When the stresses of life as a headboy and the pressures of politcal service in norn iron become too much, the idea of retreating to an exotic place, to get away from it all, can be quite tempting. The high and the mighty of Brit society, have apparently been using tropical islands, as a place for mini breaks and dirty weekends for quite some time now, while the poor commoners who pay taxes to finance them, can hardy afford their obligatory Broadcasting Licence, who then proceed to censor all news about their unsavory activities of their privilged masters, under the cover of Britain's archaic 'Official Secrets Act'.
In this particular case, some 91 full-colour photos, support allegations by decent local people, that the top Monk of Wat Na engaged in fornication with a born again virgin, who is part of an organization, affectionately known in Ireland, as the 'Pig Sucklers of Norn Iron'. The incident also involved two dogs and three 'ladyboys'.
Senior monks from the Governing Board, after examining the photos, announced they were real and pleaded with the press to “beware of publishing them and casting Buddhism in a bad light,” which is a criminal matter under Thai law. Meanwhile the BBC has censored all coverage of the matter, shielding its mainly Christian commoner audience from the rich and powerful.
The head of the country’s Mental Health Department has also warned against publication of the photos, saying they were evidence of mental illness in foreign police forces and could have evil effects on children incapable of interpreting them properly. This has prompted leading psychiatrists to label the head of the country’s Mental Health Department as insane, because they argue, there is simply no proper way what so ever, fro anyone in their right mind to interpret the pictures of utter depraved debauchery.
Investigators have also discovered that these overseas snap visits by British officials from Belfast and Derry, have been happening for quite some time and that on nights when there are no "ladyboys to come sleep with him, he has sex with the dogs". One was a “fluffy-haired” white dog, and the other a white male dog as per BNP regulations.
This particular high profile defendant, who denied he was a 'baggot'(see Urban Dictionary), claimed he was attending an Asian Martial Arts course on the island of Phuket, claiming he was robbed of hundreds of thousands of pounds after entrapment by a ladyboy he met, in the notorious Bangla adult entertainment complex.
The high profile defendant, using an alias and again denying he was a baggot(see Urban Dictionary) told police he checked into a hotel in the Bangtao area and went looking for some non-alcoholic drinking company, like his friend Martin does occasionally. He said he made some new ‘female’ acquaintances and took one of them back to his hotel room, for Evangelical Bible lessons and to teach her about some missionary positions which his friend Martin had informed him about. He poured two non-alcoholic shandys with his right hand and left the room briefly, to talk to his friend Martin on the phone in his left hand about the missionary position.
When he returned, Mr Alias and his ‘girlfriend’ drank more non-alcoholic shandies, at which point he started to feel sleepy. The next thing he knew, it was 2pm the following day and his companion had vanished, along with all his valuables and he was looking at these 91 incriminating photos put in front of him by the police. Mr Alias told police the ‘woman’ had stolen 50,000 pound sterling and a gold ring that Martin gave to him, along with a gold wrist watch, a digital camera, and a digital voice recorder worth a combined total of more than 300,000 pounds sterling, which fortunately were insured.
A local Police Commander said, that the original bait as Mr Alias claimed, had been identified as a 21-year-old ladyboy clalled Pong Suk. Mr Alias claimed he had no idea his ‘lady friend’ was actually a man. He claims that Mr Pong Suk slipped tranquillizers into his shandy before stealing his valuables. Mr Pong Suk however claims that he was approached originally by a very "feely' Mr ..ahem..Alias who was still denying he was baggot.
An arrest warrant has been issued for Mr Pong Suk and after Mr Alias made a suitable anonymous donation to a local charity, he was released with a caution, after a phone call from a high ranking politician at Stormont. Mr Alias is believed to be the second high-profile foreign Brit victim to be drugged and robbed by a ladyboy in less than a month.
Last month, a recently recruited Unionist high profile politician reportedly lost a laptop, belonging to the Department of Defence after being drugged and robbed by another ladyboy he met in a go-go bar. It is not known what steps the British government and Martin McGuinness have taken to stop these security breaches by undercover ladyboys.
Meanwhile a leading online republican publication in Ireland, called The Rebel's Yell has been accused of discrimination against dissident protestants, with a recent article targeting Kung-Fu legend David Carradine who was also found in a compromising position in Siam, unfortunately in this instance dead. The article which is believed to have targeted David simply on the basis of his role in the film Kill Bill.
