| | |  Editorials | Opinions | January 2009 
Fanaticism
 Jeff Stana - Less to Profess
go to original
The below included essay was received as email and is a very good read as far as it goes. It is important to understand the implications for our democracy, when authoritarian belief systems are tolerated or ignored. Fanaticism is a mental negligence - a ceding of rational thought and strategy to raw emotional belief. Whether one gives up authority to a supernatural agent or a political entity, it is a surrender of personal will, an unbalance of common good, a failure to check overt concentration of power. In all forms it should be contained to minimize influence on society in general.
What the essay lacks IMHO, is the foresight to point out where fanaticism may reside in this country, as well as the rest of the world. Pointing a finger at Muslims, Japanese, Germans, Russians, or whoever; while failing to recognize similar internal symptoms in American belief systems, turns a blind-eye to these issues in our own culture.
To quote Sinclair Lewis in his eerie 1936 novel It Can't Happen Here, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." To understand this quote, is to fathom the underlying basis in the pronouncements of the unnamed author of the essay on fanaticism, while remaining ever watchful for superstition and its effect on our society.
A man whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War Two owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.
"Very few people were true Nazis" he said," but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories."
We are told again and again by "experts" and "talking heads" that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace.
Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history.
It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave.
It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals.
The hard quantifiable fact is that the "peaceful majority" the "silent majority" is cowed and extraneous.
Communist Russia comprised Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China's huge population, it was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.
The average Japanese individual prior to World War 2 was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel and bayonet.
And, who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were "peace loving"?
History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.
Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awake one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.
As for us who watch it all unfold; we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.
There is an HBO film - Friends of God - Evolution about superstition and fanaticism which truly appalls me. That such ignorance concerning evolution can exist in this day and be taught to naive children strikes me as despicable and fanatical. One needs only look to our current President and his administration to see how pandering to this and other superstitions in the guise of patriotism, marks our country's dangerous slide toward fanaticism with its corresponding concentration of power. Remember, half of the Republican presidential candidates expressed reservations about concepts of evolution. |
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