Political Corruption

I am the proud owner of 2 world records.

1. I am the shortest Indigo Lee-Wilson in the world

2. I am the tallest Indigo Lee-Wilson in the world

Now, both of these records probably stem from the fact that I’m the only Indigo Lee-Wilson in the world to my knowledge, but to me, my records still stand. As you might have gathered, I was really invested in the concept of a world record as a child - especially a Guinness World Record. But, recently I’ve discovered that I’m not the only one. Turkmenistan's authoritarian president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, of all people, seems to share my interest. Turkmenistan houses the highest density of white marble-clad buildings, largest cycling awareness lesson, longest single line bicycle parade.

You’re probably all thinking the same thing - what are all these Guinness World Records doing in a place like Turkmenistan.

Turkmenistan isn’t only home to the largest architectural star, it’s also home to some of the worst human rights abuses in the world when it comes to censorship, forced labor, corruption and state intimidation of its citizens.

And Turkmenistan isn’t the only country whose Guinness world records seem to correlate with their human rights ones. Saudi Arabia holds records like the world’s largest flagpole and largest marble cake. While, the Dubai police force alone has 11 records including most consecutive formations made by unmanned aerial vehicles.

Authoritarians love getting Guinness world records and pay millions of dollars for them. Because they reinforce a cult of personality and promote a sense of legitimacy on a world stage. And this explains a lot more than Turkmenistan's obsession with having the largest indoor ferris-wheel, it explains why Qatar is the host of the 2022 Fifa World Cup. And why China was so eager for Mulan to be filmed in Xinjiang, where Uighur Muslims have been detained in mass internment camps.

Authoritarian regimes love international validation, and recognition of achievements such as these, mean we continue to give it to them. On the busiest days of the FIFA world cup, Qatar is expecting 500,000 visitors in Qatar - 78 times the number of migrant workers who died whilst building the stadiums due to poor working conditions. Mulan has made 57 million dollars worldwide, but that profit comes at the direct cost of the 1.5 million Uighur Muslims detained in internment camps where the film was shot.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, it's a tried and tested method. The 1936 Berlin Olympics, hosted by Nazi Germany, adopted extreme media censorship methods to prevent tourists seeing or hearing of any human rights attrocities.

Today, no censorship can hide poor working conditions, internment camps or forced labour. States rely on our active choices, as consumers, to look past it. And we far too often do.

But we can’t any longer. We need to boycott books, events and movies - anything that rests its success on the back of abuse, anything that uses its success to hide such abuse to begin with. Profit is far too often at the heart of abuse and denying state’s profit is far too often the only way to prevent it.

We don’t need to watch Mulan, as much as we need to help those hidden behind the scenes.

We don’t need to watch the FIFA world cup, as much as we need to help those that it hurts.

And, perhaps most importantly, I don’t need Guinness World Records - because unless there is another Indigo Lee-Wilson out there, my achievements are still entirely legitimate without it. At least, much more legitimate than the authoritarian regimes who will surely try to beat me one day.

It’s been a few unlucky years for international travel. So I don’t mean to rub it in, but I was lucky enough at the beginning of 2020, just before all of the COVID chaos set in, to finally visit the United States. And, I assumed that visiting a country like America wouldn’t involve much of a culture clash. We consume so much American media that I thought the only real adjustment would be to the portion sizes at McDonald's for that I was ready. But for the culture clash, I was not.

The first thing I saw when I got off the plane was a huge American flag hanging over the escalators leading out of my gate… Ok, I get it, land of the free… But then, there were more giant flags, hanging over coffee shops, on the back of the airport trolleys, on peoples’ houses, everywhere I looked the flag was inescapable. And for almost every flag, everywhere I looked I saw that patriotism and Christianity seemed to go hand in hand.

Whether it was literal crucifixes in people’s front yards, state flags with religious mottos, news anchors declaring ‘God Bless America’, expressions of religion were impossible to escape. Even the money comes with a reminder of the centrality of Christianity to America’s sense of self — with the words, ‘In God we Trust’ emblazoned on every note.

