V Knid esq
13th April 2002, 14:22
excuse this rant - I just spewed it out on another website in response to a load of ding-donging "Israel's evil!" "no, Arafat's evil!" "lalalalalala"... and just thought I'd bung it on here for a laugh.
OK, we can argue forever about whether Israel or Palestine are The Baddies... ultimately though, it's neither. Neither is it the devil in the White House. Once again what we have is a matter of Power vs The People. OK - the leaderships of the cliques and cabals within palestinian groups and the israeli govt are all rich fucks, we know this much, right? Most of them have plenty connections to the global military industrial complex - i.e. the big corporations and the military establishment (don't forget that the US and the Brits will train military discipline and discourse into anyone who can afford our schools, from Idi Amin upward) and international criminal syndicates (not to say that every leadership organisation is corrupt to the core, but any given group of rich/powerful men is 99.9% guaranteed to have at least one member who is in the pocket of organised crime, whether it's from drug debts, blackmail or just a taste for the dark side)... stop me if I'm wrong here... They're all on the same side - the side of control. The mullahs, the rabbis, the American govt, Osama Bin Laden, Vlad Putin - whether they consciously know it or not, they're not fighting for 'their peoples'. Their interests are all the same - maintain the status quo of controlled chaos, where rational observers will be scared to enter the hotspots, and thus potentially question the fact that a load of fat fucks are making a lot of $$$$$ out of the situation, while the poor hungry uneducated mongoes on the street and dumb grunts in uniform on all sides (and of course all of their families) take the pain...
It is the same in former Yugoslavia... someone I know - respected thinker and friend of the president of Slovenia - showed me a photo of the Bosnian Serb cabinet, and reeled off the connections of each member. Every single one had some role in the Russian mafia, Ukranian mafia, Czech mafia, Amsterdam drug trade, yadda yadda. They were very happy to keep the war ticking over for years (while their ground forces thought they were fighting toward some objective, 'Greater Serbia' or whatever), because they had the perfect Free Market (i.e. complete lawlessness) in which to sell the guns to cause the pain and the drugs to mask it. The Bosnian and Kosovan Muslim leaders mostly had connections to Afghanistan and the heroin trade, so it was again in their interest to keep the conflict going, as it created a perfect unmonitored bridge between asia and europe (90% of heroin in Europe now comes from Afghanistan via Kosovo). Russia was selling arms to the Serbs, we were selling arms to the Kosovans, everyone was making a profit and because it was a fairly primitive little country in the arse corner of Europe, there was not a lot of danger of it spilling out. If it had come close to threatening Greece or Austria or whatever, the west could have obliterated whichever side caused the problem in a matter of days, but there was never any risk of that because of all the vested interests of the power groups who were all happy to have a nice contained little war going on. The fact that it bled the land and people of the country die was an unfortunate side effect of course but fuck it - a guy's gotta make a living.
Of course, I'm not saying that there's a conspiracy - criminals, governments, corporations are all watching their own backs, are all suspicious of and in conflict with one another - it's just that a good deal of the time the interests of the heads of these organisations all lie in a similar direction.
See James Ellroy's American Tabloid for a fantastic take on the shared and conflicting interests of the Mafia, CIA, FBI etc in the Bay Of Pigs invasion.
I don't want this to just be a paranoid (but correct) rant, I'd love to be constructive, but sometimes I wonder if this isn't just the way the world is wired. My Mother is a Quaker. The Quakers are one of the few groups that will never take sides, but 'speak truth to power' - point out inequality and exploitation wherever they see it. They are a big part of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade. One day soon, when my mind is not just on beer and stupid music, I might sign over some of my miniscule income to the CAAT. Some of my Quaker friends are in Palestinian cities now, acting as observers, trying to find the truth that the media is too busy protecting their own arses to even look for. But is anyone listening?
Fuck knows what I'm saying... maybe just that arguing is pointless unless you have some clue about how to take action or at least how to support those who are taking action.
OK, we can argue forever about whether Israel or Palestine are The Baddies... ultimately though, it's neither. Neither is it the devil in the White House. Once again what we have is a matter of Power vs The People. OK - the leaderships of the cliques and cabals within palestinian groups and the israeli govt are all rich fucks, we know this much, right? Most of them have plenty connections to the global military industrial complex - i.e. the big corporations and the military establishment (don't forget that the US and the Brits will train military discipline and discourse into anyone who can afford our schools, from Idi Amin upward) and international criminal syndicates (not to say that every leadership organisation is corrupt to the core, but any given group of rich/powerful men is 99.9% guaranteed to have at least one member who is in the pocket of organised crime, whether it's from drug debts, blackmail or just a taste for the dark side)... stop me if I'm wrong here... They're all on the same side - the side of control. The mullahs, the rabbis, the American govt, Osama Bin Laden, Vlad Putin - whether they consciously know it or not, they're not fighting for 'their peoples'. Their interests are all the same - maintain the status quo of controlled chaos, where rational observers will be scared to enter the hotspots, and thus potentially question the fact that a load of fat fucks are making a lot of $$$$$ out of the situation, while the poor hungry uneducated mongoes on the street and dumb grunts in uniform on all sides (and of course all of their families) take the pain...
It is the same in former Yugoslavia... someone I know - respected thinker and friend of the president of Slovenia - showed me a photo of the Bosnian Serb cabinet, and reeled off the connections of each member. Every single one had some role in the Russian mafia, Ukranian mafia, Czech mafia, Amsterdam drug trade, yadda yadda. They were very happy to keep the war ticking over for years (while their ground forces thought they were fighting toward some objective, 'Greater Serbia' or whatever), because they had the perfect Free Market (i.e. complete lawlessness) in which to sell the guns to cause the pain and the drugs to mask it. The Bosnian and Kosovan Muslim leaders mostly had connections to Afghanistan and the heroin trade, so it was again in their interest to keep the conflict going, as it created a perfect unmonitored bridge between asia and europe (90% of heroin in Europe now comes from Afghanistan via Kosovo). Russia was selling arms to the Serbs, we were selling arms to the Kosovans, everyone was making a profit and because it was a fairly primitive little country in the arse corner of Europe, there was not a lot of danger of it spilling out. If it had come close to threatening Greece or Austria or whatever, the west could have obliterated whichever side caused the problem in a matter of days, but there was never any risk of that because of all the vested interests of the power groups who were all happy to have a nice contained little war going on. The fact that it bled the land and people of the country die was an unfortunate side effect of course but fuck it - a guy's gotta make a living.
Of course, I'm not saying that there's a conspiracy - criminals, governments, corporations are all watching their own backs, are all suspicious of and in conflict with one another - it's just that a good deal of the time the interests of the heads of these organisations all lie in a similar direction.
See James Ellroy's American Tabloid for a fantastic take on the shared and conflicting interests of the Mafia, CIA, FBI etc in the Bay Of Pigs invasion.
I don't want this to just be a paranoid (but correct) rant, I'd love to be constructive, but sometimes I wonder if this isn't just the way the world is wired. My Mother is a Quaker. The Quakers are one of the few groups that will never take sides, but 'speak truth to power' - point out inequality and exploitation wherever they see it. They are a big part of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade. One day soon, when my mind is not just on beer and stupid music, I might sign over some of my miniscule income to the CAAT. Some of my Quaker friends are in Palestinian cities now, acting as observers, trying to find the truth that the media is too busy protecting their own arses to even look for. But is anyone listening?
Fuck knows what I'm saying... maybe just that arguing is pointless unless you have some clue about how to take action or at least how to support those who are taking action.