God Is Not In His Heaven And All Is Wrong With The World

By Sukumaran C. V.

02 January, 2016
Countercurrents.org

God is in His heaven and,
All is right with the world—Robert Browning

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.—W. B. Yeats

2015 can be described as the most atrocious year in the new millennium so far. The monstrous ISIS and its coldblooded atrocities against humanity terrified the ‘civilised’ world in 2015. It seems that the world is in the vicious grip of terrorist violence and the coldblooded violence against the innocent all over the world testifies that Browning is wrong and Yeats is right.

In the wake of the Paris terror strikes in November 2015, the entire world was ‘shocked’ more than it has been shocked when terror struck Mumbai in the same fashion years ago, when innocent people were blown apart in the Turkish capital Ankara in October 2014, when more than 130 little children in a Peshawar school were shot dead in December 2014, when the hapless Yzidi girls were being raped and made sex slaves and the Yazidi people were virtually being eliminated by the IS monsters, when nearly 40 people were killed and more than 180 injured in the Lebanese capital Beirut hardly two days ago of the Paris tragedy. Mumbai, Ankara, Peshawar and Beirut couldn’t get the attention of the world media as Paris got. That doesn’t matter, because, it has been long since that the world became Euro or West-centric. What matters is that the lasting solution to this coldblooded violence should also come from the West, because, this coldblooded inhumanity spawns from the Western interference in the financial and political affairs of each and every country of the world, especially the Middle East.

In October 2014, two suicide bombs exploded in the Turkish capital Ankara and killed more than 100 people. In December 2014, a horde of gun-wielding people entered into a school in Peshawar (Pakistan) and killed 130 kids firing indiscriminately. On November 12, 2015, forty people were killed and more than 180 injured in two suicide bomb attacks in a residential area of the capital city of Lebanon, Beirut. Hardly two days later, 130 people were killed and many more injured in a series of terror strikes in the City of Lights—Paris, the capital city of France. (The Yazidis worship the Peacock Angel and live in the remote villages of Northern Iraq. The Yazidi religion blends elements of Sufism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. This combining of various belief systems, known religiously as syncretism, is hated by the ISIS bigots. In his article “Yazidis, Ethnic Cleansing and the Denial of Death”, Michael Mountain says that ‘driven from their homes in Iraq by the murderous Islamic State militia,’ they are ‘raped, thrown into mass graves, even crucified and buried alive.’)

What is wrong with the world? Is violence the salient feature of the ‘civilisation’ we are proud of? We blame the terrorists. But do the terrorists manufacture weapons? Who manage the weapons industry? How do the sophisticated weapons reach in the hands of the terrorists or fanatics? Is it the fault of our ‘culture’ that seeks profit by hook or by crook? Is it the fault of the religion(s)? The democracies of the world should retrospect. It is high time we stopped this business of retaliation and counter attacks. Counter terror has only intensified the terror of the fanatics. Enough is enough. Terror is terror, whether it is counter terror or fanatic terror. Why doesn’t the world learn the simple truth that violence breeds violence?

All the blood-thirsty terrorist outfits in the world like the IS and the Al-Qaeda are the creations of the Western interference in the Middle East. The Frankenstein’s monsters wreak havoc on the innocent and yet the Western countries don’t introspect and think for an everlasting solution to end this spread of coldblooded violence in the world. As long as the West under the leadership of the U.S. continues to have their selfish and predatory foreign policy, the monsters like the IS will not be contained successfully. The world is today not under democracy, but under militarism and militarism ‘has failed the human race in every way imaginable’ as an American Citizen, James Peters, wrote in an open letter to President Carter.

It was in the beginning of 1991, 10 years before the WTC terrorist attack, the U. S. invaded Iraq. Howard Zinn describes the result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in “A People’s History of the United States”: “The consequences of the war became shockingly clear after its end, when it was revealed that the bombings of Iraq had caused starvation, disease, and the deaths of tens of thousands of children. A U.N. team visiting Iraq immediately after the war reported that “the recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the infrastructure…Most means of life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous….””
See one of the many ‘civlised’ cruelties perpetrated on the hapless people of Iraq: “In mid-February, U.S. planes dropped bombs on an air raid shelter in Baghdad at four in the morning, killing 400 to 500 people. An Associated Press reporter who was one of few allowed to go to the site said: “Most of the recovered bodies were charred and mutilated beyond recognition. Some clearly were children.” The Pentagon claimed it was a military target, but the AP reporter on the scene said: “No evidence of any military presence could be seen inside the wreckage.””

