Saturday 27 June 2015

the morality of Aung San Suu Kyi


"There was no ethnic cleansing", Aung San Suu Kyi said to a BBC journalist when asked about the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group in Rakhine, Western Burma. There was and is no ethnic cleansing that is despite publications like the Economist claiming otherwise. "Penny Green", they write, "of the ISCI(International State Crime Initiative) argues that the ethnic cleansing of 2012 was a stage in what she describes as the 'process of genocide'". The publication, along with Green do not even debate ethnic cleansing among the Rohingya, they even propose genocide is being committed or at least will be. Human Rights Watch, in a 2013 report, wrote that 'the criminal acts committed against the Rohingya and Kaman Muslim communities in Arkan state beginning in June 2012 amount to crimes against humanity carried out as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing'. 24 years ago the daughter of the much revered nationalist Aung San, was awarded the Nobel Peace prize. The committee said of Suu Kyi the following: was 'an important figure in the struggle against oppression'. Now the 'lady' is happy to visit the likes of Chinese demagogues , along with British and American brutes including Hilary Clinton and William Hague. When the world lauded her for the suffering she endured and pacifism and forgiveness she advocated, her party members in the National League For Democracy were being brutalised, tortured, raped, murdered and so on, their leader was under house arrest and was free to leave at any time if she agreed to leave the country. Her colleagues did not have such privileges, neither did they have their own piano present. The Rohingya, meanwhile, continue to suffer, such stuff as babies being thrown into fires, women gang-raped and so on. But of course no matter, because according to the great moralist no such abuses are taking place.

16th June, 2015

An Orwellian affair

 

Human rights, human rights, it is all about human rights.  Maybe so, but only in the Orwellian sense.  Barack Obama, the U.S President met with Raul Castro, the President of Cuba, in Panama City to discuss easing the blockade which has been enforced for decades.  Obama, being a man of nobel intentions, morality, courage, decency and whatever else, is concerned about Cuban human rights, so we are led to believe.  This morality and courage and other Orwellian names we choose to affix to Obama, does not exist elsewhere.  There are a number of countries the President in Washington supports: Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, China, Egypt, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Burma, Vietnam, Qatar, the UAE, Kyrgyzstan, and of course others.  But his concerns for human rights abuses there, are invisible words.  It would be interesting to look at these countries which Obama publicly supports.

saudi Arabia

The Baltimore Sun, A U.S newspaper, in January, 2015, printed the following:

Last Friday, as the world's attention was riveted on the terrorists who murdered French journalists for publishing cartoons and texts lampooning Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, a 30-year-old Saudi Arabian father of three was brought in shackles to the public square outside the Al Jafali mosque in the Saudi port city of Jeddah where he was flogged with 50 lashes of a cane.
The brutal beating was only a small part of the penalties heaped upon Raef Badawi for running a website inviting public discussion — and criticism — of the powerful clerics who hold sway in Saudi Arabia, enabled and empowered by the Saudi royal family.Under the terms of his punishment, Mr. Badawi will be back for 50 lashes again this Friday and every Friday for a total of 20 weeks until he has received the full 1,000 lashes of his sentence. In addition to the flogging, Mr. Badawi has been sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined a million Saudi riyals — about $266,000.

Torture, corporal punishment, capital punishment, sexual slavery are all prevalent in Saudi Arabia, and is well known by Barack Obama and his colleagues.  Those who are faced with torture are often protesters, this includes sleep deprivation, suspension of the limbs and plain harsh beatings. Only thirty countries in the world hand out corporal punishment: Saudi Arabia is one of them.  This includes complete amputations and floggings.  It also executes people (chopping off the head).  This is dished out for adultery, sorcery and witchcraft, women of course being the biggest victims.

