Fanatical Religion + Capitalism = Mass Heat Death in Mecca and 'Murica

Homeland Shit to Shake Your Head At

By now I’m guessing that most of my readers have heard about the mass heat deaths that took place during the annual Muslim haji pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. The body count so far is reported at around 500 but the official total will certainly top 1000.

Death claimed masses who prayed and marched for hours under a scorching sun amid temperatures that ranged from 108 Fahrenheit to 120.

The haji pilgrimage, an exhausting endeavor even without extreme heat, is required once in one’s life for Muslims with the means to reach Saudi Arabia. The victims include people from Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Algeria, and Egypt among other countries.

A common US-American reaction to this story is to shake one’s head and say that “nobody in their right mind would put themselves at risk of heatstroke and death like those ‘fanatical hajis’ did.”

Well, yes, but, dear Americans, please note seven things:

+1. Your own country/“society” has hatched no small amount of fanatical religiosity. It has given rise to a fascistic Christian fundamentalism that has reached into some of the highest circles of your government, including many of your elected officials and your extremely powerful Supreme Court. Sam Alito, the Supreme Court justice who cited Medieval Christian “precedent” to justify the repeal of women’s constitutional right to control their reproductive lives two years ago, is a fanatical, flag-waving far-ight-Christian who thinks that the USA faces a life-or-death struggle between those who do and those who don't believe in the literal word of the Bible.

One of ‘Murica’s many right wing/Trumpist-fascist/“red” states has just passed a law requiring the barbarian Ten Commandments to be posted on the walls of every public-school classroom from K to PhD. Expect other “red” states to follow.

Masses of US Americans believe it is their God-ordained duty to eliminate liberals and leftists and insufficiently fascist Republicans by any and all means necessary.

Their Christian Holy Bible contains numerous stories in which believers’ beloved God sadistically orders and rewards mass murder, rape, ethnic cleansing, genocide, slavery, and the total subordination of women.

Millions of Americans look forward to a coming Armageddon that will mark the return to Earth of a super hero named Jesus. This glorious occasion will bring about the fiery death of most of humanity, sparing only true believers in Christ and his dad.

Most US Christian fundamentalists reject basic climate science (even though many of them might welcome evidence that “the end is near,” bringing “the saved” closer to God.)

Now there’s some crazy shit to shake your head about!

As Gilbert Achcar noted years ago, the failure of the West and the former Soviet bloc to develop a credible secular and socialist alternative to US-led “neoliberal” capitalism has produced a combination of “socio-economic anomie” and “political and ideological anomie” that “has inevitably led people to fall back on other factors of social solidarity such as religion, family and fatherland.” This is true in the United States and Europe as well as in the Middle East and other parts of the world.

+2. Your own country is the chief funder, equipper, protector, and ally of fanatical Judeo-fascist Israel, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians in a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing since last October. Your tax dollars have helped kill a Hell of a lot more Muslims in Gaza than died in the recent pilgrimage to Mecca. Shake your head at that.

+3. Your own country experiences thousands of heat deaths every year, many of them inflicted on working people expected by sadistic employers to toil past the limits of normal heat endurance.

US cooling site. Do you know where your closest one is this record-setting summer?

+4. Your own country’s imperialist (“foreign”) policy explicitly and directly cultivated fanatical and fundamentalist Islam as part of its Cold War agenda and its related “divide and rule” strategy in the oil-rich Middle East and Southwest Asia.

+5. Saudi Arabia, which hosts the death trap that is the annual summer haji pilgrimage in a time of escalating climate crisis, is a longtime leading recipient of US military and economic assistance. It is also arguably the most reactionary state on Earth, an Islamofascist monarchy that beheads dissenters and viciously oppresses women and ethnic minorities.

+6. Your country’s longtime massive intervention in the Middle East (home to more than 30 US military bases and at least 40,000 US troops) has been fundamentally about protecting US access to and exploitation of the region’s remarkable oil reserves. The US-led extraction, sale, and burning of fossil fuels is the engine behind the ever more lethal and potentially exterminist heating of the planet currently underway.

+7. The Mecca heat deaths are a deadly symptom of a world capitalist system that the US has long advanced, directed, exploited, and protected. We are seeing new planetary, national, local, and regional heat records every year, every season, every month. US-led capitalism-imperialism is turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber. The problem is rooted in the capitalist mode of production. The key factors are capitalism’s addiction to constant growth, its planless competitive anarchy, its amoral and inherent indifference to anything but investor profit, its huge sunk capital invested in fossil fuels, its reliance on fossil fuels to power endless growth, its propagandistic control of public opinion, and its division of the planet into a giant multiplicity of sovereign states. As the Iowa City Marxist Christopher Clark recently wrote me, “the only possible solution [to the capitalogenic climate catastrophe] is an international socialist planned economy established through socialist revolution. There is no solution to this question via reforming capitalism.”

US-Americans can look at the Mecca heat victims with all the head-shaking disdain they like. The basic historical and scientific facts are clear as day: the runaway fossil fuel and climate change champion capitalist ‘Murica is the nation that bears the greatest responsibility for the climate catastrophe. The USA is home to the world's highest per capita carbon footprint and the leading historical contributor to world atmospheric carbon.

It reached 123 degrees Fahrenheit in New Delhi last month

Think the scenes of swarming, sweating, and collapsing pilgrims in Mecca look creepy, crazy, and bizarre? Take a look at this picture, one of many that could be taken of ‘Murica’s massive carbon-spewing traffic jams:

Southern California traffic before Thanksgiving

Insane.

Want to see batshit crazy conduct? Go to one of Murica’s Meccas — shopping malls — on the day after Thanksgiving:

At the same time, the climate crisis is lethally evident right here in the belly of the imperial and eco-cidal beast. Yes, right here in here in religion- and fundamentalism-plagued, carbon-mad ‘Murica, the capitalogenic climate catastrophe is wreaking many-sided havoc — epic droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, derechos, wildfires, epic rainfalls, grassfires, forest fires, mudslides, giant whiteout snowfalls, bitter polar vortexes, chronic floods, killer heat domes/waves, a new and rising epidemic of heat-related deaths and illnesses — from coast to coast.

Americans, stop shaking your heads at “those crazy hajis” and take an honest look in the mirror at the sheer criminal madness of what your fanatical capitalist system and fundamentalism-poisoned politics are doing to the world and even to your own privileged and imperialist nation.