Pakistan lives in interesting times.

In yesterday’s newspaper I read that General Pervez Musharraf is thinking along the lines of putting his wife up for President if the Pakistan Supreme Court stops his candidature. This is a typically South Asian scurvy trick; and it’s been played over again, and again, and again.

Now, it may be unpatriotic of me, but I’ve got a rather soft spot for the people of Pakistan, who’ve been getting an awfully raw deal right from the terrible blunder of the creation of their country and who have never, ever, been left alone to decide their destiny their own way. So, I am rather outraged at this plan in a way that I would probably shrug off if it were a provincial Indian politician like Lalu Yadav in action.

Anyone who says “So what?” – just imagine if the US Congress impeached George W Bush and he then contrived to have Laura made president in his stead. Would you be happy about it? Everyone would know perfectly well who was the real power behind the throne.

Now, Pakistan is in turmoil and Musharraf is in real trouble. He’s alienated the courts, the people are almost all, whether liberal or fundamentalist, united in loathing him, he’s gone to the extent of deporting one of his principal opponents, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (the man he had himself overthrown in 1999) on his return from exile; he’s conducting, with American blessings, secret negotiations with the only other civilian politician of any consequence in Pakistan, the extremely venal Benazir Bhutto on a power-sharing deal; and still he hasn’t been able to secure his position.

Naturally, it’s not as if Musharraf can pull this off alone either. What’s sauce for the gander being sauce for the goose, Nawaz Sharif is at liberty to put his wife up for election against Musharraf’s Sehba. Whoever wins, the people of Pakistan end up with a proxy ruler and a power behind the throne who is accountable to nobody. That this power behind the throne can claim that the country is democratic and liberal enough to have a woman president, and so can also get away with doing pretty much anything he likes, would be merely the icing on the cake.

That this is happening under the nose of the US, which everyone knows really runs Pakistan these days, shows that the US has still not learned that imposing convenient dictators on its satellites will only worsen things. As it is the Pakistanis have more than their share of fundamentalists, and most Pakistanis hate the US with excellent reason. It’s long been my opinion that left alone, any society will inevitably gravitate towards liberalism. It’s only a society that feels itself under threat that looks towards fundamentalism and conservatism. So, imposing a hated dictator, by proxy or otherwise, is just going to make the Pakistanis hate the Americans even more and make them turn towards fundamentalism.

Also, it shows – since the Americans have not done anything to help the democratic revolution in Pakistan – that the failing colour-coded “democratic revolutions” in the former Soviet republics (so aggressively supported by the Americans) were nothing but attempts to expand the American empire. No more, no less.

And, to countries like India that would like to make an alliance with the US, it shows that once you let the wolf in through the door, it ends up locking you in the basement.

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens if massive anti-Musharraf protests break out in Pakistan’s streets and the Pakistani Army decides to crush them with brute force. Most especially it’s going to be interesting to see what action, if any, the US will take.

Osama must be beside himself with delight.

There’s a lot of guff in the Indian papers these days.

Much of it is about the “growing closeness” of India to the United States.  That’s what they call it, “growing closeness”, whatever that means.

Meanwhile the so-called Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh, calls George Bush his close friend while his ambassador in Washington calls Bush the best friend India has ever had. Which is a position strongly supported by the likes of the ultra-right wing columnist, Swaminathan G Anklesariya Aiyar, a man who is still trying to cover up his initial enthusiastic support for the Iraq invasion. Nowadays he calls Iraq a “mistake” but says it shouldn’t poison our relationship with the US.

All right, so what is so wrong here? Shouldn’t we be happy to make friends with the US?

The answer, of course, is that isn’t friendship with the US that is what we’re making. It’s a relationship with the US government and the military-industrial complex. If you want to talk about friendship with the people of a country, everyone is nowadays everyone’s friend. Half the people on my contacts list here, for instance, are Americans. None of them seems to be offended enough by my anti-neocon diatribes to quit. People never really have a problem relating to other people. Besides everyone knows all about American “soft power.” Hollywood may make a horrible amount of trash, but it still rules the world’s imagination – and rewrites history while it’s about it. Personally, I prefer French, Russian, and British films, in that order, but I do admit Hollywood’s power. But that isn’t a problem. I’m not asking for American movies to be banned or something.  

