Entry 5: 16 June 2004

 

If I were an American how I would have lived! I wonder sometime! Wondering is good for your soul I am told! Yet, I find it difficult to understand that more and more people seem to become less of wonderers and more of like mathematicians. We do not like to wonder, do we? May be it is because we are afraid that wonderings might get us to home truths that are too harsh to deal with and we would rather watch sky or cnn and have our meal and go to bed.

Before I begin with my wondering about being an American I must say that I admire American members of the public that the American constitution so profoundly called, “we the people” for many reasons!

First of all, Americans are the most loyal people on the planet to their leaders, even when they are putting them to hell! American people are open hearted, warm, friendly and open to new ideas and they do care about values of liberty, freedom and democracy. I admire American people for many reasons including the fact that they produced all these wonderful soldiers who followed the orders of their leaders and go out to foreign lands and kill people that they had never known or would ever know. In doing so they got killed in their thousands and yet they did not question their leaders and felt they were dying and killing for their country. Yes, these soldiers were and are among the finest soldiers in the world! No doubt about that!

I admire American people for another reason. The parents, husbands, wives, friends, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, friends and relatives of these soldiers keep crying, grieving and mourning for these fallen sons and daughters in the uniforms of American army, yet supporting their leaders, even though the leaders are taking them to astray!

These are finest of human qualities! I admire Americans for their openness and diversity and tolerance!
Having said that I would like to come back to my wonder! If I were an American and still able to remember how other nationals across the globe view America and American people! I wonder what would I have felt and how would I have tried to leave my American life!

To other nationals across the globe America and Americans are equivalent to American governments and what they did in relation to their country or countries and in general towards the world! Hence, Americans are the most misunderstood bunch of people on the planet! People generally like to generalise as our lives tend to get dictated by our emotions rather than our rationality. Most of these people thus generalised Americans with American governments! Hence they begin to hate America and Americans at the same time!

The situation is this that whatever all the American administrations in modern times did to the rest of the world or however American foreign policies affected or impacted upon the world are built in public memories of these countries and hatred is implanted in their minds towards the wrong enemies!

If one looks at these misguided perspectives of people against American people or the Americans one would see that this hatred is wrongly targeted! There is hardly any difference between American public or British public or Americans and Pakistanis or Amenians or German and so on.

Why is this the case? Let’s take a look. Did Pakistani government ever asked the Pakistani public whether they wanted their government to go and kill millions of Bangladeshi innocent people! No, they did not! If they had the majority of people would have said no. But they went in and killed anyway!
Did Indian government ever asked their people whether they should go to war with Pakistan! No! Nor did Pakistani government! There were wars between India and Pakistan!

Did Tony Blair asked the British people whether he should take us to war against and in Iraq with America! No he did not! Did George Bush ask Americans whether to go to war on Afghanistan or Iraq! No he did not! He went in the war!

British, Americans, Germans, French and almost all nationalities of the globe protested against the war. In London we had about two million people taking part in anti war demonstration! Did anybody listen! No!

Moreover, the media had been so manipulated that anti war demonstrations, discussions, debates and opinions were put in the background! They were not reported at all! Most importantly, people who opposed the war were portrayed is if they were the criminals! Does this make the British, Americans, Germans or French or Americans “hateworthy” for what has been going on in Iraq! People are not jumping up and down America because there are hundreds of Iraqi people dying every week! No they are not! Families are burying their dead in America, in Britain and elsewhere: the soldiers who died in Iraq! Same is true for British soldiers and people.

People generally are absolutely disempowered in western democracies and in American democracy it is even more so than anywhere else in the world!

There is no “we the people” remaining in America. Americans cannot influence American domestic or foreign policy! What is happening in American economy! What is happening with all those state governments levels, their budget deficits and fiscal crises, that do not make good copy in the print media and that do not get reported in the prime time television!

Where are the people! Crime going up! Murders going up! Serial killings going up! Unemployment, educational and welfare budget cut, low income families and those inner city areas and those villages that are way way outside cnn or fox news catchments area! They do not produce good chat show or talk show with drama, adrenalin rush and suspense like the live televised chase of OJ Simpson and so on!

America is eaten away by guns, gun crimes, gun violence and gun related genocides or massacres! Who has any power to stop American children being massacred by lunatic gun crazies!

So there is nothing so unique about Americans that the world has to hate Americans! Americans are as disempowered as anyone else! Americans cannot influence their government’s foreign policy like we British people could not and the whole world population is the same.

