02 December 2010

Rejecting the Western media paradigm

Paul Craig Roberts as always has a few interesting comments. What I appreciate about him, even when I sometimes disagree with him is the way he takes an issue and looks at it an entirely different way than it is presented in our media. He apparently would agree with me, NPR is hardly some liberal crusading news organization. Actually it's completely pro-American and demonstrates this time and time again. It's better than many of the other American news outlets, but still operates within the American paradigm. Hardly objective, but in no way anti-establishment.

In the Christian community we're supposed to loathe and hate Iran and this all goes back of course to the revolution in 1979. Iran's rulers are evil men, but that doesn't make the rulers in Washington the good guys either. It's a shame Iran is so hostile to Christianity, but I've pointed out repeatedly that we're seeing a repeat of what happened in the 4th century.



Thousands of Christians lived and thrived in the Sassanid Persian empire, but Persia of course was a long time enemy of Rome and almost at constant war with her. Rome was constantly expanding and gaining client states and Persia was always trying to push back and secure its western frontiers. Armenia (SE Turkey today) was often caught in the middle. The two empires slugged it out for centuries until the Muslim Arabs came along in the 7th century. Within a short time, Persia was broken and the Levant was no longer in Roman (Byzantine) hands.

The Armenians were the first nation to nationally convert to Christianity in the early 300's, and then when Constantine officially 'converted' the Roman Empire...suddenly Shapur II of Persia looked with dismay at all of Christian subjects, seeing them as a potential fifth column. A wave of terrible persecutions began. So was this his Zoroastrian zeal, or power politics? Probably a bit of both, but clearly it was mostly the latter. Later when the Turks arrived and conquered the northern realms of the Arab empire, various dissident groups found havens in the Seljuk realms. The Seljuk Turks were Muslims but not nearly as zealous for the vision of Muhammad. First and foremost they were Turks and the same remains true today. Groups like the Paulicians found shelter among them in order to escape Byzantine Sacralist wrath. And when the Paulicians finally turned to arms, they were to ally with the Turks against the wicked Emperors of Constantinople.

I still plan to write on the Paulicians but like many other topics, I haven't had time. They were a little more complex than how they are often presented. They're often labeled as Manichean...but so were many of the Proto-Protestant groups. It's not that simple...but that's for another day.

Fast forward many centuries....the Ottomans were ruling the Balkans, and the bulk of the Middle East, with the exception of Persia. Historically Christians were treated decently under the Ottoman regime and in fact there are many cases of Christians preferring to live under the Ottoman Turks rather than the persecuting Roman Catholic Habsburg Emperors. There were actually Reformed Calvinists from Transylvania aiding the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683.

When did this change? When did the Muslim world grow hostile to Christianity? While there have always been tensions, the historical record shows long periods of peaceful co-existence. Only with the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and the agressive policies of the Western powers do we see this hostility return. The Middle East was virtually conquered by the European powers after the war, and the Turkish regime under Ataturk was not perceived as very friendly to devout Muslims. Decades of anger and frustration have turned many to rally to the mosque. The vast majority of the Muslim world is no different the nominal apathetic masses of Christendom. It's a cultural paradigm not a true heartfelt conviction. Europe has been 'Christian' for centuries, but we could also say....it's never been very Christian at all.

Unbelievers become very religious when they are placed in crisis. We saw this in the Balkans during their long struggles against the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. The Orthodox Churches became the rallying point and you see instances of fanatical behaviour. Look at Codreanu and the Legion of the Archangel Michael for just one example. This occurred during the inter-war period, but was the result of centuries of foreign domination. The Balkan peoples were dominated for centuries by the Turk and the Habsburg and the only way they could survive was to turn to the Orthodox religion.

So while I lament the persecution of Christians in Iran and Iraq, I also know that for centuries you had Syriac groups like the Nestorian Assyrians and the Catholic Chaldeans living there in peace. The Assyrians were slaughtered by Ataturk, and Ataturk's extreme nationalism was the result of Britain and France trying to completely gobble up the Ottoman Realm. Does this justify Ataturk or the current Iranian regime? Of course not. But I hope you can see, it's a little more complicated than how our 'liberal?' media presents it.

Iran is just another country of lost people trying to thrive and survive in a hostile world. Their actions like most nations are pretty wicked....but not always illogical or driven by fanaticism. There's a lot of history behind how they behave today and when you look into what's happened over the course of the 20th century it's a marvel they're not more extreme. It's a marvel that the Kurds would have anything to do with the United States. It's a marvel that more American tourists aren't slaughtered when they visit Egypt.

