Checkered Flag for Democracy

By David Simmons

Turn the sound down on the TV set and you will be hard pressed to tell the difference among the current street protests of Kiev, Caracas, Athens and Bangkok, or the earlier ones in Dhaka, in Cairo, Dublin, Madrid ... the list goes on, and on. This is no coincidence.

While the motivations of these protests vary in detail, underlying all politics worldwide today is the economic failure of democracy. After a brief spurt of progress in the most successful democracies of Europe and North America, the economic situation of working people went into decline in the early 1980s. That, of course, was before democracy had even had a shot in much of Asia, South America or Africa, and by the time places like Brazil, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia emerged from dictatorship, it was too late. The global forces of reaction had won the day.

Everywhere we look, the picture is the same. Wealth that briefly had begun to be redistributed toward the working class has massively reversed. The income gap is vast everywhere, and growing. No one disputes this, not even the ruling class, whose most insightful economists can see this situation is unsustainable on a small, overpopulated planet with dwindling resources and where the very ecosystem is being disastrously mismanaged for the infinitesimally temporary gain of a tiny few.

The great majority of people in a growing number of regions see what is happening and are lashing out in frustration. Every class is threatened; for the very poor, the goal is the same as it ever was, simple survival. For the middle class, it is to hold its ground, stop the slide back into poverty and disempowerment, battling against foes real and imagined. For the ruling class, it is to stay in power, sometimes in the belief they can do actual good, but increasingly for power’s own sake, and whatever security can be found in their gated communities.

There is no middle ground, and no competent or incorruptible peacekeepers to call in. As we see this week in Bangkok and Kiev, the police just make things worse. Here in Thailand the right wing who perpetrated the current political clashes have always counted on the military to restore order – which, by their definition, is disfranchisement of the working and rural classes – and it now appears imminent that they will get their wish.

But it is simplistic to blame the right wing. Democracy by definition is rule by the people, and the people – mostly in the West – dropped the ball. We shirked our responsibility. We accepted payoffs by wealthy corporations, tolerated wage slavery abetted by (sometimes well-meaning) labour unions, believed the lies of “fiscal conservatives”, and ignored the signs of creeping rot in the just society our forebears had sought.

As I watch the hourly newscasts, interspersed between the images of violence in Kiev, Bangkok, Homs, and much of Africa are those of drought on the US west coast, and ferocious winter storms on the east coast. Huge sinkholes are swallowing entire forests in England, and some motorways are closed for fear they will be next. Ninety per cent of the world’s food fish are gone. New technologies like fracking are celebrated as more efficient ways to hasten the demise of civilization, if not Homo sapiens itself.

Oh well, who cares. The new Formula One season begins in a few weeks, and I’ll be out of this bad mood.

In Praise of ... Facebook

By David Simmons

Good old Henry Ford, he was a hard-working man.

He worked all night and all day.

I said, “Henry, watcha doin’?”

And Henry, he said, “I’m inventing the Chevrolet.” 

He said, “I’ve already built twenty-five models, 

One for each letter from A to Z.” 

I said, “Henry, you fool, there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet.”

He said, “Good heavens, I forgot the Model T!”

– Allan Sherman, “Good Advice”, 1964

Those of us who have never developed or innovated anything of importance often find solace in disparaging those who have, finding fault with their inventions or, after enjoying them for years or decades, remarking their unintended consequences, and lamenting how much better the world would have been if these geniuses had, like us, just stayed home and watched videos.

Sometimes this is easy. Weapons “improvements”, for example, can be seen as evil by nature. Less clear is how we have or have not benefited from Henry’s mass-produced Model T, which eventually took us down the road to a complete revamp of how we urbanize, and how we pollute the planet.

In recent years the world has changed again, revolutionized by the microprocessor and the personal computer. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg are the Henry Fords of our era.

Zuckerberg’s contribution, of course, was Facebook, and oh how we love to hate it. It invades our privacy, we note (in our Facebook comments), and tries to sell us stuff we don’t need. It encourages us to form virtual communities that lure us away from the real world, real relationships with real people.

