Possessing the largest, most plentiful and best developed oil fields known to man, one would be inclined to believe the Middle East a bastion of equality and justice, with standards of living equal to or surpassing those of the industrialized world. We would expect a thriving democracy pregnant with the freedoms and liberties inherent in wealthy nations. We would also expect, as we do with rich European and American nations, that the countries of the Middle East would possess a high degree of education among its population, allowing for rule of law and foundations of secularism to prevail. We would expect a thriving middle class, with employment at levels supportive of such dynamics. We would expect peace and balance.

Instead, in the land of black gold there exists not a shred of democracy, nor an ounce of freedom and liberties, nor an appearance by redistribution of oil wealth. In the lands where humankind first developed civilization, Machiavellian authoritarians rule, police states flourish, and backwardness prevails. Here, where a few elite are reaping the bountiful rewards of having oil below their feet, or having the lands deemed strategic to the Empire, accumulating millions and billions of dollars in profit, building majestic palaces and living the lives of gods, the vast majority struggle to survive and make a decent living. Here, in the land of kingdoms and fiefdoms and gold-plated palaces, the majority of Arabs and Muslims live in indigence, finding work only as the serfs enabling their Arab lords to live in luxury. Millions manage to survive only because their masters throw a few insignificant crumbs and bones their way, a minute sum of the enormous oil and gas windfall they greedily ensnare for themselves.

While millions subsist on meager jobs, millions more struggle to find meaningful employment. Unemployment in the region is therefore high, with military-age males the hardest hit. Without employment there is no source of income to survive; there is no morale to feel proud of; there is no sign of opportunity, no sign of a future. With an education that is insignificant, for that is how kings and dictators want it, millions have no option but to become easy targets to the propaganda and the manipulations of their lords.

Indeed, in order to better control the population, education has become a tool of indoctrination, with millions of dollars invested by the elite into religious institutions that brainwash and mold vulnerable minds to the fantasy of theology and the backwardness of extremist ideology. Subsidized and sponsored by the same kings and tyrants, these schools, rather than move society forward towards progressive goals, instead succeed in devolving into backwardness and fundamentalism. Many Muslims simply have no choice but to attend these schools, for oftentimes they are the only schools around, in the process helping indigent families cope with the realities of daily life.

So long as ignorance prevails, and as long as knowledge and leanings of modernity are sequestered and mired in the inescapable grip of poverty, the Middle East’s despotic leaders will remain secure and without fear of their own people. So long as their people are not educated to the methodical condemnation of their lives by kings and despots, leaders will reign, sitting on the thrones of gold, feasting on the spoils thrown at them by the Empire. This reality the Empire tolerates and even encourages, for a controlled, undereducated and powerless people are more likely to remain compliant and passive than those who see with open eyes the pillage of their land and the injustice of their leaders.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon of fundamentalist religious indoctrination, together with lack of education and feelings of injustice, oppression and inequality lends itself to the fomentation of extremism, just as it does in any culture, especially a form of extremism which lashes out both at domestic despotism and foreign control and support of that same despotic rule. Using fundamentalist theology to manipulate desperate minds experiencing desolate, unfulfilled lives, radical men of Islamic faith reach out to the many whose lives have been castrated by leaders supported by the Empire.

Radicalism in the Middle East, born of frustration, oppression and lack of opportunity, growing due to inequality, unfairness, injustice and persecution, nurtured by a corrupted and hijacked interpretation of modern Islamic faith, and manifesting itself through violent acts of terrorism, is a symptom of the disease called market colonialism, of an imperialism that cares nothing for people living in misery and perpetual suffering, where the west props up and supports and finances its cadre of despots and tyrants in the region, with their full array of crimes against humanity being protected by the Empire itself, at the expense of the native populations, in order to control the region’s, and the world’s, most valuable resource. Turning to Islamic extremism, then, is a symptom of anger, of hopelessness, of the presence of the Empire itself.

Islamic fanaticism, like its American, and Christian counterpart, thrives on the disenfranchised, the downtrodden, the ignorant, and in those searching for meaning to lives heavy in suffering and pain. Like all forms of fanaticism, the Islamic variety grows and thrives by listening to the angry and the oppressed, providing answers and solutions that help maintain a semblance of understanding in a cruel world. It is those who have become easily manipulated and easily deceived that fanaticism aims to reach, for in these lost souls new, molded flames can be lit.

Thus, by combining the fanaticism all theologies possess with the living, walking carcasses left behind by America’s propped up tyrants and kings, gorging on the spoils of oil, too greedy to share with their people, together with American interference in the region, a grassroots resistance is birthed that finds solace and solutions in the beliefs of the past, thinking, rightly, that the devastation of their lives is a result of modernity –albeit a debased form of it – and its corruption by authoritarians sponsored by the west.

Deceived by extremism to hate all things western, because the root of their ills is indeed a product of the western world, they fail to see the reality that true fault lies not in western progressiveness, which is humanitarian, communal and universal in nature, but in the despotic character and oppressive policies of leaders that will not free their subjects to the great virtues of real democracy.

Here, America and her puppet allies in the region have made a vital and egregious error, for in inducing high levels of indigence, uneducation and dissatisfaction, in allowing despotism to rule and the voice of the people to disappear, thereby creating a Molotov cocktail of anger and resentment aimed at the Empire and Arab leaders, they have fostered instability and resistance, some in the form of anti-Americanism, some in the form of terrorism, most in the form of a society that grows more eager for change every year. Together with a perception that America has embarked on a Crusade of Surge and Siege against the Muslim world, and that her armies are engaging in mass murder and destruction of Muslim peoples, the only avenue for change is being found inside the mosques of radical ideology.

Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic, commentator, Internet essayist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. His essays appear regularly at various alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net This column is herein published with the author's permission.

Posted  May 04, 2008

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