“Driven back and utterly ashamed shall be those who trust in an image.” Isaiah 42:17
As
an optimistic young man I was convinced that beyond the turn of the
century a gentler world would materialize. Don’t get me wrong, I was
never a believer in that terrible naiveté called utopia and have never
thought such a thing possible, indeed I think the opposite is true, that
any talk of utopia deserves serious chastisement and any actual attempt
at utopia is tantamount to human stagnation, destruction and slaughter.
Utopia
is the mother of genocide. An aberration that claims complete ‘right’,
an arrogance that pretends to understand what is ‘good’ and what is
‘bad’. This delusion inevitably leads to criminal assertions over who is
fit to live and who deserves to die. Of course I am not alone in this
belief and many others also have mistrusted this bizarre impulse.
Vladimir Bukovsky explained it best:
“This
dream of absolute, universal equality is amazing, terrifying, and
inhuman. And the moment it captures people’s minds, the result is
mountains of corpses and rivers of blood…” [1]
Freud
too, in a single lucid sentence, illustrated well why the idea of
utopia invites horrific consequences upon those unfortunate enough to
entertain such delusion:
“Our logic is at
fault if we ignore the fact that right is founded on brute force and
even today needs violence to maintain it.” [2]
Utopia
assumes the greatness of sameness and in this faith it ignores the fact
that we are each (subtly and overtly) influenced by unique personal
environments and individual experiences that give rise to complex needs.
Your happiness is thankfully not my happiness. Nor should it ever be.
Your desires are not my desires.
My
desires are constructed upon the experiences that have shaped me. My
idea of happiness makes sense only to me because it is I who constructed
the idea. It is only I who understand the meaning of the idea. To
impose my idea of happiness and its desires on you would be to deny you
your right to interpret your own experiences, to deny you your Will.
My
conviction that the world beyond the turn of the century would be
gentler and more educated was never a reflection of any utopian ideals;
in fact if anything the opposite is true. The world I saw as possible
was a result of an acceptance of difference, an appreciation of
diversity in thinking, behaviour and expression and an intense love of
all things progressive.
Of course it turned out that I was wrong, terribly wrong in fact.
Certainly
the world was more educated but still the proof that I was wrong ripped
through my hopes on the 11th of September 2001, when a horrific attack
whose utopian ideals belonged back in the 7th century initiated the 21st
century in blood. This was yet further confirmation that the idea of
sameness would find expression only in indiscriminate slaughter, only in
the assumption that ‘right’ was indeed ‘founded on brute force’.
Although
the attacks may have been spectacular, the ideas behind them expressed
no new territory; there was nothing terribly different in them, we had
long been familiar with this bizarre landscape. These same ideals, these
same impulses to slaughter in the name of utopia have been with us from
the beginning and these same varied plays on fanaticism have stained
our walls with blood surely even for as long as humans have held the
advantage of language.
There was nothing remarkable
about the suicide attacks of September 11, or indeed the many suicide
attacks that have plagued us regularly ever since. The same grotesque
impulse finds examples all the way back to the 11th century where we
encounter the Hashishiyyin (the Assassins) and their infamous leader
Hassan Sabbah. This fanatical sect of Shiite assassins took upon
themselves the role of creating a Shiite utopia built upon slaughter and
suicide attacks. They initiated their attacks from a mountain
stronghold where followers were shown a sexual, hashish induced
‘paradise’ and promised even greater pleasures should they sacrifice
their lives to the utopian cause.
Comparisons have
already been made between Hasan Sabbah and Osama bin Laden and we should
be careful to note that all such comparisons are for the most part
superficial and idealized. However, the basic impulse remains the same,
as political scientist Salim Mansur well illustrates:
“Osama
bin Laden and his band of fanatical warriors are a contemporary version
of Hasan Sabbah and his Order of Assassins. Mr. bin Laden’s hideout in
the mountains of Afghanistan is a reminder of Sabbah’s mountain
stronghold. Like Sabbah, Mr. bin Laden has raised his warriors from
boyhood to accept death for a political program dressed in religious
slogans that set him apart from mainstream Islam.” [3]
What
bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and the many offshoots that have sprouted since
2001 want is Jihad. A prolonged war waged against all opponents (both
real and imagined) until Sharia law is established over the world and
its disturbed promise of utopia becomes a reality. This point is well
illustrated in David Aaron’s work In Their Own Words: Voices of Jihad:
“Jihadism
is utopian. It seeks nothing less than the creation of a worldwide
fundamentalist Islamic state. Its adherents believe that this can be
achieved only through violence. It targets both governments in Muslim
lands and those in the West that support them… Like Wahhabis and other
fundamentalists, they insist that the only true Islam is that which was
practiced by Muhammad and his early followers, the Salaf, and therefore
they sometimes call themselves Salafis. But jihadis go further,
insisting that ‘holy war’ is the central tenet and obligation of Islam.”
[4]
What seems little
understood — particularly in the West — is that the steps to the utopian
shrine are bathed in blood and indeed this horror can only be
implemented by wholesale slaughter; we ignore this reality at our own
peril. It was therefore strange that following the attacks of September
11, 2001, we were given a silly commercial-like jingle which declared a
‘war on terror’. We were playing the wrong tune it seems because what we
were facing was not terrorism — indeed any terrorist acts were merely
symptoms — no, what we were facing was the sickness of utopian idealism.
The same siren call that gave us the horrors of Nazism, the same whiff
of absurdity that slaughtered millions with apparent ease in Stalin’s
Russia, and the same nightmare that gave us Rwanda and every other
dripping mountain of lives cut short.
The evidence
speaks for itself and it reminds us that the real criminals are not only
those who set up the gallows, or those who pull the triggers, or indeed
those who dig the pits that will later be filled with the bodies of
lives deemed unworthy to be lived. These are only the necessary sleepers
strung along by the power of the meme that blinds them, often as much
victims of the utopian nightmare as those whose lives they extinguish.
No, the real criminals are those who promote utopia and promise us the
paradise of sameness. The real criminals are those who, once the
slaughter commences, maintain the delusion with worded excuses and
attack those would seek its end. These are the real criminals and they
too belong in front of world courts charged with crimes against
humanity, even crimes against civilization, against thought and against
feeling.
Genocide is current and its easy appeal is
all too evident in the more than 250 armed conflicts (involving aspects
of genocide) that have plagued us post World War II. Without utopian
propaganda the fuel that feeds genocide would quickly burn itself out.
Sane individuals when unchained by the utopian meme well
understand the horror of war and its long-term consequences. Surely we
are now well acquainted with war’s horrific history and know well the
shame war brings on generations foolish enough to indulge in its sour
deeds.
It takes utopia to drift us head-first into
dreamland, to make us forget; a magician’s spell, powerful enough to
veil our senses and turn us into collective sadists.
You
will find this propaganda universal when the delusion of utopia
commands its dizzying conditioning. During the horrors of World War II
there appeared in a magazine titled Illustrierte Zeitung Leipzig: Sonderausgabe 1944, Der europäische Mensch, an advertisement for Focke-Wulf airplane manufacturers. It read:
“Focke-Wulf
has been building airplanes for 20 years. We join in the vastly
increased use of labour and technology in the German aircraft industry.
We are thus helping to solve the great tasks of the day, the fulfilment
of which will bring about a New Order in Europe.” [5]
The
promise of a ‘New Order’, a new peace, and a new equality rides on the
back of slaughter and genocide, it always has. Countless regimes have
encouraged — or demanded at the end of a barrel — submission into
sameness for the sake of this utopian ideal. And while:
“The
particular utopias these regimes or states advocated varied
significantly. Yet every one of them envisioned a homogeneous society of
one sort or another, which necessarily meant the expulsion or
extermination of particular groups. Indeed, all these regimes claimed
that utopia would be created only through the destruction of one or more
enemy groups.” [6]
The enemy is an essential
ingredient in the utopian recipe, without it the soup misses its taste
and the whole dish feels somewhat unsatisfying. Without the defeated
devil the hunger still lurks and the whole feast remains grossly
inadequate. The flavour is missing. The triumph must be bathed in blood
if it is to taste complete.
It is this malicious enemy
that prevents utopia; the Trojan horse that stands in the way of
promised happiness. If only this enemy were destroyed then happiness
would be a reality. The meal would have its taste.
