(HERALD) Make own bench instead of copying

Make own bench instead of copying
Saturday, 30 July 2011 23:06 Blogs
AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona Mahoso

The war of ideas in Zimbabwe is a war over values and the language which carries those values. It is a war between those who are happy to groan under the weight of countless “benchmarks” borrowed from the white empire on one hand and those who are trying to make and own their own African benches instead.

In between these groups there is a huge number of those caught in the crossfire, those who are undecided because the language used in the debate is not theirs and is therefore confusing and confused.

Our schools and universities are expected to play a strategic role in this struggle by accepting responsibility for intellectual courage, originality, innovation, discovery and truth, instead of continuing to function as traditional corridors for the channelling of brilliant, efficient and cheap “human resources” to the white empire.

This may all sound vague and abstract, but let me give one example.

A brilliant Zimbabwean fellow by the name of Blessing Miles-Tendi has just finished advanced studies at Oxford and Cambridge universities in the United Kingdom.

He did the right thing to take a deep interest in the struggle for and through soft power in Zimbabwe and researched and published a book whose title unfortunately had to be framed from the language and stand-point of the British obsession with Zimbabwe rather than from the point of view and interest of most Zimbabweans. So the book is entitled “Making History in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe: Politics, Intellectuals and the Media”.

Although the author’s main problem is the language of other people’s benchmarks, he succeeded nevertheless in exposing two key challenges facing Zimbabwe at the beginning of the 21st century: that the majority of Zimbabwe’s academics and intellectuals are mere ciphers groaning under the weight of borrowed “benchmarks” without a proper bench to sit on and without ever making or owning a single bench of their own; and that too many of these academics have been corrupted by those who pay for the adoption and propagation of the white empire’s benchmarks in Zimbabwe.

A benchmark is a standard, measure, yardstick or high point by which one’s own efforts, aspirations and plans may be assessed.

In most countries what happened to Zimbabwe’s academics and intellectuals at the beginning of the 21st century would have resulted in a national commission of inquiry into Higher Education, Academic Freedom and Intellectual Life.

Here is part of what Blessing Miles-Tendi found, for instance, on Page 62:
UZ Academic: Today I learned that a security guard at the government’s Reserve Bank earns a higher salary than me, a (University of Zimbabwe) lecturer. UZ intellectuals hold PhDs, are getting old, do not have a car or drive an old car, have lousy houses and have not accomplished much. Zimbabwean intellectuals are a downtrodden lot. What else can they do but sell out (for money)?

Interviewer: But you have stayed out of (such corruption) and managed to maintain your integrity.
UZ Academic: Who says I am not in it? I do consultancy work for (foreign) NGOs and I bend my analysis (and language) to please them. I tell NGOs what they want to hear. I tell them Mugabe is bad and there is a serious crisis (not caused by illegal sanctions but by Mugabe) and I say it loudly so they are satisfied. That way they will come again next time for my analysis and even bring me new clients. That is how I survive.

According to the author’s notes, this interview was conducted on July 23 2005.
To compound the tragedy of higher education revealed in that interview, the author had his own problems.
First he confused academics with intellectuals. Some academics may become intellectuals as well but not all academics are intellectuals.

Second, he created an unwarranted and unsustainable (binary) division between what he called nationalist public intellectuals and public intellectuals critical of power without saying whose power he was referring to.

Third, he then assumed somehow that those he labelled as public nationalist intellectuals or patriotic intellectuals were solely motivated by their desire to support the power of His Excellency President Robert Mugabe when in fact most of them emerged as intellectuals and established themselves in the realm of ideas and public debate in the 1970s, that is long before President Mugabe had any power to defend or any alleged rewards to offer the intellectuals.

The author also implied wrongly that the so-called public and patriotic intellectuals allegedly uncritical of power were also motivated by their dislike or hatred of the MDC formations, when in fact most of these intellectuals were critical of Moise Tshombe, Joseph Mobutu, Jonas Savimbi, Afonso Dhlakama, Gatsha Buthelezi, Abel Muzorewa, and other sellouts long before Zimbabwe’s independence and more than 20 years before the formation of the MDC in September 1999.