But like everything else in our “real” lives, much of our moaning is unimaginative, repeating in poorly spelled textspeak what our FB friends have already said, or, if we really get around, what they “tweeted”.

But hooray! A couple of Princeton University researchers, John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, have given academic body to our fuzzy musings and likened Facebook to an infectious disease. And like an obsolete bird-flu virus, they declare, FB will lose 80% of its users by 2017.

Permit me to go off on a tangent for a minute. One of my pet peeves is “studies” that make precise forecasts about the future, and even name the date when they will be proved right. And when that date arrives, does anyone check the accuracy of the forecast? Never.

End of tangent.

The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi gave a scholarly explanation of how Cannarella and Spechler arrived at their conclusion:

The Princeton researchers make their case via epidemiological modelling, acronyms, and lots of formulae where the γI terms in equations 1b and 1c are multiplied by R/N to give equations 3b and 3c. Quite frankly, this means the sum total of F/U+C*K all to me.

All right, we can have fun with this stuff, but what about the real issue? Is Facebook a positive force in the universe, or another symptom of the impending demise of Homo sapiens as a species? More important, as Mahdawi asks, is it cool?

Cruising through the reader comments under her piece, there seems quite a bit of evidence that it’s not. Said one: “Never saw the point of it myself. I couldn’t care less if a very good friend of mine is having roast chicken for dinner, let alone a fleeting acquaintance of a friend of a friend. I just find it a platform for posting about really mundane daily stuff, or showing off about something. Frankly I couldn’t give a toss.”

But is that really an accurate description of what most people use this tool for? If so, I would argue that it’s not the tool that is at fault but the people wielding it, like trying to build a front porch with a hammer handle.

Out of curiosity, I did an analysis of my own Facebook friends, of which there are currently 66, about a dozen of whom are inactive. Here’s the rundown:

Nationalities: 35 Canadians, eight Thais, seven British, seven Americans, three Australians, two Hong Kong Chinese, and one each from mainland China, Italy, Ireland and Germany.

Place of residence: 25 Canada, 17 Thailand, six Hong Kong, four US, two Netherlands, two UK, two Australia, and one each in Myanmar, Indonesia, Honduras, the Philippines, the UAE and Italy.

Occupation (some are retired): 36 journalists, five labourers, three NGO workers, three educators, two webmasters, two retailers, two homemakers, two office workers, one artist, one DJ, one student, one chef, one photographer, one travel agent, one food worker, one promoter, and one agriculturist.

Eight are family members, and two I’ve never met in person.

These people provide me a steady stream of personal, political and professional news from all over the world that would have been technically impossible twenty or even fifteen years ago, especially for a languid sexagenarian firmly and comfortably seated in his pleasant home in a small town in northeastern Thailand. They introduce me to brilliant examples of writing, analysis, photography or art, engage me in lively debates, and make me laugh. And only one updates me on his weekly roast-beef dinners.

Our Princeton researchers may be right that within a few years, in Arwa Mahdawi’s words, “the only signs of life left on Facebook will be toothpaste brands wondering why nobody likes them, and Nick Clegg”. But will the cure be as good as the disease?

Take My Word for It

By David Simmons

When I originally started this blog, the theme was meant to be language and linguistics, harking back to my undergraduate studies and eventual degree, and reflecting my career as a moulder and manipulator of words.

It is said that language is the main, perhaps the only, thing that distinguishes Homo sapiens from the “lower” animals. Of all the tools we have developed or exploited, from pointed sticks to fire to supercomputers, it is the most versatile, and the only essential medium of all else we have accomplished over the millennia, good and evil.

Yet so often, it is so pointless, so empty, significant of nothing.

