I have two middle fingers for Starbucks (thoughts on global cycles of injustice)

“We have too many Christians discussing the evils of global corporations while sitting in Starbucks, and they don’t see the irony”  -Peter Rollins

My wife and I are trying to explore a few intentional steps to live more simply and sustainably.  We are eating more simply, using less energy, biking where we can to cut fuel usage.  It’s been a blessing so far.  I live in the Hillcrest district of Little rock, and I love it.  I’ve been biking more, and feeling the need for caffeine, I rode to The Station this morning to supplement my addiction.  The Station is a small grocery/café that sells all organic and/or locally grown products.  And while I love me some Starbucks, the “green” in me was feeling the need to tap a locally owned business today.  The coffee is better, anyways.  It got me thinking.

I recently finished this picture of Trendy Guy with his trendy skinny jeans talking on his trendy cell phone while pumping gas into his trendy, petroleum-guzzling SUV.  He is starring at African Soldier Child who bears his big smile and AK-47 with three clips duct-taped together… better for the killing of many other children today.  The point is that while the two would never see each other in this world, they are more related that either would imagine.  Most Americans are, at best, only tacitly aware of the relation of petroleum to African tribal violence, and concordantly unaware of how many children are swept up into the fray of warring factions to dominate control of fuel.  Similarly, cell phone parts are mined from ore mines which are also controlled by warring militias.  Injustice to children so often sweeps the industry that makes our trendy clothes.  I drew this picture of a child from a pic online; he is an actual child soldier, and he may already be dead.  The Trendy Guy I copied from is most certainly still alive.  As a shot at myself (who drives a petroleum-using car and took this picture with my iPhone with parts mined from fought-over areas in Africa), Trendy Guy has a “Save Darfur” bumper sticker on the back of his SUV, implying our incognizant complicity in the very things we are against in our cheap words.  It would be hard to drive a gas-guzzler is we understood the relation of oil, al Qaeda, politics, religion, and African violence.  The picture is about Trendy Guy’s ignorance, but it is really about my own hypocrisy and injustice.  Because these luxuries, albeit near certain necessities in America, are still pictures of injustice.

Oil is not inherently a bad thing; neither are global corporations making our coffee, clothes, cell phones, and vehicles.  But where there is much wealth, there is a great temptation for injustice to emerge against those whom we marginalize with ease.  And what can we really do?  Because my biking to The Station will do practically nothing to stop a global cycle of injustice.  It’s true, but at least I removed myself from the cycle of injustice this morning in a few, very small ways.  It’s healthy for the soul.  I’m still wearing clothes made buy who-knows-who, and typing on a MacBook with parts mined from who-knows-where (more tacit complicity), but I can try.

I cannot stop injustice entirely, but I can take small steps toward participating less in the cycle.  I believe the God of the oppressed would have us do what we can to take that road toward simplicity and justice.  We will do what we can to save the world from the soul’s great sin of indifference.

From the AP on the last interview with Saddam Hussein

Pamela Hess has posted a story with the Associated Press on interviews done with Saddam Hussein during his last days in custody. Particularly illuminating to me was the discussion on the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, and why he allowed the international community to believe he had them.

Leading up the invasion, the Bush administration used WMDs as the driving reason for toppling Hussein in 2003. At the time, I believed along with the rest of America that Hussein had WMDs, was a threat to the US (particularly with alleged connections to al Qaeda), and should be removed. Accounts from within the Bush administration have long insisted that the decision to invade Iraq had been made sans WMD evidence for the purposes of asserting US dominance in the region, but WMDs were nonetheless the driving reason that Bush used to gather public opinion for the war. Bush made a show of the potentiality of staying the invasion if only Hussein would allow weapons inspectors to view the alleged chemical and nuke sites. I assume I was believing the same as most people, when I felt at the time that Hussein had to have those weapons. I mean, if all he has to do to remain in power is allow weapons inspectors in (when he claims he has no weapons), then why not let them in and retain his position of power. So it was really confusing to us when he had practically nothing except a few leftover barrels of chemicals from the 90s.

