Our higher power

By David Simmons

If you walk around one of Jakarta's many shopping malls, you will see women wearing the hijab along with tight jeans and sexy shoes. You will also see women in short dresses, often walking with and talking and laughing with the hijab-wearers. If you smile at any of them, they will usually smile back. Some might also want to take a selfie with you.

In the same mall, you will deal with sales clerks, male and female, who struggle – sometimes shyly, sometimes relishing the opportunity – to assist you in English.

Nearly all of them, regardless of how they are dressed, are Muslims.

When I read about people disparaging Muslims because of the vicious minority who claim to follow their faith while chopping people's heads off, raping women who don't follow their particular brand of Islam, slaughtering Parisians indiscriminately or flying airplanes into buildings, I think about those people in the Jakarta malls. Ordinary people, going about their lives, supporting their families, enjoying a shared laugh with their friends.

I think about the Bedouin guide I and my co-workers had during a survey job in Saudi Arabia, chatting about local cuisine and saying he'd like to go to Israel some day, because he thought people there are "just like us", regardless of what his government says. I think about the guy I bumped into in the middle of the Arabian desert who shared his sack of camel's milk with me, then went his way without a word.

I think about the transvestite motorbike-taxi guy in Yogyakarta who remained polite when I told him gently I wasn't interested in him in "that way".

I think about the lovely, intelligent Muslim girlfriend of my wife's oldest nephew, a nominal Buddhist.

I know it's silly to pretend that Islamic extremists "have nothing to do with Islam". I know they can easily justify their atrocities with the Koran. Like the other two major monotheistic religions, Islam espouses violence. I don't know how the many gentle, bright, educated Muslims I've met reconcile their own behaviour with the nastiness written in their holy book, but they do. Just like none of the Christians I've met would ever dream of murdering an abortion doctor, and most would never discriminate against a Jew or an immigrant, and many vote social-democratic.

Would the world be better off without religion? I don't know; probably. But it's a pointless argument, because it's never going to happen.

All we can do – we, the great majority of human beings who only want to live in peace, do a fair day's work for a fair day's pay, nurture and be nurtured by our families, joke and play with our friends, learn about the wonders of the universe – is get along, cope as best we can on a planet weighed down by 7 billion people.

Leave the intolerance and hatred to the extremists.

The victimhood cult

By David Simmons

A recent guilty pleasure was the 2005 Robert Redford–Morgan Freeman sobber An Unfinished Life, which centres on a woman played by Jennifer Lopez who flees her abusive boyfriend and, out of desperation, ends up on the Wyoming ranch of her estranged father-in-law, who blames her for his son’s death in a car accident.

In one brief scene, Lopez’ character answers a suitor’s unasked question about why she stayed with her jerkweed boyfriend for two long years, endangering not only herself but her impossibly cute daughter (played by Becca Gardner) – who, predictably, weasels her way into the heart of her crotchety granddad (Redford). Lopez answers that she came to believe that she didn’t deserve anything better.

Those of us who have known abused women have heard this before, or at least surmised it. It seems nonsense, seen in its most extreme horror in the guilt felt by rape victims. But it’s pointless for those of us who will never be in such a position to try to understand attitudes like that.

For me, racism is the same, and similar prejudices such as religious bigotry, or homophobia. As a straight male Canadian WASP, I’ve lived a life almost completely isolated from such cruelties. It means I’m in equal measure appalled by such things but unable genuinely to emphasize with their victims.

But the cult of victimhood is part of the human condition. How else to explain working people freely electing right-wing governments? Every time it happens, there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth, about how the campaign was a fraud, about how the electorate was lied to.

It’s a sham, pitiful excuses. If anything, conservatives are more honest than liberals about what they believe, and even when they’re not, their record is clear – most of the Western world has endured 35 years of market-fundamentalist, anti-labour economic dogma, fed the trickle-down fraud to the extent that for more than a decade, all – not some, but all – of the growth in real wealth has gone into the pockets of a minuscule billionaire elite. Only the wilfully blind won’t see this.

There’s no stopping it, not because working people in the once-great democracies don’t have a choice, but because they do.

We are all victims, because we no longer believe we deserve anything better. And we join in the same game, translating our frustration and self-loathing into victimization of others – the poor, the jobless, the hopeless migrants from war-torn Africa, Asia or the Middle East, those whose “family values” differ from our own.

I’m old enough to remember a time when people felt guilty about kicking others when they were down, but nowadays it’s vocalized more and more. Last year in Thailand, the country was nearly brought to its knees by anti-democracy protests led by the reactionary People’s Democratic Reform Committee (these outfits always squeeze “people” or “democratic” – in this case, both – into their Orwellian names). Day in and day out, ordinary Thais heard from the huge, royalist millionaire-funded stages blocking the streets of Bangkok how rural people were “ignorant buffaloes” who did not deserve the right to choose their own government, and cheers and gleeful whistle-blowing filled the air in agreement.

In the end, the self-deluded “great mass of the people” got their wish – two attempts to hold a democratic election were crushed with the help of the country’s corrupt judicial system, and a military dictatorship took over. At first it promised a “roadmap to democracy” after ill-defined “reforms”, which everyone knew would be designed to ensure “ignorant buffaloes”, if they voted at all, would not be able to reshape the nation the way they wished. Now, to the surprise of all who would not see and would not hear, the junta has settled into its cushy seats of government indefinitely.

The only democracies that have made even a feeble effort to oppose Thailand’s coup-makers have been the United States and the European Union, both of whose credibility has become a joke over the years. Thais are no longer ignorant rice farmers, whatever the PDRC says – they have Internet access, they know what’s happening in the world (if not in their own country, because of harsh and long-standing laws against freedom of expression). They, and everyone else in Asia, are fully aware of how US lawmakers are bought and paid for by Wall Street, oil companies, the Koch brothers and their ilk, and how market fundamentalism and “austerity” have caused poverty and unemployment to balloon in Europe.

Don’t tell us your brand of democracy is any kind of path to the kind of society we want – in that, if in nothing else, most Thais – probably most Asians – are agreed.

Feudalism survived for centuries, and is enjoying a resurgence, not only because of brute force but partly – nowadays, I would argue, largely – because of our own victim mentality. Those who rise to the top, the Kochs, the Donald Trumps, the Putins, the Ukrainian oligarchs, the Shinawatras, the Thaugsubans, do so because they believe unshakably they have the right to do so. They are the exceptions to the victimhood norm – they are the victimizers, and any rare apology they may make for it is transparently insincere.

The victimhood norm – that’s where the rest of us languish. And here we will stay until, as revolutionaries have done briefly in the past, we are persuaded of a better way.