Hypocrisy and Homophobia

John Maxwell

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 color-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 is 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 breakup 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 a decades long invasion of ethnic Albanians transformed Serbian ‘heartland’ into what the west now recognizes 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, a.k.a. 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 yo forceful 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 bee 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 innocen 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, kipnapped 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 s 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 practiced 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 f 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 and 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 teen age. Teenagers of all 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 offense.

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!

Copyright©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com