Dogma VS Culture
Dogmas have a profound effect on our daily lives. Everyone, at one time or another, falls into it's trap. It's our nature as human beings to do so. That being said, dogmatic thought- when used to answer a moral dilemma- can be dangerous to say the least.
The people who know me, know that I hate war more than anything else in this world. They and all others can deduce then that I am opposed to the war in Iraq. Many in the anti-war camp, now that Bush has been elected (I refused to use the term re-elected and I even use the term elected very loosely) along with the widely accepted view that the US troops are in Iraq to stay, have been focusing on the Iraqi elections as a opportunity to still register their dissent with Bush's and Blair's policies in Iraq.
I personally thought that the turnout would be very low because of all the violence and the fact that some Shi'ite parties were boycotting the election, not to mention all the Sunnis that would be as well. It appears now that the turnout was better than expected, and as expected Blair and Bush are using this to stroke their collective johnson.
This is how Dogma (on the left and on the right) fits in.
The righties (whoever you are out there) who upon seeing the initial reports of happy Arabs with purple fingers, this along with no reports of biblical , or Quranical (hey I just made up a word!!!) slaughtering of people trying to vote for the first time in their lives, must be thinking "See all those hippy fags were wrong. Sure all those coffins with American flags draped over them, and all that money spent just to find out there are no WMDs, and the torturing people thing was sucky in the beginning, but it was all worth it. We were right! Thank god, I almost begun to feel like questioning the media and government and I can't handle that shit right now."
....or something of that nature.....
The lefties, on the other hand, fell into the Schadenfreude trap. They wanted to see the bombs and deaths and tell everybody that would listen: "See, look this is Bush's freedom. This is what occupation is and this is why we should oppose it and get our troops home." That shameful joy never came to pass, well at least not yet.
The closest an article has come, that I have read, to highlight the Iraqi voters' bravery in going to the polls without using this as a retroactive approval for the occupation is this one. Imagine voting for the first time in 4 decades or at all or that matter, for a slate of candidates (who for the most part were anonymous until days before the election). That's amazing, even though you and your countrymen are at gunpoint from both sides in a senseless war, and given the fact that the date for this election and the decision not to postpone it was one made by Americans in DC and their buddies in Baghdad doesn't diminsh this accomplishment.
I happen to think electoral democracy a fetish and in the Iraq case the results wont affect much in the long run (and the similarities between this election and the election in Vietnam during it's war are scary) but I applaud the big fuck you the Iraqis gave to the criminal outsiders in their country wreaking havoc, be they Saudis, Syrians, Egyptians or Americans.
Hopefully some kind of civil structure will materialize out of this morass. A place where poets musicians and anyone can create, without the fear of death by beheading or a made in the USA evaporation by bombing. A place where women can wear a hijab or hardly anything at all. A place where young people can dance, drink, smoke and fuck and only have their overbearing parents to worry about instead of worrying about some religious police vigilante group or about breaking some arbitrary curfew and being caught by some overzealous American GI. At this point though, I don't see either side in the conflict offering a way out. Then again, I am not Iraqi and it's their call.
I don't know if I should be happy to have found this article or not. It's from a Pakistani newspaper called the Daily Times. I can't remember the last time I agreed with almost every point made in a editorial. The reason why I am so perturbed by this article and where it comes from is that I haven't found an equally profound article here in the US on the elections and it's possible ramifications for daily life for Iraqis. It shows me the sad state of the mainstream media here in a relatively free country vs. the press in very tightly controlled country like Pakistan. Enjoy.
As an aside:
Those of us who say were are against war need to ask ourselves, why?
I am against this and all other wars because there is never a justification for blowing up someone's mud hut in Afghanistan in the middle of the night just as there is no justification for plowing a plane load of people into a tower filled with more people during rush hour. The two acts are morally bankrupt.
