OdiyaTalks: As the King, so Goes the Country

Friday, April 29, 2011

As the King, so Goes the Country

• Despotic governments do not recognize the precious human components of the state, seeing its citizens only as faceless, mindless—and helpless—mass to be manipulated at will. It is as though people were incidental to a nation rather than its life-blood.
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...Democracy, like liberty, justice and other social and political rights, is not “given,” it is earned through courage, resolution and sacrifice.

--Ang San Suu Kyi, Burma 's Opposition Leader

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Someone once said: As the king, so goes the country. This means that the resonant attitudes and actions of the leader are picked up by his people and spread far and wide.

So, as one watches some of the images below, it is not beyond reason to surmize they are manifestations of the deep-seated Uganda character that has been spawned over several generations of violence. Even while it dealt violently with any challenges to its rule, the colonial occupier gave a temporary respite to the native-on-native violence. Now, we are back to the basics: I have got the gun, and you don’t, so, I will screw you.

Other people wonder; some of us don’t. Uganda is violent from top to bottom. The violent acts of the state trickle down to how we conduct our affairs with one another. In space and time we see its virtual projections in the belligerent and aversive language on Internet group sites. Beneath the effusive Uganda smiles lurk a darkness that often erupts in gruesome hostility with deaths and mayhems in its wake.

Does the guy (in the video) that is breaking the car windows and hauling the opposition leader into the pick-up truck think that he will have this power forever? If change occurs, as it eventually will, how will the oppressed, if they have the gun, treat him?

“I am just doing my job—following orders”—is no excuse. Everybody has a choice. How can the cycle of violence be broken? These are some of the questions that need to be tackled not only by primal emotional coding, but by the elevated content of reasons bestowed by civilizations. A tall order, considering the protagonists and us, the followers, seem armed with only utilitarian education and precepts from mosques and churches that are not organic and skin-deep.