THIS SORRY SCHEME OF THINGS

reflections on
OMAR KHAYYÁM
(2002)

and
THE WARS OF THE WELL-OILED HYPOCRITES

"I am anti-American and damned proud of it - but of I can't say it!" H.R.H. the Prince Philip of Greece, Duke of Edinburgh (overheard

I.

This is more remarkable than it seems at first sight, for (apart from the gentle observations of Montaigne) in the West no such attack occurred until Nietzsche, nearly 800 years after Khayyám. In the West, the foundations of modern totalitarianism were laid by Constantine I, who successfully (as it transpired) killed the Gods and severed man's connection with not just the vine, but the whole of Nature. With the survival of 'Christianity' (which, as previously pointed out, should really be called 'Paulinism', since just about all the doctrine derives from Paul and not from Jesus) through the "Dark Ages", the bogus "Donation of Constantine", the rise of the great monastic orders, and, consequently, the papacy, the foundations of capitalism (rather than mere mercantilism) were laid, so that Nature could be ruled by Man as Man was alleged to be - despite the evidence - ruled by God. The difference between capitalism and mercantilism (apart from the raising of capital from often-unknown shareholders) is that the former strives continually towards vicious monopolies. This is what links it so directly to monotheism. More than that, capitalism with its economic apologists and populist democracies of the greedy, has itself become a monopoly, the sole model of world society, so that no-one dare call it malign or even wrong. Dissidents don't need to be suppressed, they are simply marginalised to the lunatic fringe. The principles of capitalism and Christianity (Paulinism) are the same: to create an overwhelming feeling of need which only the product or the religion can supply. Spirituality is, of course, the Sufic opposite, being the physical and psychic self-sufficiency and adaptability which have no need to resort to myths, magic, faith, miracles - or products. The moral strength of Islam resides at least partly in the fact that it has few manufactured myths, and partly in its fascinating, body-hating puritanism

Islam (the State of Peace or Obedience) and 'Christianity' (the Creed of Socially-structured Love) trod different totalitarian paths: one accommodated to Oriental despotism (modified almost to Philosopher-Kingdoms in Spain), the other (after several hundred years) led to despotism of the Will, which brought Protestantism and its quasi-democracies whose lofty claims remain largely unchallenged by philosophers. The truer democracy in Athens (albeit only of free arms-bearing or warrior males, as in mediæval Iceland, but chosen by lot) was denounced as a sham by Diogenes. Athenian society was based on the labour of castrated slaves (one third of the population), was the first recorded society to force women to veil their faces, particularly their eyes, and was almost continually attacking its neighbours. The real challengers of the Western quasi-democracies are not philosophers, but corruption by Big Business, demagogues, dictators and disillusionment. In the sixteen hundred years since the sack of Rome, the West has not produced one writer to match Khayyám, whose writings (in Persian under the despotism of 'The Shepherd Kings') are considered more dangerous in modern Iran (where he was born and flourished) and Afghanistan (where he was educated) than television, the most pernicious narcotic ever offered by rulers to the ruled - or the plethoric World Wide Web, on which, of course, his writings must appear!

It is not, however, democracy (itself a looking-glass Leviathan) that matters - but the accountability and removability of rulers and bureaucrats, and the 'rule of law ensuring the security of ordinary people. Most 'democracies' elect 'representative' politicians who are only theoretically accountable (and often under the control of powerful military and/or economic interests), and are run by bureaucracies who try to ensure that they are never called from outside the oligarchy to account for themselves. In the United States, where accountability is real, extreme secrecy is one means of avoiding it. The other, since 1919, has been the consumerism which was deliberately encouraged, by Edward Bernays, nephew of and propagandist for Freud, and adviser to Presidents, big companies, trans-national corporations, the CIA and so on, to make the stroppy masses docile. It was he who made sure that any chance of a humane society in Guatemala was crushed in the early fifites. He understood that freedom and capitalism are opposing forces, so he harnessed the insights of Freud to make sure that capitalism became the turbo-capitalism we know today while making people think that they lived in a society over which they had some measure of control. He saw the wonderful power of television to render its entire audience passive and unthinking - by daily creating and seeming to assuage desires.

Television and the computer monitor are like sugar, one of the few addictive products which people immediately like. Money is another. Like any drug, money does not really liberate those who have it. On the contrary, it tends to narrow their consciousness to thoughts of saving or making more money. The rich are not conspicuously happy, and usually spend their money on self-indulgences as banal as their greed.

Like Diogenes, Khayyám was a kind of transcendental anti-nihilist, and it was this which appealed to Edward FitzGerald and his fin-de-siècle readers so much that he compiled no fewer than five versions of his translation and arrangement of selected ruba'iyat - just over 100 out of the 235 at that time ascribed to Khayyám, of which perhaps almost a third were composed by imitators.

The Kurdish journalist Hazhir Teimourian is of the opinion that Omar's quatrains, when arranged just so, form a kind of philosophical diary. This is an attractive idea contained in a fine biography in which, sadly, Teimourian's tone-deaf versions illustrate his point.

Both Diogenes and Khayyám would have welcomed the leaving of this vicious world of men, their gratuitous cruelty - and Malthusian overabundance - for utter nothingness. Like all spiritual people they felt that there is too much 'thingness' around. Here is something of the flavour of Khayyám's message - more sardonic than what emerges from the superb translations of FitzGerald - in a quatrain not translated by the Victorian:

Those who live in lonely love of Self
Or wonder what - if anything - comes after Death
Would be less pathetic honouring the Vine
Than dying to perpetuate their Breath.

The twentieth fin-de-siècle was quite different from the nineteenth - and from the tenth (when Western Europe was not yet free from external threat) . Because capitalism has made all of us strangers to ourselves, conviviality, our natures and to Nature, the last century's end is shot through with Utopian irrationalism and anti-rationalism - whether of the inane New Age variety, or, more dangerously, of the anti-philosophical weirdness of human cloning and other "mad scientist" projects which appeal hugely to the large trans-national corporations who will benefit from them. Everything has now been commoditised - including marketable (that is to say false) 'spirituality' - in the interests of a Thousand-Year Reign of capitalism whose basic currency of thought is the belief that everything is purchasable, and everyone is judged on their purchasability and their purchasing power. Its few opponents declare, on the other hand, that the only thing worth having - worth dying with - is integrity.

The Capitalist Doctrine in Three Words

True spirituality (like true love and unlike sexual love) is not marketable, for it cannot be a commodity but a state diametrically different from the nation state. Thus it has almost died out, like poetry, which has become an anorak-offshoot of the entertainment industry (perhaps a replacement for stand-up joke-spinning). Contemporary poets worthy of the name - at least in English - are well-hidden or well-suppressed by the entertainment industry. (Poetry often flourishes under despotism and/or socio-intellectual flux, as both Khayyám and the Elizabethan poets illustrate.) Nearly two thousand years after the announcement of his death, Pan, though not yet dead, is whimpering in a cage, while philosophy has withered away as the Marxist state was supposed to.

Americans, their Presidents and their European flunkeys never tire of mentioning Freedom, but the freedom they really mean is not the freedom to stand up and be counted as Khayyám was able to do as a radical rationalist philosopher in an Islamic society which might have regarded him as a learned but dangerous heretic. It is not autonomy. It is dependence upon economic circumstance. The tragedy of the "Anglosphere" is that it has no philosophy. At its empty, anti-intellectual centre of no is only a belief in economics - of the rich exploiting the poor. The obscenely grotesque Soviet system collapsed partly because it was a lie - but the lie was founded in a socialist philosophy which Marx himself, Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin progressively corrupted. The idea of freedom of the individual was submerged in a hideous, totalitarian collectivity.

But what Americans mean by Liberty has similarly been corrupted. It is now merely the freedom for Americans to shop till they drop, and American corporations as proxies for them to overrun the planet, and for the American government to be an instrument of economic terror abroad - just as the English did more blatantly with their "Pax Britannica". The Americans and the British were early national subscribers to the idea of continuous war (religious-cultural, socio-mercantile or explosive), just as Marxist-Leninists-Trotskyists talked of continuous revolution. Europe-as-Christendom has waged an unholy war against the rest of the world since the end of the first millennium - when, to its surprise and relief, the world did not end.

This war (no war can be holy) reached its apogee with the anglo-saxon empires. Britain's was more malign in its perniciousness than any that went before. It and its values spanned the globe and turned a great deal of it into a distorted mirror of its cold psychopathology of hypocritical greed that is spiritual as well as venal. A rich, natural variety of cultures were hacked and dismembered by an idea-system based on property, the nation-state, work, mines, resources, money and money-economics, mean-mindednes, shopping, and democracy of the greedy (ruled or manipulated usually by the greediest) on top of the crude hypocrisies of the Imperial 'Christian' value-system initiated by Constantine. Its successor across the Atlantic has made a cult of individualism - which has all the personality of a hamburger or a polystyrene cup.

The extremely enlightened and noble George Washington and Thomas Jefferson could also be seen as hypocritical, liberal, white, liberty-obsessed slave-owners who considered that democracy was mob-rule by and through greed in the name of 'rights'. (They would have been as utterly horrified by the thought of universal suffrage as by the blasphemous "In God we Trust" motto on dollar bills.) They earnestly sought to keep party-political democracy out of the United States, but talked and wrote at length about Liberty - a word which might never have passed the lips of the khans and pashas of the Seljuq Sultan who ruled Qurasan (Khorasan, where Haji Bektash Veli came from) in Khayyám's day. The present-day United States is such a greedy and corrupt travesty of their original uplifting anti-colonial vision that recent American presidents (whose election campaigns cost more than all elections within the European Union added together) have much more in common with the English King George III than the cultivated, tree-loving George Washington.

