Fuelling the Clash of the Civilizations Meme!

Despite the fact that few persons on either side of the so-called Clash of the Civilizations divide actually want a "clash", there are those zealots who feel that wholesale planetary warfare is a positive course of action for the species. 

I've already discussed the rationals, why Bin Laden and his Islamist cohorts felt compelled to engage in their terrorist actions in previous posts (here and here).  The nature of the Islamist mind frame, generally speaking, is that of a victim seeking vengeance to mollify either actual or perceived attacks upon him and his metaphysical being.  To further the socio-political aims of its leaders, it requires a population, or at least a subset, to use the process of psychological transference, where their existing angst, anger, and inadequacies can be directly attributed to an externality that can be understood as the "other." In this case, the other is America or more generally Western civilization. For example, in an attempt to create a focus point in which they can blame the nation's inherent failings upon, the Mullahs inveigh against the "Great Satan". By transferring their own failures to America, they draw distinctions for their loyal followers of the high mindedness and virtue of their cause.  As the Green Revolution of 2009 has shown however, the majority of educated Iranians and youth, which form the majority of the population, find this decades old form of propaganda tiresome and repressive.

One has to remember, that across most of the Islamic world, their rulers are little more than quisling satraps whose existence is dictated by their utility to American hegemony. With the end of the cold war and advent of a more multipolar world, these nations offer America either oil reserves or strategic geopolitical use.  Equally, the governments of these nations are intimately aware of their own dependency on America's military, financial, and technical resources to exist. Weak failed states like Iraq -which has now been occupied by American forces for 19-years- and Afghanistan -occupied by NATO and Western forces for nine years- would most certainly degenerate into further civil war or complete disintegration without a firm military presence in the region; American or otherwise. Thus, while the specter of American hegemony may rankle the masses in many Islamic countries, those in control understand that if left to the demented illogic of absolute religious divinity over regional politics as espoused by factional leaders, these nations would combust into fratricidal violence and destabilize whole swaths of world.  For a thousand years, these people have been ruled and governed by others, and for good reason.

On the other hand, America's religious buffoons are hopped up on pushing humanity towards Armageddon and driving a war with the Kings of the East to validate Biblical prophecies.  For example, Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida has proposed that on the 9th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist assault on America, that his flock will burn Qu'rans (aka. the Koran).  The moral equivalence argument has been made that Muslims are attacking American Christianity through the construction of the Cordoba Cultural Center in New York.  The response by this lot, to this perceived slight, is to engage in a classic book burning exercise.  America's Republican party through their coy electoral race-baiting strategies have unleashed the most bigoted and unstable element of its confederacy of dunces.  General Petraeus, the Pentagon, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President Obama, and numerous religious and national leaders across the world, including even PM Stephen Harper of Canada, have denounced the racism and brutal stupidity of this action, which they insist will further marginalize those who support American objectives in the Middle East and across the world. 

While the military-industrial complex and the mandarins of war need and demand that this segment of idiots ferment a rational for the Pentagon's exorbitant budgets, the rest of the world needs to contain, quarantine, and sterilize these maladroits before we are further dragged into their dystopian and self-destructive fantasies.

My Person of the Year: Neda Agha Soltan

Unlike TIME magazine and FT who respectively chose FED Chairman Ben Bernanke and Goldman Sachs' CEO Lloyd Blankfein as their "person of the year", the Times of London (UK) newspaper has chosen a very modest person, who gave her life not in the pursuit of capital or saving the financial behemoths of Wall Street from their own self-inflicted greed, but rather for simple measures that we in the West take for granted every day.

Neda Soltan was not political. She did not vote in the Iranian presidential election on June 12. The young student was appalled, however, by the way that the regime shamelessly rigged the result and reinstalled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ignoring the pleas of her family, she went with her music teacher eight days later to join a huge opposition demonstration in Tehran.

“Even if a bullet goes through my heart it’s not important,” she told Caspian Makan, her fiancé. “What we’re fighting for is more important. When it comes to taking our stolen rights back we should not hesitate. Everyone is responsible. Each person leaves a footprint in this world.”

