in western societies in which everyone was originally afraid to lift a finger without their approval as they cannot in Muslim lands today for fear of attracting the ire of the mullah. What is needed is separation of state and governance from clerics of all hues who have made many religions out of Faith into businesses and power politics, not separation of the spiritual from the secular. The spiritual and secular must go together for humans and their societies to be complete. Incomplete, humans search for other emotional homes and identities.

It became worse as industrialisation and urbanisation led to nuclear families without the protection and identity of joint families that were the best herd. Sense of belonging in tribes and clans was replaced by nationality and citizenship, which is hardly a natural identity or belonging. Ask any dual national to which state he belongs and he is essentially confused and harks back to his original herd. That is why I say: keep the clergyman out of statecraft; remove the mullah from governance; but keep the spiritual and secular together to keep yourself mentally and emotionally complete and healthy.

The chieftain of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami won’t have this, for he recently said that the British had kept the mosque out of government and now is the time to include the mosque – meaning mullah – in government. That is not what Pakistan was made for.