This latest book was quite a trial for me, with the other two I suppose I had backing from the biggest Publishers in the world because the books supported the official Western line on Saddam. The Black Hole however left me struggling to find a publisher because it shone a searchlight on CIA practices in Europe, my treatment in the West has in part been worse than my treatment in Iraq. To some my story might seem fantastical, a figment of my imagination, to those people I say that truth is often stranger than fiction and the truth of my life is among the strangest.
In a world where we strive for truth and freedom of speech, it still amazes me how those who try to speak the truth are shot down, ridiculed and derided, I am not the only person trying to speak out there are many, many more and always when they are filmed peacefully protesting or gathering support they are portrayed as "hippies" "liberals" "tree huggers" anything that deflates their cause and questions their intelligence.
As I wrote and spoke out against Saddam Hussein and his regime in Iraq, I have and will write and speak out against the same system here in the west, it is not because I escaped one Dictator that I can sit back and let another rule me. I have heard the rhetoric, "oh, but you are free now, you should be thankful" yes I am thankful to be out but not thankful to be brought to another corrupt system. Yes there are varying degrees of dictatorship and the ones here in the west may not have reached the heights of murderousness that Saddam did, (well at least not on their home soil) but is that enough reason for us to put our heads down and pretend that nothing is wrong?
It has been made very clear to me especially in the recent past that if the citizens of the country that I reside in are not interested enough in changing the flaws in their government and it's policies that they certainly don't want me a foreigner doing anything about it either, thank you very much.A government is supposed to represent the people, a government is employed by the people, a government is supposed to be elected by the people (although in recent years one has to wonder) so why is it that when a government isn't doing the job that we put them in power to do, we don't do or say anything? There is a prevailing lethargy, a belief that their term will be over soon enough and they'll be out so we don't have to do anything about it. Yes, but then we elect a new batch and although the faces change the policies and strategy stay the same, (it worked for the last lot why wouldn't it work for them?) and why? Because we as the people, their employers and their electors, didn't make it clear to them what we were and were not going to accept. I have heard it said that we get the government we deserve, well that maybe very true, did Iraq deserve Saddam? Does Zimbabwe deserve Mugabe? Does the great Nation of America deserve Bush? You may argue that Saddam and Mugabe weren't elected, but initially they were, can we also positively say that about Bush? Does it not seem farcical that a President whose own election was dubious should go around the world overthrowing those that he deems undemocratic?
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, you don't need to have read George Orwell's 1984 to see that his novel was prophetic, the constant state of war against an ever changing mysterious enemy, "Big Brother" the phrase Orwell himself coined is an everyday term for the eyes and ears that constantly watch over us, we are aware but for some reason buy into the idea that it's all for our own good, ask yourself a question, there is no right or wrong answer, just your own perception.
Is there less Terrorism in the world now, even though we have CCTV, Patriot laws, Guantanamo bay and stricter airport controls?
At what point did you notice your world change?
Who benefits from confusion?
What is foreign policy and who makes really it?
Latif Yahia
