Dead People in China Again

The Chinks killed five Muslims today. This wouldn’t be such a big deal, were it not for the fact that the Muslims in question have been taking shit from the Chinese government since before Mao. And the best of that is that Mao didn’t really give a shit one way or the other about the ethnicity of the Muslims recently snuffed.
     See, the folks recently snuffed were Uyghurs. They’re part of the hugely unnoticed Altaic tribal group with a language that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Great Wall pretty much unaltered by the differences. Gringo coordinates for that change, given that most Gringos have no idea at all that there is any other language than English, would be like the linguistic difference between Spanish as she be spoken in Argentina and Brazilian Portuguese. Simpler? Ok, how about between Castilian Spanish and Portuguese?
     Got that?
     Ok, so here are the Uyghurs, kin to the Kazakhs and the Kyrghiz and the Uzbeks and Turkmen & all them other turkish folks, living in a chunk of the planet that has been pretty much theirs to enjoy, at least until Leninism hit the big time.
     Up until then they’d been farmers, herdsmen, tradesmen, merchants and such, living among themselves in their tribal units (which is another story), eating yoğurt & livin’ to be a hundred & something for the Dannon commercials. But when Lenin got hot and the Russians needed to validate their territorial imperatives, the locals got inculcated and then Mao ignored ‘em long enough to think it’s cool to be Commies.
     Good commies, mind you. We do business with China like they was old boys on Wall Street, which they will quickly enough soon own.
     But I digress.
     Islam came to the region early, mainly as the result of the spice and silk trade, by which the future attackers of the European civilizations aided in making the European civilizations some of the most prolific, profitable and advanced for the past millennium and a half. When Islam rose up out of the tribal superstitions of the Arabian Peninsula, it eventually spread – by the sword more than by any price of religious or superstitionist truth – out to the East, where its sole competitor was Buddhism with a little animistic superstitionism thrown in for flavor. As Islam spread eastward, it became part of local tribal lore in much the same way that Christianity bled into African animism to become the Caribbean versions of santaría or voudoun . Thus the blending of honor killings, virginity rites and similar ancient arcana became part of present day Islam.
     Don’t ask Muslims if this is true, however. They don’t like to think that the message given by the prophet was anything but pure as the driven snow, even if there ain’t no snow in Arabia, if it was a small snow and you wanted to put your hand in there anyway. Thus we arrive at the recent executions.

Even before the Soviet hegemony discovered what the US hegemony has been trying to avoid recognizing, Islam was a problem to the Russian imperialist leitmotif. While the fervor of jihad did pay nicely into the Leninist/Stalinist mindset of total subservience and dedication to the expansion of world socialism, the simple fact that it was action done according to divine command rubbed the Soviets the wrong way.
     Not that they didn’t take advantage of the situation.
     There’s a beautiful chunk in the middle of the Reds where John Reed is standing in the middle of a theater sort of place, surrounded by local tribesmen, giving a speech to the locals on the advent of Leninist socialism. The audience picks up a chant from the translation of Reed’s speech and suddenly Reed realizes that his speech has been mistranslated.
     The crowd which he thought was hell-bent for socialism is actually calling for a jihad.
     That’s pretty much the same deal in China today, ‘cept that it ain’t Reed and it ain’t Mao and it ain’t no jihad you or I or the next dhimmi would recognize.

The Uyghurs have been watching their culture disappear under the Maoist yoke for decades. They’ve watched their herding lands and their mineral rights and their homes and schools and mosques turned into Maoist instruction centers under the hand of Han Chinese. In other words, the Han Chinese have been displacing the local Altaic folks for something like forty years now.
     Where once the signs and language as Altaic, now stand banners in gold Chinese characters against a red field. Where once the children spoke the language of their parents, now they learn to speak Chinese.
     And, to be sure, where once the tribal manners were maintained, today the Chinese socialist way is the only way . . . at least as long as you put on a good show.
     And it’s at the putting on the show that we end up with five Uyghur şahidler who were executed for being part of a militant Muslim group with obvious intentions of overthrowing the local Han Chinese administration and instituting their own Islamic government.

