Democracy?......

Two things made me really incensed this week... (Well, there were probably more, but two sprang to mind): one watching Rob Newman talking about the us 'bringing democracy to the middle east' (in a humorous and sarcastic way - he didn’t make me angry, the implications of what he was saying did), and secondly, the news on the bbc website today regarding the us government urging Nicaragua’s not to vote for Daniel Ortega when he stands (fairly and democratically) for election as president later this year. Of course there are two interesting things about this. One, how is it democratic, or supportive of democracy, for a country to attempt to tell the population of another country how to vote. How can it be acceptable for the largest superpower in the world to attempt to dictate to Nicaraguans how they should vote? Can you imagine the outcry in the US if china began issuing statements telling us citizens how they should vote? And secondly, isn't there the usual hint of sickening irony and hypocrisy about this news - the US government telling the people of Nicaragua not to vote for Ortega? Because, of course, we all remember what happened last time the people of Nicaragua DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED by a free fair national vote of 63%, ratified by international observers, Daniel Ortega as there president don't we? He, and the Sandinistas he had led in defeating the fascist dictatorship of the US backed Somoza regime, were subjected to 12 years of the most brutal, violent and immoral repression meted out by the US government and their CIA funded, armed, and backed paramilitary front the Contras. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were deliberately targeted by the Contras after the US used AWACS planes to inform the rebels where the Sandinistas were so they could AVOID them and attack unhindered the villages and autonomous communities of the Nicaraguan people. And now the US government has the audacity to inform Nicaraguans not to democratically elect Ortega president.

Well, its been ages since I wrote anything, so I thought I better get my ass in gear. First off, the eagle eyed among you will have spotted a new link to the right of this page for a new Amnesty campaign on internet freeomd. Click it for more info........

Secondly, I am becoming increasingly pissed off at the vitriolic, hate filled bile spewing forth in most circles about the "immigration crisis" at the moment. For one there is no crisis, and for another thing, people seem to be totally incapable of differentiating between economic migrants, legal migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and terrorists. This pisses me off, as it is irresponsbile and only further muddys the debate. I find it sickening to hear the bile and lies spewing forth from the foul mouthpieces of the Murdoch Empire, the Sun, the Daily Hate Mail and the Torygraph. Their respective editors editors have felt obliged to show little interest in the fact that the real story is that the vast majority of migrants have
come to the UK to escape repression and the grinding poverty which has been
forced upon them by the economic policies of the UK (and the US, G8, IMF, World Bank et al - i.e. neoliberalism) and a bunch of wars where we have wrecked thier countries. And then these bastards moan that we can't 'send them back' due to some lefty conspiracy to protect their 'human rights' as they will undoubtedly get tortured if we send them back to the places from whence they came. Well, maybe we should have thought about that before we and/or the US ran around the world teaching every dodgy regieme and failed state the latest in torture techniques, before legitimating torture internationally through our actions in Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib.

Next up, here in Britain, we lurch closer and closer to a police state, bereft of freedom, with only a thin veneer of democracy, and people do nothing, content with their nice house, small wage rise, lower tax threshold and Sky TV. It struck me the other day that we will soon be in a position where our kids will read a book like Orwell's 1984 and it won't seem like a nightmarish vision of the future, but an accurate portrayal of reality. The state pass more and more legislation allowing them to spy on us, keep personal information about us, trade this information for profit (more anon), remove and curtail our liberties and freedoms, all in the name of 'protecting' us. But from who?? The mythological terrorists? the bogeyman? Ourselves? The only people we need protecting form is the state and the corrupt and moribund politicians who are solely focussed on their own comfort, and on profit - both for themselves, and for the businesses and corporations who are their masters.
Alongside the proposed ID card which would allow them to hold a database containing our fingerprints, DNA, biometric data, and full background information from the day of our birth, through our schooling, our school reports, our jobs, our taxes, our bank accounts, our movements, our beliefs, and so on, they now propose that this information be expanded with the information that businesses collect on us daily. So they would buy information on our credit and debit card transaction, out internet usage, our phone conversations, our shopping habits, our holiday destinations, and so on. They would buy this information from business, and they would sell the information they held on us back to business to allow business to 'better tailor their products to our needs'. Frankly, that terrifies me, and yet the general public sit and accept it without even a whimper of objection. The few that rise above this apathy are singled out and labelled as 'terrorists', 'troublemakers', 'dissidents' and 'loonies'.

