the effects of absolute freedom

It is painful that people deliberately stoke others into violence. No man in his right mind would tolerate blasphemy against his religious icon. The Prophet of Islam is a no-go area for people and those who want to joke have more than enough things to joke with without offending anybody. While censor boards exist as gatekeepers of societal norm of decency there are no such gates in the cybersphere. Those with a little knowledge of gadgets can get it acted and then super inscribe anything on it.  If they have an account on YouTube they become instant success and can ignite a global war with their ignorance or their mischief. Nakoula Basseley the culprit in this instance falls in the category of mischief makers.

Even for a fraudster he knew he was treading on dangerous ground and having ignited his flame of hate and insouciance, he has fizzled into thin air with tons of credit cards he stole, the people he scammed including the actors who worked on his script unwary of his motive. Here lies the price of unchecked freedom. While he is in hiding, scores of innocent people do not have that chance. There is no predicting where the violence and destruction would lead a tension-soaked world. When people have been robbed of everything that makes for life, it is unfair to take their faith from them or to attempt to rubbish their belief.

Casualties of these protests may include political opportunists seeking to gain campaign mileage out of the situation. In America, whatever happens in the November polls may owe itself to the interpretation of how Ambassador Stephens died. The political system that brought the world to its knees by flexing its military muscles across the globe using unverifiable and nonexistent evidence of weapons of mass destruction anywhere its greed is challenged seeking to gain from this incident. The party that sunk its country’s economy into a $14 trillion deficit and left a sizeable percentage of its youths maimed also drowned global economy. Americans may need to think twice before casting their votes.

There is no way of explaining to the millions of people who have trooped out in protest either in Benghazi or in Sana’a that this is not action endorsed by the American government. There is no way of telling protesters that those they target are not the originators of this blasphemy. Spiritual affairs are hard to deal with and even moreso when it is all that is left for the poor without hope of a better life here. The middle class have dropped like paperweights to no class by global recession and religion has come in to fill the vacuum.  Where there is mass poverty and social dislocation, it is difficult to enforce a regime of rationality.

In spite of the sadness and the bloodshed, there is a golden opportunity for the developed world to re-prioritize. Freedom is no freedom where policy summersaults have caused social dislocation. Relevant figures show that more people have been killed by needless wars in the past two decades than were killed in the last World War. Defense budgets have quadrupled while more than two-third of the world population live on less than a dollar a day. Perhaps it is time to sit down and count the costs of our madventures in autocracy and re-prioritise. The world’s poor who now feed on fundamentalism could have been great members of the society if their cries of feed me more had been heard by war-mongering leaders.

Things were this disjointed globally when the United Nations was created. Today, it no longer preserves peace but rubberstamps unjust wars. If we must save our world, we must jettison the philosophy which tends to make the superpowers lord it over the weaker nations. We must change the policy that spends more researching weapons of mass destruction instead of feeding the poor. We must wrestle the world from ignorance by building schools and ensuring that those who graduate from them get jobs. If they are idle, nothing can stop the fundamentalists from reaching them first.