[ExI] riots again

[Charlie Stross]

On 24 Sep 2012, at 00:58, Joshua Job <nanite1018 at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is simply wrong. Our countries aren't the ones that force women to wear cloth bags, or stone a woman for having the audacity to be raped. We don't throw people in jail for making fun of other people's religious views. We don't riot over it. We don't they to kill people for insulting our imaginary friends.

Our countries have, however, invaded theirs, overthrown governments elected by the people and installed vicious dictatorships, encouraged the widespread torture and execution of dissidents by said dictators, and generally done everything in their power to encourage their misrule as long as it kept the oil flowing. 

And once the dictators killed off or drove into exile all the reasonable opponents of dictatorship, all that was left were the unreasonable ones who could fight back -- religious fanatics and killers.

(This goes back a long way, to the fall of the Ottoman empire and the Sykes-Picot treaty -- and before that; probably the defining moment was Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798.) 

Lest we forget, the destabilization of Afghanistan by arming the mujahedeen was a deliberate US foreign policy initiative hatched in the 1970s by Zbignew Brzezinski, to provoke Soviet intervention; subsequently the arming of more extreme and vicious radicals, including one Osama bin Laden, was *also* a matter of western foreign policy.

Yes, those guys are vile mediaeval reactionaries. 

But we -- or our realpolitik-obsessed, short-sighted leaders -- created them. That kind of fundamentalist religious extremism is a symptom of a local political culture where all progress towards democracy and enlightenment has been exterminated for a generation. Religious groups, let us not forget, also do charity work, feeding and clothing the poor. In the case of the Taliban, they also brought law to the lawless. This is also going on in other parts of the Middle East; why do you think Hamas is popular in the West Bank, or the Muslim Brotherhood able to win elections in Egypt? If the Israelis hadn't stomped Arafat's much more secular and western-oriented Fatah flat, and the Generals (from Nasser onwards) hadn't stifled democratic opposition, the reactionary extremist movements wouldn't have had room to grow.


-- Charlie