A T.U.T. reader recently claimed that Sunnis and Shi’ites re not killing each other in the Middle East. Such silliness does not merit a response, but it does bring up the question of why religious differences arise in the first place.
They arise because of hardship.
WOLF PACKS
When people are comfortable, they care little about religious differences. They get along with each other. They intermarry. Sunnis, Shi’ites, Catholics, Methodists, Buddhists – none of these labels cause any friction.
(Jews are an exception, for reasons I will discuss below.)
However, when people face extreme hunger and hardship, they typically form gangs, like wolf packs, in order to survive. They divide into groups along racial lines, or ethnic lines, or religious lines, or geographic lines. They adopt the principle of safety-in-numbers.
Gangs occur in various sizes, from a handful of people to huge armies. Each gang stakes out its “turf,” and claims to be a “victim” of the other gangs. Each gang creates its its own religious propaganda to justify its own violence, and its own predatory behavior.
The gangs are led by oligarchs or warlords or demigods who are obeyed because the gang members’ survival depends on it. If they defy the gang or the leader they will be cast out, and they will die. It does not matter who the leader is. What matters is that the gang has cohesion. What matters is the pecking order.
Some gangs are paid mercenaries. They cause their victims to form their own gangs for self-defense. But in general, gang behavior is about survival. People under extreme hardship (especially younger people) collect into gangs. Religious differences that were previously trivial become extreme. The function of fanatical beliefs to maintain gang solidarity, and to justify the gang’s brutality.
As the gangs kill each other in their struggle to survive, people in foreign lands (who do not face hardship) have distorted views of what’s happening. Some condemn the gangs as “religious fanatics,” when in fact religion is just the gang jersey, so to speak. It is the banner carried before the gangs.
Other people in foreign lands imagine that there are no gangs, and that Sunnis and Shi’ites, for example, are one and the same. In other words they imagine that people under extreme hardship are the same as people in comfort. They imagine that since there was no religious friction when the people were comfortable, there is no friction now that the people have formed into gangs.
This viewpoint is childish. As I said, people under extreme pressure form wolf packs in order to survive. Each wolf pack has its own banner, its own god, its own religious dogma, and its own propaganda. Members of the wolf pack cling to these symbols in order to maintain their cohesion.
In some cities of the USA, young people under economic pressure form gangs that have their own jargon, symbols, and gang signs.
In places where neoliberal policies have caused society to collapse (like Honduras) people form gangs. In Libya, people split into tribes. Same thing.
Where there is hardship, there are gangs. And people who are comfortable in foreign lands say they cannot understand the gang violence.
WHO CAUSES THE HARDSHIPS THAT LEAD TO GANGS?
Imperialism. It’s all about divide-and-conquer. Imperialists deliberately cause extreme hardship in a target nation, in order to force people to split into rival gangs that compete for limited resources. The imperialists arm the gangs and supply them so that they keep fighting.
After imperialists foment the gang wars, they justify their evil by telling their own citizens that one or more of the gangs is a “global threat” (e.g. the mythical “ISIS”). This is nonsense, but the home peasants buy it, since they too are members of a gang. For example, when evangelical Christians rail against Muslims in the USA, this is gang behavior. It is mindless group-think. It increases in proportion to economic hardship. And hardship increases in proportion to the breakdown of society, which itself is caused by neo-liberalism.
In March 2003, average people were more comfortable than they are today. Therefore they marched to protest the US invasion of Iraq. Today the masses face economic hardship, because they choose to let bankers, rich people, and their puppet politicians grind them into poverty. Therefore the masses cheer for movies like “American Sniper.” This is gang behavior. The popularity of such movies is quasi-religious, and it will become fully religious as the One Percent continue to grind the Ninety-nine percent into poverty.
JEWS
Jews completely depend on the principle of divide-and-conquer. They depend on splitting people into gangs, and then manipulating the gangs so that they become hosts for the Jew parasite.
Therefore, resistance to Jewish evil is not merely a form of gang warfare. It is resistance to all gang warfare, since it is resistance to imperialism. It is resistance to evil itself.
CONCLUSION
There is no such thing as a religious war. There are only gang wars that often have a “religious” veneer on the surface. The Saudi hatred of Iran, for instance, is a struggle for power. Religion is merely the wrapper.
