George Floyd’s Tears Echoes Through Eternity!

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.
Albert Einstein

In the height of ’Jihadi John’ reign of terror, the Islamic State executioner who derives pleasure in executing journalists, that image stuck in my mind because it was widely available online. However, it has been replaced with Derek Chauvin grinding his knee into George Floyd’s neck while the poor man cried for mercy. When Jihadi John murdered several innocent journalists, mostly whites. I was angry and wrote about the atrocities of ISIS. It has come as a surprise that people are eerily silent about the murder of George Floyd, although, after a while, protests has erupted around the world against racism.

Alas, Derek and countless other heartless cops in the US are terrorists protected by the state. The US President has threatened to kill looters but killers like Derek would not have been arrested without worldwide protest. Killer cops like Derek Chauvin are degenerates, racist and divisive.

I grew up in a picturesque little town in Nigeria watching American films, Hollywood portrayed the US country as a land of the free, where everyone is the same, and actors fight for peace. However, that was just Hollywood. Minnesota cop, Derek Chauvin committed murder with people filming while bystanders pleaded, George Floyd also pleaded for mercy. That scene was not from a wild western flick, and yet, the cop was only arrested after an outcry and worldwide protest.

There are so many terrorists like that in the US, terrorising the lives of African Americans. Killing them with impunity, and if prosecuted, Jury always find them doing their job.

I am black British, not American but I have to speak out against this seemingly calm terrorist while the President was also inciting more violence? Looting is wrong, but you don’t encourage more racists to start shooting and killing, and then it becomes an orgy of violence. There’s something called ’dialogue’ even kids do it.

I am very sad for George Floyd, the US has lost the last shred of respect I had for it as a democratic country where the lives of anyone with a darker skin tone is in danger, from an erratic and unstable government to devilish, racist citizens to people who found this difficult to talk about.

Derek Chauvin and other terror cops that has killed so many innocent black people are inhuman, but the brilliant thing about civilisation is this; change is constant.

The Human Story

Jan17

(Firemen tackling the Australian bush fires)

The scene was total and absolute destruction. It’s more like a disaster movie. A BBC reporter claimed on the news today that the acres of land burnt in Australia is akin to fifteen million football pitches. Throughout the Christmas and New Year celebrations, I watched with growing apprehension as Australia burns with such ferocity, it was like the end of the world. And in other parts of the world such as Indonesia, Kenya, and a large swathe of Africa, people were losing their lives in natural disasters such as flooding, landslides, etc.

Thankfully, it has started to rain in Australia, but we’re not out of the woods yet. The worrying climate event around the world forms part of our human story.

Climate change is a reality. Temperatures are rising as large sheets of ice in the Arctic continues to melt. And yet, some governments around the world were paying lip service to improve pollution. We are literally killing our home, planet earth. All our bickering, superiority, and worries pale into insignificance if we lose our home. We lose everything.

When I compared the drama surrounding the semi-retirement of Prince Harry and his wife, Megan, from active royal duties, to the heartbreaking news of our climate, it was a welcome distraction. Don’t get me wrong; I think the press has unfairly vilified Megan, but she is also human as we all are, but the challenge that is facing us all dwarfs any drama playing out in the Royal family. Or the Middle East, for that matter.

Speaking of the Middle East, I was on my way home in a cab earlier this week when the driver suddenly retorted.

”Solemaini is alive, everything is a conspiracy, President Trump is colluding with the Iranians to increase the price of oil!”

”Well, we can’t be sure,” I muttered nonplussed, and I didn’t know how to react. Then he continued,

‘The world is a stage; there are men in power who control everything that happens in the world.”

”You’re right, but what about climate change?”

”I don’t know about that,” he replied.

His response got me thinking. The average person may have an opinion about every topic and incidents around the world, but Global warming is still not that important. Sir David Attenborough hammered home another warning today, and we need to act now. I genuinely hope our human story will not end in tears because we live in such a beautiful world!

I’ll touch on other matters now. It’s a bit surreal that while I was busy running around, working, attending hospital appointments, I haven’t updated my website for months, although I feel guilty life’s been, well life. This is my first article in a long while, and I’m sorry if I’m ranting.

I am currently working on a short film, a documentary called ‘Chasing Humans,’ for one of my Master’s degree modules. The film touched on core topics around safety in London. I wrote and directed it, and I’ll keep updating on the progress of the film.

I have missed many awesome articles from my WordPress family. I will visit every one in a couple of weeks after meeting some of my deadlines.

It’s so good to be back. I hope 2020 would be an excellent year for us all.

Much love, always! 🙂

The Ugly Side…

Aug13

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”The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.” Erich Fromm

Recent events in the world are enough to sum up the fact that humanity’s ugly side appears to be dominant. We are very quick to tear apart than build, we hate anything that remotely differs from our way of thinking. We want to love but find that so difficult, rather it’s easy to be suspicious, have zero empathy and yes, we find a safe haven in hatred.

James Carroll got it right when he wrote, ”we cloak ourselves in cold indifference to the unnecessary suffering of others, even when we caused it.”

Hatred brings out our ugly side when we hide behind our knowledge of what’s right and wrong. We believe our lives are somehow a priority compared to others and when we’re not having things going our way, we’re quick to complain, bemoaning our fallen state.

We’re also beautiful creatures, that is when we want to be. Imagine doctors risking lives and limbs to save Ebola-stricken victims in a remote village in Africa or people pooling resources together to save Syrian refugees from the freezing sea. That, is the beauty of human nature just to mention a few.

However, we all have ugly sides, if not, why do we have laws trying to curtail our nastiness from spiralling out of control?

I penned this article shortly after the Nice truck massacre, somehow I couldn’t publish it but it’s still relevant today. Most of the time, it’s very difficult to comprehend when such tragedies occur, like the killings of African-Americans by rogue white police officers or the killings of thousands by the so called Isis’s mad soldiers or the time when Lord Gen Jeffery Amherst, British Commander-in-Chief of America wrote to Col. H. Bouquet to use Biological weapons (small pox laden blankets) in July 1763 against Native American Indians. He wrote, “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.” Hitler wanted to wipe out the Jews and subject the world to his madness. In the end, I think our lives shouldn’t be mapped out based on such events no matter how sad.

Humanity is renowned for fortitude in the face of extreme violence. Hitler was keen to turn the world into a huge wasteland, but he failed, even though, in the process, millions lost their lives. The incredible thing I’ve realised is this, our ugliness and monstrosity would not prevail over the beauty and love inherent in us (this is where free-will comes in). That’s contradictory but it’s the truth. As Daniel Goleman wrote, ”societies can be sunk by the weight of ugliness.”

There’s real hatred in the world, just check social media where some segment of humanity compares others as inferior to them. It’s heartbreaking but over the millennia, it’s been part of the history of mankind, the pervading hatred, the palpable feeling of helplessness experienced by slaves which brought the brutal book, ‘The Heart Of Darkness ,’ written by Joseph Conrad to mind. More than ten million people had died in the Congo in the 19th and early 20th century under the rule of the notorious Belgian King, Leopold II. The Congo had been plundered and its inhabitants killed with ruthless efficiency. It’s one of the greatest acts of mass murder in human history. That’s humanity’s ugliness at its height. According to a review on Amazon, ”Conrad makes it painfully clear that the heart of darkness can reside within us all,” how sad!

Unfortunately, the killings in Congo is still ongoing, according to an article written by Owen Jones in the Guardian Newspaper on 6 March 2015, he lamented, ” African lives did not matter enough: a death toll of up to 6 million would surely not have been tolerated elsewhere. For the West, it is a country of little strategic importance.”

Overall, I still believe that our ugly sides can be tamed, maybe I’m wrong?

This article is open to debate, let me know what you think.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend wherever you are in the world!

