Once upon a time, used to be that of the most fringe element in the political spectrum was in the left, trying to organize proletarian revolutions, destabilize governments, create so much disruption that people wanting stability put them in power, and, after a few good things, tyranny.
Article by: Francisco Lopez
Chair ASDR, Prestigious Network (31,000+) Business and Humanitarian Development, Deals, Rainmaking, Investment Mgmt.
Some were armed by us, like in Cuba, which, after sensing our betrayal, as in Guatemala and Nicaragua, aligned with our cold war foe, the Soviets. Most in the left, however, were feed by the Soviets, using, i.e., Cuba as a proxy, as we used Israel for some of our dirty job in the Middle East and extended the cold war arming everyone against each other and against the Soviets, who also were arming groups and creating for their interest the same thing. We also covered Latin America with our friendly right wing dictators.
We also tried to incite a billion Muslims against the USSR, which was courting and arming some groups against Israel and destabilizing our access to oil. We armed and supported ‘the warriors of God,’ as Reagan called them. The Taliban visited the White House and Osama Bin Laden got our support. Both super powers fought a proxy war using these people. Soon, their internal differences came up and, as happen to those messing in marriage disputes, both the Soviets and us got into the losing end. Now the ‘warriors of God’ united against the ‘infidels’ while our own warriors of God united against them, specially after 911. Conspiracy theories, hatred, religious fanaticism, racism, extremism, and all kind of lunacy mixed with ignorance found a fertile ground.
Ad to this mix in the middle east a over a decade long severe drought, and impoverished and stressed out people flowing to the cities and most of the oil riches not going to the populace.
Middle East unrest coincides with drought- Business Insider
Tables has changed. More than geo-political alignment, things in the Middle East are around ideology and religion, at least at the base. The actual reasons never change, risk and natural resources. However, the conduits are religion and ideology mixed with ethnicity and plain ignorance. The environment and flow of funds are also more conducive to organized overt efforts.
Here in the USA things are different. Therefore, the advent of the lone wolf and Manchurian mole. Although organized movements can be everywhere, it seems that the most effective model for terror here seems to be this.
Just spread inflammatory rhetoric, may be with subliminal commands inside the structure of the message, even its syntax, as any Neuro Linguistic Programming practitioner can understand, and some among the many will react to it. It could be someone becoming a recruit to go where organized terror can be overtly executed, as if entering a gang, or become a Manchurian mole or, may be, a lone wolf acting in their own for something they belief enough to act upon.
A big problem we increasingly have here, as it is in the middle east, as in other parts of the world, is ultraconservative right wing nut terrorism. We share with them a large amount of lunatics, racists, bigots, religious fundamentalist fanatics, ignorant, stupid, xenophobes, homophobes, extremists, paranoid, hatemongers, closed minded people and people in varying degrees of stress and mental illness.
Ad to this, the advent of mass communications technologies availability to practically anyone and things can rapidly spread like wildfire.
The problem is that, thanks to the combination of inflammatory rhetoric and lunacy, most, if not all, non common delinquency related shootings is coming from right wing nuts, both here, and abroad. I bet the left has their fair share but, I still have to see a three huger bombing synagogues and black churches, shooting police officers and other law enforcement personnel, or shooting congresspeople or blowing up Federal facilities.
We have on them our home grown terrorists. Used to be concentrated in the left, but, again, you never see a three huger bombing synagogues or black churches or shooting police and law enforcement personnel, congresspeople or blowing up Federal facilities. Only right wing nuts, ultraconservative fanatics as the ones we see in the Middle East, where they have the same situation worsened by war: Muslim right wing ultra conservatives and crazies, just as our home grown, who hijacked their religion and made it something else. Spiritually, these are the same brotherhood: bigots, racists, ignorant, hatemongers, closed minded religious fanatics and hyper patriots.
Article on the New York Times on the raise of right wing terrorism.
Ad to this the people with psychological problems who can blow up at any time.
Lunacy is the enemy. Home and abroad. Our right wing terrorists are as bad as the Muslim right wing terrorists, the difference is that ours cannot cut legally heads here nor no longer lynch Negroes and ‘mongrels.’
Article on Mother Jones about Right Wing Terrorism in the USA.
Part of the problem, although not necessarily the cause, is the gun culture prevailing in many parts of the world and the easy availability of arms to anyone who can buy or rob one.