I know about this stuff as little as I do for as much as I know because I have two friends, both refugees, who are Uyghurs. Each of them has had opportunities enough to know how the Chinese "organs" work. They are intent on being contributing members of Gringo society and they have worked hard to become such folks. I consider them my friends, a son and daughter, members of my family.
     As I got to know these two folks and become acquainted with other members of their ethnicity, I became more familiar with their homeland situation and with their relationship with the folks who basically built a wall to keep 'em out.
     At the same time, they know that I am not a believer. They accept that as far as they can and understand – so far as I know – how I have come to that. They also know that I have almost as jaundiced an eye for Islam as I do for the Roman Catholic church's self-proclaimed hegemony over whatever it is that the accretion of Mythrasism onto another Judaic heresy which led to the Pauline letters becoming part of the Jesus myth.
     Yeah, like that.
     So here I am torn between my feelings for the people of a distant place who have representatives within my life & family circle while at the same time feeling that the Uyghur Muslims who where rounded up and shot by the Chinese organs are probably just the tip of an iceberg in the oceans of future diplomacy & desires for peace and harmony worldwide.
     On the one side, nobody, regardless of their language, culture (providing it's at least as egalitarian as I think I am), ethnicity or whatever deserves to be cleansed from the earth just 'cause they are different in some typically simian prejudice way.
     On the other, Islam has become very vicious of late. The war that the rest of the world thought was over 1400 years ago has been hiding in the closet, waiting for the hired help to leave before bursting out of the darkness to kill everyone that doesn't agree with it.
     And there ain't much of anything even Muslims seem to agree about any more.
     So it's simple prejudice and genocidal politics versus another damn pack of sociopaths who happen have taken Islam as their shield on the way to dessimating the rest of humanity.

As I said, this leaves me in the same condition I’d be in if all I had for breakfast was a half-ett toaster strudel and the coffee maker was broke. Sure, I can get by thinking that what happened to these folks is a racist move on the part of the Commie Chinks. Or I can get uprageious about it saying that the Chinese are moving to cut off the incursion of Islam's more dangerous political elements before the jihad hits Beijing. And it will.
     Count on it.
     Which statement puts me back in the clear light of whatever passes for day in these dark times. I have to admit that there is no love lost between me and the delusion of religion. I ain't a believer and, although I do have no problem with most believers, I ain't all that good on religions which seem to be based on piracy, plunder, slavery, subjugation and violence against those who don't believe or believe as they should.
     I ain't even good on Christianity 'cause it's got its own history – not the least of which is being forged every day as I write by the likes of Karl Rove or the Bushies and the rest of the pack of Liars for Jesus – and because of what it's become in today's simplistic and dumbed-down political depravity.
     I'm tolerant of Buddhism 'cause it's so back burner about conversion, belief or disbelief. In fact, there are parts of Buddhism that are plainly disbelieving in the main. At the same time, reading the papers about a gang of Buddhism monks set buildings on fire 'cause of an argument makes me laugh.
     Judaism, well, that one's a good 'n 'cause of the same things that make Mormonism so bizarre: there's no serious archeological proof for anything in the Bible, new or old testament. And if Jews are a private race within the human species, then that beggars the position held by some that Jews are an anointed and blessed people, which is another way to hide your own version of racism and elitist delusion masquerading as belief.
     And then there's Islam, which we all know has been hijacked, although most of the Muslims I know don't talk about that much 'cause, well, they either accept being hijacked as the status quo or they're in on the hijacking and don't care one way or the other. Or they're just simple believers who'd like to be left alone just as I, a disbeliever, would enjoy being left alone about all this stuff.

And then here come's the Chinese organs, rousting a bunch of Muslims in a nominally break-away province of the Commie Chinese geopolitical hegemony and I'm not sure where I stand.
     I have friends among those people.
     I have very little respect for the world-view of present day Islam, which puts me at odds with the co-religionists of the Uyghur people.
     But these folks – these two folks in particular and members of their ethnicity whom I've met as well – are close to me, mind and spirit.
     The attack on the Muslims may have been justified by the Chink organs and police state politics since, after all, the dead Muslim Uyghurs were, by someone's definition, jihadis. They were working for the end of the Chinese hegemony and the eventual imposition of Shar'ia law across China (and the rest of the world in the process).
     At the same time, these are just folks want to be left to be Uyghurs.
     All of which leaves me conflicted. And sad.

Truly, this is another case in point of religion and the delusion from which its ugly little head doth spring ruining everything. Everything. Every last single human concern & compassion burned on the edges, if not in flames all around, by the fire of religionistic superstitionism.

And I don't know what to say to my friends, believers they be and all that.