Shutter Control: Personal And Historical Perspectives

A Personal Perspective

The past few weeks were vexatious. As soon as I published a previous article on the mechanics of evolving electronic and net surveillance, all the data on my "flagship" page - the Panopticon - were irretrievably lost. My ISP groped around for reasons till they came up with an answer that looked tentative: "problems with spaces."

Feedback received showed that my ISP was responding in good faith, and judging by the semantics of their replies, the fault might, just might, lay elsewhere. One writer replied that she had once faced a worse situation: A complete shut-down. Her ISP finally, and rather grudgingly, released her back-up files before she resorted to another ISP.

It’s a fact that every security-related organization includes employees tied with the state-security apparatus. The British were the global pioneers and their colonies inherited all the checks and subterfuges termed "cloak and dagger." Was it someone employed at the ISP, someone closer home, or a plain technical glitch.

If it was a glitch, the timing was uncanny. For I had peppered my last article with words like "delusional world", "illusions" etc. Anyone accessing my Panopticon page then would have thought that I was delusional. The page looked fine but it was in fact running on cache mode. The admin side showed zero data, and if I had published or updated anything, that page would disappear, which it eventually did. It was a Catch 22 situation while I waited for the ISP to restore the page. They couldn’t and I was getting too many reminders that my Panopticon page was ok, until I emailed to all and sundry a graphic copy of what it looked on the admin side before proving it by posting a message.

Douglas Rushkoff had only one word to say: "Weird." Others were offering technical solutions.

Then came another problem: My File Manager directory couldn’t be accessed and it seems I had too many files on them. Fine, that was a logical answer which I rectified.

I was hit on my site’s two Achilles Heels. One after the other. I had no use for the other available features, one of whom is a "Shopping Cart." They were all ok.

This could at least be attributed to technical woes of all sorts, from personal responsibility to something electronically related.

But when your Mastercard shows a Feb 2005 bill for a transaction made in Sept 2004, you start to ponder whether Murphy’s Law includes a highly metaphysical "uncanny coincidence - human angle" phenomena or whether someone was sending a message: "Beyond this and no more..."

Well, whatever it is, there other subtle tools of control to choke out views, weed out credibility, and throttle personal mobility.

The personal experience is mirrored in history. Six billion people now are making contemporary history, and after a century, any treatise on this era would include the name of George W. Bush, not the republican voter who died while fighting in Iraq.

Both the personal and the historical have common themes: struggle, oblivion, death, or victory. Dissident publications best embody these themes. I rarely read them, preferring wire reports instead. But when I do take a look, the most cleaving impressions are of dissident writers under fire, of dire financial straits, and of left-wing writers crossing over to the right, or of people, when faced with total ruin, quitting it all to join mainstream society or media. Or life itself. Many of them put up a first-class analysis, but what strikes me most is their struggle.

For writers who face odds and despair, I am not shying away from offering a personal example. For if you need examples of charades about "justice", "freedom" and even that war in Iraq, as seen through my Asian eyes, read on.

My earliest memory of a left-wing journal was The Nation’s publicized spat between Christopher Hitchens and Noam Chomsky. As late as the winter of 2001/2002, when I was in England, I had never even heard of Hitchens. I never imagined then that I would be writing on similar themes, gradually morphing into something that didn’t even stand in the middle of either of them.

By 2005, my online articles would have crisscrossed the works of The Nation’s writers a couple of times, in some compilation.

And why online? Well, while I was writing about US depredations in Iraq and elsewhere, I was condemned to copy-editing articles over food reviews, Ronald McDonald charities, and so on. All this while, there was a national debate about the lack of good writers, brain drain, discrimination against Malaysian writers over the Nobel Prize and similar editorial parroting of former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad and his successor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, whose followers learn to take orders in their stride along the corridors of power.

Online submissions - for free - would ensure that I wouldn’t be breaching my former print establishment’s "conflict of interest" policy. It would also ensure that I could build up a profile in the speediest and most effective way while favored local journalists could actually visit Iraq and build a nice personal resume, not of content, but more importantly of "first-hand experience." Earlier, some of them would have visited Saddam’s Iraq and castigated the Anglo-American alliance upon return for starving Iraqi children to death. Saddam, it seems, played no part.

By 2005, my online commentaries would cross the bylines of two Nobel Prize winners (Gunter Grass and J.M. Coetzee) and those who had bagged Pulitzers, a Booker and even an Oscar. Included too were ex-US Army generals and two recent US presidential hopefuls. When I took full stock recently, the list was in fact long, and they were taken from extant links. I saved some screenshots just in case.

