The Independent from today:

Johann Hari: A morally bankrupt dictatorship built by slave labour

Dubai is finally financially bankrupt – but it has been morally bankrupt all along. The idea that Dubai is an oasis of freedom on the Arabian peninsular is one of the great lies of our time.

Yes, it has Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts and the Gucci styles, but beneath these accoutrements, there is a dictatorship built by slaves.

I was sent an interesting link from Huffington Post yesterday.  In her article, Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein brings to light the UN “fat map” in response to the growing hunger taking over the world.  Her article makes many good points and is worth reading, especially as those of us in the U.S. prepare to gorge ourselves on Thanksgiving Day.

While the U.S. and Australia look like they are going to explode, their land mass hides the bloated size of Europe, Japan, and several Middle East countries.

I have read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I have seen Food, Inc., Blue Gold, and King Corn, and I recommend that all of us who live in these lands of affluence do the same.  If not for our own health, for the sake of others.  To be sure, the book and documentaries are not fool-proof, but they are vital to our understanding of our food systems and their ramifications.  Hopefully they will also get people to thinking about where they fit into this globalized world of ours.

I think when people consider buying non-processed and non-industrial food, they will see their financial position is further down the ol’ totem pole than they thought.

But what I find most interesting about the Princess’ article is the princess herself.  She resides in Dubai, one of the most unsustainable habitats on this planet.  From indoor ski slopes, to multi-million dollar islands, to a hidden slave population that keeps building it ever higher, Dubai consumes and pollutes in its effort to become “a Shangri-La in the Middle East” says Johann Hari in his long but eye-opening article in The Independent.

Dubai is not just a city living beyond its financial means; it is living beyond its ecological means. You stand on a manicured Dubai lawn and watch the sprinklers spray water all around you. You see tourists flocking to swim with dolphins. You wander into a mountain-sized freezer where they have built a ski slope with real snow. And a voice at the back of your head squeaks: this is the desert. This is the most water-stressed place on the planet. How can this be happening? How is it possible? The very earth is trying to repel Dubai, to dry it up and blow it away. The new Tiger Woods Gold Course needs four million gallons of water to be pumped on to its grounds every day, or it would simply shrivel and disappear on the winds.

So how does a princess, a recipient of the wealth being dumped into Dubai, tell the world it needs to cut its calorie consumption and expect to be taken seriously?

She doesn’t, and neither do the politicians driveling on in speech after speech about the moral imperative we have to feed the starving people of the world.  With massive conglomerate corporations lining the pockets of politicians, nothing will change.

After watching the documentaries and doing a little research into the subsidies given to farmers who dump food into world markets and destroy local economies exacerbating the hunger crisis, you might feel a little overwhelmed and think the problem is too big for us.

May I suggest another movie?

-mike

George Osborne may appear out of touch but wait until you hear about Jacob Rees-Mogg

There are two men that epitomise the ‘new’ Conservative party, they are George Osborne and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Now, on the surface, George might seem to be quite a reasonable young chap, well-to-do maybe, but basically a good Cheshire MP.  It may come as a surprise that he recently said that; his inheritance tax cut on properties worth £1m would be enjoyed by people living in ex-council houses. He then said his £20,000 a year private school, St Paul’s, is “incredibly liberal” because “your mother could be the head of a giant corporation, or a solicitor in Kew.”

As Johann Hari says; ‘if you think council houses are worth a million quid and solicitors in Kew are the lowest rung on the social ladder you can imagine.’

But if George appears detached from reality then Jacob is positively divorced from the 21^st Century and arguably the 20^th!

Jacob, 40, has attended public events with his nanny, who he calls ‘Nanny’ when addressing her. At one event, when challenged over the issue, he said; “If I’ve got a nanny, I’ve got a nanny. And if anybody doesn’t like it – tough!” He then added: “I do wish you wouldn’t keep going on about my nanny. If I had a valet you’d think it was perfectly normal.” 

I really hope the new rules for employing MPs spouses will be extended to MPs nannies!