The Bill of Rights declares the right (for Euro-Americans only - for Jefferson was the first to affirm that some people are more equal than others) to pursue happiness as if it were a hapless hare - or Amerindian. Americans confuse democracy with rights and with justice, just as eagerly as they contrast 'security' with 'freedom'. Many of us also confuse Freedom of Will and Freedom of Speech with the very different and ever-diminishing Freedom of Thought - thus demonstrating our lack of freedom of thought as well as our ignorance of the satisfaction of Thoreauesque subsistence living. Freedom of choice tends to exclude the freedom to refuse. Khayyám in 12th century Persia might have had greater freedom, not just of expression, but of philosophical discussion than (for example) people in the monoglot, monocultural, federal empire of the U.S.A. where most people believe what people in authority tell them (or else, on principle, the very opposite); where close on 90% of the population in a supposedly secular society believe in the Judæo-Pauline god, 45% believe in demonic possession, and close on 100% subscribe to the new sub-cult of success and fame (within the larger cult of sheer greed), in which quality is as nothing compared with quantity, and simplicity is run over at high speed by (to use Yeats' phrase) "mere complexity". And mere complexity (symbolised by the golden, mechanical Byzantine bird) ends, Yeats implied, in "complexity of mire and blood".

Other depressing statistics indicate that in a country where almost everyone watches television news broadcasts, over half the population believes in personal angels, that less than a quarter know which country is the United States' southern neighbour, and that over three-quarters cannot locate Afghanistan or Iraq >> on a map of the world.

Famously, Cavafy wrote about the stultified wealthy of the late Roman Empire enjoying the frisson of waiting for the wonderful, exotic Barbarians. Now, however (and perhaps even then, too), there are only slightly-different and equally-stultified civilisers, and distorted, faint folk-memories.

SOME QUATRAINS BY OMAR KHAYYÁM
translated by Anthony Weir

I was most assiduously taught -
Then myself contributed to thought.
Threescore years and twelve I pondered
only to conclude that I knew naught.

*

Evil prospers. The heart is pain.
Time rushes by. Try to be sane.
You are just a grain of dust, a spark
A little puff of wind, a drop of rain.

*

He who each day has vegetables and bread
And has a modest roof above his head
And is no-one's master, employee of none,
Has none to envy when he goes to bed.

*

Mighty God excels in all the arts
Yet every day He breaks unnumbered hearts.
Passionate young breasts and cheeks of rose
He casts in ditches and penetrates with darts.

*

The sea of consciousness has come from naught:
From it only red herrings have been caught.
Although philosophers have claimed to plumb its depths
From its depths scant wisdom has been brought.

Omar Khayyám - Life and mathematics Fifth Edition of Edward Fitz Gerald's version of THE RUB�IY�T OF OMAR KHAYY�M visit a related page: The Bektashi Order of Dervishes Four different editions of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám on another website   SEARCH THIS SITE USING the web beyond-the-pale.uk/   FEEDBACK TO THIS PAGE

 

AMERICAN INSIGHT by 'REDNECK' JOE BAGEANT >

"I am anti-American and damned proud of it - but of I can't say it!" H.R.H. the Prince Philip of Greece, Duke of Edinburgh (overheard

'As long as there is a Lower Class I am in it. As long as there is a Criminal Element I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison I am not free.' - Eugene Debs 1855-1926, four times a Socialist candidate for the presidency of the USA. At his peak in 1912 he attracted 6% of the voting populace: 900,000 votes. The last time he ran, in 1920, he did so from a prison cell and had himself been barred for life from voting.

---

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people
what they do not want to hear.

George Orwell

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Human beings are perhaps never more frightening
than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.

Laurens van der Post

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Winning is great - but it is not funny.

Charles Schultz

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During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

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The profoundest oppression is aspiration, the most destructive emotion ambition.

Swami Vrhka Baba

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States have don't have friends - they have only interests.

Talleyrand (quoted by de Gaulle)

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Conscience exists only to justify one's goals.

Mao Zhe-dong

 

Islamic societies have not been (up to now) victims of the Western fallacy of progress and drug of perfectibility or infinite possibility - thus they have, in a social (not a religious) sense, known when to stop. Thus they are quite different from Western societies with their adrenaline culture of continual expansion in all spheres - except the spiritual, in which they are continually contracting. "There is no limit to the greatness of America." George W. Bush's victory speech, 3rd November 2004 An Alternative History of the USA >> Just because he's paranoid doesn't mean he's entirely wrong BETTER THAN KAMINSKI...   "America wages perpetual war in the cause of perpetual peace." Gore Vidal "War is good for the American economy." George Bush (2008)

 

 

II. THE WAR-CULTURE OF THE WELL-OILED HYPOCRITES
mostly written at the beginning of the rape of Iraq (2003) - with a few subsequent comments and corrections.

 

Alike for those who for TO-DAY prepare,
And those that after some TO-MORROW stare,
A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries,
"Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There."
- Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, fifth edition, rubái 25

In one way, the world did not change all that much on the 11th September, 2001. The plight of the starving and the homeless and the tortured remains on the same downward path. The armaments and 'reconstruction' industries are gleeful. What has changed is the Americans' (and their allies') dangerous perception of their privileged and seemingly-invulnerable status. The vengeance subsequently wreaked upon the (relatively) innocent party, mujaheddin-hating Saddam Hussain, will destroy Iraq.

The world changed not in 2001, but in 1979/80 - when Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and Ronald Reagan was subsequently elected President of the United States. Thus began the world-wide dismantling of the democratic and egalitarian values so slowly and painfully constructed in the West, and the infantile if not downright wicked doctrine of 'Market Forces' as a substitute for good and honest governance. Millions suffered as a result. It took almost 20 years for those chickens to come home to roost.

The kamikaze destruction of a tiny piece of New York should have had the effect of halting or slowing the progressive self-infantilisation of the people of the United States and its closest allies, but infantilisation is fostered at the highest level and is evidenced by America's predilection for attacking small and impoverished countries: Grenada, Nicaragua, Guatemala - and, of course, Cuba and North Vietnam, where it also bit off more than it could chew - and Afghanistan (with cluster-bombs and peanut butter!). Since then the United States has become (numerically) the most hated military empire of all time, and not just in the Muslim and Arab world.

What really did change - specifically after President Bush's "with us or against us" speech and the iniquitous 'Patriot Act' - was that Muslims in non-Muslim societies became ghettoised and victimised, and, as a result turned to the mosques and the imams in desperation. This polarisation was al-Qaïda's triumph, and partners in fundamentalism, Christian and Muslim, entered into a struggle in which the chief victims are the tolerant, the liberal and the 'multi-cultural'.

A few people (among them John Kaminski) claim to produce astounding, mind-boggling evidence that the Pentagon and Twin-Tower attacks were a put-up job, that the towers could not have fallen as they did had they merely been hit by passenger jets (which they were built to withstand). This would make the events of the eleventh of September the most amazing and heinous government conspiracy of all time - with 'The American People' as the real target because they had to be duped into collusion with a criminal executive. Whatever the truth about the attack, the 'realpolitikal' truth is that American political, military and economic hegemony was hugely enhanced by the event - which was the necessary pretext for the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. (And, given the ingrained culture of secrecy and cover-up in the UK it would never be known how much British Prime Minister 'Phony Tony' Blair was implicated.)

America, with its cut-throat culture, did not "lose its innocence". Such a phrase is a sick joke. Civilisation itself is the opposite of innocence - and where there is obsessive consciousness of self, innocence, like humility, is spectacularly absent. The obscurantist confusion of innocence and ignorance is as obscene as the events of the eleventh of September - which might be seen as the hitherto greatest piece of epic theatre, or as an atrocity against a nation which (like most nations) is built upon atrocity and lies. (Some would say that the atrocity was committed by that nation's government against that nation and three thousand individuals.) As far as ignorance is concerned, people tend want to know everything except what they need to know, and governments are anxious to misinform them as much as they can get away with.

Be this a conspiracy theory or not, a country whose colonial past is almost as shameful as that of any European country never had any innocence. The foundation and development of the United States (as of every nation-state) are bedizened with myth. The decisive victory at Yorktown in the War of Independence (or Liberation) was made by the French fleet temporarily breaking the British blockade, not by Washington's troops. The trigger for the War of Independence was the imposition of Stamp Duty. The 'Boston Tea-Party' riots resulted from the monopolist British East India Company (in effect a nation-state without credentials or legal control) reducing the tax on tea, thus putting Massachusetts smugglers out of business, and threatening to spread its hideous monopolism in the Colony. The myths obscure the fact the basic unit of American democracy remains the empowering gun - whereas Ireland (for example, which parades its own republican lies such that the English Republic's 'Protector' Cromwell's slaughter' at Drogheda) fought desperately for independence, and on achieving it, disarmed its police force, and made it constitutionally illegal for it to go to war unless attacked, or to join any military pact or grouping (e.g. NATO).

In fact, the American War of Independence was the beginning of the Civil War, in which a large number of colonists, alongwith the majority of African slaves and indigenous Indians, supported the British - mainly because they feared the consequences that actually came about: rule by a hypocritical oligarchy, entrenchment of slavery and genocide of Native Americans. Thousands of colonists fled north to Nova Scotia, and east to Bermuda. French support for the rebels (in their continuing 900-year power-struggle with the English) bankrupted the state, leading directly to the Revolution which destroyed an absolute monarchy and changed the world.

The history of American slaughter, interference and puppet-government in the Philippines alone in the last hundred years makes terrible reading - and was a foretaste of the future for Iraq. For the Americans colonise without a Civil Service to do so, and with no concern for or interest in the people and the country they are colonising. In the Philippines a century ago there was a swift military victory, followed by an ever-collapsing 'peace'. The best that can be said about the US yo-yo colonisation there is that the Americans did not treat the Philippines worse than did the Spanish. Nor as badly as they did the Panamanians, who are still suffering under a nasty oligarchy which is supported by the USA.

