Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Author: pelshvalen (Page 25 of 43)

Rett skal være rett – et partipolitisk innslag

10.06.2018 /

Arbeiderpartiet sliter, sies det. Det kan være mange grunner til det, og media er stadig frampå med forklaringsmodeller.

Jeg har mine egne tanker om dette og hint, selvfølgelig. I et demokrati må politiske partier tåle at det koster å ta upopulære avgjørelser, og følgelig tar de fleste partier alt for få av dem. Arbeiderpartiet er ikke noe unntak da det må ta hensyn til det såkalte “grunnfjellet”, som fremfor alt ikke ønsker innskrenkninger, begrensninger, avkortinger, nedskjæringer og annet som kan true eller begrense økt velstand for de av oss som er mest høylydte, mest verbale og mest pågående.

I mellomtiden må et ansvarlig parti forholde seg til folkerett, internasjonale avtaler og langsiktige økonomiske og klimatiske forhold. Arbeiderpartiet er dessuten programforpliktet til å forholde seg til solidaritetsprinsippet, hva nå det enn innebærer. Sikkert er det i alle fall at det omfatter også våre nye landsmenn. Akkurat dette siste faller enkelte tungt for brystet, og derfor er det mange som håper at det ikke blir stadig flere “nye landsmenn”.

Sikkert er det også at vi i de kommende årene vil oppleve mange relativt dramatiske endringer som ingen av oss vil sette pris på, flere av dem betinget av klimaendringer som til dels blir uforutsigelige. Kulden nå i vinter var det vel få som forutså, og hetebølgen og tørken vi nettopp har opplevd var det heller ikke mange som forestilte seg på forhånd. Hvordan skal vel bønder kunne tilpasse seg slike svingninger? Dette har bare vært en ørliten forsmak. Vi foretrekker å ikke tenke på det, men allerede ser vi at økt rasfare som følge av stigende nedbør, betyr at folk vil måtte forlate gård og grunn mange steder i landet, og hvem skal betale for det?

Samtidig vokser polariseringen mellom NATO-land på den ene siden og, på den andre, konkurrerende land og traumatiserte folkegrupper. Denne polariseringen håndteres etter mitt skjønn svært dårlig av NATO. Det er en annen historie jeg ikke ønsker å gå nærmere inn på her og nå.

Det jeg ville ha sagt, er at Jonas Gahr Støre er en mann som nyter mye større respekt enn det oppslutningen om Arbeiderpartiet kan tyde på. Personlig har jeg aldri stemt på Arbeiderpartiet. Jeg regner heller ikke med å gjøre det i fremtiden. Men de aller fleste jeg snakker med om politikk, og det er mange – og det fra ulike politiske ståsteder, fordi jeg er opptatt av landets ve og vel – omtaler ham med stor varme og respekt. Han oppleves som en sjelden fugl i den politiske faunaen, som en usedvanlig hederlig og rettskaffen person. Dertil er han mer enn vanlig kunnskapsrik, analytisk og velsignet klar i tanke og tale. Om det skulle være slik at enkelte personer i Arbeiderpartiet intrigerer mot ham, så anser jeg det som tragisk. Tragisk for Arbeiderpartiet og også for oss andre: Dersom det enda er en mulighet for at Arbeiderpartiet igjen kan lede en flerpartiregjering, så ville det muligens forutsette Jonas Gahr Støre som leder.

Til tross, altså, for at jeg ikke er noen Arbeiderpartitilhenger, så ønsker jeg med dette å uttrykke en slags hyllest fra min ringe person til Jonas Gahr Støre. Dette gjør jeg ikke minst fordi jeg vet det er utallige andre personer i Norge som ikke er “partipolitisk aktive”, men som følger med og som bryr seg om vårt lille lands skjebne i en usikker fremtid og som har større tro på ham enn på Arbeiderpartiet han leder.

52 shot dead today in Gaza…

14.05.2018 /

… and still counting.

The emperor and his henchmen seem determined to unleash a new world war. I am not, for the moment, referring to the latest insults against Iran (though the gods above know there is reason to). I am asking myself: Where does he want all the Palestinians to go? Does he expect Palestinians whose homes on the west bank get demolished by occupant settlers and those who get evicted from their homes in East Jerusalem to go quietly?  And where should they go? Or does it seem ok to just continue killing them?