This
poisoned chalice is so easily positioned at the lips that it led Herman
Göring to comment during his time at the Nuremberg trials:
“Why
of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a
farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it
is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people
don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter
in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a
country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to
drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist
dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no
voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked,
and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the
country to danger. It works the same in any country.” [7]
If
the illusion of an external enemy is not sufficient to fan the flames
of slaughter then surely the idea of progress will set the stage; and
this peculiar ambition has destroyed even otherwise perfectly
intelligent minds. George Bernard Shaw looked upon Nazi Germany as a
continuation of European enlightenment and in the same light he looked
to Stalin’s Russia as the source of glorified progress.
On
his seventy-fifth birthday a party was held in his honour in Moscow
while he visited there in August of 1930. He told his stunned, starving
audience, that upon learning that he was travelling to Russia, concerned
friends back home had given him boxes of tinned food to take to the
people of Russia. However, he told them giggling, he had thrown all of
the food out of the train window while he was still in Poland and before
crossing into the Soviet Union.
Why? Simple. Mass
starvation and thus mass extermination were natural and even desired
symptoms on the way to progress, who was he to slow down progress? The
promised utopia required sacrifice: their sacrifice.
And
what a sacrifice it was. From 1917 until 1959 an estimated 60 million
people were exterminated. There was no secret in their extermination, in
fact if anything there was support and celebration. Progress required
sacrifice, everyone understood. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich in
their seminal history Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, remind us:
“There
is no question that the Soviet people knew about the massacres in the
countryside. In fact, no one tried to conceal it. Stalin spoke openly
about the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’, and all his
lieutenants echoed him. At the railroad stations, city dwellers could
see the thousands of women and children who had fled from the villages
and were dying from hunger.” [8]
Such is the nightmare of utopia.
And
there is yet a third delusion that will gladly lead us down the road to
utopian slaughter. This is the delusion of salvation; that humanity has
fallen and is in need of some type of cleansing in order to redeem it.
This dangerous madness is gleefully celebrated in the ramblings of many
of the world’s major religions. The world needs a baptism of blood, a
mass slaughter of as yet unimaginable magnitude, before the particular
saviour-flavour subscribed to will be stirred to action and remember his
dying creation.
Such beliefs have found root in many
parts of the world but they are most fertile in the Abrahamic
imagination of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In these traditions the
world is in wait for a final showdown between the forces of good and the
forces of evil. Often such hope for a final decisive cataclysm is
accompanied by bizarre beliefs in pre-determined victory brought about
by supernatural forces that will reward the believers and slaughter the
unbelievers.
When dressed in Christian garments this belief proposes:
“…that
the moral conditions of the world and the church are destined to get
increasingly worse. When they get almost unbearably bad, the Lord Jesus
will return in the clouds to ‘rapture’ the living saints up to heaven.”
[9]
The ‘rapture’ is slaughter, an orgiastic
mass genocide disguised as joyous deliverance. The idea of utopia
delivers such force and blindness to individuals — and more dangerously
to whole societies — that it can stare at cold-blooded genocide and call
it ‘rapture’, ‘ecstasy’ and ‘joy’.
The promise of happiness gives way so easily to forgetfulness.
In
his acceptance speech for the 1980 Nobel Prize for literature, Czeslaw
Milosz made the curious remark that what characterized our present age
was a “refusal to remember.” As an example of our collective
forgetfulness he illustrated his remark with the fact that at the time
of his speech there were over 100 books denying the Holocaust. American
television journalist Bill Moyers reiterated this forgetfulness when he
lamented:
“I worry that my own business . . .
helps to make this an anxious age of agitated amnesiacs …. We Americans
seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very
little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.” [10]
This
forgetfulness is made even more apparent by the steady rise of
conspiracy theories that have plagued the internet since the attacks of
September 11. While the internet has certainly provided us with a ready
stream of information, what has risen to the top of the murky waters of
online opinion is also a steady stream of bizarre paranoia. Media has
become fragmented, delivering bytes rather than historical context. This
provides the necessary vacuum readily filled with opinion disguised or
mistaken as truth. The larger and wider the vacuum the more certain the
opinions will be and with more absurdity their claims will be expressed.
