Learning from History - Faulty Powers. Living in a Lie

Luvequ's Happy New Year to us all.

May last year pale into insignificance as we get older but may we all learn from history. There are already worrying trends emerging early in 2008. Voreqe is already dictating who can and cannot contest elections. Voreqe also saying the military that would decide the presidency and all the other functions of Government. What a sham we are living in. What a life living in a big fat lie. The self-styled Military Council sitting in on illegal Cabinet Meetings. Why are they even bothering having Cabinet Meetings.

It's all a big sham, a big lie.

Today's history lesson is about Regime Ideology and what makes people think they can rule other people.

As you know NO success has ever been wrought anywhere in the world where a few people have tried to dominate others and force their will on others.

As you read this through, see if you can see any similarities with our situation right now in Fiji.

Remember the Communists?

Well to put it simple, their Ideology consisted of the following basic precepts:

Because the Communists believed people could not be left free to make their own choices, they believed it was the duty of the state was to supervise and oversee their affairs via their goal of a state-managed economic and social order . This takeover was usually achieved by via the gun involved an immediate forceful transformation of the entire society.

Communism disguised its will for power in an all-embracing ideology that "explained everything," demanded acceptance by everybody, and allowed opposition by no one. Similarities in this kind of thinking is reflected by the new spokesman for the Fijian Gestapo, Kernal Saddam Aziz who said today : "the priority in Fiji should be the People's Charter and not the general election ......the Charter is their effort to restore Fiji to what it was once known for "the way the world should be," ".

Under Communist Rule often termed the "People's Democracy" by the State, the intent of the state was callous and blatant. The individual was made to conform to and obey the demands and commands of the state. Elections were a charade, and political participation was a shameless farce in which there was only one-party rule.

The lie of life under this regime was difficult to hide, and, as a result, was all the more morally wretched and spiritually humiliating.

Nothing was permitted to cut through the veil of lies upon which the socialist order was based.

Because once the veil was torn by even the smallest openings of light of truth, the foundations of the system was threatened with collapse.

The legitimacy of the system, therefore, required continual verbal and allusive reaffirmation of its premises and rationale for existence very much like the constant streams of denivuaka from Raturala and Co, and the constant press releases from iarse, chodo, and parmass about how wonderful everything is.

Included in this is the blah speech from Voreqe about how he has a "vision" for Fiji. Hahahahahahahah ahahah ..... oilei - If he was serious he wouldn't lie so much about truth and hope and fairness etc.

(What would he know about virtue anyway?)

Iyarse keeps harping about we have to talk about our issues in order to move forward. Kemudou ! Turaga kei na marama, se tu makawa madaga o Qarase at the door waiting to talk to Vore, but Vore won't talk to him. Hello !! So much for that bullshit.

Under Communism all were "forced to accept" the regimes decrees, charters and hollow slogans about "developing and improving" the State's "causes", voting in sham elections, and being forced to state belief in and dedication to "moving forward" programmes.

Through obedience to and participation in these legitimizing games, citizens as victims were forced to permit their own oppression and could hide their fears, and the rulers could justify their power and cover their corruption.

And through these means, the loyalty of both ruler and the ruled was given to the system and this is what sustained it.

The Czech dissident Vaclav Havel in his secretly published essay "The Power of the Powerless." 1979 said " in everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life"

And so people lived in a lie.

How many of us in Fiji are living such a lie ?

"If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth," explained Havel. "Living within the truth . . . is . . . an attempt to regain control over one's own sense of responsibility.

In other words, it is clearly a moral act. One usually paid dearly for it and the risk sometimes brought a rewards in the form of a general enhancement in the situation, and sometimes it did not.

What was courageous was the decision and the statement by the individual that the truth was more important than the material losses he may suffer; that his own sense of integrity and honesty to his own conscience was more important than the political risks he may have to face; and that what he knows and thinks to be true must not be denied, regardless of whether any others choose to hear it and whether or not it succeeds in changing the world.

If an individual chose to live the truth under this regime, it produced something more than just self-liberation.

This very action undermined and challenged the very foundations and premises upon which the system was built and upon which it was dependent.

"By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. . . . He has said the emperor is naked . And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened. . . . He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth."

Havel insisted that the pillars of the socialist state could slowly be worn down and finally destroyed if only an increasing number of people in their various walks of life would do numerous simple and sometimes hardly noticeable things that manifested a rejection of a life of the lie.

Such actions might be a teacher at School or in Sunday School telling his students the facts of the coup rather than the rubbish stories created by the regime.

It might be a writer, journalist, artist or blogger challenging the "official" information , and sharing his or her own interpretation or facts with trusted friends or on a public newspaper, noticeboard or website.

It might be the courage to read "forbidden" blogger postings, pass it on for others to digest and then to discuss it with friends and colleagues with whom truth could be spoken without betrayal.

It might be a refusal to vote in the one-party election or failure to show up for a "charter consultation" , decline a nomination to a Statutory Board or a refusal to spout the "politically correct" slogans and phrases.

Or it may have manifested itself simply as an unwillingness to believe anything said by the State anymore.

These are the things that undermined and finally destroyed socialism in practice.

Its bankruptcy, blatant croynyism, corruption, and lies became the breeding ground for a growing number of people first to reject its promises and then slowly and incrementally begin to do and say things that tore more and more holes in the veil of illusion upon which the system was based.

The distinction between illusion and reality finally could not be denied or ignored.

It is my fervent hope that Fiji will see this reality in 2008 and I encourage each one of us to poke holes in this veil of lies that the FLP and FMF have constructed.

Meanwhile back on our small island in the Pacific, in the face of rising crime, rising cost of living, possible disenfranchisement of indigenous Fijians ,the desecration of taukei institutions, the rape of our national coffers, and promotion of nepotism and cronyism for military incompetents in government positions, who can believe that this illegal government has provided success of any kind in the last year like iarse & baininananas is trying to have us believe ?

In a one-party FLP/FMF regime in which those in the ruling party are beginning to abuse our taxpayer funds to accumulate innumerable travel and other privileges denied to most of us and the civil servants they want to cut, who have committed commercial and intellectual genocide with their ousting of excellently qualified educated Fijians, who have hold of our taxpayer funds without our mandate, who hide and lie behind the barrel of the gun to protect their tax evading staff, who say they will be forcing their People Charter down our throats; who can believe their claims that theirs will be a true democracy with equality for all?

With prisons filled with itaukei who have lost their way, latent censorship over all forms of communication, 3 men dead from savage beatings , and 5 soldiers killed on orders from Frankie, an army that has been plotting this takeover from 2001, an (In)Human Rights Commisioner who will defend the rights of animals over Fijian citizens, an incompetent Police Commish , an illegal Attorney General who has written a thesis on how to disrespect and deprive itaukei in their own country, who could meaningfully argue that these guys respect human rights and civil liberties?

Here today, gone tomorrow? Not me ragone - how about you ?