The Big Lie Down Under was Re: Ethnomathematics

[Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Lou's wonderful post on Ethnomathematics has set me thinking or is it maybe
counting.  I thought I would sit through a News day and count the lies.  I
could not get beyond the headline in the Murdoch rag _The Australian_ - it
screamed _Last Chance for the UN_.  In a way this is true.  I reckon that
this crisis will destroy the UN, but how?  Not as the Australian would have
us believe because there is a remote chance that the Security Council will
vote against the USA's invasion of Iraq.   Rather the truth beneath the
Headline is that what the Australian is telling us is the exact opposite of
the truth. Blix, Annan and the other clever maneuverers of the UN have kept
their careers afloat by trying to keep ahead of the USA beast.  They throw
it crumbs and look the other way while US diplomats bribe and bully the
entire UN structure.

But the thugs in the Bush regime have no time now for the subtleties of UN
diplomacy. They will have their pound of flesh. I am reminded here of the
scene in The First Circle where the imprisoned scientists struggle to do a
voice analysis of the three suspects and identify who made the phone
call.  They talk at great length about wave patterns and then the KGB bloke
says - "Arrest all the suspects".  The scientists feel let down. Months of
painstaking research have been rubbished by a command from a thug.  What
has really happened however is that Stalinist thuggery has exposed their
equivocation and co-operation with State Terror.  Similarly Blix and
Bareidi go on about the distance a missile can be fired, while Bush and his
gang could not give a damn.  They bombed the missile sites this morning.

Truly the farcical nature of the UN tactics is there for all with even a
modicum of intelligence.  The UN inspectors are trying to disarm Iraq
before an invasion, and they will not give a guarantee that there will be
no invasion if the Iraqis do disarm.

I cannot see how the UN can emerge from all this without being exposed, as
Perry Anderson puts it, the branch office of US imperialism


Having failed to count the lies in the print media I tried my luck with the
TV bulletins.  I tuned in at 6.30 to SBS - the multiethnic public
broadcasting station watched by about 2% of Australians.  Generally SBS is
more liberal than the other public station, the ABC, and it certainly
easily out-liberalises the private stations.  I won't even talk about Cable.

So I sat there while SBS counted (more ethnomathemtics) the nations on the
Security Council and who was likely to vote with the leaders of the Free
World.  Good old Bulgaria, that bastion of democracy, is already voting for
the US invasion.  The British poodle is yelping out its imitations of the
Churchillian bull dog. The Brits will be there. What a wonderful nation.
Spain too will be there.  Franco lives is all I can say.

In its run down of how the others will vote the SBS commentary was that
they probably would vote for the invasion because of USA "political
influence" (sic) in their countries.

This arguably is a more subtle form of the Big Lie.  The Australian was
guilty of commisio falsi
but SBS perpetrated omisio veri.  USA strategy and tactics can hardly be
reduced to the phrase "political influence". Nothing less than the
forbidden word 'imperialism' covers what is happening to the world today.

So there you are I got as far as two lies and gave up. Might as well go
down to the sea again and try and count the plankton (or is that getting
easier?).    Mind you my mathematics was never up to much - 44% for Junior
Arithmetic was the highest I ever got, and that was way back in 1956. God
be with the days.

regards

Gary




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