Today’s Indie has published an article in their ‘Voices’ section by Smriti Singh, ‘Voices: British Indians have a racism problem – we need to be honest about it’ talking about anti-Muslim prejudice in the British Hindu community. This has been generated by Modi and his Hindu-supremacist BJP, with their hatred of non-Hindu minorities and particularly Muslims. Anti-Muslim messages and images have as result been published not just for domestic Indian Hindus audiences, but also for the consumption of Hindu communities abroad, particularly in Britain. The article begins
‘I was recently sent a WhatsApp clip of a street vendor in India, dressed in a manner that suggested he was Muslim, apparently spitting into food containers. The clip was clearly doctored and shared in the name of “raising awareness”. But in fact it was intended to stir up more hatred against India’s Muslims – not just there, but among Hindus here in Britain.
I come from a family of immigrants – my parents came to the UK from India and we all experienced racism, particularly in the early days. Yet despite this, I am heartbroken by how much racism I am seeing from British Hindus today, directed at Muslims and stirred up by India’s extreme right-wing government.
Since the election of the BJP government in 2014, Hindu fundamentalism has been growing in India. Legislative changes from the top, with the judiciary and mainstream media capitulating to this agenda, are turning India from a secular country to one that puts “Hindu” first.
In 2019, the BJP passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, providing Indian citizenship to refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan – but specifically excluding Muslims. Muslim girls who wear the hijab are increasingly excluded from schools. There are frequent reports of lynchings of Muslims for (allegedly) killing cows. Day-to-day life for religious minorities, particularly Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, is becoming harder.’
Respect to the Indie for publishing this article, which would surely annoy Diane Abbott. I’ve said for a long time that racism in Britain is complex and not simply a case of White prejudice against and victimisation of people of colour. I’ve heard that in some schools in Bristol, the big problem of racial friction and gang fighting in the playground wasn’t between Blacks and Whites, but between various groups of Asians. But the mainstream anti-racists really don’t seem to want to recognise the complexity of situation or that it simply isn’t Whites against non-Whites. One Asian man at a Labour gathering asked Diane Abbott about doing something about racism amongst Britain’s different ethnic communities. She reply that she didn’t want anything done, because ‘they’ would use it to ‘divide and conquer’. Which shows you how fixed and racist her own anti-racist views paradoxically are.
This story has been exercising GB News and History Debunked’s Simon Webb. According to the Torygraph, the leader of Brent council, Mohammed Butt, wishes to rename Gladstone Park in his borough. Apparently the sprogs in the local schools were given a talk on racial inequality and the murder of George Floyd by a ‘racial expert’, before being asked for their views on the park’s name and what they thought should replace it. Suggestions included ‘Rainbow Park’, ‘Diversity Park’, ‘BAME Park’ – which is clearly racist as it very definitely excludes Whites – and ‘Diane Abbott Park’. The move follows similar attempts to rename places named after Gladstone and remove monuments commemorating him elsewhere in Britain, ‘cos his father, Ewart Gladstone, was connected to the slave trade. It’s also part of a general move by Sadiq Khan to rename places in London so that they reflect the capital’s multicultural population.
GB News’ Mercy Muroki, who’s black, was not impressed. She objected to children being used to support what was clearly a decision made by Butt and his cronies. She took as an example of the way young children think her own seven year old. She stated that the child was bright and imaginative, but that you wouldn’t ask him questions like that because he wouldn’t know anything about it, nor who Gladstone was. As for Diane Abbott, she stated that she had many excellent qualities. She had risen from her working class origins to become Britain’s first Black woman MP. Quite. Abbott’s certainly not thick, despite what the Tories say about her, although some of her comments on race certainly have me grinding my teeth. She’s a good role model for Black women and girls looking for a career in politics. But she isn’t in the same league as someone who was four times British Prime Minister.
And this is one of the problems. It’s been claimed by the right that the ‘woke’ left have no awareness nor interest in anything but very recent history. This would seem to bear that out. I dare say that to many modern Brits Gladstone is just a name with no relevance to the present day. But this is a mistake. Gladstone, and his opposite number in the Tories, Disraeli, are two of the 19th century political titans that have shaped modern Britain and the British empire. And Gladstone was hardly any kind of Fascist monster. Rather, it’s been said that he became ‘the voice of the Nonconformist conscience’. I firmly believe that if he had succeeded in granting Ireland home rule, the modern history of Ireland would have been far less bloody.
And there are other events and figures from further back in our history that also deserve to be remembered, but may also be lost if the attitude persists that the only people worth remembering are those of the near present. Magna Carta is celebrated as the first check on royal power and the beginning of English liberty. An Anglo-Norman phrase from about the time declared that the country was ‘the commune of England, where each man had his view’. But there’s also the British Civil War, which commenced a long process of political speculation as writers and politicians attempted to formulate ideas about the ideal state, correct forms of government, the rights of the individual and political and religious tolerance. Carl Benjamin of the Lotus Eaters harks back to John Locke, who laid the foundations for liberal, democratic government, but there were many others. Socialists and the Labour party have looked to the Levellers and Diggers, and their plans for an expansion of the franchise, the creation of state education, hospitals and almshouses for the elderly and in the case of the Diggers the establishment of a Christian communist utopia. The Glorious Revolution finally established the supremacy of parliament over the crown, and the Bill of Rights that followed is another key document in the development of British political liberty. Then in the 18th century there’s Edmund Burke and his classic foundational text of modern Conservatism, Reflections on the Revolution in France and Thomas Paine’s defence of the American and French Revolutions, Common Sense and The Rights of Man. And this is before you get to the bitter political struggles and leading politicians of the 19th century. Now no-one is suggesting that these figures and events should somehow be erased from commemoration or official British history. The commemoration of the Glorious Revolution and the accession of William of Orange to the throne was played down, however, particularly in Northern Ireland in the 1980s because of fears that it would spark further sectarian violence. But I am afraid that the mentality that demands that Gladstone be cancelled because of his personal family history may expand to demand the removal of other important British political figures, merely because someone feels they don’t properly represent the values of modern Britain.
I am also afraid Khan’s decision to have places renamed according to the area’s modern ethnic composition will also prove divisive. There’s been a movement of Whites away from inner city areas, which have become increasingly dominated by Blacks and Asians, dubbed ‘White flight’. Many of these area’s Black and Asian inhabitants are genuinely upset by this. A BBC documentary discussing this a few years ago in the case of the dwindling White population of the East End featured an imam, who said he regretted that his son would never meet a White person from the area. Part of the reason for this exodus is that many Whites no longer feel a proper part of those areas. They feel outsiders, and so move away to areas with a higher proportion of Whites. Predictably, those Whites who’ve said that they feel like foreigners in these areas because of their colour have been attacked as racist, but they’re simply expressing the same kind of sentiments many Blacks have when moving into a majority White area.