In an interview Gail Jensen, Carradine's third ex-wife, said he enjoyed tying himself up at their California ranch and experimented with drowning himself in their pool. "He had his kinky moments," said Jensen, who was married to Carradine from 1986 to 1997. She added that the late actor like Mr Alias saw the sex acts as a form of meditation and stress release. Jensen also revealed that Carradine "would tie himself up, and I would walk in and see him and say, 'Oh, my God, David, you've got to be kidding me,'" in a totally born again manner.
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.
Baby Fried by White Phosphorous.
Documented War Crime of the Geneva Convention
Please if you are a parent or care about innocent babies or justice, be an ethical shopper and boycott, War Criminals.
Ireland was and still is Britain's first colony. They proceeded to create and sow the same divisions as they practiced in Ireland, in successive countries all over the world, on religious and racial grounds,etc., so that their small country, could rule in the midst of their state sponsored violence,chaos and confusion. They have proceeded to teach Americans how to do the same in their former ex-colonies, where they left behind compliant administrations of neo-colonialists after the American dominance of the Suez crisis.
The British used what they learned in Ireland, to rule, torture and divide the middle-east, creating the UK/US axis and enable Zionism, which is another form of Facism, as their proxy for wars of armnaments and oil profits principally in the Middle-east. The innocent victims of all of this are now approximately the same as the victime of the holocaust by Hitler in Europe.
Their corporate media and the BBC bombard every home worldwide daily, with brainfilthing propaganda and censorship, to have you believe that their WAR CRIMES are Kosher, that their state terrorism and Nazi style genocide, are your form of 'security" and justification against the violence they themselves created.
The UK/US media peyops on their own populations, include calling their own WAR CRIMINALS, "securiiy forces" in Ireland and "IDF" "Israeli Defence Forces" in occupied Palestine. Their "Reichsministers of Propaganda", would have the whole world believe that their WAR CRIMES are Kosher or Halal, while freedom fighters who fight with their naked bodies are labelled terrorists.
Any sane person who is aware of the TRUTH, wants this to stop, these eternal wars are truly INSANE and EVIL(LIVE spelled backwards). Peace will only be possible with justice and freedom from oppression and occupation. There are many brave Jewish and English people who have worked tirelessly and bravely against great odds to stop all of this. They deserve the support of all HUMANITY.
Please support the Palestinian and Irish people.
DO NOT BUY INTO THE DAILY CORPORATE MEDIA LIES, INVESTIGATE THE TRUTH, DECIDE FOR YOURSELF and then please PEACEFULLY BOYCOTT THE REAL TERRORISTS, WAR CRIMINALS AND THEIR ENABLERS.
Go Raibh Maith agait.
The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil], is for good men(women) to do nothing.’
"As I came round the bend of the road, an extraordinary spectacle was presented to me. About a hundred yards away, on the left-hand side, was a house which astonished me. It looked as if it was painted like an advertisement on a board on the roadside and indeed very poorly painted. It looked completely false and unconvincing. It did not seem to have any depth or breadth and looked like it would not deceive a child. That was not in itself sufficient to surprise me because I had seen pictures and notices by the roadside before. What bewildered me was the sure knowledge deeply-rooted in my mind, that there were people inside it. I had no doubt at all that it was the barracks of the policeman. I had never seen anything with my eyes ever in my life before anything so unnatural and appalling and my gaze faltered about the thing uncomprehendingly as if at least one of the customary dimensions was missing, leaving no meaning in the remainder…
I kept on walking, but walked more slowly. As I approached, the house seemed to change its appearance. At first, it did nothing to reconcile itself with the shape of an ordinary house but it became uncertain in outline like a thing glimpsed under ruffled water. Then it became clear again and I saw that it began to have some back to it, some small space for rooms behind the frontage. I gathered this from the fact that I seemed to see the front and the back of the ‘building’ simultaneously from my position approaching what should have been the side. As there was no side that I could see I thought the house must be triangular with its apex pointing towards me but when I was only fifteen yards away I saw a small window apparently facing me and I knew from that that there must be some side to it. then I found myself almost in the shadow of the structure, dry-throated and timorous from wonder and anxiety. It seemed ordinary enough at close quarters except that it was very white and still. It was momentous and frightening: the whole morning and the whole world seemed to have no purpose at all save to frame it and give it some magnitude and position so that I could find it with my simple senses and pretend to myself that I understood it. A constabulary crest above the door told me it was a police station. I had never seen a police station like it."
