Afkar-e-Qurtuba

It’s happening again. War bells are reverberating in the air. An enemy has been designated. Not the first time the Americans have attempted to create a bifurcation that assumes them to be representative of good while the other to be the very embodiment of evil. Once again it is a death match between freedom and tyranny. Rights and oppression. Progress versus the medieval. Success vs Failure. Such a stark contrast helps in easing what needs to be done. The beacon of Freedom must eradicate its arch rival. Good, after all, must triumph over evil. As it did before in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines to name a few. In their junoon of bringing freedom to the backwater savages they will have to relieve them from the burden of their existence. For only by decimating what was there before can they hope to erect their monument to freedom. Down with the traditions of old, and their traces. Down with allegiances to antiquated scriptures and rituals. Instead the muhsins of civilization promise unbridled freedom. The freedom to overload oneself with sensory pleasures. The freedom to be a consumer that is played like a fiddle in the tussle between corporations. The freedom to regurgitate the lines, “Civilisation has advanced. We are no longer tribal nor held back by religion or superstition. The world has progressed.” The freedom to live and die for a crumbling system yet to affirm dogmatically its vitality at every moment of one’s life. The Americans remain perplexed as to why the other is so intransigent when it comes to acquiescing to their perspective. The only perspective. It is their obduracy that is a hindrance to everlasting peace. That is why they must be eradicated. They must be rescued from their gullible assumptions that cannot coexist with the shenshah civilization. It is not destruction but rather a correction mechanism. Rectifying measures, that shall be assigned ever so complicated designations so one’s mind does not wander to the screaming of women and children as they are pummelled by the fruits of the overworked post docs in search of stable employment. Then once the savages have been levelled, pulverized, eviscerated beyond recognition. When the temporal existential enemy has been neutralised, and “tamed”, the shehanshah shall announce that its truth of freedom and liberty has been vindicated decisively. The stragglers having lost everything in the invasion shall be propped up as exemplars of the American dream. Colorful shades in the tapestry of the American experience, that can only coexist once sanitised in cauldrons of liberty. But it is only what the Empire can see that it can attempt to control and annihilate. Timeless aspects of reality lie outside its domain. One’s sense of being grounded in an ancient civilisation is not something that can be done away with so easily. Propaganda might be able to mutilate and morph the mind of the savage into something akin to its master. But abstractions cannot perish. The mode may die but the archetype does not. It cannot.