By Arindam Chaudhuri
Terrorism in Paris shocked you but today's news of a man killing three in Colorado Springs planned parenthood clinic didn't shock you much? Have some patience and read this article till the end and you will believe in my article heading forever and realize why what happened today at Colorado Springs is as shocking an act of terrorism. And more importantly how from Paris to Colorado Springs it's the American Capitalism which has blood in its hands.
You often hear of college shootouts in America and it seems to you 2/3 such happen each year, right? You often hear of some more mass shootings and think that about 12/15 happen every year, right?
What did you do? You changed your figures from 2/3 to 6/7 and from 12/15 to 20/25 at the most. Well hear me out. In 2015 campus shootings in America have been 45 plus and the total of all mass shootings have been a whopping 320 plus!! And Christmas is still a month away!!
How many you think died? And how many got injured. I didn't total the data, but my guesstimate is at least 750 died and about 1250 got injured (you can calculate the exact total by going to a site called shooting tracker). Yes! That's how many mass shootings (meaning where 4 or more people were shot at) took place in America. On an average one act of terrorism each day. Not by ISIS or extremist Muslims. But by their own predominantly Christian populace and white brothers. And by no means are these killings of innocent kids lesser acts of terrorism.
Have you wondered how did a terrorist get created in almost every lane of America? A terrorist who is the worst of the lot because at least 20 % of times his target specifically is youth and kids . The Pakistan school massacre was barbaric wasn't it? Here we have had in America 4 campus shootings every month. One every week!! In the land of plenty. In the land of the Great American Dream. In the land of extremely efficient policing. And undoubtedly in a land of some of the greatest thinkers, scientists, philosophers, Nobel laureates and humanists.
Well I had written this earlier a few times after the Virginia Tech shootout and the Wisconsin shootout, and I write again – capitalism is a great slave, but a pathetic master. This truth unfortunately gets lost in our chase for that elusive dream... especially in America, the land that has been marketed as the land of dreams – the Great American Dream. It’s the dream of being independent masters of our lives, the dream of making big bucks and the dream of being happy – even if that happiness is being bought by money, which all of them chase out there. No doubt, the US, on its part, has been fairly successful in creating material comfort aplenty. It has upped the living standard of its average citizen to an extent that it stands amongst the highest – even if that is a result of more than 200 years of unbridled growth and exploitation. Thus, the shop window of Americanism looks lucidly attractive; you’ve got all of them standing there – from Bill Gates to Michael Dell – in Tommy Hilfigers and Ralph Laurens! And that is what has made the rest of the world mindlessly chase Americanism, not necessarily happiness or an ideal form of society. All because the shop window looks very impressive and it has been marketed very well.
What goes unseen and almost unheard is that America also happens to be the land that is right amongst the top in terms of the number of divorces per thousand, the number of single-parent families per thousand, the number of old people in old-age homes, the number of rape cases per million, the number of suicides, homicides, and of course, the number of college/school shootouts... And why not! After all, in a society where ‘what you are’ is equal to ‘what you have’ plus ‘what you consume’, the only way to achieve more is to have and consume more (That’s why we call the US a consumerist society, and its culture, consumerism), and therefore, be constantly driven towards higher profits and materialism. Expectably, this materialism comes at a cost that the world is paying today. The interesting thing about material things is that they only give an illusion of happiness; and even such happiness always is momentary in nature. Ergo, at this juncture, after buying your new car or flat-screen TV, you feel you are the happiest person in the world; and just a few days later, these are the very possessions that cease to make you happy, because you are already thinking of a bigger car or a bigger TV. While you chase the bigger car to become larger than life in order to be happier, you sacrifice those that have the maximum power to make you happy –family, emotions and love. Prolonged abstinence in employing emotions finally destroys them; and you don’t even realise when you’ve become a dry-eyed moron (Yes! America also happens to be the land that has the maximum number of dry-eyed people). And then, while chasing never ending desires, one day you are left alone... probably divorced, without children, and in an old-age home (Even if not exactly that, the situation is often closer to what I have described, than not). And suddenly, you realise that there is emptiness all around... and you land up in a Deepak Chopra workshop to find out the ‘real meaning’ of life – or whatever vague crap he is capable of explaining. But by then, it’s really too late.