In the USA the gun culture and powerful lobby is behind many psychologically borderline who are paranoid about a new world order taking the sovereignty of the USA, putting them in FEMA camps, taking away their guns and letting the ‘mongrels’ to rape their women and contaminate the race and all sorts of conspiracy theories and paranoia against the government. One thing is to be watchful, another is to be paranoid, bigot, racist and willing to kill for it.
This is where most of our local terrorism comes from. Usually shooting police and law enforcement officers, even blowing up Federal facilities like in Oklahoma City, attacks against minorities and fierce opposition to immigration.
Something must be done without infringing the right to free association and assembly of these people.
Stats are clear, the more guns, the more homicides and gun violence, half of gun related killings are related to domestic violence, accidents and irresponsibility, the other half, due homicides (crime and delinquency) and the most visible for psychological problems and internal terrorism. Right now internal terrorism has killed more people than 911.
Our constitution may have to be amended, as it has been done over 20 times. The circumstances our founding fathers faced are very different than our current reality. May be the big test was when the robber barons of their time, attempted a coup against FDR and hired General Butler for putting troops in Washington, DC and take over the FDR government who the right wing elites view as socialist.
General Butler went all the way, and at the last moment informed FDR and Congress. FDR chose not to hang for treason these traitors, as it was not the time to cut the head off the leaders of the USA economy. The incident was shoveled under the rug. Our republic owns its existence today to this hero, General Butler.
Our nation and our military tradition reached political maturity at that date.
I advocate for a system similar to the Swiss. Everyone can have a gun, but must be properly trained, be fit for the responsibility of having it and the guns and the ammo accounted for.
It is true that Switzerland is a small and very rich country that, even their neutrality, can be invaded from any direction, so it is desirable to have its citizenry armed. We, in contrast, have relative geographic isolation from enemy bots on the ground and have a large land mass which will dilute and make very expensive any invader’s effort, and have a powerful army now, a national guard at every state and law enforcement so the needs of the Swiss may not apply to us perfectly. When we were nascent, our needs were very different.
The Swiss have double the incidence of people killed by guns, in comparison with Europe, where most people do not carry guns, but, in absolute terms is almost microscopic compared to our system in the USA.
The NRA had this view point years ago, but they became radicalized by the right wing nuttery and the interests to protect the industry (the real main motor on this).
How the Gun Lobby rewrote the Second Amendment (Bloomberg View)
The NRA once supported Gun Control. ‘It may seem hard to believe but, for decades the organization helped write federal laws restricting gun use.’
BTW, is good to examine the stats, after all, these people love to use beginning and end points that suit their beliefs, like the Tobacco, Anti Environmentalist and Climate Change Denier shills.
Again, I advocate for a system similar to the Swiss.
Everyone can have a gun, but must be properly trained, be fit for the responsibility of having it and the guns and the ammo accounted for. Also, a national uniform code with the closing of all the loopholes.
The increase in lunacy and hate mongering mixed with lose availability of guns, is a dangerous thing. In a large population, inflammatory rhetoric can easily lose lunatics and psychopaths into action.
Is time for a change. Hate-mongering should stop.
I do not advocate to infringe on freedom of expression but, the rhetoric is too inflammatory. Words have consequences.
That anti Muslim refugee campaign, specially anti Syrian refugee fleeing the lunatics in their area, by the right wing nuttery can lead to very bad things. It happened before, to the Jews in Germany by the NAZI right wingers. That’s why 1,000 Rabbis signed a letter asking the current administration to accept more refugees and offering their assistance to settle them. Of course, we must address all security issues.
This is one of the best opportunities to show the Muslim world that we, the common citizens, are not the enemy. Christians, Muslims and Jews worship the very same God. Even Muhammad, who became an orphan, was taken as his son by a Jewish Rabbi, who taught him Judaism and his trade as a merchant. The challenge, in all sides, is to translate what civilized people want into the realm of geopolitics.
Is time to move out of the geo-politically induced interventionism of the kind that trap innocents in the path of bullets. With all the damage in the region this will be a long road but, it must be traveled. Is time.
Hatemongers, lunatics, racist, ignorant, bigots, crazies mixed with guns is an insane combination. Both sides have gun cultures as happenes in other similar situations around the world.
Lunacy is not only a mater of ultraconservative right wing extremism in the Muslim world and the USA. Dr. Syed Ghalib Imam Zaidi put it very well in a thread discussing similar things: “There are Hindu fanatics in India who are killing people for eating beef. Question: Is this the teaching of Hinduism? No. Buddhism teaches peace and tolerance but in Myanmar we have Buddhist fanatics committing a genocide of Rohingya Muslims. Should we blame their religion? It is people who are good or bad, not religions, ISIS and their supporters are acting contrary to the teachings of Islam.” I think the punishment is crucifixion and cutting the left hand and the right foot or around that. Religions has been used many times as a medium to inject exogenous stuff into the adherents body of beliefs.
