“The next step further down the track could be that persons deemed to be critics and detractors of the regime might be excluded from holding practising certificates. It’s obviously with a view to silencing dissent"And so it has come to pass.
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The above example is only one of hundreds of examples of our beloved land turning into a fictional society .
There is no where else in the world except prob. in Mao's old China, where you can find an insane Police Commissioner who knows nothing about policing but supposedly everything about Jesus, decide what conference can go ahead and what cannot, BUT change his mind in 5 minutes based on a prayer or some (un)intelligent (Chinese) whisper , or a (Korean) bribe - who knows ?? .....
A fictional society where everything is supposedly known about everybody and yet, at the same time, nothing is known about anything.
Teleni and Bainimarama's type and kind of phlegmatic ignorance can be likened to the once only 1989 address by the infamous and cruel Stasi leader, Erich Mielke, to his"comrades" in the GDR parliament when he announced: "I love all people. I put myself out for you…" ......... This was met with laughter from the crowd.
Fast forward to Fiji ...... to share with you Bhaini's vision for Fiji.Opening Address at the Nadi Chamber of Commerce Forum-Sep 17, 2007
Essentially, my vision is to rebuild Fiji into a non-racial, culturally vibrant and united, well-governed, truly democratic nation that seeks progress and prosperity through merit-based equality of opportunity, and peace "..... blah blah .....yaawwwwn. ..... laughter from the populace (qori nei Atu).
Mielke's unique brand of "love" transformed East Germany into probably the most spied-upon country in history. In its 40 years of rule, 'the Firm' generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the Middle Ages . It is worth repeating the statistics: 180 kilometres of files, 360,000 photographs, 99,600 audio cassettes, one in every 6.5 of the population an informer.
Fast forward to Fiji 2009 - we see the plain clothed informers military soldiers, prisons and the police too, being transmogrified into instruments of oppression; as they were with the practises of the Soviet KGB and the Stasi.
Police and informers remorselessly chronicled the most humdrum and pointless of activities, intercepted the most innocent of letters, and spent months , and the nation's entire budget for decades, trailing political suspects, even at funerals, while following absurd but detailed instructions on how to play the nonchalant passer-by.
The whole system would be a laughing-stock were it not for the fact that hundreds of thousands of unfortunate East Germans, most innocent of any political crime, were arrested, interrogated, routinely tortured and sent to prison camps and psychiatric hospitals.
But of course Repression was never called that by name: the Stasi saw themselves as revolutionary heroes, saving their fascist Germany from defectors and infiltrators.
Fast forward to Fiji 2009 - today's brutal reality of Fijian Military repression. Not many people in Fiji and overseas know this, but many ordinary villagers continue to be hauled up to the Military HQ in Fiji to be threatened and brainwashed about having any ideas about protesting. Many influential personalities have had trumped up charges placed against their good names in an effort by the Regime to besmirch their reputations. Many potential leaders continue to be harassed, their homes fire-bombed and burgled in the middle of the night by military thugs in an effort to terrorise them into silence with the threat against the safety of their loved ones. Many ordinary citizens especially academia, have their phones tapped, and military undercover personnel tailing their every move and meeting.
This paranoia points to the Regime's fear of individual thought, the first step in a process that History has shown is littered with systematic genocide and / or erasure of items on the regime's list such as ... Media, Cultural Icons and Cultural Structures, Indigenous Historical Records, Academic thought and research, Established Religion and Religious Bodies ... etc etc....
Like the Third Reich that preceded it, the East German system depended on the active participation of thousands of ordinary citizens who shopped their friends, workmates and colleagues to the authorities. Police states depend upon collusion, not simply upon coercion, which may explain why Fiji will never have a Truth Commission.
When we cannot be true to ourselves, who can we be true to?
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation. He works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared." CiceroWhen we find that the "secret police"and the "secret informers" are not monitoring their own society, their own people, they have turned their eyes on others - like when they blame the Media and other Governments for their mistakes ..... NEVER for a moment looking in toward themselves - always externalising.
Like Suu Yan in Mynmar currently awaiting "judgement" in the most Mickey-Mouse of trials you could ever imagine, we see ourselves in the same insane situation where if one was deemed to be "inciteful" merely by writing a letter to the Commonwealth Leaders Meeting, one could be brutally interrogated and eventually imprisoned....
Fast forward perhaps to a couple of weeks from now when one may read in one of the Fiji Regime's stooge media outlets some inane pronouncement like this :
"Fiji's Judge Magistrate Rabuku has pronounced ..... (name of person ) Guilty ... and sentenced to 40 years jail and $500,000 fine for writing a letter and thinking aloud as 'inciteful'.The Stasi flourished on such nonsense .............
Fast Foward to Fiji 2006 - 2009 and guess what ? I dont see any differences to what the Stasi leaders saw back then ..... even worse ...... I see the Fijian military usurpers are actually encouraged to flaunt such nonsense by the mischievous backers of this boneheaded and naked power grab by Military cowards in Fiji.
Anyone who harbours any lingering sympathies for this dreary and self-important dictatorship that bespeaks a paranoia that's both comic and horrible must have to have urgent therapy.
The function of the Stasi was to arrest, imprison and interrogate anyone it chose, to open all mail, intercept phone calls, bug hotels & businesses, spy on investors, and their own citizens, run its own hospitals and universities, and to train their own terrorists.
When we examine the reasons from history as to why people collaborated with the state to spy and inform on their neighbors and families and lovers and friends we see why they did it.
Many did it for money, some out of fear, others for the narcissistic thrill of feeling themselves indispensable to those in power.
This as we know reflects some of the worst aspects of human nature. And we can all point to the ones to date that have seriously pushed past the post lacking all the necessary ethics, honour, virtue, morality , fibre and fortitude that defines the difference between excreta and all of the above . Thats all I will say about that.
The crimes of Fascism offend our sense of justice and morality and offends our our intellect, our respect for logic, rationality, coherence, reason. At its worst it is the sense that to have an independent or logical thought, to insist on things as they are rather than as they are said to be, is to indulge in criminal activity.
Orwell chose the phrase "thought crime" well -- the crime isn't just in what you think but in thinking at all. And this is the infernal, literally maddening state that we must fight against.
The controversial free thinker, Carl Sagan has said that one of the saddest lessons of history is this:
If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous —
