hypocrisy

"Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century" George Bush

Says who. Says the man who began the 21st century with unprovoked invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and who threatens to engineer a third invasion before the first decade of the century is over. Says the man at whose hands over a million have died and as many at least have been forced from their homes. Says the unelected President and Commander-in-Chief of the strongest military force the planet has ever known. Says the self-appointed ruler of the world... Read on

... and other idiotic sayings.

'You can look back at this time and you can be very, very proud of what you have done',

Tony Bliar, flying into Basra to tell the troops they can be proud. (Dec. 2005)

'It's not that they're welcoming us because they're welcoming foreign troops, They're welcoming the fact of their liberation.'

Tony Bliar in April 2003

And what do the Iraqis say?

About two years ago, a friend in Russia said that she had long been thinking about interviewing the last survivors of the Stalin era, to see how they perceived those years, and to remind the Russian public of the full horror of what happened. She was concerned about the gradual rehabilitation of Stalin in official discourse, the return to power of Russia's secret services and the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the Putin regime. And she was concerned that young people in today's Russia are taught almost nothing about that period of history; that almost all they know about it is from the official discourse.

I had an ulterior motive in joining her in the project - a motive which in a way was opposite to hers. I was concerned about the discourse in the 'west', where enemy dictators are identified and vilified, then separated off from the context and society in which they have come to power. I was sick of the finger-pointing, the moral high-horses, and the evil dictator discourse - whether that concerned Stalin or Hitler or Saddam or Slobodan (depending on the point the finger-pointer needed to make or the country they wanted to invade). I was sick of the idea that you remove the man and plant democracy in his place, and sick of what Jean Bricmont calls the humanitarian imperialists: self-righteous politicians, journalists and academics justifying savage bombing campaigns, illegal invasions and punitive economic sanctions in the name of human rights. Or human rights workers standing on the fence while the bombs fly.

In the 'west', dictators are the ultimate evil, along with paedophiles - and anything is justified to take them off the earth. But I wish the west (by which I mean humanitarian imperialists in the west) would take note of the other dictators, those we have supported or put into power - like Pinochet, Suharto or even Saddam in another era. I wish the west would look at daily life in a dictatorship, and daily life in an invaded, war-torn country - and then say which is best. I wish the west would ask whether a death from torture is anyway much worse than death from malnutrition or starvation, and I wish the west would look at how they (we) treat the citizens of developing nations, safely beyond our borders and safely out of reach of the human rights instruments which only apply to governments' treatment of their own citizens. I wish that we would try our own mass murderers in an international court, that we would count the victims that we are responsible for murdering in other regions of the world. We do not even bother to do that.

And I wish the humanitarian imperialists would see that if they do fail to do all this, if they fail to be informed about the crimes their own governments are committing, if they fail to shout about those crimes, and fail to keep on shouting until the crimes have stopped - then they show that they would be the ones who would be propping up dictators, had they been unfortunate enough to have been born in another part of the globe.

So how do we teach the next generations to behave?

What about...

Set yourselves high standards: do not intentionally deceive, harm, undermine or otherwise disadvantage others. Explore the likely consequences of your actions before embarking on them, weigh up the likely good and harm that may be caused by anything you do and never undertake actions which violate, directly or indirectly, the basic human rights of others.

Look around you constantly for behaviour which violates these principles - in particular the last. Be ready to withdraw your support from such behaviour, to express publicly your disapproval and to lend your positive support to any actions meant to put an end to violations.

Try to take small steps towards a world where instances of deception, harm, or undermining and disadvantaging others are made less likely and more difficult to bring about.

... as a bare minimum. But it would be kind to the next generation – and more honest as well – if we added a few notes of caution to this list.

So here we go ...

Expect to find a world where there are far too many instances of deception, harm, intentional undermining and disadvantaging of others for you to be able to be aware of them all, let alone to take a stand on all. Do your best to allocate your time and energies between these issues, while still retaining enough optimism and sanity to have the drive to carry on.

Be aware that you will meet small and large instances of corruption and deception around every corner, and that mostly the rest of the world will not stop in its tracks to be shocked, let alone to address them. Be aware that unless you too are prepared not to stop in your tracks, you are likely to be left behind by the steaming engine of world progress.

Proclaim the noble principles above with passion and with eloquence, by all means: you will be generally revered if you do so. But do not expect to take them seriously or follow them to the letter. In fact, it is probably advisable, for your own security and sanity, to follow the crowd, rather than the principles.

If in doubt: compromise. You are certain to have to do so if you want to get anywhere in the world, at least in a worldly sense. Be ready to turn a blind eye to injustice, to tolerate deception, to venerate the wealthy and the powerful, and to court those in positions of power or influence. They are likely to return the favour - and you may need those favours.

Above all: never doubt or undermine the unwritten rules that keep the system going and the engine of world progress steaming forward. Hold the written rules up to inspection, one by one; doubt them a little and even undermine them, mostly with your tongue in cheek. But do not try to halt the engine of progress; do not seek to undermine the institutions that the engine put in place; do not wonder if the place might be a better one without the institutions; and do not even entertain the thought that the unwritten rules were unwritten according to the wrong unwritten principles.