In Iran Neda has become the face of the revolution against the aging, sclerotic, and corrupt Mullahs.  Vigils and shrines were established across the country to commemorate her murder by a Basij militiaman on a motorcycle as she protested and chanted, "Death to the dictator!"  The Times elaborates:

It was not hard to see why Ms Soltan so quickly became the face of the opposition, the Iranian equivalent of the young man who confronted China’s tanks during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations 20 years earlier. She was young and pretty, innocent, brave and modern. She wore make-up beneath her mandatory headscarf, jeans and trainers beneath her long, black coat, and liked to travel. She transcended the narrow confines of religion, nationality and ideology. She evoked almost universal empathy.

The cowardice of the Mullahs and their police apparatus reached new heights in the months that followed her death.  The regime banned public displays of mourning, intimidated and jailed witnesses who observed her death, harassed Neda's family to prevent them from talking in public, and blamed foreign journalists for her death.

The corporate yes-men who have bankrupted our states, the war-mongers intent on justifying torture and genocide, and the shifty immoral politicans who run our governments and collectively represent the very worst of humanity, deserve nothing but contempt.  We however, as individuals can look through the veil fashioned by the corporate media and find virtue and human decency even in the darkest corners of this world.  This is why I too, even though her life was short and her contribution an accident, feel that Neha Soltan deserves to be known by us all; because her struggles and the ideals of the Green Revolution are our struggles.

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For more information on Neda and the international response to her death, PBS's Frontline has an excellent documentary that is viewable online and also has a set of links on the subject.

Iran's Green Revolution Continues

Six months ago I started this blog to document the indolence of the mainstream press and the vast hypocrisy and duncery that masquerades as civil society across the world.  At the moment of this blog's inception the theft of the Iranian election by the Mullahs was presenting itself. The clerics terrified at their own dwindling domestic support, handed their lackey Ahmadinejad the election and brutally suppressed student protesters, reform minded civilians, and even former colleagues of the 1979 Iranian revolution, who disagreed with the Mullahs maniacal objectives.

Today I return to Iran, where thousands of people have rallied together in the face of certain prosecution, incarceration, torture, and possible death via the police forces that serve the criminal theocrats in Tehran.  Again, the slothful mainstream press have done a stupendous job at not providing coverage, insightful commentary, or acknowledging the seriousness that this revolution may portend to global politics.  Bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, who in this particular case have replaced the MSM, has an excellent on-the-ground compilation of twitter, you-tube, and individual first-hand accounts by protesters from across Iran.

To contextualize this uprising further, one should first remind oneself that if the neo-conservatives of America and their belligerent and bellicose accomplices in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Pentagon had had their way, these very protesters -who are striving for Western ideals of freedom and liberty- would lay bloody and bleeding, not from the truncheon or pistol of the Iranian stormtroopers, but from American heavy armaments.  The nascent struggle for individual liberty against the corrupt and incompetent rule of the Mullahs would have been aborted, leaving the Islamic regime even more powerful.  Instead, the theocrats are now deprived of the old canard that the evil Satan, in the form of the Americans, the British, and the BBC, are stirring dissent and chaos within their borders.

In addition, it should be understood that the moral vacuousness and intellectual dishonesty of the neo-cons, which has been apparent for all to observe since the Iraq fiasco detonated in their collective faces, has an equivalent in the autocratic and murderous actions of the Iranian theocrats.  The leaders of the American war machine and the murderous Mullahs are the same: greedy, pugnacious old-men bereft of civil decency, who are dedicated to maintaining their own power at the cost of innocent lives.

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I have a series of earlier blog posts that explain the origins of dictatorships, outline the original rationals about the election fraud committed by the Mullahs (here and here), and the propaganda model as it relates to Western media (here).

