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talkpolitics2010-04-22 11:48 am
underlankers.livejournal.com) wrote in talkpolitics2010-04-22 11:48 am
Entry tags:
On religion and geopolitics:
I became intrigued the other day when I was reading about the recent outbreaks of religious violence in places like Orissa.
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/08/27/india-world-leaders-urged-condemn-violence-orissa
I've noticed that the violence in Orissa aimed at Christians got a great deal of coverage in Western media, where it took a site like *this* to find an article about the contemporary massacres of Muslims going on at the same time: http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&pagename=Zone-English-News/NWELayout&cid=1248187896567.
I look at this double-standard and I've come to ponder an issue as regards the contemporary geopolitical scene and its reflections in today's religious world. Today, people like Peter Akinola stir up violence against Muslims in one of the largest countries in Europe, yet all the coverage reflects violence by Muslims against Christians. The irony is that while at least some of it is unprovoked evil, others of it is very much not. Yet Akinola gets away with it because he is an Episcopal religious leader. Were he a leader in any Muslim sect it would not be half as bad.
For that matter, Christian leaders as seen here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/world/africa/04uganda.html have been deeply involved with pushing the bill in Uganda that would establish anti-gay Concentration camps. Now, these are Western Protestant religious readers, yet the involvement of these men received minimal attention in its own right. The House of Saud is the nastiest bunch of bastards in a region full of them, and no doubt tries to spread as much influence in American mosques as it can. Yet it's *Westerners* who are directly encouraging outbreaks of violence with a religious rationale here.
And in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are of course the acts of provocation by the fundamentalists in the military which attract attention, yet little attention gets paid to things like this: http://dogemperor.newsvine.com/_news/2008/06/03/1536421-prosyletization-in-iraq-a-threat-to-national-security where Western proselytization threatens as much the Native *Christian* communities in the chaos from the fall of Saddam Hussein as the unleashing of Muslim extremism does.
This is, of course, not to mention as well the double-standard applied to domestic Right-Wing as opposed to Left-Wing terror movements, while![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
paft has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer she's done a good job of pointing out the problem not only exists is real. So this is what's going on. Why is it that things like this occur but no attention is paid to them, or if it is it's not enough nor effective enough?
I believe that the simplest answer to this that the United States/American Empire, which is the current hegemonic imperial power, is a Protestant Christian nation like the old British Empire was. The current "War on Terror" should more accurately be called "War on Islamic Terrorisms", and yes, the plural is deliberate. But since the USA is majority-Christian (whatever the political extremist movement that terms itself Evangelicalism wishes to think 70% of the USA still identifies as Christian and that *does* influence its politics) it turns a blind eye to atrocities done by Christian movements and/or would use them as proxies to project its power.
I believe a more complex answer is in the reality that Western interests in the early 21st Century are in steep conflict with interest of Muslim societies in the Middle East, and that the conflict between say, the United States and the various forms of Muslim extremism prevalent throughout the Middle East has as much to do with conflicting hegemonic interests in a variety of factions as it does with Christianity *or* Islam. Yet due to the intersection of US imperial interests with Christianity and the resistance movements of the Middle East with Islam, the tension leads to the complete silence on massacres of Muslims by members of other religions both now and in instances like say, the Greek attempt to kill off all the Turks in the 1920s.
What say you?
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/08/27/india-world-leaders-urged-condemn-violence-orissa
I've noticed that the violence in Orissa aimed at Christians got a great deal of coverage in Western media, where it took a site like *this* to find an article about the contemporary massacres of Muslims going on at the same time: http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&pagename=Zone-English-News/NWELayout&cid=1248187896567.
I look at this double-standard and I've come to ponder an issue as regards the contemporary geopolitical scene and its reflections in today's religious world. Today, people like Peter Akinola stir up violence against Muslims in one of the largest countries in Europe, yet all the coverage reflects violence by Muslims against Christians. The irony is that while at least some of it is unprovoked evil, others of it is very much not. Yet Akinola gets away with it because he is an Episcopal religious leader. Were he a leader in any Muslim sect it would not be half as bad.
For that matter, Christian leaders as seen here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/world/africa/04uganda.html have been deeply involved with pushing the bill in Uganda that would establish anti-gay Concentration camps. Now, these are Western Protestant religious readers, yet the involvement of these men received minimal attention in its own right. The House of Saud is the nastiest bunch of bastards in a region full of them, and no doubt tries to spread as much influence in American mosques as it can. Yet it's *Westerners* who are directly encouraging outbreaks of violence with a religious rationale here.
And in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are of course the acts of provocation by the fundamentalists in the military which attract attention, yet little attention gets paid to things like this: http://dogemperor.newsvine.com/_news/2008/06/03/1536421-prosyletization-in-iraq-a-threat-to-national-security where Western proselytization threatens as much the Native *Christian* communities in the chaos from the fall of Saddam Hussein as the unleashing of Muslim extremism does.
This is, of course, not to mention as well the double-standard applied to domestic Right-Wing as opposed to Left-Wing terror movements, while
paft has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer she's done a good job of pointing out the problem not only exists is real. So this is what's going on. Why is it that things like this occur but no attention is paid to them, or if it is it's not enough nor effective enough? I believe that the simplest answer to this that the United States/American Empire, which is the current hegemonic imperial power, is a Protestant Christian nation like the old British Empire was. The current "War on Terror" should more accurately be called "War on Islamic Terrorisms", and yes, the plural is deliberate. But since the USA is majority-Christian (whatever the political extremist movement that terms itself Evangelicalism wishes to think 70% of the USA still identifies as Christian and that *does* influence its politics) it turns a blind eye to atrocities done by Christian movements and/or would use them as proxies to project its power.
I believe a more complex answer is in the reality that Western interests in the early 21st Century are in steep conflict with interest of Muslim societies in the Middle East, and that the conflict between say, the United States and the various forms of Muslim extremism prevalent throughout the Middle East has as much to do with conflicting hegemonic interests in a variety of factions as it does with Christianity *or* Islam. Yet due to the intersection of US imperial interests with Christianity and the resistance movements of the Middle East with Islam, the tension leads to the complete silence on massacres of Muslims by members of other religions both now and in instances like say, the Greek attempt to kill off all the Turks in the 1920s.
What say you?
Re: Noam is an island
Re: Noam is an island
Re: Noam is an island
Re: Noam is an island
In fact, that's one of the things Chomsky constantly harps upon, the fact that most Americans never get to hear the evidence, when it's concerning what their own country has done. And when they do, it's typically presented in a way that is astounding hypocritical.
I expect that the people of the U.S. would be utterly outraged if only they were allowed to know of what has and is being perpetrated in their name, or where they do know of it, if they only wanted to understand what it really meant.
Re: Noam is an island