Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Category: Crimes against humanity (Page 5 of 5)

Whose dirty socks, mine or yours?

17.06.2017 /

My mission is not to tell you that you-know-who is fabulously ignorant, since I’m sure that whoever reads these pages will be more than aware of that. Nor is it a matter of honour for me to convince you that his ignorance is his most endearing quality.

My mission is, rather, to point out that due to his ignorance, he repeatedly puts his foot in the mouth and exposes the rest of us, for which I am grateful, since we all have an awful lot dirty linen lying around.

Yes, ignorance can create the most embarrassing situations. When the US president went to visit Saudi Arabia, a country notoriously known for human rights abuses (e.g. the war on Yemen, the torturing of political dissidents and the suppression of women and alien workers) he virtually genuflected to his Saudi counterpart, according to Washington Post, without apparently realising that Wahhabi Saudi Arabia is suspected of being the principle financier of Islamic extremism in Europe. I quote Washington Post:

Almost every terrorist attack in the West has had some connection to Saudi Arabia. Virtually none has been linked to Iran.

Wahhabism is named after the eighteenth century activist Muhammad ibn Abd Al-Wahhab, whose teachings inspire the official, state-sponsored form of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia, and also – please note – the ideology of ISIL/ISIS.

With the help of funding from Saudi petroleum exports, the movement underwent explosive growth beginning in the 1970s and now has worldwide influence. The US State Department has estimated that over the past four decades the capital Riyadh has invested more than $10bn (£6bn) into charitable foundations in an attempt to replace mainstream Sunni Islam with the harsh intolerance of its Wahhabism. (Source: Wikipedia as at 17/6/17).

What puzzles me is why we all need to be such buddies with Saudi Arabia. For instance, according to the Guardian, the UK recently found, when the laundry was taken out of the washing machine, that every piece was grey. There the press is getting restless about UK-Saudi relations in the wake of the recent massacres of civilians on the streets and in concert halls, the genocidal war on Yemen, and by a strange and apparently irrational boycott of Qatar, a tiny country with an important, global news outlet, Al Jazeera.

Now, Qatar is also a Wahhabi state, just like its neighbour Saudi Arabia. But unlike the Saudis, Qatar is on civilised terms with Iran and the country’s stance on the Moslem Brotherhood and Hamas is nuanced. What’s worse, from a Saudi perspective, is that Qatar is doing extremely well, whereas Saudi Arabia is amassing colossal debts and will soon run out of funds. Is there reason to suspect that Saudi Arabia hopes to annex Qatar?

The US president suffers from a visceral loathing of Iran and played right into the hands of the Saudis. Qatar, they told him, is supporting Iranian terrorism. The president was more than willing to believe them. He signed the largest arms deal in American history on 20/5/2017, claiming that this would create “jobs” for Americans. Amazingly, attempts to block the deal in the Senate failed on 13/6/2017. Just imagine what the Saudis can do, not only with tanks and weaponry but also with the radar, communications and cybersecurity technology they have been promised! Truly, the thought should make your hair stand on end.

While many analysts tend to focus exclusively on Saudi oil and the country’s leading position in OPEC when explaining the West’s shameful relationship with Saudi Arabia, I believe we need to take a closer look at Saudi Arabia’s fascinating consumption of arms. Why is the country so obsessed with weaponry? I find that Newsweek has an interesting take on the matter. Here are a few tidbits:

Additionally, … religious restrictions within Saudi Arabia make it nearly impossible for the kingdom to diversify or grow its non-oil economy. … Thus, as discussed in “Why the Saudis May Be Preparing for a Real War”, due to … a steady decline in the relative importance of oil in the world economy, …. hawks within Saudi Arabia’s political establishment may have decided to grow their economy not internally but externally, through conquest and violent expansion. Accordingly, Saudi Arabia has dedicated 13 percent of its gross domestic product to its military for six years and has become the largest per capita purchaser of weapons in the world.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Teresa May is embarrassed in more ways than one. Not only is Saudi Arabia probably grooming potential terrorists among marginalised British citizens (e.g. the victims of the recent ghastly fire and their friends and relatives), but the UK economy depends on that distant medieval country. I quote the Economist:

The war in Yemen has certainly been lucrative. Since the bombardment began in March 2015, Saudi Arabia has spent £2.8 billion on British arms, making it Britain’s largest arms market, according to government figures analysed by Campaign Against Arms Trade. America supplies even more.

Let’s face it, however, the US and the UK are not the only countries who depend on arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Terrorism and poverty

12.03.2017 /

Never mind the definition of terrorism (let alone the definition of poverty). As the Guardian wrote in 2001:

While most people agree that terrorism exists, few can agree on what it is. A recent book discussing attempts by the UN and other international bodies to define terrorism runs to three volumes and 1,866 pages without reaching any firm conclusion.