Meanwhile, it has come to my attention that people are hearing two very different versions of the Palestine story. Two stories, in fact. You might think they were about two very different issues. In one of the stories there is no mention of the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 adopted on December 11, 1948, which reads:

…that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

There are also a lot of other pretty important details that are left out of the story told in the US and Israel. Obviously, in the heat of the day, people will exaggerate, will be tempted to distort facts, and listeners will innocently repeat the fallacies they hear, so misconceptions are bound to get spread to a large public.

But in this, as in a number of other issues, there is more afoot than what can be explained as overly enthusiastic storytelling: One side is deliberately and systematically doctoring the story, and I am not only  referring to hawkish Israelis, but to the born-again Christians that make up much of the Zionist Lobby in the US. To many fundamentalist Christians, the “Holy Land” appears to mean as much as to fundamentalist Jews; for them human Law, not to mention international law, appears not to apply to the Holy Land. It must at all costs be saved from the “infidels”. (Nevermind that many Palestinians are Christian, too.)

I am not sufficiently well informed about the sway of born-again Christians in the US, but I understand that they were largely to blame for the rise to presidency of the remarkably ignorant and incompetent George W. Bush. To manage such a feat they must have very great power, I reason.

The fact that Israeli hawkish politicians spread all kinds of untruths about the “enemy” is understandable. So would leading politicians of any country at war. What is interesting, though, is that the majority of the Israeli public want peace. So they must be told that the enemy is a serious threat to national security. Because the hawks do not, repeat – not – want peace. They want more land.

The majority of the Palestinians also want peace, but not at any cost. Yet, the Palestinian and the Israeli authorities are not, as you see, eagerly negotiating peace, and we are told that the Palestinians are to blame for this. Yet there have been serious efforts in the past, and if Israel had not had the undivided support of the US, there would probably have been a peace accord.

This is where the Zionist Lobby comes in. The Lobby has sway on US foreign policy. The US has sway over NATO, and NATO defines my country’s foreign policy.

Any peace agreement would have to be on Israel’s terms, you see, and Israel wants the West Bank (preferably without Palestinians in it). The US supports Israel, in all conceivable shapes and forms, not least financially, and a large part of the world cannot afford to challenge the US on this score, or for that matter on any other score, as we have seen since the mad hatter came to power. The outcome of a peace agreement on Israel’s terms would, for Palestine, be nill, the end.

Nill. We are not talking about compromise here. We are talking about extermination. Extermination of Palestine. I suspect that Palestinians living on the West Bank would be given the option of leaving (they would certainly not be welcomes as refugees to Europe) or of becoming second degree citizens of Israel, without the same rights as Jews.

This is the story as I understand it: The options are pretty bleak for Palestinians and Israel would go down in history as being guilty of genocide.

Today I stumbled across a site that seemed interesting. I am, after all accusing the US of enabling Israel to continue occupying neighbouring territories and ultimately of genocide. The site is not updated anymore, but exploring its innumerable pages, I found much historically interesting material. I have not explored it at length, so I cannot vouch for it, but I found its Mission Statement attactive. http://ifamericaknew.org/about_us/

 

 

SHAME!

04.05.2018 /

Norway is a country that claims to be peace-loving, humanitarian and certainly not racist. While Hungary is being hounded by other EU nations due to its animosity to refugees, and Poland is being hounded for its disrespect of the justice system, Norway is not hounded by anybody.

However, in all practical terms, Norway has virtually closed its borders to refugees, and today an interesting decision reached by Norway’s Immigration Appeals Board was made known to the press.

It’s a symbolic case, you might say. An Afghan family came to Norway in 2011 and was allowed to live in the small town Dokka, in the forbidding central mountain massive. The current government is, however, adamantly opposed to immigration, probably no less so than Victor Orban’s government, and the family was subsequently ordered to leave the country.

Meanwhile, the town they lived in appeared to have adopted the family that had landed on its doorstep, not least the little girl Farida, and took the case to court. And won. The Immigration Appeals Board appealed. And lost. The matter has been considered by three court instances, and even the Supreme Court upheld the decision to allow the family to live in Norway.

So much for court rulings.

The Immigration Appeals Board’s grounds for flouting the Supreme Court is, apparently, that the situation in Afghanistan is now “stable” (whatever that means!) if not in the part of the country the family came from, at least in Kabul.

Now I have not previously paid any attention to the so-called “Farida Case”. But in the back of my mind I have been wondering how many of the Afghan returnees from sanctimonious Norway have been hit by the rising number of bomb blasts in Afghanistan over the past months. Hardly a week passes without brief news reports from Afghanistan, of a new horrible blood bath, more often than not caused by IS, rather than the Taliban. This is exactly as expected: As IS was being driven out of Mosul and Raqqa, it was clear that they would step up operations in fragile Afghanistan.

