Why kill the Hazaras?

 

Why kill the Hazaras?

(originally published January 2021)

In memory of the eleven (11) Hazara coal miners who were brutally slain----all of them blind-folded, their throats slit with a blunt knife, and left to bleed to death----in Mach, Balochistan on Jan 3, 2020.

"Tell the truth even if it be unpleasant" and "Speak truth to a tyrannical ruler."

Hadith of the Prophet (pbuh)

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They gun them down and
Blow ‘em up
They hunt them down and
Line ‘em up
Pick them out
Tie ‘em up
Slit their throats, and hang ‘em up.

Why kill the Hazaras?

They kill them once
Force ‘em out, and then
Kill them again
Make them grieve
Make ‘em leave
Pakistan, Afghanistan
They send them all to…
Qabristan (the graveyard).

They kill them there, kill ‘em here
Why kill the Hazaras?
Who kills the Hazaras?

The cursed snakes
Are let loose
By the snake charmers
The wily handlers
Whose takfiri “assets”
Whose wretched monsters
Are the evil performers.

The right hand consoles

As the left hand slaughters
Say these forked-tongued impostors:
“See, it’s the bearded serpents, it’s deh-shat gardi”
No, it’s not: it’s wardi gardi
That kills the Hazaras.

The Dajjali death cult has poisoned
The old Tin Town
In Little London
The Iblisi darkness
Has spread all around
The petro terror, the "jihad" e Jahilliya
Has maimed and murdered, or
Killed the Hazaras.

Collateral damage, false flag games
“Strategic Depth” is the cause of the flames
The gains of the goons
Of the murderous buffoons
Are the pains of the ruined
Who are violently strewn
The pogrom continues
The graveyards get filled
As the Hazaras get killed.

Friends and comrades---
The old neighbors
Allies and aides---
Are now like strangers.
Numb spectators
Of dumb bloodbath
They whisper and watch
Some with sorrow
Some with wrath
Some are scared
Others just shrug their cold shoulders:
“Too sad, too bad, but…”

That “but” betrays
The heartless starkness
Of the Dajjali credo and
The Iblisi darkness.

“But” I guess, they know

Why they kill the Hazaras.

And so it seems
To this Hazara, at least
That no one really weeps
No one bewails
Alas!
Accomplice in crime
The silence, too,
Is a bloody cold mime
It, too,
Condemns
and
Kills the Hazaras.

The System: Blackmailing

 

The System: Blackmailing

The System has a system within it through which it operates. It is called blackmailing. The System cannot function without this sub-system of blackmailing, its modus operandi of choice. It is its heart and soul, its bloodline. It traps, manipulates, controls, predicts, enslaves, demeans, distracts-deludes-divides-and-rules and, finally, destroys through blackmailing. The real owners and beneficiaries of The System have actively promoted the dark cult of blackmailing, in the same manner that they have promoted another of their cardinal virtues: mediocrity. They have done so very effectively, to the point where blackmailing is now part and parcel of the general culture of Pure-istan and where everyone blackmails everyone else: the bosses blackmail the employers, and the employers blackmail the bosses; women blackmail men, and men blackmail women; children blackmail parents; teachers blackmail students; politicians blackmail the narcotized awam (the people); the media blackmail the politicians; the majority blackmails the minorities; the believers blackmail the doubters; lawyers blackmail the judges, and the judges blackmail the lawyers; and, The Vampires blackmail everyone! After all, The System is The Vampires. 

 A century ago, the economist Joseph Schumpeter suggested the concept of “creative destruction”. He argued, in short, that sometimes, when things become hopeless, beyond repair and reform, it is best to destroy and build anew. Unfortunate, indeed, but perhaps The System in Pure-istan can benefit from Schumpeter's old idea.

The System: The Vampires

 

The System: The Vampires

"Those who say ‘the system works’ work for the system!"           Russell Brand

"If the [system] is sick, then your ease with it is a sign of sickness."

