Call Them on the Absurdities
Demand That They Make Sense!
Stop. Stop acting as though anything in recent years has been normal, or that the American public has been told the truth about matters from the press. Stop thinking in terms of republican double talk, all of that republican"newspeak" about framing debates is called propaganda, plain and simple. The American public has just always assumed that propagandists were very small operators and very obvious, but that isn't the case and never has been when it comes to the US government. Like it or not, an enormous part of that US government is devoted to maintaining a post 9/11 increase in propagandized misunderstandings which are only for the benefit of neo cons and their bedfellows, the neo liberals.
The answer to propaganda isn't counter propaganda, it's anti propaganda. Counter propaganda simply involves itself in propaganda meant to turn political opinion in the opposite direction from someone else's propaganda. Anti propaganda turns itself against propaganda by exposing the phenomena and how it works. Like propaganda, counter-propaganda is to lie or spin issues towards a given agenda. Anti propaganda remains separate in that it simply relies on the truth, that is it relies on the facts of the matter and upon reason itself. You can't beat it. As one of the founding fathers said, God himself would have to nod his head to reason.
The world is such that people have always had to fight for their freedoms, and it's no less so that people have to fight for freedom of thought, not only in being able to express one's thoughts, that's freedom of speech, freedom of expression. What is more important is that people remain free to think, and this means that we have not only to fight propagandists without, but we have to fight being propagandized from within. We have to educate ourselves about the facts, about critical thinking, and about the many ways other persons will try to steal both of those right out from under us.
Having spent a fair amount of time studying theology I can tell you that various kinds of apologists apply every propagandist trick in the book, just as do governments and institutions of every kind who have some vested interest in doing so. And when religious and government propagandists get together they cook up a real witches brew of the patently absurd and manage to sell it to the masses before they even know there's a sales pitch going on. It makes me very angry to note how little critical thinking challenges some of the most obvious lies and distortions of our times.
There are no such things as "Islamists" any more than there are "Christianists", or "Hinduists", an "ism" implies that there is one best approach to everything, the "ism" the glasses through which one views the entire world and what to do about it. None of these, Islam, Christianity or Hinduism ascribe to "isms" of any sort in the immediate sense. Buddhism is an ism because the Buddha had a "Middle Way" which was a well defined ism in and of itself. Same thing for Methodism, it says that methodology is the most important thing, and hence is an ism in general terms. Same thing for Taoism, "Tao" means "The Way", and thus makes for a fine all inclusive ism. For the most part isms aren't exactly mutually exclusive, Taoists and Buddhists get along together just fine as a general rule, and probably so do Methodists, for that matter. Isms in religion don't really represent competition, they just represent a favorite means of understanding the phenomenal world. Politics are something else altogether.
Fundamentalism is a political cult and decidedly competitive. It really transcends any specific religion in that it's simply a regressive political movement, one in which religionists resent all that they view as encroaching upon their power and influence in the world. They wish for everyone to rely on belief more than anything provable, but there be madness, my friends. Why kill off critical thinking and believe the words of men who are admittedly not very good at being reasonable? There may be fundamentalist Islamics just as there are fundamentalist Christians, but the point here is that in reality such religionists have placed politics before their religion. Religion then becomes a convenient excuse for whatever they decide to do since everything is based on things which nobody can prove to be true. In short, politicians hijack religions, not the other way around.
There may be fascist Muslims, but there is no such thing as "Islamofascism". Islam itself teaches that people should not be forced to believe. It actually says that people shouldn't be compelled to convert, but I'm not dismissive of the fact that the ancient Muslim Empire gave persons a 10% tax break for converting to Islam, which I suppose some people found to be a compelling reason to wax Islamic. So I take it that what was meant was that they may not be forced. Now, propagandists could find examples of fundamentalist Muslims to tout, but that is also true of fundamentalist Christians- you know, Jim Jones, snake handlers, abortion clinic murderers and the like but they're hardly representative of those religions. One wonders if the idea that there are "Islamofascists" was invented to support the notion that other fascists will be required to beat them, or whether it's simply a case of fascists pointing their collective finger elsewhere. "Fascism? LOOK! Over there!" According to neo conservatives and their ilk there are "Jihadists", which would literally mean "struggle-ists", people whose way it is to struggle. Although Christians admit to struggling, they're never accused of such. And only an idiot would coin such a term as "strugglists".
Terms like "Islamist" and "Islamofascism" have gained political traction in America simply because the lies and distortions have been told often enough and loudly enough and for no other reason whatsoever. Likewise they've managed to make it seem as though liberals themselves are extremists by calling them "liberalists" as if reason escapes liberals altogether. Notice that there are no "conservatists" about, that's because they wish to be seen in a more favorable light, even if they do admit to conservatism as their one true love. Conservatism itself is full of other isms such as capitalism, nationalism, religionism and so forth, but accuse a liberal of any sort of ism and they melt away as if you just declared them to be mad. That's because liberals don't really have an ism of their very own nor do they want to have one ever, isms are anathema to liberals who acquire their thinking from things like, oh, education, sociology, economics, you know, science... as opposed to acquiring ideas from things that go bump in the night.
Stop all of this framing nonsense. It's no more right to frame a debate or an issue than it is to frame someone for a crime. It's absurd. Facts speak for themselves, and when you have all of the facts about an issue the thing speaks for itself. Bad arguments are like bad paintings, they only look slightly better when well framed. All of this is well known. It's just mostly gone unspoken in this age of timidity. As if none of the people wanted to be responsible for setting off another 9/11, causing a thermonuclear holocaust, an anthrax attack, or spending time being tortured in a secret dungeon somewhere for having spoken truth to power. Though, honestly, to me, it seemed more as if for years now no one dare not speak reason to the criminally insane. It became like an episode of The Twilight Zone. Because of NASA, SDI, the NSA and the CIA, we were all left to say, "Please don't wish me to the corn field, George!" But if you want to be free you have to be bold. When the conservatives start to complain say, "What are you going to do, kill us all?" Remember always that rights are like muscles, if you don't use them you lose them. This is the land of the free (formerly) only because it was the home of the brave (formerly). I would rather die free than to live as a slave under a bunch of heartless industrialists. How long would it be before they simply harvest us like cattle?
Now is always the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their country.
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