Of Human Savagery and Human Joy

Christopher Hitchens once wrote “I think human civilisation only begins when people separate religion from the state. Policing that frontier, making sure of it, is a huge thing, culturally and politically. You realise that any attempt to cross it is poisonous – in the sense of lethal.” I am reminded of that while reading yet another account of human savagery in a land which was based on a lethal religious dogma. But be warned that this is rated R for violence. If you don’t have a strong stomach, skip the text and just go to the embedded videos.

Fasi Zaka, a Pakistani columnist wrote a piece titled “Pakistan’s Human Cockroaches.” I am certain that it is as painful for Zaka to write it as it is to read. Only deep anguish at the disgusting savagery of one’s own countrymen can prompt one to begin a piece with

Pakistan, you are a failed state. Not because of Zardari. Not because of America. But because you are a failed people, all of us undeserving of sympathy. We are diseased, rotten to every brain stem, world please make an impenetrable fence around us, keep us all in so we don’t spread it to other people, other countries.

Thankfully I have not seen the video which prompted him to write that. I continue to quote him —

I have an unusually negative mindset these days. It happened after I saw the video of the two teenage brothers brutally clubbed to death by a crowd frenzied with blood thirst in Sialkot. The police watched gleefully. The video has blurs at certain parts, but even this sensible sensitivity does not prevent one from seeing mists of blood flaying from the heads of these teens as they are hit relentlessly, and remorselessly, again and again.

The murderous crowd was truly representative of the richness of Pakistan. Some wear jeans, others shalwar kameez, some were bearded, others clean shaven. The Pakistanis had gotten together to have some fun.

Do not be shocked. This wasn’t isolated, it’s just that the crowd wanted to make sure their orgasmic moment could be captured for later viewing, at one’s pleasure. We blame our ill-educated brethren for the barbarity we witness, but that’s a self-serving lie.

The middle and upper classes are immune to education it seems. They hold opinions of everyday violence even if they have never raised their hand at anyone. If you believe Jews are the scum of the earth, all Ahmadis deserve to die or that Hindus are inferior, well why not two teenage boys?

Then he writes something that I have always felt to be so true: democracy without constitutional guarantees such as the Bill of Rights can lead to horrible outcomes if the society itself is sick.

The fact is, if we had real democracy, there would be no internet in Pakistan, women would not be allowed out of their homes, education would come to a standstill and we would begin a programme of killing off every minority. Thank you corrupt generals and politicians, you keep this at bay with some sense of being answerable to a world that still has some humanity in it, even if you don’t.

Go read that piece and feel compassion for the victims and rage at the cruel monsters — not cockroaches — that do such things.

The brutal inhumanity of Islam poisons societies. The evils of an ideology that turns males into misogynistic monsters is as obvious as the nose on your face. Read the TIME report of July 29th: The Taliban and Afghan Women:

The Taliban pounded on the door just before midnight, demanding that Aisha, 18, be punished for running away from her husband’s house. They dragged her to a mountain clearing near her village in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan, ignoring her protests that her in-laws had been abusive, that she had no choice but to escape. Shivering in the cold air and blinded by the flashlights trained on her by her husband’s family, she faced her spouse and accuser. Her in-laws treated her like a slave, Aisha pleaded. They beat her. If she hadn’t run away, she would have died. Her judge, a local Taliban commander, was unmoved. Later, he would tell Aisha’s uncle that she had to be made an example of lest other girls in the village try to do the same thing. The commander gave his verdict, and men moved in to deliver the punishment. Aisha’s brother-in-law held her down while her husband pulled out a knife. First he sliced off her ears. Then he started on her nose. Aisha passed out from the pain but awoke soon after, choking on her own blood. The men had left her on the mountainside to die.

Had enough of the brutality of the followers of the religion of peace? Here’s another story of Islam and sharia in action. It turns humans into pure evil. It literally made me sick to my stomach and I very nearly threw up. It involves the taliban. The taliban are students of Islam and know what Islam demands. It demands blood.

The NY Times of August 16th reports that the “Taliban Order Stoning Deaths“. The story is about a 25-year-old man named Khayyam and a 19-year-old woman named Siddiqa. They eloped because they were in love.

The punishment was carried out by hundreds of the victims’ neighbors in a village in northern Kunduz Province, according to Nadir Khan, 40, a local farmer and Taliban sympathizer, who was interviewed by telephone. Even family members were involved, both in the stoning and in tricking the couple into returning after they had fled.

Family members killing a couple whose only crime was that they wanted to be with each other.

After the Taliban proclaimed the sentence, Siddiqa, dressed in the head-to-toe Afghan burqa, and Khayyam, who had a wife and two young children, were encircled by the male-only crowd in the bazaar. Taliban activists began stoning them first, then villagers joined in until they killed first Siddiqa and then Khayyam . . .

. . . about 200 villagers participated in the executions, including Khayyam’s father and brother, and Siddiqa’s brother, as well as other relatives, with a larger crowd of onlookers who did not take part.

Read and weep. And be very afraid. The Islamization of India under the careful ministration of the Italian Sonia Gandhi and her minions is proceeding rapidly. Death by stoning and the mutilation of women — coming soon to your neighborhood.

Are humans inherently evil? The answer is an unqualified NO. Humans are infinitely pliable creatures: we must be because that is the feature that allows us to be all that we are — from murderous savages to joyful civilized beings.

Take a child. Take any child. Put him or her in a Jain or a Buddhist household, and you are likely to get a vegetarian pacifist, not a suicide bomber. Take the same child and immerse him or her in the study of the holy book of the religion of peace, and you can make a human bomb out of him or her. As the Jesuits say, “Give me the child for seven years, and I will give you the man.”

Humans are not born evil. Here take a look at some videos of humans not stoning or maiming.

There they are making music and dancing, expressing joy. They are as much a community as the ones in Afghanistan or Pakistan that got together to kill. In all these cases, someone had to organize the events, someone said, “Hey, this is what we should do, this is how we will express our humanity, this is how we will as a community express our deepest social feelings.”

They clapped and they cheered.

So what gives? What accounts for differences in how societies behave? Some societies are rich, prosperous, and joyful, while others are poor, miserable and hateful. Clearly the foundational principles differ: Buddhist societies are different from Protestant Christian societies which are different from Islamic societies. Savage societies have savage ideological foundations and are poor.

The question then is which came first: the poverty or the savage ideology?

My feeling is that it is a bit of both. Bad ideology creating poverty, which in turn intensifies the malignancy of the ideology — and then the downward spiral. A natural experiment has been going on in the Indian subcontinent. The people in the west of India are very similar to the people across the border in Pakistan. So also, the people of West Bengal and Bangladesh. But economically and socially they are diverging as time goes by. Those who follow the religion of peace appear to be regressing.

Another natural experiment comes from abroad. There are immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to the UK. The Indian immigrants are above average in education, income, and other positive indicators; they are below average in crime, unemployment, etc. In other words, they are near the top of the heap. The immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh are near the bottom of the heap: high crime, low employment, low income, etc.

So there you are. My apologies if you found any of the above disturbing. To reinforce my faith in humanity, I will watch once again another of the joyful videos of people dancing and partying.

(Note that in Islam, dancing and music is forbidden (‘haram’). It also forbids women from appearing in public generally, and Islamic societies insist that women should be encased in a black tent. This video goes against everything Islamic.)

{Thanks to my friend Dr O’Neill for the video links.}