Tweet
Hypocrisy and homophobia
COMMON SENSE
JOHN MAXWELL
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Hypocrisy is an essential element in diplomacy.
As Oscar Wilde or somebody once said, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. And, to continue the quotation game, diplomats are, according to Lord Palmerston, people sent abroad to lie for their country.
Condoleezza Rice is the US top diplomat, so one should normally expect her to titrate the truth. No one expects anything vaguely resembling the truth to issue from the lips of George Bush, even when he's making what seems to be sense.
But this week's performances have been landmarks in the history of hypocrisy, especially since huge expanses of the US press appear to have become accredited members of the US diplomatic apparatus.
The president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, is an American puppet installed after one of the trademark colour-coded 'revolutions' in Eastern Europe. Georgia's was the 'rose' revo, following the 'orange' revo in the Ukraine, both part of the supposedly invisible American campaign to encircle the Russians with hostile regimes, Lilliputian warriors primed to tie down the Russian Gulliver and render him harmless and ready to yield billions of barrels of petroleum to Mr Cheney's friends.
According to the US government and its official press, Russia, that big bad bully, has cruelly attacked and mauled poor little Georgia - a shining light of western style-democracy in the formerly limitless expanse of Soviet empire.
The problem is that that statement is a lie.
The break-up of the Soviet Union has some parallels to the break-up of the British Empire. Both were composed of a variety of states in various states of development.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics contained not only autonomous republics like Belorussia and the Ukraine, longtime members of the UN, but other republics like Kazakhstan, autonomous regions like Inner Mongolia and a mishmash of statelets and mini-nations of ethnic minorities and indigenous ethnic groups. Some of them had been attached to larger republics for administrative reasons. Some, like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, were Russian ethnic enclaves embedded in newly independent states, yearning for reunion with mother Russia.
This is not quite the same situation as in Kosovo, where decades-long invasion of ethnic Albanians transformed Serbian 'heartland' into what the west now recognises as an independent nation.
The west permits Kosovo-type solutions when it works to the advantage of the US and its allies. It fixes its face firmly against the adhesion of places like South Ossetia to its sibling North Ossetia, although both have been full of Russians for a very, very long time.
The Russians may very well have a grievance against Georgia because that is the homeland of the most successful tyrant of recent history, one Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, aka Stalin.
The Georgian president, an American-educated American-installed puppet, has been less than a stellar success since he took charge of Georgia, despite the fact that he shares a name and familial antecedents with a recent head of the American military and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff.
Mr Saakashvili developed a surefire way of deflecting criticism of his governance. Whenever he felt threatened he would turn the argument to the so-called re-integration of the Soviet-era enclaves Abkhazia and South Ossetia, into the body of Georgia. Recently, under very serious pressure from his electorate for other reasons of nonperformance, Saakashvili decided to forcefully reintegrate South Ossetia. In this, his army, trained and armed by the United States and Israel, was supposed to have made short work of South Ossetia.
Another link in the NATO ring round Russia would have been forged and Central Asian petroleum supplies made safe for Mr Cheney and the bankers.
They did not expect the Russians to react as they did. In their brotherly intervention, the Georgians blitzed the capital of South Ossetia, killing thousands of innocent people, destroying the university and most of the capital city. Unconditional surrender should have followed.
Instead, the Russians came to the defence of their nationals, and in three or four days of fighting routed the Georgians and seemed determined to teach them a lesson not to be soon forgotten.
In their panic, the Georgians demanded and got the return from Iraq of 2,000 of their troops illegally engaged with the Americans, British, Australians and sundry others, in the rape and pillage of a country which had done none of them any injury.
As the Bible says, echoed of course, by Bob Marley: "He that diggeth a pit shall fall in it, fall in it ."
Mr Bush and his administration are said to be 'seeking to punish" Russia for its behaviour, which it has described as disproportionate and tending to lower the Russians in the estimation of right-thinking people round the world.
He said: "Russia has invaded a sovereign neighbouring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st Century."
