OUR old friend Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is gasping for life. After lording it over his hapless people for over 40 years, he is wondering why they have let him down. They are not the only ones who have deserted him. The entire so-called Muslim world has turned its back on him and his friends. And as the Drones and the Tomahawks land in his back garden, he is sitting there in his fancy tent, counting his last hours, may be last minutes, of his life.
He is not the only one. The entire Arab World, which means essentially the Muslim World, is up in arms against the despots and tyrants who have kept it down. The first to fall was the so-called President of Tunisia, a man called Ali. He was followed by Hosni Mubarak, the faithful ally of the West, who ran away to his camp on the bank of the Nile. Now it is the turn of Gaddafi and his henchmen.
Bahrain’s rulers are next in line and have asked for help from their grand-daddy, Saudi Arabia. After the fall of Bahrain, it will be the turn of Yemen and its so-called President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is also waiting for Saudi forces to bail him out. After Yemen, the next in line will be Dubai and other Emirates. The Arab World, which means the Muslim World in West Asia and the Maghreb, is cracking up and all the barrels of oil under the sands will not hold it together.
Does this remind you of something? Cast your eyes twenty years ago and you get a sense of history repeating itself. Exactly twenty years ago in 1991, another world was cracking up before your eyes, a world that, like the Arab world in 2011, looked so massive it was almost indestructible. I was in London at the time and wondering whether to take a trip to Moscow or go to Spain, particularly Barcelona, where Geroge Orwell had fought Stalin’s thugs before World War II. In the end, I cancelled my plans for Moscow, as things did not look safe enough, and decided to go to Spain while the Soviet empire cracked and collapsed in my absence.
It collapsed exactly in the same way the Arab world is cracking up now. Nobody invaded Soviet Russia, nor, for that matter, Rumania or Czechoslovakia or Hungary. They just folded up of their own weight, and collapsed. The Arab countries are also collapsing like a pack of cards, while the dictators are counting their hidden money in Swiss banks for a quick getaway.
They would have collapsed without any help from the western countries, for that is their ultimate destiny, just as it was the destiny of Communist leaders in Soviet Russia to be dragged out of the Kremlin and thrown out with a kick in the pants.
This is because Islam is not so much a religion – which, of course, it is – as a political ideology, just like Nazism and Fascism. In fact, there is a great deal about it that makes sense only if you view it as a political doctrine. Look at the way they treat their people. They are annihilated if they say anything, let alone do any thing, that runs counter to the spirit of the Holy Quran. This is precisely how the communists used to behave, and also the Nazis.
Joseph Stalin massacred millions of small farmers, the so-called Kulaks, because they refused to hand over their lands to him as they were supposed to under the Marxist diktat of Stalin. Stalin held bogus trials in the Kremlin and elsewhere in which thousands of party faithful – not anti-Communists – were sent to concentration camps – so-called Gulags – because they did not follow the party line.
Last month, two officials in the Zardari government in Pakistan were shot dead, one a Muslim and another a Christian, because they expressed doubts about blasphemy laws. This is precisely what the communists used to do. Even at the height of World War II, thousands of officers in the Polish army were slaughtered because Stalin doubted their loyalty. This is what Nadirshah of Iran had done in Delhi when he slaughtered thousands of Hindus – men, women and children – only fault was that they were Hindus, just as the fault of the Kulaks in the eyes of Stalin, were that they did not believe in Karl Marx, but had Gods of their own. Under Communism and Islam, it is not enough to be a good citizen; you also have to be a good Communist or a good Muslim. Just as every man who defies Communist holy book, Das Kapital, is a traitor and has to be put down, every man who does not accept the Quran is potentially a traitor and a “Kaffir”, and, therefore, not fit to live.
All authoritarian philosophies are brutal. Cruelty and brutality are inherent in such ideologies. Adolf Hitler did not just ban Jews from taking up government jobs. He murdered them. He threw them out of their homes and offices, marched them to the nearest gas chambers, and exterminated them with technical precision – so many gas showers for so many men etc – and wiped out six million Jews in the process. And when the monster committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin, he boasted to one of his generals that was his proudest deed.
Women are stoned and killed in public places in Saudi Arabia, and possibly other so-called Islamic states. Many Saudi newspapers carry pictures of women so killed. And Saudi Arabia is a premier Muslim country, which includes a number of Islamic towns and places. Surely such a country, so rich in resources, and so bountiful in oil, should treat its citizens, particularly women, with kindliness. The Taliban, which is said to represent the purest form of Islam, will not allow women to attend schools or learn even the Arabic alphabet for fear it might give them wrong ideas. No wonder, Islamic countries are among the most backward in the world, despite the fact that between them they control more oil than the rest of the world together.
This was also true of Communist countries. Stalin built more steel plants, more power stations, and longer roads than the rest of the world, but he was unable to give his people bread or butter or clothes or houses, because he despised them. Stalin despised his people and had no compunction in sending them to death in concentration camps in Siberia. Hitler, another dictator, despised Jews and non-Nazis and sent them to gas chambers. Col Gaddafi despises his people and shoots them down from helicopters. The Saudis despise women and lock them up and stone them to death as people watch from the sidelines. And then you wonder why Stalin’s Soviet Russia collapsed all of a sudden, why Hitler’s Germany folded up and the man committed suicide and why the mad cap Colonel is waiting for his last bullet! You kill your people, and your people kill you !!