As long as there are lunatics, ignorant, racists, bigots, fanatics, hatemongers, xenophobes, homophobes, crazies, hyper pseudo patriots, zealots, backward looking people with access to the means and ways to kill others for their beliefs, there will be terror.
Also, we cannot serve humanity as a nation with so many hateful people willing to hunt immigrants and refugees like animals.
In states where getting a gun is unrestricted, the deaths by guns is double the national average. You can have a city like Chicago, with strict gun control laws, surrounded by counties where you cross the city limits and can buy a gun unrestricted, therefore killing the city policy effort. Is time for a uniform regulatory environment.
I propose the Swiss model, adapted to us and addressing the problem at its root: Lunacy
The forces of oppression, economic and political, produced a fertile ground for terror, ironically, as a weapon against them. Religions and other philosophical systems, many times used by the oppressors, now are used by the extremists as a way to plant the seeds, not of liberation, but of a way to substitute one oppressor for another. Many times, those tenets people swear for, end converting the converted into pawns of the actors in the background political game.
Of course, we cannot reduce our standing as humans by redoing the Fuhrer’s doctrine of declaring other humans unfit to live, for getting rid of the ignorant, lunatic, racist, bigot, fanatic, hatemonger, stupid, xenophobe and all that radical element that would be glad to recreate that doctrine in the first place. Also, in the USA these people have rights.
Our hope to save that thin layer of lacquer over our animal bodies we call civilization from its freedom to destroy itself is to publicly condemn these things as not part of civilization, not part of religions and philosophical systems, so the barbarians are isolated, We must act to protect ourselves here and abroad from these from wherever they are and, when necessary, destroy that threat to our specie, as we did with those committing crimes against humanity. For this, we need thinking people, not other racists, bigots, lunatics, fanatics and hatemongers.
This is not about two factions of barbarians killing each other and making who is wrong, a matter of perspective and definition.
We may not completely destroy the cancer, but maintain it it under control and contained, after all, the underlying force of the barbarian may reflect traits that are desirable at the time of questioning the status quo and evolving . . . or as the canary in the mine.
Religions and philosophical systems may be a reflection of a higher order we can still not understand and gradually placed in front of us to guide by means of the symbolic and the emblematic, our efforts to break with the futility of our animal nature and its physical, genetic and evolutionary chemical constraints, a thing we may need if we are to survive in one way or another the end of our current universe.
In the same way we rescued Science from being a superstition, is time to rescue religion, philosophical systems and bodies of belief from those who use them to serve special power interests, many times not in sync with its tenets.
Is time to canalize the emotions and needs associated with human nature, out of lunacy, bigotry, racism, ignorance, fanaticism, zealotry, craziness and all those other forces that divide us instead of uniting us for the fight for our very own existence as a specie.
Let’s not forget that the biggest trigger of all this are poverty, despair and hopelessness, reinforced by a distribution of wealth and income where a few have most of the riches and the rest just the scraps. Unemployment, already very high among the young populations in many countries, leads to poverty and the ostentatious exhibition of a way of life foreign to those who have not can lead people to question the validity of the regime that keeps them poor and in need.
In the USA we have an incredible bad distribution of wealth and income, worst than most undeveloped countries, but the magnitude of our economy, up to now, has been masking this. But, with a middle class making less in real terms and the poor doing worst, the seeds for social discontent beyond the pure ideological rage are becoming planted.
I discuss this in my article “The worst Enemy of Capitalism is a free Market.”
William Laraque, discuses about this from a different perspective in his article Terrorism: The Causes and Cure
Be aware that most conservatives are decent people professing more traditional values and not right wing nuts. The same as for Muslims and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, Atheists and Animists and Pagans. Of course, anyone can be radicalized, still, most people are not crazy. The key is that their political parties and religions are not hijacked by extremists and lunatics taking advantage of the geopolitical grave errors of those who, in one hand feed the world and make it move and in the other hand support the interests of a few with the blood sweat and tears of the many.
If you like this article, please, share. This is not an ego trip, I am too old for that. But together, this may help to open a needed dialog, or, at least, putting a small grain of sand in uniting civilization against barbarism and the forces of evil.
This is another article I wrote related to this. About the Middle East Refugee Crisis
Other articles by Francisco Lopez
Is time to stop this.