For instance, there is Brian Haw. He is a husband and a father, a committed Christian, and a protestor against the Iraq war. He felt so strongly that the war was illegal and atrocious, and was so upset that it was being waged in his name by 'his' 'democratically elected' government, that 5 years ago he went to London, and set up opposite the Houses of Parliament with some placards to protest against the war. He has been there constantly since. For five years he has lived and slept on
the pavement, heckled and berated by passers by, spat on, assaulted, threatened. The police harass and intimidate him. And yet he has stayed. This has upset the sensibilities of Parliament so much that they have written a new law just for him. As part of their new 'Serious and Organised Crime' law (SOCPA) which covers international drug trafficking, terrorism, threats to national security and so on, they included a passage which makes it ILLEGAL to hold any protest within one square mile of the Houses of Parliament. Despite the right to free assembly and the right to freedom of protest being enshrined in our laws, the European Union Human Rights
Act, to which we are a signatory, and international recognised standards of human rights, it is now illegal for a citizen of this country to protest outside our own parliament, to which we elect people to represent us (apparently). A few brave individuals instantly protested this abomination of a law, and were promptly arrested, fined heavily, banned from protesting, and threatened with jail. One man held a picnic opposite parliament, with no placards, he simply sat there drinking tea wearing a T-Shirt that read 'protesting is not a crime'. He was promptly
arrested and charged, fined, and banned from protesting. As for Brian Haw, he
successfully challenged the ruling by arguing that he preceded the law and so it didn't apply to him. Yesterday, at 3am, 50 police arrived and dismantled his display, removed his placards, stole all of his personal possessions, and served him with a court order informing him that if he has more than twenty people visiting or standing with him at any time, uses a megaphone or loudspeaker, displays placards, or rings a hand bell, then they will arrest him. Apparently he threatens the security of the Houses of Parliament. What a joke. I wonder how these politicians and police and judges can sleep at night. But more than that I wonder how the
population of my country became so lazy, so blind, that they would sit passively
by and watch this dictatorship, this fascism, take hold. We, the Brits, love
to hark on about how our grandfathers fought and died in the World Wars to save England from the threat of fascism and totalitarianism in the guise of Nazism. And yet this terrible evil threat which so many millions died to defeat has snuck in through the back door, in the guise of a "democratic" "Labour" party. While we sit passively by and allow this to be done to us, the state becomes more and more paranoid. They pass more and more laws to keep us down, and more and more laws to give our freedoms, our birthrights, to the corporations and businesses that I truly believe are destroying the world. When I go on protests now I risk being arrested not for whatever offence I may or may not be committing (i.e. trespass, obstructing a highway, public order offences, etc) but being arrested under the 'prevention of terrorism act'. Terrorism? When did protest become the same as crashing planes into buildings? Companies can now apply for it to be illegal to protest against them. Whole areas, streets and neighbourhoods can be designated 'no protest zones'. Now, in many places there is a designated protest zone, where protestors are herded into prebuilt steel cages, well away from the eyes of the public and media, to be
'allowed' to protest.The police and state have more power and we have less, and yet
this seems to worry no one.

Sometimes I despair. I'd leave the country, but where would I go?? This situation is happening everywhere. As the US brings freedom and democracy to some places at gunpoint, its allies too are forced to fall into line of risk its wrath. Hence Canada and England and Europe looking more and more like the police state which is America. The only places left to go are the 'undeveloped' places. Because they
are the only places where the big business/corporation/EU-US neoliberal agenda
has not been able to take root yet. Or, thankfully, the places where the
people still have cojones and see when they're being shafted, and actually
respond. Places like some of Latin America, where the businesses have promised development and progress, and used these promises to blind the people while they rape and pillage and steal their natural resources. Thank god the people responded. Assuming Morales resists the inevitable corruption that comes when you have money and power, thank god he's kicking the businesses out and taking back the resources. These people are realising something that we long ago forgot - that development is
something which can only be achieved collectively by the people on the ground.