Ahmadinejad's Poor Choice of Analogies

Under an agreement hammered out by negotiators from France, the US, and Russia, Iran would send 1.2 tons of low-enriched uranium to Russia in a single shipment, where it would be converted to fuel exclusively for a Iranian research reactor. However, Iran's president Ahmadinejad has refused to respond to the proposal and wants in typical fashion to have more discussions on the matter.

In my opinion, Ahmadinejad has always been underwhelming. He clearly has no grasp of international politics and by his own pathetic antics in this summer's bloody suppression, has shown that his primary interest is in propping up the corrupt and exceedingly maladroit theocrats of Tehran. This past Sunday, in response to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's comment that the US was "not going to wait forever" for a response to the IAEA's proposal, Ahmadinejad gave this classic bit of mindless frivolity:

"While enemies have used all their capacities ... the Iranian nation is standing powerfully and they are like a mosquito," a government Web site quoted Ahmadinejad early Sunday as saying. ... "Given the negative record of Western powers, the Iranian government ... looks at the talks with no trust. But realities dictate to them to interact with the Iranian nation.

A mosquito? I'm assuming he meant housefly or some other irritating insect, because there is no single animal that has caused more misery and death than the mosquito. Alexander the Great who conquered and dispatched the ancient Persians was fallen not by foreign swords but by the malaria parasite delivered by a mosquito. Entire armies have been wiped out by malaria and other mosquito borne illnesses throughout the course of history. During the American civil war, for example, malaria accounted for 1,316,000 episodes of illness and 10,000 deaths. The parasite furthermore fell more allied troops in the Pacific theater during World War II than did enemy combat.

If Ahmadinejad does mean to equate the West with mosquitoes, then he should prepare for an adversary that has proven both unstoppable and ultimately lethal.

Ahmadinejad- A Useful Idiot

The Power Behind Ahmadinejad's Disputed Win: Ayatullah Khamenei - Yahoo! News

Christopher Hitchens in his 14 June Slate article describes the type of characters who are Ahmadinejad's adherents

I went to the last major Ahmadinejad rally and got the whiff of what I imagine fascism to have been all about. Lots of splotchy boys who can't get a date are given guns and told they're special.

There certainly are attributes of fascism, which are clearly expressed in the convoluted theocracy that is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nationalism, belligerent foreign policy, ethnic and class superiority, and authoritarianism are readily identifiable traits. However, the lack of a corporate dominated core and the weakness of the punditry class to adequately define Islamo-fascism other than in the most vague of metaphysical terms leads me to dismiss the label and accept that the Mullahs and their supporters are just good-ole-thugs at heart flying a revolutionary flag of convenience. The Iranian theocracy in my opinion is no different than any other autocratic junta who has seized power through military means and mob assistance. It is hardly a surprise that Ahmadinejad, instead of being a shrewd and refined politician is merely a punch-drunk lackey of the mullahs parading around in proletarian garbs and espousing populist shibboleths to convince the masses that he's one of their own.

The Yahoo news article outlines that the real power in Iran has always been the clerics and their security apparatus. Before the votes were fully counted the country was already operating under seige mode. Internet connections and cell phone lines were cut, opponents arrested, stormtroopers were sent out to control major institutions, foreign and domestic press coverage was stifled or completly removed, and the supreme (with extra cheese) leader himself declared (twice) that their man had won even before the votes were all counted.

Ahmadinejad's post-election responses to CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour about the integrity of the voting process, the validity of the election results, and the safety of electorial opponents were little more than farcial drivel that could have been written by Saddam Hussein's former Information Minister. For example, he claims that Iran, "Is the most stable country in the world" and it is a country where "all are equal." I'm sure that is true, unless of course if you belong to any particular minority group or are a woman.

He states that citizens can vote for any candidate that they wish for. Brilliant, you can vote for any candidate that the Mullahs allow you to vote for and in the present case you will have the representatives that the Mullahs have dictated, in spite of the popular vote. In other words, "You're free to do as we tell you to do!"

"The situation is very good... everyone is friends."

"Iran is a political power" and will make "economic, scientific, and
cultural" gains in the years to come.

