Cockaigne Adieu?

'Cockaigne' Vincent Desiderio

The title is a reference to Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Land of Cockaigne" (1559), a moral allegory set in a land of plenty where the houses are tiled with cakes, the fences are made of sausages and the fowl fly roasted and ready to eat. The targets in Bruegel's painting were gluttony and sloth; Mr. Desiderio's version is a critique of what he calls "cultural bulimia" — our compulsive consumption of images that only leaves us hungry for more. It is also a comment on the predicament of painting in the 21st century: faced with such a plethora of styles and formal idioms, how is it possible to create something new, something distinctively relevant to our own time?

We live in a political world, | Love don't have any place. | We're living in times where men commit crimes | And crime don't have a face.

Shelley

Anger and sex. Anger, sex, and absolutes. Just listen to the opinions, right and left. If we lined up all the online pundits, end to end, their perceived influence would stand ten times as tall as the actuality. Not only that, but their crap would provide enough ethanol to light the planet.

It’s not that people have opinions about the US President or the election or the war in Iraq–it’s just that they’re so damn sure they’re right. We’ve been talking about how polarized the upcoming election in the States is but on a good day nowadays, I’ll take polarized over what we’ve got. Everyone is so damn angry.

Look. It made me angry.

If we could have just one day per week when we all talked softly and quietly; when we listened to others views, and actually listened, not filtered; where we didn’t shoot from the hip, bringing out the verbal axes at first word; maybe where we even acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers–I can’t help thinking that we’d all be richer for the experience. more...

There are not a lot of countries who are very happy with the United States now, but much of the anger has been directed at the President and his staff. After all, Bush did not win the popular vote, so we can’t necessarily be held accountable for his actions. But what happens if Bush gets re-elected? At that time Bush’s actions will be seen as following the mandate of the people of this country, and how is that going to alter other country’s views of each of us?

If Bush is re-elected, can we still be friends?

Even when I share much of the same views as those who would condemn our actions, I have found myself experiencing tension, more than once, with someone I consider friend, primarily because of condemnation of our actions has been balanced, precariously, against condemnation of the nation as a whole. And good or bad, I am part of this nation. more...

Yule

What will continue unabated, whether it’s Kerry or Bush next year, is the reduction of everyone in America (in the industrialised world) to a mass bereft of the dignity of differentiation. The pace might change – under Bush, it’s been breathtakingly brisk; perhaps a Kerry administration will allow shades of difference or make for some slow-downs – but continue it will. “My country, right or wrong,” beliefs largely homogenised (and marketed!), and Individuality a Brand available at Walmart. That too is a sure sign of any kind of totalitarianism, soft or hard, governmental or corporate: it reduces the citizenry to an undifferentiated mass, even if we’re all yelling our heads of in support of this or that ideology. In that sense, if we want to prevent atrocities and stop wars, we have to fight to protect civil rights and freedoms, oppose Patriot Acts and infringements of civil liberties, insist on and defend the separation of Church and State, fight for freedom of the press, insist on pointing out conflicts of interest in government and business, protect whistle-blowers: those rights are fighting tools, which is probably why crooks of any stripe are so interested in taking them away.

Your friends abroad can prove their friendship by resisting that reduction to sameness, by insisting on seeing the differences, and making the arguments within their countries that there have always been and always will be different Americans, and that it’s a trick of criminal leadership to make all citizens appear the same and therefore equally responsible for what the criminals in power do. Today, criminals the world over are scheming to consolidate their power so that all over the world, everyone will soon look guilty: they want us all to be the same, tearing each other apart so that we don’t line them up against the wall. They do it through government power, they do it through corporate power, they do it through military power. And if the occasional leader does get lined up against the wall, it’s considered a small sacrifice that keeps the whole scheme going. But they can’t smooth over the pointy wedge of steady, resolute insistence on the dignity of difference.

[...]

Perhaps there’s more hope in infiltrating the system slowly but surely: get strategically-thinking individuals placed in positions of power in government and industry, people who will show some ability to resist. There’s more potential in that strategy, we need to make it our own again. It’s what our enemies have been using to bring us to where we are now. Key problem is that it’ll take time, which we’re getting panicked over running out of. more...

Joel

I need to speak to this from the place of gentle horror, where we have paved over the sufferings of the Iraqi people like we have paved over and channeled the streams gushing from the canyon mouths. For my antiwar views on this blog, I have suffered, not only from the Right but from members of the Left who one year and one month ago, were telling me that there was nothing to do but go along. A year ago, I spoke to the war. A year ago, I protested loudly against it. I questioned and I questioned the weapons of mass destruction. One year later, everything that I thought would prove true has: we breezed into Baghdad, then entered a long period of occupation where our soldiers were picked off one by one. One year and one month later, we have not found a single weapon of mass destruction. We've caught Hussein and it doesn't matter. We haven't found any links between Hussein and Al Quaeda. The economy totters and we need more money to keep this "operation" going. This butchery that we class as a surgery.

One year later, this critic of the Bush Administration is tired. He's tired not only of Bush, but of the Democrats who have gone along and gone along with the war in Iraq. He's tired that the majority of the population of this nation doesn't see beyond the Walmart greeters and the pretty products lined up on the shelves. He's tired of all the people who have closed their doors on him, whose votes and decisions perpetuate the evil he sees.

The war isn't the only issue we have to face here, Mike... more...

We're All Americans Now

'Land of Cockaigne' Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1559)

We live in a political world | Where peace is not welcome at all, | It's turned away from the door to wander some more | Or put up against the wall.

George W. Bush is an alien. I kid you not. Were I to be interviewed by a lurid U.S. tabloid I'd swear on any holy book that I was abducted by the U.S. president, impregnated with his foul seed and returned to Earth to sow carnage, discord and general mayhem. I would make a packet from my story and live high on the hog for the rest of my days. Sadly, the tabloids have yet to come knocking. But, as they say inside the Beltway, my door is always open.

Ah, yes, the Beltway. I believe the beltway constitutes the roads circling, ringing or locking in the cocooned goons now charting their stocks and our global descent into a madness beyond compare. The tabloids would find much to write about were they to root around the head of the average DC functionary performing lewd acts in the capital of the New World Order. Perhaps the toxicity levels emanating from the cesspit are too high for lowly scandal rags; I don't know. Either way, the skin-sheets persist in searching for people like me, people born of lizards or abducted by strange and twisted life forms up to no good.

According to my friend David Icke (he of the lizard king and the warbloggers' conventions in the secret chamber under the Lincoln Memorial), both the above descriptions apply to George Walker Bush. A friend sent me an e-mail pointing to a Glenn Reynolds' (Instapundit) post. He asked me what I thought of Reynolds. I have no idea to which entry in this blog I should point him. Needless to say, they all involve Mike Sanders, Howard Owens, Nick Denton, secret warblogging conventions in the antechamber of the secret vault under the Lincoln Memorial and, of course, the poor donkey. As a scholar though, David refuses to speak to the tabloids and therefore retains me as his spokesperson.

He's an easy customer compared to some of my other clients. One-time Brigadier General and torturer-in-denial Janis Karpinski is proving a real pain in the butt (the pun is not intended and I apologise to all Iraqi citizens sodomised by instruments of the U.S. global law-and-order machine). Janis is as guilty as all hell. Then again, aren't we all? As George Paine points out, "You knew." Indeed we did and do. There is no way out of this one, Bubba. You know what they say... you can run, but you can't hide. We will hunt you down and beat you like swine before putting the muzzle to your medulla. You too will know fear. I will show it to you in a fingerful of lead.

Way to go... death to the Yankees... Eh, shit, wait, this wasn't supposed to go in this direction... Let me start again. Scrap the dead Yanks bit... Gah! Blogging... Give me a fucking break. It leads me to places I really don't want to go. Which is where I started this; being abducted by George W. Bush. Look, you know what I think. As far as I'm concerned, we are all vile, wicked and depraved. There is no hope of redemption and we are all for the Lake of Fire. It's obvious, innit? I mean, look about you. Look at yourself. You deserve Nirvana? Does anybody else? Why? See my point? Good. Okay, now that there's no hope, we'd better make the best of the time allotted us, i.e. three score years and ten (more if you're a widow living in the States and a hell of a lot less if you're Joe Soap living in Africa, but let's not quibble). Frankly, if I'm to live out my life with some dignity and any measure of peace, I can do without George W. Bush, his buddy General Ariel 'Arik' Sharon, their minions and all those supporting them (Republicans, Democrats and Likkudnics).

Okay... wait. Back up a bit. Why the hell am I writing this incoherent piece of babble? It's all Shelley's fault. She's thinking of breaking up with me. Well, she doesn't put it like that, but I can always tell what Shelley is thinking. I mean, look at the title of her blog entry. Can We Still Be Friends. I kid you not. This is a line I am supposed to use. I'm telling you, never fall for a feminist. They'll make a mess outa you and have you believing that they're somehow justified in terminating what you thought was a deep, meaningful and lifelong friendship. I mean, fuck it, I'm not going anywhere. I've always regarded Shelley as my friend in the same way as I do many others I take for granted around here. I think of Jeneane, Elaine, Tish, my mentor Father Christopher (there's a funny smell coming out of the Jesus Bunker), Tom Shugart... in other words, the multitudes contained within, too numerous to mention.

We Hate America

'The Land of Cockaigne' (after Bruegel) Chris Gollon

We live in a political world, | Wisdom is thrown into jail, | It rots in a cell, is misguided as hell | Leaving no one to pick up a trail.

Take my advice. Never blog about friends and George W. Bush in the same entry. It's a killer. The one cancels out the other. Don't get me wrong; George W. Bush is far easier to write about, but friends are far easier to lose. Shelley's justifiably concerned that much of the acrimony directed by some (ehem) at the United States of America will jeopardize friendships now and in the future. They might... I can see it happening, but I can't see it happening to people who share pretty much the same views on the Boy Wonder's plans to destroy Earth and all who sail in her. The confusion arises because of the propensity of some (ehem... okay, so I'm speaking of Chris Kovacs here) to lump good people like those mentioned above, many others on our blogrolls and perhaps half the population of the United States, with The Other Half. The Other Half, of course, comprises all those representing that which is sick, repulsive and morally reprehensible. In other words, George W. Bush, his crazed administration, and its brain-dead collaborators. These people are evil and deserve to be shot like wild pigs but, in the United States, where Janet Jackson's boob is a big deal and Bill Clinton's blowjob is an impeachable offence, they are treated with kid gloves.

