combatting normality

"SUICIDE WHILE THE BALANCE OF HIS MIND WAS TEMPORARILY RESTORED"

The rather unscientific study reported above entirely begs - of course - the question of the motive or reason for suicide. Suicide, like cannibalism and infanticide, is a great taboo in the present near-totalitarian World-Order, so these two highly rational (or explicable) behaviours frighten the highly-bred and nervous horses of reason.

Suicide also comes in different qualities: messy, dramatic, neat, quiet, ambiguous (Camus ? Tchaikovsky ?), invisible, pathetic - and world-shaking: the Czech student who set himself on fire in 1968.

To group "suicides" together in a lumpen-category is rather like putting "gays" together in a tight ghetto of unknowing.

One can commit suicide out of shame (for one's family), guilt, grief, despair, the feeling that one has had enough, the knowledge that one should never have been born, or the awareness of the wrongness of being. One might also be a "suicide bomber" in which various motives are ideologically subsumed.

The suicides of (for example) Primo Levi and John Berryman are hardly comparable. Nor are those of Sylvia Plath and Vladimir Mayakovsky. And what is suicide, anyway ? Why did Dmitri Shostakovich never kill himself ? If ever there was good reason, his, like Mayakovski's would have been among the best.

The deepest sadness is the knowledge that happiness is just the embracing of shallowness. Suicide is the only conclusion of utter grief, not 'merely' of suffering.

Those who talk of objectivity are careful to apply it only to a very narrow sector of their lives - otherwise they might be forced to act with compassion - which involves, amongst other cans of worms, a serious consideration of suicide.

In some societies suicide has been more acceptable than others. In Japan especially, Ancient Greece and even 19th century Europe, suicide to redeem one's honour was not only acceptable in the ruling class, but de rigueur . Berserks and battle-suicides were an important element of the Nordic world-view, which also accommodated, as do many non-universalist religions, ritual murder. (Universalist religions also practise ritual murder, but under the category of Punishment for Heresy.) In Ancient Greece infanticide (not just of females) by exposure on hillsides was also widely practised - as was, we shoul d remember, pædophilia.

Among the 'lower' animals suicide is not unknown. There is the tragic case of the octopus trained to perform tricks for food. When his circus disbanded, he simply put into a tank and ignored. Unnoticed, his tricks produced no reward. Unstimulated, his colour slowly ebbed away (a sign of mood-deteriorations in octopi as well as humans), and, after performing his tricks to no effect a final time, he stabbed himself to death with his beak.

The more angry might combine various ideological and personal motives and become hunger-strikers (as recently in Turkey) or "suicide bombers" - though Japanese Kamikaze (the word means Sacred Wind ) pilots were more dutiful than angry. If the Japanese submerged ego and individuality in sacred duty, the Wahhabi schismatics of Arabia submerge ego and individuality in hatred and intolerance - mostly of orthodox Muslims, but also of secular states.

CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST , or
LICKING THE FUNDAMENTS OF THE FUNDAMENTALISTS ( THEIR SHIT HIT OUR FAN) :
the events of 11th September, 2001 -

A DISSIDENT IRISH PERSPECTIVE

I am a pacifist. I hate the deliberately exclusive concept of nationality, and the divisiveness of religions. I believe all armies are evil. But I have often indulged myself in a fantasy: of setting myself alight outside an American or Chinese embassy. The nearest I ever got was to tear up my British passport way back in the seventies and post it to the Foreign Office in protest against Britain's support of Apartheid.

For nine years, every day, America bombed The Plain of Jars in Laos - and it hadn't bothered with the nicety of declaring war on that country. Is this not terrorism ? Cambodia lost nearly half its population as a result of the Vietnam war, and over a quarter of the population of Vietnam was killed by the American military and their stooges in Saigon. Nor must it be forgotten that America's own vicious Civil War (or War of Secession) claimed one million dead. The United States, like all empires, was born and raised in violence, genocide and militarism - having severed its roots in pacific puritanism. It has sown many a whirlwind, and has so far reaped only a comparatively gentle gale. Islam, too, emerged like a whirlwind out of Arabia and completely changed the world. Ironically, enantiodromically, the word means Way of Peace .

