David Prashker's World Hourglass: August 2015

Monday, August 31, 2015

Ukraine

I have tried on several occasions since 2013 to write this entry, but the goalposts keep shifting and it is still impossible to do so - even today, August 31st 2015, as I am updating in order to go live with the page, the media are reporting bombs and protests as the parliament votes to give more autonomy to the Crimea.

But what is Ukraine? An independent state, belonging to the European Union? A semi-autonomous province of the Russian Federation? Several new countries formed out of the collapse of the former Ukraine, initiated by agents of President Putin? A very large hole in the ground in the middle of eastern Europe?

This entry is suspended until the world powers stop bitching and sort the damned mess out (I am not anticipating that this will be within my, or even my grand-children's lifetime).

Marks for: 0

Marks against: много (pronounced "menoga")

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The Argaman Press

Uganda

One way or another all dictators are mad. Some in the Neronic manner of Niyazov of Turkmenistan, others in the Macbethian manner of a Hitler or a Stalin. And then there are the Caligulas of the world, who take great delight in evil for the simple reason – insofar as anyone can tell – that they can, they enjoy it, and so they do. Caligula insisted, for example, that his horse Incitatus had his oats mixed with gold flake, appointed him a consul, and had the horse invite important dignitaries to his stable for dinner parties; their wives in the meanwhile providing brothel-service for the Emperor and his guests - though many of these tales may well be legendary rather than historical.

Not so with Idi Amin Dada, or “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal al-Haji Dr. Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE" as Radio Uganda customarily introduced his Castro-like rants from the microphone, who ruled Uganda from 1971, when he ousted Milton Obote in a coup, until 1979, when he fled to Libya, and then Saudi Arabia, after the failure of a war with Tanzania. Amin was not only the President; he was also Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, of the Army and of Air Staff; having suspended most of the Constitution he was also the unofficial speaker of Parliament, leader of both the government and the opposition, and the head of the State Research Bureau, a body put in place after he disbanded the intelligence services, though what exactly it was researching was not always obvious – the number of ways a man could think of to torture and murder people seems to have been its principal activity, and the Bureau came up with several that certainly never occurred to Caligula or Macbeth, being devoured by crocodiles among them. He also headed the military police, and the wonderfully named Public Safety Unit, whose methodologies for ensuring public safety you can try to work out for yourself, though you will only succeed if you have the sort of demented imagination of an Idi Amin. Included in the list of those removed to ensure public safety were virtually all religious leaders, journalists, artists, senior bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, students and intellectuals, as well of course as those suspected of committing crimes, and that most evil of all human sub-categories, foreigners (mostly people of Asian origin who had come under the British to help build the country, and now fled in droves to Britain). Estimates vary as to how many were disappeared – to use the verb favoured in South America – but not less than 80,000, and probably more like 300,000, though it may even have been as much as 500,000, if you believe Amnesty International, which sadly no one ever does.

My own favourite Amin story is the tale of the Air France passenger plane that was hijacked to Entebbe in 1976 by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, with a little bit of help from two members of the German Baader-Meinhoff gang. Amin went to the airport to “welcome” the 83 Jewish/Israeli hostages who were being held (all but 20 of the remaining 176 non-Jewish/Israeli passengers were quickly flown to safety; the 20 insisted on remaining, including the entire crew), and then flew off to Nairobi for a conference. With help from the Kenyans, Israeli commandos conducted the first ever attempt to refuel a plane in mid-air (the very verb, letadlek, had to be invented for the occasion), but only after they had landed at Entebbe airport, and driven a Rolls Royce identical to Amin’s to the terminal, with a "double" in the front seat in case anyone looked through binoculars to check, flanked in the darkness by rifle-toting soldiers, so that guards genuinely thought Amin had returned early, and the kidnappers were dead and the hostages freed before a shot was fired to prevent them. Two deaths on the Jewish/Israeli side as well. The first was Dora Bloch, an elderly English woman who had fallen ill and been taken to hospital; she was murdered there in retaliation afterwards. The other was the leader of the commandos, one Yoni Netanyu, the elder brother of the current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

After Amin, Obote returned to power, and if he was less eccentric he was no less murderous – somewhere in the region of half a million people were murdered during his Presidency, which ended in 1986. His successor, Yoweri Museveni, who took power in yet another coup (he overthrew Tita Okello, just six months after Okello overthrew Obote), improved matters to some degree, though he also banned multi-party politics (he restored them in 2005).

For some years Uganda was embroiled in a civil war with the Lord’s Resistance Army, a particularly unpleasant gang of barbarians who used child slavery and mass murder as you and I use cups for drinking coffee: just another everyday utensil. The LRA were kicked out of Uganda in 2006, but simply moved into the Democratic Republic of Congo instead, and Uganda has continued to fight them, in partnership with the DRC. Museveni is still in power today, though his 2011 election victory was probably not authentic, and autocratic tendencies have become more and more evident with each passing year.

Marks for: 0

Marks against: millions, alas, all dead before their time

The Argaman Press

Tuvalu

The coastal regions most at risk from global warming - coral islands aren't even included!

We used to sing this when I was at school, with a Tuvalu ra laddie and a Tuvalu ra lay; but apparently this has nothing to do with these nine islands in the South Pacific where global warming, seeking low-lying fruit, will be munching on coral and coconuts before anywhere else even realises it has started. The highest point of the tallest of the islands would not reach the ceiling of a National Trust house in England, though a modern home would just about hit its head on the palm-tree chandeliers – around fourteen feet.

Imagine an island with no water, especially a small island, which is entirely surrounded by water. Undrinkable sea water, unless you process it. But no rivers, no streams, no wells, no springs, just bottled water – brought in by boat from the filtration plants, or caught in rainstorms and then boiled. You can always live on coconut milk, which is plentiful, and no need to add salt when you cook the tuna, just drop it on the ground for a moment – the soil is so totally drenched with salt that even subsistence farming is virtually impossible. Intelligent design, you see. Nice job again, God!

Tuvalu has, however, found the modern way of doing things, the Kardashian way, the Big Brother way. You can now set up your website anywhere in the world as, for example, Davidprashker.tv – a Californian broadcaster acquired the TLD (top-level domain) at the cost of several million dollars per year, though for the moment only other TV-broadcasters can get the suffix (I am trying to encourage some transvestite friends to launch a transvestite TV channel, and then go for the website address and see what happens). The income has allowed the first ever three-storey building to be constructed, and several roads once made of crushed coral have now been paved. Ah, progress!

Marks For: 2 (one for each of the storeys that will still be visible when global warming traps the people on the ground floor on the now sea floor)

Marks Against: 9 (the number of islands that comprise Tuvalu)

The Argaman Press

Turks and Caicos Islands

A British overseas territory in the Caribbean, just east of Cuba, just north of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), forty islands in all, eight of them inhabited, with breath-taking views of financial services, large numbers of low-lying tourist resorts, and waterfalls upon waterfalls of income that pour in from all manner of sources, though few of those are taxes, because the islands are ideologically opposed to taxes, where, if I may put it that way, taxes can be avoided.

This latter is not entirely fair. The term “breath-taking” definitely applies to the beaches, and “low-lying” to the politicians as well as to the smaller islands and what are called cays - sandy islands on the surface of coral reefs. The waterfalls, on the other hand, are mostly Atlantic waves, and in 2012 the government finally agreed, after years of procrastination or even downright refusal, to sign an international agreement that obliges them to share tax information with those European countries who have the power to demand it of them.

The Turks and Caicos Islands also claim to have the oldest population in the world (oldest in terms of the age of the still-living rather than the longevity of human habitation) after South Florida, though most of these continue to hold US or Canadian citizenship, and like the bird population tend to fly home for the summer.

Marks for: 63 (Turks and Caicos' ranking on the 2013 Financial Secrecy Index)

Marks against: 78 (the number of points out of 100 awarded on that index - to understand more, click here)

The Argaman Press

Turkmenistan

The names that politicians give their parties are often an indication of what they are pretending to be, but which in reality could not be further from their aspirations. The Communist Soviet Union which did more to discredit the ideals of communism than Joe Macarthy could ever have done; the Thais Love Thai party; various People's Parties around the world; and in Turkmenistan, from his rise to power in 1990 with the fall of Communism, until his death in 2006, the so-called Democratic Party under Saparmurat Niyazov.

Perhaps he simply understood democracy differently from the rest of us. To have universal adult suffrage in a one-party state in which not turning up to vote is not an option – well, that means the government was elected by 100% of the people, which is surely democracy at its best. "Eccentric dictator" is the favoured term to describe him, though he insisted on Turkmenbashi, which means "Father of the Turkmen", a variation on Abraham really, which meant "Father of Many Peoples"; so if we think of Niyazov as a megalomaniacal egotist for wanting to be the patriarch of just a single ethnic group, where does that leave the father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the group therapy ward?

Niyazov had himself declared President for Life in 1999, and then dedicated himself to making Turkmenistan a great country, by using all the income from its vast gas and oil reserves to build a kingdom of the future (including a 2,000 square kilometre artificial lake in the Karakum desert), unfortunately at the expense of the kingdom of the present, which became impoverished, physically anyway; not spiritually, because everyone had read (everyone was expected to have read) his great philosophical work, Ruhnama.

Mercifully, Niyazov was granted an early welcome in Paradise in 2006, where no doubt he is working to have his Ruhnama replace the Quran as the first book on the celestial library, and himself seated where Muhammad has usually expected to sit, though whether the bleach and toothpaste (see photo) accompanied him on his journey to the afterlife remains a matter of speculation, as is the current status of the paradisal calendar, which is believed to still use the traditional names of the months, though Niyazov is likely to be recommending the same change that he introduced in Turkmenistan, where the months of the year are now named for himself, his mother, and the chapter headings of the "Ruhnama". A full and unexpurgated translation of the Ruhnama into English, including quotes from Chairman Mao, can be found here. It is, without rival, the most incomprehensible work of literature ever set to paper, or even to digital blog, by man, moron, or divinity.

Niyazov's successor, Kurbanguly Berdymuhamedov, has thankfully not renamed any months after himself; or at least, not yet...nor has he torn down any of the Niyazov statues, nor repackaged the vodka bottles bearing Niyazov’s portrait as their brand-name, though work has started...just click here for a flavour. The trouble is, as those pictures also indicate, the new man is simply replacing the old order with his personal new order, and continues to advocate for the "Ruhmana" as a fit choice for youth education, so expect the publication of his great sequel very soon, and the renaming of the months of the year soon afterwards.

Marks for: 1 (the death of Saparmurat Niyazov)

Marks against: 192 (1 for every month of the year, multiplied by the number of years in which he ruled)

The Argaman Press

Turkey

What started out in the middle years of the prophet Muhammad's life as tazaqqa, a glorious philosophy of ethical humanity, became transformed in his later years into the religion of Islam, focused on the Ka'aba in Mecca, but metamorphosed into the dream of absolute world conquest, the establishment of a universal Caliphate that requires the whole of humanity to accept Shari'a law or face death - Sura 9, "at-Tawbah" or "The Repentance" is the key reference if you want to look this up.

When we speak of "moderate Moslems" today, and when British Prime Minister David Cameron repeatedly advocates for Islam as "a religion of peace", he is really speaking of tazaqqa, whose roots lie in Judeo-Christianity, and which shares the same core principles of justice, mercy and compassion, of altruistic concern for widows and orphans, the poor and needy, as those religions do.

By contrast Radical Islam, as manifested in the likes of al-Qaida, Boko Haram, ISL and al-Shabab, reflects the conquest years of Muhammad’s life, the years of ethnic cleansing in Yatrib (Medina), of wars across the Hejab to expand his empire; and then the centuries of continuing conquest afterwards, when the first Caliphs took Islam all the way to China in the east, as far as the gates of Vienna in northern Europe, across the Russias, and into southern France and southern Italy. This is what the Crusades were all about; not simply the attempt to ensure the Holy Land for Christianity, but to prevent the Moslems from conquering all of Christendom. The western half was secured; the eastern half, Byzantine Christianity whose centre was in Constantinople, was lost, and Constantinople found itself rendered in Arabic pronunciation as Istanbul, a Sunni Sultanate at first, then a Caliphate founded by Oghuz Turks under the leadership of Mehmed II. By 1453 the conquest was complete, and what ruled the Moslem-Arab world for the next four hundred and sixty-ones years became known as the Ottoman Empire, which at its height controlled most of south-eastern Europe, western Asia, the Caucasus, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. The Turk, in Shakespearian parlance, and the two names are effectively interchangeable. Ottoman, incidentally, is a European mispronunciation of Osman, the founding-father of the Oghuz people.

As described in my entry on Tunisia (and in my novel "The Persian Fire", scheduled for publication very soon), the Arab-Moslem world from Baghdad to Cordoba was an extraordinary civilisation, probably the most advanced civilisation the world had ever known, developing mathematics into sophisticated architecture and engineering, developing medical knowledge that was half a millennium ahead of Europe, and applying the Hippocratic Oath in a manner that would put to shame the opponents of "socialised medicine" in contemporary America; advances in astrology and cosmology too, a literature that is among the finest in the world; much more. What the Moslem-Arabs knew by, let us say, 1453, was not even permitted to be known in Europe for another hundred and fifty years, and the great library at Cordoba, which held half a million books, was equal in size to all the private and public libraries in Europe combined, but first you had to multiply all of them by fifty. But then it came to an end, fell into an epoch of decadence and stagnation and ignorance and poverty and loss of identity and brutality; and I did not write "let us say, 1453" by chance, because it was precisely the arrival of the Ottoman Empire that caused, and precisely the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War that rejuvenated, the Moslem-Arab world, and initiated the Moslem-Arab renaissance that we are witnessing in so many different forms today. The Ottoman Empire was, in brief, an absolute disaster for the Moslem-Arab world.

It was the Allies who finished off the Ottomans in the First World War, but actually it was already ripe for diseisement, and collapsing internally before that war broke out; the new constitution of 1876 gave Turkey a Parliament, and the Committee of Union and Progress, known later as the Young Turks, would probably have brought it to an end had war not broken out, or Turkey joined the Allies against Germany, instead of the other way around. They had already staged one rebellion, which they called a revolution though it wasn't really, in 1908; it brought about a second and improved constitution and enabled multiple political parties, but it did not yet bring to an end the absolute Sultanate.

After the war, the key figure was Kemal Ataturk, who ruled until 1938, and most importantly for the current state of politics, enshrined secularism in Turkey as an unchallengeable absolute, with the army behind him if it was necessary to remove governments that wanted to pull the country back into established Islam. Ataturk's position remained the country’s position, constitutionally and in popular opinion, until 2002, when the Islamist Justice and Development Party won a landslide election victory, bringing Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the Prime Minister's office, and then, in 2014, to the Presidency. Now Turkey has a problem, and it is struggling to resolve it. The constitution does not permit a return to formal Islam, and the opposition has repeatedly challenged the right of the AKP even to exist as a political party, let alone to be the party of government, because of its commitment to established Islam. The courts, which the AKP control, have thus far not upheld these challenges, and the government has accused the army of supporting the opposition in plotting a coup to overthrow it, arresting so many senior officers that the chief-of-staff felt obliged to resign in protest. What is clear is that Erdogan favours the Ottoman way of doing things, and what at the end of the twentieth century was a country moving ever closer to meeting the conditions of entry into the EU, is now a country pulled back behind the Kiswah – the Moslem equivalent of the Iron Curtain; the Kiswah is the cloth that covers the Ka'aba in Mecca. This is why the Turks are so reluctant to join the coalition against ISL – Erdogan fears the growing power of the Kurds, has imperial aspirations to reclaim Syria as part of Turkey, and does not want to be on the side of anyone who supports Israel. The West does not seem to understand Erdogan any more than it understands Putin or the ayatollahs in Iran – in all three cases because western education teaches from the perspective of western education, to acculturate western loyalists and patriots. You have to look through its own lens to understand who and what makes a people's identity. A revival of the Ottoman Empire under Erdogan may be good for Erdogan, but it will be another disaster for everybody else. And Erdogan is currently trying to change the constitution, to allow him to become President-for-life.

Marks for: 1 (the number of Turks - novelist Orhan Pamuk - who have won a Nobel Prize in any field)

Marks against: self-evidently 1453

The Argaman Press

Tunisia

Ibn Khaldun, founding father of sociology and economics

Like most of north Africa, Tunisia is a former French colony, though the Italians actually conquered it first, and the French only acquired it after invading in the 1880s and making it a protectorate, until it granted independence in 1956.

The first president, Habib Bourgiba, ran the place as a strict one-party state for the next thirty-one years, though untypically he repressed rather than encouraged Islamic fundamentalism, and gave women a freedom and status in the society such as no other Arab or Moslem nation would ever approve.

His regime was overthrown in a bloodless coup in November 1987, after which Zine el Abidine Ben Ali doppelgangered the autocracy and brutality of his predecessor. The “Arab Spring” that swept across the Middle East actually began in Tunisia, when hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the street to express their anger about…well almost everything actually, from high unemployment to official corruption to the impact of ever higher food prices on the existing condition of widespread poverty. On 14 January 2011 Ben Ali sacked the government and fled the country, after which a national unity government was put in place and elections for a new Constituent Assembly held in October. A much respected human rights activist named Moncef Marzouki was appointed interim president and a new constitution was ratified in January 2014. Presidential and parliamentary elections for a permanent government are in the planning, but the nation has collapsed into anarchy and Islamic radicalism, making the transition to democracy as unlikely as is the continuation of western tourism in the wake of the shooting on the beaches in June 2015.

Ben Ali is now in exile in Saudi Arabia, which is refusing even to discuss extradition; to see the list of charges brought against him and his former cabinet colleagues, and the sentences handed out in his absence, take a look at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/13/tunisian-court-punishment-zine-al-abidine-ben-ali

Wanting to write more about these countries than just what is by now the formulaic reiteration of the same human evils and failures, you might not know the greatness and glory of Tunisia’s past, for it was in Tunisia that the ancient city of Carthage was built by the Phoenicians, and the tiny inland town of Keirouan is regarded as the fourth holiest city in Islam (see photo, right), having provided its religious centre for centuries when the Moslem Arabs controlled the whole of the Magreb, and their empire extended northwards into all of Spain and Portugal, most of southern France, as well as Sicily and most of southern Italy. Every single one of the "great discoveries" of the European Enlightenment, in the fields of chemistry and astrology, physics and engineering, medicine and mathematics (the discoveries, that is, of Copernicus and Galileo, Tycho Brahe and Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler and William Harvey and even Isaac Newton), every single one of them had already been made, in some cases five hundred years earlier, by the great men of the Arab Moslem world from Baghdad to Cordoba. Not something you are likely to be taught in a European History course in a school in the English or French speaking worlds, where the same people are simply "Infidel", "heathens" and "barbarians". My novel on this subject, "The Persian Fire", is due for publication very soon.

Marks for: 1 (the number of absolutely amazing holidays I took in Tunisia when it was still a country you felt safe to visit even if its politics was rather questionable)

Marks against: 38 (the number of foreign tourists killed in the beach shootings)

You can find David Prashker at:

http://theargamanpress.com/
http://davidprashker.com/
http://davidprashker.net/
https://www.facebook.com/TheArgamanPress
http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkerssongsandpoems.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.com/
http://davidprashkersartgallery.blogspot.com/

The Argaman Press

David Prashker's World Hourglass

Monday, August 31, 2015

Ukraine

Uganda

Tuvalu

Turks and Caicos Islands

Turkmenistan

Turkey

Tunisia

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