However, the author realised at the end of the research which became the book that those academics groaning under borrowed benchmarks from the British, the Europeans and the North Americans lacked conviction and were not convincing because they could easily be dismissed as ciphers for foreign forces and interests; they could be dismissed easily as unconvincing and derivative mouthpieces of the empire.
But those who had their own benches (instead of just benchmarks) to sit on, those who insisted on crafting their own benches instead of carrying someone else’s benchmarks, in fact won the debate on the Zimbabwe crisis.

The reason was that the latter group did not just read textbooks and texts produced by others. They read whole situations. They could read the world. And they were convinced of what they experienced and they were therefore convincing to many others.
Hazard: When Professors Become Ciphers

It is a hazard to the nation and to the individual academic or intellectual to borrow the empire’s benchmarks instead of crafting his or her own benches because a crumpling empire is an insecure centre of authority whose deteriorating state forces it to lie not just to its victims but to itself as well. Just as the UZ academic cited by Blessing-Miles Tendi illustrates, desperate people produce unreliable and dangerous research.

When the United States and the United Kingdom invaded Iraq in 2003, it was admitted that the intelligence systems of the empire were no longer capable of producing intelligence because their work was driven and contaminated by desperate politicians.
This is an important warning to all the collaborators with imperialism who are being paid to man or to woman the Anglo-Saxon empire’s conveyer belt of lies. Adrian Guelke in Terrorism and Global Disorder cites the case of one of George W. Bush’s aides interviewed by Ron Suskind in 2004.

The White House aide took literally the narcissistic belief by post-modernist theorists that reality is what one says and decides that it is the reality. Language is a mere instrument with no ethical rules and one is free to deploy it as one chooses without suffering any consequences. Language never fights back. What was important was to make decisions and use whatever language was necessary to define and justify them even after the fact.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based (or history-based) community”, which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality . . . That’s not the way the world works any more”, he continued.
“We are in an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We are history’s actors . . . and you (intellectuals) will be left, just to study what we do.”
In other words, if one acted even on the basis of lies, the lies no longer mattered because action had been taken. In fact the lies became as good as scientific truth and they became justifiable and morally good because, after all, they made it possible for action to be taken. Some call this delusional philosophy “solipsism”.

Since September 11 2001, the Western media (Rupert Murdoch’s empire included) have been telling the empire and its victims that terrorism was primarily a Third World and especially Moslem problem which was going to be ended by occupying Afghanistan and invading and occupying Iraq.
Once robust actions had been taken on the basis of that lie or distortion, the lie became the truth because it had led to action. That is why the news was supposed to be surprising about the Caucasian killer, Andres Behring Breivik, who bombed and killed 76-90 persons in Oslo on July 22 2011.

The imperialist conveyer belt of lies together with the Danish editor of Jyllands-Posten newspaper told the world through the global publication of so-called Danish anti-Islamic cartoons in February 2005 that terrorists were primarily non-Caucasian, Islamic and mostly outside Europe and America. But on July 28 2011 Zimbabweans woke up to the story that “Evidence confirms Norway killer has UK links”.
When Nato was bombing Yugoslavia in 1999, some school children in the US mass-murdered their teachers and schoolmates. Today, while Nato terrorists were bombing Libya, the Norwegian Andres Behring

Breivik mass-murdered almost 100 Norwegians. What are we saying? The Danish anti-Islamic cartoons were a lie. The Nato war on terror is a lie.
The pretexts used to rationalise the criminal war against Libya are a lie. The illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe are based on lies.
Beware of the many ways the empire lies

There is no room now to explain the many ways in which the empire and its ciphers lie. But I will start with some of the major ones here. I have already demonstrated that: the imperialist subverts and pollutes the very language that we share with him. The imperialist lies by saying big lies that lead to big actions become the truth when the actions create history. But we have seen some of the results of that “reality” or history in Norway on July 22 2011.

