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and thus a more responsive and responsible media industry.
The one myth we should quickly dismiss is that a free media need be nationally unhelpful, and unpatriotic in the simple sense of loving and showing own commitment to country.
No such media exists anywhere in the Western world, the same world which has given us canons of media freedom, which it now seeks to turn into deadly canons ready to blast African Nation States to smithereens.
The press in the West is not only patriotic; it is unconditionally so, which is what makes it proudly and aggressively stupid in defense of Western interests, three-quarters of which are patently unholy, notoriously unjustifiable.
Patriotism suspends reason, does it not? Patriotism suspends conscience, does it not? Patriotism overtakes personal credo, does it not? If Bin Laden was an African enemy, with pictures of his corpse being withheld by an African government, what would have been the nature of debate on such an action? How many more sanctions would have been declared in the name of press freedom?
My country, right or wrong!
Your country needs you!
—-The story of creation—-
It must surely embarrass those in our midst who think there is any choice dilemma between the mighty pen of media freedom, and the flaming sword of national interest and sovereignty. Or that there is a crisis where the former is summoned by the latter.
The seven holy days of our good Lord’s forming labors included creating the earth, then man and animal, flora and fauna, day and night. Of course woman came a little later, to give man comfort, and then temptation! Don’t please blame Manheru for this patriarchal history; he didn’t write the bible much as he would have loved to. But we are also told by this Great Book that before the Almighty took His well-deserved rest, he made sure he had settled the habitually vexatious power equation in the Garden.
By His own holy pronouncement, he gave Man dominion over all else: woman, animal, nature and, as is beginning to be apparent, the nether too!
Of course I am disappointed that the scriptures do not talk of the day the Almighty created the mighty Pen, and the hand that wields it – outside of, and above Man the ruler of the demesne!
That ellipsis in creation, to my mind, was most meaningful, namely meant to stress the subsidiarity of the pen relative to human glory and pursuits.
This, the Westerners – principally the Americans – have understood very well. The media has its place in the national and continental scheme of things, which is why those societies not only enjoy harmony,but also rule the world. Was it not Marx who said in every epoch, the ideas of the ruling class are always the ruling ideas?
—-The day Judith ruled the EU roost—-
A few media-related observations before I move on to the big one for the day. I thought the hero of the Press Freedom Day commemoration was Judith Makwanya. Was she not? She tackled one Mr Adol Dell’Ariccia of the European Commission here, in respect of those journalists under EU and American sanctions, sarcastically wondering whether this inadvertent contrivance by the EU was not, would not, hurt our precious press freedom, itself the foremost Being on creation day!
Herself among this hanged group, Judith bemusedly sought clarification on why these scribes were “convicted” in the first place. The response was vintage stuff for students of communication and diplomacy. I will share it with you, gentle reader.
Here is the ambassador: “Some journalists were included on the sanctions list because of the role they played presenting news in a specific period that was considered as inciting hate and violence. I can tell you that there is a permanent revision of that list.
“Frankly speaking, I have been here for the past eight months and we have started working seriously to see that indeed some of the people who are on that list should they continue to be there or not and it’s a continuous process. So in short, I take your point that including journalists on the list of people who are on EU restrictions could be considered as a violation of the freedom of the press but the reason was not that because they are journalists, but because of what they were publishing or saying in their work”.
—-When publishing and talking is not journalism—
Can someone out there decipher this one for me please? Especially the last bit? What is the good ambassador saying in short and straight? I have always thought that journalism is about writing, speaking and publishing? That is the core work of journalism, is it not?
So, if they are not under sanctions because they are journalists, but are on the sanctions list because “of what they were publishing or saying in their work”, why are they under restrictions, to match the ambassador’s Italian English?
But, let us read the man in perspective. His Excellency came into our little portion of Eden in September last year. He has been with us some eight or so months, such time, I want to believe, he has used profitably to understand us as a free people.
When he came, specifically on 16th September 2010, he told the media the following: “I have been in this country for the past eight days and what I can tell you is that there is a press that is free. You can read newspapers in this country and have a feeling of independent information”.
