Wednesday, November 05, 2014

You could always die anonymously.

Even by the standards of the Government of Kenya, what the Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs and International Trade said was a bit harsh. In essence what she said was if any of you were fucking idiots and decided to make a beeline for the sandy expanse of the Arabian peninsula and it all went tits up and you were enslaved or murdered or whatever, you were on your own. Don't go whingeing to the consulate. Don't go whingeing to the Ministry. And for God's sake, die in silence like all the other fucking idiots out there.

The United States has demonstrated that citizens are the stupidest people in the world, and when they do stupid things, they expect their government to sort it out for them. So US citizens will foolishly travel to Syria and Iraq to "tell the truth about the Islamic State", they will get abducted and some of them will be beheaded on gruesome videos. The moment it goes ape shit for any one of those foolish, brave souls, their mothers and their congressman will write to Barack Obama, John Kerry, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs...anyone and demand action to bring their boy back home safe. You will be surprised how many stupid US citizens are rescued by the US government after doing patently stupid things.

The Kenya government, a bit like the UK government, doesn't really like fucking idiots. It likes them even less when they do fucking idiotic things like get enslaved in Saudi Arabia or one of those West Asian hellholes. The two governments will ignore you because at the end of the day, if you are not DJ CK or any member of the Capital Club, if you are not a person of some considerable means whose misfortunes could plausibly become the misfortunes of the State, then your ass is on its own, fucking torture notwithstanding. It doesn't really matter if you follow the correct procedure to verify that the shady woman with the Kiambu accent, Murang'a weave and multiple menacing silent partners has all the proper permits to operate as a labour recruiter, that your prospective employer avers to abide by the labour laws of fucking Qatar, or that everything so far as you can see is on the up and up. If it goes to shit, and it most likely will, Amb Mohammed says you really can't expect your government to do jack shit about it.

Which, I suppose, is how it should be. We know for the most part that West Asia is still living in medieval times despite the hundreds of billions of petro-dollars it has spent on gold-plated loos in gold-plated Airbus A380s. These people are still remarkably backward. It's why they still seem to have princess and princesses, regents and court cryers. Their royal families are a fucked up lot. But it is the religious nutters who make the whole thing surreal, with their penchant for blowing up, in this order, infidels, Jews, apostates and US citizens.

And every prince or princess seems to be connected to one nutter or another. With that kind of networking, it is almost certain that many employers in that part of the globe are not really sticklers for the finer points of the ILO Convention; their idea of "acceptable working conditions" is that they don't use the whip while you are sleeping in the two hours they let you sleep. So if you want to be a fucking idiot about it and sneak into any of the employable bits of West Asia and you suddenly find your ass in sexual bondage, don't go fucking crying to the consulate. Find Rambo. Or Jack Bauer. Let them sort it out for you. Or you could do the decent thing and die anonymously.

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