6 June 2014

'The West's War on the World' - @DanJohnJohnson #US #UK #policy

SHAFAQNA- In his book “The River War”, a young Winston Churchill wrote:
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog… A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement…. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men… Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith”.
Such bigoted opprobrium is particularly hard to swallow if one bears in mind that Churchill wrote it while embedded in the British Army as a war reporter during the so called “Mahdist War”.

One of Britain’s most infamous colonial outrages, the “Mahdist War” saw England’s finest Christian Soldiers use cutting edge machine gun technology to massacre 10,000 Sudanese Muslims armed with swords and pointy sticks (47 brave British Soldiers also died that day).

Churchill was not the first nor was he the last Champion of Imperialism to see in Islam the violence, malice and misogyny to which he was blind in his own self. In our own time, Neo Con Columnist Mark Steyn lambasts in his book “America Alone” the evils and dangers of militant Islam, while pointing the finger of blame for the attempted genocide of Bosnian Muslims during the breakup of Yugoslavia not at violent Serb Nationalism or Christian Fanaticism, but at Muslims having too many children. He writes:
“Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography—except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent”.
Misogyny is another favourite hobby horse of Islam hating poison pens. The late letch and rent a mouth Christopher Hitchens spoke eloquently about the presumed mistreatment of women in Islamic Law, yet revealed his contempt for the female of the species – the species he regarded as no more than an advanced form of ape – in comments such as:
“Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about... Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women?... The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex... Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift”.
Fairly harmless banter one might think, but Hitchens’ reduction of human idiosyncrasies to a mere  product of Social Darwinism is eerily reminiscent of the violent worldview – the weltanschauung – of Hitler and the chief ideologues of National Socialism.

According to the Bible – Matthew 7: 3 and 4 – Jesus Christ said to his bewildered contemporaries:
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?”
Throughout the history of Christendom, perhaps no verse in the whole of the Bible has been more purposefully ignored than this one. The West obsesses with the supposed violent nature of Islam, apparently oblivious to the damage it has wrought on mankind and Mother Nature since it came into its own some three centuries ago.

A millennium of crusades, pogroms and mutual incinerations are enough of an indictment of Christendom's blood lust to make any self-respecting Trinitarian think twice before criticizing the martial inclinations of other faiths.

But the atrocities and excesses of all pre-modern civilisations are as nought when compared to the West’s Total War against God and Man launched some time in the late 18th century C.E. and continuing unabated until the present day. The war began with the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution, and yielded immediate and catastrophic results.

The Industrial Revolution started in Britain and spread to mainland Europe and America in a few decades. Revolutionary techniques in steam power, textile production, gas power and chemical engineering rendered countless Britons redundant and condemned countless more to lives of unspeakable squalor in the factories and mills of the British Isles. The gains of the revolution provided a few factory owners and industrialists with obscene wealth, but the workers on whose sweat they grew fat were little more than slaves, subject to unimaginable cruelty and privations at the hands of their new Masters. In 1759 Scottish Poet Robert Burns visited an Iron Works in Falkirk, Scotland, and wrote:
We came not here to view your works,
In hopes to be more wise,
But only, lest we go to hell,
It may be no surprise.
In “Nicholas Nickleby” Charles Dickens describes the tragic condition of Industrial Britain’s children:
“Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men… boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies… there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were viciousfaced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail… With every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding here!”
Thanks to the fast extending tentacles of the British Empire, this prototype Jahannam was quickly exported across the globe. The Industrial Revolution scarred the face of human civilisation forever, leaving the world a more cruel, unjust, unequal and less beautiful place.

After more than a century of brutalisation the working class of industrialised Europe were primed, like pit bulls reared to rip each other to shreds, for the greatest orgy of mass slaughter the world had ever seen. WW1 saw the apparatus of mechanised industry used to kill an estimated 16 million people, approximately half of whom were non-combatants. This obscene bloodbath was the product of a cultural milieu conceived and nurtured in Western Christendom, and its reverberations would give rise to an even more cataclysmic conflagration of violence, the shadow of which we still live in today.

WW2 claimed the lives of over 60 million people, the vast majority of whom were non-combatants. The apparatus of mass production were utilised for the purpose of systematically annihilating whole communities. A new age of evil had dawned, and it was entirely the creation of technologically advanced Western Christian nations. Almost 3% of the world’s population perished in WW2, and the use by America of nuclear weapons against Japan’s civilian population made possible the grim new potential outcome for future conflicts – M.A.D – Mutually Assured Destruction. The century in which Western Christian Hegemony came into full fruition was by far the bloodiest century in history.