Naturally, this was a big topic for his interrogators. Excerpts from the AP story (note: “Piro” is an FBI agent charged with Hussein’s interrogation):

In a series of interviews between February and June of 2004, Saddam also told Piro that he falsely allowed the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran, which Iraq fought in a ruinous, eight-year war in the 1980s that involved the use of chemical weapons.

Saddam denied having unconventional weapons before the U.S. invasion but refused to allow U.N. inspectors to search his country from 1998 until 2002. The inspectors returned to the weapons hunt in November 2002 but still complained that Iraq was not cooperating.

“By God, if I had such weapons, I would have used them in the fight against the United States,” he told Piro.

…

Piro had described the discussions with the Iraqi dictator in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” last year. Saddam told him he had “miscalculated” Bush’s intentions and expected only a limited U.S. attack.

“Hussein stated Iraq could have absorbed another U.S. strike, for he viewed this as less of a threat than exposing themselves to Iran,” according to a June 11, 2004, FBI interview report.

It makes only too much sense in hindsight. The US had been threatening Hussein for over a decade, and only ever tossing a few cruise missiles his way. We had bluffed for a decade, and faced with two countries he had gone to war with in the past (Iran and the US), Hussein miscalculated that Iran was the more pressing threat, and he oriented his international policy accordingly. For me, this is yet another example of how easy it for conflict to erupt from a basic lack of assumption that people generally act as rationally as possible, even those we label “madmen” or “Islamo-facists.” While far from justifying Hussein, he was simply doing the best he could with the information available to him. His miscalculation was in failing to differentiate between the paths the old Clinton administration and the new Bush administration would take.

Regarding his alleged connection to al Qaeda and bin Laden:

In the interviews, Saddam dismissed Osama bin Laden as a “zealot” and said he had never personally met the al-Qaida leader. He said the Iraqi government did not cooperate with the terrorist group against the U.S.…

…

Saddam also stated that the United States used the Sept. 11 terrorist attack as a justification to attack Iraq and said the U.S. had “lost sight of the cause of 9/11.” He claimed that he denounced the attack in a series of editorials.

My opinion of Osama bin Laden is that he is a “true believer,” but I could be wrong. My opinion of Saddam Hussein has always been that he used Islam as a PR front. Apparently, in that part of the world, politicians use religion to manipulate the public support of those in their charge. Thank God it’s not like that here. Nevertheless, this bit on bin Laden points to our failure to differentiate between enemy motivations. We see the common connection of Islam between bin Laden and Hussein, and it’s so easy to jump to concluding both are just motivated by a desire to see the US fall because they are crazy, hell-bent Islamo-fascists or whatnot. I’m anything but an apologist for the two, but with both bin Laden and Hussein, I believe this is a gross misunderstanding of the motives of both. I think we have seen enough sources to say that bin Laden wants Islamic renewal (a taking back of Arabia for God), and Hussein just wanted to keep his niche of power in the desert. Both men miscalculated the US, and we returned the favor of miscalculation.

Oops.

Islamo-fascism (points for pundits and death knells to critical thought)

You know what term has been getting under my skin recently?  It’s one that I hear flare up as a battering ram every time there is talk of ending the Iraq War or giving some sort of court process to the guys we hold in Gitmo.  And recently, I’ve heard a lot of people locally come out swinging with the term, what with the shooting of the recruiting soldier here in Little Rock last week.

Islamo-Fascism has been that term for me as of late.  Maybe it’s evidence that I’m getting way to hung up on my politics and social justice rants, but nevertheless, someone has to utter that word every time there emerges evidence that some (*gasp*) in the Islamic world are not fans of the US.  You hear it from right-wing pundits nonstop. What does it mean?  If you answer “I don’t really know,” you are pretty close.  If you answer “it actually means nothing,” I say you are right.

I wonder why we don’t hear about Christiano-facists???

I, for one, was hoping this Islamo-fascism term would go out of fashion with the end of the previous administration.  It was probably too much to expect, but the mention of the term has at least subsided significantly.

