Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Taking a leak
I have been watching Hilary Clinton and the apparatchiks of the White House for the last two or three days in increasing amusement tinged with not a little disgust. The leaking internet is pouring their urine back over their heads and they are attempting to put up the sanctimonious umbrella of victimhood as though the world they live in is devoid of deceit and wrong-doing. A bit like Watergate in the early days. Diplomacy is being undermined, they thunder, through the fluttering eyelashes of denial. We cannot get on with our work of protecting democracies throughout the world.
At the same time, Sep Blatter and his corrupt cronies on the FIFA Panel are saying, more or less openly, that The Sunday Times and BBC exposures of vote-rigging for money (plenty of it) will mean that England will not host a World Cup.
The way the world is means that the virtuous cannot inherit the earth. These powerful groups within their establishments have got to their lofty positions precisely because they operate within what they call realpolitik. Like Putin the self-confessed alphadog, they claw and stamp their way to the top with sweeteners and threats their tools of the trade. And they expect the world to genuflect to their missions and admire them for it.
I once did some work for the Home Office in the UK, developing case studies on public order and the like, to help train police recruits to understand ‘complexity’. At the time, some branch of the secret service was tailing vicars, landowners and any proles who were supporting a campaign to stop nuclear waste dumping in Lincolnshire. I interviewed individuals who swore they were beaten up, cars trashed and whatever, as the then UK Government sought to further its democratic vision of a subservient and ignorant public. Is it any wonder we, the voters, who are normally excluded from the whispering corridors of power, feel duped and disenfranchised? The Unites States has a history of dirty deeds in the name of spreading democracy, undermining and toppling regimes it does not like. We swore it was going on and it always denied it. So we sit back and grin at the schadenfreude and sick sanctimony, scrabbling to find a way of presenting their incredibly expensive diplomatic machine as though it was a misunderstood and much maligned force for good. The fact is, reading some of the transcripts, they disgrace the name of democracy, are little more than the bilge of bigots and have as much cultural sensitivity as a whole legion of Prince Philips.
They don’t want us to know. Vive L’Internet!