I confess that apart from three exceptions my view of American talk is dictated by on-screen programmes and their participants. Americans talk a lot. Any one of their documentaries can be exhausting in its verbiage without being exhaustive in its incisiveness. American talk appears to be designed to conceal rather than to discover the truth. It seems very difficult to call a spade a spade.
An example recently was an American television documentary on the fiery deaths of seven American astronauts. The programme was designed to show what happened and what was done about it. Within the space of 60 seconds somewhere in the programme it became very obvious that what happened was a piece of foam coming off and ripping a hole in one wing. You could see the hole and it was significant. Upon re-entry this hole allowed the fire to begin.
However, the programme and its participants spent the entire time showing how heroic the leader of the ground team was, how they went through all the planned procedures with strength and courage - and yet how they had to suffer failure at the end. It became very apparent that the ground team and the programme pretended that the hole in the wing was not significant. There was a wish to blank out the implications. This may have been due to the fact that in their arrogant planning failure was not an option, and there was nothing to be done. But American talk can be based upon such spurious assumptions and shortcomings.
Then the inquiry into the disaster by yet another American hero, while blaming organisational failure, failed in itself to be specific with the public. Or perhaps it was the programme makers who had to be non-specific with us, so that a spade could not be called a spade and the wooden-jawed leader of ground crew kept his job. But we can be assured that there was much talk analysing and explaining irrelevant factors.
As for the three Americans who visited me, I had been warned in advance not to speak about American political matters with them. He was Republican, she was Democrat, and the daughter was apolitical, but it made no difference. After all the tears of joy and hullabaloo about Obama he was beginning to show what a flop he was, but we had to close our eyes to this unwelcome fact and not talk about it. Just as the ground team had closed their eyes and not talked about the hole in the wing.
Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts
Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Friday, January 15, 2010
HAITI
We all want to see international support for a people suffering a catastrophe, do we not? The sudden outburst of sympathetic promises for Haiti after its earthquake is, however, extraordinary. There is a positively orgiastic international outpouring, led by the United States, for a poor little shit country nobody knows anything about. The spectacle of the last three U.S. presidents spear-heading a fundraising campaign is strange indeed. What is going on? What we are told is that Haiti is the poorest nation in the region, but at the same time it is a special little friend of the United States. How can a nation be both these things at the same time? Not a case of child abuse?
Omnipotent Obama has declared many a thing for Haiti but especially a contingent of paratroopers to protect Haitians from their own natural propensity for criminality. He is acting to protect Haiti in the awesome image of its big special friend. He has commissioned his special envoys, the Celestial Clintons, to do what has to be done. Indeed Beelzebub Bill has a personal interest in Haiti, He sent in the United States military when He was Himself the Omnipotent One, and did what had to be done when an elected government threatened to go astray. He is personally affronted that God should visit such a catastrophe upon His own Haiti. He takes it very personally.
I cannot say it any better than Carl Dix: "The United States has promised $100 million, sounds like a lot, but that is about 1% of the US military budget for occupying Iraq and Afghanistan for one month. What have they done so far? What they have mainly brought in are paratroopers to help secure the situation and to control things as opposed to focussing on what people really need which is food, water, access to healthcare and relief operations. I think about Afghanistan where they have helicopter gunships going around firing missiles at villages, think about what those helicoptors could do if they had been deployed to Haiti where they are talking about how the roads are down and nobody can get supplies through, well a helicoptor could airlift rescuers, airlift food or water or doctors.
So there is a question of what the priorities are here, as well as the history of US-Haitian relations. The problem is when you talk about Haiti's lack of infrastructure you have to talk about the political and economic strangulation of Haiti historically by the US going all the way back to the founding of Haiti. The US and France attempted to isolate and blockade Haiti when the Haitian slaves rose up and chased the French out because the US felt it would be a very bad example for all the African slaves in the US to hear that the slaves in a neighbouring country had gotten free.
You need a rescue and supply effort that doesn't suppress the Haitian people but actually unleashes and helps them in doing this because there has been a portrayal of Haitians as thugs and criminals just as the way they tried to portray the people in New Orleans after Katrina as criminals who were looting and killing everything, when people were actually saving themselves because the government at all levels, local, federal and state had refused to do that, people were stealing food to get something to eat, taking boats to save other people.
You need a relief effort that is backing up the Haitian people and doing that, not one that is suppressing them in order to maintain Haiti as a low wage area where people can be paid starvation wages to produce goods for export, and not an area where globalisation can destroy the domestic agriculture as US efforts have done in Haiti since the 1980s."
I just know that this analysis is going to be proven correct. Already the US is a military presence controlling who else can land in Haiti. Just today two aircraft carrying medical equipment were turned away by the US military whose helicoptors appear to patrol the skies not to be helpful but to survey the country for trouble, which given the US approach is almost guaranteed to occur.
Update: As the hysterical goodwill towards poor little obedient Haiti continues, one has to wonder when comparing this to the complete indifference toward Gaza which was hit in similar fashion not by an act of God, but by an act of fascist man. I realise that the world's establishment media is comfortable expressing compassion for Haiti and indifference for Gaza but what about the people of the world? Do they really have compassion for one set of people and indifference for another set? because if they do, then the compassion has to be completely phoney. Pretty scarey.
Omnipotent Obama has declared many a thing for Haiti but especially a contingent of paratroopers to protect Haitians from their own natural propensity for criminality. He is acting to protect Haiti in the awesome image of its big special friend. He has commissioned his special envoys, the Celestial Clintons, to do what has to be done. Indeed Beelzebub Bill has a personal interest in Haiti, He sent in the United States military when He was Himself the Omnipotent One, and did what had to be done when an elected government threatened to go astray. He is personally affronted that God should visit such a catastrophe upon His own Haiti. He takes it very personally.
I cannot say it any better than Carl Dix: "The United States has promised $100 million, sounds like a lot, but that is about 1% of the US military budget for occupying Iraq and Afghanistan for one month. What have they done so far? What they have mainly brought in are paratroopers to help secure the situation and to control things as opposed to focussing on what people really need which is food, water, access to healthcare and relief operations. I think about Afghanistan where they have helicopter gunships going around firing missiles at villages, think about what those helicoptors could do if they had been deployed to Haiti where they are talking about how the roads are down and nobody can get supplies through, well a helicoptor could airlift rescuers, airlift food or water or doctors.
So there is a question of what the priorities are here, as well as the history of US-Haitian relations. The problem is when you talk about Haiti's lack of infrastructure you have to talk about the political and economic strangulation of Haiti historically by the US going all the way back to the founding of Haiti. The US and France attempted to isolate and blockade Haiti when the Haitian slaves rose up and chased the French out because the US felt it would be a very bad example for all the African slaves in the US to hear that the slaves in a neighbouring country had gotten free.
You need a rescue and supply effort that doesn't suppress the Haitian people but actually unleashes and helps them in doing this because there has been a portrayal of Haitians as thugs and criminals just as the way they tried to portray the people in New Orleans after Katrina as criminals who were looting and killing everything, when people were actually saving themselves because the government at all levels, local, federal and state had refused to do that, people were stealing food to get something to eat, taking boats to save other people.
