USA OUT OF IRELAND ! - Indymedia Ireland

USA OUT OF IRELAND ! - Indymedia Ireland:

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WHITE SLAVERY & HOLOCAUST GENOCIDE

More than 200 years before the British ethnically cleansed its first colony Ireland in the 1840's of native Irish, whom like all of their colonies to follow, they regarded as subhuman, with their systematic, organized Holocaust that "disappeared" 6,257,456 Irish persons, there is the serious matter of Irish slavery, a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories by British mentored historians, well paid to airbrush these British crimes against humanity from our history books.

Where is the truthful education of our public (and PRIVATE) schools??? Where are the honest history books? Why is it not discussed? Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims not merit a mention in Irish or British history ? Or is history forever to be one that English pirates control: Unlike the African records, the Irish story has like its holocaust, completely disappeared like it never happened. Its not just holocaust denial by the British with regard to the Irish, its their  inhumanity in British Occupied Ireland denial, right up to the present day. See torture, see internment without trial.

None of the Irish victims ever made it back to tell their story. They are the lost slaves of very expensive history books, that conveniently forgot like other history books of British mentored revisionist historians, the airbrushed history of genocide and the murder of  6,257,456 Irish people, revised down to a million to a million and a half, in one of the greatest examples of history being written by the victors, to hide British crimes against humanity in British Occupied Ireland. Below is the story of "The Irish Slaves That Time Forgot."

By John Martin

They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.

Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.

We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? After all, we know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade. But, are we talking about African slavery?

King James II and Charles I led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.

The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.

As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.

African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African.

The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.

In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves.

This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.

England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia.

There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.

There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry.

In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end it’s participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery.

But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong.

Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories. But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed?

Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer? Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To (unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and completely disappear as if it never happened.

None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.

USA UK COLONY

THE UNITED STATES IS STILL A BRITISH COLONY

(The Book 607 pages)

America Is Still A British Colony

Murdered by The Monarchs

                        THE UNITED STATES

                    IS STILL A BRITISH COLONY

                            EXTORTING

                      TAXES FOR THE CROWN!

                      A DOCUMENTARY REVIEW

                    OF CHARTERS AND TREATIES

go to link ;  http://www.apfn.org/apfn/bcolony.htm

Love of Country

Seldom Requited

By Fred Reed

August 18, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- I’m trying to understand love of country. It’s hard hoeing. Maybe some things just ain’t understandable. Or maybe it’s ‘cause I’m from West Virginia and don’t have shoes, ‘cause they ain’t any that fits people with twelve toes. How are you supposed to love a country where you can't get shoes?

I’m not even sure there’s any such thing as a country. Mostly my country seems to be a bunch of brigands in Washington who send you tax forms to get money so they can kill people in some place that never did anything to you and you probably don’t know where is. When did I ask them to do that?

It looks to me like a country is just a temporary mood ginned up to get everybody hooting and hollering behind the grenade industry with other people’s money. People just naturally like to get together in packs and kill each other, or beat each other full of concussions like in football, or have gangs and zip guns and ball bats and smack hell out of each other. A country’s just a teenage gang with older teenagers and better zip guns, I reckon. All you got to do is get them riled up about something that probably don’t exist. You send the dumb ones to get killed and the smart ones cash the checks at home. That’s what a country is.

Think about it. Isn’t it true? When the gummint wants to go kill folks we mostly never heard of, in Halfghanistan or Eye Rack this week anyway, it acts like the country is one solid thing, a big happy family, and has to think the same things. If the  gummint hates Halfghans, or wants their oil or something, we all got to hate them because we ought to love our country. It makes as much sense as lug nuts on a birthday cake.

I can’t see how there’s anything special about a country. It’s just a big herd full of little herds that hate each other and want to swindle each other and pick everybody’s pockets and burgle their houses if they can’t actually steal them. I mean, the blacks hate the whites and beat them lopsided so they can take pictures, and half the whites hate blacks but don’t dare say so, and want to run Mieesicans out of the country, and the Messicans hate the blacks and the whites that want to run them back to Messico, and everybody hates Moslems, whatever one of those is. Maybe that’s a country. It looks more like a bar fight waiting to happen.

