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By Dr Fereydun Rafiq Hilmi:
19. Representative democracy is the antipathy of the most basic principles of democracy
That means that, although we say we have a democratic system, the inequality that is endemic in the system means we are practically an undemocratic system serving only the rich and powerful. All the other values of human rights, justice, fairness and freedom of the individual to elect parliamentary representatives are therefore breached and compromised while the population is placed under sedation with false values and boasts and encouraged to engage themselves with trivia, mind-numbing media productions full of violence and sensationalism and, of course, the great political deception by the politicians.
But it is not only in business and commerce that these principles are practiced. Government is based on the same, and in particular foreign policy. The prime minister or president behaves like the president or proprietor of a multinational. Anyone who does not like the company policy or product will be sacked immediately and so any citizen who objects to the government’s foreign policy will be regarded as an anti-patriotic undesirable. The difference in Western Europe and US is that, when all the standard methods fail – and they usually do for cultural or religious reasons, armies and armaments are used to achieve the takeovers and monopolization.
20. Holocausts, genocide and war crimes
Our dynamic value system dictionary treats the above categories of murder in a completely subjective way, transcending logic and reasonable interpretations in favour of narrow, politically-motivated definitions influenced by the desire of the affected group who may now have newly-acquired wealth, power and influence in western society. As a result the yardstick used to understand the meanings of these words is warped. More importantly, the conclusions made can influence the special status of that group and special positive discrimination which would render them untouchable and unaccountable for any excesses or crimes they may commit against other minorities or group they do not see eye-to-eye with. This situation may continue for as long as that group maintains its hold on the political, economic and judicial system in a country. It also means that the people of that country are no longer in control of their lives because there will be all sorts of such influential groups holding great chunks of the decision-making process and democracy goes out of the window.
Such lobbies and groups will have a disproportionate say in government and about the passing of laws and they will inevitably change society to suit themselves and serve their purpose, which means that to deal with the original injustice we may be creating more injustice.
The irony is that the continuation of such provision of privilege to the victims of genocide will in the long run be counter-productive and may lead to even worse acts against them
21. Should you deny or insist on taking the blame for genocide?
The Armenian nation suffered great atrocities at the hands of an Ottoman government in the last throes of its life. It is not generally called a Holocaust because that term has become copyrighted for the Jews. Is it therefore Genocide, Mass Murder or a War Crime?
The Turks and their government strongly deny it. The French deny their attempts at reducing the Algerian population, while the Americans – judging by the thousands of cinema films about their annihilation of the Red Indians – are quite proud of what they did. The Italians have committed their share of atrocities and so have all the other imperialist powers from China and Japan to Russia. The British nearly finished off the Aborigines and Maoris and the Spanish and British played havoc in the two American continents.
Nearly every one of those acts had genocidal and racist motives and the sole purpose of getting of rid of the inhabitants to settle their own races instead on the lands and usurp all their rich resources. Yet, hardly anyone in the west or in these empires or ex-empires admits this. War is genocidal by nature because its purpose is to kill the people of the other side. Thus, when the Germans attacked the Russians or the British it was to kill as many Russian and British people as possible, and hopefully without killing any Germans who happened to be there at the time. Before the invasion of Iraq, Saddam was holding a few Europeans hostage and the west held off their attacks because they did not want to kill Europeans, just Iraqis. That mass killing claimed a total of more than 1.5 million Iraqi lives, and as a consequence meets all the conditions for genocide but our dynamic value system has a special temporary name for it: Liberation and Democracy. Nearly 20 million Russians were killed in WW2 because they were Russian but no one talks about them as victims of holocaust. In fact after the war, the Russians were given the status of enemy that needed to be got rid of.
The term Holocaust is therefore a highly politicised term and the distinction between Jewish victims of genocide and non-Jews cannot be regarded as reasonable and smacks of racism.
22. All wars are genocide, except unavoidable defensive wars
As for the term War Crime, I believe it is one of those hypocritical values invented to justify wars and identify only some acts (preferably committed on the other side) as evil and unacceptable. The fact of the matter is that any non-defensive war is a crime, a genocide and a holocaust.
None of those victims received any real apology or came to be treated as untouchable because they had no one working for them who possessed the power, wealth and influence necessary to control the opinion and laws of the nations that systematically murdered and annihilated them. For this reason they remain obscure and unknown. The weird situation we are in at present is that, although we admit the Holocaust, we hold the wrong people responsible for it. Those who perpetrated the crimes are now held in great esteem and allowed to become members of the western club, even joining in the killing when invited to Afghanistan and other places where new atrocities are committed, while the blame is curiously apportioned to the Arabs and Muslims, themselves at the receiving end of racist and genocidal actions by the erstwhile victims of the same sort of crimes. What’s even weirder is the fact that to deny or doubt the extent of this distinctly European crime has been enshrined as a crime because of a purely political decision made in a parliament and under governments strongly influenced by the lobby representing the victim. And so, under a secular system which allows any insurance against God and religious values and against millions of peoples of other religions in the name of freedom of thought, we have been passing laws to stop thought and analytical reasoning and forced to believe at the point of a metaphoric gun, forgetting that banning thought will actually encourage it and cause more harm than good. Furthermore, this is a masochistic law which reminds me of the Shia practice of beating their own heads with sharp swords until they bleed in a demonstration of sorrow and recognition of guilt over the murder of the descendents of the prophet. But there is a clear difference: western law demands that everyone adopt that posture of guilt and remorse and not just those who committed the crimes, whereas at least the Shia only expect their own to do so.
These Fatwas – like edicts passed by parliament rather than religious clerics or political prophets – will be added to gradually until we will be longing for dictatorship and we will gradually be placed in straightjackets and society becomes dogma-driven, incapable of free thought, leading to a backward and docile population engaged only in its daily quest for the basics.
23. A value system that is becoming empty of contents
Our value system is today made up of tags and headlines which can be assigned ad-hoc, rather like a menu in a restaurant displaying the flavour or dish of the day. The most apparent characteristics of the system is its breaching of Aristotlean philosophic principles which stipulate that, for a proposition made up of a set of premises and conclusions to be true both premises and conclusions must be true. Those who manage the value system to serve them and their interests will offer propositions where the conclusions are decided first and the premises are dubious or completely untrue.
Concluded.