Women, no doubt, are the biggest victims in this patriarchal  Kingdom.  Women are persecuted when they are raped, they are banned from driving, total oppression and repression is enacted on all women.  Apostasy carries the death penalty and women can do nothing without the consent of the male brutes, who believe they own them in their twisted, Wahabbist interpretation of Islam.  Every inch of their lives are controlled by their male relatives and are not treated as second class citizens but as fifth class ones.  Their suffering is silent as Obama prattles on about human rights abuses in Cuba.


Israel


According to Human Rights Watch, the New York-based human rights group:

Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress, the Obama administration’s National Security Council (NSC) recently published “five key facts you need to know about the US-Israel relationship under President Obama.” Here are some relevant facts it neglected to mention:
NSC: Since 2009, the US has provided Israel with more than $20.5 billion in foreign military financing.
Since Prime Minister Netanyahu came to office in 2009, Israeli security forces have demolished the homes of more than 4,450 Palestinians in the West Bank. Israel claimed the demolitions were justified because the buildings lacked Israeli building permits – yet Israel blocks virtually all such Palestinian permit applications. Demolitions intended to drive Palestinians from their communities in occupied territory are war crimes under the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The US should take all practical steps to ensure it is not contributing to such unlawful policies and practices by the Israeli military.
NSC: In 2014, the US voted against 18 United Nations General Assembly resolutions and was the only “no” vote against 5 UN Human Rights Council resolutions that were critical of Israel.
The Obama administration justifies these votes because of the UN’s excessive focus on Israel, but it almost never finds Israeli conduct worthy of criticism in UN fora despite its persistent illegal settlement expansion and, most recently in 2014, its unlawful attacks in Gaza, such as its deliberate attacks on the family homes of Hamas fighters and its attacks on schools used as shelters by displaced civilians.
In addition, the Obama administration has opposed efforts to investigate both sides in the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas, such as the International Criminal Court and the UN commission of inquiry. Its claim that these are one-sided efforts is utterly unsupported by the conduct of these investigations.

