The Seven Greatest Threats to the World
by Ben Nnolim
I wonder, living in any country in Europe, if you have observed how discussions of the current, militant Islamism, in any public media, seem to have the consensus that this version of Islam is the biggest threat to the world. I wonder, too, if you have observed the huge blind spot which rapidly reaches that conclusion and prevents the Western media and even its political, governing and professional elite from seeing the beam in their own eyes while they make much ado about the speck in other peoples’ eyes.
Take some time and give it some thought and it would be very quickly clear to you that there are greater threats to the world than extreme Islam, even in its unpredictable brutality and apparent mindlessness. These threats are so obvious and pervasive that not to observe them is either deliberate self-deceit or a presumptuous assumption that everybody else, except you, is a fool.
The most serious problems of the world, which affect everybody everywhere, adversely, on this planet, on a daily basis, are caused by seven leading groups or phenomena.
The first group is the Western Press. In Western civilization, the management of society is in the hands of four dominant groups – the legislature, the executive, the judiciary and the Press, with Christianity as its primary arbiter in matters of conscience. Each of these dominant groups has the ability, and is allowed, to advertise and publicise its activities. Because the ability and the freedom, of these dominant groups, to educate their public on their activities, may be self-serving, the Press, much more than the other groups, is designed and expected to expose and criticise the other three groups in order to present balanced perspective to the public and thus, continually lead to a better society. To enable it to do these things, entry to its practice is not as restricted as it is to the other groups in which a practitioner is not permitted to practice unless he or she has been either elected or professionally trained and certified. What does the Western Press do?
Instead of checkmating the evils of governments, business operators and dangerous but powerful individuals, by exposing their nefarious activities, it hides under national security in illicit government activities, business survival or fear of expensive law suits, in turning blind eyes and deaf ears to the robbery, the endangering of life and reduction to penury of citizens by businesses, corporations and dangerous but powerful individuals. Many of its practitioners succumb, too easily, to the pressure to be secret agents of governments or the lure of lucre to promote the interests of commercial enterprises.
The Western Press, which claims to be free, sees nothing wrong with having copies of its daily or any editions reviewed by some government department before the edition is released to the public. Yet it is loud and persistent in headlining, as evil and evidence of the suppression of free speech, similar practices by governments of non-Western countries it is directed to vilify.
The Western Press promotes, stokes and hypes up racism, xenophobia, wars and rumours of war throughout the world when objective and impartial presentation of the facts about each situation would have doused the conflicts. It presents only those facts which make matters worse in the hope and expectation that this would lead to a scoop, a good story and sell the media. It will brainwash the public with sustained and headlined misinformation and propaganda and then turn around to conduct public opinion polls to obtain results which confirm its intended result.
To lull the public into the false belief that the Western Press is free, the Western Press will run stories for weeks on the divorce, or some other indiscretion, of a public figure while ignoring the outright robbery of its citizens by the power supply, the telecommunications and many other companies or the nefarious activities of their governments which their citizens would not approve of if they knew of them.
The net result of all these is that the world is presented as, encouraged and forced to be, in perpetual turmoil, instability and war and a modern version of the Circus Maximus of ancient Rome, splashed over the pages of newspapers and magazines and on the screens of television sets, laptops, mobile phones, tablets and such devices.
The second biggest threat to the world is the group made up of Western companies and corporations. These companies and corporations, continually, cheat their home governments and citizens in tax, in overpricing and price gouging, in inferior or dangerous products and in the destabilisation of their societies by mass, often unnecessary, retrenchments and resource over-consumption and misuse. If the facts were to come to light, it would not come as a surprise to discover that every war, political upheaval or social disorder, especially, in the developing countries, can be traced to the activities of these companies and corporations.
Somehow, governments and the general public, including academicians and philosophers, who should know better, have become convinced that companies and businesses create jobs and for this reason allow these companies and businesses to rape and strip society of its wealth, its every other resource and its very reasons for existence.
How many companies and businesses have gone into an area of huge unemployment or social depression and created jobs unless they can make a profit of some kind? The more common event is that companies and businesses will retrench employees, and even close down, if some profit margin or level they expect is breached. The indisputable truth is that demand creates jobs. Companies and businesses do not create jobs. Jobs create companies and businesses. Companies and businesses need jobs to exist and to operate.
The third biggest threat to the world is the United States of America or the USA. It has refused to let, and invests a huge amount of resources to prevent, contrary to its abiding principles, people, all over the world, from determining their own futures, and/or to choose who will govern them and how they wish to be governed. Not being prosecuted or censored for, almost, exterminating and emasculating the native American Indians of its continent, or for its unimaginable cruelties to, and mistreatment of, its black African slaves together with its reluctant but decisive role in the European second world war, it has become so confident that the United Nations and its agencies and most business and industrial enterprise in the world are under the iron grip and control of the USA. No government, industry or organisation can exist or be allowed to operate, peacefully, unless it toes the line advocated by the United States of America.
It trumpets, hypocritically, its idealised definitions of freedom, democracy, free speech, self-determination and so on. Yet, it spends billions of its Dollars, in covert and unlawful activity, undermining every government or society on planet earth, even those declared as its allies. It is not even democratic in its own territory and free speech is only allowed for pro-American sentiments while anti-American sentiments are prosecuted and hounded as un-American activity. Democracy is, essentially, for sale which only the wealthy can buy.
