The Indigo Firmament

By Zaman Stanizai, Ph.D.

In the name of the One God,

The Immanent and Transcendent, who is beyond any human perception

On a beautiful Sunday morning, as this summer solstice shines over the peaceful shores of the blue Pacific, where gentle waves kiss the Malibu coast, one wonders how this serene place can be a luxury that many in war-torn countries around the world cannot afford. I may be distant from their pain, but my humanity bleeds with their suffering as I write these troubling thoughts. Perhaps some mysterious celestial misalignment has darkened our skies these days, and humanity’s lot along with it. Will history pause long enough for the lingering dark shadows to clear from these horizons?          -- Zaman Stanizai

Despite any notion of evolution, the human mind and attitude have not advanced to a state of peace, tranquility, fulfillment, or genuine civility befitting a civilized world community. Instead, they have developed into a condition in which 'civilization’ is characterized by ongoing shifts from one war to another. Essentially, warmongering has become an obsession, justified in the name of one or another terrestrial or celestial god, whose names are used to rationalize violence and aggression and are invoked in every bloody conflict.

Our parents placed their hopes and dreams in the world leaders who gathered some 80 years ago along this same Pacific coast, farther north in San Francisco, where the United Nations Charter was drafted, ratified, and hosted by the government of the United States of America.  

Now, eight relatively peaceful decades yonder, the pendulum has swung completely to the other side.

The United States has become the most hostile member of the very international organization it helped create, withdrawing its membership from several UN-related agencies and institutions, including the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the UN Relief and Works Agency for the Near East (UNRWA), and the World Health Organization (WHO). It has also stopped funding the Paris Climate Agreement, adopted by 196 Parties in 2015. 

The U.S. further undermines global stability by refusing to join the International Criminal Court and by threatening to withdraw from UNESCO and UNICEF. It is even dismantling its own USAID. Now, the president and some members of Congress are considering a full withdrawal from the United Nations. This eerily resembles Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations before the war.

Against that backdrop of raging wars, discussing peace feels futile. Yet without a viable alternative, we must hold onto hope. Telling the truth hurts, and the truth that sets you free hurts even more, especially when we can’t tell whether we're in the Nile or in denial as we stare back at the harsh reality before us. Are we still dreaming, or have we awakened to a higher level of consciousness?

This past summer solstice may have begun with bright explosions over Persia, but, not-so-coincidentally, it also signaled the start of dimmer days ahead, which could lead to darker times if any remain.

Americans protested, ‘No Kings’; instead, they got an emperor with no clothes, and ‘the Republic for which it stands’ has become a pretentious empire on the brink of collapse—whether it falls with a bang or a whimper, only time will tell. This grim view is based on even bleaker circumstances. 

‘We the people’ may have adorned the Constitution of these United States, but when a foreign lobby has a stranglehold on the executive and legislative branches of our government, which seem more accountable to a foreign interest than to their own citizens, their legitimacy should be questioned, and history will surely frown upon their legacy and their loyalty to the Constitution. It no doubt appears as if ‘the tail is wagging the dog.’

When the clear provisions of the fundamental law of the land are openly violated in letter and spirit; when the executive threatens the judiciary, and Congress is more loyal to the party boss than to the charters that united the first thirteen colonies, there is no power left for ‘the checks and balances,’ no Constitution remains to uphold, and no Congress left to keep the White House in check. Essentially, little ‘demos’ remains in such a democracy. The Founding Fathers must indeed be turning in their graves. 

Americans face a stark reality and question how a nation that once championed global peace and sent the Peace Corps to every corner of the globe has now shifted from ‘the beacon of democracy’ to the dictatorship of ‘prolet-à-Right,’ an extreme Right. Some fear they might be walking in the footsteps of Germans under the fascist rule of the Third Reich.

The separation of church and state may be more theoretical than real; if not in words, then certainly in the glaring hypocrisy in Washington. Is it just a coincidence that the Vatican's colors—yellow, white, purple, and red—mirror those of the yellow-haired individual in the White House, as the spineless blue Democrats turn purple and red during a year when the first American Pope takes his seat on the Chair of Saint Peter, the Holy See? We certainly live in interesting times.

Championing human and civil rights around the world, once the hallmark of American democracy, is now completely overlooked by the ‘civilized’ West’s apathy toward the Palestinian genocide in Gaza, as Western rationalism easily succumbs to apocryphal Armageddon.

For the past century or so, the U.S. Constitution has been one of America's most influential exports worldwide. Since the Cold War ended, however, the primary American export to the Muslim world has been war: American bombs dropping on a region that spans more territory than the United States itself, from Afghanistan to Gaza, Palestine, and from Libya and Somalia to Yemen. These bombings are often followed by American troops on the ground, who create, train, and arm factions that fight each other, later labeled as terrorists, providing a pretext for outright American invasion and/or occupation of Muslim lands. Yet it is the Muslims—their religion, culture, and traditions—that the Western media unabashedly associates with terrorism.

American politicians often lie effectively, perhaps taking a cue from a line by Jonathan Swift: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…”

The Iranian nuclear threat is a trumped-up falsehood (pun intended), or they wouldn’t be bombing Iranian nuclear facilities and exposing thousands to radiation fallout. The truth is, they were convinced there was no real danger to the people in the region or to Israel. We’ve been down this road before, and remember the 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' in Iraq that were never found?

The biggest lie is that Iran, a non-nuclear state, poses an existential threat to the nuclear-armed Israel. This is false for one simple but deliberately ignored reason. The tiny nine-mile-wide state of Israel cannot be nuked because the radiation fallout from such an attack would likely kill more people in the region than just Israeli citizens. Therefore, Israel's small size acts as its own form of protection.

The real threat to Israel and the Palestinians is the gangs of heavily armed settlers backed by the Israeli government, who spread hatred and attack native Palestinians without fear of prosecution, as criminal laws differ for Jews and non-Jews in the Apartheid state. 

When 82% of the descendants of Holocaust survivors approve of the Palestinian genocide in Gaza and want the Israeli forces to “kill all the Palestinian inhabitants"[1] because that is what Joshua did in Jericho…, that’s when religious indoctrination has really crossed the Rubicon. 

Can we break free from this endless cycle of despair? Not if we keep expressing ourselves through scripted narratives that depict God as a commander, a real estate agent, and a destroyer—all in one—whose dark deeds become a mission to kill anyone they see as Amalek. 

The United States is the world’s strongest military power, but it’s no longer the great country it once was; it has become a somewhat rogue superpower. Its actions resemble those of other hegemonic superpowers in history, teetering on the edge of collapse.

We have a moral duty as a nation to act responsibly so that the current chaos does not become the beginning of the end. It will be, unless we free our government from the stranglehold of foreign lobbyists; unless American foreign policy in the Middle East is made in Washington, D.C., and not in Tel Aviv; unless, instead of Israel, America is made number one again; unless we restore a government in Washington that is accountable only to ‘we, the people’; and unless we reestablish the rule of law and respect for the Constitution of the United States of America, under which we establish not a kingdom or an empire, but a republic and a democracy— as “the government of the people, by the people, for the people.”