Open your eyes now …
… or THEY will close them!
This article, written by a Czechoslavakian in 2006, deserves wide circulation. It should be placed on the notice-boards of institutions of higher learning and public spaces, quoted in newspapers and magazines, and introduced into the English textbooks recommended by the syllabus:
Why The Peaceful Majority Is Irrelevant
Paul E. Marek
I used to know a man whose family were German aristocracy prior to World War Two. They owned a number of large industries and estates. I asked him how many German people were true Nazis, and the answer he gave has stuck with me and guided my attitude toward fanaticism ever since.
“Very few people were true Nazis” he said, “but, many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.”
We are told again and again by “experts” and “talking heads” that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unquantified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is, that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars world wide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is, that the “peaceful majority” is the “silent majority” and it is cowed and extraneous.
Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people. The Average Japanese individual prior to World War 2 was not a war mongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of Killing that included the systematic killing of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet. And, who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were “peace loving”.
History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by the fanatics. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awake one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun. Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others, have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” - Edmund Burke
Labels: Activism, Education, Events, Literature, Media, News, Pakistan, People, Personal, Politics, Religion
8 Comments:
Brilliant. I am nearly tired of telling me to stop being in denial and stop finding a scapegoat for Pakistan's problems. Let's please at least accept that people from Pakistan are doing this in Pakistan and we're unwilling to even chastise them.
I do want to know if the writer was Czech or Slovak because they were/are two countries in 2006.
06 April, 2009 02:17
brilliant, indeed!
especially the last part sounded so true and so analogous to the current situation of Pakistan...
time for us to "realize" it all.
06 April, 2009 02:47
let us all hang our heads in shame. :(
06 April, 2009 02:52
i found this article link at ATP, i guess zakintosh posted it there
true indeed....i hope swat incident shakes things up....i hv for the first time seen outrage in publuc against extremists elements..i hope this outrage continues
06 April, 2009 06:04
@rabayl He called himself a Czechoslavakian in an interview.
More details: "Paul E. Marek is a second-generation Canadian, whose grandparents fled Czechoslovakia just prior to the Nazi takeover. He is an educational consultant specializing in programs that protect children from predatory adults."
06 April, 2009 07:09
I think that the analogies need to be dug a little deeper: the Germans were given an unfair treatment at the treaty of Versailles--or rather a totally irrational one. This was the right condition for all the wrong conclusions and permitted a criminal ideology to take over because those who were controlling the world at that time were not willing to be rational.
Be it Kashmir, Afghanistan, Checheniya or Palestine, more Muslims are being killed without any charge of guilt, let alone a trial, than they are accused of killing all over the world. No wonder a criminal ideology is taking over again.
06 April, 2009 21:55
There is indeed little to choose between the future of Pakistan with these murderous extremist lost and its future with a corrupt devil-may-care establishment. Neither option provides much hope. We accept the suffocating status quo today - and over the past 62 years - and lived with it. No doubt we will learn to live with whichever plague-infested dawn emerges tomorrow.
07 April, 2009 08:22
While the main idea presented in here bear some credibility (although arguable) the whole text is written from a western perspective. The author seems to be (or chose to be) totally oblivious to the atrocities of western "civilisations" such as (Dresden bombing, killing of millions in iraq, carpet bombings in vietnam, apartheid in palestine, nuking of hiroshima and nagasaki...) and yet the "peaceful majority" in these countries didn't speak up. And the main reason is that not that this majority is careless or because it approves these attrocities, but because these attrocities are being committed in the name of just causes...so people prefer not to speak up and stand firmly against these behaviors because of the just causes they r behind them...and this applies to eastern people also especially palestinians
31 August, 2009 12:04
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