The problem, of course, with the whole concept of this alleged “growing closeness” is that it has nothing to do with all that soft power and people to people contact. It has everything to do with the current position of the US in the world as the leading threat to peaceful co-existence. See, if you have a bully in the neighbourhood who enjoys beating up people at random just to show who’s boss (the Ledeen Doctrine) – you can either knuckle under to him, you can try and resist him in any way you can, or you can leave the neighbourhood. Since a country can’t leave a neighbourhood, one can either resist current US policy or else join in it. Joining in it means, as the Pakistanis are discovering these days, total submission, so that one can’t even get rid of a hated dictator if his continual in office is convenient for the US. It also means joining in the US’ foreign policy misadventures, even when such joining is harmful and counterproductive, as with Britain in Iraq. This brings its own problems in its wake, like the increased likelihood of retaliatory “terrorist” attacks.

Also, no power lasts forever. America’s power is already in decline, and it has lost the constituency that belonged to it – the respect of the rank and file of the world’s people. Even the Roman Empire collapsed in the end – of its own weight. There is absolutely no reason to think that the US Empire won’t do the same. And then, my friends, other nations have long memories. Just see what happened to the nations on the losing side of the First World War if you wish to know what settling scores is all about.

As for the common dream of the middle class to aspire to American standards of living and an American lifestyle – that isn’t on either, because (except for a tiny uber-rich minority, and that too living on borrowed time) even the Americans can’t aspire any longer to the American Dream lifestyle, which probably peaked somewhere in the late fifties. If we all wanted to live like Americans, we’d need the resources of six more earths for that. Is this something that is possible?

I’m surprised hardly anyone in the media has the integrity to point these simple, well known facts out.

On second thoughts, though, I’m not surprised at all.     

Military alliances make no sense.

All right, so I didn’t keep you waiting, there’s the message of this blog post.

Again – today, military alliances make no sense.

What is a military alliance, anyway? What does it get you?  Security? Not on your life.

This is not the nineteenth century, a time of endless conflicts and unending wars. No one begins wars nowadays without some compelling reason, even if that compelling reason is one others would find mercenary, cynical or plain crazy.

This isn’t the world of a few centuries ago when small countries might pool their armies to resist the aggressive designs of a single large and powerful enemy or a conglomeration of enemies. Even then it rarely worked; the Napoleonic Wars saw various small states band together, but in the end it was the big countries – the Russians, the Prussians, the British – who, jointly and severally, beat Napoleon. The Italian city states, for example, just got steamrollered into the ground. And that was then.

So, what would a military alliance in today’s world achieve? It wouldn’t be an alliance of small countries with one another. All that would achieve would be some kind of ad hoc alliance of convenience, like the Second Congo Civil War (the one that’s not quite over yet) where the two competing sides would fight to a standstill and then begin fighting among themselves. No, the much more likely shape of a modern alliance would be small countries clustering together under one large and hegemonic country, allegedly for “protection”.

Protection from what? Aye, there’s the rub.

Can you really imagine a World War II style campaign any more? No? No ground invasion of Western Europe, tanks landing in Denmark and rumbling past the Dutch windmills? Can you imagine Blitzkrieg in the nuclear age? Still no?

Then what the hell is the point of an alliance?

In my opinion, there are only two:

Firstly, the alliance enables a large and hegemonic power (I’m not talking names here) to claim that it has international backing as it goes about its nefarious purposes. All it has to do is call in its alliances.

Then, it enables that hegemonic power to get its “allies” to provide the cannon fodder for the fighting, to do the dying in its stead.

You’ll notice that all the advantages here rest with the hegemonic hyperpower in this equation. The little countries get nothing out of it except the doubtful privilege of providing the warm bodies to take some of the strain off the big one.

If you’re a country allied to a hegemonic hyperpower, you can be sure that the hyperpower won’t come to your aid in your troubles (your troubles, unless it’s convenient for the hyperpower to intervene for its own reasons, are far too small to figure on its radar) – but you can be just as sure that when the hyperpower demands your help in its squabbles, you’ll have to come running, even if that squabble has nothing whatever to do with you.