Naturally, because these bozos are blowing up the world and its relatives, many Americans and most foreigners are in what one might politely call a state of high dudgeon. We are seriously pissed off. We are perhaps a bit beyond pissed off and might even be said to be hoping that somebody will shortly land a sizeable aircraft on the White House. It would do wonders for world peace, the interior decorating business and newspaper sales. And, just to appease those who might believe I am advocating terrorism here, I'd like to state that I am merely considering the possible benefits of a Tokyo option. Or Hiroshima. Or Nagasaki. Y'know how it goes. Destroy the White House in order to save the world. Actually, put like that, it makes a lot more sense. Yes, we'll run with that.

Sometimes, especially when a sub-normal, dim-witted, inbred piece of white trash rises to the most powerful office in the world (I've told you how George Jr. was lumped on Bush Sr. after a Houston Convention trailer-park tryst with Sweet Melinda, Sister Annie and Angel, who'd just got back from the coast), there is a need to be blunt. Look, I know many Americans take to the streets to fight for civil liberties, peace, choice and all good things now being savaged by the rabid dogs of Christian Fundamentalism. We see them on the TV. They march sedately in carefully designed protester suits under carefully designed flags of convenience and are tracked by legions of carefully designed Darth Vader police. It all looks kind of unreal. And that's where I have to admit to a lack of understanding. Where're the guns, the riots, the blood, the bodies, the burning buildings? I don't see 'em. Look, even Old Europe has these things. A good protest isn't a good protest without a burning building or two. Y'know? Shit. Sometimes axes are called for. I mean, the post below originated somewhere. It has a basis in reality; a link to something that is happening. If it's not enough to get people to go ballistic, what is?

Yup. I'm in two minds. Somehow, I can't help feeling that if I knew I were doing more than taking time out to contemplate and justify my indifference to an ongoing and savage reality, I'd rest a lot easier. But, as I say, I'm in two minds. It's always a tough one.

The thing is, George W. Bush and his pus-headed followers are doing more than messing with my friendships, sodomizing Muslims or blowing Arabs to bits from here to Kingdom Come. They are messing with my blogging and I don't like it one bit. There was a time, before George put a cork in it and started taking that mad dog Rove and his rabid bitch Rice seriously, when I could blog away about life in general while registering my strong opposition to mindless acts of thuggery supporting commercial greed, e.g. the invasion and obliteration of Afghanistan. No more. Afghanistan showed Bush to be capable only of dancing to Bin Laden's tune. He was sucked in and chewed up. It was only a matter of time before he was spat out. As I have stated before, 9-11 signalled the end rather than the beginning of the war. Osama said, "Welcome to the world. You lost." Now, if George W. Bush had listened to his electorate in much the same way as Jacques Chirac, Gerard Schroder and others listened to theirs... well, we'd be living in a different world today, wouldn't we?

But no, George wanted revenge, Dick wanted oil, and St. John of Ashcroft wanted the Rapture produced and directed by Donny Rumsfeld and his neo-con goon squad.

Rather than answer that nagging little question, "So, what do you think they have against us?", George and his idiot friends set about bombing the world in accordance with plans sketched decades ago by deviants and perverts employed by the Pentagram to dream up enriching things for presidents to do. The Constitution of the United States? George was not told to read it before being assigned his position, but nobody minded. It was when George slipped effortlessly from his newfound belligerence to a state of pure hate and started tearing up the constitution of the globe that I got seriously pissed off. That was the moment evil clouded the air. Everybody was afraid. 9-11 hadn't changed the world, but George sure as hell was going to. Whereas the invasion of Afghanistan represented naked imperial aggression against a defenseless state, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was (and has repeatedly proven to be) a crime against humanity. We screamed about it. We ranted, raged and vented against it. We spent an awful amount of time arguing with the shit-for-brains mob sailing under the warbloggers' flag. Well, that sure as hell was about as counter-productive as one could possibly be (I'll never speak to those bastards again) and George launched his illegal and morally repugnant campaign.

Bang went my blogging.

But I digress. We were speaking of the Wonderchicken. Now, we all know how testy, bad-mannered and socially ill-equipped Chris Kovacs is. I'd ask that you overlook his grievous shortcomings for just a short while and try to understand this ghastly Canadian expatriate who proudly professes his hatred of America. Read the essay to which he alludes in a comment he appends to Shell's post, Anti-America. He says he's proud of his article. I'm sure he is, but I wonder who he got to write it. Not that Kovacs is incapable of cobbling together an occasional piece of lucid prose, you understand, but this piece is just... well... so... moi. There, I said it. I didn't write it, but I might have. So now you'll never know who did write it, will you? Mind you, I don't know The Clash's music that well... heh... or do I? Okay, let's give this one (just to speed things up) to Stavros. He is, after all, the only wonderchicken I'll ever allow inside my house. If waeguk's not a soup, I want to know what the hell it is. After a long-winded explication of his childhood as an anti-American Eskimo punk, Kovacs gets down to brass tacks. Here they are, for lazy sods:

I love Americans, many of them. I hate America because through those who lead that powerful nation, it seems to be hellbent on making a world that is worse in every way that's important for most of the people in it. And I feel this way not because I am Canadian, or 'lefty', or religious, or anything else other than who I am. I hate America because I want so desperately to love it.

But, bar constituting an important statement, that's not the half of it, so if you're sick enough to want to crawl into this self-admitted kindergarten sociopath's mind, you'd best read the whole thing.

Against the Wall?

'Land of Cockaign' Johannes Phokela

We live in a political world | Where mercy walks the plank, | Life is in mirrors, death disappears | Up the steps into the nearest bank.

Joel is a sucker for punishment. He lists many of the things that irk him about our Western or, to relocate to my neck of the woods, Western-ized approach to regulating life. In other words, and like Yule, he fights the inexorable march to sameness and is therefore fiercely protective of the individual. Hey, I agree with all Joel's stated views. More, I believe that if you protect the individual, you protect the people. Frankly, it's self-fucking-evident, but try telling it to the freaks promoting insidiously divisive concepts like multi-culturalism. Hell, a small example. I remember watching 'multi-racial' soccer during the late 70s in South Africa. Blacks playing whites (or vice versa). What a sick joke. It was labelling, stereotyping, and story telling at its worst. It was divisive and extremely dangerous. To us, as South Africans, the lie was obvious and we set out to expose it.

Today, we see the same corrosive logic employed by the social engineers of yesteryear dividing the States. I remember watching a film called Hardball. Starring Keanu Reeves, it told the story of a bum coaching a Little League Baseball Team. A predictable enough story line, eh? But this was different. First, Reeve was believable. A gambler, he owed big and he played his role believably. You could see the greasy sweat on his forehead and feel the pit in his stomach. Secondly, Cabrini Green and the ABLA housing projects reminded me of Cape Town's Lavender Hill. "So this is the democracy being exported to the world," I thought. Segregation, whether one calls it multiculturalism or multiracialism is racism by another name.

It's not that we took to the soccer pitches in protest. We continued fighting (more through talk than action) that which was at fault. As is the case in the post-constitutional United States today, South Africa's system of governance was corrupt. Anything coming out of it reflected that corruption. And here we find the reason why Americans today have so many causes for which they see a need to fight. They should not lose themselves inside the causes. They merely represent a system incapable of producing anything but that which is rotten to the core. Look, systems are pretty neutral. It's we who corrupt them. When we reach a stage where both are bent beyond recognition, there's a need to bring about change in both. Besides fighting the small battles (institutionalised barbarism in the U.S. armed forces, for example), we need to tackle the system making these potentially devastating injustices inevitable.

George W. Bush and his minions are not my primary concern. They are pimples on the skin of America, easily cleansed by time. It's the system that endures and, through it, global suffering. George W. Bush and his goons, as the leaders of the most powerful nation (guns and money) on Earth, currently represent a system in dire need of a drastic overhaul. George W. Bush is odious, sure. But, to me, he is also a person. I like some people. Others, I do not. I do not like George W. Bush. Nor do I like his puppeteers or those who vote for him. Besides representing a corrupt system, they seek to profit from it. But I'm okay separating them out from the system they represent. That system, rooted deeply in the American psyche, generates the problems of which Joel speaks. It does this as a natural consequence of itself, the way it works. Sexism, racism, religious intolerance, materialism, ignorance, prejudice and their children, e.g. the wars we fight, are natural consequences of an organising principle determining how we live our lives or look at the world.

The list of possible battles is endless, but the source remains the same. To tell you the truth, Joel, I'm tired too. The enemy is never without; always within.

Note Again redefining "prolific", the indefatigable scribe at Pax Nortona takes issue with the nut of most of that which corrupts; our much-favoured "isms". Read Post-Modernism vs. Democracy and take it from there...

Eating Dirt — Affirming Friendships

'Land of Cockaigne' Pieter van der Heyden (1570)

We live in a political world | Where courage is a thing of the past | Houses are haunted, children are unwanted | The next day could be your last.

We blog on many levels. Nothing illustrates this better than the many blogs listed on my blogroll. They range from the intensely personal to the stridently political. Some, and I hope I can include myself here, try to straddle the divide, blogging the best and worst of both worlds. Not getting much time at my machine and being living proof of Father Christopher's famous blog maxim "Where we write at night when we should be sleeping", I've not maintained a steady flow of entries for the past eighteen months. I've also tended to focus on that which preoccupies most of us, U.S. imperialism. I don't believe myself to be anti-American. Like Stavros, "I hate America because I want so desperately to love it." He certainly has a way with words, that boy. I've asked my mother about him. She says she had a miscarriage when first she fell pregnant, but I don't know...