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
There's a bad smell in thon barracks, all over norn iron…the pigs…the coming of Baggot…t…Marteen's plan…we are saved …the....There was always a bad smell in the barracks in the bhogside. Passers-by neither stopped nor even walked when in its vicinity but raced past its entry and never ceased, until they were half a mile from the bad smell. There was a house two hundred yards down the road from it and the smell was that bad, that the people there cleared out, went to Amerikay and never came back.
Police at the barracks were guilty of this stench. You see there was a born again virgin sow there, which was possessed. She had numerous teats. There was none for one wee one though, when the piglets were suckling for their nourishment from her, altogether as always. Marteen was a shy one in the beginning and when hunger struck the piglets, all at the same time, he was left with nothing at all. Unfortunately God's every creature possesses its own smell and this pig's inherited aroma was rotten.
When Marteen was little, he had a little smell. When his size increased, his smell grew accordingly. When he was big, the smell was likewise big. At first, the situation was not too bad hroughout the day, because they left all the windows open, the door unshut and great gales of wind swept through the barracks. But when darkness fell and the sow came in with the piglets to sleep, that indeed was the situation which defies both oral and written description.
Well you see, the sow with all the teats became a born again virgin but the smell stayed all the same. In the middle of the night it still seemsed the piglet suckers of norn iron(PSNI, abb.,) would never see the morning alive. Some of them often still went outside to walk ten miles in the rain, trying to escape from the stench, you see for their safety, they slept in their barracks at night for fear of the wrath of the dissident protestant population. The barrack dogs even refused to come in at night and were found every morning drenched and wet, there was hardly a night without a downpour in bhogside. Their dogs however as a result of interaction with the occasional local street bitches and mongrels, were in good humour, despite all they suffered from the inclemency of the weather. Strangely enough, as a result of some baggot training from their english master, they were never hungry in the morning.
Anyway, matters continued like this for a little while at the Bhogside PSNI barracks, while Marteen was swelling rapidly and the local Sergeant said that shortly, he would be fat enough to be out on parole with the other fat pigs. He was the Sergeant's baggot pet and that is why they could not drive out this unfragrant pig from the barracks by cudgeling, although their health was failing due to the putrid stench.
One morning the PSNI noticed suddenly that Marteen, all in one night it seemed, had increased to a fearful size. He was as tall as the sergeant but much wider. His belly reached the ground and his flanks were so swollen that they would frighten even the most loyal of commoners. The Sergeant was putting down a large pot of potatoes for the pig's dinner, when he too noticed that all was neither good nor natural. 'pon me soul! Said he, this one here is about to burst! When he scrutinized Marteen sharply, it was clear that the poor craythur was almost fully cylindrical, although only last night he appeared sausage-like to the sergeant.. Whether it was due to over-eating or over sucking of the artificially created teat the sergeant regularly gave him or some other foul disease struck him, nobody was sure.. The smell was now almost insufferable for all at the barracks and especially the one PSNI sowlet fainted at the end of the barracks, her health failed due to the stench.
If this pig is not put out of the barracks at once, said she from the bed at the end of the barracks, I'll set the barracks on fire and blame the protestant dissidents for it, that will put an end to the hard life in this barracks of ours and even if we finish up later in hell, at least that roasted pig would smell better ! Hell ! we can't as it is even go home to our families at night, with so many of them dissident protetsants from both sides waiting for us.
The sergeant was puffing at his peace pipe strenuously, in an attempt to fill the barracks with smoke, as a defence against the stench and the sight of Marteen. He replied to her, Woman he said ! the poor craythur is sick and I'm slow to push him out and he without his health or a friend left in the Bhogside. 'Tis true right enough, that this stench is beyond belief but don't you see that the pig himself is making no complaint, although he has a snout on him just like yourself there.
He’s dumb from his own stench, she said.