You need a relief effort that is backing up the Haitian people and doing that, not one that is suppressing them in order to maintain Haiti as a low wage area where people can be paid starvation wages to produce goods for export, and not an area where globalisation can destroy the domestic agriculture as US efforts have done in Haiti since the 1980s."
I just know that this analysis is going to be proven correct. Already the US is a military presence controlling who else can land in Haiti. Just today two aircraft carrying medical equipment were turned away by the US military whose helicoptors appear to patrol the skies not to be helpful but to survey the country for trouble, which given the US approach is almost guaranteed to occur.
Update: As the hysterical goodwill towards poor little obedient Haiti continues, one has to wonder when comparing this to the complete indifference toward Gaza which was hit in similar fashion not by an act of God, but by an act of fascist man. I realise that the world's establishment media is comfortable expressing compassion for Haiti and indifference for Gaza but what about the people of the world? Do they really have compassion for one set of people and indifference for another set? because if they do, then the compassion has to be completely phoney. Pretty scarey.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
10 MILLION A YEAR
I am obviously not thinking of those success stories of my glorious civilization, those shining exemplars of ingenuity and enterprise, for whom salesmanship lies at the heart of human relations, those precious and superior beings to whom we are all beholden and for whom we hold such veneration, because for these immortal souls 10 million a year is probably not a sufficient remuneration. No, I am thinking of persons somewhat regrettably at the other end of life's wonderful spectrum, persons so unsuccessful as to be almost correctly described as non-persons, who doubtless have only themselves to blame.
10 million children die a year. 10 million. Apparently it corresponds to an aircraft full of them falling out of the sky every 15 minutes. Is it bird flu, or swine flu, or Aids? Why is it not on national television every night? Where are the mobilizing forces of righteous international corporate action? No need to worry, it is just plain old-fashioned starvation and the comfortable cannot catch it.
Indeed the comfortable contribute considerably to starving 10 million a year by protecting and subsidising their own products while subjecting those of the uncomfortable to tariff and exploitation. In the name of free market globalisation - which does not apply to the United States or the European Union - the comfortable insist upon flooding the uncomfortable with the surplus goods of their own comfort, destroying the indigenous production of goods. Having played a significant part in creating poverty the comfortable send in the United Nations to assist the economies of the uncomfortable while having no intention of buying anything from them that is subsequently produced unless completely on their own terms. The uncomfortable are not allowed to compete against the comfortable in any genuine free market.
These sick values are exemplified in the capitalistic horror that is the United States. It goes right back to the founding of that peculiar nation. Reading those wonderful stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder's pioneering family to my six children in succession, even then we read of proud Pa who is independent, who does not need anyone's help and who does not need to help anyone else unless he chooses. (This does not stop Pa taking off when they are starving and forcing wheat from someone else who was not choosing to share it). This phoney philosophy of choice was mysteriously laid down from the start. The ultimate logical end of this attitude is that the final 'choice' may just have to be starvation and death. In the current United States debate on health care reform one conditioned pawn in the game stated proudly that he would rather die poor and free - presumably in preference to living in a civilized nation which looked after those who for whatever reason were unable to do so themselves.
This is one way I can rationalise why the United States can carry on the way it does with a supposedly clear conscience. Then I get some understanding of copycats, for example, how the United States and its little buddy Israel can behave toward Gaza without a blush. How the United States and its despicable crony the European Union has behaved toward Iraq the way they have with economic sanctions and military war.
In my idle luxury, living in the eye of empire, I used to wonder how the world kept going, why it did not come to a grinding halt and fall apart. The people in charge did not seem to have a complete picture. Now I know that for the families of 10 million different children every year, and for hundreds of millions more like them, the world is not working, it is falling apart. But here in a country like New Zealand we can sleep on. What will wake us up will be that time when the centre of empire decides to really take over New Zealand. Warships in the harbours and helicoptors in the skies will be the time when we discover the implacable ruthlessness of the United States, the time when the false mask of benignity begins to slip off. Then we will begin to know what the vulnerable in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East are now experiencing.
10 million children die a year. 10 million. Apparently it corresponds to an aircraft full of them falling out of the sky every 15 minutes. Is it bird flu, or swine flu, or Aids? Why is it not on national television every night? Where are the mobilizing forces of righteous international corporate action? No need to worry, it is just plain old-fashioned starvation and the comfortable cannot catch it.
Indeed the comfortable contribute considerably to starving 10 million a year by protecting and subsidising their own products while subjecting those of the uncomfortable to tariff and exploitation. In the name of free market globalisation - which does not apply to the United States or the European Union - the comfortable insist upon flooding the uncomfortable with the surplus goods of their own comfort, destroying the indigenous production of goods. Having played a significant part in creating poverty the comfortable send in the United Nations to assist the economies of the uncomfortable while having no intention of buying anything from them that is subsequently produced unless completely on their own terms. The uncomfortable are not allowed to compete against the comfortable in any genuine free market.
These sick values are exemplified in the capitalistic horror that is the United States. It goes right back to the founding of that peculiar nation. Reading those wonderful stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder's pioneering family to my six children in succession, even then we read of proud Pa who is independent, who does not need anyone's help and who does not need to help anyone else unless he chooses. (This does not stop Pa taking off when they are starving and forcing wheat from someone else who was not choosing to share it). This phoney philosophy of choice was mysteriously laid down from the start. The ultimate logical end of this attitude is that the final 'choice' may just have to be starvation and death. In the current United States debate on health care reform one conditioned pawn in the game stated proudly that he would rather die poor and free - presumably in preference to living in a civilized nation which looked after those who for whatever reason were unable to do so themselves.
This is one way I can rationalise why the United States can carry on the way it does with a supposedly clear conscience. Then I get some understanding of copycats, for example, how the United States and its little buddy Israel can behave toward Gaza without a blush. How the United States and its despicable crony the European Union has behaved toward Iraq the way they have with economic sanctions and military war.
In my idle luxury, living in the eye of empire, I used to wonder how the world kept going, why it did not come to a grinding halt and fall apart. The people in charge did not seem to have a complete picture. Now I know that for the families of 10 million different children every year, and for hundreds of millions more like them, the world is not working, it is falling apart. But here in a country like New Zealand we can sleep on. What will wake us up will be that time when the centre of empire decides to really take over New Zealand. Warships in the harbours and helicoptors in the skies will be the time when we discover the implacable ruthlessness of the United States, the time when the false mask of benignity begins to slip off. Then we will begin to know what the vulnerable in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East are now experiencing.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
PRINS, NOMI. IT TAKES A PILLAGE
The author has been a managing director at Goldman Sachs and gives an insider view of the bailouts, bonuses and backroom deals from Washington to Wall Street. One chapter is headed 'Government Sachs' to underline the network of interaction between the U.S. top financiers and government agencies and elected officials. Criminal financiers were rescued by the public purse because of this interaction and Obama has a more integral relation to this network than Bush. He is now presiding over the largest transfer of public money to private pockets in U.S. history. There is no sense of responsibility to the public and no inclination to reform the financial system.
