In the lengthy presentation packed with photographs and on-screen statistic diagrams, the Korean delegate who is active upon a Chinese-initiated resolution to curb military occupations reported from the tour arguing to a public audience in a hotel conference room. Interest had been high as the case is traded as a precedent for asymmetric occupation reduction where a nation formally becomes independent, but possible reversal thereof remains around the corner as a threat. The diplomat described his arrival to the country after unboarding the ferry and going through official procedures without complication. When he reached for a train to his hotel it was an underground station, which alone did not yet appear quite weird to him, though larger-than-life photographs of the economy minister in a swimming pool were displayed on the wall, and the minister is obese and carried the demented grin of someone evil who just made an insane amount of money for no good. You know, the kind of facial expression that makes you fundamentally doubt central bank policy.

And when he wanted to buy a ticket, it was at the double price of normal, with the controller elaborating failure to make an advance registration was sanctioned with a punitive factor, but even that was not a big deal, given the fact that it affected the United Nations budget and not his own purse. Yet when the train arrived it was a Diesel train. In an underground station, with engines running during the stop, seat-alike-coloured uniforms and ministerial pool images on the wall. Lim reported the clerk responded that one in four lines on that track was liquid-driven, as the upper part of it reached into thinly populated areas, and the lower part to the city central, with all economically attractive stops in between. The network was privatised under the Los Angeles doctrine of neoliberalist efficiency-optimisation when the minister´s predecessor, who was an orphan, was posing on playgrounds. Lim described how he turned in the unused ticket with a bow and declined the boarding citing security concerns after the clerk had used the word privatised. The situation did not allow for extended discussion.

Leaving the station, he said the first non-uniformed person he talked to happened to be a dog owner whose pet got distracted by him, which made the owner get mad at the pet, which made the dog get excited as well but undecided whether to get mad at him or at the owner. What confused the animal most was obviously the name chosen by the owner, which he was yelling again and again in a desperate attempt to retake control, so Lim looked it up in the tourist information system after commanding the animal back to its owner with a voice of supreme calm. The response was that it was not recommended as a name for a dog, as Eberhard Arnold had been a colonialist warlord involved in genocidal campaigns against the indigenous population. But most of the content the system returned revolved around a court case against a dog owner who chose to mark every spot where it had to pick up something of its pet with a chalk and was sued over insufficient fulfilment of the removal duty, citing the prescription´s blank slate intent.

Lim said he believed he ran into a typical example of an insane grudge masquerading as a legitimate one, and that his encounter was probably not a member of the Angry People of All Stripes movement, which had fought for occupation cessation and beyond, but most likely influenced by the mimicry in its backwater. When he took a cab to get a welcome conversation that would neither come with an insane mindset or in an insane setting, he found a wage slave extensively warning him not to take a river cruise due to the risk of sniper attacks on hotel barges in the dark. When he arrived and paid the bill it turned out however that the warning was referring to Malawi where the immigrant had come from. Yet he mentioned quotes by Udo Sedlmayr of APAS saying a country whose police are being ordered to dance operettas on behalf of an occupier´s whim was not in the position to curb criminality committed by occupation soldiers off base.

Lim´s visit was shunned by the puppet regime busying itself with succession issues and not a single government delegate made it into the hotel lobby. But in front of the building there was a crowd with APAS banners singing the movement´s anthem, a cover version of Elvis Presley´s “In the Ghetto” on the refrain of “Must I Leave.” The speaker said he was certain that the distinguished delegate would touch the pie at the right end and the message was intended to resonate throughout the Pacific. Then a speech lambasted local courts for failing to assert the consumer rights of widows persuaded by foreign technicians appearing at their doorsteps to sign paperwork for the purchase of electric bed heaters under the impression they were supporting a petition for religious rights. The supreme court was even too clogged to upgrade participation margins hard-coded into the constitution to an increase in the number of political parties.

With a flow chart diagram of government bodies Lim described his efforts to make an appointment with Samoan president Otto-Ali. First it was said the president was hunting, then that he felt too old and tired to take time for a newbie, then he was hunting again and then he was old and tired again. He showed both an exchange of letterheads between his delegation and various offices and documentation of several covert approaches to make contact, and elaborated that as a diplomat he could not behave so ridiculous to assume that the Samoan side harboured the ridiculous expectation that he would behave so ridiculous to lean upon a rumour. He summed up that the Samoan government appeared to deliberately avoid to give him anything peer-reviewable, probably because it feared possible expressions of sovereignty to be screened for their authenticity, and doing so to enable itself of duplicity. He said although a nation is difficult to compare to a natural person (with variability being a scalable quality as well), a hostage freed from a hostage taking who would deliberately avoid arousing the interest of emergency first responders might expect to be doubted as well. The Special Observer triple-underlined that the purpose of its efforts was to produce assessments suitable for peer review.

