The looming threat to stars and stripes
In my school days, one day we got the news that one of our female teachers got married and was soon off to join her husband in Syria. We were all in awe for her to be so fortunate to be going away to a nice country where the Pakistani husband was making a handsome amount of money. That was in the late 90s.
In early 2020, I was in Istanbul. After dinner, I took a walk in the beautiful city. A man approached me begging for money or food while showing me his passport. Then a minute or so later came another man begging with his passport again. I encountered several such Arabic-speaking men. They were all Syrian. They all said they were refugees from Syria and needed food. The purpose behind these two stories is to make the point that this is what a civil war does to a country. People now don’t go to Syria for work but rather Syrian citizens wander the globe begging for food and shelter. If the proposal for another female teacher of this generation came from a Pakistani man working in Syria, it would surely not be viewed with awe now.
There is a lesson in this for everyone, especially the United States of America: a country deeply plagued by internal division driven by anger and hatred. The ghosts of the Taliban have come home, meaning the hatred for those who have a different ideology, religion, skin colour, and political affiliation are inside America. While everything else is made in China, hatred is made in America.
It may sound outlandish and too far-fetched an idea that mighty America would face the same fate as Syria due to an internal civil war, however, it is not unimaginable. We may not want to be bold in the verbal expression of our opinions but we can be bold in our thoughts. Many scholars already believe that America being the most lethal army mankind has ever seen and the largest economy in the world, can only be brought down by people from within instead of an armed attack by some foreign power.
With 9/11, America came together against the common enemy living in the caves of Afghanistan. It was “us” versus “them”. The alarming thing today is that those “us” and “them” are both in America now. The liberal thought rubs against the ever-narrowing conservative mentality driven by sheer hatred and anger. The election of Donald Trump was the expression of that anger by an electorate, whose feelings went undetected until that Halloween-ish election night of 2016.
America is a fertile land for the cultivation of conspiracy theories. No wonder, a vast majority of the Americans believe in the existence of QAnon. They think this individual, also called Q alternatively, is pulling the strings in the background and is leading the way toward a better America. The bubbles in which people live are stronger than ever.
While the Syrian civil war was ignited by a trigger from a nation in the neighbourhood (Tunisia), it is a weaker comparison to what can potentially happen in the US. Because while the war is within, the trigger is within too. The trigger to unite America came from abroad in the form of 9/11 but the trigger to divide the nation is homegrown. In Syria, the nation actually got united against the government during the civil war.
In America, however, in a civil war lite, if you will, of the last few years, the nation has divided chronically. In a full-fledged civil war, the division would reach mind-boggling levels. And that is why it has the potential to be very explosive. If it might come handy, the Nazi Germans also thought they were on the right path during their racist and destructive actions. They were quite an educated lot. Sometimes, the most dangerous threat is within.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 18th, 2021.
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