Why should anyone trust the USA?

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

In 50 years at the present rate of warming there will be no ice cap. There are an estimated 375 billion barrels of oil reserves below the North Pole, which could be accessed once the ice is gone which the 9 nations bordering the pole would be only too happy to drill. Even so Mr. Bush is not content to wait for the ice to melt and his administration has tried to ram oil drilling in the Alaska ANWAR through Congress about 60 times so far.

This brings me to another point and that is about the quality of life in industrial consumer society, which it seems with the global economy everyone is hell bent on rushing into. It is getting to the point where air quality and traffic congestion are so bad in every major urban area around the planet that the automobile is almost becoming non-functional.

I think that the rise of religious fundamentalism not only in Islam but in Christendom, is a leap of blind faith by ignorant masses who are facing future shock. They want to impose a simpler order based on strict religious rules because they cannot face the complexity of technology and modern life. The trouble with orthodox religions is that they are bureaucracies based on dogma with the aim of keeping a few old white haired men in charge.

But I saw something else going on during and after the revolution of 1979, which was a desire to resist foreign cultural invasion, a desire to maintain Iranian culture and traditions and a desire to have self determination and nationalism. It was the same desire that Mossadegh had for Iran to be the main beneficiary of its own petroleum. I saw a similar trend in the USA during the ‘70’s when the 2nd and 3rd generations of immigrants tried to rediscover their ethnic and cultural roots and identities.

Why? Because the quality of life in the post-industrial age is highly dissatisfying to the individual. People are asked to give up their customs, their traditions, their home towns and villages, their clans, extended families and communities and life long friendships in return for what? “A higher standard of living.” The corporations who own everything and produce everything, want humanity to be reduced to a vast undiscriminating consumer that shops til it drops and goes into debt and works non stop for all the stuff that our media tells us we must have to be cool.

Meanwhile the family is so broken that single parenthood is becoming the norm and everyone who can afford it is in therapy or failing that on drugs and alcohol. Afghanistan has been returned to an opium economy by design and popular demand. You see Karl Marx was wrong. It is not religion that is the opiate of the people but opium. As long as people are drugged out or busy killing each other in violent crimes they cannot focus or organize a revolution. It is a strategy that works in Iran and it works in the USA.

Unfortunately the moral decadence of the consumer society in which cultural icons are those who have become so wealthy either by legitimate or illegitimate means as to be able to act free of or above the law, give plenty of ammunition to the religious zealots.

And this “War on Terrorism” is a war on dissidents. One person’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Americans have forgotten their revolution of 1776 in which they threw off the mercantile yoke of the British Crown. I think that Americans have to get back in touch with their own ideals and their own constitution and bill of rights and stop supporting a President and an administration that refers to the constitution as “just a damn piece of paper.”

This administration has made spying on its own civilians and wire tapping without a warrant an accepted norm. It is time to stop the incursions against our civil liberties by an administration, which has used the fear factor of 911 to reinstate the military industrial complex. Americans need to believe in the rights of other nations to have democracy and the US needs to develop foreign policies that treat all nations equally and measure them by the same yard-stick. No more real politique.

I do agree with Reza Pahlavi about non-violent resistance. I saw it in action in the run up to the revolution of 1979 with the many peaceful marches and strikes ironically directed against his father’s regime, which met them with violence and lost and I know that the Iranian proletariat is capable of organizing for peaceful change; witness the bus driver strikes and student protests.

It worked for Martin Luther King Jr. and Julian Bond during the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s. It worked for Gandhi and for Nelson Mandela and I am proud that the philosophical underpinnings of passive resistance are attributable at least in part to Henry David Thoreau, an American, who wrote the essay on “Civil Disobedience” back in the 1840’s protesting the Mexican American War and the institution of slavery.

Two other men in history created major change by preaching non-violence and that was Buddha and also Christ. Buddhism eventually converted all of India, China, Japan, Mongolia and Tibet and Christianity, which started out persecuted by the Romans eventually turned the Roman Empire with Emperor Constantine, the first Christian one. I have also read that Islam was spread as much by Sufiism as it was by the sword, which is something that is lost in today’s climate of Islam bashing.

Indeed there was a great deal of communication between Christian and Islamic mystics during the Middle Ages including even St. Francis. And Christ by the way understood the importance of the separation of Church and State with his comment about: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” In other words, the two are not necessarily compatible and this is also a statement about non-violent resistance and civil disobedience. It is time to throw the moneylenders out of the temple again...

I think in conclusion that there are two main ingredients, which are missing from modern life and those are: spirituality and compassion. Spirituality is a desire to do what is morally right and follow the Golden Rule not because a religion or a government tries to dictate it to you but because you are listening to God who resides in your heart. Spirituality is thinking of the greater good instead of only thinking of self in the empty hedonistic lifestyle fostered by consumerism.

Spirituality is first of all being aware of the existence of spirit and the spiritual world; the unseen world that is all about us whose vehicle is love and compassion. A culture which

has lost touch with its own humanity and spirit; a culture which is not governed by compassion at the very center of its core values will not survive for long. The quest for power has turned the world into a killing field and as in the end of the ancient Greek play Antigoni, a cemetery has been mistaken for peace.

[donsaeid]

Nobody can trust US foregin policy when they have studied the history of that...

Sometimes you get a sence of that the president is almost just a figure and everything happens behind the close doors