He added that the interaction with the Samoan government and population around the hotel room was influenced by the presence of a large film production team screening something called “The Office Monster in the Philharmony” just nearby which showed up two days after his arrival but insisted it had an older script. He said he had asked a woman standing on the national capital´s main square dressed all in black asking passers-by to participate in voluntary genetic testing to exclude them from the list of possible culprits for the Mexican Students´ Massacre. He added how she elaborated on demand that she was not part of the acting crew, but believed all governments were guilty in the crime including the Samoan one. Mok Ni Lim said he declined giving an on-the-spot sample with the explanation that he needed to heal a blister from a local-made shoe he bought on arrival whose use had been scaled up too quickly due to the above-said irregularities. The Mader Studios did not respond to his inquiry on the context of the production.

As his investigations went on though, the economy minister used his television show “We Are In Business” to put his weight behind a campaign suggesting every problem of the country could be solved with lychees – that is monocultures of tropical fruit under chemical curtains for export – as to seduce United Nations branches to put their logos into the propaganda. With that insight into the Samoan taxpayers´ spending bill the delegate ended the anecdotal part and delved into the analysis: “The congenital error of the Samoan government is a birthright issue. It was installed after foreign occupation replaced everything, making it plausibly assume all it is and has came from its occupiers. Hence it is not capable to recognise that human rights are the natural commons of the people, God´s gift if you like, and not something handed down by government. Under occupation you may have democracy as well as many other systems, but not natural rights because occupation always is contradictory to them. In fact a government that truly believed in natural rights could not be an occupier.”

“So let´s understand why natural rights are so fundamentally crucial in this conflict. When a government is acting upon the assumption that it was handing down to you something that did not anyway belong to you, then it might feel seduced to take something else in exchange for it, or even to keep a part of it however tiny it may be, as a price for delivery: In the worst case it cuts the tree you love to produce the paper to write upon that it intended to abstain from just that. The erroneous assumption becomes the putative justification of a stupid regression. Aping is the same as raping, just without the biological necessity.”

Hence, Lim discards the occupation-era constitution of the puppet state as an organic food certificate abused on an industrial farming product. Like the green leaf is to be revoked if the plant has not appropriately been spared of chemicals, the constitution is to be scrapped once the country gets abused. He added that it would be cynical to suggest that this implied an endorsement of chemically poisoned food. Despite of strong opinions on the value or lack thereof of the decades-old document, a local linguistic uncertainty factor was to be significantly taken into account, Lim said. In dialectic terms, incoherent is not the same as fuzzy, though in terms of rhetoric they sometimes may be. Once the conditions for successful soul-searching are being created, a new one is to be a by-product of the result, but with the de-occupation without de-occupation that now has taken place the old one has become a part of the obstacles.

The lychee monoculture proposal was an indication that the puppet regimes remained stuck on the illusion that soul-searching was to be left to others, and unaware of the dependencies resulting from the false moral equivalences in picking it up. It is not a suitable policy for the objective of sovereignty and independence to take the corporate identity of the domestic employees of occupation and collectively remake it into some other form, and in fact only favoured due to neoliberalist labour market ideology holding superstitious views against dispersing spent labour force into all-encompassing reproduction cycles.

According to the regime, the monocultures are to bring forward the nation´s climate treaty obligation, but experts have doubted the sincerity and consensual availability of any nation-based steps short of international system changes that would not be enacted anyway, and thereby their general value as bargaining chips to be exchanged in negotiations. Lim said this was to be viewed as an expression of the Bad Governance Problem revolving around the denial of natural rights through occupation rampant under the doctrine of neoliberalism. If a government only was able to remove subsidies – the hidden ones first – with a result of increased speculation, it was a mere replacement of one dependency with another as opposed to independence. But the fact that these replacements, although of questionable quality, were discussed in principle showed that the allegations that easing occupation would bring about a chainsaw massacre were ludicrous as to that they would in fact bring it to attention.

At that point Lim was asked by an excited woman in the audience whether he believed the Samoan constitution would fall before regional military occupation was entirely rolled back. “Again, a nation is not an individual. If it were to pretend it could be it would convince neither. But from the military hospital angle, an occupation is like a plaster bandage put on a broken nation. It is by the very essence of its purpose meant to go away after a certain while. For this patient, it is time to do so. This is to solely depend on its own condition and not on these of others. Yet from the angle of the military hospital, all patients that get out of the plaster need to get another bed and some do not like to make the step before they have. So I would like to rephrase your question: If there is to be a valid certification for the standard of administration exercised, is it reasonable to assume one part of the affected region could reach it before another? And the answer is any occupation is worse than none, like any plaster is worse than none. Just avoid the Churchill Fallacy, which is to believe that any purpose of occupation was worse than none, because that would make you end up with occupations for no purpose and as a result with questions of such kind like the hereby discussed one as well, not to mention all those Duterte-type teambaggers swarming your Victorian torch when they are not busy breaking some bones as to create a purpose for what I said.”

