3 Gs- Outline

S.M.A. Ehtisham MD,
PO Box 469 Bath NY U.S.A 14810
Phone 607 776 3336
e-mail syedmae@yahoo.com

GOD, GOVERNMENT AND GLOBALIZATION.

An Outline

Human beings (Homo Sapiens) are understood to have evolved to the currently recognizable physical shape and attributes about half a million years ago. The term “attributes” encompasses bipedal locomotion, coherent speech, power of analysis, greater social organization, imagination-all benefits of a larger brain.
The earliest available records are those of hunter-gatherer society, which over hundreds of thousands of years developed in turn into tribal, feudal-monarchial-mercantile and capitalist stages.
In line with the stage of social development the concept of divine passed through the stage of multiple deities, which in the beginning had more or less equal representation of male and female forms and monotheistic creeds to deism. For a variety of reasons matriarchal society declined and gave way to male domination. Ever since that time Gods have been male.
Initially gods were believed to be just more powerful beings than humans but over time they have grown more and more distant and different from the ordinary mortal. God of Moses used to invite him for regular parleys, Jesus did not talk to him directly and his followers were reduced to award him with a biological relationship with the Almighty. The prophet of Islam had only one audience when he rose to seventh heaven on a flying horse named “Burraq”; archangel Gabriel was the appointed emissary for all exchanges.
Accounts of the earliest beliefs and their origin are necessarily speculative. Humans needed explanation of and protection from natural elements. It was probably a coincidence that a prediction of member of a tribe came true-drought ended or the crop was good or a fire died down. The person, pushed to explain how she/he knew, might have claimed a special relationship with gods. The profession of clergy probably started that way.
With advancement of knowledge and ability to explain some natural phenomenon on a scientific and rational basis, it became necessary to invent the ultimate unknown which was the first cause, the uncreated creator-we have God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.
Governance evolved in a similar fashion. Women ruled the roost and polyandry was practiced till humans settled on land in the earliest agricultural societies. Sheer physical strength rather than stamina, which women are more endowed with than men are, became the prized attribute. Women were further handicapped by relative physical weakness during later months of pregnancy and post delivery-nursing periods also took their toll. Men gradually achieved the dominant position in society. (As a consolation prize Mother hood was sanctified. In Islam it is said that paradise lies at the feet of the mother. Christians gave Mary was a divine status. Classical Judaism however did not place them on a pedestal. But pedestal or not, omen, did not start to regain status till nineteen thirties. Majority of them still do not.
Humans acquired fixed assets in the shape of homes, land and farming equipment and tamed animals. Men would want to leave the assets to their own seed. Legitimacy acquired previously unknown gravity. Polyandry was gradually abandoned. Marriage rites were invented through the agency of priests, who had by this time attained high status by dint of their knowledge and supposed links with gods. Marital fidelity was imposed and inevitably became a greater burden on women, as their liaison would show up as swollen abdomen. The oldest profession in the world was invented to enliven the otherwise drab marital life. Women lost out there too. Female “comfort workers” far out numbered the male ones. Men who spent more time on conflicts and were more prone to accidents lost more of their number than women did. Polygamy became a “necessity”. Kings, tribal chiefs and the affluent had never needed any sanction any way. Islam, as a compromise, limited the number of simultaneous wives to four, but abjured equivalence of treatment by husbands in every way. Mullahs, conveniently defined equality as food, clothes and shelter. Sexual relations with “women under the right hand” with out the inconvenience of a marriage contract was allowed to accommodate the superabundance of female captives in the early days of the religion
Not all humans found rich and fertile lands. A substantial number could not draw sustenance from what they had and took to raiding the fields and homes of affluent farmers. Security had to be found. Aggressive and able-bodied men were relieved of farming and animal husbandry duties and assigned security work. They in time organized themselves into gangs. The job of gang leader gradually and over time became hereditary. Tribal chiefs emerged.
Fashioning your own tools was too cumbersome. It took away time from production. Artisans offered cheaper and more convenient supply.
Inter village trade started. Itinerant vendors were especially vulnerable. Security had to be extended to regions. Chiefs morphed into Rajahs. Priests aligned themselves with the ruling class in mutually sustaining relationship.
Commercial and petty bourgeoisie made their appearance. Society was getting more and more complex. Bigger Rajahs attacked the smaller ones and become Kings. Religion helped out by offering celestial sanction. A feudal class emerged and displaced the ordinary farmer from commonly owned natural pastures-the so-called enclosure movement of medieval Britain.
In Europe the feudal class rebelled against the excesses of kings and forced them to grant some powers to the aristocracy. Parliaments were born. Civil rights were celebrated in the Magna Carta.
Europe entered the enlightenment phase.
