The Faith Trap

This week's Camino a Ítaca draws parallels between religious bigotry in two distinct places. The faith trap is lethal to inquiry and thought and is throw about with alarming regularity. Click over to the original article published in Spanish in el HOY, or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The world recently watched in horror as American forces abruptly pulled out of Afghanistan. Overnight the Afghan people were once again at the mercy of a tribalistic gang of mercenaries intent on restoring the brutal theocratic regime that the American coalition had overthrown in the wake of the September 11^th terrorist attacks. The Afghan army that had been trained and equipped by the coalition immediately folded and the heavily bearded zealots waltzed into the capital before the West could even evacuate their people.

They did so promising that they were no longer the Taliban of yore. This new 2.0 version was much more media savvy and gave their word that they would respect human rights and implement new laws that would bring peace and stability to the long-suffering land. Western commentators, desperate to paint a positive picture of such a dismal debacle, happily took them at their word or at least used them to try and spin the story away from the treasonous abandonment of the country.

The words that they didn’t spin though were the ominous phrases dropped like deadly bombs by Taliban spokesmen. These were phrases like ‘in accordance with Islamic values’ or ‘in concurrence with the Koran’ when talking about human rights and the laws that they planned to implement. In today’s politically correct world, to question these phrases, based on religious content, is seen as some sort of racism. The fact that they are faith based immediately allows them to be accepted as well intentioned.

Little stifles questioning and debate more than the concept of faith. It doesn’t matter if someone espouses the most outrageously illiberal ideas, or in the case of the Taliban, prevents half of the population from getting an education. If the word faith is mentioned it becomes an extremely effective talisman against investigation and debate. This includes faith-based ideas from Quranic literalists like the Taliban who avoid figurative interpretations of a text they believe to be the immutable word of a perfect god.

But it isn’t only these reactionary tribesmen who shelter behind this celestial shield. Here in Spain the concept of faith is also used to stifle debate around topics related to another religious text many believe to be the word of god. This week, in response to an appeal filed by the extreme right to declare the prohibition of public funding for schools that segregate boys and girls in separate classrooms unconstutional, the constitutional court emitted a draft ruling that stated that that the principle of freedom of education and the criteria of the parents are above the law. In effect, the parents’ beliefs were written in stone.

True, this isn’t quite demanding that a woman who was raped must be executed, because she didn’t cry out loud enough in order to prevent her attack, prescribing the death penalty for same-sex acts, or stoning non-virgin brides to death but the principle stems from the same source, a belief in an ancient text over the laws of the country.

Beliefs do matter and everyone has the right to hold them, but equally important is the right to question them, strip away supernatural shields and expose them to the light of reason.

Empty Promises, Empty Shelves

This week's Camino a Ítaca travels back to the 1970's and some of the parrallels we see happening today. Populist, right wing sociopaths are marching once great nations into the abyss of a #me-me, all for me world. Click over to the original piece published in el HOY or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The recent images coming out of the United Kingdom take me back to the fuzzy TV images of my 1970’s childhood. Cars stretching for miles all lined up to try and fill up their tanks with gas that just wasn’t there. Back then, the cause of the crisis was external. It took place when the OPEC member states, led by Saudi Arabia, proclaimed an oil embargo on countries that were perceived as supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Prices soared over 300% in North America but in the end, the embargo failed and ended up being self-defeating. Israeli forces did not withdraw, the countries that were targeted by the embargo refused to change their positions and perhaps the most longstanding consequences were that the crisis sparked increased oil exploration, alternative energy research and initiated a move towards energy conservation.

This conservation can be seen in the smaller cars that form the long queues in the U.K. They are certainly no longer the enormous land boats of my North American childhood, but what really marks the difference between these two crises is the root cause. While the 70s oil crisis was a multilateral affair involving many different actors from different continents, the crisis the U.K is currently facing is entirely self-inflicted. Try as they might to shift the blame elsewhere, there is no one to blame but themselves.

Brexit was not the result of foreign interference. While the Trump administration, knowing full well it would debilitate the U.K and weaken the EU, threw their support behind the slow-motion suicide, it can’t be said that they or any other foreign state forced the British to shoot themselves in the foot. They did it to themselves at the polls. The end result is that a once great nation, the 6^th biggest economy of the world and permanent member of the UN Security Council now finds itself with bare supermarkets shelves and shuttered up petrol stations.

Brexit was the direct result of a dangerous ideology. One that exploits the fear of the ‘other’, scapegoating immigrants and those who do not think like them as the cause of everyone’s problems. All the while diverting the attention away from their neoliberal aims of dismantling the social nets across the West and transferring public wealth into increasingly smaller yet richer hands. It’s a jingoistic right-wing populism that is eating away at the rotting traditional core of conservatism across the western world. One which may have lost its poster boy in power in the U.S, but that is still firmly represented in the U.K by someone who combs his hair with a balloon, and which has many representatives here in Spain in the House of Parliament.

This siren song that leads people to think that their problems are soley caused by someone else may lull one into a gentle sleep but it certainly won’t fix anything. The British can try and blame the EU for their misfortunes, the Catalans can accuse the rest of Spain of robbing them, Extremadura can allege that the fault lies in Madrid and xenophobes can claim that migrants are stealing nonexistent jobs but the result always turns out the same. The sooner we stop listening, the better.