In Haiti, where the Americans without provocation, kidnapped and deposed a lawfully elected president, and where it is now one year since a leading opponent of the occupation has disappeared, people might be forgiven for thinking that Mr Bush is being a little disingenuous. But perhaps Mr Bush no longer cares about lowering the United States in the estimation of the world. No hypocrisy is necessary in relation to Haiti.
Georgians have rights. Haitians have none.
THE BIBLE AND HOMOPHOBIA
I have good news for the Jamaican homophobe community: homosexuality is not contagious.
And for the journalistic and political ignoramuses who support the homophobes, I have some startling information: homosexuality is not illegal, so it cannot be decriminalised.
And for those policemen who blackmail homosexuals, I have more information. Buggery is illegal, whether practised upon a man or a woman. That should extend the scope of your extortionate enterprises.
The problem of trying to argue rationally with fundamentalists is that they bring their own facts to the table, and nothing that has happened in the last 4,000 years is important if it in any way challenges the rules of Leviticus if those rules are convenient to them. They are ready to put homosexuals to death, but routinely dishonour their parents, commit adultery and curse and blaspheme all serious crimes deserving of the death penalty, according to Leviticus.
The real problem has nothing to do with the Bible, but with the sexual insecurity of the homophobes.
It is a fairly well known fact that all human beings pass through stages of sexual awakening in which very little is obvious or clear, and many of us never have anyone to help us through the sexual swampland of teenage. Teenagers of both sexes develop 'crushes' on all kinds of objects, other human beings, movie stars, animals, teddy bears.
Some never get the chance to grow out of these dead ends and imagine themselves guilty of all kinds of wickedness because according to the Bible, lust itself is a capital offence.
In the state of fear that grips some of us in youth we imagine ourselves as demons of the deepest dye and some of us kill ourselves or try to, because of our avoidable confusion.
It is now as clear as anyone could wish that homosexuality is not a disease, it is not a psychological disorder, or learnable behaviour, it is simply another expression of the genetic variousness of humanity.
Recent research has confirmed what many have suspected for centuries - that homosexuals are born, not made. Measurements of the human brain provide compelling evidence that
. Ordinary male brains are different from ordinary female brains
. Homosexual (male) brains are almost indistinguishable from ordinary female brains
. The brains of female homosexuals - lesbians - are almost indistinguishable from ordinary male brains
There are other studies, for instance, of identical twins separated at birth and brought up by different 'parents' which indicate that if one twin is homosexual, the odds are almost even that the other twin is also homosexual.
These and other studies would seem to me to make it plain that an enormous amount of psychic energy is wasted, especially in Jamaica, in trying to change the facts of human sexuality.
What we proud heterosexuals should do is to be happy that we are what we are and allow the homosexuals to be happy with who they are, since none of us can do anything to change the situation.
If we manage to do this, we can gain millions of man and woman hours for creative things, like making life miserable for those who throw plastic bottles out of buses and otherwise despoil the environment, stealing beaches and so on.
We journalists do a disservice to the public interest when we fail to inform ourselves of the facts and so mislead people. To argue for justice for homosexuals is not to argue that we must join in homosexual behaviour. And, as I said earlier, homosexuality is neither contagious nor illegal.
Get a life!
War shows that Putin is running things in Russia
MOSCOW, Russia - When the fighting broke out in Georgia, it was Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and not Russia's new young president who stepped up to lead the country's tough response.
The ongoing conflict has confirmed what has become increasingly obvious in recent weeks: Putin is still the one in charge.
President Dmitry Medvedev has been the Kremlin's voice in recent days, but Putin set the tone from the beginning. And when Medvedev suddenly made an uncharacteristically blunt statement, he seemed to be imitating the mannerisms and language of his powerful mentor.
After Georgia opened fire on the Russian-backed separatist region of South Ossetia, Putin was the first to speak to the nation on television. He also was the first to confer with world leaders, including President Bush, in Beijing for the opening of the Olympics.
Putin promised a strong Russian retaliation, which was not long in coming. Russia rolled hundreds of tanks into Georgia and bombed from the air.