I am including a list of incidents gleaned mostly from Reuters (with a filter of “Kabul” + “past month”). The reason I concentrated on Kabul was that this city was specifically referred to as “stable” in the decision to flout the Supreme Court.

30/4/2018 (Reuters about Kabul): In all, 26 people died in the two blasts, which were claimed by Islamic State.
22/4/2018 KABUL (Reuters) – The death toll from Sunday’s blast in the Afghan capital Kabul rose to 48, with 112 others wounded, a public health officer said. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the blast set off by a suicide bomber outside a voter registration center.
12/4/2018 KABUL (Reuters) – The number of civilians killed and wounded by suicide bombings and “complex attacks” in Afghanistan has more than doubled so far this year, the United Nations said on Thursday.

Suicide bombings and attacks by militant groups killed or maimed 751 people from January through March, one-third of total civilian cases, the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said. Attacks are considered “complex” when the assailants employ a variety of means.

One suicide attack in January carried out in vehicles disguised as ambulances, killed more than 100 people in Kabul.

Overall, UNAMA recorded 763 civilian deaths and 1,495 injuries in the first quarter, similar to the same period in each of the past two years. Fighting on the ground was the second-leading cause of civilian deaths and injuries.

Cases attributed to anti-government forces, mainly the Taliban and Islamic State, increased 6 percent year-on-year to 1,500.

In addition:

(Wikipedia on the War in Afghanistan): The UN estimates that 1,662 civilians were killed from January through June 2017.

4/5 /2018 (Reuters): In terms of districts, the government controls or influences 56.3 percent of the country, the second lowest level since at least 2015, the latest report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan, a U.S. congressional watchdog, shows.

Fra Hannibal til Assange

18.04.2018 /

For at en knekt skal kunne ta rotta på en konge, må han bryte spillereglene, og om han gjentatte ganger har fått utdelt elendige kort, kan han jo alltids velte spillebordet. Det var det Hannibal gjorde da han gikk over Alpene med elefantene sine. Han brøt spillereglene og veltet bordet.

Den store hærføreren Hannibal huskes nå mest på grunn av elefantene, men i 216 f. Kr., etter slaget ved Cannae, var han den frykteligste fienden romerne noensinne hadde opplevd. Hannibals ettermæle er likevel dårlig fordi romerne fikk overtaket til slutt og derfor fikk skrive historien, så til denne dag er det få som vil døpe en sønn Hannibal.

At romerne som hevn (vel og merke etter definitivt og endelig å ha knust kartagenerne) jevnet Hannibals praktfulle Kartago ved jorden og gikk fra dør til dør for å slakte dets innbyggere mann for mann, er bare en fotnote i historien. Hannibal hadde jo brutt reglene, romernes regler.

Ca. 100 senere ble romerne slått på nytt i slag etter slag, av teutonere. Heller ikke det ordet – teutoner – er positivt ladet. Romerne ble nemlig bare midlertidig satt ut av spill og fortsatte å ekspandere i alle retninger og å skrive sin egen historie.

Men andre germanske stammer utslettet rett og slett flere romerske legioner ved slaget i Teutoburgerskogen i år 9 og satte en stopper for videre romersk ekspansjonisme mot nord. Snart skulle germanerne selv nå toppen av næringskjeden med en germansk keiser, mens romerne måtte nøye seg med en pave.

Det de ulike germanske stammene hadde til felles var at de var romerne teknisk, organisatorisk, teoretisk og økonomisk underlegne. Men de var rovmennesker som brøt spillereglene, la seg i bakhold og dolket legionærene i ryggen; temmelig feigt, spør du meg. Forresten var ikke romerne stort bedre: de forgiftet hverandre over en lav sko for å nå toppen og forbli der. Selv pavene gjorde det.

Rovmennesker har fortsatt med den slags til denne dag. Den som skal nå toppen av næringskjeden kan ikke ha skrupler. Og for å forsvare seg mot rovmennesker hjelper det ikke med bønn. To tusen år etter Hanibal skjøt vietnameserne sovende amerikanere som prøvde å redde dem fra kommunisme. Ikke pent, hva, men amerikanerne var ikke snauere enn at de tok igjen med napalm (er ikke det kjemisk krigføring?) og “Agent Orange”, og den dag i fødes alt for mange misdannede barn i Vietnam (The Guardian om Agent Orange). Vietnamkrigen pågikk under flere USAnske presidenter, blant dem flere fra det demokratiske partiet.