How do we read him then; how do we read him now? That then, he spoke too early when he was under a giant seizure of politeness to his newfound hosts? That he leaped before looking?
What would that make him as a diplomat worthy of continental representation? If that is so, how do we trust him now? How do we not think he has made yet another mistake – second in severity – that of limping before leaping? And limping he really did, what with all that tongue hobbling in his gallant effort to make sense, and then convince!
—-We are guilty of hate speech—-
Or that things have gotten worse, worst, in the eight months that have gone by? Let us test that too. In September, the month of the Ambassador’s remarks, Zimbabwe had few newspapers than it now has in the month of May in the Year of Our Lord 2011.
If debate was vigorous then, it is frenzied now. If power was irreverently interrogated then, power is perfectly harassed now, possibly explaining why our negotiators want the media to be compelled to support Government. But this burgeoning media industry has also acquired an added trait: it now admits too, generating hate messages, itself the first step towards atonement and the rebirth of journalistic righteousness!
Or did the gentle reader miss a NewsDay editorial chastising Minister Shamu for daring to exculpate the media from sins of propagating hate speech? No, Mr Minister, went the unusually candid and self-convicting editorial guilt plea, we are guilty for vices you are putting on your doorstep as a representative of politicians and political parties! It was an unusual plea by the fourth estate to be restructured by the first estate, so media freedom can bloom! Mr Ambassador, that is how far we have gone in building media freedom in this country.
Unlike any of your media in the EU, here our private media asks Government to restructure and restrict it! What greater trust do you want for the EU to lift sanctions originally imposed in the name of restoring press freedom?
—-Perfidious Albion—-
So, media matters could not have gotten worse since September last year? Which means what? Nothing! Ambassador Dell’Ariccia comes from the land of Popes. He cannot lie, or, to use Jonathan Swift’s phrase, he cannot say a thing which is not! Plainly, he is a victim of Italian English, bad policies and burdensome officialdom.
That English is his second language need no further comment. That he has been send here against bad EU policies which he must defend – unconditionally defend – combines his second and third incapacities. In the circumstances, he did superbly well to communicate the sheer absurdity of the policies he must defend and justify, but without becoming treasonous and Italian.
The subtext was clear, very clear: Listen Judy, I am the EU man here and for that reason have to get the job done. But it’s a bad, dirty job that soils my conscience, yet what do I do? I can only promise the list of those on sanctions is being “permanently” reviewed! And see how bad these people are, they get me – an Italian – to stop Barwe from covering the beatification of late Pope John Paul II? What do I tell the holy Pope when he stages his second coming as a saint? What do I tell my God? Perfidious Albion!
—-The day Obama turned to Osama—-
I never for once thought that Obama would turn to Osama for assistance. Or more accurately that Barak would turn bin Laden for assistance in a warm, deadly Pan-Arab embrace. Late last week and early this week,
President Obama faced an unprecedented crisis whose sheer sublimity was as deep as the sheer absurdity of it was lofty.
Some white Trump loudly wondered whether Obama the President was an American citizen. He was not born on American soil and thus could not be a born-American. Or was he? Let him show us his long birth certificate, long birther, to use American lingo. Or else his pedigree was in doubt. It took little imagination to visualise the endnote to this deadly attack, all founded on a mundane document which no one requests or creates for themselves. America is about to go back to the polls and soon, Obama’s fate as a resident of White House shall be decided.
Individually, we are all some couple’s child, are we not? Even the President of the United States of America is, however awesome the powers he now wields maybe. He was and will always be of some woman and some man born, out of mundane processes which include sex and some elastic womb that distends progressively against time’s inexorable march.
Mauled by a maverick with means
But this most mundane document so mechanically written, proves so key to one’s life, determining one’s chances in this life. This Trump was trumping for a technical knock-out that would have seen Obama and his fierce election rhetoric out of America’s electoral equation. Not just out, but also in the care of prison warders, thereby confirming his real being as an African-American whose only way to heaven from white America, is via correctional institutions.
It was a deadly attack mounted by America’s deadliest seal: a maverick with means. For those whom America wants to harm, she first charms with madmen-mavericks. Check America’s history, ending with Luther Junior and JF Kennedy. America has this unmatched technique of resolving logjams through deadly rifles in the hands of mad persons.
Somehow these Langland-anointees are in the habit of momentary sanity recovery, so they can shoot and kill, before going back to insanity, and then arrest soon after! That way history is moved; justice is denied, with material for PhDs on history’s inconclusive moments unfurled. This is America, Hillary Clinton would say!
—-A nation exalted by death—-
For a man of Barack’s instinct and parlous ratings, he knew immediately what this Trump attack portended. When America un-shelves one of its seven deadly sins, it’s no time for dalliance. Something extraordinary had to happen to fend off this deadly assault.
Enter Osama, pursued by America’s deadly seals! They always say great, momentous events happen twice, first as actual occurrences, second as the way they are covered or reported. Osama bin Laden is dead, was dead since last weekend.
America, whose war machinery murdered him, is in a frenzy of orgasmic patriotism. The heinous sins of 9/11 today stand atoned, America’s wounded pride varnished to new levels of blinding refulgence.
Never has murder and death so exalted a people, a nation. And America’s exaltation today measures her wilted ego and self-belief only yesterday. At the centre of this whole American power renaissance is a man of colour, a man whose American pedigree white America doubted and was doubting at the time of the bloody deed.
—-So many questions, no answers—-
As always, the local media could not, yet again, situate this occurrence which America wants to sell to the world as of cosmic value. Of course, The Herald tried, but in a rather episodic fashion. It correctly highlighted the changing facts as the world recovered from the shock of the elusive Osama’s death, and the smother of America’s grand and myth-making lies.
America was moulding a great occurrence’s second phase. But a perspective was sorely needed so readers could understand why America was under a compulsive need to lie, under a compulsive need to sea-bury a quarry they had tracked for over a decade, a “terrorist” they had told us surpassed all terror, and whose demise we all imagined would be capped by a grand parade of his corpse, all this to chill terrorists, would-be-terrorists, in Torah Bola and elsewhere in the world.
Why America, itself the country that gave us the First Amendment, would refuse to release images of the dead terrorist and an operation which could only bring it greater admiration and greater awe, above all, greater believability to a claim that now invites derisive questions and sneers. Why Obama felt the compulsion soon after to spend an afternoon with firemen of New York who battled and “died” in the engulfing inferno of 9/11, before wafting presidentially back to the Twin Towers – now all but a gaping hole in America’s earth – to lay new wreaths, to gush out vacuous words, all to commission another campaign season in America?
But also to know why here, back home, so far away from America and the dead bin Laden, a private newspaper feels the compulsive need to sigh with enhanced African relief, and then proclaim “hopes for greater peace”. Or the link between killing bin Laden and the whole American ambassador cosying up to vendors of Harare, using Press Freedom Day as a pretext.
—–Beyond the long birth certificate—–
First the long birth certificate affair. Many in the media were inclined to treat this matter as some bit of comic relief to an otherwise dreary electoral affair of a superpower. Except there was a serious matter which underlay the whole saga. Like it or not, the fact of a white tycoon and therefore a man well connected to the establishment, questioning the nationality of a US black man who has been a President for one full term, necessarily makes both the question raised and the protagonists duelling around it perfectly iconic.
The one protagonist is white, possibly Republican, a presidential aspirant with fabulous means, albeit tempered by a dash of useful, employable strangeness. The other is black, presidential and a potent symbol of race possibilities and relations in the land of striped and starry dreams.
—-Who is American anyway?—-
In the long birth certificate saga, white America was simply posing a question which every man of colour faces in an America of deeply embedded and institutionalised racism. Are you American and can you ever be? How did you end up there, which is a pedestal exclusive to white Americans? Prove that you deserve to be there once, let alone twice?