Abdal Hakim Murad

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The System is alive and well. This System is old, seven decades old, but it keeps re-inventing itself in a myriad of ways. It has evolved in the true Hobbesian-Darwinian sense, as an aggressive, predatory beast red in tooth and claw; yet, it has not changed at all.  It distorts and deceives; it lies shamelessly through its teeth; it exploits, colonizes and plunders all, especially those denizens of its borderlands whose main crime is that they do not hail from the power centers, and who raise their just voices for the dignity and honor that were promised to them by the Great Leader when The System came into being. The System has perennially been brutal to these unfortunate mortals of the peripheries. This System threatens, silences, “disappears”, maims and kills all those who protest against it and resist its arbitrary dictates and its obscene violence. It still does all this just like before, but now more efficiently and more brutally. That’s progress, real progress for The System, that is. The System is the same old chameleon, but now given a new, postmodern euphemism to mask its old toxicity: hybrid. Yes, it is now a “Hybrid System”. In this new, symbiotic contraption, the junior partner---the lower species--- is an abusive, vindictive dimwit with an ego the size of a blue whale and who parades as a spiritual avatar, a savior of the masses, with his ridiculous slogans of justice (insaf), fair play and dignity. 

The Truth: The System means The Vampires. The System is made up of The Vampires. The System is The Vampires. It is run, controlled and maintained by The Vampires; and, therefore, it benefits the bloodsuckers. The Vampires have been around all along, in control of all affairs in Pure-istan, ever since the colonial holocaust seventy years ago. The Vampires are everything, and they are everywhere: they are politicians and businessmen; they are in boots and uniform; they are God fearing mullahs and whiskey-guzzling, golfing, pandering and wenching men-of-the-world; they are in the media and in the universities; they are anchors, senior anal-ysts, actors, singers, script-writers, directors and producers; they are visible and (often) invisible; above all, they are the judge, jury and executioner of the land. The Vampires are Janus-faced and forked-tongued. They are saviors but destroyers; they are kind when they are cruel; they are just and fair, but only when unjust and unfair; they are as clean as corrupt, and as corrupt as clean; they are traitors when they are patriots and vice versa; they are the angels when they are the devil. These wicked chuckleheads are competently incompetent and incompetently competent: The Vampires are the deadly parasites that have sucked their host dry. 

The host. Yes, the captive host of 220 million souls that need to be rescued from The Vampires. The System needs to be restored to health and sanity. Just like in the old vampire stories and movies, a la Lugosi,  Karloff and Chris Lee, stakes must be driven right through the hearts of The Vampires. Only then one can expect a new dawn; only then one can meaningfully and honestly speak of "Naya Pure-istan".

The Picture

 

The Picture

"The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable."                                                                Arundhati Roy

    
“They did not die when they died; their deaths happened long before. It happened in the minds of people who never saw them. It happened in the profit margins. It happened in the laws. They died because money could be saved and made."
Ben Okri

"The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear."   

Zygmunt Bauman
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“A picture is worth a thousand words”, says an old English adage. It is especially worth a million words when it depicts the extremes of human joy and, even more so, of human suffering. But words, after all, can do only so much: they are but just forms that “define” and hence, limit what they try to capture. Even the best of poets, the deftest and most elegant of wordsmiths, lament that unfortunate limitation of words. Every capturing is also leaving out something; every story told is also another left untold. There always remains the unsaid---the unsayable---that which escapes language or is left out intentionally.  Politics is always there.

The picture here is an image that defies all attempts at a fair description. It is many things at the same time. It is a story. It tells of a history. It is a genocidal narrative borne out of ugly politics that is itself a manifestation of what is worst in the human soul. It captures a moment in time when tragedy befell upon old and helpless folks of a violently vandalized land like a thunderbolt from the cruel skies. It is a portrayal that hides within its every pixel a thousand sad tales. They are the tales of deception, of injustice, of wanton greed and undiluted corruption. They are the stories of those who swear allegiance to God, faith and country but who shamelessly serve and worship Mammon, both covertly and overtly. But above all, they are the tales of betrayal and of convenient Faustian deals entered into and endorsed by the sons of the soil who shamelessly abandon their land and sell its people, all to be defiled by the power-intoxicated marauders, of the uniformed variety or otherwise. For “nobody can enter your house until and unless you want them to” as the sages of the region have said.