Hvis jeg ikke tar mye feil brukte amerikanerne napalm også i Irak, til tross for at verdens nasjoner hvert år kom sammen i FN for å prøve å enes, blant annet om hva som var tillatelig krigføring. Napalm var definitivt ikke tillatelig.

FN var nemlig ikke like populær over alt. FN representerer et forsøk på å temme rovmennesket, i praksis ved å bevare status quo; balanse mellom nasjonene; ro i klasserommet; lov og orden. Personlig liker jeg godt status quo. Jeg har det helt ypperlig her jeg er. Men er man et rovmenneske, vil man gjerne ha mer, og da er folkeretten forbannet irriterende. Er man derimot på bunnen av næringskjeden og har ingenting å miste, slåss man vilt og fortvilet uten tanke på lov og orden.

Det er ikke ofte at en knekt tar rotta på en konge, men det har skjedd og det vil fortsette å skje fra tid til annen så lenge det finnes rovmennesker på jorden, medmindre genmodifisering ikke tar helt av. Ganske enkelt fordi knekter stadig vekk prøver seg.

Midlene som brukes varierer. Jeg har nevnt bakhold, dolking, gift, Agent Orange og napalm. Jeg kunne ha tilføyd mange andre, men vil konsentrere meg om opinionsformende nyhetsfiltrering i riksdekkende etablerte og respekterte media og subtil meningspåvirkning i alle hovedkanaler, for det er derfor jeg skriver dette.

(En takk til Lars Birkelund for noe han skrev 15.04.2018 . Jeg synes at han gjør så saklig og grundig rede for seg at jeg ikke skal oppsummere hans poeng men anbefale at artikkelen leses. Det som følger er inspirert av den.)

Vi kan i dag umulig vite om Hannibal var en psykopat, men det er godt mulig. Det er også godt mulig at helten Armenius, som ledet germanerne i Teutoburgerskogen, var psykopat. Det er dessuten ikke en gang interessant om de eller Nixon, Kennedy, Assad, Putin og Julian Assange var eller er psykopater. Det er deres meritter som må bedømmes og virkningen av deres handlinger.

Det hersker liten tvil om at Assad vil bli bedømt, ikke på grunnlag av hva han gjorde før 2011 – det var faktisk mye bra – men for hva han har gjort siden. Jeg antar at han med rette kan anklages for grove krigsforbrytelser. Ettertiden vil formodentlig fortsatt dømme ham hardt. Jeg regner med at mange land vil ønske å stille ham for retten ved egne domstoler hvis han forlater Syria. Det har de anledning til.

Men vi må ikke glemme at Assad handler i en kontekst, slik USAnerne handlet i en kontekst da de begikk de grusomste krigsforbrytelser i Vietnam: De fryktet i rammeste alvor at Asias land ville falle som dominobrikker for kommunismen.

Assads kontekst i Syria er blant annet at opprørsgruppene er finansiert og støttet av utenlandske krefter. Vi har forresten nettopp lært at selv Norske myndigheter har sent soldater til Syria for å trene opp soldater, angivelig for kamp mot IS, men i praksis for kamp mot regjeringshæren.

Vestens kontekst i Syria er blant annet at Russland styrker sin posisjon i Midtøsten og knytter stadig tettere bånd til Iran og til og med Tyrkia. I den anledning er vi ofre for en propagandakrig, hvor man blant annet har satt munnbind på Julian Assange. Det gjelder å demonisere Assad og Putin og for den del også Assange, og å fremstille vestens intervensjon som et ønske om å redde sivile slik man prøvde å lure oss til å støtte krigen i Irak.

I Norge bør vi holde oss for gode til å la oss lure.

The proverbial “none”

14.04.2018 /

Crime fiction never seems to go out of fashion, as opposed to just about everything else, so we all know that to find the culprit we have to examine who had the means, the motive and no alibi. Whether or not he or she confesses is neither here nor there, as we all know, so when the Russians dismiss the accusations of being behind the nerve gas incident in Salisbury, there is absolutely no reason to believe them. After all, Clinton never had sex with …. etc., etc., and etc. Likewise, when Assad says the accusation about his use of chemical weapons is “madness”, there is no reason to believe him either.

I do not doubt that the Russians and Assad had and have the means to do what they are being accused of and goodness knows what else, as well, but I most definitely wonder what their motives for such acts would have been.

Unless the perpetrator is psychotic, his or her motives for committing the crime in question tend to be recognisable, the most notable being on the one hand jealousy, revenge and/or ideology and, on the other, a lust for money, sex and/or power, or so we are given to understand.