As far as I can tell, “Islamo-fascism,” a term came onto the scene in force during the Bush era, was a improper and educationally lacking neologism used to sway public opinion.  There is evidence of the word being sparsely used before this point, but it was post-9/11 that it became a media-savvy, household term.  And a compliant media made it oh-so-trendy to talk about.  There are two words run together to create a term synonymous with “terrorism,” but is also used to reductionistically label any possible enemy so long as he is Muslim.

Short history lesson:

If we started popularly using this term “Islamo-fascism” right after the 9/11 attack (when anti-Muslim hysteria was sweeping the media and culture) then it is easy to see that the prefix “Islamo-“ is not at all neutral.  It means “bad” in this case.  The suffix of the term is generally a bit more vague to people.  What is fascism, you may ask?  Well, the truth is that historians have argued about the meaning of the term “fascism” for decades and have reached no conclusion.  It emerged in the early 20^th century Italy to describe a government structure that had no distinguishing feature other than a name.  Italy’s dictatorship was really nothing new.  Italy even used the term for years before she even came up with an actual definition for herself (because then, like today, nobody really knew what the term “fascism” meant).  Mussolini favored keeping the term as vague and open to interpretation as possible in order to encompass as many people as possible.  Actually, when other nations started considering adopting a form of fascism after Italy, the Italians objected saying that it was only an Italian thing.  I write all this just to expose some of the ridiculous nature of the term itself.  We can say that there are some common traits, that sometimes reoccur in nations that called themselves fascists.  But even then, most of these tenants are so vague (suspicion of Marxists, suspicion of liberal democracies, support for the military, vying for national supremacy) that it could just as accurately (which is not much) be said that the average Christian in America is every bit as much fascist as the average al-Qaeda unit.

So if the term “fascism” is fully known to historians and the academia to mean nothing consistent enough to merit it’s vogue usage, why then would an administration or the media latch onto it with such tenacity?  Because it’s a pejorative term that is vague enough to pass for a quick label, I suspect.  At a time when “Islam” meant “bad,” and if a vague term like “fascism” always means bad, and we have historically always tried to kill any fascists, and if we want the public to hop on board with killing any opponents without thinking all that hard first, then let’s run the terms together.  That way, we can label something that we don’t think people need to adequately understand in order to take position on.  It makes sense if you are trying to build a public consensus, doesn’t it?  I think those in media and in popular culture who continue to use the term are sadly buying into an packaged term with an etymology they are ignorant of and with implications they have not really thought out.

But the truth is that it is so poorly reductionistic.  When I hear the term “Islamo-fascist” used over here, it makes me feel the same way I do when I hear a Palestinian refer to Israelis as “Zionists” or when I hear Muslims refer to “militaristic American imperialists.”  When you reduce the Other to a simple term, you dehumanize him in some sense.  It becomes easier to say things like, “Some people can only be dealt with one way.”  And we know what one way means (hint: doesn’t involve civil discourse).  It makes me sad that Palestinians reduce Israelis to mindless “Zionists” who can only be dealt with one way; it makes me sad that several Muslim groups reduce us to “militaristic imperialists” who can only be dealt with one way; and it makes me saddest of all when I hear Americans, specifically Christians (who should know better than to reduce people into easy categories), reduce certain Muslim peoples to “Islamo-fascists” who can only be dealt with one way.

I have no problem with someone labeling me an American.  But if they reduce me and my whole tribe as just a bunch of militaristic imperialists, without considering any of our perspectives or differences among us, then that is immature.  It is the same issue we are guilty of if we were to reduce any militant Islamic group to “Islamo-fascists,” with no consideration that they may have any legitimate grievance at all.  A mark of maturity is being able and willing to see through the eyes of the Other.

It is so, so easy to think that there is only one way to deal with a problem.  It is shockingly easy for us to reduce people to simplistic categories and never even consider that the Other has any legitimate grievance.  And in case we are not clear on this, yes, it’s safe to assume that anyone we can an opponent has at least some legitimate grievance against us.  But we can label them easy, point-scoring terms so that we don’t have to see them as worth speaking with.