Ariana Grande, Manchester, London, Zbigniew Brzezinski, toxic masculinity, the War on Terror and us

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Days after the Manchester attack at the Ariana Grande concert and days before this weekends terror attack on London Bridge,  Zbigniew Brzezinski died.

Who was he?

Why he was the Former National Security Advisor of the United States and is the architect of all the horror you see every day in your social media feeds right now.

This was what he said in 1998 to justify handing Islamic extremists huge amounts of weapons to fight the Soviets in the 1980s –

…the blowback of this decision to fund extremists in the 1980s explodes on the streets of the West every month now while America continues with the exact same intervention in the Middle East that helped create Al Qaeda in the first place.

Post 9/11, I watched as George W Bush manipulated our fear and anger of Islam to illegally invade Iraq based on weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. The legacy of that manipulation of our fear and anger makes me believe that we desperately need to resist any political attempt to paint Muslim’s out to be some sort of alien culture totally incompatible with our values.

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That way of thinking justifies dropping bombs on civilians and it creates the very alienation that extremism feeds on.

Westen foreign policy that props up authoritarian regimes in the Middle East for cheap oil does more to create justified grievance than any single thing. If we in the West want to stop terrorism, perhaps we should stop funding the causes of that terrorism.

Many former Iraqi Army officers who were tortured by American Detention camps in Iraq went on to become officials in ISIS. We have sown the very seeds of hate we now denounce.

Clamping down on the internet as Theresa May has suggested won’t stop terrorism, but if we stopped feeding the righteous grievances that become justifications in the minds of the angry and the lonely, we might succeed.

The disconnect between Trump handing Saudi Arabia a $110billion weapons contract and the terrorism that the Saudi’s sponsor is big enough to fill several Ariana Grande concerts.

In my mind, these home grown terror attacks that we have seen recently in Paris and London being conducted by angry Muslim’s isn’t about Islam, this is about twisted toxic masculinity from culturally alienated men attempting to justify their own violent inadequacies in the face of female emancipation.

Western foreign policy generates the justifications to carry out terrorist attacks while cultural alienation and toxic masculinity provides the hate to ignite it.

How do we stop our children being blown up? How do we stop our friends, our family, our people, our whanau, our lovers from dying as they go about their lives?

First, we ensure the stability and freedom from violence that we are demanding in the West is available to those we are oppressing in the Middle East, and secondly we promote love.

This is Richard Angel and he was caught up in this weekends terror attack. What he has to say is probably the most poignant response to how we overcome terrorism…

…responding to cruelty, hate and twisted spiteful inadequacy with compassion, kindness and love will do more to ending this war on terror than any military escalation or civil liberties clamp down ever can.

27 COMMENTS

  1. In my mind, these home grown terror attacks that we have seen recently in Paris and London being conducted by angry Muslim’s isn’t about Islam, this is about twisted toxic masculinity from culturally alienated men attempting to justify their own violent inadequacies in the face of female emancipation.

    You seem prepared to go to any absurdity to stop yourself from even examining the very real links between political and religious extremism.

    Politics uses religion to abet its goals, and vice versa. Moreover, some religions offer more fertile grounds for fomenting extremism than others do.

    Cognitive dissonance best describes your condemnation of Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and your refusal to pin any responsibility for terrorist attacks on Islamic doctrine, not all but some.

    Your assessment of historic ineptitude of the US in the Middle East is however, spot on.

    • Good assessment, thanks, according to the holy book of Islam we are ALL born believers in Allah, that is God, but only those who live according to islamic faith remain faithful, others that follow other beliefs or no beliefs are considered gentiles.

      Like Catholicism, like Mormonism, like many faiths, Islam claims to be the ONLY true religion, and therein lies one problem few dare talk about. Religion can be a source of many troubles:

      Some sources:
      https://www.islamreligion.com/articles/1983/fitrah/

      “The Prophet, may the mercy and blessings of God be upon him, reported that God said,

      “I created My servants in the right religion but the devils made them go astray.”[2]

      The Prophet also said,

      “Each child is born in a state of “Fitrah”, but his parents make him a Jew or a Christian. It is like the way an animal gives birth to a normal offspring. Have you noticed any (young animal) born mutilated before you mutilate them?””

