Professional demonisation of Africa

In the last instalment I showed that the "stake" which imported "stakeholders" erect in our midst is neither a gambling bet nor an investment.  Rather, it is the lynching post, the scaffolding from which imperialism may unleash mass torture upon the people while claiming to be protecting human rights.

I drew parallels to the great European witch craze and the Catholic Inquisition at a time when the church was also an empire.

Stamping out heresy and witchcraft have now been replaced with the imperialist need to stamp out sovereignty, independence, autonomy and self-determination by citing "the right to protect innocent civilians" against themselves as in the case of the Nato war on Libya.

That is why the mushrooming of human rights NGOs and human rights "experts" in the last 25 years since the end of the Cold War has been accompanied by a massive deterioration in the human life situations of hundreds of millions of people.  Naomi Klein reveals that the growth of the human rights racket has been accompanied by the mass torture of entire peoples and whole nations, as neoliberal capitalism has degenerated into disaster capitalism in its efforts to survive crisis.

That is why in 1996, Caroline Moorehead and Ursula Owen confessed that:
"No other generation has ever known so much, so quickly, so graphically about human rights in the world.

"There have never been so many reports, on every violation and every country, so well written and so accessibly presented. Human rights organisations do invaluable work [for whom?] ' they are needed [by whom?] as never before.
"Why, then, as a group of human rights experts asked themselves at a seminar in Oxford in July (1996), is all this knowledge having very little effect? Has more knowledge become less action?"

Some readers may have thought my comparison of current campaigns of imperialist demonisation of its enemies with the Mediaeval Inquisition under the Holy Roman Empire to be too far-fetched to explain our world today.

The passage I have quoted from Index on Censorship Number 1 of 1996, Page 53, does reveal comparable features:

The huge gap between the stated good intentions of the self-appointed stakeholders on one hand and their actual conduct, their actual function and its consequences, on the other hand.

Moorehead and Owen reveal that the phenomenal growth in the numbers of human rights organisations and the prolific production of human  rights reports since the end of the Cold War have not improved the human life situation in the world at all.

Likewise, the mediaeval do-gooders confused their good intentions with their actual historical purpose and impact.

They believed they were serving God and humanity for the better, but the result of their work was an atrocity, as good as a holocaust, lasting a whole 300 years. In our time, imperialism has used fraudulent human rights reports and stories to justify mass torture and massive atrocities in places as far apart as former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guatemala, Ecuador, Vietnam, Panama and Haiti.

The growth of the intolerant assumption that autonomous, independent and self-reliant peoples and communities should no longer be allowed to speak their own language, define their own needs and devise their own ways of meeting those needs.

As a result Zimbabwean journalists report on the so-called United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as if Zimbabwe never had its own "Health for All by 2000", "Education for All by 2000", African land reclamation and reform as well as Indigenisation Policy ' which the Anglo-Saxon powers have tried to destroy through illegal sanctions about which the same UN has done nothing. So how can the UN's MDGs be meaningful if the UN does nothing about illegal sanctions imposed on an innocent little country?

The growth of an army of "stakeholders' sects" or orders, now called NGOs, who become intolerant, overzealous and expansive in assisting the empire to identify, target, demonise, harass and isolate those who refuse to be swept along by the latest crusade.

The predominant role of lawyers and "experts" as purchased "stakeholders" serving the empire in its campaign of repression and counter-revolution.

The growth of new media, new means of communication, which the stakeholder sects or orders of "experts" now employ to identify, target, demonise, harass and isolate their "clients" or victims.

The growth of new jargon, a new language, to suppress the independent thought of autonomous communities and movements by depriving them of their own language and their right to name their own reality and learn their own history.

The growth of a cult or mystique of the human rights expert, activist, specialist or consultant paid or sponsored by the empire.

