Our Gitmo guests or treason of intellectuals
Today, as always in this business, I have been waylaid by other pressing, but not necessarily more important matters which have seized centre stage in the public mind. I refer to the great deal of media-orchestrated concern of the decision by our government to host two guests from the Guantanamo Bay detention centre for suspect terrorists.
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Those suspects, arrested and sent to this outpost of the United States, have had a field day in the 14 odd years since they were captured with the constitutional and legal system of the US and the conscience of the world since then. In my take on this live issue, I shall say my mind on some of the angles of the Ghanaian dimension.
If my knowledge and memory serves me right, Guantanamo Bay is actually the property of the US, seized as part of the settlement following a war over Cuba, then a Spanish colony, by the US in 1898 or so. The seizure of the bay is to be in perpetuity, but knowing the vagaries of history and politics since t
Leeway
In the media hype of this so-called deal, we all have blissfully forgotten that foreign policy and national security are the two areas in functioning democracies where the executive have a lot of leeway. Had it not been so, President Obama himself nor his government could not have also bypassed Congress and other institutions in his country to reach out to countries friendly to his country for help in resolving a conundrum in America, albeit with global ramifications, because of the immense global influence of his country.
Of course, this so-called deal arose out of a promise to the American people to close down the detention facility on the bay, and peacefully disperse the detainees who included our two guests.
Treason
Now to the terms I have liberally employed in this epistle. Treason of the intellectuals is actually the title of the seminal work by Jacques Barzun decades ago. I think my copy is with the Foreign Minister. It captures perfectly our contrived perturbation at the decision of the President to accept them into this country for two years. It is a historical fact that since the American and French Revolutions in 1766 and 1789 respectively, what we call public opinion is driven by lettered interests who purport to speak on behalf of the masses. ‘We the people’ is actually the example that is usually cited to capture the duplicity inherent in the claims by some organised interests purporting to speak and act on behalf of all of us. This understanding also informs my description of this decision as a media hype and as a deal so called, to give the wrong, unsupported impression that something very bad has taken place.
What strikes me as odd is the patently anti-religious, and profoundly secular view of His Grace Archbishop Joseph Osei-Bonsu, that compassion should be balanced with common sense. If Martin Luther had said this, I would not have been worried, and certainly as a Methodist, I appreciate John Wesley when he said our faith should be based on reason.
One should not attempt to walk on water, for example because Christ did the same. That is unreasonable. Compassion is different; it is a sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress coupled with the felt desire to alleviate it. It is the equal of pity. You either demonstrate it, or you do not. It cannot be spliced and still retain its essence. That at once told me that the position of the mainline orthodox churches in this matter is contrived, and not the result of prayerful, compassionate reflection, but the undisguised desire of the Christian clergy to partake in politics hiding behind their cassocks. This is because callousness and coldheartedness are not religious virtues, not in Christianity or in Islam.
Contrived brouhaha
I have this belief that the whole contrived brouhaha stems from a simple revelation; the beloved Americans are dealing with a hated government on a matter so important that it would decide the tenor of Western support one way or another in an election year in Ghana. I pointed this out to a close NPP friend, and he strangely responded that the
West, led by America, have no friends but only interests, but he could not respond to my riposte if this is so, why do you give the impression that the West is always pro-NPP in this country?
I am fortified in this by the loud silence of the flag bearer of the opposition NPP in this matter, seeing his touted credentials as a foreign policy guru having served as the first
Foreign Minister in the government of President J.A. Kufuor. To me as a student of politics, this diplomatic coup would have been touted and praised as the height of political sagacity, love for world peace and good governance manifest, if this had happened in the time of President Kufuor, or in any government formed by the pro-Western NPP.
In short, with one fell brilliant stroke, President Mahama has established the seriousness of this country as historically, a big player, in our own way, in world affairs, a status we established for ourselves from the days of President Kwame Nkrumah. The role and relevance of the shrill Fox TV News is not required to understand and appreciate the larger meaning of this so-called deal to our country. Their constituency of viewers and listeners are not Ghanaian, and they should not factor in our analysis of this decision by our government.
I had wanted to write today about the upcoming 50th anniversary of the first coup in Ghana which occurred on Thursday, February 24, 1966, and its ramifications and reverberations in our politics since then, but this matter waylaid me. Another time.