When the Americans (having dumped Afghanistan in order to pursue vainglory in Iraq) set up their military government in Baghdad, they had just three Arabic-speakers in their ranks. Not for them the British eccentricities of cuneiform-readers and Arabists, for the Americans, with their heads stuck up the rectum of their own anomic technology, are uninterested in RoW (the Rest of the World). They regard 'democracy', like everything else, as product - spiritual Coca-Cola - and believe it can just be donated or transferred, rather than taking decades at the very least to establish by fits and starts as it is doing in Iran - an Islamic Republic whose mosques are empty. As the power behind the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation, they believe that 'democracy' can be imposed by force: by an an army of dehumanised zombies modelled on the Israeli military, without more than a parody of the Rule of Law. Is it any wonder that most people in the Middle East regard the the Second World War as a tragedy, no victory over Fascism but its triumph in various guises - a democracy of domination in Israël, a kingdom in the grip of religious fanatics in Sa'udi Arabia, and republics of repression everywhere else ?

The moral high ground is wreathed in fog. - Arthur Miller

Immediately after the 11th September 2001, 'The Land of the Free' (where I know from recent immigrants that it is very difficult to be a dissident) jailed several hundreds of 'suspects' - mostly illegal immigrants - without charge, without telling their families of their whereabouts. The same country, of course, showed no concern for the plight of the starving and bombed in Afghanistan, nor the thousands of refugees prevented from swelling the two million already in Pakistan. That country, with a horrific stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction, was much more absorbed in its own hysteria about the minuscule threat from anthrax.

The leader of the 'free' and pseudo-democratic world is, of course, doing next to nothing to help the poor and downtrodden anywhere in the world - not even in America. One third of the victims of the obscene 'Death Row' system are mentally handicapped. The world SuperPower is, almost as part of the job-description, doing the down-treading through what it whitewashes by the name of Globalisation: creating poverty by undermining co-operative agriculture and convivial societies everywhere - even the rich countries of Europe - and thus herding people into gruesome cities where they can be easily controlled - and subjected to state or other terrorism. Subsistence economies are anathema to secular-fundamentalist capitalism, which exists to make people dependent on goods which they never dreamed that they wanted. Capitalist globalisation abhors conviviality because its whole raison d'être is to selling alienating substitutes for conviviality: to create wants that quickly are perceived as needs which only goods and services only-acquirable by money or indentured labour can satisfy. Except that there is no satisfaction - only complaint, ennui, and continuing desire which turns into need.

Another -ism that hates conviviality (though in a different way) is Wah'habism, a fiercely arrogant and intolerant sect which in a mere two hundred years has, through ruthlessness, come to power throughout Arabia, and in fact controls Mecca and its other holy places, though there are many Shi'a muslims in Eastern Arabia. The hellfire-preaching Wah'habis are also at the forefront of Muslim evangelism: it is the Wah'habis who are converting tens of thousands in Africa and Asia. It is the Wah'habis who control 80% of the mosques in the United States. The Sa'udi Wah'habis have spent huge sums of money building grim mosques in Bosnia and Albania - and all over the world in hope of converting the lax locals into fanatics. It was the Wah'habis who swept into formerly tolerant and pluralist Afghanistan when America lost interest after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The Wah'habis received American money and eventually managed, as Taliban, to unite the Mujaheddin under their extreme puritan ægis. They then invited their unacknowledged secular leader, Osama (or Usama) bin (or ben) Laden, to Afghanistan - which, under cynical Western gaze, became a training ground for guerrillas and terrorists (perhaps better described as 'liminal warriors') dedicated to the overthrow of the more tolerant orthodoxies of Islam and to the fight against the obscenities of 'Christian' civilisation. (Remember the story about Mahatma Gandhi, who, when asked to comment on European Civilisation, said that he thought it would be an excellent idea.) Pakistan also sheltered the Mujaheddin, and subsequently the Taliban, as part of its strategy against India.

It was the Sa'ud family who empowered the Wah'habis - as a particularly virulent kind of secret police - to do their dirty control-work in the Arabian peninsula. At the same time the Sa'ud family set about destroying shrines and traditional places and customs throughout Arabia, replacing them with a modern pseudo-traditionalism which spawned bin-Laden amongst hundreds of thousands of truly heretical anti-Islamists. (Nowhere in the Quran is the veil, chador or burkha mentioned: the enforced wrapping of women in black robes was a borrowing from the Byzantine Empire !)More recently this dynasty (which makes every small reform in the teeth of Wah'habi disapproval) has set about destroying Mecca and Medina with high-rise buildings which dwarf the Ka'aba more and more every year. Truly, in its claim to be true protector of the Holy Places, Sa'udi Arabia is the most anti-Islamic place on earth !

But Wah'habi fundamentalism is not the only ingredient in militant islamism. The other, perhaps more important element is bin Laden's political teacher, Ayman al-Zawahari, founder of Islamic Jihad, slayer of Egyptian banker-loving president Anwar Sadat, who in turn was the pupil of Sayyid Qutb, a founder member of the Muslim Brotherhood who was hounded, imprisoned, tortured and finally executed by Gamal Abdel Nasser for his anti-materialist, anti-secular (and, it must be said, non-Islamic) philosophy. Qutb identified Jahili'ya - the state of wilful self-indulgence (very akin to the mediæval concept of Luxuria) - as the worm in the apple of Western 'liberal' pseudo-democracy, which is really only Majoritarianism.

Everyone in the world is confronted with the problem of how to cope with the effects of greed-driven turbo-capitalism and the low-level liberalism which feeds it. It is not just affronted Muslim societies who constantly have constantly-shifting and hypocritical 'Western Values' shoved up their noses, and into their eyes through television, but the people of Europe as well - people who, themselves, like the North Americans, are getting richer on the wealth bled out of Africa and South America. We are all invaded and threatened by greed-consumerism. The liberalism/libertarianism that it promotes is of the lowest kind, and deliberately designed to appeal to envy, lust and greed.

The problem with libertarianism as a philosophy is that it was devised by and for serious, frugal philosophical people. But once it becomes inextricably enmeshed in the culture, it simply becomes the virus or instrument of invasive capitalism which seeks to take over every aspect of our lives by infecting every aspect of our lives with envy, greed and unmitigated desire. It constantly, stridently diminishes and ridicules asceticism, the only philosophical brake to its 'progress'.

Qutb (who, significantly, sported a Hitler moustache) was scandalised by middle-class Coloradans having no philosophy beyond the neatness and greenness of their front lawns. Now, in the shadow of a vast mosque the Muslim inhabitants of Toledo, Ohio, devote their lives to their lawns and Wal-Mart. What would he think of oxymoronic (and, indeed, solipsistic) 'gay marriage' ? He would be apoplectic. (The whole point of homosexuality is that it is not child-producing. Marriage exists to 'legitimise' i.e. establish ownership of children.) But liberal thinking, as the Neo-Conservatives of the USA (who, confusingly, call themselves 'libertarians') rightly see, leads only to spineless decline. They wish to 'stop the rot' and, like right-wingers everywhere from scarcely-mentioned Opus Dei to the over-rated al-Qaïda, establish some kind of totalitarian, or Taliban morality. In the end there is not much to choose between Neo-Conservatism, Fascism and Islamic Jihad. The only 'third way' is the now-impossible model of Athens in the fifth century BC - despised and ridiculed by Greece's greatest moral philosopher, Diogenes of Sinope, who was both the ultimate libertarian and the ultimate ascetic.

Liberal or free thinking is an intelligent course only when tempered by temperate asceticism - otherwise it inevitably produces, through the capitalist economics of desire, the grotesque, obscene consumerism which I (and countless millions) see around me daily.

The United States repeatedly creates enormous problems for itself by its crude attempts to forestall (sometimes imaginary) problems, to second-guess history. Bin Laden, a Wah'habi already radicalised by Qutb and al-Zahawari, was was radicalised further by tactless American military and economic presence in Arabia, and by seeing whole populations marginalised and destroyed by American-led globalisation (the destruction of local economies by transnational companies). The US government also grotesquely inflates the bogeymen it identifies (and sometimes creates out of nothing) for its own manipulative purposes. If there is a single al-Qaïda network, can it possibly be as widespread, sophisticated and secret as the US would have us believe ? Of course not. It is largely a figment of diseased and cynical imaginations, as the Terrible Imminent and Immanent Threat of the USSR was in the nineteen-eighties. And it must be highly gratified that its importance has been so inflated and so enhanced by imprecise (for Security Reasons) innuendo that ordinary Americans think that there could be 'cells' in any or every American city, even near Walden Pond.

The United States was taken over by the 'Neo-Conservative' followers of Leo Strauss who want to establish American global domination, and have invented much 'secret intelligence' to further their end. This group, whose de facto leaders were Cheney and Rumsfeld, is just as anti-liberal, anti-secular as the groups who have emerged from the teachings of Sahyyid Qutb. A tiny group of extreme 'Islamists' dreams of a new 'Jihadist' world-order. America, infinitely more powerful and organised, went to extreme lengths to promote its vision of a New World Order - essentially controlled by huge transnational companies, policed by its own vast military-industrial-congressional complex, and supported by tame and dependent 'democracies'.

Ironically, one of the tiny handful of Arab/Muslim countries to have a peaceful democracy
according to the Western model, is a country unrecognised by any other:
Somaliland (formerly British Somaliland), which detached itself from a forced union with Somalia
when the latter started disintegrating due to lack of institutional infrastructure.

Capitalism has always been the enemy of free, rational thought (as opposed to unrestricted, irrational spending), and Shari'ac Islam has always been the enemy of social improvement, science, knowledge and freedom of action. There is, seen through the wrong end of a telescope, little for the serious person to choose between them.

