2/8/2012

"Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is." ~Albert Camus

Isn't it convenient how our centuries long theories of evolution and
adaptability have provided us with sufficient discourse to defend the
abandonment of human virtue?
The tragedy lies not in the fact that misery and suffering have become
permanent residents of daily headlines; but in the undeniable
emptiness of hollow reactions invoked in people.
We spend more time toiling with the construction of a bubble around
our individual worlds than we dare to realize. Sophistication has come
at the price of compassion and raw human disposition. We're so
hellbent on cold detachment we disguise our efforts as cynicism. Is
this adaptability or have we become this averted to humanity?

Every one has become impressively skillful at caging an organism
behind a stonewall of make-believe indifference. Our true selves are
sheltered behind conspicuous layers of materialism and
self-involvement. We're living in perpetual denial of our
disposability. Mortality has become a scarlet letter we're refusing to
come to terms with let alone bear. Rationality and knowledge have
become the ingredients to a fatal concoction that blinds us to our
fate.

When did reality steer so far away from what's real?

From Chomsky's "Notes on Anarchism" (1970)

Indeed, many commentators dismiss anarchism as utopian, formless, primitive, or otherwise incompatible with the realities of a complex society. One might, however, argue rather differently: that at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to---rather than alleviate---material and cultural deficit. If so, there will be no doctrine of social change fixed for the present and future, nor even, necessarily, a specific and unchanging concept of the goals towards which social change should tend. Surely our understanding of the nature of man or of the range of viable social forms is so rudimentary that any far-reaching doctrine must be treated with great skepticism, just as skepticism is in order when we hear that "human nature" or "the demands of efficiency" or "the complexity of modern life" requires this or that form of oppression and autocratic rule.

Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

George Orwell, Why Socialists Don't Believe In Fun (1943)

Bertrand Russell - To Our Descendants

The Fallacy of Liberal Democracy

Until recently, I used to naively believe that Social Darwinism ended along with dark boorish years of colonialism. The notion that the Creator had enthroned a certain race and nation to be perpetually reign over all others; to guide us, to feed us, to show us, to institutionalize us. Then end up leaving us to marinate in our own disillusioned moral, social, and religious decay. Suck the life out of the people and soil, and then deem the action social justice, democratic liberation, free enterprise. But, was I ever so wrong. If anything, Social Darwinism has indisputably evolved into a collective mentality; a mutual recognition of politically, socially, and intellectually inferior and inept societies; a deference to what we’ve been conditioned to credit as emulation-worthy figures and institutions. Social Darwinism had long ago been an intellectual warfare that has been deemed won by the West since the post-Cold War era.

It seems that every capitalistic, white supremacist, self-righteous, holier-than-thou endeavor that the West has taken, bears the outright deceptive yet ornamented marque of “liberation” and of course the infamous “self-determination”. A voyage donning the unanimously commendable, if not valiant, demeanor of “anti-terrorism” and the obsessive compulsive nuclear non-proliferation spiel.

In my foreign policy class, you seldom ever hear any lament over the spoils of American wars; only its Jeffersonian overtones. God forbid, such discourse might discredit the American Crusader ideal. Personal experience has taught me that sitting through these discussions could very possibly induce an embellished fit of rage.

Sitting in a perfectly conditioned classroom, while earlier waking up from a warm bed, a functioning shower, and driving a luxury car to boot, she firmly believed that America’s war on Iraq was genuinely liberational as well as the best decision Bush had ever made. She defended the guy as if he had cured the HIV her youngest uncle caught on his last trip to Thailand. I knew it was coming – Saddam Hussein was Satan, and we’re the Middle East’s one and only choice for deliverance from evil.

For a second, my circulation seemed to have found a detour to my cheeks.