I’m no intellectual, so I make no apologies for stating here that I am a fan of the original Terminator trilogy. In the second film, Judgement Day (1991), Sarah Connor has a recurring dream in which she tries to warn families in a playground of the coming holocaust, but her cries are muted, and the families are deaf and blind to their approaching doom. The missiles land, the nuclear blasts obliterate all vision, and Sarah is consumed by flames as hot as the sun before she awakens.

That scene keeps popping up in my memory as I watch from my comfortable bubble in northeastern Thailand the disaster being perpetrated on this pleasant little country by villains, vying for power that they say they will use to “reform” the nation but which of course they will use as they always have, to enrich themselves at the expense of their yellow- and red-shirted sycophants. Plenty of people see the truth, and cry a warning, but are neither heard nor seen.

Voranai Vanijaka wrote in the Bangkok Post last week:

When [the Shinawatra siblings] Yingluck and Thaksin say reform, rest assured they mean to do nothing short of changing the system to afford their family and cronies more power. When Suthep [Thaugsuban] speaks of reform, rest assured he means to rid Thailand of the Shinawatra family’s political power and put said power in the hands of his own clique and cronies. That is the meaning of reform, and both sides know it. That’s why they are not sitting down together at a table to discuss reform. Nobody would be able to keep a straight face.

The only people who are fooled are the people still believing either side has the best interests of Thailand as a priority. Fortunately for Thaksin and Suthep, there are millions of such people. These are otherwise good and intelligent people, but goodness and intelligence too often don’t stand a chance against a tide of anger and hatred, plus tribal loyalty. Humans are emotional creatures. Add effective propaganda to righteous fervour, and suffer the fool.

My wife is one of those fooled, lapping up the lies and propaganda of the doublespeak-moniker Democrat Party’s Bluesky Channel, as the pro-dictatorship People’s Democratic Reform Committee (amazing how these outfits don’t see how abusing the word “democratic” places them in the same ilk as the DPRK and GDR) “shuts down” Bangkok and drives the already struggling economy toward oblivion (the Thai Chamber of Commerce, no fan of the Shinawatras’ “populist” policies, warns that the PDRC’s actions are costing the economy up to a billion baht – more than C$300 million – a day). Meanwhile the activities of the corrupt palm-oil oligarch Suthep are emboldening the red-shirted fans of the corrupt telecoms oligarch Thaksin, now gathering like storm clouds on the outskirts of the besieged capital, awaiting the next chapter in this tragic saga.

Western commentators smirk at all this. So silly, these Thais, caught up in their superstitious worship of their monarch, utterly unaware that the underlying purpose of the dispute they are fuelling and funding with their eagerly proffered 500-baht notes is to determine who is in the seat of power during the fast-approaching royal succession, greedy hands outstretched to welcome the new ruler’s largesse. So silly, as they revel in their tribal self-delusions that those outside their own circles are “stupid buffaloes” not worthy of suffrage, or that they are Western-corrupted urbanites who have abandoned His Majesty’s “sufficiency” philosophy and honour of the hard workers of the rice paddies.

Meanwhile in the West, sophisticated folk flock to the polls to elect “fiscal conservatives” who, as these voters would know if they bothered to do even a few minutes’ research, have neither the competence nor the desire to improve the lot of anyone but themselves. These sophisticated folk embrace the “consumer economy”, wilfully ignorant of the destruction they are wreaking on the very ecosystem that supports them, and of the injustice and inequality that history (if they bothered to recall it) teaches can only lead to violence and destruction.

Words. So many words, in this “information age”, flying around and then disappearing into the void, forgotten and pointless.

Coming Home: The Year in Review

By David Simmons

Pigeons home. Dogs home. In the late 1970s we learned, in the Fawlty Towers episode “Basil the Rat”, that even Rattus homes under the right circumstances, in this case the tender, loving care of a kindly waiter from Barcelona who thinks it’s a hamster (“You have rats in Spain, don’t you, or did Franco have ’em all shot?”).

The homing instinct of cats is also renowned, although it can be as much of a curse as a blessing.

