The American Condition

When you talk about the global South, you say our countries and our people as if you're from there. But you are a white American after all. How do you reconcile that?

Well, say our people and I say our countries with regards to the Muslims and the Muslim lands because I'm a Muslim. The history of the Muslims is my history. The Muslims are my family. That's my nation. The ummah is my nation.

Being American isn't a citizenship. It's a condition. And once you realize that you have that condition, you can spend the rest of your life trying to recover from it. It's like PTSD. You have American dissonance syndrome.

And if you reach adulthood and you're still patriotic, you have the most profound case of Stockholm Syndrome imaginable because that society has deeply, deeply wronged you. I mean, when you say that someone is an American, basically you're saying that they were an abused child, psychologically abused, emotionally abused, mentally abused, educationally abused, and abused in every other kind of way. You've been lied to. You've been programmed with dysfunction. Your intellect has been, systematically degraded.

Your intellectual and your moral depth has been deliberately depleted to make you shallow. Cognitive dissonance has been inflicted on you your whole life. When you say American, you may just as well say damaged or victimized. You come from a country, that has a fabricated national identity around a set of values and principles it never ever applied anywhere. And in fact, more often than not, only ever applied the opposite.

You live in a country that is demonstrably and obviously an authoritarian oligarchy, but which you have been taught since childhood is a democracy. No one living in America today has lived under any administration that wasn't guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, committed both abroad and on domestic soil. And you've been brainwashed into thinking that your country stands for freedom and justice. Quite sick. Your education system is based on the Prussian system of indoctrination to turn every student into an obedient, conformist, slave to power.

But you pretend, that your society cherishes individuality. They've done nothing but damage you. Your schools have damaged you. Your media has damaged you. Your entertainment, your fake history, your myths, your government have done nothing but damage you all your life.

That's what it means to be an American. And part of that damage, one aspect of that relentless damage is in the question itself. You're a white American, you said. That matters to you, and you force it to matter to everyone in that country even though it's an actually completely irrelevant characteristic. But because of the way that you have, developed as a so called society, you made it relevant, And you made it an issue, and you insist on keeping it an issue.

So you can never escape. I don't even get to make it irrelevant to me because of the racial history in America. The whole context of race in The United States is a self perpetuating death spiral that never dies. You assign value to all of these characteristics that are actually the least valuable characteristics that a human being can have. I mean, why race?

Why skin color and not eye color or hair color? Why not height? It's incredibly arbitrary and stupid, but you did what you did. You drew the lines where you drew the lines, and you sentenced whole segments of humanity to imprisonment within these shallow superficial meaningless definitions, which then created a long disgraceful history of actual experience that millions upon millions of people have suffered for no reason. So everyone who grew up in America eventually has to pursue self rehabilitation, deprogramming, repair, debugging, detoxification, just to try to undo all the damage that being American has done to them, just so they can try to be normal.

To be American is to suffer from a multitude of chronic diseases. It's a condition not a nationality. It's a condition that every serious and sincere person has to try to cure themselves of over the course of their adulthood. But for most of them it's a terminal condition. They'll never get over it.

They'll die that way. And the sickest part of it is that this condition, you're actually pressured to preserve it, to uphold it, to cherish it rather than to abolish it. Just like your question. As if I'm doing something wrong by not basing my identity and my worldview and my understanding on the dysfunctional reductionist definition of white American. I mean, look, for most of the people who are categorized as Americans and who claim American history as their history, who feel some sort of, you know, connection to the so called founding fathers, Paul Revere and what have you.

Most of them only have have even been over there for two or three generations. A smaller number than that's been over there for four generations, and very few, except for the descendants of slaves, have been over there since the beginning. The overwhelming majority of so called Americans throughout most of American history, their families were somewhere else. It's the same with mine. The Irish side of my family came over during the potato famine, and the German side came over more recently than that.

Yet for some reason, we're all supposed to believe that we are all somehow connected to the history and the cultural heritage of that country. Connected to people that we're not connected to in any way whatsoever, as if they are our ancestors, you know. They even call them our forefathers. What do I have to do with George Washington? America isn't a tribe.