On his way home from China last weekend, Putin stopped in southern Russia to see South Ossetians who had fled the fighting. He was shown repeatedly on television bounding down the steps from the aircraft, sending the clear message that he was ready to take charge.
Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili had little doubt who was behind the Russian attack. Speaking on a conference call with foreign journalists Wednesday, he said he had tried to reach "President Putin, or Prime Minister Putin," but was unable to get through.
Even Putin's critics were impressed with his performance in the first days of the conflict. "For the first time in my life, I was amazed by the mastery with which Putin is able to hold onto power," political commentator Yulia Latynina wrote in the online Yezhednevny Zhurnal.
In contrast, Medvedev chaired a meeting of his Security Council over the weekend and made a statement worthy of the former law professor he is: "In accordance with the constitution and federal law, I, as president of Russia, am obliged to protect the lives and dignity of Russian citizens wherever they are located. We won't allow the deaths of our compatriots to go unpunished."
Russia has given passports to residents of South Ossetia, which broke from Georgia in the early 1990s.
By Tuesday, the Kremlin image makers seemed to understand that Medvedev as commander-in-chief had to put in a better performance. And as president, he was the one who needed to meet with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was in Moscow on a EU-sponsored peace mission.
But when their joint news conference was delayed, the word circulated among reporters in the Kremlin that the two presidents were waiting for Putin. As if in confirmation of this, the prime minister's motorcade was seen zooming through central Moscow toward the Kremlin.
This created the impression that Putin could not really trust Medvedev or Medvedev needed reinforcement, said Masha Lipman, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. "In any case, I think this too is an indirect indication of who is more important in this ruling tandem," she said.
When Medvedev walked out with Sarkozy for their televised news conference, he spoke like Putin.
"You see, thugs differ from normal people in that when they smell blood, it's hard for them to stop," Medvedev said. "So, we are forced to resort to surgical intervention."
He punched the words with cold anger, but his anger and crime-world language seemed forced, an imitation of Putin's naturally flowing rebukes.
It was perhaps his toughest public statement since becoming president in May.
Medvedev had little choice but to take a tough stance since Russians remember all too well how Putin handled similar situations, said political columnist Georgy Bovt.
"They expect the same from Medvedev," Bovt wrote in The Moscow Times. "Otherwise, people would begin to call into question his ability to run the country and accuse him of being spineless."
But Russians increasingly have seen Putin as holding the real power in the country. A poll by the independent Levada Center last month showed that 36 per cent of those surveyed see Putin as more powerful, compared with only nine per cent for Medvedev.
This was a sharp divergence from a similar survey in March, the month Medvedev was elected, when both leaders polled around 20 per cent. In both surveys, nearly half of those polled said they had equal powers.
The poll, conducted nationwide in late July among 1,600 people, has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
The presidency is the far more powerful position under Russia's constitution, and both men have stressed that this will not change.
But a prominent Russian sociologist, who studies the Russian political elite, said Putin is steadily expanding the powers of the prime minister. Many members of the government who used to answer directly to the president, including the defence minister and foreign minister, now take their orders from Putin, said Olga Kryshtanovskaya.
"We have never had such a powerful prime minister," she said at a recent news conference.
Since becoming president, Medvedev has put forward several new programmes, including one to fight corruption and restore respect for the law. Some have read this as veiled criticism of Putin's eight years in office and an attempt by Medvedev to push Putin aside.
Kryshtanovskaya said this is absurd. These claims have been promoted by the hardline Kremlin camp of former KGB officers who opposed Putin's choice of Medvedev as his successor and now hope to undermine him, she said.
Medvedev, 42, is an integral part of Putin's team and has no incentive to go against his "political father", she said.
This doesn't mean that the Russian political system is not evolving with Medvedev as president.
"The political process can always be looked at either through a telescope or a microscope", she said. "If you look up close, of course, much is changing. But if you take the longer view, it turns out that the system was totalitarian and continues to be totalitarian," she said.