Shelley's post made me think. Why the hell should bloggers focus their energies on the Iraqi Occupation? What are blogs for? Are there other ways to voice dissent? How many blondes does it take to change a light bulb? I'm buggered if I know the answer to the last question, but I realize how foolish I've been in ignoring the answers to the first three. If truth be told, they leave me feeling more than a little abashed and acutely embarrassed. If anything, they tell me this. I value George Walker Bush and Ariel Sharon, whose obdurate intransigence I admit to occasionally adopting, far less than I do any single online friendship.

I do not believe my being 'for' or 'against' the United States or its citizens as a whole is at issue here. Shelley puts it bluntly. Friendships are at stake. I've been mulling this over. She's right. They are. Why? I believe it's all about the tone we adopt on our blogs and the respect we show for others' views and realities. Anger affects the first and does away with much of the latter. So, what is my tone? Born of anger, it's self-righteous, prescriptive, arrogant, and cocksure. With just a couple of words, I transform a justifiable anger into a demand that others adopt my thinking, change their lives and man the barricades. Doing that reduces even anger to little more than a vituperative and impotent frustration. Hell, even I can't accept that. Motivated by anger (but fuelled by frustration), I become dogmatic. I assume the right to tell others how and what to blog. In other words, I become prepared to ride roughshod over others' views and realities. In short (and in tone), I become Bush. It's my right to want to do that but what conceit would make me want to exercise such a right? No sensible conceit that I can think of. Anger, poorly expressed, can do great harm.

Others have similar rights to me. They can tell me to go screw myself. I'm surprised none did. Fight fire with fire? Sometimes it's necessary.

Not that it'll stop me speaking exactly what's on my mind, of course...

We live in a political world. | The one we can see and can feel | But there's no one to check, it's all a stacked deck, | We all know for sure that it's real.

Bob Dylan | Political World

The American Way

A Blogger's Guide to...

...spreading Peace, Harmony and Goodwill to All



stay in line. stay in step. people are afraid of someone who is not in step with them. it makes them look foolish t' themselves for being in step. it might even cross their minds that they themselves are in the wrong step. do not run nor cross the red line. if you go too far out in any direction, they will lose sight of you. they'll feel threatened. thinking that they are not a part of something that they saw go past them, they'll feel something's going on up there that they don't know about. revenge will set in. they will start thinking of how t' get rid of you. act mannerly towards them. if you don't, they will take it personal. as you come directly in contact face t' face do not make it a secret of how much you need them. if they sense that you have no need for them, the first thing they will do is try t' make you need them. if this doesn't work, they will tell you of how much they don't need you. if you do not show any sadness at a remark such as this, they will immediately tell other people of how much they don't need you. your name will begin t' come up in circles where people gather to tell about all the people they don't need. you will begin t' get famous this way. this, though, will only get the people who you don't need in the first place all the more madder. you will become a whole topic of conversation. needless t' say, these people who don't need you will start hating themselves for needing t' talk about you. then you yourself will start hating yourself for causing so much hate. as you can see, it will all end in one great gunburst.



never trust a cop in a raincoat. when asked t' define yourself exactly, say you are an exact mathematician. do not say or do anything that he who standing in front of you watching cannot understand, he will feel you know something he doesn't. he will react with blinding speed and write your name down. talk on his terms. if his terms are old-fashioned an' you've passed that stage all the more easier t' get back there. say what he can understand clearly. say it simple t' keep your tongue out of your cheek. after he hears you, he can label you good or bad. anyone will do. t' some people, there is only good an' bad. in any case, it will make him feel somewhat important. it is better t' stay away from these people. be careful of enthusiasm...it is all temporary an' don't let it sway you. when asked if you go t' church, always answer yes, never look at your shoes. when asked you you think of gene autrey singing of hard rains gonna fall say that nobody can sing it as good as peter, paul and mary. at the mention of the president's name, eat a pint of yogurt an' go t' sleep early...when asked if you're a communist, sing america the beautiful in an italian accent. beat up nearest street cleaner.



if by any chance you're caught naked in a parked car, quick turn the radio on full blast an' pretend that you're driving. never leave the house without a jar of peanut butter. do not wear matched socks. when asked to do 100 pushups always smoke a pound of deodorant beforehand. when asked if you're a capitalist, rip open your shirt, sing buddy can you spare a dime with your right foot forward an' proceed t' chew up a dollar bill. do not sign any dotted line. do not fall in trap of criticizing people who do nothing else but criticize. do Not create anything. it will be misinterpreted. it will not change. it will follow you the rest of your life. when asked what you do for a living say you laugh for a living. be suspicious of people who say that if you are not nice t' them, they will commit suicide. when asked if you care about the world's problems, look deeply into the eyes of he that asks you, he will not ask you again. when asked if you've spent time in jail, announce proudly that some of your best friends've asked you that. beware of bathroom walls that've not been written on. when told t' look at yourself...never look. when asked t' give your real name...never give it.

Bob Dylan | Advice for Geraldine on her Miscellaneous Birthday

Discussion point

In the face of widespread and ongoing atrocities, human rights violations, massacres, murders and war crimes by the illegal occupying forces of Iraq, the continued silence of so-called 'progressive' bloggers stuns me. Most have retreated to silent collaboration with the incremental genocide being carried out in their name. Daily, mainstream media reports detailing such atrocities by supposedly benign liberating forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are available to those it offends. There is therefore no excuse not to speak out on these horrendous consequences of U.S. foreign policy and the individual acts of mindless thuggery carried out by criminals wielding unfettered power.

A year or so ago, Donald Rumsfeld stated that either Americans were going to have to change their way of life or Iraqis were going to have to change theirs. He chose to change theirs. It is quite apparent, reading the blogs of those with the power to speak out, that most bloggers agree with his chosen course of action. This being the case, those who remain silent should be coerced into justifying their support for continued violations of their fellow human beings' most fundamental human rights and the desecration of everything for which the United States purports to stand. To do anything less is to echo and lend value to the mealy-mouthed verbiage emanating from the U.S. administration's spineless apologists.

In short, the continuing silence of supposedly 'liberal' bloggers supports these atrocities and damns fellow bloggers such as River to a terrible isolation.

Note In Torture at Abu Ghraib, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh notes:

As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.

Hersh does not indict only the military. The role of mercenaries employed by CACI and Titan (the link to the latter is a cached page as Titan's servers appear, somewhat inexplicably, to be down) highlights the degree to which the Pentagon depends on highly paid thugs to do the administration's dirty work (military intelligence). In a recent Dispatch from Tom Engelhardt, Nick Turse's article The Military-Academic Complex: Who's the Real National Champion? explores the entrenchment of the privatised military in academia. Far from reinforcing the military's capabilities, privatisation appears to have rendered it pathetically ineffective and infinitely more dangerous. Hersh observes that "...these detentions have had enormous consequences: for the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the growing insurgency; for the integrity of the Army; and for the United States’ reputation in the world." Indeed. And now, with Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard retaking Falluja (using less-than-obvious tactics in the person of General Jassim Mohammed Saleh, former head of the 38th Infantry Division), the U.S. military appears incapable of carrying out its most basic function which is, when all is said and done, offensive.

Mugging the World...

U.S. and Israel Form Unholy Alliance

Middle-Eastern and Asian Fragmentation Key to U.S. Global Strategy

[April 2003]

"...something is going terribly wrong in Baghdad and something is going on which demands that serious questions be asked of the United States government."

Robert Fisk


Bush seeks global conflict, fragmentation, and domination of Middle East and Asia.

Some things are too hot to touch | The human mind can only stand so much | You can't win with a losing hand

Bob Dylan | Things Have Changed

Weighed down by an awful awareness of willing blindness, I watched supposedly right-thinking, sensible people around the globe ignoring the unfolding horror of Iraq's and, by the extension, the world's 'sacking'. Little was being said of irreplaceable Mesopotamian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian and other artefacts and archaeological wonders being destroyed or burnt at Baghdad's National Museum of Iraq and National Library. Archives spanning the ages were disappearing and Iraq's complex infrastructure, servicing 26 million people, was being trashed. The Bush Gang, a culturally deprived horde of low-rent pimps, drug lords and whoremongers dripping with the blood of innocents, was mugging the world before my eyes. On the blogs, with the exception of the usual suspects, nada. People were contemplating their virtual navels, ignoring the horrendous crime being carried out in their name.

In January of last year, I wrote an open letter to my long-lost brother in poetic madness, the hopelessly insane romantic, Marek J. I wrote it to thank him for offering to buy me a new PC. While waiting for FedEx to drop off the 3GHz laptop I will use instead of my trusty 486, my one-time innocence testifies to partial sight and bears reposting. Here, in part, is my letter to the panic Mole manic Pole:

Marek, thank you for your generosity. I intend setting up an offshore bank account to take full advantage of your concern for my well-being, but it may take some time. Please bear with me. I bank with Tropicana in Lagos (I started doing a bit of financial consulting on the side for the much-loved Abacha family, benefactors to the Nigerian people, who called on me personally in July last year) and I thought I would have no difficulty in arranging things to our mutual pecuniary benefit. However, I did not count on the FBI, CIA, NSA, sundry oil company representatives, several out-of-work US Secretaries of State, one ex-British prime Minister, and two Men in Black.

The nut of it is that these high-powered heavies from the US have been hanging around outside the doors of the bank for weeks now, harassing innocent customers. Among the heavies was a guy who insisted he was from the AA, but he looked like a drunk to me rather than a respectable representative of a Western security agency. I set a bunch of street kids onto him and he soon disappeared beneath a seething mass of small black bodies. He was last seen naked, trying to catch the last bus to Kano. I hope he made it in time for the riots. The Men in Black immediately gave the urchins scholarships to the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, where they will learn to behave like gentlemen.

Apparently this desire to interrogate innocent strangers in the interests of their continued freedom has something to do with overly advantaged, Koran-waving Saudis using the United States air transport system to kick over a couple of castles in the air above lower Manhattan and flatten a building called the Pentagram in Washington. The wanton destruction queered the pitch (to thugs now controlling access to Caspian Sea gas) of their superiors in a multinational gun-running outfit going by the name of The Carlyle Group, which hangs out at 300 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Carlyle Group is, ostensibly, run by former employees of the World Bank and Securities Exchange Commission, but it is known to be home some of the world's most heinous gangsters, including the likes of Frank Carlucci, George Bush Sr., James Baker, John Major, Fidel Ramos, Anand Panyarachun, and Karl Otto Pohl.

