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If the Empire gave them a language, it forgot to give them rules for collocating words. They refused to accept the gift of a language which was a black box, a wrapped gift too sacred to be played with. They dismantled; they rebuilt, all to end up with a tool versatile enough to carry their own thoughts, their own feelings. See what we now have! Something ours, something England can never claim back.

Ending London’s judicial surveillance
So the good Honourable Portia Simpson Miller took advantage of her acceptance speech to announce to the world through her immediate Jamaican interlocutors that her brand new government would rest the “beautiful lady”, rest her eternally by dropping her as head of state of Jamaica.
That means Jamaica would cease to be a vicarious monarchy run from afar by an absentee foreign queen. Jamaica would become a Republic, now looking to the Caribbean for identity, governance and justice. She went further. She would replace the privy council in London with the Trinidad-based Caribbean court of justice as Jamaica’s highest court of appeal, in the process ending “judicial surveillance from London”.
For your information, gentle reader, Jamaica declared Independence from Britain in 1962, but had since then remained within the Commonwealth, with the Queen as head of state! Not much comment except to say even the real sun sets. The challenge though is to make sure that this setting British sun is not allowed to rise again, to hide behind clouds or to pretend to be the real sun!

New monarch?
Is it interesting that this Prime Minister representative of a subject people of colour drops this bombshell at a time that the Duke of Edinburgh – husband to the “beautiful lady” – was hospitalised, itself a quiet reminder that the monarchy too ages, that the monarch too gets sick and, hiya-aa, dies some day?
I wonder how Rudyard Kipling feels just now. What with his tall, poetic fib on the immortality of Britannia. I wonder. And when the monarch dies, what becomes of the monarchy? What becomes of Australia and New Zealand? Caliban-like, cry Hi Ho, Aussies have a new master? And the natives groaning beneath them?
Accept occupation with the fatalism of a bird chirping under an eclipsing sun, moon? And the Scots? And the Welsh, Timothy Stamps’ descendant people? What, with the turmoil in the EU? Shakespeare would have called it “a great perturbation of nature”!

Can Britain save England?
More matters. Will the boy-leaders who run distraught Britain ever be able to save England? To salvage her global influence of yore? I wonder. In the meantime, let Britannia’s rule continue to waive. What else can become of it when United Kingdom, in typical fashion of a surly virago, picks unnecessary quarrels with her erstwhile colonial wards, passes opportune moments for rapprochement with them, even pumps weird gay values on its aghast, erstwhile subject people, so masculine, so patriarchal, so straight?

And when the “master” traffics in ridiculous message before a truculent native, the demeaning result is guffaws of scornful laughter, best epitomised by Ghana’s usually sedate Atta Mills, unusually moved to utter disgust by the “mouth” of David Cameron addressing the most recent meeting of the Commonwealth.
A big man does not face the rostrum to tell me – no matter how small, contemptible – how not to “sleep” my wife, tell me that I must abandon my wife to “sleep” another man, all in order to smart up for generous Albion’s alms.

Manhood drooping, manhood emitting a foul scent from green fecal grime, I stretch out my fallen arms for British alms, coming as reward for dark misdeeds sure to puzzle my forbears who fumble in vain for words to describe an abomination I will have done under Albion’s gun? Aa-h!
Someone must tell Whitehall that hey, thanks to the Emperor’s civilising mission, the native has now gained a facility and faculty for raucous laughter, especially when treated to a comic pantomine by way of an oversized roar from an aged stand-pat power. The native laughs at the master. In good English too! Indeed I think time come.

Giving a dog a bad name
Iran might look so far away, remotely located in distant Persia. Yet in reality, it is so near to us. Indeed if what I fear comes to pass – and please God, forbid! – Iran will get even nearer to us. I have been to that great country, and today bear loud witness to her massive efforts at improving her lot, and the lot of those around her.
I did not know this: Iran houses millions from Afghanistan, refugees created by America’s murderous wars abroad. You do not hear, read, or see this side of Iran, namely as home to the homeless, refuge to the stateless, the occupied. No, you only hear of “mad Mullahs”, of Islamic fundamentalists who are framed as completely impervious to “common sense”. And common sense of agreeing with Washington, acquiescing to her whims!

A disgusting binary
You look more closely at what amounts to this “fundamentalism” which the West so execrates, and you discover it is exactly the same thing the West calls “patriotism”. The Republican Guard, Iran’s defence cutting edge, is demonised as comprising thoughtless fighting fanatics, helplessly ready to defy man’s elemental instinct – self-preservation – all for the “Mullahs”.
They cannot love their country, want and seek to sacrifice for it’s sovereign continuance, for its eternal well-being. No. That is a western faculty only. After all, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” – it is sweet and right to die for your country – is Latin, from an ode by Horace.