And this raises the question (purists say we’re not allowed to say “begs the question”, as its actual meaning is irrelevant to most real-world purposes): Do people have a homing instinct?

It also speaks to one of the two most significant events in the Simmons family in 2013.

Not all of us get as stubbornly attached to a domicile as cats (or hamster-impostor rats). When early this year my wife and I decided to move out of our rented townhouse in south-central Bangkok and into the house we had built a few years ago in the town of Pak Chong, in the province of Nakhon Ratchasima in northeastern Thailand, it became an issue.

We (by which I mean my wife Pong) decided that for this move, about the eighth we had endured since moving to Thailand from Hong Kong in late 2001, we would not hire movers or rent a truck but move gradually, utilizing the pickup trucks owned by her family and their friends. Since there was no rush to make the move, this took place over several weeks, and the townhouse became more and more empty.

One day I went downstairs to the main living area, looked around the barrenness and – a little to my surprise, as it was quite a nice place and we had lived there since 2005 – I felt not even a twinge of sadness. 

Outside the Bangkok townhouse.

This may have been partly due to my anticipation of moving, for the first time in my six-decade life, into a real house that I “owned”, rather than renting. The quotation marks are there for two reasons. The most obvious is that the mortgage still has a few years to go until we can finally wrest the place out of the hands of the bank. The second is that I am not a Thai citizen, and therefore cannot legally own property. The house is in the name of my wife, a Thai national.

To make this move possible, I had to get approval from my employer to work from home, as it would of course no longer be possible to commute to the newspaper’s office in Bang Na, a district of southeastern Bangkok. The boss agreed, and the paper’s tech department arranged for me to get remote access to the server, so that I could do my copy-editing job normally. I had already been doing something similar for my secondary employer, a paper in Hong Kong; nowadays with nearly universal Internet connections, the old concept of a physical newsroom is becoming as obsolete as the manual typewriter.

Before we moved, my wife’s family (who live in the same area) oversaw the construction of an extension to the house, which was to be my office. I didn’t have time to make the trip up to Pak Chong to see what was happening, and when I finally saw what they had done, I was stunned. The office extension was huge, covering nearly all of the yard. The interior was in pink tile (for no reason other than it’s a favourite colour of my wife and our daughter, as of course I wasn’t consulted on this or anything else) and very spacious, necessitating the most powerful air-conditioner in the house. It was fully equipped with Internet and satellite-TV connections.

But what about Onet the cat? What was her verdict on the move?

She generally approved, but of course didn’t confine herself to exploring the boundaries of the house itself, or the yard. She wandered down the soi (lane) to where it joined the subdivision’s main street. Then she wandered out to the thanon (main road) through the village.

Then she got lost.

She was missing for a week before an alert neighbour spotted her in a vacant lot about 300 metres down the road and told my wife. They drove back to the spot on the neighbour’s motorbike and fetched Onet, who had lost a bit of weight but was otherwise fine, and now confines her travels to parts of the soi from where the house is still visible.

Onet, party animal.

So the cat came back and lived on in comfort and health. Her master was not so fortunate.

One day I was busy in the office, struggling as I do every day to translate Thaiglish business stories into publishable English, when I noticed my left foot was swelling a bit. At first I ignored it, as this happens sometimes when I’m sitting for a bit too long. But when Onet banged on the office door and I got up to let her in, I found I could hardly walk.

At first we thought I must have been bitten by an insect (kids found a red ant in the office later), and then we thought a spider bite was more likely. Anyway, when the swelling didn’t go down overnight, Pong drove me to a nearby private hospital to have it looked at.

It turned out I’d contracted a serious infection, which had spread out of my foot and into my circulatory system, bringing my blood pressure down to dangerous lows. The doctors put me on general antibiotics, though they still didn’t know what exactly the infection was. Not wanting to take a chance on it, they transferred me by ambulance to a bigger hospital in the same chain, in the provincial capital about an hour away. There I was slapped into the intensive-care unit and poked full of intravenous tubes to fight the (still unidentified) infection and get my blood pressure back up.