Apparently the building demolition jobs on the Eastern seaboard resulted from a spat between Dubya and a former boyhood buddy, the aforementioned Osama bin Laden, whose family also has significant interests in the Carlyle Group. Dubya, stressed to the gills by an incident wherein he was attacked by a pretzel after referring to some of his closest friends as "Pakkies", is still pissed off at Osama's reluctance to allow friends in the Carlyle group, including his family, to route a pipeline through Afghanistan and into the South Asian market. As Dubya's latest lover, 'Big Dick' Cheney, a former Secretary for Defense and CEO of Houston-based Halliburton, the worlds largest oil services company said jokingly in 1998, "...the Good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would normally not choose to go. But, we go where the business is."

Indeed.

Dubya has always been one to stick close to the money. Unfortunately, things do not always work out as intended and the poor fool is now in dire need of additional income. Friends who had given him close on $2m for furthering their interests in Pennsylvania are in trouble and things are not looking good. What with Halliburton and one-time energy supremo Enron both operating out of Houston, it seems like a hell of a place in which to do business. Osama has fucked things up for Dubya and many other high-profile energy industry high rollers and they are out to get him. Hence the presence of their heavies at the doors of the offshore finance house of my choice. These guys carry big guns, larger wallets, and recruitment forms for the US Special Forces. They ask customers inconsiderate questions about personal matters that should be of no concern to them.

I believe they have Mr Abdullah Habib, the manager of the Tropicana, a devout Muslim and my personal friend, locked in the vault. There is no money in there. Abacha took it.

I did not foresee the horror of Iraq in that post. As my friend Bob Dylan says, "Things have changed." Yes, they have but, unfortunately for Bob [who I see as something of a prophet], the song remains the same. George W. Bush's live-in lover, Big Dick Cheney, said:

"...the Good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would normally not choose to go. But, we go where the business is."

Unfortunately for all of us, this is as true today as it was when he said it. I should have foreseen the dark undertow leeching Iraq of life and a future from a billion dollars away. We can always count on Big Dick to continue raping the planet for fun and profit. He does it with the charm of a flesh-eating zombie. And he does it for the good of all mankind. In other words, he does it for us. He does it in our name. Not in my name? It's a nice slogan but I spit on it. Like it or not, the upending of history as we know it, the trashing of the Cradle of Civilisation, and the desecration of our global future by a gang of red-necked, oil-guzzling thugs and their willing partner, Israel [hotly pursued by out-manoeuvred, European vested interests], is being carried out in your name. The United States of America, in the guise of global policeman and arbiter of all that is right, good, and just, is smashing the Middle East to pieces. It seeks a fragmented, tribal Arab world a thousand years removed from an OPEC-powered, pan-Arabic bloc. Maintaining order is always difficult. Managing chaos is easier, especially when you control the wealth.


U.S. policy is to smash and fragment Iraq.

Forget nascent democracies, human rights, and an urge to rid the world of despots. Forget liberation, the protection of Iraq's interests, and a desire to get out of Iraq as fast as possible. The Americans want the Middle East and, by God and your good graces, they're going to take the whole fucking shebang. Don't expect them to relinquish it anytime soon. Other states will follow in the next few years and the Palestinians, well, fuck the Palestinians. After Ariel's played his part in Syria, he'll take care of the Palestinians. Sharon has a mind like a mortuary, is an internationally renowned homicidal maniac and war criminal, heads up the all-purpose butcher's brothel and charnel house disguised as the Israeli parliament, from where he dispatches his ruthless death squads, dressed in the garb of the so-called Israeli Defense Force [IDF].

Fuck me? Fuck you. As if Sabra and Shatilla and the ongoing carnage and wanton slaughter in the Occupied Territories weren't bad enough, this week we gaze on the bone-shattered, blood-spattered memories of Qana. You'll not glean this reality from your duplicitous mainstream, blood-sucking sham network media. Get it on the Internet. Get used to it and do something about it. "Not in my name" indeed. Amid reports of routine torture by U.S. security agnecies, such slogans are banners of rich expedience. The devious psyches of overly well-fed intellects will go a long way to avoid committing themselves to strong statements or action opposing the likes of Big Dick, Little Bush and The Devil's Outrider, Ariel "Fuck You" Sharon.

There is a particularly insidious little school of tea-party thought among wannabe liberals that says those opposing Israeli-supported U.S. aggression should offer the invaders alternatives to their chosen course of recent action. We should outline the means whereby George W. Bush, a deviant with a chocolate-chip morality, a cornflake Christianity and the culture of a bunker buster, can extricate himself [and us] from the quagmire into which he has led us. Implicit in this perverted little piece of blowback rhetoric is the assumption that the sick bastards pulling down the pillars of the Temple had 'good' and 'noble' reason to invade Iraq, a Third World, impoverished country led by cheap gangsters whose malice turns physical far more quickly than does that of anally retentive, repressed Western psycho-deviants.

I don't doubt they had reason, but don't try to sell me on the hoary notion of it being 'good'. Let's look at the situation as it now stands. Paid to sell their country and their people down the rivers that nurtured our collective histories, the Iraqi civil and military leadership, those running its civil service, scientists, academics, secret police, intelligence agencies, torture and death squads, and the myriad apparatchiks who made a meaningful contribution to the perpetuation of Hussein's power - in other words, tens of thousands of people, have DISAPPEARED. Yes. Bar four or five hosers and perpetual losers as well as several thousand Ba'athists press-ganged into terrorising civilians, poof! Offering no resistance, they vanished into the thin, desert air. Planes were grounded, weapons weren't used, bridges and oil wells were left intact and POWs were served up on a plate.

The trillion-dollar American military and intelligence machine that allowed a crazed populace to root around every nook and cranny containing anything of value in Iraq [destroying all that was left to the protection of the invaders], cannot tell us to where Saddam's demented coterie of mass-murderers have relocated. The extraordinarily vicious trashing of Baghdad and other cities [far worse than pillage seen in recent European and African wars and in contradiction to Islamic principles] constitutes a gross violation of the Geneva Convention protocols so beloved of Rumsfeld since a couple of dead marines were shown parading in front of television cameras. It should have triggered alarm bells. More, with U.S. prisoners of war being returned in extraordinarily good health, why is their pampered status as guests of a collapsing regime not being questioned? Spirited away to Germany, they were debriefed before being flown to a muzzled heroes welcome in Texas. Do not expect much in the way of intelligence from them. Or from the hollow halls of Rumsfeld's head for that matter.

Why were the lives of millions of civilians and the histories or our civilisations left unprotected? Because U.S. marines were too busy guarding looters and bussing arsonists into central Baghdad to raze government buildings. A long occupation demands the destruction of infrastructure and, by God, that infrastructure was to be destroyed. IslamOnline.net quotes an Iraqi lawyer telling al-Jazeera, "This is an Islamic country, and its people could not behave in such a way. American forces are involved in encouraging such pillaging." As for Saddam's missing government, the international media is full of ideas. They're in hiding. States of choice include Belarus, Syria, Russia, France, and the United States. Detailed theses of less-than-dubious value posit credible hypotheses of a duplicity mind-numbing in its cynicism. It bespeaks a demoniacal cunning staggering even for the rot-brained, cancerous cabal now dividing Iraq into three warring states and running the U.S. economy and its people into the ground and infinite penury.


Israel's role and interests in the Middle East are pivotal to the U.S. global agenda.

The catalyst tying the loose strands of perplexity surrounding the missing government and encouraged looting besetting Iraq is found in a Pravda article, Behind the Scenes of the Iraq War, alleging Israel's guiding hand in the destruction of modern Iraq. Before you throw your hands up in Holy Horror and kick your machine to a blue-screen death, hear me out. Under the dubious authorship of Harun Yahya, this particular article is likely to be panned. However, its sense and thrust cannot be scoffed or wished away. Nor can countless voices echoing the same refrain while shedding new light on Israel's role in the atomisation of the Middle East.

Israel sees Iraq's ancient cultures clashing with its desire to have the run of the region. Yahya's thesis is backed by a 1982 Ha'aretz article by military correspondent Ze'ev Schiff, calling for "the dissolution of Iraq into a Shi'ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part." A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s, authored by journalist and former Israeli Foreign Ministry official Oded Yinon, sketched the possible break up of Iraq into three states around Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. Veteran Israeli peace activist and former Knesset member, Uri Avnery, says Yinon's ideas inspired Ariel Sharon.

"[Sharon's] head was full of grand designs for restructuring the Middle East, the creation of an Israeli 'security zone' from Pakistan to Central Africa, the overthrow of regimes and installing others in their stead, moving a whole people [the Palestinians] and so forth."

Yahya's article details Mossad's active pursuit of the break-up of Iraq and other neighbouring countries, its role in driving America's subsequent wars in the region, and the now familiar plans put forward for Iraq's invasion by the Project for the New American Century [PNAC] back in 1997. Turkey's Cengiz Randar highlights the role played by the Jewish Institute for Security Affairs [JINSA] in formulating Richard Perle's much-touted strategy of 'Total War' and the 'Clash of Civilisations' theory, which call for the overthrow of governments in the region and the imposition of 'democracies'. Perle, a man with the face of a blood-soaked gargoyle and a co-founder of the PNAC, sees tribal 'democracies' or fragmentation spurred by the U.S. and Israel exploiting ideological, ethnic and sectarian differences in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt and Iran.

Don't believe it? The PNAC's Feith and Perle worked on a plan for restructuring the Middle East, re-establishing the Hashemite kingdom in Iraq and using 'pre-emption' against Syria for Likud Rottweiler Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. Chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and co-author of the report, A Clean Break, prepared by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, a right-wing Israeli think tank with ties to Netanyahu, Perle states:

"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right."