By then, you have made profits out of arms, and engineered wars to keep that industry alive. You’ve sold guns across counters at Wal-Mart and made more profits. You’ve lobbied that guns should be made accessible to the common man, and all for the sake of profits. You’ve created an end result of a society increasingly becoming devoid of emotions; not a society where man was born with all the natural traits of love, bonding and emotions, but a society which has succeeded in making one fall prey to the idea of greater happiness through endless materialism, by making one appreciate the bombing of countries and killing of millions, because the profits from the war would help accumulate more materialistic assets...
You have created a society where man is judged by what he has and how much he has and not by his human qualities. He is whole day in search of having more. More cars, more Nikes, more burgers and more alcohol. By then he has packed off his parents to an old age home, his wife has left him after a divorce and he finds himself sitting alone in front of a 60 inch TV set with a dog by his side (in place of a loving family and kids) with a Big Mac burger large pack of fries and a bottle of coke in his hands. He looks in the mirror and finds himself unhealthy and obese. He looks out and sees his neighbor has a bigger car and goes out and sees young boys and girls looking happy. He can't have it... because when happiness is about comparative possession of more material, you can never be happy. There will always be too many people with more happiness. So that's when he picks up a gun, goes to the neighborhood school and kills a few kids and shoots himself dead. Why should I die alone while the neighbors are happy, he thinks. Let me kill their children before dying and spread my lack of happiness to them too. After all their car seems longer than mine.
That's how a society finally creates emotionless monsters, who get satisfaction in killing innocent students in a campus, movie watchers in a cinema hall, even families, children at a Sikh gurdwara and most painfully even in an elementary school. The truth is a country with so many single-parent families and divorces can neither bring up its children any better.
Among 50 states of US, around 44 states currently have provisions allowing civilians to own guns in accordance with the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. The Second Amendment, adopted on December 15, 1791, was the right of US citizens to possess firearms. Today, the gun culture has spread its tentacles all across the world, with more than 700 million guns officially circulating around the world, resulting in millions of deaths over the years – a number that is at par with deaths due to terrorist attacks or the global drugs trade. The need to make more profits even at the cost of selling guns to common man and WMD's to nations and the existence of monstrously uninitiated gun lobbying ministers is a key reassure of the bottom line driven Capitalist system which tries its best not to question for as long as it can, where the profits originate from.
And it's not just the creation of these pathetic inhuman terrorists in their own backyards. Who do you think created and funded Osama Bin Laden or ISIS? If you have seen a film called Charlie Wilson's War then you know how America, thanks to Charlie Wilson (an American Congressman - elected 11 times from Texas to the US House of Representatives, from 1972 till 1996) brought an end to the Cold War and engineered the breaking down of erstwhile USSR.
The film is about how, in less than a decade – starting early 80s when USSR invaded Afghanistan brutally – Charlie Wilson influenced the CIA budget for covert operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan to support the Mujahideen forces and increased the same from a mere 5 million dollars to 10 million dollars initially, and then subsequently to 20, then to 40, then 100, then again to 250, to 500 and finally to a billion dollars! And that, mind you, is what they officially accepted! And all this money was to be used to paradrop high end arms to the common men and boys of Afghanistan so that they could fight the mighty USSR and defeat them! And they did! By firing down hundreds of Russian fighter jets and blowing off almost as many Russian tanks with handheld bombers and high-end guns! Of course, the rest, as they say, is history! The mighty USSR conceded defeat and pulled out of Afghanistan, the Berlin wall came down and USSR broke down!