What we need is to not view the news as patriots or through Nationalist lenses. As Christians we're blessed with renewed minds and an otherworldly citizenship....we should be able to understand the world around us with a detached wisdom.

How sad that you find unbelievers who rightly see Nationalism as a disease, but many Christians who consider it a tenet of Orthodoxy.


Here's the link to the original article, and the text itself below:



Who, Precisely, Is Attacking the World?




by Paul Craig Roberts, December 01, 2010

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Antiwar Forum

The stuck pigs are squealing. To shift the onus from the U.S. State Department, Hillary Clinton paints WikiLeaks’ release of the “diplomatic cables” as an “attack on the international community.” To reveal truth is equivalent, in the eyes of the U.S. government, to an attack on the world.



It is WikiLeaks’ fault that all those U.S. diplomats wrote a quarter of a million undiplomatic messages about America’s allies, a.k.a. puppet states. It is also WikiLeaks’ fault that a member of the U.S. government could no longer stomach the cynical ways in which the U.S. government manipulates foreign governments to serve, not their own people, but American interests, and delivered the incriminating evidence to WikiLeaks.



The U.S. government actually thinks that it was WikiLeaks’ patriotic duty to return the evidence and to identify the leaker. After all, we mustn’t let the rest of the world find out what we are up to. They might stop believing our lies.



The influential German magazine Der Spiegel writes: “It is nothing short of a political meltdown for U.S. foreign policy.”



This might be more a hope than a reality. The “Soviet threat” during the second half of the 20th century enabled U.S. governments to create institutions that subordinated the interests of other countries to those of the U.S. government. After decades of following U.S. leadership, European “leaders” know no other way to act. Finding out that the boss badmouths and deceives them is unlikely to light a spirit of independence. At least not until America’s economic collapse becomes more noticeable.



The question is: how much will the press tell us about the documents? Spiegel itself has said that the magazine is permitting the U.S. government to censor, at least in part, what it prints about the leaked material. Most likely, this means the public will not learn the content of the 4,330 documents that “are so explosive that they are labeled ‘NOFORN,’” meaning that foreigners, including presidents, prime ministers, and security services that share information with the CIA are not permitted to read the documents. Possibly, also, the content of the 16,652 cables classified as “secret” will not be revealed to the public.



Most likely the press, considering their readers’ interests, will focus on gossip and the unflattering remarks Americans made about their foreign counterparts. It will be good for laughs. Also, the U.S. government will attempt to focus the media in ways that advance U.S. policies.



Indeed, it has already begun. On Nov. 29, National Public Radio emphasized that the cables showed that Iran was isolated even in the Muslim world, making it easier for the Israelis and Americans to attack. The leaked cables reveal that the president of Egypt, an American puppet, hates Iran, and the Saudi Arabian government has been long urging the U.S. government to attack Iran. In other words, Iran is so dangerous to the world that even its co-religionists want Iran wiped off the face of the earth.



NPR presented several nonobjective “Iranian experts” who denigrated Iran and its leadership and declared that the U.S. government, by resisting its Middle Eastern allies’ call for bombing Iran, was the moderate in the picture. The fact that President George W. Bush declared Iran to be a member of “the axis of evil” and threatened repeatedly to attack Iran and that President Obama has continued the threats – Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has just reiterated that the U.S. hasn’t taken the attack option off the table – are not regarded by American “Iran experts” as indications of anything other than American moderation.



Somehow it did not come across the NPR newscast that it is not Iran but Israel that routinely slaughters civilians in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, and that it is not Iran but the U.S. and its NATO mercenaries who slaughter civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Pakistan.



Iran has not invaded any of its neighbors, but the Americans are invading countries halfway around the globe.



The “Iranian experts” treated the Saudi and Egyptian rulers’ hatred of Iran as a vindication of the U.S. and Israeli governments’ demonization of Iran. Not a single “Iranian expert” was capable of pointing out that the tyrants who rule Egypt and Saudi Arabia fear Iran because the Iranian government represents the interests of Muslims, and the Saudi and Egyptian governments represent the interests of the Americans.



Think what it must feel like to be a tyrant suppressing the aspirations of your own people in order to serve the hegemony of a foreign country, while a nearby Muslim government strives to protect its people’s independence from foreign hegemony.



Undoubtedly, the tyrants become very anxious. What if their oppressed subjects get ideas? Little wonder the Saudi and Egyptian rulers want the Americans to eliminate the independent-minded country that is a bad example for Egyptian and Saudi subjects.



As long as the dollar has enough value that it can be used to purchase foreign governments, information damaging to the U.S. government is unlikely to have much affect. As Alain of Lille said a long time ago, “Money is all.”