Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD

And here is the dilemma we face as a civilization. We march collectively toward self-annihilation. Corporate capitalism, if left unchecked, will kill us. Yet we refuse, because we cannot think and no longer listen to those who do think, to see what is about to happen to us. We have created entertaining mechanisms to obscure and silence the harsh truths, from climate change to the collapse of globalization to our enslavement to corporate power that will mean our self-destruction. If we can do nothing else we must, even as individuals, nurture the private dialogue and the solitude that make thought possible. It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.

(Chris Hedges - author of Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (“How to Think”, Common Dreams, 7/9/2012).

The UNO does not represent the humanity; it represents the paper-based concept of the Nation States having membership at the UN. The same set-up as of the failed League of Nations craving the 2nd WW. You will find less than being intelligent, lacking leadership and vision of the mankind holding important office at some of these organizations. Often the self-geared leaders of the Nation Sates are eager to voice their individualistic interests and priorities to the global community that lives and flourishes outside the legal and intellectual scope of the domains of the UNO. Viewing this week the deliberations of the UN General Assembly, most of the Western leaders are driving the mankind to ambiguous threats of wars appearing on the horizon. None of these so called leaders exhibit any sense of moral and intellectual accountability toward the humanity - being the direct object and victim of all of their delusional thoughts and priorities. Most scholars would agree that these outspoken characters are just programmed dummies run by the hired advisors-political strategists and pretending to be political leaders. They do not possess any originality of intellect or vision and are not representative leaders of nations but actors at the global stage. The truth is that none of them have actually fought any wars on the real war fronts except their decorated offices - a disconnect with the real world. Most appear to be individualistic retarded psychopath and liars on the global political scene – falsify the facts of human affairs, the mankind knows it well. They hire news media to propagate their message to the global arena. President Obama is overwhelmed with his re-election campaign, and given the critical juncture of the media operated political numbering games, he has no interest or time to face the global community because of his broken promises for change, lost credibility and misgivings to end the bogus wars on terrorism. In line with his confused mindset, PM Netanyahu is actively falsifying the facts about the Iran nuclear capability and using it as an excuse to define the unilateral “Red Lines.” Rationality of global affairs wonders, if this is not the extreme insanity, what else is new. Iranian President Mahmood Ahmad Deenjehdad took defensive overtures that Iran is not developing the bomb making capability. Leaders do not pretend to be leaders more so if they have accountability to the electorate Most of the current international critical assessments including those of the US intelligence point out that Iran does not have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons.

There are critical issues of peace and harmony amongst varied people and cultures deserving immense global significance that these spokesmen are not talking about. Paul Craig Roberts (“The Culture of Delusion” 9/27/2012) calls them political “prostitutes” operating in Washington. The people who do the political horse-trading. America is financially and militarily broke and exhausted and it cannot survive to cope with more wars. Israel needs peace and harmony not more animosity to co-exist with the Palestinians, not more wars. The freedom of Palestine and the end of Israeli occupation is the central problem to be focused not the threat of wars to Iran. Amongst the leading Jewish scholars, there are many better equipped in intellect and vision to speak on behalf of Israeli people than what Netanyahu claims to represent-the warmongering psyche. Peace is more vital and much need by the global community than any talk of the more wars. Earlier European wars of centuries were aimed at annihilation of imperial, political and national enemies but the 21st century conflicts are ready-made recipes not only to eliminate the mankind but also the environment in which human beings survive and the planet Earth that sustains life. One would have imagined that more knowledgeable people become, more rational world will emerge in the coming ages of rational thinking. Not so, we continued to be occupied with false images and misleading rationale of the global conflicts. Like always, few cynical and mentally unbalanced people plan and wage wars against others, not imagining the dreadful end results of their intrigues and conspiracies against life, human rights and dignity and futuristic possibilities for survival on the planet.

Those who plan and wage wars, know what they are engaged in, they are not innocent belligerent or without knowledge. Those who go to farfetched lands to bomb the innocent people, divide and massacre men, women and children, fully understand what they are doing. Perhaps, common people are misled by the warmongers enabling them to sustain their war agendas under false political perceptions and imagery as is the case in the US. In his article Professor Camillo "Mac" Bica, School of Visual Arts, New York City and an activist of Peace and Justice (“Atrocity and War”, OpenedNews, 4/28/2010) offers a penetrating insight:

“…war is not accessible through the understanding, rationally, intellectually, by watching a film or by reading a book. To "know" war, you have to experience it, live it, feel it in your gut the anxiety, fear, frustration, boredom, hopelessness, despair, anger, rage, etc. In truth, warriors exist in a world totally incomprehensible to those who have never had the misfortune of experiencing the horrors of the battlefield.”

Paul Craig Roberts (“A Culture of Delusion” Activist Post, 9/27/2012) captions the prevalent context of the US strategic delusion:

“Americans live in a matrix of lies. They seldom encounter a truthful statement. There is no evidence that Americans can any longer tell the difference between the truth and a lie. Americans fell for all of these lies and more: Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda connections. Saddam Hussein’s troops seized Kuwaiti babies from incubators and threw them on the floor. Gaddafi fed his troops Viagra to help them rape Libyan women. Iran has a nuclear weapons program. Change–yes we can! The US is “the indispensable country.” …..Israel is America’s most loyal ally.….. The list is endless. Lies dominate every policy discussion, every political decision. The most successful people in America are liars. The endless lies have created a culture of delusion.”

