A fairly uninspired browse through some of the main news stories of the day.
It occurs to me that I've written very little about the news recently, and that perhaps you may be getting rather sick of hearing tales of woe regarding pets, friends, and girlfriends. And so it was that I planned to sit down and review a few of the meatier items of note from the last few weeks. However I find that I am handicapped by one or two trifling factors. Not least of these is the following; nothing interesting has happened.
Well, that's not entirely true of course. Lots of things have popped up to stimulate my interest in the last month or two. It's just that something seems to have conspired to make them all seem as bowel achingly dull as possible. Lately the papers have been a torturous read, as if every journalist had suddenly and simultaneously decided to write in the style of Charles Dickens (i.e. dull and plodding; Dickens could quite easily take up 5 pages describing the turning of a door handle...). The only thing that was reported on by journalists who didn't seem to be somnambulant was the Amy Gehring trial, and frankly that's only because the whole affair was stage managed to resemble a twisted circus where the editor of the Daily Mail was the ringmaster. And besides which, I've already bleated on about her bouts of frenzied and drunken seduction. Should I be suspicious about this trend towards making important news seem as riveting as a football match involving Middlesbrough FC? And whether I should or not, what does that leave me with to actually talk about?
Well, I suppose one should really start with the aftermath of the Taliban. In Afghanistan itself there are now peacekeeping troops in place. This is of course a good thing. However, the peacekeeping troops are Para’s. This is of course a bad thing. It was the Para’s who were acting as peacekeepers on Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. It was also the Para’s who had the lion's share of action in Sierra Leone, and acquitted themselves well. Finally, it was the Para’s who opened fire on a group of Afghanistani civilians last week, reportedly without provocation. In case I'm not making myself clear, Para’s make brilliant soldiers and appalling peacekeepers. From what I understand of Para training, their aggression and killing instinct are encouraged as much as possible within the constraints of military discipline. Asking them to fulfil the role of a peacekeeper is akin to using a starving tiger to guard some sheep.
And then of course we have Camp X-Ray, the holding facility for...well, they're not being called prisoners of war are they? I believe "Illegal combatants" is the current euphemism for the 500 or so men who are currently confined there. Does anybody know what has actually been happening to them, or what the reason for their continued detention is? Donald Rumsfeld, the American Secretary for Defence and for Americans in Favour of Behaving like a Pissed Up Redneck was adamant that the men held were dangerous and high ranking members of the Al-Quaida terror network. He talked grandly of secret military tribunals to try them (and of course to try Bin Laden and Omar Mohammed, but as they are still at large they remain unmentioned in most of the press; after all, we don't want to be reminded that the entire purpose behind the conflict in Afghanistan hasn't actually been achieved, do we?) Today the Pentagon shuffled it's collective feet like an embarrassed schoolboy as a spokeswoman admitted that none of those held are actually likely to face trial in the US (apart of course from the infamous American Taliban John Walker Lindh, who's committal proceedings occurred a few weeks ago; I won't go into detail about what happened at the committal, but suffice to say the prosecution lawyers seem determined to top the ratings of the OJ Simpson trial, and aren't shy about using pathetic media stunts to do so). Now that this has been admitted, the pressure will surely grow for these men to be sent to face trial in their own countries. Who knows, maybe the supposedly unsophisticated nations of the Middle East will do something that the US has been incapable of doing and actually charge them with a crime. Remember the outcry when the Taliban held those members of a Christian Aid group? At least the Taliban had the sense of due process to actually charge them with a crime pretty much straight away.
I wouldn't object to the cack-handed abuse of power in keeping these men out of sight but not quite out of mind (who would? It's difficult to shed many tears for men who supported a brutal regime or a self-obsessed terror group) were it not for the fact that it has been handled so badly. From the beginning the US has proclaimed that they are fighting in defence of freedom and democracy. Then they enforce it using methods that would not be out of place in a dictator’s paradise. If the west wants the rest of the world to follow the rules of "freedom and democracy" then we're going to have to as well, whether it suits our purpose or not. And if we're not, then we're going to have to learn to present it in a more palatable form to the rest of the world. Anyone who has a mindset of "Fuck them; it's out right as the victor to behave in this way; everyone else is just going to have to deal with it!" can look forward to a world of increasing tensions and further terrorist atrocities. The current methods of stamping out terrorism have the same effect as stamping on jelly; it doesn't get destroyed, it just fragments and spreads further.
Israel is also simmering nicely. After over a year of pretty much continuous pseudo civil war the Israeli people are starting to realise that Ariel Sharon's methods have not led to peace and never will do. I should also make it clear that, despite one or two accusations to the contrary, I do not hate the Israeli's, nor do I excuse the atrocities committed by the Palestinians. Both sides have suffered, both sides have committed terrible crimes, and both sides deserve a lasting peace settlement. Happily, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has provided a plausible plan for peace, which everyone has tentatively welcomed. So now all we have to do is wait for some extremists to do something truly abominable in order to derail any negotiations and we can get back to the daily business of hearing another report of a suicide bomber killing Israeli's followed by the deaths of Palestinian civilians in the retaliatory action taken. Both sides are as bad as each other in that respect. The most worrying thing is that the Israeli extremists number Ariel Sharon and half of his cabinet in their number. I have a sinking feeling that this conflict is similar to a hit West End musical; it will just run and run and run.
The Enron scandal also broke and singularly failed to engulf the governments of the US and UK in an avalanche of accusations concerning corruption and toadying to big business. It would have done so were it not for that fact that it involved economics, which is boring and therefore unimportant. No? Then why has the media simply reported the scandal as is, with no effort to break down the various (frankly baffling) elements of this sorry affair into something that would be understood by the majority of people? And why is it that the tidbits of coherent information that indicate corruption in and collusion between government and big business have been greeted with a "Yeah? And?" reaction by all and sundry?
Once again, it's my favourite scapegoat; apathy. No-one is really surprised to know that our government is corrupt to some degree, and we are happy to accept it as long as tomorrow is much the same as today. Enron got found out and shafted and is now a semi-worthless piece of intellectual property. Are we to believe that all other large companies play by the rules? Or that Enron was the only company with close ties to western governments? Of course not, and by doing nothing about it we are tacitly encouraging this sort of thing to continue. Oh, there have been various people who have said that nothing has been proved conclusively and so on and so forth. Usually these are the same people who are happy to repeat smears and slanders originating from the right wing press, and pass them off as pure fact, unpolluted by the "biased liberal media". Well, just as some of the accusations that have been thrown at the US and UK governments concerning their corruption are rather too rabidly left wing (I'm sorry, but I still don't believe in any governmental master plan to shaft the people of their country in order to line their own pockets; I believe in a series of greedy and rather weak willed individuals who are looking out for themselves), attempts to claim that Dubya and his pals have completely clean consciences show the same detachment from reality. Okay, innocent until proven guilty is one thing, but in burying ones head in the sand against the tide of circumstantial evidence (The vice president refusing to reveal details of meetings between himself and Enron where he is suspected to have offered them the chance to regulate themselves; had this happened then Enron would never have been caught. Not to mention Kenneth Lay's refusal to testify for fear of incriminating himself and a number of people in office, perhaps even Dubya himself) has the effect of making one seem wilfully and selectively ignorant.
The last big (ish) story that I want to look at caught my attention for no other reason than one of the main players is my local MP. I'm talking about the story that has rocked British politics in an extraordinarily boring way; the fall and further fall of the Transport Secretary Stephen Byers MP. Fate really does seem to hate Mr. Byers; not only is he lumbered with trying to sort out numerous problems not of his own making (the railways, the state of our roads, traffic congestion in cities) but he has inherited a government department consumed with a level of infighting and cattiness that has not been seen since the backstage footage of the Pop Idol Final was released. Basically, two senior civil servants in his department had a row. One (Martin Sixsmith) accused the other (Jo Moore) of forcing the civil servants (who do not work for the Labour Party but for the country; civil servants are theoretically apolitical) to do work for the Labour party itself. Both resigned, then Sixsmith declared that he had done no such thing and generally stamped his feet in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a 4 year old in a huff. Poor old Mr. Byers then found himself having to explain just why the senior members of his department seemed to be a bunch of self aggrandising turds who were happy to use the time that should have been spent doing governmental work composing spiteful emails to undermine their colleagues. In one way this story is reassuring though; it's good to know that anyone in any walk of life is capable of acting in such an immature way. It gives me great comfort to know that if they can behave like that then so can I, and I don't have to grow up quite yet. If only I came away from every news report feeling so positive.
Wednesday, 27 February 2002
Thursday, 21 February 2002
Animal Nitrate
I'm afraid I'm still guilty of a ridiculous level of love for all things cute and fluffy.
Two things happened that had an effect on me this past weekend. Firstly a friendship that has lasted since childhood ended. Secondly my cat, Ali, died. Who wants to guess which of the two was more upsetting? I’ll give you a clue; I conform to the stereotype of England being a nation of animal lovers.
Many moons ago I wrote about how we seem to be far more horrified at the mistreatment of animals than we are at the mistreatment of people. I’ve seen and heard little or nothing to alter my views regarding this. For example, after the main body of the Afghanistan conflict (it wasn’t a war apparently; to echo a better man, a war is when two armies are fighting...) had ended there was a huge relief effort aimed at improving the lot of the Afghanistani people. And yet donations to charitable causes for the populace were dwarfed by contributions to a charity that concerned itself with the welfare of Marjan. Marjan was the one eyed lion that had eked out a miserable and tortured existence in Kabul zoo for the last 23 years. So in the midst of a sea of human suffering, our heartstrings were plucked and played by the plight of a solitary beast.
I should make it very clear that I am in no way looking down on the huge number of people who find animals more agreeable than people. Whilst scanning through the news yesterday a story broke involving a young boy being battered and burnt to death. Let us be in no doubt at all that this was a truly horrific crime. Just beneath it on the Ananova website was a story of a Czech man who was sentenced to 6 months in prison for kicking a hedgehog to death. Suffice to say that I would have been happy for the former crime to be inflicted on the perpetrator of the latter.
What is it about the human condition that allows us to hear reports of appalling human suffering with something horribly close to tolerance whilst we cannot condemn those who cause pain to animals fast enough? This is even reflected in our charities; the main charity for the protection has a royal charter, which although it counts for little in this day and age does give the RSPCA a certain air of esteem. Contrast this with the leading UK charity concerned with the welfare of children, the NSPCC. They are merely a national society. So our monarchs (Prince Phillip notwithstanding of course; the irony of his being patron of the World Wildlife Fund has been oft commented on) are apparently more concerned with animals than with children (which explains quite a lot, not least of which is the fact that our future king has become an old hippy with spiritualist leanings and one or two pointed views on architecture; if only Phillip had shown as much attention to his son as he has to the various species that he’s been helping become extinct).