The history of the Taliban is closely tied with Pakistan, whose leaders encouraged them financially and morally - only to find that Pakistan's economy was collapsing because of the extreme corruption, smuggling, car-theft, and tax-evasion which were the Taliban's modus operandi if not quite their raison d'être. Their core support came from the war-orphaned, desperate and merciless males of Southern Afghanistan who despised all government and, as soon was revealed, all culture. All the forests of Afghanistan were cut down and shipped out to the Gulf States to provide funds for a régime which spent no money on education or welfare, let alone the environment - only on arms gladly supplied by those Western powers whose economies seem to revolve around the 'military-industrial complex'.

Without the eager support of Pakistan, the Taliban would never have taken control of Afghanistan. In the wider world, Sa'udi Arabia was the only other country actually to fund the Taliban régime right up to the 6th of October - while Iran was the only country actually to challenge and denounce it. Ousama bin Laden was not quite the Sa'udi dissident that the US would have us believe: he was actually a private, quasi-secular agent of the Wah'habis, behaving in exactly the same way as British renegades did in the Middle East. Britain was very glad to export its brilliant paranoiacs all over the globe (Cecil Rhodes, T.E. Lawrence, Orde Wingate, Speke, Philby père et al., as well as its dispossessed) - so is Sa'udi Arabia. How can America and Britain wage a "war against terrorism" if they refuse to come clean about their licking of the Sa'udi fundamentalists' fundaments just so that their oil sources can be maintained ? Is it any wonder that most of the Arab world hate Britain and America for their hypocrisy ? (Hypocrisy is, of course, as Sufis were the first to point out, not at all rare in the Muslim world, either. It is the most salient feature of universalist and text-ridden religions.)

Americans (only 10% of whom have passports) conveniently forget that most people on the planet are not connected to sewerage systems - or even to septic tanks, the provision of which would do rather more to help the world than 'military advisers' and tooth-rotting, dehydrating Coca-Cola - and would, in the end, do America itself more good than the money spent on at least TWELVE huge and often competing 'Security Agencies' which have no co-ordinating mechanism or structure. In the 1990s there was no electricity in the whole of Afghanistan.

FOR THE WEST, 'MORALITY' IS JUST A WAR-CRY
- AND A PRODUCT

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the West looked the other way - gloating. The United States did not lift a finger to help the collapsed economies of Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus, where almost the only way for an ordinary person to make money has been to breed and sell children into international prostitution. It was the US and its perennial sidekick/arselick Britain of course who made sure that the Soviet Empire really collapsed like the baleful twin towers of the World Trade (i.e. World Exploitation ) Center, instead of undergoing gradual, democratic reform. The crisis-countries that the United States took a dramatic interest in - Bosnia, Kosova and Afghanistan - have been left to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. In Kosova the most thriving business was for a long time the sex-industry, servicing the men of the occupying NATO troops and UN personnel with women from Ukraine, Romania, Moldova etc. who were lured, tricked or kidnapped. In the same territory there were no fewer than 240 "Aid" Agencies from outside who seized office space and jacked up the rents and living-costs of the Kosovars. In equally-ravaged neighbouring Serbia there were just 4.

The US and Britain are, of course, not really interested in exporting 'democracy' - or morality. Their obsession with it, as with 'freedom', suggests that it is merely a shorthand for "doing things like we do". The only 'first world' democracy is the Confederation of Switzerland, a tiny federal country in which all important decisions are made by local and by national referenda - and the only European country not to have or have been part of an empire. The US and Britain are not alone in disliking popular governments, much preferring tame dictators, generals and juntas to rule the countries their business interests wish to exploit - dictators such as Suharto and Pinochet, a whole series in sad Central America, the Shah of Iran, and, more recently the President-for-Life of oil-rich Turkmenistan. The U.S. would dearly have liked some sort of army- or palace-coup in Iraq to replace Saddam Hussain with a more manipulable strong-man, rather than the trouble and expense of going to war. They had done this (with Britain's help) when they got rid of the elected socialist prime minister of Iran, Mossadeq, in 1953, as soon as he announced that he would nationalise British Petroleum, which had been calling the shots in Iran up to them.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 almost exactly mirrored the British invasion of Egypt in 1882 - which itself recalled aspects of the First Crusade. Britain's Liberal prime minister (Gladstone) then assured Parliament that the invasion would be a quick surgical operation to replace a corrupt régime (which, he claimed, threatened Britain's global trade) with one which would bring some measure of democracy. The British found themselves enmeshed for 70 years in local politics and 'Muslim Extremism', hopelessly unable to see how they were seen by Egyptians. Blind and deaf in their christian-imperialist cocoon, they could not understand why they were resented. Britain was not finally forced out of Egypt until 1954, after the stooge monarchy was overthrown by a quasi-socialist and wholly-authoritarian army coup. It is to this day a corrupt and nasty dictatorship.

So, from as far back as the 1880s, the hypocritical sub-sub-Pauline morality of the West has shifted from serving the interests of production and reproduction to being itself a product ripe for forcible export all over the globe.

Added to the long list of outrages and shocking crimes against humanity and nature (including the invention of the concentration-camp) that Britain has perpetrated against the world since the 16th century is the shameful story of the Chagos islands in the Indian Ocean, seized from the Portuguese two hundred years ago and still a British Colony. In 1971 it rounded up the inhabitants and simply dumped them on a dockside on Mauritius, a thousand miles away, where a few still survive in shacks and talk of home. One of the Chagos Islands - Diego Garcia - is a very important American base, bristling with surveillance equipment and weapons.

Western countries wishing or seeking to impose any of their several flawed versions of representative democracy of greed on countries (created or carved through colonial-economic expediency) conveniently forget that it took the countries of Europe a very long time indeed and very hesitatingly to develop their various systems. Britain and America with an appalling history of crimes against humanity (not just non-white humanity, either) display a sickening arrogance in their proclaimed superiority to Mesopotamian Muslim peoples whose history is nowhere near as hate-filled, bloody and vindictive as ours - and even whose slavery was usually more benign. Slaves could become Vizirs (Prime Ministers) in Haroun al-Rashid's Baghdad hundreds of years ago, and in the more-recent Ottoman Empire. It will be a long time before a non-white becomes Prime Minister of Britain or President of France. Women in France did not get the vote until 1945, and until the 1970s married women there could not open a bank account.

Meanwhile, we in the rich, 'democratic' world make the poor 'Third World' ever poorer by swamping them with our subsidised food (thus destroying their agriculture) and 'encouraging' them to have 'defence forces' which of course are keen to buy sophisticated and expensive hardware from the rich countries. In Senegal, onions for the National Dish come from the Netherlands, tomatoes from Spain - and rice from Thailand. Thus globalisation is cynical Third World impoverishment.

"The Free [or First] World" is also a world of cultures based on alcohol. It is always at war with cultures based on the prohibition of alcohol, and always overpowered cultures which had less aggressive and destructive drugs. "The Free World" has globally criminalised other mind-altering substances. The French and the English between them invented Nationality, one of the most poisonous and lethal concepts of the European mind.

Just as most child-abuse occurs within families, so most terrorism is carried out by nation-states against people within their borders. Often those states were ruled by unbelievably nasty dictators who were puppets of Soviet patronage (e.g. Korea) or of global and militarist capitalism (e.g. the creation of a completely insane police state in South Africa) by Hendrik Verwoerd, but Pol Pot's more-than-Stalinist r�gime in Cambodia flourished for a while under the indifference of both the USSR and the West, while Verwoerd's imitator in Zimbabwe has, with only mild criticism from outside, turned one of the richest countries in Africa (even under the previous totalitarian régime) into one of the most stricken. He owes his special hatred of Britain to the Irish Catholic Orders who were allowed to set up schools throughout the British Empire and to preach hate against the Imperialists.

In pursuit of its policy to support the often terrorisingly-Zionist State of Israël at all costs, the United States destabilised Lebanon - thus leading directly to a horrible civil war there. (I remember a Lebanese shaking his head at me in Bangui (Central African Republic) in 1973 and telling me how stupid the Irish were in Ulster.)

The whole world has forgotten that the US arranged the assassinations of both Patrice Lumumba and the Secretary-General of the UN (Dag Hammarskjöld, who was considered 'pro-Soviet') way back in 1961 to prevent Russian penetration of the Congo, having already fomented civil war there by helping the mineral-rich province of Katanga secede. They then encouraged Mobutu and the resulting pillage of the country to the tune of over one million human deaths.

For nine years, every day, America bombed The Plain of Jars in Laos - and it hadn't bothered with the nicety of declaring war on that country. Is this not terrorism ? Cambodia lost nearly half its population as a result of the Vietnam war, and over a quarter of the population of Vietnam was killed by the American military and their stooges in Saigon. Nor must it be forgotten that America's own vicious Civil War (or War of Secession) claimed one million dead. The United States, like all empires, was born and raised in violence, genocide and militarism - having severed its roots in pacific puritanism. It has sown many a whirlwind, and has so far reaped only a comparatively gentle gale. Islam, too, emerged like a whirlwind out of Arabia and completely changed the world. Ironically, enantiodromically, the word means Way of Peace.

The 'Christian' Puritans were very conscious of the sin of vainglory (vanitas), but modern America seems from the outside to be nothing but vainglory - and worse, a vainglorious militarist machine which, for example, has funded the persecution of the Kurds in Turkey, and supplies arms (land-mines, grenades, rocket-launchers etc.) to anyone who will serve its temporary interests: Saddam Hussain in the 1980s, the Taliban in the 1990s, and both Israël and Turkey continuously since 1948. Now it is pouring money into the pockets of the corrupt and repressive rulers of Tadjikistan and Uzbekistan - while refusing to condescend to enter into bilateral talks with the country that poses the most serious danger to its neighbours and to the US: North Korea. George W. Bush's government has rightly been accused by veteran Washington commentators as having attitudes but no policies.

