OCHIENG: You gain nothing by severing links with the world

 

In Summary
Like the “parries” of Clifford Simak’s science fiction, one has even dispensed with legs altogether and taken wholly to levitation.

During the Bush dynasty, the Brother never even tried to conceal its readiness to hurl destructive weapons to wrest anything from the world.

Even subjectively, you will lose everything when you cut the umbilical cord that links you to the world, including even the Big Brotherly “aid” that maintains you in power.

By PHILIP OCHIENG
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Both George Orwell (in Animal Farm) and Kenneth Grahame (in The Wind in the Willows) are fictional allegories of civilised mankind’s horrendous situation today. But method is the only thing that distinguishes them from Desmond Morris, the zoologist whose book The Human Zoo is a direct scientific commentary on it.

All three are otherwise inspired by the yawning inequalities and horrifying prejudices and injustices that govern the human household – national and international.

They all bring out one particularly poignant dilemma. It is that, at present, there is just no escape from that human “farm”, “zoo” or field of “willows”.

That is the answer to those who carp by mail that, in my last two contributions here, I contradicted myself by deprecating the hegemonic colonially created world justice system and yet, at the same time, urging Kenya never to even think of removing itself from that same world.

On that farm, countries like Kenya remain two-legged and even four-legged. But remember that a handful of countries now need only one leg each.

Like the “parries” of Clifford Simak’s science fiction, one has even dispensed with legs altogether and taken wholly to levitation.

Indeed, it no longer needs to move at all because it has devised artificial eyes which put in the shade even the “All-Seeing Eye” of Horus, the son-god of the ancient Nilotes.

Without budging afoot, it can now see every nook and cranny of your bedroom no matter where you may hide in self-isolation.

Thus our earth has become so tiny that Orwell already knew that Big Brother was watching you and will not hesitate to strike fatally hard should you make any step he might interpret as a threat to his strategic interests.

Thus – like the monastery – political self-isolation from the world is no longer a choice.

That is why our MPs are so laughable when they liken Kenya to the United States in its refusal to sign the Rome Statute.

For the US has no use for that statute. Being the Big Brother, it is the greatest perpetrator of human rights abuse the world over and, therefore, the most important potential target of Rome.

DEMOCRACY

Moreover, where the gospel of “democracy” cuts no ice, the US has what it takes – the dollar and nukes – to dictate whatever it needs worldwide.

Ever since the downfall of Soviet “communism”, the US can consistently demand certain “human rights” from Kenya’s leaders because Kenya has no strategic commodity.

But the US dare not demand the same rights from Saudi Arabia and Israel because the (Saudi) oil remains our era’s most strategic industrial commodity and, as kith-and-kin, Israel is Big Brother’s Trojan horse in the oil-producing world.

During the Bush dynasty, the Brother never even tried to conceal its readiness to hurl destructive weapons to wrest anything from the world.

Yet what all this shows is merely that the earth is the only place anybody can do so. It shows that, objectively, no one can really isolate himself from such a world.

Now, of course, there looms the possibility of Outer Space. But I do not think that the present generation of mankind can as yet aspire realistically to any “pie in the sky”.

The point, however, is that, even when we get there, our straitjacket of upbringing and education will ensure that we carry with us – like so much flotsam and jetsam – all our pinheaded prejudices and mean-spiritedness of the clan, tribe, nation, race, religion, sect and gender.

Even subjectively, you will lose everything when you cut the umbilical cord that links you to the world, including even the Big Brotherly “aid” that maintains you in power.

Remove yourself from such facilities of the “comity nations” as diplomacy, trade and courts, and you will have lost every right to participate in and try to influence them in your favour.