If that's the way it is, said she to the sergeant, I'll put rushes in flames in the barracks! The two of them continued bickering with one another for a long while but at last the sergeant agreed to eject Marteen. He went forward plamasing the pig to the door with whistling, nonsensical bullscutter and pet-words but Marteen stayed as he was, unmoved. It must have been that the pig's senses were deadened by the smell and that he failed to hear what the sergeant had to say. At any rate, the sergeant took down a shillelagh and drove the pig to the door, lifting him, bating him and poking him with his weapon. When he reached the door it appeared that Marteen had become too fat, to go out between the jams.
'pon me soul! said the sergeant, but the poor craythur is too well-fed and the door is too narrow, although there is room in it for an elephant.
If that's the way of it said the PSNI born again sowlet from the bed, then 'tis the way and 'tis hard to get away from what's going to happen us.
Her voice was weak and low and 'twas certain she was now willing to bow to her fate, to the rottenness of the pig, and to face hell. Suddenly a smothering fire arose in the end of the barracks, with the PSNI burning their own place. Back went the sergent in a jump, threw a couple of ould sacks on the smoke and bate them with a big baseball bat sent from Amerkay, until the fire was quenched. He then bate his subordinate sowlet and gave her the benefit of his advice while doing so.
God bless us and save us! There was never such a hard a life as that which Marteen gave them for a fortnight after that. There's no describing the smell in the barracks. The pig was doubtlessly ill and vapour arose from him, reminiscent of a corpse above ground for a month. The Bhogside barracks was rotten and putrid from top to bottom. During that time the virgin sowlet was at the end of the barrracks unable to stand or speak. At the end of the fortnight, she said goodbye quietly and feebly and set her face towards eternity.
The sergeant was smoking his peace pipe as energetically as ever during the night, as a shield against the stench. He leapt up and dragged the sick sowlet out to the road, saving her from death although both of them were drenched to the skin. The following day all the beds of the barracks were put out by the road in the Bhogside and the sergeant said that there they would remain, because said he, it is better to be without barracks or life, even if they were drowned in the norn iron rain at night or burned by the dissident protestants, that death itself was better than the hell within a PSNI barracks.
Adam O'Geriatric happened to be going along the road, on his way from Belfast next morning, when he saw the unfragrant pigs beds outside, beneath the sky, beside the deserted barracks, he stopped and struck up a conversation with the sergeant.
'Tis true that I don't understand life said he and the reason that the beds are outside, but look at the barracks on fire! , he said.
The sergeant's glazed eyes fixated on his barracks while he shook his head.
That's not a fire, said he, but a dirty big rotten pig left in our barracks by the name of Marteen. That's not smoke that's drifting from the barracks, as ye think Adam, thats pig-steam.
That steam is not pleasing to me at all, a tall, said Adam, I'm ashamed of it.
There's no health in it, right enough ! replied the sergeant.
Adam meditated on it for a while he too sucked a peace pipe.
It must be the way of it, said he, that this particular pig of yours is a pet, otherwise you would have cut his throat long ago and buried him?
'Tis true, tis true right enough for you, Adam, said he.
If that’s the way, said Adam, I'll give ye help!
He went up on the roof of the barracks and put scraws of dry grass in the chimney-opening. He closed the doors and blocked the windows with pig excrement and discarded jam rags from the born again virgins of the RUC, to keep air from going in or out.
Now, said he, ye must stop squealing for an hour.
'pon me soul, said the sergeant, I don't understand your work but it's a wonderful world that's there today and if you're pleased with what your at, I won't go against you.
After an hour, Adam O'Geriatric opened the door and they all went in except the born again virgin sowlet, who was still weak and feeble on her damp bed. Marteen was stretched out cold and dead, on the hearth-stone. He died of his own stench and a black cloud of smoke wafted from him and almost smothered everyone. The sergeant was very upset but gave heartfelt thanks to Adam and ceased puffing his peace pipe for the first time in years. Marteen was buried in an honourable and becoming manner for any pig. Everything was all right once more in the Bhogside. The sick sowlet died from her ill-health and was once more energetic, boiling large pots of potatoes for the other pigs, who were all enjoying the perfume of roasted pork in their new location.
Marteen was an odd sort of a pig and I do not think his like will be smelt again. Good luck to him if he's alive in another world today!