The reason I write about it all is not to explain how America won the Cold War! It’s about what happened post that! The CIA operative who gave all the knowhow to Charlie Wilson, on how to beat the Russians, tells him post the victory that the biggest mistake now would be to leave Afghanistan ravaged. Young boys would go back to find their homes destroyed and families killed. He insisted that America build schools and health facilities and rebuild the country before leaving. Charlie went back to the Senate to ask for funds for building schools in Afghanistan. Of course, this time he asked for a meagre one million dollars! Yes, you read it right! Just one million. Imagine the comparison – one billion to ravage the nation, but just one million to rebuild it! Shockingly, the Committee rejected his proposal, commenting, “Who cares about schools in ‘Pakistan’...”. Yes, Charlie did counter that it was “Afghanistan” he was talking about which won the war, and not “Pakistan”. But the committee was dismissive about it with a “Yeah... whatever” attitude! Charlie himself wrote subsequently, “Yes, it was a great war... A great feeling... But at the end, we screwed it all up!” What he didn’t write was that at the end of the war, they created Osama bin Laden!
Yes, that’s exactly what had to happen when a country was left devastated with high quality arms in the hands of the common man and the knowhow of where to get it all from, but without access to education, health and livelihood! There is, of course, no doubt that the most ever wanted terrorist on Earth was a creation of the Americans. What, however, amuses me is the unbelievable lack of heart and humanity in American policies! They have now done the same in Iraq and again in Afghanistan – after setting up their greed driven oil pipelines and enriching their arms and oil industry - left these countries devastated and bleeding! And this time, the cost of war has been one humongous trillion dollars!!! And now they are doing in Syria the same and are responsible for the formation of the world's most dangerous terrorist group in the form of ISIS . After all ISIS is nothing but a breakaway faction of the so called moderate militants the Americans were funding in the middle east in the war against the likes of Assad. This group just thought we have guns and arms thanks to Americans, now let's show our true colors! And we have had endless beheadings to Paris massacre and what not.
Of course creating armed terrorists in Middle East has never worried the Americans (they have never created terrorists in a similar way in the countries like Mexico with whom they have a border) as they are far away surrounded by oceans on all sides where entry barriers are very high for these terrorists and Americans have great faith in their internal checks and security measures. And truly they have rarely been a victim of a major terror attack barring 9/11. So knowing fully well that creating terrorists in Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan can only destabilize Russia, India n China that are accessible to them by road; creating terrorists never bothered America. Until now - that the refugees are lining up in lacs on the borders of Europe and finally Europe is the new target of terrorism.
It's really time for the world, the people in Europe and even Americans to realize... that from Colorado Springs to Paris the story is the same... the story of American greed driven capitalism and urge for more profits from arms to oil. And resultantly we have terrorists spreading terror all over the world and inside their own country like never before. That's the only truth behind terrorism the way we see it today.
But should I leave this article at this without talking of a solution? I shouldn't. I remember, when I was a child, my father used to say that it amused him no ends how Americans in the 1960s had spent 32 billion dollars on the war in Vietnam to keep it away from swerving towards communism, whereas the reality was that nobody should have cared if one literally invisible country took to communism! The same money could have been poured into India; and India would have become a developed nation and would have never moved towards communism (those days, with India’s proximity to USSR, the fear of India eventually taking up the communist ideology was real).
And that’s exactly what I wonder today! 600 billion dollars would be good not just to remove health and education problems from India but to make it a nation with a living standard comparable to Chinese living standards! Another 400 billion would do the same magic not just in Iraq and Afghanistan but additionally, the whole of Africa put together! Yes, that could have been the alternate use of this one trillion dollars! And it would have benefitted the Americans far more.
War benefits only their arms industry and of course it helps them capture oil! But an alternate investment plan to develop Africa and India would have meant another five uninterrupted decades of boom for their entire economy! For more purchasing power here in the hands of these two huge land masses would mean more sales of Coca Cola, Apple and Chevrolets etcetera! For years to come! War mongering, it seems, comes naturally to Americans than spreading peace, love and humanity!
These are huge strategic blunders and I only hope humanism soon prospers in capitalist nations paving way for humane and happy Capitalism instead of the bottom line driven terrorism creating monster that it has become now. That’s the only way to humanity and global peace. And I hope we realize this before not just ISIS and AL Qaeda but mass shooting individual unorganized terrorists of all colors and religion spring up in back lanes of every home in the world.
United by only one common thread -the thread of exploitation and the growing gap between the rich and the poor in a world where we are being judged by the contents of our bank accounts instead of the content of our character.
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