Military/Militarism

With the ISIL terrorists mounting more gory adventurism in Syria and Iraq and capturing villages and towns, there seems to be no tangible impediment to stop this influx of terror.
The ghastly images circulated freely by the cult on the internet from beheading to crucifying their victims in cold blood have incensed the international community on the one hand but on the other hand, they have regrettably conduced to Islamophobia, a plan long funded by the officials in Washington.

First some principles to stimulate another discourse, another way of thinking that is not militarist – and then some concrete proposals – 27 in all for your deliberation, discussion with friends and perhaps to share through your social and other media.
Neither war nor doing nothing
The principle of ”An eye for an eye will one day make the whole world blind” – said Mohandas K. Gandhi who was born on October 2, 145 years ago. Since then, human civilisation has not advanced much when it comes to handling conflict.

“FBI Believes It Has Identified ISIS Hostage Executioner
The U.S. believes it has identified the British-accented masked man in the video depicting the beheading of two American journalists and a British aid worker, The FBI director says.”
— Huff Post Politics September 25, 2014

Every national peace group (large and small, new and old, religious and secular) opposes Barack Obama’s war against ISIS in Iraq, and its recent extension to Syria. Their opposition extends to Obama’s Congress-sanctioned arming of “moderate” Syrian rebels (for which legislators found half a billion dollars).

The third century Christian theologian Tertullian is famously credited with defending his faith with the outrageous claim, “Credo quia absurdum” (I believe, because it is absurd). That is a paraphrase of Tertullian’s actual statements from De Carne Christi, notably “certum est, quia impossibile” (It’s certain because impossible). Some have claimed that Tertullian was appealing to an Aristolean notion that it is possible to deduce an argument of probability from the astonishing improbability of an event.

The referendum campaign on Scottish independence heightened many people’s awareness of the pro-elite bias of the ‘mainstream’ news media. The grassroots power of social media in exposing and countering this bias was heartening to see. But the issue of independence for Scotland is just one of many where the traditional media consistently favour establishment power.

1. President Barak Obama spoke to youth on June 11, 2014

The following six photographs confirm that a favorite “moderate rebel” leader, Abdel Jabbar al-Okaidi, is allied with ISIL.
The first photograph is from Spring 2013 and shows Okaidi with the American who has been the principal coordinator of US policy on Syria. The last two photographs are from a meeting days ago when Congressmen Adam Kinzinger (Rep Illinois) and George Holding (Rep. North Carolina) met with Okaidi and other “moderate rebels” in Turkey.

“This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed.”
American hysteria is a wondrous thing to behold.
Our hysteria is usually obvious in retrospect, whether the freak-out is over witches, labor unions, or communists. Hysteria is not always so easy to perceive as it happens or, in this case, as it is happening right now with ISIS-centric Islamophobia running rampant around the nation’s terror-drenched reptilian brain.

Despite vast amounts of imperial data to the contrary, the great majority of writers on imperialism continue to describe and analyze US imperialism strictly in economic terms, as an expansion of “capital accumulation”, “accumulation on a world scale”.