A MESSAGE FROM THE BUNKER

[Stanley]

A MESSAGE FROM THE BUNKER

10 March 2005

‘You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.’ (Abraham Lincoln.)
For thousands of years our ‘rulers’ have been honing their methods of social control. Poverty and repression served for a while and then feudalism was invented. As feudalism allied to monarchy lost its power religion and education became useful tools but even they started to decay in efficiency so a form of ‘democracy’ was foisted on us via politics but this only worked as long as the underclass trusted their rulers. It seems to me that we have now reverted to one of the oldest and most inefficient strategies for control, fear and relative disadvantage.
As always we have to make our own risk assessments. Taking at least 28 million dead in the Soviet Union in WW2 or 1 million dead each year in Africa from malaria as a yardstick I have worked out my personal fear threshold. I’m told today I am in imminent danger of terrorist attack and therefore it is sensible for some of my guarantees of freedom to be eroded. There is more chance of getting killed in the ‘safe’ Green Zone in Baghdad than there is where I'm sitting in Barlick. I've survived for almost 70 years and I refuse to allow these jerks to frighten me in my last 40 years. So leave the small guarantees I still hold alone!
I read a report the other day of a speech made by Bush referring to Lebanon in which he said that an election conducted in a country riven by religious discord and under foreign domination could not be described as a democratic process. (I paraphrase.) Excuse me, was he really trying to be ironical or did it just never strike him that what he was describing applies to 'democracy' in Iraq?
Who am I to question the assessments of my betters? I’m one of the army that sweated for fifty years to transport your goods, lift your weights, build the economy that supported your wars and when called on was forced to go and support you overseas. I’ve guarded your prisons and borders and held your territory. I’ve been immersed for almost 70 years in the real world and I’m here to tell you now that Abe Lincoln, for all his faults, had it dead right.
The message is that you are running out of time and options. Knee jerk global politics isn’t the answer, neither is some spurious concept of democracy. Freedom doesn’t come out of the barrel of a gun, it comes from equality of opportunity, just laws and fair governance. Manipulation and short term opportunism don’t cut it.
What you really need to concentrate on are the major problems facing the world, environmental, economic and social disasters that any sane person knows are looming over us. Fiddling with boundaries and regimes and posturing aren’t going to do anything about these real-world concerns.
Perhaps that’s the trouble. How many of you actually understand toil, poverty and endemic disease? Is the problem that you are all so insulated by your trappings of power and ‘importance on the world stage’ that you have lost sight of reality? Think what the position in the Middle East would be now if all the money expended on aggression in the last five years had been invested in the infrastructure. Make the same calculation for Africa. Look at what China is doing by putting all her resources into development. Ask yourself what the balance of economic power will be in fifty years.
In other words, stop acting like narrow minded politicians who can't see further than immediate advantage and start acting like statesmen whose responsibility because of the accidental power you hold is not national but global. If humanity fails so do you in the long run and the way you are going now is leading to just that outcome.

10 March 2005

[I was struck by how appropriate this article is twenty years later..... ]