INDIVIDUAL REVOLUTION: REVOLUTION IS INTERNAL, EVOLUTION ISN'T OVER

We have to carry out 

daily little individual revolutions.

 

My family considered me strange since I began my life style of deliberated consumerism and non violent resistance when I was quite young. They called me the purple sheep, not black and nasty, just really strange by their standards.  I was the butt of many jokes and yes, at times I cried but never wavered. As a result my own life has been one of thousands of small non compliances and ethical decisions. I carried it pretty far by the standards of my generation.

These little individual revolutions are basically what I consider to be the basic application of resistance and non compliance. When my children were young I was not the compliant parent. They never went to Disneyland. They were never taken to MacDonalds. They did not receive Barbie dolls, etc. Every one of these "passages of Western childhood" was denied them because of my personal scruples... all small revolutions.

I will admit going into MacDonalds on my lunch hours to buy them the stupid little toys of the week, however, so they weren't left right out of the play loop! If someone gave them a Barbie doll, I let them keep it, I just never encouraged or purchased anything to do with them myself. The more you make something big time tabu, the more desirable it becomes and I was not going to fall into that trap.

When asked "why" I would, using age appropriate ideology, explain my reasons. The Barbie dolls clothes were made by little girls their age in the Philippines who worked long hours and never played and were let go when their eyesight gave out. The hamburger meat came from burned forests in South America and Indians lost their homes. No great big stories, just short and sweet/bittersweet/sour.  Twenty five words or less to keep the thought there. 

In short, when I could, I taught them the true human and natural environmental costs of their purchases. This was a fine line to walk without raising them angry, keeping their spirits clear and forward looking. Somehow I managed.

Now they are accomplished young adults and have thanked me for never taking them to Rotten Ronnie's. They brag that they were never ever fed breakfast cereals full of junk and that all they ate was scratch made from home.  Both abhor the violence of meat and eat well.  They look and see Disneyland for what it is.  They grew up just fine, in fact are the embodiment of good health and ethics yet are thoroughly modern. They are, as well, very savvy conscientious, consumers.

So my hundreds of small revolutions resulted in two young women who do not even realize they were brought up revolutionaries! It is that simple...

I taught them that every little step is part of the whole. You cannot resist everything, but you can certainly make a huge difference by applying your scruples and ethics to your every thought. 

I suppose it is that simple dictum, living your life as a prayer....

By Brkic Sulejman

Revolution is internal
Help yourself at anytime
Evolution isn’t over... 

~ Raise The Knowledge by Gogol Bordello

When I think of the West, including Japan, let’s say the G8, excluding China, I think of devolution, which in biology is also called degeneration. How else can we explain the state of apathy and ridicule we have sunk into?

Take me for example. I’ve been teaching French and English at a language school here in Tokyo since 1991. I’ve made it a rule not to teach the police, the Self Defence Forces (the Japanese army) and the U.S. military.  That’s the kind of money that I can do without. I am just a teacher here, I do not own the school. An Israeli does, a Zionist, I think. We never talk about politics. He knows where I stand. To make my point one day I went to work with a Palestinian keffiyeh around my neck.

In the past few years there has been a steady increase and attendance by U.S. military personnel. Right now, there is a bunch of them coming to the school where I work to learn Chinese, Persian, Thai, Indonesian, Korean from North Korea and one young, 25, American soldier studying French... not with me of course.

En passant, right here there should be a conflict, a Zionist, a pro-Palestinian and a U.S. mercenary working together but no… we allow our capitalist democracies to absorb all these potential conflicts and turn ourselves into greedy whores. Anyway, I kind of manage to avoid them, even saying hello bothers me. Since the school reception office is not that big, I do sometimes unfortunately have them in my face.

Now, to get back to the 25 year old Yankee. He was already here about 2 years ago. The other day, there he was on the balcony, where we can smoke, with his French teacher of Moroccan origin, chatting, laughing; I said hi and out of the blue this colleague of mine starts telling me what an exciting life the Yankee has had and... boom!

He hits me by saying that the Yankee was also in Iraq and Afghanistan and since that day he brought it up himself several times ~ the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures, sometimes even complaining about the heat and the noise of the five daily calls to prayer in Iraq.

To be honest with you I feel disgusted, not only with him, but with myself for just standing there, smoking, smiling and even exchanging a few words with a criminal. Yes, a criminal!

"The U.S-U.K.-led war against Irak was illegal" ~ Kofi Annan, International Herald Tribune, Friday, September 17, 2004 (U.N chief calls Iraq war Illegal) The Associated Press, United Nations, New York.

So, if it’s illegal, it’s a crime and the despicable people who have taken part in it are criminals as well as all those who have acquiesced. I do throw in a few sarcastic comments and I’ve made it pretty clear about my stance on the whole Iraq/Afghanistan/U.S. criminal foreign policy issue, but that’s it. Being under the same roof with criminals frustrates me very much. Sometimes the Yankee has his French lesson in a classroom next to mine and I can’t focus on my student because I tend to eavesdrop.

I tried to talk about this with the secretary at the school, expecting some/any kind of shock reaction but she just said, oh, well, being a soldier is just a job, but it’s not just a job! It’s not even a job…

Here in Japan they have had 3 main bogeymen since the end of WW2: Communism, North Korea and China. The Japanese government, through its keyboard, the mainstream media, has managed to instill such fear into the hearts and minds of the Japanese people, who in turn only too readily dove into the comfort of not thinking, that it’s impossible to have a reasonable debate.