U.S. capitalism finds its ultimate achievement in the vicious competitiveness of its financial institutions which create clever and complex methods of making something out of nothing. Who gets the biggest bonuses is part of the competition. The most successful institution is Goldman Sachs whose personnel infiltrate and direct government. The author does not ascribe any planned conspiracy to this running of the country, but believes it to be a matter of backroom deals between extreme opportunists.
Nor does the author make any reference to the ethnic backgrounds of the top dogs. Although I have never read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, although I simply accept the document is a fake, although I presume it is about controlling the world by controlling its finance, I now realise after reading this book that regardless of ethnicity the document may well speak truth. We now live in a world controlled by the financiers, making so-called democracy and political parties irrelevant. The author quotes Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the House of Rothschild: "Let me issue and control a nation's money, and I care not who writes the laws".
There is much useful information in this work: the similarity of cause for the Great Depression and this 'recession'; the value of the New Deal; the unacceptability of merging commercial and investment banks; the lack of responsible oversight from the Federal Reserve and from Congress. An example of some good and clear information: "The Second Great Bank Depression has spawned so many lies, it's hard to keep track of which is the biggest. Possibly the most irksome class of lies, usually spouted by Wall Street hacks and conservative pundits, is that we're all victims to a bunch of poor people who bought McMansions, or at least homes they had no business living in. If that was really what this crisis was all about, we could have solved it much more cheaply in a couple of days in late 2008, by simply providing borrowers with additional capital to reduce their loan principals. It would have cost about 3 per cent of what the entire bailout wound up costing, with comparatively similar risk.... There were approximately $1.4 trillion worth of subprime loans outstanding in the United States by the end of 2007. By May 2009, there were foreclosure filings against approximately 5.1 million properties. If it was only the subprime market's fault, $1.4 trillion would have covered the entire problem, right? Yet the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the FDIC forked out more than $13 trillion to fix the 'housing correction', as Hank Paulson steadfastly referred to the Second Great Bank Depression as late as November 20, 2008, while he was treasury secretary. With that money, the government could have bought up every residential morgage in the country - there were about $11.9 trillion worth at the end of December 2008 - and still have had a trillion left over to buy homes for every single American who couldn't afford them, and pay their health care to boot. But there was much more to it than that: Wall Street was engaged in a very dangerous practice called leverage. Leverage is when you borrow a lot of money in order to place a big bet.... Leverage included, we're looking at a possible $140 trillion problem. That's right - $140 trillion!......but leverage would not have had a platform without the help of a wondrous financial feat called securitization......" etc.
The overall impression left with me is that after a century or so of mass education and non-participatory democracy all that we have produced in the name of progress is the most sophisticated and powerful criminal gang in the history of mankind.
Rating: Very good
U.S. capitalism finds its ultimate achievement in the vicious competitiveness of its financial institutions which create clever and complex methods of making something out of nothing. Who gets the biggest bonuses is part of the competition. The most successful institution is Goldman Sachs whose personnel infiltrate and direct government. The author does not ascribe any planned conspiracy to this running of the country, but believes it to be a matter of backroom deals between extreme opportunists.
Nor does the author make any reference to the ethnic backgrounds of the top dogs. Although I have never read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, although I simply accept the document is a fake, although I presume it is about controlling the world by controlling its finance, I now realise after reading this book that regardless of ethnicity the document may well speak truth. We now live in a world controlled by the financiers, making so-called democracy and political parties irrelevant. The author quotes Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the House of Rothschild: "Let me issue and control a nation's money, and I care not who writes the laws".
There is much useful information in this work: the similarity of cause for the Great Depression and this 'recession'; the value of the New Deal; the unacceptability of merging commercial and investment banks; the lack of responsible oversight from the Federal Reserve and from Congress. An example of some good and clear information: "The Second Great Bank Depression has spawned so many lies, it's hard to keep track of which is the biggest. Possibly the most irksome class of lies, usually spouted by Wall Street hacks and conservative pundits, is that we're all victims to a bunch of poor people who bought McMansions, or at least homes they had no business living in. If that was really what this crisis was all about, we could have solved it much more cheaply in a couple of days in late 2008, by simply providing borrowers with additional capital to reduce their loan principals. It would have cost about 3 per cent of what the entire bailout wound up costing, with comparatively similar risk.... There were approximately $1.4 trillion worth of subprime loans outstanding in the United States by the end of 2007. By May 2009, there were foreclosure filings against approximately 5.1 million properties. If it was only the subprime market's fault, $1.4 trillion would have covered the entire problem, right? Yet the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the FDIC forked out more than $13 trillion to fix the 'housing correction', as Hank Paulson steadfastly referred to the Second Great Bank Depression as late as November 20, 2008, while he was treasury secretary. With that money, the government could have bought up every residential morgage in the country - there were about $11.9 trillion worth at the end of December 2008 - and still have had a trillion left over to buy homes for every single American who couldn't afford them, and pay their health care to boot. But there was much more to it than that: Wall Street was engaged in a very dangerous practice called leverage. Leverage is when you borrow a lot of money in order to place a big bet.... Leverage included, we're looking at a possible $140 trillion problem. That's right - $140 trillion!......but leverage would not have had a platform without the help of a wondrous financial feat called securitization......" etc.
The overall impression left with me is that after a century or so of mass education and non-participatory democracy all that we have produced in the name of progress is the most sophisticated and powerful criminal gang in the history of mankind.
Rating: Very good
Sunday, November 29, 2009
TREASON
Since the 1980s in New Zealand it has become compelling to apply the meaning of treason to those persons in positions of power who act in a manner disloyal and injurious to the general population. The two governments of David Lange probably constitute the most significant period of treason in New Zealand history. Conscientious and professional civil servants were labelled irrelevant underpaid monkeys and replaced with a multitude of overpaid monkeys whose brief was to act with force, unpredictability and irrationality. History and context were also irrelevant; everything was done as if newly hatched by flippant adolescents.
The lives of those who did not, could not or would not play the game were turned upside down so that money could move from the public sector into the pockets of select individuals. Muldoon called them the Greedies. The first excuse for the upheaval was the need to get rid of the national debt. It was all a lie. The debt is as bad as ever. Whenever a new government comes in Treasury delivers a paper outlining a severe situation requiring extreme right-wing
measures. Currently the Brash Commission nicely supplements this.
This impulse continued through the 1990s, was somewhat quiescent in the 2000s, resurfacing now and again showing impatience with community and democratic process. A lone outlaw from the rogernomic era comes shooting his way back into town (Auckland) and is allowed to force major changes by a sheriff who watches quietly from behind his curtained office window. That same sheriff, with the laid-back manner and smiling visage, is doing a lot of quiet dismantling in other areas of social service without a peep from the newspaper office next door.
There are now 20,000 young New Zealanders who cannot find work, many with university degrees. Despite this an overpaid peanut called Jonathan Coleman, MP for Northcote and Minister of Immigration, unveils the Silver Fern Visa which actively entices young people from overseas to come to New Zealand looking for work. This is an act of disloyalty and injury to our young people and their families. Otherwise known as treason. There can be no excuse for it other than a variation on the old story of monkeys and peanuts.
