Hillary Clinton and tomato-inspired drivel

Maybe all it takes is a few tomatoes, rotten or otherwise, to get Hillary Clinton rattled out of her mind.  She was rattled enough to come out with some prize gaffes about democracy, desire, will, and about US foreign policy.

It was Clinton’s first visit to Egypt since the election of President Mohamed Mursi (reported as ‘Islamist President’, note, and we never hear any European leader getting a tag ‘Christianist’).  Protestors threw tomatoes and shoes at her motorcade.  No one was injured and that’s a good thing, especially since the stuff that the USA has been tossing around the world were far more potent that tomatoes.   

No one knows who the protestors were. What is known is that people outsider Clinton’s hotel had been chanting anti-Islamist slogans and accusing the USA of ‘backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power’.


Clinton has to say something: ‘I want to be clear that the United States is not in the business, in Egypt, of choosing winners and losers, even if we could, which of course we cannot’.  What rubbish!  The history of the United States of America is nothing if not the BUSINESS OF CHOOSING WINNERS AND LOSERS BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY! 


Here are some key phrases which, if tagged with ‘USA’, would yield enough material to keep you tickled for years: Assassinations and attempted assassinations of heads of states, military coups, overthrow of democratically elected governments, support of terrorists, support of armed groups, training of armed combatants.  Or, simply, you could look for ‘USA and Regime Change’, USA and Cuba (Grenada, Panama, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Congo, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Arab Spring…the list goes on).


I’m still grinning at that.  But there’s more to come. 


Clinton has to do a little Democracy Dance with a Secular Twist to keep the aggrieved and apprehensive Christians in Egypt at bay. This is what she tapped out:


"When we talk about supporting democracy, we mean real democracy.  To us real democracy means that every citizen has the right to live, work and worship as they choose, whether they are man or woman, Christian or Muslim. Real democracy means that no group or faction or leader can impose their will, their ideology, their religion (and) their desires on anyone else."

Wow!  I should say ‘WOW’, bold and in the 72-pt font equivalent to capture the utter bewilderment that reading this provoked in me.  It reminded me of an Amarasiri Peiris song ‘Snehaye Nagarayai’ (The City of Love’).  Well, ‘snehaya’ is somewhere between affection and love, and I can’t find the English equivalent.  The song goes like this: ‘Snehaye nagarayai sitha mage, maavathak ho novo raagaye’ (My mind is the Sneha City and in it there is not one single avenue of lust).  The female singer responds, ‘Vandanaave gihin enna aasai matath koi dese ethda me mok pure?’ (I would like to make a pilgrimage to this wonderful place but pray, tell me, where on earth is this city of bliss?).

An ideal type, folks, is a great platform from which you can preach (even if you don’t practice it). We’ve heard that word ‘democracy’ roll out of lying tongues so many times that the word sounds hollow and vulgar. 


Clinton is making an impassioned or tomato-inspired plea for secularism.  Will cannot be imposed. Ideology cannot be imposed. Religion cannot be imposed.  Desires cannot be imposed.  According to Hillary.  Here are some snippets, tidbits to munch on until the next tomato strike, perhaps.

WILL

When last did the USA NOT impose or tried to impose its will? The expansion of the United States was about imposition of will, with guns mind you.  In fact, the establishment of that country was about imposing will, i.e. the will to steal land and other resources, the will to subjugate native populations, the will to kill and the will to destroy traditions and coerce people to convert to ‘Christianity’.  If that’s too far back, take the Patriotic Act.  Take the protection of those responsible for the financial meltdown and the violence against protesting victims.  Take the treatment of African Americans and Hispanics.  That’s ‘will’, and let’s not even get to the whole business of helping tyrants into power, removing them when they refused to play ball and replacing them with more pliant tyrants.  That’s also ‘will’.

IDEOLOGY

What Hillary’s ideology?  Well, it has many strands obviously, but principally it is constitutionally sanctioned theft, aka capitalism.  Have the goon class that has been running the USA from Year Dot done anything apart from thrusting this ideology down the throats of others, citizens as well as those living in other countries?  Hillary is old enough to know what her ideological fellow-travelers did to Communists and those suspecting of being Communists.  She would have heard of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. 

RELIGION

‘Religion’, the biggest, mother-of-all bullshit story ever, according to George Carlin, is not to be ‘imposed’, Hillary insists.  Then why on earth is there a line saying ‘In God We Trust’ on each ill-earned dollar bill put out by the US Treasury?  Why celebrate Christmas?  When is Hillary going to give the Queen of England a piece of her mind for doing absolutely eff-all with regard to priests from the Church of England reserved seats in the House of Lords?  When is she going to tell France to revise its holidays so that Christians and their preferred holy days are not stuffed down the throats of non-Christians?  When is she going to Switzerland and give them hell for the fundamentalist anti-minaret referendum?  And how about dress codes, especially for Muslims in Europe? 