All this bullshit we're offered by the lackys and theorists of the neoliberal
new world order about 'trickle down benefits' from big business making big bucks is seen by people like Morales, like Chavez, like the Zapatistas, the indigenous, the masses or poor people at the coalface, for the crock of shit it is. What is more, as the world succumbs to climate change, as oil and gas run out, we need to realise, collectively, that we actually need less development. That the only hope for long term survival is to buy less, use less, waste less. For their to be less travel, less business, less consumerism. These people we in the west so patronisingly refer to as 'peasants', 'tribal', 'indian', etc, know more than we could ever understand about the natural world, about the respect needed to live in harmony with nature, about how to live naturally in a symbiotic relationship with our world. But we laugh at them, kill them, displace them, force them to move to the shitest parts of the worst cities, just so we can steal their land, its contents, its riches. Whilst they much hate and resent us, you can imagine they also must smile to themselves, as
they know that ultimately we will bring this whole system crashing down around
us, and they will be left as the only people with the knowledge to survive
when the world returns to its primordial state. And one of the ways that this neoliberal order, this US led global hegemony (which is noting more than the continuation of the previous British empire, which began this process of neoliberalism, 'free' trade and globalisation) has managed to be so successful (apart from being a sickeningly powerful military force led by a bunch of religious fundamentalists with their fingers on the nuclear button) is by instilling this animalistic sense of individualism in us. Since the start of the last century there have been concerted attacks on anything which represented collectivity. The
unions were busted, the idea and the spirit of the working class was crushed,
and it was all replaced with this rampant individualism, couched in the religion of consumerism. The British people lie down while our hard earned freedoms and liberties are stolen because we see ourselves not as a group, a collective with common cause, but as individuals. And what can one person do? Besides, why would each individual wish to react, when it might place in peril their job, their money, their future earning potential, their ability to watch TV, take three foreign holidays a year, and enjoy the expropriated products and services of the 'third' world. We are far to comfortable buying our 'made in china' electronics, and using them to purchase holidays in Indonesia, where we can lie in the sun while the
locals are forced to work 14 hour days to manufacture, for 10 pence a day,
clothes which we happily buy for £40. We see it as natural. They have to work in shit conditions for shit pay making our luxury goods, after all, if they don't how are they ever going to develop?? The hypocrisy is sickening. We like to kid ourselves they are undeveloped because of some natural law, or because or their sheer stupidity and laziness. we never stop to think that it is the very system of globalized neoliberalism which has caused this disparity. We have systematically stolen their resources, subjugated them to our laws, stolen anything of any real value, then sold them the dream of McDonalds, TV, Nike, of unfettered consumerism as the goal to be attained. We need to learn again what so many people struggling against this global power in the undeveloped corners of the world already now. The only power we have is the power of collective action. Individualism is destroying
us. Here in Britain, when we do talk about issues like Climate Change, its
always in terms of what single action or actions can be taken by government, by business, by individuals. The middle classes, once they have got rich and sent their children off to university to be tutored in the ways of business, build their dream eco-homes, and pat themselves on the back, because they have done their bit. But we don't realise, it is all of us, together who must act. Whole communities must come together and rediscover the benefits of acting in the interest of others, not only
of ourselves. All these ideas we have been told are old fashioned, backwards,
are, conversely, our future. We can only hope to consume less, use less, have less impact on our environment if we see things through a collective groups lens, not from within our own little gated communities. But the problem is that the government, at the behest of the criterion of business, refuses to place an economic value on things like community, environment, planet. They will never act of their own free will to safeguard tradition, communities, the environment, for the simple reason that they are unable to make a profit form doing so. Likewise, individuals are prone to only seek to make changes to their own lives, their own patterns of energy use and consumerism, if there is an economic benefit to it. We have to start
to see that our blindness to anything non-economic will ultimately destroy us.
That's why I don't believe we should expect governments, even OK ones like
Bolivia or Venezuela, to do the right thing, to save their people, or their
countries. That's why I think we must fight them to prevent them removing the last spaces we have to be free in and to experience and live liberty in. Not as an end in itself, but in order to give us the room to act collectively to establish a better and different order, freed from the shackles of their greed and corruption. We need to look at the whole story of human history and see that everything which has been achieved to the benefit of the greater good of mankind has been achieved through
collective action. The vote, the abolition of slavery, civil rights, human right.
No individual won these changes. No government introduced these changes through their own benevolence. These changes occurred because we, the people, made the tiny groups that try to run our lives scared, and in doing so, forced their hand.





One last example of the way my country's going, before I get back to work!!! The government is in the process of changing the rules which govern being in the army. The current illegal and immoral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have prompted an unprecedented number of soldiers to either refuse to serve in the first place, or go AWOL once they see what they're facing. One recent example was Ben Griffin, who resigned from the SAS and refused to go back to Iraq, declaring "I didn't join the army to carry out American foreign policy". Blair is now forcing the new 'Armed Forces Bill' through Parliament, which recommends sentences up to life imprisonment for those refusing to serve in a war, whether it's legal or not. Although this
would breach the Nuremburg principles which enshrine in international law the responsibility of everyone to "refuse to obey illegal and immoral orders from any government". The Bill also proposes that those who get a free education while in the Forces must remain a soldier until they're 40! This bill will have its third and final reading on the 22nd May. It's sailed through the first two readings without a whisper of opposition. Imagine this scenario. A normal civilian member of UK society could go out, commit premeditated murder, and get a sentence of 'life' meaning, in reality, 16 years, of which he may serve less than 12. The latter half of his sentence would be spent in a low security prison with satellite TV, a gym, sports pitches, free education, the chance to work and earn money, and conjugal visits. Conversely, a UK soldier who refused to go to Iraq because the war is illegal and he
DID NOT want to commit premeditated murder against an Iraqi civilian, could face
life in prison, meaning, in reality, 35 years in a high security military jail. We are now punishing those with a conscience more than those without. This country is fucked.