The Statue of Liberty is Closed Until Further Notice…
“The current access patterns reflect a responsible management strategy in the best interests of all our visitors,” says the out-going Park Service Director, Fran Mainella; which is to say that the Statue of Liberty is closed to the public, and is seemingly to remain closed to the public until further notice.
A citizen is able to enter the statue but only to climb as far as the pedestal, or the statue’s toes; with the crown and the stairway up inside the body itself being out of bounds. The importance is of course that this statue is hollow, and without people ascending its stairs to her crown it remains just that, a hollow and people-less idea.
The Statue of Liberty is a symbol of Freedom and Opportunity, of the Hopes and Dreams of not only the American people but of all people who aspire to be great in the face of all the odds. Its closure, since 9/11 2001, is a significant symbolic gesture. In fact Senator Charles Schumer has gone so far as to couch this debate in explicit terms having said, “In this case, freedom has given way to fear”. Well perhaps Senator Schumer, perhaps…but however we look at it, the 21st Century truly began on that day…
It is critical to realize that nationalism or the tendancy towards it is not only a positive feeling. In the positive – by way of example to illuminate the difference – one may feel an attachment to a nation, England say, or an ethnic or racial group, as is demonstrated in the all black oscar awards for instance. However, on the more foul side of such tendencies and feelings is the negative; whereby a group feels bound together simply by a collective hatred or fear of another group or ideology.
This kind of sentiment has two major aspects. Firstly, it inclines a slackness of moral thought, whereby WE are good on the basis of THEM being bad. They are always bad, and so by virture, we, being good, must always be good, regardless of what we actually do. So, when we bomb an urban area and the generals report that “collateral damage” was fairly high, we fail to see this as a crime against humanity, we fail to see that the killing of innocent civilians is wrong, and that even terming the death of a civilian as “collateral damage” is wrong; but because it is US doing it to THEM, and since they are bad then we are good, anything we do must be to further goodness… To labour this point somewhat, the overall hysteria and frantic rage that was built up and surrounded the deaths of those 3000 or so innocents in the World Trade Centre attacks is grossly disproportionate to the feelings of regret over the deaths of nearly 1 million Iraqi civilians (remember that the invasion was partly justified as a retaliation to the attacks on the Twin Towers). This negative type of nationalism produces the same results as scape-goating does. It allows rage and hatred to be vented without actually necessitating any change in the behaviour of those that are doing the hating.
This was at the forefront of politics in the McCarthy era, the era of the Communist witch hunts, where again the burden of proof fell upon the accused and people arrested were encouraged to ‘name names’ of other potential communists… In this era, the enemy is the ‘terrorist’, and more specifically the Islamic terrorist, with everyone a suspect until somehow they prove themselves innocent. And this burden of proof seems to remain in place even while the suspected are locked in concentration camps without charge, little legal access and with the prospect of a closed, juryless trial ahead of them. The very existence of a camp such as that at Guatanamo bay ought to be enough for the civilized nations of the world to scrap any existing treaties with the American administration, begin an immediate boycott of all USA exports to the world, and seek to enforce the international laws upon those responsible for behaviours and policies that would not have been out of place in the Third Reich of the 1940s…
Another aspect of this slackening of moral thinking and accuracy of thought can be seen in the slogans of the day (as well as in the slogans of repressive governments of the past), all hollow and meaningless. Support the troops for instance, is about as meaningless as oil your weapons, or, change your socks… it is something that in itself is right, and no body can have an objection to, for of course any good hearted and decent person will support the troops (who are people after all..) just as they would support the teachers or the train drivers. The sinister use of this slogan is that it has been used as a pro war slogan, as a slogan meant to divide and not bring together. That is to say that those who are against the war in Iraq are accused of not supporting the troops, something which does not go down well. And so those in favour of the war have the ammunition that the anti-war lobby does not support the troops giving further cause to avoid rational debate or dialogue regarding the facts of the situation… It is often missed that the people who are looking out most for troops are those who are resolutely against a war for oil, where people’s lives are being lost, given and taken for the sake of the profit margins of a few companies closely tied to the White house and the Pentagon. Rationally speaking, a slogan such as support the troops ought to be an anti-war slogan, but here again is an example of the twisted world view that is brought about by such negative nationalistic feeling.
