This is a verbatim copy of a comment I posted to Indonesia Matters and relates to a posting on that site regarding attempts to erase Valentine's Day from the social calendar because it is a day of sin. The comments also relate to some of the comments of other commentators to the post (so go read the original post for yourself)...
I guess this is why the term "globalization" was coined! Rapidly developing technology and ease of communication means that cultural influences other than our own can permeate the whole world -- some good, some bad but that's the way it goes.
The only way to stop it is to prevent people from communicating with each other, prevent travel to different local regions and foreign locales, and to generally restrict the basic rights of citizens -- if this were to happen then we might have a real conspiracy on our hands!
But that said it is a creative approach to whip out an old law or create new laws that label certain cultural traditions like Valentine's Day a sin and then let the very heavy hand of the law deal with it! It is not the right approach but you do what you do!
Jewish conspiracies and Jews ruling the world through the domination of the mass media and the monopolization of capital and any other theory out there all stem from that same source that the Jews are responsible for the death of Christ and are to be punished for it. Let's not forget that the crucifiction of Christ was possibly a political power play and that Christ was a Jew and the distinction between Christianity and Judaism may have really been a result of seeking out political advantge in tumultuous times (these differences have supposedly become more pronounced over time)...a reading of the Gospels will enlighten the reader to where the blame game originated.
Yet, when it is all said and done this absolute domination of world affairs has not allowed the Jews to remove the nonsense being spouted by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about wiping Israel of the face of the map from public discourse -- so much for world media domination! To be brutally honest I do not see the extermination of the Jews bringing about any positive changes in my life, it has been tried before although Ahmadinejad would have us believe that the Holocaust is a fiction and that it never occurred. But obviously listening to the man it is something that he desires to see happen now -- a world leader advocating the extermination of a group of people from the earth -- it is time we as a global community woke up and smelled the coffee, we have a serious problem here.
The extermination of groups of people removes from the very fabric of our communities those things that make us what we are. There is no glory or honor in genocide and the Holocaust is a history lesson that as human beings we must not be allowed to forget. even more importantly it is something we must not allow ourselves to repeat!
Killing people for their religious beliefs is just plain morally wrong and I do not think my moral compass is broken on this point!
However, I do see my life taking a significant turn for the worst if Ahmadinejad was to rule my world -- definitely no heaven there!
It reminds me of an oft used argument from the Indonesian context where every time there was rumblings and under-currents of dissatisfaction with the economy the Soeharto Government trotted out the race card that it was Indonesian Chinese almost total domination of the local markets that was the root cause of all this economic evil -- rubbish!
But the real question here is that if I give my wife a box of chocolates and flowers on any other day besides 14 February have I committed a sin in Bukittinggi or some other part of Sumatra?
I would have thought there are more pressing issues in those parts of Indonesia than the sinful nature of globalization and additions to Indonesia's diverse cultural traditions.
A little bit more love and tolerance in the world from all sides would serve us much better than some of the vitriol being espoused here. The issue here is the value of foreign cultural traditions and the manner they are incorporated into local cultural traditions and not one of the big Zionist conspiracy to rule the world -- the Jewish conspiracy is an alternate reality that just does not stand up to scrutiny.
Whatever happened to that base Indonesian ideological concept of unity in diversity?
I do not expect to convert any diehards to my cause of tolerance but as Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi said "You must be the change you want to see in the world"!
So, on that note thanks for reading this far :)
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