Thoughts, Words, and Humanism

Yet another Rabbit article. I don't usually pay attention to what happens on campus- I never did at Rutgers and that hasn't changed here- but occasionally you do come across some drama that's worth opining about. Some writer for the paper got slack from the LGBT alliance on campus for using the word 'gay' in a pejorative fashion in a recent issue. A lot of other writers were up in arms about it- freespeech and all that. I decided to offer my two cents, as seen below:

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Thoughts, Words, and Humanism

R.H. Langan

I am commenting on a controversy that broke out regarding a certain article in a previous issue of this paper. I’ll just cut straight to the point.

I am an open supporter of LGBT and queer beliefs. This is basically because I am a humanist; all people ought to expect certain inalienable rights, even if our governments selectively removes them. Furthermore the bigotry towards queers is, no matter what way you want to define it, is usually a product of misplaced masculine insecurities and fear of what is foreign to us. The idea to deny marriage to someone because of their sex or gender is as foolish and primordial as was the reluctance of allowing blacks and white to marry in America up until 1970. I see little difference. And to deny that queers, women- hell, even men in a less unjust sense- are all prisoners of certain social expectations is something that I think is hard to deny from a psychoanalytical perspective.

And yet we can argue, and to a certain extent I agree, that when it comes to political correctness, that there is a problem with focusing on language alone. Censoring words doesn’t change thought; in fact it may merely muddle the quality of it and keeps the dirtier residue on a more subversive level. And do words have anything other than a neutral in of themselves? It is the motives behind them that determine the moral value. As the late George Carlin said, the quality of our thoughts can only be equal to the quality of our language. What if words are just words? Then what we instead need to do is improve thought.

So this is precisely why I understand and agree with the anger brought on by the flippant use of the word ‘gay’. Not because of the word isolated in of itself, but really because the offhand use of gay in a derogatory fashion still reveals a deficiency in quality of thinking, an ignorance of consideration for the decency of others. And if we are to indeed achieve a more equal world for all, it is crucial that we enrich our thinking to improve both our speech and actions. Then perhaps those inalienable rights will not be a privilege reserved for white straight males, but a birthright for us all.

Gaddafi's Death: The Killing Joke of the Arab Spring

The following is my second article for The Rabbit, the school paper of Essex U. This is the unedited version of it; for the paper I squeezed it down from 1000 words to about 600. I have chosen to post the unaltered version here. Also, at some point I refer to his death happening three or four weeks ago. This is because the school paper comes out every two weeks, so I was writing for future audiences in mind.

Alterations aside, this article is still property of The Rabbit, the school paper of Essex University.

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Gaddafi's Death: The Killing Joke of the Arab Spring

R.H. Langan

Three weeks ago on the northern coast of war ravaged Libya, usurped dictator Muammar Gaddafi was pulled out from the crevices of a drainpipe, his last, futile point of refuge before begging for his life to be spared. The defamed leader, yet another icon in a long string of insidious personalities packaged from the Middle-East, ultimately met his demise shortly thereafter. His battered, bloodied carcass was put on display for the Libyan people to see, so that they could confirm with their own eyes that the tyrant had been toppled, that at last they were free, and- to quote that All-American phrase: justice had been done.

Gaddafi's death: An exclamation point on the Arab Spring. A complete and utter triumph for democracy.

I've heard this joke before.

My dismay has little to do with the barbaric way in which the rebels killed Gaddafi after capturing him; although to be sure, to be shot multiple times and sodomized with a lead pipe before being dragged through the streets are all acts that safely qualify as human rights violations. We can declare this murder to be savage- and it is- but to those who had suffered under Gaddafi's rein for decades, this could only have been seen as fitting. As justice. We in the west can fancy ourselves to be above such primal outbursts, but did not thousands in America scramble to the streets the night Obama announced bin Laden had allegedly been disposed of, all so these patriotic denizens could frantically clamor “USA! USA! USA!” Was not George W. Bush talking for all Americans when he asked for bin Laden's head on a platter following 9-11? Or what about the high demand for the viral video featuring the hanging of Saddam Hussein?

We as a species aren't yet above revenge. We still want to place the heads of our enemies on the spikes overlooking our town gates for all to see. This is a universal human condition; we all need to project what we don't like onto someone we can hate, whether it be one man or an entire race. And for those in Libya, Gaddafi wasn't just an effigy- he was a true monster for decades. A monster that the UN accepted for a long time, a despot warmly embraced this past decade as a friend of your leaders here in Britain or Europe, who endorsed and shook hands with Obama last year.

This is where the fraudulence of the Arab Spring comes into view. It isn't that the people of the Middle-East don't desperately want liberation from the plutocracy secretly running them (i.e. Saudi Arabia), but changes in leadership in the Middle-East have historically only happened when the west allows it. It is rarely an inspired rise of the serfs, but rather a manufactured production from the powers that be. The west backs the movements when the time is right, irrespective of the quality of people on board. The chosen successor for Gaddafi is Abdelhakim Belhadj, former head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a known terrorist organization that was listed as such following 9/11.