A few years ago there was a similar bit of controversy when the Heil ran a story about the Bangladeshi part of the Smoke renaming itself ‘Banglatown’ and having the street names written in both the Latin and Indian scripts. I think part of the idea was to raise the area’s profile by making it into a piece of local colour that would make it stand out. ‘Banglatown’ was a nickname given to the area by the storm troopers of the NF/ BNP, and its adoption as an official name may have been an attempt to reclaim it as source of pride by the Bangladeshi community, in the same way that some Blacks have tried reclaiming the ‘N’ word and some gays ‘Fag’. This move predated Khan’s tenure of the elected mayoralty by some years. However, it cause outrage because it was felt, understandably, that Bangladeshi identity was being privileged and British culture erased. And this latest move by Khan and Butt may be set to be similarly controversial and divisive.
Not to mention that it’s a gift to the Tories, who are trying to make the most of the culture war because of the increasingly grotty state of Britain after over a decade of Tory misrule makes it difficult for them to claim that Brits are materially better off.
I’ve an interest in conspiracy theories. It partly comes from studying the rise of Fascism as part of the history course at college and having friends, who were huge fans of the Illuminatus! books. They’re a series of science fiction books about various secret societies competing to bring about the end of the world, or take it over, written by Robert Anton Wilson and Michael Shea. Conspiracy theories can be an extremely powerful political force. The Nazis gained power and popularity because of the ‘stab in the back’ myth that the Jews had secretly conspired to cause Germany’s defeat in the First World War from within. The infamous Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is a classic example of this kind of poisonous conspiracy theory. Written by the monk Nilus for the Tsar’s secret police, it was intended to persuade Nicholas II to increase the persecution of the Jews even further. It claimed to prove that the Jews were secretly controlling both socialism and capitalism in order to enslave gentiles, and has been a major force in the rise of Fascism and anti-Semitic movements throughout the world. Some of its readers have continued to believe it even after it was shown to be a forgery, claiming that it is ‘symbolically true’. Although thoroughly discredited in the West, it remains popular in other parts of the world. I’ve read that it can be freely bought from kiosks in Russia, while in the 90s it was serialised on Egyptian television. I was therefore particularly interested in this video from Simon Webb’s ‘History Debunked’ channel.
In it Webb discusses the influence of conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus and fake history among the Black community. An American study had found that Black Americans were far more inclined to believe conspiracy theories. He had been visiting a Black female friend, who told him she wasn’t going to take the Coronavirus vaccine because of the grossly unethical Tuskeegee Experiment that ran from the 1930s to only a few decades ago. A group of Black sharecroppers had been deliberately infected with syphilis, which was left to go untreated until it culminated in their deaths. The intention was to study the progress of the disease, and in return the victims had their funerals paid for. Webb’s friend was afraid the Covid vaccine was a similar experiment. Back in the ’90s, a similar conspiracy theory arose about the origins of AIDS. This was supposed to have been developed by the US military as a germ warfare experiment at Fort Detrick. In fact the story was a fabrication by the KGB in retaliation for the Americans claiming that the Soviet Union had been responsible for the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II by a far-right Turkish nationalist. One American doctor, writing in the US conspiracy magazine Steamshovel Press, stated that in his experience many Black Americans in particular believed that AIDS was an engineered bio-weapon because of the Tuskeegee Experiment. There is a problem with Blacks and some Asians refusing to accept the Covid vaccine because of similar fears.
Of course, these bizarre and malign beliefs aren’t confined solely to Blacks and Asians. There are also Whites who refuse to have the vaccine because they also believe it is some kind of malicious experiment. One such theory claims that Bill Gates and Microsoft are putting computer chips in it to control people, or wreck their health, or something. All completely false.
These destructive theories have also harmed the campaign to eradicate killer diseases like Polio in Pakistan. Government officials and aid workers there have been attacked and murdered because of the widespread belief that the vaccine is really intended to sterilise Muslims. As a result, a terrible disease that has been successfully fought elsewhere is still very much a threat to the life and health of the people of Pakistan and other areas which have similar theories. I noticed that the government and the TV companies have tried to combat the conspiracy theories about the Covid vaccine by reassuring people that this is just a conspiracy theory, and showing Black doctors and patients administering and receiving the vaccine.
In the 19th century the kidnapping of Asian labourers during the infamous ‘Coolie Trade’, and the subsequent loss of contact with their families for years, even decades, resulted in another conspiracy theory. This claimed that people from India and what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh were being killed for the cerebrospinal fluid in their skulls, which was being used as lubricant for Europe’s machines. A similar theory also emerged in Latin America, where it was believed that a White or mestizo man in a black coat, armed with long knives, was murdering Amerindians. In this myth, it was the victims’ body fat that was being used to grease the wheels of Europe’s machines.
Commenting on the Tuskeegee Experiment, Webb wonders if he wouldn’t also believe in the conspiracy theory about the Covid vaccine if he was Black. But he goes on to consider the role of fake history in convincing many Black Brits they’ve been cheated by a racist society and deserve government assistance. A couple of examples of this fake history is the belief, expressed by a Black friend, that it was a Black man, who invented the lightbulb, and David Olasuga’s claim that there was a 15,000 strong Black community here in Britain in the 16th century. He speculates that the greater belief in conspiracy theories among Black Americans may well be due to a comparative lack of education. Blacks are more likely to leave school earlier and fewer Blacks go to university than other groups. But it could also be that the fake history, to which they’ve been exposed, has resulted in a widespread feeling of resentment and feeling cheated, thus fuelling demands for affirmative action programmes.
It’s possible, though I think the resentment and widespread suspicion of racial injustice comes from the real racism and exploitation many Blacks have experienced during the slave trade and after, when the British and colonial governments deliberately imposed highly discriminatory legislation on the newly freed Black workers in order to keep them tied to the plantations and maintain the Caribbean nations’ economies. There’s also the often vicious racism and blatant discrimination that Black and Asian immigrants have faced in Britain. The affirmative action programmes, dubbed over here ‘positive discrimination’, began following the 1981/2 race riots, which were partly caused by the particularly large unemployment rate and consequent despair in Black communities in Bristol, Liverpool and London. The Black community continues to be generally poorer, less educated and suffering greater unemployment and marginalisation than other racial groups. Hence the continued demands for affirmative action campaigns on their behalf. Structural racism or its legacy may well play a role in the Black community’s impoverishment, although this would conflict with Webb’s own views that some of the Black community’s problems are rooted in biology. He believes in the ‘Bell Curve’ nonsense that Blacks are less intelligent than Whites, who are in turn less intelligent than Asians. He is also impressed by neurological medical papers noting the greater genetic inclination towards schizophrenia among Blacks.