It would seem that our attitude toward animals stems from a somewhat unholy alliance of duty to protect those that are weaker than ourselves, compassion for those who have suffered, guilt for the fact that the suffering has invariably been at the hands of man, and selective sentimentality. I name the latter with a certain amount of trepidation and self-disgust, as I am guilty of it myself. This sentimentality comes from our anthropomorphication of cute animals. We are less eager to put our hands in our pockets to save endangered insects (unless they are pretty or fluttery, preferably both), fish (the stocks of cod in the North Sea and Atlantic have plummeted, but as long as we get out fish and chips then everything is ok, right?), or birds and mammals that occupy the less attractive end of the looks spectrum (if every hyena on the face of the planet was to disappear tomorrow I don’t think anyone would mourn too much, do you?).
Of course, all of the above could quite easily be applied to people as well with the exception of sentimentality (except perhaps toward children, but as I am not a parent I find it difficult to relate to that mindset; in my world children are there to cry noisily, make awful smells, and ask banal questions. In all respects they are little different to French tourists...) and it is that final element that makes the crucial difference. I think we find it easier to sympathise with the plight of an animal because we can impriny our own idea’s of it’s characteristic onto it regardless of how close this may be to reality. For instance, let’s return briefly to Marjan. A lion is regarded as a noble beast, the king of the jungle. It simply isn’t right for this regal feline to have suffered so much. Therefore it seemed proper to try and restore it’s sense of dignity in it’s last days.
That all sounds about right, does it not? Yet I have seen footage of these ‘noble beasts’ behaving in a decidedly ignoble way; would we use the same metaphors of royalty if we were more familiar with them as bloody great big pussycats that produce echoing squitty noises when emptying their bowels? Or if we had seen one drag it’s backside along the ground in much the same way that a dog might do (and incidentally, the next time you do see a dog do that, pay close attention to the owner; you will never again see such a look of acute embarrassment in your life...)? Okay, with our Royals it’s not the best comparison but you get the gist.
It’s not so easy to make these simplistic projections of emotion onto people, and if it is tried then it doesn’t sit easy with us. Again, the conflict in Afghanistan provides a recent example of this. I talked to many of my friends about Afghanistan (and doubtless bored them all senseless in doing so) and there was a certain amount of ambivalence about the future of the Afghanistani people. In general, we wondered why they had not done more to rid themselves of the oppressive Taliban government, and why they had tolerated the insidious presence of the terrorists who had brought American retribution upon them all. As to the starvation that they were enduring, many people wondered why they didn’t just leave (because as a man named Sam Kinison once said “You live in the middle of a desert! There wouldn’t be any famine...IF YOU PEOPLE LIVED WHERE THE FOOD IS!!”). We are happy to think such things, yet the people of Afghanistan were just as caged as Marjan. Pakistan, Iran, and the various former Soviet republics are not exactly teeming with opportunities for fleeing Afghanstani’s. The refugee internment camps in Australia and the UK are a fairly clear indication of what the West thinks about anyone who had the courage to flee. And make no mistake about how courageous or desperate they had to be to attempt to leave. They ran the risk of execution at the hands of the Taliban or the Northern Alliance, or being robbed by the various tribesmen on the Pakistani and Iranian borders, not to mention the incredible risks involved in sailing for days to get to Indonesia or Australia. No one expected an animal to have done this, but we believe a person to have been in some way negligent if they didn’t.
In truth, I’m not even sure that valuing animal welfare above that of people is such a bad thing. Obviously if taken to extremes it is (Hitler’s love of his dogs is an established historical fact; his regard for Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and, by the end of the war, people in general is something of an oxymoron) but in general I’m inclined to think that anything that encourages us to feel compassion toward something that is not ourselves can’t really be faulted. I certainly don’t feel guilty about feeling relieved that my former friend is out of my life whilst sobbing at the prospect of never seeing Ali again. Maybe we should stop trying to compare sympathy for animals with sympathy for our fellow man and recognise them as different things. Hopefully we will then stop trying to establish a hierarchy of consideration and get on with the important business of treating every living thing with respect and empathy. And following that we can go on a flying pig hunt because, let’s face it, that is just as realistic a prospect.
Two things happened that had an effect on me this past weekend. Firstly a friendship that has lasted since childhood ended. Secondly my cat, Ali, died. Who wants to guess which of the two was more upsetting? I’ll give you a clue; I conform to the stereotype of England being a nation of animal lovers.
Many moons ago I wrote about how we seem to be far more horrified at the mistreatment of animals than we are at the mistreatment of people. I’ve seen and heard little or nothing to alter my views regarding this. For example, after the main body of the Afghanistan conflict (it wasn’t a war apparently; to echo a better man, a war is when two armies are fighting...) had ended there was a huge relief effort aimed at improving the lot of the Afghanistani people. And yet donations to charitable causes for the populace were dwarfed by contributions to a charity that concerned itself with the welfare of Marjan. Marjan was the one eyed lion that had eked out a miserable and tortured existence in Kabul zoo for the last 23 years. So in the midst of a sea of human suffering, our heartstrings were plucked and played by the plight of a solitary beast.
I should make it very clear that I am in no way looking down on the huge number of people who find animals more agreeable than people. Whilst scanning through the news yesterday a story broke involving a young boy being battered and burnt to death. Let us be in no doubt at all that this was a truly horrific crime. Just beneath it on the Ananova website was a story of a Czech man who was sentenced to 6 months in prison for kicking a hedgehog to death. Suffice to say that I would have been happy for the former crime to be inflicted on the perpetrator of the latter.
What is it about the human condition that allows us to hear reports of appalling human suffering with something horribly close to tolerance whilst we cannot condemn those who cause pain to animals fast enough? This is even reflected in our charities; the main charity for the protection has a royal charter, which although it counts for little in this day and age does give the RSPCA a certain air of esteem. Contrast this with the leading UK charity concerned with the welfare of children, the NSPCC. They are merely a national society. So our monarchs (Prince Phillip notwithstanding of course; the irony of his being patron of the World Wildlife Fund has been oft commented on) are apparently more concerned with animals than with children (which explains quite a lot, not least of which is the fact that our future king has become an old hippy with spiritualist leanings and one or two pointed views on architecture; if only Phillip had shown as much attention to his son as he has to the various species that he’s been helping become extinct).
It would seem that our attitude toward animals stems from a somewhat unholy alliance of duty to protect those that are weaker than ourselves, compassion for those who have suffered, guilt for the fact that the suffering has invariably been at the hands of man, and selective sentimentality. I name the latter with a certain amount of trepidation and self-disgust, as I am guilty of it myself. This sentimentality comes from our anthropomorphication of cute animals. We are less eager to put our hands in our pockets to save endangered insects (unless they are pretty or fluttery, preferably both), fish (the stocks of cod in the North Sea and Atlantic have plummeted, but as long as we get out fish and chips then everything is ok, right?), or birds and mammals that occupy the less attractive end of the looks spectrum (if every hyena on the face of the planet was to disappear tomorrow I don’t think anyone would mourn too much, do you?).
Of course, all of the above could quite easily be applied to people as well with the exception of sentimentality (except perhaps toward children, but as I am not a parent I find it difficult to relate to that mindset; in my world children are there to cry noisily, make awful smells, and ask banal questions. In all respects they are little different to French tourists...) and it is that final element that makes the crucial difference. I think we find it easier to sympathise with the plight of an animal because we can impriny our own idea’s of it’s characteristic onto it regardless of how close this may be to reality. For instance, let’s return briefly to Marjan. A lion is regarded as a noble beast, the king of the jungle. It simply isn’t right for this regal feline to have suffered so much. Therefore it seemed proper to try and restore it’s sense of dignity in it’s last days.
That all sounds about right, does it not? Yet I have seen footage of these ‘noble beasts’ behaving in a decidedly ignoble way; would we use the same metaphors of royalty if we were more familiar with them as bloody great big pussycats that produce echoing squitty noises when emptying their bowels? Or if we had seen one drag it’s backside along the ground in much the same way that a dog might do (and incidentally, the next time you do see a dog do that, pay close attention to the owner; you will never again see such a look of acute embarrassment in your life...)? Okay, with our Royals it’s not the best comparison but you get the gist.
It’s not so easy to make these simplistic projections of emotion onto people, and if it is tried then it doesn’t sit easy with us. Again, the conflict in Afghanistan provides a recent example of this. I talked to many of my friends about Afghanistan (and doubtless bored them all senseless in doing so) and there was a certain amount of ambivalence about the future of the Afghanistani people. In general, we wondered why they had not done more to rid themselves of the oppressive Taliban government, and why they had tolerated the insidious presence of the terrorists who had brought American retribution upon them all. As to the starvation that they were enduring, many people wondered why they didn’t just leave (because as a man named Sam Kinison once said “You live in the middle of a desert! There wouldn’t be any famine...IF YOU PEOPLE LIVED WHERE THE FOOD IS!!”). We are happy to think such things, yet the people of Afghanistan were just as caged as Marjan. Pakistan, Iran, and the various former Soviet republics are not exactly teeming with opportunities for fleeing Afghanstani’s. The refugee internment camps in Australia and the UK are a fairly clear indication of what the West thinks about anyone who had the courage to flee. And make no mistake about how courageous or desperate they had to be to attempt to leave. They ran the risk of execution at the hands of the Taliban or the Northern Alliance, or being robbed by the various tribesmen on the Pakistani and Iranian borders, not to mention the incredible risks involved in sailing for days to get to Indonesia or Australia. No one expected an animal to have done this, but we believe a person to have been in some way negligent if they didn’t.
In truth, I’m not even sure that valuing animal welfare above that of people is such a bad thing. Obviously if taken to extremes it is (Hitler’s love of his dogs is an established historical fact; his regard for Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and, by the end of the war, people in general is something of an oxymoron) but in general I’m inclined to think that anything that encourages us to feel compassion toward something that is not ourselves can’t really be faulted. I certainly don’t feel guilty about feeling relieved that my former friend is out of my life whilst sobbing at the prospect of never seeing Ali again. Maybe we should stop trying to compare sympathy for animals with sympathy for our fellow man and recognise them as different things. Hopefully we will then stop trying to establish a hierarchy of consideration and get on with the important business of treating every living thing with respect and empathy. And following that we can go on a flying pig hunt because, let’s face it, that is just as realistic a prospect.
Friday, 15 February 2002
I Know Who My Friends Are
I had just fallen out with one of my oldest friends when I wrote this. By writing it, I managed to piss of most of the rest of my friends. Whoops.
I've always been told that friendship is a good thing, a gift to be valued. Your friends should be the family that you can actually choose. A true friend will always be there to support you, and a group of friends are bound together by ties as strong as blood. History is littered with great and famous friendships that have enriched the world through their strength; Churchill and Roosevelt were good friends. Had they not been, who knows if the US would have entered WWII or if they would have continued their isolationist policies? Coleridge and Wordsworth were good friends. Without the influence of one on the other then generations of people might never have known that a man has wondered lonely as a cloud. The Ancient Mariner might never have troubled us (which if I'm honest is not necessarily a bad thing...).