Let us for this particular exercise say that terrorism is the deliberate taking of civilian (i.e non-combatant) lives for ideological purposes.

Some scholars have come to the conclusion that there is no link between poverty and terrorism. Indeed, there is absolutely no denying that the world’s have-nots far outnumber the haves, and that most have-nots are anything but terrorists. Nor can it be denied that ISIS, to take an example, is headed by a man with a university doctorate. I quote Wikipedia (12/03/2017):

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, contemporaries of al-Baghdadi describe him in his youth as being shy, unimpressive, a religious scholar, and a man who eschewed violence. For more than a decade, until 2004, he lived in a room attached to a small local mosque in Tobchi, a poor neighbourhood on the western fringes of Baghdad, inhabited by both Shia and Sunni Muslims.

With a doctorate, he would at least not have been destitute. Whether he lived in relative poverty because he had no choice, or out of solidarity with the poor, or for tactical reasons must be a matter of speculation, judging from the above cited Wikipedia article.

At any rate he did live in relative poverty and he was detained at Abu Ghraib for 10 months. I have never been to Abu Ghraib, but I have been given to understand that detention there was no tea party.

Have you, dear reader, ever felt that you or somebody you cared for had been subjected to gross injustice? Now if you, as I, enjoy a reasonably comfortable living standard, your anger will probably have abated somewhat after a few days. You would certainly not seriously contemplate terrorism. Those of us who have jobs to tend, and family and loved ones to inspire with hope and love of life, cannot allow our minds to be poisoned by bitterness and hate.

But if even the simplest chores of survival were a minute by minute uphill battle and if any of your loved ones had been killed or tortured, believe me: You would be a potential terrorist. You would perhaps not be willing to kill, but you might be willing to harbour a killers, feed him and refuse to give him away, etc. That would make you an accomplice in terrorism, which in many countries is as serious an offence as active terrorism.

I fear the methods that have been employed in the studies referred to above are seriously flawed.

Poverty alone may not be enough to drive a man or woman off the cliff, and successful terrorist groups (whether white-supremacist or religious) are contingent on having leaders who are moneyed and/or educated and who are probably, more often than not, psychopaths. But the foot soldiers who make up their armies are as much victims as their victims, cf. BBC outline of terrorist groups in Africa:

They are given the feeling that they are a very important person and that martyrdom is something to aspire to – the anger over their deprivation is lowered to a feeling of comfort, to a point where the only thing they aspire to is a collective action.

Whether that action leads to their survival or death doesn’t really matter any more.

 

 

Attempt at making a list

12.10.2016 /

And now for all the good things, the things for which those who believe in a God have reason to offer thanks. Such a list, my friends, is called for, to prevent us from weeping all day and all night over Aleppo and all the little dead children there; an energetic list, to the accompaniment of drum rolls and waving flags, while happy children prance around dressed in their Sunday best.

We hear items from the list every day. In the lift on my way up to work, for instance:

– At least it’s not snowing.
– Better than in Aleppo, for sure.

Or in the lift on my way from work:

– Weekend at last! My wife is away with some friends, and I’m going to get drunk with mine.
– My children are away, so I’m going to read that book, at last.

No, that won’t do. If there is no rain in Aleppo, humanity’s tears will drown the place unless we can do better. So let’s pull our socks up, shall we!

– My begonia is still blossoming, in October, would you believe it? It’s so very beautiful; a hybrid of course. It reminds me that though species in the wild are dying, one by one, due to drought or whatever, we – humans, I mean – will always be able to create new and wonderful hybrids.
– … which will be available to those that can afford to keep a gardener, or something.
– Well, I’m sure there’ll be botanical gardens here and there, at least in big cities.
– Yes, and zoos. You know, in theory we can probably clone any of the popular mammals before they become extinct: lions and whales and tigers and stuff.
– … and we would not have to clone those horrible snails…
– I’m afraid they’ll be among the last to go.
– Oh dear. Well, at least there are still a few birds left in the country, and I’m off to the country for the weekend.
– Leaving your beautiful begonia?
– I’ll have something to look forward to coming back to, won’t I? Have a nice weekend.
– You too.

But I, the furry whale, have a better candidate than begonias to promote as a generator of happiness: Violin quartets. Violin quartets do not need rain or for that matter sun or fertile earth or even concert halls. Violin quartets only need violins and sheet music and a room that can accommodate four people, and me of course, who wants to listen.