But researchers into conspiracy theories and the people, who believe them, have come to the conclusion that lack of information is a powerful factor in their emergence and spread. Without any proper information to the contrary, stupid and destructive conspiracy theories, like those about the Coronavirus and Polio vaccines, can arise and spread. I also suspect that the prevalence of such theories in parts of the Middle East, Iran and Pakistan also comes from these countries being dictatorships or absolute monarchies. In this anti-democratic culture, the state may be distant or exploitative and so there is an immediate suspicion and resistance to its interference. Hence the stupid ideas about the Covid and Polio vaccines. Folklorists also noted a similar theory among Black Americans about Coca-Cola in the 1990s. This was supposed to have had a chemical added to it to sterilise young Black men. A fellow volunteer at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol also told me that there was a conspiracy theory believed by many Black South Africans that the government was also covertly trying to destroy them through similar methods. This last belief is perfectly understandable, given the immense poverty and oppression caused by apartheid. And it does seem that the South African secret service, BOSS, was working on a germ warfare weapon which would only target Blacks.
These poisonous conspiracy theories need to be tackled and disproven, just as the widespread fake history also needs to be refuted. But this has to be alongside policies to improve the conditions of Blacks and other ethnic minorities so that they can enjoy economic, social and educational equality. If that’s achieved, then perhaps so many won’t distrust their government so much that they mistakenly think it’s deliberately trying to poison them.
Note I say ‘race activist’ not ‘anti-racist activists’ as I don’t believe that the demands for some monuments to be removed or renamed, in this instance four pubs owned by Greene King, are genuinely anti-racist. Rather they are the result of ignorance and a simmering resentment against a perceived injustice that in this instance doesn’t actually exist. It’s prejudice masquerading as a demand for racial justice.
The Daily Telegraph announced at the weekend that the brewery Greene King were going to rename four of their pubs, called ‘The Black Boy’. This came after the Torygraph had revealed that the brewery’s founder had received government compensation money for slaves he owned following the emancipation of enslaved people throughout the British Empire in 1837. The brewery’s current head made an apology for his ancestor’s participation in slavery and announced that they were going to change the names of those four pubs. Halima Begum, of the anti-racist organisation the Runnymede Trust, declared that the name change was very good news indeed, because BAME people walking past the pub would have been reminded every day of their oppression. The problem with this is that the pubs’ name may not actually refer to slaves. It could come from a racehorse owned by Charles II or the statues of Indians put outside tobacconists.
Simon Webb of History Debunked has put up a number of videos tackling some of the bad history promoted as truth by Black and anti-racist activists. In the one linked to below, he refutes the assertion that the names have anything to do with slavery. He states that he has a number of books on British history and folklore and none of them make that connection. There are a number of other possible sources for the pub name. One explanation is that it may refer to Charles II himself, as he was so dark complexioned that as a child his mother used to call him ‘the black boy’.
Webb is also massively unimpressed by Begum and her comments. He says scornfully that if BAME people were that upset every time they went past the pub, then why didn’t they change their route? He also believes that, as a foreign immigrant, Begum has no right to tell native Brits what to do, just as he would have no right to tell the people of Bangladesh what to do if he lived in their country.
I don’t agree with these latter comments. The same could be said of the Blacks in Bristol, who were upset by the reminder of their people’s enslavement by Colston’s statue, which they had to pass to go to work each day. It’s too glib just to say that they should change their route so they don’t have to go past offending monuments. However, there is a difference between Colston’s statue and those pubs. Colston was definitely a slaver, while those pubs probably don’t have any connection to the slave trade whatsoever.
As for Begum’s immigrant status disbarring her from having an opinion, it may well be that Begum is second or third generation British. She almost certainly regards herself as British, which is why she is angry at the perceived injustice the pubs’ name represents. I disapprove of her opinion, but she has a right to hold it.
This decision may well affect folks down here in Bristol. One of the streets in my great and noble city is Black Boy Hill, and local folklore has assumed that it comes from the city’s notorious participation in the slave trade. But that well be another piece of bad history. Years ago back in the ’90s the City Museum and Art Gallery in Bristol dealt with it in their ‘Respectable Trade’ exhibition on the city and slavery. This stated that there was no evidence connecting the street’s name to slavery, and that it may well have come from one of Charles II’s racehorses. That should have ended the matter. I certainly haven’t heard of any demands to rename the street, in contrast to those for the removal of Colston’s statue. Unfortunately it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the more historically ignorant peeps in Bristol now started demanding it to be renamed following Greene King’s pubs.
Webb says in his video that the connection with slavery may well have come from the American use of ‘boy’ as a demeaning term for Black men during slavery. It’s possible. I got the impression that much anti-racist activism and attitudes are strongly influenced by America despite the differences in history and culture between the two nations. It’s how the Black supremacist Sasha Johnson can posture as a British ‘Black Panther’ and scream that the cops are the Klu Klux Klan. I think the assumption that the name refers to a slave probably comes instead from the fact that wealthy ladies used Black children as page boys during the days of slavery, or simply that enslaved Blacks included children as well as adults.
However, it seems that there really is no connection between the name of these pubs and slavery. In which case, Halima Begum and her friends should actually stop allowing themselves to be guided by their racial prejudices and resentment and actually do some proper historical research of their own, rather than promote fake history. And while I understand that the desire to remove or rename monuments and buildings connected with slavery or celebrating slaveowners is part of a perfectly understandable desire for racial justice, I think it also detracts from the campaign against real, present day slavery. Back in the ’90s it was estimated that around 20 million people were in various forms of slavery around the world. That’s almost certainly grown. I think the figure now is 30 million. There have been slaves found and liberated recently in this country, from women brought here and abused by sex traffickers to immigrant workers on farms. They caught one of the farmers in Gloucestershire, one of the neighbouring counties to Bristol, doing this a few years ago.
I’d have far more respect for Begum and her like if she showed some concern over the victims of modern slavery than spouted bad history about the British slave trade, which ended well over a century and a half ago.
Over the past week or so we’ve seen mass protests across the Islamic world, including the Islamic community in Britain, over the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. These have followed the assassination of school teacher Samuel Paty for simply showing his class the cartoon as part of a lesson about free speech. It’s been pointed out in articles in the I that Paty was far from a racist or Islamophobe. He had taken lessons in Islam in order to understand his Muslim students better, and had warned the Muslims in his class what he was about to do so they could leave to avoid being offended. One girl remained, told her father, her father told the local mosque, the mosque told the community. And a Chechen Islamist heard them, and took matters into his own hands. Other Islamists have carried out further attacks on innocents, who had absolutely no part in the affair. Three people, including a priest, were stabbed to death in a church, simply for being Christians, and there have been shootings in other nations.
The murders of these innocents has not been denounced by the Muslim protesters, however. Instead we have seen former cricketer Imran Khan, now leader of an Islamic party and the president of Pakistan, denounce Macron for the publication of the cartoon. He has been joined by Turkish president Erdogan, another leader of a Muslim party Who wouldn’t know free speech if it came up and bit him on the elbow. Tunisia has also denounced France, and when I looked online last night, Islamists in Bangladesh were giving their government a few hours to sever links with France.
