About Julia Gillard, that is. All these years, I thought she was a mensch, perhaps the last standing Australian politician with integrity and a backbone. But especially a politician with an all-encompassing grasp of government.

Since taking over as Prime Minister, she has shown none of these qualities. Instead she has revealed herself to be an incompetent drone. The woman who used to eat the Coalition for Question Time snacks has suddenly become a wishy-washy fool. Several weeks have gone by without any evidence of the person we all thought she was. Who’s running her? I fear she is running herself. Too many bungles have surfaced for the blame to be put elsewhere. It looks like Julia Gillard is a fake.

It has become evident that the resignation of Lindsay Tanner (and attempted resignation of John Faulkner, who is remaining on the back bench as an advisor), was prompted by a fear of Gillard’s perceived inadequacies. Indeed, the Labor Party may be about to implode.

Where does that leave Australians? With Tony Abbott and the party that locked hundreds of children behind barbed wire for years until they went mad. And they plan to start it all over again.

Australia is facing its most absurd election ever. Two politicians going for PM and not a leader in sight. People are clamoring for action on climate change, and the response from on high? Willful Dithering. Both sides are pandering to an unhinged fear over an insignificant number of boat people. What is lost here is the humanity of those who believe these people are a danger. On all issues, our humanity is being king-hit by political behavior lower than the lowest common denominator.

I keep thinking that people like Tony Abbott and Sarah Palin must be kept out of office. But maybe it no longer matters. Perhaps they will simply give us what we deserve.

December 21, 2012 is looking more and more interesting. Not because it signals the end of the world, but because millennia of willful ignorance have brought us to the breaking point. Perhaps we are at the end of an ultimately embarrassing history where all the worst aspects of human beings have been routinely exploited by a patriarchy that regards human life abstractly. Everywhere the signs are pointing to an eventual paroxysm, both from a ravaged earth and from the despair felt by almost every human being at having lived a helplessly second-rate life. You hear this phrase often these days: “We are better than this.” But, in fact, we are not. We are a failed species. As things stand, we are too broke to fix.

Yet, we do not need to perish along with our planet. We simply need to wake up. To switch on whatever it is that has lain dormant since we acquired consciousness. Maybe it’s compassion. Not just a here and there compassion, but one that doesn’t go to sleep, that can always understand what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes. I don’t have any more of it than you do. But I’ll wager it’s the answer. Or a good part of it.

In the meantime, I’m finally over politics. This is my last entry on the subject.

Technorati Tags: australian politics, compassion, julia gillard, labor party, liberal party, Politics, Sarah Palin, tony abbott

Back in the 70s everyone loved the Dutch football teams. But that was when Holland was regarded as the most civilized country on earth. Liberal and liberated, it was a country whose people appeared to have grown up. These days Holland has moved disgracefully to the right.

The 2010 Netherlands football team has reflected this soul-eating shift. Johan Cruyff, who played brilliantly in their 1974 defeat at the hands heads and feet of West Germany, has described the team who lost this year as playing “anti-football” and choosing an “ugly path”.

By contrast, Spain in the 70s was still deeply under the influence of a repressive Catholic Church and just coming out of decades under the dictator Franco. Today they have the most progressive government in Europe.

If you hadn’t followed any of the previous matches, you would quickly have noticed the profound difference in the demeanor of the 2010 finalists. The Spanish team played with enthusiasm and verve and you liked every one of them. The Dutch played like bullies and every player wore the expression of a thug.

Technorati Tags: espana, left, netherlands, right, spain, world cup

We are all pretty well convinced that politicians embody some of the worst aspects of humanity. Thus, if Julia Gillard cannot bring her integrity to work for the people, then it is clear no politician ever will. She’s one in a million.

Opposing her and the Labor Party are a rabble of self-interested puppets of the big end of town, not so much a political party as a cabal of misanthropists. This motley mob hit rock bottom when they chose Tony Abbott as leader. His unrelenting, repetitious negativity is nothing less than a health hazard. Prolonged exposure to his automated vitriol could weaken the immune system, eventually producing in the listener a diminished capacity to think clearly because the only emotion he allows to flourish is hate.