Also, because losing an ally is a big loss of face, you can be sure that your government will be forced to remain loyal to the hyperpower and periodically demonstrate its fealty. Otherwise it will be “regime-changed”. It’s happened again and again – Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua, Iran, Iraq, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and more are cooking right now. Just in order to preserve its existence, the government will have to crawl when it’s asked merely to bend.

Which is why I’m amazed that not one Indian media outlet or political party (except the left) has spoken out about India’s unspoken alliance with the US and its local vassals Australia and Japan.

And yeah - I couldn't think up a snazzy title for this post. So sue me. 

I think there isn’t anyone among the regulars on my blog who’s unaware of my feelings about the Bush imperium and about imperialism in general. I’ve been writing now for years – since September 2001 at least – of the particular danger posed by the United States of America to the world at large, and I’ve repeatedly pointed out the fact that in my own considered opinion the planet, as a living entity, cannot continue to tolerate the existence of the US in its present form.

Does that, however, make me anti-American, as I’m accused, virtually on a daily basis, of being?

No.

What is being anti-American, anyway? Am I against the soil of the United States? Am I against grizzly bears, coyotes, and redwoods? Am I supposed to oppose the existence of the Gila Monster or the Grand Canyon (and never mind – just for a moment - the US Rangers there being forbidden to mention its geological origins)? 

It’s easy to say, like so many of my interlocutors on Orkut and other websites, that “All Americans are evil,” “all Americans should be killed, “the only good American is a dead American,” and so on. Most of the people who say this are immature and semi-educated, but not all; most of them are Muslim, and of a fundamentalist bent of mind, but not all. I’ve known white Australians with college degrees and of impeccably Christian heritage who refused to even write the word “America” properly.

These people aren’t insincere in their viewpoints. When they say “All Americans are evil” they mean what they say. They’re just not adequately informed. They’re also excellent propaganda copy for the enemy; because don’t imagine the Bush cabal doesn’t know about them, and doesn’t use them as fodder in its “They hate our freedoms” campaign.

Before I go further, let me clearly state my position, so there isn’t any confusion over what I’m saying.

I hate the government of the United States of America, its armed forces, its social and economic system, its foreign policy, and its continuing attempts to impose its ownership over the world. There is nothing I would like better than to see all this destroyed.

I do not hate the people of the United States, its tradition – now imperilled – of free thought and dissent. I do not hate even the most retrogressive, the most hidebound denizen of the Bible Belt, because – unlike the “America to the gallows” crowd – I do know a little of what I am talking about.

Americans have done a hell of a lot of horrible things, and continue to do a lot of horrible things. They – even if nothing else mattered –live so wastefully that if we all did the same, we would need six more Earths just to supply the resources. They do have a government, which they (by common perception) voted to power which is hell bent on turning the rest of the world into slaves. Granted.

But…

Take another look.

The average American is brainwashed systematically from birth to believe that his/her country is the greatest in the world, that the nation’s authority flows from “god”, that the country stands for “good”, that anyone opposing it must be therefore evil, that everyone loves America, and that since America is the centre of the universe nothing else is really worth knowing. The average American is carefully guided into these beliefs by being kept systematically ignorant, especially in these days of “intelligent design” and “teach the controversy”, of science and logical thinking; he or she is force fed TV trash till what is on TV becomes the perceived reality. A nation where museums can exist that posit that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, or where the Grand Canyon’s geological history is suppressed, cannot be considered a nation looking at modernity. A nation where the price of petrol (“gasoline”) becomes the benchmark of foreign policy success cannot be considered a modern society.

So when this American who has never been taught to think for himself, who has been force fed the notion of the infallibility of Genesis, who has been brainwashed into believing that his nation is the greatest on earth and is beloved of all except “evildoers”, is suddenly confronted with the truth, that is, that America is not the most loved nation in the world, but rather the most hated; that the rest of the world does not want to live as American vassals; and that US power is not universally applicable, and that not everyone thinks “god” made the world in six days and rested on the seventh, he is faced with a stupendous intellectual shock.

