Tag Archives: Culture of Imperialism

A Children’s Crusade

02 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Living among the dead, Flanders, Belgium, most likely during Second Battle of Ypres, April 21-May 25, 1915. (http://www.flandersfieldsmusic.com/).

Living among the dead, Flanders, Belgium, most likely during Second Battle of Ypres, April 21-May 25, 1915. (http://www.flandersfieldsmusic.com/).

World War I reached its 100th anniversary on Monday. One hundred years ago this week, European imperialism, nationalism, and Social Darwinism/scientific racism all led to what was once known as the Great War. It was a war that would leave ten million soldiers, sailors and airmen dead, another seven million civilians dead from military action, malnutrition and disease, and another 23 million wounded in action on both sides.

A British Mark V tank coming out of a trench, France, circa 1917. (Imperial War Museum via http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/10/05/).

A British Mark V tank coming out of a trench, France, circa 1917. (Imperial War Museum via http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/10/05/).

That war, a mostly European war of the great world powers, was itself based in the idea that Western culture and technologies would make this a quick and winnable war of dominance, for Germany, Britain, France and possibly Russia. The first war planes, the first tanks, the first submersibles, along with mustard and chlorine gas, nests of machine guns and trench warfare. It’s amazing how small-minded these so-called great powers were a full century ago, and so remarkable that we’ve grown beyond this thinking today!

Actually, not so fast! Our world seems to have learned little from the lessons of the First World War, repeating practices that leave the globe perpetually on the brink of chaos and potentially in peril of annihilation. We’ve seen this with the Second World War, with the Cold War and its myriad proxy wars in the Global South, with post-Cold War aggression in the Balkans, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and with US preemptive aggressions in the Muslim world. Ethnocentrism and ethnic cleansing in the name of a religion (or a lack thereof, in a couple of cases) or nationalism has been a part of modern war since World War I.

Poppies in field between Kelling and Weybourne, North Norfolk, England, UK, June 2002. (John Beniston via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Poppies in field between Kelling and Weybourne, North Norfolk, England, UK, June 2002. (John Beniston via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Imperialism and colonialism and resistance to both in the name of freedom, or too frequently, another form of ethnocentrism and religious nationalism. Name a given nation, and you have some strain of Western imperialism and colonization, resistance and ethnocentrism and nationalism (religious, anti-religious or otherwise) running through their recent history. India, Pakistan, the former Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the former Yugoslavia, Perón’s Argentina, Pinochet’s Chile, the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia, South Africa and apartheid, Israel and Zionism and settler colonialism, Japan and its military occupation of China, just to name a few. The First World War unleashed these forces this week one hundred years ago, a Pandora’s box that we will need to destroy, for it’s obviously too late to close it.

One of Sting’s songs from his first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, is titled “Children’s Crusade” (1984). It’s the story of Britain’s blind march into the First World War, the wasting of a generation of youth in the name of the empire, juxtaposed with the UK’s heroin and drug epidemic of the early 1980s.

Young men and soldiers, Nineteen Fourteen
Marching through countries they’d never seen
Virgins with rifles, a game of charades
All for a Children’s Crusade

Pawns in the game are not victims of chance
Strewn on the fields of Belgium and France
Poppies for young men, death’s bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed

Though not his best work, Sting’s “Children’s Crusade” has made me think more than once about the brutality of humanity and this inherent need to dominate other human beings, as well as the lands and resources for which vulnerable people have been cleansed and displaced. He should update it for 2014 this way:

Midnight in Gaza, Twenty Fourteen
Bombed and shelled hospitals, pawns in the game
Ashes and sackcloth, death’s bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed

And all for a century-old crusade of nationalistic paranoia, imperialistic abuse, and dehumanizing ethnocentric warfare.

American Denial & Fear, Courtesy of Family Feud

10 Saturday Sep 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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The Culture of Fear cover (audio edition), September 10, 2011. (Source/http://betterworldbooks.com).