The newly appointed Brit headboy of the British police in the north of Ireland is Martin McGuinness's mate, Matt Baggot. He went to Dublin last week to speak at a press conference to criminalize republicans who will not take the Queen's shilling to become thugs, to enforce British law in Ireland.
Baggott, speaking in Dublin said of the "PROTESTANT" liberation movement.
"I think it's very helpful to see it as a criminal enterprise," he said.
Maybe Flann O'Brien from Strabane when he wrote "The Third Polceman" had a premonition of the arrival and statements of the illegal Brit headboy, when he wrote the following;
"Because a man can have more disease and germination in his gob than you'll find in a rat's arse,"
--------------
One of Ireland's best known dissidents was Bobby Sands, whom the British also tried to criminalize.
Bobby Sands was twenty-seven years of age and was sixty-six days on hunger strike when he died in the H Blocks of Long Kesh concentration camp, on the 5 May 1981. The young Volunteer spent the last nine years of his short life in this concentration camp. He became known world-wide by the time he died, having been elected to the Brit parliament, having withstood political torture to abandon his protest at criminalization by the British and their henchmen.
The hunger strike was aimed at rebutting the British government's attempts to criminalize the struggle for Irish freedom by changing the status of Sands and his fellow comrades from political to criminal status.
While behind bars, Sands secretly wrote on toilet paper and cigarette papers with the refill of a cheap pen that was hidden inside his body. These writings were then smuggled out of prison.
With humour, in prose and poetry, he wrote to preserve his identity against freezing cold, unimaginable filth, appalling beatings and numbing boredom. He conjures up vividly the enclosed hell of Long Kesh concentration camp, the harassment, and the humiliatingly invasive searches. Bobby Sands and his comrades were gripped by an iron system that held them at torture-point and yet their courage never faltered. He gave his life along with his comrades as political prisoners.
Despite a so called peace process, Irish political prisoners are still beaten savagely today while in prison without trial while their families are being terrorized by McGuinness's thugs as they do what families of Irish political prisoners have always done, gather support for their loved ones in British prisons.
Here is what Bobby Sands wrote just before he died -
"They will not criminalise us, rob us of our true identity, steal our individualism, depoliticise us, churn us out as systemised, institutionalised, decent law-abiding robots. Never will they label our liberation struggle as criminal.
I am (even after all the torture) amazed at British logic. Never in eight centuries have they succeeded in breaking the spirit of one man who refused to be broken. They have not dispirited, conquered, nor demoralised my people, nor will they ever.
I may be a sinner, but I stand — and if it so be, will die — happy knowing that I do not have to answer for what these people have done to our ancient nation.
Thomas Clarke is in my thoughts, and MacSwiney, Stagg, Gaughan, Thomas Ashe, McCaughey. Dear God, we have so many that another one to those knaves means nothing, or so they say, for some day they’ll pay.
When I am thinking of Clarke, I thought of the time I spent in ‘B’ wing in Crumlin Road jail in September and October ‘77. I realised just what was facing me then. I’ve no need to record it all, some of my comrades experienced it too, so they know I have been thinking that some people (maybe many people) blame me for this hunger-strike, but I have tried everything possible to avert it short of surrender.
I pity those who say that, because they do not know the British and I feel more the pity for them because they don’t even know their poor selves. But didn’t we have people like that who sought to accuse Tone, Emmet, Pearse, Connolly, Mellowes: that unfortunate attitude is perennial also…
I can hear the curlew passing overhead. Such a lonely cell, such a lonely struggle. But, my friend, this road is well trod and he, whoever he was, who first passed this way, deserves the salute of the nation. I am but a mere follower and I must say OÃche Mhaith."
Some small minded fucker has taken down the Dylan version which I think is the best. This according to YouTube is the Dubliner's version but its a long tome ago since I heard this song sung properly, as there doesn't appear to be any singers in Ireland at the minute who can sing it properly with a bit of passion like ! Is there any nature left in people anymore ?
THE NEWRY HIGWAYMAN
Botanic Gardens Belfast, 19. 6. 1998
Traditional
In Newry town where I was bred and born
In Stephen's Green now I lie in scorn.
I served my time there to the saddlers' trade
And I always was a roving blade.
At seventeen I took a wife,
And I loved her dearer than I loved my life
And for to keep her both fine and gay
I went a-robbin' on the king's highway.
