Radicalization? Here’s Why and How, Nitwits

Radicalization? Here’s Why and How, Nitwits

Dr. Matthew C. Stelly

      What is “radicalization,” you may ask. It’s a word being tossed around after, once again, it is discovered that people right here in the United States are planning and plotting to blow up buildings, kill people and otherwise undermine the nation. The response or “explanation” is that somehow these people “are becoming radicalized” and the followup questions are, “how is this possible?” “Why is this taking place?”

     “Radicalization” simply means “to make radical, especially in politics.” To act as if we don’t know what the reasons for these anti-social actions are taking place is ridiculous. America was conceived in radical activity and this nation has glorified it and reveled in it. “We killed the Indians,” “We put the blacks in slavery,” and more recently, a president (George Bush) declared from the deck of a battleship, “bring it.” He had no idea that the people bringing it would be living within the boundaries of America.

         Teaching western civilization in a way that implies that Greeks and Romans invested the air is a part of the radicalization mechanism. Radicalization takes place with each pink slip that’s issues after promises of long-term employment. With no regard for families, these corporations take their profits and talk of “downsizing” and “budget cuts.” Families are left to fend for themselves. And the recent subprime lending scam, carried out in full view of lawmakers, surely pissed a lot of people off and led to the biggest housing catastrophe in American history.

       Can’t you see it? George Clinton once sang that, “America eats its young.” The world is watching. The people watching today are the grandchildren of the people that his nation bombed and beat up. Every other movie that hits the theatre is presenting someone from the Middle East as “an enemy.” People are beginning to notice that America has the largest prison system in the world and that large numbers of those people are brown and black.

        Here’s a major example of America’s bombast and why people who are watching hold this country in contempt.

        A man -- former veterans -- Chris Kyle, who killed 160 people as a “sniper” has had a school named after him, Texas television pre-empting regular programming to show his funeral process (100 miles), has had a statue built and now none other than Bradley Cooper has been hired to play the role (with Steven Spielberg directing) in a movie about this guy’s life. What is a sniper? It’s someone who hides behind a rock or a tree and then shoots people. But here’s my point: most of his victims were brown people. Has anybody noticed that? On top of that, he’s not just a veteran, he’s a “hero,” dubbed “America’s deadliest sniper.” That’s like referring to Jack the Ripper or the Boston Stranger as “the world’s most aggressive feminists”!

        What is the message being sent all over the world? Kill people of color and you’ll be rewarded. You’ll argue that “they kill white people, too.” So that supports my point in terms of how the U.S. is being perceived.

       Where is all this radicalization coming from? It’s coming from right here in Washington, DC and its long-time policies. Slowly but surely America is becoming a dictatorship and is violating the privacy rights of its own gullible citizens. Having become a debtor nation, this country is farming jobs out to other countries and raising college tuition; revising its history and working to eliminate its racist past from movies and old-time TV shows. In other words it’s covering its tracks. Why? Because those tracks lead to many of the reasons why this nation has become a bastion for radicalization.

         America is so infected that even when it tries to do right it does wrong. You see it almost every week: some politician, whose role it is to use words and create images, has made some “racial” or “sexual” gaff and has to issue an apology. What’s inside usually comes out, and not always in a drunken stupor. Look at the composition of Congress: there’s your answer. The same people who have made decisions for centuries are still there in the guise of their progeny – progeny who, like their ancestors, believe in talking about equality while living in gated communities.

        Because of its history and tendency toward sensationalism, America has provided a rationale for radicalism. Just because it’s disguised in an earth vs. alien motif or humans versus zombies background doesn’t hide the fact that this is a country that beliefs in shooting first and then shouting, “halt!” Cartoons that teach young children every bad manner and habit in the book. And it’s been this way since the days of Little Black Sambo, when hundreds of thousands of kids had to sit in classrooms and listen to this crap. It happens when people talk about being “politically correct” so that they won’t slip up and say “nigger” or “spic.” Black women lightening their skin while white women get tans in an attempt to darken theirs. As the Last Poets album denotes, “This is Madness!”

      As most of us know, history shows two tendencies: that which rises and comes into power and then that which withers away like the last leaves of a painfully prolonged autumn. America is in the latter stages and simply chooses to go out “in a blaze of glory” (ala Rome). The National Rifle Association, the Tea Party movement, anti-immigrant hysteria (when white folks are the real illegal aliens) and the rise of a social networking movement that has people looking at i-pods as the world is crumbling around them – this is a sign of “the end of days.”

        I’m no Christian because I don't associate with any religion - none of them - that want to relegate women to second class status (and most of them do). But I do believe this: “whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Look around you: what some call radicalization is a response to this mass insanity. 

       And we have only ourselves to blame.