New Zealand has been spared the determined attention of the United States. Despite betraying us into accepting an undemocratic americanisation of our economic and social life, Lange did his thing - a very important thing - which resulted in our anti-nuclear stance and this may have helped deter any such attention. But like a death wish, politicians and media hanker after what they fondly term a 'free-trade deal' with the United States. It is always spoken of as a given positive. Nowhere in the mainstream have I heard or read a critical view. Yet it must be known that the United States does not practice free trade. John Key must know this in order to tell us to be ready to make concessions. Ultimately these will be concessions on our sovereignty. An act of treason.
For decades people and nations have wanted to like and get along with the United States, but the US is constitutionally unable to recognise and practice genuine mutual respect. It is like the man who has a willing woman happy to go along with him but he much prefers to drag her into a dark alley and rape her. Not OK behaviour, but let's look the other way.
The lives of those who did not, could not or would not play the game were turned upside down so that money could move from the public sector into the pockets of select individuals. Muldoon called them the Greedies. The first excuse for the upheaval was the need to get rid of the national debt. It was all a lie. The debt is as bad as ever. Whenever a new government comes in Treasury delivers a paper outlining a severe situation requiring extreme right-wing
measures. Currently the Brash Commission nicely supplements this.
This impulse continued through the 1990s, was somewhat quiescent in the 2000s, resurfacing now and again showing impatience with community and democratic process. A lone outlaw from the rogernomic era comes shooting his way back into town (Auckland) and is allowed to force major changes by a sheriff who watches quietly from behind his curtained office window. That same sheriff, with the laid-back manner and smiling visage, is doing a lot of quiet dismantling in other areas of social service without a peep from the newspaper office next door.
There are now 20,000 young New Zealanders who cannot find work, many with university degrees. Despite this an overpaid peanut called Jonathan Coleman, MP for Northcote and Minister of Immigration, unveils the Silver Fern Visa which actively entices young people from overseas to come to New Zealand looking for work. This is an act of disloyalty and injury to our young people and their families. Otherwise known as treason. There can be no excuse for it other than a variation on the old story of monkeys and peanuts.
New Zealand has been spared the determined attention of the United States. Despite betraying us into accepting an undemocratic americanisation of our economic and social life, Lange did his thing - a very important thing - which resulted in our anti-nuclear stance and this may have helped deter any such attention. But like a death wish, politicians and media hanker after what they fondly term a 'free-trade deal' with the United States. It is always spoken of as a given positive. Nowhere in the mainstream have I heard or read a critical view. Yet it must be known that the United States does not practice free trade. John Key must know this in order to tell us to be ready to make concessions. Ultimately these will be concessions on our sovereignty. An act of treason.
For decades people and nations have wanted to like and get along with the United States, but the US is constitutionally unable to recognise and practice genuine mutual respect. It is like the man who has a willing woman happy to go along with him but he much prefers to drag her into a dark alley and rape her. Not OK behaviour, but let's look the other way.
Friday, November 27, 2009
CHOMSKY, NOAM. WHAT WE SAY GOES
These are conversations with David Barsamian in 2006 and 2007 about United States power and world affairs. If I had only one person to read on these matters it would have to be Chomsky, he is that rare individual - an academic with the ability, insight and courage to call a spade a spade. He cuts through the crap to the essential truths. He is an international treasure. His interviewer is excellent in not wasting time with idiotic questions. The primary truth in these interviews would be as follows: "the United States is a leading outlaw state, totally unconstrained by international law, and it openly says so. What we say goes."
Rating: Excellent
Rating: Excellent
Sunday, November 22, 2009
JAMAIL, DAHR. THE WILL TO RESIST
About soldiers who refuse to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. A story of courage and conscience from out of the pit of evil. An excellent foreword by Chris Hedges. "We do not have the power or the knowledge, nor do we have the right under international law, to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not for us to debate the terms of the occupation. We divert ourselves in our dotage and decline with images and slogans that perpetuate fantasies about our own invulnerability, our own might, our own goodness. We are preoccupied by national trivia that pass for news, even as the wolf pants at our door. These illusions blind us. We cannot see ourselves as others see us. We do not know who we are or what we have become. "We have fed the heart on fantasies," wrote William Butler Yeats, "the heart's grown brutal from the fare.""
Rating: Very good.
Rating: Very good.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
IRAN
I remember when Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The United States never gave up insisting upon it despite a complete lack of evidence before they invaded. They repeated it so often and so belligerently that mainstream media chimed in and - in a so-called democracy - the population could only look on and protest without influence. Many people allowed themselves to be taken in, though it was an obvious lie even at the time.
We now have Iran and its nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The United States never gives up insisting upon it despite a complete lack of evidence. They are repeating it so often and so belligerently that mainstream media is chiming in and - in a so-called democracy - the population looks on and protests without influence. Many people are allowing themselves to be taken in, for it is an obvious lie.
We are having a replay and any lessons from very recent history just pass us by. And this, after a century of mass education.
This new lie stands alongside a breathtaking hypocrisy. Iran belongs to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and within the Treaty wishes to develop nuclear power. Sorry. Israel refuses to belong to the Treaty and has nuclear weapons which it refuses to have inspected. No problem. Pakistan also refuses to belong to the Treaty and also has nuclear weapons. No worries, we are in the process of dismantling its sovereignty in order to maintain "stability" anyway. The United States has just encouraged India to develop nuclear weapons. So far, so good.
Iran is doomed because it insists upon being an independent sovereign state. It has a democratically elected government based upon a distorted form of democracy. In the United States distortion consists in the population having to be mere spectators between elections. Elections constitute a phoney selection between two dominant candidates who are interchangeable and supported by wealthy elites. New Zealand reflects this. Election time is when we imagine we are participating in democracy. Our wonderful free media encourages us in our futile imaginings.
During the Obama election not a principled word was said about Iraq. But there were a few rumblings about Iran. Look to the future. The weapons industry is booming and these weapons need to be tried out somewhere. A lot of people are employed. When we have devastated as much of the Middle East and Asia as is possible and necessary our greed can continue to feed without hindrance upon oil.
What can possibly go wrong?
We now have Iran and its nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The United States never gives up insisting upon it despite a complete lack of evidence. They are repeating it so often and so belligerently that mainstream media is chiming in and - in a so-called democracy - the population looks on and protests without influence. Many people are allowing themselves to be taken in, for it is an obvious lie.
We are having a replay and any lessons from very recent history just pass us by. And this, after a century of mass education.
This new lie stands alongside a breathtaking hypocrisy. Iran belongs to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and within the Treaty wishes to develop nuclear power. Sorry. Israel refuses to belong to the Treaty and has nuclear weapons which it refuses to have inspected. No problem. Pakistan also refuses to belong to the Treaty and also has nuclear weapons. No worries, we are in the process of dismantling its sovereignty in order to maintain "stability" anyway. The United States has just encouraged India to develop nuclear weapons. So far, so good.