It’s been a decade since the largest American tragedy since World War II in 9/11 in New York, Washington, DC and central Pennsylvania. And we’ve spent much of the past week in remembrance of this event, what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost as a society since that tragic Tuesday. Cutting through all of the chatter and bullcrap in the run-up to 9/11 the last few weeks has been a part-time job, especially since most of it is wrapped in one of our nation’s best-selling products — fear.

Second plane, Twin Towers, 9/11, 9:03 am, courtesy of Today Show. (Source/http://en.wikipedia.org).

But a few things are clear. One is that we as a nation have spent the past ten years in constant fear, as if the Cold War wasn’t enough for anyone born before ’74. We wasted trillions of dollars on wars that have done more harm than good for us at home and abroad, ruining the economy, shredding the social welfare state and leaving us with curtailed civil liberties. Most of all, we’ve left ourselves in constant denial of our own fear, xenophobia, racism and religious intolerance, making America look even more imperialistic — if that seemed at all possible in ’01 — then we did a decade ago.

Of all the half-truths and total lies we’ve been told — and told ourselves — over the past ten years is how “the nation came together” in the first few months after the attacks. Really? In a parallel universe, maybe. I had the unfortunate experience of riding a Greyhound bus from Atlanta to Washington, DC two days after the attacks. My one-day business trip became three days, with flights suspended, rental cars gone and trains booked ten days out. Two guys, one White, one Black, “came together” on the back of the bus to insult and threaten a Sikh, all because he had the nerve to wear a turban. I had to get between the two dumb asses and the poor Sikh man to tell them that he wasn’t Arab or Muslim. “What difference does it make,” one of the dumb asses said, implying that I didn’t love America because I wasn’t ready to kill the “m-fs,” as he put it.

We came together, alright. To persecute Arab Americans, Muslims, Sikhs and South Asians and anyone else

They Hate Us For Our Freedom (2008), Claire Fontaine, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, December 11, 2008. (Source/http://language.cont3xt.net).

who looked like a potential terrorist. Even now, people like Bill Maher and Rush Limbaugh can agree that because some Arab Muslims are terrorists, that we should suspect the millions here in the US and the half a billion in the Middle East. This makes the Red Scare look like a high school lunchroom fight by comparison.

This is why the reference to Family Feud reference is so appropriate, especially with good-old Brit Richard “Dickie” Dawson as the host from ’76 to ’85. It was a show full of not-so-learned people giving rather folksy answers to questions big and small. I loved the part where one family would get together after a first or second strike, and someone would come up with an answer everyone in the group sounded like it was correct. Then they’d start clapping and yelling, “Good answer! Good answer!” before the buzzer would sound and the audience would say, “Uhhhhhhhh!”

That, and the hillbilly theme music for the show, and Dawson prancing around the set while kissing all of the female contestants, allegedly to wish them luck, were all things I enjoyed about Family Feud. The ’70s were so grand!

So in the spirit of Family Feud, I’ve spliced myself as various characters into an episode from ’81. The topic is about naming the people to blame for our current American mess, at home and abroad. I hope that it’s funny and goofy.

But I also hope that it’s food for thought. For in the end, we are all to blame. For being so entitled and privileged, for worshiping the US dollar and the people who have billions of them. For refusing to believe that America, as great a country as it is, screws up on the international stage, that our politicians have put our nation in a precarious position militarily and economically. For being so willing to buy the idea that the Rapture is upon us, but not the idea that climate change is real and that we can do something about it. For acting as if ours is a Christian nation, despite the fact that Christians, Jews, agnostics, atheists, and yes, Muslims were all part of America’s founding.

I hope that we can somehow find a way to outgrow our petty, stupid, idiotic differences around race, religion and politics and put down the class and corporate warfare against the average person. But our lust for wealth and constant feuding may be too much to overcome. Did those twenty Saudi terrorists win after all? Only if we let denial and fear — and those in power who rely on us voting out of both — lead us over a cliff.

Noah’s Ark, Judges & Lessons Not Learned

03 Tuesday May 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Religion

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Celebration of Osama bin Laden's death outside of White House, May 1-2, 2011. http://cfnews13.com

One of the really cool things about having lived an eclectic life — whether by choice or parentage — is that I often see things around me very differently from most people. It may make me goofy or an oddball, but it also makes me the thinker that I am.

