Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist living and working in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. You can find his biography and CV, including his many books, here.
I read Mr. Cook’s blog regularly. I also check out any of his articles or books whenever I come across them.
Yesterday, The Greenville Post (another excellent website I read regularly) published a Cook article entitled “How the Corporate Media Enslave Us to a World of Illusions.” Cook describes the slow evolution of his own social, political and historical consciousness as his work in journalism taught him to recognize something he calls the “Great Western Narrative.”
I hope you will take the time to read Cook’s article. He is extremely insightful. I have posted an excerpt below with a link to the entire article.
Cook’s analysis can be particularly challenging for Christians. He not only diagnoses the ways in which western Christians succumb to establishment propaganda, just like everyone else — no, brothers and sisters, we are not immune to the dangers of brainwashing —
But Cook’s advice for breaking free of the “Great Western Narrative” and learning to understand and engage in this world from a more humane
perspective, is very similar to the argument I tried to make for Christian readers in my book I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America.
Christian disciples can only perceive this world aright, that is, from a New Testament, heavenly perspective, when we learn to replace the Great Western Narrative with Jesus’ own Narrative of the Kingdom of God.
That should be a lifetime goal for every follower of Jesus. Yet, it is so much easier to live as loyal Americans than it is to be faithful citizens of God’s kingdom on earth.
This, in a nutshell, is the goal of my blog. Everything I write at HumanityRenewed, is something (I hope) that will help us to peel off the worldly consciousness — the Great Western Narrative — that works overtime to hold us captive and cripple our ability to live out God’s Kingdom citizenship in the here and now.
Nowhere is the evangelical church’s idolatry of the Great Western Narrative, coupled with its abandonment of Jesus’ Narrative of the Kingdom of God, more evident than in its blind devotion to Christian Zionism and the state of Israel, whatever its crimes.
Here is the excerpt:
“Israel is enthusiastically embraced by the Great Western Narrative: it is supposedly a liberal democracy, many of its inhabitants dress and sound like us, its cities look rather like our cities, its TV shows are given a makeover and become hits on our TV screens. If you don’t stand too close, Israel could be Britain or the US.
“But there are clues galore, for those who bother to look a little beyond superficialities, that there is something profoundly amiss about Israel. A few miles from their homes, the sons of those western-looking families regularly train their gun sights on unarmed demonstrators, on children, on women, on journalists, on medics, and pull the trigger with barely any compunction.
“They do so not because they are monsters, but because they are exactly like us, exactly like our sons. That is the true horror of Israel. We have a chance to see ourselves in Israel – because it is not exactly us, because most of us have some physical and emotional distance from it, because it still looks a little strange despite the best efforts of the western media, and because its own local narrative – justifying its actions – is even more extreme, even more entitled, even more racist towards the Other than the Great Western Narrative.
“It is that shocking realisation – that we could be Israelis, that we could be those snipers – that both opens the door and prevents many from stepping through to see what is on the other side. Or, more troubling still, halting at the threshhold of the doorway, glimpsing a partial truth without understanding its full ramifications.”
You can read Cook’s entire article here.