Iran is doomed because it insists upon being an independent sovereign state. It has a democratically elected government based upon a distorted form of democracy. In the United States distortion consists in the population having to be mere spectators between elections. Elections constitute a phoney selection between two dominant candidates who are interchangeable and supported by wealthy elites. New Zealand reflects this. Election time is when we imagine we are participating in democracy. Our wonderful free media encourages us in our futile imaginings.
During the Obama election not a principled word was said about Iraq. But there were a few rumblings about Iran. Look to the future. The weapons industry is booming and these weapons need to be tried out somewhere. A lot of people are employed. When we have devastated as much of the Middle East and Asia as is possible and necessary our greed can continue to feed without hindrance upon oil.
What can possibly go wrong?
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
ISRAEL IN PALESTINE: A PRIMER
Criticism of Israel often leads to claims of anti-Semitism by apologists which are designed to deflect attention from the issues which merit discussion. They are as hateful in their determined intolerance and dishonesty as anti-Semitism itself.
If what Israel has just committed in Gaza had been done by any other nation without the acceptance of the United States, the whole world would be voicing its criticism.
In his Nobel Prize speech Harold Pinter stated: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them”. The same could be said about Israel. Certainly the New Zealand mainstream media are extremely hesitant in criticising Israel.
I have tried to take an interest in the Israel / Palestine situation for four decades, and I believe that I have reached a number of valid conclusions. None of them are controversial and I apologise for their obvious nature, but they appear bothersome because apparently we are meant to keep quiet.
The first of my conclusions is that Israel is a nation founded by terrorist activity. An increasingly aggressive settlement of Palestine from the 1880s leading to terrorism in the 20th century killed and drove from their homes and lands 750,000 Palestinians. Many of these people and their descendants now exist in Gaza. It is not acceptable for Jewish people, renowned for intellectual and artistic achievement, to use religion and its texts as an excuse for this terrorism. And although it is understandable, it is also both dishonest and unacceptable to use the holocaust as an excuse.
Israel is not a victim. Jewish people in World War Two were victims, but the contemporary state of Israel is a powerful military force, fully supported by the most powerful nation on earth. It is wrong for Israel to continue to convince itself and the world that it is always and essentially the victim.
Israel is a racist society. If you found a nation for one group of people, a Jewish nation, then it follows as a matter of fact that the foundation of your nation is racist. It also follows that another group of people, the Palestinians, previously and still living within this nation are unavoidably a negative problem. So long as Israel = Jewish nation the mindset of any Israeli government to the Palestinians will be inherently racist. This is completely at variance with social developments in Western countries, mistakenly said to share common values with Israel, which make efforts to forge multicultural societies.
Israel practices apartheid. It has chosen apartheid rather than multiculturalism because it must maintain Israel as a Jewish state. A growing, developing, educated and participating Palestinian population would be a threat to this. So Israel cannot allow peaceful coexistence where all individuals possess equal rights. Some elements of an apartheid state found in Israel include: complete control of all elements of the lives of a group of second class citizens; the need for ID cards in order to travel; the subjection to checkpoints for any movement; the requirement to live in defined areas; arbitrary arrest and detention without charge; the ability to kill without excuse or apology. Israel goes a step further than South Africa by building enormous walls and structures to encircle the defined areas. If the subject population threaten to get out of control, for example by electing the wrong party, then intervention occurs. Sometimes it just occurs anyway.
Israel has never negotiated in good faith. It has strung the Palestinians along for six decades. Negotiation is a game and an end in itself. There is always a reason not to do the right thing. There is always another condition to derail an agreement. There is always someone to blame. The blameworthy have included the PLO, then Fatah, and now Hamas – the very people you must talk to in order to find a just solution. If you demonise them then you do not have to be responsible for a solution, for any solution may mean that you have to relinquish power and control. Yet if Israel has an acceptable person with which to negotiate still nothing happens. Abbas, the Palestinian Fatah president, has been available for negotiation for some time now and Israel has given him nothing – except more checkpoints in the West Bank and more Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. When a person in his position feels the need to write in newspapers directly to the Israeli people for their understanding, this underlines the disdain with which the Israeli government is treating him. Israel need not negotiate with Palestinians when they are divided: Israel will not negotiate with Palestinians when they are united.
Israel has created and is creating the most enormous open prison system in the world. These prisons, given the relentless nature of Israeli policy and behaviour, are on their way via ghettoes to concentration camps. These prisons can be and are shut down at will at any time. This can be done in part or in whole whenever an excuse can be claimed, or it can be done quite arbitrarily. The imprisoned population can be subjected to lack of food, warmth, shelter and other basic necessities of life whenever the occupying power decides.
Israel is responsible for the Palestinian resistance. It is inevitable and a human right that when an occupying power mistreats its subjects they will resist. In films of World War Two we applaud the efforts of the Dutch and French resistance when they blow up the armaments and kill the soldiers of the occupying military force. The Palestinian resistance finds this difficult because they are so bottled up and the occupying force is so much more powerful. Because the Israeli military can mistreat the Palestinians from arm’s length the resistance has adopted the questionable tactic of firing rockets into the Israeli civilian population. Israel refuses to learn the right lesson from this, namely that it is unacceptable for any group to lose some of their people to military force. This tactic merely gives Israel the supreme excuse to blame and to kill further. Israel and “the West” refuse to acknowledge that it is the role of any resistance movement not to allow the occupying force to feel comfortable in its abusive power. In the current crisis, Israel speaks of seeking “peace and quiet” for itself, not ever of dialogue and justice.
Israel is completely self-centred. It appears to have a complete inability to empathise with others, to see their point of view, even to be interested in it. Its racism equates the death of one Israeli (even a soldier) to hundreds of Palestinians. If a human being is self-centred in this way we would say that his development is somewhere between a child and an adolescent with sociopathic tendencies. The USA, as parent of this unruly child, has overindulged and spoiled him all his life. As a result he is demanding, self-righteous, overbearing and out of control. If anyone in the neighbourhood dislikes his attitude and behaviour he will respond with some form of bullying aggression, knowing that Dad is always there to back him up. He becomes the neighbour from hell.
My final conclusion is that Israeli spokespersons lie to the media. Time and again they will, with a reasonable face, indicate what reasonable actions are being taken, only for the persistent media watcher to discover that Israel will not be doing those actions at all or are doing the exact opposite. It is the old story: pay no attention to what is said, but attend to what is done. Unfortunately, in “the West” it works the other way round for most people. When Israeli spokespeople speak to the media they do so from out of an attitude and national character which has created a militant, racist, apartheid society and all the trappings which go with this.
Some of these trappings include the stubborn assertion that Israel is always in the right, and also the inability to consider that a mistake or injustice has been committed, let alone a crime. This can lead to quite extraordinary statements: that because Hamas exists and because it lives among the Gazans it is responsible for the death of 400 children, not the Israeli military who fired missiles, shells and bullets at them. I assume that, in an individual, this severe inability to take responsibility for one’s actions would be recognised as some kind of mental or moral incapacity.
Norman Finkelstein, son of holocaust survivors, has said that if Israel does not wish to be likened to Nazis then it must stop behaving like Nazis. This is true not just for the war on Gaza, but for the war on all Palestinians for the last sixty years. Over this time Israeli policy has shown that it does not respect the Palestinians, it does not care about Palestinian civilians, and it does not want Palestinians to get too close. In the words of Peres it wishes the Palestinians would just disappear.