Now I am a very reasonable chap but does this not strike you as being somebody who is so out of touch with modern society that really he, and his Tory chums, should not be let loose with a modern, progressive democracy?

Johann Hari has written an excellent article, in today’s Independent, on why no one should ever vote Conservative, and I commend it to you.

Johann Hari:  Uwolnijcie kobiety, a uwolnicie cały kraj

2006 Grudzień

Johann Hari:  Odrzućmy dyktat nowomowy

2009 Październik

Johann Hari:  Kłamstwa i mity o piratach

2009 Styczeń

Johann Hari:  Idąc pod ogień: pokojowi demonstranci, którzy przeciwstawiają się przemocy

2003 Sierpień

Johann Hari has a fascinating article trying to understand homegrown British Islamists:

Yet they felt equally shut out of British or democratic identity. From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of “Go back where you came from!” But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn’t want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as “the funny foreign child”, and told to “explain their customs” to the class. It patronised them into alienation.

“Nobody ever said – you’re equal to us, you’re one of us, and we’ll hold you to the same standards,” says Husain. “Nobody had the courage to stand up for liberal democracy without qualms. When people like us at [Newham] College were holding events against women and against gay people, where were our college principals and teachers, challenging us?”

Without an identity, they created their own. It was fierce and pure and violent, and it admitted no doubt.

To my surprise, the ex-jihadis said their rage about Western foreign policy – which was real, and burning – emerged only after their identity crises, and as a result of it. They identified with the story of oppressed Muslims abroad because it seemed to mirror the oppressive disorientation they felt in their own minds. Usman Raja, a bluff, buff boxer who begged to become a suicide bomber in the mid-1990s, tells me: “Your inner life is chaotic and you feel under threat the whole time. And then you’re told by Islamists that life for Muslims everywhere is chaotic and under threat. It becomes bigger than you. It’s about the world – and that’s an amazing relief. The answer isn’t inside your confused self. It’s out there in the world.”

But once they had made that leap to identify with the Umma – the global Muslim community – they got angrier the more abusive our foreign policy came. Every one of them said the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 – from Guantanamo to Iraq – made jihadism seem more like an accurate description of the world. Hadiya Masieh, a tiny female former HT organiser, tells me: “You’d see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think – anything is justified to stop this. What are we meant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?”

But the converse was – they stressed – also true. When they saw ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began to stutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq War: “How could we demonise people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?” asks Hadiya.

Britain’s foreign policy also helped tug them towards Islamism in another way. Once these teenagers decided to go looking for a harder, tougher Islamist identity, they found a well-oiled state machine waiting to feed it. Usman Raja says: “Saudi literature is everywhere in Britain, and it’s free. When I started exploring my Muslim identity, when I was looking for something more, all the books were Saudi. In the bookshops, in the libraries. All of them. Back when I was fighting, I could go and get a car, open the boot up, and get it filled up with free literature from the Saudis, saying exactly what I believed. Who can compete with that?”

He says the Saudi message is particularly comforting to disorientated young Muslims in the West. “It tells you – you’re in this state of sin. But the sin doesn’t belong to you, it’s not your fault – it’s Western society’s fault. It isn’t your fault that you’re sinning, because the girl had the miniskirt on. It wasn’t you. It’s not your fault that you’re drug dealing. The music, your peers, the people around you – it’s their fault.”

Read the whole article.

Your Thoughts?

Johann Hari has two exquisitely written and detailed pieces on Rand, one from 2005 and one from this past week.  I have to admit that she is held with so much contempt by philosophers that I have never bothered to read her, even if only to understand the influence of her infamously crude appropriation of Nietzsche, so a lot of what Hari brings forth is frankly stunning and revealing to me about why her reputation is really that bad.  Just a few clips to convince you to go read the articles in their entirety:

Alisa Rosenbaum (her original name) was born in the icy winter of czarism, not long after the failed 1905 revolution ripped through her home city of St. Petersburg. Her father was a self-made Jewish pharmacist, while her mother was an aristocratic dilettante who loathed her three daughters. She would tell them she never wanted children, and she kept them only out of duty. Alisa became a surly, friendless child. In elementary school, her class was asked to write an essay about why being a child was a joyous thing. She instead wrote “a scathing denunciation of childhood,” headed with a quote from Pascal: “I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.”