Even on matters of belief, I find myself at odds with most Christians. It’s made it hard for me to find a church that I’m comfortable with for more than a few services. Today’s American Christians, Protestant, Catholic, Evangelical or otherwise are for the most part a bunch of hypocritical and self-absorbed — but hardly self-reflective — imperialists who use scripture and religious traditions at every turn to thwart equality and peace. We lack the wisdom necessary for real faith, and knowledge necessary for real understanding.

In the case of global warming and climate change, this deliberate ignorance has bothered me for years. The fact that so many have been willing to ignore droughts, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes in favor of “drill, baby, drill” has been a point of disgust. Add to it the belief for many that these are the signs and wonders of the book of Revelations is somewhere between absolutely stupid and arrogance unlike few

Johan's Ark, a half-sized replica of Noah's Ark, in the port of Schagen, The Netherlands, September 3, 2006. Ceinturion (via Wikipedia), in public domain via Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license versions 2.5, 2.0, and 1.0.

other than God has ever seen. Even theologians have trouble interpreting the many contradictory messages of Revelations. Yet most of us prefer this explanation to the scientific proof that our burning of oil, coal, forests and vegetation over the past 250 years has done damage to the global climate.

Fewer who claim to be Christian use the Bible as a way to understand what’s happening beyond fire, brimstone and thunderbolts, making these folks no different from Norse or Greek pagans scared of Thor or Zeus’ wrath. Take Genesis and the story of Noah. It’s ultimately a story of great faith and climate change. Noah had the unique wisdom — some would say revelation — that a great flood would eventually arrive, and dutifully prepared for it while everyone else refused to believe and conducted business as usual. Eight millennia later, with enough scientific evidence to convince a doubting Thomas of climate change, and denial and debating Revelations is all that most of us do.

Or take the historic announcement Sunday night. After nine years, seven months and twenty days, the architect of 9/11 — not to mention the embassy bombings in ’98, attacks in Indonesia, the UK, Spain, and other parts of the world — Osama bin Laden, was killed by US special forces in Pakistan. As conflicted as I can be about many things, I wasn’t conflicted about US forces capturing or killing him. Not because I’m a bloodthirsty person, and not because I believe in the cause of invading other countries to capture leaders of a global terrorist organization. But because a billionaire global terrorist leader is a danger to us all.

So relief, a little bit of vindication, even, is what I felt, followed by the thought that this helps Obama and completely invalidates Bush’s preemptive war and occupation doctrine for both Afghanistan and Iraq. Not to mention thousands of dead and $4 trillion spent. Then followed by dread, because of the idiotic giddiness and hyper-patriotic vitriol spewed Sunday night and all day Monday by my fellow Christians. I’m not arguing that some folks shouldn’t have been a bit happy, felt some relief, and shouldn’t have been in tears. It’s been a long decade of intolerance, ignorance and insecurity that’s followed 9/11. But “USA! USA! USA!”? We took out one man. Al Qaeda still exists, along with a whole bunch of other homegrown and foreign terrorists, many unaccounted for.

Many of my fellow Christians would deny a peaceful afterlife to bin Laden’s spirit because of the evil that he did while here on Earth, playing the role of judge, jury and executioner. Not entirely unlike the judges in the Old Testament, providing law in a leaderless land of lawlessness. I’m hardly suggesting that we should all forgive and forget, even though that’s what we should ideally do. I doubt, though, that expressing glee equivalent to the Pharisees after the Romans crucified Jesus is high on the Christian playbook list.

All of this also leaves me sad. Because it shows that there’s no way on what’s left of God’s green Earth that most of us American Christians can repair the damage we’ve done to ourselves, our country, and the rest of the world. We won’t admit that jobs and gas for our cars today are more important than the environmental, economic and geopolitical future of our children. That the underlying conditions that led to the rise of Osama bin Laden — US political and economic imperialism all over the rest of the world — haven’t changed enough to prevent the rise of another in his place. We might as well keep doing what we’re doing. Chanting patriotic slogans while waiting on the side of a road, bags packed, waiting for Jesus’ return. While the world around us burns.