It’s been reported that Khan has been complaining about the hurt felt by Muslims around the world about the publication of the cartoons. Supposedly the right to free speech does not mean the right to offend. But others have pointed out over and over again that that is precisely what it means. The type of free speech that only permits what is inoffensive is no free speech at all.
At the heart of this are the Muslim blasphemy laws. This is an attempt to impose them on France and, by implication, other western nations. However, Muslim are a minority in Europe and so the only arguments Khan and the others can use against Europeans is that their feelings are hurt, and that there will be political repercussions.
I looked up the article on blasphemy in The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, ed. by John Bowker (Oxford: OUP 1997). This provides information on the concept of blasphemy in Christian, Judaism and Islam, its punishments, and the problems of enforcing such laws in Britain. It runs
‘Blasphemy (Gk: ‘speaking evil’ ). Impious or profane talk, especially against God; and in many western legal systems , the offence of reviling God or Jesus Christ or an established church. To be blasphemous a publication must be intended to shock and endanger the moral fabric of society; one that is merely anti-religious (e.g. denying the existence of God) is not. In England in 1977 the editor of Gay News was convicted of blasphemous libel for publishing a poem which portrayed Christ as a practicing homosexual. This was the first successful prosecution for blasphemy since 1922, and showed the difficulty of objectively applying the common law definition. The appearance of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, raised the issue whether blasphemy should be extended to become a more general offence (in the UK), or whether it is an offence in the domain of inciting unrest.
‘In Judaism, ‘blasphemy’ is speaking scornfully of God (Heb. gidduf, heruf) and is described euphemistically as birkat ha-shem (‘blessing the name’, i.e. God). According to Leviticus 24. 10-23, the penalty for cursing God is death, but in discussing this passage, the rabbis defined blasphemy in such a way that it became an improbable crime-and thus the death penalty did not need to be invoked. Excommunication (herem) became the punishment in any case once legal autonomy had been lost…
‘The nearest equivalent in Islam is sabb, offering an insult to God. Qur’an 9.74 condemns those who sear by God that they said nothing but in fact spoke a word of rejection (kalimat al-kufr) after they had become Muslims. This relates blasphemy closely to apostasy (ridda). The expression of contempt for God, the Prophet Mohammed, the angels, or the traditional explications of revelation constitute the offence. Accidental blasphemy is not usually excusable (though Malikites allow it if it is expressed by a recent convert to Islam).. The punishment varies between different Schools of Islamic Law -e.g. the Hanafites remove the offenders legal rights, declare his marriage invalid, and declare any claims to inheritance or property void; the Malikites demand immediate execution of the death penalty.,’
The British prosecution for blasphemy mentioned in the article was brought by Mary Whitehouse, who made it her professional duty to be offended about everything. The gays on the opposite side took this as an attack on them, and launched their own protests against Whitehouse. There’s a comic aspect to this, as Whitehouse recalled that she woke up one morning to find militant gays marching about her garden waving placards.
I think the enforcement of the blasphemy laws is more or less impossible. They’re a dead letter, if they haven’t been repealed. As an example, just consider how many TV comedians since then have expressed their own contempt for Christ and his followers. The comedians Lee and Herring regularly did so on their BBC 2 programme, Fist of Fun. It came as a surprise to me a few years ago when Muslims around the world were again up in arms demanding the execution of blasphemers because of something Pope Benedict said about Mohammed in a speech when one of the two appeared on television attacking Islam. When they were interviewed by the short-lived mag Comedy Revue in the 1990s, they were asked about their attacks on Christianity and whether they would do the same to Islam. They laughingly made it clear that they definitely wouldn’t because they were afraid of violence and attempts on their lives. And thought themselves very clever for doing so. Which shows the British media establishments general attitude to Christianity.
The Muslim blasphemy laws are extremely dangerous. At the moment there are 200 people on death row in Pakistan on charges of blasphemy. Most of these are probably entirely spurious. They’re brought for entirely cynical reasons, such as getting rid of an opponent in a dispute over a completely unrelated issue. Muslims have also claimed that their attacks on Christians were also motivated by the outrage they felt at blasphemies committed by their victims. But some of it seems to me to be an attempt to enforce the Pakistani caste system. Indian and Pakistan Islam has a caste system like Hinduism, only not as severe. Most of the Christian community in Pakistan are of the lowest caste, and many are bonded labourers in brickyards, effectively slaves. One of the Christian women accused of blasphemy was accused after she brought water from a well to a group of Muslim women. Along the way she took a sip of the water. It looks to me that the real crime here was that she broke their laws of caste purity, and that the accusation of blasphemy was added on after this offence.
The ex-Muslim vloggers the Apostate Prophet and Harris Sultan have also pointed out the hypocrisy in Khan’s denunciations. When western countries have criticised Pakistan for human rights abuses, Pakistan has simply told them to mind their own business. But when France defends the publication of cartoons Pakistan and its Islamic leadership find offensive, suddenly he’s justified in interfering in their affairs. He has also denounced the closure of radical mosques and the expulsion of extremist imams as an attack on Islam. It isn’t. It is simply France protecting itself against Islamist violence, in the same way right-wing terrorist groups are banned. And Khan is again being hypocritical in his denunciations. When the Taliban made a series of bloody attacks in Pakistan a few years ago, the armed forces and security services cracked down hard. According to the two above vloggers, they went from house to house in the province of Waziristan arresting anyone with a beard. I haven’t linked to the two because I don’t want to offend any Muslims reading this blog. But you can Google the articles on YouTube if you want to find out more.
Macron should stand firm against all this. Blasphemy laws are a severe attack on free speech, and the penalties inflicted for it and the flagrant abuse of such accusations are particularly dangerous. Freedom of speech and conscience, including that of Muslims, is far too important to be sacrificed because of hurt feelings and outrage.
Here’s another old article, this time from the Times, Monday, August 4 1997. Written by Anjana Ahuja, ‘Are We Ready for the Next Plague’ argues that the world has been mistaken in scaling back its defences against global disease, leaving us seriously unprepared. Subtitled ‘We are dropping our defences against disease’, the article runs
In the Middle Ages, one would not have lingered by the marshes of eastern England, particularly those in Kent and Essex. Nowhere in the country, which was falling prey to plagues, was more hospitable to the malaria parasite.
The menace of malaria hung over British shores until the mid-19th century, when it mysteriously declined. By 1940, the disease was no longer a threat to humans, because of rising standards of hygiene, the falling price of the anti-malarial drug quinine and the lessening availability of cattle, on which mosquitoes prefer to dine. But there is no guarantee, says a leading parasitologist, that malaria will not haunt the nation again.