But the Rosenbaums’ domestic tensions were dwarfed by the conflicts raging outside. The worst anti-Jewish violence since the Middle Ages was brewing, and the family was terrified of being killed by the mobs—but it was the Bolsheviks who struck at them first. After the 1917 revolutions, her father’s pharmacy was seized “in the name of the people.” For Alisa, who had grown up surrounded by servants and nannies, the Communists seemed at last to be the face of the masses, a terrifying robbing horde. In a country where 5 million people died of starvation in just two years, the Rosenbaums went hungry. Her father tried to set up another business, but after it too was seized, he declared himself to be “on strike.”

While Rand is (rightly) appalled when the state kills people, she considers businessmen taking risks with the lives of ordinary people or government bureaucrats to be actually heroic. In ‘Atlas Shrugged’, the heroic Nat Taggart “murdered a state legislator who attempted to revoke a charter granted to him” and (ho, ho) “he had no trouble with legislators from then on.” And that’s not all: “He threw down three flights of stairs a distinguished gentleman who offered him a loan from the government.” Anybody who tries to impose regulations to protect ordinary workers is “a louse”. This is partly because she really does seem to see the rich as more deserving of life than the poor.

She did not understand that the kind of pure selfishness she advocated would quickly corrode capitalism itself. The economist Alfred Marshall has shown that without “economic chivalry” – a willingness to stick by the rules, even when they work against your selfish interests – markets become unworkable. Only regulation by (cue thunder) the state can guarantee this chivalry. Rand’s philosophy would simply create an unsustainable Enron economy of rip-off merchants – much as the Bush administration’s bonfire of regulations has. But Rand could not see the dense interconnection between the market and the state: she spoke absurdly of establishing “a separation between government and economics” analogous to the constitutional separation between church and state. But without institutions of government like the police and courts, who would enforce contracts? Nor could she admit that the corporations she lauded as heroic were just as often beneficiaries of government subsidy as of market innovation. Wal-Mart, for example, is often supposed to be an icon of the success of the free market, when in fact it has – according to Multinational Monitor’s investigations – received over $1bn in state subsidies.

Although Rand despised Russia, she was far more shaped by her Russian adolescence – and her interaction with Bolshevism – than she could ever have imagined. Even as she preached freedom, she created a personality cult around herself – sardonically dubbed The Collective – which permitted no dissent and even adhered to her list of banned books. Any dissent from the Leader’s opinions was punishable by excommunication – a fate that even befell her lover, Nathaniel Braden, when he withdrew his sexual favours. She ended up creating a Leninism of the market fundamentalist right, based on the need for a small cadre of true believers to enact a violent revolution against the state (democratic or otherwise) that will usher in a utopian society without conflict, modelled on the Ideal Man of her own creation. Even her Objectivist epistemology reeks of Lenin’s dialectical materialism.

The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented “the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should.” She called him “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy,” shimmering with “immense, explicit egotism.” Rand had only one regret: “A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough.”

It’s not hard to see this as a kind of political post-traumatic stress disorder. Rand believed the Bolshevik lie that they represented the people, so she wanted to strike back at them—through theft and murder. In a nasty irony, she was copying their tactics. She started to write her first novel, We the Living (1936), and in the early drafts her central character—a crude proxy for Rand herself—says to a Bolshevik: “I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one’s right, one shouldn’t wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them.”

For her longest novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957), Rand returned to a moment from her childhood. Just as her father once went on strike to protest against Bolshevism, she imagined the super-rich in America going on strike against progressive taxation—and said the United States would swiftly regress to an apocalyptic hellhole if the Donald Trumps and Ted Turners ceased their toil. The abandoned masses are described variously as “savages,” “refuse,” “inanimate objects,” and “imitations of living beings,” picking through rubbish. One of the strikers deliberately causes a train crash, and Rand makes it clear she thinks the murder victims deserved it, describing in horror how they all supported the higher taxes that made the attack necessary.