But when the forests die and when almost all violins have been burnt in towns like Aleppo (compare Warsaw under WWII – a topic of many films) there will be neither violins nor paper on which to print the notes to be played … Aleppo again!

Why – in heaven’s name! – why Aleppo, again and again? What about Niger? What about all the countries of the Sahel, where death by drought and starvation is the order of the day, where sub-human Bocoharamists put people out of their misery when poverty has finished doing it’s business.

– Your dog had puppies? Why congratulations!!
– Wait, I’ll show you. Hold on, I’m a bit slow with this mobile phone stuff… oh yes, here they are.
– Oh my goodness! How unbelievably adorable!

1029… and still counting

26.11.2015 /

Even I was taken aback by the Counted!

Why the Guardian feels called upon to kindly help the US keep a record that most civilised and indeed, even uncivilised, nations would blush to admit they did not themselves scrupulously record, is explained here.

There is really nothing I can add.

Except, yes, for one thing: Developing nations of the world: Here is your chance to demonstrate that you can do better than the United States of America.

Atttacks against humanity

14.11.2015 /

We have just heard that the killings in Paris last night “are an attack against all humanity”. Indeed they are! They are loathsome, ghastly, cowardly acts of random cruelty. There is no obscenity that can fully convey my contempt for the intoxicated sadism that characterises such acts.

However, Mr Obama, did you or any of your predecessors ever state that the ghastly, cowardly, randomly cruel war on Iraq was an attack against all humanity?

Did the US ever pay war damages to the country they dismantled “in error” as it turned out?

Has it ever occurred to you, Mr Obama, or your allies, that the Palestine situation has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that talks, negotiations, etc. won’t get you anywhere if you are not formally a “nation state”, and if your counterpart is a US ally, no matter how unequivocal your rights. So fundamentalist Islamists don’t even consider negotiating, and frankly, who can blame them for that.

Western policies versus Islam are utterly and devastatingly failed! After the Sovjet débâcle in Afghanistan, the West should have learnt that no matter how much we dislike our medieval counterpart, we have to find some other way of solving differences than by trying to exterminate him.

After all, we are not perfect either. 

As for France: Frankly, Ms Le Pen has much to answer for, I believe, and should never have been allowed to spawn rabid racial hatred. I believe that in my country, she would have been behind bars a long time ago.

You will say this is not the time to criticise France. On the contrary, it is just the right time! The thing is, that what we do has consequences. What happened to the victims was not just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Please please remember that.

Alternative warfare – Christmas proposition

25.12.2014 /

UNESCO has published a list of killed journalists. This year there were 60 of them. Sixty killed journalists! That’s a lot of dead journalists. Many were killed in 2013, too. And not only in Syria! Just take a look at UNESCO’s list:

Unesco condems killing of journalists

Being dead may, however, be better than being tortured in a prison. I can’t tell you, because I’ve never been tortured, but I don’t think I could bear it. What I do know is that for every dead journalist there are probably many more rotting in sinister jails. It’s a marvel that there are any of them left.

I depend on those people! So do you. So do we all. Without intrepidly investigative journalists, we would still be back in the middle ages, ignorant, rebellious perhaps, but impotent. We would sign infinite petitions to our kings and the Virgin Mary, asking for their protection against barons that would, without a doubt, exploit us till we could take no more and wouuld lie down in some corner to wait for the next life. That’s the way things still are in much of Central America, where they’ve been killing judges and journalists for decades.

Thinking about the perpetrators – the moron killers we hear of from the Middle East and Mexico, for instance – I find myself wishing that somebody would go and whip them out of their beds and hang them up in the nearest tree. If there is no tree or lamp post at hand, at least they should be given public whippings.

But what can I do? I am opposed to capital punishment, opposed to torture. So I have to rethink, to calm down and try to examine the consequences of hanging hundreds of depraved morons from trees and lamp posts.

To begin with, we know from morally primitive societies (I shall refrain from giving examples of what I consider morally primitive societies), that if you kill one of them, there will be hell to pay, collective retribution against your entire tribe. You and a lot people you care for will be wiped out, one way or another. They can take your water, or your electricity or your hospitals or your livelihood or they can simply shoot you.

What if, you might say, we wipe them out first? Well, I admit that reading about the journalists this morning, that was approximately what I thought. The problem is that they have access to as many and as lethal firearms as we do. Maybe not the same firearms, maybe not as “superior”, as it were, but somehow, we keep seeing again and again that the outcome of wars is not as foreseeable as the weather. Thanks, not least, to journalists, this should now have become eminently clear.

