I am restless, continually praying for peace in the world, and hopeful. When we send our sons and daughters to die in someone else’s war and political agenda, we are not just merely responding to a delusional ally, we are also using our family’s lives and tax payers money to protect the political ideology of the West. This ideology goes way back to the slavery movement in the mid 1800s in America and Europe much earlier. The ideology goes like this: “Anyone brown, black, or dark, are less intelligent, more violent, immoral and sexually dissolute, unreliable, lazier, and less concerned about cleanliness.” This is the purity ideology that Yuval Noah Harari talks about. Worse is that this purity ideology was built around biblical principles promoted by the Western puritan missionary movement that Christianized most of North America. The ideology has grown over time. Despite the abolishing of slavery, the slavery principles continue to inform politics, science, economy in the West, but also ingrained an imagined hierarchy in international relation where non-Western countries are considered immoral, unreliable, violent, less intelligent, and lack the idea of “purity” that the West has, therefore either must be developed in the civilized image of the West, or destroyed and eliminated. When we hear a phrase such as “we’re the most powerful country in the history of the world”, it is not just a phrase developed overnight. It is the foundational slogan of a system that goes back to the slavery movement, built around white standards of civilization, entitlements, and beauty. The racial slavery ideology has become a vicious circle, forming a social system that the West, in particular the US, is trapped in. It was the same ideology that led to the West testing their nuclear weapons in the Pacific (see below) which is continually causing health, water, and food security issues for many. In other words, the human and ecological costs of war in the name of protecting an ideology outweighs any benefits that we can think of. Until the West, in particular the US, finds its metanoia moment, humble itself, and liberate its political and social system from this 18th century ideology, it will continue to destroy itself from within, including everyone associated with it.
Photo: the testing of a nuclear bomb in what the US labelled the Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands.