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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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Posted: 26 Oct 2006 09:58 pm |
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Unlike most of those who affect to despise America and Americans, I have actually been to that incredible and in many ways wonderful country, and have travelled extensively within it, and I certainly don't despise America and Americans. They are, on the whole, very pleasant, friendly people. Just like most New Zealanders, most Australians, most Canadians, most Brits ... you get the picture.
But there does seem to be a touch of The Masque of the Red Death about America today - a sense that although the wonderful party is still in full swing there's a significant threat to this happiness, and it's now in the room, mingling with the revellers, spiking their drinks and poisoning the canapes.
What prompted these thoughts was a book by Dan Brown - he of The Da Vinci Code. The book concerned was Deception Point, whose plot is so ludicrous (actually, it starts by being ludicrous and then swiftly becomes much, much sillier) that a summary of it here may have you laughing your coffee out through your nose, so I will spare you the details. The writing is even worse than the creaky plot so why, I hear you cry, did I bother to read it?
The answer, with apologies to Sir Edmund Hillary, is "Because it was there". The other day I sent and received for the first time a text message on a cellphone. (It was a rude message about cellphones and the answer which came back entirely agreed with me, which was gratifying except that as the author of the reply is courting my teenage daughter it is possible that his response was calculated to please.) I am also contemplating other ventures into the unknown. I have never entered a nightclub. I have yet to skateboard, ski (land or water), bungy jump, hang glide, parasail, deep sea dive, climb a mountain or abseil. Many adventures await me.
So I decided to read a Dan Brown book. And Deception Point was certainly interesting, despite the considerable limitations already referred to. What made it particularly fascinating, however, is best exemplified by this extract:
"Rachel sensed [that] her boss was contemplating [ie thinking about] the number of people who might have access to a small kill force [ie group of people who would be prepared to kill literally anyone if told to do so]. Certainly, the President had access. Probably Marjorie Tench too, as senior adviser [to the President]. Quite possibly NASA administrator [ie NASA head] Lawrence Ekstrom with his ties to the Pentagon. Unfortunately, as Rachel considered the myriad of possibilities, she realised [that] the controlling force behind the attack could have been almost anyone with high-level political clout and the right connections."
There are 585 pages in Deception Point, and it's full of stuff like this. Now try, if you will, to imagine a book written about New Zealand in which it is alleged that a team of Government killers, at the command of "virtually anyone with high-level political clout and the right connections," has:
* thrown a man, his dog-sled and the dogs out of a helicopter
* murdered another man because he saw some plankton in a pond
* murdered a woman by ramming her mouth full of snow and forcing her to asphyxiate ("the White Death")
* assassinated the head of the Prime Minister's Department by firing a rocket into his car in central Wellington
* attacked and sunk a large civilian vessel a few miles off the coast, killing two more people in the process
* and failed in several attempts to kill other people (who survive against incredible odds and in extraordinary ways only because if they died the story would be brought to an abrupt end)
If you are having difficulty imagining that such a book set in New Zealand rather than America would manage to find a publisher, please ask yourself why this is so.
I suggest that there are two reasons why such a plot would ensure that the manuscript was returned to the budding novelist with the suggestion that he/she take an aspirin and a strong laxative and lie down in a darkened room for a few days:
* The first is that much of the technology involved is far beyond anything which is currently at the disposal of the New Zealand Government. I think. And I hope.
* The second reason is however much more fundamental. It is that there is probably not a single person anywhere in New Zealand who, if ordered to do all or indeed any of the things described above, would be prepared to do commit such actions.
In short, I can't see a New Zealander murdering someone in cold blood because a Government agency told him to do so. At least, given that John Barlow is still in gaol, I can't see anyone who is currently at liberty agreeing to such an extraordinary suggestion.
Such constraint is not universal, however, and nor is it found in all "civilised" countries. For example:
* The United States of America is a civilised country, and yet it dispossessed the native peoples of Hawaii, has invaded many non-belligerent countries, has perpetrated Abu Ghraib, has committed countless other horrors - and all in the name of freedom. (So powerful is the cradle-to-grave conditioning of Americans that virtually any citizen of that country alive today who read the preceding sentence would not be able to comprehend it. That this should be so is may seem to be even more incredible than a Dan Brown plot, but there it is. The difference between a Muslim fanatic and an American patriot is narrower than it may at first appear to be.)
*The United Kingdom is a civilised country, and yet it sought to suppress terrorism and dissent in Northern Ireland with techniques which were every bit as barbarous as those of the IRA.
* France is a country which its own citizens and many others besides believe - with some justification - to be the most civilised on the planet (the wine! the food! the clothes! the preening leftwing pedagogues!). And yet in 1985 the French Government was prepared to send its forces to New Zealand - an ally in two wars - to bomb a Greenpeace vessel in Auckland Harbour.
* Israel is a country founded on an ancient and great religion and culture and yet the Israeli Government has prosecuted a campaign of reciprocal terror against its Arab enemies whose ferocity matches, if not exceeds, theirs. And it has forged the passports of New Zealand, a country which has (rightly) been an ally of Israel in every forum since 1948.
And so on. The question which repeatedly arose in my mind while reading Deception Point was this: although this is a work of fiction, the behaviour depicted must in the minds of American readers be at least conceivable, else this book would not have been published. After all, if the behaviour depicted is palpably ludicrous - if it could not possibly be true that the President and many others can and do order the commission of cold-blodded murder - people will laugh at the book (as I all too frequently did) rather than be enthralled by it. And it will be tossed aside.
So what are the facts here? Are there really Government employees in America who will kill people - people unknown to them, selected more or less at random - if ordered to do so?
The answer, quite obviously, is yes.
To give a very simple example, a man was killed by lethal injection somewhere in the US yesterday. The Government official who administered the injection did not know the victim. He was told to kill him, and he did so. Ask yourself this: how long a step is it from capital punishment to officially sanctioned murder? In my view, it is but a short step.
It's all very odd, is it not? The world where upfel ist upfel - orders are orders - is one which most of us thought had been left behind in the rubble of Berlin in May 1945. But it seems not.
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 26 Nov 2006 11:30 pm |
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I was asking you in the entry above to try to imagine an everyday scene in modern America - the Government orders a "kill team" to annihilate numbers of superfluous citizens - translated to New Zealand.
The result, for me at least, was laughably fantastic. Whatever may be possible in America - and if a president of the United States can order the bombing of a neutral country without formal authority of any kind, as Nixon did, it would seem that anything really is possible there - the murder of one's opponents doesn't seem to fit with what it means to be a New Zealander, and to live in New Zealand.
Not yet, anyway.
But let's try a different scenario.
The scene is a nightclub in downtown Auckland. It's 4 o'clock on a Sunday morning and a bachelor party following a wedding on the Saturday is just ending.
As guests leave the nightclub armed police arrive. They start shooting at a car containing the groom and other guests.
More than 50 shots are fired, 21 of which hit the car. One officer alone fires 31 shots, emptying two magazines. (According to news reports, "The gunfire also hit nearby homes and a train station, though no residents were injured".)
As a result:
* The groom is killed.
* The front seat passenger is shot eleven - count them: eleven - times but, miraculously, survives (although he is in a critical condition, and may be dead by the time you read this).
* The back seat passenger is shot three times. He is described as being in "stable" condition.
The three men killed or injured by the Police are unarmed. None of the other 250 or so guests are armed. The only people on the scene who are armed are ... the police.
Of course you can't imagine this happening in Auckland. The suggestion that it might happen there, or anywhere else in New Zealand, is self-evidently ridiculous.
But, as a matter of fact, you don't have to strive to imagine it happening in America, because that's where the incidents I've just described did happen - in New York, on Sunday morning of the weekend just past. The only thing of any moment which I have omitted to mention from my account is the fact that one of the policemen involved was admitted to hospital. With high blood pressure.
After all that excitement I'm not surprised.
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 27 Nov 2006 04:51 am |
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Not a mention of this story on our radio news bulletins tonight. I wonder what kind of treatment it will get in the papers tomorrow.
Landlside in China kills 200.
Hundreds die in race riots in India.
Busload of tourists kidnapped in South Africa.
Police shoot three unarmed black men in America.
I guess these are all dog bites man stories these days.
Incidentally, according to CNN:
In 1999, NYPD officers killed Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant who was shot 19 times in the entry to his apartment building. The four officers in that case were acquitted of criminal charges.
In 2003, Ousmane Zongo, 43, a native of the western African country of Burkina Faso, was killed during a police raid on a warehouse where he repaired art and musical instruments. Zongo was shot four times, twice in the back.
Both Diallo and Zongo were black, it hardly needs be said.
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David Harcourt
Administrator
| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
| Location: | |
| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 1 Dec 2006 02:24 am |
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No press reports of any significance until Wednesday, 29 November, when this (below) appeared in the Dominion-Post.
I suppose it's just another story of just another person being killed in the glorious United States and America (cf. Borat), but it impressed me at the time...
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