For Deadmeat, The Prospects Are Bleak! [Archives:2002/29/Focus]

COMMON SENSE
By Hassan Al-Haifi
In looking at the Yemeni scene and at the Arab World at large, the observer is convinced that we have become the victims of our own despair. Of course, we cannot simply say that all our problems are the direct cause of the rulers in this seemingly helpless Arab Nation, although they undoubtedly will be accountable to God for much of the misery and unfavorable climate in which we live from the Atlantic to the Gulf. However, our rulers are free to do what they do, for the simple reason that we are the ones who have either approved their placement at the helms, or out of fear, or out of simple apathy, we have turned a blind eye to the tyranny that dominates us, awaiting Gods relief from such unholy governance. It is a pathetic climate indeed, when a nation of some 250 million souls are unable to even find the mechanisms by which to express their feeling of contempt for the sterility of their governments, which have excelled only in the art of repressing their people and bleeding their resources. Even these resources have ceased to work for the welfare and prosperity of its rightful owners. Yes, the people of the Middle East have been turned into deadmeat that is regarded even by the scavengers that churn it up as unsuitable for its palate!
From the Atlantic to the Gulf, we have become a nation of helpless lambs, subject to the worse kind of repression, which diligently works night and day to kill any spirit of vitality that might arise to reenergize its people to become productive in the economic sense and dynamic in the political sense. Kings and presidents carry on in this region, without the slightest consideration for the feelings and aspirations of their constituents. It almost seems like these regimes have been given a God-given mandate to tread on anything that might stand in the way of their ugly regimes. These regimes regard the public as a flock of sheep that can easily be shepherded to carry out their whims or simply be sent to the slaughterhouses, if this public tries to even express its lack of satisfaction of the state of affairs in the land.
Even those regimes that rose on the pretext of introducing progress and welfare for their people have turned the clock of time back by centuries, and made the repressive regimes they overthrew appear more desirable than their revolutionary replacements. Even feudal times, when authority was mandated by sheer power were probably more merciful on the constituencies. At least they did not have the psychological and technical tools of repression that destroy human dignity, which are readily available to the tyrants of our times.
There are even those in this once lively region, who actually wish for us and the rest of the world actually believe that they have adopted democratic principles, when in fact they have turned the mechanisms of democratic practice to additional tools by which they turn their constituencies into subjects, who are manipulated as they wish to give counterfeit legitimacy to the mandate for such oppression. It is an ugly form of tyranny, when the will of the public can be so easily oriented, or projected to reflect that we actually approve of all the havoc and misgovernance that we are witnessing night and day. This is aside to all the unholy corruption that has prevailed freely in our midst, seeming as if it was an essential element of our lives! We should not forget that even the laws and regulations that are supposed to organize our lives into seemingly workable institutionalized frameworks, have become actual mechanisms for the evil and the criminal to unleash their own selfish drives without fear of accountability or even public censure. To even demand the latter, would be treated as being more criminal than the actual crimes that one may wish to expose on a large scale. It is amazing how these privileged criminals have found comfortable niches in the regimes that prevail in the region, even among those that claim to be the guardians of our divine inspirations and holy grounds.
One is distraught by all that one sees on the ground at home and elsewhere in the region. The Arab and Islamic Worlds are now truly in a bottomless pit that will either collapse into oblivion or explode uncontrollably. In both cases the future is certain to be unpredictable and unhealthy for both the governed and the ones holding the helms. The fact of the matter remains that a nation that has no control over its destiny is no more than deadmeat, no matter what resources it possesses, physically and aesthetically.

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