Yahya argues that Israeli regional objectives play a greater role than oil in the break up of Iraq. I certainly don't buy into that one lock, stock and barrel. The smashing of Iraq and the annexation of its oil reserves serve complementary Israeli and U.S. ambitions. The one is as important to the U.S. as the other is to Israel. Whether Israel wants the region as its playground or not is beside the point. The point is that the two increasingly inseparable allies are prepared to take on Islam to achieve their objectives. They are now doing so in a way that would make Josef Stalin blush.

Rather than face a certain annihilation, Iraq's leadership bought into the only avenues of escape publicly offered them by Rumsfeld and Bush. Bush, operating from the hellhole of an infinitely dense mind, gave Saddam 48 hours to leave town as Rumsfeld, using three detachments of 'human shields' and other operatives, made contact with and urged top levels of the Iraqi government and military, most notably, the Republican Guard, to defect. They skipped the country with face-saving grace, a war of token resistance, and the assistance of their ousters. Stripped by duplicity and devious agreement of any means to defend themselves, the Iraqi people were lambs led to a slaughter in a charade played out by blood-crazed butchers, amphetamine-stoked goons keen to blow any A-rab to a pink mist and Nirvana.

"Well, okay, so it happened. It's history. Let's not dwell on dark times. Who really gives a shit? Eh? No, we want the reasons you war protestors continue to protest and denigrate the freedom delivered the long-suffering people of Iraq. We want an alternative vision." You had no vision to begin with, Bubba. Why the fuck should I give you one? Wake up and smell the sick sweetness of rotting flesh. You were blind, blinded, and blind-sided. You were led, dumb and willing, to quiet collusion and complicity in a carnage that will reverberate down the annals of history and change forever the way we view each other and the future. Let's get the obvious shit out of the way. Politics does not brook altruism. It's a fundamental fucking law understood by anybody with half a brain and an IQ above 10. Politics is about gaining and retaining power. That's all there is to it. Simple, eh? Remember it. How does one go about it? Let's look to Israel again, the fears of Iraqi scientists, and the assassination squads sent in to murder some 500 identified by the U.S.

Maariv, an Israeli newspaper, reports a retired French general, interviewed by French TV's Channel 5, alleging that 150 Israeli commandos, working from within U.S. military units, are charged with killing 500 scientists identified as having worked on chemical and biological weapons for Hussein's government. The scientists were all slated to be interviewed by Hans Blix's UNMOVIC inspectors. The 'exercise' has been undertaken to eliminate Iraq's capabilities to develop chemical, biological and nuclear armaments. An e-mail from the scientists, pleading for assistance from the international community, was copied to IslamOnline.net on April 11. In the e-mail, allegations of the U.S. military transporting looters to Mosul University back the assertion that rampant destruction of property is taking place under U.S. military supervision. The scientists further allege arbitrary detention by U.S. troops working from lists naming individuals and demands that they hand over all academic and research papers in their possession. Several have been approached by the CIA with offers of work elsewhere.

So much for Saddam's ugly regime and Israel's non-complicity in this most underhand obliteration of a sovereign state. The mealy-mouthed dross and syrupy pronouncements of a deep commitment to human rights and everything else that makes us dance in fields of dreams and draw up noble documents of meaningless intent was just so much shite pumped out by dangerous psychotics with a blackhole sense of humour and disseminated by a complicit network media. That the dunderhead right swallowed such bullshit hook, line and sinker is of no concern to me. My concern is stopping their support for an ongoing crime against the past, present and future of humanity. There's more to this story than meets the average Republican's eye and, as Robert Fisk says at the outset, "...something is going terribly wrong." If United States' citizens cannot see their regime mirrored in that of the now-departed and unlamented Saddam Hussein, they have a long way to go before their minds hit ground.

The short story is that there are no 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq. As for the Americans, the story is very different. However, when it comes to the U.S., we use different criteria and standards. Rumsfeld knows this all too well and exploits it to the nth degree. The argument pushing oil as a prime motivator of this conflict is convoluted and follows two strands. The first runs along very much the same tack as that set out in my reference to the nefarious doings of the Carlyle Group and Dubya's childhood friend, Osama, another well-paid scapegoat and fugitive from justice. Crude Vision, a publication put out in March by one of myriad shady Washington DC-based outfits, the Institute for Policy Studies [IPS], appears to capitalise on Rumsfeld's buffoonery during the recent onslaught on civilisation. It reads as a publication targeting Rummy's tenure as Defense Secretary. Whether they're right, left or misguided, the IPS does offer us some facts.

Between 1983 and 1988, during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam allegedly unleashed 13,000 - 19,500 chemical bombs and artillery shells on Iranian forces. He acquired them from his chief backers, the United States and other Western powers. On March 16, 1988, Iraqis allegedly gassed the Kurdish city of Halabja, killing approximately 3,200 people. While Iran and Iraq cluttered the Straits of Hormuz and the Shatt-al-Arab Waterway with the hulks of tankers of every nationality, the Reagan administration and Bechtel, whose interests and agents were synonymous, courted Saddam for the rights to build a pipeline from Iraq through to the Red Sea at Aqaba in Jordan. U.S. government officials and agents for Bechtel offered Israel's Labour Party 10% of the profits if Shimon Peres's government did not bomb the thing to blazes. With Aqaba a stone's throw from Eilat, I doubt he'd be able to resist the temptation.

None of them gave a damn about dead Iranians or Kurds. They gave Saddam the ordnance needed to get the Iranians to "shut the fuck up". While thousands choked on gas made in the U.S.A. and gasped their last, Rumsfeld did all he could to help Saddam 'increase his oil exports'. Official condemnation placated the media and Reagan's hoods put the squeeze on U.S. Export-Import Bank and the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation to put up the money for Bechtel's pipeline. This disgusting [and shameful] episode shows us that, in 1988, the United States viewed the gassing of thousands of people as a potentially "embarrassing situation". Today it forms the focus of the publicity campaign driving their so-called War of Liberation in [or on] Iraq. How times and viewpoints have changed. I doubt pangs of conscience or a feeling of goodwill to all men have anything to do with it.

According to the IPS, the blood-toothed greedheads and numbskulls involved in the Aqaba pipeline deal included George Schultz, Ed Meese, William Clark, James Schlesinger, Lawrence Eagleburger, Robert McFarlane and a supporting cast of thousands. Ed Meese was later investigated for the Iran-Contra affair. He was about as much an Attorney General as Ollie North was a war correspondent. After Iran, Saddam thought he could count on the moral torpor of his Yankee friends and slid into Kuwait. He should not have mixed a dearth of morality with benefits accruing to the States from a cosy oil source. Saddam was hit with another devastating war, twelve years of sanctions and UNSCOM and UNMOVIC weapons inspections. These were interrupted by Operation Desert Fox, the carpet-bombing of suspected weapons facilities by Clinton's administration in 1998. Militarily, Saddam was a spent force by 1999, incapable of mounting a meaningful defence of Iraq.


Nuclear proliferation threatens U.S. hegemony.

Four years later, Scott Ritter of UNSCOM and Hans Blix of UNMOVIC went as far as they could in stating that no weapons 'of mass destruction' existed in Iraq. They were more inclined to point to those wielded and used so readily by Israel and the United States. These two rogue states seem to have a surfeit of the damned things. Why should Syria and North Korea not have a few nukes if Israel can stockpile around 160 bombs? What of the annual India-Pakistan Derby, during which long-range delivery systems and nuclear warheads are tested? What do these people need such things for if not to sow terror? Ah yes, Pakistan is on the U.S. roster. It is, after all, an Islamic dictatorship. Should it send one of its missiles towards Israel it would, if U.S. foreign policy is to make any sense at all, constitute a direct threat to the stability of the United States of America. Today, as U.S. oil reserves drop and the need to pump oil for their own account becomes more urgent, the U.N. is avenging its drubbing by the murderously arrogant NeoCons. It is demanding the reinstatement of UNMOVIC before the Security Council considers lifting sanctions against a U.S.-occupied Iraq. It's unlikely to win many friends delaying the U.S.' ability to flaunt its newfound wealth and hits a raw and oily nerve both sides of the Atlantic. The second strand of the oil story lends some substance to a near-miss post I made a few days before writing to Marek [see above]. On January 16 last year, I wrote:

This war has been waged for millennia and its battles have been fought on a pretty much continuous basis in the hearts, minds, and countries of every person conscious of its existence. The buildings hit on 9-11 were symbols or, if you insist, targets rather than battlefields. And the attacks formed a message rather than a military onslaught designed to meet set objectives. The message was simple. "You have lost the war. If you don't understand that by now, you're even dumber than your worst critics think. We, the barbarians, are no longer at the gates. We are inside and, once we've fucked you up good and solid, we'll be on top. Catch us if you can. Sleep tight."

It was as straightforward as that. Just because Dubya used the event to further family and others' interests in the oil and armaments businesses will not change a thing. The clarity of the statement was immediately apparent to all but those living inside the mental fortress of the Northern psyche. Subsequent events have shown Africa to be bemused at, Asia perturbed by, and the East indifferent to the West's propensity to try and stuff the process of achieving global dominance into an envelope of several years. They know all to well that these things take time and they're prepared to wait.

Saddam told Daddy that he was initiating the mother of all battles. Daddy didn't listen and Desert Storm was the result. All the US seemed to gain from that exercise was more sand in its eyes. It took the victor, Saddam, eight years to build his Mother of all Battles mosque and a further three to deliver his riposte. Destiny's children. We'll see more of them born as our misunderstanding of each other increases.

False perceptions abound. The US believes it's in a position to help the world. Crap. It needs all the help it can get. Its enemies believe they can teach the US a lesson. Rubbish. Uncle Sam is far too arrogant. Once we get these little misperceptions out of the way we can, perhaps, start communicating with each other and find a way out of the mess. Otherwise we'll just have to get used to living in the state of perpetual idiocy to which we seem to have become accustomed.