Yet I've also heard it said that your friends drag you down. That friendship can be a prison and the expectations of your friends are your jailors. Should you ever wish to soar off and explore what you believe to be your full potential your friends will curse your name for abandoning them. The full capacity of friendship becomes the capacity to hate that person. History is again most instructive on this aspect; Julius Caesar was supposedly betrayed by his friend Brutus because of his desire to be King of Rome. In rather more recent and mundane times Tony Blair risks being knocked off the political moral high ground by his continued support and repeated rehabilitation of Peter Mandelson, a man who is gaffe-prone and unpopular. This is to say nothing of the 'Old Boys Network', the main public achievements of which have been to shield certain persons from too much scrutiny only to throw them to the wolves if they become a liability (no doubt Lord Archer and Jonathon Aitkin could explain just how dreadful a thing this is!)
Which of these two statements is true? Is there a grain of truth in both? Or are neither of them particularly relevant, mere idealisations of man's need for companionship? As I have nothing better to do today I'm going to make a (probably vain) effort to decipher this particular mystery.
Before making a start, I'll make a confession of intent. One of my very best friends betrayed me in about as comprehensive a manner as it is possible to do last weekend. He did something that he knew would cause me immense emotional pain and he did so wilfully and deliberately in the full knowledge of what the result would be, and he did so because he wanted to know what it felt like to do so. His behaviour is utterly contemptible by any reasonable standards and I think it's reasonable to say that he is not my favourite person in the world right now. So if by the end of this I have concluded that one's friends are vile and selfish scum who no more deserve compassion than a fat man deserves a girlfriend...well, at least you know of my bias before we get started!
The main example that I intend to use is the friendship between 2 powerful men; George W. Bush (I said powerful, I didn't say anything about being especially bright...) and Kenneth Lay. The former needs no introduction (except possibly to remind his raddled brain of who he is). The latter is the former chairman of Enron, the energy company that has recently been revealed to have done for financial honesty what Enoch Powell did for race relations. Some may question the validity of the friendship between these two; after all, in the murky world of politics friendship comes second to ambition. Yet I believe that there is a strong element of mutual admiration between these two that could be described as friendship, and so it is with these two that I will proceed.
Firstly, if we rewind a few years to when dear old Dubya was running for the governorship of The Lone Star State. Lay (or Kenny Boy as Dubya refers to him) ensured that a lot of money went into Dubya's campaign fund. There is nothing unusual about this in politics of course, but once Bush was elected he returned the favour with bells on. Enron was given pretty much free reign to do what it waned in Texas. In politics, favours are usually given out begrudgingly and are only awarded in the first place because a company has contributed to a campaign fund. Even then, a politician is careful with what he promises because chances are the company or individual will have donated to the opposition as well (as indeed Enron did, though the political party accounts show that the Republicans were the more favoured to the tune of almost $1 million).
The favour that George Bush bestowed was that he trusted Enron to keep their own house in order. When one bears in mind that most politicians are almost porn star-like in their willingness to jump into bed with big business, Dubya's decision to leave Enron to their own devices whilst he got on with the important business of ensuring Texas had the one of the highest execution rates in the world is surprising to say the least. The personal friendship between Lay and Bush seems to provide many of the answers as to why this decision was made.
In a strange sort of way, this shows how friendship between two people can make them greater than the sum of their parts. Without the staunch and unwavering support of the powerful businessman Lay, the political career of Bush (a reformed alcoholic who was even then regarded as something of a simpleton) might have been stillborn. Without the support of Bush, Lay's company might have had to subject itself to greater regulation and control by state and federal government. The one could not have been achieved without the other. The friendship and trust between the two further showed itself by the amount of time the two men spent in each other's company.
Yet things are not quite the same now. The rosy future that the friendship between these men offered seems to have disintegrated for at least one of them. Dubya's trust in Enron to be their own policeman has proved misplaced to say the least. The favour shown to Enron was abused to a frightening degree. As a result of Dubya showing trust and friendship in Lay, a mighty company has been bankrupted by it's own dishonesty. Thousands of people have lost vast amounts of money via their pensions or sharesave scheme. The abuse of friendship has also damaged Bush himself; accusations of cosying up to big business at the expense of the rights of the average man are flying thick and fast at his government, perhaps justifiably so. Yet for all I am a critic of Bush, I don't believe he is an evil man. I don't accept that he extended such trust to Lay knowing full well that Enron would make a mockery of it. I am of the impression that he is genuinely shocked at the extent of Enron's questionable activities and is upset that his friend has betrayed his trust in such a manner and it would seem over such a period of time.
If the relationship between Dubya and Lay was one of convenience then we could be assured that Mr. Lay would be the second Enron executive to commit suicide under the kind of circumstances that keep conspiracy theorists in business. Yet Bush seems to be honouring his friendship with the man who has made his government look like fools, and corrupt fools at that. He was given an easy ride at the inquiry into the collapse of Enron. There is no question that he will suffer any form of censure in terms of criminal or civil actions. Every possible scrap of information that shows Lay as an innocent is being hurled at the media (today the papers make a big deal about the evidence given by Sherren Watkins who was the whistleblower on Enron's financial crisis; she is vociferous in her belief that Kenneth Lay was kept in the dark and was not to blame). Though it is perhaps in Dubya's best interests to abandon Mr. Lay, he is not doing so.
Will the two men still be friends in the future? Probably. I have no doubt that things will be worked out between my friend and I as we have been through a lot together and are simply too fond of each other to allow one incident to make us enemies, and I would expect things to be no different between Lay and Bush. I think what I am saying in all of this is that we should certainly love and cherish our friends, and should always do whatever is within our power to help them. But don't trust them, at least not completely. When someone is faced with a choice of advancement of oneself at the expense of a friend then it would appear we will do so 9 times out of 10.
I've always been told that friendship is a good thing, a gift to be valued. Your friends should be the family that you can actually choose. A true friend will always be there to support you, and a group of friends are bound together by ties as strong as blood. History is littered with great and famous friendships that have enriched the world through their strength; Churchill and Roosevelt were good friends. Had they not been, who knows if the US would have entered WWII or if they would have continued their isolationist policies? Coleridge and Wordsworth were good friends. Without the influence of one on the other then generations of people might never have known that a man has wondered lonely as a cloud. The Ancient Mariner might never have troubled us (which if I'm honest is not necessarily a bad thing...).
Yet I've also heard it said that your friends drag you down. That friendship can be a prison and the expectations of your friends are your jailors. Should you ever wish to soar off and explore what you believe to be your full potential your friends will curse your name for abandoning them. The full capacity of friendship becomes the capacity to hate that person. History is again most instructive on this aspect; Julius Caesar was supposedly betrayed by his friend Brutus because of his desire to be King of Rome. In rather more recent and mundane times Tony Blair risks being knocked off the political moral high ground by his continued support and repeated rehabilitation of Peter Mandelson, a man who is gaffe-prone and unpopular. This is to say nothing of the 'Old Boys Network', the main public achievements of which have been to shield certain persons from too much scrutiny only to throw them to the wolves if they become a liability (no doubt Lord Archer and Jonathon Aitkin could explain just how dreadful a thing this is!)
Which of these two statements is true? Is there a grain of truth in both? Or are neither of them particularly relevant, mere idealisations of man's need for companionship? As I have nothing better to do today I'm going to make a (probably vain) effort to decipher this particular mystery.
Before making a start, I'll make a confession of intent. One of my very best friends betrayed me in about as comprehensive a manner as it is possible to do last weekend. He did something that he knew would cause me immense emotional pain and he did so wilfully and deliberately in the full knowledge of what the result would be, and he did so because he wanted to know what it felt like to do so. His behaviour is utterly contemptible by any reasonable standards and I think it's reasonable to say that he is not my favourite person in the world right now. So if by the end of this I have concluded that one's friends are vile and selfish scum who no more deserve compassion than a fat man deserves a girlfriend...well, at least you know of my bias before we get started!
The main example that I intend to use is the friendship between 2 powerful men; George W. Bush (I said powerful, I didn't say anything about being especially bright...) and Kenneth Lay. The former needs no introduction (except possibly to remind his raddled brain of who he is). The latter is the former chairman of Enron, the energy company that has recently been revealed to have done for financial honesty what Enoch Powell did for race relations. Some may question the validity of the friendship between these two; after all, in the murky world of politics friendship comes second to ambition. Yet I believe that there is a strong element of mutual admiration between these two that could be described as friendship, and so it is with these two that I will proceed.
Firstly, if we rewind a few years to when dear old Dubya was running for the governorship of The Lone Star State. Lay (or Kenny Boy as Dubya refers to him) ensured that a lot of money went into Dubya's campaign fund. There is nothing unusual about this in politics of course, but once Bush was elected he returned the favour with bells on. Enron was given pretty much free reign to do what it waned in Texas. In politics, favours are usually given out begrudgingly and are only awarded in the first place because a company has contributed to a campaign fund. Even then, a politician is careful with what he promises because chances are the company or individual will have donated to the opposition as well (as indeed Enron did, though the political party accounts show that the Republicans were the more favoured to the tune of almost $1 million).
The favour that George Bush bestowed was that he trusted Enron to keep their own house in order. When one bears in mind that most politicians are almost porn star-like in their willingness to jump into bed with big business, Dubya's decision to leave Enron to their own devices whilst he got on with the important business of ensuring Texas had the one of the highest execution rates in the world is surprising to say the least. The personal friendship between Lay and Bush seems to provide many of the answers as to why this decision was made.
In a strange sort of way, this shows how friendship between two people can make them greater than the sum of their parts. Without the staunch and unwavering support of the powerful businessman Lay, the political career of Bush (a reformed alcoholic who was even then regarded as something of a simpleton) might have been stillborn. Without the support of Bush, Lay's company might have had to subject itself to greater regulation and control by state and federal government. The one could not have been achieved without the other. The friendship and trust between the two further showed itself by the amount of time the two men spent in each other's company.
Yet things are not quite the same now. The rosy future that the friendship between these men offered seems to have disintegrated for at least one of them. Dubya's trust in Enron to be their own policeman has proved misplaced to say the least. The favour shown to Enron was abused to a frightening degree. As a result of Dubya showing trust and friendship in Lay, a mighty company has been bankrupted by it's own dishonesty. Thousands of people have lost vast amounts of money via their pensions or sharesave scheme. The abuse of friendship has also damaged Bush himself; accusations of cosying up to big business at the expense of the rights of the average man are flying thick and fast at his government, perhaps justifiably so. Yet for all I am a critic of Bush, I don't believe he is an evil man. I don't accept that he extended such trust to Lay knowing full well that Enron would make a mockery of it. I am of the impression that he is genuinely shocked at the extent of Enron's questionable activities and is upset that his friend has betrayed his trust in such a manner and it would seem over such a period of time.
If the relationship between Dubya and Lay was one of convenience then we could be assured that Mr. Lay would be the second Enron executive to commit suicide under the kind of circumstances that keep conspiracy theorists in business. Yet Bush seems to be honouring his friendship with the man who has made his government look like fools, and corrupt fools at that. He was given an easy ride at the inquiry into the collapse of Enron. There is no question that he will suffer any form of censure in terms of criminal or civil actions. Every possible scrap of information that shows Lay as an innocent is being hurled at the media (today the papers make a big deal about the evidence given by Sherren Watkins who was the whistleblower on Enron's financial crisis; she is vociferous in her belief that Kenneth Lay was kept in the dark and was not to blame). Though it is perhaps in Dubya's best interests to abandon Mr. Lay, he is not doing so.