Much love, always. 🙂

Surviving Decay…

Sep30

(Photo credit: Flickr)

”Although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallisation, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things ‘suffer a sea-change’ and survive in new crystallised forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living.”

Hannah Arendt.

I saw this quote by one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. I studied some of her writings, and was pretty impressed by her bluntness, ingenuity, and simplicity. Some of her works are ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism, ‘The Human Condition,’ ‘On Revolution,’ and ‘The Human Mind.’

It’s a known fact that when we don’t really use our cognitive function, we rot and decay. It’s no wonder that people with warped views of the world and society caused most of the evil in this present age. In layman terms, cognitive function can be aptly described as ‘an intellectual process by which one becomes aware of, perceives, or comprehends ideas. It involves all aspects of perception, thinking, reasoning and remembering.’

I won’t go into too much details about the lack of this important aspect of our civility as humans, I’ll just try to touch base with some of the setbacks we would experience if we don’t use our brains. Lack of cognitive function is responsible for most of the ills in our societies today. Citing the examples of religious bigots like Islamic State murderers, Boko Haram and serial killers whose brain have been irreparably damaged by their intellectual paucity, its little wonder that they believe in fables and riddles purportedly yarn to elicit their obedience.

Decay is essentially part of all living things, we are born, we live, we grow old or maybe not, and then we die and the decaying would start. All living things, especially humans, have the extraordinary ability to survive decay through our offspring, thought patterns, actions and deeds.

How do we leave great legacies behind? How do we defeat the theory of decay which governs all living things? It’s simple – our thought processes is as important as the air we breathe because that would ultimately affect our choices in life, beliefs, and the quotidian or relatively mundane life we led.

Another thing I wanted to point out, also by Arendt, was the effect of thoughtlessness in the life of human beings, it’s always disastrous to lead a thoughtless life. This was aptly described when Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem on behalf of The New Yorker, to report the trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann, who was accused of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Arendt described Eichmann as thoughtless; quiet authentic inability to think. Succinctly put, absence of critical thoughts can actually turn us into a monstrous, stupid, or crass entity who could be easily blown apart by every wind of doctrine.

Critical thoughts are what makes us the higher beings, capable of making sane, rational decisions. That’s simply what differentiated us from animals.

Arendt is a political theorist but many scholars hailed her as a philosopher. I love reading her works, it makes me think deeply about life and society in general. The above quote could be used and interpreted in several ways, I have chosen my way and that is the fact that we can surely survive decay. We only need to think and we’re free to create a better life for ourselves and everyone around us. Life is in stages, enjoy it while you can and THINK before you act.

NP: The life of a writer is a lonely one, I’m still slaving away on my books hence the sporadic updates on my website. I’ll be visiting your blogs as time permits. I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts, I’ll love to read what you think. 🙂

Enjoy the rest of your week my friends!

Much love, always. 🙂

The Two Face Monster!

Aug14

I love this wise statement from Mahatma Gandhi, ”My religion is based on truth and non-violence. Truth is my God. Non-violence is the means of realising Him.” Gandhi extol the virtues of peace and truth, something I think the world lacks today. A friend of mine said recently that religion has shed more blood in human history and that was why he’s an atheist. Grudgingly, I agreed. People kill in the name of a god they have never seen, they destroy and slaughter without remorse and it made me think, shouldn’t religion be a personal thing? A private belief? A right for one to believe whatever one chooses to believe, without fear for one’s life?

But I guess, I’m wrong!

The recent campaign of hell unleashed on Christians and other sects like Yazidis by ISIS in Iraq is not something we can conveniently ignore any longer. Everyone has the right to live but things are not as easy as they seem, or are they?

America is a country which prides herself as a Christian nation. When our Prime Minister, David Cameron stated that Britain is a Christian nation, all hell broke loose! Many were quick to state the opposite, while others were quick to say exactly the same thing. I believe Britain is a Christian nation, and anyone who has a problem with that should go and study history. A nation, or people has the right to call or align herself to certain beliefs or way of life. It’s simple, that’s just ‘free will.’