Unknown to me at the time, the doctors warned my wife that if these measures proved ineffective, the infection had already spread so far that it could kill me.

Eventually they decided I needed surgery, to drain the poison out of my foot. I think it was at that point that they diagnosed the infection: necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh-eating disease, which in severe cases can

only be halted by amputating the infected limb. In my case, the surgeon was able to carve out the worst chunks, and after a week or so the infection was subsiding satisfactorily, I was taken off the IV, and sent home (after excellent care by nurses not all of whom looked like the one on the right) with a bagful of oral antibiotics. A month later I was fine.

Other than that little adventure, the move into our home has been a success. As I had no medical insurance, the hospital stay blew us out of the water financially, but thanks to the assistance of a family friend, we avoided taking out a second mortgage. And despite my above-noted long-standing indifference to the concept of home ownership, I confess to a change of heart. This place gives me great pleasure.

That pleasure is enhanced by the fact that it is a very nice house; it was mostly designed by my wife, and she spared no detail to make it her personal “paradise”. She has used that word dozens of times since we moved in. She grew up in a poor farming family and has always dreamed of having her own

Lukyi and Dang.

house. Now she does. She has established a garden in the front where she grows jasmine and other flowers, and there is a small mango tree. And the climate in this part of Thailand is cooler and much cleaner than Bangkok. I’ve even started going for walks in the evening.

Our daughter Lukyi transferred from her small international school in Bangkok to a large privately run school in Pak Chong. Unlike the Bangkok school, the medium of instruction is Thai, not English, and her Thai literacy wasn’t up to snuff in the opinion of the administration, so she is repeating Grade 4. But she likes the school and has made lots of new friends, and I think she’s doing OK academically. I help her with her English reading at home.

Her biological brother Dang is staying with us. His parents have split up; his father Ut lives here in Pak Chong and comes over frequently, but his mother Nok is busy in a construction business in Bangkok and comes more rarely. They pay for his schooling, and Ut, who is an excellent handyman, helps us maintain the house at little or no cost.

View from the Floating Bar

My friend Martin and I made another trip to the Philippines in March. We went to Subic Bay this time; he is a scuba-diving fanatic and wanted to explore the shipwrecks around that former US naval base. We stayed at the Arizona International Resort, which besides a good dive shop to keep Martin happy, also featured an excellent restaurant and a floating bar. 

The best way to get to Subic Bay from Thailand is via Clark airport, just outside Angeles City, so this trip also allowed a visit with my old friend Ted, who runs an Internet cafe there.

As I write this, life is passably normal. Pong is still convinced an insect or spider bite caused my foot infection, so I’ve been banished from the office and moved into one of the bedrooms in the main house, which is deemed more bug-proof. I’m working six-day weeks to make a dent in our debts.

There is little sign here in sleepy Pak Chong of the reactionary movement that has nearly paralysed Bangkok with protests demanding “reforms” aimed at somehow preventing a succession of governments favoured by the “uneducated” rural majority. There is an excellent chance of another bloodbath early in 2014, possibly even a civil war.

But hey, it’s the festive season. Let’s keep a good thought.

Pong (Nuannoi), Lukyi (Natinicha), Dang, Onet and I wish you all a great 2014.

Why the villains win

By David Simmons

Like many baby-boomers whose fathers fought in World War II, I was mystified in my youth by how quickly the Western Allies reconciled with the Japanese, Italians and especially the Germans. In the early 1970s, I travelled around Germany to try to make sense of it. I saw Dachau, the memorials in West Berlin, the still war-damaged buildings of East Berlin.

And I met wonderful people.

Years later, I went to Israel, where I saw the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. I spent three months on a kibbutz, where I met more wonderful people, including our Israeli hosts and the Arab labourers, along with the foreign volunteers from Britain, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the US, France and Canada.

And Germany.