The only proper solution is integration. This happened in the US in the sixties and in South Africa in the nineties. De Klerk had the statesmanship to realise that apartheid could not continue, it was morally bankrupt. We cannot live in ethnically pure states and democracy cannot be based upon tribalism. There has to be a one-state solution. Part of the one-state solution requires compensation for the Palestinians. New Zealand has experience to offer in the manner in which crimes committed by an occupying people might be addressed by an integrated nation.
Imagine if New Zealand, which has the same kind of population numbers as Israel, were able to virtually dictate American foreign policy and thereby that of Europe? How weird. That one small country with such a small population could cause so much trouble in the world! It would surely go to our heads. We would probably come to believe that the United States was also our country.
If what Israel has just committed in Gaza had been done by any other nation without the acceptance of the United States, the whole world would be voicing its criticism.
In his Nobel Prize speech Harold Pinter stated: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them”. The same could be said about Israel. Certainly the New Zealand mainstream media are extremely hesitant in criticising Israel.
I have tried to take an interest in the Israel / Palestine situation for four decades, and I believe that I have reached a number of valid conclusions. None of them are controversial and I apologise for their obvious nature, but they appear bothersome because apparently we are meant to keep quiet.
The first of my conclusions is that Israel is a nation founded by terrorist activity. An increasingly aggressive settlement of Palestine from the 1880s leading to terrorism in the 20th century killed and drove from their homes and lands 750,000 Palestinians. Many of these people and their descendants now exist in Gaza. It is not acceptable for Jewish people, renowned for intellectual and artistic achievement, to use religion and its texts as an excuse for this terrorism. And although it is understandable, it is also both dishonest and unacceptable to use the holocaust as an excuse.
Israel is not a victim. Jewish people in World War Two were victims, but the contemporary state of Israel is a powerful military force, fully supported by the most powerful nation on earth. It is wrong for Israel to continue to convince itself and the world that it is always and essentially the victim.
Israel is a racist society. If you found a nation for one group of people, a Jewish nation, then it follows as a matter of fact that the foundation of your nation is racist. It also follows that another group of people, the Palestinians, previously and still living within this nation are unavoidably a negative problem. So long as Israel = Jewish nation the mindset of any Israeli government to the Palestinians will be inherently racist. This is completely at variance with social developments in Western countries, mistakenly said to share common values with Israel, which make efforts to forge multicultural societies.
Israel practices apartheid. It has chosen apartheid rather than multiculturalism because it must maintain Israel as a Jewish state. A growing, developing, educated and participating Palestinian population would be a threat to this. So Israel cannot allow peaceful coexistence where all individuals possess equal rights. Some elements of an apartheid state found in Israel include: complete control of all elements of the lives of a group of second class citizens; the need for ID cards in order to travel; the subjection to checkpoints for any movement; the requirement to live in defined areas; arbitrary arrest and detention without charge; the ability to kill without excuse or apology. Israel goes a step further than South Africa by building enormous walls and structures to encircle the defined areas. If the subject population threaten to get out of control, for example by electing the wrong party, then intervention occurs. Sometimes it just occurs anyway.
Israel has never negotiated in good faith. It has strung the Palestinians along for six decades. Negotiation is a game and an end in itself. There is always a reason not to do the right thing. There is always another condition to derail an agreement. There is always someone to blame. The blameworthy have included the PLO, then Fatah, and now Hamas – the very people you must talk to in order to find a just solution. If you demonise them then you do not have to be responsible for a solution, for any solution may mean that you have to relinquish power and control. Yet if Israel has an acceptable person with which to negotiate still nothing happens. Abbas, the Palestinian Fatah president, has been available for negotiation for some time now and Israel has given him nothing – except more checkpoints in the West Bank and more Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. When a person in his position feels the need to write in newspapers directly to the Israeli people for their understanding, this underlines the disdain with which the Israeli government is treating him. Israel need not negotiate with Palestinians when they are divided: Israel will not negotiate with Palestinians when they are united.
Israel has created and is creating the most enormous open prison system in the world. These prisons, given the relentless nature of Israeli policy and behaviour, are on their way via ghettoes to concentration camps. These prisons can be and are shut down at will at any time. This can be done in part or in whole whenever an excuse can be claimed, or it can be done quite arbitrarily. The imprisoned population can be subjected to lack of food, warmth, shelter and other basic necessities of life whenever the occupying power decides.
Israel is responsible for the Palestinian resistance. It is inevitable and a human right that when an occupying power mistreats its subjects they will resist. In films of World War Two we applaud the efforts of the Dutch and French resistance when they blow up the armaments and kill the soldiers of the occupying military force. The Palestinian resistance finds this difficult because they are so bottled up and the occupying force is so much more powerful. Because the Israeli military can mistreat the Palestinians from arm’s length the resistance has adopted the questionable tactic of firing rockets into the Israeli civilian population. Israel refuses to learn the right lesson from this, namely that it is unacceptable for any group to lose some of their people to military force. This tactic merely gives Israel the supreme excuse to blame and to kill further. Israel and “the West” refuse to acknowledge that it is the role of any resistance movement not to allow the occupying force to feel comfortable in its abusive power. In the current crisis, Israel speaks of seeking “peace and quiet” for itself, not ever of dialogue and justice.
Israel is completely self-centred. It appears to have a complete inability to empathise with others, to see their point of view, even to be interested in it. Its racism equates the death of one Israeli (even a soldier) to hundreds of Palestinians. If a human being is self-centred in this way we would say that his development is somewhere between a child and an adolescent with sociopathic tendencies. The USA, as parent of this unruly child, has overindulged and spoiled him all his life. As a result he is demanding, self-righteous, overbearing and out of control. If anyone in the neighbourhood dislikes his attitude and behaviour he will respond with some form of bullying aggression, knowing that Dad is always there to back him up. He becomes the neighbour from hell.
My final conclusion is that Israeli spokespersons lie to the media. Time and again they will, with a reasonable face, indicate what reasonable actions are being taken, only for the persistent media watcher to discover that Israel will not be doing those actions at all or are doing the exact opposite. It is the old story: pay no attention to what is said, but attend to what is done. Unfortunately, in “the West” it works the other way round for most people. When Israeli spokespeople speak to the media they do so from out of an attitude and national character which has created a militant, racist, apartheid society and all the trappings which go with this.
Some of these trappings include the stubborn assertion that Israel is always in the right, and also the inability to consider that a mistake or injustice has been committed, let alone a crime. This can lead to quite extraordinary statements: that because Hamas exists and because it lives among the Gazans it is responsible for the death of 400 children, not the Israeli military who fired missiles, shells and bullets at them. I assume that, in an individual, this severe inability to take responsibility for one’s actions would be recognised as some kind of mental or moral incapacity.
Norman Finkelstein, son of holocaust survivors, has said that if Israel does not wish to be likened to Nazis then it must stop behaving like Nazis. This is true not just for the war on Gaza, but for the war on all Palestinians for the last sixty years. Over this time Israeli policy has shown that it does not respect the Palestinians, it does not care about Palestinian civilians, and it does not want Palestinians to get too close. In the words of Peres it wishes the Palestinians would just disappear.