I don’t think I would be any better off being an American at all! I am as powerless as an American. Because the system of civilisation is such which is now lead by American administration that does not offer or support power to people. A powerful people means a powerless government that means a “government of the people, by the people and for the people”. That means that government would live to establish equality and liberty. Power to the people means the end of “power” the way we know it. But that is not going to happen with this globalised system of capitalism.

There is no point mixing Americans with their government. The government lives in White House that speaks a different American than the Americans on the streets across that wonderful landscape, that sends their sons and daughters to be killed in foreign land and then mourn and still stay sane!

I still wonder and I still feel strongly about Americans and hope Americans will someday say again: we the people and take the “gun” out of the politicians' hands, who play games with the lives of people and at the same time say a thunderous "no" to death penalty and stop politicians playing with the justice system and with people's lives.
 

 

The greatest tragedy for the globe is taking place now, which is threatening to eliminate whatever achievements we have been able to make since the World War Two in terms of democratic and human rights, civil liberties, fundamental freedoms, rule of law and international law! For this two men will be judged harshly in history that is now being written in blood, massacres and xenophobia! This will ensure that Mr Tony Blair would have secured a place in history with George Bush: but not the way he had wanted it. They would be remembered and hated for murdering all the ideals we worked for so hard and so long to achieve: the ideals that have given us a set of values to suggest that the due process of law is the ultimate measurement of civilisation. The posters in Texan Ranches saying wanted dead or alive or the cowardice phrases like "smoke ‘em out" do not define civilisation.

By the way the so called clash of civilisations or two civilisations is nothing but a created myth! The whole world is under the domain of globalised capitalism and there is only one economic system dictated by global market place! Hence we have only one civilisation in the face of globalised capitalism. Religions are not civilisations. Yet Mr Bush and Mr Blair went to war! Since that ill fated day we have seen enormous change in the UK! Massive hatred, anarchic hysteria and Islamophobia/Muslimophobia and all other phobias including phobias against refugees, illegal immigrants and asylum seekers began to take shape and finally all these have managed to begin to destroy all these ideals and values we hold so close to our hearts. This phobia and hatred now polarising the whole world!

In Britain we have made significant advancements towards eliminating racism and all other forms of discrimination and prejudices, particularly in the nineties! Now they are eroding fast! People and media organisations are feeling so confident that they are now coming out with colours in promoting racial hatred, prejudices and massive attack on anything minority!

No Muslims in their right minds would fail to feel revulsion, nausea and a sense of utter disgust towards what this Mr Hamza says or tries to preach! Let me make it absolutely clear! There is no support for him in the Muslim communities! Yet he had some supporters! Well, Saddam had some of these people even when he went down! These people are not part of the Muslim communities I am referring to the way the so called supporter of Saddam were not part of the Iraqi people!

If one looks carefully Mr Hamza is a disabled person who had lost an eye and arm! Anyone trying to make this become a joke and use this to create a horrendous joke out is equally revolting and vulgar as Mr Hamza's horrendous opinions! But no one feels disgusted about this!

Now I don't think many people heard of Mr Hamza until the press got hold of him! He does not enjoy any crowd willing to support his utter rubbish opinions and to be frank no one gives a damn as to what he thinks!

But this is not about Mr Hamza or his disgusting opinions but about the ideals and values I refer earlier! So long the due process of law is concerned, the rule of law is concerned and the constitutional law, European and international laws are concerned Mr Hamza is a British citizen! Hence he must be afforded the same protection of the law as it has been afforded to even worse criminals like Myra Hindly or serial killers or rapist or paedophiles or mass murderer like West or Dr Shipman! Mr Hamza's crime so far proven is his lunatic opinions! This could be seen as a crime in line with exciting racial hatred and even public order related crimes! Let the police charge him on these crimes and try him with the astonishing judicial system we have got about which the whole world looks up on Britain!

No this is not happening here! Everyone is trying to scream including the Home Office to take his nationality away! Why? Because he is a Muslim! Has anyone ever considered doing that to mass murderer Dr Shipman? To West? To all other horrendous criminals that are serving multiple life sentences? No! Why not? Rightly so! Because whatever crime they had committed our judicial system followed the due process of law and punished them! Their nationality is not the issue! A prudent judicial system which Britain should be proud to have in place and working cannot work at all if it has to respond to public hatred or public zeal or public desire or demands for vengeance!

In Mr Hamza's case it is happening because the Afghanistan and Iraq war have created the grounds that have sown the seed of phobia and hatred. When Bask Terrorists attack in Spain no one says that Christian terrorists attacked! When IRA used to plot bombs no one said Christian terrorists! When Maoist guerrillas bomb somewhere no one says they are Buddhist terrorists! When American bombs their own country or sends in Anthrax no one says they are Christian’s terrorists! When terrorists bomb India no one says they are Hindu terrorists! When Israeli occupation forces massacre Palestinian children no one says that it was Jewish terrorists' work but only when terrorists come with Islamic names they are reported Islamic terrorists! They are Muslim terrorists! Why is this! Simple! It is the phobia! There were and still is phobia against Jews in the world! There are even stronger a phobia now developed by the hysteria against Muslims!