How could this be? How could these young Germans, these intelligent, fun-loving, perfectly normal people, be connected in any way with those monsters who slaughtered Jews by the millions? Young, bright-eyed, idealistic like the rest of us, and working hand in hand with Jews, eating, drinking and playing with them, including some who still had memories of those dark days in Europe?

And yet they were not monsters, those Hitler Youth members of the 1930s, those brave soldiers of the Wehrmacht, maybe not even the guards at Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and the rest. They were people, humans who trod a path spared others only by the grace of the gods. They loved their country but saw no hope for it to rise from the ruins and reparations of the Great War, the hyperinflation, the exploitation of the bankers, many of whom were Jews.

Until an ugly little man with a swastika on his armband stirred their aspirations, and their hatreds, with his bold rhetoric.

As I write this, I hear the television in the next room, the anti-government Blue Sky channel that my wife watches day and night, spewing bold rhetoric from an unattractive man with a Thai flag on his armband. He offers hope to save Thailand from – what? Hyperinflation? Mass poverty and unemployment? Enslavement by foreign powers?

No; the Thai economy is one of the strongest in Asia, poverty has been nearly eliminated, unemployment is less than 1 per cent, foreign investment is pouring in, factories are popping up all over and churning out cars and computer components. Wages are rising, and the worst villains of exploitative capitalism – the garment industry – are fleeing to havens like Bangladesh and Cambodia.

No; he will save the land not from any of these things but from a family from the northern province of Chiang Mai who exploited the democratic system to establish themselves in the once totally dominant Central region. He will save the land, therefore, from the real culprit – democracy itself. For it is a flawed system, empowering the lower classes to install governments that promise them a better life and, worse, spread the wealth around outside the great city of Krung Thep, the City of Angels, the seat of a quasi-divine monarch.

Western media haven’t been able to grasp what is happening. They are used to covering street revolutions, but those are nearly always struggles to rid their lands of dictators, absolute monarchs and military juntas. Here in Thailand, it’s the complete opposite.

It’s not logical. And ironically this anti-democratic, anti-unification, pro-class-war revolution flared up at almost exactly the same time as most of the rest of the world was mourning the loss of a black man who spent decades in prison for fighting apartheid, but who went on to become his country’s president and forgave his former tormenters, who preached reconciliation.

But as in 1930s Germany, logic is not the main issue. Yes the man from Chiang Mai they now demonize was a crook and a murderer, and the current bureaucracy, security forces, and Parliament itself are deeply corrupt. Yes some of the populist programs favoured by the rural majority have been ineffectual, even damaging. Yet the real momentum comes not from meaningful solutions proposed from the protest stage, but from soothing words backing the myth that the fair-skinned Central tribe with its strong Chinese ethnicity is superior to the Lao and hill-tribe-tainted Northern highlands and Northeastern plateaus, and let’s not even talk about the Malay Muslims in the South. In fact let’s not talk about anything but how much we hate that one family, and by extension all those who support them.

Let’s not focus on the usurious Jewish bankers who are getting fat on the misery of Aryan Germans, said the ugly little man with the swastika; let’s exterminate all the Jews, even our friends and neighbours and co-workers, our children’s teachers. And let’s not stop there; let’s celebrate our superiority by conquering the lower races, the Slavs and the Latins, to expand our Lebensraum. For we are not of the world; we own it.

I have often thought about what my life would have been like if I had been born thirty years earlier, and not in Canada but in Germany. Would I have been among the Righteous Gentiles who protected Jews from persecution? I doubt I would have, not just in Germany but anywhere else in Europe at that time, for anti-Semitism was rife everywhere – the Germans (and the Soviets) just took it to its logical extreme. I might have been skeptical of National Socialist fantasies and uncomfortable with its aggression, maybe. I really don’t know.

We don’t have to look far, after all, to see the power of rhetoric over logic. The Cold War was mostly based on the former, and that decades-long conflict wasn’t embraced primarily by naive little Asians or goose-stepping fanatics, but by the great democracies that dominated much of the world after 1945.