The choice at the next election is clear: optimistic vitality in the service of making Australia a better place for all. Or an Orwellian return to a medieval state of masters and servants.

Technorati Tags: australian politics, julia gillard, labor party, liberal party, tony abbott

With the election of Barack Obama in the United States and Kevin Rudd in Australia we thought the Conservative Right Wing would crawl back under the rocks from whence they came. At least for a while. Instead they are frothing like unleashed Pit Bulls.

This cancer of humanity’s soul is presently rearing its destructive head in America as the Tea Party (current mouthpiece for the Repuglycan Party), and in Australia as the Tony Abbott Party (formerly the Howard Party and before that the Liberal Party).

Promoting what amounts to governmental overthrow in the United States is the Murdoch Press and affiliates. The Wall Street Journal and the gobsmacking cretins at Fox News regularly spew the kind of wilfully ignorant propaganda that would have made Stalin green with envy. Forget the fact that Barack Obama was elected president by the will of the people — without having to steal the election as did is precursor, with the help of the Supreme Court — this lot won’t have a bar of it. They quite simply want the result annulled.

Murdoch is alive and well in Australia, too. The Australian is the newspaper equivalent of Fox News. Rabid. Mendacious. Unwavering in its bid to unseat the Rudd Government.

The two countries have in common an opposition that is one hundred percent obstructionist. Neither government can get its bills passed, and if one does get by it is so watered down as to be ineffective.

The common cry for the opposition right wing is that Obama and Rudd are socialists, even communists. The fair go for all (partnership with society) has become a communist ideal to be neutered and/or destroyed and replaced by the cult of the individual (dominator masters with society as servants).

The Tea Baggers in Umeruhca are now swaggering around armed to the teeth. That’s right, tree huggers, the tree-loppers are taking their coffee and donuts at Starbucks with six guns nestled cosily next to their little dicks.

Insane? Umeruhca became a pre-fascist state with the first stolen election of George W. Bush. By the time he stole the second election it had become fully fascist. Now, with the reversal of fortune that Obama represents, the fascists have no one in power to cater to their atavistic whims. Just look at Arizona’s Nazi-lovin’ law requiring Hispanics to show their papers at the whim of redneck cops. Where Umeruhca’s pitchfork-wielding herd was sedated by Dubya’s God-told-me-to-do-it policies, they are exploding with rage over the black man who believes in peace on earth good will toward men. And the sick irony is that they all profess to be Christians. “Onward Christian Soldiers/marching as to war…” is the anthem they grew up with. That it has nothing whatsoever to do with Christ’s teachings shows they have not evolved beyond the middle-ages mentality of the Crusades.

Here in Australia Tony Abbott and the undead remnants of the Howard Party have called a jihad against the duly elected Rudd Government. They will do and say anything, even to the point of contradicting themselves, in their ferocious attempt to denigrate the government.

Just today Tony “n’importe quoi” Abbott has been caught out admitting as much. Ni’mporte quoi is a French idiomatic expression with several meanings. “Whatever” is one. “Nonsense” (as in talking nonsense) is another. Tony fits the bill for both in that he will spout any nonsense whatever to con the electorate. His update of John Howard’s core and non-core promises.

Of course, the French phrase will never catch on, but Phoney Tony looks the goods.

As with Howard, Abbott’s coalition of larval cynics treat voters as ignorant mugs, secure in the contemptuous belief that no one has an attention span of more than a sound bite, and that they will eventually realise the error of their Labor-voting ways and return to power the party that panders to their hatred and fear.

Kevin Rudd has not helped his cause, with his pedantic prissiness and politically expedient backflips. There are now polls suggesting that Julia Gillard should take over as Prime Minister. Gillard is too smart to fall for that one and Rudd’s ego is too monstrous to let it happen. But unless he sheds the perception that he is an incompetent prime minister, he could well find himself head of a government that barely gets over the line at the next election.