Will the two men still be friends in the future? Probably. I have no doubt that things will be worked out between my friend and I as we have been through a lot together and are simply too fond of each other to allow one incident to make us enemies, and I would expect things to be no different between Lay and Bush. I think what I am saying in all of this is that we should certainly love and cherish our friends, and should always do whatever is within our power to help them. But don't trust them, at least not completely. When someone is faced with a choice of advancement of oneself at the expense of a friend then it would appear we will do so 9 times out of 10.
Tuesday, 5 February 2002
Hey, teacher; Leave them kids alone
I do find I keep commenting on cases where teachers are accused of shagging their pupils. Is this social commentary, or barely disguised frustration that none of my teachers were even remotely fit, let alone promiscuous?
The Amy Gehring case finally reached a climax (if you'll excuse the pun) yesterday. If you are unfamiliar with this lovely little case then I shall briefly recap; a Canadian Supply teacher (the aforementioned Miss Gehring) was accused of seducing 3 teenaged (i.e. 14-15 year old) boys. Various other details fleshed out the trial, such as the salacious reporting of 26 year old Miss Gehring allegedly groping and kissing a young female pupil at the same party that she was supposed to have slept with at least one of the boys (the Daily Mail in particular reported on this bout of bisexuality with a luridity that must have set 50 and 60 year old saliva glands across the country into overdrive...). We were also treated to revelations that Gehring herself could not actually remember if she had slept with one of the boys at a party but had taken the Morning After pill as a precaution because "...I heard a rumour that I had had sex with him". After a trial lasting a few weeks, and after Miss Gehring was shown to be pitiful rather than predatory, she was found Not Guilty on 3 charges of Indecent Assault, with the judge having earlier directed the jury to lodge a Not Guilty verdict on the 4th charge.
The case and it's conduct have raised a few questions about both the law and about morality (as well as leaving me wondering why school parties these days seem to be so much better than they were when I was at school; we were happy with a few awkward sticky fumblings at age 15. Shagging a teacher was never on the cards for most of us, although in fairness most of them were post menopause anyway...). For example, this was not the first time Gehring had faced allegations of this nature. She had been investigated for "inappropriate behaviour" at another school and the agency that employed her, TimePlan, had been warned that she posed a risk to children. Should this have been revealed at the trial? We also have the treatment of the case in the press. It has been marked by a distinct lack of moral outrage. Had Gehring been a man and the accusers been 3 teenaged girls, would the coverage of the trial have been different? Would the verdicts themselves have differed?
First of all, let us look at the press coverage of the case. I always got the feeling that there was a certain amount of sympathy for Gehring being generated by the media. We were told that she grew up in a remote rural hamlet in Canada, thus giving us the implication of a rather sad and lonely young woman. Much was made of her admission in court that she had never really received much attention from her peers, and so the fluttering and flattering of the pupils made her feel wanted and popular. All in all one was left with the impression of an unbalanced and maladjusted lady who was ill equipped to be in a position of authority over young people as she had more in common with them in terms of emotional development than she did with people her own age.
Can anyone see the same sort of coverage happening if a male teacher is accused of sleeping with his pupils? Would anything have been made of his disadvantaged life or emotional well-being? Or is it more likely perhaps that he would be painted in the colours of a monster; a ravening beast whose only thought is for his own gratification and to hell with the consequences? It's not a brilliant comparison, but look at the Jonathon King case and the differences in the language used. King was branded a paedophile. Gehring was cast as a seductress (although frankly it sounded like she practiced the same art of seduction that will be familiar to anyone who has drank far too much on a Friday night and slurred lovingly at the nearest member of the opposite sex until they either respond or someone else catches one's eye...). King lured (only just) underaged boys back to commit sordid acts. Gehring was simply accused of having sex with an (only just) underage boy and his brother. In both cases the boys were, by their own admission, willing partners. It seems that there is a double standard concerning sex and the young.
I suppose there are a number of reasons why this could be. First and foremost let's look at the unspoken reason; no one can realistically picture a 15-year-old boy who has had sex with a 26-year-old female teacher as a victim. Will the young lad be traumatised and have difficulties in forming relationships in later life? Or is it more likely that he will tell every single one of his friends and earn a place in his school folklore? At the school I attended there was a relationship between a female teacher and a boy who had just entered 6th form. Nobody batted an eyelid at this (except of course to congratulate the boy in question; after all, Miss Binks was rather nice...) but had it been a male teacher and female pupil then I have little doubt that reaction would have been different.
It seems that it is all about our different attitudes to the young depending on whether they are male or female. These boys have doubtless been feted by their peers for what they allegedly did (and they will probably still be hailed as heroes; I don't exactly think that a Not Guilty verdict will stem the tide of schoolyard gossip) and they certainly haven't been portrayed as victims in the press. If you cast your mind back 6 months you may or may not remember 15 year old Katherine Baillie from Portsmouth who ran away with her 35 year old maths teacher for almost a year. She was the poor girl who had been duped and seduced by her pervert of a teacher and had lost a year of her life because of his determination to keep her away from those who cared about her. Yet for all we know, the Gehring boys may be traumatised and unsure of themselves whilst Baillie may be entirely comfortable with herself after her year with the teacher. But we don't want to hear that. That would muddy the waters of social morality where men are always the instigators of sex and women are precious little things whose virtue is to be jealously guarded.
I can sense a snigger building at that last sentence and that only goes to show how unrealistic the social conscience that is peddled by the media as an ideal is. That's not to mention how paternalistic and offensive it is to women in general. If we're going to demonise somebody for having sex with a 15 year old, should it matter what sex either party is? I mentioned how difficult it was to see the Gehring boys as victims at any stage of the case. Yet the boys that King seduced were portrayed as poor lost souls who had had their innocence cruelly taken from them. The only major difference that I can see is that the King case involved consensual underage homosexual sex and the Gehring case dealt with consensual underage heterosexual sex (bisexuality is forgivable in a woman apparently...). Not to mention of course the fact that King was found guilty of a crime under British law and Gehring innocent.
Of course, I could just be honest and say that all of the above is a roundabout way of saying that it's not fair that women can sleep with sexually mature young men whilst men are held in contempt for sleeping with sexually mature young women, but that would be frivolous. Society's differing rules for young men and young women are the product of several hundred years of men being on top (figuratively speaking) and 30 years of Women's Lib. is not going to change it for the better (in the case of certain radicals such as Andrea Dworkin I would go so far as to say that they make it worse). We still don't have true equality in our society and as long as cases like this are portrayed in the way that they are then it will continue for many years yet.
The Amy Gehring case finally reached a climax (if you'll excuse the pun) yesterday. If you are unfamiliar with this lovely little case then I shall briefly recap; a Canadian Supply teacher (the aforementioned Miss Gehring) was accused of seducing 3 teenaged (i.e. 14-15 year old) boys. Various other details fleshed out the trial, such as the salacious reporting of 26 year old Miss Gehring allegedly groping and kissing a young female pupil at the same party that she was supposed to have slept with at least one of the boys (the Daily Mail in particular reported on this bout of bisexuality with a luridity that must have set 50 and 60 year old saliva glands across the country into overdrive...). We were also treated to revelations that Gehring herself could not actually remember if she had slept with one of the boys at a party but had taken the Morning After pill as a precaution because "...I heard a rumour that I had had sex with him". After a trial lasting a few weeks, and after Miss Gehring was shown to be pitiful rather than predatory, she was found Not Guilty on 3 charges of Indecent Assault, with the judge having earlier directed the jury to lodge a Not Guilty verdict on the 4th charge.
The case and it's conduct have raised a few questions about both the law and about morality (as well as leaving me wondering why school parties these days seem to be so much better than they were when I was at school; we were happy with a few awkward sticky fumblings at age 15. Shagging a teacher was never on the cards for most of us, although in fairness most of them were post menopause anyway...). For example, this was not the first time Gehring had faced allegations of this nature. She had been investigated for "inappropriate behaviour" at another school and the agency that employed her, TimePlan, had been warned that she posed a risk to children. Should this have been revealed at the trial? We also have the treatment of the case in the press. It has been marked by a distinct lack of moral outrage. Had Gehring been a man and the accusers been 3 teenaged girls, would the coverage of the trial have been different? Would the verdicts themselves have differed?
First of all, let us look at the press coverage of the case. I always got the feeling that there was a certain amount of sympathy for Gehring being generated by the media. We were told that she grew up in a remote rural hamlet in Canada, thus giving us the implication of a rather sad and lonely young woman. Much was made of her admission in court that she had never really received much attention from her peers, and so the fluttering and flattering of the pupils made her feel wanted and popular. All in all one was left with the impression of an unbalanced and maladjusted lady who was ill equipped to be in a position of authority over young people as she had more in common with them in terms of emotional development than she did with people her own age.
Can anyone see the same sort of coverage happening if a male teacher is accused of sleeping with his pupils? Would anything have been made of his disadvantaged life or emotional well-being? Or is it more likely perhaps that he would be painted in the colours of a monster; a ravening beast whose only thought is for his own gratification and to hell with the consequences? It's not a brilliant comparison, but look at the Jonathon King case and the differences in the language used. King was branded a paedophile. Gehring was cast as a seductress (although frankly it sounded like she practiced the same art of seduction that will be familiar to anyone who has drank far too much on a Friday night and slurred lovingly at the nearest member of the opposite sex until they either respond or someone else catches one's eye...). King lured (only just) underaged boys back to commit sordid acts. Gehring was simply accused of having sex with an (only just) underage boy and his brother. In both cases the boys were, by their own admission, willing partners. It seems that there is a double standard concerning sex and the young.
I suppose there are a number of reasons why this could be. First and foremost let's look at the unspoken reason; no one can realistically picture a 15-year-old boy who has had sex with a 26-year-old female teacher as a victim. Will the young lad be traumatised and have difficulties in forming relationships in later life? Or is it more likely that he will tell every single one of his friends and earn a place in his school folklore? At the school I attended there was a relationship between a female teacher and a boy who had just entered 6th form. Nobody batted an eyelid at this (except of course to congratulate the boy in question; after all, Miss Binks was rather nice...) but had it been a male teacher and female pupil then I have little doubt that reaction would have been different.
It seems that it is all about our different attitudes to the young depending on whether they are male or female. These boys have doubtless been feted by their peers for what they allegedly did (and they will probably still be hailed as heroes; I don't exactly think that a Not Guilty verdict will stem the tide of schoolyard gossip) and they certainly haven't been portrayed as victims in the press. If you cast your mind back 6 months you may or may not remember 15 year old Katherine Baillie from Portsmouth who ran away with her 35 year old maths teacher for almost a year. She was the poor girl who had been duped and seduced by her pervert of a teacher and had lost a year of her life because of his determination to keep her away from those who cared about her. Yet for all we know, the Gehring boys may be traumatised and unsure of themselves whilst Baillie may be entirely comfortable with herself after her year with the teacher. But we don't want to hear that. That would muddy the waters of social morality where men are always the instigators of sex and women are precious little things whose virtue is to be jealously guarded.