The Christians Puritans were very conscious of the sin of vainglory (vanitas) , but modern America seems from the outside to be nothing but vainglory - and worse, a vainglorious militarist machine which, for example, has funded the persecution of the Kurds in Turkey, and supplies arms (land-mines, grenades, rocket-launchers etc.) to anyone who will serve its temporary interests: Saddam Hussain in the 1980s, the Taliban in the 1990s, and both Israël and Turkey continuously since 1948. Now it is pouring money into the pockets of the corrupt rulers of Tadjikistan and Uzbekistan.

In the 1950s it quickly overthrew the first Latin American democracy in Guatemala, installing a minion of United Fruit and backing him with military force. It fomented civil war in the Belgian Congo in the early sixties, from which Congo-Zaïre has never recovered. Over a million people died there in the past two years, and no cries of "Outrage!" from anyone. If it be claimed that the government acted without the consent of the people, as governments by definition almost always do, it should be remembered that most of the funding for the IRA's low-grade but unpleasant activities in Britain and Northern Ireland came from non-official sources in the United States - from some of the very people who are now, suddenly, clamouring for revenge against terrorism.

The United States does not of course confine its attentions to impoverished nations like Honduras, Haiti and Afghanistan. It was also involved (indirectly, of course) in the assassination - outside a Stockholm cinema - of the "leftist", pacifist Prime Minister of Sweden in 1988.

The world did not change on the 11th September, 2001. The plight of the starving and the homeless and the tortured remains the same. Only Americans' (and their allies') dangerous perception of their privileged and seemingly-invulnerable status changed. The kamikaze destruction should have the effect of halting or slowing the progressive self-infantilisation of the people of United States and its closest allies, but it probably won't: infantilisation is at the highest level and is evidenced by America's predilection for attacking small and impoverished countries: Grenada, Nicaragua, Guatemala - and, of course, Cuba and North Vietnam, where it bit off more than it could chew. In declaring war on Afghanistan (with cluster-bombs and peanut butter!), the United States will make itself the most hated military empire of all time, and not just in the Muslim and Arab world.

Nor did America "lose its innocence". Where there is obsessive consciousness of self, innocence, like humility, is spectacularly lacking. The confusion of innocence and ignorance is an idea as obscene as the events of the eleventh of September - which might be seen as the hitherto greatest piece of epic theatre, or as an atrocity against a nation which (like most nations) is built upon atrocity and lies. As far as ignorance is concerned, people (and, alas, governments) tend want to know everything except what they need to know.

Immediately after the 11th September, 'The Land of the Free' (where I know from recent immigrants that it is just as difficult to be a dissident as in the USSR) jailed several hundreds of 'suspects' - mostly illegal immigrants - without charge, without telling their families of their whereabouts, and, effectively, suspending habeas corpus . The same country, of course, showed no concern for the plight of the starving and bombed in Afghanistan, nor the thousands of refugees prevented from swelling the two million already in Pakistan. It was much more absorbed in its own hysteria about the minuscule threat from anthrax.

The leader of the 'free' and pseudo-democratic world (with, incidentally, the highest percentage - mainly black - of its population imprisoned and permanently deprived of the vote) is, of course, doing next to nothing to help the poor and downtrodden anywhere in the world - not even in America. One third of the victims of the obscene 'Death Row' system are mentally handicapped. The world SuperPower is, almost as part of the job-description, doing the down-treading through what it whitewashes by the name of Globalisation: creating poverty by undermining co-operative agriculture and convivial societies everywhere - even the rich countries of Europe - and thus herding people into gruesome cities where they can be easily controlled - and subjected to state or other terrorism. Subsistence economies are anathema to fundamentalist capitalism, which exists to make people dependent on goods which they never dreamed that they wanted. Capitalism and globalisation abhor conviviality - unless it is selling its alienating substitutes.

In a BBC interview on November 6th. 2001 the former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, Denis Halliday, soberly declared that the war-crimes of Saddam Hussain and Slobodan Milosevich were almost trivial compared with those of the Western powers.

Another -ism that hates conviviality (though in a different way) is Wahhabism, a fiercely arrogant and intolerant sect which in a mere two hundred years has, through ruthlessness, come to power throughout Arabia, and in fact controls Mecca and its other holy places. The Wahhabis are also at the forefront of Muslim evangelism: it is the Wahhabis who are converting tens of thousands in Africa and Asia. It is the Wahhabis who control 80% of the mosques in the United States. It was the Wahhabis who swept into formerly tolerant and pluralist Afghanistan when America lost interest after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The Wahhabis received American money and eventually managed, as Taliban, to unite the Mujaheddin under their extreme puritan ægis. They then invited their unacknowledged secular leader, Osama ( or Usama) bin ( or ben) Laden, to Afghanistan - which, under uncaring Western gaze, became a training ground for guerrillas and terrorists dedicated to the overthrow of the more tolerant orthodoxies of Islam and to the fight against the obscenities of 'Christian' civilisation.

