Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon's Blog
"If we want to help the Palestinians, the Iraqis and the other millions of victims of Western imperialism we really must stop for a second, take a big breath and start again from scratch. We must learn to listen."
The following is an updated edition of a paper I published eighteen months ago. The current edition includes new references to the unfolding events in Egypt.
In front of our eyes, a gigantic regional Arab uprising is taking place. It is evident that until the last few days Western Left had very little to say about it all. It seems as if the Left has reached a rock bottom state of detachment. It has lost contact with the people, social reality, and humanity in general.
Thinking Outside the Secular Box
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." ―Karl Marx, 1843
Before I launch into a disclosure of liberal and leftist delusional treatment of religions in general, and Islam in particular, I would like to share with you a bad racist joke. Beware; you may not want to share this short tale with your feminist friends.
An American female activist who visited Afghanistan in the late 1990’s was devastated to find out that women were marching 15 ft behind their men. She soon learned from her local translator that this was due to some religious guidelines that ruled [this is the way we show] respect for the ‘head of the family’. Once back in America the devastated activist launched campaigns after campaigns for women's rights in Afghanistan. As it happened, the same devoted activist visited Kabul last month. This time she was amazed to find a totally different reality. Women were actually marching 30 ft ahead of their husbands. The activist was quick to report to her headquarters in America: “The Women’s rights revolution is a great success here in Afghanistan. While in the past it was the man who marched in the front, now it is the woman who takes the lead.” Her Afghani translator, who overheard her report, took the activist aside and advised her that her interpretation was totally wrong. “The women” he said, “are walking in front because of the landmines.…”
As tragic as it may sound to some, we are not as free as we believe ourselves to be. We are not entirely the author of most of our thoughts and realizations. Our human conditions are imposed on us; we are a product of our culture, language ideological indoctrination and in many cases, victims of our intellectual laziness. Like the semi-fictional American female activist above, in most cases we are trapped within our preconceived ideas, and that stops us from seeing things for what they really are. Accordingly, we tend to interpret (and in most cases misinterpret) remote cultures by employing our own value systems and moral codes.
This tendency can have some grave consequences -- For some reason ‘we’ (the Westerners) tend to believe that ‘our’ technological superiority together with our beloved ‘enlightenment’ equips us with a ‘rational secularist anthropocentric absolutist ethical system’ of the very highest moral standard.