Hoodwinking people with spurious freedoms

[HASEEB ANSARI]

Hoodwinking people with spurious freedoms
By Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur

Pakistan has used education and the media as the primary mechanisms for thought control and the projection and promotion of a fake and distorted past to counteract the real history of nations.

Dr Paul Andre Degeorges, a renowned, respected ecologist, cultural and political activist, very kindly e-mails me a lot of valuable material. Recently he sent me a talk, “The Story of Your Enslavement” by Canadian blogger, essayist and author Stefan Molyneux. It is an exceptionally profound historical analysis of the subtle methods colonists and governments use to make something as abhorrent as enslavement seem glamorous and essential to those enslaved. Instinctively my thoughts went to the Balochistan situation.

This piece is based on that talk. Molyneux says that we humans at first, like all animals, subsisted off the land but at a certain social stage became afraid of death, of future loss, and this made us controllable — and so valuable — in a way that no other resource could ever be. Because of this the greatest resource for any human being to control is not natural resources, tools, animals or land, but other human beings. He observes animals can be frightened but because animals have very little sense of tomorrow you cannot frighten them with loss of liberty, or with torture or imprisonment in the future while human beings can be. He says you cannot get more eggs by threatening a hen, but you can get a man to give you his eggs by threatening him, and consequently, human farming became the most profitable — and destructive — occupation throughout history and it is now reaching its destructive climax. Human society cannot be rationally understood until it is seen for what it is: a series of farms where human farmers own human livestock. The quest of the powerful to control the human livestock is insatiable.

Molyneux astutely observes that some people get confused because governments provide healthcare, water, education and roads, and thus imagine that there is some benevolence at work. He clarifies, “Nothing could be further from reality.” “In your country, your tax farm, your farmer grants you certain freedoms not because he cares about your liberties, but because he wants to increase his profits.” Mark the word benevolence and the importance Pakistan attaches to its NFC Awards, Aghaaz-e-Huqooq-e-Balochistan package, Gwadar Port, etc, as examples of that ideal benevolence for the Baloch and Balochistan.

Molyneux then asks, “Are you beginning to see the nature of the cage you were born into?” And then lists four major phases of human farming. The first phase, in ancient Egypt, was direct and brutal human compulsion where human bodies were controlled. The second phase, the Roman model, wherein slaves were granted some capacity for freedom, ingenuity and creativity, which raised their productivity. The feudal model introduced the concept of livestock ownership and taxation; instead of being directly owned, peasants farmed land that they could retain as long as they paid off the local warlords. Then the modern democratic model of human ownership superseded the feudal as the ruling class of human farmers quickly realised they could make more money by letting their livestock choose their own occupations.

Under the Democratic model, Molyneux says, direct slave ownership has been replaced by the mafia model. The mafia rarely owns businesses directly, but rather sends thugs around once a month to steal from the business ‘owners’. And you are now allowed to choose your own occupation, which raises your productivity, and thus the taxes you can pay to your masters. Your few freedoms are preserved because they are profitable to your owners. However, these freedoms along with prosperity engender discontent against curbs from the ‘livestock’ who now begin to question why they need rulers at all. This irks the ‘human farmers’ no end. They know it is very difficult to rule human beings directly through force and understand the need to keep rebellious persons and thoughts under strict control. They employ a three-phase process for keeping the livestock securely in the compounds of the ruling classes. The first is indoctrination of the young through government ‘education’. Schools and education systems are universally inflicted in order to control the thoughts and souls of the livestock. Pakistan has used education and the media as primary mechanisms for thought control and the projection and promotion of a fake and distorted past to counteract the real history of nations that existed for millenniums before August 14th, 1947.

The second is to turn citizens against each other through the creation of dependent livestock. For farmers the best way to maintain this illusion of freedom is to put some of the livestock on the payroll; this explains why people like Aslam Raisani, Shafiq Mengal, Sanaullah Zehri and others of their ilk are patronised. Those cows that become dependent on the existing hierarchy will then attack any other cows who point out the violence, hypocrisy and immorality of human ownership. Those cows who become dependent upon the stolen largesse of the farmer will violently oppose any questioning of the virtue of human ownership — and the intellectual and artistic classes, always and forever dependent upon the farmers — will say, to anyone who demands freedom from ownership: “You will harm your fellow cows.” This perfectly explains the establishment’s policy of creation and proliferation of death squads in Balochistan. The livestock are kept enclosed by shifting the moral responsibility for the destructiveness of a violent system to those who demand real freedom. The third phase is to invent continual external threats, so that the frightened livestock clings to the ‘protection’ of the farmers. The Indian bogey and the involvement of foreign hands has always been a staple diet here. Unwavering implementation of these phases has guided all policies in Balochistan.

Molyneux’s conclusion is brilliant: “To be truly free is both very easy, and very hard. We avoid the horror of our enslavement because it is painful to see it directly. We dance around the violence of our dying system because we fear the attacks of our fellow livestock. But we can only be kept in the cages we refuse to see. Wake up...To see the farm is to leave it.” The people in Balochistan have woken up and have seen the cages and it was not the supposed threat of violence that kept the people away from polling; it is 65 years of unabated violence that has made them see the cages that the farmers have kept them in. All the proffered freedoms and benevolence are utterly spurious and the Baloch have understood it.


The writer has an association with the Baloch rights movement going back to the early 1970s. He tweets at mmatalpur and can be contacted at mmatalpur@gmail.com

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default...9-5-2013_pg3_2