There are more American than Iraqi members of al-Qaïda.

Mr bin Laden's men only destroyed 1� big buildings and the lives of a few thousand: pretty small beer compared with the destruction, misery and death wrought by the most insignificant of the fascist puppet-dicators which the U.S. installed in places such as Haïti, Paraguay, Panama, El Salvador and Chile - and Honduras, where even in 2003 the police and middle-class vigilantes in this valued and loyal supporter of 'democracy' and human rights actually hunt, mutilate and kill street-children and other 'vermin'. (One can reasonably judge a country also by its friends. The same mass-murder of children occurs in other parts of America's back-yard, Guatemala being just the most blatant example.) Having succeeded in the genocide of their own aboriginal population, the United States (which sometimes seems no more than Hollywood with H-bombs) has funded (or provided the military hardware for) systematic genocide in Guatemala (of course), Paraguay, Honduras, Colombia and Costa Rica.

In the United States shoot is a euphemism for shit.

Bin Laden's evil-doing is insignificant compared with the huge axis of evil formed by trans-national corporations, the Industrial-Military complexes of the US, Britain and France, and the oil kingdoms of Arabia. Of these, by far the most corrupt is Sa'udi Arabia, a country whose cynical view on life (not to mention Islam) is the model for every corrupt, American-backed régime on the planet. This country alone, if reformed from within, could change the world. At the very least, it could have opened its frontiers to Palestinian refugees - but it prefers them to be in the hideous, hopeless camps which the Israeli Jews have condemned them to for three generations. The Sa'udi rulers are the slaves of greed, privilege and misogyny, and, because of their oil, the West is their eager minion. In fact Roosevelt personally guaranteed the security of the Sa'udi royal family for as long as Sa'udi Arabia would remain a kind of central bank for oil reserves. Thus the principal Axis of Evil runs between Riyadh and Washington, with London, Paris, Tokyo, Jerusalem, Ankara, Beijing, and a score of other capitals forming parallel axes.

In the 1950s the United States quickly overthrew the first Latin American government to be elected by more or less universal suffrage - in Guatemala - installing a minion of United Fruit and backing him with military force. It fomented civil war in the Belgian Congo in the early sixties, from which Congo-Za�re has never recovered. (Over a million people died there in the first two years of the 'New Millennium', and no cries of "Outrage" from anyone. In fact, British taxpayers, through financial aid to the Ugandan government, indirectly but substantially funded a juggernaut of Ugandan atrocities against civilians, just as they directly financed the massacres, subjugations and wars of attrition against people and groups who were Obstacles to the Empire and financial exploitation.) If it be claimed that the government acted without the consent of the people, as governments by definition frequently do, it should be remembered that most of the funding for the IRA's low-grade but unpleasant activities in Britain and Northern Ireland came from non-official sources in the United States - from some of the very people who began, suddenly, to clamour for revenge against terrorism. (Alongwith the million and more who died in the Congo in the first years of the millennium were thousands of elephants, shot with AK-47s to get ivory to sell for arms from Britain, France, Germany or the U.S.A.)

The United States does not of course confine its attentions to impoverished nations like Honduras, Haiti and Afghanistan. It was also involved (indirectly, of course) in the assassination - outside a Stockholm cinema - of the "leftist", pacifist Prime Minister of Sweden in 1988. It has military presence or liaison in one hundred of the 180 member-states of the UN. Since its own Civil War, the United States' has been in a state of almost continual war: its "war on drugs" started in 1905, then its war on alcohol ('Prohibition') in 1919. Presenting a continual 'threat' from outside (and indeed from a Fifth Column inside) to the greed-based 'American way of life' since 1945, the US government found itself utterly without raison d'être after the fall of the Soviet Union - but soon put itself on a war footing again. It is now terrorising the whole world with its "war against terror".

United States forces invaded the tiny island of Grenada because the US government didn't like the democratically-elected Prime Minister there. In Panama it actually owned not just the Canal Zone but the whole country as well, and installed and uninstalled dictators there according to its whim. It kept in power such enlightened advocates of democracy as Duvalier in Ha�ti and Stroessner in Paraguay. It brought down a genuinely democratic and experimental government in Nicaragua, backed Pinochet to the hilt in Chile, supported Indonesia in its rape of East Timor - and still occupies the Japanese island of Okinawa. Iran - the only country in modern times to attempt a home-grown and pragmatic, experimental 'democracy' - has been accused of being part of an Axis of Evil.

The United States made only token protest against the Military Junta known as "The Colonels" in Greece (a member of NATO), and, before that, was happy enough with Franco and Salazar forming an Iberian 'bulwark' against communism. Like Britain, it has been happy to see friendly-military rather than unpredictable and demagogic 'democratic' rule in Pakistan. Military governments buy more weapons of individual and mass destruction, thus keeping the manufacturing countries (with their export credit guarantees) happy.

One Moment in Annihilation's Waste,
One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste -
The Stars are setting, and the Caravan
Draws to the Dawn of Nothing - Oh make haste!
- Edward FitzGerald/Omar Khayyám

More recently, the United States tried to oust the left-of-centre President of Venezuela by financing and organising the usual 'democratic' military coup to ensure that the country continued to be run in the interests, not of its people, but of American and trans-national corporations. The coup failed, and an embarrassed Washington pretended ignorance and assumed a false distance.

By its outrageous and extravagant support of the Shah of Iran (an impetuous rather than a bad ruler) and his secularist, westernising, Atatürk-inspired influence, it provoked the (non-Wah'habite) fundamentalist-Shi'ite reaction in Iran which has oppressed that country since 1980. By attempting to get the reformist King of Afghanistan into its orbit it provoked the appalling Russian invasion and occupation, then supplied weapons to any Mujaheddin who asked for them, including the Wah'habite Taliban (or Taleban). In supporting Sa'udi Arabia's Wah'habite dynasty for its own petroleum gain, America's government may secretly realise that if you sup with the devil you need an infinitely long spoon.

The British, who ran the most hypocritical Empire of Greed ever, are no better. The London government of the 1990s had constructed its own insane realpolitik which required friendship with Russia, the friend of Serbia. By blocking all (including American) support for the Bosnian government it ensured that thousands of Bosnian Muslims were massacred by the well-armed Serbs, and that the completely-avoidable, Serb-initiated Bosnian war would drag on for four years - with the British ensuring the helplessness of the Bosnians through British forces on the ground. British forces are sent all over the world either to further the perceived interest of the United Kingdom (gunboat diplomacy in the 21st century) or to fight causes known to be lost (such as Afghanistan).

Fundamentalism ("extreme normalisation") assumes many names. It usually rides on the back of nationalism, xenophobia or genuine grievance. Islamic fundamentalism is a very recent phenomenon. The Imam Wah'habi lived in the 18th century and used his fascist ideology as a sectarian and nationalist weapon against the tolerant, polyethnic Ottoman Empire. Fundamentalism has more recently become a retrenching defence against the onslaughts of fundamentalist socialism, fundamentalist Judaism, and fundamentalist capitalism - itself inspired by fundamentalist Protestantism. There is now a fundamentalist Hinduism, and, since the Anglo-Norman-Papal genocide of Cathars in the 13th century through 'The Albigensian Crusade' there has been continuous fundamentalist Catholicism. Woman-hating (i.e. -fearing) Wah'habi fundamentalism has resulted in the misery and deaths of far more Muslims than non-Muslims. It must, however, be stated that Islam was a seventh-century revolutionary reaction against indigenous matriarchy in Arabia, and is thus even more ineluctably man-centred than 'Christian' Paulinism. Only the few tolerant 'sects' such as Sufi mystics and the Bektashis are prepared to consider women as equals.

The Occupying Power in North America supported Israël's seizure of most of the fertile land in the desert kingdom of Jordan which it regards as an unfortunate geopolitical anomaly. This desperately-poor country now has more Palestinian refugees within its borders than natives - and even its water has been stolen by Israël. On the other hand, in the Gaza Strip and the Occupied Territories of Palestine, hundreds of gay men have been tortured by the Palestinian Authority. Unknown numbers of gay men have been murdered by Hamas. Their families have been victimised, too. The only refuge for Palestinian gay men is Israël, where they must live illegally and often economically exploited - and risk being picked up and literally dumped on a Palestinian road. The same is true for the smaller number of gay women. Even worse, gay men and women are the targets of blackmail by both Palestinian and Israeli agencies who want to recruit them for espionage. Thus gay Palestinians are likely to be executed summarily as spies.

Throughout history, the temples of the defeated were sacked and torched by the victors as a matter of course.
Composed in celebration of the pillage and conflagration of Troy,
hundreds of generations of readers and listeners were enthralled by the Iliad.
But suddenly, it is an "atrocity" to sack the ugly twin-towered Temple of New York.
Thousands of innocent victims were killed, to be sure.
But they were not raped beforehand, as in most of the celebrated tales of heroes,
nor did their surviving relatives and children, as in Nagasaki.
A whole race was not wiped out, as the English wiped Tasmanians, whom they hunted
for yet another of their vile 'sports'.
The English have not apologised for one single war-crime out of hundreds in their imperial history.
But the 'fanatic' pilots, who did no worse than the British 'dam-busters' of WW2,
are reviled as the worst criminals the world has known!

The suicide pilots were not, however, Palestinian freedom-fighters or supporters of any kind of liberty, tolerance or justice. Like fundamentalist capitalists, Wah'habis have no interest in justice, only in pursuance of a goal. (Justice too, however, is vainglory.) Nor were they, it seems, Wah'habis, for they indulged in wine, women and song when they were training in the United States. Might they have had no connection whatever with Mr bin Laden's reviled 'network' ? Might they have done better to bomb Sa'udi Arabia's oil port of Jeddah ? For, although everyone thinks that the US is the force to be reckoned with, the bully on the block - it is the Sa'ud family which controls the US to a considerable and humiliating extent.

As Western Europe and the anglophone countries get wealthier they put more and more of their increasingly-old people into institutions. As Western Europe and the anglophone countries get richer and ever more triumphalist, Islamic countries, along with the rest of the world, get poorer. Roman Christianity, from the start anti-Jewish, has conducted holy war against Islam since the year 1000 of the Christian calendar. The horribly amoral Crusades were excuses for pogrom and pillage, and the expulsion of the Moors with the 'Sephardic' Jews from Spain was a nasty and shabby affair.

It must be pointed out, however, that the Northern Protestant nations, especially England, favoured and found favour with the Ottoman Empire on account of the shared dislike of what they considered the idolatry of Catholic and Orthodox Christianities. England had almost a love-affair with Arabs and Muslims, and greatly favoured the Muslims of India over the 'idolatrous' Hindus, just as they favoured (the new jargon word is privileged) the Muslims of Nigeria over the 'primitive' Animists.

Most Islamic countries were colonised and/or dismembered and/or created at 'Christian' Europeans' whim. It is hardly surprising that Islam today is not the religion of enlightenment that it was in Moorish Spain, but a religion of desperation - the religion of the poor and dispossessed. Islam is desperately trying not to fall into the moral vacuum of overweening competitiveness that it perceives around it. The container of that moral vacuum is 'The American Dream' and 'The American Way of Life' - which is a nightmare of debt, the lies of advertising, social and economic failure - and divorce - for millions of Americans who are much poorer and worse-considered than the average slave in the Ottoman Empire. These American Dreamers judge traditional societies which have pride in self-sufficiency as 'impoverished' - when it is the Dreamers who are truly impoverished by their dependence on products and their sad, brainwashed belief that products and the means to buy them are the only Measure of Mankind.

Of course, the original 'American Dream' was a quasi-spiritual vision of wholesome self-sufficiency and respect for Nature and other peoples, in which money was a necessary evil and luxury was frivolous. This dream was supplanted by the crude and degenerate desire for conspicuous and unending luxury which was brought into the United States, from 1870 to the present day, by the abject immigrants from Europe and now from all over the world. What both dreams have in common is the anti-communal and competitive work-ethos. The competitiveness that now drives America is a pubertal phase that should be left behind at the age of 16. The world is run by emotionally-undeveloped men locked in a pubertal stage, obsessed with asserting themselves, with competition, power, panoply, ostentation and sex.

The new American Dream has brought The Media State, in uneasy alliance with the 'military-industrial complex', and unassailably founded on sensation and false sentiment. Yet in America also live many clear and admirable voices of Reason such as Jared Diamond and Daniel Dennett. But when the Media State fully merges with what Gore Vidal calls 'the National Security State' we may start to long for the porosity and permeability of the Police State. Already there are cries in the US for the introduction of torture of suspected terrorists! So much for the 'free society' born out of a slave economy which was abolished only some 10 years after the serfs were 'liberated' in Russia.

Moral vacuum is, of course, no recent phenomenon. It is just more powerful than ever, like a Black Hole in outer space increasing through its own greed. The tendency towards vacuum (and indeed vacuity!) is part of our genetic make-up and the reason why we invent bizarre notions such as 'soul' and 'God' in the first place. If there were a perfect god, there would be no Creation, since perfection is beyond mere and crass creation. There cannot be a perfect god who, out of vainglory, made us in his/her own image, only an imperfect one, a lonely devil in the galaxy.

One fifth of the population of the Caucasian republic of Georgia and one quarter of the populations of Albania and Armenia have left their countries following the arrival of "democracy". The American "democratic ideal" seems to be to install puppet or ungoverningly weak r�gimes everywhere possible so that the United States can cream off the talent which makes it ever-richer, and so that American business interests can exploit the whole planet in the ever-more-vain "pursuit of happiness" that was so hedonistically enshrined in the US Declaration of Independence. Modern democracies depends on ignorant, ill-educated populations - whereas those of ancient Greece were formed by people with a good grasp of logic, a subject conspicuously absent from modern mass-education curricula.

In fact, since 1944, the USA has been responsible for more grisly deaths outside its borders - by Atom Bomb, napalm and 'conventional weapons' - than the USSR and China outside theirs. It has waged proxy wars and committed proxy war crimes, usually in Africa - to say nothing of the innumerable environmental crimes against the planet perpetrated by the richest and greediest countries in the world in pursuit of yet more riches. Of course the United States (together with North Korea one of the most backward-looking nations of the earth) is only behaving as Britain did 120 years ago. Britain's war-crimes were committed with impunity, for there were no conventions on human rights, on prisoners of war, on the rights of the child and boy-soldiers, and so on. Nor was there television for every little violation to be flashed around ther world and pounced on by those 'liberal' hypocrites who hate America.

We who have computers are all complicit. In a real sense, no computer-owner can ever be an "innocent victim" of "terrorism" - maybe even no supermarket shopper or television-watcher. In any case, "innocence" with respect to human beings is as meretricious a word as "righteousness".

When people live in a style unimaginable to the most luxuriating and decadent of Roman Emperors (from Tiberius to Heliogabalus), I should expect some of them to die in a style unimaginable even to the inveterate watchers of Games and Circuses who despoiled the whole of the known world of its fauna.

But not unimaginable to Hollywood, some of whose catastrophe films are much more horrific than the attack on the Towers of Babel that was and will doubtless again be the World Trade/Exploitation Center. The United States finally starts to live in one of its horrible movies: death imitating 'art'. Within a week of the real catastrophe Hollywood producers were surely planning the spin-off movies.

It is a sickly piety to call the mini-holocaust of the World Exploitation Center 'unthinkable' or 'unimaginable'. Most little boys have crashed toy aeroplanes into towers of blocks, just as most little boys, given toy guns to play with, "play at" shooting people. And in geopolitics we are talking little boys !

Ten percent of our taxes are spent on the military. One thousandth of the cost of America's and Britain's war-machines would eradicate malaria, leprosy and trachoma from the entire planet (half of whose population lives on a dollar a day or even less), but neither of these countries - nor any Colonial War-Crime nation such as France, Spain, Portugal, Italy or Germany, is doing anything to alleviate the horrible suffering due to these and other endemic diseases. Russia cannot now even feed or care for its own population: most of its capital is now outside the country, used by gangsters, while inside its borders it is bleeding itself dry in a ghastly war against the Chechens which neither can win - any more than it could win in Afghanistan which was its nemesis. (When Russians say "terrorists" they usually mean Chechens.) We should remember that over two million Afghans fled as refugees to neighbouring countries Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan and Uzbekistan - and even into China which has a short strip of border with Afghanistan. Tadjikistan has just one truck and a handful of soldiers to patrol a long border through which a great deal of the world's heroin passes from Afghanistan. One wonders how serious is any 'war on drugs'.

While it is no surprise to learn that US spending on 'defense' is more than the entire military budgets of the rest of the world put together, it is a little surprising to learn that half of America's anthropologists are employed by the military. Indeed American anthropology arose from the desire to prove 'scientifically' that the white, 'Christian' races are inherently 'superior' to all others. And, of course, the notion of discrete, hermetic tribes and ethnicity was developed by these early anthropologists, to the terrible detriment of Africa - the whole continent of which receives in American aid just one third of the subsidy that the US hands out to its cotton farmers in violation of its own doctrine of 'free trade' - which means trade free only for the United States.

I shall not dwell upon the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though the US could have defeated Japan otherwise, despite the post facto propaganda that had the bombs not been dropped, Japan would have been defeated only by a long war of attrition which could have lasted until 1950. Nor am I dwelling on the genocide of Native Americans, nor the US exploitation of the Anglo-Portuguese slave trade which destroyed Africa. America has established a hegemony which is an Empire like that of the British who destroyed the economy of India by forcing it to buy the inferior goods made in England's "dark, Satanic mills". It is not so ruthless as the British or Soviet Empires, nor so openly avaricious as the Empire of the French Republic, but it is more hypocritical - and powerful - than any heretofore.

Graffito in Athens, photographed 2007

All empires and hegemonies are hated for their arrogance - including that of ancient Athens. The American hegemony is hated not because it is American, but because of its unprecedented power - and power, as we know, corrupts...its victims, too. A single Super-Power is a lonely, fearsome phenomenon. (If China were the sole superpower, things would be much worse.) Americans see other countries in terms of crass stereotypes, but do not realise that many think of the USA only in terms of Wild West genocide movies, McDonald's, global military domination, Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. They do not realise, either, that some slaves in the Ottoman Empire enjoyed greater privileges and better lives than any 'nigger' or 'native-American'ever has in the United States.

Nevertheless, the Muslim world has yet to face up to the continuous pillage and destruction of African societies by its greed for slaves-as-luxury-items since the time of the Prophet - a trade that still goes on in (surprise, surprise!) Sa'udi Arabia, the darling of the freedom-loving United States. Slaves (including Muslim slaves) were treated horribly even in Moorish Spain, and, although castration is forbidden in the Koran (Qur'an), slaves were handed over to non-Muslims to be castrated: Prague and Verdun were European castration-centres.

Just as there was rejoicing in Britain at the annihilation of Dresden and Hamburg in World War II, and just as Americans applauded the shooting down of an Iranian passenger airliner which killed all on board, so there were many who rejoiced at the United States 'getting a taste of its own medicine' on September 11th, 2001. For them a new Tower of Babel had been toppled.

And the result was the calling of a Crusade. The Fourth Crusade got no farther than Constantinople, which it wrecked in sectarian rape and pillage - and carried off the famous "lions of St Mark". America's Afghan adventure, however, might have been less to do with bogeyman-'terrorism' than with oil. In which case, the attack upon the twin Towers of Babel came most conveniently to the Pentagon.