If young people from Iraq are willingly recruited into camps of the ISIS, can we blame them? Can we stop the violence of ISIS (which originated in Iraq as a result of the devastation of the country by the military strikes of the U.S. and its allies) by invigorated military action?

Let me quote the sane words of an American woman, Amber Amundson, whose husband, an army pilot, was killed in the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11, 2001: “I have heard angry rhetoric by some Americans, including many of our nation’s leaders, who advise a heavy dose of revenge and punishment. To those leaders I would like to make clear that my family and I take no comfort in your words of rage. If you choose to respond to this incomprehensible brutality by perpetuating violence against other innocent human beings, you may not do so in the name of justice for my husband.” (Quoted from Howard Zinn)

Another sane voice is that of Alex Molnar, the father of a twenty-one-year-old Marine who was sent to Iraq to wage war against the Iraqis. In an open letter to President Bush, Molnar asked: “Where were you, Mr. President, when Iraq was killing its own people with poison gas? Why, until the recent crisis, was it business as usual with Saddam Hussein, the man you now call a Hitler? Is the American “way of life” that you say my son is risking his life for the continued “right” of Americans to consume 25 to 30 percent of the world’s oil?...I intend to support my son and his fellow soldiers by doing everything I can to oppose any offensive American military action in the Persian Gulf.” (Howard Zinn)

Robert Bowman, a former lieutenant colonel in the U. S. Air Force, wrote even three years before 9/11: “We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism….Instead of sending our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs so we can have the oil under their sand, we should send them to rebuild their infrastructure, supply clean water, and feed starving children…In short, we should do good instead of evil. Who would try to stop us? Who would hate us? Who would bomb us?” (Howard Zinn)

The ‘democratic’ governments world over should listen to the sane and tolerant voices of the people like the wife of the army pilot, the father of the U.S. Marine, and the lieutenant colonel and learn that the permanent solution for the terrorist menace overpowering the world lies outside the field of military action.

Let's mourn for those killed in the World Trade Centre terrorist attacks, Let's mourn for the victims of Paris terror strikes, and Let's mourn for the victims of each and every terrorist attack that occurs in any part of the world. But Let's equally mourn for the victims of U.S. and NATO bombings and air strikes in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, and in every part of the world too. If today God is not in his Heaven and all is wrong with the world, the responsibility mainly goes to the U. S. and its European allies whose interventionist policies wreak havoc in the Middle East. God is not in the heaven because He has fled fearing the humans and their destructive ways.

In the chapter titled “Why civilization is killing the world, Part I”, of his book “Endgame”, the American writer Derrick Jensen says: “In Vietnam, the CIA set up its notorious Operation Phoenix, a systematic program of assassination, terror, and torture. It condoned confining prisoners in “tiger cages,” five-by-nine-by-six-foot stone compartments, where three to five men would be shackled to the floor, beaten, mutilated. Their legs would wither, and they would become paralyzed, or at best reduced for the rest of their miserable lives to scuttling like crabs. Buckets of lime were emptied upon them. Elsewhere in Vietnam, CIA assets applied electric shocks to victims’ genitals and threw victims out of helicopters in order to force their associates to talk. More recently in Afghanistan, U.S.-backed troops loaded 3,000 prisoners into container trucks, sealed the doors, and left these to stand for days in the sun. A U.S. commander ordered an Afghan soldier to shoot bullets through the containers’ walls to provide air holes. Soon enough, blood began to stream from the containers’ bottoms. Those victims who survived were dumped in the desert and shot …”

Howard Zinn says in “A People’s History of the United States”: “It seemed that the United States was reacting to the horrors perpetrated by terrorists against innocent people in New York by killing other innocent people in Afghanistan…A journalist with the “Boston Globe”, writing from a hospital in Jalalabad, wrote: “In one bed lay Noor Mohammad, 10, who was a bundle of bandages. He lost his eyes and hands to the bombs that hit his house after Sunday dinner….The hospital’s morgue received 17 bodies last weekend….yesterday, a bomb’s damage could be chronicled in the life of one family. A bomb had killed the father. In one bed his wife who had severe head injuries….Around her, six of her children were in bandages…One of them, Zahidullah, 8, lay in a coma.””