Industrial revolution caused a qualitative and quantitative change in the mode of production. National bourgeoisie emerged. They needed workers, produce of the land and power to acquire both. They aligned themselves with royalty and aristocracy in turn and gradually over powered both. Capitalism was born (there are two rival theories of the birth of capitalism, the commercialization theory which offers that capitalism was a natural progression, and Marxist and allied theories which contend that it was the transformation of social relationship that cause the emergence of capitalism).and ushered in democracy, which empowered them as every one (men) had a vote and would naturally support the party of people who offered them employment. Women started getting franchised only at the end of nineteenth century with Australia-New Zealand taking the lead. Great Britain actually gave them a vote after the USA did.
Capitalists found it difficult-expensive to acquire raw material and needed markets for their products as well. They went around marauding all over the world and found easy pickings among the people who had lagged behind in sociological development (India and the countries of Ottoman Empire countries were actually far more developed, but power was concentrated in fewer hands and there was no pressure to maximize profits and enhance productivity). They subdued people of Asia, Africa and Americas. The Church gave them official permission and blessings. The world entered the imperialist age.
For easier transport of goods infrastructure had to be developed in colonized lands. Natives had to be given education to be able to perform minor administrative work. A comprador class had to be developed to control the natives as the rulers lacked adequate numbers. This applied more to thickly populated and advanced countries in Asia. In Americas and Australasia the simple device of genocide worked fine. In North America slaves were imported for harsh manual labor.
Africa was a different case altogether. It was generally not fertile. The productive parts were taken over by Arabs and later by Europeans. (On 8/3/07- BBC showed Zimbabwe peasants running away to South Africa. Vigilantes-white- arrested and herded them back).
The educated and the rich among the people of the colonies in Asia and Africa wanted to replace the foreign rulers. Industry had created a working class. Peasants were groaning under the yoke of the more intrusive and oppressive feudal system introduced by foreign rulers. Independence movements started raising their head.
In the meanwhile the communist party in Russia had overthrown the Czar and established a dictatorship of the “proletariat” via the agency of members of the party. They owed their success partly to the fact that Europe was in the throes of WWI.
WWI did not adequately settle the conflict over the share claimed by colonial powers in the lands of Asia and Africa. After an uneasy peace of just over two decades WWII broke out. Capitalism helped by socialism defeated fascism. The Soviet Union acquired much of Eastern Europe as spoils of war. Hot war was replaced by a cold one.
Led by the now dominant USA, an existential struggle ensued between the Soviet Union and imperialist powers. China was already in the throes of a civil war in which lackeys of imperialism were clearly losing. Pressure was on the much-weakened British to let go of the colonies, lest they follow the socialist path. They “granted” independence to a cunningly nay devilishly divided India. That bit of chicanery move would pay rich dividends.
Winds of change were blowing in Asia and Africa. People overthrew the yoke of foreign rule. Nehru, Nasser, Tito and Soekarno raised the banner of non-aligned movement.
French were made of “sterner” stuff and wanted to hold on to Indo-China. Humiliated by a peasant army they handed over the fight to the still politically naïve and arrogant USA. The country was led by Eisenhower, a general who had been transformed into a hero by WWII because the US president wanted to send a second ranker to lord it over the Allied forces in Europe. His secretary of state a hard-boiled cold warrior by the name of John foster Dulles subscribed to the domino theory. If one (Vietnam) were allowed to fall, all Asia would tumble into the lap of communists. He also led the campaign of sabotage against nationalist governments and corralled counties like Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan into “mutual” defense treaties.
The biggest success was the over throw of Mossadeq in Iran in 1953. Military take over in Pakistan in 1958 was part of the same grand plan. Murder of Lumumba in Belgian Congo in 1961, China-India border war of the same year, 1965 overthrow of Soekarno, the 1967 Arab debacle among diverse such episodes were natural sequences.
The USA bled in Nam for over a decade, but control as it did the resources of nearly the whole world, came out shaken but intact. The country went through a period of introspection, but recovered in due course only to suffer a serious setback in the fall of the Shah of Iran who was driven out in 1979 by a coalition of petit and commercial bourgeoisie, intellectuals, radical leftists and the clergy. The US government thought that they could make a deal with the successor government as they had agents in high places like a future President Bani Sadr and a future foreign minister Gotebzadeh. The latter had been the chief of the personal guard of Khomeini. But the hatred of the Shah, and by corollary of the USA was such, and the clergy were led by the messianic zeal of Khomeini, that they managed to sideline and defeat all the factions and excluded the USA from the game. Direct aggression was not practical politics yet as the USSR was still around.
Post WW II The West including Europe had to concede some measures of an egalitarian system lest people opt for socialist parties, as they nearly did in Italy and France. The labor party in the UK and the governments in Scandinavian countries offered wide-ranging reforms in heath care, education and welfare. The USA followed suit and both mainstream political parties continued and built upon post depression government assistance of the poor.
By the mid-sixties big money had had enough of government intervention and took vigorous steps to regain lost ground. Corporate funded think tanks; academics and intellectuals developed a neo-liberal ideology. A concerted campaign to take over of media, political parties and academia was launched. Right wing evangelist Christian operatives threw their wholehearted support in building a neo-liberal coalition and played a key role in persuading the working class in voting against their interests. With the 1979 advent into power of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA in 1980, the conservative movement came into its own. Post Thatcher and Reagan, Tony Blair in Britain and Bill Clinton in the USA abandoned their base of support and continued the “good” work.
The Soviet leadership had in the mean while fossilized. It blundered into a confrontation in Afghanistan with the combined might of the West and subsidiary states like Pakistan and Iran. That, together with the largesse to the under developed world which kept their own citizens in relative want, took a heavy toll. Advances in mass communication had made soviet citizens aware that they were subsidizing poorer and non-communist countries. They no longer wanted to make sacrifices in the name of ideology. Gorbachev took over and tried a gradualist approach. He finally lost his nerve. The military made a final but botched attempt to retrieve the situation. A true blue reactionary Yeltsin took over.
Soviet union imploded on itself. USA became the only super power. Muslim countries, which had gleefully helped out in the decline and demise of the Soviet Union, became the object of western corporate greed. (According to British intelligence reports, the USA had planned to invade Saudi Arabia and other oil rich states in Mid-East after the oil embargo of 1973, but the states agreed to deposit all oil dollars in New York investment banks). They were sitting on most of the oil in the world. Saddam who had bankrupted his country by helping the West by waging a war against Iran for eight long years was enticed into “retaking” Kuwait, which had been a part of Iraq in Ottoman times. He was warned of the consequences but did not take the threats seriously. He was after all dealing with his patrons and had taken the precaution of taping his discussion with the US ambassador April Gillespie, that the USA had no position in his interest in Kuwait. To no avail. Soviet union was no longer in the equation. Bush the senior gathered a coalition force under the umbrella of the UNO and put Saddam in a bottle.
A few years later Yeltsin gave away majority of the assets of the country to corporate parasites in return for comparatively little in election contributions. (there were no billionaires in 1993. In 2000, there were 24). Russia became an economic basket case.
With the USSR out of the picture, the capitalists changed their tactics. They truly globalized and resorted to accumulation now at greater cost to their own “people”. Manufacturing went to China, IT to India. Capitalism undergoes a cycle of recession about every ten years, and major depression every 70-80 years, 1860s, 1930s and 2008) Ranks of US unemployed, barely employed and inadequately employed swelled. Social benefits, little that they were any way, were further whittled down. Forty five million US citizens have no health coverage. At least twice the number have inadequate insurance. Hospital bills are the biggest cause of bankruptcy.
Third world satraps vied with each other in selling national assets. World Bank and International monetary fund underwrote projects, which would pauperize the countries. WTO helped along with discriminatory policies. Economic hit men and good old CIA destabilized any recalcitrant rulers.
Militant Islam had long had the “great Satan’ in its sights. They had made a “Faustian” bargain with one devil against what they perceived to be the more pernicious enemy in Afghanistan. Freed by the collapse of the USSR from the constraints of having to look over its shoulder, the great Satan was extending itself. It was hitting Muslim interests right and left. The worst cut of all was stationing of its troops in the holy land of Hejaz. Palestine under Israeli heels remained a long festering sore. Muslim wealth was under “Kafir” control. Muslim rulers had sold their soul for a piece of silver.
They could not take the great Satan head on. Bombings of twin towers, naval ships, and embassies culminated in 9/11. Little Britain had its own 7/7.
Fundamentalist Christians gave ecclestial reasons for economic wars. They got Bush to the stage where the Supreme Court could put him in the white house. Academics developed spurious thesis of clash of civilizations. Bush found excuses-weapons of mass destruction, WMD’s in popular usage, invented for the specific purpose and launched the war of liberation on Iraq. Britain helped along by announcing that Saddam was capable of launching missiles on targets hundreds of miles away at a few hours notice. When no WMD’s were found, removal of Saddam became the moral excuse/imperative.
The central theme of this book is that religion except in its pristine stage has always supported establishment and has supported the ruling elite whether it be a monarchy, aristocracy or corporations. It is highly opportunistic, and waits in the wings to displace the establishment in the corridors of power. It used all instruments at hand, regardless of the teachings of the creed it claims to champion.
Capital has changed its essential character from being national to multi-national and with the advancement in technology, has ceased to pay even lip service to the working class.
Above is the general outline of the text in which I hope to bring the thread of continuity between religion, government and