What then is easier but to delude this wretched individual into the belief that he does not see what he is seeing, but that this is all the result of a conspiracy by “liberals”, “faggots”, “commies” and other traitors? Especially when you control the media, and where these individuals have only the media as their window on the world?

Of course, this American is also likely to be a person of limited economic means, and therefore of limited access to independent information or education, and he is likely to be kept there in that economic bracket. He will be encouraged to buy on credit and not save at all; in his employment, he will be deprived of the right to form effective unions so that he can be kept under further control by not having economic security; and as far as his health is concerned, he will not be able to afford any real care without expensive and often unaffordable insurance. All this will go to keeping him exactly where he is.

He has democracy, sure – he has the right to vote for either the Republicans or the Democrats, between whom one would need an electron microscope to distinguish, and who follow exactly the same policies on virtually every issue one can name, even if they were voted to power to do the exact opposite. 

All this is not quite enough, so you also have warrantless arrests, the deliberate fomenting of fear and a siege mentality, the poisonous military industrial complex, the USA Patriot Act and  similar legislation, all designed to keep the population – including our putative American - in a state of permanent and voluntary subjugation.

Does this American, therefore, look like a monster any more? Doesn’t he begin to look like just another victim?

What amazes me, frankly, is that this American, despite all that is going against him, can’t be kept down. You can do your worst, but the American still can’t be fooled all of the time.

When the US dropped more bombs on the inoffensive neutral nation of Cambodia than were dropped in all of World War II and napalmed Vietnamese villages, who stormed the streets with slogans like “Hey Hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

Americans.

When the US was actively planning the invasion of Iraq, which everyone outside the US knew had neither WMDs nor links to Al Qaeda, who – despite it being “unpatriotic” then – came on the streets in their hundreds of thousands to protest the planned invasion even before it happened?

Americans.

Just, as a piece of perspective for Indians – can you imagine any of us marching on the streets to protest an Indian invasion of Sri Lanka, for example, as actually happened in 1987?       

Who risked their careers, when they did not have to, to protest the mass murders of Iraqi and Afghan civilians? Who are the Dixie Chicks, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn? Who are Cindy Sheehan, Eric Blumrich, or our very own Malcolm Mills? 

Americans.

Can you, my fellow Indians, imagine Amitabh Bacchhan or Lata Mangeshkar protesting the murder of Kashmiri civilians by Indian troops?

Who was it that insisted on the individual’s right to oppose governments, even governments at war, and went to jail rather than pay taxes that would go to support an illegal war? Henry David Thoreau, in my own opinion one of the greatest philosophers since Socrates, and he was an American, too.

And another question – yes, the American government and its corporate cronies are vile beyond comprehension. Yes, they would be glad to batten upon us and suck us dry. Yes, they think they own the world. But can they actually, by themselves, impose their will on all of us?

Who the hell do these murderous parasites work through? Isn’t it our own governments, our own “leaders”, who follow their orders and let them in through the door? When farmers commit mass suicide and Manmohan Singh (who came to power promising an independent foreign policy and left of centre economics) parrots economic policies written down for him by the World Bank, when he betrays our old friend Iran by voting – not once by twice – against it in the IAEA in order to please Washington, when he throws our ports and air space open to American military units, what price anti-Americanism? Why don’t we rise up, pull this Quisling out of his office and hang him by his own intestines from the lamp-posts? Until we destroy the compradors and fifth columnists among us, do we have a right to blame it all on Washington?

Of course it’s easy to do that. Blame the Americans. It’s easy to do for the same reason that it’s easy for the Bushies to claim that anyone who hates the US does that because he “hates their freedoms”.

Ignorance and chauvinism make the worst of all combinations.   

After all the posing in uniform and the histrionics and the threats to resign his commission if not sent to Iraq, Herr Junior Fuehrer won't be going there after all. He won't even be resigning.

Now isn't that just fine, seeing that the situation in Basra has never been better, which is why the Brits are beginning to withdraw troops (or so Bush said). Maybe there was no fighting for Harry to do, and he seems certainly extraordinarily keen to shed Iraqi blood.

Or maybe they decided a Spare in the trunk is better than one in pieces.

I wonder if this guy is driven to prove that he's not a wimp, coming as he does from one of the world's most useless families? Or is it the von Battenberg blood showing through?