Through slogans of this type the identity of the US is strengthened further through the identification of those who are not US. This of course is deliberate, and is nothing new. Perhaps a slightly unusual comparison to make, but none the less valid as an illustrative tool, would be to the marketing campaign of the 50s engineered by Edward Bernays, whereby in order to break the taboo of women smoking and thereby open up a large new market for the tobacco companies, Bernays organised a march of cheer leader type girls through New York with banners saying “smoke for Freedom”. This meant anyone objecting to the women smoking now was branded as one who was against women having equal rights, rather than objecting to the shameless use of a serious political issue of the day to promote the benefits of big business.
The second important aspect of this type of negative nationalism is that the group involved are very easily manipulated and the politicians doing the manipulating need have no coherent policy or objective, and need only satisfy immediate requirements for the hatred and fear of the OTHER group to continue. Helpfully as well, the other group needn’t be too specific, and any perceived enemy of the state can be added without any contradiction to the group of the OTHER, with no any real or rational justification. A person can be accused simply of being one of THEM, and no evidence is needed for such a claim if through the media and other channels of communication their name can be sufficiently tarnished…Hence we see groups being suddenly added to the list of international terrorist organisations who were trading and dealing quite normally with Western governments until their expulsion, generally for reasons unknown to the public at large, while other groups, generally those who cooperate with the military plans of the West, Pakistan for instance, are embraced and heralded as heroes in the war of terror when to all extensive purposes they are criminals of the highest order. Pakistani human rights records are appalling, and the country was run until very recently by a tight knit military dictatorship that has only changed since then in name and not in actually reality.
To return to our Senator’s observation of how freedom has given way to fear now… a group caught up in the hysteria of negative nationalism displays all the characteristics of a cornered animal, and will attack without thought if its escape is blocked. A population constantly on red alert, fearing the imminent attack, divided and insecure with no apparent escape from the endless torrent of media and political speculation endlessly reminding it that its fate walks a knife edge is a population that is easy to manipulate quickly and without proper rationale. Ironically maybe, the group that is scape-goated also begin in their turn to behave like cornered animals, and so we are left with a situation of two cornered animals facing each other…
Against a background of this type of negative nationalism all kinds of repressive actions are to be justified, phones can tapped, databases kept on those who attend anti-war rallies and demonstrations, restrictions in the civil liberties of a nation’s population, biometric ID cards, increased stop and search powers and of course the limitations of the powers of the judicial system and the limiting of basic human rights; and all can be justified with respect to the apparent increased need for tighter security to protect against the evils of THEM (and evil is not too an extreme a word to use, remember we are at war with the axis of evil…). However, any sane or reasonable person can see that the two – ie security and freedom are unrelated in the sense implied by the draconian measures of the western democracies. Similar to the divisive thinking behind the slogans, no-one would wish for innocent people to be killed in terrorist attacks but by reducing the freedoms of people targeted by those attacks will not reduce their effects or probability, particularly with the cases of the so called home grown terrorist. A little off the point but worth remembering is the fact that as the Nazis clamped down harder and harder on the French resistance it did not stop them, in fact it only encouraged them to continue to fight against that repressive and cruel regime. And well that they did.
The closure of the Statue of Liberty will fire up a rage in the hearts of many Americans, and will be symbolic act elsewhere too, and of course the answer given to this rage will be Blame Them, its not our fault, but the fault of our Enemies, further entrenching the negative nationalism we discussed before. And those in power will have the job of simply channelling that rage to what or whoever it suits them to even when it is quite irrational.
The Lyrical Terrorist escapes jail with a Suspended Sentence…A 24 year old Muslim woman who had worked in the Heathrow airport escaped a jail sentence and got off with a suspended 18 month sentence and was ordered to carry out 100 hours of unpaid work we learnt on the 7th December 2007. She had called herself the lyrical terrorist, as an on-line persona, because she had written poetry that was anti-western and anti the US, some of that poetry described and called for the beheading of non-believers; also she was alleged to have printed information from the Internet which together with the poetry was deemed to be likely to be useful for terrorism… Samina Malik had done nothing wrong, at least criminally, and one can only conclude that she had committed a so called thought crime… In a society where freedom of expression is valued then she has the categorical right to create such poetry – despite its evident bad taste and lack of literary skill – and also the right to read and collect any information that happens to be in the public domain.
This young woman’s poem was no great piece of art work as I have tried to stress, in fact it has hardly any artistic merit whatsoever and can only be seen akin to self harming and other destructive behaviours, however, to my mind at least, neither does the work of Damien Hirst or the Chapman brothers (respectively cutting a shark in half or mutilating original Goya prints with cartoon sketches of Mickey Mouse…) or any number of other contemporary artists making a very healthy living today…Freedom of expression cannot be restricted and it is as simple as that, and anyone who seeks to restrict the most basic freedoms of thought and expression is an enemy of the free world, of free people and of freedom itself and these individuals must be seen in that light with no mitigating circumstances being able to revoke that judgment for it is the most basic fact. Human rights are non-negotiable.
This case only highlights the potential for the irrational and damaging outcomes of this environment of whipped up Fear and channelled false Hatred. It seems that Samina Malik is a victim, not a criminal. It appears that she has lost the right to freedom of expression and the freedom of association – both enshrined in the human rights laws that the UK is a signatory to. The only way to explain this is that those in positions to do otherwise were swayed from rational thinking by this poisonous environment that we are creating around us. For thinking rationally again, how could an angsty young woman’s poor attempts at literature truly present a threat to a nation, or truly be useful to a terrorist or terrorist organisation..?
Freedom of expression also has another side. To be able to act properly information must be available. In fact, a premise of democracy is that those in power are honest with those that they serve. To create a divisive environment fermenting with fear and hatred is not conducive to reasoned thought or action, nor is it serving the best interests of the electorates. It can be concluded that more than anything the endless streams of misinformation and hashed logic that is pushed down the throat of the average person is perhaps the greatest threat to freedom of expression. When a person is enraged, full of hatred and confused in their fearful state their reason will often abandon them, and their expressions will not be free in the sense that they have been manipulated to be as they are by a whole series of false queues that trigger an intended reaction, rather like a puppet.
And so against this background, any victory that we are told that we have achieved in this war by the same people who have consistently deceived and divided us, will remain as hollow a symbol of victory as the Statue of Liberty is of freedom until it is once again opened to the public. However, the Statue of Liberty remains closed, and those in the positions to affect real change in the crushing environment that is being created across the globe continue to lie and deceive their electorates, they continue to refer to the deaths of civilians as “collateral damage” and continue to maintain and fill concentration camps in the name of freedom, and ultimately, they show no signs of changing their ways, and so, it appears that the Statue will remain closed until further notice is given by the authorities; unless, of course, the people of the world take it upon themselves to reopen it…
Hesq.,
A citizen is able to enter the statue but only to climb as far as the pedestal, or the statue’s toes; with the crown and the stairway up inside the body itself being out of bounds. The importance is of course that this statue is hollow, and without people ascending its stairs to her crown it remains just that, a hollow and people-less idea.
The Statue of Liberty is a symbol of Freedom and Opportunity, of the Hopes and Dreams of not only the American people but of all people who aspire to be great in the face of all the odds. Its closure, since 9/11 2001, is a significant symbolic gesture. In fact Senator Charles Schumer has gone so far as to couch this debate in explicit terms having said, “In this case, freedom has given way to fear”. Well perhaps Senator Schumer, perhaps…but however we look at it, the 21st Century truly began on that day…
It is critical to realize that nationalism or the tendancy towards it is not only a positive feeling. In the positive – by way of example to illuminate the difference – one may feel an attachment to a nation, England say, or an ethnic or racial group, as is demonstrated in the all black oscar awards for instance. However, on the more foul side of such tendencies and feelings is the negative; whereby a group feels bound together simply by a collective hatred or fear of another group or ideology.
This kind of sentiment has two major aspects. Firstly, it inclines a slackness of moral thought, whereby WE are good on the basis of THEM being bad. They are always bad, and so by virture, we, being good, must always be good, regardless of what we actually do. So, when we bomb an urban area and the generals report that “collateral damage” was fairly high, we fail to see this as a crime against humanity, we fail to see that the killing of innocent civilians is wrong, and that even terming the death of a civilian as “collateral damage” is wrong; but because it is US doing it to THEM, and since they are bad then we are good, anything we do must be to further goodness… To labour this point somewhat, the overall hysteria and frantic rage that was built up and surrounded the deaths of those 3000 or so innocents in the World Trade Centre attacks is grossly disproportionate to the feelings of regret over the deaths of nearly 1 million Iraqi civilians (remember that the invasion was partly justified as a retaliation to the attacks on the Twin Towers). This negative type of nationalism produces the same results as scape-goating does. It allows rage and hatred to be vented without actually necessitating any change in the behaviour of those that are doing the hating.