Conspiracy
theory is of course nothing new and conspiracy theorists have been
recycling the same fear and selling the same snake-oil for as long as
history cares to record their babblings. What has made their paranoid
ramblings a little more public now is not that their ‘case’ has become
more solid, or that their fear has finally been corroborated with
evidence. No, what has made them more public is simply their access to Youtube
and other forms of social media. Conspiracy theorists today are just as
deluded as they have always been; the only real difference now is they
have an audience.
Conspiracy theory is a modern day
cult riding (parasite-like) on the back of horror, fear and uncertainty.
It feeds on paranoia and promises a disturbed utopia complete with
‘unseen’ enemies and visions of progress and salvation. It adopts the
language of every cult on earth with its in-group and out-group slang.
It considers its followers ‘awake’ while the rest (the unbelievers)
deserve little more than the derogatory moniker: ‘sheeple’.
Given
power, this lunatic fringe would readily take up arms and happily set
up the gallows and dig the pits to watch with glee as their vision of
utopia stains the walls of civilization with yet another wave of
slaughter. Such is our nature and our collective weakness that we forget
the past easily; almost gladly.
From reptilians to chemtrails,
no theory is too absurd and no conjecture too outlandish when the prize
is utopia. The path from conjecture to murder is only paved in
opportunity.
On July 17th, 2013, Zee News ran an article titled Malala Yousafzai urged by Taliban to come back, join madrassa.
The piece concerns the well-known story of the shooting of Malala, a
young Pakistani girl who was shot by the Taliban for wanting an
education. It reported that a letter had been written by the Taliban to
Malala asking her to come back and join a madrassa. What is interesting
about the letter is the language of conspiracy theory readily found
wherever and whenever this absurdity rears its ugly head:
“I
advise you to come back home, adopt the Islamic and Pashtun culture,
join any female Islamic madrassa near your hometown, study and learn the
book of Allah, use your pen for Islam and the plight of Muslim ummah
and reveal the conspiracy of the tiny elite who want to enslave the
whole humanity for their evil agendas in the name of a new world order.”
[11]
It would seem that the illness of
conspiracy paranoia is already happily engaged in murder and its Western
proponents cannot understand — much less see — their willing
endorsement of slaughter. Utopia blinds magnificently.
All
of this merely reiterates the troubling fact that collectively we are
not yet ready to take up the liberating challenge of overcoming our
fears. The individual is still at risk of the mob breaking down his door
and dragging his shell to the rope.
Can we find a
solution? Can the wheel that drives us to murder be turned? Can the
curse of utopia be finally eradicated from the thoughts and languages of
the earth?
I propose as a solution, and I suggest
this with utmost humility, that we divert our devotion away from
humanity, which is in reality a devotion to a group or mob, and turn it
instead to a devotion to the individual. I propose even a taste of
extreme individualism where the ‘self’ is as it were an independent
nation allowed to furnish its own growth and independence as it sees
fit. I propose that if the individual be free then it follows that
humanity as a group will enjoy freedom. The group ruled by the
individual and not the individual ruled by the group. The real tyranny
rests in the persistent belief that what is good for the group must also
be good for the individual, it is not.
What does the
group understand of love, of loss, of joy, of sorrow? It understands not
because it is not individual, it is collective and in its
collectiveness it has lost its humanity.
Per audacia ad ignotum.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Vladimir Bukovsky,
To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, Viking Press 1979
2. In a letter to Einstein and reprinted in Al Smith’s
Why War: The Human Investment in Slaughter and the Possibilities of Peace, Lulu.com 2006 p. 424
3. Salim Mansur,
The Father of all Assassins, The Globe and Mail October 11, 2001 p. A21
4. David Aaron,
In Their Own Words: Voices of Jihad, Rand Corporation 2008 p. 4
5. Cited in
The Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, Thomson Gale 2005 p. 1
6. Ibid p. 1125
7. G. M. Gilbert,
Nuremberg Diary, Perseus Books Group 1995
8. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich,
Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, Summit Books 1988
9. A. Smith,
Jerry Falwell’s eschatological schizophrenia, WorldNetDaily™, at:
http://www.wnd.com/2001/07/10140/
10. Quote appears in Bill Postman’s
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Penguin Books 2006, p. 137
11. ‘Malala Yousafzai urged by Taliban to come back, join madrassa’, Zee News July 17, 2013,
http://zeenews.india.com/news/south-asia/taliban-urge-malala-yousafzai-to-come-back-join-madrassa_862850.html