It is not from the Koran, or from Prophet Mohammad. How then does patriotism and the attendant attribute of self-sacrifice visit a race, a people and a culture that does not speak Latin, that never bore Horace? It is this despicable Western habit of making standard attributes of nationalism a preserve of themselves and themselves only.
This habit of naming the same phenomenon twice depending on who wields it, who exhibits it. If patriotism evinces itself in western hearts, it is edifying, it is decent and glorifying. If it is found in, and practiced by the rest of us, it is ignoble, it is ugly and irrational. One finds this quite disgusting.
By that hypocritical binary, Iranians, Zimbabweans, Cubans, Venezuelans, Bolivians can only be zealous fanatics; they cannot be patriots ready and able to offer themselves in defence of their own people, their own lands, their own independence. Only westerners can. Only westerners should. Only westerners must!

When it is only western to die for country
It goes much farther. The only challenge provoking and deserving genuine patriotism is that posed by Kaiser’s Germany, that posed by Nazi Germany, that posed by Communist Soviet Union, Communist North Korea, Red China and lately, Fundamentalist Iran! Only those things, those formations, these values can and do justifiably trigger laudable, legitimate, righteous patriotism! A-aah!
That means patriotic wars and glorious warriors only come from the West. That means Nazism cannot be western. Communism cannot be western. Fundamentalism cannot be western. The world seems permanently framed, either for everlasting infallibility or for eternal damnation. It is “West” and right to die for their country! That is how Europe and America have redone Wilfred Owen’s savagely ironic poem.

Today, Iran faces a raft of sanctions from America and, very soon from the European Union. Barack Obama signed a raft of measures against Iran, including severe strictures on its crude oil sales transacted through that country’s central bank and various other national institutions.
Now, crude business accounts for 80 percent of Iran’s livelihood, meaning both US and EU have their muscular hands on Iran’s gullet. They don’t mean to harm Iran, only to kill it! The same Latin – cursed be that language – gives us two vital words: casus belli. Read together casus belli mean justification for acts of war. Singly read, “casus” means “case” or “incident”; “belli” means “of war”.
That translates to “incident of war”. Big book will tell you the doctrine of casus belli belongs to the 17th Century, and is associated with scholars like Hugo Grotius, Cornelius van Bynkershoek and Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, among others. Needless to say none of them were Iranian.

Casus belli and Iran
Out of that scholarship emerged the theory of “jus ad bellum”, or the doctrine of a “just war”. We used it here in prosecuting our liberation struggle. The principle gives moral high ground to a nation about to start or enter into hostilities, while creating an impression of inevitability and war as a last resort measure (ultima Ratio).
In modern international law, a key reason for causing and waging a war is self-defence. In fact it is one of the only three, the other two being defence of an ally under a mutual defence pact, and hostilities sanctioned by the UN, usually under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. Anything outside of these three, amounts to aggression. All told, it means modern nations must have a plausible casus belli for initiating hostilities.

Crude diplomacy
Now, when you start to uncomfortably squeeze the gullet of a 75million-strong nation by outlawing its livelihood without a single day at the UN headquarters, just what do you expect that country to do? Supinely submit, quietly slouch demurely towards a cemetery, then dissolving into 75 million mute graves, all adorned by verses from the Koran, all blest by Prophet Mohammad?
US has not a single word of authority from the UN, not a single UN murmur let alone resolution, in spite of its copious abuse of the International Atomic Energy Agency which, by the way, has only projected a fear of a nuclear Iran. It has not convicted Iran of violating any international protocol. Yet Iran comes across in the West as condemned, as deserving chastisement through a cruel war.

Wanting to have what I already have
EU is worse. It has neither the moral cover of the UN, nor the self-interest for this inexplicable bellicosity towards the Islamic Republic. Its economy is in throes, badly needing cheap crude from the Middle East and Persia, principally from Iran. What crude diplomacy!
And both America and the EU seek to punish Iran for appearing to want to commit a sin they themselves have already committed, have already multiplied a million times without pausing by the confessional. They have nuclear bombs and have, in the case of America, used it against a part of humanity without any censure. You strangle a people for what you fear they might have, for what you fear they might want to have?

Which you already have by way of your ordinance? Are you not the civilised one? Are you not the civilising one, our model, willy-nilly? Or is our wanting to have what you already have an expression of Islamic fundamentalism, for which a whole nation must perish?