As for the motives of international players, they may ostensibly be more complex, but no matter how misguided the players’ moves are, you can always see the motive, the driving force: They want the upper hand, i.e. power.

For some decades now we have seen any number of international conventions, agreements and treaties according to which all signatories agree to follow certain rules of the game, such as that of not using chemical weapons.

Twice in the course of a very short period of time, this rule has apparently been deliberately and insolently flouted. Now why on earth would Russia and then Syria want to tell the world that “we don’t give a damn about international conventions”? What on earth is won by such a tactic? If the Russians wanted to kill their former agent in Salisbury, there would have been any number of ways of doing so more or less discreetly. As for Syria, the war is basically won for Assad. A chemical attack is unbelievably redundant. (True enough, so were the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) Why would Assad, on the threshold of winning his ugly war, risk having all eyes of the world turned on him in outrage?

There are, however, players out there who most definitely would benefit from ‘framing’, as it were, Russia and Assad.

I cannot possibly know who done it (though I know very well where my suspicions lie). However, it is pretty clear that while the US and the EU have been busy isolating Russia, Iran, Turkey and of course Syria, these countries have drawn closer together and are forming some sort of informal alliance. With Mr Trump at the helm in the US, China, too, may well find itself in league with them.

Consider, then, an alliance between Russia, Iran, Turkey ( a NATO member, no less) and possibly China. That’s pretty heavy stuff. Consider, also, what such an alliance would mean for NATO, for Israel, for the EU and US, and for Saudi Arabia… I say no more.

Dead Rat

31.03.2018 /

There is a dead rat somewhere. The question is: Where?

For one thing, there is this business of the expulsion of Russian diplomats from western countries. Journalists everywhere keep clamouring for evidence of the Russian government’s involvement in the Salisbury incident, and Boris Johnson is quoted as replying that Russia’s complicity is “rather like the beginning of ‘Crime and Punishment’ in the sense that we are all confident of the culprit, and the only question is whether he will confess or be caught.” To which a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson is said to have asked Mr Johnson whether he managed to make it past the beginning of the novel, quoting another line from the book: “From a hundred rabbits you can’t make a horse, a hundred suspicions don’t make a proof.”

Now they are saying that it’s “not just Salisbury”, it’s a “reckless pattern of behaviour”, and they mention Crimea. So let’s take a look at Crimea.

The 2014 referendum (which overwhelmingly supported reunification with Russia) was undoubtedly flawed and certainly very disputed. Nevertheless, there seems no doubt that only about 10% of the Crimean population spoke Ukrainian as their native language at the time and that the majority of Crimea’s inhabitants have considered themselves ethnically Russian for a very long time (67% in the 1989 census, 60% in 2001 and 65% in 2014). In addition, after the fall of the Soviet Union, exiled Crimean Tartars started returning and made up more than 10% of the population. (Source: Wikipedia 31.03.2018)

Much as the Crimea affair was irregular, the Russian side was very understandable given the country’s long-standing friction with Ukraine. Have we forgotten the sources of that friction? Have we for instance forgotten the pipeline through Ukraine from which Russian gas was “diverted” by Ukraine for years?

Do not misunderstand me: If the Russian government did indeed carry out a public liquidation in Salisbury, I’m all for the expulsion of Russian diplomats. It’s just that the Western hand in this matter does not seem clean. So whose hands are dirtiest?

Why is so little mention made, on the British side, of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a case that seemed pretty cut and dried at the time. Even the Russian media thought FSB was responsible. This puzzles me, so I have been reading about it.

Both the murder itself and the British investigation into it appear to have been fairly clumsy affairs, for one thing, and if the Russian secret service was responsible, clumsiness would not have been expected. As for the British, they vociferously requested the extradition of a Russian suspect, failing to remind the media that no civilised country ever extradites its own citizens.

Russia, on the other hand, requested the extradition of Boris Berezhovsky, whom they claimed they suspected. Now there is every reason to suspect this was a front on their part, but there appears to be no doubt that Mr Berezhovsky was a crook who had helped himself most liberally to taxpayers assets when the Soviet Union was dissolved. True, he was not the only one to do so, but people who go to court claiming three billion pounds in damages, as he did in London in 2012, are not your ordinary paper thief.

The British refused to extradite him. Moreover, they have been protecting a number of other personages that are lining UK banks with their assets. I quote the Telegraph:

Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, has ordered a retrospective investigation into past cases of “investor visas”, which are open to people who stake £2m or more in the UK.

