On the night of June 29, an African singer – paladin of anti-oppression, resistance music – a political activist, prominent voice of a local ethnic group which counts a considerable population of 25 million people, was shot dead in the Capital.
According to local media, investigations, arrests started immediately but so did nights and days of riots, destruction of property in the Capital and the region of origin of the singer. Hotels, restaurants, companies were systematically ravaged in the name of a blind ethnic and investment cleansing in the attempt to obliterate, overnight, successful entrepreneurial
achievements of other ethnicities.
The logic of blind anger.
On the morning of 30 June, the Capital was rocked by three explosions while many of the nation’s streets were filled with smoke and the accompanying soundtrack of operating machine guns. The usual way for police to disperse crowds when everyone revolts against everyone else.
Small shops closed. So did hotels, bars, clubs, flower stands, barbers, beauty salons and offices.
Public transportation ran as a ghost of itself. Time and people froze. Statues of past Emperors were beheaded.
Neighbourhoods quickly displayed batons, cleavers, stones. Citizens coordinated patrols; those who could afford the prohibitive cost, bought a gun with the excuse of protecting children.
The logic of force majeur self-defense.
Wounded people were rushed to hospitals carried on the shoulders of brave volunteers.
The very same morning, internet was shut down to prevent further chaos, violent speech, to avert the worsening of events.
The logic of a sharpened state of emergency (already declared to avoid spread of Covid-19).
The country theatre of violence remained in a double lock-down with no access to internet for over 14 days.
Human rights organizations expressed concern (don’t they always) calling for the leadership to immediately reinstall access to internet and blaming the very same government for the heinous murder of scores of civilians. Locally, the people continued to blame the police for not having protected civilians against ‘hooligans’.
On the domestic front, death toll figures were said to be released – if ever – in due course, with no rush.
The logic and timing of body count, especially in developing countries.
Foreign media barely covered the event on the first two days.
Had a European country been isolated for over two weeks from the world, with a death toll running in (at least) 250 people, the headlines would have been incessant, with the systematic bombardment of news and frantic analyses from an abundance of experts.
Had it happened in the Middle East, an intervention to restore democracy would have been immediately, unofficially and secretively considered (the unofficial boots on the ground). With the inevitable, despicable rise in arms sales.
Still, there would have been media coverage.
When it comes to Africa, there are few, foreign reliable experts. Their voices, in this case, were suspiciously silent.
What is most striking, though, is that journalists from within the very same continent were not given the space to explain, analyse, report, to correspond.
Status quo: hundreds of families spent months mourning loved ones in a country torn apart, burnt, ravaged by, what the local government later claimed was a sparkle generated by a separatist group.
In the year of Black Lives Matter, a conservative figure of 250 black, African people were slaughtered in the streets of a nation purposely not named as it would make no difference.
Over a hundred million of others were denied access to the outside world, proper information and media coverage.
The black lives of hundreds slain have not been deemed to be relevant enough, worthy, to international newsrooms: if Black Lives Matter on social media in a rare, overdue momentum, it is not so in the streets of an African country and in the offices of media establishments.
Indisputably, the logic of two weights and two measures.
photo: bruno costa, creative commons
the talking of the soul 
“LOGIC”……. Logic? The writer sums it up in a nutshell.
But I’ll respond with my version of “Logic”:
All our questions, trials and errors originate from the existence of “Life”.
Without Life, on this Planet at least since no one can in all honesty proclaim the existence and the order of such in any other place in the Universe, there would be no problems, the Universe goes ’round and ’round, at its own pace, there exists no concern what goes on in any part thereof. The Universe is Matter, Matter Does Not Think.
We need to learn to relate to Life on Planet Earth…… Nowhere else. For this is where we are having an infinite amount of serious, deadly problems. Be concerned about resolving those problems as they exist TODAY, their creators have long gone, they’re dead, buried, dissolved into Matter as all that dies does. We’re not concerned solving our problems with dead people, we’re concerned about those left with the legacy of exerting their corrupted power over us. “Us” is the people who live today, in the vices of the mind wrenched authoritarians who don’t give a damn about “Us the People”, nor any other form of Life which this Earth has inherited by some sheer Universal Electromagnetic or other but nonetheless miraculous phenomenon.
Let’s not carry on seeking answers elsewhere but within ourselves and given our lot as a human race on Planet Earth, let no one stand above another but face the truth individually and collectively, and fix the problems individually and collectively. We are not indebted to our forefathers for leaving us a Fail State Planet Earth, nor are we indebted to those who continue to chain us to their imposition of debts – let crime pay for its own crimes and impose its due penalties on itself, in accordance with its own judgement, and its laws imposed on its illegally under duress of fear enslaved population.