A black man in America has to prove his whiteness, prove his worth, regularly too. This for me is the big issue behind a mundane challenge led by Trump. Which is why even the production of the long birth certificate was not long enough to out-stand white America’s cynical but profoundly meaningful skepticism. Something longer, greater, was needed to save Obama, his American identity pretensions, and his ambitions to turn fluke Presidency into an era. But before I leave this one, the Zambians have reason to beat their chests. They started this whole saga of presidential candidates and identity, and its even more absurd dimension, that of sitting presidents versus national identity.
Otherwise, how do you reconcile these identity issues in respect of a man who has already ruled you for more than a term? Only when he is seeking another term do you then think of donating him to another country, another people? And, in America, who is American anyway? Who isn’t an arrivant? Is America not the world’s largest colony of immigrants? Immigrants who slaughtered indigenes to forever wipe out the question of nationality?
Who – white or black – can produce America’s birth certificate as American? Much worse, identity issue is only legitimate in America, but not here on the African continent? Was that not the issue between Outtara and Gbagbo in Ivory Coast? Anyway, I am saying the Zambians must patent this one!
—-Trump the trigger on a marked man—
I said a longer deed was needed to back up the longer certificate demanded of Obama by white America. Indeed it was. It is now emerging that America knew of Bin Laden’s whereabouts more than two years ago, thanks to both their torture sessions in Cuba’s Guantanamo, and tip-offs from their Pakistan counterparts, however configured. It is one reason Musharaff had to go. He did not want the Americans to violate Pakistani sovereignty, like they have now done, in their pursuit of bin Laden. For more than two years, bin Laden lived a marked man. The altercation between the Gucci-wearing president of Afghanistan and Musharaff, centred on this very matter.
American drones were deployed as an automated way of dealing with the delicate matter. To all intents and purposes, Obama’s America was merely being polite to Pakistan, and also choosing its own moment. This is how Trump in fact pulled the fatal trigger on bin Laden. Once questioned on his fitness as commander-in-chief and as an American, Obama had no choice but to turn to Osama for a longer birth certificate. The rest is now history. But ask my good friend here, Charles Ray, you have to kill for America to surpass your blackness, to be one of them. Ali refused to kill for America in Vietnam. Now he has to wait for a second miracle of Papa John Paul II to be rehabilitated from a larger Parkinson.
—–Murder most foul—-
I have used the word “murder” to describe what America did to bin Laden. I stand by that word. After America sought to panegyrize its hit squad called the seals, panegyrize it by claiming it moved from floor to floor of bin Laden’s so-called one million dollar mansion, all under intense enemy fire, it has emerged bin Laden was unarmed and asleep, both hardly good factors for a protagonist seeking beatification as a hero. In fact there was hardly any fire, only some hesitant shot from bin Laden’s courier. America, the only Superpower, shot and killed an unarmed man fresh from the confusion of slumber. Is that how George Bush’s War on Terror was meant to finish, namely in such a dramatic anti-climax? You kill a son, wound a wife and then shoot your target at point blank, unarmed, and that way you trigger jingoistic ecstasy in a nation? Americans seem about to re-invent heroism as we have received it from the Greeks and William Shakespeare!
—–Who was behind 9/11?—-
But there is a deeper symbolism there requiring another preliminary sobering truth. Just who was killed by the Americans? The man behind 9/11? Against a whole crust of American lies, who says bin Laden was behind 9/11? Well, it’s bin Laden himself, Americans would say, arguably with justification from the late departed’s addresses. Fine, but the late departed also told us America is the crusading devil? Do we take that too? Why is America ready to believe bin Laden as the evil hand behind 9/11 when it rejects all else he said about itself as a hated prowling imperialist power? You must understand how the power of a superpower is constructed, renewed and retained. Such power needs a matching, powerful enemy to justify it. With the Soviet Union gone, America needed another mythical enemy, against which to measure its own power and the pursuit of more of it. Soon after the fall of the Wall, America turned to imaginary beings from the nether, all to refocus its misgoverned. That did not work, which is why was such a suspicious god-send which filled a sorely felt need. It gave America a mythical enemy, thereby keeping Americans outward, upward, well away from the chamber of pernicious power. To imagine that for a whole decade, America feared a mere family man, living on the fringes of Pakistan is both to magnify bin Laden and the world that carried him for so long. It is not to proffer America or Bush, Blair, Brown and now Obama encomiums. It is also to raise a new dilemma for America which always needs a powerful, mythical enemy.