I can sense a snigger building at that last sentence and that only goes to show how unrealistic the social conscience that is peddled by the media as an ideal is. That's not to mention how paternalistic and offensive it is to women in general. If we're going to demonise somebody for having sex with a 15 year old, should it matter what sex either party is? I mentioned how difficult it was to see the Gehring boys as victims at any stage of the case. Yet the boys that King seduced were portrayed as poor lost souls who had had their innocence cruelly taken from them. The only major difference that I can see is that the King case involved consensual underage homosexual sex and the Gehring case dealt with consensual underage heterosexual sex (bisexuality is forgivable in a woman apparently...). Not to mention of course the fact that King was found guilty of a crime under British law and Gehring innocent.
Of course, I could just be honest and say that all of the above is a roundabout way of saying that it's not fair that women can sleep with sexually mature young men whilst men are held in contempt for sleeping with sexually mature young women, but that would be frivolous. Society's differing rules for young men and young women are the product of several hundred years of men being on top (figuratively speaking) and 30 years of Women's Lib. is not going to change it for the better (in the case of certain radicals such as Andrea Dworkin I would go so far as to say that they make it worse). We still don't have true equality in our society and as long as cases like this are portrayed in the way that they are then it will continue for many years yet.
Wednesday, 23 January 2002
Religion: Totalitarian
I'm more proud of this rant than of any other.
Something rather surprising happened a couple of weeks ago. A friend of mine announced that she had found God. After the obligatory comments of '...lost him down the back of the sofa did you?' my friend began to gush about her newfound sense of serenity and happiness that Jesus had afforded her. Approximately 20 minutes later she was absolutely horrified at the seemingly never-ending stream of bile that I had spewed concerning the sheer evil that is organised religion. Anybody who has ever heard me talk about the subject will not exact be taken aback by that, but I rather think that my friend was wrong footed by the amount of venom that I hold for the Church. We agreed to disagree on the subject, though she made the observation "Have you had a bad experience or something...not trying to pry & its really none of my business but you seem so angry...” This got me to thinking about just why I hold the Church (and I used 'Church' as a catch-all term for absolutely every organised religion or religious cult, from Anglicans to Zarostranists (sic)) in such contempt.
I've never personally had a bad experience with the Church. I even managed to be in a church choir for a few months when I was 10 and I remained resolutely unbuggered by a single priest (although in fairness I still hold the diocese record for "Longest Maintaining of Anal Virginity in a Church Choir (under 11's section)" for this feat...). Nor have I been denounced as a heretic by any particular religious group (though under the strict definition of a heretic as 'One who questions' I hold up my hand and admit to falling into this category). I've corresponded with the Bishop of Newcastle and he has never been anything less than polite. So what is it that gets my back up? After all I'm not the only vehemently anti-church person that I know. Amongst my friends those who are religious fall into a distinct minority. So why is this?
Firstly I should make clear that I do not bear any grudges against a single individual that I have met who has any involvement in the Church, or at least if I do dislike them it has nothing to do with their religion. I realise that I'm just about to launch into a lengthy tirade about why the Church is an awful thing, but I am a believer in personal freedom within the boundaries of having consideration for how your actions can affect others. If somebody wishes to believe in a 2000 year old fairy tale (well...about 16-1700 years old as the bible was compiled centuries after the death of Christ), or the slickly packaged musings of a former Coventry City goalkeeper who used to wear turquoise shellsuits, or whatever, then that is their prerogative and it's not for me to tell them to stop. I'm going to tell them exactly what I think of it, but I'm not going to ask them to stop.
No, my grudge isn't against individuals but against the organisational aspect of the Church. Simply put, I think that Religion is Totalitarianism for beginners. Both are methods of imposing the will of the few onto the many. Both give absolute control of almost every aspect of a person's life as their stated aim. Both say that they do this for your own good. Both are rife with hypocrisy. Both ensure that those in the upper echelons of the organisation have the opportunity (not always taken) to grow fat, rich, and corrupt.
For example, the Catholic Church states that their priesthood must remain celibate and that it's followers must not use contraception and have sex only to reproduce. Communist rule in Romania dictated that the birth rate must increase and so sex became a patriotic duty. The Party in Orwell's 1984 sought to completely control reproduction via the encouragement of artificial insemination. One's sex life is a pretty damn personal thing yet all of these three bodies want to control it. The only difference that I can see between the 3 is the figurehead that is used. The Church relies on a mythical father figure who is kind and benevolent. The Church is merely an extension of his will. To question the will of the Church is to question the will of God. To question the will of God is to be disobedient, and so the miscreant needs to be gently disciplined as a father would discipline his son when he goes astray. As God is not a tangible being, this discipline is done by the Church on His behalf. Of course, I personally have gone astray from my Father's values on many occasions and he has yet to order me burnt at the stake, pressed by rocks until dead, excommunicated and thus condemned to hell, or even just shunned by himself and his friends.
The Nazi's had Adolf Hitler as their figurehead, which immediately gives them one advantage over the Church; they have a physical, tangible human being as their father figure. Of course, he was elevated to semi mythical status and imbued with all sorts of characteristics that gave would make him superhuman were they all true (this is a trick repeated by cults everywhere; indeed it's possibly the only thing that distinguishes the likes of Icke and L Ron Hubbard's cash-cow sects from mainstream religion). All things done in Nazi Germany were done in the name of Hitler whether he had ordered them (or even heard of them) or not. Whilst I do not doubt that he was a paragon of evil in himself or that he would have approved of 99% of what was done, all sorts of vile acts were done without his consent and in his name. To question any of this was to question the will of Hitler who in turn spoke for the Volk of Germany. As Hitler was unquestionably doing what was right for Germany, to question his will was anti-German and so these people had to be 'corrected' in protective custody. Nazi Germany was a long way advanced of the medieval church and so they could draw on the modern equivalents of burning at the stake etc.
The Party of 1984 had a fusion of the two; Big Brother was a Hitler like figure who was represented as a real person to the masses though the book is ambiguous at best as to whether he really does exist. Senior party members used Big Brother as a mixture of father figure and avenging angel to justify their use and abuse of power. The common thread that runs through all of these is that power is exercised by a few men and women. They justify themselves using a distant figure to whom no right of appeal can be reasonably expected. Therefore all of the decisions that affect the running of the Church/Party are made by those same few. In other words, one of the reasons I hold such hatred for the Church is that it places immense power in the hands of a few people, and as history has shown time and time again, power corrupts. There are few or no checks or balances in place to ensure that power is exercised in a fair way because they are exercising the will of an infallible being so why would they need them?
Which leads us into the heart of just why I have such a problem with the Church; they allow people to believe that by becoming a member of the church they are receiving guidance from God/Alpha Waves/Good Aligned Martian Lizards. They are doing absolutely no such thing whatsoever. They are receiving guidance from men. From human beings. There is nothing divine about the people whom they are handing over control of their lives to. They are just flesh and blood like everybody else. And like everybody else they have their own reasons for doing what they do. I'm not doubting that some do genuinely belief in the unfathomable mystery of the divine, in the rapture, or in whatever piece of mumbo jumbo of variable age and questionable origin that their particular Church espouses. However, as they are all people like any other then they will have the same sense of ambition, the same vulnerabilities, the same irrational likes and dislikes, the same flaws as any one of us. And their all-too-human traits will affect their actions toward their followers. So no one ever receives the undiluted wisdom of the spiritual world. They receive somebody else's interpretation of it. This is the reason for my less than charitable prejudice against the more devout followers of the Church; they don't have the courage to try and come to their own conclusions so they let somebody else do it for them.
Naturally the Church would dispute this. They would point to the Bible, or the Koran, or to a series of Sumerian and Aztec/Inca pictograms, or whatever book contains the teachings and dogma of that Church. They would say that it is the truth and the leaders of the Church simply teach the followers about it and encourage them to live their lives according to it's precepts. If that is so, how on earth is there still war and murder (because after all, Thou Shalt Not Kill) that receives the support of the Church? Why isn't the Church encouraging us to shun menstruating women (as we are told to do in Deuteronomy)? Why are we told to love our fellow man whilst simultaneously encouraged to denounce them if they don't follow the same religious teachings as you?
It's because those books of timeless wisdom are all mired in a particular place both historically and geographically. The Bible is a good textbook on how to live your life in 3rd-6th century Europe. The Koran does the same job for the Middle East of the 6th-7th century. They did not foresee a world that would change quite as radically as it has since then. So these books (that were written by men) are now interpreted by men and women as to how they relate to today's world. Fallible man and women. They may like to kid themselves that they are being entirely objective in their interpretations but this is a self-delusion. No one is completely free of bias, and so the teachings of the Church have been influenced by Byzantine politics, personal grievances, jealousies and petty hatreds.
As a humanist it does seem a little strange to me that the reason I criticise the Church is because it is mortal and not divine. But I hate it because it pretends to be something it is not. It claims higher motivations for seeking base power and it is absolutely no different to any method of controlling or subjugating a populace that has ever been created. People should by all means seek answers for to the divine and to the spiritual (I know I do) but I wish that they would do so without abdicating responsibility for doing so to someone else. Your own personal beliefs are just as valid and far more important than anything that you are encouraged to accept or have imposed on you as the truth. I truly believe that the world would be a better place if more people remembered that.
Something rather surprising happened a couple of weeks ago. A friend of mine announced that she had found God. After the obligatory comments of '...lost him down the back of the sofa did you?' my friend began to gush about her newfound sense of serenity and happiness that Jesus had afforded her. Approximately 20 minutes later she was absolutely horrified at the seemingly never-ending stream of bile that I had spewed concerning the sheer evil that is organised religion. Anybody who has ever heard me talk about the subject will not exact be taken aback by that, but I rather think that my friend was wrong footed by the amount of venom that I hold for the Church. We agreed to disagree on the subject, though she made the observation "Have you had a bad experience or something...not trying to pry & its really none of my business but you seem so angry...” This got me to thinking about just why I hold the Church (and I used 'Church' as a catch-all term for absolutely every organised religion or religious cult, from Anglicans to Zarostranists (sic)) in such contempt.
I've never personally had a bad experience with the Church. I even managed to be in a church choir for a few months when I was 10 and I remained resolutely unbuggered by a single priest (although in fairness I still hold the diocese record for "Longest Maintaining of Anal Virginity in a Church Choir (under 11's section)" for this feat...). Nor have I been denounced as a heretic by any particular religious group (though under the strict definition of a heretic as 'One who questions' I hold up my hand and admit to falling into this category). I've corresponded with the Bishop of Newcastle and he has never been anything less than polite. So what is it that gets my back up? After all I'm not the only vehemently anti-church person that I know. Amongst my friends those who are religious fall into a distinct minority. So why is this?