And we have not been permitted to enjoy our complacency of having survived the Cold War without nuking one another into oblivion. Now there is a new struggle, currently being lost by working people everywhere, against out-of-control corporatism and financial terrorism that threatens not just civilization, but possibly the ecosystem itself.

So there are villains everywhere, and they win by exploiting our own failings, our refusal to think for ourselves, like the whistle-blowing mobs now paralysing Bangkok. They too easily breach our weak defences against the prejudice, greed, close-mindedness inside our own hearts, that can fester into hate so quickly.

Paths to Peace: Keep the Faith

By David Simmons

The Ismaili Muslim community in Kenya is reeling from eight deaths at the hands of Islamic terrorists. Among the dead are Sikhs, Hindus, Christians and Jews. Multiple nationalities. Multiple religions. Now it is true that Islamic terrorists are killing more Muslims than anyone. But this stunt – the sparing of Muslims for PR – is just that. They shed the blood of humanity. The majority of the Muslim world is against these people and they think they can turn the tide. They can’t. We will not let them.

This heartfelt declaration was posted on Facebook by a former newspaper colleague, a man I have always admired for his sound investigative journalism and his integrity, after the terrorist attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. A Muslim immigrant from East Africa living in Vancouver, he claims to speak for the majority of the followers of Islam when he condemns the kind of violence we saw in the Kenyan capital, and have seen in the Sunni-Shiite bloodbaths of Syria and Iraq, and during the attacks in London in July 2005, in Bali that same year and in 2002, in New York, Pennsylvania and near Washington in September 2011, in ...

Indeed, the Holy Koran says (25:63): “The worshippers of the All-Merciful are they who tread gently upon the earth, and when the ignorant address them, they reply, ‘Peace!’” But many other verses call for violent jihad against infidels, such as this passage in Chapter 2:

And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And al-Fitnah [disbelief] is worse than killing ... but if they desist, then lo! Allah is forgiving and merciful. And fight them until there is no more Fitnah and worship is for Allah alone.

According to TheReligionofPeace.com, “The Koran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with non-believers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are called ‘hypocrites’ and warned that Allah will send them to hell if they do not join the slaughter.”

So, is Islam going through a bad patch, as Christianity did in the Crusades, during the Inquisition, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland? Both Christianity and Islam are developments of Judaism, whose own holy book is full of violence up to and including genocide. Yet like the Koran, the Old and New Testaments also vehemently call for justice, love and forgiveness.

No wonder so many religionists are confused.

There is no point denying that all three of the great monotheisms are at their core intolerant; how could it be otherwise, when all three condemn to everlasting torment anyone who worships any god but Yahweh/Allah? Jews, Christians and Muslims who plead for peace are forced either to reject the fundamentalist traditions of all three, or cherry-pick those passages in their holy guidebooks that support their point of view. For their part, the jihadis/crusaders/Zionists rely on the ample support in the Bible, Koran and Hadith for condemnation of, and even violence against, the infidel.

Fundamentally, the other major religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism appear to make it easier to find spiritual support for tolerance of “alternative paths” to enlightenment, and throughout history the followers of those faiths have, in terms of sheer numbers of victims, tended to be less destructive. Yet they are not immune to the base instincts that infest militant Islam and its Judaeo-Christian counterparts, as seen in the recent anti-Muslim atrocities in Buddhist Myanmar, or the occasional extremism of India’s and Bali’s Hindu right wings.

Looking at this situation more broadly, it is possible to see that the contradictions in the great religions that call for peace and violence simultaneously are nothing more than a reflection of the human condition. The most damaging conflicts in history, the First and Second World Wars, though they (especially the Second) had some religious elements, were primarily secular.

The most violent of the current nation-states, the US, makes war on much of the planet not to convert infidels to any traditional religion, but to maintain its own wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. By so doing, the United States is merely following in the footsteps of the secular empires that went before it – the British most recently, but in a continuation of the historic course laid out most successfully by the Romans.