The real question in my mind is how much knowledge and involvement did he personally have in this sorid affair? Did he instigate the ballot rigging or was he only told he won with the blessings of the Mullahs? At what point did he know the Mullahs had his back covered?

Because They Panicked - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Because They Panicked - The Daily Dish By Andrew Sullivan

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Firstly, if I can digress with an introductory Thomas Jefferson quote: "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."

What authoritarian governments fear most is their loss in maintaining and perpetuating power. Fear, once it takes hold of an individual or a dictatorship in this case, is not easily assuaged. It tunnels deep into the primal brain and stimulates terrible imaginations, which inevitably cascade into real life horrors. The clumsy and authoritarian meanderings of the Mullahs have confirmed unequivocally that Iran is a rogue nation with little capacity for reason or goodwill (especially to its own citizenry).

Perhaps the biggest winner of this act of self-immolation in the public arena is Israel. Having hectored endlessly and hysterically this past decade over the unstable nature of the Mullahs, one can only cede the Likudist crowd a few points here. What this does to Obama's Mideast peace plans and regional stability are unknowns.

Unfortunately Ken Pollock and the rest of the so-called establishment Middle East experts have already been asked what they think. The average 3-year old would at least give a more honest answer; that being they don't know, but these partisans exist only to dissemble and divulge disinformation.

The reason for dictatorships...

"One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship."
-1984, George Orwell

Therein lies the gist of all so-called political revolutions. Nary one has occurred that didn't descend into a state of cronyism, criminality, and towards their end a persistent and extreme proclivity towards incompetence. Of course for the casual observer, one would say, "That's why it's called a revolution." You simply replace the current existing strata or ruling class with whatever group that happens to toil on the periphery of power. History also tells another story in which sooner or later the new organs of power will become diseased and the rot pervasive. Its all happened before and will happen again. Benjamin Franklin said this about the American revolution and the newly adopted constitution in 1787:

Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.

Therefore with western eyes it comes as no surprise when the Chinese roll tanks into Tiananmen Square to butcher students, when Burmese Generals slaughter peasants and Buddhist monks and hold kangaroo courts against opponents, or as today has it, the Mullahs of Iran so fearful of transcendent change they dismiss the presidential elections as merely an academic exercise in public opinion management.

It's very simple to loath the "mad-Mullahs" and other religious-fanatics during these times. Theologically ordained gangsters, who issue fatwas declaring death to authors who fictionalize their precious religious mythology, permit rape and murder of foreign journalists who question their brutality, and execute children, can generally be described at their best as being detestable. On the economic front 82% of Iran's exports reside in oil and gas which flow East to China (another dictatorship) and Japan; inflation is listed at 25% per annum; and the state subsides gas, electricity, and a variety of consumer products. As all tyrants they claim divine right to authority, because they alone are the protectors of the sacred and defenders of society's integrity.

The early Romans, already well craft in Machiavellian arts, knew too well the religious undercurrents involved in subjugation, “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” Thus when Iranians who lead the coup against the Shah are asked if the revolution has been betrayed, they respond begrudgingly with a stern no. They know very well that this was how the revolution was always meant to be; a dictatorship of frauds masquerading in clerical robes. With the apparatus of the secret police under their control and the military as their eager partner in crime, the dictatorship was always guaranteed.

Unlike Western democracies where the forces of propaganda are far more sophisticated, Asian despots have no use in subtleties. Rather, heavy-baton weilding shock-troops and the public fear of torturous incarceration are their modus operandi. A compliant populace can also be obtained when economic growth, prosperity, and materialism rise and substitute for individual liberty and freedom. The Chinese, for example, have found a way to have a shiny happy dictatorship that the ruling class, the local communist chieftains, and the nouveau-rich masses can support. This however, is not the situation in Iran or for most dictatorships. There exists in each historical case a universal want for power. It is an unquenchable devotion that manifests itself in the relentless pursuit towards dominion over others and in a cruel desire to punish the populace for the slightest of inconveniences. This is not a practice that will lead to prosperity, but instead collapse, revolution, and cyclical historical repetition.