The warning has been issued by Robert Desowitz, Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, who has spent many of his 71 years studying insect-borne diseases in places such as Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Burma, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, India, Laos, Vietnam and Sir Lanka. His view, expressed in his book, Tropical Diseases, is that the “golden age of antibiotics is waning”. As a result, he says, it is not impossible that the nightmares once vanquished by modern science will recur. Isolated outbreaks of Ebola and Lassa fever are, like the rise of HIV, a sign to him that we should be on our guard. However, he does not wish to seem apocalyptic. ” It may be true thyat there are diseases coming out of the jungle to kill us,” he says. “My response is that we don’t know that, but we ought to stay alert.”
His book is an eloquent, and sometimes alarming, history of how diseases have hitched their way around the world. The subtext is that humans, particularly in the colder climes (this includes the British), live in a fool’s paradise. Our defences are further weakened by mass migration and global change, leading to great changes in epidemiology. He expresses incredulity that worldwide efforts to combat infectious disease are being would down.
“I was listening on the radio this morning to America’s new military chief of staff, who was saying that we cannot demilitarise against old enemies,” he says. “The symmetry with disease struck me. We are not properly prepared.”
“The science budget is shrinking. My opinion is that the World Health Organisation is scientifically bankrupt. We are having problems with infectious disease. If you were going to certain parts of the world, you would be hard pushed to find a really good anti-malarial drug. We have neither cures nor preventions for viral diseases such as Ebola, Lassa and HIV.”
One particular worry is climate change, which he sees as an enormous potential problem. Tropical diseases such as malaria are very temperature-sensitive-higher temperatures allow an influx of alien pests and the warmth encourages the pests to breed more rapidly.
Other researchers have been discovering the effect of climate change on unwelcome visitors. Biologists at Leeds University have set up a simple experiment that shows what happens to insects when faced with temperature changes. Using eight linked cages, and three species of fruit fly adapted to different temperatures, Professor Bryan Shorrocks and Dr Andrew Davis have tried to replicate what would happen to fruit flies if the temperature changed across Europe. the Biotechnology and and Biological Research Council financed the £241,000 project.
The cages were connected by thin tubes through which the flies could migrate. The temperatures in the cages ranged from 10C to 25C; the intention was to mimic average temperatures across a swath of Europe stretching from Leeds to southern Spain. The optimum temperature for the three types of fruit fly – Drosophila subobscura, Drosophila simulans, and Drosophila manogaster – were respective, 15C, 20C and 25C. Fruit flies are easy to use and they breed quickly.
When each species was tested on its owns, and confined to one cage, it became extinct at temperature extremes. The next step was again to treat each species on its own, but to allow it to move through the tubes between cages.
Dr Davis reports: “The flies survived across the whole temperature regime. Where they became extinct, the population was topped up by individuals from other cages looking for more food and space to lay eggs.
The last, and most complex stage, was to populate the cages with different permutations of the three species. This was where the most interesting results began to emerge. For example, when subobscura and simulans were thrown together, the simulans species dominated its familiar temperature climate of 20C., but subobscura was more populous at about 10C, well below its optimum temperature.
Dr Davis says that each species did not necessarily behave according to expectation. He concludes: “We may not be able to predict where a species will occur on the globe purely by knowing its temperature requirements. It’s surprising.
In other words, matching the pest to a temperature zone is not that simple. Dr Davis is keen not be seen as alarmist. “I am not saying these effects will happen, or that they will be important,” he says. “But some of the things that might happen with global warming may need planning, particularly pest problems.
Professor Desowitz does not envisage doom for the human race. Not yet, anyway. “People have survived plagues before, but we are not preparing ourselves properly. Perhaps,” he adds, not without a whiff of menace, “London will become malarious again.”
Meera Senthilingam says much the same thing in her Outbreaks and Epidemics: Battling Infection from Measles to Coronavirus (London: Icon 2020). Climate change, migration and mass travel are leaving us vulnerable to new epidemics, traditional antibiotics are losing their effectiveness. And we still have no cures or treatments for diseases like Lassa fever. or Ebola. But whatever other faults Blair’s government had – and these are legion, like the invasion of Iraq – it did take the threat of a renewed epidemic seriously, especially after Avian and Swin flu. They invested in the NHS, and developed specialist medical and bureaucratic machinery and protocols to combat such an epidemic when it came along. And when the epidemic was wargamed in 2016, the Tories knew that we were seriously underprepared. But they simply didn’t care. They wanted austerity and budget cuts so they could give tax cuts to the super-rich. And as a result, this country has one of the very worst infection rates and mortality from Coronavirus in the world.
They knew the disease was coming. They did nothing.
60,000+ people have died.
The Tories are guilty, and Johnson is responsible for mass manslaughter at least.
Yesterday, Norwegian schoolgirl eco-warrior and global phenomenon Greta Thunberg visited my hometown, the fair city of Bristol. She was due to speak at College Green by City Hall in Bristol, before leading a march through town to the Tobacco Factory. This was exactly what it’s called, but the tobacco industry has just about vanished from Bristol, and it is now a theatre. Many of the city’s schools gave their pupils the day off so that they could join her. Her visit was naturally the main focus of the local news yesterday. Thousands went to see her, and it was a real family event. Parents and grandparents also went, and took their children and grandchildren. The teenage organisers, who had invited her, were interviewed. They were intelligent and articulate. One of them, a young man, was given the opportunity by the local TV crew to appear again promoting another, different, but equally important issue. The lad had said that he wished there was the same kind of crowds and interest for combating knife crime. He’s absolutely right, as this is a plague claiming and wrecking young people’s lives up and down the country. So the crew told him to wait a moment while they found someone he could talk to about this. With luck this should lead to positive developments so that in a few months’ time or however long, he should be back with us organising a mass campaign against that issue.
Thunberg’s visit was an historic occasion for the city. The people going enjoyed it, and it will doubtless have delighted Mayor Marvin and the other members of the council, who are trying to turn Bristol into one of the world’s leading Green cities. I didn’t go, as I still have this stinking cold, though I didn’t really feel like attending anyway. But I’m glad for the people, who did.
One person, who definitely didn’t approve of Thunberg’s visit was TalkRadio right-wing mouthpiece and howling snob, Julia Hartley-Brewer. According to Zelo Street, Hartley-Dooda got very sneering about the whole affair on Twitter. First she retweeted Mike Graham, another right-wing TalkRadio entity calling Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall a ‘plank’, because he was in Bristol with his sister and family to support the demo. Dooda herself then issue the following Tweet explaining why she wouldn’t let her daughter go on the march:
“If my child wanted to join a school #ClimateStrike I’d expect her to: 1. Know enough to pass a test on climate change facts 2. Agree to give up fashion, all lifts home & all holiday flights 3. Even if she did both 1 & 2, I still wouldn’t let her bunk off school”.