Because, let’s face it, if Tony Abbott is elected, then voters will have well and truly “lost their minds”. Abbott stands for everything despicable about the right wing. He is anti-abortion. He believes women should view their sexuality as a gift to men. He could care less about climate change; as a result he supports the big end of town without reservation. He wants to reintroduce WorkChoices, where wage slaves can once again be under the Master’s thumb. Worst of all, he is a low-rent demagogue who, like his predecessor John Howard, believes he can hornswoggle the ever-anti-evolutionary Silent Majority into believing that being members of a civilised society is a communist plot and that they are far better off as self-serving individuals.

In both the United States and Australia, the rabid right wing has declared war on humanity’s basic desire to simply collect their paycheque and live in peace. Hatred is their impetus; treason is their goal.

PS: There is one Rudd Government bill that if it passes into law would find me advocating any party but Labor. This is the Rudd-Conroy ISP Internet Filter Legislation, supposedly set in place to prevent the downloading of child pornography but in reality is meant to protect adult Australians from themselves. Made law, Australia would be in the same league as China and North Korea. Even though it will be relatively easy to get around the filter, the answer is a resounding no. A government that censors this blatantly is unsupportable.

ISP bill links:
ISP filtering bill delayed indefinitely
Ruth Ostrow: Let freedom reign

Technorati Tags: fox news, kevin rudd, labor party, liberal party, murdoch, Obama, tea bag party, tony abbott, workchoices

Second. Insure there will be no interruptions. If you think your dog will want to play while you are listening, lock the animal in the garage. To save the tenuous grip on reality of your wife and children, make sure they are not present.

Third. You must be seated well before the music begins. Nothing must distract your listening to these first notes. Use a remote to begin the music once you are settled and ready.

Fourth. The music must be played as loud as you can bear. Do not consider the neighbours. It only lasts a half hour or so, so fuck ‘em. Remember, play it loud!

Fifth. It is best to listen in total darkness. Otherwise, look out upon a bleak landscape. If the sun is shining and turning everything hideously merry, shut the curtains, pull the blinds, put on a blindfold.

Sixth. Again, do not be distracted. LISTEN and keep your mind from wandering.

Seventh. After the last few notes have provided you with a springboard into a void emptier than any void you have yet contemplated, release the dog and go for a long walk to relieve the desire to commit suicide.

Eighth. Return refreshed and, with the dog snoozing from exertion, listen a second time and know that you are experiencing an aural map of human existence.

Link: The Music: Symphony no. 4 op. 63 (1911)

Technorati Tags: classical music, Sibelius, symphony

Michael Garrison,
from the back cover of In the Regions of Sunreturn, 1979

I first heard Michael Garrison’s music in January of 1984. And the very first piece of his music I heard was “Daydreams” from Point of Impact. It has always been my favourite.

I had recently arrived in Victoria, British Columbia, after a few years of itinerant wandering in Europe and the Middle East. I was dead broke, but managed to score welfare. I rented a furnished room in a dilapidated boarding house on Richmond Street, with the intention of beginning a book. Welfare supplied enough money to pay the rent, eat sparingly and to drink a half bottle of cheap red wine every night while I banged away on the AZERTY keyboard portable typewriter I’d bought for a song in France. I supplemented my food income by shoplifting rump steaks and butter and the like. I borrowed a bicycle from a friend and drove twice a week to McGavin’s bakery, where I loaded up on day old bread. It was a frugal existence, and one of the happiest of my life.

Missing was some way of listening to music. I inveigled a friend into loaning me the money to buy a Sharp Double Cassette recorder with FM, AM and a couple of Short Wave bands. Paying her back from various gardening jobs I’d taken on to keep fit and supplement welfare would take more than a year. Almost immediately I came across CFUV FM, the station run out of the University of Victoria. One of the programs was called Ear Meals, hosted by Brian Lunger. This knowledgeable young dude played electronic and experimental music and sounds, the kind of music I’d come to love while living in Europe. But until now the only artists I’d heard were Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. He extended my listening range exponentially, and I owe most of my musical experience in these genres to him.

