Islam, Elections, and Managed Lies

While a multi-million dollar ad campaign posing as a democratic process informs us of the startling news that Republicans lie, Romney is a capitalist, Obama is a Muslim-socialist-communist agent of terror and the only hope black people have, and American Idol isn’t a TV show describing the plight of citizens without employment, serious problems and their possible solutions might better be found by excavating ancient ruins to find evidence that Jesus was married or that Moses was gay.

Separating truth from lies is not the job of our mass media. It is joined at the hip to our government, which is locked in a passionate embrace with corporate capital in a perverse ménage-a-trois that threatens to bring forth ever more mentally disabled offspring. What this unholy alliance does to our social and natural outer environments is matched by its endless attack on our internal system, especially our capacity to think. When it comes to thinking about the more than a billion Muslims of the Abrahamic triad of Judeo-Christian-Islam, our media and government are united in creating an atmosphere of hateful and near raving insanity.

The western establishment uproar over violent reactions to an Islamophobic film that continues a program of intense disrespect and fanaticism directed at Muslims all over the world led to an even greater uproar of arrogant ignorance in response. How can they be so childish, echoed angry voices from the U.S. secretary of state to corporate pundits and other media stenographers. Why this allegedly irrational response to what is seen by the intellectually blind as simply a stupid film of mysterious origins? While blamed on an alleged Coptic Christian zealot, well financed Israeli supporters at work for years in denigrating Islam and casting the religion as a super-Nazi plot to control planet earth and kill its Jewish population went unquestioned.

More popular for western consumption were analysts (?) debunking every action by angry mobs in Muslim nations as poor, manipulated people too ignorant to understand that western neo-colonialist invasions and intrusions, especially American and Israeli, were all about importing enlightened democratic standards to help them overcome their backward ignorance. The murders of American members of the diplomatic corps in Libya unleashed an especially vivid example of blighted mentalities confronting a situation of the west’s creation, and blaming the results on people who have suffered for so long almost any match is likely to set off a raging inferno. Whatever its supporters or critics may have believed, Libya was a nation and has now been shattered and divided into a series of fiefdoms controlled by armed militias, many of them the very forces said to be terrorist enemies of the west which somehow became allies in destroying the Libyan regime. Now, they are enemies again?

Whether or not political manipulations figure in this matter we should all understand that we cannot, with impunity and unconcern, murder people in far away places and not expect actions to be taken in retaliation. In the case of the embassy attack in Libya, the deaths were of conscious promoters of American power in the Middle East, unlike the innocents sacrificed in the USA on 9/11/01 and at so many other locations and times before and since.

Unless we stop our government from conducting the savage attacks that take lives in so many countries under the guise of fighting a terrorism it is responsible for creating, we can expect more, not less such retaliation. Until then we can only hope that no more innocents will pay the price of our systemic contempt for human life that stands in the way of western, most especially American and Israeli, pursuit of profit.

Failing empires and nations are often run by people whose intellectual capacity reflects the deteriorating material conditions they preside over. The greater the crisis, the more likely that the psychologically damaged and mentally challenged may assert command. When the crisis is systemic and transcends borders, the weapons handled by the incompetents are so lethal, and the area blanketed with homicidal ignorance extends from nation to global community, far more than a local population is under assault. The threat to Islam and Muslims, as grave and bloody as it is, merely expresses a part of the greater threat to humanity represented by a system of profit and loss economics which is making the great majority of us losers in a market place of madness, social division and ecological destruction that can only be stopped by a unified democratic force.

What Islamic people in some parts of the world are trying to assert is no different, in essence, from what the Occupy movement in America is attempting and what many in South America have started doing via the electoral process. These are all really parts of the same struggle to meet a menacing threat to humanity with the force of united people asserting their democratic will. A positive outcome to this global struggle will be more difficult than many imagine but it has never been more possible or necessary. Whether in the U.S.A., Spain, the Arab world, Greece or anywhere else, progress in one place will affect the outcome everywhere else. If we allow the loonies to remain in control of the west and start a war with Iran, we may face an immediate future that will make the economic breakdown of the last few years seem a picnic by comparison.

Whatever the outcome of the ad campaign posing as the November elections in the U.S.A., the loonies will still likely be in charge. It’s the immediate aftermath that should most concern us since what we do then will hopefully begin the democracy we need and end the oligarchy we have. That is far more important than which corporate politician takes up residence in the tax payer subsidized housing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Frank Scott writes political commentary which appears online at the blog Legalienate. Read other articles by Frank.