Firstly I should make clear that I do not bear any grudges against a single individual that I have met who has any involvement in the Church, or at least if I do dislike them it has nothing to do with their religion. I realise that I'm just about to launch into a lengthy tirade about why the Church is an awful thing, but I am a believer in personal freedom within the boundaries of having consideration for how your actions can affect others. If somebody wishes to believe in a 2000 year old fairy tale (well...about 16-1700 years old as the bible was compiled centuries after the death of Christ), or the slickly packaged musings of a former Coventry City goalkeeper who used to wear turquoise shellsuits, or whatever, then that is their prerogative and it's not for me to tell them to stop. I'm going to tell them exactly what I think of it, but I'm not going to ask them to stop.
No, my grudge isn't against individuals but against the organisational aspect of the Church. Simply put, I think that Religion is Totalitarianism for beginners. Both are methods of imposing the will of the few onto the many. Both give absolute control of almost every aspect of a person's life as their stated aim. Both say that they do this for your own good. Both are rife with hypocrisy. Both ensure that those in the upper echelons of the organisation have the opportunity (not always taken) to grow fat, rich, and corrupt.
For example, the Catholic Church states that their priesthood must remain celibate and that it's followers must not use contraception and have sex only to reproduce. Communist rule in Romania dictated that the birth rate must increase and so sex became a patriotic duty. The Party in Orwell's 1984 sought to completely control reproduction via the encouragement of artificial insemination. One's sex life is a pretty damn personal thing yet all of these three bodies want to control it. The only difference that I can see between the 3 is the figurehead that is used. The Church relies on a mythical father figure who is kind and benevolent. The Church is merely an extension of his will. To question the will of the Church is to question the will of God. To question the will of God is to be disobedient, and so the miscreant needs to be gently disciplined as a father would discipline his son when he goes astray. As God is not a tangible being, this discipline is done by the Church on His behalf. Of course, I personally have gone astray from my Father's values on many occasions and he has yet to order me burnt at the stake, pressed by rocks until dead, excommunicated and thus condemned to hell, or even just shunned by himself and his friends.
The Nazi's had Adolf Hitler as their figurehead, which immediately gives them one advantage over the Church; they have a physical, tangible human being as their father figure. Of course, he was elevated to semi mythical status and imbued with all sorts of characteristics that gave would make him superhuman were they all true (this is a trick repeated by cults everywhere; indeed it's possibly the only thing that distinguishes the likes of Icke and L Ron Hubbard's cash-cow sects from mainstream religion). All things done in Nazi Germany were done in the name of Hitler whether he had ordered them (or even heard of them) or not. Whilst I do not doubt that he was a paragon of evil in himself or that he would have approved of 99% of what was done, all sorts of vile acts were done without his consent and in his name. To question any of this was to question the will of Hitler who in turn spoke for the Volk of Germany. As Hitler was unquestionably doing what was right for Germany, to question his will was anti-German and so these people had to be 'corrected' in protective custody. Nazi Germany was a long way advanced of the medieval church and so they could draw on the modern equivalents of burning at the stake etc.
The Party of 1984 had a fusion of the two; Big Brother was a Hitler like figure who was represented as a real person to the masses though the book is ambiguous at best as to whether he really does exist. Senior party members used Big Brother as a mixture of father figure and avenging angel to justify their use and abuse of power. The common thread that runs through all of these is that power is exercised by a few men and women. They justify themselves using a distant figure to whom no right of appeal can be reasonably expected. Therefore all of the decisions that affect the running of the Church/Party are made by those same few. In other words, one of the reasons I hold such hatred for the Church is that it places immense power in the hands of a few people, and as history has shown time and time again, power corrupts. There are few or no checks or balances in place to ensure that power is exercised in a fair way because they are exercising the will of an infallible being so why would they need them?
Which leads us into the heart of just why I have such a problem with the Church; they allow people to believe that by becoming a member of the church they are receiving guidance from God/Alpha Waves/Good Aligned Martian Lizards. They are doing absolutely no such thing whatsoever. They are receiving guidance from men. From human beings. There is nothing divine about the people whom they are handing over control of their lives to. They are just flesh and blood like everybody else. And like everybody else they have their own reasons for doing what they do. I'm not doubting that some do genuinely belief in the unfathomable mystery of the divine, in the rapture, or in whatever piece of mumbo jumbo of variable age and questionable origin that their particular Church espouses. However, as they are all people like any other then they will have the same sense of ambition, the same vulnerabilities, the same irrational likes and dislikes, the same flaws as any one of us. And their all-too-human traits will affect their actions toward their followers. So no one ever receives the undiluted wisdom of the spiritual world. They receive somebody else's interpretation of it. This is the reason for my less than charitable prejudice against the more devout followers of the Church; they don't have the courage to try and come to their own conclusions so they let somebody else do it for them.
Naturally the Church would dispute this. They would point to the Bible, or the Koran, or to a series of Sumerian and Aztec/Inca pictograms, or whatever book contains the teachings and dogma of that Church. They would say that it is the truth and the leaders of the Church simply teach the followers about it and encourage them to live their lives according to it's precepts. If that is so, how on earth is there still war and murder (because after all, Thou Shalt Not Kill) that receives the support of the Church? Why isn't the Church encouraging us to shun menstruating women (as we are told to do in Deuteronomy)? Why are we told to love our fellow man whilst simultaneously encouraged to denounce them if they don't follow the same religious teachings as you?
It's because those books of timeless wisdom are all mired in a particular place both historically and geographically. The Bible is a good textbook on how to live your life in 3rd-6th century Europe. The Koran does the same job for the Middle East of the 6th-7th century. They did not foresee a world that would change quite as radically as it has since then. So these books (that were written by men) are now interpreted by men and women as to how they relate to today's world. Fallible man and women. They may like to kid themselves that they are being entirely objective in their interpretations but this is a self-delusion. No one is completely free of bias, and so the teachings of the Church have been influenced by Byzantine politics, personal grievances, jealousies and petty hatreds.
As a humanist it does seem a little strange to me that the reason I criticise the Church is because it is mortal and not divine. But I hate it because it pretends to be something it is not. It claims higher motivations for seeking base power and it is absolutely no different to any method of controlling or subjugating a populace that has ever been created. People should by all means seek answers for to the divine and to the spiritual (I know I do) but I wish that they would do so without abdicating responsibility for doing so to someone else. Your own personal beliefs are just as valid and far more important than anything that you are encouraged to accept or have imposed on you as the truth. I truly believe that the world would be a better place if more people remembered that.
Thursday, 17 January 2002
Dark Side
Why are people fascinated with evil, but find good to be bland?
So the War Against Terror rumbles on into the New Year and, just as in WWI, promises of it being all over by Christmas have proved empty. Though the Taliban is a spent force and Al Quaida are broken and running only a hopeless optimist would say that it is all over. Yet it has been worth it; in the last few weeks a thoroughly corrupt regime has been exposed for what it was. The words and promises of its leaders are being shown to have been hollow and empty. And so a regime that preaches war to those who oppose it's will and by it's own admission cares not a bit for the basic rights of the men that fought against it is facing extremely tough times. No, I don't mean the Taliban but the US Government which is facing it's own problems involving the Enron Energy Scandal.
To briefly summarise; Enron's accountants lied about the profits the company could expect to make, thus the share prices went up. When the stench of cooked books began to give the game away Enron's share price plummeted (they have lost 99% of their share value since the revelations; that amounts to about $60 billion). The company executives have also been busy little beavers; salting away debts in offshore funds to conceal them from prying eyes and destroying thousands of documents that may or may not have been incriminating. This was all found out during an independent audit. An audit, which Enron, with the help and connivance of its friends in government, had done, it's utmost to avoid. Indeed, it had avoided it for a long time so who knows how long 20 or 30 people have been making money out of these lies (lies which have now cost Enron Employees their pensions; the pension fund invested heavily in now worthless Enron stock).
Of course, I'm overstating my case somewhat here. Although one of the biggest corporate bodies in the world is being shown to have been run in a corrupt and inept manner, and although many members of the US government have been party to that corruption (up to and including George W. Bush who received numerous campaign contributions from Enron when he was the Governor of Texas) it is doubtful that that any of the main political players will suffer much. And as there is a still a war going on, who is really going to notice that their Government is in the pocket of big business? By the time the next election rolls around, will anyone remember the revelations that the men and women elected to represent the interests of the people are in fact lining their own pockets at the expense of those they serve? Or will they remember September 11th and the subsequent war that saw the evil upstarts of Al Quaida humbled by the might of the USA?
Doesn't it strike you as odd that one President almost loses his job for getting sucked off by a porker in the White House whilst another changes laws and amends taxes so that his rich friends can become mega rich whilst the taxpayers bear the burden, and yet will almost certainly remain unchallenged in his current office? After all, the things that Clinton made the press for were trivial on the grand scale of things whilst Bush is demonstratably behaving in a corrupt manner. But he won't make the mainstream press in quite the same way. Is this because Clinton made the mistake of telling little white lies whilst Bush delivers whoppers that would make Baron Munchausen blush?
I suspect that he's going to get away with it because of one of those little quirks of humanity that makes us such a thoroughly unpredictable bunch. We tend to like bastards. And the bigger the bastard, the worse the crime, and the more likely it is that the person will have a group of people (large of small) who admire what they did. Even the rest of us will almost certain feel a guilty stab of awe at what was done whilst we heartily condemn their actions. As a group we seem to be fascinated with evil, with the darker side of human nature. Although we do our best to distance ourselves from the evil that men do (we use such phrases as "Inhuman" or "He was like an animal" or "Depraved and bestial") our continuing interest in the crimes committed by some people (not to mention the fact the crimes keep on being committed) shows that evil is a most human quality indeed.
Let us take, for example, Adolf Hitler. Here is a man who still to this day is venerated by many hundreds of people. He has had more books written about his life than Mother Theresa. He has been the subject of films, TV programs, comedy, drama, and horror. He is the object of repeated and vigorous academic study. Yet this man is one of the most evil and hateful men ever to have walked the earth. And people admire him. Even those who don't will know more about the life of this profoundly malignant man than they will of, say, William Morton (the man who first used anaesthetic in a medical procedure in order to alleviate pain; without him medical science would have not been able to advance at the same rate and so many hundreds of thousands of people indirectly owe their lives to him).
It's not as if those apologists and revisionists of Hitler's Reich are trying to repaint the man as an innocent duped by those who served him, or a colossus of compassion whom history has misunderstood. If someone says that they admire what Hitler achieved, do you think that they admire the early years of his Winter Aid scheme which sought to ensure that Germans did not go hungry in Winter months by use of scheme's such as asking every comfortably off family to contribute the ingredients of one meal a week to give to the Nazi Party soup kitchens? Are they professing their desire to implement Hitler's vision of a meritocracy where everyone, regardless of background or social status (though not race and religion; Jew's and Christians were automatically excluded from this promised land), will get the same opportunities to better himself or herself throughout life? Of course not. They are invariably referring to the murder of 6 million Jews, the slaughter of the mentally and physically handicapped, the abandonment of the older generation to die, and of course the war-mongering and general hatred and contempt shown by Hitler to anyone who was not "Aryan". This is what has these shaven headed cheerleaders dancing for joy.