[email protected]
COMMON SENSE
JOHN MAXWELL
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Hypocrisy is an essential element in diplomacy.
As Oscar Wilde or somebody once said, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. And, to continue the quotation game, diplomats are, according to Lord Palmerston, people sent abroad to lie for their country.
Condoleezza Rice is the US top diplomat, so one should normally expect her to titrate the truth. No one expects anything vaguely resembling the truth to issue from the lips of George Bush, even when he's making what seems to be sense.
But this week's performances have been landmarks in the history of hypocrisy, especially since huge expanses of the US press appear to have become accredited members of the US diplomatic apparatus.
The president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, is an American puppet installed after one of the trademark colour-coded 'revolutions' in Eastern Europe. Georgia's was the 'rose' revo, following the 'orange' revo in the Ukraine, both part of the supposedly invisible American campaign to encircle the Russians with hostile regimes, Lilliputian warriors primed to tie down the Russian Gulliver and render him harmless and ready to yield billions of barrels of petroleum to Mr Cheney's friends.
According to the US government and its official press, Russia, that big bad bully, has cruelly attacked and mauled poor little Georgia - a shining light of western style-democracy in the formerly limitless expanse of Soviet empire.
The problem is that that statement is a lie.
The break-up of the Soviet Union has some parallels to the break-up of the British Empire. Both were composed of a variety of states in various states of development.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics contained not only autonomous republics like Belorussia and the Ukraine, longtime members of the UN, but other republics like Kazakhstan, autonomous regions like Inner Mongolia and a mishmash of statelets and mini-nations of ethnic minorities and indigenous ethnic groups. Some of them had been attached to larger republics for administrative reasons. Some, like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, were Russian ethnic enclaves embedded in newly independent states, yearning for reunion with mother Russia.
This is not quite the same situation as in Kosovo, where decades-long invasion of ethnic Albanians transformed Serbian 'heartland' into what the west now recognises as an independent nation.
The west permits Kosovo-type solutions when it works to the advantage of the US and its allies. It fixes its face firmly against the adhesion of places like South Ossetia to its sibling North Ossetia, although both have been full of Russians for a very, very long time.
The Russians may very well have a grievance against Georgia because that is the homeland of the most successful tyrant of recent history, one Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, aka Stalin.
The Georgian president, an American-educated American-installed puppet, has been less than a stellar success since he took charge of Georgia, despite the fact that he shares a name and familial antecedents with a recent head of the American military and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff.
Mr Saakashvili developed a surefire way of deflecting criticism of his governance. Whenever he felt threatened he would turn the argument to the so-called re-integration of the Soviet-era enclaves Abkhazia and South Ossetia, into the body of Georgia. Recently, under very serious pressure from his electorate for other reasons of nonperformance, Saakashvili decided to forcefully reintegrate South Ossetia. In this, his army, trained and armed by the United States and Israel, was supposed to have made short work of South Ossetia.
Another link in the NATO ring round Russia would have been forged and Central Asian petroleum supplies made safe for Mr Cheney and the bankers.
They did not expect the Russians to react as they did. In their brotherly intervention, the Georgians blitzed the capital of South Ossetia, killing thousands of innocent people, destroying the university and most of the capital city. Unconditional surrender should have followed.
Instead, the Russians came to the defence of their nationals, and in three or four days of fighting routed the Georgians and seemed determined to teach them a lesson not to be soon forgotten.
In their panic, the Georgians demanded and got the return from Iraq of 2,000 of their troops illegally engaged with the Americans, British, Australians and sundry others, in the rape and pillage of a country which had done none of them any injury.
As the Bible says, echoed of course, by Bob Marley: "He that diggeth a pit shall fall in it, fall in it ."
Mr Bush and his administration are said to be 'seeking to punish" Russia for its behaviour, which it has described as disproportionate and tending to lower the Russians in the estimation of right-thinking people round the world.
He said: "Russia has invaded a sovereign neighbouring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st Century."