To Chris Hedges - a global scholar of rational thinking and author of Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (“How to Think”, Common Dreams, 7/9/2012), visualize basic problems with Human Thinking, the delusional concept of war by the masses:

Human societies see what they want to see. They create national myths of identity out of a composite of historical events and fantasy. They ignore unpleasant facts that intrude on self-glorification…. The psychoanalyst John Steiner calls this phenomenon “turning a blind eye.” He notes that often we have access to adequate knowledge but because it is unpleasant and disconcerting we choose unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, to ignore it….. At night you could hear gunfire. But they were the last to “know.” And we are equally self-deluded. The physical evidence of national decay—the crumbling infrastructures, the abandoned factories and other workplaces, the rows of gutted warehouses, the closure of libraries, schools, fire stations and post offices—that we physically see, is, in fact, unseen. The rapid and terrifying deterioration of the ecosystem, evidenced in soaring temperatures, droughts, floods, crop destruction, freak storms, melting ice caps and rising sea levels, are met blankly with Steiner’s “blind eye…… The Shakespearean scholar Harold Goddard wrote: “The imagination is not a faculty for the creation of illusion; it is the faculty by which alone man apprehends reality. The ‘illusion’ turns out to be truth.” “Let faith oust fact,” Starbuck says in “Moby-Dick.”…..“It is only our absurd ‘scientific’ prejudice that reality must be physical and rational that blinds us to the truth,”

Strangely enough, warmongers hire war propagandists to classify wars as “noble”, “good”, necessity of the ruling nobility and to protect the flag, borders and national interests. George Bush claimed to be a “Man of God” who started the day with reading of the Bible. Nobody ever mentions in America that George Bush and his neocons massacred three million Iraqi civilians. The same bloodbath is well in progress in Afghanistan. The Drone attacks in Northwest Pakistan tribal areas have killed an estimated 2,900 people just in 2011. The recently released observations by the New York University - Stanford University on the Drone Attacks, calls into question the legal and moral stance of the sting operations and the continued drone attacks most harmful to American political interests in that part of the world.

Paul Buchheit (“War or Revolution happen in Every 75 Years. It's Time Again” 06/11/2012) reminds us: “In our 'civilized' times people aren't being run down by noblemen or forced to eat grass. The aristocracy has learned a lot about suppressing crowds in 225 years. But they need to fear the growing revolution. They need to fear, as Dickens put it, "the remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them."

Professor Camillo "Mac" Bica, School of Visual Arts, New York City and an activist of Peace and Justice (“Atrocity and War”, OpenedNews, 4/28/2010) makes it known in bold words:

“…..while I do not justify nor excuse the actions of these individuals, neither do I seek scapegoats in order to absolve myself of culpability and responsibility as a citizen of a democracy in whose name and with whose tax dollars these atrocities are committed. Consequently, if there is to be condemnation and punishment, let it begin with those whose incompetence and desire for wealth and power make war inevitable and unnecessary; whose apathy allows the slaughter to continue; and whose blind allegiance, misguided patriotism, or utopian idealism hamper their ability to understand and appreciate the true reality and nature of war and its tragic and profound effects upon the warrior. We must see through the mythology, the lies and the deceptions, and understand that all who become tainted by war are victims. Consequently, we must recognize as well, that their culpability must be mitigated and that we all share responsibility and blame for the inevitable atrocities of war.”

Nobody seems to be pursuing any rational course of plan and actions to promote global peace and understanding amongst different cultures and civilizations or the need to stop the political belligerency and the bogus Wars on Terrorism and help the humanity to return to normal setting of co-existence. America and Israel could have used it to build new relations for co-existence and for the good of all. The US and some Europeans are living in a state of paranoid thinking, and fail to see the prevalent realities and reactions of the global masses against their warmongering. The Western world is terribly naïve in its approach to warmongering against the poor, deprived and divided mankind in other parts of the world. History has a role to teaching and learning which is denied by the global war strategists. All wars are the outcome of anti-human thinking and cruelty and none can or will usher peace and security to the mankind. After the 2WW, the Europeans have learned it in a hard way but American political minds are trying to escape the prevalent truth. Those who try to overrun the humanity, do get overtrumped by their vicious plans. Hitler and Mussolini experienced it and so did the former USSR and so many other tyrannical empires. Every beginning has its end. Those who perpetuate wars and victimize the mankind sooner or later will cease to exist. This is the Law of God that no worldly materialistic or political power can change or challenge. Seeing a nation or a people depicted most powerful on the visual screen is not a reality but a delusional imagery – falsification of truth carved by the political propagandists and hired agents of influence. The recorded history clearly demonstrates that whenever worldly powers went haunting the large segments of the mankind in farfetched lands, it is usually the end game of their role-play in global affairs. Massouline, Hitler and the former USSR all went through that path. America and Israel are alone in global political configuration. America, Israel and some of their hired European allies live in constant FEAR that soon they will be replaced by others - the natural course of history to override the dead past. All the great political powers have met the same end. America and its bribed–coerced European allies are at the top of waiting list to reach the end game. C.E.M Joad (Guide to Modern Wickedness, 1935), the classical scholar on world politics offers a rational perspective:

“War provides an outlet for every evil element in man’s nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in position of power the vulgar and base.”

The conscientious and informed global citizenry looks for an active and effective new world organization under intelligent leadership and responsible to the Global Community, not a dysfunctional UNO debating forum facilitating the old imperial powers of the dead past. Redundant myths make no difference. The question is how soon the global citizenry will see a NEW UNO and an end to this monstrous mindsets and act of belligerency against the interest of the global mankind and its futuristic survival?

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(Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking. Lambert Publishing Germany, May 2012)