futhermore,  since 2009, when the Obama administration came into power, there has been little criticism of their terrorist aggression, if any.  The peace process is largely a fraud and what will eventually happen is that the Palestinian Arabs in the occupied territories will get land which is not fit for rats to live on, they can either accept this hideous deal or continue to be bombed with American machinery, cluster bombs, missiles and whatever else.
Turkey
Amnesty International. another human rights group, along with others have frequently documented the abuses of the Turkish Government under the premiership of Recep Tayyip Erdogon.  Amnesty, in October 20013, write:
Amnesty International’s report, Gezi Park protests: Brutal denial of the right to peaceful assembly in Turkey, details how the use of live ammunition, tear gas, water cannon, plastic bullets and beatings of protestors left more than 8,000 people injured at the scene of demonstrations. The deaths of at least three protestors have been linked to the abusive use of force by police.
The organization monitored demonstrations in Istanbul and Ankara and interviewed scores of people in four cities across Turkey who were injured by police or who were unlawfully detained, beaten or sexually assaulted during detention.
The report documents how:  protesters and others were severely beaten resulting in one death and scores of injuries. • Police frequently fired plastic bullets directly at protesters’ heads and upper bodies;  Tear gas canisters were routinely fired directly at protestors, bystanders and sometimes into residential buildings and medical facilities, resulting in hundreds of injuries and, according to witnesses, at least one death; • Chemical irritants were added to water cannon supply tanks; • Women protesters were sexually abused by law enforcement officials;  live ammunition was used, killing one protester
“The levels of violence used by police in the course of Gezi Park protests clearly show what happens when poorly trained, poorly supervised police officers are instructed to use force - and encouraged to use it unsparingly – safe in the knowledge that they are unlikely ever to be identified or prosecuted for their abuses,“ said Andrew Gardner.
The vast majority of police abuses already look likely to go unpunished, while many of those who organised and participated in the protests have been vilified, abused and now face prosecution on unfair or inflated charges. Those who assisted protestors or reported on the protests – such as doctors, lawyers, journalists and even businesses - have faced threats and harassment.
This is just one aspect of the abuses Turkey takes part in.  The abuse of women is awful; tens of women are murdered each month, with little or no state response.  The fierce war fought against Kurds is truly shocking.  They, as a group, have been left without linguistic rights, cultural rights, many are imprisoned on a whim.  Adding to that Turkey has the highest number of journalists imprisoned more than anywhere else in the world.  Torture is a common practice.  In terms on its freedom of speech, expression and so on, it is about as free as Saudi Arabia, perhaps a little more free than China, but then China does not even pretend to have democratic elections, and neither does Saudi Arabia.
China
According to Radio Free Asia
Across the country, rights lawyers, writers, journalists, academics, NGO activists, political dissidents and rights activists were targeted with often violent measures under the system, according to the report.
In 2014, it documented 2,270 cases in which the authorities had implemented "stability maintenance" measures against such targets, which can include house arrest, phone tapping, enforced 'holidays' and criminal detention by state security police, the report said.
The government also stepped up control over online content and the media, further limiting freedom of expression, it said.
Police commonly used public order offenses like "illegal gathering," and "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble," as catch-all charges for stability maintenance purposes, the report said.
"Police are increasingly abusing their powers of detention to limit the personal freedom of citizens," the report said, adding that in addition to beatings of those deemed troublemakers, state security police have a number of non-violent means of pressure and coercion in their arsenal of measures.
"Under the banner of stability maintenance, previously unusual measures like inviting targets to 'drink tea,' summoning them for questioning, surrounding and watching people's homes, following targets, issuing warnings..., enforced vacations, enforced relocation, enforced disappearances and detention in black jails and legal study centers have become normal and everyday occurrences," the report said.
Non-government groups are particular targets of the system, especially on China's tightly controlled internet, and "large numbers" of civil society groups had their websites taken down in 2014, it said.
It said politically sensitive times, once limited to three or four major events or anniversaries a year, are proliferating, to the extent that online stability maintenance now takes place year-round, instead of in the run-up to important meetings or anniversaries like that of the 1989 military crackdown on the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement.
"The stability maintenance measures surrounding the 25th anniversary of June 4 lasted for five months," the report said.
By contrast, the situation of citizens who pursue complaints against the government, who are also frequent targets of the stability maintenance regime, showed a marked improvement last year, a prominent activist said on Monday.
Indeed it would be long and arduous to go through all the human rights abuses China is involved in.  The abuse is systematic and savage to extreme degrees.  That is not even speaking about the war on minority groups: Tibetans, Taiwanese, and there are literally tens of others.  It is not a question of repressing civil liberties, it is a question of spending tens of years in prison for even criticising the state.  The lack of western action against the brutal state is shocking, but trade and foreign investment is far more important than the lives of its citizens.

By now I think we understand Obama's morality in 'human rights abuses'.  He speaks, of course, of  abuses in Cuba, and, as there are abuse on the little island, what Obama fails to point out are the abuses the U.S has itself subjected Cuba to over decades.  This includes chemical warfare, outright invasion, bombing the country, imposed sanctions of which the intention was to starve tens of thousands of people to death as they did years later in Iraq.  It failed of course, largely because of Castro's impressive health care reforms.  This was not mentioned by Obama, unsurprisingly.

28th April, 2015

Purifying Churchill



In 1927 Bertrand Russell delivered a lecture "Why I am not A Christian", was later published as a pamphlet, these days it is part of his collection of essays, one reason for this perhaps is that the work is tiny.  In Philip Roth's 2008 novel, Indignation, he quotes Bertrand Russell, directly from the Russell lecture, so it would seem: "Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?"  

I read the lecture many years ago and the quote above does not seem entirely correct.  Sure enough, the Russell lecture in a collection of his essays repeated the quote above.  The original speech however had something missing, it had been 'edited', or rather censored in the true Orwellian sense.  The original lecture, which I managed to see online, read: “Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti, and Mr. Winston Churchill?”

