Bumbling in the junta jungle…

From Cassandra’s Desk

As a child, your correspondent was a huge fan of Rudyard Kipling's magnificent and unmatched work of pure fantasy, "The Jungle Book".

Among other things, Kipling's detailed life in an orderly and moral jungle, is a far cry from the disorderly and dangerous jungle into which Fiji has been drawn by its bumbling military rulers.

It’s the fantastical nature, not to mention magnitude, of that bumbling that has sparked this Kipling/jungle analogy.

For example, let’s take the futile and self-defeating push by the Fiji junta leadership against freedom bloggers. As events unfolded over the past week or so, the junta's antics started to assume the same exquisitely surreal quality of Kipling's most fantastical imaginings.

On the one hand, the junta's appalling lack of decency or sophistication, demonstrated so graphically and gruesomely by repeated acts of violence towards their fellow citizens. On the other hand, witness the bizarre spectacle of the same strongmen - with the entire civilized world watching - applying the same methods to gain mastery over cyberspace!

It’s a paradox of truly surreal proportions. To “secure” Fiji’s national security, the Fiji Military Forces has decided to launch a war against unknown enemies in unknown (to them) territory - cyberspace. Hurrah! Wow! Gosh! It’s breathtaking.

Yes, one needs to keep one's sense of humour because in the junta jungle, where it can be eerily dark and gloomy, there's naught to laugh about. Like the illumination of a full moon on a cloudless night, the only light to penetrate its dark sinister depths, is the one shone by our Freedom Bloggers. Long may they stay free to blog!

Which evokes more jungle analogies: Fiji's military rulers bark fiercely as they run around in ever-decreasing circles, as happens when a pack of feral dogs in full hunting frenzy suddenly realises that it has lost the scent.

The ruckus continues and only dies down around midnight when our junta hounds succumb to that most basic of all canine (and human) instincts - self-preservation. They suddenly, and in unison, they start baying long and loud at the moon.

For some reason, and beginning with their primitive ancestors, the revealing glow of a full moon, beaming benignly from space, has always instilled fear and panic in feral dogs.