adminIt is quite expected for the BBC to be complicit in efforts to provoke incidents of political violence in Zimbabwe, especially if the blame of it all is likely to end up on the doorstep of President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party. If it were possible to stick the Mugabe label on every death that happens in Zimbabwe that would make excellent politics in Western circles, and we have seen a lot effort at attributing as much atrocities as possible to the Zanu –PF leader.
The over-dramatised Mbare incident where provocative political activists reportedly abused the noble YES vote campaign to pursue their own selfish partisan interests must be looked at in context, especially when one factors in the fact that the MDC activists had a BBC crew in tow before they clashed with residents during their ill-fated adventure.
The imperial culture essentially thrives on the faults and crimes of perceived enemies, and without habitually blaming the targeted enemies imperialism has no wings. In the book Hopes and Prospects Noam Chomsky makes very interesting analyses on the importance of November 9, 1989 – the date the Berlin wall fell, of course after the fall of communism in Russia.
Noam Chomsky writes about Timothy Garton, a British historian who described the year 1989 as “the biggest year in world history since 1945,” adding that the year “changed everything.”
Garton was celebrating the fruits of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms within Russia, and he glowingly hailed Gorbachev as a man who hadembarked on a “breathtaking renunciation of the use of force …..a luminous example of the importance of the individual in history.” Gorbachev’s reforms led to the Russian election of 1989, culminating in a global effect that included the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9 in the year 1989. To many Gorbachev opened the way to the liberation of Eastern Europe – and the liberal line is that East Europe was freed from the tyranny of Russia.
After this there emerged in the West the “niners” – a new generation of political leadership as currently led by Barack Obama; and barrister Matthew Ryder says this generation of political leadership is “shaped by a world changed without guns.”
This is a generation thatis led by the drone-obsessed Obama, the murderous Nicolas Sarkozy, the war crazy David Cameron – all these preceded by criminal war maniacs like George W. Bush, John Howard and Tony Blair. It is hard to imagine that these can be described as members of a generation “shaped by a world without guns.”Ryder asserted that the 1989 events created in this generation great confidence in “the power of dedication to non-violence and justice,” to borrow directly from the words of Noam Chomsky.
Not many sane people would dispute the memorable nobility of the accolades of November 9, 1989, and the urge to glorify the fall of communism in Russia is quite compelling, especially for those that rigorously observe and abide by the dominant principle of the imperial culture. This is the principle that says keep all the focus on the crimes of enemies, and also on the West’s high-minded and courageous condemnation of crimes of all others, especially those of dictatorships and tyrannies as defined by mainstream Western media.
The focus of the International Criminal Court has been firmly on Africa since inception in July 2002, and that is precisely why all the 30 indictments so far made have been directed at African denizens, including two sitting presidents.
In Libya Western media televised the 2011 war and all focus was on the evil intentions of Muammar Gaddafi, particularly the hyped Benghazi genocide we were all told Gaddafi was determined to carry out.
The murderous Benghazi rebels raped and killed freely as they marched alongside NATO on their way to Tripoli. An estimated 50 000 were killed in the meaningless war leading to the callous murder of Gaddafi, and all we were made to focus on was the vacuous rhetoric on the purported murderous dictatorship of Gaddafi. That is how the dominant principle of the imperial culture works.
We see the same thing happening in Syria where the egregious war crimes carried out by the Western-backed rebels are often ignored, or elevated to nobilities of acts of freedom fighting. In Bahrain a regime ruthlessly killing protesters is hailed as democracy defenders while the acts of Asad’s regime are demonised as the definition of evil. Of course Bahrain is a client state, and Syria is an enemy state, so naturally allies do good and enemies commit evil.
In Zimbabwe political evil is by definition a Zanu-PF attribute, while all nobility to do with the love for democracy is crucially reserved for the Western-funded MDC-T, and the insidious party has tremendously enjoyed playing perennial victimhood to Zanu-PF brutality. That is the propaganda model upon which Morgan Tsvangirai’s party is founded.
The coming July election is no exception – and we have already seen the sensationalising of unfortunate incidents and crimes to portray Zanu-PF as the incarnate architect of atrocities. The crucial rule in this principle of the imperial culture is that one should never look at the crimes committed by the West, or if they do, that they must pretend these crimes are only unintended side happenings of noble intentions. So glorified is November 9, 1989 that German chancellor Angela Merkel had to make a call for the whole planet to “use this invaluable gift of freedom . . . to overcome the walls of time.”
Noam Chomsky suggests that this is great advice that could easily be followed, starting with the dismantling of the Israeli-constructed massive wall that snakes its way through Palestinian territory in blatant violation of international law. Squarely affirmed and motivated by Merkel’s excellent advice, every decent being must of necessity ignore the discredited justification that says the erection of the annexation wall has got something to do with security. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if security was the reason for the erection of the wall, then the wall would logically be along the border, not deep inside Palestinian territory.
This illegal monster was constructed with tacit support from the US and the EU, and there is no logical dispute that can be offered to counter the solid fact that the annexation wall serves no other purpose except taking over Palestinian land, as well as the region’s main water sources.
The whole effort is plunderous and bullish. In 2009 the Mubarak dictatorship completed the imprisonment of Palestinians by allowing US military engineers to erect an impenetrable high steel wall rooted 18 meters into the groundalong the Egypt –Gaza Strip border. Surrounded by the two walls, Palestine becomes the world’s biggest prison.
We have a Western community that dishes out fervent advice to the world that it is an “invaluable gift of freedom” to “overcome the walls of time,” at a time erecting anti-freedom walls all around the Palestinian people is hailed as a brilliant idea.
Apart from Egypt and Israel erecting anti-freedom walls using money generously donated by the United States, one can visit the hard to penetrate border construction between the US and Mexico –explicitly constructed to bar victims of US terror in Central America from fleeing to the glorious land of their tormentors.
As Thomas Carothers concluded, Western political leadership supports democracy if and only if it conforms to strategic and economic objectives. This is precisely why Uhuru Kenyatta’s victory in the recent Kenyan election ended up in a quandary for the West. The wrong person became popular enough to win the election, just like it was democratically wrong for the Palestinian people to elect Hamas to power in 2006. To the West democracy produces victors compliant with Western doctrines – otherwise the voters must face the consequences for making wrong choices.
It would be democratically improper for the people of Zimbabwe to vote Zanu-PF and its leader President Robert Mugabe into power in July this year. That is the moral imperative from the West, and precisely this is why all efforts to discredit the election are seemingly underway right now. It is important to maintain the imperial culture for as long as the enemy stands a chance of survival.
It is not regarded as a crime for the West to illegally sanction Zimbabwe for more than ten years, but it becomes deplorable when Zimbabwe bars election observers from nations strangulating the country from covering its elections. Observers with an indisputable interest in the outcome of an election cannot be neutral, let alone objective. But this is the principle of the imperial culture — only enemies can do wrong.
It is quite telling that the events of November 9, 1989 are highly celebrated in as far as the fall of the Berlin wall is concerned, but there remains virtually no notice of what happened seven days later, when on November 16 the Washington-trained Atlacatl Brigade ruthlessly killed six prominent Latin American intellectuals in El-Salvador.
The murder of the six was just a test run by the elite brigade that had just returned from a refresher course at the JFK Special Warfare School, and it’s a wonder to the West that some people have sought justice over it.
This atrocity, just like many other similar ones does not qualify to be recorded in the credible books of international history – precisely because it was carried out by the cream of a Washington-backed terrorist army. In international affairs Washington is a god that cannot and does not sin.
It is just like we were all required to hail the ruthless atrocities carried out by Libyan rebels under aerial cover from NATO, or the atrocities currently carried out by the Western-sponsored Syrian rebels. We are expected to elevate these atrocities to matters of noble freedom fighting – and of course it is all in the mighty name of democracy.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Mali, Ivory Coast, Syria, Libya are all wars carried out by this niners generation whose minds were purportedly and presumably shaped by a world changed without guns way back in 1989. Obama cannot operate in a world without guns, and the same goes for all his other Western allies, and that reality cannot be disputed from however many the number of angles.
Every day we have to be tormented by news of the United States itching for war in Iran or in North Korea, while their ever-dirty military hands are full of murderous engagement in Afghanistan and elsewhere. We are indoctrinated to believe that all this blood shedding is synonymous with democratisation. What a very sad world. It is a survival imperative for Zimbabweans to expose the ill intentions of those who seek to posture themselves as world arbiters of democracy when their own hands are dripping with the blood of nationals of weaker nations.
Imperialism beyond 1989 has been as callous as it was always throughout the Cold War, if not worse. We have had the Kosovo massacres, the Gulf War, Iraq 2003 invasion, South Lebanon bombardment in 2006, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and many more murderous wars directly or indirectly carried out by the West.
For Zimbabwe the backlash for the 2000 compulsory land reclamation have been catastrophic, and the imperial culture shows that the West will maintain the ruin of sanctions until an MDC-T government is installed. The only people who can silence Western hegemony are the voters and Kenyan voters just recently silenced the Western voice that was interfering with their destiny.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death.
l Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.
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