A Sense of Perspective

A Sense of Perspective

John Maxwell

Three years ago several millions of us round the world were busy
marching and demonstrating our objection to the brutal war we knew
was coming in Iraq. We knew then that the Mr Bush's reasons for war
were bogus. We knew that Iraq had not been involved in the 9/11
atrocities, we suspected that Iraq had no weapons of mass
destruction and many of us, myself included, carried posters
reading "No blood for Oil!"

I have been rereading what I said then and I found that I had
nothing to regret or correct:

"We are the world, we are the people, and last weekend, for the
first time in our half million years on this planet, humanity found
the means to speak with one voice. The global village had suddenly
become the global family, able to make its views known, to demand
that its conscience be heard.

"It was a giant step forward for the human race.

"[Nothing] could have affected the message we sent to our human
family councils ? to the United Nations and the governments of the
world: We want no tribal war; we want no blood on our hands; we
want Justice and commonsense; we want Peace!

"The globalisation of greed has called into existence its
antithesis, the globalisation of conscience ? the discovery of
the international public interest.

"While we cannot and will not defend Saddam Hussein, we remain to
be convinced that he has shown any predisposition to attack the
United States or anyone else, or that he possesses, as the British
and American leaders claim, weapons of mass destruction and the
means to deliver them.

"Natural justice would seem to demand a true bill of
particulars, a credible list of charges, an indictment, not
plagiarised theses and hearsay ?intelligence?.

That was then.

The then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US, General
Shinseki, was fired out of hand for suggesting that the US needed
hundreds of thousands of troops to subdue Iraq. He has nothing to
correct or regret either.

The neocons, the chicken-hawks, the Sunday soldiers and armchair
generals are in a somewhat different position.

Today, large majorities of people in the United States and among
the American soldiers in Iraq believe that the war is a mistake.
They want an end to it.

Today, Mr Bush's popularity is way down and dropping like a stone.
Most people in the world were right three years ago and the
generals and their satraps, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Blair, were
wrong.

But, if you will forgive me one last self-quotation, most of the
rest of us of us knew what was wrong and what is needed to correct it.

" The mechanisms meant to organise and advance the public
interest have been captured by the people we deputed to minister to
our needs and to fulfil our aspirations. They have been captured
by our delegates, our boards of directors, by the managers and the
politicians , and have been converted into instruments for the
aggrandisement of wealth and power, instruments of oppression.
Having jettisoned their responsibilities to their constituents ?
stakeholders, shareholders, electorates, consumers and taxpayers,
they now attempt to put themselves above the law and out of reach
of the public interest which they say they serve.

"The result is carnage; the wanton destruction, destitution and
demoralisation of people by war, slavery, starvation, unemployment
and alienation and by man-made plagues and cancers."

What we call democracy has proven to be an empty shell, a zombie's
carcase, manipulated and moved by a small horde of apparatchiks who
have used our apathy and our decency to hog-tie us, to demonstrate
that no matter what we want we will get what they want to deliver
false promises, empty slogans and brutal actions intended to
intimidate and silence.

The tide is turning; we are in slack water when it is not clear
which way things will go. The gaulieters are in disarray, in as
much disarray as we are, but we do not understand that we need to
seize the time and to try to ensure that we are not swept away
again in a boat piloted by greedy, selfish fools.

We can change governments all we want, but until we change the
systems of governance to make them answerable to us, there is no
hope that things will be much different five years or five decades
or five centuries from now.

What is certain is that if we allow our current leaders to continue
on their mad careers, we all will go over the cliff with them.

At this moment, stopping wars is important. Ending the torment of
the Haitian people and the Darfur refugees is important. They are
the women and children of Lifeboat Earth. But Lifeboat Earth has to
be put under new management because if it isn't, we will all sink
with it.

The Iraq war in all its brutal fatuity is in a way, a metaphor for
our existence on Earth. Our systems of production and consumption
are destroying our environment, our health, our children and
civilisation itself. The things that seems so important to the
Bushes and the Blairs, to the Rumsfelds and the heirs of Sharon are
small potatoes to the real problems that we face. Pieces of
Antarctica the size of Palestine have broken off the ice shelves
there, the glaciers of Greenland and Europe are melting at an
accelerating pace and the Arctic Ocean is becoming a seaway after
11,000 years.

Bird flu is not a disease of wild birds, as most people imagine; it
is the result of factory farming; the DDT and PCB found in mothers'
milk all over the world is produced by the same process. The Earth
has been yoked to systems of production which survive only because
there is still space in China and India for its final fatal
efflorescence. As the globalisation bird chases its own tail in
search of cheaper and cheaper labour, the Chinese are beginning to
go through the same disillusionments gone through by workers in New
York, watching their jobs flee to Georgia, to Mexico and then to
China. Sooner, rather than later the race to the bottom will end ?
at the bottom, somewhere in China.

Meanwhile, the treasure spent on war could have stopped the AIDS
pandemic in its tracks and could probably also have built a house
for every homeless person in the world. While the Jamaican Minister
of Finance glories in having sold 30 year, 10% bonds, people in
the US with bad credit records are fighting off mortgage lenders
eager to hand them money at 8%.

'Every Day Bucket go a well
one day the bottom must drop out', as the jamaican proverb has it.
As I get nearer to real old age, and increasingly to understand
that the world is just as crazy as I thought many many moons ago,
my one real regret is to watch the depreciation and increasing
depravity of what I once called the profession of journalism.

When Slobodan Milosevic died last week it soon became known that he
had been protesting against the medical treatment he had been
getting. One of the things he protested against was the fact that
his blood had shown the presence of rifampicin, a drug which is
used to treat tuberculosis and leprosy. Milosevic, in a letter to
the Russians, complained that he couldn't understand why he was
being given this drug.

A New York Times story on his death reported that "Preliminary
autopsy results said he had died of a heart attack, although
doctors who examined him just months ago said they did not believe
he had significant heart disease. Likewise, tests done before he
died detected the presence of a medicine he had not been
prescribed, one that would have put him at grave risk by reducing
the effectiveness of his blood pressure pills.

"Court officials and some scientists have been quick to insinuate
that Mr. Milosevic was secretly ingesting the extra medicine to
exacerbate his medical problems, so that he could be transferred to
a clinic in Moscow, where his family now lives."

According to the New York Times, Mr Milosevic's blood pressure had
become increasingly difficult to control and prison doctors had
long suspected that he wasn't taking the medicines prescribed for
him The Times says: 'After several weeks of sleuthing, the
toxicologists recently determined that Mr. Milosevic ingested the
antibiotic rifampicin, which would blunt the effect of his blood
pressure medicine. Dr. Uges, as well as tribunal officials speaking
on condition of anonymity because an investigation is under way,
suggested that the antibiotic was taken intentionally, smuggled in
by visitors."

It is an odd story. Mr Milosevic complains that he was being given
the same drug which the responsible officials suspect that he was
taking intentionally.

Something doesn't make sense here, but my fellow journalists do not
care.

In another story, this one from the Iraq war. the New York Times
reported on March 16 that American soldiers demolished a farmhouse
after encountering unexpected resistance from insurgents, killing a
number of civilians in the process. "The American military said
that only three civilians had been killed, while Iraqi officials
said an entire 11-member family - from a 75-year-old grandmother to
a 6-month-old baby - had died in the attack."

The Reuters version of the story begins: ' Iraqi police accused
U.S. troops of killing five children in a raid on an al Qaeda
suspect on Wednesday as ousted leader Saddam Hussein used his
televised trial to call on people to "resist the invaders".

"The judge promptly cut off the cameras and barred the press."

After a diversion about the court proceedings, the Reuter story
returns to the raid:?'A senior Iraqi police officer said autopsies
on the bodies, which included five children, showed each had been
shot in the head. Community leaders said they were outraged.

'Television footage showed the bodies of five children, two men and
four women in the Tikrit morgue. One infant had a gaping head
wound. All the children seemed younger than school age.

"Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the
building," U.S. spokesman Major Tim Keefe said. "Coalition Forces
returned fire utilising both air and ground assets.

"There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also
killed in the firefight. The building ... (was) destroyed."
Keefe said the al Qaeda suspect had been captured."'

Reuters perseveres with the story however and makes it clear that
the US version is not accurate.

Under the subhead "Horrible crime" Reuters reports that

'Major Ali Ahmed of the Ishaqi police said U.S. forces had landed
on the roof and shot the 11 occupants. Colonel Farouq Hussein, said
autopsies found all had been shot in the head.

'Their hands were bound and they were dumped in one room before the
house was destroyed, Hussein said.
'"It's a clear and perfect crime without any doubt," he said.

'Ishaqi town administrator Rasheed Shather said. "We want the
Americans to give us an explanation for this horrible crime."'
Nothing more has been heard of this incident. The pictures of the
civilian bodies, including the children, were shown on American
television, at least in CNN, but no American reporter seems to have
been worried that every person in the building had been killed,
except, apparently, for the wanted Al Qaeda insurgent.!!!

After all that I am afraid there is no room for my own personal
saga of mystery and intrigue, concerning how my email appears and
disappears. Cable and Wireless has no explanation.

I am, however, writing it up to ask both my Internet Service
provider, C&W and my mail service provider, Mac.com to try to
explain some mysterious happenings which have dogged my
communications with the outside world. I suppose I should consider
myself lucky, however. Had I been practicing my profession in Iraq
I would no doubt by now, be among the more than one hundred
journalists caught in the crossfire and murdered by accident.

One needs an appropriate sense of perspective.

Copyright©2006 JOHN MAXWELL