After listening to his weekly program for the first time, I extended my shoplifting items to include quality blank cassettes. The following week I was ready with a pristine BASF ninety-minute tape. I hit record and on came Garrison’s “Daydreams.” I still have this cassette. Indeed, over the next few years I recorded over one hundred tapes of what I came to call Bananas Music (early Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley) — in that their repetitive minimalism tended to drive unsuspecting partygoers bananas, and what French friends referred to as Musique Planante, or “mind-blowing music” (Garrison, Schulze, et al). Lunger’s Ear Meals introduced me to the work of Ian Boddy, Ron Slabe, Steve Roach, Manuel Göttsching, Don Robertson, Ron Berry, Rainer Bloss, Danna & Clement, Ebondazzar, Michael Stearns and Robert Schroeder, to name a few. And then there were the alternative groups such as Algebra Suicide, The Legendary Pink Dots, Ptose, Merzbow, Xray Pop, and Courage of Lassie, again to name a very few. There were hundreds.

In Europe the signature music for me was Schulze’s “Floating” (from the album Moondawn), a masterpiece of Sturm und Drang, and Reich’s tabula rasa music, such as “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Six Pianos.” But after first hearing Michael Garrison, it was his music, with its uncomplicated life affirming, often child-like joys and mysteries, that became the music I turned to whenever I needed to boot myself out of misery.

I managed to find three of his albums while in Victoria: In the Regions of Sunreturn, Prisms, and Eclipse. But Point of Impact was nowhere to be found.

And then I moved to Australia in 1989 with my new wife, an Aussie. I wrote Mike, putting in an order for a cassette of An Earth-Star Trilogy, and asked if he had any copies of Point of Impact, as it was unavailable in Australia as well. To my astonishment he too was sold out. What he did was to send me, free of charge, a cassette of three songs, which he called The Basement Tape. It included “Daydreams,” but the next piece was not from Point of Impact. It was only recently that I found that it was “Daydreams” and subsequent songs from the CD reissue of Eclipse.

Later, we corresponded again, when I ordered The Rhythm of Life on CD.

Then, with a new daughter to look after, and life being what it is: a series of nows that often do not connect, Michael Garrison and the great synth masterpieces of the Germans slipped out of my musical consciousness.

Many years elapsed before I wrote again, to find out how things were going and what new releases he’d come up with. But I never heard from him. I thought, maybe he’s hit the big time, or moved. So I let it go.

Just last week, while I was looking through a 1976 journal I’d written while in the south of France, I came across the mention of the “recent” Tangerine Dream recording of “Ricochet.” I went to look for the CD in my collection and found, several slots above it, Garrison’s Rhythm of Life. I’d forgotten I had it!

This led me to look through the old vinyls stored away in the closet. I pulled out the three albums mentioned above and decided to digitize them. While doing this I Googled “Michael Garrison” to find out what he’d been up to. I was absolutely stunned, physically paralysed for a moment, to find that he had died in 2004 … six years ago! How could this be? The website Perfect Sound Forever: Michael Garrison is in part an interview by Mark S. Tucker with Mike shortly before he died, and a eulogy. It turns out that he suffered depression from childhood and became an alcoholic. He died of massive liver failure. The very last thing I would have expected. Drugs, perhaps, but alcohol? He just didn’t seem the type. But then, who really is? As Tucker so eloquently says, “If any sum-up might be drawn, perhaps it would be that he was living proof that, even amidst the most unbearable of circumstances, spirit always prevails. As with so many creative minds, Mike found profound solace and intellectual engagement in beauty and wonder, documenting his visions for the rest of us. That is the essence of all art.”

It was as if I had just learned that a dear old friend, not seen for years, had died and I had been too busy with my life to notice. I can tell you that a day or so later, I shed tears listening to this gentle soul’s music.

Another web site, Music Blog of Saltyka and his friends, provides a Garrison discography with comment and downloadable links. It seems most of Mike’s work is out of print. Through this site, I was finally able to get a recording of Point of Impact. It has taken me 26 years!

By now I’ve downloaded all of Mike’s work, except Aurora Dawn, the link being broken. For the past two weeks I’ve been playing Michael Garrison in my car, often driving out of my way to keep listening. I’ve found many new favourites, but “Daydreams” remains number one. Tucker describes it as “an almost tabernacularly moody number, a gem in the Garrison repertoire and unusually pensive.” And I agree with him when he says it’s much too short.

