Bhutto is dead. [1]
One tries to be understanding, patient, tries to embrace the tolerance so thoroughly rejected by those who condemn out of hand, with no chance for counterargument, the possibility of dialogue. Comes a point where one has to simply acknowledge that some people, in some places, just don’t share anything in common with us.
We have tried to explain the Jihadists by looking at history, pointing out where they have just cause to be angry with the West, outraged at what has been done to their people, and that the response can be understood from some exterior position that refrains from taking sides. Suicide bombing as a cultural aberration can nonetheless be comprehended from the perspective of the political outsider who sees that the only weapon available to those with no voice is sometimes the loudest, most irrational shout imaginable. We see the situation in the Middle East and shake our heads at the repeated injustices committed over and over again in the name of oil or power or faith, which may in the end all be one and the same.
But the simple truth now seems to be that any political or moral validity these movements may at one time have possessed has been squandered in a mindless lemming-like inability to allow for anything other than the preprocessed, spoonfed insanity of their religious convictions. The act of destroying those who are not One Of Them has become a self-perpetuating series of negations, a denial that anyone can have any authority to negotiate, to make policy, to attempt reconciliation, to render the situation rational. Only Allah may be “in charge” and anyone else who attempts to command a plebiscite to accomplish anything that in the least way deviates from the perceived path of the righteous must simply die.
Which in the end will be everyone. Under such a program, no one may be in charge.
And since Allah chooses to be silent in the present day, the natural condition of such a polity will be subsistence and terror. All progress must cease by this program. Everything must be rendered down into a basic mortal pabulum that has no definable shape, no direction, no possibility of Becoming.
These people are insane. Perhaps not clinically–there may be no organic component to their madness–which makes it all the more terrifying. They value nothing by which common ground can be found or common cause be made. Even their leaders probably cannot control them, once the zeal and the arrogance that has no Self at its center takes hold and they believe they are acting according to divine will.
There is no political future in that path and it is abhorrent to all we hold dear. One may deride the West for many failures to live up to its own promises, criticize us for our lapses in conscience, but in the face of such utter nihilistic perversity one has to admire the things we cling to as noble and true and precious, at the base of which is the assumed freedom to simply have a different opinion.
The genius of the United States and modern Europe lies in the fact that when we have an election, regardless the outcome, we Go Home. We do not riot. We do not overturn the Constitution. We do not have coups. (One can argue these points, but in the end they are largely true.) How does one teach that to a nation that seems incapable of accepting differences of opinion? We see it time and again, when elections here or there or some other place are declared, by someone, to be not the will of the people, the cities burn, the leaders are shot, the military is called out, and democracy is kicked in the balls again.
Bhutto may not have been able to save Pakistan from itself. But now we’ll never know. A plebiscite of one decided for the whole country.
And people wonder why religion in politics is such a Big Deal.
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