Mr bin Laden, of course, is only the most recent in a line of pirates and mayhem-makers as long as history. He is in the tradition of the English hero Sir Francis Drake who, with others of his compatriots, set fire to whole cities, raided settlements and sank dozens of large ships. He is in the tradition of Barbary pirates and corsairs and the much-admired Vikings. The English have never admitted that Sir Francis Drake was a 'terrorist', even though he was far more outrageous and destructive in his day than Mr bin Laden is in ours. Nor have they ever admitted to their war-crimes - which make those of the Third Reich seem like a momentary episode.

The Wahhabis, who control the rich American quasi-protectorates of Sa'udi Arabia, Kuwait, etc., are not interested in democracy, the plight of the poor, or socialism. They are Islamic fascists who, as Taliban, have rendered even more inhabitable a country ruined by The Great Game of the Cold War. They are interested only in power through hatred and intolerance, and are too arrogant to consider issues such as crop-failure, famine, sanitation, disease and the millions of refugees displaced by their nasty government.

Sa'udi Arabia was the only country actually to fund the Taliban régime right up to the 6th of October . Ousama bin Laden is not the Sa'udi dissident that the US would have us believe: he is actually a private Wahhabi agent of the Sa'udis, who is behaving in exactly the same way as British renegades did in the Middle East. Britain was very glad to export its brilliant paranoiacs all over the globe (Cecil Rhodes, T.E. Lawrence, Orde Wingate, Speke, Philby père et al., as well as its dispossessed) - so is Sa'udi Arabia. How can America and Britain wage a "war against terrorism" if they refuse to come clean about their licking of the Sa'udi fundamentalists' fundaments just so that their oil source can be maintained ? Is it any wonder that most of the Arab world hate Britain and America for their hypocrisy ? (Hypocrisy is, of course, not at all rare in the Muslim world, either. It is the most salient feature of universalist and text-ridden religions.)

Americans (only 10% of whom have passports) conveniently forget that most people on the planet are not connected to sewerage systems - or even to septic tanks, the provision of which would do rather more to help the world than 'military advisers' and Coca-Cola, and would, in the end do America itself more good than the money spent on at least TWELVE huge and often competing 'Security Agencies' which have no co-ordinating mechanism or structure.

It has not lifted a finger to help the collapsed economies of Ukraine and Belarus, where almost the only way for an ordinary person to make money is to breed and sell children into international prostitution. It was the US and its perennial sidekick/arselick Britain of course who made sure that the Soviet Empire really collapsed like the baleful twin towers of the World Trade Center, instead of undergoing gradual, democratic reform.

But the US and Britain are not really interested in democracy. The only 'first world' democracy is the Confederation of Switzerland, a tiny federal country in which all important decisions are made by local and by national referenda - and the only European country not to have or have been part of an empire.

Added to the long list of outrages Britain has perpetrated against the world since the 16th century is the shameful story of the Chagos islands in the Indian Ocean, seized from the Portuguese two hundred years ago and still a British Colony. In 1971 it rounded up the inhabitants and simply dumped them on a dockside on Mauritius, a thousand miles away, where a few still survive in shacks and talk of home. One of the Chagos Islands - Diego Garcia - is a very important American base, bristling with surveillance equipment and weapons.

In any case, for 'The West' to seek to impose any of its several flawed versions of democracy on countries created or carved through colonial-economic expediency is to forget that it took the countries of Europe a very long time indeed and very hesitatingly to develop their various systems. The French even now are retreating from an excellent check-and-balance system devised by Charles de Gaulle to one in which an executive president is a member of the same party as the powerful prime minister.

"The Free [or First] World" is really the world of cultures based on alcohol. It is always at war with a culture based on the prohibition of alcohol. "The Free World" has globally criminalised other mind-altering substances. It also invented Nationality, one of the most poisonous and lethal concepts of the European mind.

