The Unreasonable Man

It seems that Americans think that atheists are more of a threat to The American Way Of Life than recent immigrants, muslims, gays or lesbians. Atheists are, it appears, the group Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.This recent study shows how much of a theocracy America really is.Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism. I would sit here and think about this, but I have no time: I am off to steal another Rolex and buy a book the peasants will not understand.

I am feared… I am flattered!

As I write and read my blog, I realise more and more that I am taking a stand. The 1970s must be catching up with me: I feel that I need to say what I think and stand up for what I believe in. If I don’t, who will? So allow me to rant for a few minutes.What do I believe in?Killing is wrong. War is wrong, except if you are attacked. A few hundred hotheads with bomb belts flying into buildings does not constitute an attack in the sense of war. Lying to your citizens is wrong (no, Saddam was not a friend of Osama’s. Yes, Saddam was put into power by the USA: I know, I was in Iraq in the 80’s during the Iran-Iraq war, when US personnel there were training Saddam’s men). Just because Iraq is Arab does not make it Terrorist.

People are people, not abstractions. There is no “collateral damage”. Tell the parents of Jean Charles de Menenez that he is the victim of terrorists, not of the policemen who fired eight or nine bullets into his head. Tell the 12-year old Iraqi boy who lost both his arms in a US bombing that he is the unfortunate victim of necessity. Tell the wife of the taxi-driver in Kabul who was killed last week by Canadian soldiers that it’s his own fault. Tell the between 35,000 and 100,000 widows and widowers in Iraq that their loss was necessary to depose their leader. Tough.

Civil liberties are essential. They are the only thing that precents us descending into totalitarianism again. Governments by nature want to be totalitarian. Civil liberties prevent that from happening. Also, it takes a hundred times longer to create a freedom than it takes to abolish it, especially if done in the name of “security”. Hitler used that excuse too.
Erosion of civil liberties must therefore be taken extremely seriously.

So who am I? In view of what I said above, do I wear a ponytail and smoke dope? Am I a member of the Canadian Green Alternative Marxist-Leninist Trotskyist Union? No, I am a corporate manager who reads The Economist and the Globe, who wears a tie, and who debated whether to vote conservative or liberal in the last election.

So who has changed? Me? No, the fact that I used to think of myself as right of centre and now find myself quite a way left of centre is not due to me changing my opinions on anything. I would have given you the same opinions ten years ago. Only then, they were mainstream opinions. The world has changed. In particular, the USA public mood and the American government have changed, and have forced the world to change with it. Whose fault is all this? The terrorists’? No way. It is the Americans’ fault, plain and simple.

So. That feels better.

I am at an airport: what is new. Having arrived back last night from the UK, I am now on my way to Los Angeles, to see a customer. And a few thoughts occur to me while I sit here in the darkened but WiFi-equipped lounge.

• Is it the end of Moore’s law? The new IBM laptop I bought last month has the same speed processor (1.8 GHz M-class), at the same price point, as before. Or do we need the new Windows (”Intel Giveth, and Microsoft Taketh Away”)?
• Both Windows and DRM are increasing their market stranglehold. It is getting impossible to use large TVs on high-def players without running into “NO SIGNAL - COPYRIGHT VIOLATION” warnings. The new Windows also will not play a DVD onto a high-def screen unless that screen has DRM built in. The French are about to outlaw VLC. How will all this nonsense square with my sons’ generation and their “more, better” experience so far? Will they regress to “Less, worse”? It would be a first for several generations. We will watch and see.

But my main thought, one that surely cannot be a mere bullet, is one I would not have believed when I was a child.

Imagine yourself in a society where several times a week, you must queue up, sometimes for an hour, to stand in front of officials who fingerprint and photograph you. They have the right to refuse you entry to where you are going, without giving reason. There will be no appeal if they do so. Even if you are going to your own home, they can ask many intrusive questions before they allow you there. You have no right to question these interrogations. You must not smile at these people, or make small talk, just in case. Notices warn that “verbal abuse” (of them, by you) can result in prison sentences.

After the interrogations, other officials make you open your bags and make you take off your shoes, belt, coat and jacket and walk in stocking feet through scanning devices. Your children are given the same treatment and can be interrogated too: while they are being questioned, you may not speak. If you are arrested in this world, you can be held without charge indefinitely and secretly, without access to any lawyer, legal process or communications. You can be tortured and flown to secret prisons all over the world. The prime ministers and presidents in this world say they have a personal connection with God and wage wars in His name, not in that of the law. These wars-justified-by-God kill hundreds of thousands of people, mostly innocent civilians. When we protest in this world, we protest symptoms (”a compulsory ID card would be expensive”), not principles (”a compulsory ID card would be unjust”).

That world, my friend, exists. It is not George Orwell’s 1984, Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, or Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge. It is of course the western world today. And amazingly, we are making it so entirely voluntarily. Bit by bit, the difference between liberal democracies and police states disappears, and we nod and approve.

As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap - we will regret this. Or maybe my sons’ generation will have more sense.