      Another source:
      http://islam101.com/dawah/newBorn.htm

      This is not made up, no BS.

      Add the fact that the western lifestyle of today is rather socially liberal, where people live as they please, and you can see how this creates a conflict for those who want to believe and follow certain faiths. And with the excuse of ‘jihad’, that some interpret too widely and generously, we easily have some take things as far as we see.

    • Indeed, the sooner left commentators stop even endorsing unscientific conceptual nonsense like ‘toxic masculinity’, the sooner the left can finish flushing the turd of neoliberalism.

  2. Plenty of sense there.
    I still dislike the term “toxic masculinity” its a squishy term that is easily misapplied – Im not in total disagreement with your usage here. Men are more likely to act on an impulse hence one reason they are over represented in both suicide and violence statistics.
    Reportedly the wife of one of these latest murderers wears a hijab so Im not sure how emancipated she was feeling – its supposition.

    Islam isnt the problem, militant islam is the problem and yes the west has gone a long way to creating it.
    (Just as i would say Jadaism isnt a problem, zionism is)

  3. Martyn;

    Good spotting on Brezezinski.

    Another perspective;
    http://stevepieczenik.com/brezezinski-r-i-p/

    I suspect what is happening today is similar to the operations of Gladio.
    Webster Tarpley, in the mid ’70’s and expert at the time, was engaged by
    Italy to investigate who was responsible for the kidnapping and eventual
    killing of their Prime Minister.

    He uncovered a network of intel ,that was left in place after WW2, that was
    staging terror type events for political purposes. He named them Gladio.
    http://tarpley.net/?s=gladio

    “Zbig was one of the first senior advisors in the WH to allocate billions of dollars in military aid for Islamic militants fighting the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan. Later, these militants with help from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, UAE, and the CIA became Al Qaeda and ISIS.”

    Alas, it seems that TPTB have turned them on us, the West.

    There is an election looming, in this instance.

    Cheers.

  4. It’s really a lot worse than blowback – it’s a symbiotic relationship between Western arms dealers & right-wing Govt’s with Saudi funded fanaticism. They all want this merry go round to continue – the oil dollars get spent on the arms which go to the fundamentalists who are the useful idiots of the Saudis (& others) and can be called upon to carry out an attack when needed. The Western backed bombing keeps producing more fanatics who attack the West
    which keeps the RW Govt’s in power. And so on.

    I was really amazed at what an amateur attack this was in London – three guys with knives and a van, no explosives. Must’ve been hastily put together as if they needed another one ’cause the Manchester one didn’t get the desired back lash against Corby.

  5. The big story here is how western governments and the UK in particular made Faustian deals with salafist movements to shortsightedly further their foreign policy(read corporate/ commercial)ambitions
    Abedi was part of the Manchester community of Libyans opposed to Ghadaffi, not because of his brutality but because of the secular nature of his govt, and its provision of free higher education to women , its apostasy in other words.
    Theresa May as home Secretary lifted the control measures on these Libyans, known as the Manchester boys and affiliated with Al Queda, gave them back their passports, and urged them to fight Ghadaffi in 2011.
    Allowed to travel freely between Syria, Europe and Libya,picking up fighting skills on the way, is it any wonder
    that some come back to kill the infidels in Britain?

  6. Brzezinski, lovely guy.
    Brzezinski said that “in earlier times, it was easier to control a million people, literally, than physically to kill a million people” while “today it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people.”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO2U9jJoWsM

    Earlier Brzezinski:
    “The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values (like liberty and democracy). Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
    – Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, 1970

    • E-Clectic: “Brzezinski, lovely guy.”

      Indeed. A prize bit of work, that one. He was Polish, connected to the Polish aristocracy, I believe. In historical times, the Polish elites and aristocrats hated the Russians; which goes a considerable way to explaining some of the things he did.The consequences of which we live with today, of course.