Alan Greenspan – who was considered by many people to be the most powerful man in America for the decade he headed the US central bank – was a fervent Randroid. He wrote that Atlas Shrugged is a great novel because it shows how “parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish, as they should.”

 

Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme self-pity: They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their time fuming that the masses don’t bow down before their manifest superiority.

In the end, Rand was destroyed by her own dogmas. She fell in love with a young follower called Nathaniel Branden and had a decades-long affair with him. He became the cult’s No. 2, and she named him as her “intellectual heir”—until he admitted he had fallen in love with a 23-year-old woman. As Burns explains, Rand’s philosophy “taught that sex was never physical; it was always inspired by a deeper recognition of shared values, a sense that the other embodied the highest human achievement.” So to be sexually rejected by Branden meant he was rejecting her ideas, her philosophy, her entire person. She screamed: “You have rejected me? You have dared to reject me? Me, your highest value?”

And the articles are just chock full of more quotes, anecdotes, and analysis.  Read them here and here.

Your Thoughts?

Johann Hari has won me over with this argument about celebrity:

“We will always have celebrities, and we will – if we are honest – always want them. If we rage against them Starsuckers-style, with an annihilating, snobbish superiority, we will lose the argument. The real struggle instead is to temper our instinct for fame – and stop it sucking up all the cultural oxygen.”

Consequently, I was probably wrong to argue that Tatler must be stormed for socialism. So, while I know it isn’t mutual, I forgive Tatler.

Johann Hari:  Gdzie się podziały wszystkie kobiety? Manifest przeciwko apartheidowi płci.

2009 Wrzesień

Johann Hari:  Najodważniejsza kobieta w Afganistanie. Wywiad z Malalai Joya.

2009 Lipiec

Johann Hari:  Czy Bóg nienawidzi kobiet?

2009 Lipiec

Johann Hari:  Polowanie na czarownice: ukryta wojna Afryki z kobietami

2009 Marzec

Johann Hari:  Mimo zamieszek i gróźb podtrzymuję to, co napisałem

2009 Luty

Johann Hari: Dlaczego miałbym szanować te ciemiężące religie?

2009 Styczeń

I rarely do a quick blurb and link, but I couldn’t resist.

I’ve detailed my dislike of Libertarianism, Ayn Rand*, and even Slate before, but here is Johann Hari’s excellent and scathing evisceration of Ayn Rand based on two new biographies (props to Travis for the find).

Enjoy:

http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/

*I have since attempted to actually read Atlas Shrugged and get halfway through before giving up due to inherent nonsense. Meanwhile I have read all of the fountainhead in sort-of-skimming fashion.

by Johann Hari, The Independent/UK, Oct 21, 2009

An extract from SlackBastard’s Bloggy Tuesday:

Gathering Forces is another blog what I think I’ve referred to before — but, now that I search for it, actually haven’t, I don’t think — that raises some interestink questions. If anything I wrote made the slightest difference to the success of their project, I’d wish them luck. It doesn’t, so I won’t.

Poumista is a blog I’ve referred to before, but as it’s totally neat-o, I thought I may as well do so again. It draws together a phantastic array of sauces on anarchist / Marxist / socialist history, and, like any good library, infoshop or second-hand bookshop, invites you to become lost in its wares, only to realise years have passed, and you’ve wasted your life reading. (And then you die.)

Stalin’s Moustache is all about Stalin and his moustache. Rather cleverly, the writer’s obsession with the facial hair grown on the upper lip of Uncle Joe is disguised by his authorship of various blogposts, articles and even books, seemingly dedicated to exploring such notions as socialism, biblical studies, politics, theology, philosophy “and so on”, but which the discerning reader, armed with the relevant machinetranslation, will soon discover are really all about Stalin (and, moreover, his moustache).

Stalin is alleged to have remarked that ‘Everybody has a right to be stupid, but some people abuse the privilege’. ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’ is a phrase often credited to P.T. Barnum (1810–1891), an American showman. ‘Never give a sucker an even break’, said W. C. Fields.

There then follows a long piece by Jorge Semprun which I highly recommend. Read it.

More links below the fold.

La lucha continua: Mexican military kidnap electricians to break strike. Transition to democracy cancelled in Mexico. For a new constitution in Honduras. US labor solidarity with Puerto Rican workers. Protest banned in Argentina. Outrage at slavery in Bolivia. Colombian flower workers on strike. Peru’s miners in struggle against Chinese economic imperialism.

Anarchist history: Johann Hari’s misrepresentations.

Socialist history: The left we have and the left we need.

Recently deceased: One more for the Irving Kristol list from Matt Zeitlin. Jack Jones: rotten politics, not a spy story.

Stalinism: George Galloway, Bob Crow and the ultra-Stalinists.

Johann Hari has an interview with Gore Vidal, in which Vidal expresses some wild opinions. First Hari’s rundown of Vidal’s one of a kind biography:

At 83, he has lived through one third of the lifespan of the United States. If anyone incarnates the American century that has ended, it is him. He was America’s greatest essayist, one of its best-selling novelists and the wit at every party. He holidayed with the Kennedys, cruised for men with Tennessee Williams, was urged to run for Congress by Eleanor Roosevelt, co-wrote some of the most iconic Hollywood films, damned US foreign policy from within, sued Truman Capote, got fellated by Jack Kerouac, watched his cousin Al Gore get elected President and still lose the White House, and – finally, bizarrely – befriended and championed the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh.

Yet now, he says, it is clear the American experiment has been “a failure”. It was all for nothing.

Vidal on Obama:

“I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic. Everything we had been saying about racial integration was vindicated,” he says, “but he’s incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It’s a pity because he’s the first intellectual president we’ve had in many years, but he can’t hack it. He’s not up to it. He’s overwhelmed. And who wouldn’t be? The United States is a madhouse. The country should be put away – and we’re being told to go away. Nothing makes any sense.” The President “wants to be liked by everybody, and he thought all he had to do was talk reason. But remember – the Republican Party is not a political party. It’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth. It’s full of hatred. You’re not going to get them aboard. Don’t even try. The only way to handle them is to terrify them. He’s too delicate for that.”

When he compares Obama to his old friend Jack Kennedy, he shakes his head. “He’s twice the intellectual that Jack was, but Jack knew the great world. Remember he spent a long time in the navy, losing ships. This kid [Obama] has never heard a gun fired in anger. He’s absolutely bowled over by generals, who tell him lies and he believes them. He hasn’t done anything. If you were faced with great problems in chemistry – to find the perfect gas, to gas a population – you won’t know for a long time whether it works. You have to go by what people tell you. He’s like that. He’s not ready for prime time and he’s getting a lot of prime time on his plate at once.”

Vidal on “gayness”:

Strangely, though, Vidal has always resisted the idea that he is a “gay” champion. “I never said I was gay, because I don’t think anyone is.” He says he finds “these restrictions tiresome. In the centuries of Rome’s great military and political success, there was no differentiation between same-sexers and other-sexers; there was also a lot of crossing back and forth. Of the first 12 Roman emperors, only one was exclusively heterosexual.” The US today is, for all the fussing, full of sodomy, he says. “Did you see [Colonel] Gaddafi [at the UN] complaining that American soldiers have been sodomising Arab boys? I thought, well that’s been the case since the very beginning of the republic. They blamed the sodomy on those great forests out there which they said made them horny. There was nothing else to do but bugger boys, they said.”

So homosexuality and heterosexuality are fictions? “Yes, of course.” He adopts a camp voice and adds: “But it makes a lot of girls happy.” Why do so many people believe it to be true about themselves if it’s false? “They believe in Jesus, and that’s a much bigger fiction, with more money spent on it. Prettier clothes too.”