Being a weak spoken polemicist, I barely got my grievances across to this lovely moronic young woman. Encountering individuals such as herself has engendered my most passionate political insights. Opinions of individuals such as herself are still, to this day, further accrediting every last one of my theories on ultra-sanctimonious American self-perceptions. I’m well aware of the reproach you might be wishing to express on my lack of “freedom of opinion” tolerance and all that jazz; frankly, I don’t buy it. I’m a firm believer that some opinions out there do not deserve a microscopic morsel of my respect. Hence, I shall feel free to reject them and maliciously impale their flawed substantiation. (Don’t like it? Stop reading)

What I said next, in response, was merely a reminder of the lurid heinous torture methods that American insurgents practiced on Iraqi prisoners and civilians. The freedom package that America was so kind as to give away to Iraq as alleviation from years of being downtrodden, chewed on, spit out, and stepped on turned out to only be an expired shipment of rusty shackles from Uncle Sam’s dirty cold basement. Iraqis were delivered from a bad situation to an even worse one, it’s undeniable. Liberal democracy that’s being propagated in this case is all-inclusive of demolishment of infrastructure and facility, lack of electricity and water, as well as the perennial trepidation of a much too Hobbesian need for self-preservation amid a state of nature that the US singlehandedly managed to simulate.

The American Dream Delusion

Here’s a statistic that I still can’t wrap my mind around: 70-80% of the American population isn’t remotely engaged in matters of American foreign affairs.

Ironic right?

A few weeks back I blatantly stated that the American society is plagued with a dry consumerist internationally absent mentality. I’m kind of hesitant calling it a mentality since it’s more like a complete absence of one. Unfortunately, I got responded to with sentiments such as “you obviously hate America”. Plain and simple. I’m an Arab Muslim so it really doesn’t take me by surprise that that is the default reaction.

This concept of political ambivalence was visited innumerable times by my college professors. Given materialistic incentives to mobilize and enliven capitalistic enterprises, individuals have no psychological vacuum (let alone need) to fabric politics into their interests. Living in this country, it’s not very difficult to identify this theory as a reality; I like to call it United States of Entrepreneurship. In a nation where you can gain a substantial sum of money as a result of the death of your spouse, it’s not really a challenge to identify its priorities.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not venting here. Not at all.

What baffles me is this: despite American apathy to its, and not to mention our, political alignments, we still hold “American Democracy” as the holy grail of modern day liberalism. The “American Dream” as that of modern day living. Knowledgeable figures, such as Francis Fukuyama, went so far as to conjure up a discourse on American Exceptionalism. As a result, we, the peoples of peripheral societies, became enamored with the concept of “libertarianism”. Unfortunately this concept has mutated into something of a social disease. Liberalism has been translated into the belief system of loose morality and abandonment of restraint.

I’m sure you would all agree that in the Middle East when an individual outright states that he/she is “very liberal” it often connotes morally/religiously indifferent. My question is: why did we neglect the American judiciary system and Supreme Court structures, civil and criminal laws, admirable judicial temperament and professionalism, hard work and self-discipline and merely focused on the very much coveted lack of moral restraint? For some mysterious reason, we took “liberalism” and tailored it to cater to our deprivation of social freedom.

Post January 25, I heard people left and right commending American democracy and “liberalism” holding it capable of molding our currently-fragile Egyptian society around. There’s an essential difference between liberalism and libertarianism. The former is political and the latter social. Politically, Egypt is desperate for progressivism and change. Socially, we have a responsibility to NOT be internally imperialized by Western lifestyle.

Call me crazy but I’d much rather not have homosexuals, PDA, teenage moms, failed marriages, and alcoholism taking the country over. We're a conservative society for a reason.

What we’ve seen so far in 2011 only accentuates the incredible democratic drive that Arabs possess. The Arab revolution has become emblematic of change and shackle-breaking. We inhabit the holiest region on the planet having hosted the nascence of monotheism and tradition. Let’s think twice before proposing to adopt a hollow indifferent ideology mindlessly negating all that we have stood for.

Rationalization of Stereotypes

Since the last time I've written, I've had the most eye-opening conversation involving political discourse among Egyptians living abroad.

What I've heard infuriated me to no end. It's the type of talk that makes stereotypes completely justifiable and even rather commendable.