By now, readers and friends of this blog know when I’m trying to approach a sensitive topic, and I’d wrestled with this for over a week now, so the only sane thing to do is to write it down for, maybe posterity.

I am a Christian, and proud to be so. I would not apologise to anyone for that, because I have a right, and the will, to be a Christ follower. That shouldn’t be a problem, should it? But yeah, it could be a problem if I live in the northern part of Nigeria, or in Iraq, Syria, or Turkey. Islam claims to be a religion of peace, yet Christians are murdered in that part of the world. In Nigeria alone, Boko Haram has murdered more than 12,000 people, majority of them Christians, women, and children!

Let’s go back in history a bit. Let me use Turkey as an example. The country used to be a 100% Christian population before Mehmed II and his marauding soldiers came and destroy Constantinople and turned all their churches into mosques around fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. You may think that’s centuries ago but in 1895, during the ”Hamidian massacres” almost 300,000 Armenians were killed by the Ottoman empire who had ruled over them for more than six hundred years. In 1909, more than 30,000 Armenians were again murdered, their blood darkened the streets unchecked. Between 1914 to 1922, more 850,000 Armenians were murdered. Anyone in doubt can check this link for full details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

Writing in the late 1890s after a visit to the Ottoman Empire, the British ethnographer William Ramsay described the conditions of Armenian life as follows:

”We must, however, go back to an older time, if we want to appreciate what uncontrolled Turkish rule meant, alike to Armenians and to Greeks. It did not mean religious persecution; it meant unutterable contempt … They were dogs and pigs; and their nature was to be Christians, to be spat upon, if their shadow darkened a Turk, to be outraged, to be the mats on which he wiped the mud from his feet. Conceive the inevitable result of centuries of slavery, of subjection to insult and scorn, centuries in which nothing that belonged to the Armenian, neither his property, his house, his life, his person, nor his family, was sacred or safe from violence – capricious, unprovoked violence – to resist which by violence meant death!”

Anyone who says Islam is a religion of peace should go to Borno state in Nigeria, or better still, just type Boko Haram in YouTube and you would see all their gory acts explicitly displayed. If you live in Europe or other parts of the world like I do, don’t think for a moment that we’re immune from such horrible and cowardly acts, it played out on our streets in London when a soldier was slaughtered like a common ram. True, some Muslims are saddened by the atrocities committed by this terrorists, but the fact remains that Islam seems to seamlessly perpetuate violence where all non-Muslims are considered ‘infidels’ and ripe for the edge of their swords or guns as the case may be.

Islamist terrorists would stop at nothing to maim and kill if given the chance but what do we do? Nothing! As a Christian, and a woman who believes in free will as God Himself does, everyone have a right to worship whomever they wanted, and if you don’t believe in a God seated in heaven, by all means, you’re right to have your opinion. But to impose the will of a certain religion on people, that’s just wrong.

Children as little as five were beheaded in Nigeria, Syria and Iraq. Women were stoned to death or had their throats slits. Christians were rounded up and shot or forced to convert to Islam and then still, they were beheaded. This is not the fifteenth century but it’s happening now. And my fear is that, if this two-faced monster is not curtailed, they could overrun everywhere. People of all faiths should stand up to this threat. Yesterday I read in the newspaper that British grown terrorists were seen distributing leaflets urging Muslims to join their unholy war in Iraq.

This is the Twenty-First century, and by God, Islamist terrorists would fail in their quest to kill and maim the innocent. I’ll be praying, and I hope the US, UK, Europe and other people intent on protecting the sanctity of human life would rise to this threat and quench this rampaging two-faced beast in the name of religion. I believe in peace with all people of all race, colour and way of life, but there would always be those who loves death, as Osama Bin Laden once said, ”Americans love life but we love death.” I pray that humanity would conquer this monsters.

To all my friends worldwide, have a great weekend.

Much love, always!