The United States of America, is a let down as an influential member of the United Nations Organisation, in facilitating the enforcement of this Organisation’s generally accepted standards of freedom, justice and democracy, especially as the same United States of America is loud and tedious in constantly advertising lofty principles of freedom, justice and democracy. In reality, the United States of America definitions of freedom, justice, democracy and international law are not the definitions that the world knows and accepts but its own definitions in which only its non-negotiable interest, good or bad, is the standard of assessment.
To give just one of several examples, if the Tea Party in the USA teamed up with the Nation of Islam, the Ku Klux Clan and other similar organisations to force the US President out of office through street demonstrations and occupation of public buildings, you and I have no need to imagine what will happen in the USA. But if the same thing happens in the Ukraine, in Egypt, in Syria or elsewhere, it is democracy which the USA, as a champion of democracy, must support.
In modern international law, no country of the world, except the United Nations Organisation, can interfere with the sovereignty of another country. Not only has the United States of America, publicly, declared its intention to remove serving heads of states of sovereign countries but also, with what it terms international alliances, has bombed and invaded sovereign countries in complete disregard of the United Nations Organisation and international law.
The fourth biggest threat to the world is Western European governments. After centuries of war with each other and everywhere else in the world, it would seem that the proverbial blood has entered their eyes that all they can see now is war, war and nothing but war. Peace is somehow uncomfortable and war must be initiated and waged at all costs, and if not possible, continually, commemorated and celebrated. In addition to the first and second world wars, the Spanish civil war, the Korean war, the Boer war, the Arab-Israeli war, the Vietnam war and many other such wars all over the globe, Western European governments seem not to be satiated with the Bosnian war, the Iraq war, the Libyan war, the Syrian war, the wars in Ruanda, in the Congo, in the Central African Republic, in Darfur, in the Sudan and South Sudan, etc. and are still angling to start another war in the Ukraine.
The fifth biggest threat to the world is what has always been a background and ever persistent problem for the West – racism. It was racism, consequent upon the desperate search, and competition with each other, for scarce resources, that energized Western imperialism and continues, today, to drive its foreign and domestic policy. The largest and most visible symbols of Western racism, present and past, are exemplified by the United States of America, USA, by all the modern countries of South and North America, Australia, New Zealand, the Polynesian and Caribbean islands and the unending political, social and economic instability in Africa and the Middle East.
The sixth biggest threat to the world is what I call the Rip van Winkles of the 20th and 21st centuries. For those of you not familiar with the story of Rip van Winkle, it is a story, published in 1819 AD, by Washington Irving, while living in Birmingham, England, of a man named Rip van Winkle, who, to escape constant nagging by his wife, wandered, with his dog, Wolf, into the Catskill mountains in what is now the state of New York, then known as New Amsterdam when it was a Dutch colony. He drank some moonshine given to him by elaborately dressed men playing nine pins and slept for twenty years. The story is about his waking up twenty years later, to find his dog, Wolf, gone and people he did not know and who didn’t know him, and not even able to identify his house, his friends and his neighbours etc.
The challenge to human beings, in prehistory, was to understand who and what they were and their place in where they found themselves. After millions of years of eating and being poisoned by various vegetables, mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, fish, even from eating fellow humans, etc., they settled on those they found safe and nutritious. After being frightened by tall trees and their shadows at night, by volcanoes, lightning and thunder and all such other frightening natural phenomena, they progressed from worshiping them, sacrificing animals and humans to them, to what we know today as the many modern religions and scientific discoveries we have on planet Earth.
After trying to understand their sexual urges and experimenting, for millions of years, with each other, male to male, female to female, male to female and with animals, birds and fish (remember the satyr, half man half goat, the centaur, half man half horse, the Minotaur, half man half bull, the siren, half man, half bird and mermaids, half human half fish, etc.), human beings settled on human male to female sexual relations for which, to ensure universal observance, they ring-fenced with social and religious stigma.
Now, the gay rights activists and their movements, the abortionists, the humanists and secularists, and all such groups, the modern Rip van Winkles, have just woken up after millions of years, of human social and cultural evolution, and want to, and have succeeded in stampeding all of us back to pre-historic times and are, in this respect, therefore, the sixth biggest threat to the world.
In a debatable seventh place is militant Islam which prospers because reputable, orthodox, Muslim scholars, its clergy and its Ummah do not publicly, theologically, and vigorously, condemn it and advise all true Muslims against it. Recall how the Catholic Church, its theologians and its Bishops, fought off many heresies in the third century of the Catholic Church.
Militant Islam, an idealistic, youthful, activity of misguided youths and their elderly sponsors, if not for its mindless violence and mass murder of innocent citizens, is a greater threat to Islamic civilization than a threat to the world. This is not to say that it is not a threat to the world, especially, in its current incarnations such as the Islamic State (IS), the Boko Haram, the Al Shabbab, etc. which prosper because the United Nations Organisation has, since, been emasculated by the USA, NATO and the European Union. A proper United Nations Organisation, not compromised and discredited by being used by the USA, NATO and the European Union for their selfish purposes, would have sent in crack troops, of happily willing members of a proper United Nations Organisation, to subdue the rascals.
Imagine what would have happened, however, if the Islamic world, with its oil resources, highly educated, competent human population and availability of modern technology, settled down and paid due attention to its affairs. It would have grown a civilization superior to all known civilizations. Militant Islam is, thus, more of a serious distraction and hindrance to Muslim civilization than to the world.
Social activist and blogger Ben Nnolim lives in London, England. More from his website: www.benedictnnolim.com