Another way in which lies are spread and sustained is the use of oxymorons such as economic sanctions or measures targeted at individual leaders of a country; such as humanitarian intervention or counter- insurgency intervention in another country whereby the local nationalist government becomes a bunch of “insurgents” while Nato and its sponsored stooges become the counter-insurgents enforcing the rule of law against the owners of the country.

According to Adrian Guelke again, “humanitarian intervention” is “an oxymoron insofar as it came to be used to justify the use of force (against Iraq) on a massive scale . . . ”
“On the face of it the concept is ambiguous (actually contradictory) since it is not evident from the words themselves that the term ‘humanitarian’ does not apply to the means employed rather than to the (alleged) ends being used to justify the intervention. Further, the fact that a state advances humanitarianism as its justification for violent intervention does not necessarily mean that this was its actual or sole motivation.”

The author concludes that the alleged nobility of the cause or intention is regarded as excusing the use of any and all means used.
What results is an argument which goes as follows: Since the ultimate objective of humanitarian intervention is to save lives, we have to accept the unarmed civilians who may get killed in the process as justifiable collateral damage, as the price to pay for achieving the humanitarian end.

This sentence uses several devices in addition to the oxymoron. It also uses agent deletion because it removes or refuses to reveal the actor. Who has determined that the ultimate objective is to save lives?
Is that person or country in the habit of intervening to save lives? The sentence also makes something that is particular or local appear to be universal. It uses false universalism to justify an individual crime by employing ultimate objective as if that is a globally agreed objective when it may be the objective of the US White House or the objective of Whitehall.

Back to Zimbabwe, the ultimate “benchmarker” for the MDC formations for the last 11 years has been Anglo-Saxon imperialism.
Therefore on July 24 2008, we find in The Financial Gazette under the column “National Report” an uncontested verbatim statement by Mr Morgan Tsvangirai entitled: “Morgan Tsvangirai speaks on MOU: The

World Stands Ready to Join us in Rebuilding our Nation”. The last paragraph of that statement brings to the interparty talks period the same hoax contained in the March 2005 MDC manifesto:
“The heart of the entire world is broken by what has happened to our country (because of illegal sanctions invited by the opposition), and your bravery is praised among all peoples everywhere. The world stands ready to join us in rebuilding our nation and restoring what has been lost, once our peace and freedom are re-established.”

That was Morgan Tsvangirai on July 24 2008, according to The Financial Gazette. Two months later, on September 25 2008, MDC-T chairman and Speaker of the Zimbabwe House of Assembly Honourable Lovemore Moyo repeated the same hoax, making it clear who in MDC-T thinking is meant by “the entire world” whose heart “is broken” for the sake of Zimbabwe and its people.

The Honourable Speaker attended the New Labour Party Congress in Manchester, UK, where he said:
“We look to our friends and comrades in the UK and around the (white Anglo-Saxon) world to help us rebuild our economy and institutions. We look forward to renewing links that have been broken (by the

liberation movement of Zimbabwe) and to being welcomed back into the (British) Commonwealth family.”
In other words, what the economic war has destroyed in 11 years can be rebuilt in months!

This is an article of faith in opposition ranks: The UK, the US and the EU first help their sponsored opposition in Zimbabwe by destroying the economy through illegal sanctions; the people mistake the genocide-like effects of those sanctions for manifestations of Zanu-PF mismanagement alone and therefore vote Zanu-PF out of office or remove it from power through violence; and the same UK, US and EU mobilise the entire North Atlantic to come and install the opposition as the new government of Zimbabwe and to launch the new economic miracle upon the ashes of the devastated Mugabe economy!

People who engage in this type of miracle-mongering should travel through the Mozambican countryside 18 years after the end of Renamo’s campaign to destroy and rebuild the economy of that country at he behest of apartheid and imperialism. There has been no such miracle recovery. What Renamo destroyed remains unconstructed to this day.-The Sunday Mail