But if images are stories, the stories have plots and characters; they have contexts. 

These are, therefore, the stories of the sick and the deceived, horror tales hidden from the tranquilized, the bamboozled and captive audiences of the bread and circus technology of the demigods of the country. This obscene coterie of villains---these demigods, the bloodsucking ruling pack---through their “proactive” presstitude mouthpieces, the plastic talking heads on TV screens and increasingly in the clogged and toxic bowels of the Internet, has historically played the cannibalistic Center to the deceived and ravaged Periphery. It is a consciousness---a strange word indeed for this class of genocidals!---informed and sustained by a murderously instrumental worldview that binds the depraved master to the wretched subjects. The stories, therefore, are not just contemporary but also historical. They are hopeless serial episodes within the epic length tragic narrative for the comprehension of which one needs to update one’s understanding of (modern and postmodern) evil in South Asia, as the street fighting public intellectual Ashis Nandy has suggested.

The context: the complete image, the other half of the story

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BLM: Balochistani Lives Matter
(A short tale, in verse, of The Sick and The Deceived)

Excluded and fooled
Divided and ruled
Plundered and colonized
Disappeared and demonized.

Terrorized, targeted, tortured and killed,
Balochistani lives ruined, evil designs fulfilled.

Center and periphery
An old tale of demagoguery
Deception the norm, the way of sophistry
The same old ruse, civilian or military.

Terrorized, targeted, tortured and killed,
Balochistani lives ruined, evil designs fulfilled.

Chaghi is copper, silver and gold
Cui bono?, Quare? we are never told
And there’s coal, gas and lots of oil
But not for the locals who drudge and toil.

Terrorized, targeted, tortured and killed,
Balochistani lives ruined, evil designs fulfilled.

Now it’s Gwadar, the jewel in the crown
That makes the mouth water of sahibs brown
“Don’t you dare cry, fume, or frown!”
Yell the neo-colonials of Pindi town.

Terrorized, targeted, tortured and killed,
Balochistani lives ruined, evil designs fulfilled.

Economic Corridor, BRI ‘n CPEC---a curse, a violent puzzle
Development and progress, taraqee---under a gun’s muzzle!
The Bajwas accumulate, the Sharifs load up as Balochistan bleed
Goes on and on this tragic tale of corruption and greed.

Terrorized, targeted, tortured and killed,
Balochistani lives ruined, evil designs fulfilled.

To raise your voice is to dig your own grave
'Cause they buy the craven and butcher the brave
The tanks readily roll, the gunships arrive
The shudras wipe n’ waste the kshatriyas in caves.

Terrorized, targeted, tortured and killed,
Balochistani lives ruined, evil designs fulfilled.

In the old Tin Town of this new Bengal
There’s the old new trick of divide-and-rule
Sectarian blood lust, and ethnic cleansing
Exposed n’ all crystal clear, save to the fool.

Terrorized, targeted, tortured and killed,
Balochistani lives ruined, evil designs fulfilled.

The snaky talking heads on the idiot screen
They bend and bow, these bootlick, arse-lick filthy shysters
The gibber-jabbering, twiddle-twaddling wily vermin
The paid pied-pipers who shun the victims and serve the masters.

Terrorized, targeted, tortured and killed,
Balochistani lives ruined, evil designs fulfilled.

The scoundrels scream “It’s Naya Daur" n "It's Naya Pakistan!”
It’s a bloody sham, nothing new in the rotten towns
“Insaf, insaf”, shout the trolls of the Ego Man--Hybrid Khan
It's the same old spoof, the same old sins of the criminal clowns.

Terrorized, targeted, tortured and killed,
Balochistani lives ruined, evil designs fulfilled.