Of course the Iranians have reacted, rightly reacted. These sanctions from both sides of the Atlantic pass for a casus belli for war, a just war at that. All nations enjoy an inherent and inalienable right to self-defence.
Of course if they were not Iranians, not Mullahs, not fundamentalists, both history international law would have recognised this basic right, would have been on their side. Sadly they are all these bad things, and shall have no right to go to war, to wage war, or to defend themselves against one.
Last year, particularly the last quarter of it, we saw America brazenly provoking Iran, including making the tall claim that Iran conspired to kill a Saudi diplomat on American soil. You gaped your mouth in utter disbelief, wondering why elections make an American president so sapped in common sense and reasonableness, like one part of a male body I know whose mere tautness causes all common sense to take leave of us. It has been a clear build-up with intent, a brazen will to aggression. It has now brought the world to this, near war.

Engorging America with Islamic blood
Iran threatens to close the Strait of Hormuz through which passes between 30 to 40 percent of world oil from the Gulf. All things being non-western, Iran’s actions would have been understood as falling within legitimate actions in self-defence. But all things, the United Nations included, are western.
Iran shall be denied its right to self-defence, a right so elemental to the nation-state. And as always, the debate shifts to Iran’s latest threats, never to America and EU’s long-standing threats against Iran, their attempts at her strangulation on spurious grounds, and how these threaten international peace and international livelihoods.

There is a clear escalation, much of it meant for America’s thirsty election god, who has to be engorged by alien blood, before he can spin his wheel of fortune even-handedly. Lately that god has shown an appetite for Islamic blood, much like zebra meat to a lion.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Iran itself. Just look at the provocation: US and . . . yes you guess right, and Israel want to mount extensive naval exercises in waters around Iran, around the arterial waters of Hormuz, through which world oil passes.
The exercise has been codenamed Austere Challenge 12. US aircraft carrier, USS John Stennis, is already in the volatile region, in fact has been, provoking Iranian defensive exercises. Not to be outdone, the price of oil has been shooting out of the barrel, creeping beyond US$100, tending toward the dreaded US$120 apiece.
Hard behind all this slouches the world economy, precipitously headed towards the zone of devastating recession, thanks to these bullies who provoke a war they least afford.

Under war or women underwear?
I said Iran is near us, is getting nearer by each day. I am not referring to bilateral relations, important though these are. I am referring to the ineluctable fate that binds Iran to the rest of the world, including us, especially us. She is Third World, which we are. She is anti-imperialist, which we are.
She wields a vital resource called oil, which we do not have, for now at least, but which recalls what we have uniquely, what we may one day suffer for, like her. And the ominous beginnings are clearly evident. Iran may not trade in her crude; Zimbabwe may not trade in her diamonds. So says America! Iran sits contiguous to a waterway critical to the world: Hormuz. All the oil states of the Gulf are its promontory, so to speak.
Zimbabwe’s oil comes from that region, passes through that vital strait, never mind that she has an oil state in Sadc, several in the AU. She goes all the way to the Gulf to secure oil that is in her sub region, on her continent. That is how near we are to Iran, how we share her vulnerability.
Our senselessly bullish Finance Minister thinks Zimbabwe’s growth will hit double-digit this year of American elections, only threatened by Mugabe’s call for elections. What a simpleton we have, making much on imported women’s underwear – call it plumage – while forgetting the dying bird! Let him dream of women underwear, oblivious to a war under way.

Killing knowledge opponents
Recently I had a discussion with someone from that part of the world. Ominously hinting that America and the West may be coming to the party too late, he exposed me to a dimension I had never heard, never read in any book or journal. America and her allies in the West are not just demanding closure to Iran’s nuclear projects, whatever their purpose.
They are asking her to close down all university faculties and studies in nuclear physics, nuclear technology. Such knowledge is anathema, a threat to international peace, a casus belli for war, according to the West. We have moved from regulating war, its industry, its warriors, to regulating knowledge that may or may not be acquired by lesser people, with the same ease with which early settlers regulated what beverages the native could sip.
America goes farther. It has taken to physically eliminating all those Iranian doctors and professors wielding such knowledge, literally arranging hit squads for such knowledgeable unfortunates. Many of Iran’s scientists have since died, are set to die that way. Here they falsely accuse us of killing our political opponents, or in the case of Libya and Syria, of killing armed “demonstrators”; in Iran they kill knowledge opponents!
One day soon, declining America shall decide beneficiating diamonds hurts the world economy, threatens international peace the same way that nuclear electricity in Iran threatens world peace! She shall attack us, similarly. Or America will one day decide that platinum mining should not be done by indigenes, lest world peace is threatened. Where are we headed for when your mere existence is enough casus belli for a “just” war? Where? Icho!