We’re only just about halfway through the year, and 2004 is already looking like a disaster zone — but a disaster zone with ferocious gums, rather than with real teeth.
There could be no worse indictment of our worldwide political inertia than the tedious, ongoing American-sponsored invasion of Iraq. People die, are tortured. Wedding parties get blown to bits by airborne missiles that rely on digital data rather than real eye contact to decide what is actually going on on the ground. Chaos reigns, but the leaders of the Free World blithely continue to state that everything is under control.
It’s their version of control, of course. And that is what is particularly worrying.
Not only are things visibly out of order. Not only is the invincible American army and its British, Australian, Japanese, Polish and other duped surrogates bogged down in a meaningless war against people they don’t understand. The leaders of these countries, from the safe distance of their respective capitals, are telling the world that everything is just tickety-boo, as we used to say in the days when real wars were fought by real men.
”We’ve been caught out torturing, raping and abusing Iraqi prisoners in an Iraqi jail?” says the boss-eyed Bush. ”Hell, just to prove we didn’t really mean it, we’ll tear down the jail.” End of story. And the world packages it, reports it and buys it wholesale. The Masters of the Universe stride on about their business.
In less than 30 days from now a new regime will be installed in Baghdad. No one is even suggesting that the people of Iraq themselves will be behind this process. The Iraqis have been told that that is the timetable, and they had better make do with it.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Iraqis, led by a bunch of supposedly mad mullahs, continue to bog down the coalition forces with lethal attacks to the north, east, west and south of the country.
Let’s face it, things were not nearly as bad as this under the raging rule of Saddam. But nobody dares say this. Nobody dares say why there is a permanent state of war, starvation, backwardness and misery in a country that used to have one of the highest rates of literacy and nutritional self-sufficiency on the planet.
It’s all just bombs and Blah-Blah Blair nowadays. Nobody says a word.
Elsewhere in the region, the Israeli government proceeds with its genocidal policies against the Arabs of Palestine, also without a significant murmur or protest from the world at large. This is simply how it is. Helicopter rocket ships soften up targets in Gaza and are then followed in by tanks and various forms of armour to turn women, children and men into bloody pulp.
They then say they are withdrawing from a few key sections of the occupied territory for humanitarian reasons. The right-wing, fascist Israeli lobby gets up in arms, prompting further incursions into the occupied territories, and suicide bombings in Israel in response. More blood, guts and pulp all over the place. More beating of breasts. More helicopter gunships over Rafah refugee camp. More waste of time.
We are numb to all these images on our television screens. The BBC shows another burial party of thousands of people carrying an uncoffined corpse through the streets of Gaza to be buried in an unspecified grave. Victim of another Israeli rocket attack. The cries of anguish and personal grief are just more wallpaper, a dumbed-down soundtrack to an ongoing, gratuitously prosperous world that has nothing more to worry about than a couple of cents’ rise in the price of petrol, and whether or not Britney Spears’s bum has been genetically modified, and will make it to the Grammys in one piece.
There used to be a sense of moral outrage at stuff. Call it Vietnam. Call it the Cold War. Call it the Congo, and the humiliation and final mortal torture of Patrice Lumumba.
There used to be, at least somewhere in the wings, a sense of a moral bottom line. There used to be a political process that led to the arrival on the scene of a truly working-class-oriented Labour Party under Harold Wilson in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, and a dawn of what they called the New Deal in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s.
There was also the Kennedy Camelot, the era of beautiful people emerging into the stuffy, conservative, history-laden walls of the White House in the early 1960s, and all the things that it promised, along with flower power and the student revolt that was spreading across the civilised world. (Although Vietnam and the consolidation of the Cold War were a product of the same, seemingly liberal, administrations.)
What we are seeing today are grey men (and their grey wives) with nothing to offer to the world but death, destruction, and a supposedly holy book that has long become outdated. What we are hearing is no sense of apology in their voices for the ugly deeds that they are engaged in.
There is no balancing voice of reason to challenge the arrogant progress of the unattractive Bush and Blair axis. There is not even a voice that says to us that they are unattractive. They are what they are, and the hell with beauty and attractiveness. Bomb the beautiful people back into the Stone Age. ‘Cos they are in the way. They are standing in the way of the grey age.
It is tragic that we have lived all this way to come, as we thought, into an age of liberation, only to find that the cold, colonial hand of death and mediocrity still hangs over us.
But that’s how it is. And that’s how we have to define how we step, brazenly or cautiously, into the future.