What’s funny is how people talk about how they love their country, but don’t act like it. I mean, there ain’t nothing more patriotic than a businessman who thinks he can make money at it. The newspaper in Charlestown says the gummint spends a trillion dollars on wars every year, either fighting them or getting ready or looking for new ones. I don’t know how much a trillion is. I do know it never sees the inside of a soldier’s pockets.

No. All they get is stumps and blinded and dead. The businessmen don’t want them to win, because then the gummint wouldn’t buy as many helicopters to get shot down and then buy more. But businessmen don’t want the troops to lose either, for exactly the same reason. Nobody in his right mind stops a going concern.

We got two kinds of businessman, and they both love their country the way a bank robber loves a bank. One kind wants to bring the whole country of Messico to America so they can pay them twelve cents an hour under the table and get rich. The other wants to send all America’s factories to China where they can pay twelve cents an hour and get rich. Both kinds drip patriotism like oil from a 1964 Harley. If anyone loved me like businessmen love their country, I’d go into hiding.

Then we’ve got the military that loves its country something crazy. In West Virginia I noticed that ticks love cows. (Why did I think of that, I wonder?) In Washington you’ve got whole packs of colonels strutting around like barnyard roosters, but with less brains, and saying that hippies and reporters need to support the Pentagon’s troops in killing Halfghans. It’s so they can show how much they love their country.

See, colonels think they are the country, and nobody but them gets to decide what the country wants. But what if I think I’m the country as much as some useless tax-sucking colonel with colored gewgaws stuck on his coat jacket like a stamp collection? And what if I don’t want to bomb anybody that I don’t know, just to make money for bomb factories?

I didn’t know that Lockheed-Martin was a country. I do now.

I got my doubts about some other patriots too. Suppose you went up north to Wall Street and asked those Yankee tape worms if they loved their country. Reckon they’d say yes? Of course they would. Why, they love their country like a hog loves cornbread. Of course, the hog don’t care whose cornbread.

Thing is, the tapeworms, along with the other part of the gummint that stays in Washington, just busted the economy and left half of us with no house. If that ain’t patriotism, I don’t know what might be. And they didn’t even say they was sorry, probably because they were too busy hiding the money in off-shore accounts.  Somehow, patriotism usually seems to have dollar signs attached.

A famous fraud said, “Ask not what your country can do for you,” but that’s just what everybody does ask. Best I can tell, lots of folk love the United States till their gums bleed, but don’t want to do anything for it except run it broke. Congress takes bribes the way a Las Vegas slot machine eats quarters. Big Pharma swindles the public like a riverboat gambler with three decks of aces in his pockets. The Pentagon ain’t nothing but Section Eight housing with five walls, so’s you can tell whoever built it wasn’t paying attention.

I guess with lots of practice I might learn to love hookworm, or leprosy, or even rap music like they have on the radio out of Wheeling—though that may be stretching it. But I can’t go lower. I got my limits.

Fred's Biography: As He Tells It. - Fred, a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, has worked on staff for Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of For tune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times.fredoneverything.net

Love it ... LOVE it!................... Bless his heart.

jake ross· 8 hours ago

This y'ere feller knows whut hes talkin' about...and I feel jes lik he does!

hankbob· 8 hours ago

Famous frauds don't get assassinated.
Presidents like JFK that don't play ball with the central bankster thieves do. You started out pretty good

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michaelgaia· 6 hours ago

i don't love cages of people called nations..i just love people and one day we will all live within one global stateless society ruled BY THE PEOPLE using the system of participatory republic...

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miki67· 5 hours ago

Here in The NeoCon ConDemNation of the UKplc we have some shit of our own going down. And there is going to be a larger demo on Oct.20th. Keep yourselves posted.http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/atos-g...

Dick· 5 hours ago

'Love of Country' is the patriotic expression of nationalism, which is an emotional expression of respect for a nations founding principles, geographic diversity, or cultural traditions. Being emotional it is the anti-thesis of rationality and has been used by nations for centuries to control popular opinion and influence popular support for government policies.

In America this process begins in Kindergarten where (in my experience) the first thing children learn is the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, latter schooling teaches Americans that they are the freest and greatest country on Earth, and how the US in an act of benevolence defeated the Nazi menace in WW2 failing, of course, to mention the contribution of Russia's defeat of 300 Nazi divisions. As a result of this Americans grow up believing in American Exceptionalism and 'We are number 1', 'My country right or wrong', 'Love it or leave it' rhetoric. The problem with American patriotism is it is inclusive of government actions and policies whereas, for example, Russian patriotism is more generally for Mother Russia (the land the very soil of the nation) rather than of what form of government is in power.

Everyone knows the quote 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a Scoundrel', but I would suggest adding 'but Blind Patriotism is the last refuge of a Fool'. Patriotism in itself is a normal emotional response to your country, but Blind Patriotism can lead to catastrophic results when a governments policies are emotional supported without question, such as the German Reich. Any citizen of any country needs to view Patriotism rationally and question when necessary the actions and policies of their government. As a former American who has traveled extensively, I think Americans need to step down off their pedestal and rejoin the human race as an equal among nations. Otherwise, the America will ultimately commit a policy overreach based on irrational beliefs that will be catastrophic, similar to the German invasion of Russia. Emotionally love your country but rationally question your government.

amazindyes· 4 hours ago

JFK was no fraud. He tried to do the right thing and look where it got him...other than that, I agree with you completely. If you have any doubt, read JFK and The Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters.

rs ago

Cisco812· 2 hours ago

If anyone hasn't read that book, read it now. Very important.

dim mak· 1 hour ago

a simple summary of what usa has de evolved into in plain english: a parasitic corporate police state of anti intellectual dullards

PHUCK U VALENTINE

Saint Valentine's Day, commonly called Valentine's Day, is on February 14 which is today. It is a day to celbrate love between close companions. This day is called after an early Christian martyr called Saint Valentine, who was made a Saint by Pope Gelasius in 496 AD. He was removed from the calendar of saints in 1969 by Pope Paul VI who was a bit of a general bollix when it came to anything associated with love. It is by tradition, a day which lovers declare their love for each other, with things such as flowers, confectionery, greeting cards and sex.

Originally a day to express all sorts of love, not particularly associated with romantic rubbish love, until an English phecker called Chaucer turned it into lust love in the Middle Ages. Modern Valentine's Day symbols have been turned into mass-produced commercial greeting cards, commercial confectionery, commercial flowers and commercial sex, which is more about using and being used. So phuck it ! Phuck Valentine !

Early medieval "Acta of  Saint Valentine" were allowed briefly, according to 'Legenda Aurea' until St Valentine was tortured and interrogated by  the Roman Emperor Claudius II, himself. Claudius was reported to like Valentine and had chats with him, trying to put a bit of sense into him to convert him to paganism, to save his life. Valentine was a right eejit who refused and tried to convert Claudius.This is why he was executed. Before he died, he is said to have healed the blind daughter of his jailer miraculously in an act of love.

The reason that Valentine, Legenda Aurea, love and sex were a danger to the Roman Empire then and its subsequent British Empire passed on by the puritanical WASP establishment in the American Empire of today, is that the Emperor then, in order to grow his army, believed that married men, did not make good soldiers and were not good at killing. However Valentine performed marriage ceremonies for young men. When the Emperor learned about this, Valentine was arrested sent to jail and murdered.

 Most of the trouble though was begat by an English phecker called Chaucer or more appropriately called Chancer by the Irish, because he was the first to record the association of Valentine's Day, with sexual love as in Parlement of Foules (Parliament of Fools or Dail Eireann in Gaelic) by Geoffrey Chancer. Chancer wrote:
For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.

In 'The Righteouf Fquire Rascal of Charlef' there is an interesting account of a local English counte, who sold judgements on outsiders who frequented the village for orgies. Squire Rascal was known, somewhat affectionately in the village of Monmuthe as the 'jug-eareded cunte', or the 'fatte baftard of Avon'. He had something of a reputation for sending outsiders back to barbarian held territory, where anyone with black hair would be put to death, with red hot pokers. One particular passage of Empire Britannia's perverted Valentine love is quite explicit...

"'Ye outfidere folk cried do not put upon uf ye red hot pokerf, which scorch and blifter our anufef. But ye jug-eared cunte, Fquire Ruffel hearde non of it and even ignoring hif own adviferf of ye  Foreign Hall of the Council, did fend all ye outfideref back to have ye red hot pokerf thruft up their anufef. And all ye while ye ferrety English King did laff hif goolief off'."