I never robbed any poor man yet
Nor tradesman I caused to fret
But I robbed lords and their ladies at night
And carry all home to my heart's delight.
To Covent Garden I yook my way
With my dear wife for to see the play
Lord Fielding's men did me pursue
And taken was I by the cursed crew.
My father cried, "My darling son."
My wife she cried, "I am undone."
My mother tore her white locks and cried
That in the cradle I should have died.
When I am dead and in my grave
A flashy funeral pray let me have
Six highwaymen for to carry me
Give them broad swords and sweet liberty.
Six pretty fair maids to bear my pall
Give them grey ribbons and green garlands all
When I'm dead they will speak true
He was a wild and a wicked youth.
In Newry town where I was bred and born
In Stephen's Green now I lie in scorn.
I served my time there to the saddlers' trade
And I always was a roving blade.
So two thirds of the Irish free state voted for the Lisbon treaty and what will be a European superstate to mirror the USA. So what will "DEMOCRACY" in the United Snakes of Europe be like. Well this is the actual type of US democracy, being exported with war crimes and torture at the moment.
The average cost of a successful campaign for the House of Representatives in the US is almost $1.4 million. Most House seats don't change hands, because in the American 'democratic' system of the twenty-first century, incumbents don't lose, they retire or die.
In 2008, 403 incumbents ran for seats and 380 of them won. As for becoming a Senator? You need some really good buddies in pharmaceuticals or health care ($236,022,031 in lobbying in 2008), insurance ($153,694,224), oil and gas ($131,978,521). A winning senatorial seat costs a cool $8,531,267, a losing seat $4,130,078 in 2008.
So you want to be president of the EU? In that case, just to be safe next time, you probably should consider raising somewhere in the range of one billion Euros. After all, the 2008 campaign in the US cost Barack Obama's team approximately $730 million. Of course, it helps to know the right people. Last year, the total lobbying bill, including money that went out for electoral campaigns and for lobbying Congress and federal agencies, came to $3.3 billion and almost 9 months into 2009, another $1.63 billion has already gone out without an election in sight.
Want to overturn a referendum of the people of a small European free state like Ireland, no problem if you've got the money, as the revised Lisbon Treaty result in Dublin proves yesterday.Its not so much a case of the ballot paper in one hand and an armalite in the other, as money talks and democracy walks.Want to complain about it, your kidding right as if the corporate media will allow it. Doesn't leave you many options, does it comrade??.
What Have We Done to Democracy?
Of Nearsighted Progress, Feral Howls, Consensus, Chaos, and a New Cold War in Kashmir
By Arundhati Roy
While we're still arguing about whether there's life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By "democracy" I don't mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.
So, is there life after democracy?
Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defense of democracy. It's flawed, we say. It isn't perfect, but it's better than everything else that's on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: "Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia... is that what you would prefer?"
Whether democracy should be the utopia that all "developing" societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn't meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It's meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy -- too much representation, too little democracy -- needs some structural adjustment.
The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?
Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly -- our nearsightedness?
Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost. It would be conceit to pretend I have the answers to any of these questions. But it does look as if the beacon could be failing and democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would.
A Clerk of Resistance
As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry.
Something about the cunning, Brahmanical, intricate, bureaucratic, file-bound, "apply-through-proper-channels" nature of governance and subjugation in India seems to have made a clerk out of me. My only excuse is to say that it takes odd tools to uncover the maze of subterfuge and hypocrisy that cloaks the callousness and the cold, calculated violence of the world's favorite new superpower. Repression "through proper channels" sometimes engenders resistance "through proper channels." As resistance goes this isn't enough, I know. But for now, it's all I have. Perhaps someday it will become the underpinning for poetry and for the feral howl.
Today, words like "progress" and "development" have become interchangeable with economic "reforms," "deregulation," and "privatization." Freedom has come to mean choice. It has less to do with the human spirit than with different brands of deodorant. Market no longer means a place where you buy provisions. The "market" is a de-territorialized space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling "futures." Justice has come to mean human rights (and of those, as they say, "a few will do").
This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalize their detractors, deprive them of a language to voice their critique and dismiss them as being "anti-progress," "anti-development," "anti-reform," and of course "anti-national" -- negativists of the worst sort.
Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, "Don't you believe in progress?" To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs, and whose homes are being bulldozed, they say, "Do you have an alternative development model?" To those who believe that a government is duty bound to provide people with basic education, health care, and social security, they say, "You're against the market." And who except a cretin could be against markets?
To reclaim these stolen words requires explanations that are too tedious for a world with a short attention span, and too expensive in an era when Free Speech has become unaffordable for the poor. This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing.
Two decades of "Progress" in India has created a vast middle class punch-drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it -- and a much, much vaster, desperate underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts, and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering and massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines, and Special Economic Zones. All developed in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy.
The hoary institutions of Indian democracy -- the judiciary, the police, the "free" press, and, of course, elections -- far from working as a system of checks and balances, quite often do the opposite. They provide each other cover to promote the larger interests of Union and Progress. In the process, they generate such confusion, such a cacophony, that voices raised in warning just become part of the noise. And that only helps to enhance the image of the tolerant, lumbering, colorful, somewhat chaotic democracy. The chaos is real. But so is the consensus.
A New Cold War in Kashmir
Speaking of consensus, there's the small and ever-present matter of Kashmir. When it comes to Kashmir the consensus in India is hard core. It cuts across every section of the establishment -- including the media, the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia, and even Bollywood.
The war in the Kashmir valley is almost 20 years old now, and has claimed about 70,000 lives. Tens of thousands have been tortured, several thousand have "disappeared," women have been raped, tens of thousands widowed. Half a million Indian troops patrol the Kashmir valley, making it the most militarized zone in the world. (The United States had about 165,000 active-duty troops in Iraq at the height of its occupation.) The Indian Army now claims that it has, for the most part, crushed militancy in Kashmir. Perhaps that's true. But does military domination mean victory?
How does a government that claims to be a democracy justify a military occupation? By holding regular elections, of course. Elections in Kashmir have had a long and fascinating past. The blatantly rigged state election of 1987 was the immediate provocation for the armed uprising that began in 1990. Since then elections have become a finely honed instrument of the military occupation, a sinister playground for India's deep state. Intelligence agencies have created political parties and decoy politicians, they have constructed and destroyed political careers at will. It is they more than anyone else who decide what the outcome of each election will be. After every election, the Indian establishment declares that India has won a popular mandate from the people of Kashmir.
In the summer of 2008, a dispute over land being allotted to the Amarnath Shrine Board coalesced into a massive, nonviolent uprising. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people defied soldiers and policemen -- who fired straight into the crowds, killing scores of people -- and thronged the streets. From early morning to late in the night, the city reverberated to chants of "Azadi! Azadi!" (Freedom! Freedom!). Fruit sellers weighed fruit chanting "Azadi! Azadi!" Shopkeepers, doctors, houseboat owners, guides, weavers, carpet sellers -- everybody was out with placards, everybody shouted "Azadi! Azadi!" The protests went on for several days.
The protests were massive. They were democratic, and they were nonviolent. For the first time in decades fissures appeared in mainstream public opinion in India. The Indian state panicked. Unsure of how to deal with this mass civil disobedience, it ordered a crackdown. It enforced the harshest curfew in recent memory with shoot-on-sight orders. In effect, for days on end, it virtually caged millions of people. The major pro-freedom leaders were placed under house arrest, several others were jailed. House-to-house searches culminated in the arrests of hundreds of people.
Once the rebellion was brought under control, the government did something extraordinary -- it announced elections in the state. Pro-independence leaders called for a boycott. They were rearrested. Almost everybody believed the elections would become a huge embarrassment for the Indian government. The security establishment was convulsed with paranoia. Its elaborate network of spies, renegades, and embedded journalists began to buzz with renewed energy. No chances were taken. (Even I, who had nothing to do with any of what was going on, was put under house arrest in Srinagar for two days.)
Calling for elections was a huge risk. But the gamble paid off. People turned out to vote in droves. It was the biggest voter turnout since the armed struggle began. It helped that the polls were scheduled so that the first districts to vote were the most militarized districts even within the Kashmir valley.
