Have a Care of What We Wish For

We are most certainly living in interesting times.  And, for the time being, the most 'interesting' part of our existence on this Globe is currently in the Middle East.  Of course, equating 'interesting' with catastrophic or ruinous or representative of the worst excesses of human disequilibrium, would lead one to suggest that the Middle East represents a standing candidate for capturing the title of representing 'interesting' times.

From Iraq to Iran, Syria to Egypt, and going a little further afield to Libya and Tunisia - and stretching just a little further - Afghanistan and Pakistan, wherever Islam the little-brother religion to Judaism and Christianity resides, there too exists crises of wholesale proportions and never-ending strife.  These are countries, including Turkey, that are governed most successfully by tyrants.

Whether they represent countries of inherited kingdoms, or sheikdoms, or simply dictators, or more complex religion-obsessed clerics who rule by proxy, the power of coercion tightens like a vice over those ruled.  The better to maintain order and complicity, forced agreement and the oppression of the enslaved.  For within all of these countries there are polarizing influences.

All of them related to the origins of the communities represented within the greater enclave calling itself a state.  These are tribal communities, Bedouin who have migrated toward urban centres and become accepting of a facade of 'civility', although there is little depth to it.  For simmering close beneath the surface of human co-operation is resentment and clan affiliation, allied with sectarian righteousness.

In the Middle East the various Arab and Muslim countries have always regarded one another with suspicion, and as with African countries, the tribal entities have always remained in an alert state of suspended animation, awaiting the next war.  War was the lingua franca, the heritage imbibed with their mother's milk, the oral history, the expressed culture and expectation.

Waging war meant satisfying for the moment, the emotions of resentment, anger and hatred, by destroying the enemy, and anyone not of one's tribe or clan was ipso facto, the enemy.  War enabled tribes to prosper, because they looted and plundered, taking for themselves the herds and the properties belonging to the vanquished enemy.  And the women and the children.

Either to be used to broaden their own population base, or to use to be sold into slavery.  Some of that remains in existence, but is little spoken of, other than as symbols of ongoing systems of warfare, where the enemy is mutilated, taking into slavery, women raped and people entirely dispossessed.  The International Criminal Court now sits in judgement of those few practitioners of custom they can isolate.

But in the Middle East, wealth has enabled the heads of state formerly spoken of as dictators, strongmen, theocratic despots, to administer the affairs of the country as unquestioned and unchallenged autocrats privileged through force abetted by oil wealth, and entitled to do so.  Until they are surprised by the occurrence of revolts that must be controlled and those attempting revolution are destroyed.

And because these wealthy autocrats are engaged not only in acquiring and accumulating great wealth for themselves and for the state, enabling those with these resources to buy the fealty of the people whose sect and tribal affiliation they share, they are able to maintain order, fiercely tamping down the occasional insistence of the downtrodden others within their society toward obligatory compliance.

The Western powers have conceived the notion that instilling a wish for democracy in those autocratic, dictatorial states will work wonders for the stability of the region, and people will be quick to set aside their tribal and sectarian differences, becoming magically civilized with the institution of a democratic order.

Whereas what has happened is that the decades-upon-decades-long growing fanaticism leading toward fundamentalist Islamization of those unprivileged sectors of people so long dominated by cynics and traditional tyrants have encouraged the clerical order to impose stricter interpretations of Islam.  Which groups have been slowly and cleverly working their way into the trust of the population which then 'votes' for them through the 'democratic' process.

And the Middle East and other Islamic countries which once were governed by more secular-minded dictators able to maintain order, are now being stealthily replaced by Islamist parties intent on restoring Islam to its initial state of purity, which also translates to aggression toward non-Muslims in a march to install Islam on a global scale.

This is democracy, Islamist-style. 

And just incidentally, the global population of Muslims has expanded hugely through outreach-immigration, capturing within its wake those who consider themselves to be moderate Muslims wishing to live in peace with non-Muslims, and gradually being absorbed into what is becoming through a process of sinister integration, the maelstrom of Islamism.

Jihad-devoted Muslims have destroyed the lives of those Muslims who deplore their mission.  And they will continue to do that on an unprecedented scale.  Unless and until some unknown force of nature puts a halt to the ideology that inflames the passions of the fanatical Islamist.