Breathing with a Limp: QUESTIONS FOR CITIZENS OF AN HYPOCRACY

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.

Britain plays a central role in the global financial system, for good and ill. Our financial services are a major employer and tax-payer, but they also enable globalised corruption: according to the National Crime Agency, at least 100 billion pounds worth of illicit money flows through our institutions every year. Much of this money is corruptly acquired from some of the world’s poorest countries and, indeed, much of it ends up buying top end real estate, and luxury goods from the London’s finest brokers.

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.