It was after a series of shutter controls that I reflected on the Road to Now.

I had to write with little time to spare, and had to sacrifice many hours of sleep. I had an immediate job and a dream job to juggle. The typos and syntax errors are a testament to this. It was race to escape the clutch of many repressions, and I had laid the escape hatches for years. I had to grapple with personal, familial, and financial odds. It was also odd to read editorials over the lack of "good writers" while I sat yards away from the writer.

Barbara Ehrenreich would understand this battle over odds; she was literally doing "odd jobs" before getting her break.

Still, it’s still not easy when US journals publish my articles while I am ignored by the vanguard "dissident intelligentsia" in my nation, whose works can be demolished by a politically savvy 15-year-old from Mumbai. The excuses are plenty among those who had never met me. From arrogance to "I am not Malaysian but Malaysian-based" to being anti-Muslim. Fact is I got this far through the help of Malay Muslim editors who themselves were discriminated for being non-discriminatory. Despite their manifest intelligence, they will never chair, or regularly participate in any power East-West conference. Fact is, all of us can’t stand fanatics and their intellectual apologists.

It’s not easy when "Malaysia’s best writer" can be ridiculously compared to one literary giant, whose agent ironically, is willing to look at my final manuscript. There is a further ironic twist. I decided to approach top notch after meeting a silent rebuff, twice, from an obscure publisher, as expected. It had Malaysia’s top "dissident" on its board.

It’s not easy during "referral time" either when visiting dissidents or writers are hogged up by a cabal of poseurs. It’s not just me. One well-connected Malaysian journalist, who had started writing even before I was born, could not meet a Nobel laureate, an old friend of his, when the man was down on a visit. I placed this journalist on the bottom of my list of local overtures, and, as I predicted to a friend in Chennai, he replied. I was student of propaganda, trained under someone who once joked about military analysts "who could discern how many times Saddam would touch his genitals in a day, just by looking at his photo." Written semantics are a serious give-away as any photo.

It’s not easy when local hacks claim to fight for a "just world" when their innumerable contradictions are, again, best demolished by a Mumbai teen. US posturing against Iran is evil but Iranian Shi’ite Islam is a no-no topic. It is banned here. Forget freedom of religion. That exists in the decadent West, something left-wing giants regularly omit in their commentaries, and if they do, this life and-death matter in the Middle East they comment on is consigned to the very periphery of their grand discourses on justice. It doesn’t exist in their scheme of human sufferings.

In their scheme of human sufferings, there are the ‘worthy" and "unworthy" victims, something they attribute to the international imperialism of the USA alone.

It’s not easy to pack and leave. Who will recommend anyone they haven’t met, and take a risk? Very few are willing. Foreigners will find it more bona fide to recommend people they had met in face during an anti-Imperialism conference, providing a career or literary fillip to those whose only forte is their imperial zest to shut out others perceived as "rivals."

In the most global of public domains, their works cannot even have an interface with the very foreigners they are banking on, coz selections are done by strangers who dictate their own merit as they want more readers and online hits.

When I read The Nation that winter, I wouldn’t have dared thought that I would be engaged in a private spat with Noam Chomsky himself. To give him due credit, he replies. His first reply to my linguistic "theory" in 1997 was proudly brandished before others. He was my hero then. The latest correspondence was marked by rancor.

He can advocate freedom of speech to holocaust deniers while those who hang on to his tailcoats can rant on merit, bigotry and imperialism, and perform a routine travesty on their ideals without batting an eyelid.

That’s the shutter control paradox. It means sciolists can only excel in a contrived vacuum, bereft of alternatives. It’s self-serving.

There is no "just world", only a planet of human bondage, from a left-wing writer facing a gangplank to that neo-con guy who can press the nuke button.

The world cannot be painted in shades of gray; it is composed of dark zones within a shade of gray, and whiter redoubts within another shade of gray.

For shutter control means the lack of access, information and inadvertently, freedom and mobility. It’s the story of our lives, and our history.

We forget the lessons of history too often.

A Historical Perspective

On Oct 19 1945, a young major, after having "found his voice" and nerve, served a copy of an indictment to a major war criminal, who probably out of the effects of a morphine addiction, could not quite understand the legalese. He had no use for lawyers. This is what he said.

"It all seems hopeless to me. I must read this indictment very carefully…"

Later, the prison psychologist, a certain Dr Gilbert, asked the prisoner to "autograph a copy of the indictment."

The prisoner wrote:

"The victor will always be the judge and the vanquished the accused."

In his last stance, this mass murderer was a victor, for he spoke of the stark reality of our state of bondage.

He was none other than the former Reichsmarschall Hermann Wilhelm Goering.

Goering did put up a brilliant, embarrassing defense during the Nuremberg trial. He was the only one in that row of cells who somehow got the privilege to commit suicide. From the victor’s angle, it was best outcome.

For victors care not about the vanquished, even among their allies or "friends." If he had lived long enough, Goering would have seen and mocked it all.

Throughout WWII, reports reaching London about Soviet war atrocities were deliberately suppressed. The massacres were much more than Katyn and involved much more than the Poles.

Polish officers and men, who were fighting with great distinction under British command, could do nothing. They were in fact fighting to defeat one murderous tyrant to hand over their country to a more murderous one. Even those who fled Stalin’s two continental-sized gulag of genocides and mindless killings were thrown back - post-war - to satiate the psychopath’s bloodlust, under a pact arranged by one renowned Allied leader, who himself was musing over The Iron Curtain while this was going on.

The examples are horrific.

Major Dennis Hills, during Operation Keelhaul (1946-7) deliberately fudged the classifications of those who were to be repatriated to the Soviet Union. Of 498 persons in a camp at Riccone, he "whittled down the number to 180." When the Russian group leader told him:

"So, you are sending us to our deaths…Democracy has failed us."

"You are the sacrifice," Hills replied; "the others will now be safe."

This story was suppressed till 1973.

Violent attempts by the British army to round up a Cossack Brigade and their dependents in Austria, were met with mass suicides. There are other similar stories. Death was preferable. For Stalin cared not about enemy children.

The treachery was damning.

Honourable men, like the (Polish) unbroken General Okulicki, deserved to stand amongst the heroes of the Allied cause. Instead, amidst the shameful silence of their comrades in the West, they were consigned to obscurity, dishonor, and an early grave", after a Moscow show-trial.

Stalin’s Gulag, if you had read Anne Applebaum’s book, included among them, former residents of the United States and other Western nations. Yet, in 1944, Stalin, puffing a pipe, was allowed to pencil a "naughty document" before the Allied leader on post war power balances. Here is a sample:

                                                         Russia                    Others



Romania                                                     90%                        10%

Greece                                                        10%                         90% 

The revered leader who could eloquently galvanize millions to war, could also sacrifice millions behind the Iron curtain, while concealing too many "naughty documents."

He had a history.

At the onset of WW1, the Kaiser and his staff were in fact dithering, a predicament faced in other European capitals. No one really planned the war; they just had strategies. Even von Moltke, who once, eulogized war, had warned of the coming industrial slaughter back in 1890.

"Woe to the man…who first throws the match into the powder keg."

This man reacted differently.

He "put on his warpaint, and was "spoiling for a sea fight." When war was declared, he dashed about, "radiant, his face bright, his manner keen, one word pouring out on another how he was going to send telegrams to the Med, to the North Sea, and God knows where. You could see he was a really happy man."

"Britain was the only Entente Power to take the initiative in going to war." (Italics mine)

Our hero would write to his wife:

"Cat-dear, It’s all up…But the world has gone mad, and we must look after ourselves and our friends." [1]

Sure! How many hundreds of thousands of "friends" this man sacrificed is matter of numerical conjecture.

His thirst for war can be debated, his bigotry evident, and his idea of "friends" skewed. During the Cuban revolt of the late 1890s, he would write:

A grave danger represents itself. Two fifths of the insurgents in the field are Negroes. These men…would, in the event of success, demand a predominant share in the government of the country…the result being, after years of fighting, another black republic." [2] He meant Haiti

He had no moral dilemma over using hundreds of thousands of brown Indians and other colored people for his wars while calling Ghandi a "half-naked fakir." Ghandi, who deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, even in the 20s or 30s, never got it.

The man was half-American, himself the product of a genocide, having native American blood, but he was recently voted the Greatest Briton of All Time. If there was any one person responsible for surrendering British power to the United States it was him. From, then on No 10 would play poodle.

The man was Winston Churchill. Patriot, war hero, war criminal, or a product of human bondage? That depends on who wins, which winning journalist writes, and which winning historian narrates. Take this lesson of "history" to ground zero and observe our mundane societies. What do you see? A social pact of bondage with its sacrificial lambs?

Kuala Lumpur

March 12 2005

Copyright@ Mathew Maavak, 2005

References

1) Quotes taken from Norman Davies’ Europe, Chapter 11 - Tenebrae (Pimlico)

2) A People’s History of the United States (Howard Zinn, p 303, Pearson Longman)