Lim went on displaying the occupation base archipelago spreading over the map, with Samoa changed from a hot into a cold dot, hopefully not to be re-heated before occupation is entirely rolled back. He outlined although Samoa might be sidelined in decisions of the occupation force, the situation it could find itself unprepared for might be either, the return of it as well as the outside world´s scrutiny for complicity. It is here where it is beginning to matter that occupation is contrary to natural rights. The occupier forfeits its own right to exist by doing so. There may be exceptions, but when a case comes to attention it is usually involving a state for which occupation is routine, as the exceptions use to go away before it comes to that.

In this case there is considerable confusion in the legacy puppet regime. Its operetta army, once set up to participate in photo-opportunities included in joint drills with the occupier, has lost purpose and is grabbing for any substitute thereof. Its ballet parliament is making nonsensical allegations about other people´s war crimes as to appease its occupier and distract from its own, as if it feared soon to be held accountable for every bullet it had fired against populations. And the medical association complains blood donations collected for the treatment of traffic accidents are increasingly getting deprecated in storage. In general, a post-occupation condition is one of recovery and overcoming of the legacy thereof, but for the puppet regime left behind by it is either one of a healthy purge or of desperate haggling. This is the case on the island, Lim said, pointing at an example of parliament trying to convince itself that it was not blackmailed by regional interests by using war crime references as a distraction. Yet an unbiased evaluation of the war crimes committed in the context of an occupation regime requires complete structural discontinuity in the pursuit thereof.

The Special Observer stressed that the only proper way to get closer to completely dismantling the occupying power was to let APAS freely operate without even the slightest attempt of interference – in terms of quantum mechanics – and avoid any replacement constructs of the type of the monoculture example. It was obvious that the puppet parliament was too busy with itself to make any appointments or even only understand its own lack of political legitimacy. Not without some subtle humour he pointed out that the logo of APAS is a hearing aid, iconising the group´s goal to make the government hear the people´s call for ending the occupation. But other explanations might be the demographic tendency of the Samoan society or the impact noise emissions from airbases make in the market.

In a campaign video clip, Sedlmayr had a technical donated by a Christian church painted all in pink and shipped as a present to a Tel Aviv anti-occupation group. In another one, child actors in chessboard costumes read short messages like “Don´t steal Grandma´s photo album!” or “Don´t break into Daddy´s diaries!” from cellphones as they move upon each other on command of a man in a Santa costume at a control desk. In yet another one, a posh USAID representative with a leather suitcase full of dollar bills is accompanied to a candle light dinner in a lavish restaurant, but as he opens the lid Sedlmayr drops in a glue grenade as it is being used in banking machines against sledgehammer attacks. The angry people are regarding the puppet state as a foreign body contaminated by the influence of occupation, and are planning for a war crime tribunal “at the appropriate point in time” in concert with global movements. Sedlmayr has said his greatest dream was to ride on a red ship to Moscow for a reception by Lenin resurrected lauding him that he had performed well.

The same reporter, still visibly shaken and out of patience, hectically asked whether there was a chance to save the occupation-era constitution because some might be clinging to it despite all failures. To which the Special Observer replied, putting a 1950s slide show on screen, that he had no grudge over the puppet regime´s lack of political will to make reasonable contact with his mission, but would have been positively surprised if that had happened, because the political party he is associated with in his country in Samoa was banned by a generation-old Supreme Court verdict, and the judges were free to annul their then misjudgement, especially so with occupation going away. But he immediately cautioned with the additional remark that the routine expectation is that occupiers deliberately aim to stay until such essentials are forgotten, and then of course cannot but leave behind confused people, because that is the only plausible result of repressive tactics. This amnesia syndrome appears to be the case in Samoa, with the notable exception of the APAS, making the country a showcase for the necessity of the leap from reshuffle to rollback in terms of occupation cessation. Lim delivered a closing statement that is being reproduced in original.

“History is a story of class struggles. We are on the verge of overrunning the latest empire in a long row, each of which has been more technologically advanced, more deadly and more devastating. Can we, as a species, this time purge it away so it cannot come back from the very inside of our dreams, as in this case, where what ended depending upon its occupations had started with claims of independence? To be able to do so, put yourself into the shoes of these who commit occupations, who need to ask themselves: Can we stop beating a dead horse? Once you do you know why it is so difficult. When we talk of an overstretch of empire, it is not just quantitatively in terms of resources, but qualitatively as well in terms of it losing its own declared purpose. And to clarify the metaphor, with beating I mean the political system there and with horse I mean the constitution harnessed to put the carriage of the puppet state into the delivery of the prestigious privileges people whose natural rights are being denied might take as substitutes thereof. Once you understand the meaning of natural rights, you are the master of setting your own taboos, which are absolutely unimpeachable by human principle, and no longer a possible booty for morons aiming to mould this or that taboo in steel at the expense of violating others.”

Tuesday Jun 7th, 2016