For example, Farai Maguwu (who is one of the sponsored saboteurs of Zimbabwe's diamond policy together with Dhewa Mavinga and others) is now called "a diamond rights expert and researcher" by those journalists and editors who are working for the same imperialist crusade against Zimbabwe. In South Africa we hear a white NGO called Africom has declared African liberation songs part of "hate speech".

The retreat by human rights "stakeholders" to Oxford in 1996 and the hundreds of thousands of so-called human rights conferences and reports referred to by Moorehead and Owen represent the re-staging of a similar drama to the dramas of the Middle Ages, the witchcraze and the Inquisition.

According to William Monter in European Witchcraft, there were three phases in the witchcraze: the period before 1230 when the Church and the State fought against what was called harmful magic in its old traditional form and definition; the period after 1230, in which scholars, lawyers and other so-called specialists were instigated to study so-called witchcraft in order to allege its connection to demonic forces and conspiracies.

"Then under the aegis of the Popes, the simultaneously founded inquisition against heresy made these possibilities real by earmarking magic acts as heresy. In this manner, the disastrous collective term

"witchcraft" was created (coined) from originally scattered (unrelated) features.

The second phase is after 1430. The process of study, theory and strategy was completed, imagining a huge conspiracy against church and empire supposed to be driven by a set of sorcerers and witches allied to devil. A similar process today is the practice of sending bogus "fact-finding missions" whose reports are rigged to support a pre-determined position. The Freedom House report cited last week was a typical example.

The third and final stage was publication and propagation of tracts across Europe, using new media, that is cheap books and pamphlets coming out of the new printing press. The counter-revolution against Zimbabwe relies heavily on newly printed scandal sheets not different from white missionary tracts.

William Monter refers to the most effective and most destructive of the Mediaeval publications, called Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches).

"This oldest and most successful of all handbooks . . . is a horrible and fascinating work. It climaxed a sustained investigation into witchcraft during the fifteenth century, when at least a dozen treatises were composed on the subject, most of them by Dominican Inquisitors like Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer. The Malleus distinguished itself from its predecessors by its completeness and its practicality. It advanced slowly (in its argument), disposing of possible objections along its route, and with a confident logic."

The object then as now was to purge, to purify, the body of the empire, by smelling out and hammering its enemies. According to Mary Daly, what we see in Malleus Maleficarum is "a purifying doctrine, and one that was enthusiastically carried out by professional men (stakeholders) ' priests, theologians, lawyers, physicians ' and the thousands of thugs who carried out their Holy orders . . . the witchcraze focused predominantly upon women who had rejected marriage (spinsters) and women who had survived it (widows). The witch-hunters sought to purify their society (the Mythical body) of these 'indigestible' elements ' women whose physical, intellectual, economic, moral, and spiritual independence and activity profoundly threatened the male Catholic monopoly on authority in every sphere."

It turns out that many of the women burned as witches by stakeholders were popular midwives and healers who competed with church-sponsored "doctors".

As already pointed out, imperialism has been quite consistent since the Holy Roman Empire under the Catholic Church. According to Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology:

"This phenomenon of leadership and control by 'experts' is familiar to inhabitants of modern Western society.

"It is not surprising, then, that there was not only a 'body' of expert knowledge, but also popularised propaganda for the masses [via media and sermons]. Here again, technology, in the form of printing, was an essential means of mental artificial insemination. A new genre of literature emerged in the form of Teufelsbücher, or 'devil books', whose general effect was o suggest that the devil was everywhere".

In our time, George W. Bush and Tony Blair consulted lawyers on how to torture innocent suspects without being accused of torture and how to extend the so-called "war on terror" to Iraq even though Iraq had no ties with al-Qaeda and even though the UN Security Council had refused to authorise that invasion. Al-Qaeda, like the Mediaeval devil, was now everywhere.

The Uses of the so-called Expert or Professional by Imperialism
The Anglo-Saxon onslaught on Zimbabwe, like the Mediaeval terror against heretics and independent communities, must rely on the creation of specialised orders or single-issue organisations and "professionals'', such as Stanford Moyo, Beatrice Mtetwa, Jestina Mukoko, Dewa Mavinga, Farai Maguwu, Sydney Masamvu and Sydney Chisi.

Quoting Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, Mary Daly observed that:
"Laymen might not accept all the esoteric details supplied by the experts, but they accepted the general truth of the theory (and doctrine of the crusaders), they were unable to argue against its more learned interpreters. So the experts commanded the field. For two centuries the clergy preached against witches and the lawyers sentenced them . . . Confessors and judges were supplied with (expert) manuals incorporating all the latest information."

It is no accident that the Anglo-Saxon onslaught on Zimbabwe in the last 15 years has capitalised on multiplying the members and organisations who not only claim to hold a stake in Zimbabwe's destiny but also claim the purity of being experts, professionals, specialists and consultants on everything to do with Zimbabwe's fate. The combined message of these busybodies as "stakeholders" is that:

    Zimbabwe should not have allowed a spontaneous African land reclamation movement to take land from white settlers without the blessing of a blueprint conceived by experts and funded by donors.

    Zimbabwe cannot hold elections without first bringing in experts to design a voters' roll, forge a roadmap and define its media policy.

    The status of Zimbabwe's diamonds on the global market should not be defined by Zimbabwe, its allies and the normal Kimberley Process. Rather it must be defined by foreign-sponsored "diamond rights experts".

    Zimbabwe should not hold elections before turning its defence forces into "professionals" who, like consultants and mere technicians, should not be concerned about the close link between security, patriotism and the political direction of the nation and its leadership. This is to say, Zimbabwe should re-form its defence forces into a mercenary outfit which will obey anyone who promises the most money and best benefits.

    Zimbabwe cannot enjoy good governance until everything that really matters is turned over to an "independent" commission, separate from the state and staffed by independent experts and specialists. The list is endless.

Ivan Illich is an Austrian-born priest, scientist and historian. He understands the link between capitalist repression through the use of "professions" on one hand and the repression carried out by the Catholic Church empire through the use of similar experts and professions in Mediaeval times.

In 1978, Illich published a book titled Toward a History of [Human] Needs. He wrote:

"Let us first face the fact that the bodies of specialists that now dominate the creation, adjudication, and satisfaction of human needs are a new kind of cartel . . . A profession, like the priesthood, holds power by a concession from an elite whose interests it props up. As a priesthood offers salvation in the train of an anointed king, so a profession interprets, protects, and supplies a special this worldly interest to the constituency of modern rulers."

For 15 years Zimbabwe has been besieged by the desperate fringes of the panicking priesthood of a dying Anglo-Saxon empire. Recently this priesthood has been praying for the sudden death of the founders of our revolution in the belief that death is the remaining reliable ally of the dying empire and its scared stooges; in the belief that African revolution will also die at the imperial stake together with the mortal bodies of its founders.

But the fight against the imperial crusaders is also about ideas.  Therefore our ability to fashion our own language to explain our experience to ourselves is critical. The desperate fringes of the dying Anglo-Saxon empire must therefore be exposed.  As Illich said, in the face of such an onslaught, the control of language is a war objective.

"[The] mutual dependence [of the empire's priesthood] as tutor [on the people as] charge has become resistant to analysis because it has been obscured by corrupted language. Good old words have been made into branding irons that claim wardship for [imported] experts over home, shop, store, and the space and ether between them.  Language, the most fundamental commons, is thus polluted by twisted strands of jargon, each [shard] under the control of [yet] another profession."

This foul and alien language is everywhere: diamond rights expert, human rights defender, free and fair election, pro-democracy demonstrators, open society initiatives, democratic process, democratic change, transition to democracy, international best practice, universally accepted benchmarks, key stakeholders.

For example, South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon have just found out that a "no-fly zone" is a country where Nato bomber jets and combat helicopters are allowed to kill civilians and destroy homes without challenge.