This was at the forefront of politics in the McCarthy era, the era of the Communist witch hunts, where again the burden of proof fell upon the accused and people arrested were encouraged to ‘name names’ of other potential communists… In this era, the enemy is the ‘terrorist’, and more specifically the Islamic terrorist, with everyone a suspect until somehow they prove themselves innocent. And this burden of proof seems to remain in place even while the suspected are locked in concentration camps without charge, little legal access and with the prospect of a closed, juryless trial ahead of them. The very existence of a camp such as that at Guatanamo bay ought to be enough for the civilized nations of the world to scrap any existing treaties with the American administration, begin an immediate boycott of all USA exports to the world, and seek to enforce the international laws upon those responsible for behaviours and policies that would not have been out of place in the Third Reich of the 1940s…
Another aspect of this slackening of moral thinking and accuracy of thought can be seen in the slogans of the day (as well as in the slogans of repressive governments of the past), all hollow and meaningless. Support the troops for instance, is about as meaningless as oil your weapons, or, change your socks… it is something that in itself is right, and no body can have an objection to, for of course any good hearted and decent person will support the troops (who are people after all..) just as they would support the teachers or the train drivers. The sinister use of this slogan is that it has been used as a pro war slogan, as a slogan meant to divide and not bring together. That is to say that those who are against the war in Iraq are accused of not supporting the troops, something which does not go down well. And so those in favour of the war have the ammunition that the anti-war lobby does not support the troops giving further cause to avoid rational debate or dialogue regarding the facts of the situation… It is often missed that the people who are looking out most for troops are those who are resolutely against a war for oil, where people’s lives are being lost, given and taken for the sake of the profit margins of a few companies closely tied to the White house and the Pentagon. Rationally speaking, a slogan such as support the troops ought to be an anti-war slogan, but here again is an example of the twisted world view that is brought about by such negative nationalistic feeling.
Through slogans of this type the identity of the US is strengthened further through the identification of those who are not US. This of course is deliberate, and is nothing new. Perhaps a slightly unusual comparison to make, but none the less valid as an illustrative tool, would be to the marketing campaign of the 50s engineered by Edward Bernays, whereby in order to break the taboo of women smoking and thereby open up a large new market for the tobacco companies, Bernays organised a march of cheer leader type girls through New York with banners saying “smoke for Freedom”. This meant anyone objecting to the women smoking now was branded as one who was against women having equal rights, rather than objecting to the shameless use of a serious political issue of the day to promote the benefits of big business.
The second important aspect of this type of negative nationalism is that the group involved are very easily manipulated and the politicians doing the manipulating need have no coherent policy or objective, and need only satisfy immediate requirements for the hatred and fear of the OTHER group to continue. Helpfully as well, the other group needn’t be too specific, and any perceived enemy of the state can be added without any contradiction to the group of the OTHER, with no any real or rational justification. A person can be accused simply of being one of THEM, and no evidence is needed for such a claim if through the media and other channels of communication their name can be sufficiently tarnished…Hence we see groups being suddenly added to the list of international terrorist organisations who were trading and dealing quite normally with Western governments until their expulsion, generally for reasons unknown to the public at large, while other groups, generally those who cooperate with the military plans of the West, Pakistan for instance, are embraced and heralded as heroes in the war of terror when to all extensive purposes they are criminals of the highest order. Pakistani human rights records are appalling, and the country was run until very recently by a tight knit military dictatorship that has only changed since then in name and not in actually reality.
To return to our Senator’s observation of how freedom has given way to fear now… a group caught up in the hysteria of negative nationalism displays all the characteristics of a cornered animal, and will attack without thought if its escape is blocked. A population constantly on red alert, fearing the imminent attack, divided and insecure with no apparent escape from the endless torrent of media and political speculation endlessly reminding it that its fate walks a knife edge is a population that is easy to manipulate quickly and without proper rationale. Ironically maybe, the group that is scape-goated also begin in their turn to behave like cornered animals, and so we are left with a situation of two cornered animals facing each other…
Against a background of this type of negative nationalism all kinds of repressive actions are to be justified, phones can tapped, databases kept on those who attend anti-war rallies and demonstrations, restrictions in the civil liberties of a nation’s population, biometric ID cards, increased stop and search powers and of course the limitations of the powers of the judicial system and the limiting of basic human rights; and all can be justified with respect to the apparent increased need for tighter security to protect against the evils of THEM (and evil is not too an extreme a word to use, remember we are at war with the axis of evil…). However, any sane or reasonable person can see that the two – ie security and freedom are unrelated in the sense implied by the draconian measures of the western democracies. Similar to the divisive thinking behind the slogans, no-one would wish for innocent people to be killed in terrorist attacks but by reducing the freedoms of people targeted by those attacks will not reduce their effects or probability, particularly with the cases of the so called home grown terrorist. A little off the point but worth remembering is the fact that as the Nazis clamped down harder and harder on the French resistance it did not stop them, in fact it only encouraged them to continue to fight against that repressive and cruel regime. And well that they did.