I should add Mr Roth is not to be accused of censoring out Churchill because he was quoting from a book, using the correct quote.  It, of course, would be more useful if the author of Portnoy's Complaint had quoted from the original lecture but never mind.  It remains disturbing that 45 years after an intellectual's death, his work can be censored.

Noam Chomsky, the Linguist and political theorist, for many years while Professor at MIT, had a large poster of Russell in his office.  He held the British philosopher in very high regard.  Bearing this in mind I emailed Chomsky.  I asked him the following:

Mr Chomsky,

Bertrand Russell's 1927 lecture Why I am not a Christian contains the following comment, 'you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascists and Mr. Winston Churchill;
I read  the Allen Unwin edition some years ago.  Philip Roth wrote in his novel, Indignation, quoting Russell from the same lecture, he writes, 'you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists’...omitting the Mr. Churchill.  Since researching this I understand the 'Mr. Churchill' has been censored out in some editions.  I have never known this to happen before, and am very concerned this could happen.  My question to you is are you aware of this?  If you were I would have expected you to document the fact,

Sincerely,

John Mulligan.

He replied the following day:

Interesting.  And “kafkaesque” is not a bad term for it.  It does happen.  It’s happened, for example, with some of Churchill’s awful speeches, purified in standard editions.

13th April, 2015

A Literary Scandal



Antony Burgess, the novelist once said “I was both disqualified and castigated when, in a school essay competition, I declared that James Joyce’s Ulysses was my favourite book…Now, making the identical declaration, I will be sneered at for the banality of my choice. Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century”. James Joyce's Ulysses was published in February, 1922, at the age of forty. Ulysses of course is his masterpiece but there are others he wrote of course. In 1914 Dubliners was published, a collection of short stories, the short novel, the Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in 1916, Exiles two years later and of course a lot more including Finnigans Wake. Tom Paulin, the literary critic and poet even went to far as to compare Ulysses with paradise Lost. He wrote in the guardian newspaper on 29th August 2000 the following:

Joyce, unlike those lesser modernist writers, Eliot and Pound (Pound is distinctly less), was famously free of prejudice. In Joyce's work there is a place for everybody, and an unrelenting scorn for all forms of bigotry.

Early in Joyce's great, tough-minded epic Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus listens to a tedious monologue delivered by the headmaster of the school where he is teaching. Mr Deasy is a unionist and he tells Stephen: "England is in the hands of the Jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation's decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation's vital strength."

Joyce balances Deasy's anti-semitism with that of the nationalist fanatic and pub bore, the Citizen - he is Cyclops in his stinking cave and he attacks Bloom, asking him "what is your nation?" When Bloom says "Ireland. I was born here. Ireland," the Citizen spits in the corner. A few pages earlier, the narrator of this episode points to a story and photograph in the newspaper of a lynching in the Deep South of the US.

Joyce hated racism in all its forms. He didn't believe in race, didn't believe you needed "Irish blood" to be Irish. He gave up attending Patrick Pearse's Gaelic classes because, he said, Pearse was asking his pupils to feed on "the old pap of race hatred.

Indeed. James Joyce not only is credited with producing one of the greatest masterpieces in literature of the twentieth century but of all time and much more than that. In his works, Ulyssess and the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man particularly, there is not only genius but humility, humanity, morality, a sense of justice and altrusim, that can not be said of modern writers generally, or even as writers in history as Paulin so aptly points out. Why then, one may argue, was he not awarded the Nobel Prize in Litearture? Only the Nobel Prize Committee can answer that question.

Marcel Proust is another 'giant' who was also not given the award. His masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (in Search of Lost Time) was published between 1913-1927. Swann's Way (volume one) was published in 1913; in the Shadow of the Young Girls in Flower (volume 2), in 1919; the Guermantes Way, a year or two later; the final volume Finding Time Again, so the work of monumental genius took a generation to complete.

