Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Think ours would do the same?
So, you've probably heard about the situation in Pakistan:
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN; and NEW DELHI - Two days after President Pervez Musharraf suspended Pakistan's stuttering transition to democracy by declaring a state of emergency and dismissing most of its Supreme Court, a familiar pattern has set in.
Lawyers who took to the streets were beaten and arrested by the hundreds. Meanwhile, the country's fractured political establishment waits to see what will happen next. It is a similar dynamic to the one that emerged eight months ago, when Mr. Musharraf sought to sack an independent-minded Supreme Court chief justice for his willingness to defy the government.
Now, let's take a look at another passage in that news article:
Since March, the lawyers' community has become the nucleus of the larger movement against Musharraf. Through their efforts, Pakistan's judiciary was able to become more active and defiant. Musharraf said this activism was a major reason for the emergency order. The high court was set to rule this week in a case questioning the legality of Musharraf being both president and Army chief.
Even amid baton-wielding police, lawyers contended that "we still have a legal case," says Akram Shiekh, a lawyer who had filed a case against Musharraf's eligibility. "But personally I have serious doubts that the lawyers' community will now look to a legal recourse."
Instead, many have vowed to stay in the streets and boycott all legal proceedings, hoping to bring the country to a standstill.
And that's what I've been thinking about the last couple of days. Let's say that some US President *cough - Bush - cough* decided that he had to declare a state of emergency because of the War on Terra (or some other excuse). Do you think that the US legal community would take the lead in street protests?
No, neither do I. I suspect, as an attorney friend of mine responded when I posed this question, that they would keep their heads down and try not to let it hurt their practices. I think that says a lot.
But I can't say I really would blame the lawyers, since I doubt most of the rest of the country would want to step up and resist such an action as well. We've become a nation of sheep, herding together, frightened from the constant threats hyped by our leaders.
Jim Downey
Bookmark/Search this post with:
Pakistan Turmoil
My feelings about what's happening in Pakistan are mixed.
Musharraf is a secularist. I've read that the minute he goes, Pakistan will become a fundamentalist Muslim nation. He's a bully ... but what if he's all that's keeping the lid on a radical Islamic revolution?
We saw how that turned out in Iran a few decades back. The modernist Shah was deposed and the new leader was that murderous freak Ayatollah Khomeini.
I had an Iranian classmate in college, Behyar "Ben" Goudarzian, who used to tell me how bad the Shah was (in spite of the fact that Ben was on a full Iranian government scholarship). But when Khomeini took over, the first thing he did was to slaughter a lot of those "tainted" by western education.
I will always wonder if Ben went joyfully back to his homeland to celebrate the ousting of the Shah, only to be killed by Khomeini's Islamic thugs.
"modernist" must mean exploitive
The reason the Iranians didn't like the Shah was that he was America's bitch, they had every right to want to depose him. And unlike the current mess in Iraq they actually did it themselves. Yes, the government immediately following was hostile to America and the west in general, can you blame them? I mean we'd been basically stealing their resources for years, and on top of that had installed a puppet dictator who lived in luxury while his people were poor. If things had been the other way around you can bet your ass Americans would have had strong anti-Iranian feelings. Was what Khomeini did right? No. Was it unexpected that after being treated like that their next leader would be a hard-ass anti-American? Not really, no. Do I care that they took Americans hostage? Ya I care, it was a great laugh reading about it in history class.
Might I remind you also that despite that Iran shifted back to being one of the most western countries in the Middle East afterward. It has only recently shifted back to being more anti-western as a reaction to the events in Iraq. When it comes right down to it we're not the only group of people who has the problem that when they're country is in uncertain times (like, say, being called part of the "Axis of evil" by a nut job with access to nukes) they're going to elect the guy who promises he'll deal with the threat and seems most likely to do it (remember the Bush vs. Kerry campaigning?). Unfortunately that generally means the biggest nut.
"If there is evil in this world, it lurks within the hearts of men" ~Edward D. Morrison, Tales of Phantasia
Blame, etc.
No matter what his motivations, I can say without reservation that the Ayatollah Khomeini was an evil little freak. He was so evil he LOOKED evil.
I lived through that history, and my memory of it was that one of the biggest reasons the Shah was deposed was that he was trying to modernize his country at top speed. He gave women unparalled rights, sent tens of thousands of young Iranians to the US, France, etc., for free college educations. The fundies hated him because he wasn't aggressively Muslim enough for them.
I suspect the biggest reason Iran became the recent secular beacon in the middle east was because a lot of people who lived through that time remembered how good it really was for everybody, and wanted an end to the repressive power of the Ayatollahs.
Then George W. Bush, moron-in-chief, working tirelessly to piss away the good will of the entire world after 9/11, opened his stupid mouth and gave his "Axis of Evil" speech. That re-empowered the Islamics, no surprise, and reversed the trend toward greater secularism. It alienated a country that was becoming one of the more open, friendly ones in the middle east.
history
True, I technically lived through it but I was somewhere in the baby-toddler age group at the time, so I didn't really know it was happening.
Your memory may be true, but the text book we were assigned for modern history said people were dissatisfied with him because of the large gap between rich and poor. According to this text quite a few of the "overly westernized" people were the overly wealthy people who were seen to have been exploiting their fellow countrymen. At the time it struck me how similar this was to the revolution in France, where after Louie the XIV (or was it XVI? I was never good with remembering things like that) the revolutionaries executed quite a few nobles and upper class. I don't know how many of them exploited the peasants just like I don't know what percentage of the people executed in Iran were executed because they had exploited the peasants, because they were too western for the Islamic reactionary force or just because they happened to be in the wrong income bracket at the wrong time. In the end though it was just another event, like the moon landing or a pre-union worker revolt that ended in the striking workers being massacred (that was a bitch, I was one of the workers in the reenactment, I didn't even get to try to club anyone before I was shot) that in the grand scheme of the modern American student only matters because you need to know it to get an A on your history tests (because the modern American student is so overworked and sleep deprived that it's a minor miracle if they can remember something they learned last semester). And you know what, that's a shame that history is such a trivial thing.
Another thing that strikes me, in a recent editorial in the Metro this woman said it is not uncommon for a dictator to present himself as the only sane option in a sea of otherwise insane (and in this case Islamic) people. They do that so that as much as people might dislike their policies they'll be too afraid that the guy who replaces the dictator will be worse. So much so that the guy whose desperate and violent enough to overthrow the dictator probably will be worse (this is known as a "self fulfilling prophesy").
"If there is evil in this world, it lurks within the hearts of men" ~Edward D. Morrison, Tales of Phantasia
big mess
I have similar feelings about Pakistan and I'm scared of what will happen to their nukes if Musharif is gone. I would also point out that no matter how dispicable Saddam Hussein was, Iraq was also a secular country before we overthrew their government. Now, Iraq is a mess and has a constitution based on Sharia law. That's not what I would call progress.
Scary
Unsettling to say the least.
Blueprint for US
Oh yeah, this ain't no Clancy novel - we probably seeing our very-near future thru the teevee right now. Juan Cole put it best a few days ago:
[...If Bush and Cheney are ever tempted into extreme measures in the United States, Musharraf has provided a template for how it would unfold. Maintain you are moving against terrorists and extremists, but actually move against the rule of law. Rubin has accepted the suggested term of "lawfare" to describe this kind of warfare by executive order...]
It's reported that the Pakistan policy is Cheney's baby. Pervez is learning from the best.
Post new comment