The closure of the Statue of Liberty will fire up a rage in the hearts of many Americans, and will be symbolic act elsewhere too, and of course the answer given to this rage will be Blame Them, its not our fault, but the fault of our Enemies, further entrenching the negative nationalism we discussed before. And those in power will have the job of simply channelling that rage to what or whoever it suits them to even when it is quite irrational.
The Lyrical Terrorist escapes jail with a Suspended Sentence…A 24 year old Muslim woman who had worked in the Heathrow airport escaped a jail sentence and got off with a suspended 18 month sentence and was ordered to carry out 100 hours of unpaid work we learnt on the 7th December 2007. She had called herself the lyrical terrorist, as an on-line persona, because she had written poetry that was anti-western and anti the US, some of that poetry described and called for the beheading of non-believers; also she was alleged to have printed information from the Internet which together with the poetry was deemed to be likely to be useful for terrorism… Samina Malik had done nothing wrong, at least criminally, and one can only conclude that she had committed a so called thought crime… In a society where freedom of expression is valued then she has the categorical right to create such poetry – despite its evident bad taste and lack of literary skill – and also the right to read and collect any information that happens to be in the public domain.
This young woman’s poem was no great piece of art work as I have tried to stress, in fact it has hardly any artistic merit whatsoever and can only be seen akin to self harming and other destructive behaviours, however, to my mind at least, neither does the work of Damien Hirst or the Chapman brothers (respectively cutting a shark in half or mutilating original Goya prints with cartoon sketches of Mickey Mouse…) or any number of other contemporary artists making a very healthy living today…Freedom of expression cannot be restricted and it is as simple as that, and anyone who seeks to restrict the most basic freedoms of thought and expression is an enemy of the free world, of free people and of freedom itself and these individuals must be seen in that light with no mitigating circumstances being able to revoke that judgment for it is the most basic fact. Human rights are non-negotiable.
This case only highlights the potential for the irrational and damaging outcomes of this environment of whipped up Fear and channelled false Hatred. It seems that Samina Malik is a victim, not a criminal. It appears that she has lost the right to freedom of expression and the freedom of association – both enshrined in the human rights laws that the UK is a signatory to. The only way to explain this is that those in positions to do otherwise were swayed from rational thinking by this poisonous environment that we are creating around us. For thinking rationally again, how could an angsty young woman’s poor attempts at literature truly present a threat to a nation, or truly be useful to a terrorist or terrorist organisation..?
Freedom of expression also has another side. To be able to act properly information must be available. In fact, a premise of democracy is that those in power are honest with those that they serve. To create a divisive environment fermenting with fear and hatred is not conducive to reasoned thought or action, nor is it serving the best interests of the electorates. It can be concluded that more than anything the endless streams of misinformation and hashed logic that is pushed down the throat of the average person is perhaps the greatest threat to freedom of expression. When a person is enraged, full of hatred and confused in their fearful state their reason will often abandon them, and their expressions will not be free in the sense that they have been manipulated to be as they are by a whole series of false queues that trigger an intended reaction, rather like a puppet.
And so against this background, any victory that we are told that we have achieved in this war by the same people who have consistently deceived and divided us, will remain as hollow a symbol of victory as the Statue of Liberty is of freedom until it is once again opened to the public. However, the Statue of Liberty remains closed, and those in the positions to affect real change in the crushing environment that is being created across the globe continue to lie and deceive their electorates, they continue to refer to the deaths of civilians as “collateral damage” and continue to maintain and fill concentration camps in the name of freedom, and ultimately, they show no signs of changing their ways, and so, it appears that the Statue will remain closed until further notice is given by the authorities; unless, of course, the people of the world take it upon themselves to reopen it…
Hesq.,
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