Edmund White, in 1999, said in the New York Times the following

Graham Greene once wrote: "Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.... For those who began to write at the end of the twenties or the beginning of the thirties, there were two great inescapable influences: Proust and Freud, who are mutually complementary." Certainly Proust's fame and prestige have eclipsed those of Joyce, Beckett, Virginia Woolf and Faulkner, of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, of Gide and Valery and Genet, of Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, for if some of these writers are more celebrated than Proust in their own country, Proust is the only one to have a uniformly international reputation. The young Andrew Holleran, who would go on to publish the most important American gay novel of the seventies, Dancer from the Dance, wrote a friend eight years earlier: "Robert, much has happened: That is, I finally finished Remembrance of Things Past and I don't know what to say--the idea that Joyce ended the novel is so absurd; it's Proust who ended the novel, simply by doing something so complete, monumental, perfect, that what the fuck can you do afterwards?

Yet it is amusing people can write these things and yet not be a recipient for the great literary award. Virginia Woolf, found the novel 'boring', and complained that 'nobody told me he was a mental defective'. It is seldom you will find any of the two writers writing above missing from the great novels and novelist of the 20th century and it is a sad indictment from the Nobel Prize Committee to make these disgusting decisions. There are other writers too who have been ignored in Stockholm: Nabokov, Auden, Chekhov, Borges, Henry James, Ibsen and of course many, many others.

11th April, 2015

the Battle over Ideologies



According to the BBC and others, Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party is leftwing, David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister is not rightwing but a 'liberal', Natalie Bennett, the current and new(ish) leader of the Green Party is on the 'radical left' option and so it goes.  The question, a fundamental one in my view, is why do they use these terms when it is clearly evident these fixed ideologies are simply a fabrication. It appears, on the face of it at least to be trifling and pointless.  It is neither and the fabrications are a concerted effort in the indoctrinal system in which we are all ensnared.

If somebody who's party declares war on public sector workers: forcing them to work longer hours, get paid less and receive a lower pension; target the workless and vulnerable: introducing sub-fascist policies such as dismantling the welfare state (at least as we know it), privatising anything they can get their hands on, using racist language in dealing with immigrants, crushing women's rights, i.e through the job market, handing out zero hour contracts, as well as creating job opportunites, at least of which at least 20% are temporary and/or part-time; this is a fundamental attack on women.  The country still has the highest prison population in Europe, one of the highest rates of reoffending, and the tax payer is footing the bill.  For every prisoner it costs around £40,000.  The 'Liberals' are opposed to the European Court of Human Rights, which is a fundamental attack on human rights in general, they want less immigration, they would like the jobless to work for their benefits, they have cut so harshly, even the IMF have critcised them, they are prosecuting people for looking at pornography on the internet and labelling them 'sex offenders', they have changed nothing in terms of the banks and their iniquitous behaviour, leaving London as the centre of international fraud.  All this from a liberal government.


Now, this is a Liberal government so we are told by political commentators.  That is significant, because if they are 'liberals', how on earth would a conservative act?  And also is the case, and this is a far more important point, if Cameron and his recidivist colleagues are liberals, then real liberals surely must be left wing dissidents like the Green Party, but of course that is patent nonsense.  Natalie Bennett and company are not leftwing radicals but mere liberals, and Ed Miliband is certainly not leftwing, neither is he a liberal.  No, he is none of these, he is a Conservative.  Using such language prevents genuine liberals and leftwing leaders, because they would just be labelled crazed Marxist-terrorist Anarchists who want to cut your children's throats.  But of course these political commentators are from a 'free press', under brainwashing freedoms perhaps.  
10th April, 2015

