Two quotations, from
very different writers, help reveal the context for the froth and
bother that have followed the chemical weapon crime in Salisbury,
England.
From the book, that led
to the tv series, McMafia, by Misha Glenny:
Organised crime is
such a rewarding industry in the Balkans because ordinary West
Europeans spend an ever-burgeoning amount of their spare time and
money sleeping with prostitutes; smoking untaxed cigarettes; snorting
coke through fifty-euro notes up their noses; employing illegal
untaxed immigrant labor on subsistence wages; stuffing their gullets
with caviar; admiring ivory and sitting on teak; and purchasing the
liver and kidneys of the desperately poor in the developing world.
And from Mail on Sunday
columnist, Peter Hitchens:
If Nato was dissolved
tomorrow, you’d be amazed how peaceful Europe would become. The
reason for its existence – the USSR – vanished decades ago. We
don’t keep up a huge alliance to protect us from the
Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottomans, or any other powers that have
disappeared. So why this one? It was preserved to save the jobs and
pensions of its staff. It was only expanded because American arms
manufacturers were afraid they would lose business when the Cold War
ended.
So they spent huge
piles of cash lobbying the US Senate to back eastward expansion, as
the New York Times uncovered. Having survived and expanded, it needed
something to do, and began to infuriate the Russians, and so that is
where we now are. If you look for trouble, you get it.
Rather
than being on the outside looking in, from the safety of their sofas, a
mug of tea and a chocolate biscuit close at hand, citizens are living
through a tv drama crime spree. Pubs and restaurants are
chemically weaponised, as is much of the rest of the world. The
innards of computers and smart (sic!) devices, where souls
now reside, are mined for the ores of data they contain, which is
refined and processed into political power and financial profit.
Even
before the recent 8 part tv series McMafia, cultural and
public processes to demonise Russia as a state and Russians as people
– a huge number of individuals across a vast territory - as demonic
and to cast them as the New Other, got underway.
Who
do citizens believe when the Russian state, through its press secretary in
Ireland, flatly denies any involvement, in the recent nerve gas
attack?
Moreover,
Russia has no means to arrange that kind of chemical attack since
Soviet chemical programme has been stopped in 1991, and all the
stockpiles have been destroyed in accordance with the Convention on
the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use
of Chemical Weapons, and their destruction was overseen by the
Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)
observers.
At the same time, as has been indicated by many experts, including former Soviet scientists involved in chemical studies and living now in the US, the type of chemical agent that the British government is talking about has been extremely researched in the US and several European countries, Britain among them.
The
use of nerve gas in the city of Salisbury is a heinous criminal act.
The rush by UK Prime Minister Teresa May and others to blame the
Russian state is knee-jerk. It is also politically dangerous, because
citizens have grown wary of assertions that the demons out there are
mad and bear weapons of mass destruction pointing this way.
Citizens
are not aware of the macro-moves around them. Most of the time. When
the UK or the USA states sell yet more fighter bombers to the
despotic regime in Saudi Arabia, the sales literally pass over
citizens’ heads. Most of the time. But even within the criminally
secretive world of arms manufacturing and sales, cracks are appearing
and chinks of lights, often beamed by Quakers abseiling off
road-bridges into the paths of arms convoys, are finding their ways
into the high-rise office towers and sumptuous halls where the
deathly deals are done.
So
citizens live in a Hypocracy, where the demons own the most expensive
houses on the most expensive streets in London. They bring their
money, openly labelled as white (legal) and black (illegal) and
launder it through the financial services industry.
Citizens
ring their hands, saying “of course we have spies and contract
killers and agents. If only the New Other didn’t have them, we
wouldn’t have to, but they won’t play the game our way. So we
have to be vigilant. And if they didn’t launder their
money in London, they’d go somewhere else. The benefits might as
well be here.”
What
benefits? What costs? As citizens experience life as a Kleptocracy, where wealth, services,
data and livelihoods are stolen by nameless corporate agents of
progress and modernity, masking the activities of individuals
hoovering riches and power into fewer and fewer hands.
Business/enterprise/capitalism/profit-making,
all the honoured terms that underpin the modern way of life, are
weaponised against us, in a Grand Theft Data. Citizens are conned and manipulated for political and financial gain. The data
theft penetrates deep as a nerve agent and as far as the most
powerful political party in Northern Ireland, if the conclusions in
Fintan O’Toole’s article, The DUP and Cambridge Analytica (The
Irish Times, 24.3.2018), hold up.
A
letter writer to The Irish Times wonders if
the Irish state is going to expel Russian diplomats, what about the
expulsion of British, American and French diplomats for deaths in
Syria, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen?
A
good question for citizens living in a Kleptocracy and Hypocracy.
Frontline
Club, Kleptocracy 9
McMafia, BBC tv crime series
The
Irish Times, Letters to the Editor; Vasily Velichkin and Eugene
Tannam