Since 9/11, in the U.S. not in Chile, in order to be in line with the foreign policy of its master Uncle Sam, Japan has added another bogeyman to its list: Islam. Here is an article that will give you a rough picture of Japan’s attitude vis-à-vis its Muslim community. North Korea, China, as well as Arabs, besides being government/media prop-up bogeymen, are also an object of great ridicule, and not only among the Japanese but also Westerners.

Ridicule. Ridiculous. Ridicule: Words or actions intended to evoke contemptuous laughter at or feelings toward a person or thing.

This is where the G8 comes in. When it comes to ridicule, I believe that the joke should be on us, the ridiculous-dangerous-coward-anti-depressant/Viagra popping Western degenerates.

How dare we make fun of the rest of the world? I mean, just take a look at this headline I saw the other day, front page, the Daily Yomiuri, Tokyo: Obama says China must respect international law. Nobody is laughing. Obama ~ the apostle of ridicule. He should get another Nobel Prize just for this. I ain’t no fan of China but this… He should tell this to the hooded prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

America, our dear leader.

Most people we make fun of live in our dictatorships and there isn’t much they can do about it. But we, in our democracies with all our freedoms, rights; what do we do about being robbed blind by mega-banks that suddenly crash and we, the little guy, are forced to bail them out?

About the austerity plans, the welfare cuts, the pushing back of retirement age, the tripling of university tuition fees, environmental degeneration... and hundreds if not thousands of other daily humiliations? Nothing.

What do we do about the fact that most of our dear leaders are liars, thieves, war criminals who have led us to commit and support the Supreme International Crime, the attack on Iraq that so far has killed more than a million of Iraqis for our oil, and numerous other wars of plunder? Nothing.

What do we do about our democratic ridiculous mainstream media that bombard us daily with government-fabricated lies called news, mind-numbing programs, sports, sex and violence?

Nothing.

What else do we do beside demonstrating in the streets five minutes before our democratic bombs are about to rain on another country that possesses our natural resources?

Nothing.

What do we do here in our psychopathic democracies about our unbridled capitalism that’s destroying everyone and everything on its highway to the ever mightier buck, the ever rising unemployment, poverty, misery and add to all this the annual 30 000 suicides here in Japan ~ what do we do about our whole democratic malaise?

Nothing.

What do we do when we are led to believe that the top threats to our Western values and our freedoms (to do nothing), Western (genocidal) civilization are Islam and immigrants or when French leaders, including one socialist, pass a law banning the veil in schools and the niqab in public out of concern for the happiness of barely 2000 Muslim women in France who are forced to cover themselves when outside but no concern at all for millions of women and girls throughout the world forced by our savage democratic capitalist system to uncover and sell their vaginas 24/7 on TV, Internet, the press sold in all major bookstores on every street corner of our beautiful democratic capitals, or here in Tokyo where I’ve seen a vending machine, in a residential area, selling used panties worn by high school girls?

What do we do about all this?

Nothing.

What do we do with all those freedoms, rights, all that democracy, all those values that the West prides itself in, to make our world, or for that matter our rotting Western societies, a better place?

Nothing… nothing… nothing… nada.

The best we have come up with is to blame Islam, immigrants, Iran, China, North Korea ~ and that is what makes us ridiculous, so ridiculous that it’s painful.

Ridicule. Ridiculous. That’s the feeling I’ve had when saying hello, chatting, smiling, smoking with that Yankee who visited Irak and Afghanistan.

So here I am exchanging greetings with a criminal and working for a Zionist while at the same time being anti-American and pro-Palestinian. Why? Well, I guess I gotta eat. That’s one excuse.

Having to eat is one thing. But making someone starve so that one could eat is another. And my example is pretty much what the great Western civilization is about. This is pretty much how it’s done.

It is millions of daily actions like mine throughout the West, harmless at first glance, actions of accommodation, appeasement, cooperation with capitalism that grease the wheels of our genocidal capitalism. And as long as we continue like this, all we’ll ever be is... ridiculous by pretending otherwise.

All our values, our democracy, our freedoms are drenched in blood. All the comforts and material wealth enjoyed by the peoples in the West and here in Japan are owed to their acquiescence to their governments’ murder and plunder of the rest of our world.

And whatever is called the Left in the West, content with paper protests and playing riskless politics, is a joke.

My point is that there cannot be any accommodation, any compromise with our capitalist democracies.

They have to be sabotaged from within by us with actions not words.

 We have to derail our capitalist train that we are on.

We, on the left, gotta stop hiding behind our endless so-called organizing.

Acts of sabotage can be carried out by individuals.

We have to carry out daily little individual revolutions.

The other day my brother was telling me about this article by Slavoj Zizek in which he writes how Western intellectuals want a revolution, but not here, not in their countries. They’d rather have it in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela.

Our capitalist economies, our fake and murderous democracies must be crippled.  All most of us have been doing so far is greasing the wheels of our Western capitalism with our hypocrisy and with the sweat of millions of women, men and children throughout the world ~or we can continue to be ridiculous.

"In Iraq, children are looking towards
the night sky with fear, as though
there were no stars, only bombs in the cosmos.
And they are afraid of the earth because
they can count the cancers in their
hoods now, where once there were none."

On the brink of... by Suheir Hammad, Palestinian poet.