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For more, please click:

On Belief

The Hollow Men of Pakistan

Regal Cinema Quetta

Balochistani Lives Matter

The Hollow Men (of Pakistan)

 

The Hollow Men (of Pakistan)
(with an apology to T.S. Eliot)

“We are not the doctors; we are the disease!”        Alexander Herzen

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”                         

                                                        George Orwell, The Animal Farm

“The country is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.”           
                (To borrow from the wise man of Nigeria, Chinua Achebe)

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I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Scheming together
Heads filled, from ear to ear,
With dried dung. Alas!
Our ugly gibberish, when
We scream together,
Belching pieties,
Is utterly meaningless---hollow, stinky--
Like our rotten lives.

We are the hollow men, the filthy hustlers
We buy and we sell
We pander and peddle---everything, everyone:
Ourselves,
Our kith and kin,
Compatriot, brother, father, son, husband--
No backbone, neither honor nor dignity--
We bend readily
For a few dollars,
We even sell our mothers.

We are the toxic vermin
Dark clouds of voracious locusts
We are the plague that
Defiles the face of
The “pure” land
Like puss-oozing carbuncles.

We are the hollow men
The shape shifting, bullshitting impostors
Tirelessly spouting humbug
That fills the air
Like a numbing, dumbing white noise
We are
The “ruling elite”, the “umpire”
The “boys”, the “establishment”---
All nasty euphemisms for
Bloodsucking, villainous cartoons
Cabals of vile con men
Mafioso civvies and
Uniformed goons.

II

This is the damned land
This is mob land
Rioting, burning, posse lynching
Bedlam reigns supreme
Here we sing songs
Colorful carols
Of faith, discipline and unity
Of brotherhood and sisterhood
In the “pure” motherland,
We keep on chanting, these gory
Anthems of hypocrisy.

Words without meaning---our poisonous trope.
Compassion as fashion, deception as hope.

III

Here we sell made-up dreams
Soothing stories in textbooks
Fairytales on TV screens
Told by pumped-up noisy fiends
These murderous nightmares, in reality,
Mock the babbling screen ogres
The soulless chattering monsters.

IV

Those who dare speak
Truth to power
With untied tongues and unsold souls
With eyes that see
And hearts not dead---not yet
See through us, and call out:
“You are the genuinely bogus hollow men
The stuffed men (and women).
Disgrace! Disgrace! Disgrace!”

For more, please click: Uncle Marx, Education: Old and New

Distraction

Distraction

"All the unhappiness of men arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber."                               Blaise Pascal

"Don’t just do something. Sit there!"                  Old Japanese saying

T.S. Eliot once wrote somewhere that “we moderns are distracted from distraction by distraction”. Distraction is now the presiding or the defining idea of (post) modern existence, especially after the volcanic rise and plaguey spread of digital technologies and what is now called social media. With the arrival and cultural entrenchment of Instagram, TikTok and “streaming” Netflix, the term distraction has acquired new levels and depths of meaning. Once it was terms like anomie and alienation; now, distraction is THE zeitgeist.  They are of course related in a variety of ways-----the conditions of anomie and alienation cannot prevail unless the subject is distracted in one way or another---- but it seems that both the scale and intensity of these forces of fragmentation, debasement and dehumanization in man require new ways of understanding and analyses.

Distraction is about attention, or to be precise, about its lack or absence. To distract means to disturb, divert and distort attention, to take it away, to steal it. Attention is the new capital or, the new source of capital generation now, as many contemporary cultural critics have argued (see The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff and The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu). The most successful entrepreneurs----the attention merchants----are people who know how to identify and “harvest” attention and turn it into gold.  Mostly Silly-con artists of The Valley, this new breed of captains of dog-eat-dog casino capitalism can now make and train algorithms, the entrails or vital organs of software and applications on digital devices that are now the main attention grabbers, which can easily distract us from almost anything.

Once you are distracted, the algorithms will take control and do all the work for you. In fact, the designers and developers of algorithms know this very well: without distraction and disorientation of the target audience, the algorithms cannot work effectively. The users have to be thoroughly bombarded, bamboozled, rendered incapable of using their uniquely human discriminating intellectual and especially moral faculties before any gains from the algorithms can be realized. It is crucial that the subject be unmoored from the ground of traditional ethical, spiritual worldview and turned into flotsam---turned into the wreckage of his or her former rooted and integral self---for the algorithms to achieve their goals.