America is nothing but a blood soaked piece of land that a ragtag horde of Europeans fled to to escape Europe. And then it would then it became a land that people fled to to escape American foreign policy that pillaged their own countries. And you know the people that have undeniably been so called American longer than 99% of so called Americans, the descendants of African slaves, are still treated like outsiders. In a country that they've been in longer than most people. They've been there at least as long as the as the most pedigreed aristocratic so called Mayflower families.

I mean, just on seniority alone, they're supposed to be among the highest status citizens of that country. Their ancestors sacrificed more by force and for more generations than anyone living in America today. But until now, they have to fight just to be given equal rights and equal opportunities on par with people who just got off the boat three generations ago, two generations ago, one generation ago, or yesterday. Let's not even talk about the indigenous people because of course let's not talk about them. They're never to be spoken of.

But somehow we're all Americans. This abstract fabricated identity that everyone is just supposed to believe in and unthinkingly adopt. Because if you didn't, you might actually notice how abstract and how fabricated it is. You know, when it comes to some sort of national identity, country based, geographically based identity, politically based identity, everyone accepts the idea that you can become integrated into a history that isn't yours. That for instance, your family, can immigrate to The US in the twentieth century or the nineteenth century or the twenty first century and get citizenship, and then suddenly you have Abraham Lincoln in your family tree.

Everyone accepts that as rational. But when it comes to Islam, for some reason you can't accept it. You can't accept that becoming Muslim connects you to the continuum of Muslim lives stretching back all the way through the followers of all the prophets. You can't accept that becoming a Muslim makes you a member of a nation based on belief. Even though belief in so called American values and the and the American constitution is supposedly what makes you or what makes an immigrant an American.

You know, an Italian American, a Greek American, a Haitian American, everyone. Everyone recognizes and everyone accepts that those people, immigrants, feel a connection to and still derive their identity from their home country. But being a Muslim American isn't supposed to be like that. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, all of these men who never believed in or practiced the values that you're supposed to revere them for are supposed to mean more to you than Rasulullah more than the Sahaba, more than all of the Muslims throughout history all over the world who believed in and practiced and lived by the values that you as a Muslim also believe in, practice, and live by. No.

Sorry. I do not identify with the hypocrites of so called American history who only ever use their preaching of values and principles as a way to mislead and misdirect the population and to distract them, from the misery caused by the actual values that they practiced. The values of greed and selfishness and white supremacy and classism and materialism, exploitation, theft, murder, and plunder. I was raised in the country where those values were practiced but not preached, and where the values that were preached were not practiced. Just having been born there, and just having been raised there does not oblige me to pretend otherwise.

No. The history of Islam, the history of the Muslims, that's my history. And that includes Muslims from all parts of the world. Muslims of every race and color, ethnicity and language. Those are my predecessors.

Those are my ancestors. The Ummah is my nation and my national identity. And their history is my history. Being American is nothing but a legal status and an incidental fact of where my parents were when my mother gave birth to me. The rest of it is just damage, and programming that I've had to overcome over the course of my life and superficial characteristics like my language and, you know, certain cultural practices like the food and the manner of clothes that I'm used to, what I'm familiar with.

But it's like what I've talked about before, being a westerner, being an American refers more to a mentality than a nationality. And separating that mentality from that nationality is the most crucial thing that any American can ever do for their own mental, spiritual, psychological, and emotional well-being. And I think that any American who does that, who genuinely does that, sincerely does that, well I think that they will inevitably find that they feel that they have more in common with the people of the global South than with mainstream America. Whether they're Muslim or non Muslim. I personally believe that nothing can actually help you do that.

Deprogram yourself better than Islam. But even for those who don't embrace Islam, who just try to come to terms with the fallacy of Americanness and Americanism. Well, I think that they'll realize how duped and how propagandized and how abused they've been their whole lives. And how the system over there is parasitically sucking every drop of blood, sweat and tears out of their beings. And how all of their sacrifices and all of their hard work, are being paid back in IOUs and counterfeit bills.

I think they realize how, they're being conned from the cradle to the grave, all for the enrichment and all for the benefit of people who don't and never did believe in the myths that they tell you about America, that they want you to believe. And I think that they'll start to identify with the oppressed and with the victimized all around the world. You know, just like how the the super rich are a nation unto themselves. America's victims globally should be a nation unto themselves too. America's victims, foreign and domestic.

And they should feel and they should build solidarity with one another because we all have more in common with each other than we have with that predator nation that's been preying on all of us.