The methods may be different but the Authoritarianism is the same.
The premise that Iraq has been infiltrated and taken over by extreme radicals from neighboring countries hasn't really sunk into the collective psyche yet. We keep being told it's Iraqi people fighting amongst each other but what is actually occurring is far worse than that. A once secular people where they were not bound by Shariah Law are now being killed on the spot by outside religious jihadists looking to conquer Iraq. The act of not diapering a goat will now get an Iraqi civilian brutally killed...
August 7, 2006 from
Morning Edition (JOHN HENDREN reporting)
This is how staggeringly pointless the killing in Iraq is getting: shepherds in the rural western Baghdad neighborhood of Gazalea have recently been murdered, according to locals, for failing to diaper their goats. Apparently the sexual tension is so high in regions where Sheikhs take a draconian view of Shariah law, that they feel the sight of naked goats poses an unacceptable temptation. They blame the goats.
I’ve spent nearly a year here, on more than a dozen visits since the early days of the war, and that seemed about as preposterous as Iraq could get until I heard about the grocery store in east Baghdad. The grocer and three others were shot to death and the store was firebombed because he suggestively arranged his vegetables.
I didn’t believe it at first. Firebombings of liquor stores are common, and I figured there must’ve been one next door. But an Iraqi colleague explained matter-of-factly that Shiite clerics had recently distributed a flyer directing groceries how to display their food.
Standing up a celery stalk near a couple of tomatoes in a way that might – to the profoundly repressed – suggest an aroused male, is now a capital offense.According to Michael Ware, TIME Magazine's Baghdad bureau chief, our invasion of Iraq has emboldened this Islamic crusade.
.. It's the jihad. Idealistically, they're striving to create or to return to the ultimate Islamic caliphate, where borders dissolve and nation-states cease to exist, and it's one great Muslim world stretching from Spain through North Africa, the Middle East, all the way down to Indonesia and into parts of Asia. It's ruled by the caliph, and it's lived accorded to Sharia principles.
Now, that's the ultimate aim. However, just maintaining a perpetual state of jihad elevates you and your community closer to God. That alone is an end in itself.
And I see it; I've touched it. I've sat with these people ...
under a dictator like Saddam, where there was no Al Qaeda; there were no camps like there were in Afghanistan; there were no training programs; there were no cells and safe houses. I have been to Al Qaeda camps, Al Qaeda communities; I've seen them training. I am now in possession of their training video, so eerily reminiscent of what we saw coming out of Afghanistan: foot soldiers going through obstacle courses, men in masks learning how to search houses, fire missiles, handle weapons, bombs, assassinations, drive-by shootings. We're now seeing that happening here in Iraq. That is only happening as a result of the U.S. invasion and ongoing prison
. This is going to be the great legacy of the war in Iraq.We've opened this possibility in Iraq where there was none before. Our continued misunderstanding of the middle east coupled with our desire for perpetual war has only radicalized the populace, many of whom once saw the US as a beacon of hope to strive for. Despite it's leaders, the Iranian and Lebonize people yearned for a more democratic way of life. Our aggressions have and will continue to obliterate that perception giving the jihadists the gaping hole they need to do what they've achieved in Iraq.
So long as everyone, including us here at home, are busy fending off the web of religiousity, democracy continues to get burried beneath the rubble. Leaders throughout human history have used faith as a weapon to achieve their ultimate ambition - power. The formula for an authoritarian movement of any kind is always the same. A collusion of leaders who share the same philosophy mixed in with the segment of a population who take comfort under such rule. The main ingredient bringing these two forces together always is the perception of an "enemy".
John Dean explains the modern day republican mindset best:
Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, ``enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/07/14/triumph_of_the_authoritarians/Republicans are truly the same everywhere.
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