——Matching fear and powerful ideas—–
Now the significance of how bin Laden perished. He was unarmed. He was in a simple quarter-of-a-million dollar building sited nearer the structures of power of his unwilling host. Does this describe what America is ranged against, namely a naked but powerful idea bearing no arms, which America seeks and strives for a whole decade to subdue and execute through arms? If the team that knocked out bin Laden needed stealth helicopters, deadly arms, hard training, certainly all this was not to match their lonely opponent who turns out to have been mightily in physical terms, un-defended and remarkably vulnerable. Rather, what was a match for america’s arms and all those who bore them, was both the power of the enemy’s ideas and of course the boomeranging fear which American propaganda had created in their own standing army.
—–The forgotten Geneva Convention—-
But there is also a fundamental question which the current frenzy has smothered, a very legitimate question. If America branded its world-wide campaign against bin Laden “war on terror”, did that automatically make bin Laden and his followers potential prisoners of war deserving shelter under the Geneva Convention? Don’t we have a case for war criminal charges, something America is so fond of hurling at others, including lately Gaddafi? Clearly there was something bigger, greater at stake than honouring Geneva, than capturing bin Laden alive. Or parading his body on terra firma. Or interring it therein. The Americans knew and know that the idea that moves Al Qaeda is potent, very potent, indeed that its potency grows tremendously should it one day find a face by way of a martyr. They were not about to consciously create another Che Guevara for the Arab incendiary Arab world. Or another shrine at Villagrande, that village in Bolivia where Che was executed, as always with American involvement. Bin Laden had to be buried at sea, itself a fitting metaphor for the vengeful turbulence which his death could bring to America. By making his body more mysterious than his real life on this earth, Americans could very well have created myth that now has a martyr.
—–Planting an enormous idea—-
The thick propaganda which America deployed bears out my point. There was a real bid to make bin Laden unattractive, more unattractive in death than he was in life. He lived a life of opulence in town, never in Torah Borah as the omniscient Americans thought. He had many wives, something as earth-shattering in the Arab world as to say Americans eat McDonald burgers. He was a coward who pushed his wife as a human shield, all in the line of fire. Today Americans will have to explain to the world why a man with a superpower for a enemy, and with such a huge price on his head, did not seek the protection of a fortress, an atomic bomb, a missile shield, a warship and other deadly instruments of a planetary war. Where was his fear, why was his courage so bare? The Americans also tell us that bin Laden’s will clearly speaks against any of his children enrolling with Al Qaeda. Really? Why was this will more important to the world than details of Al Qaeda’s next target, which we are only getting now? Or was this frightened America’s message to youth, principally Arab youths? Does this suggest the extent of America’s fear of ideas behind Al Qaeda?
—-Toppling symbols, beatifying new myths—-
Debate has been on who won, America or bin Laden. Americans themselves have been fulsome in claiming victory, but are now rowing back fast, having realized celebrating the death of bin Laden means acknowledging a second term for Obama. Americans, obviously led by Republicans, are beginning to temper the euphoria, less for the dead Osama, more for the politically dying Obama. Obama must remember elder Bush won a war only to lose a second term. Bush Junior who started the war against Osama, would not oblige a trip to the scene of 9/11. The Republicans seem to know how to kill a man’s soul, which is what makes Osama such an ambiguous tool in Obama’s campaign chaste. But that should not stop us from making serious observations. One, mighty America needed almost a decade to find a single, simple man whom it finally finds in family, unarmed. Frankly, the operation has killed Osama, defeated Obama and America. Two, the twin towers are down, more or less at sea level, the same sea that now houses Osama. As part of American iconography, the twin towers were a piece of architecture of America’s awesome physical grandeur. In the words of Deyan Sudjic, power expresses itself through architecture, by building complex edifices as for quiet but timeless self-adulation. Who doubts Rhodes’ immortality, what with the sleeping monument at Matopos? But today the twin towers are no more, thereby symbolizing the toppling of one of American power’s physical symbols. Today bin Laden is dead, physically toppled, to symbolize a violent beatification of a man who now lives a martyr. America is about to enter a troubled age.