She had to sneer at the Beeb’s coverage of pro-Brexit demonstrations, stating
“‘At least 30,000 people.’ Or, if it was the same size crowd at a pro-Brexit rally in a BBC report, ‘hundreds of people’”.
She then sneered at the people, who did attend, with this tweet
“There’s something about the people attending this #climatestrike by #BristolYS4C with #Greta that I can’t quite put my finger on… Gosh, now what *is* it? I wonder if [Jon Snow] or a BBC reporter could help out?” This was followed by “Nope, I still can’t work out what it is. It’s on the tip of my tongue but…”
This was accompanied by photos of the crowd. If she’s trying to imply that they were somewhat lacking in charisma or shoddily dressed or whatever, she’s seriously missed the mark. They don’t look like anything to me except severely normal people with their hoods and anoraks on getting soaked.
She then retweeted a piece by someone called Ben Pile, who completely denies the existence of global warming and who had attacked George Monbiot: “George invents victims of climate change in Bangladesh and Ethiopia … Both countries have in fact boomed over the last two decades”.
She then followed this by retweeting Darren Grimes, who was in turn responding to Guido Fawkes and their endorsement of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which, you will not be surprised, also denies the existence of global warming. Grimes was moaning that, thanks to environmental concerns, Britain couldn’t build an additional airport even though with contribute less than 1% to global emissions.
The Sage of Crewe concludes of her rather mean-spirited behaviour
‘But seriously, this is a sad show of inconsiderate selfishness by someone who is regularly given a platform by major broadcasters. Just because Ms Hartley Dooda wants to carry on with her long-haul jollies doesn’t invalidate the scale of the climate crisis. And the only reason she seems concerned about the Coronavirus is because that, too, could prevent her jetting off to embark on another exhibition of conspicuous consumption.
Julia Hartley Dooda cares. But only about Herself Personally Now.’
In fact, the event seems to have been positively received by very many teachers and educationalists. Many of the group that organised it, a group of youth climate strike activists, came from Chew Valley school. Chew Valley is the name of one of the neighbouring villages outside the city. The school said that they had been given time off for the pupils to go. One of the girls involved, a 17-year old, was given an honorary doctorate by Bristol University for her work researching birds and working for their preservation. Another teacher, who was going with his pupils, said that they were incorporating the visit into the curriculum. This apparently covers the environment and ecology. Thunberg’s visit was also important to the citizenship part of the curriculum as well, because it is an example of the right to protest.
But as a right-wing Murdoch hack, Dooda doesn’t believe in global warming or cares about the environment, because doing so gets in the way of those all-important corporate profits. It’s an attitude obviously shared by Grimes and the Paul Staines’ collective. Pile pointing to Bangladesh and Ethiopia experiencing significant economic growth is, as Zelo Streets points out, a piece of misdirection. Climate change doesn’t necessarily prevent it. But it does mean a deterioration in the environment and living conditions for those countries hit by it. Bangladesh may well be experiencing a boom at the same time it’s threatened by rising sea levels.
As for organisations like the Global Warming Policy Foundation, they are very definitely in the minority. The vast majority of scientists believe that global warming is an established fact. Groups like the Foundation, on the other hand, tend to be the pet scientists set up and funded by big business in order to protect themselves and their profits. The Koch brothers set up a number of fake ‘astroturf’ right-wing grassroots organisations and research groups denying climate change, in order to protect their companies in the fossil fuel industry. I dare say the GWPF is a similar organisation, whose findings should be taken with the same scepticism given to the pronouncements of the various medical research groups funded by the tobacco industry, which told everyone that there was no link between ciggies and cancer.
And just looking through one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham a few weeks ago, I came across an academic book about environmental decline and the effects of global warming. The information supporting its existence is out there, if Hartley-Brewer cares to look.
But she won’t. Because that might show her that unrestrained capitalism isn’t completely good and benign, and that she herself might have to change her behaviour to save the planet. Like stop jetting around to exclusive, exotic resorts to show how much wealthier she is than the rest of us.
Everybody in Bristol seems to have had a great time yesterday, despite Dooda’s determination to sneer at it all. I hope the world pays attention to them, than hacks like her. Which will not only annoy Dooda herself, but her master, Murdoch. And that, like fighting climate change, is itself a noble goal.
One of the most ludicrous reasons I’ve heard from those demanding Britain leave the EU is that of Paul Scully, the Conservative MP for Sutton and Cheam. Way back in October 2015, the Sutton and Croydon Guardian’s Anders Anglesey reported that Scully was supporting Brexit because he feared that the EU was preventing proper curry chefs from Bangladesh coming to Britain. Without them, the standard of the British curry would fall. The report quoted Scully as saying
“The curry industry is struggling at the moment, partly because of some unintended consequences of our immigration policy.
“Leaving the EU would give us more flexibility to control our borders and tackle some of the unintended consequences of immigration from outside the EU.
“Things such as the curry industry – bringing curry chefs over – might benefit.”
Mr Scully clarified his position in a Facebook post. He said: “Curries may well be tastier after Brexit.
“By leaving the EU and controlling our own borders, we could be able to be more flexible in our immigration policy when tackling unintended consequences with our traditional Commonwealth partners, such as the shortage of skilled curry chefs.
“I’ve just got back from Bangladesh when even the President lobbied us on the issue. It it actually causing a number of restaurants to close.”
The newspaper also spoke to Oli Khan, vice-president of the Bangladesh Caterers’ Association, who said that there was indeed a problem getting enough trained Bangladeshi curry chefs. British-born Bangladeshis want to become lawyers or work in other jobs, rather than cook like the parents. They have tried using eastern Europe migrants, but there is a problem as many of them don’t speak English. Mr Khan was hoping the government would introduce a six month contract to allow people from Bangladesh to migrate here, and have their contract renewed if they do well.
Now I do like a good curry myself, and I sympathise with Mr Khan’s concern for the prosperity of his industry. But Brexit threatens to destroy British agriculture and manufacturing industry, accelerate the privatisation of the Health Service as Trump and the Americans buy it up as part of their wretched trade deal, and cause massive poverty and unemployment. It will even harm the financial sector as many foreign banks and financial houses move out of Britain to Europe.
Compared to all this, supporting Brexit because you’re afraid EU migration law is preventing you getting the right chefs for a good curry is bonkers and risible. I hope Boris Johnson’s government falls at the earliest opportunity, and Paul Scully is forced out along with the rest of the Tory clowns.
The clip below is a grim report from The Young Turks about the methodical rape of Rohingya women in Myanmar by the Buddhist armed forces. This comes from a report from the Associated Press with 29 women and girls, who had fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh. Some of these testimonies are very disturbing. In one instance, a woman was nine months pregnant, when she was caught by the soldiers and raped. She couldn’t get away because of her condition. Nevertheless, her husband, who sounds like a scumbag himself, is blaming her. She didn’t run fast enough. He, however, had already scarpered. In another interview, one woman told of how she and her husband were both caught, and her other half was tied to a tree while the Myanmar storm troopers gang raped her in front of him. When he began to scream and cry at what was being done to his wife, they stabbed and killed him.