The whole world has forgotten that the US arranged the assassinations of both Patrice Lumumba and the Secretary-General of the UN (Dag Hammarskjöld, who was considered 'pro-Soviet') way back in 1961 to prevent Russian penetration of the Congo, having already fomented civil war there by helping the mineral-rich province of Katanga secede. They then encouraged Mobutu and the resulting pillage of the country to the tune of over one million human deaths. For American (but not French) involvement in the widely-expected genocide of a million people in Rwanda in 1994 see
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB53/press.html and http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/09/power.htm

In pursuit of its policy to support the often aggressively-Zionist State of Israël at all costs, it destabilised Lebanon thus leading directly to a horrible civil war there. I remember a Lebanese shaking his head at me in Bangui (Central African Republic) in 1973 and telling me how stupid the Irish were in Ulster. For a dissident American view of the Israëli tail wagging the American dog, see http://www.davidduke.com/writings/09-15-01.shtm l

United States forces invaded the tiny island of Grenada because the US government didn't like the democratically-elected Prime Minister there. It actually owned not just the Canal Zone but Panama itself and installed and uninstalled dictators there according to its whim. It kept in power such enlightened advocates of democracy as Duvalier in Haïti and Stroessner in Paraguay. It brought down a genuinely democratic and experimental government in Nicaragua, backed Pinochet to the hilt in Chile, supported Indonesia in its rape of East Timor - and still occupies the Japanese island of Okinawa. It made only token protest against the Military Junta known as "The Colonels" in Greece (a member of NATO), and, before that, was happy enough with Franco and Salazar forming an Iberian bulwark against communism. Like Britain, it has been happy to see friendly-military rather than unpredictable and demagogic 'democratic' rule in Pakistan. Military governments buy more weapons of individual and mass destruction, thus keeping the manufacturing countries (with their export credit guarantees) happy.

By its outrageous and extravagant support of the Shah of Iran (not at all a bad ruler) and his secularist, westernising, Atatürk-inspired influence, it provoked the (non-Wahhabite) fundamentalist reaction in Iran which has oppressed that country since 1980. By attempting to get the reformist King of Afghanistan into its orbit it provoked the appalling Russian invasion and occupation, then supplied weapons to any Mujaheddin who asked for them, including the Wahhabite Taliban (or Taleban). In supporting Sa'udi Arabia's Wahhabite dynasty for its own petroleum gain, America may now realise that if you sup with the devil you need an infinitely long spoon.

Fundamentalism ("extreme normalisation") assumes many names. It usually rides on the back of nationalism, xenophobia or genuine grievance. Islamic fundamentalism is a very recent phenomenon. The Imam Wahhabi lived in the 18th century and used his fascist ideology as a sectarian and nationalist weapon against the tolerant, polyethnic Ottoman Empire. Fundamentalism has more recently become a retrenching defence against the onslaughts of fundamentalist socialism, fundamentalist Judaism, and fundamentalist capitalism - itself inspired by fundamentalist Protestantism. There is now a fundamentalist Hinduism, and, since the Anglo-Norman-Papal genocide of Cathars in the 13th century through 'The Albigensian Crusade' there has been continuous fundamentalist Catholicism. Woman-hating ( i.e. -fearing) Wahhabi fundamentalism has resulted in the misery and deaths of far more Muslims than non-Muslims. It must, however, be stated that Islam was a seventh-century revolutionary reaction against indigenous matriarchy in Arabia, and is thus even more ineluctably man-centred than Christianity.

The United States supported Israël's seizure of most of the fertile land in the desert kingdom of Jordan which it regards as an unfortunate geopolitical anomaly. This desperately-poor country now has more Palestinian refugees within its borders than natives - and even its water has been stolen by Israël.

But the suicide pilots were not Palestinians. Like fundamentalist capitalists, Wahhabis have no interest in justice, only in mayhem. (Justice too, however, is vainglory.) Nor were they, it seems, Wahhabis, for they indulged in wine, women and song when they were training in the United States. Might they have had no connection whatever with Mr bin Laden's reviled 'network' ?

