1
1
1
One of the most striking manifestations of the perpetual dishonor here is hypocrisy of lies. May my fellow- American readers forgive me but I have never seen so many damned liars as I have seen here. People here lie all the time for any reason and at the same time they vehemently call themselves the most truthful people on Earth, the pillars of integrity. Those lies manifest themselves in many things but especially in not providing the information needed and sought. Very rarely in the US people volunteer information unless directly asked or confronted. That is buyer beware applies. Some people might say that to be a normal feature of the capitalism. But I specify that as a hypocritical lie deliberately because that is how it is qualified in the culture I am from.
There are many features of dishonor in the culture where I am from. It would be dishonorable for a man to be arrested and/or humiliated in front of his family. It would be dishonorable for grown-up men to be lined up, pushed, shoved, told to spread eagle, prodded like animals, ordered to take their clothes off in public. It would be dishonorable even to let yourself to be touched sometimes. It would be dishonorable to let yourself to be addressed in a humiliating way, to let yourself to be stopped somewhere for hours without explanation, to be ordered to do something you do not understand what and why. It would be dishonorable for a man to see his dwelling violated, doors broken, people barging in, violating members of the family and do nothing. It would be dishonorable to let someone else deal with your children. It would be dishonorable for a person to disclose his/her problems to some group of people he /she does not know. It would be dishonorable to not to help children lost on the streets even if those are not yours. It would be dishonorable to disrespect the Temples by say entering Mosque in shoes or the Orthodox Church with the hat on. It would be dishonorable not to address an older person by his/her patrimonial, to photo people without their permission, to destroy books, to ruin dwellings, to make fun of the religious or family symbols, to exercise hypocrisy, to calmly and indiffrently discuss as an entertainment the level of harm done to other people while yourself not experiencing it, to mock other people’s way of life, to interfere with your own perceptions on what is right and wrong, to consider thyself superior to others, to enforce your own moral values and especially- to deny other people their free will to live the way they want. All of those things and many more if somehow imposed, especially by the foreign power or some entity like UN or some NGO or some big corporation – INEVITABLY create the most horrible response ever- HATE.
This is a different type of hate, not the one I described in one of my previous diaries, that one coming from irrational fear: http://www.opednews.com/populum/diarypage.php?did=153
No, this one comes from the insulted sense of equality. Notice that in all those little details of dishonor I have listed there is nothing about the relative role of wealth- the concept of honor and dishonor equally applies to the wealthy and poor alike. Americans brag a lot about the places they are from. There, where I am from HONOR IS A RIGHT and ALL MEN are equal in front of it, no matter how much money a person could have. That honor is associated with the simple fact of being human and an honorable person expects to be honored by the equals. Yes, many things have changed and what I have listed is not absolute. But the culture is a culture and deep inside people to whom I belong ( and that includes both Moslems and Russian Orthodox, also Jews, those Jews who understand who they really are) make their decisions in the thread of life on the basis of those perceptions, sometimes, funny to say, without even realizing that.
And here I come to the issue of the Suicide Bombers. The violation of the way of life of the people, perpetual insult had developed the resentment up to that HATE I mentioned. That hate manifests itself in a type of a psychological trauma, a paranoia, so to speak, You do not just resent those foreigners, infidels, whatever. You cannot live on the same grounds with them. You cannot breath the same air, drink the same water, see them, hear them, even talk about them. Hate consumes a person totally and fully, it becomes the only thing; you wake up and go to sleep with it and everything what you do is defined by it. In the final act of desperation the Suicide Bomber stays equal in front of the jet fighters, tanks, mortars, mines, space weapons, in front of the iron- clad monsters with barking dogs, in front of those who have no faces, no eyes, no language, no manners, no dignity, no HONOR. Desperation makes him/her an equal because death is the most ultimate equalizer of all. And of course, when he does it he does not see the victims around him and does not realize them to be just the people like him. Eastern people are not the only ones who experienced that. Many people did that: Russians, Scots, Irish, Jews, Spanish, Moslems, Serbs, Chinese. Even in the US we had John Brown. And the reason was always the same- hate driven by the deeply insulted sense of equality.
No, I do not condone the Suicide Bombing. I consider it an act of the insane. Neither do I imply that people of my cultural legacy are somehow better than my neighbor from Arkansas. But the proper way to learn from the phenomenon is to look at the way we ourselves conduct things and for a moment imagine thyself in Congo or in Uganda, in Gaza or in the West Bank, in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq… standing alone, without everything you hold dear, under the skies full of deadly machines, insulted in your own essence of life, desperately trying to preserve the only human feature you cherish- your Honorable Dignity.
1 | 2