Knowing that they'll never have to fight, why do all these guys go through military training at all? Cachet? 

Pity, though. Despite the media blitz that would've followed, I'd have really enjoyed this little nazi being blown in half on his first day in country. Like the people here, I wonder what the impact would have been.

Incidentally, this morning on CNN I was watching a Marine Corps unit in "action" in Iraq. There was the usual incestuous, I mean embedded, journalist along, dressed like them in flak vest and Kevlar helmet, looking significantly into the camera as he did his thing about the glorious mission, OK, about the anti-terror mission, glorious missions have been abandoned since about late 2003. In the background were some Iraqi troops in blue uniforms, not a flak vest in sight, with berets on their heads. The allies who are supposed to "stand up."

When they break down doors and storm into houses where an armed fighter might be crouching, AK 47 at the ready, who goes in first, the armoured Marine or the virtually defenceless Iraqi?

I wonder!  

I guess I should be incensed.

I should be incensed that someone like Robert Mugabe is destroying his country, its resources, its economy, its reputation, with inflation running at 2200% (reputedly) and people flocking abroad by any means possible. I should be incensed that Mugabe is going to chair the UN Commission for Sustainable Development, when he is an "international pariah" or at least ought to be.

I guess I should be incensed at the audacity of a man who beats up his political opponents and imprisons them on the flimsiest of pretexts, is now a figurehead for African resistance to the West. That this is the man of whose country President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa (that same South Africa whose apartheid regime was such a paragon of democratic anti-communistic capitalism to Reagan and Thatcher), said

"The fight against Zimbabwe is a fight against us all. Today it is Zimbabwe; tomorrow it will be South Africa, it will be Mozambique, it will be Angola, it will be any other African country. And any government that is perceived to be strong and to be resistant to imperialists would be made a target and would be undermined. So let us not allow any point of weakness in the solidarity of SADC, because that weakness will also be transferred to the rest of Africa."

Or perhaps I am not so incensed at all.

Just look at who's lined up against Mugabe. The Bush regime - that same Bush regime which ignores its own peoples' wishes on Iraq and pretty much everything else, which has mishandled and destroyed everything it touched, domestically and internationally. The Bush regime's poodle Tony Blair, whose signal contribution to English has been the term "sexing-up" and whose only desire seems to be to grovel at the feet of the king. Australia, whose prime minister John Howard's publicly stated goal is to make his nation "America's agent in the Asia Pacific" and who opposed sporting sanctions against South Africa in the Apartheid period, yet wants them imposed against Zimbabwe now.

Remember what these worthies said about Saddam Hussein, and what they did - and are doing - to Iraq?

I do admit Mugabe is a dictator. I admit that he's doing everything he can to cling on to power, including manipulating the media and controlling the verdict of elections. But, uh, didn't we see someone else doing those exact things to stay in power? Now who could that be?

All right, sarcasm apart, just why is the West going such hammer and tongs at Mugabe, given that Zimbabwe isn't exactly the  most resource rich country in Africa, nor yet the most dictatorial (why don't they check the Moroccan occupation regime in the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, or the Meles Zenawi regime in Ethiopia, for example?). I mean, even if Zimbabwe suddenly returned to democratic ideals (whatever those might be) and cast iron market capitalism tomorrow, it still won't be a gigantic market for Western goods, would it? And as for talk about the West supporting freedom...spare me.

The answer, I think, isn't all that difficult to find. And it lies in the core idea of racism and the hangover of the imperial past.

When the white settlers arrived in Africa, they found in the wide grasslands of Southern and Eastern Africa good farmland. The problem was, if you had farmland you needed men to work it, most so in that age before farm machinery. And the locals were quite comfortably settled on their own little farms. So, what do you do?

The solution was found in what became the conscious and forcible alienation of land from the African tribal, so he was quite literally rendered landless in order to force him to labour for the white settler. Much of the time the newly landless labourer found himself working for the white master on land which would have been his own under normal circumstances. And in order to tie the African to that land, two other things were done.