Vidal on McVeigh:

McVeigh wrote to Vidal, saying he had been motivated, in part, by studying his work. He said he believed the US Constitution had been usurped by a National Security State that had to be defeated by force. Vidal wrote back – and they became friends. He started mounting passionate defences of the bomber in public. He says he was not crazy, but “too sane for his place and time”.

“He was a dedicated student of the American way, of the Constitution itself,” he says. “You should read his writings – they’re very good. Particularly on the Posse Comitatus Act of 1876, which forbids the Federal government ever to use its troops against the American people – but which they proceeded to do at Waco [a compound used by a religious cult that was attacked by federal troops in 1993]. They killed more people than he managed to kill when he blew up that building in Oklahoma City. He was a noble boy.”

Read much more.

Your Thoughts?

Environment is one of the subjects closer to my heart. Ever since I read the silent spring by Rachel Carson I have been converted to crusades of environmental protection. I came across an intelligent article by Johann Hari in independent.co.uk. He cautions if the manmade warming rises beyond 2.4C irrecoverable damage would be done to planet Earth. We must act fast. He has fixed year 2015 as a dead line. He laments that the developed countries have not done anything. They refused to think beyond fossil fuels. They have not done anything to encourage tapping solar power for our energy needs.

“The entire energy needs of the US could be met by covering 200 square kilometers of its empty deserts with solar plants: it would cost about 10 years’ worth of oil purchases, with none of wars tyranny or blowback Islamism.”

It’s achievable. Instead of discouraging carbon based energy source World Bank lend millions of dollars to start a coal based energy generating plant in Gujarat, Western India. What a retro step in containing carbon emission.

Carl Zimmer in his science blog says it in a different way,

Apocalypse via Press Release

   ..Today a team of scientists offer a new way of thinking about the environmental fix we’re in. In the words of one of the scientists, we’re driving around on a mesa in the dark with the lights off and without a map. We may fall off the edge of the mesa before we realize where the edge was.

The scientists argue for a safe operating space for the planet, which they propose should be bounded by limits on the carbon dioxide in the air and other factors. That way, we’ll stay away from dangerous thresholds and be able to pass on a healthy planet to our children.

I stumbled upon this beautiful environmental poem from a blog by Jeff McMahon.

The polar ice-caps are melting, the mountain glaciers

Drip into rivers; all feed the ocean ;

Tides ebb and flow, but every year a little bit higher.

They will drown New York, they will drown London.

And this place, where I have planted tree and built a stone house,

Will be under sea. The poor trees will perish,

And little fish will flicker in and out the windows. I built it well,

Thick walls and Portland cement and gray granite,

The tower at least will hold against the sea’s buffeting ; it will become

Geological, fossil and permanent.

What a pleasure it is to mix one’s mind with geological

Time, or with astronomical relax it.

There is nothing like astronomy to pull the stuff out of man.

His stupid dreams and red-rooster importance: let him count the star-swirls.

—————–   Robinson Jeffers

In reply to this brutal story about the murder of the honorary consul to the British High Commission in Jamaica which involved a note threatening the same fate for all other gays, “Sendai Anonymous” points me to a must-read article by the invaluable Johann Hari about the extent of the homophobia in Jamaica. Key excerpts:

Salute, a reggae concert in St Elizabeth, Jamaica. The country’s most celebrated reggae artists were present. Almost every song performed that night had a clear, consistent message: Kill gay people. “Shoot dem like a bird!” cried one artist to cheers. Another declared, “Battyman fi dead! [Gay men must die.] Take dem by surprise/ Get dem in the head.” During the show’s conclusion, the audience was asked, “Who wants to see dem dead? Put up your hand.” The crowd roared in agreement and countless hands waved in the air.