As Western Europe and the anglophone countries get wealthier they put more and more of their increasingly-old people into institutions. As Western Europe and the anglophone countries get richer and ever more triumphalist, Islamic countries get poorer. Christianity has conducted holy war against Islam since the year 1000 of the Christian calendar. The Crusades were excuses for pogrom and pillage, and the expulsion of the Moors with the 'Sephardic' Jews from Spain was a pretty nasty and shabby affair. Most Islamic countries were colonised and/or dismembered and/or created at nominally-Christian Europeans' whim. It is hardly surprising that Islam today is not the religion of enlightenment that it was in Moorish Spain, but a religion of desperation - the religion of the poor and dispossessed. Islam is desperately trying not to fall into the moral vacuum of overweening competitiveness that it perceives around it. The container of that moral vacuum is 'The American Dream' and 'The American Way of Life' - which is a nightmare of debt, the lies of advertising, social and economic failure - and divorce - for millions of Americans who are much poorer and wors-considered than the average slave in the Ottoman Empire.

The American Dream has brought The Media State , in uneasy alliance with the 'military-industrial complex', and unassailably founded on sensation and false sentiment. Yet in America also live many clear and admirable voices of Reason such as Jared Diamond, Daniel Dennett, and Noam Chomsky. But when the Media State fully merges with what Gore Vidal calls 'the National Security State' we may start to long for the porosity and permeability of the Police State. Already there are cries in the US for the introduction of torture of suspected terrorists! So much for the 'free society' born out of a slave economy which was abolished only some 10 years after the serfs were liberated in Russia.

Moral vacuum is, of course, no recent phenomenon. It is just more powerful than ever, like a Black Hole in outer space. The vacuum is part of our genetic make-up and the reason why we invent bizarre notions such as 'soul' and 'God' in the first place. If there were a perfect god, there would be no Creation, since perfection is beyond mere and crass creation. There cannot be a perfect god who, out of vainglory, made us in his/her own image, only an imperfect one, a lonely devil in the galaxy.

One fifth of the population of the Caucasian republic of Georgia and one quarter of the population of Albania have left their countries following the arrival of "democracy". The American "democratic ideal" seems to be to install puppet or ungoverningly weak régimes everywhere possible so that American business interests can exploit the whole planet in the "pursuit of happiness" that is so hedonistically enshrined in the US Constitution.

In fact, since 1944, the USA has been responsible for more grisly deaths outside its borders - by Atom Bomb, napalm and 'conventional weapons' - than the USSR and China outside theirs. It has waged proxy wars and committed proxy war crimes, usually in Africa - to say nothing of the innumerable environmental crimes against the planet perpetrated by the richest and greediest countries in the world in pursuit of yet more riches.

We who have computers are all complicit. In a real sense, no computer-owner can ever be an "innocent victim" of "terrorism" - maybe even no supermarket shopper or television-watcher. In any case, "innocence" with respect to human beings is as meretricious a word as "righteousness".

When people live in a style unimaginable to the most luxuriating and decadent of Roman Emperors (from Tiberius to Heliogabalus), I should expect some of them to die in a style unimaginable even to the inveterate watchers of Games and Circuses who despoiled the whole of the known world of its fauna.

But not unimaginable to Hollywood, some of whose catastrophe films are much more horrific than the attack on the Towers of Babel that was and will doubtless again be the World Trade Center. The United States finally starts to live in one of its horrible movies: death imitating 'art'. Within a week of the real catastrophe Hollywood producers were surely planning the spin-off movies.

It is a sickly piety to call the mini-holocaust of the World Trade Center 'unthinkable' or 'unimaginable'. Most little boys have crashed toy aeroplanes into towers of blocks, just as most little boys, given toy guns to play with, "play at" shooting people. And in geopolitics we are talking little boys!

Ten percent of our taxes are spent on the military. One thousandth of the cost of America's and Britain's war-machines would eradicate malaria, leprosy and trachoma from the entire planet, but neither of these countries - nor any Colonial War-Crime nation such as France, Spain, Portugal, Italy or Germany, is doing anything to alleviate the horrible suffering due to these and other endemic diseases. Russia cannot now even feed or care for its own population:most of its capital is now outside the country, used by gangsters, while inside its borders it is bleeding itself dry in a ghastly war against the Chechens which neither can win - any more than it could win in Afghanistan which was its nemesis. (When Russians say "terrorists" they usually mean Chechens.) We should remember that over two million Afghans have already fled as refugees to neighbouring countries Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan and Uzbekistan - and even into China which has a short strip of border with Afghanistan.

Half of America's anthropologists are employed by the military. Indeed American anthropology arose from the desire to prove 'scientifically' that the white, Christian races are inherently 'superior' to all others. And, of course, the notion of discrete, hermetic tribes and ethnicity was developed by these early anthropologists, to the terrible detriment of Africa.