The only proper solution is integration. This happened in the US in the sixties and in South Africa in the nineties. De Klerk had the statesmanship to realise that apartheid could not continue, it was morally bankrupt. We cannot live in ethnically pure states and democracy cannot be based upon tribalism. There has to be a one-state solution. Part of the one-state solution requires compensation for the Palestinians. New Zealand has experience to offer in the manner in which crimes committed by an occupying people might be addressed by an integrated nation.
Imagine if New Zealand, which has the same kind of population numbers as Israel, were able to virtually dictate American foreign policy and thereby that of Europe? How weird. That one small country with such a small population could cause so much trouble in the world! It would surely go to our heads. We would probably come to believe that the United States was also our country.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
NOBEL OBAMA
Like Obama I and millions of others have a vision for peace and fail to do anything about it. Only our vision includes recognising that Hamas was democratically elected by its people. It includes acknowledgement that blockading these voters in an open prison and subjecting them to human rights and war crimes is not right nor peace-loving. At the very least it does not mean opposing the Goldstone report on the Gaza war at the United Nations.
Our vision means that we will give up interfering in South America. We will stop undermining governments democratically elected by their people. We will not support disaffected wealthy elites. We will stop building bases all over the world. We will not extend war-making in the Middle East. We will stop demonising other world figures and other countries. Instead we will stand up to the psychos leading our own country by the nose. We will treat Israel with discrimination. We will stop thinking so well of ourselves, that we the United States are somehow special and not subject to international law. We are just another country. We will look after the people in our own country properly, and this will peacefully help people in other countries.
A prominent New Zealand commentator has described Obama as a big fat disappointment. His vision of peace continues the Bush vision, only with a very charming smile upon the face of the tiger.
Does the corrupt and outrageous nature of this award mean that I can anticipate the Nobel Prize for Literature being won by Obama’s speechmakers?
OSAMA BIN LADEN
When Osama bin Laden’s messages to the world appeared it annoyed me that the media fixated upon two things: was this message genuine? plus one or two statements from the message which sounded suitably inflammatory. Where could I read the complete messages for myself and come to my own understanding and conclusions about this man and what he had to say. If I cannot trust my political leaders over Middle East wars or global economic affairs, I certainly have no reason to trust what they have to repeat about this particular individual.
I found a publication called “Messages to the world: the statements of Osama bin Laden”, published in 2005 by Verso, and edited by Bruce Lawrence. These statements cover the period from 1994 to 2004 when he lived in Sudan, Khurasan and Afghanistan and include the events of 9/11 and the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
Let us get 9/11 out of the way. Does he take responsibility for it? Apparently not. As time passes he becomes more ambiguous, but initially it seems clear enough that he has no planning role in the operation. He applauds the actions of those who undertake it. For it is about time that America begins to feel the pain.
What kind of a person emerges? Do I respect him? Well, compared to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair and Obama, yes, I do. He is intelligent and uses his intelligence to understand and articulate the predicament Muslims find themselves in. He is reasonable and tries to make us see this predicament and the response to it. He is obviously courageous in his response to the predicament: in resistance, in battle and in breaking ranks and criticising corrupt Arab governments. He possesses a genuine spiritual mana – and this is a key factor.
It is the profound lack of spiritual knowledge and stature in his adversaries which fills Osama bin Laden with contempt. We are once again the crusading barbarians who invade the more civilised world of Islam.
Even if I drop the word “invade” and just speak of an increasingly aggressive Western interference in the Middle East over a long period of time, this poses a problem for any conscious Muslim. If you are unconscious, then no problem. But if you are conscious you have two choices, no matter how you pretend otherwise: resist or collaborate. Without having to put our lives on the line yet, we have the same choice.
Osama bin Laden is no socialist. He will not become an icon for youth in the West like Che Guevara, but he is nevertheless the resistance icon of our time. The foe is the same. It does not help that youth of the West are the product of forty more years of education in conformity and unconsciousness. How free-minded we seemed to be in 1968!
So a good deal of Osama bin Laden’s messages contain increasingly severe criticism of Muslim collaborators. These may be the rulers who ineffectually protest US/Israeli aggression while secretly allowing use of their territory, and effectively doing nothing. They include the official Muslim scholars in high places who make religious pronouncements of appeasement in the name of peace. They include the Palestinian Authority which does nothing while its people are forced out of their homes or are having to fight for their lives and land as the apartheid Wall goes up.
For bin Laden there is no peace without justice and freedom from foreign oppression. (To use an idiot phrase, it’s not rocket science, is it?) But it is the kind of obvious thing that he wants us to see and accept. The kind of obvious thing that our media, full of educated people, does not want to report.
A primary point that Osama bin Laden wishes to make is this: people from overseas come to our lands and terrorise us with interference, control and massacre, and if we resist they call us terrorists. American (and Israeli) military kill and mutilate civilians with sophisticated weaponry in any Muslim land they choose, and this is the initial terrorism. He asks the question: what, for example, has Australia, way down in the south of the world, got to do with Afghanistan?
When I last saw a programme about our own New Zealand troops in Afghanistan, I had to stop and try to remember why we were there. Oh yes, we were pretending to be helpful. But this has now moved on. Someone in a Muslim country blows up a hotel for the rich and the free which includes a New Zealander among the victims. The New Zealand prime minister states that such a random outcome gives New Zealand reason to increase its commitment to Afghanistan. How can you deal with such a man?
The main document, in my view, which ought to be required reading, is the letter To The Americans of October 6 2002. In this Osama bin Laden explains why he is fighting, and he describes the sick nature of American civilization, and in doing so indicates the remedies. It is guaranteed to enrage the materialistic liberal and humanist. And this is why in the West we have a liberal defence of the murder being pursued in Muslim countries. Our Left and Right divisions have become one.
I do not like spirituality which transfers into institutional religious fundamentalism. It is medieval in any country. However, there appears to be only one way in which the West can gain the respect of genuine leaders in the East and the acceptance of the people of the East; and that is by having a more “spiritual” civilization.
Unfortunately, what Osama bin Laden says today about America and its allies is all too true. We are a civilization “which does not understand the language of manners and principles” and we refuse to reflect upon why 9/11 happened (or could have happened). If Americans could become a people of manners and principles “you may be freed from the self-deception that you are a great nation, the self-deception your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state that you have reached”.
I found a publication called “Messages to the world: the statements of Osama bin Laden”, published in 2005 by Verso, and edited by Bruce Lawrence. These statements cover the period from 1994 to 2004 when he lived in Sudan, Khurasan and Afghanistan and include the events of 9/11 and the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
Let us get 9/11 out of the way. Does he take responsibility for it? Apparently not. As time passes he becomes more ambiguous, but initially it seems clear enough that he has no planning role in the operation. He applauds the actions of those who undertake it. For it is about time that America begins to feel the pain.