And so we see that for believers and unbelievers alike, the choice between forgiveness and intolerance, between war and peace, love and hate, good and evil is a personal or, by extension, a social or national one. It is not dictated by a verse in a holy book that might be contradicted on the very next page. We have seen this tendency very recently as ordinary Britons and even Americans have turned sharply, and in significant numbers, against their warmongering politicians who favour aggravating or even participating in the Syrian civil conflict.

To pursue my own brand of tolerance and pacifism, I found it helpful many years ago to abandon the spiritual/superstitious elements of my religion (Protestantism) and retain only its benign moral guidelines. My Muslim friend quoted at the top of this essay has followed a different path to the same destination, as have many more like him. And so I support his prayer (for that is what it is, not a statement of fact), “The majority of the Muslim world is against these people and they think they can turn the tide. They can’t. We will not let them.”

He Scores, Once More

By David Simmons

The days of our years are threescore years and ten;
and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
yet is their strength labour and sorrow;
for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

– Psalm 90:10

The place was teeming with people; it was some sort of travel terminal, for ferries or maybe an airport.

Outside, there was a cataclysm: The Earth was collapsing into itself. We had been warned that there was no escape; the passenger terminal would be crushed within minutes, and us along with it.

There was remarkably little panic, even as the inevitable happened: The walls closed in on us, and our bodies were pushed closer and closer to one another.

My own thoughts were not fear, but curiosity: What would it feel like to be crushed to death? Would there be pain?

The answer came quickly. No pain, just a relentless sensation of squeezing on my head.

Then, nothing. Blackness.

But not quite nothing. Memories emerged from the darkness. The most prominent was the memory of breathing, that simple pleasure of drawing air into the lungs, the invisible stuff of life. How appropriate that the Latin spirare gives us both “respire” and “inspire”; the latter in the sense that the gods breathe truth or ideas into our souls.

But was it only a memory? It seemed so real. And then it was: I woke up, perspiring, my heart racing.

As far as I can recall, this was the first dream I’ve ever had in which I died. I have recurring dreams in which I am submerged in water, and in many of them I take a breath before I reach the surface, but they are Aqua-Lung–type breaths, never fatal. Normally the water is calm, though after my experience in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, the dreams occurred in rivers or rapids for a while.

I write this on my sixty-first birthday, officially the day when my sixth decade of taking up unproductive space on this planet draws to a close, and a seventh begins. We are often taught that the Bible limits our time to “three score and ten” years; in fact that phrase only appears once in the Good Book, in Psalm 90, “A Prayer of Moses the Man of God”.

Forty years ago this December, I entered the hospital room where my mother was nearing the end of her battle with cancer. She was awake but her face was in an oxygen mask, so I couldn’t talk to her; only her eyes smiled at me. I left for my afternoon shift at the local plywood plant. I returned home after midnight and fell asleep, to be awakened by a phone call from my father, asking me as his voice cracked to call our pastor and ask him to come to the hospital. I did so, groggy with sleep, then crawled back into bed. Then I realized why Dad had called, got up, jumped into the car and rushed to the hospital myself.

When I entered her room, she was alone. The tubes and oxygen were gone; she lay there in peace. I tiptoed out to the hall. Dad appeared; “Did you know she’s gone?” he said quietly.

Still in my early twenties, I had not had much need to think about death; it was an abstract, faraway concept. Now it had become reality, taking from me the person with whom I had always been closest, and no one has matched that closeness since. But though of course I was sad, sadder than I have ever been before or since, the more overwhelming feeling was of gratitude that her suffering was finished forever.

I’ve not feared death since. Despite that, my own brushes with it have been very few. The most recent was last month, when I contracted a serious infection that dragged my blood pressure down to dangerous levels. But this was very brief and by the time I learned I had had one foot in the grave (literally; the left one), I was recovering. Today I begin Decade 7 in excellent health.

And so we look again at Psalm 90, this time in a modern English version, where Moses pleads:

Teach us to number our days,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Amen.