Hari describes at length some of these musicians who advance this homophobia, emphasizing the story of Beenie Man, a Jamaican superstar since childhood who has 62 No. 1 hits.  He gives the lyrics to one of Beenie Man’s songs:

One of Beenie Man’s most popular songs says, “I’m dreaming of a new Jamaica, come to execute all the gays.” He often uses the Jamaican slang term ‘chi chi’, which is similar to ‘faggot’ or ‘poof’. His song ‘Hang Up Dem’ says, “Hang chi chi gal [gay women] wid a long piece of rope.” In his popular hit, ‘Bad Man, Chi Chi Man’, he says that if his listeners see a gay DJ, they should, “run im off stage like a clown, kill dem DJ!”

Both songs are actually on YouTube now, go rate them down:

Beenie attributes his attitudes to his being from a “spiritual country.”

Hari goes on to list some of the atrocities against gays committed in Jamaica:

Snap. In February 2004, a father encouraged students to attack his 16 year-old son after he found a picture of a naked man in his rucksack. As his son was lynched in his school playground, the school was forced to call the police. No charges were ever brought; nobody was punished.

Flash. In June, a man was accused in the Jamaican town of Montego Bay of checking out another bloke. A mob surrounded him and began to punch and kick him, chanting, “Kill the battyman! Kill the battyman!” The police arrived after fifteen minutes. Once they heard that the victim was accused of being gay, they joined in the beating. After a while, they walked off, leaving the crowd to beat their victim to death.

Hospitals have often refused to treat victims of gay-bashing.

Members of the Jamaican Forum For Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG) live in a constant state of terror. They can never appear in public, never reveal their names. Their office is in a secret location which they reveal to nobody. The one and only J_FLAG leader to go public is a heroic figure called Brian Williamson.

Williamson was born into a privileged family at the very top of Jamaica’s caste system. Although he studied to become a Catholic priest, he gave this up in 1979 to evangelise for a different cause: gay rights. He turned his home into a centre where gay people could meet in safety once a fortnight. He refused to remain in the closet, and spoke openly about his sexuality – something no Jamiacan had done since the nineteenth century. He bulldozed through the island’s homosexuality taboo – and decided in the early 1990s to do the unthinkable. He founded a gay club called Entourage. The club stayed open for two years, until Williamson was stabbed.

He left Jamaica for a few years, but returned to
intensify his solitary campaign for gay rights. On June 10th this year, his friend Desmond Chalmers visited Williamson’s small flat in New Kingston. He found a corpse that had been stabbed and hacked at over seventy times. Blood had splattered onto every wall; Williamson’s throat had been slashed open.  Brian’s small dog was whimpering in the corner. One letter-writer to the Jamaica Observer explained the day after the murder, “To be gay in Jamaica is to be
dead.”

Hari calls for active solidarity with Jamaican gays:

Gay people in free countries have a choice.

(Hari’s wrong—we all have this choice, gay and straight and everyone in between.)

We can follow Tatchell and send a message to the battered, terrified gay population of Jamaica: we stand with you against the homo-cidal maniacs who say you should be burned like an old tire or shot like birds. When these thugs come to our countries, we will shun them. We will not offer them awards. We will not buy their music. We will not sing their songs.

Or we can do nothing. We can abandon Jamaica’s gay people and congratulate ourselves on how wonderfully non-racist we are. You decide.

1. Outrage! depends solely on public donations. You can give money at
http://outrage.nabumedia.com/donate.asp to help fund their campaigns against murder music and other forms of violent homophobia.
2. Boycott murder music. Janet jackson has performed a duet with Beenie Man. Outrage! calls on her millions of gay fans to stop buying her albums until she apologises for associating herself with murderous homophobes.
3. E-mail Puma explaining that you support their condemnation of Buju Banton, and you’ll be watching closely to ensure his homophobic comments stop. You can contact them at http://www.puma-uk.com/main_contact.htm

There is much more detail in the problem in Hari’s article, so still go read it at his archive (and while you’re there read more of his important work on behalf of freethinkers, the impoverished, oppressed women, gays, and just about anyone else whose side people of conscience should be on).

Your Thoughts?