Because of the English Chancer's perversion, it gave sex a bad press and is also the reason, that in the USA today, killing and war are cool but sex is banned and pornographic. Thus love and sex were declared pornography in the American Empire, as in the case of  the Roman Emperor, in order to grow his army, who believed that young men acquainted with sex, did not make good soldiers and were not good at slaughter or legalized murder. However Valentine performed marriage ceremonies for young men. When the Emperor learned about this, Valentine was arrested sent to jail and murdered.

So the Roman Empire passed all of this on to the British Empire, who in turn have passed it on today to the Americans. All of this was given the dubious title of civilization and has been responsible for the deaths of up to a hundred million young men who were virgins. This is also the reason that in the US of today, killing and war are cool but sex is banned and pornographic. The result is that Americans are very good at killing but no good at sex. So phuck it ! Phuck Valentine !.

It really is a question of choice, Phucking or Phighting ! Make Love or make War. So today is Valentine's Day! Phuck it !

Phuck Valentine ! because in our modern fascist world, you may be all dead tomorrow, as happened the last time it went fascist in hard rimes.!

President John F. Kennedy's Contemporary Ireland

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
John F. Kennedy

The basis of the Belfast Agreement or peace process, supposedly the agreed democratic common denominator, between British monarchists and Irish republicans was presented to Irish republicans, originally by their middle-management negotiators back in 1973, as an alternative to their fight for freedom. The basic principle for any change offered, was that instead of blanket censorship of Irish republicans in the media, they would be given a state sponsored platform, to allow them to PERSUADE the contrived majority, of the un-constitutional status of occupied Ireland. That PERSUASION rather than armed struggle would be the basis for any change in the status of the one party, non-democratic state of occupied Ireland.

After approximately twenty years of assassinating, blackmailing, buying the opposition within the Irish republican movement and the loyalists to the British monarchy, the deal was eventually squeezed through. Naturally authentic Irish republicans who yearned for a coherent Irish republic with self-determination, on the already small island of Ireland, were at best sceptical if not totally opposed to this dissolution of Irish sovereignty but some for the sake of peace, against their better instincts, were willing to go the extra mile for the sake of peace.

The reality of what has transpired however, is that the media platform given, was usurped for the glorification of the middle manager negotiators, raising them to the cult status of the individual in the modern media, rather than the equality, liberty and fraternity principles of the republican tradition. All of the media in both parts of Ireland have long been compromised to embedded agents of the British, corporate and local self-serving Anglo-Irish colonial establishment interests, with its gombeen politicians. We are what we consume and contemporary Irish consciousness under such a barrage of dis-information, like all dying civilizations is either psychotic or delusional.

The almost total blanket censorship of Irish republicans which existed, was meant to be lifted under the principles of the agreement, have in fact been selectively applied with filters, intranets and rampant censorship, to allow only those who serve the long-term interest of the British establishment to PERSUADE. The reality is that there is no indie media of any significance in all of the island of Ireland. Nominally as a sop to local interests, there is an Indie media setting an agenda of distraction, dis-information and astroturfing campaigns to fragment and euthanize any Irish progressive even further.

Persuasion under such conditions is impossible, even for authentic Irish peace activists. The Irish media which is saturated with secret British intelligence agents, continues with its operatives on the ground, to criminalize the voices of Irish republicanism, while normalizing two British compliant police states on the island and ghettoizing the Irish people of no property, under the control of police mentored criminal thugs.

The fragmentation of the Irish community, on the island of Ireland even further, from the existing two British complaint scum states, into criminal fiefdoms, is a further extension of the age old repressive colonial foreign policy of divide and conquer. The results coupled with the deepening crisis of western capitalism, are producing intolerable conditions of material deprivation, despair, alienation, elite corruption and merciless oppression for the dispossessed native Irish people. This continued malign British repression in Ireland, coupled with their former holocaust and Irish slave trade has almost obliterated Irish culture and its ancient civilization, with a cocktail of gombeen slavery and alcoholism within their two barbaric police states.

With a unilateral policy of almost total censorship across Ireland's British, corporate non indie media are creating the John Kennedy reality of "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."





Join the CAUSE for Justice & REAL Peace Ireland http://www.causes.com/Diasporadoes

MONEY TALKS AND DEMOCRACY WALKS IN IRELAND

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.

Copyright 2009 Arundhati Roy