——Yankee go home—-
But before his death, bin Laden made sure America has fought two major wars – in Iraq and in Afghanistan – wars whose deadly harvest by way of American lives is creeping the 6000 band. Is this bin Laden’s worth reckoned in American lives terms? Afghanistan is not about to be subdued. Iraq is today no less restive than before. There in Afghanistan, America faces the Talibans, an equally deadly force that has turned itself into a people’s war against “invading infidels”. With bin Laden dead, the Talibans have good reason to tell Americans to leave their country, now that bin Laden – their excuse for invading Afghanistan – is dead, killed on Pakistani soil, not in Afghanistan. America will have to justify its occupation of Afghanistan, if ever it had a decent reason to be in that country in the first place. Don’t Afghans have good enough reason to demand reparations for this war fought on their soil, fought in the name of an enemy born in the Middle East, who thrived in corporate America, was armed by America, an enemy who hid in Pakistan, and was finally killed by americans, all in Pakistan.
—-He gave America lawful autocracy—-
Then the horrors of Guantanamo. The horrors of rendition, all to contain bin Laden, a man who seemed to trust only his long beard for safety. Read that together with the Patriot Act and many other draconian security legislations enacted in the name of fighting a man living a simple family life in some little garrison town near Islamabad. Both at home and abroad, bin Laden gave America and the western world an epoch of lawful and even legitimate autocracy. Just as unjust wars were fought abroad in his name, at home civil liberties were being rolled back, again in his name. A whole new politics, a whole new generation of politicians may now be needed to retrieve receding civil liberties and anti-Muslim xenophobia, in order to remake the western world. That is if it is reckoned that bin Laden was Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda was bin Laden. It shall be called a post-bin Laden generation of leaders, making the terrorist a marker of time.
—–Zionist Israel that won’t go away—-
Worse for the West, Israel remains, its obverse, a stateless Palestine. Israel is as hostile and as aggressive as ever, against legitimate Palestinian interests and aspirations. There is raw Arab anger, and every indication that the Palestinian question is about to be renewed to enter a new phase. Israel is in a state of anxious war-readiness, with the so-called Arab spring siring politics it cannot quite place or name. New Egypt reopens he deadly route to Gaza, in the process raising old fears. Much worse, Hamas and Fatah are slowly finding each other, after both have realized the futility of disunity and bravado. Israeli “peace” seems about to make way to something more ominous. With the western world – America especially – sworn to unconditional support for Zionist Israel, Al Qaeda will remain a persuasive brand of militant Arab nationalism. Of course abroad, America will call it Al Qaeda. Frankly what’s in a name as long as struggles are being fought?
—-Remaking global powers—
But bin Laden has mired America in long wars beyond just the two countries I have mentioned. Those wars have claimed trillions from America’s butter, the same way that the decline of Soviet Union needed a penultimate war of attrition in Afghanistan. Today China is smiling, Russia is rising. America continues to decline precipitously. Of course bin Laden was launched on the war against Russia. Of ourselves bin Laden was not Chinese. But we are in the realm of the unintended, thanks to bin Laden.
—-Fawning African American—-
And the deadly seals? Well one of them, now very old and tired from the war in Vietnam, was busy creeping on news vendors of Harare. He killed all of them – or so he thinks – with deadly ideas targeting the next elections here in Zimbabwe. The Americans have been investing heavily in the media, including creating a media center at the erstwhile citadel of the Rhodesia Front, a place once called the Salisbury Club, now Harare Club. Ambassador Ray has been cleansing the thing, placing it in the public domain, gradually, all to naturalize it until it starts doing its real intended unnatural job. We watch; we wait. The Club is on our soil, is it not? The Club is for playing, is it not? After the grand certification of vendors, all of whom now survive on penny commissions – thanks to America’s sanctions – the vendors went back to their tenements, all wondering why a man as black as they are, shorter than they are, fawns such closeness yet being so far.
Icho!
Online Reporter