Another lonely traveller through the blue nowhere…

Reports in this morning’s papers say that 10,000 have been killed in Indonesia by a cyclone and that it has left 1,000,000 people homeless. In an unprecedented move, the Indonesian government have said that they will accept international aid in this, their time of need.

So… Having resisted (read: ignored) international pressure over their corrupt military dictatorship, appalling human rights abuses and their political prisoners, now they want help…

Folks, it’s like this: When you give money to corrupt regimes in “aid”, a large chunk of it magically sticks to the hands of the rulers of said corrupt regimes. That part of it which actually goes where it was meant to go keeps the population just well fed enough that they won’t overthrow their government themselves. Zimbabwe, anybody? How do you think Robert Mugabe is a US dollar multi-billionaire in a country with 6000% inflation? And why do you think that a population with 85% unemployment hasn’t overthrown him yet?

Easy: “The people are always only three meals from revolution” – that’s true in any society in the world. So, what I want to know is this: Why are we providing the three meals which prevent the people of oppressed third-world regimes from deposing rulers who are morally abhorrent and who we don’t want in power anyway?

My take on the Indonesian cyclone is easy: Allow the UN to station troops in Indonesia, arrange for democratic elections, free ALL of their political prisoners, and THEN we’ll help to feed the people. Quid pro quo.

Only it never works like that does it? “Why should the people suffer because of their rulers?” – because those same rulers bleed Western aid dry at the same time as making us pariahs and scapegoats for all of their countries’ ills, and the bottom line is that the people are the only people who can change it. We need to remove their motivation for tolerating the status-quo.

<rant>

I’m going to expand upon my post below with a diatribe about George Bush, Republicans, and rich, stupid, white, Christian Americans. If you don’t like it, or if you think you’re likely to take offence at such a diatribe, then a) go away, and b) don’t bother leaving a comment.

The “intellectual elite” you rabidly rant about is ME, and that means that I’m better than you, smarter than you, and will destroy your stupid Nazi ass in an argument.

Anyway. For many years, America’s government has pretty much owned the media, to the point where, for many outsiders like myself who have sattelite TV, watching American news programmes on CNN, Fox News and the like, has become very similar to watching Nazi propoganda from WW2. By the way, slight diversion here: America you did not win WW2, Russia did, check your history reading.

But I digress. For many years, the American right-wing media has sought to demonize African-American (in Britain we still say “black”, but then in Britain, it really doesn’t matter what colour you are) population, turning them into a source of fear and mistrust for the rest of American society.

Now American media/business/government (if you still think that those things are distinct from one another, LEAVE you fucking moron, they’re not) are trying to do something similar on a Global scale: Make the community scared of the man with the different skin colour/religion. This time he’s Muslim, and he’s an Arab. Nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that America owes a hell of a lot of money to Arab states which it would like a decent excuse not to pay back, or the fact that most Arab states have a goodly supply of oil with which America can keep polluting our planet and killing us for profit…

This time, however, something has gone wrong for America, and it is this: the rest of the world has not been force-fed your bovine, Nazi media for generations. We are NOT afraid of Muslims, in fact we don’t have anything against them at all. There’s a few who will insist on violence, but hey, there’s members of every religion who do that. Except Buddhism, they just get really good at fighting, then don’t fight.

</rant>

Let’s have a poll: Does anybody think I’m wrong when I say that when fiery nuclear death engulfs us all, a) it will be really easy to trace the blame back to America, and b) CNN, ABC and FOX will blame Arab or Arabs unknown?