Traditional beings live at the intersection of the two planes of existence: horizontal and vertical. Traditional man, or Pontifical man, is always passive, or contemplative, vertically and active horizontally.  In other words, traditional man, in Islam especially, is servant of God (abd Allah) horizontally, and vicegerent or deputy of God (khalifa Allah) vertically.  On the latter plane, we remain aware of our true, primordial nature, or fitrah, and therefore remain intact and whole as we engage with the world on the former, horizontal plane, that contingent dimension that extends into time and space. Worldly forces of distraction, especially now in the form of new digital “tricknologies” (Dick Greogory’s term) invert this traditional ontological, epistemological/ethical configuration which is the source of equilibrium (mizan) in man and in the world---the microcosm and the macrocosm. They do so by making us obedient and passive horizontally---vis-à-vis the world, the duniya---and forgetful (alnisyan), heedless (ghafil) vertically. We then become the Promethean man. These centrifugal forces render man slave to worldly demigods as they completely make him forgetful of his real Master, Creator and Lord. To protect oneself and resist one’s uprooting, debasement and, ultimately, destruction, one needs to resist this Satanic inversion. 

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Spirituality in dark times: Ruh on the leash of nafs

"Spirituality" in dark times: Ruh on the leash of nafs

“The cult of our times, which is really the cult of ourselves, produces a general frame of mind as unfavorable to religion as anything could be, an inflation of the soul which is altogether incompatible with true intelligence, let alone spirituality.”                 Martin Lings

While authentic religion is about discriminating between the Real and all other realities, dark times spirituality is about attacking and damaging that crucial human faculty by and through which such discrimination is made possible. Dark times spirituality is "spirituality without religion" as it is now commonly known and celebrated, or it is what a typical Tik-Toking, Netflixing floating weed would proudly declare: "I am spiritual, but not religious". One has to struggle really hard to find a more terrible oxymoron! It is like desiring the fruit but condemning the tree that bears that fruit; it is like seeking the honey but remaining blissfully ignorant of the nectary flowers, the bees and the gardener. Says Charles Upton: "If you can get people to react with positive feelings to images of ugliness, you have damaged their ability to discern and respond to beauty; likewise, if you can induce them to accept obviously contradictory statements without noticing the contradiction, you have wounded their ability to recognize the truth."

While traditional esoterism (spirituality, or the inner core of authentic religion) is essentially about constant striving (jihad) to overcome the relative, the unreal, and to pine for union with the Absolute, the Real---a return to that from which we have been separated in a created world which is by definition finite, relative and therefore imperfect and un-real---dark times spirituality is the exact opposite: it aims for uprooting and fragmentation, dispersion and disorientation. After all, the word "religio" once meant "to tie" or "to tie back" to the Source and Origin---hence, union and return. In the former, we are like beads strung together on a necklace string; in the latter, the string is cut and we fall and scatter all over the place. In the former, we are like beings on the edge of a rim and all anchored, tied to the center through the spokes; in the latter, we are unhooked from the center, anchorless and wandering on the circumference of the rim: liking, sharing, following, influencing, streaming, uploading and downloading.

In these amnesiac dark times, religion and spirituality mean something entirely different from their traditional meanings. In the algorithmic spiritualties that are now meticulously packaged and efficiently promoted on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Netflix, to name just a few of the channels through which the bestial dictatorship of the nafs is disseminated and sustained, the traditional inner hierarchies in man are completely inverted: what the nafs now "likes" is equated with---if not considered superior to--- what the traditional intellect (nous, Spirit/Ruh) once comprehended and realized; what was once objective Truth is now so totally subjectivized and relativized---Instagrammed!--- that it is merely a matter of popularity contest; beauty, once held as "the splendor of truth', is now whatever that appeals to the uncultivated, passional nafs in its never-ending quest for instant gratification; goodness is pretentious sloganeering, sheer sentimentality, smug, "woke" posturing.

Duniya al-Duniya

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