People from all over the world have become British and we are not going to get in to the question: how, here! No one in their right minds could think of a Britain of mono-lingual, mono religious and mono-cultural! Britain has learnt how to foster diversity and I am proud of it! But it is no longer the case! Racism has taken a "yes but syndrome" and hence now officially it is justifiable to express racist views, carry on promoting racial hatred, prejudices and bias under the “yes-but syndrome”.

This is the cost Tony Blair has made Britain to pay! Mr Hamza is not at all a factor to British Muslim communities and he will be forgotten! And if remembered would only be as the holder of nauseating and revolting opinions! This is not about him! It is about the values we fought so hard and long to achieve and establish here! When BNP seeks to promote racial hatred and works to promote equally vulgar, disturbing, revolting filthy racist opinions and even talk of civil wars no one screams to take their nationality away! No one wants to see them prosecuted! But Mr Hamza is an easy target because he is a "Muslim"! This is nothing but racism coming back with a vengeance! As British citizen anyone not working or disable or ill or in whatever circumstances is legally entitled to get statutory benefits! Mr Johnson gets it! Mr Obacumba gets it! Mrs Naido gets it! Mr Ahmed gets it! Mr Hamza gets it! This is no one's pocket money that we should scream when it is Mr Hamza! This happens because we have law and rule of law! Just because we are the taxpayers does not make us immune from following the law! Just because we are taxpayers does not mean we can be racists! We can discriminate and promote lawlessness! No we cannot! Because Britain has rule of laws and that is why we do not have Hitlers! We do not have Stalins! We do not have Saddam Hussain here but if we loose to hatred, racism, prejudice and phobia then we will have them here sooner than we think!

We might win the battles in Iraq but we are losing the war here! We are losing our democratic values, our libertarian ideals, we are losing rule of law, we are losing due process of law and we are losing even the values of European Union, we are losing and getting away from international law!

Britain must wake up now to face the reality and begin to work to undo the damages Mr Blair has done to the fabrics of British values, ideals and system in his efforts to ensure a place in history! Well he has a place but that is the dustbin of history! He will go and someone else would become prime minister! This is not relevant! But we must not lose to racism! We must not lose to hatred! We must not lose to phobia, bias, prejudice, ignorance and vengeance! We must rise up to oppose these horrible monsters that are as horrendous as the opinions Mr Hamza or BNP holds or expresses!
 

03 June 2004

 

 

The recent scandal or abuse in Iraq news got out in the media and we have seen the scenes that take place but we do not see. The problems with public interests in things and public memory if such a thing exists is not what happened and where it happened but the massive oblivion that underpins our way of life and way of thinking. We as public do not want to know. Moreover, where the publishers take the monopoly judgement to decide which books the public would like and publish them, where editors decide with their divine knowledge of the public mind and decide what sort of news to publish. Both publishers and the editors and their troops exercise a serious and corrosive censorship in the news that is a commodity. Anyone ever sold anything in the market would know that they want their commodity to look good if they are at all going to be able to sell them. No one wants to buy depressing stuff! That is why it is easier to spend millions in getting so called reality television! The irony is so called reality television is not at all reality but an imposed reality to suck the juice out of the participants for the viewers so that the programme could make more money!

Reality is brutal, bloody and tragic! The globe now than ever is a place, space and nailed by a time dictated by the global capitalism where we do not live in or at all connected to the reality! We live in a time of pictures that sell for us! We think everything is like computer games, murders, massacre, rapes, hunger, famine etc are nothing but reality of a reality show! These are not real at all! At best it is stoppable and at worst it is virtual!

We had Afghanistan! War! Reported like a game show, albeit in grand scale! Who cares what happened after the carpet bombing! Who cares what happened to the prisoners of wars, who cares how much and how brutally they are abused, battered, brutalised, tortured and humiliated! These things have no interest value to the public! They do not produce good pictures and anyway how many of us living in the west actually knew of where Afghanistan was! There were some liberal faint screaming about the Guantanamo Bay brutalisation of detainees who are not detainees but prisoners of war! Americans did not lose their sleep over the treatment afforded to these poor souls!