I was a heavy dope smoker in my younger years. Growing older, my lungs started rebelling, and so these days I only occasionally have a few tokes. I do so to rouse myself out of whatever mental status quo I’ve sunk into. These occasional tokes are like spiritual medicine. And so is Michael Garrison’s music.

Michael Garrison, from the cover of Images, 1986

Addendum: Tucker says, “Mike had none of the pretensions too often normal to many artists. He was unhurried and natural. Even in his e-mail’s, there was always an unselfconscious smile.” How true. He was, in a word, a nice guy. I’ve included the following scans of his letters to me simply to verify this. And also, to quote Tucker once more: “… for the selling [of] a half million units from a 13-title catalogue, his was, and still is, not a well-known name.” These letters will add a little to the dearth of what is known about Michael Garrison.

See also the web sites of: Craig Padilla; Klaus Schulze; Steve Roach; Ian Boddy; Don Robertson

Technorati Tags: alternative music, ambient techno, electronic music, michael garrison, Music, synth, synthesizer

Inherent Vice has been described as “Pynchon Lite” and a “beach read” and it’s true that of all his tomes, this is the easiest to digest without recourse to a complete encyclopedia and a ten kilo dictionary.

But on page 347, Pynchon nails perhaps the main reason why the world we’re living in is too broke to fix. Doc, in conversation with Crocker Fenway, a man who speaks for Those Who Have Always Ruled, is told:

“We’re in place. We’ve been in place forever. Look around. Real estate, water rights, oil, cheap labor — all of that’s ours, it’s always been ours. And you, at the end of the day what are you? one more unit in this swarm of transients who come and go without pause…eager to be bought off with a car of a certain make, model, and year, a blonde in a bikini, thirty seconds on some excuse for a wave--a chili dog, for Christ’s sake. We will never run out of you people. The supply is inexhaustible.”

Technorati Tags: Books, thomas pynchon

They cannot abide being in opposition. How could they? This is the Born to Rule Party. Tory Toffs and lower caste right wing larvals long ago put aside their innate revulsion for one another to become a grab bag Coalition to further the interests of the big end of town. To ensure this wealth creation of the few it was a logical step to eliminate as far as possible any interfering human rights. This later became a sport with asylum seekers.

It must have been hard for the likes of Alexander Downer to rub shoulders with a Wilson Tuckey or a Bill Heffernan.

Now, with the final farewell performance of the Smirking Jerk, Peter Costello, the only representative of the Higher Born is Malcolm Turnbull. And look at what a dill he has become. Who knows what kind a leader he might have been had the Howard Virus not continued to quarantine the ethical standards of those still in Parliament.

If I’m not mistaken, Turnbull used to be a liberal. But the Liberal Party is Conservative; they just don’t have the courage to correct that glaring error. A political party that calls itself Liberal but is in fact ultra conservative is a good indication of its schizoid state.

At the beginning of his leadership, Turnbull found himself trying to convince a rabble of Howard loyalists that the party must change. Now, with the OzCar disaster, it is clear that his integrity has been gutted. A shadow of his former self, all we see and hear now is a stentorian bully, a patrician whose features are getting sleezier by the day. Soon his ravaged visage will be indistinguishable from Heffernan’s.

And any day now, Turnbull will become yet another failed leader swinging in the breeze. Who is left? Joe Hockey? Also damaged by OzCar. Tony Abbott? He should get out of politics. Andrew Robb? Another nasty, but perhaps their only hope.

As an opposition, the Coalition’s one and only goal is to bring down the government. It has no other purpose than to be obstructionist. Its opportunism is on display every day in every way.

Imagine how vastly improved the governance of Australia would be if a broader version of the Greens were the opposition. Instead we have this wheyfaced pantheon of ferals whose self-interest places the well being of Australia dead last in a miserable list of grubby priorities.

Australia desperately needs an effective opposition. The Coalition has forfeited that right.

Technorati Tags: australian politics, coalition, ethics, john howard, liberal party, malcolm turnbull

Memorial to Neda Soltan: Angel of Freedom

The current horror in Iran between a majority of people who want to be free in a secular society and the minority of insane fundamentalists who are happy to slaughter in the name of Allah is a clear example of a species that looks to have passed its use-by date. After centuries of moral crimes committed by each and every religion, it’s hard not to conclude that now, in the 21st century, the human race is too broke to fix.