Throughout the 20th Century Western leaders rewrote the rules of war, erasing all trace of chivalry and morality, while mad scientists in the West’s top Universities taught the world to have contempt for nature, to learn its ways only so as to warp them. So devastating was the effect of Western Man’s rise to power that even weather patterns were distorted. For the first time in history, mankind as a species was able to destroy itself.

We are now on the brink of environmental meltdown, but terminally distracted by TV, entertainment sports and pornography we are impotent to effect any change. Divorced from nature, we rot in megacities from which we cannot even see the stars at night. Men who know the price of everything and the value of nothing dictate our lives by remote control, and we sit and wait to die while the acid rain falls around us. Thank you Western Christian Civilisation, thank you for liberating us from our humanity.

By Daniel Johnson - More articles by Daniel Johnson

Daniel Johnson is a British writer and activist. He has traveled extensively in the Middle East and his interests include the history and politics of the region. In addition to this, Daniel has been hosting Spice FM, and his passionate political articles can be found at the Press TV website. Follow Daniel on Twitter to get updates on his work.

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#Book Review: The Traveller and Pandemonium (2014) by Harry J. Bentham @HJBentham

TheTraveller and Pandemonium (2014) is Harry J. Bentham’s science fiction opus in 2014 and the longest work written by Bentham. It is a full-length novel at 24 chapters, and includes many additional features that you won’t find in other books. After the Maquis Books review, we at ClubOfINFO feel a duty to compete by penning our own enthusiasm for this exquisite book.

By following the journey of Jreeco – a traveler who begins as a teenager in the initial chapters of the story – this is an adventure that soon turns into a story of war, tragedy and comradeship… on an alien planet. The genre is hard to describe, as the novel takes on the difficult challenge of creating a genuinely original plot when so many other books in the stores these days are forced to simply rehash exhausted themes and ideas. If an original story and a real change of pace are what you are looking for, this is the novel for you.

The balance of romance, adventure, violence and philosophy in this book is mastered by Bentham like an expert, which we can assume be the reward of years of drafting and development (the original draft was written as far back as 2011, according to Bentham). Political themes in the book are relevant and clearly influenced by the world events of the time at which Bentham wrote the book. In the political and war themes of the story, there is a clash of extremist philosophies, coupled with a desperate and unavailing war to oust an ancient authoritarian regime. Remember, this is told in a unique way and it is impossible to get bored, because it is all set against the backdrop of an apparently botched human colonization of an alien world. In Karakhana, the world of the story, humans are clinging for their very survival against the odds and have bifurcated into two great kingdoms with quite different ideas about humanity’s future. In this way, the story gets to explore the worst abysses of human fanaticism, desperation and hardline behavior in the most fitting possible setting – effectively imagining what kind of internecine fighting might be experienced by future humans if they took divergent paths with regard to their own evolution.

Calligraphy from the fictional nation of Krozan
Detail of the characters and opposing cultures involved in this story of intrigue and horror goes way beyond the best expectations that any reader might have. Bentham has even included beautiful calligraphy that brings each country to life, allowing the reader to imagine truly exploring this harsh world and the reflections of alternative humanity found in all its cultural embellishments. After reading your way through this adventure, you may just think you have really been to Karakhana – or visited a genuine record of the costs to humanity in settling an alien planet.

With its compelling tale of human individuals and cultures isolated in an alien world and struggling with matters of ethics and survival, the intrigue and darkness shown in The Traveller and Pandemonium is quite beyond imagination, beyond challenge. It is quite likely that nothing similar to this has ever been attempted in literature before, and no other recent work of fiction could be encouraged stronger for its profound themes and ideas.

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3 June 2014

Obama’s US exceptionalism explained - @HJBentham - #US #equality #respect

In the speech by Barack Obama on Wednesday 28 May, the US President affirmed his belief in a foreign policy influenced by “US exceptionalism”.

To its critics, US exceptionalism is nothing but a euphemism for immunity, discrimination and propaganda to excuse and defend war crimes carried out by the United States. In view of the US’s exposure as a dangerous rogue state by an increasing army of whistleblowers, something like US exceptionalism is Obama’s only excuse for otherwise starkly hypocritical international relations.

US exceptionalism has meant many things, but this tragically abused expression now seems to be the monopoly of Neoconservative hawks. The previous US exceptionalism, believed presidents preceding George W. Bush, was the view of the US as a political example to other democracies and not a justification for unilateralism and Neoconservative hate ideology.

The version of US exceptionalism popularized by George W. Bush’s supporters was the violent idea of the United States as the only country that should be allowed to carry out wars of aggression. The Neoconservatives twisted the original version of US exceptionalism to say that the United States somehow has an exceptional right to invade other states and murder their people, and should not face consequences for its war crimes.

Obama’s US exceptionalism, we might have hoped, is more along the traditional lines of the US being a political example to other democracies and reformers across the world. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case. By claiming that US exceptionalism entitles the US to carry out unilateral military actions, as he did in his recent speech, Obama is spouting the very same destructive Neoconservative ideology that many of his supporters must have thought he had rejected.

As a matter of fact, the US is not exceptional either in the benign archaic definition or in the newer Neoconservative definition. In the Twenty-First Century, the view of the US as a young country, a novel regime, or a benign conqueror is fundamentally out of date and out of touch with the reality of history. There are now plenty of younger countries, more promising forms of government, plenty of more peaceful and reliable international actors, countries with superior human rights records, and countries that have killed fewer people in wars of aggression than the United States.

Saying a country can break international law due to being exceptional is a fallacy, because every country is exceptional to the same extent that the United States is. French exceptionalism would have to be the most convincing, because the French models of national republic and popular sovereignty have come to shape the parameters of statehood across the whole world. If exceptionalism gave any qualification for world leadership, then that role would have to go to France.

Britain could be described as exceptional, too, because its language and customs are more widespread than any other culture in the world. The argument for German domination of Europe is more compelling than the argument for Anglo-American domination of Europe, because Germany is still an exceptional economic and military power based at the heart of Europe. The USSR was exceptional in its time, because it was the first constitutionally socialist state. The Islamic Republic of Iran can be viewed as exceptional, being the first Islamic revolutionary state to be founded in the modern world and having never attacked another state in its history.

Fortunately, other countries are not promoting their own exceptionalism. By now, humility, and the lessons of fascism and chauvinism prevent countries other than the United States from speculating that their regime is exceptional and entitled to rule the entire world. In 1945, Western European countries were prepared to be led and defended by the United States in the post-war order in Europe, to repay the role the United States had played in rebuilding a devastated Europe. In the Twenty-First Century, the US no longer has any similar package to offer Europe or any other part of the world. US leadership of the “free world” is now hanging by a very thin thread, and it is hard to convince even normally reliable US partners like the French, the Germans or the British to tolerate the arrogance of their “ally”.

Since 1945, the view that the United States as a benevolent occupier in Europe has steadily become less convincing. Amidst the revelations that the US tries to influence politics in Europe and spy on its own “allies” there, the US seems tantamount to a selfish occupier defending its own power, like Hitler’s Germany before it, rather than a protector. The so-called “alliance” that justifies this US leadership in Europe is NATO, supposedly based on the North Atlantic Treaty but now degenerating into a front for unilateral US power. Through NATO, the US exploits European powers by trying to conflate their national interests with US military dominance and ensure the special treatment of the US occupiers as “exceptional”.

In the history of the North Atlantic Treaty, the famous Article 5 – supposedly promising the collective defense of Europe against an external aggressor – was invoked only once. Having never actually called on the US to protect European interests, NATO instead summoned Europe to protect the supposedly mighty US itself on September 11, 2001. Prior to 9/11, individual NATO states actually faced all kinds of similar violent “terrorist” threats to their sovereign territory. Such threats included attacks in and from colonies considered as extensions of European countries like French Algeria, PKK operations in Turkey (they have supporting bases and forces outside NATO boundaries), the IRA in Britain, and the Argentine invasion of the Falklands. The US and NATO did nothing to protect the interests of these member states because, quite simply, these were not the interests of the United States.

Looking at what has happened, it seems the so-called “collective defense” article of the North Atlantic Treaty only renders military support to the “exceptional” United States and not to its allies. Could NATO be dismissed as a puppet organization, appointed to sweet-talk the Europeans into dying for American interests, and not representing any European national interests? What kind of “leadership” does this reveal to be exercised by the US over its Western allies?

Rather than being a leader, an example or a protector for other countries, the US instead comes across as yet another occupier, and its “exceptionalism” smacks of nationalist propaganda rather than a sound academic argument. While it used to be based on a compelling analysis that the US was a young country and a unique regime in the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century, US exceptionalism is not a credible theory among academics in the Twenty-First Century. Most scholars in Europe will label it for what it is: a form of chauvinism and half-baked propaganda vainly appealing to American and Western European audiences who don’t want to hear it.

US exceptionalism, in fact, is one of the most foolish and dangerous ideas that the modern world is embarrassed to hear. Obama, who is destined to stand out from the pages of history as America’s first black president, should certainly not be offering support to ideas of US national supremacy that are inimical to civil rights, equality and mutual respect.

In the Twenty-First Century, there is no place for the crude propaganda of national superiority, which is nothing but an appeal to latent hooliganism and racism in the United States. If Obama really believes what he said about the US being “exceptional” enough to break international law and use military power unilaterally to defend its interests, he is as dangerous as his criminal predecessor.

By Harry J. Bentham - More articles by Harry J. Bentham

Originally published on 30 May 2014 at Press TV

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