Now I accept that those worshippers of Hitler are a marginal group in this country. But they aren't so marginal in France (where the National Front is a powerful force in politics) or Austria (where Jorge Haider leads a semi fascistic party in government). So despite the fact that Hitler was a crank and madmen who engineered the most horrific atrocity in world history, large numbers of people still model themselves on his ideals.
Just look at recent history; there seem to be any number of young Moslem men who are willing to die for Bin Laden. What was it that attracted them to his cause? Was it the spiritual peace promised by Islam? Or was it the promise of inflicting humiliation on the US and of course Israel together with the opportunity for violence and bloodshed? They admire Bin Laden because he dares to commit horrific acts on a grand scale. And lest we sneer at them for being uneducated fanatics bear in mind that Time Magazine gave serious thought to naming Bin Laden their Man of the Year.
In closing I want to make it clear that I don't condemn or criticise our fascination with darkness (lord knows I would be the worst kind of hypocrite if I did; I've read about the deeds of countless serial killers, tyrants, and dictators) but I wish that we'd at least try to understand why it is that we are like that. There is something peculiar about a race of people that remember all of the horrors of WW2 but who forget almost entirely forget about the generosity of the US immediately afterwards (they loaned money to Germany, Japan, Britain, and Italy thus ensuring that all of those countries could afford to rebuild themselves. To the best of my knowledge we haven't repaid it all and America are not pressing us for it). I'll bet you've heard of Ted Bundy, Harold Shipman, and Jeffrey Dahmer, but who has heard of Kimberly Leach, Kathleen Grundy, or Raymond Smith? The former killed all of the latter, but who's memory will live on. If we are a sick society for venerating these people, wouldn't it be best to find out why so that we can perhaps cure the social disease?
So the War Against Terror rumbles on into the New Year and, just as in WWI, promises of it being all over by Christmas have proved empty. Though the Taliban is a spent force and Al Quaida are broken and running only a hopeless optimist would say that it is all over. Yet it has been worth it; in the last few weeks a thoroughly corrupt regime has been exposed for what it was. The words and promises of its leaders are being shown to have been hollow and empty. And so a regime that preaches war to those who oppose it's will and by it's own admission cares not a bit for the basic rights of the men that fought against it is facing extremely tough times. No, I don't mean the Taliban but the US Government which is facing it's own problems involving the Enron Energy Scandal.
To briefly summarise; Enron's accountants lied about the profits the company could expect to make, thus the share prices went up. When the stench of cooked books began to give the game away Enron's share price plummeted (they have lost 99% of their share value since the revelations; that amounts to about $60 billion). The company executives have also been busy little beavers; salting away debts in offshore funds to conceal them from prying eyes and destroying thousands of documents that may or may not have been incriminating. This was all found out during an independent audit. An audit, which Enron, with the help and connivance of its friends in government, had done, it's utmost to avoid. Indeed, it had avoided it for a long time so who knows how long 20 or 30 people have been making money out of these lies (lies which have now cost Enron Employees their pensions; the pension fund invested heavily in now worthless Enron stock).
Of course, I'm overstating my case somewhat here. Although one of the biggest corporate bodies in the world is being shown to have been run in a corrupt and inept manner, and although many members of the US government have been party to that corruption (up to and including George W. Bush who received numerous campaign contributions from Enron when he was the Governor of Texas) it is doubtful that that any of the main political players will suffer much. And as there is a still a war going on, who is really going to notice that their Government is in the pocket of big business? By the time the next election rolls around, will anyone remember the revelations that the men and women elected to represent the interests of the people are in fact lining their own pockets at the expense of those they serve? Or will they remember September 11th and the subsequent war that saw the evil upstarts of Al Quaida humbled by the might of the USA?
Doesn't it strike you as odd that one President almost loses his job for getting sucked off by a porker in the White House whilst another changes laws and amends taxes so that his rich friends can become mega rich whilst the taxpayers bear the burden, and yet will almost certainly remain unchallenged in his current office? After all, the things that Clinton made the press for were trivial on the grand scale of things whilst Bush is demonstratably behaving in a corrupt manner. But he won't make the mainstream press in quite the same way. Is this because Clinton made the mistake of telling little white lies whilst Bush delivers whoppers that would make Baron Munchausen blush?
I suspect that he's going to get away with it because of one of those little quirks of humanity that makes us such a thoroughly unpredictable bunch. We tend to like bastards. And the bigger the bastard, the worse the crime, and the more likely it is that the person will have a group of people (large of small) who admire what they did. Even the rest of us will almost certain feel a guilty stab of awe at what was done whilst we heartily condemn their actions. As a group we seem to be fascinated with evil, with the darker side of human nature. Although we do our best to distance ourselves from the evil that men do (we use such phrases as "Inhuman" or "He was like an animal" or "Depraved and bestial") our continuing interest in the crimes committed by some people (not to mention the fact the crimes keep on being committed) shows that evil is a most human quality indeed.
Let us take, for example, Adolf Hitler. Here is a man who still to this day is venerated by many hundreds of people. He has had more books written about his life than Mother Theresa. He has been the subject of films, TV programs, comedy, drama, and horror. He is the object of repeated and vigorous academic study. Yet this man is one of the most evil and hateful men ever to have walked the earth. And people admire him. Even those who don't will know more about the life of this profoundly malignant man than they will of, say, William Morton (the man who first used anaesthetic in a medical procedure in order to alleviate pain; without him medical science would have not been able to advance at the same rate and so many hundreds of thousands of people indirectly owe their lives to him).
It's not as if those apologists and revisionists of Hitler's Reich are trying to repaint the man as an innocent duped by those who served him, or a colossus of compassion whom history has misunderstood. If someone says that they admire what Hitler achieved, do you think that they admire the early years of his Winter Aid scheme which sought to ensure that Germans did not go hungry in Winter months by use of scheme's such as asking every comfortably off family to contribute the ingredients of one meal a week to give to the Nazi Party soup kitchens? Are they professing their desire to implement Hitler's vision of a meritocracy where everyone, regardless of background or social status (though not race and religion; Jew's and Christians were automatically excluded from this promised land), will get the same opportunities to better himself or herself throughout life? Of course not. They are invariably referring to the murder of 6 million Jews, the slaughter of the mentally and physically handicapped, the abandonment of the older generation to die, and of course the war-mongering and general hatred and contempt shown by Hitler to anyone who was not "Aryan". This is what has these shaven headed cheerleaders dancing for joy.
Now I accept that those worshippers of Hitler are a marginal group in this country. But they aren't so marginal in France (where the National Front is a powerful force in politics) or Austria (where Jorge Haider leads a semi fascistic party in government). So despite the fact that Hitler was a crank and madmen who engineered the most horrific atrocity in world history, large numbers of people still model themselves on his ideals.
Just look at recent history; there seem to be any number of young Moslem men who are willing to die for Bin Laden. What was it that attracted them to his cause? Was it the spiritual peace promised by Islam? Or was it the promise of inflicting humiliation on the US and of course Israel together with the opportunity for violence and bloodshed? They admire Bin Laden because he dares to commit horrific acts on a grand scale. And lest we sneer at them for being uneducated fanatics bear in mind that Time Magazine gave serious thought to naming Bin Laden their Man of the Year.
In closing I want to make it clear that I don't condemn or criticise our fascination with darkness (lord knows I would be the worst kind of hypocrite if I did; I've read about the deeds of countless serial killers, tyrants, and dictators) but I wish that we'd at least try to understand why it is that we are like that. There is something peculiar about a race of people that remember all of the horrors of WW2 but who forget almost entirely forget about the generosity of the US immediately afterwards (they loaned money to Germany, Japan, Britain, and Italy thus ensuring that all of those countries could afford to rebuild themselves. To the best of my knowledge we haven't repaid it all and America are not pressing us for it). I'll bet you've heard of Ted Bundy, Harold Shipman, and Jeffrey Dahmer, but who has heard of Kimberly Leach, Kathleen Grundy, or Raymond Smith? The former killed all of the latter, but who's memory will live on. If we are a sick society for venerating these people, wouldn't it be best to find out why so that we can perhaps cure the social disease?
Monday, 14 January 2002
Not what it seems
It is of course extremely tempting to talk about Dubya's timely pretzel related reminder that he is not a superhuman immortal leader of a mighty warrior nation but, in fact, a recovering alcoholic with questionable intellect, poor grammar, and a level of stupidity so high that even harmless bar snacks can be a lethal to him ("Ok Mr. President, we don't want any more scares like that now, do we? Now, if you'll observe the demonstration and make notes then hopefully you'll be a lot safer. Now then; place the pretzel in your mouth...that's good...now chew...good...ok, and now swallow...Mr. President? MR PRESIDENT? Ahh shit, some salted peanuts must have got lodged in his throat. Can somebody call 911?").
It's also testing my willpower not to mention young Prince Harry's weekend of revealed depravity. Once again though, despite providing frankly the strangest set of Sunday Newspaper headlines that I've ever seen (did anyone else think it was a joke I wonder?) I would contest that his personal popularity will increase. After all, if a possible future British King has been spending his teenage years not only getting drunk and stoned but also finding the time to throw insults at a Frenchman...well, that just shows how the younger Royals are firmly in tune with the general populace.
Instead I'd rather like to have a look at a couple of stories from a slightly skewed perspective. The main things I want to look at are the problem with Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan ( I'm afraid that, unlike Dubya I shan't be referring to them as Paki's at any point so if you have any National Front tendencies then you'll be disappointed...) and the efforts of President Mugabe in Zimbabwe to ensure that he continues his tenure as President.
Pakistan is a country that has been much maligned in the British consciousness. Anybody over the age of 20 will remember the variations on the cry of "Paki bashing" with a shudder. They are also a country whose recent history has been a confused and turbulent time. They have gone from the Military Dictatorship of General Zia Ul Haq to the most corrupt democracy in the world before returning to military dictatorship in the guise of General Pervez Musharraf. Since September 11th the latter has become "one of the boys" again due to his support for the US War on Terror. However, in recent weeks he has been acting in the kind of autocratic manner that Idi Amin would recognise and be proud of.
You may have seen the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament a few weeks ago. I say "may have" because despite being one of the most appalling terrorist atrocities in memory it happened "over there" and so it garnered little interest among the public (of course, if a bunch of crazed fools attacked Parliament in a suicide mission then, aside from our fervent thanks, they would have received press coverage that would have lasted until 2007). India was rightly incensed and demanded that Pakistan do something. As both sides in that simmering little tiff have nuclear weapons most people have welcomed Musharraf's arrest of numerous "terror" groups.