Savagery, brutality and violence are part of the human condition, and are found in people of every race, creed and political ideology. Buddhism is no different from any other religion or ideology in this regard. But M. Reza Pirbhai published an article in Counterpunch in September this year, 2017, arguing that the world’s failure to respond adequately to the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar was partly due to the western, liberal myth that Buddhism is uniquely tolerant. He begins his article by arguing that the silence and reluctance to condemn the atrocities is partly due to western imperialist perceptions of Islam as uniquely evil. He then goes on to argue that the positive image Buddhism has as a uniquely tolerant religion was created in the 19th century by disaffected western intellectuals. Alienated by the sectarianism and bigotry of their own Christian culture, they turned to the Buddhist east, and so created an entirely false image of the religion as uniquely peaceful and tolerant. He writes
Academia is in fact rife with examples of scholarship that touts the tolerance and inclusiveness of Buddhists and the general argument is nothing new. According to Thomas A. Tweed, Professor of History at Notre Dame University, increasing awareness of religious diversity due to colonial expansion and Christian missionizing led Euro-American Enlightenment intellectuals repelled by Christian sectarianism to consider Buddhism to fit the bill of the “natural religion” (or “perennial philosophy”) they sought, one that exuded “tolerance” toward people of different faiths and was amenable to scientific progress. So convinced were they that some, such as the nineteenth century German-American scholar Paul Carus, even chastised Asian Buddhists when they launched polemical assaults on Christian missionaries, accusing the Asians of using language the “Buddha certainly would not…” So was born the pervasive myth, characteristically articulated by the early twentieth century Swedish-American Theosophist Herman Vetterling, that Buddhism is “a religion of noble tolerance, of universal brotherhood, of righteousness and justice,” and that in its growth as the religion of a global community it had not “caused the spilling of a drop of blood.”
Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Michael Jerryson, picks up where Tweed signs off to show that the tendency to associate Buddhism with tolerance did not die in the early twentieth century or remain bound in an ivory tower. In the wake of World War II, it found its way into the writings of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, marching further forward in time with such works as Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and by the 1980s assumed political dimensions in the form of the Free Tibet Movement. And finally, who can forget (even if you want to) Keanu Reeves in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha.
Social history, however, tells a different tale than Orientalists and popular culture. For every instance of forbearance, history also provides examples of violent intolerance legitimated by Buddhist doctrines and conducted by practitioners. As many ancient Jain and Brahmanical texts speak of persecution at the hands of Indian Buddhists, as Buddhists accuse their South Asian competitors of the same. And consider Jerryson’s examples of the sixth century Chinese Buddhist monk Faqing, who promised his 50,000 followers that every opponent they killed would take them to a higher stage in the bodhisattva’s path. Or recall that with the advent of nationalism, Buddhist monks rallied to the cause as with Japanese Rinzai support for the military campaign against the Russians in 1904-5, or Zen and Pureland Buddhist justifications of the Japanese invasions of China, Korea and Singapore during World War II. Buddhism has been corrupted in these places, they argued, and violence is necessary to insure that ‘true’ Buddhism is restored and preserved. The same rhetoric – of some fundamental Buddhism under threat – also underwrites the more recently nationalized bigotry and violence that Buddhist monks and laypersons have unleashed on non-Buddhists in Thailand, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and, last but not least, Myanmar.
It isn’t just Muslims, who are in a perilous position in Myanmar. So too are the country’s Roman Catholics, who are also under the threat of Buddhist persecution. This explains why the Pope was very careful not to describe the Rohingya as indigenous Burmese when he decried the violence against them the other week. He was afraid of upsetting the authorities too much, and calling down persecution on the country’s Christian population. At least according to another article in Counterpunch.
Pirbhai’s article notes that Buddhist priests, laymen and armed forces have also carried out atrocities against those of rival or different religions elsewhere, including Sri Lanka. In May 2013 Tariq Ali also published a piece about rising Sri Lankan Buddhist fundamentalism. This was during the conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamils, who wanted a separate state and union with India. The Sinhalese are Buddhists, while the Tamils are Hindu, although the Tamil Tigers, the revolutionary force fighting for independence, were Marxists and therefore atheists. The civil war resulted in horrific atrocities, for which the Sri Lankan army was condemned, but little action taken by the West. And Muslims there were also the victims of Buddhist intolerance. Ali wrote:
Four years after the brutal assault on the Tamil population and the killing of between 8—10,000 Tamils by the Sri Lankan army, there is trouble again. The saffron-robed fanatics, led by the BBS—Bodu Bala Sena: the most active and pernicious of Buddhist fundamentalist groups that have sprouted in Sinhala strongholds throughout the island— are on the rampage again. This time the target is the relatively small Muslim minority. Muslim abattoirs have been raided, butchers shops attacked, homes targeted. Terrified kids and adults in Muslim areas are living in fear. The police stand by watching passively while the Sri Lankan TV crews film the scenes as if it were a school picnic.
A few weeks ago, Buddhist monks led some hoodlums and attacked the car sales room of a Muslim-owned company (Emerald Trading) in Pepliyana. Reason? An employee was stepping out with a young Sinhala woman and her father had complained to a local monk. A journalist on The Sunday Leader (a courageous broadsheet whose editor Lasantha Wickramatunga had, four months ago, denounced President Rajapaksa for corruption, predicted in print that he would be killed as a result and was) reported on 2 April that, ‘Following the complaint, an eye-witness saw a monk leaving one of the temples in Pepiliyana followed by a group of youths, mostly under 25 years of age. The group carried stones and, people were later to discover, kerosene…’
As if the anti-Tamil pogroms were not enough to satisfy the blood-lust, a BBS blogger explained the ‘reasoning’ behind the targeting of Muslims in the Colombo Telegraph (6 March 2013):
“Muslims have been living in this country since 7th century and now only they want to have Halal food in Sri Lanka. Population wise they are only 5%. If we allow Halal, next time they will try to introduce circumcision on us. We have to nip these in the bud before it becomes a custom. We should never allow the Muslims and Christians to control anything in Sri Lanka. What is Halal to Muslims is Harem to Sinhala Buddhists. Slaughtering cow and eating beef should also be banned in Sri Lanka. Instead, we should promote pork. We are glad that the parliament has re-introduced pork in their menu. Hijab, burqa, niqab and purdah should be banned in Sri Lanka. The law and the legislature should always be under the control of the Sinhala-Buddhists and our Nationalist Patriotic president. After all, Sri Lanka is a gift from Buddha to the Sinhalese.”