In Haiti, where the Americans without provocation, kidnapped and deposed a lawfully elected president, and where it is now one year since a leading opponent of the occupation has disappeared, people might be forgiven for thinking that Mr Bush is being a little disingenuous. But perhaps Mr Bush no longer cares about lowering the United States in the estimation of the world. No hypocrisy is necessary in relation to Haiti.
Georgians have rights. Haitians have none.
THE BIBLE AND HOMOPHOBIA
I have good news for the Jamaican homophobe community: homosexuality is not contagious.
And for the journalistic and political ignoramuses who support the homophobes, I have some startling information: homosexuality is not illegal, so it cannot be decriminalised.
And for those policemen who blackmail homosexuals, I have more information. Buggery is illegal, whether practised upon a man or a woman. That should extend the scope of your extortionate enterprises.
The problem of trying to argue rationally with fundamentalists is that they bring their own facts to the table, and nothing that has happened in the last 4,000 years is important if it in any way challenges the rules of Leviticus if those rules are convenient to them. They are ready to put homosexuals to death, but routinely dishonour their parents, commit adultery and curse and blaspheme all serious crimes deserving of the death penalty, according to Leviticus.
The real problem has nothing to do with the Bible, but with the sexual insecurity of the homophobes.
It is a fairly well known fact that all human beings pass through stages of sexual awakening in which very little is obvious or clear, and many of us never have anyone to help us through the sexual swampland of teenage. Teenagers of both sexes develop 'crushes' on all kinds of objects, other human beings, movie stars, animals, teddy bears.
Some never get the chance to grow out of these dead ends and imagine themselves guilty of all kinds of wickedness because according to the Bible, lust itself is a capital offence.
In the state of fear that grips some of us in youth we imagine ourselves as demons of the deepest dye and some of us kill ourselves or try to, because of our avoidable confusion.
It is now as clear as anyone could wish that homosexuality is not a disease, it is not a psychological disorder, or learnable behaviour, it is simply another expression of the genetic variousness of humanity.
Recent research has confirmed what many have suspected for centuries - that homosexuals are born, not made. Measurements of the human brain provide compelling evidence that
. Ordinary male brains are different from ordinary female brains
. Homosexual (male) brains are almost indistinguishable from ordinary female brains
. The brains of female homosexuals - lesbians - are almost indistinguishable from ordinary male brains
There are other studies, for instance, of identical twins separated at birth and brought up by different 'parents' which indicate that if one twin is homosexual, the odds are almost even that the other twin is also homosexual.
These and other studies would seem to me to make it plain that an enormous amount of psychic energy is wasted, especially in Jamaica, in trying to change the facts of human sexuality.
What we proud heterosexuals should do is to be happy that we are what we are and allow the homosexuals to be happy with who they are, since none of us can do anything to change the situation.
If we manage to do this, we can gain millions of man and woman hours for creative things, like making life miserable for those who throw plastic bottles out of buses and otherwise despoil the environment, stealing beaches and so on.
We journalists do a disservice to the public interest when we fail to inform ourselves of the facts and so mislead people. To argue for justice for homosexuals is not to argue that we must join in homosexual behaviour. And, as I said earlier, homosexuality is neither contagious nor illegal.
Get a life!
War shows that Putin is running things in Russia
MOSCOW, Russia - When the fighting broke out in Georgia, it was Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and not Russia's new young president who stepped up to lead the country's tough response.
The ongoing conflict has confirmed what has become increasingly obvious in recent weeks: Putin is still the one in charge.
President Dmitry Medvedev has been the Kremlin's voice in recent days, but Putin set the tone from the beginning. And when Medvedev suddenly made an uncharacteristically blunt statement, he seemed to be imitating the mannerisms and language of his powerful mentor.
After Georgia opened fire on the Russian-backed separatist region of South Ossetia, Putin was the first to speak to the nation on television. He also was the first to confer with world leaders, including President Bush, in Beijing for the opening of the Olympics.
Putin promised a strong Russian retaliation, which was not long in coming. Russia rolled hundreds of tanks into Georgia and bombed from the air.