With an ability to discern differing personalities [Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein], I was right about destiny's children, but I failed to interpret Bin Laden's message correctly. After advising Bush he'd lost the war, he said "We are inside, and we are going to fuck you up. We are on top. Catch us if you can. Sleep tight." The translation doesn't really matter very much because the message remains lost on those 'living in the mental fortress of the Northern psyche'. The extent of Bin Laden's victory is only now becoming apparent. In The Real Motives for War in Iraq, Noor ad-Deen Ingalls fills us in on just how frantic our satanic suitor, Little Bush, has become. He also shows up the arch-conservative and hopelessly corrupt French president, Jacques Chirac, for the vested-interest joker he is.

The U.S. imports about 60% of its oil needs. Iraq's oil reserves are second only to those of Saudi Arabia, a country from which the U.S. is trying, with increasing desperation, to sever unnaturally close ties. Pointing out the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimate of $688 billion needed for long-term occupation and rebuilding and Yale University's Prof. William Nordhaus high-end estimate of $1.92 trillion, it seems George's desert adventure will not endear him to penny pinchers watching the U.S. economy and millions of jobs going down the drain. How does this fundamentally depraved and morally bankrupt individual get Iraq's looted oil to market? Ingalls highlights both the means Bush will use to accomplish this and the reason for the rift tearing apart the cosy family of Western nations. Bush will enter Partnership-sharing Agreements [PSAs] with U.S. and British oil companies large enough to foot the $60-140 billion needed to pump the black gold through various stages and into the back of your SUV. The advantage to the oil companies, which stand to realise a 30-year fixed profit tax and exemption from domestic environmental, tax and safety laws, is mind boggling.

The fly in the ointment, however, is the smiling visage of Saddam Hussein. Forced by sanctions to enter future PSAs with Russian and French companies, Saddam did two things. He put the oil beyond the rapacious America's reach and ensured one hell of a fall out. As France and Russia are two of Bush's most vehement opponents and stand to have their PSAs torn up, I guess he played his cards right. Further, the small matter of $1.1 trillion in contracts awarded China, Russia and the E.U. means the U.S., hell-bent on paying for its new acquisition through PSAs with U.S. and British companies, is likely to view those it intends disappointing as potential threats to entrenching its hegemony. One can view the Occupation of the Middle East and Asia as mineral and territorial imperatives for the U.S. and Israel. One can also see it as a last-ditch attempt by Bush to ensure the dominance of the dollar over the Euro and the Yen. Big Dick Cheney's view is less subtle. He reckons that whoever controls the flow of oil in the Persian Gulf enjoys a "stranglehold on the economies of most of the other nations of the world." Heh. Saddam and Osama bin Laden appear to have achieved what nobody was able to do before them, i.e. set the U.S., Russia, China and countless bit players at each other's throats.

Okay, let's deal with 'Saddam Invades New York'. We have seen there was no 'real and imminent threat' to the security of the region or the United States of America. Saddam had neither the weapons nor the means to deliver them. That around half of Americans believe the secular infidel Hussein played a role in a terror attack allegedly carried out by a shadowy bunch of Saudi religious fanatics and moneyed hoodlums going under the collective name of al-Qa'eda, is no indicator of Saddam's power. It shows how dumb most Americans are. For fuck's sake, I do believe if I leaked South African plans to invade America tomorrow, I'd be toast this evening. Yeah, we're coming at you with our 10 gunboats, 20 outdated Mirage IIs and 30 vials full of AIDS. Cause for a pre-emptive strike? You bet. The simple, brainless dupes who sucked in Bush administration garbage, slaughtered thousands, and then gloated while a bunch of uniformed yahoos, Iraqi dissidents and high-flying hoodlums flown in for the occasion, joined a few dozen locals looking for a party in pulling down a statue outside the hotel where the independent media had been shelled a couple of days before, are less than shark shit.

They have no brains and no balls. They are dumb cunts. Period.

Look, the evidence arguing against this act of Momentous Barbarism has been available for decades. It has been posted, nay plastered, across the Web for two years. Valid arguments opposing the invasion of the sand-blasted backwater formerly named Iraq so that the U.S. could manage a Yugoslavia-type break-up were as compelling as those used to fight bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age and implanting U.S. military and air bases in a ring of steel across Asia. If you need arguments opposing these things, well hell, I guess you need arguments opposing rape, pillage and murder. There aren't any that would matter to those who indulge in such things. I'd say you have to be pretty fucking bent if you don't see such activities as evil.

What do 'anti-war' or 'pro-peace' wets want now that the carnage has been allowed to go ahead? Simple. Get the fuck out of Iraq and forget about it. Let others, advised by Iraqis prevented from killing each other by a multinational peace-keeping force, clean up the mess and get the hell out as soon as possible. You foot the bill. Instead of realigning your sights on African oil-producing countries, stick your armaments up your jack and get down to negotiating oil deals. Start observing international protocols. Impeach the Anti-Christ Bush and his flunkies. Try them for heinous crimes against humanity and find the unscrupulous bastards as guilty as all hell. Burn them at the stake. Make like normal human beings. Take cold showers. It's not your job to impose your nightmare visions on the world. Leave it alone already. Is this likely to happen? Hah! The multi-billion dollar invasion of Iraq is going to cost nothing compared to the damage caused by its immediate after-effects and the coming war of liberation. As the generals tighten their grip, lock Iraqis in their houses at night and shoot curfew breakers on sight, antipathy towards the United States increases by the day. Americans will not bring war to Iraq. Iraqis and Arabs from across the Middle East, Africa and Asia will visit war on occupation forces.


Palestine: A working model of Divide and Rule.

As tens of thousands of Iraqis chant "Yankees go home" in the streets of Iraq, Robert Fisk has been dragging himself around Baghdad, taking notes as he goes along. Fisk is a damned fine reporter. He reports what he sees and this drives Americans crazy. He offers no spin. The man's obviously fucking crazy. If he sees Marines shooting civilians for the sheer hell of it, he reports it. If he sees canned carnage of a bridge over the Tigris, he reports it. If he hears of theories speculating on the whereabouts of Saddam and his missing thousands, he reports them. In fact, all you can really say of Robert Fisk is that he's about the only reliable source of information going in Baghdad today. Here's what he says of the coming war:

"It's easy for a reporter to predict doom, especially after a brutal war that lacked all international legitimacy. But catastrophe usually waits for optimists in the Middle East, especially for false optimists who invade oil-rich nations with ideological excuses and high-flown moral claims and accusations, such as weapons of mass destruction, which are still unproved. So I'll make an awful prediction. That America's war of "liberation" is over. Iraq's war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin. In other words, the real and frightening story starts now."

Too right. Witness Britain, where a semblance of conscience, 'fair play', and security of tenure in the House still plays a part in directing foreign policy. In Prove Iraqi guilt, MPs tell Blair, panic-stricken Labour backbenchers show increasing alarm that the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq will confirm that the war was illegal. Such things matter to the Brits. Was Saddam still alive as statue toppled? fuels a horrible fear that Saddam strolled the streets of Baghdad, waving to adoring throngs, as his statue was being leant on in the botched PR job Rummy laughably likened to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Brits fear Hussein has lived to fight another day. If he hasn't been bought off, as speculated above, I don't doubt it. Saddam does not die for causes. Like Tony Blair and George W. Bush, he employs others to die for him.

This weekend's Mail & Guardian carries an Ewan MacAskill story from Nassiriya, US faces its nightmare scenario. "Dissent emerges as in Southern Iraq as Shia Muslims oppose a Western-style democracy" shouts the blurb. This is where the wheels come off and the Guardian reporter, for once, misses the point of this exercise in global rat-pack chicanery. Citing the possibility of Shiites aligning themselves with their Iranian counterparts, MacAskill warns:

"Western diplomats and academics have been warning Washington and London for years that the fall of Saddam could be accompanied by a rise in Shia power. Washington opted to take the risk and may yet have to live with the consequences."

MacAskill is one of countless journalists stuck in a groove that says the U.S. seeks a peaceful transition to 'democracy' in Iraq. It wants no such thing. It has gone in to smash the country, carbonise people who get in its way, render the place ungovernable, divvy it up, occupy it for years and profit hugely from its wealth. Echoing Rebuilding America's Defenses, a September 2000 PNAC strategy document, the Bush Administration's September 2002 National Security Strategy Report calls for a permanent American military presence and domination, through an imperialist Pax Americana, around the world, particularly in the Persian Gulf. Presenting the views of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and business interests including Lockheed-Martin and Cheney's Halliburton, the PNAC states:

"The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American military presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

Need more? This is the stuff of apartheid South Africa. The Nationalists were past masters at the old 'divide and rule' strategy. They used it at every level of government and in every organ of civil society. Israel has used it most successfully to slaughter Palestinians and filthy anti-Semitic foreigners, and it is now being put to effective use by the United States. 'Divide and rule', applied by the National Party, became so entrenched in South African thought it struck me only last night that other societies might be new to its double-dealing, underhand and deadly duplicity. For many years, I've taken for granted an awareness of its use in hobbling the Palestinian cause. The U.S. goal in the region is to smash all dissent by setting neighbour on neighbour. It will exploit any social, religious, and ethnic differences it can find to foster massacres, terror, gangsterism, a fresh market for new guns and anarchy. MacAskill's article is blithely oblivious to this. The U.S. seeks fragmentation or atomisation rather than a threatening stability. Why else would the U.S. bring in Iraqi National Congress leader and international gangster, Ahmed Chalabi? Sentenced in absentia to 22-years in prison for a $200 million banking scam that threatened the Jordanian economy, the U.S. do not expect Chalabi to succeed. They need him as a front. The U.S. does not want secular states of the type built, against overwhelming odds and with uncommon brutality, by Saddam Hussein. Chalabi is a face of convenience, a short-term puppet with a healthy bank balance, no scruples whatsoever, and zero future.