If the people of Afghanistan are willingly recruited into the camps of ISIS, can you stop them by military action? Can you intimidate people like the young boy Zahidullah by military action, when they were forced to be terrorists by the same monster called military action? Violence breeds violence. The so called ‘war on terror’ started immediately after the 9/11and it has been going on relentlessly ever since. But the coldblooded terror is still not only contained, but also it strikes in every part of the world at will. The reason is that we can’t eliminate a disease without eliminating the sources from where it springs, without totally removing the reasons that cause it. The world is waging the war on terror without addressing the reasons that create the terror. As long as this attitude is not changed, both the war on terror and the terror will continue to rip the world apart and the innocent will continue to be the victims of both—the cold blooded violence of fanatics and the cold blooded violence of the war on terror.

Those who killed the innocent people in Ankara, those who killed the little kids in Peshawar, those who killed the people in Beirut and in Paris commit such coldblooded killings in the name of the religion. It is said that the fanatic outfit IS has re-established the Caliphate under its chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It is said that they believe in Islam. But if their version of the religion is Islam, it means that the first Caliph, the real and benign Abu Bakr is not an Islam. Because his directions to the ‘Army of God’ ran as the follows: “Be just; the unjust never prosper. Be merciful; sly neither old men, nor women, nor children. Destroy neither fruit trees, nor grains, nor cattle. Keep your word even to your enemy. Molest not those men who live retired from the world”

In “The Historical Role of Islam”, M. N. Roy writes: “There is no end of testimonies to prove that even in the predominantly martial period of their history, the Muslims were far from being barbaric bands of fanatical marauders, spreading pillage and rapine, death and destruction in the name of religion. Then, the period of conquest was short, as compared to the long period of learning and culture that flourished subsequently under the patronage of the Khalifs…”

Then how is it possible for ‘barbaric bands of fanatical marauders’ like the IS operate in the name Islam? Is it the fault of the religion or the result of the Western interference in the Middle East? Deborah Root, the author of “Cannibal Culture” says that ‘we must face the possibility that something is dreadfully wrong with society and that this is somehow connected to the bloody history of Western culture, a bloodiness that surpasses all others.” The U.S. foreign policy has been the curse of the world long since. Almost all the human-right violations and atrocities committed on the people world over since the Second World War are either by the U.S. or by the monsters like Al-Qaeda and ISIS (and even the terrorists who wage ‘holy war’ against India with the help of Pakistan) that are indirectly spawned by the U.S. foreign policy. Analyzing the U.S. bombing on Tripoli (1986), Stephen Shalom wrote in his book “Imperial Alibis” (1993): “If terrorism is defined as politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets, then one of the most serious incidents of international terrorism of the year was precisely this U.S. raid on Libya.”

The U.S. hasn’t still stopped its international terrorism. That said, we should not put all the blame on the U.S. alone and take rest. We should analyze why such atrocious organizations ‘whose members take pride in carrying out beheadings’ spawn in the name of religion. In the name of religion, why these heinous fellows are beheading innocent people, raping the hapless girls and women and tell them either to convert or to die?

The world today direly needs love and tolerance and non-violence. To have such a world, the U.S. and the West should retrospect and shun their predatory economic policies that create terror and terrorists. And the true followers of Islam should try to free the religion from the grip of the fanatics and democratise it. Then

God may again be in His heaven and,
All will be right with the world.

Sukumaran C. V. is a former JNU student and his articles on gender, communal, environemenatl and other socio-political issues are published in The Hindu, Mainstream etc. Email id: [email protected]