I'm not going to try to be objective in delivering to the reader the main arguments of the conversation. You are free to judge for yourself whether you think what this particular person said is of any substance. The reason I’m sharing this encounter is to fortify this following claim:

Every stereotype, alleged weakness, or speculated threat is fully reinforced by certain Arab-indigenous catalysts who take part in Western foreign policy/intelligence institutions and/or media outlets.

It is excruciatingly ironic how the sugarcoated ideal of Arab ambassadorship helps us sleep at night while these very entities are willing and able to stab us in the back whenever they see fit. The insufferable truth is this: Once you entrench yourself in a certain executive structure, you become a cog in a vast mechanism of self-righteous group think. Unfortunately, not everyone is aware of the potential volume of their own voices; it’s tempting to give in to the general conventional wisdom in this given environment. For instance, if your line of work involves intelligence operations covering global terrorist networks, it wouldn’t make sense to vocalize contentions that are not parallel to the philosophy and nature of your job (which, consequently, rationalize the need for this particular organization in the first place). Unfortunately, this certain philosophy starts to intrude on your political and social perceptions, tainting them with unsubstantiated condemnatory rhetoric with your line of work being the rationalization.

With that said, I’d like to share what this particular conversation comprised (I’ll refer to my adversary in this conversation as X): In a status on Facebook, I intoned the quintessential importance of political pluralism in any democratization process (which would undoubtedly accommodate any Islamist and/or leftist organizations), there’s no possibility of us calling ourselves democratic while still condemning certain groups to social and political fringes; common sense, right? Why should we allow petty futile banter on religious superiority eclipse the infallible nationalist stride of the people’s revolution? X’s main arguments were evidently very enamored with utopian American principals and believed it was appropriate for Egypt’s upcoming regime to adopt them as constitutional foundations. I replied to X stating that a relatively young nation-state such as Egypt cannot be assimilated to a Western liberal model since our society is hungry for incorporation of tradition in policy. We cannot rule out cultural groups for the sake of mimicking a foreign (and very dissimilar) nation. Post-revolution transitional government is required to tailor a modified democratic process that doesn’t step on anybody’s toes while simultaneously providing lacked human rights. Throughout our debate, X would tease out imaginary claims out of my arguments to reinforce his own beliefs on the subject.

I was quoted for saying: Arab culture is incompatible with democracy; Islam is a hindrance to the democratic process; and, the best one, I HATE/CODEMN THE US.

What I found to be exceptionally droll was the manner in which X would be critical of my way of writing instead of the actual content; a very tactical fake demeanor of authority. Although this person claims to have a “respectable” background in academia, I found myself doubting the merit of his discourse.

In case I didn’t explicitly and clearly spell it out: X’s occupation is attributed to US terrorism intelligence and surveillance services. X only holds the Egyptian passport but has lived his entire life in America.

I personally had to question the authenticity of his “Egyptianness” when he said, and I quote: “Egypt will never have honor. They are not civilized, and never will be”.

It’s funny how we’re usually wondering how Americans are inspired to firmly believe that we’re backwards, weak, and lesser than core countries. We’d be asking ourselves: How did 9/11 convince an entire nation that 1.57 billion Muslims are militarized and angry? Simple, self-proclaimed Arabs took part in the very institutions that implement foreign policy contributing their opinion of how Muslims (and most Arabs) do not welcome democratization and push an anti-Western agenda.

Why wouldn’t you believe a native about his own homeland? He must be portraying reality, right?

I cannot imagine how many of these people are infiltrating American executive offices. Who knows what kind of information they deliver about us. What’s worse is the covertness of these situations; we can’t be fully aware of them if they are done behind closed doors. We only get to experience the outcome of these policies; and then we start to wonder why stereotypes run international relations.

Please stop using your religion as a weapon. Muslims are not anyone’s antagonists; Muslims are not democracy’s enemy; Muslims are not taking over your country and suppressing your women.

We’re constantly being played against each other against our will.

Wisen up.