      As is recorded in this post, he said of the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Which indicates his fundamental failure to understand what the Vietnam war was about. And what the Afghan conflict was about, either, come to that. But his hatred for the USSR (and Russia) was such that he would do anything that he thought would bring about its collapse, never mind the innocents who suffered – and continue to suffer – as a consequence.

  7. There is a lot of truth in what you say Francesca. The biggest issue I have with the whole “Islamic terrorist” issue is that we in the West seem to have developed some cognitive dissonance that prevents us from seeing clearly. This in turn prevents us from a uniformity of response.

    Martin is quite right that the Soviet US conflict was a progenitor to our current issues. We could however say the same about the way the Allies carved up the Ottoman caliphate in 1918, about the existence of the state of Israel, about the partition of India, about the importation of cheap labour into Europe, about the trading armaments with a state that promotes Wahabist ideology., or about the Wests casual warfare in the Middle East. We could go on and on and on about who is to blame. All of these are inputs and are “to blame”. They are however not the key issue.

    The real key to this is that we in the West need to recognize who we are and what we represent. In the process we need to state the line beyond which our value system is breached, and consequently be at war with any overstepping that mark. Top of the list is ideological / religious violence: it is not right to kill for this, totally non-acceptable, and we must not give terrorism any dignity: call it by its true name which is murder. That means that if you come to Europe that you must adopt this standard, and your community must live by it. It also means that if you are European you do not allow your governments and industries to export violence or the means to enact it. This whole thing is “for real”, to stop it we must “get real”. Zero tolerance, no excuses for anybody, no conspiracy theory. This is an existential issue, we are at war with a psychopathology.

  8. “In my mind, these home grown terror attacks that we have seen recently in Paris and London being conducted by angry Muslim’s isn’t about Islam, this is about twisted toxic masculinity from culturally alienated men attempting to justify their own violent inadequacies in the face of female emancipation.”

    It’s about Islam, right enough. And terror attacks of this sort are how one sector of Muslim society interprets the Koran’s enjoining jihad of them, to either convert or kill the non-believers. And it isn’t about female emancipation, either.

    It’s how we respond that is of moment. I was sent this Twitter feed the day of the attacks: “Man told not to be Islamophobic by man literally being forced to cower for his life during an Islamist terror attack.”

    This is truly bizarre: it looks as if overuse of the epithet “Islamophobic” has made it a reflexive response, and interfered with many people’s ability to think and discriminate in critical circumstances. Put bluntly: such people are in thrall to propaganda.

    https://twitter.com/LeaveEUOfficial/status/871138429744140289

    • It’s the monotheistic religions that have the capacity to go seriously nutty, infidels and heathens etc dispatched to the fiery furnace.Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all cut from the same cloth
      I include market fundamentalists in their jihad to install a neoliberal caliphate
      Buddhists tend to immolate themselves as a protest, and dont get all evangelistic

  9. Martyn; This made MSM overseas. Why not NZ?

    And then there is the issue of Fake News.

    This has now gone viral. On MSM as well.
    Here is how it all unfolded with the original post.

    http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/06/shock-video-cnn-creates-fakenews-london-following-terror-attacks-stages-anti-isis-muslim-protesters/

    https://www.infowars.com/cnn-caught-staging-fake-news-scene/

    “Is London Bridge Terror Attack A False Flag?”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5swHSN-VrY

    “Man Who Caught CNN Staging Fake News”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJeM5BoNAms

    https://www.infowars.com/why-cnns-denial-that-they-staged-a-muslim-anti-terror-protest-is-bs/

    Unfortunately, this “Hollywood” type production of ‘real events’ happens
    on a regular basis to ‘frame ‘ the MSM’s narrative.

    We all need to be aware of what’s happening and keep an eye out.
    MSM simply can not be trusted, especially after the American election
    campaign, and they can not now ‘stuff everything back in the bottle’ and
    expect to carry on like normal.

    The numbers of people around the world becoming aware is exploding!

    Cheers.

    Note your last BBC video clip of Richard Angel is taken at
    virtually the same exact location???

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