On his way home from China last weekend, Putin stopped in southern Russia to see South Ossetians who had fled the fighting. He was shown repeatedly on television bounding down the steps from the aircraft, sending the clear message that he was ready to take charge.
Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili had little doubt who was behind the Russian attack. Speaking on a conference call with foreign journalists Wednesday, he said he had tried to reach "President Putin, or Prime Minister Putin," but was unable to get through.
Even Putin's critics were impressed with his performance in the first days of the conflict. "For the first time in my life, I was amazed by the mastery with which Putin is able to hold onto power," political commentator Yulia Latynina wrote in the online Yezhednevny Zhurnal.
In contrast, Medvedev chaired a meeting of his Security Council over the weekend and made a statement worthy of the former law professor he is: "In accordance with the constitution and federal law, I, as president of Russia, am obliged to protect the lives and dignity of Russian citizens wherever they are located. We won't allow the deaths of our compatriots to go unpunished."
Russia has given passports to residents of South Ossetia, which broke from Georgia in the early 1990s.
By Tuesday, the Kremlin image makers seemed to understand that Medvedev as commander-in-chief had to put in a better performance. And as president, he was the one who needed to meet with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was in Moscow on a EU-sponsored peace mission.
But when their joint news conference was delayed, the word circulated among reporters in the Kremlin that the two presidents were waiting for Putin. As if in confirmation of this, the prime minister's motorcade was seen zooming through central Moscow toward the Kremlin.
This created the impression that Putin could not really trust Medvedev or Medvedev needed reinforcement, said Masha Lipman, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. "In any case, I think this too is an indirect indication of who is more important in this ruling tandem," she said.
When Medvedev walked out with Sarkozy for their televised news conference, he spoke like Putin.
"You see, thugs differ from normal people in that when they smell blood, it's hard for them to stop," Medvedev said. "So, we are forced to resort to surgical intervention."
He punched the words with cold anger, but his anger and crime-world language seemed forced, an imitation of Putin's naturally flowing rebukes.
It was perhaps his toughest public statement since becoming president in May.
Medvedev had little choice but to take a tough stance since Russians remember all too well how Putin handled similar situations, said political columnist Georgy Bovt.
"They expect the same from Medvedev," Bovt wrote in The Moscow Times. "Otherwise, people would begin to call into question his ability to run the country and accuse him of being spineless."
But Russians increasingly have seen Putin as holding the real power in the country. A poll by the independent Levada Center last month showed that 36 per cent of those surveyed see Putin as more powerful, compared with only nine per cent for Medvedev.
This was a sharp divergence from a similar survey in March, the month Medvedev was elected, when both leaders polled around 20 per cent. In both surveys, nearly half of those polled said they had equal powers.
The poll, conducted nationwide in late July among 1,600 people, has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
The presidency is the far more powerful position under Russia's constitution, and both men have stressed that this will not change.
But a prominent Russian sociologist, who studies the Russian political elite, said Putin is steadily expanding the powers of the prime minister. Many members of the government who used to answer directly to the president, including the defence minister and foreign minister, now take their orders from Putin, said Olga Kryshtanovskaya.
"We have never had such a powerful prime minister," she said at a recent news conference.
Since becoming president, Medvedev has put forward several new programmes, including one to fight corruption and restore respect for the law. Some have read this as veiled criticism of Putin's eight years in office and an attempt by Medvedev to push Putin aside.
Kryshtanovskaya said this is absurd. These claims have been promoted by the hardline Kremlin camp of former KGB officers who opposed Putin's choice of Medvedev as his successor and now hope to undermine him, she said.
Medvedev, 42, is an integral part of Putin's team and has no incentive to go against his "political father", she said.
This doesn't mean that the Russian political system is not evolving with Medvedev as president.
"The political process can always be looked at either through a telescope or a microscope", she said. "If you look up close, of course, much is changing. But if you take the longer view, it turns out that the system was totalitarian and continues to be totalitarian," she said.
[email protected]
Comment