By: Nasrin Parvaz

Elected Guards

It’s Saturday 29^th May 2004, I’m reading a book by Michel Foucault, called: ‘Discipline and Punish, The birth of the prison.’ It is a book about the history of torture, because prison and discipline and punishment are torture. In page 8 he says, ‘By the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the gloomy festival of punishment was dying out, though here and there it flickered momentarily into life.’ In page 32 he talks about ‘The spectacle of the scaffold’ and that, ‘Public torture and execution was by no means the most frequent form of punishment.’

The book is in my hand; to have a quick break, I turn the TV on, and go to BBC World. The scene on TV is very similar to what I was reading in Foucault’s book. Isn’t it strange? It seems that time has taken me back to medieval times. TV shows Abu Ghraib prison and how American military forces tortured Iraqi prisoners. A woman from the American military force is pulling a man prisoner with leash round his neck. She is enjoying herself and it is not difficult to imagine the humiliation that the prisoner is experiencing. Only a racist may not become angry by seeing the scene. It shows Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba that prisoners are shackled.

I’m thinking about the scene on TV and if it is the past that repeats or we never passed that past? Perhaps we are living in the same history that Foucault is talking about. However it is for centuries that they haven’t take place in the streets and squares of Western countries. They commit the same crime which were committing against their people in the past, against the people of other countries now. People in the West don’t let their governments inflict such cruelty on them, so they do it to other people. Now it is the Western governments’ treatment of the people all over the world. They spread misery in the name of liberty and some other euphemism such as war with terrorism. In this way they spread state terrorism and provide a good situation for the recruiting of Moslem terrorism.

The scene of people shackled being taken through European streets to the hanging places of centuries ago gave place to the same scene in other countries by the ‘civilized’ Western governments. Centuries ago it was happening in the name of god, king or property. Now it is happening in the name of liberty and war against terrorism. With their medieval treatment of people all over the world they make Moslem terrorists. Both of them have an excuse of fighting each other, while killing innocent people. In between people are bombed, starved, become homeless and are not welcome anywhere as immigrants.

Those who make the international laws are the same people who do these atrocities, so they can act outside their conventions. They are acting as prison warden and guards of the world. They guard people, and pictures of the torture they inflict upon people count for nothing. No matter what they do, or how they torture people, they always have their excuses; they have the right to do what they like to do; they are always right, because they are elected to be so, to do so. News or pictures of their ‘civilized’ treatment of people in Iraq, Afghanistan and all over the world or in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo camp in Cuba do not change the politics of the world. Because they are the politics makers of the world and they want it in this way and call it ‘new world order’, they are guards and politicians at the same time. They have chained the world and people are blindfolded, so they don’t see the whole scene.

Isn’t it funny that people by choosing their guards and by electing them give them power to kill them or send them to kill other people? By this way of electing murderers people give them all their power and make themselves powerless; some show their anger but again comes another person who promises that he/she will not be such a murderer and become elected to ruin the world! Why don’t people keep their power for themselves and decide for themselves? No one is happy, but prison seems big and guards are everywhere to make sure no one acts differently from a captive citizen. However for some time now many people do not believe their version of globalization or liberation, and demonstrate their anger. Perhaps the day will come when these people, hand in hand, shake the core structure of the watchtower and collapse the guards’ safe house. Then people may restore the true meaning of the words to them, and then liberty would not mean killing and imprisonment!