The visas are a way for the super-rich to fast-track their residency and citizenship in Britain.

About 700 Russians were granted the gold-plated visas between 2008 and 2015, the Home Affairs Committee was told.

So Mr Berezhovsky was not the only Russian crook in the UK. Needless to say, the British do not extradite their citizens either, but granting rich Russians fast-track citizenship takes care of the issue. (I refer to Mr Berezhovsky in the past tense. The findings of his death coincided with suicide. Of course many people assume he was killed, but there was no evidence. The Russian state or the Mafia?)

The Telegraph politely refers to these “about 700” people as “super-rich”. Permit me to use a different word: “Mafia”. State-sponsored public liquidations have rather gone out of fashion, whereas Mafia liquidations are still bread and butter in many countries.

Finally, I wish to make it very clear that I’m not saying the Russians “didn’t do it”. I’m just saying that some pieces of the puzzle just don’t fit. There is a dead rat somewhere.

Democratic deficit

29.03.2018 /

After two world wars, Europeans had had enough of wars, and so we saw the slow but inexorable development of the EC, which has evolved into the EU.

Now, it is true that many considered this multinational organisation a bureaucratic and undemocratic mastodon, and for many years the Scandinavian countries, for instance, refused to join, with good reason, you might say. There are certainly grounds for maintaining that joining the EU weakens national sovereignty, and there is undoubtedly the matter of the “democratic deficit”.

On the other hand, where is there no “democratic deficit”? Personally, I’m not really sure what “democracy” means, in spite of all we can read about the topic in various sources. Forget about the ancient Greeks, for a moment, though the concept is said to stem from them; in Athens only a small proportion of males, i.e. landowners, were “eligible” to vote, as it were. So Athens doesn’t really count as a model.

In modern-day western societies, we see more or less fascist movements gaining ground through fair elections. We also see elections that are not blatantly unfair but dubious. I won’t detail what I mean by dubious – each country has its own turgid electoral issues with or without the involvement of the Russians, fake-news factories, abused Facebook data etc. Be all that as it may, we are left with a lot of question marks regarding even so called “fair elections”.

Regardless of our doubts, however, most of us in the west still agree that we value certain standards of law. We need to trust that our courts and law enforcement are politically, financially and personally impartial and just. Most of us also firmly adhere to the importance of civil liberties.

So where does that leave us?

I knew a man who used to say, “nowhere in the Bible have I found any statement to the effect that parents must love their children”. I believe him. He had actually read the Bible many times. The Bible only commands us to love and obey our parents, and that’s it.

I find a parallel in our faith in “democracy”: We believe in it as though it were the Bible, but nobody requires us to vote for what is best for the country, for society or for humankind. All a voter needs to do is to vote for whoever will best serve his or her personal interests. Now.

Right. And now we have a situation of impeding serious climate change. Left to choose between a policy that will impose inter alia serious restrictions on personal travel and make a dent on our personal finances, or, on the other hand, business as usual, what do you and I choose?

And we have a situation in which parts of the world population are destitute, desperate and/or even angry. Do we choose to leave them to their own devices, put them into concentration camps, or even exterminate them? Or do we consider a different order?

Finally, we have a situation in most western countries where a growing proportion are growing poorer by the year, where the welfare state is crumbling and where young women are increasingly reluctant to bear children for fear of what the future may bring. It is very tempting to blame “the others”, i.e. China, Russia, the immigrants, and all the oddballs that make a society colourful. Are there any other sources of concern?

The EU may be a bureaucratic mastodon, but from my perspective, the EU is a relatively civilising force in Europe at the moment. Not that I trust the EU. The EU was from its inception, and still is, a fundamentally capitalist animal. But so far, no successful alternative to capitalism has been devised. (Russia and China are, after all, as capitalist as the rest of us.) The EU aims, at least, to resist individual countries’ and companies’ attempts to undermine the rule of law, and to defend civil liberties. The EU even defends, to a certain extent, its members’ welfare state. And the EU realises, unlike most of us, that in the end, we will all be the losers of climate change.

There is no punch line here, except that if you are itching for a new war, you may not be disappointed. I only hope that the majority of Europeans take to their senses. Soon.

 

Gabriel

16.03.2018 /

I can’t get Gabriel out of my head.

He disappeared on 27 February. I saw it on the news and since then, for some reason, the little boy has haunted me. The whole business has seemed so utterly improbable in every way.

