I visited my family house yesterday and had a riveting argument and discussion with my pop. Something led to him mentioning Iranian leaders as devils for killing their citizens. At the same vein, popsy emphatically labeled Trump and America the good people for trying to end the bad leaders of Iran.
I took a deep breath and calmed down because I knew I was going on a delicate mission that involved shooting down misinformation and religious sensibility. As a Christian, my dad’s bias is definitely for Israel and America. We all have such biases until some of us embraced objective analysis and true information.
Arguments between me and my pop can get fiery some times, but on this one, the Holy Spirit was upon me. I was calm and lucid than loud. I asked him with the softest a voice can be; “papa, what makes the Iranian leaders who killed their citizens more devilish than the American leaders who kill citizens of other countries”? Of course it took him time to digest that question because he tried to prevaricate( by the way I learnt the word from my dad when he used it on my elder sister years back)
Pop said any government that kills its own citizens is evil, and I totally agreed with him. I never said the Iranian leaders weren’t evil as charged. I just asked my dad what makes them more evil than their American counterparts that have killed civilians in same Iran? I told him about Vietnam, Libya, Afghanistan and places where America wasted lives of civilians.
Concentrating on Libya, I told my old man how Libya was flourishing under the ‘tyrant’ Muammar Ghaddafi, and how Libya today not only became desolate, but contributed to the surge of terrorism in Nigeria, no thanks to his ‘darling’ America. I was glad he mentioned Ghadaffi as one of the bad leaders America went after, that’s why I seized the opportunity to tell him more about Ghaddafi’s Libya.
The question i kept asking pop is this; “what is the difference between leaders who kill their own citizens and leaders who kill citizens of other countries”? To help him figure things out, i told him that some of the terrorist groups that America is fighting today were created by the same America for their interests, then when their is a fall out, the group becomes everybody’s terrorist that everyone must fight, even though America sired them in the first place.
All these felt like too much for my old man to deal with, but I didn’t spare him at all, he is intelligent enough to draw the logical conclusions.
Surprisingly, my old man corroborated my argument by mentioning Kwame Nkruma whom he said was frustrated by foreign interests because he wanted to make Ghana a great nation. I hurriedly supported him with another example of Thomas Sankara, not wanting this ‘divine opportunity’ to slip off.
We talked about how the West( ndi ocha) can destabilize any country for their own interests. Feeling like I have done some job about misinformation or lack of it, I moved to religion.
Pop’s deference to America and the White generally is also religious. Here Israel enjoys bountifully. I told him there are more christians in Iran than in Israel and that the Iranian christians probably enjoy more tolerance from the leaders than christians in Israel do. He remembered that a synagogue was bombed in Iran and I’m like; ” you see what I’m talking about”
I reminded him about Trump’s genocide adventure in Nigeria. I told him Trump most likely would have got what he is looking for from Tinubu and safety of christians was just a smokescreen. At every time I hit my gavel, you could see both bewilderment and some kind of “are you for real” expression on my dad’s face. His reluctance to let go of what he thought was truth came with ‘but ehhh’ response to the arguments he couldn’t contradict but still wouldn’t accept.
Whether my pop accepted all I said or not doesn’t really matter, what matters to me is that he heard a perspective that challenged some biases and preconceptions about the Whites(ndi ocha) and Israel as the good guys and the Arabs and Iran as the bad ones. We some how came to agree that bad leaders like the ones we have in Nigeria that kill their own citizens aren’t more evil than the bad leaders that kill citizens of other countries while making life cozier for their own citizens.
China and Russia are in his list of bad people of the earth. Hopefully my conversation will make him add more to that list after realizing that bad people are everywhere and same with good people. All I did was to let popsy look beyond the Western media narratives, propaganda and misinformation, as well as look beyond religious biases in assessing Peoples.
How do the Pope and Pastor Chris Oyakhilome come in? Stay tuned.