None of India's analysts, journalists, and psephologists cared to ask why people who had only weeks ago risked everything, including bullets and shoot-on-sight orders, should have suddenly changed their minds. None of the high-profile scholars of the great festival of democracy -- who practically live in TV studios when there are elections in mainland India, picking apart every forecast and exit poll and every minor percentile swing in the vote count -- talked about what elections mean in the presence of such a massive, year-round troop deployment (an armed soldier for every 20 civilians).
No one speculated about the mystery of hundreds of unknown candidates who materialized out of nowhere to represent political parties that had no previous presence in the Kashmir valley. Where had they come from? Who was financing them? No one was curious. No one spoke about the curfew, the mass arrests, the lockdown of constituencies that were going to the polls.
Not many talked about the fact that campaigning politicians went out of their way to de-link Azadi and the Kashmir dispute from elections, which they insisted were only about municipal issues -- roads, water, electricity. No one talked about why people who have lived under a military occupation for decades -- where soldiers could barge into homes and whisk away people at any time of the day or night -- might need someone to listen to them, to take up their cases, to represent them.
The minute elections were over, the establishment and the mainstream press declared victory (for India) once again. The most worrying fallout was that in Kashmir, people began to parrot their colonizers' view of themselves as a somewhat pathetic people who deserved what they got. "Never trust a Kashmiri," several Kashmiris said to me. "We're fickle and unreliable." Psychological warfare, technically known as psy-ops, has been an instrument of official policy in Kashmir. Its depredations over decades -- its attempt to destroy people's self-esteem -- are arguably the worst aspect of the occupation. It's enough to make you wonder whether there is any connection at all between elections and democracy.
The trouble is that Kashmir sits on the fault lines of a region that is awash in weapons and sliding into chaos. The Kashmiri freedom struggle, with its crystal clear sentiment but fuzzy outlines, is caught in the vortex of several dangerous and conflicting ideologies -- Indian nationalism (corporate as well as "Hindu," shading into imperialism), Pakistani nationalism (breaking down under the burden of its own contradictions), U.S. imperialism (made impatient by a tanking economy), and a resurgent medieval-Islamist Taliban (fast gaining legitimacy, despite its insane brutality, because it is seen to be resisting an occupation). Each of these ideologies is capable of a ruthlessness that can range from genocide to nuclear war. Add Chinese imperial ambitions, an aggressive, reincarnated Russia, and the huge reserves of natural gas in the Caspian region and persistent whispers about natural gas, oil, and uranium reserves in Kashmir and Ladakh, and you have the recipe for a new Cold War (which, like the last one, is cold for some and hot for others).
In the midst of all this, Kashmir is set to become the conduit through which the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills into India, where it will find purchase in the anger of the young among India's 150 million Muslims who have been brutalized, humiliated, and marginalized. Notice has been given by the series of terrorist strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.
There is no doubt that the Kashmir dispute ranks right up there, along with Palestine, as one of the oldest, most intractable disputes in the world. That does not mean that it cannot be resolved. Only that the solution will not be completely to the satisfaction of any one party, one country, or one ideology. Negotiators will have to be prepared to deviate from the "party line."
Of course, we haven't yet reached the stage where the government of India is even prepared to admit that there's a problem, let alone negotiate a solution. Right now it has no reason to. Internationally, its stocks are soaring. And while its neighbors deal with bloodshed, civil war, concentration camps, refugees, and army mutinies, India has just concluded a beautiful election. However, "demon-crazy" can't fool all the people all the time. India's temporary, shotgun solutions to the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun), have magnified the problem and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the aquifers.
Is Democracy Melting?
Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds and temperatures that dip to minus 40 degrees Celsius. Of the hundreds who have died there, many have died just from the elements.
The glacier has become a garbage dump now, littered with the detritus of war -- thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents, and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate. The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy temperatures, a pristine monument to human folly.
While the Indian and Pakistani governments spend billions of dollars on weapons and the logistics of high-altitude warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt. Right now, it has shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do with the military standoff than with people far away, on the other side of the world, living the good life. They're good people who believe in peace, free speech, and in human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose governments sit on the U.N. Security Council and whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan… it's a long list.)
The glacial melt will cause severe floods on the subcontinent, and eventually severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. That will give us even more reasons to fight. We'll need more weapons. Who knows? That sort of consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better life -- and the glaciers will melt even faster.
Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. Her new book, just published by Haymarket Books, is Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. This post is adapted from the introduction to that book.
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