IT is wholly appropriate that Sir Vidia Naipaul should have been awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Sir Vidia, a most eloquent and gifted writer, has been a fountain of joy for those who believe that the 'end of history' has sanctified capitalism and the Mid-Atlantic way of life.

Naipaul has been at pains for four decades, to explain away the 'White Man's Burden'. He has made it his mission to explain to the Anglo-Saxon world the painful deficiencies of the lesser breeds, so granting absolution to those who may have felt guilt about mistreating the masses of humanity without the law.

My only meeting with Naipaul was 42 years ago, around the time of Jamaica's independence, when he was writing The Middle Passage. I helped shepherd him round Kingston and, unwisely, as it turned out, was responsible for inviting him to a party at a house in Trafalgar Park. There, a furious argument broke out between two of my friends, Parboosingh, the painter and Basil Keane the dentist. This row was later immortalised in The Middle Passage as one example of the 'Congolese behaviour' Naipaul found so acutely distressing.

The use of the term 'Congolese behaviour' was a giveaway. It was not only a deliberate insult to Jamaicans but to the Congolese, whose prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, had recently been murdered by the Belgians on behalf of the Americans. It was the kind of express malice which is Naipaul's signature in his dealings with his ex-compatriots in the post-colonial world.

Naipaul is, as far as I am concerned, a lifeless robot with a second-hand soul.

Anthrax and the Post Office

In the journalistic coverage of the War on Terrorism, I noticed some peculiarities:

* The determination to keep Iraq in the gunsights, though there seems to be no credible evidence of its involvement;

* The refusal to follow the story of the investigation into suspicious financial activity immediately before the September 11 atrocity;

* The refusal to question the use of cluster bombs - an indiscriminate weapon - by the US;

* An apparent reluctance to bring home-grown terrorists into the anthrax terror picture.

All of a sudden, the anthrax scare proves to have teeth. Three people have now died, two of them postal workers from a mail sorting office at Brentwood, in North East Washington, DC. Most postal employees in metropolitan America are black. The postal workers union is extremely upset that they didn't get the same kind of treatment and attention afforded the people who worked for the Congress buildings which were closed down as soon as anthrax was found. The authorities traced the mail back to the sorting office which delivers to Congress, but didn't test the next facility up the line, the Brentwood mail sorting centre.

"They closed the House building down while we were in there inhaling it," said Abraham Odom of Oxon Hill, Md, who sorts small packages at the Brentwood facility. "That's not right. That's not fair. This stuff is supposed to be deadly."

The postal service doesn't agree that it was at fault:

Greg Frey, a spokesman for the postal service, said the matter needed to be "put in perspective."

That perspective, Mr Frey said, is that more postal workers die every year from influenza than from anthrax.' (NYT)

The converts

The consensus of world opinion seems to be that the September 11 terrorists were connected to Osama bin Laden if not directly under his control. Most important, it seems, they were Muslim.

One is therefore taken aback by the revelation in the New York Times - "Islam Attracts Converts by the Thousands, Drawn Before and After Attacks".

"With some 6 million adherents in the United States, Islam is said to be the nation's fastest-growing religion, fueled by immigration, high birth rates and widespread conversion.

One expert estimates that 25,000 people a year become Muslims in this country; some clerics say they have seen conversion rates quadruple since Sept.11. [My italics]

...: The vast majority of converts are African-Americans, who make up about a third of Muslims in the United States. Thousands find Allah while in jail or in recovery from drug or alcohol addiction. Less familiar are the lapsed Catholics and lost Jews, often highly educated professionals, who come to the mosque".

The NYT doesn't really try to analyse the reasons for the increase in conversions after September 11. It seems to me they need to, because it must be a symptom of something wrong in the Protestant Christian, Anglo-centric middle class American way of life. If Islam and its adherents are the enemy, what exactly is happening within the body politic of the United States?

Bin Laden's aims

A fatwah - call to holy war - was issued in 1998 by bin Laden and the leaders of Islamic groups in Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It gave three reasons for a holy war against "Crusaders and Jews".

First, was the American '"occupation" of Islamic holy Lands In (Saudi) Arabia, "plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbours, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighbouring Muslim peoples. "Second, it accuses the Americans of continuing aggression against the Iraqi people, despite having killed more than a million of them; of planning to annihilate the Iraqis and to humiliate their Muslim neighbours for religious and economic reasons. The third reason is the US support of Israel designed, according to the fatwah, "to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there." All of this, according to the fatwah, is to destabilise Islamic states, make them into paper 'statelets' - impotent servants of American imperialism.

Strong stuff. It becomes even more ominous when you read on to realise that this fatwah claims to be a divinely inspired message which is said to be the duty of all Muslims to obey.

Straw men and 'failed states'

Britain's new Foreign Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, has been delivering himself of some thoughts on the future of Afghanistan and other entities which he calls "failed states".

" ...the problem of the 21st century may be states with too little power.

After the murder of thousands of people in the heart of Manhattan, no one can doubt that the primary threat to our security is now posed by groups acting formally outside states, or from places where no state functions."

After setting out an agenda for the rebuilding of Afghanistan - the UN will, of course, be the garbageman for the Atlantic Alliance - Mr Straw delivers himself of observations on the fecklessness of states and the poverty of nations:

"Terrorists are strongest where states are weakest. Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network find safe havens in places - not just Afghanistan - where conflict, poverty, ethnic and racial tensions, exploitation, corruption, poor governance, malign interference from outside or just plain neglect have brought about the collapse of responsible government and civil society."

Mr Straw, speaking to the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London last Monday, is totally unconscious that he is describing the world that most of humanity inhabits, and that the critical interference from outside comes from institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and the armies, navies and secret services of states like his own.

It was a British Labour government which, 48 years ago, disrupted the government of British Guiana, crucially exploding the racial compact made so carefully by Cheddi Jagan. Of course, Jagan was a Communist, and Communists, like bin Laden, were then out to rule the world.

Mr Straw should ask himself what forces have pauperised states like Argentina and Brazil, destabilised democracies such as Chile, attempted to starve Cuba into submission when terrorism and subversion didn't work and gave anthrax spores to Iraq for use against Iran.

The destruction of the Haitian, Somali and Liberian states, the subversion of the Congo, Angola, Nigeria and Mozambique, to name a few, were all accomplished in the same way, by the same operators, using the same methods. The tribal wars began after independence, not because of independence, but because of the diamonds, uranium, oil, cobalt and other riches which are essential to the western way of life. Now that oil is about to run out, except in what was formerly Soviet Central Asia, steps are to be taken to make strategic pipeline crossings, like Afghanistan, what Mr bin Laden calls "paper statelets" - safe for democracy.

Mr Bush did not surprise me when he used that dangerous buzzword "crusade" in his description of US reaction to September 11. But I thought that Jack Straw and Tony Blair were intelligent enough to avoid giving hostages to fortune - or to Bin Laden.

It appears that I was wrong. I do apologise - or perhaps, Mr Naipaul will apologise on my behalf ...(JOKE !!!)

Purely incidentally, this week saw two important anniversaries:

Thursday was the 39th official anniversary of the US blockade on Cuba. It was also the 36th anniversary of Mr Seaga's celebrated outburst when he threatened to attack his Jamaican enemies - "It will be fire with fire, blood with blood and thunder with thunder." The words were Paul Bogle's, from 1865. Bogle's speech, unlike Mr Seaga's, ended with the words: "War is at my black skin".

Copyright 2001 John Maxwell

maxinf@cwjamaica.com

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