Difficult to imagine how circumcision could be ‘nipped in the bud’ even by a buddhist, or how the percentage of the Muslim population could have decreased from 9.7 percent in 2011 to 5 percent today. It has undoubtedly gone down but demographers doubt it could have done so by more than one or two percent at the most. The decline is obviously a direct result of unchecked harassment and persecution. It has gone down over the last few decades. The Tamils did their bit. Muslims in Tamil-majority areas were harassed and effectively driven out by ethnic purists from both the communities. They regret what they did now because it has been done to them on a much larger scale.
If it were only the BBS mouthing this nonsense, it would be one thing. But many within Sinhala political-military mainstream pander to rhetoric of this sort. In Pottuvil in the Ampara district, for instance, where the Muslims are a majority, the uniformed soldiers have been collaborating with the local monks and monasteries to erect Buddhist statues and inflaming the region in noise pollution via loudspeakers which start early with Buddhist hymns and a nightly replay. Local women who own land are being driven off it: the monasteries steal as the army provides protection.
The 1911 consensus revealed, as has always been the case, that the Buddhists compose a huge majority (70.2 percent), followed by the Tamil Hindus (12.6), Muslims (9.7) and Christians (7.4). Nobody threatens the Buddha or his followers except fanatics from within.
Ali ends his article with a report of Buddhist sectarian attacks on Muslim fishermen in Myanmar.
And will talk of Burma joining the Commonwealth be nipped in the bud? Buddhists have clashed with a tiny Muslim minority and driven them out of their villages, though the cause in this case appears to be material rather than ethno-religious Puritanism. The Buddhists wanted the land for themselves. A macabre confrontation resulted in, of all places, an Indonesian refugee camp where the Burmese Muslims had been provided with shelter. Eight Burmese Buddhist fisherman whose vessel had foundered in nearby waters were also rescued by the Indonesians and taken to the same camp. That night the two sides battled and all the fishermen apart from one were killed. Muslim casualties were two dead, and seven wounded.
It was an ominous precursor of the mass violence against the Rohingya that broke out a few years later.
Pirbhai ends his article by noting no religion has the monopoly on violence. But the myth of Buddhism as uniquely peaceful and tolerant is blinding Americans to the savagery that Buddhists, as humans, are capable of committing.
“No religion has a monopoly on ‘violent people’,” Jerryson astutely concludes, “nor does any one religion have a greater propensity for violence.” All religions are vast complexes of thought and institutions and devotees of each can always find legitimacy for hostility or hospitality toward the other depending on mundane needs or wants. It is for this very reason that the apparent disconnect between historical Buddhism and the sustained Euro-American myth of its tolerance is as malignant as the perpetual dehumanization of Islam and Muslims is cancerous. These Buddhists have long been the good guys and those Muslims the bad in this lore. Each is a necessary fiber in the liberal fabric of Euro-American imagination that veils the gaze of international law when it comes to the murder and displacement of the Rohingya.
Over the past week the major news issue has been about Trump and North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, ratcheting up the tension that could easily lead to a nuclear war. The North Koreans have test fired another missile, which is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, and have threated to hit the island of Guam, on which America has a military base. In return, Trump has vowed to retaliate ‘with fire and fury, such as the world has never seen.’
This is terrifyingly like some of the Cold War rhetoric I grew up under in the 1980s, when the spectre of a global nuclear holocaust was all too real. It was also completely unnecessary, a product of Reagan and Thatcher’s militant posturing and determination to spread capitalism around the globe, no matter what the dangers. All while pretending to be the champions of political freedom.
In this clip from The Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his guests Ron Placone and Steffi Zamorano, the Miserable Liberal, comment on a very revealing piece on another liberal internet news channel, Democracy Now. They interviewed the respected academic linguist and veteran critic of American militarism and capitalism, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky revealed that two years ago, the North Koreans offered to make a peace deal with Barack Obama. They would freeze their nuclear programme. In return, they wanted the Americans to stop conducting manoeuvres close to their borders, including flights by B52 bombers, which are capable of carrying nuclear bombs.
Obama refused.
Which, they comment, kind of makes America look like the aggressor. Dore makes the point that during the Korean War, the country was literally flattened by American bombing, so that there were no targets left. A million people were killed. And the North Koreans have very long memories.
Obama’s refusal of the peace offer by the North Koreans, and this latest jingoistic saber-rattling by Trump, also shows that it doesn’t matter who’s in the White House, the military-industrial complex gets its way anyway.
They also comment on the complicity of the American media in promoting a possible war. There are no journalists working for MSNBC, or writing for the New York Times or Washington Post, advocating peace. No Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector, who told George Dubya what he really didn’t want to hear: that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. And no Phil Donohue either, who was sacked because he also spoke out against the war in Iraq. And the New York Times also sacked one of its journos for writing a piece arguing against the invasion of Iraq.
Dore makes the point that this piece needs to go viral, and be reblogged, because you aren’t going to read it or hear about it in the mainstream news. Or if you do, it’ll be on page 88, after a long piece demanding America go to war.
There’s no doubt that Kim Jong Un is a psychopathic dictator, a Stalinist autocrat with the taste for murdering his own family of a Roman emperor. This doesn’t change the fact that this episode, and the horrifying possibility of nuclear war, could have been avoided.
Just like tensions are being ratcheted up with Iran on the same issue of nuclear weapons, and for apparently the same reasons: the American military-industrial complex and bought politicians want a war with Iran. A war which would have similar devastating consequences for the country and the wider Middle East as the Iraq War.
And this is another piece of news that tarnishes the gilded reputation of Barack Obama. Obama, remember, won the Nobel Peace Prize when he was elected, despite not having done anything. It was enough that he was America’s first Black president, and that great things were expected of him. Once in power, however, his radical critics on the Left have pointed out that he was as centrist and corporatist as his predecessors. And far from being anti-war, he massively expanded American military adventures into a further five nations. And Hillary Clinton, who served him as America’s foreign minister, was responsible for backing another Fascist military coup in Honduras. This installed a right-wing government that has restored power to American corporations, and conducted a reign of terror against trade unionists, indigenous peoples and activists for their rights, and the left wing opposition. Killary was also close friends with Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s close aide, who has been dubbed the greatest unindicted war criminal because of the murderous regimes and atrocities he backed from Pinochet’s coup in Chile, Pakistan’s attacks on Bangladesh during their war of independence, and the Vietnam War.
This is why so many Americans want change, and flocked to Bernie Sanders when he denounced Clinton for her friendship with Kissinger, and said that America should no longer interfere in other countries’ domestic affairs.
And the silence of the press over this – both in America and over here, in Britain, on similar issues, is why we need to support the internet and left-wing news shows like Dore’s and Democracy Now, as well as independent bloggers like Mike, despite attempts by Google and Facebook to close them down by denying them an audience.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 