Moreover, as a colleague of mine pointed out today, people in Mexico, Guatemala or IS are not likely to be genetically more prone to depravity than the rest of us. To every story there is, implicitly if not explicitly, a prologue.

For reasons I need not go into, I have seen a lot of newborn babies in my life. I have seen many small children, many adolescents, and many adults. Need I add that when something went seriously wrong somewhere along that line, what happened was almost always preceded by a series of unfortunate circumstances. An unhealthy society is countless series of unfortunate circumstances.

So my Christmas proposition is to capture them (and having done so, to resist at all costs the temptation to spit at them, bruise them, or tell them to fuck their mothers, and of course, to refrain from any of the infamous methods applied by the US authorities at Guantanamo), feed them, and proceed to question them. They will be incarcerated in conditions that satisfy the terms of international law. Next, they will be educated, brainwashed, if you will. They will be subjected to education in accordance with their respective religions. If they are Catholic, they will be taught by Catholics, if they are Moslems, they will be taught by Moslems, if they are atheist, they will be taught by atheists. The consequences of their past acts will be made clear to them – consequences for their families, their communities, their countries and, finally, the world. They will be taught by social scientists and psychologists. Modern educational principles will be applied, i.e. student participation will be stimulated. They will be recalcitrant, sullen, nasty, deceitful etc., even more so than high school students, but they will be adults who take pride in being able to justify themselves, so something will penetrate in spite of their emotional resistance.

Some, many, will have been so brutalised that nothing will move them. Many will be so traumatised that reintegration will be unlikely. If released, many will return where they came from, hardened. At any rate, they will all have to serve long sentences for war crimes, or in the case of the Mexican butchers, for gang murders.

On the other hand, many others will come around, will regret their acts, will want to help put a stop to continued violence and the devastation of their respective regions. They in turn will educate others.

I put it to you, that such an approach would cause bewilderment and chaoes in the “enemy camp”. It should be clear now, that perpetual shoot-outs will not permanently solve any of the underlying long-term issues that caused the current debacles.

Execrable

12.07.2014 /

The body count is 121 and rising. By yesterday morning, 19 of the victims were children. I haven’t seen the figure for today. The words terrorism, racism, fascism etc have been so mangled for manipulative purposes that they are now utterly useless. We are left with no more than instruments of international law to describe the atrocities systematically committed again and again and again and again … forgive my lack of imagination – against the same people!

International charters insistently and doggedly violated by Israel include (but are in no way limited to) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which I believe even Israel implicitly ratified by the very fact that it was a UN member when the Declaration was signed, the Genocide Convention, ratified by Israel on 9 March 1950, and the Geneva Conventions 1-4 ratified by Israel in 1951 (though it hasn’t bothered about Protocols 1 and 2 (“As of April 2013, the Protocols had been ratified by 167 countries, with the United States, Turkey, Israel, Iran, Pakistan, and Iraq being notable exceptions” [source Wikipedia])

In general, Israel does not seem to care much for international treaties. This is clear from the fact that Israel (and Sudan and the US) were, but no longer are, parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. They simply signed out. (Hark ye, you guys, what company you keep!)

I am trying to reign in my tongue which, left to its own devices, would have lambasted Israel’s authorities, whipped them till there was not a sliver left of their precious self-righteous, vindictive, bigot dignity. Oops! There went my tongue.

Mind you, although I am neither from the US or Israel, I feel almost as much shame as anger and pain because of what the rest of us – the West – are – practically speaking – condoning. I suspect many of you do too. We have allowed this to happen, to continue happening with absolute impunity for many decades. We are accessories to the acts. Do you understand what I am saying? Do you understand what being accessory to genocide means, morally, I mean? You might want to think about that.

And don’t tell me that we have no choice! No of course I’m not referring to armed intervention!

We could simply refuse to do business with Israel. Not a blade of grass should we sell to or buy from Israel. Not a single product, soft or hard, not a single service, should we purchase or sell. Never mind the cost to our own economies!

More:
Since we cannot prosecute them in the International Criminal Court, we should make it clear beyond any doubt what we think about genocidal, aparteid states. No Israeli passport should be allowed entry to the Schengen Area. Not one! Let them taste the medicine they have forced down Palestinian throats for decades: Let them feel what it’s like to be prisoners in their own country.

I am not saying that all Israelis are war criminals. Many of them are probably no more or no less war criminals than all of us who are passively accessory to the systematic and repeated impunity of the crimes committed. (But please note that since Israel is a so-called democratic state, the majority of its voters must have voted for its government.) Any Israeli who abhors Israel’s genocidal and apartheid policy should be welcome to apply for residence or citizenship in, for instance, my country. I shall welcome him/her.

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