DESIRE

The less said about ‘stuffing desire down the throat’ the better.

Forget all this.  What on earth is Hillary doing in Egypt if not lecturing people about what’s right and wrong, and in the process, putting her contradiction-foot in her contradicting-mouth?  Even advocating ‘democracy’ and Hillary-Democracy is itself a matter of ‘imposing will’.  The USA is not a democracy, doesn’t Hillary not know? 

The lady says the USA is not interested in winners and losers.  Great.  Now can you get the whatever out of the Middle East, Ma’am?  If you are not interested in winners and losers in Syria, say, why in god’s name are you telling Russia and China to agree with you on who should lose?  Why did you back a certain horse in Afghanistan? 

Come on Hillary, something is stinking and it is making the smell of rotten tomatoes seem like something that came out of a top class perfumery. 

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The pathways from Democrazy to Ethnocrazy

It is fashionable at times to compare apples and oranges.  It is convenient to blur differences.  It is easy to use blanket terms.  For example, ‘The Arab Spring’, which implies that all Arab nations suffering political convulsions can be spoken of in one breath.  Egypt, however was not Libya and neither Saudi Arabia nor Bahrain will be allowed to be Egypt or Tunisia, let alone Libya. 

‘Libya’ was different because a degree of international approval for the NATO invasion was arm-twisted off the Arab League (which has since expressed misgivings), not to mention tacit approval by China and Russia.  Libya was different because of oil-wealth and a long history of being unbending to the will of Western thug nations.  Gaddafi didn’t do his case any good, sure, but then again, worse offenses have not provoked the same kind of invective backed by military invasion either.  The world is not fair, this we know. 

‘Libya’ has naturally invited comparisons with Sri Lanka.  Well, we don’t have oil; not yet anyway and even if we did, not in comparable quantity or quality.  Sri Lanka and Mahinda Rajapaksa are not exactly ‘unbending’ in the Gaddafiesque sense.  Neither does the tyrant-tyranny argument hold much water.  Still, when it is convenient truth can be fudged, realities manufactured and gonibillas conjured too. 

I read two comments which referred to Libya in the Midweek Review of the Island (August 31, 2011): Dayan Jayatilleka’s ‘Libyan lessons for Lanka’, and Fr. J.C. Pieris’ ‘Government lapses and the patriotic trap’.  Fr. Pieris’ chides Dr. Gunadasa Amarasekera for going easy on the lapses of the Government.  He faults Dr. Amarasekera for not going far enough with his regime criticism, pointing out that they ‘cannot be disregarded as inevitable irritants we must put up with for the sake of the country,’ i.e to stop it from being the next Iraq or Libya. 

To be fair, all those who spoke at the symposium where Dr. Amarasekera called for the defence of the President, Dr. Amarasekera included, have on numerous occasions leveled scathing criticism on the man and his government; i.e. all those associated with the particular organization, the Strategic Initiatives for the Protection of Sri Lanka.  In my short presentation at the said symposium, I did refer to issues of corruption, flaws in governance and so on (elaborated in an article titled ‘Offensives and counter offensives’, Sunday Island of August 28, 2011), for example, and that was certainly not a one-off footnote-like comment.

Fr. Peiris is right, however.  This regime knows that to the extent that it is seen as a bulwark against separatism and bullying in a country where the stronger sections of the ‘alternative’ are as compromised morally and worse, have shown themselves to be ideologically and politically as thick-as-thieves with separatism, it has the patriots in the kind of bind that Fr. Peiris describes.  If, for example, there’s any Libyanization attempt or some external attempt at illegal regime change, then for reasons or morality and the need to mitigate threats on sovereignty and territorial integrity, Mahinda Rajapaksa will not find support lacking from the nationalists.

On the other hand, as Fr. Peiris rightly says, ‘A patriot does not steal from his own disadvantaged brothers and sisters; a patriot does not waste national wealth; a patriot does not sell our land, our assets and our resources to foreigners; a patriot loves all the people of the country and is just and fair to all not nepotistic; a patriot establishes law and order in the country and lives according to it’.  It is incumbent on patriots to call for patriotism on all counts, and tell those who would conjure the threat of a Sri Lankan ‘Libya’ that warding off the devil calls for putting the house in order as a necessary prerequisite on all the counts Fr. Peiris has enumerated and others besides. 

Dayan Jayatilleka

Dayan is different.  He’s a beneficiary of regime largesse.  True, he was extremely effective as Permanent Representative at the UN in Geneva in warding off anti-Sri Lankan initiatives, but has nevertheless abused the office and the prestige of title to tout his own brand of separatism.  He does rant and rave about Tamil grievances and does champion the Chelvanayakam plan of ‘little now, more later’ by arguing for ‘resolutions’ that will in effect fix the boundaries conjured by Eelamist myth-making.  He does not rant and rave about regime flaw.  His sycophancy was quite evident in his multi-newspaper defense of his boss, G.L. Peiries at the time the latter was facing a vote of no-confidence in Parliament. 

What is most striking, however, about Dayan’s piece is that he deftly (yes, he’s good at this) throws in selective realism to inflate the threat, making the devil blacker than he/she is.  He argues ‘Libya’ was made possible by the approval obtained from the Arab League, Organization of the Islamic Conference, and Gulf Cooperation Council.  Now, are we to believe that had such approval been absent, ‘Libya’ would not have happened?  By-your-leave is not part of the culture of global thuggery, Dayan knows this.  Indeed, he knows enough world history to give his readers a lengthy list of these R2P-like operations without any such approval from regional groupings. 

So why does he bring all that into the story? Simple: India.  Sri Lanka must please India, is and has always been this political quack’s line, frilled of course with lots of Marxist mumbo-jumbo.  He contends that ‘de-stabilisation, hegemonic intervention and regime change are possible only if there is a breach in the wall of neighbourhood solidarity’ and warns, ‘already in the sub-region, comprising Sri Lanka’s ‘greater Northern’ neighbourhood, voices of redolent of ancient animosity are being raised’.  He doesn’t have to say ‘India’ any more.  The thesis is clear: surrender to India’s will and the President and the regime will be safe.

It’s not about regime or president, though. It is about sovereignty and territorial integrity with or without regime or president.  The man goes on to re-define patriotism as all those things that win support from the neighbourhood (only one neighbor counts here, India).  Fr. Peiris’ criteria for patriotism is not even footnoted.  Dayan sweeps it all away with a clean India-made, for-India broom. 

He lets it all out by claiming that there is an ‘imperative need for compromises and concessions on the secondary and the tactical, so that a strong protective ring can be reconstructed on our perimeter, i.e., our neighbourhood, thereby protecting that which is essential: Sri Lanka’s sovereignty, unity, territorial integrity and the gains of the historic military victory’.  In other words, we need to please India, and pleasing India means giving into Eelamist demands pertaining to devolution, not because it resolves any ‘grievances’ but because it is a ‘tactical imperative’.  We need to, according to Dayan, agree to a course of action that asserts a falsehood and affirm claim that cannot be substantiated in order to, marvel of marvels, ‘ensure sovereignty, unity, territorial integrity and gains of a historic military victory!’

So, we give up all that or pave the way for giving it all up and then pat ourselves on the back for having not given it all up?  The key word in his argument is ‘compromise’ and ‘concessions’.  This means, that we yield something that we should not because we believe it is wrong to give it up.  It is an admission that India is being grossly unfair and so too the Tamil chauvinists; that they don’t have a case, but that anyway, we will go along with the lie because that’s the only thing we can do to stop a Libyanization.  And to make it sweeter, we can have a celebration later for having secured ‘sovereignty’, ‘territorial integrity’ and keeping intact the gains of a historic military victory! 

Dayan says ‘the final analysis is closer than one thinks’ (Dayan’s fear-mongering has a long history) and that in this final analysis, the most durable defence (apart from groveling at India’s feet) is to repair ‘internal fragility’.  Now here he may have had a point if he was on Fr. Peiris’ page, which is far more real than that which Dayan offers, ‘discontent and disaffection of the minorities’.  He then drops some names of books and personalities (again, Classic Dayan), and says the way to go is ‘to replace or transform an ethnocracy into a modern democracy’, elaborating the latter as ‘a state in which belonging to a particular ethnic group ensures you of privileges over the other inhabitants of a country; in a democracy, all citizens, whatever their origin, language, religion or customs enjoy the same rights’.

Well, we already have that to the extent that territories containing multiple ethnicities are ‘democratic’ anywhere in the world.  Carving out one-third the land mass and offering two-thirds of the coast is not ‘democratizing’, it is pandering to land-theft and expansionist intentions of chauvinists.  If this is an ‘ethnocracy’, then what is Norway, Britain, the USA, France, Pakistan, India, Bangladhes, the Maldives, Indonesia and other countries where either ethnicity or religious faith is privileged in pernicious ways that are totally absent here in Sri Lanka?  What Dayan is offering is not ‘ethnocracy to democracy’ but ‘democrazy to ethnocrazy’.  Both don’t get the general public anywhere. 

What’s most amusing about his piece and why it contrasts so much with Fr. Peiris’ comment is that he asserts that nothing can be more patriotic than his proposition.  I’ve heard people say that patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel.  Well, looks like the scoundrel has named himself.  I believe Fr. Peiris’ piece helps undress Dayan and it came on the same section of the same edition of the same newspaper, which, tellingly carries the name ‘The Island’!  

Courtesy: The Nation - Sunday 4 September, 2011

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