Has it been seventy-one years of peace?
Here it comes again, the wrath of mankind!
Baghdad- March 13, 2003
Today any coward can produce shock and awe. With a little bomb here and a little bomb there, her a bomb, there a bomb, everywhere a bomb bomb. Any fool who can pull a trigger can create chaos. Any idiot can get tactical weapons training.
Perhaps we've been too fortunate, perhaps we’ve been too lucky, perhaps the last 71 years — however bloody they have been in regions of the world where our real politics have played out in epic manipulations of our world — has simply been an anomaly.
Yet many of us in the West have enjoyed decades of peace and binging consumerism. We’ve been able to consign death and destruction to the Third World— mere externalities. Our control of commodities and energy has given us the power to own more things and enjoy unparalleled freedom. We’ve been awash in information and entertainment. It’s been a good run.
Today machines are becoming smarter than people and we’re still pining about making widgets. We can’t even respect and feel thankful for the slaves in foreign countries who make our cheap stuff.
(You see, real men are anti-intellectual. It’s time for war!)
We’ve learned nothing from The War to End All Wars and World War II, and we’ve learned nothing from the invention and use of its ultimate terror tool, nuclear bombs.
And so it’s beginning to look like a new race war is brewing. Extremist groups blabber on about it incessantly. Like Charles Manson, they think it’s inevitable. The stated aim of Daesh is unfolding like clockwork, and all the fools are rushing in concocting their poisons. The better angels of our nature are being trumped by our human propensity for fear and hate. Men in bars across the Western world are talking of murder and revenge as if the collateral damage of decades of illegal wars in the Middle East was an insignificant and meaningless spat, a mere preamble to a greater conflict, a warm-up for the big show.
“You see after 9-11 everything changed!” When we become victims the gloves come off.
Why are so many of us so comfortable with hate?
The world is going towards a very dark place exacerbated by technological progress, globalization, global extinction events, climate change, inequality, stateless corporations, narrow ideological thinking, magical thinking and its hate child terrorism. Idiots like Donald Trump are just symptoms of a greater conflagration caused by human psychosis.
We have always been close allies of death and destruction, to understand this one only needs to crack open a religious book and read; one needs only be a fan of mythology and history.
9. Exodus 32:27-29
Then he said to them, "This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: 'Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.' "The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. Then Moses said, "You have been set apart to the LORD today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day."(NIV)
If we stop building trust, we will be left with only suspicion and hate.
Prepare to spy on your brothers and sisters; grab your war kit and prepare to fight and die; say goodbye to your sons and daughters; grab your kit for desperate survival— the zeitgeist compels us to do so and we are powerless to stop it.
We are being conditioned to want mass death in the guise of holy war. Has this always been the case? Crusaders unite! Give the people what they really want: to be ugly, to be ruthless, to be brutal like the storied days of old. Prepare to suffer, the party is over, prepare for the wrath of humanity. Unleash the hell stuffed missiles, that divine energy that has been sweating in silos for decades now. Release the poison gas supposedly outlawed in 1925. Let’s spend our genius and treasure on weapons of war: Let's liberate life on earth from the horror of humanity. Let's do what God wants.
6. 1 Kings 20:28-30
Then a man of God came and spoke to the king of Israel, and said, “Thus says the LORD: 'Because the Syrians have said, “The LORD is God of the hills, but He is not God of the valleys,” therefore I will deliver all this great multitude into your hand, and you shall know that I am the LORD.’” And they encamped opposite each other for seven days.
So it was that on the seventh day the battle was joined; and the children of Israel killed one hundred thousand foot soldiers of the Syrians in one day. But the rest fled to Aphek, into the city; then a wall fell on twenty-seven thousand of the men who were left. (NKJV)
Syrian cities today.
But wait, we have a hero waiting in the wings of power and righteousness, President Elect Donald Trump has more powers than all the Marvel Comic Book heroes combined. He will use tools like torture, military might and mind control to rip the faith right out of 1.6 billion Muslims who will magically become Christians overnight turning into evangelical Trump supporters. Our world will finally be perfect. We can dream can’t we?
"He may be talking, but he'll talk a lot faster with the torture…” Donald Trump
It's a complicated thing this Islamist insurgency. Can we see through it? Must all manner of faith be destroyed? Which kind of magical thinking is the best? Is a reality based world view just too hard for evolved human societies to create? Does egotistical ambition always outweigh common sense among the talented and driven?
The desire for recognition is a dangerous addiction.
We will all be forced to draw the line somewhere and all sides will spout a cacophony of opinions. As identity politics grows and calcifies groups will be forced to confront their fates. Some will join in the violence surrendering to a purer nature. Others will take a more nuanced view and struggle to keep the peace from completely falling apart. Peace is like a dam that needs constant maintenance lest it crumbles unleashing utter destruction like a great flood perpetrated by God.
Why did Einstein think that Gandhi was the greatest political mind in human history? History, that untamable beast. When Nation States no longer wage conventional wars we can only wage war on each other. The end of history is just another excuse to clique up and fight!
Pitting one's God against another's God and becoming the agent of God's wrath is, perhaps, just too ingrained in human minds to give up. Religion— that old tribal brick and mortar, that old tribal differentiator, that old tribal motivator, that old trope, may be with us until the end of days.
So what, pray tell, will set my people free?