He left his grandparents’ house to go and visit his cousins, just a hundred metres, or so, down the road, but apparently he never got there. The reporters have taken us back and forth that short stretch of dirt road time and time again, telling us, the viewers – and repeating time and time again – that nothing, absolutely nothing dangerous lay along the road. No pond, no bog, no cliff….

Above all, no crime could possibly have befallen him in such a godforsaken place with only 73 inhabitants (according to Wikipedia). Everybody knows everybody, and you simply cannot hide.

We were shown pictures of him, an eight-year-old with a beautiful smile on his cheerful face. His mother spoke to the TV-cameras, begging for help – she too was beautiful, I thought – explaining that he was a very good little boy who liked drawing fishes and who wanted to be a marine biologist. “If anyone out there is keeping him, please, I beg you, bring him back safe and sound,” she said. I was obviously not the only one who was moved by her appeal, because around 5000 people came to that desolate little village to comb the surrounding countryside.

Day after day, Gabriel with the sunny smile was the centrepiece of the evening news. Nor was there any escape from the agonised faces of the boy’s father and his girlfriend. There were endless search parties crossing drab, treeless hills that were almost the same grey-green colour as the Guardia Civil. Grim looks in every face. All of Spain held its breath.

On 3 March, a shirt belonging to the boy was found.

Then I left Spain and thought I had heard the last of the matter. But no. One day I stumbled across El Pais, and there he was on the front page. On 11 March, they had found him. Dead. In the boot of a car. “We wept when we saw the body,” said one of the officers in charge of the investigation.

Apparently Guardia Civil had suspected the murderer ever since the shirt was found. For various reasons, they believed it had been placed there by the person who found it. They kept the suspect under close surveillance, and in the end, they intercepted her car as she was moving the corpse.

Yes, her. The murderer was the father’s girlfriend. She had played the prominent part of grieving, close relative before the press, weeping and giving several interviews.

I just can’t get Gabriel out of my head!  That is why I have to write about him. I keep seeing the countryside, plain and dispassionate, the very antithesis of violent crime. And I keep wondering: What motive could possibly be strong enough to warrant the killing of a bright and sunny-tempered eight-year-old?

And I keep thinking: If a woman is capable of doing that and, having done so, of feigning the intense commiseration and grief of a deeply caring, kind, attentive and loving partner, while in constant limelight day after day – 12 days in all – what are other women capable of doing?

Already, all the details of the matter are on Wkikpedia.

Paradise on earth

24.02.2018 /

From my rooftop terrace in the old town on top of the cliff, I might perhaps be excused for imagining that this is a beautiful world. Squinting against the sun, I see undulating green fields, pink almond blossoms, pale against the rich green foliage of orange trees, frolicking birds, a twinkling river – all carefree under a warm mid-February sun. From my long walks in the mountains just a few kilometres away, I know that some wild animals still survive , and even here, in this very village, by the river, there are exotic birds and otters. On one of my walks near the town I actually saw a mongoose.

Yes, this part of the world is without doubt beautiful, at least for some of us, it is.

A financial crisis struck Spain in 2007, and banks had to be bailed out with tax payers’ money. Now, they say, the crisis is over, but a large part of the middle class has been pauperised since 2007, as by a stroke of lightning. More than 37% of those who are 25 or younger are still unemployed.

As for this village, time has forgotten it, has passed it by. In the old town, many have moved out, and lots of the town’s 16th–19th century mansions have been partially or entirely abandoned and left to crumble, while people who still live here try as best they can to whitewash their erstwhile seigniorial dwellings in time for Easter every year.

My neighbours live on what they can gather from day to day. Wild asparagus, for instance, which is sold in the streets, or snails. But Spain is still, after all, in the EU, and people are not allowed to die of starvation. There are social services. And neighbours help each other as best they can. One neighbour is nearly a hundred years old, and her mind has long departed. Her six children take turns nursing her. Lifting her out of bed, dressing her, feeding her, taking her to the toilet, putting her to bed… They have been doing so for years. And years. And years.

This is a kind village. A very kind village. Very little crime. You can walk safely home at night.

Meanwhile, hearing the faint echoes of the news, I ask myself: Why is mainstream media so pusillanimous about discussing the essence of each disaster? I mean ALL mainstream media, not just US media, though my example now is about the NRA: Just exactly what is the National Rifle Association? What is the socio-economic profile of its members? What is the average level of education of its members? What are the NRA’s links to the Republican Party? How much does the organisation as a whole plus individual members pay to maintain their political sway, officially and unofficially? And not least, what is the extent and the nature of the NRA’s links to the arms industry?

