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The state is no longer the state but a cartel against the citizens.


Freedom is priceless because the price of losing it does not exist, or rather, it is immeasurable when it is unjustly taken, attacked or destroyed by a small group of individuals who know they are above the law.

While the 21st century is completing its first quarter, if we have seen over the last 20 years a significant propensity for information, with what is called the digital revolution with the internet, it is just as important to know that the rapid circulation of information has also enabled the rapid deployment of methods aimed at subtracting freedom of expression, either by threats which use the same channels or by subversion which aims to discredit the information and those who carry it. Attacks on free speech are endemic in an intolerant society, and it doesn't take a fortune teller to understand that intolerance is the cornerstone of extremism. Of course, when we engage in extremism, we can only do so by breaking the fundamental laws that guarantee the fundamental freedoms of each other.

Noam Chomsky said: "For the powerful the only crimes are those that others commit". Also, it should be understood that, for these same powerful, the murder does not exist, because it is only one means like another, to achieve their objectives like those to live at their ease without having a journalist who would come to disturb their peace of mind while they are exercising their bourgeois privilege, including by looting public property. A notion of public property which in this same perspective, does not exist for the powerful. For the political and economic elite of several countries, from north to south, public funds are taxes that poor people give to the kings that they are. This seems to be caricatural, yet we are not far from reality. Otherwise how to understand the contempt displayed by the class of elected politicians and the oligarchy towards their fellow citizens with their habits of chronic kleptocracy, which range from tax incivility to massive embezzlement of public funds?

In sub-Saharan Africa as in the West, the idea of state wrens is no longer a pipe dream, but a reality that has since given birth to even more perverse behaviors such as murder.

If we admit that in modern states the average citizen gives the right to those who represent the state to use force to ensure justice is done, is it still logical to continue to give carte blanche to a cartel of evildoers who for too long has used the state for its own purposes. Is it normal for citizens of corrupt countries in the southern hemisphere, like those in the northern hemisphere, to continue to trust their rulers? Should citizens continue to give the state the freedom to take their freedom? And for what for, when we know that it is a weapon that is used against the same citizens?

These questions are essential and should appeal to more than one.

If at the start we admit that the State is first and foremost the people, who form a country including its rulers, we must understand that the perversion of the State or rather its takeover by elitist cartels has over the years modified the essential mission of the States.

From the moment when the notion of the modern state began to refer rather to the idea of the power of the rulers over the ruled; the maxim that says “the State is all of us” has become obsolete, or rather inadequate; because nowadays it would be more accurate to say that the State is them and the "Them" must be understood as the caste of kinglets who make the weather rain or shine.

You don't have to be a public law graduate to understand that many States in their current form have lost what was their essence, namely a common entity at the service of the people. In fact, the state has become this cold monster that crushes the people under the rule of a member of the privileged class. And suddenly in this vision of objectification of the State, as an Object belonging to a certain class, the State crimes or rather crimes by the cartel which controls the sovereign force has only become a logical thing. Beyond direct crimes, like execution of journalists; how many thousands of citizen die in developed and underdeveloped countries because money for hospitals is embezzled and decision that are supposed to enhance the quality of life of citizen are not taken, to please cartel members?

While world news is scalded with cases like that of the heinous murder of the Cameroonian journalist Martinez Zogo, whose only crime was to have drawn the attention of the people to the massive embezzlement of public wealth by the apparatchiks of Yaoundé, we are entitled to ask whether, both in the so-called advanced democracies and in the dictatorial slums of sub-Saharan Africa, States have essentially become entities that serve to fail citizens, and to serve the wealthy, who find a malicious pleasure in taunting the populace, with sometimes pompous speeches which do not serve to tell the sincere truth to the people, but rather in a pernicious way to glorify their ego and their eloquence. The crisis of rhetoric is also the crisis of truth, because politicians perversely not only do not tell the truth, but above all generally put themselves on display in an exercise of self-flattery and admonishment towards the less well-off, whom abused and manipulated, find it difficult to understand, not because the degree of understanding of the average citizen would have been reduced to its simplest expression, but above all because these speeches are hollow and inaudible despite the use of pompous words, which beyond pedantry, illustrates well the evils of a society in perdition..

States are no longer states but cartels, which take commissions from citizens, to say so is not to outbid, especially since we know that economic crimes are intimately linked to violent crimes. Yes, the terse definition of a state crime stipulates that it is a crime committed by one or more elected or appointed representatives of a sovereign state, using the means which come under the sovereign authority, such as the administration and armed forces, it is logical to think that the public force has long since become a private force which defends above all the interests of cartels in power both in the northern hemisphere and in the southern hemisphere.

If we have the impression that, paradoxically, advanced democracies and tropical dictatorships have never been so close in their mode of operation, we must rather understand that one has generated the other. Honest historians can confirm that Western democracies have always supported tropical dictatorships since at least the 1960s, manipulating elections and assassinating political figures like Lumumba in the Congo; despite the official speeches which seem to tell another truth. These sleights of horror weren't always to counter the Soviet Union during the cold war, but much more, to ensure that a corrupt tropical elite would serve their interests better, than those of their despoiled fellow citizens.

Instead of continuing to teach in universities what the state should be, it is time for academics to define and analyze the cartelization of states where nepotism, racketeering, influence peddling and crime, reign; to find ways out of this deliquescence, which takes on dangerous propensities.


Hubert Marlin Elingui Jr.

Journalist

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