Ally of ours. Nice enough place, shame about the people. No, that’s not strictly fair; the people are alright. But if ever a powerful minority ruined it for everyone, it’s here.
It starts as soon as you get off the plane. The passport-control people are a little too suspicious, overzealous, even. So you’re guilty, automatically, of something. Almost certainly of subversion, and you’re probably a witch to boot. Unless you can prove otherwise, in which case they’ll start fawning instead.
It’s not their fault, though. Blame the President, an unthinking and insensate fool (IQ 98) who only got the job because of his father and brother. And the all-pervading influence of the media, of course.
Naturally, most of the country’s budget is spent on ‘defence’, and since they’ve built such a mighty war machine, they have to flex the proverbial military muscle from time to time, provoked or otherwise. Frankly, the money would be better spent on welfare: there are 35 million people living below the official poverty line.
Got to be careful not to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, too, or you could find yourself taken away to some remote place and tortured. They’ve been doing more and more of that recently, actually. Humiliating and beating prisoners – mostly innocents – on military bases defended with weapons most countries have had the decency to ban. Extracting confessions at the edge of a razor blade. Then if they decide a prisoner really is innocent after all, it can still take months to secure a release. One of the President’s most senior henchmen claims it’s their ‘right’ to torture detainees.
Sounds like some backwater hellhole, doesn’t it? A forgotten African ex-colony that went straight to hell the minute the Empire fell.
Nope.
America. Home of the Brave. Land of the Free. Our ‘special’ friend.
So many voices are raised in protest at the behaviour of our subordinate allies – Uzbekistan’s way of dealing with political demonstrations, for example. Yet they fall silent when it comes to the conduct of our senior partner in the War on Terror(ism. If we must call it a ‘war’ – thus legitimising terrorists’ actions by implicitly referring to them as soldiers – can we at least refrain from warring against ‘terror’? Though perhaps the contraction is not a solecism, but a tip-off to those in the know that there really is nothing to fear but fear itself, and our governments are merely scaremongering).
We should criticise actions taken by ‘allies’ when that criticism is deserved, just as you would with a friend – “You’re being a total arse George” – who needs a word in the ear. Not to do so is an implicit vote of support for questionable policy. It is, of course, easy to censure a less-developed, ‘inferior’, nation – like Uzbekistan – but the same standard should be applied to the US, regardless of the imbalance of power. France had the collective couilles to do so before the invasion of Iraq, it would be nice if the UK grew some balls too.
In Peter George’s novelisation of Dr Strangelove, the introduction by ‘the men who discovered the manuscript’ comments that the USA and USSR were “not on friendly terms, and we find this difficult to understand, because both were governed by power systems which seem to us basically similar.” The imperceptibly different agendas of two sworn enemies is perhaps more pertinent with the present terrorist threat.
Employing legal loopholes to allow extrajudicial detention and torture in Guantánamo Bay is indistinguishable from Islamicist terrorists’ use of their own legalistic interpretation of the Qu’ran to justify the wholesale murder of civilians. Growing levels of conservatism forcing opinions on others – creationism, abortion restrictions, and recently the bizarre seizure of a Tennessee student newspaper for running articles on birth control and tattoos – barely distinguishable from Talibanesque control-freakery as exhibited in Afghanistan.
Bush presents our enemies as antithetical fundamentalists trying to take away our free-dumb, but is he really any better? The only noticeable difference in Western society (whatever the hell that may mean) is the bromidic pretence of democracy, for the most part so tainted by corruption and mud-slinging that Congress might as well be the Iranian Assembly of Experts.
And Britain follows, as always. Sometimes blindly, a donkey following the media’s carrot, sometimes more consciously. We are, after all, the 51st state, a dotard father controlled by a bullying son, serving only to legitimise US power amongst the Old Countries of Europe.
We talk of ‘enemies’. Bugger enemies; we’re our own worst enemy. But if the absence of any practical difference in two ostensibly very different sides of a conflict teaches us anything, it’s that people are fundamentally the same the world over.
The government of the day causing a negative perception of its people has happened throughout history: 1990-present Iraq, 1914-45 Germany, Britain for bloody ages. It will doubtless continue for as long as governments are comprised of capricious, egomaniacal and, above all, irresponsible, politicians. Forever, then.
Nice place. Minority ruining it for everyone. Everywhere you go.