Such questions are important, are they not? Why do I hear so little about them? True, I am not a US American. But are these questions loudly addressed in the USA? Do US Americans understand why the NRA holds so much sway? For that matter, do US Americans understand why they are being ruled by a Donald Trump?

Semantics

19.02.2018 /

I need not remind you that what we imagine we know about the past tends to be what victors of the past wanted us to believe. Ever since barons, of one sort or another, came into existence, they made sure to hire and overpay the most talented bards to sing their praises. In our day, we have the media. Running an attractive media outlet costs far more than consumers are willing to pay, and modern barons are happy to sponsor those who tell their side of the story.

I have just been to Cordoba, Spain. There are many reasons to visit Cordoba, one of which surpasses every other. True, you may not share my tastes, but the Mesquita in Cordoba is the most sublimely beautiful building I have ever visited! To my mind, neither the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg nor the Acropolis in Athens nor any Gothic cathedral hold a candle to the Moorish Mesquita in terms of transcendental architectonic harmony.

The Moors were defeated and driven out of Spain, and most of us are unaware of the remarkable scientific and artistic supremacy and – not least – relative tolerance that had characterised Moorish culture in Spain during what is known elsewhere in Europe as the “dark ages”. “We won”, as it were, and we are telling our story now, a story that centres on Western moral superiority, on the one hand, and Islamic religious fanaticism and brutality, on the other. The story is no more true than innumerable other fanciful concoctions spun out of ignorance. The ghastly war crimes committed by US soldiers in Vietnam, for instance, do not mean that US Americans are cruel monsters.

Now, telling a fib is not as straightforward as you might think. After all, incorrect facts can be gainsaid, although the correction will often only be found on the last page, in small print and long after the entire population has taken the venomous bait. In the long run, though, a mainstream news outlet would not want its reputation to be tainted as fallible, so journalists and speech writers need a more indirect approach, which is where their semantics come into the picture, their choice of words.

If you are up against a brutal dictator, and there are many of those, you may be engaging in political activism, but as soon as your authorities get on to you, they will not convict you of political activism but of “sedition”** or “incitement” for the simple reason that no self-respecting country will admit banning “political activism”. In the news, your friends will hear about a “rioting mob”, rather than about a “crowd of demonstrators”. Nobody wants to be part of a “mob” and most people are reluctant to have anything to do with a “riot”. Serious opposition to your country’s authorities will not be labelled a “rebellion” – since anyone can easily be sympathetic of a rebellion against a tyrannical regime – but as “treason” or “terrorism”.

In fact, even in a country that does not have a tyrannical regime, you risk being indicted of treason if you are some Mr Nobody who exposed your country’s war crimes. On the other hand, presidents who harm their countries past the point of no repair are very rarely accused of anything at all.

Mind you, semantics – the words that are used to describe, in this case, your political opposition – matter not only to you as a dissident, but to all who attempt to bring down tyrannical regimes. No country is an island, not even North Korea. Your country will have financial, military, strategic and other ties to other countries. The US, for instance needs to keep its military bases in a large number of minor countries and will not risk disrupting relations with a regime that has taken draconian measures against “terrorists”.

As for the rest of us, those who believe that the occupants of the White House are – ehem – whatever-we-believe-they-are, we are all “conspiracy theorists”. Those of us in favour of some redistribution of income and wealth are “populists”, and analysts who expose the inefficiency and financial extravagance of the US health system are elitist, and their arguments are merely referred to as a “narrative”, i.e. something distinctly dubious.

Israel refers to all who have the slightest sympathy for the Palestinian cause as anti-Semite. Makes my blood curdle, in fact, because I very much resent being called a racist.

Unfortunately, those of us who are referred to as populists, conspiracy theorists, elitist or anti-Semite are often no better. Referring only to myself, I have on occasion vehemently stated that so-and-so was a racist, a fascist or for lack of anything more precise, a bastard. Only recently I referred to a very prominent person as a hooker, on these very pages. I can’t say I very much regret having done so, because letting off steam feels good. My words were less elegant, though, than those used against me, and would have no other effect than to make it clear that I loathed the object in question, and that was not really my aim, which was to make the reader share my loathing.

Any political movement that is referred to as populist, elitist, anti-Semite or based on conspiracy theory will probably never seriously get off the ground, so semantics do matter.

**A recent case from a so-called Democratic country is that of Catalonia: Although the separatist movements earned a majority in Democratic elections for the second time in a row in December 2017, the Spanish authorities have indicted the separatist movements’ leaders on charges of “sedition”.

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