It really is a crusade

[morgan_dhu]

I found this item courtesy of techn0goddess.

Let me ask just one simple question.

WHAT THE FUCK?

Seriously.

People all over this planet are strangling on the accumulations of bile-soaked hatred and slaughter justified by fundamentalist doctrines (not to ignore the contributions of all those other wonderful things like colonialism, imperialism and incessant meddling from European and american empires and the global neo-liberal nightmare of untrammelled oppression and greed in the name of the holy profit margin).

And the US military machine is humming "Onward Christian Soldiers."

Is anyone in power there even thinking anymore?

(Edit: I originally misspelled techn0goddess's name. This has been corrected. My apologies.)

Comments

[guyindkny.livejournal.com]

I wish I could say that I was terribly surprised by all of this, but I'm not. After all, American foreign policy has been nothing short of neo-colonial, and what is such a big part of colonialism but the White Man's Burden. The orientalising process of that also dehumanises those who practice another religion, making them an Other that is easier to hate and kill. Add to that, before the current Iraq war started, you had American generals publicly saying "My God is bigger than their god," this story just reaffirms what I already knew.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

I think that what surprises me is not so much that this is happening - as you say, it's perfectly in line with what American and european imperialism has been doing for a very long time... it's just that it's so blatant.

And I guess there's also a sickening feeling that we might well be finding ourselves trotting along behind them, as Harper fulfils (or at least does his very best to fulfil) his dream of turning Canada into Mini-America.

[guyindkny.livejournal.com]

Oh, you just had to bring the Supreme Leader of Canada Prime Minister into this, didn't you? I'm not as certain that we'll be trotting along to the same extent with the Crusade aspect of their imperialism, given how much more multicultural we are, and how we seem to allot a certain added degree of respect to other religions than the Americans tend to.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Intellectually, I agree with you that our culture has farther to go if we're going to go all the way down that road. In fact, the public opinion polling company (http://erg.environics.net/) I work for has done a lot of social values research (http://www.michaeladams.ca/books/fire_ice/) that supports the argument that our values are different in enough ways that we're not likely to go that way under normal conditions.

But we're not necessarily living under normal conditions anymore. I acknowledge that it's more of a gut fear than a well-supported argument, but I'm still afraid that we'll take "shelter" in, or be imprisoned by, Fortress America.