Westminster vs ISIS

Saturday, 28 March 2015



Barbarism', is a word often used by members of Parliament at Westminster to describe ISIS or ISIL, but interestingly enough they do not use this term or even terms or phrases synonymous with it to describe the other two largest barbaric terrorists in the Middle East: Israel and Saudi Arabia.  The difference is the two states have been terrorising women, children and Arabs for decades; Saudi Arabia in fact has been at it for hundreds of years.  Silence not only permeates the lips of the hypocrites at Westminster either;  they also are complicit in the state terror the two states are involved in.  Saudi Arabia of course treats women as Israel treats Arabs: worse than animals. The country is run by autocratic wahbbi sadists.  Women even need permission from a male to enter education, they are unable to leave the country unless a male relative consents.  They are not permitted to drive of course, and when they are raped, the punishment falls heavily on the women and the men are the victims.  For adultery women are stoned to death and so it goes.  With Israel they take delight in barbaric acts against the Arab population who are 'two-legged beasts', to borrow a phrase from Menachem Begin.  In the last fourteen years there have been seven 'operations' which have led to thousands murdered by the Israeli Defense Force.  Every day is a struggle. torture is rampant in the prisons, houses and settlements are routinely destroyed, creating thousands of refugees.  The so-called peace plans are a charade, and are scuffled by fanatics like Netanyahu and Sharon.  There is not one ounce of criticism from the politicians at Westminster on these people and their actions.  Their terrorism, eventually becomes our terroroism.  It is a war being waged by all of us against all of us.
28th March, 2015

A Hero of Freedom


Hilary Clinton recently labelled Henry Kissinger a hero of democracy.  She did not mention the wholesale slaughter of Vietnam, the secret bombing of Cambodia, the chemical genocide in Laos Kissinger oversaw; neither she care to discuss his 1974 plan of mass genocide by controlling food supplies in order to commit genocide.  In 1995 Joseph Brewder, writing for Executive Intelligence Review, wrote

On Dec. 10, 1974, the U.S. National Security Council under Henry Kissinger completed a classified 200-page study, “National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The study falsely claimed that population growth in the so-called Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) was a grave threat to U.S. national security. Adopted as official policy in November 1975 by President Gerald Ford, NSSM 200 outlined a covert plan to reduce population growth in those countries through birth control, and also, implicitly, war and famine. Brent Scowcroft, who had by then replaced Kissinger as national security adviser (the same post Scowcroft was to hold in the Bush administration), was put in charge of implementing the plan. CIA Director George Bush was ordered to assist Scowcroft, as were the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, and agriculture

Clinton, in her fit of amnesia also fails to mention his support for mass murder in Latin America, the overthrow of a democrat, with the replacement of a fascist, Augusto Pinochet, in Chile.  The bloodbath in Bangladesh in 1971 also happened on Kissinger's watch; but most barbaric than the others was the genocide in East Timor.  This is democracy, so we are told.  

28th March, 2015

re-election of a Psychotic Fanatic


 
Gideon Levy, the Israeli journalist wrote 'Netanyahu deserves the Israeli people and they deserve him.'  He was of course referring to his election win.  He later says in the article, writing for the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz,  that Netanyahu is seeking to emulate David Ben Gurion.  If so, Netanyahu will become the longest serving Israeli prime minister in their entire history.  The Israeli prime minister  first came into power in the 1990s and some twenty years later, or there abouts, he still remains.  That is not to say he held power for all those years, he has not.  He is haunting the Palestnians with such rhetoric as 'there will be no Palestinian state'.  Even by Western standards he is  extreme.  There are three sides to Netanyahu.  The first is the lunatic: this is his rhetoric on Iran.  He, recently compared them with ISIS and this is absurd even from him.  Who have Iran, say over the last ten years bombed, invaded, attacked? The only people they have assaulted and abused is their own citizens.  In fact the only country in the entire region who have launched fierce attacks against other countries is Israel itself.  They do not threaten counties with state-terrorism, they do it.  Murdering children, which they clearly target more than others.  The second side to Netanyahu is the war criminal, just touched on of so there is no need to proceed any further.  The third side to the Israeli prime minister is his own very brand of propaganda which would make even Goebbels applaud, notice the irony here.
 