First, the white settler took over much more land than he needed or could possibly ever use. The idea was to reduce as far as possible the land available to the black tribal to force him to work for the white settler for survival. Again, I repeat, this was a deliberate policy, part of a package that imposed high taxes, prohibited blacks from owning media outlets, and promoted Christianity as the sole means of gaining affordable education. Worldwide, missionary Christianity has virtually always been a tool of imperialism.

Secondly, the black labourer was issued with a pass, called kipande in Kenya, which was a

registration certificate recording work periods, wages, comments by employers, and other employment-related matters; from 1920, all adult males were required to carry the kipande under penalty of heavy fines - Sicherman (1990).   

The kipande, and its Southern African equivalents, was a virtual certificate of slavery. The black could not even spend a night off his farm, or go and visit a friend, without written permission from his employer on his kipande. If he wanted an education for his children, he had to get them baptised so they could attend missionary schools - such as they were. He could not work for himself. He had nothing. He could aspire to nothing.

So, what did this produce?

In time, it created a country of massive landholdings, mostly under- or un-utilised, run by a tiny number of white farmers, with an underclass of black slave labour - slave labour in all but name. This happened in Kenya and led to the Mau Mau revolt of the Kikuyu people. It happened in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia, after the imperialist warmonger and mass looter Cecil Rhodes) and led to the liberation war against the British and then against the Ian Smith apartheid regime.

Then, Zimbabwe's freedom came. And what happened?

Although the revolutionary black government was in power, most of the country was still in the hands of a small minority of white farmers and the blacks still had little or nothing to show in terms of regaining the lands that were theirs by ancestral right. Of course, with modern machinery, the white farmers could claim that they were hyper-efficient and running the country as the granary of  Southern Africa. But the blacks were in the same old hole as before.

Now please remember two things.

First, when you keep a people trodden down for centuries, and when they finally get the chance to stand up again, they get quite vocal about regaining their rights. This becomes especially true when they regain their rights as the result of a revolutionary movement. That movement has to deliver on its promises or stand accused of selling out. And, second, as I said here, nations that fight for their freedom tend to value them far more than countries which gain independence by default.   

For a long time, in fact, the Mugabe regime sold out the revolution. It didn't deliver on a key promise to the indigenous people - the reclamation of the lands occupied by the white farmers. And when it finally did, when politically it became suicidal to hold off on that promise any longer, it went about it in a totally ham-handed way, sending in an armed rabble to forcibly and violently take the land over. It was so crude that the farmers, who - let's remember - usurped that land from the actual owners, and reduced them to the status of slaves, came out as the victims and the target of sympathy in the eyes of the media. And - today - it's only the media that counts, in the manufacture of reality.

Again, let's remember that racism cuts both ways - nobody gave a damn so long as it was just Afghans killing each other, just as it was all right for Rwandans to massacre 800,000 of their own citizens and Somalians and Congolese to tear their country apart in endless civil wars. White and yellow lives count for much more in this world than black or brown. Just stating facts.

So, I think it finally comes down to this - so long as Mugabe remains in power, the black population of Zimbabwe is at least nominally empowered; while if the Western supported Morgan Tsvangirai were to come to power tomorrow, you can bet he would pay for his accession by restoring the farmlands to the white settlers - and more likely than not pay compensation.

As long as Mugabe remains in power, it can be claimed that the economic woes of Zimbabwe are the fault of his land reforms, which handed over land to incompetent and corrupt blacks, and not other causes (actually, Mugabe asked many of the white farmers to continue in charge of their farms, but as managers and not owners). Also, Mugabe said clearly that it was Britain, which alienated black land and handed it over to the white settlers, which should pay any compensation due - but that is another thing the British refused to so much as consider. Who wants to remember inconvenient historical fact, after all?

Again - I don't like Mugabe. I suspect nobody, really, does. But then nobody really liked Saddam Hussein either and he proved to have been the bulwark against the deluge, didn't he?

Regime change in Zimbabwe would certainly make the Bush cabal cream themselves. But would it actually make any positive difference to the people of Zimbabwe?

Look at Africa and see the worsening indices of human development, the rampant corruption, skyrocketing poverty - and all this in countries which are held up as models of freedom. Would a capitalist pro-Western Zimbabwe's people avoid that fate? 

Going by the experience of other nations where Bush has been at work, I think they'd rather not find out.