Now having done the "Jihad" for "democracy, civil liberties and human rights" in Afghanistan America then went onto Iraq and there it was: the democratisation of brutality! All those bombs and missiles fell on the screen and designed to create for good television news! Real people, children and women, men and women, elderly, infirm and disabled all died in their hundreds! American soldiers, British soldiers did their best to carry on killing and "freeing" Iraq and they tried to win "hearts and minds" of Iraqis as if to say these "no-brain-subject-to-be-collatoral-damage" called Iraqis are dolls made of American companies!

In representative democracy, any political scientist would expect and accept that the media must be an independent institution to offer safeguard for rights and civil liberties and thus must not become part of the government bodies! But what had we seen in the coverage of the Iraq War! We saw the media became part of the government! The media became carefully "embedded" with the occupying armies of America and Britain! We saw the media becoming a propaganda machine for the powers.

This has damaged the credibility of the media deeply and will come to haunt the media in years to come! Let me just give you a personal perspective: over the last fifteen year I have never missed the news at ten by ITV. To me ITV was (as opposed to BBC) the best the news could offer. During the war I saw ITV as nothing but a propaganda machine of America and Britain! I stopped watching ITV's news channel! It has been more than a year I have never for once switched on to their news channel! That is how ITV lost viewers!

In fact BBC seemed like a media organisation giving a relatively balanced coverage including the anti war voices and demonstrations including an overview of the war. Look where it has got it! It has been taken on and and brutally put back to its secondary place to the government!

The Newspaper that stood against the government and was once in tune with the hearts and pulse of the people of this country The Daily Mirror and its courageous editor Piers Morgan! Look where it has got The Mirror and Mr Morgan! They not only got rid him but the deliberate disregard and humiliation offered to him sending him out with security! What does it tell us about the state of the media now! The media has gone to the control of their owners and the governments!

When that happens the people, their rights and liberties get corrosively eroded away! This happens because there are no one to scream in support of them! We the public have a memory less than fishes! We do not remember! No, let me put it another way, we forget quicker than quick sand!

We have forgotten the First World War! We have forgotten the Second World War, we have forgotten Vietnam, India, Combodia, India Pakistan and Bangladesh, we have forgotten the whole nineties and the deaths, murders and messacre! We do not want to remember! 

That is why American and the British are the same! We live in the cuckoo land! We elect our leaders and we let them practise our moral judgement as if we have taken leave of our faculties for life! Nothing concerns us!

The brutalities, the degradation, the horrific vulgarity, the sheer degree and level of lunatic revolting and nauseating barbarity with which the American soldiers went about dealing with the imprisoned Iraqis along the way killing them and recording them, taking photographs of them do not say that these are acts done by individuals who are rouges! No this goes to show how systematic, how doctrinal and how brutally accountable with back up reports with words, photos, videos and  graphics that comes from the top! Bush Administration is the custodian of Democratic Fascism that is born to establish globalised capitalism! This doctrine does not believe in democracy, human rights or civil liberties! This doctrine is based on supremacy, dominance and control!

This happened in Afghanistan, in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay but it happens at the very heart of America! This sort of things happen and conducted by the CIA, by the FBI and the Police Forces and the Prison Services! This is how American Judiciary wants to secure peace for the people who matter! This is whyAmerica still finds it acceptable to legally murder Americans in their death penalty! It does not bother American sophisticated cultural and political values!

How do we get the real pictures! You get it if you have the money to get CCTV cameras in very stations where CIA, FBI works, the police stations, the prisons and wherever power is exercised over powerless! "We the people" accept it! American and British law legalise assassinations of foreign leaders "for safe guarding our interests"! Who pass these laws! The very people who we elect to represent us!

Moreover, we are told that criticising the government is now an act of treason! Criticising the brutal, immoral and illegal war waged by our governments are unpatriotic! And there are people who would and do buy these rubbish! What is so patriotic about killing and murdering innocent people! We the people: do we need this? Can we do anything about it? Do we feel like doing anything about it!

The plain truth is this: where there is power there it is to be abused! Power cannot be used but abused! This at least political science understood correctly! That is why we tried our best to put up checks and balances, barriers, divisions powers, and all these people to oversee each other! That is why we have constitutions, laws, judiciary, law enforcement and the rest! However, it seem that modern day powerfuls found it absolutely easy peasy to get round these checks and barriers!

Modern representative democracy is increasingly and vehemently becoming democratic fascism to go with the globalisation of capitalism! America is the leader in it and Britain under the "sheep-like-prudence-leadership of Tony Blair made a choice to be on the train to conquer the world so that it could share the kill in the future! The question is do "we the people" want it like this! Do we really want this to happen that our democracy has been transformed into a monster under our noses and before our vary eyes!