I have been pondering the type and quality of politician that are prominent in today's world and it is quite alarming. There are fewer and fewer people in powerful positions that command any kind of respect or convey a sense of confidence. For example, I have been watching the news coming out of the Philippines with a mixture of disbelief and alarm. Their new president, Rodrigo Duterte, rejoicing in the sobriquet Duterte Harry, has given anyone who feels free to do so, the permission to kill drug addicts, drug dealers and the head of drug gangs. If anyone is found to have killed a drug addict etc. he has promised them immunity from prosecution. I am reminded of a nation in the not so distant past who gave immunity to anyone who killed Jewish people simply because they were Jews. This is the kind of situation I try to emphasise when I speak about the nature and role of government and the state. Here we have the president of an important nation simply cancelling the whole concept of the rule of law and the presumption of innocence and is apparently doing so with the support of the majority of the population. There are already wholesale executions in the Philippines without the tiresome business of due process. This recalls the words of Pastor Niemoller who wrote that "First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.....etc." Once he has gotten rid of the drug dealers and addicts, who will be next? You see once you allow death squads loose with no restraints, it is very difficult to get them to stop.
I have just watched Donald Trump announcing that he is going to build an impenetrable and beautiful wall right across America's southern border, and that, although they don't know it, the Mexicans are going to pay for it. Now, first, there is no such thing as an impenetrable wall, next, there is no such thing as a beautiful wall, and next, how does he plan to get the Mexicans to pay for it? He is also going to deport 2 million people in his first day in office, that is what he said, not me. How on earth do people like that ever come to national prominence in any country, never mind in a country like America that is supposedly educated and civilised? I said some weeks ago, that I am beginning to suspect that he may just win in November. If he does, then America is going to become very interesting because the last time any national leader spoke like Mr Trump, that nation ended up invading the Soviet Union, and, rather than deport 2 million people, simply gassed them.
In the United Kingdom we are witnessing the government preparing to exit the European Union and they still have not a clue what they are going to do, or how they are going to replace the institutional and structural arrangements. The British are cursed with some of the most hapless and incompetent politicians on the planet who have stoked the same kind of racist rhetoric and immigration hating sentiments that Mr Trump is doing and brought division, hate crimes and xenophobia onto the streets of this country in a way I would never have believed could have happened. I say again, I am ashamed to be British and now refer to myself as Scots in all literature and official forms. The British government have managed to reduce the medical profession, the epitome of the British public school culture and bourgeois value system, to striking and other forms of industrial action, again things I would never have believed possible. These are the same people who fulminate against the miners, railway workers etc when they go on strike and who pen indignant letters to the Telegraph and the Daily Mail under such pseudonyms as 'disgusted of Chipping Norton' but who are now seeking the support of ordinary working people against a government who are simply incompetent bullies who wish to destroy the NHS as a precursor to privatising it. This is their well-tested blueprint, in order to destroy the mining industry, the steel industry and the railways so that they could be privatised, they had to wage war against the workforce and destroy their unity and organisation. The doctors still have not guessed what the government is up to, but it is as plain as day to me, and, in the end, the gullible British public will turn on the doctors just as they turned on the working class and the doctors will lose.
Civilisation and order are very fragile things. Civilisation is clearly breaking down in the Philippines, is becoming very shaky in the United States and is under threat from an uncivilised set of Tory gangsters in this sorry country amusingly known as the United Kingdom. This is the inevitable result for all nations who persevere with the debased and uncivilised ideology of free market neoliberalism. Unless this loathsome ideology is overcome and defeated we are headed for the war of all against all. I remind you of the words of Adam Smith, published in 1776, "All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind." There are indeed no people more vile than the masters of mankind in our own time, but they rule by an ideology that is just as vile as their characters and is the root cause of the hatred and disunity we see all around us. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
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