The Iranian government, led by the devastatingly vicious ignorance of Ayatollah Khamenei, his stooge, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and their stooges, the Basiji, speaks for the persistence of evil in the human psyche. Perhaps not since Hitler and Stalin has a regime so blatantly embodied a hatred of their fellow man. Indeed, for them their fellow man is non-existent.

At the root of the insanity is a triumvirate of hopelessness: 1) The Y Chromosome. 99.99 per cent of all violence is caused by the malformed male gender. 2) Religion. The Gods are not crazy. The people who made them up are. Religion is the single greatest contributor to intolerance in history. 3) Money. If religion is not involved in the quest for power, money is. All three work together in most cases.

The Iranian killers are all men. The Iranian religious hierarchy is all men. Allah is a man. God is a man. Yahweh is a man. Men and religion are the toxic combination that will eventually destroy the human race.

History shows one thing very clearly: life is cheap. Iran’s protesters have two choices. For Neda Soltan and every human being who realizes that we are all brothers and sisters, they can use their numbers to overrun the Basiji, the police, the Revolutionary Guards, and finally the desiccated old men at the top, until what is left of them can take over the government. It’s time to stop offering their precious lives as nothing more than target practice for a mob of deluded maniacs.

Or they can go home and try to live out their lives as best they can.

Technorati Tags: fundamentalism, Iran, Iran election, Khamenei, Neda, religion

It was too early for the weekend rush so I had a chat with the woman on duty while the cook went about the task of sizzling and toasting. I’d bought The Age, which lay open on the counter. The woman noted President Obama’s photo on the front page — he’d just given the Cairo speech — and wondered how long he had to live. I seconded her worry, remarking that politicians who spoke of uniting different cultures and especially religions were usually targeted for death by Right Wing dividers.

To my surprise she started to talk about the situation in Israel. She knew all about hardliner Binyamin Netanyahu and moderate Tzipi Livni and their opposing views on a separate Palestinian state. I was blown away. Most people who work in a food court are barely able to grunt when local politics are raised, let alone foreign affairs.

Then she returned to Obama’s speech. She wasn’t so sure about his opening salutation of Salaam Aleikum. I was about to differ on its utter appropriateness when the brekkie was delivered. Putting the plate on a tray, she said: “Almost the very next thing Obama talked about was the Holocaust. You know, don’t you, that millions being killed is a lie. I doubt the toll was more than a hundred thousand.”

Now I was blown away again. I gibbered something before saying, “Well, I’m off to eat. See you later.” I found a table well away from the food court and sat there for a stunned minute or two before opening The Age to read the news of the day. But for the life of me, I was unable to concentrate. What in the hell had I just heard?

Here was a woman in her mid-fifties, seemingly intelligent and definitely articulate. A Holocaust denier. So how, in the face of irrefutable proof, could she maintain the belief that the Holocaust had killed so few? I guess I was lucky to get away before she could go on about “what really happened”.

Are the brains of Holocaust-deniers (and creationists too, for that matter) defective? What part of their cognitive faculties is switched off so that belief replaces reality? I have no problem with debating reality: what it really is and how many of them there are. Reality, in this case, is what we all agree on, but beliefs are the stillborn offspring of dogma, and, as Robert Anton Wilson said, “When dogma enters brain, all intellectual activity ceases.” The vital signs are there, but the brain is dead.

Belief is where you part company with complexity. Holocaust deniers believe that six million Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and the physically and mentally impaired did not perish at the hands of the Nazis, just as creationists believe that God created the earth in six days some four or five millennia ago. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary in both cases.

If Holocaust denial weren’t bad enough, my face almost fell into the eggs when I read about what amounts to the other extreme end of this spectrum. That of Michael Ben-Ari, an MP for the right-wing Nation Union Party in Israel. He was recently arrested during rioting by settlers in the occupied West Bank. These settlers are as blind as their opposites in Holocaust denial. They regard the Palestinians the same way the Nazis regarded the Jews. Of Obama’s speech, Ben-Ari said: “Mr Obama’s hatred for the people of Israel led him to deliver a most dangerous speech that exposed his pro-Islamic trends.”