The simple rules are to recognise both our individual and collective failure as a Planet Earth species. The writer of “Somewhere in Africa” has handed it to us in plain truth language. The ball is in everyone’s court, not just a handful of concerned people. Life must be considered for what it is: “An ephemeral moment in an infinite ocean of inexplicable presence for which there exists no reason, and no purpose”.
Life is an accidental reaction to Universal Activity, activity with no kindness, no conscience, no emotions, no responsibility. We, the human species continue to live under a vast set of rules said to be handed us by one non existent creator or another, none more but one or more fictional characters created in our minds for the evil pleasure of those insisting to rule over us. There is no God, there is no Satan.
Both good and evil are present in the conditioned human mind. But we have all been conditioned to accept crime and corruption as a prerequisite to Life. The “systems” imposed on us are not only unmanageable, they are downright criminal. Both the individual and the collective will have to rewrite the rules if a better world for all is ever to be seen. Only then will the word “Logic” find its place in the human vocabulary. As it stands to this day, December 10, 2020 AD, the word “Logic” is none more but a recipe for debate resulting in conflict, resulting in war, crime, corruption and the suffering of the entire Planet Earth human, animal and ecosystem species.
https://www.worldpeaceembassy.com has 50 eye opening pages on more than necessary, but best recommended clean bill of health for a polluted degenerative world is the Music Section: https://www.worldpeaceembassy.com/music.html
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Spot on, Bob.
More so on a day like today: Universal Human Rights Day. If that has ever had any meaning.
Rules and anniversaries and commemorative days serve only one purpose: to fill the gaps in the calendar.
We both know – along with many others, thankfully – that situation will not change overnight. It will take centuries. Our global conscience has reached low levels throughout history, this is one.
Just one out of a long series. Just one prior to many next ones.
The rotten logic behind the happenings in Somewhere, in Africa is that we accept the illogic, barbarism, bloodshed and uncertainty as ‘rule of order’. Order create by us. Not by nature or good heart.
We do not question any longer. We proceed in silence. We silence those we deem uncomfortable. We turn our head. We move on going backwards.
My cosmic pessimism has reached its lowest, I guess.
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You’ve summed it up neatly. “Human Rights”, an empty expression, sterile words like the supermarket advertisements painting their wares in the light of illusionary dishonesty rather than the truthful reality. Your cosmic pessimism stands against all those whose optimism is a staged barrier through which the truth however known, does not materialise into visible reality. The human world as a whole, is a lie, and a self defeating lie at that, a self imposed dilemma since preferred above truth.
I was unaware of “Human Rights” Day. I don’t use a radio, don’t buy news rags, don’t have a TV, and I have deleted myself off my news source – Facebook – ?????? a few months ago since it was a mission impossible to find anything newsworthy among the Mount Everest of ignorance, vindictiveness, egocentricity, and expertise on everything except knowledge – that is aside from the blunt refusal of the 99% bulk of its materialist/techno/rags fashioned society users to stand united for World Peace.
We’ve landed in the critical era of apparent unstoppable “technology” – it’s either full on into becoming a star wars robot society or technology with all its flaws and fakery will crash to dust after which by some chance people, if any left, may come to their human senses and start living according to their moral conscience and responsibility as global citizens e.g. not run this Earth and all that lives to death by means of their ill fated “expertise” but of concern for all, in the order of priority e.g. ecosystem, wildlife, domestic animals, humans.
As per technology example, on clicking “Like” on your comment a drop down message required my email address, upon meeting that request it said: “This email address does not exist” – though it does and has done so for 22 years. Let’s not mention automatic spelling correction – if you don’t proof read what you wrote before sending it off, the recipient receives an entire different content. But, we have AI (I is a capitol i, not a lower case L), it know us better than we know ourselves (??????) but let’s be thankful that someone, or something, does all our thinking for us in every conceivable way, since our own capacity to do so has been demolished beyond retrieve. Let’s be thankful for robotic mass production of motor cars, computers, home entertainment “centres”, mobile phones, ATMs, fashionable rags, “food” and fake nutrition supplements.
All I can say is: “Here’s to my 80 years as a Planet Earth UniverseCity graduate with no credentials to match the intelligence of this 21st century Earthlings society. I’ll sing it out till my unavoidable last breath, but I will have no quarrels leaving, quietly, through the back door, when the time comes”.
Cheers and well wishes to the few still living alive.
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At times I laughed, at times I felt utterly sad: your message is what we have been saying for the past 10 years or so, since we met.
Since nothing changed. Since you called me in one of the most unfortunate moments of history, since… since…since…
All this ‘intelligence’ is virtual, Bob. No feelings attached. Sterile. Detached from reality.
Artificial intelligence does not bring food on the table the same way it cannot coordinate what they make us believe can be ‘intelligent bombs’; artificial intelligence is an ego bursting beast eating its tail.
Your 80 years on the planet have made the lives of many much better. You know who we are.
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