On the 15th of September 2001 the Republic of Ireland - not a member of NATO - observed a National Day of Mourning for the victims of those suicide pilots who genuinely and quite rationally (if inadvisedly) aimed at what they considered to be the Heart of Darkness. The rest of Europe had an appropriate three minutes' silence. I do not remember any Irish National Day of Mourning for the millions of victims in Rwanda, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Southern Sudan. Nor for the dead of horrendous battles such as the Somme and Passchendaele. Nor even (100 years on) for the four million of us who died or emigrated during its famous Famine.

Freedom of Speech in the West: It is illegal in the USA to publish
criticism of the appalling, environmentally-catastrophic methods of
agricultural production and criminal contempt for animals.

The dramatic holocaust of the overweening World Exploitation Center may be compared with that of the average American slaughterhouse - whence there is no hope of escape for animals which have spent their lives in conditions worse than Auschwitz.

I am a pacifist transcendental-nihilist, a puny witness for the Angel of Calamity. I hate the deliberately exclusive concept of nationality, and the divisiveness of religions. I believe all armies are evil. But I have often indulged myself in a fantasy: of setting myself alight outside an American or Chinese embassy. The nearest I ever got was to tear up my British passport way back in the seventies and post it to the Foreign Office in protest against Britain's support of Apartheid.

It was a pity the suicide pilots hadn't just concentrated on the Pentagon (and timed their attack for the much more sensitive date of November 11), because the suicides of those incontrovertible heroes (though perhaps not as heroic as the New York firefighters!) play straight into the American myth of "victimisation" and the hands of the militarists of "the free world" - free, that is, to exploit everyone and everything in the most hypocritical way; free to make the rich ever-richer and the poor and impoverished ever more desperate: we in "the free world" enjoy freedom without responsibility, and the "Leader of the Free World" likes nothing better than to declare war on the poor - but never on poverty.

Perhaps the most irresponsible freedom in the alcohol- and desire-based "Free World" is that enjoyed for the moment by the Internet - available, of course, only to the richest and least "innocent" people of the planet. Most of the rest do not have running water, much less electricity.

THEMEATRIX

But at least in increasingly-resentful, American-occupied Afghanistan, however miserable the dogs, there is not - yet - a single concentration-camp for pigs that 'puts all Heaven in a rage' - which is unlikely to be the case in Iraq. However, the impressive mass-gathering to determine Afghanistan's political future (including popularly-acclaimed women) in June 2002 - such as has never been seen in the United States since the days of its founding- turned out to be a sham, an elaborate and beautiful piece of window-dressing. Since the removal of the Taliban, very little non-military investment from outside has been made in Afghanistan, because the country has been carved up by war-lords still financed by the U.S. Ministries and provinces are their fiefdoms, and there is no popular participation outside the office of the admirable Prime Minister. The one good thing achieved by the Taliban - the suppression of the war-lords - was enthusiastically reversed by the U.S., and the country returned to the conditions of the early nineteen-nineties when it was carved up by greedy local pashas into tyrannical fiefdoms - with the added extra of 'International Aid Agencies' living like lords, driving around in 4 x 4 vehicles, dispensing funds which they know are seized by the war-lords.

Two years after the Loya Djerga, the Afghan minister of Justice admitted to the BBC that there was no rule of law in his country, where children are kidnapped for ransom, peasants' land is simply grabbed, and which supplies three-quarters of the world's demand for heroin. Since then, the situation has deteriorated further, the commitment to Afghanistan by the US and the EU becoming ever more token - and the silly attempt at eradicating the opium-poppy crop merely driving farmers into the arms of the resurgent Taliban.

Despite billions of dollars being promised by the rich powers, any small improvements in the terrible conditions of that country have been made by the efforts and funds of returning refugees. Afghanistan is now also a huge, threatening American military base - one amongst hundreds across the globe. (One has the distinct impression that the United States' military-industrial complex would like to make the whole world its military base and market.) The money from abroad has gone straight into the warlords' coffers. The "Aid Agencies" occupy most of the habitable buildings in Kabul and are not building their own accommodation or even cheap, good, low-rent housing for the indigent indigenous. The "Aid Agencies" are an international racket manipulated by the corrupt and the rich, and should be a reproach to those who contribute to them.

The "American Effect" is not new - but is what always happens when America intervenes in another country. The most dramatic example occurred in 1944 when the United States re-introduced to Italy the Mafia which Mussolini had almost entirely smashed.

But what happens when America does not intervene in a 'failed state' ? Read here.

We shall see what the special results are in Iraq, where America (abetted by its British lapdog) has added melt-down to Saddam Hussain's mayhem - not because Saddam posed any significant threat to either country, but to justify and enrich the oligarchy who not only have huge interests in the oil industry (the Bush family, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney) but stand to gain and bestow yet more riches from 'reconstruction' of what they destroyed through war and sanctions - as well as from the military-industrial complex. The staggering hypocrisy of the United States makes Stalin, Mao and Saddam seem like rather honest leaders.

From its beginnings the US was driven by radical Renaissance forms of Christianity (the desire for salvation) and the Enlightenment-inspired desire for 'liberty' (freedom to expand exponentially in all directions); a significant influence in both the Northern and the Southern states was Ulster Protestantism. Christianity/Paulinism makes liars and hypocrites of all its followers, for all the Monotheisms are, to a greater or lesser extent, hypocrisy-machines - and Christianity has, since the First Crusade and in successive forms, been simply a world-wide instrument of terror and rapine such as Osama bin Laden could not even dream of becoming.

The constant military harassment of Iraq and its people made Saddam more powerful and ruthless; later bombing and occupation - just at the point when its infrastructure was about to collapse - made Iraqis more impoverished and humiliated and turned the country into a new version of America's Wild West with everyone - even mild academics - toting guns in a country strewn with unexploded ordnance (including cluster-bombs, not to mention unknown but certainly large amounts of Depleted Uranium dust and shrapnel: a weapon of mass murder if ever there was one) from the 'liberators' - as well as Saddam's land-mines.

By the end of 2004 over 100,000 Iraqis - mostly women and children - had been killed as a result of their Anglo-American 'liberation'. At that point it did not seem so unlikely or grotesque that Saddam should be re-instated simply to stop Iraq turning into another Vietnam. But then they hanged him.

However, a few American troops did the right thing. So appalled have 7% of them been that they committed suicide.

At the end of the Iraq (or Second Gulf) War, and before 'liberation' turned to permanent occupation, Iraqis themselves - by destroying certain dams and blocking recent canals which it took slave labour to dig out - started on their own initiative to reverse the greatest of all Saddam's crimes: the poisoning and draining of the vast marshes of the Tigris-Euphrates delta. After the poisoning and draining of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan (then in the USSR) by Brezhnev and his fellow-criminals, this was the second-greatest ecological disaster of modern times. Saddam visited this genocide upon the Marsh Arabs whose millennial way of life Saddam resented and sought to destroy - which he did with impunity in the 1990s. Nobody cared - except of course the Marsh Arabs and a few environmentalists. As a result the climate has become hotter, the unfiltered and polluted waters of the Tigris and Euphrates are killing the fish in the Arabian [or Persian] Gulf, and unbelievable, incalculable numbers of living creatures perished - for this was the only wetland in the Middle East. Many species were on the verge of extinction when Saddam fled. Those not extinct are starting to return with the water - as are the remnants of the Marsh Arabs - who have already started to rebuild their boats. But meanwhile, huge dams recently built upstream in Syria and Turkey ensure that, with the great reduction of water arriving in the delta, only part of the Marshes will revive.

There is an underlying assumption that democracies of the greedy are self-improving, whereas it is obvious that the opposite is the case: television makes sure that the population at large becomes ever more inane and shallow, while its producers and executives ensure that no real debate ever occurs in public. The media concentrate on trivialities lest anyone ever question the despicable values of the society they both prop up and continually corrupt.

As for "rogue states" possessing and using Weapons of Mass Destruction - the only state to have used them is the USA. Russia has not needed them to pursue its genocidal policies in Chechnya. And what is Israël if not a rogue state, founded by 'terrorists' ? (The Romans certainly regarded Judæa as a rogue province, which was why they eventually destroyed Herod's Temple.) Founded by 'terrorists', sustained by terror abetted by the USA, Britain and France, it now occupies over a quarter of the territory of Jordan where it constantly harasses the subject people, and builds fortified settlements to pacify the country rather as the English did, first in Wales, then Ireland, and eventually all over the globe.

Britain itself allowed its territory to be occupied, without any formal treaty, by US forces so that it could win the unnecessary and capitalist Second World War (which was actually the Third World War since the first was waged all over the globe at the beginning of the 19th century by Britain against Napoleon).

It is hideously ironic that the British, having no control over the deployment and positioning of US Nuclear Arms on its territory, had Cruise missiles stored and at the ready at Greenham Common, upwind from nearby London. Thus over TEN MILLION people were put BY THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT (and that of its Powerful Ally) at risk of nuclear accident to each individual some thousands of time greater than the current and paltry risk of 'terrorism'.

Governments are, of course, often the real terrorists.

And they have their Orwellian ways...

Israël has serious nuclear weapons: thermonuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. It has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty - because it will not admit that it has nuclear weapons. More alarmingly, it has not signed up to the international convention on chemical and biological warfare. It has bigger facilities for the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons even than Great Britain, and it has used a new poison gas in its genocidal war against the Palestinians. That Israël is a 'democracy' unlike Iraq is beside the point: its secret weapons are completely undeclared, have no more sane control than those alleged to exist in Iraq - and even if a 'security'-crazed Israëli parliament votes to use them, does that make it right ? There seems to be a Western train of thought which says that democracy (which amounts to rule by the most powerful lobbies and tabloid newspapers) is the only morality - a view (paradoxically) not shared by the Religious (fundamentalist) Right in the United States, who so support Israël.