And so, it wasn’t that surprising to me when, last year we all witnessed a horde of insurrectionists storm the U.S. Capitol, I noticed a lot of religious iconography on show amongst the rioters. Christian symbols and the American flag were going hand in hand with far more threatening imagery — neo-nazi symbols, QAnon signs, and even iconography harking back to the Jim Crow era.

I myself am Christian, and when I first visited America, I’ll admit I found the constant public displays of Christianity odd, but I didn’t question it as anything particularly dangerous. Christianity is an ideology which, at its heart, is about love, empathy and generosity — ideals which any community can benefit from. But when I saw the displays of Christian symbols amongst the Capitol insurrectionists, I had a very different reaction. Suddenly, this belief system which, for me, is supposed to embody kindness, was being used as a vessel for hate, conspiracy and violent white nationalist entitlement.

It’s not a new observation that powerful people often manipulate religion in pursuit of their own political goals. But you’d think after decades where, as a world, we’ve aimed to pursue principles like religious freedom or separation of church and state, we would be smart enough to stop this in its tracks. But that’s not the case. It seems that White Christian entitlement is beginning to take an even greater hold in a lot of western political spaces, and a religion centred around peace and unity is being manipulated and weaponised to justify discrimination, by focusing on policies that are fundamentally antithetical to the core principles of Christianity like denying economic and social support to the poor, or rejecting refugees, or denying women medical care.

This problem is not just America’s. It is still very present in our Australian institutions even if our news anchors don’t say God bless Australia. And in some ways that’s even more dangerous because it’s harder to identify and therefore harder to call out.

Australia has a dark history of using Christianity to justify bigotry. White Australia as we know it was founded upon the use of religious enrichment as a justification for colonialism.

Christianity is what started missionaries forcibly converting Aboriginal Australians and then seeded the bigotry which led to the stolen generation.

Here we might not have rabid crowds storming our government buildings, but we do have a political environment that is deeply influenced by religious entitlement. Scott Morrison called Operation Sovereign Borders, whose main slogan is “no way, you will not make Australia home,” Australia’s greatest national security success, when the bible states “Do not oppress a foreigner.”

It’s not just Scomo. Look no further than the farce that was the 100 million dollar gay marriage plebiscite — that put the humanity of LGBTQ+ people and the right for their love to be recognised in question.

When religion is used to amplify one voice, it almost always comes at the expense of another.

And Alexandria Ocasio Cortez agrees, stating that “there is nothing Holy about writing discrimination into the law” and that we must stop “Weaponising and abusing scripture to justify bigotry. Because White supremacists have done it, those who justify slavery did it , those who fought against integration did it.” Sadly, she’s right.

So, how do we actually make a change? Religions can cooperate with social movements. Just look at the Black Church in America — and BLM . This is not an attack on Christianity, but rather the manipulation and weaponizing of it.

Contrary to the motto of the American dollar bill, we need to trust in more than just God for a healthy and functioning democracy. We need to trust ourselves — to separate religion from that democracy. If you believe that God does bless America (or Australia), then you must believe in that blessing extending to all.

Account 1: The situation is deeply worsened by the pandemic, almost all social services have been halted to a significant degree and the state is doing no efforts to legally bring vaccination to all citizens. Venezuela needs vaccines and because of bureaucracy and corruption the government isn’t doing enough of a push to guarantee Venezuelans vaccines.

Account 2: Dollarisation here is getting worse and worse by the second, excluding more and more of the average citizen from being able to buy what they need to satisfy their daily needs. Things were already bad enough already, yet they only seem to keep worsening, no hope, no light at the end of the tunnel.. nothing more than despair and constant suffering.

Account 3: most of Venezuelans who have been in public transport have seen either corpses or puddles of blood in the subways and the goverment will stay quiet about it

Account 4: the goverment wont say anything bad about the country in any way, they only say the good things and make it seem like everything its okay