However if we look a little further at this then it ceases to be something so clear cut and simple. Pakistan has a great history of allowing freedom of religion for the numerous Moslem schools (talibs) there. These talibs provide an education for hundreds of thousands of people who quite simply would not have access to school otherwise. And yet Musharraf seeks to deny these people the benefit of an education simply so that he can consolidate his hold on power and crush one of the most powerful dissenting voices in his illegal reign. He is seeking to close down hundreds of these talibs on the unsupported claim that they are behind the attack on the Indian Parliament. Whilst there is no doubt that some of these schools do in fact produce people who's version of Islam would probably have horrified the Prophet had he heard them, there is absolutely no evidence that they are "training grounds for terrorists" as claimed by Musharraf. Indeed, one would have thought that if this were the case then he would be parading the numerous caches of weapons and terror training material that had been found at the schools. And has there been any such event? No. Do you know why? Because the assertion of the Pakistani military is what is known in the common parlance as "a lie". What in fact has been found is...well, more copies of the Koran than even the most devout Muslim could need.... and that's about it really. Not exactly a major threat to world peace (unless you're one of those tiresome little people who thinks that Islam is the biggest threat to world peace since Communism. In which case stop reading this, go away, and shoot yourself. In the head. Make sure you don't miss).
President Musharraf's goal is fairly straightforward; under the cloak of a War against Terrorism he is ensuring that perhaps millions of ordinary Pakistani's will have only the most basic and rudimentary education. He is crushing dissent against his reign and is doing so with the blessing of the west. Once the eyes of the world are turned away from Pakistan (which they will as soon as we are shown something else to distract us) he will have a compliant country that will not raise too many questions or arguments. International criticism will be muted to silence because of their support for the US in their hour of need. If we're really lucky he may even go completely power mad and attempt something along the lines of Pol Pot's Year 0.
Now then; Zimbabwe. There are Presidential elections due there in March of this year and they promise to be a close run thing. The election is between the current President, Robert Mugabe and his challenger, Morgan Tsvangirai. There has been much talk about how Mugabe is behaving in a dictatorial and thuggish manner due to his recent media gagging of certain dissenting voices. However, the more I look at the situation the more I am convinced that it is just not that simple.
For example, the taking of land from white farmers and redistributing it among the black population. This is repeatedly held up as an example of Mugabe's tyranny. Yet all he is doing is delivering on a promise that should have been kept many years before. Zimbabwe of course used to be Rhodesia before Ian Smith's autocratic and racist government fell and was replaced by a more representative rule. At that point Zimbabwe closely resembled Apartheid era South Africa in that the white people held 95% of the land and wealth whilst making up a tiny minority of the population. It was in 1979 that the first free and fair elections took place in Zimbabwe. The black population must have thought that there would be a new era of equality being ushered in. Yet they were wrong. It is over 20 years later and still a few white men own the majority of farmland. Are we really condemning a man for wishing to see justice that has been too long delayed finally being done?
And so we must look at the numerous accusations that have been levelled against Mugabe in a new light. For example, his socialism immediately counts against him on the international stage. We live in a world ruled by self-serving pragmatists and to have any sort of ideals or principles is regarded as faintly embarrassing at best by the worlds elite. Yet Mugabe is unflinchingly and unselfishly committed to a fairer society in Zimbabwe and is unconcerned as to whether or not he offends "right-on" sensibilities in the western world. Liberals the world over have criticised Zimbabwe this weekend; the army has been pilloried for it's declaration that it will only accept a Mugabe victory in the election. Mugabe himself is painted in tyrannical colours for closing down newspapers and banning gatherings by the opposition. Yet it just takes a few pen strokes to change the unfair accusations that have been thrown his way. The army's declaration, far from evidence of despotism, is in fact the most ringing endorsement that I could imagine. The army are clearly so concerned at the possibilities for corruption, disorder, and pandering to foreign whims that an opposition victory would bring that they have taken the unprecedented step of publicly supporting their current leader.
As to the controls imposed on the opposition and media...well, one criticism I will make of Mugabe is that he is not particularly media savvy. His opponents however are, and know how best to use the "free" press (as fine a collection of rabble rousing amoral hacks as would grace any nation's hallowed halls of journalism) to their own advantage. The current instability in the region is due entirely to this motley collection of agitators doing their very best to magnify the complaints of a few into a worldwide movement against the man who seeks to give Zimbabwe a taste of the equality and justice that socialism can provide if put into practice effectively. And could we really trust international observers to be evenhanded in their reports of the upcoming election? Not when someone who has the potential to be a first class toady for the west is one of the candidates.
In both of these countries, hopefully the truth will win out.
Incidentally, if you found yourself agreeing with a single thing I said then I have to say that I am most disappointed. I no more believe the above stream of drivel than I believe Elvis is alive and well and living in Woking. It's certainly challenging trying to either praise something you despise or criticise something that is a bloody good thing. Still, I enjoyed it....
It's also testing my willpower not to mention young Prince Harry's weekend of revealed depravity. Once again though, despite providing frankly the strangest set of Sunday Newspaper headlines that I've ever seen (did anyone else think it was a joke I wonder?) I would contest that his personal popularity will increase. After all, if a possible future British King has been spending his teenage years not only getting drunk and stoned but also finding the time to throw insults at a Frenchman...well, that just shows how the younger Royals are firmly in tune with the general populace.
Instead I'd rather like to have a look at a couple of stories from a slightly skewed perspective. The main things I want to look at are the problem with Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan ( I'm afraid that, unlike Dubya I shan't be referring to them as Paki's at any point so if you have any National Front tendencies then you'll be disappointed...) and the efforts of President Mugabe in Zimbabwe to ensure that he continues his tenure as President.
Pakistan is a country that has been much maligned in the British consciousness. Anybody over the age of 20 will remember the variations on the cry of "Paki bashing" with a shudder. They are also a country whose recent history has been a confused and turbulent time. They have gone from the Military Dictatorship of General Zia Ul Haq to the most corrupt democracy in the world before returning to military dictatorship in the guise of General Pervez Musharraf. Since September 11th the latter has become "one of the boys" again due to his support for the US War on Terror. However, in recent weeks he has been acting in the kind of autocratic manner that Idi Amin would recognise and be proud of.
You may have seen the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament a few weeks ago. I say "may have" because despite being one of the most appalling terrorist atrocities in memory it happened "over there" and so it garnered little interest among the public (of course, if a bunch of crazed fools attacked Parliament in a suicide mission then, aside from our fervent thanks, they would have received press coverage that would have lasted until 2007). India was rightly incensed and demanded that Pakistan do something. As both sides in that simmering little tiff have nuclear weapons most people have welcomed Musharraf's arrest of numerous "terror" groups.
However if we look a little further at this then it ceases to be something so clear cut and simple. Pakistan has a great history of allowing freedom of religion for the numerous Moslem schools (talibs) there. These talibs provide an education for hundreds of thousands of people who quite simply would not have access to school otherwise. And yet Musharraf seeks to deny these people the benefit of an education simply so that he can consolidate his hold on power and crush one of the most powerful dissenting voices in his illegal reign. He is seeking to close down hundreds of these talibs on the unsupported claim that they are behind the attack on the Indian Parliament. Whilst there is no doubt that some of these schools do in fact produce people who's version of Islam would probably have horrified the Prophet had he heard them, there is absolutely no evidence that they are "training grounds for terrorists" as claimed by Musharraf. Indeed, one would have thought that if this were the case then he would be parading the numerous caches of weapons and terror training material that had been found at the schools. And has there been any such event? No. Do you know why? Because the assertion of the Pakistani military is what is known in the common parlance as "a lie". What in fact has been found is...well, more copies of the Koran than even the most devout Muslim could need.... and that's about it really. Not exactly a major threat to world peace (unless you're one of those tiresome little people who thinks that Islam is the biggest threat to world peace since Communism. In which case stop reading this, go away, and shoot yourself. In the head. Make sure you don't miss).
President Musharraf's goal is fairly straightforward; under the cloak of a War against Terrorism he is ensuring that perhaps millions of ordinary Pakistani's will have only the most basic and rudimentary education. He is crushing dissent against his reign and is doing so with the blessing of the west. Once the eyes of the world are turned away from Pakistan (which they will as soon as we are shown something else to distract us) he will have a compliant country that will not raise too many questions or arguments. International criticism will be muted to silence because of their support for the US in their hour of need. If we're really lucky he may even go completely power mad and attempt something along the lines of Pol Pot's Year 0.
Now then; Zimbabwe. There are Presidential elections due there in March of this year and they promise to be a close run thing. The election is between the current President, Robert Mugabe and his challenger, Morgan Tsvangirai. There has been much talk about how Mugabe is behaving in a dictatorial and thuggish manner due to his recent media gagging of certain dissenting voices. However, the more I look at the situation the more I am convinced that it is just not that simple.
For example, the taking of land from white farmers and redistributing it among the black population. This is repeatedly held up as an example of Mugabe's tyranny. Yet all he is doing is delivering on a promise that should have been kept many years before. Zimbabwe of course used to be Rhodesia before Ian Smith's autocratic and racist government fell and was replaced by a more representative rule. At that point Zimbabwe closely resembled Apartheid era South Africa in that the white people held 95% of the land and wealth whilst making up a tiny minority of the population. It was in 1979 that the first free and fair elections took place in Zimbabwe. The black population must have thought that there would be a new era of equality being ushered in. Yet they were wrong. It is over 20 years later and still a few white men own the majority of farmland. Are we really condemning a man for wishing to see justice that has been too long delayed finally being done?
And so we must look at the numerous accusations that have been levelled against Mugabe in a new light. For example, his socialism immediately counts against him on the international stage. We live in a world ruled by self-serving pragmatists and to have any sort of ideals or principles is regarded as faintly embarrassing at best by the worlds elite. Yet Mugabe is unflinchingly and unselfishly committed to a fairer society in Zimbabwe and is unconcerned as to whether or not he offends "right-on" sensibilities in the western world. Liberals the world over have criticised Zimbabwe this weekend; the army has been pilloried for it's declaration that it will only accept a Mugabe victory in the election. Mugabe himself is painted in tyrannical colours for closing down newspapers and banning gatherings by the opposition. Yet it just takes a few pen strokes to change the unfair accusations that have been thrown his way. The army's declaration, far from evidence of despotism, is in fact the most ringing endorsement that I could imagine. The army are clearly so concerned at the possibilities for corruption, disorder, and pandering to foreign whims that an opposition victory would bring that they have taken the unprecedented step of publicly supporting their current leader.
As to the controls imposed on the opposition and media...well, one criticism I will make of Mugabe is that he is not particularly media savvy. His opponents however are, and know how best to use the "free" press (as fine a collection of rabble rousing amoral hacks as would grace any nation's hallowed halls of journalism) to their own advantage. The current instability in the region is due entirely to this motley collection of agitators doing their very best to magnify the complaints of a few into a worldwide movement against the man who seeks to give Zimbabwe a taste of the equality and justice that socialism can provide if put into practice effectively. And could we really trust international observers to be evenhanded in their reports of the upcoming election? Not when someone who has the potential to be a first class toady for the west is one of the candidates.
In both of these countries, hopefully the truth will win out.
Incidentally, if you found yourself agreeing with a single thing I said then I have to say that I am most disappointed. I no more believe the above stream of drivel than I believe Elvis is alive and well and living in Woking. It's certainly challenging trying to either praise something you despise or criticise something that is a bloody good thing. Still, I enjoyed it....
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