Right Up The BBC’s Alley

Russell Brand is the BBC world view, their mindset, brought into being in a perfect, eloquacious, silver-tongued articulate glibness and quite barmy life form…well, life, perhaps not as we know it.  If you have two hours to spare….go and walk the dog or wash the car….anything but watch this video.  Surprised Sam Harris doesn’t run him through with a chair leg or something.

Islam?  All about the peace, designed to produce a loving and harmonious society [though he hasn’t read the Koran].  Nagasaki?  Nuclear terrorism.  Iraq War?  Stealing land and oil [The war cost far, far, far more than buying the oil would ever have].  Wars by the West are just colonisation to sell Coca Cola and Starbucks.  Who are we to judge other societies and cultures?  Burqas are great…wearing one is just a self-discipline for the ladies….it’s like yoga, a way of refining consciousness for a woman in a world where abstract ideas commodifying women are served by overly-bloated power dynamics in the tumble-dryer of love.

Here’s an example of Brand in glorious full flow….he hardly listens to Harris and has the left-wing rhetoric off pat…he is so over the top he doesn’t make much sense and is definitely in love with his own cleverness and poetic flow of left-wing cant….he is set off, triggered, by Harris’ thought that the women of Afghanistan are oppressed…..Brand thinks not….who are we to judge?…..

The metric by which we evaluate them is a distinct metric drawn from another narrative…we might say ‘Bloody hell…women dressing like that’….but I don’t think we are in a position to make that kind of judgement.  Why should their narrative adhere to our template?

The imposition of our heterogeneous, hegemonic ideas of how masculine and feminine relationships work might not be universally applicable.  I think it’s precisely the kind of reasoning that’s used to justify the bombing and commercial colonisation of those territories….‘they’re not like us, they treat women differently from us’….I don’t think we’re in a position to make those judgements.

I think these kinds of theoretical tableaux are used to create a false hierarchy and a moral superiority by a dominant culture that subsequently uses thinking of this nature to underwrite the modern day colonisation and subjugation of these people on a massive scale…it’s 9/11 every day so that a state system can perpetuate itself using rationalism, using comfortable means of execution…it’s no better than 9/11.’

Hmmm…the West freed the Arabs from the Ottoman whip and subsequently helped support and develop so many Muslim countries that then arose, freed the Afghans from the Soviet yoke, fought against the anti-Muslim Serbs in the Balkans, protected Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from the ravages of a secular Saddam and then freed Iraqis to choose their own destiny, they saved Indian Muslims from the Hindu fascists and created Pakistan…a Muslim Zion, they smashed the ‘non-Muslim’ Isamic State that was terrorising so many Muslims….and of course it is well known that Western countries are more Muslim friendly than Muslim countries…go figure Russell.

The anti-Islam West?  The real problem in the Middle East and across the world in Muslim territories, and indeed in the West itself, are the ‘extremist’ Muslims who want to impose ‘Islam’ upon Muslims.

But who are we to judge.  All cultures are equal, it is all relative.  You can contemplate my template, you can contemplate your template, but what you can’t do is conflate one template with another template because that way you just get an illegitimate estimate of a cultural distillate.  or something.

Of course it’s suddenly not all relative when it comes to choosing a political party and a manifesto….suddenly you can make judgements about the value of certain ways of life and policies.