Saddam Hussein represents a failed experiment in power broking, a deluded stooge with an independent streak willing to challenge Israel's regional hegemony and, therefore, the heartbeat of America. Noises now being made of Bush getting tough on Israel are just that, noise of a flatulent nature. With elections looming, Bush has to look to his traditional power bases, the fanatical far-right Jewish community that funds his campaigns [represented by mad beasts like Perle, Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith, et al], the white fundamentalist trailer trash who vote him in and the brainless bully, Big White Business, that sustains him. George W. Bush, fast developing a taste for frenzied orgies of genocidal gluttony, is as much a fascist dictator as the U.S. has seen to date. Having secured his domestic power base with a multi-billion dollar campaign of duct tape, flashing lights and draconian security legislation undermining the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, the anthrax-spreading, remote-controlled corpse and dyslexic cowboy might turn out as much a failed experiment as Saddam. Somebody has to pay for so-called 'war-time security intensification'. In the short term, the U.S. taxpayer will foot a large and completely unnecessary bill.

Will the average American see through this giant charade? It's unlikely. A floundering economy, soaring unemployment and tax breaks for fat-cat friends, call for distraction and Bush Inc. can be counted on to deliver. While he can use Israel as a hollow drum on which to beat for a couple of months, the single-track U.S. and Israeli policy on Palestine calls for further twists and turns in the famously "fictitious" War Against Terror. In the cynical world of global politics, with a couple of months to go before the presidential campaign gets under way, Syria and other states fill the roles of expedient options. Little Bush holds them in reserve. They are targets of convenience furthering the agenda of a gang of thugs that, calmly and without blinking, stole democracy from under the noses of U.S. voters. These Third-World clay pigeons are guaranteed international sympathy. When it comes to a choice of the lesser of two evils, the dime-a-dozen pariah states awaiting fragmentation don't look half as dumb or dangerous as the average American voter. Lacking the willing blindness of the average couch potato to whom war is beamed by satellite from a swamp full of rumour-mongering satyrs mesmerised by the sleazy pornography of their own groupthink, they might well turn out to be the instruments of George's eventual undoing. But we can't bank on it. It's my belief that only the people who give George W. Bush his power can stop him. Until the American public steps up to the plate and says "Enough", this nauseating gnome doubling as the epitome of everything execrable and evil will continue to mug the world.

People are crazy and times are strange | I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range | I used to care, but things have changed

Bob Dylan | Things Have Changed

Primary Sources

Graphics: James Neff

Jeff Rense

InformationClearingHouse

WeLoatheGeorgeWBush.com

al-Sahaf Celebrates a Year in Power

Plus ça change, plus cest la même chose

[A transitional arrangement, with words and music by the indistinguishable duo, George W. Bush and al-Sahaf, from their smash-and-hit conflagration, Any Given Despot.]


"I think there is some methodology in my travels." U.S. President Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

Hah! Yes, by the Grace of Allah, the Most Merciful, it is me again, you scabrous infidels and louts of colonialism. I am now your president, but you have nothing to fear from me. I know something about being a government. And you've got a good one. I think anybody who doesn't think I'm smart enough to handle the job is underestimating. Be assured. I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully. I think the American people - I hope the American - I don't think, let me - I hope the American people trust me. I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn't here. Please excuse my English. Although I do not speak it well, Allah be praised, I've coined new words, like, misunderstanding and Hispanically. Besides, it does not matter. I speak better English than that villain Bush.

By the Grace of Allah, the Most Merciful, the war against you infidels is over. The super power of villains has been utterly vanquished. Allah be praised. Their military effort is a subject of laughter throughout the world. On this occasion, I am not going to mention the number of the infidels who were killed and the number of destroyed vehicles. The operation continues. We're giving them a real lesson. Heavy doesn't accurately describe the level of casualties we have inflicted. Their dead and wounded lie everywhere. We have destroyed 2 tanks, fighter planes, 2 helicopters and many shovels. We have driven your soldiers back and I am now president of U.S.A.

Allah be praised, we have occupied you and are now in control.

Blair is accusing us of executing British soldiers. We want to tell him that we have not executed anybody. They were either killed in battle, most of them getting killed because they are cowards anyway, the rest they just got captured. Their forces committed suicide by the thousand at the gates of Baghdad. As they did so, our Iraqi fighters slapped the gangsters on the face, and then when they fled, they kicked their backsides. The battle was very fierce but God made us victorious. The fighting continues. It is a pathetic sight. These soldiers were thrown into the fires of Hell, the Museum of Antiquities and several government buildings by their leaders. They were like a snake and we cut it in pieces.

The Americans? They fled. The American louts fled like wild donkeys. Indeed, concerning the fighting waged by the heroes of the Arab Socialist Baath Party, one amazing thing really was the cowardice of the American soldiers. "By God," I thought on hearing this. "I think this is rather very unlikely. This is merely a prattle." Definitely, we had not anticipated this. We blocked the faltering forces of infidel mercenaries inside the city and we slaughtered them in the airport. We went into the airport and crushed them, we cleaned the WHOOOLE place out. They were slaughtered. They tried to bring a small number of tanks and personnel carriers in through al-Durah but they were surrounded and most infidels had their throats cut.

They were in a state of hysteria. Losers, they thought that by killing civilians and trying to distort the feelings of the people they would win. I did not think they will win, those bastards.

God willing, and with me as president, you are safe, protected. I think we agree, the past is over. There's no such thing as legacies. At least, there is a legacy, but I'll never see it. I am not scared, and neither should you be, praise be to Allah in His Infinite Mercy. I'm a patient man. And when I say I'm a patient man, I mean I'm a patient man. But do not turn off your TV sets. It will do you no good. I am your president now. I have you surrounded. You are being besieged. I am hitting you from the north, east, south and west. I chase you here and you chase me there. But at the end, thanks be to Allah, the Divine and Most Merciful, I am the person who is laying siege to you. And, God willing, it is not you who are besieging me.

We have driven the leader of the international criminal gang of bastards, the insane little dwarf Bush, back into the swamps where God will roast his stomach in hell at the hands of Iraqis. We're going to drag his drunken junkie nose through Iraq's desert, him and his follower dog Blair. There's no cave deep enough for America, or dark enough to hide. He deserves only to be hit with shoes. In fact, he is not worth an old shoe. I am a person who recognises the fallacy of humans. Bush is a very stupid man. His rear is blocked. When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfathers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves. I think the British nation has never been faced with a tragedy like this fellow Blair.

You American people are not stupid, you are very clever. You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test. Rarely is the question asked, "Is our children learning?" So listen carefully. I can't understand how such clever people came to elect such a stupid president. My goals for this country are peace in the world. There's only one person who hugs the mothers and the widows, the wives and the kids upon the death of their loved one. Others hug but having committed the troops, I've got an additional responsibility to hug and that's me and I know what it's like. A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier.

My officials have been calling upon all the leaders in the - in the Middle East to do everything they can to stop the violence, to tell the different parties involved, praise be to Allah, the Divine and Most Merciful, that peace will never happen.

George W. Bush, this man is a war criminal, and we will see that he is brought to trial. God willing. We are not afraid to try the whole former American leadership. We butchered their villainous mercenaries and bastards with bullets and shoes. Allah has condemned them. They are nowhere... they are nowhere, really. They are also stupid. They are stupid - and they are condemned. We have them surrounded in their banks. I triple guarantee you, we have given these blood-sucking bastards a sour taste. God willing, they will be burnt. Our initial assessment is that they will all die. We are going to tackle them. They are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves! I do. By the Grace of Allah, the Divine and Most Merciful, I am President Mohammad Saeed al-Sahaf of U.S.A.

We made Bush Jr. and his international gang of bastards drink poison and Saddam Hussein's soldiers and his great forces gave them a lesson which will not be forgotten by history. Truly. They are lost in the desert... they can not read a compass... they are retarded. We defeated them. God willing, I will provide you with more information. I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that they have started to commit suicide in the secret chamber under the Lincoln Memorial. We will encourage them to commit more suicides quickly. Yes, we will kill them all... most of them.


"There ought to be limits to freedom." U.S. President Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

But, praise be to Allah the Most Merciful, I am not here to speak to you of the miserable Bush and his gang of Al Capones. We are here to make peace with Iraq and Syria. It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas. For this reason, Allah be praised, you will now watch al-Jazeera TV. It is better for you than Fox or CNN or other blood-sucking instruments of the Great Satan. Don't believe anything they say!

What is this headline, "Time to restore order"? What does that mean, by God? Time to cover up the crimes of the villains? We will chase these rascals back to London! There ought to be limits to freedom. Will the highways on the Internet become more few? Allah, the Most Merciful, will decide. For now, the American press is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies! These cowards have no morals. They have no shame about lying. They deceived their soldiers and their officers that aggressing against Iraq and invading Iraq would be like a picnic. This was a very stupid lie they told their soldiers. What they faced was a definite death. No one received them with roses. They were received with bombs, shoes and bullets. The game was exposed. Awe backfired on them. This was the boa snake. We extended it and cut it the appropriate way.

I blamed Al-Jazeera for the lies - they were marketing for the desperate Americans! But they are our brothers and, praise Allah, they have repented. I said to them, "The Americans, they always depend on a method what I call ... stupid, silly. All I ask is check yourself. Do not in fact repeat their lies. I can assure you that those villains will recognize, will discover in appropriate time in the future how stupid they are and how they are pretending things which have never taken place." Praise be to Allah, the Most Merciful, this has happened and I am able to speak to you today. Lying was forbidden in Iraq. President Saddam Hussein [there are 26 million Saddams in Iraq] would tolerate nothing but truthfulness as he was a man of great honor and integrity.

The little criminal bastards’ failure in this regard was abysmal. Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld. They were the funny trio. They wanted to tell the world changes thought - as a matter of fact, they did not respect the world, they wanted to tell taxpayers and the domestic public to keep them deceived. We embroiled them, confused them and kept them in the quagmire. They began to tell more lies so that they might continue with the perpetration of their crimes. May they be accursed. As your president, I encourage everyone to speak freely of the truths evidenced in their eyes and hearts. Just look carefully, I only want you to look carefully. Do not repeat the lies of liars. Do not become like them. Once again, I blame al-Jazeera before it ascertains what takes place.

Please, make sure of what you say and do not play such a role. Search for the truth. I tell you things and I always ask you to verify what I say. I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe - I believe what I believe is right. To this law, you will surrender or we will behead you all. Like flea-infested camels with open wounds and saddle-sores, you will carry your coffins on your backs until the day you die. Wherever you go, you will find yourselves encircled.

