I reject the warped idea that the other side is the culprit

Official Kenya identifies radicalisation as the cause of all our deadly security woes. That puts me in a dilemma. For, though I consider myelf a radical, the thought of murdering a human being has never crossed my mind. However, radicalisation is just one of those scapegoats which every elite invents for its own failings.

While, objectively, society always struggles for a general mental and behavioural equanimity, the intelligentsia habitually seeks to shift the blame from itself to anybody else for the spectacular failure of its own system of upbringing and “education” to achieve this.

For, in every generation, our leading classes appear increasingly bereft of ideas. Every time members open their mouths, what comes out is either the polluted air that Kenyans condemn as “hate speech” or an alarming proliferation of nihilism in thought.

Our official attack on radicalisation is a deepening expression of nescience of human nature and history. It reveals a social stratum completely bereft of ideas. On one level, this radical challenge to me as a teacher of English probably stems from one hait of the corporate family.

It always seeks to identify the adjective radical and the verb to radicalise with the characteristically disorderly and infantile anarchism which is characteristic of the ruling Western corporate class. But if you identify radicalism with leftism, you would be hard put to describe America’s Christian Fundamentalism – which is decidedly right-wing – as radical.

It is from the Latin word radicus (“root”) that we characterise any utterance or act as radical if it delves deep down to the real or metaphorical root of whatever is under discussion. That, then, is the problem. It is that only if our teachers delved deep down to the real roots of our world’s social problems can we legitimately call them “radical”.

In this sense of the word, then, we must say that objective radicalism is what is missing from our whole classroom upbringing and government offices. Our social sciences do not go to the roots of things. Christianity, Islam and Judaism are a good example. Basically, they teach the same theistic religion, Yahweh-Allah being the same deity.

Radically, then, Jesus and Mohammed impart more or less the same moral teaching and are the same prophet. Because I have studied both systems radically (down to the taproot), it wouldn’t occur to me to hurl a petrol bomb at you simply because your expression of god differed from mine in both nominal or liturgical terms.

Thus radical ignorance – absence of radical knowledge – of each other is the reason fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims seek to slaughter one another so mindlessly, claiming that such bloodiness is the passport to “God’s heaven”.

SAME DEITY

Anybody who slaughters human beings just because his form of worship of the same deity is different merely reveals how small his medulla oblongata is, reveals how small his understanding is of the God whom my Nilotic Gnostics once worshipped, how unradical his inability to go to the roots of his religion.

It seems probable that if all Christians studied the Koran and all Muslims studied the New Testament radically, the two religions would immediately rediscover their unity of purpose, see the need to conflate their moral and apostolic energies and thus hasten the coming of the “peacable kingdom”.

The sacerdotal institution on both sides is what has turned the altar into a forum for propagating self-importance, self-righteousness, hatred and false witnessing against each other – preferring to slaughter all dissenters rather than to sue for the mutual youth enlightenment of the kind that Yahweh-Allah would ordain.

One can readily see that, because no positive radicalisation takes place in our education forums, so many of our youngsters will continue to grow up with the terribly warped idea that the other side is the culprit and that God will reward us handsomely when we kill them all. That is why I reject such a god.

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