I shall not dwell upon the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because the US could not have defeated Japan otherwise, except by a long war of attrition which could have lasted until 1950. Nor am I dwelling on the genocide of Native Americans, nor the US exploitation of the Anglo-Portuguese slave trade which destroyed Africa. America has established a hegemony which is an Empire like that of the British who destroyed the economy of India by forcing it to buy the inferior goods made in England's "dark, Satanic mills". It is not so ruthless as the British or Soviet Empires, nor so openly avaricious as the Empire of the French Republic, but it is more hypocritical - and powerful - than any heretofore.

All empires and hegemonies are hated for their arrogance - including that of ancient Athens. The American hegemony is hated not because it is American, but because of its unprecedented power - and power, as we know, corrupts...its victims, too. A single Super-Power is a lonely, fearsome phenomenon. (If China were the sole superpower, things would be much worse.) Americans see other countries in terms of crass stereotypes, but do not realise that many think of the USA only in terms of Wild West genocide movies, McDonald's, global military domination, Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. They do not realise, either, that slaves in the Ottoman Empire enjoyed greater privileges and better lives than most blacks and sharecroppers in the United States long after the Ottoman Empire was destroyed by the West.

Just as there was rejoicing in Britain at the annihilation of Dresden and Hamburg in World War II, and just as Americans applauded the shooting down of an Iranian passenger airliner which killed all on board, so there were many who rejoiced at the United States 'getting a taste of its own medicine' on September 11th, 2001. For them a new Tower of Babel had been toppled.

But talk of a Crusade by Mr Bush is as disturbing as Mr Blair's claim that "we are all children of Abraham". The Fourth Crusade got no farther than Constantinople, which it wrecked in sectarian rape and pillage - and carried off the famous "lions of St Mark". America's suicidal Afghan adventure, however, may be less to do with 'terrorism' than with oil . In which case, the attack upon the twin Towers of Babel came as a godsend to the Pentagon.

On the 15th of September the Republic of Ireland - not a member of NATO - observed a National Day of Mourning for the victims of those suicide pilots who genuinely and quite rationally (if inadvisedly) aimed at what they considered to be the Heart of Darkness. The rest of Europe had an appropriate three minutes' silence. I do not remember any Irish National Day of Mourning for the millions of victims in Rwanda, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Southern Sudan. Nor for the dead of horrendous battles such as the Somme and Passchendaele. Nor even (100 years on) for the four million of us who died or emigrated during its famous Famine.

Freedom of Speech in the West: It is illegal in the USA to publish
criticism of the appalling, environmentally-catastrophic methods of
agricultural production and criminal contempt for animals.

The horror of the World Trade Center (the highest pair of heels on the planet) may be compared with that of the average American slaughterhouse - whence there is no hope of escape for animals which have spent their lives in conditions worse than Auschwitz.

It was a pity the suicide pilots hadn't just concentrated on the Pentagon, because the suicides of those incontrovertible heroes (though perhaps not as heroic as the New York firefighters!) play straight into the American myth of "victimisation" and the hands of the militarists of "the free world" - free, that is, to exploit everyone and everything in the most hypocritical way; free to make the rich ever-richer and the poor and impoverished ever more desperate: we in "the free world" enjoy freedom without responsibility, and the "Leader of the Free World" likes nothing better than to declare war on the poor - but never on poverty.

Perhaps the most irresponsible freedom in the alcoholic "Free World" is that enjoyed for the moment by the Internet - available, of course, only to the richest and least "innocent" people of the planet. Most of the rest do not have running water, much less electricity.

One and a half million Afghans died in the 'successful' struggle against the USSR. Another one and a half million, streaming back from exile and refugee camps, are ready to fight America. The United States may well - and knowingly - have committed suicide by attacking Afghanistan. The path will then be open for China (whom no-one, not even the USA, amazingly, wants to attack) to assert itself on the world stage in what will necessarily be a new way.

While we all should ponder the plight of Afghani women (some were ambassadors and senators in the latter days of the monarchy in the 1960s) represented by their own brave association in Pakistan - I will wonder about the dogs of Afghanistan. But at least in that country there is not a single concentration-camp for pigs that 'puts all Heaven in a rage'.

16th September - 18th November 2001

The
Maxims
of Swami Vrhka Baba