Is this man insane? How could he interpret Obama’s speech as full of hatred or pro anything except world peace … unless he is stark raving mad?

But this is the world we live in. Peopled by far too many subs ‘n’ duds who are clearly out of their minds.

But leave us not forget their leaders. That Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and the Burmese Generals continue to rule with unrelenting cruelty while the Free World looks on is indicative of the moral failure that plagues all governments. Kim Jong-il of North Korea may be the worst of all. He has the mental capacity of a booze-addled eleven-year-old in charge of a military with nuclear capabilities. Recently we’ve heard that Kim is favouring his youngest son to replace him as Dear Leader. And why not the eldest son? Well, that nong fell out of favour with daddy when it was discovered that he snuck into Japan to go to Disneyland.

At least we hear on the odd occasion of Zimbabweans and Burmese challenging authority. But, aside from the international antics of disgraced number one son, the people of North Korea are phantoms.

Remember that lethal fool George W. Bush? Like the madmen above, he simply stole elections. A fundamentalist Christian, he is identical to his fundamentalist Muslim enemy, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Bush claimed over and over that God was instructing him in everything he did. Ahmadinejad claimed that he was surrounded by light when he addressed the UN General Assembly in 2005. But the “light” wasn’t coming from Dubya’s God, it was coming from his own personal deity.

The beat thuds on when we read that the world’s most wanted war criminal, Ratko Mladic, is living openly in Belgrade; or if not there, elsewhere. Serbian authorities are miffed that the unauthorized release of this information might jeopardise their entry into the EU. But they are mum about successive Serbian governments and the military keeping him safe all this time. The point being surely that his alleged part in the murder of 7000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica was no more than a soldier doing his duty. One thing is sure, the world’s overfunded spy agencies have been conspicuously impotent in his capture. Just as they allowed hundreds of Nazis to get away after WWII. In some cases they even helped the war criminals to migrate freely to other countries.

We also read of James von Brunn, an 88-year-old American Holocaust-denying fascist who walked into Washington’s Holocaust Center and shot dead a black security guard. He was wounded by two other security guards before he got the chance to murder others. A fellow white supremacist wrote on his blog: “He was trying to set Our Race free”. If only this representative of “Our Race” would look in the mirror he would see that the only members of the race he is trying to save amount to white trash.

Racism and nationalism go hand on spotty cock. To paraphrase Yu Hua, referring to the post-Tiananmen Square generation of Chinese nationalists: They “have no sense of ambivalence, no idea of life’s ambiguities.” Indeed, they could easily devolve into today’s equivalent of the fanatically murderous Red Guards. The only thing separating the Chinese nationalists with the inbreds among their Western brethren is religion.

It’s like we’re still living in the Dark Ages; or worse, trying to return to them. During Europe’s nadir at least the Islamic world flourished. Now every last religion is in mortal danger of being overrun by its extremist elements. They may be a minority, but they are a minority with weapons and the fanatic’s lust to use them in the name of each religion’s blinkered self-righteousness.

Tariq Ali is correct in naming the present era a “clash of fundamentalisms”. Anti-evolutionary extremists are like robots run amuck. The Christian who believes a foetus has more rights than its mother; the Jewish settler who burns Palestinian crops because his God decreed the land to be sacred for Jews and Jews only; The Islamic terrorist who beats to death a young girl because she went to school. It is these people, those among us, who look just like us, who have declared war on humanity. But it’s not just a battle between tolerance and intolerance, your god or his god, it’s a battle between sanity and insanity.
—
Addendum: The man whose name could be transmogrified into Ahm-as-mad-as-a-Djinn was never in doubt to win the Iranian election. When a nation is ruled by clerics, you can be sure their chosen halfwit will be victorious. Just look at Franco of Spain. The Catholic Church backed him to the hilt, the other end of which he drove into the heart of his nation.

Technorati Tags: Christian fundamentalists, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Jewish settlers, nationalism, Obama, religion, Taliban, terrorism