In 1986 Israëli scientist Mordechai Vanunu escaped to Australia, where he was a 'whistle-blower' on his country's secret weapons of mass-destruction being developed at the secret (but notorious!) Dimona 'plutonium research plant'. He was lured to Rome, kidnapped and put on secret trial in Israël. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison, and spent over eleven of those years in solitary confinement for following his conscience. He is still in prison. Parole has been denied to this Enemy of the People.

If the US had devoted just one tenth of its huge, neotenous energy in improving the world instead of obsessing about the power of the Soviet Union (but not about post-Soviet Russia's genocide in the Caucasus) and China (and latterly, Iraq), donating staggering amounts of money to the military who virtually run Turkey and Israël, and embarking on costly wars very far from its shores, we might be living closer to paradise than on the edge of an euro-american-created hell all over the earth. But the US will not allow any alternative system or world-view to expand anywhere even slightly. It will not tolerate any kind of pluralism, for it sees diversity of world-view as a 'threat to freedom and democracy' - i.e. Euro-American greed. And so it is very happy with military dictatorships all around the world, and could conceivably become one itself...

Meanwhile, the cynical oil companies whose interests are one with The White House are wooing new corrupt and cruel dictators of malleable and oil-rich countries - such as Guinea and Angola - who keep their people in misery.

(2004)

further reading:
"THE DEVIL'S TEARS"
BLOOD AND OIL IN CENTRAL ASIA

Reason hurts, but only a little of what hurts is Reason.

Reason has its reasons unknown to reason.

A reader of the above piece has asked me the Platonic Riddle: how in the 'First World' we can live honourably. What can we do ?

I think the answer is:
Do nothing.
All the evils of humanity come from doing. None come from being (except being born, which is doing, not being).

We can try and use as little electricity as possible, buy only second-hand and local - and, of course, get sterilised.

Or, if we are so brainwashed by our culture of hyperactivity that we must do something (apart from vasectomy), then the only honourable thing to do is to commit suicide.

If one (like me) hasn't the guts to kill oneself, then one must go on through-living the knowledge that one lives ineluctably in dishonour.

For further anti-enlightenment see the writings of
U.G. Krishnamurti.

and

Apposite to the above is this poem by Rumi - known in Persia and Afghanistan as Jalaluddin Balkhi - because he was born (1207) in Balkh, where Khayyam was educated nearly 200 years earlier.
When he was about 10 years old he fled the advancing Mongols to Konya in Anatolia (Rum).

THE TENT

Outside: the freezing desert night.
Another night inside gets warmer, illuminating me.
Though the earth be covered with impenetrable thorns
In here there is a sweet and gentle meadow.

When the continents are devastated -
cities, towns and everything between
scorched and blackened -

the only news is future full of grief -
while inside me there is no news at all.

This is our intimacy, my beloved friend*:
anywhere you put your foot,
feel me in the firmness under it.

How is it, soul-mate, that
I see your world and don't see you ?

Listen to the whispers inside poems,
follow their intimate suggestions

and never leave their premises.

Translated by Anthony Weir

*His beloved Teacher Shams-i-Tabriz (known as 'Murshid' among BEKTASHI Sufis).

SHATTERING ALL WRITING PENS
after Rumi

by Margie Cronin

Don't write!
It makes your toes go soft!

Don't write!
You will be eaten by snails!

Don't write!
You will hear voices
and be pursued by every contamination
and deprivation!

Can you come to the bed
and do things
that can only be done
with flesh ?

Put your cool hands here...

Please don't remember my words.

"I am anti-American and damned proud of it - but of I can't say it!" H.R.H. the Prince Philip of Greece, Duke of Edinburgh (overheard

FEEDBACK TO THIS PAGE:

- from R.J. Emery, Lyons-la-Forêt, France.

If only one could read this in one of the major newspapers instead of simply on a lonely website from outer space!

Just one criticism. I think one must avoid the illicit jump (made earlier by the Marxists) from the implicit finality of capitalism to the intentions of its proponents and actors. The philistine rejection of philosophy in the name of consumerist materialism is more likely to be found amongst the working-class victims than the leaders of capitalism. The latter usually belong to the "leisured classes" who have leisure enough to indulge in philosophy and even altruism. Milton Friedman may be helping to perpetuate an iniquitous system, but his intentions are probably no worse than those of Marx, Plato or anyone else. Even the cigar-toting, top-hatted capitalists of the 19th century often had the interests of their workers at heart. Only monsters like Hitler or Stalin actually revel in the iniquity they are perpetrating.

Otherwise one falls into fanatical hatred of a sort which even Osama bin Laden himself manages to avoid. George W. Bush has twisted his 'War on Terror' into a war against people. Instead of looking at the reasons which lead some islamicists into acts of suicidal murder, he prefers to demonize the Taleban and al-Qaïda. Bin Laden wishes to destroy a system, and in doing so he is prepared to sacrifice human lives in the way in which, rightly or wrongly, all political leaders do when they declare war. But he shows no signs of owing a debt to Nietzsche!

As you say, no one is innocent, and that includes the shopper who buys a pound of coffee at the supermarket without thinking about the exploitation of the bean-pickers and the fact that their earnings from the industry is now a tenth of what it was 30 years ago. If no one is innocent, then perhaps no one should be demonised either.

_____________________________________

- from Todd, address unknown

Your comments on the October 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali were both relevant and insightful.
You point out what the business press glossed over and buried in covering this tragedy: that terrorism is a consequence of a parasitic tourist-industry which exploits and feeds off indigenous cultures, and that as the only weapon available to the humiliated, terrorism is the violent reaction to this trend.
It was refreshing to hear this point of view - especially, in light of the fact that I work in Japan with privileged Occidentals whose only lament on the Bali bombing was that it altered their vacation plans!

>>Tourism and Terrorism >>

_____________________________________

WHY I DID NOT JOIN A DEMONSTRATION
AGAINST WAR ON IRAQ:

I have never been on a demonstration or march. Demonstrations are for those who pay taxes and have jobs and children and generally support and perpetuate the institutions that form the system. I have never paid direct (income) taxes, and refuse to have any kind of job which will support this system or any government through taxation. So I have lived in permanent demonstration against the government - and of course any war that it wages - by living 'on the poverty-line' and taking welfare benefit all my life to use money that otherwise may go to Export Credit Guarantees for arms-manufacturers, or to road-building, or to the "defence" forces. I am a passive Enemy of the State - any state. I give money to beggars and drink sour milk. I buy clothes and most things second-hand (including the lap-top computer with which I started this website) so as to give no Sales or Value-Added Tax to the government. I live in a house deemed 'unfit for habitation'.

Apart from that, it is a fact that China's mildly neo-fascist Politburo, Russia's genocidal president Vladimir Putin, and the Pope - like his institution and almost all his predecessors back to and including St Peter, a ruthless enemy of 'human rights' (except for the hierarchy that elected him) - also spoke against war on Iraq, along with many other dictators... What the Americans did in Vietnam was in some respects less appalling than what Russia has been doing in Chechnya.

France's hauteur as The Voice of Reason is somewhat devalued by the huge amount of weaponry (40% of the country's total military exports) which France supplied to Saddam from his seizure of absolute power in 1978, right up to 1988. Nevertheless, it was made clear to the American deputy-secretary of defense by France's foreign minister at the 2003 meeting of the Bilderberg Club at Versailles, that if America had declared war on Iraq on the relatively-honest grounds of 'régime-change' rather than on the fabricated grounds of Weapons of Mass Destruction, France would not have been unsupportive.

Compared with the outrageous 'coalition' of 1956 when France, Britain and Israël jointly invaded Egypt, America's action in Iraq was positively humanitarian. Indeed, it is one of the less-indefensible American adventures. But the non-existence of those 'Weapons of Mass Destruction', proof-positive of whose existence was declared by the US and the fawning, adventurist UK to be the reason for invading Iraq, has undermined the action, particularly since it was quickly obvious that Iraq (due to international sanctions) was on the verge of infrastructural collapse - which the invasion made worse, and the occupation unforgivingly and unforgivably prolonged.

If some parts of Iraq are slightly more relaxed and liberal than, say Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan (both of which new American allies are grotesque, anti-Islamic dictatorships), the people of the Sunni Triangle of central Iraq are now suffering more under American door-smashing, quarter-levelling occupation than they suffered under Saddam Hussain. I heard one Iraqi tell a BBC reporter that under Saddam he had lost seven of his relations - but under American occupation he had lost no fewer than fourteen. American behaviour in Iraq seems guaranteed to create a multiplicity of angry 'terrorists' - thus justifying their behaviour (and their manufacture and deployment of weaponry) in a vicious and grisly circle. If the (retrospective) pretext for invading Iraq was to bring 'democracy', the emotional stupidity of the Americans seems likely to ensure, not even a hesitant, home-grown quasi-democracy like that of Iran, but a new dictatorship - or a civil war.

America is very good at war - but terrible at occupation, and very poor at conducting or even coping with peace. The war of March 2003 was an example of an arrogant and globalising evil fighting a more restricted and more concentrated malignance. When evil fights evil, only evil can result. The twenty-first century is set to become even more terrible and bloody than the terrible, bloody twentieth.

F"I am anti-American and damned proud of it - but of I can't say it!" H.R.H. the Prince Philip of Greece, Duke of Edinburgh (overheard

NOW READ ABOUT KAZAKHSTAN

"I am anti-American and damned proud of it - but of I can't say it!" H.R.H. the Prince Philip of Greece, Duke of Edinburgh (overheard

'never live downhill from a white man'

An Alternative History of the USA >>

Wealth has revealed in you
the malice masked by poverty.

- Abu al-Ha'ul