In the name of Allah the Most Merciful, you will vote for me in 2004. There may be some tough times here in America. But this country has gone through tough times before, and we're going to do it again. We will fix up little Ali and forget the rest. Our nation must come together to unite. God willing, things are looking up. As people do better, they start voting like Republicans... unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.

By the Divine Grace of Allah, the Most Benign and Merciful, there's no doubt in my mind that we should allow the world worst leaders to hold America hostage, to threaten our peace, to threaten our friends and allies with the world's worst weapons.

Praise be to Allah in His Infinite Mercy. May he continue to bless our country. I have taken up too much of your time. You infidels who celebrate the death of the prophet must take up your hammers and spikes, spears and vinegar-soaked sponges, and head for the hills. Your time has come. Eh? Who is this dog Powell in Qatar? What are you saying? Send him to me. There are no Americans here! What? Do you have blacks, too?

Sources

Slate

WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister.com

Whitehouse.org

MongaBay.com

"Even those who live on another planet, if there are such people, would have condemned this action before it started."

U.S. President Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf [April 16, 2003]

The Struggle...

...of Memory Against Forgetting

Chris Hani 1942-1993

We appeal to every religious service over this Easter Holiday to commemorate Chris Hani's life and what he stood for. Let Wednesday 14 April be a day on which, wherever we are, we hold memorial services in honour of one of the greatest freedom fighters this country has ever known. We are a nation deeply wounded by callous, uncaring men who plot such heinous crimes with impunity. The cries of our nation are heard from old men who bury their sons and daughters, wives who weep for their husbands, communities who endlessly bury young and old, infants and pregnant women.

This killing must stop.

Chris Hani championed the cause of peace, trudging to every corner of South Africa calling for a spirit of tolerance among all our people. We are a nation in mourning. Our pain and anger is real. Yet we must not permit ourselves to be provoked by those who seek to deny us the very freedom Chris Hani gave his life for. Let us respond with dignity and in a disciplined fashion. Let us observe April 14 in dignified memorial services and in accordance with the decisions of our leadership. more...

Many have asked why we South Africans will go to the polls today, Wednesday April 14, 2004. Eleven years ago, four days after Chris Hani was murdered outside his Boksburg home, South Africa remembered a man who went a long way to making today's elections possible. On that day, South Africa could have gone either way. We chose the right way.

At the end of the day

Off-the-cuff reflections on a healthy democracy...



Scanning the above, my wife commented, "So you think Thabo had Hani in mind when he set the date, eh?" There was a familiar, ribbing scepticism to her question. "Nah, but it's a nice coincidence, isn't it?" I replied. "Besides, people are going out to vote. I couldn't possibly push my own choice, could I?"

Democracy comes in many flavours and we've invented our own. Many supporting the splinter groups making up the former 'white' parties, the NNP and DA, don't like what we have. They face an ANC likely to harvest more than 70 percent of a vote depleted by apathy or dissatisfaction. Apathy need not be a bad thing. Generally, complacency is born of being satisfied with the way things are going. Either way, when a party dominates a democracy as the ANC does, there are bound to be those who mutter "One-party state."

Such people are clueless and deserve to take a beating at the polls. If South Africa is a one-party state, it is a direct result of policies implemented over centuries by succeeding colonial powers that succeeded only in driving South Africans to a common cause. Since 1912, the ANC has been that cause, first as an organisation, then as a liberation movement and only over the past ten years, as a political party.

Until 1994, close on 80 percent of South Africans had no say in how their lives were run. Those now rabidly criticising the ANC can count their lucky stars that disenfranchised South Africans aligned themselves with an organisation holding to the view that this country belongs to all those who live in it. The Africanists and Black Consciousness movements, the "Africa for Africans" and "One settler, one bullet" factions, and other malcontents served to remind those in danger of being seduced by Western models of democracy that they should not stray too far from their roots. They kept the ANC honest and, to a degree, complemented it.

Most, however, felt at home in the broad church of the African National Congress and it became, for tens of millions, the representative voice of most South Africans. In short, it was a government exiled in its own country, catering to the needs of South Africans from myriad cultures, creeds, and views. This being so, it had within itself the capacity to be infinitely more democratic than the country in which it existed.

This was evident after its unbanning in 1989. Every member of the organisation had direct access to members of the national executive. Of course, those who lived in urban areas with access to telephones and transport had greater access than others but, as an ordinary South African, I was able to meet and discuss issues of immediate national importance with the likes of Dullah Omar, Albie Sachs, Kader Asmal and many, many others who once held or now fill positions in our national leadership. I could pick up the phone or, at a branch meeting, argue a point with Willie Hofmeyr, Tony Yengeni, Cheryl Carolus, Bulelani and Phumzile Ngcuka, Cheryl Carolus, Peter Mokaba (he of "Kill the farmer; kill the boer" fame), Johnny de Lange, Trevor Manuel, Tokyo Sexwale or Cyril Ramaphosa. And then there was Winnie... but we'll leave that for now.

They were, and still largely are, that accessible. Those now filling provincial leadership positions, the Cameron Dugmores and Ebrahim Rasools of the movement, were less so. They were the workhorses, putting in 24 hours of work each day for years. The striking thing about these people was that they were not dedicating their time to their constituents; they were doing it for their country. Idealism had a place and it made a difference. The ANC and its partners, the SACP and COSATU, had become the de facto representatives of all South Africans and, accommodating vigorous debate within their structures, had developed a culture of democracy and tolerance few other countries will ever know.

Those who chose to remain outside the Mass Democratic Movement cannot seem to grasp the importance of this home-grown school of democratic thought. It is inevitable that people who have aligned themselves with a movement for decades will take their grievances back into structures that have accepted them in the past. Sure, there was a lot of authoritarianism, corruption, and bullying from branch level on up. Show me a political organisation in which this is not the case. Power play is the name of the game. Generally though, the ANC was home and that's where problems were worked out. The result was better and more effective policy formulation.

Anybody with the slightest experience of the ANC as a movement was taught three things. One, politics and day-to-day living are inseparable. "Buying a loaf of bread is a political act." Two, government's job is to legislate and regulate; nothing else. Government cannot create jobs. That's up to those steering the economy. Government can only create a climate conducive to job creation and, for the most part, the ANC set out to do that after 1994. Unfortunately, it had both become a political party and business, in the hands of the whites, did not want to (and did not) play ball. Inheriting a civil service that had for centuries served authoritarian regimes and an economy run by those who'd benefited from perpetual privilege was a daunting prospect for a newly elected government hamstrung by 'national unity' ruling partners dead-set on up-ending it.

In the language of the day, 'counter-revolutionaries' were expected and contingency plans had been made and the government of Nelson Mandela survived its detractors. It did not fare so well on the global stage. Egged on by a sullen business sector, the First World and its economic instruments, i.e. the World Bank and IMF soon made their presence and their power felt. In 1996, the ANC's Reconstruction and Development Programme was abandoned in favour of our current neo-liberal economic policy, GEAR. Today, the poor are poorer and the rich far richer. Families and countries, no matter how close, survive on their economies and it is on matters pertaining to the economy that the ANC, as a ruling party, has compromised most. As Arundhati Roy is so fond of pointing out, it sold out. In its favour, it was coerced into doing so and bowed unwillingly.

Even so, given that it sold the family jewels, the ANC remains the only party capable of governing South Africa. It is still the organisation with which the vast majority of South Africans identify and it therefore reflects their aspirations. It has its faults; it is deaf to outsiders but, internally, it has an under-appreciated culture of democracy that makes it amenable to change. Today, the PAC, AZAPO and, to a degree, the IFP have given way to non-governmental pressure groups born of the congress or mass democratic movements. AIDS, Zimbabwe, poverty and job creation are all hurled in government's face by those who, frustrated by internal inaction, take to the streets in the knowledge that those to whom they are speaking know who is speaking to them.

That's democracy as I see it. Who needs 'an effective opposition'? Why does South Africa 'deserve better' and where are we going to find it? Which brings to mind the third lesson taught South Africans from grassroots up. It remains one of the reasons I continue to support, if not work for, the ANC. It is appreciated throughout the former movement that government is its own greatest opposition. Working with the broad range of structures and groups it encompasses, this insight remains one of the ANC's greatest strengths. Therefore, seeing as the polls are now closed, I ask "If it ain't broke, why the hell try to fix it?"

If ever there should be a need to 'fix it', South Africans will want to do the job themselves. My wife, for whom Chris Hani was something of a pin-up boy, understands these things better than most. Her parents and other family members continue to live in Zimbabwe, a country devastated by mismanagement and a thuggery edging towards genocide. Many of her family have been either murdered or shot in the years following independence. She knows that Robert Mugabe is planning his retirement and will settle in a ZAR30m mansion overlooking Llandudno on Cape Town's Atlantic seaboard. Serves 'em right. Mad Bob will be followin the example set by Mozambique's RENAMO leader Alfonso Dhlakama who, after the apartheid-backed civil war in that country all but destroyed it, retired to a villa overlooking Maputo. Nobody troubles Dhlakama any more. The war is over.

Chill and enjoy it. Things could be far worse. You might live elsewhere. Besides, they used to be...

It is estimated that more than 3 million workers stayed away from work, and several million more students joined the strike. A huge demonstration in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, was described in press reports as the largest ever ANC gathering in that city. 100,000 people gathered in Durban, also in Natal. What violence did occur was overwhelmingly the result of police attacks on the demonstrations. More than 26,000 police were deployed by the government to deal with the April 14 protests. Many parts of the country were declared “unrest areas”, giving police powers equal of the states of emergency through the '80s. The ANC called the declarations a “calculated provocation”. At least nine people were killed by police in Cape Town and Soweto. In Soweto police fired on a demonstration at the Protea police station, killing at least three and injuring 240. more...

Note Yes, I'm hopelessly biased (and this does read somewhat like a children's story) but this is my day for being so. For a detailed and impartial breakdown of the South African elections, links to our political parties, and our political topology in general, visit Farrel Lifson's comprehensive and informative site, Politics ZA.