Wiping off the chessboard. History makes this claim not controversial, but academic.

This was the same case with disposed Egyptian president Mubarak, a former friend to western powers who was called 'family' by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before she and the rest of world condemned his leadership just a year later when the revolts in Egypt began. Or perhaps a more telling example would be the president installed in Iraq by the CIA in 1963, a man who was a friend to the west for nearly three decades, who shook hands with US Official Donald Rumsfeld in 1983, just months after murdering thousands of his own people, the very same crime he was executed for in 2006. Pray tell, when exactly did Saddam Hussein became an unwanted piece on the Central Asian chessboard, the popular board game that the US, Britain, and Europe continue to enjoy for their own gain? Did Washington and London wake up one morning in 1991 and abruptly realize that one of their allies was actually a rather evil dude? Or maybe it just made sense for certain interests involved- military, energy, etc- to slowly phase Hussein out and begin wiping the board clean for the new millennium? Is this the case with every so-called 'freedom' movement we seem so eager to be involved with nowadays, under this phony pretense of spreading our esteemed values? Is this not the same fraudulent policy that we all so eagerly- and rightfully- slammed Dubya Bush for? Are we so quick to forget the recent lessons learned from Bush and Blair that we now overlook the fact that the tongues of Obama and Cameron are just as forked?

Gaddafi: overnight from friend to foe. Just another name on a long line of puppets we've decided are no longer satisfactory. The BBC, Sky and the big US Networks make it appear as if we treated Gaddafi as a baddie all along; how many times now are we going to hear about Reagan disliking him? Moreover, the media and our politicians carefully repaint the picture to make it seem like the images of Gaddafi's bashed-in skull are icons for all us freedom-loving folk, rather than the truth for what they really are: The culmination of a pawn being discarded, so the harnessing of oil and power in the Middle-East can be renewed by the west in full.

This has been the entire operation in the Middle-East for the past year. Facebook didn't make the fall of Egypt or Libya happen, the people didn't will the demise of Gaddafi or Osama bin Laden. It wasn't a zeitgeist effort. It was all decreed in boardrooms somewhere in Washington and Westminster, all so these massive, volatile shakeups could occur in less than a year in order to aid our troubling economies, and all the while it was innocuously sold as liberty for the people, by the people.

Bashed-in skulls. Hangings. We love to showcase the grizzly demise of our phantoms. Makes you wonder what happened to those bin Laden photos. Obama said America was too noble of a nation to show them off.

I've heard this one before...

The Occupy Protests: courageous stand or cul-de-sac?

The following is my first article for Uni. Essex's newspaper, the Rabbit. I'm not too thrilled about the small word count I had to work with- I guess readers of the Gleaner have higher attention spans after all- but trying to get my ideas into 400 words is actually a reasonably fun challenge. This was rather well received by the newspaper staff here.

It seems prudent that I stress that this article is technically property of The Rabbit, the school paper for the University of Essex.

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It only takes a cursory glance at our history to see that there are certain points in time when, for reasons of injustice, the peasants, commoners, lower classes- the 99% as it were- collectively clash against the barriers set up by the ownership of the world. When we speak of the ownership, we of course speak of that upper 1%, that ruling class that owns more than all of us combined. The 1% control the corporations behind our governments, the secret revenue behind our plunging economies, and, yes, the leaders behind the puppets we elect.

These statements are not so liberal or controversial under the lens of history; even in a country where her majesty reins more as a figurehead than a politician, has the power of her class ever vanished from this society? She or those like her are still capable of great influence. And similarly, in America, is the embattled presidency of Barack Obama not evidence that even in the so-called land of the free, the president has become little more than a rubber stamp for the industry around him? Many Americans think their country has only recently lost its ‘innocence’ (an unfortunate phrase often conflated with 9-11), but would not the fate of JFK suggest otherwise? Indeed, a black or American Indian would advise to look back even further.

But at certain points in time, the commoners are inspired to rebel. Women’s suffrage. The enlightenment. Yes, the 60s. And right now, from New York to Rome, from Philadelphia to London, thousands are joining the so-called ‘Occupy’ protests. Many believe these peaceful protests will inspire change. And perhaps they will. But history suggests that success is deceiving. The movements of the 60s ended with conciliatory changes that didn’t erase racism; it just created ghettos. Women’s suffrage did not defeat sexism; it merely gave the ruling class a whole new population to tax. For the Occupy protests to avoid a mediocre dead end, we the 99% must not buy into that illusion that the injustice around us is a recent phenomenon conjured by one side of the political spectrum. Rather, it is a fundamental part of humanity, from kings to church to Rockefeller. We cannot accept institutional changes; rather we must demand changes in how we as a species think.

Then my friends, we will have a revolution.