The act of killing of millions of Jews, gypsies, Gays and whomever is equal in its brutality as the burning to death of 100,000 in Dresden and the 300,000 plus burned to a crisp in Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Tokyo. These acts reduce humans to, well I would say beasts but I can't seem to remember the last time any beast killed that many of its own.
Numbers are used to numb the mind.
Would you rather live next to a man who raped one woman or one that has raped 10? Well I'm sure your answer is neither. Why? Because the moral value of either choice is zero.
Once we start to rationalize one act of brutality against the other, we are falling into the trap of Dogma, of stale thought, of Schadenfreude, of shameful joy. Then culture dies a slow horrible death.
The people who know me, know that I hate war more than anything else in this world. They and all others can deduce then that I am opposed to the war in Iraq. Many in the anti-war camp, now that Bush has been elected (I refused to use the term re-elected and I even use the term elected very loosely) along with the widely accepted view that the US troops are in Iraq to stay, have been focusing on the Iraqi elections as a opportunity to still register their dissent with Bush's and Blair's policies in Iraq.
I personally thought that the turnout would be very low because of all the violence and the fact that some Shi'ite parties were boycotting the election, not to mention all the Sunnis that would be as well. It appears now that the turnout was better than expected, and as expected Blair and Bush are using this to stroke their collective johnson.
This is how Dogma (on the left and on the right) fits in.
The righties (whoever you are out there) who upon seeing the initial reports of happy Arabs with purple fingers, this along with no reports of biblical , or Quranical (hey I just made up a word!!!) slaughtering of people trying to vote for the first time in their lives, must be thinking "See all those hippy fags were wrong. Sure all those coffins with American flags draped over them, and all that money spent just to find out there are no WMDs, and the torturing people thing was sucky in the beginning, but it was all worth it. We were right! Thank god, I almost begun to feel like questioning the media and government and I can't handle that shit right now."
....or something of that nature.....
The lefties, on the other hand, fell into the Schadenfreude trap. They wanted to see the bombs and deaths and tell everybody that would listen: "See, look this is Bush's freedom. This is what occupation is and this is why we should oppose it and get our troops home." That shameful joy never came to pass, well at least not yet.
The closest an article has come, that I have read, to highlight the Iraqi voters' bravery in going to the polls without using this as a retroactive approval for the occupation is this one. Imagine voting for the first time in 4 decades or at all or that matter, for a slate of candidates (who for the most part were anonymous until days before the election). That's amazing, even though you and your countrymen are at gunpoint from both sides in a senseless war, and given the fact that the date for this election and the decision not to postpone it was one made by Americans in DC and their buddies in Baghdad doesn't diminsh this accomplishment.
I happen to think electoral democracy a fetish and in the Iraq case the results wont affect much in the long run (and the similarities between this election and the election in Vietnam during it's war are scary) but I applaud the big fuck you the Iraqis gave to the criminal outsiders in their country wreaking havoc, be they Saudis, Syrians, Egyptians or Americans.
Hopefully some kind of civil structure will materialize out of this morass. A place where poets musicians and anyone can create, without the fear of death by beheading or a made in the USA evaporation by bombing. A place where women can wear a hijab or hardly anything at all. A place where young people can dance, drink, smoke and fuck and only have their overbearing parents to worry about instead of worrying about some religious police vigilante group or about breaking some arbitrary curfew and being caught by some overzealous American GI. At this point though, I don't see either side in the conflict offering a way out. Then again, I am not Iraqi and it's their call.
I don't know if I should be happy to have found this article or not. It's from a Pakistani newspaper called the Daily Times. I can't remember the last time I agreed with almost every point made in a editorial. The reason why I am so perturbed by this article and where it comes from is that I haven't found an equally profound article here in the US on the elections and it's possible ramifications for daily life for Iraqis. It shows me the sad state of the mainstream media here in a relatively free country vs. the press in very tightly controlled country like Pakistan. Enjoy.
As an aside:
Those of us who say were are against war need to ask ourselves, why?
