Epilogue: 10th Anniversary of Benazir Bhutto's Assassination Zahir Ebrahim | Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
Epilogue: 10th Anniversary of Benazir Bhutto's
Assassination
The long running 'strategy of tension' coming
to fruition in Pakistan
“it is folly to be America's enemy, it
can be fatal to be its friend.” --- Henry Kissinger
Read the Full Report
'The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits
and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society
constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of
our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes
formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.'
If you actually read this far, you are surely the curious type who'd
also like to understand in much greater depth the mechanics of how
the 'strategy of tension' interplays with propaganda warfare and
psychological operations, the necessity of manufacturing the
boogeyman of Bin Laden and Al-qaeeda, loose nukes et. al. in its
latest variants, alongside the manufactured terror, the bomb blasts,
the assassinations, the frequent dharnas, the rising debt burden, the
looming economic collapse, the hard crisis upon hard crisis with the
concomitant perception management that cunningly installs desired
beliefs which make the public mind to accept preplanned policies as
solutions to these crises, in Report on Mighty Wurlitzer
(https://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/05/note-on-mighty-wurlitzer.html).
If you can perceptively understand that modus operandi, then no news
media, no learned pundit who graces your television screen 24x7, no
politician, no academic, no philosopher, no propagandist, no molvi,
no ayatollah, no president and no prime minister can make your mind
as easily as they do today as vassals and stooges of the Mighty
Wurlitzer, to get you to react in the aggregate to manufactured
crises as predicted by game theory, the cornerstone of modern mass
behavior control.
Even after ten years of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, not just
Pakistan's news media, but the world's news media, continues to play
variations on the same tunes of the Mighty Wurlitzer.
Under president Trump's administration, the United States of America
appears to be taking all the antagonistic steps against both Iran and
Pakistan to make the Wakeup call of 2007 even more pertinent as the
world enters 2018. Unfortunately, neither nation can still make an
effective self-defense (despite all their bravado that is more
reminiscent of Sadaam Hussein before the first Tomahawk cruise
missiles hit the ancient land of Mesopotamia). The establishment
leaders, intellectuals, politicians and opinion-makers in both
nations, alongside the rest of the world, still continue to “United
We Stand” with the base fiction of “War on Terror”
of the United States. Neither has the courage to publicly recognize
and call this fiction for what it is, albeit, most wise people in
both nations well understand the calculus of hegemony and primacy
which underwrites it.
Well, as in love, timeliness in war can make the difference between
win and lose. Perhaps it is already too late to throw the tea
overboard for Pakistan! The nation has been completely destroyed
from within over the past two decades of alternately raining American
made military dictatorship and American made mercenary democracy upon
it, before the first American missiles and American boots will ever
land on its sacred soil to “save” it from the
“terrorists”.
But then, just as Patrick Henry tried to rile up the elites of the
distant American colonies with his now famous clarion call to free
them from the imperial jackboot stamped upon their face, perhaps the
same holds true for all who are vigilant, active, brave, in any
nation:
“Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There
is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who
will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir,
is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the
brave.” --- Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775
As Muslims, our belief in God helping us when we help ourselves is
much stronger – or so we like to tell each other. Our tragedy
however, is that we are overrun with great belief without the courage
of our convictions! And we also don't have Patrick Henrys to lead us
into battle.
Sadly, instead, “her shaaq per ulloo bhaitha hai” (an owl
is perched on every branch --- the nation is overrun with fools and
useful idiots in all corridors of power, when they are not outright
mercenaries that is).
Will the existential crisis facing Pakistan in 2018 and beyond,
thanks only partly to being America's best friend all these years,
the rest is surely our own misery, motivate a transformation away
from that ugly Zeitgeist of always being a pliant vassal state
of great powers du jour?
The foundational question for Pakistan from which all good and evil
naturally follow is really this: will its leaders, its politicians,
its intellectuals, and its establishment ever find the courage to
stop being house niggers of the massa?
That revolution of the mind I see is slowly already in the making! It
is being driven bottom up by the clergy class, being led primarily by
the revolutionary Iran trained Shia Muslim clergy on the one hand who
wish to emulate the Islamic revolution in Iran, and a new Sunni
Barelvi revolutionary movement called “Labaik Ya Rasool-Allah”
on the other which is being led by a most unusual cleric on
wheelchair who wishes to bring back the glory days of thirteen
centuries of Sunni Muslim rule. Both groups claim to want to enact
the original teachings of the Prophet of Islam, as they each perceive
it through their respective sectarian epistemology, and both have
started very dynamic national movements to influence the masses. The
Iran trained revolutionary Shia leadership however has refrained from
entering the political theatre and instead chosen to concentrate on
mass education and raising social awareness; to raise a new
generation of Shia madrassa-trained Muslim men and women who shall
become the backbone of the future Shia revolution in Pakistan to
usher in Iranian style “nizam-e-vilayat” as a dominion of
the global “valih-e-faqih”. There are several other
groups as well but not worth mentioning, including militant
antediluvian groups turned “respectable”, and dogmatic
religious factions among both Shia and Sunni that have long been
politically active and almost always self-servingly aligned with the
status quo, whose rather lack lustre clergy profess the same
ambitions but thus far have commanded little traction nationally;
quite unlike the first two revolutionary movements whose rise to
national prominence is a recent phenomenon. These new crop of
revolutionary Shia and Barelvi religious leaders display an uncannily
high level of learnedness of ancient texts of Islam, the Holy Qur'an,
and intriguingly, also obscure verses in Persian language of “Sir”
Allama Muhammad Iqbal (the national poet laureate and intellectual
father of Pakistan), all of which they deploy liberally in their
rhetoric for social transformation of Pakistan back to “real
Islam”, alongside claims of throwing the tea overboard
the moment they come to power.
However, there appears to be no indication of any awakening from the
plague of occidentosis (Westoxification) among the so called
liberal class, the educated class, the professional class, the
business class, the praetorian guard class which includes feudals of
all shades, and the rank and file class. Among the latter class, the
vast majority of the indigent public in both urban and rural areas,
largely because of deprivation, lack of opportunity, daily struggle
for subsistence existence, and occupying marginalized stratas of
society, appear to be increasingly attracted to the new revolutionary
clergy class as the ones possessing the panacea for ending the
servitude and misery forced upon them by the ruling class.
How long will the metanoia take to trickle up to the actual
ruling class who run the country?
This ruling class of ours, nay, the ruling class in virtually all
Muslim dominant nations (with the exception of Iran), willingly carry
the white man's burden as the obedient Uncle and Aunty
Thomases, are amply rewarded for their servitude with permission
to loot and plunder the public exchequer in line with the overarching
objectives of the massa, will simply have to be replaced
forcibly.... and that cannot happen without an actual physical
organic revolution in Pakistan. Of this, there are no signs
whatsoever as of this writing in 2018. Indeed, there can be no 19th
and 20th century style revolutions in Pakistan, not even like
revolutionary Iran, because Pakistan is not a homogeneous nation. The
seeds of division are too deep and too broad spectrum, and the public
mind is too indolent. The rising new Sunni Barelvi leadership wearing
the revolutionary mantle, different from the revolutionary Shia
leadership, is attempting to rather Pollyannaishly, peaceably replace
the ruling class with themselves through the ballot box of 2018. If
this new revolutionary clergy class comes to significant
parliamentary power, at least they promise to strive to dump the
tea overboard. However, what will happen to the already fractious
Pakistani society under their dogmatic sectarian stewardship is
anybody's guess. Thus far, they have defined themselves mainly in
terms of their foreign and domestic enemies, including corruption of
the Pakistani elites and other Muslim sects they do not approve of.
They have not mentioned at all how they plan to address the very real
domestic challenges facing Pakistan's population after they have
wiped out all their enemies from the face of the planet.
Neither the Shia nor the Sunni revolutionary thinking on display in
Pakistan by their respective clergy class appear to have any
solutions for living in modernity except to bring back antiquity.
Perhaps they haven't had the time to develop their post-antiquity
ideology, think of manifestos and constitutions for a country like
Pakistan with its deep divisions and fracture lines, by which their
plan for Pakistan can be adjudicated beyond their pious claims
against their enemies.
The vacuum in integrity and honesty in the corridors of power has
opened the leadership doors wide open for alternatives to step in,
including the clergy class. Since Pakistani clergy class has never
tasted unfettered political power or national responsibility, nor
experienced developmental and population challenges at a national
scale, nor do they brook any familiarity with the actual mechanics of
modern statecraft and its relation to international institutions and
global politics, their competency to run a modern nation-state beyond
their recitation of ancient Prophetic wisdoms and Caliphatic history
of conquests, would only be determined on the job. If the Iranian
clergy can learn on the job to run a theological state and continue
to survive American sanctions and American-sponsored wars, the
Pakistani clergy surely may have rational claims to a modern
precedent, except that Pakistan is not Iran, and Pakistanis are not
Persian! But Pakistan is also a nuclear state. There will always be
greater urgency to confront Pakistan and de-nuke it if any
revolutionary clergy class of Pakistan, Shia and Sunni, ever comes to
power. In its calculus of primacy and hegemony, the white man's
burden simply cannot tolerate any Muslim nation possessing real
nuclear weapons (as opposed to tolerating the illusion of
possession). The massa class well understands all that they
have destroyed and stolen of the Muslims in the centuries past and
cannot risk losing Western hegemony and its vassal states to a
revival of “revolutionary Islam” with teeth. This means
that when military-style injection of its forces is not being staged,
even more strangulating sanctions and psychological warfare can be
expected than weathered by revolutionary Iran before it was forced to
give up (or roll back) its nuclear program under the 2015 JCPOA
agreement with world powers for the promise of economic relief.
Where Pakistanis have survived American-sponsored military
dictatorships, American-sponsored political graftmanships,
American-sponsored inept leadership, and American-sponsored
enlightened moderation, the divine state will surely survive
the clerics as well, American-sponsored and not.
There is evidently a deep secret to the very existence of Pakistan
--- and anyone given to even a modicum of metaphysical reflection can
easily believe that this secret hasn't been revealed (or uncovered)
as yet.
I support anyone and any system that can a) deliver the nation from
servitude; and b) give justice and fairness to its public. The rest
we can do ourselves. We are a hard working industrious people, we
don't need foreign hand-outs, and we don't need big-brother
hand-holding. Let us live in dignity and self-respect among nations,
give us fairness and justice domestically, stop the elite from
looting the exchequer and living their privilege at the expense of
the public, and we shall show the world what it means to throw tea
overboard once again.
And that, as the cynic would say, is the greatest of all platitudes!
Thank you.
Epilogue published as standalone essay on
Sunday, January 7, 2018 06:00 am | Last updated Sunday, January 14, 2018
10:00 pm
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