What kind of a person emerges? Do I respect him? Well, compared to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair and Obama, yes, I do. He is intelligent and uses his intelligence to understand and articulate the predicament Muslims find themselves in. He is reasonable and tries to make us see this predicament and the response to it. He is obviously courageous in his response to the predicament: in resistance, in battle and in breaking ranks and criticising corrupt Arab governments. He possesses a genuine spiritual mana – and this is a key factor.
It is the profound lack of spiritual knowledge and stature in his adversaries which fills Osama bin Laden with contempt. We are once again the crusading barbarians who invade the more civilised world of Islam.
Even if I drop the word “invade” and just speak of an increasingly aggressive Western interference in the Middle East over a long period of time, this poses a problem for any conscious Muslim. If you are unconscious, then no problem. But if you are conscious you have two choices, no matter how you pretend otherwise: resist or collaborate. Without having to put our lives on the line yet, we have the same choice.
Osama bin Laden is no socialist. He will not become an icon for youth in the West like Che Guevara, but he is nevertheless the resistance icon of our time. The foe is the same. It does not help that youth of the West are the product of forty more years of education in conformity and unconsciousness. How free-minded we seemed to be in 1968!
So a good deal of Osama bin Laden’s messages contain increasingly severe criticism of Muslim collaborators. These may be the rulers who ineffectually protest US/Israeli aggression while secretly allowing use of their territory, and effectively doing nothing. They include the official Muslim scholars in high places who make religious pronouncements of appeasement in the name of peace. They include the Palestinian Authority which does nothing while its people are forced out of their homes or are having to fight for their lives and land as the apartheid Wall goes up.
For bin Laden there is no peace without justice and freedom from foreign oppression. (To use an idiot phrase, it’s not rocket science, is it?) But it is the kind of obvious thing that he wants us to see and accept. The kind of obvious thing that our media, full of educated people, does not want to report.
A primary point that Osama bin Laden wishes to make is this: people from overseas come to our lands and terrorise us with interference, control and massacre, and if we resist they call us terrorists. American (and Israeli) military kill and mutilate civilians with sophisticated weaponry in any Muslim land they choose, and this is the initial terrorism. He asks the question: what, for example, has Australia, way down in the south of the world, got to do with Afghanistan?
When I last saw a programme about our own New Zealand troops in Afghanistan, I had to stop and try to remember why we were there. Oh yes, we were pretending to be helpful. But this has now moved on. Someone in a Muslim country blows up a hotel for the rich and the free which includes a New Zealander among the victims. The New Zealand prime minister states that such a random outcome gives New Zealand reason to increase its commitment to Afghanistan. How can you deal with such a man?
The main document, in my view, which ought to be required reading, is the letter To The Americans of October 6 2002. In this Osama bin Laden explains why he is fighting, and he describes the sick nature of American civilization, and in doing so indicates the remedies. It is guaranteed to enrage the materialistic liberal and humanist. And this is why in the West we have a liberal defence of the murder being pursued in Muslim countries. Our Left and Right divisions have become one.
I do not like spirituality which transfers into institutional religious fundamentalism. It is medieval in any country. However, there appears to be only one way in which the West can gain the respect of genuine leaders in the East and the acceptance of the people of the East; and that is by having a more “spiritual” civilization.
Unfortunately, what Osama bin Laden says today about America and its allies is all too true. We are a civilization “which does not understand the language of manners and principles” and we refuse to reflect upon why 9/11 happened (or could have happened). If Americans could become a people of manners and principles “you may be freed from the self-deception that you are a great nation, the self-deception your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state that you have reached”.
TO BE OR NOT TO BE
I try hard not to think about things, to turn my back on what is happening, cover my head and hope for the best. I can see this is what many young people do and I feel sorry for them. They know matters are just too bad to face. I live my suburban life, I grow my vegetables, I go shopping, I try to read books which are not going to upset me, and most of all I only get my news from Television New Zealand.
There is simply nothing better than TVNZ news to keep me coddled and insulated from reality. Coalition of evil? Gaza? They simply do not exist. An attractive middle class Iranian woman is shot dead by an agent of a repressive regime. Axis of evil. TVNZ shows it over more than one evening. (And only 7 minutes of international news per evening) A Palestinian woman is shot dead on her own land by an agent of a repressive regime. It never happened.
Then I go and blow it. I look something up on the internet and discover what I fear: wickedness is continuing out there. The Israelis turn away a ship destined for Gaza with medicine and toys. No government of the coalition of evil does a thing or says a word. (Not TVNZ news either) Having performed a revised 2009 version of Guernica in front of the world it is business as usual for Israel. The wickedness and the evil of the civilisation I live in, a civilisation of pre-emptive strikes against civilian populations, fills me with disgust and shame.
The United States is so wedded to its own good opinion that it will dismantle its domestic base in order to pursue global power. Having driven the Muslim world into resistance it already begins to blame that world for the consequences. The U.S. is driven by fear and sentimentality, and both lead to insanity.
And Israel seems perfectly happy to be the match for global conflagration. Is this because the traumatised child grown up is going to take it out on all of us? Or is it because Israel is too full of people with a shameless ethnic superiority which they will insist upon until the bitter end?
Perhaps it is a mixture of both. Israel has been practicing both for decades against the
Palestinians with malicious spitefulness ........................................................................... forgive me, it is nearly time for me to go back to sleep for a while. I need some hack television journalism, to hear the sweet inanities of Simon Dallow and Wendy Petrie, to listen to the inconsequential splutter of Mark Sainsbury, and to wallow in the earnest emptiness of sports news ..................................................
There is simply nothing better than TVNZ news to keep me coddled and insulated from reality. Coalition of evil? Gaza? They simply do not exist. An attractive middle class Iranian woman is shot dead by an agent of a repressive regime. Axis of evil. TVNZ shows it over more than one evening. (And only 7 minutes of international news per evening) A Palestinian woman is shot dead on her own land by an agent of a repressive regime. It never happened.
Then I go and blow it. I look something up on the internet and discover what I fear: wickedness is continuing out there. The Israelis turn away a ship destined for Gaza with medicine and toys. No government of the coalition of evil does a thing or says a word. (Not TVNZ news either) Having performed a revised 2009 version of Guernica in front of the world it is business as usual for Israel. The wickedness and the evil of the civilisation I live in, a civilisation of pre-emptive strikes against civilian populations, fills me with disgust and shame.
The United States is so wedded to its own good opinion that it will dismantle its domestic base in order to pursue global power. Having driven the Muslim world into resistance it already begins to blame that world for the consequences. The U.S. is driven by fear and sentimentality, and both lead to insanity.
And Israel seems perfectly happy to be the match for global conflagration. Is this because the traumatised child grown up is going to take it out on all of us? Or is it because Israel is too full of people with a shameless ethnic superiority which they will insist upon until the bitter end?
Perhaps it is a mixture of both. Israel has been practicing both for decades against the
Palestinians with malicious spitefulness ........................................................................... forgive me, it is nearly time for me to go back to sleep for a while. I need some hack television journalism, to hear the sweet inanities of Simon Dallow and Wendy Petrie, to listen to the inconsequential splutter of Mark Sainsbury, and to wallow in the earnest emptiness of sports news ..................................................
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