I am against this and all other wars because there is never a justification for blowing up someone's mud hut in Afghanistan in the middle of the night just as there is no justification for plowing a plane load of people into a tower filled with more people during rush hour. The two acts are morally bankrupt.
The act of killing of millions of Jews, gypsies, Gays and whomever is equal in its brutality as the burning to death of 100,000 in Dresden and the 300,000 plus burned to a crisp in Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Tokyo. These acts reduce humans to, well I would say beasts but I can't seem to remember the last time any beast killed that many of its own.
Numbers are used to numb the mind.
Would you rather live next to a man who raped one woman or one that has raped 10? Well I'm sure your answer is neither. Why? Because the moral value of either choice is zero.
Once we start to rationalize one act of brutality against the other, we are falling into the trap of Dogma, of stale thought, of Schadenfreude, of shameful joy. Then culture dies a slow horrible death.
posted by djshoghi at 01:35
2 Comments:
I really did enjoy this thought-provoking piece of yours. However I think there's a point where you have to take sides. I had a striking realization the other day when it ocurred to me that for a long time I had fallen into the trap of becoming a liberal. This caused me to be infuriated with US Democrats and others because I considered myself "on their side" though a bit further to the left. But the fact is, I am not on their side anymore than I'm on Bush's side. In a response to Bush's reactionary policies, too many of us have become soft on anyone opposing Bush and as a part of that, we've lost our own sense of fighting spirit - for example, many anti-war activists voted for a pro-war candidate, myself included. We need to get back to making the word "activist" mean something again.
As for being against the Iraq war "and all other wars" because they are "morally bankrupt" I am not sure where you are coming from. You have to ask yourself this question - as long as a system is based on money and profit, and the pursuit of that profit by any means necessary (ie Iraq), can a world peace exist within that system? If the answer is "no" then you at least have to concede the possibility that you would be for a war to get rid of that system. In other words, world peace is not going to come through a peacable agreement of nations whose whole reason for existence is based on their ability to retain as much money and land as possible and who shift countries around (mainly through debt) from one to another. For example, Iraq used to be a British colony and has now reverted back into being an occupied country. Would a violent uprising against that system be "morally bankrupt"? Uncomfortable though they may be, we have to ask these questions if we oppose the war in Iraq.
Finally, I think you are being far too hard on the "left" by claiming that they wanted to see bombs blowing people up on polling day in Iraq. I have not read that in any article of any lefty press. What I did read were varying opinions on why these said "elections" were nothing but a sham because you can't have a "democratic election" under a foreign occupation. Also, a number of people on the left pointed out that many of the Shias voted specifically because Al-Sistani told them it was a way to end the occupation sooner. Unfortunately, we all know this will not happen. Far from being happy about it, I find it rather tragic that people think they are exercising their right to govern their own country when nothing could be further from the truth. What they did end up doing was giving further legitimacy in some people's eyes to the very occupiers they were attempting to get rid of by peaceful means.
For the first time in my life I am taking sides. I am siding with people. Siding with people and feeling for their plight, be they Palestinian or Israeli, a burning banker falling to his death in Manhattan or an Iraqi, or a Kurdish child. I refuse to side with Political or Religious programmes anymore.
"How many monks did the Chinese get"......
I also refuse to sit here, enjoying my prosperity and freedom, and think that people a million times worse off than me, who must have (besides physical aliments such as cancer from depleted Uranium and wounds from terrorist, be they Arab or American, bullets) deep psycological problems, are somehow selling out or diluting themsleves by voting. I personally think the vote a sham, but I think it is a sham here as well. I think elections by nature are shams but that is a topic for another day. That doesn't mean we should sit on our 1st world thrones and pat the 3rd worlders on their collective heads.
That is how it must sound like to them when European and American "leftists" argue aganist their vote. Sure, pattings on Iraqi heads administered by the "neo-cons" are alot more bloody but no one likes a pat on the head, no?
Post a Comment
<< Home