19th March, 2015

the Assassination of Arcbishop Romero 35 years on


In March, 1980, Oscar Arnulfo Romero was assassinated while saying mass.  Several weeks before he wrote to the then President of the united States, Jimmy Carter. Well, Jimmy Carter's response was interesting to say the least.  The response was mute; in other words there wasn't one.  What Carter did instead was an attempt to shut him up by the authority of the pope.  He need not of bothered because Carter's state sponsored terrorism in El Salvador, the country which Romero was native to, murdered the inspirational figure.  The letter he wrote to the U.S President in 1980 was a plea to stop sending arms to the death squads, many of which were trained in Georgia, America, what was then known as The School of the Americas.  In fact Roberto D' Aubuisson was responsible for the assassination, along with others.  D' Aubuisson just happens to have been one of those who was trained in America.  The letter, written in mid-February 1980 reads:

Dear Mr. President: In the last few days, news has appeared in the national press that worries me greatly. According to the reports, your government is studying the possibility of economic and military support and assistance to the present government junta. Because you are a Christian and because you have shown that you want to defend human rights, I venture to set forth for you my pastoral point of view in regard to this news and to make a specific request of you. I am very concerned by the news that the government of the United States is planning to further El Salvador’s arms race by sending military equipment and advisors to “train three Salvadoran battallions in logistics, communications, and intelligence.” If this information from the papers is correct, instead of favoring greater justice and peace in El Salvador, your government’s contribution will undoubtedly sharpen the injustice and the repression inflicted on the organized people, whose struggle has often been for respect for their most basic human rights. The present government junta and, especially, the armed forces and security forces have unfortunately not demonstrated their capacity to resolve in practice the nation’s serious political and structural problems.

17th March, 2015

Defunct Moral Decline



The country is in a frenzy, or at least soon will be.  That is in Britain of course.  The reason is what people refer to as 'the general election'. The dispossessed, the downtrodden, unemployed, despised, inevitably will not vote, neither will much of the population.  In the northwest of the country very few will vote the Conservatives, and this is very well-known.  Can anybody name a single Conservative Member of Parliament elected in Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, that is a Conservative MP? No.  Because there is not one.  Whoever is elected, and it makes little difference who is, there will be a sort of war, as there is already.  Who can beat and destroy the downtrodden the most? It is the case with the Nazis or the Fascists, who to pick? Well, the truth is it does not make a huge difference because they are both, or rather all are playing the same ferocious game on who can make people's lives the most unbearable. This is not represented in the mainstream press of course, and why would it? That is frivolous talk.  Class warfare is not only restricted to the Conservatives, but extends to the other parties, and they have shown how savage they can be.  This Government, an illegitimate one, has condemned a higher education system for the elite, the public sector workers have been bruised and battered; pensions have been robbed, in the process they are to work longer hours and draw their pension later.  This is how a government applauds its nurses, teachers and so on.  The poor creatures subjected to the harsh conditions of the welfare state also have had a vicious war launched against them with the full complicity of the media, the immigrants as well, are punished even more so.  It is a truly hideous political system that has been imposed on all of us by all of us.  Most countries, or rather all of them, barring Britain, progress in some way, even Saudi-Arabia and the Islamic fanatics have progressed in some way but it is not the way in Britain; there has been no progression.  In fact the opposite is the case: things have gone more backward and of the people that have been utterly repressed, oppressed and suppressed, they are not even aware of this fact which tells you a great deal about the 'democratic' system.  'Parliamentary democracy', said Tony Benn, 'is a sham'.  A sham it is and far more besides.  Tens of people commit suicide in prison each year but few of us are aware of it because it seldom gets reported, the baleful practices of the social services seldom gets reported, the lack of liberties, civil rights of the country are ignored.  But people will think of the election and vote for a sociopathic sadist, reducing their freedoms and rights even further.  We must not think about that though.  We must think about who will be the best leader, Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini.