blessed britons

Robin Cook's first trip abroad included Indonesia, where he shook hands warmly with Suharto...

[He] knew of course. Amnesty filled cabinets with evidence of Suharto's grisly record. Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were wimps by comparison. Shortly before Cook flew in, an exhaustive investigation by the foreign affairs committee of the Australian parliament concluded that Suharto's troops had caused the deaths of "at least" 200,000 East Timorese, a third of the population. In New Labour's first year in office, Britain was the biggest weapons supplier to Indonesia.

mad world

you have this business where TV won't show what we see, for reasons of so-called 'bad taste.' I remember once being on the phone to a TV editor in London when Al Jazeera were asked to feed some tape of children killed and wounded by British shell fire in Basra, and the guy started saying, 'there's no point feeding us this, we can't show this.'

"The first excuse was, 'people will be having their tea, so we can't put it on,' then it was, 'this is sort of pornography, we don't show this.' And ... the last thing was, 'we have to show respect for the dead.' So we don't show any respect for them when they are alive, we blow them to bits, and then we show respect for them.

racism

collaborators

Submitted by antarchi on November 27, 2007 - 03:01.

I went out to Russia in 1991 - still just the Soviet Union - certain that anyone who had not fought against, or stood up in some way against the regime was a collaborator. I went out partly to understand how a society of collaborators, collaborators on a mass scale, a scale of many millions - how it could exist. What was the mind of a collaborator like? How did they square their personal principles with what was happening around them? How did they excuse their failure to condemn the evil acts of the regime and their continuing participation in the structures set up by that regime - all essential to its continuing existence?

climate racism

Submitted by antarchi on August 18, 2007 - 02:00.

There was something particularly sobering about the map I included in a previous post - quite apart from the sheer numbers. Even if I know that it is not the richer nations that will bear the brunt of climate change, seeing it in such graphical form, already happening, suddenly makes it graphically clear why the richer nations are not in any hurry to do anything; and makes it graphically difficult to know how we can make them.

Why on earth should it matter to anyone in this country, let alone the government, that Africans, Asians and South Americans are going to die in their millions from climate change, if it doesn't matter that they are dying in their millions now, from starvation, from the bombs we send them, from the weapons we sell them, from the debt we load on them - and from the carbon effects of our mad and luxurious lifestyles, a world away. There is nothing in British government policy - and never has been - to suggest that the concerns or lives of people in the South count for anything at all: they are treated as expendable, resources at our disposal to be used as we think best. Very occasionally they are used in PR drives to earn some brownie points among the British population.

But if the government won't take anything except their chance of re-election seriously, can the public come to stop denying the link between our actions and the lives of other people in the world; and can it be made to care enough about those other people to change the actions? And then even if they - we - can make those two great leaps of understanding, can we stop ourselves backsliding later on?

The human mind has an extraordinary capacity to hold conflicting thoughts in separate compartments, to bury uncomfortable truths, and to rationalise what cannot and should not be rationalised. We know it is wrong, we know that most of us could make it less wrong by making alterations to our lifestyles that need not be radical enough to tip us into anything approaching hardship. And yet I catch myself wondering if I can justify one more flight to Georgia, and another one to Russia... Before Christmas.

For those who want to sin, and still feel good about themselves, I cannot recommend strongly enough cheatneutral.com - an innovative (and lucrative) approach to solving the world's escalating levels of despicable behaviour.

the beastliest people in the world

Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 16:21.

There was the general sense of callousness. Churchill permitted himself to make the remark that the Indian population bring it onto itself by breeding like rabbits. And there was another statement of his when he said that he was well aware that the Indian people were the beastliest in the world, next to the Germans. It cannot be said that the central government was full of sympathy.

antarchi's quotes

I have to tell the truth

Submitted by antarchi on November 1, 2007 - 02:18.

What do I see and hear in the Holy Land? Some people cannot move freely from one place to another. A wall separates them from their families and from their incomes. They cannot tend to their gardens at home or to their lessons at school. They are arbitrarily demeaned at checkpoints and unnecessarily beleaguered by capricious applications of bureaucratic red tape. I grieve for the damage being done daily to people's souls and bodies. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the yoke of oppression that was once our burden in South Africa.

I see and hear that ancient olive trees are uprooted. Flocks are cut off from their pastures and shepherds. The homes of some people are bulldozed even as new homes for others are illegally constructed on other people's land. I grieve for the land that suffers such violence, the marring of its beauty, the loss of its comforts, the despoiling of its yield. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the bitter days of uprooting and despoiling in my own country.

— Desmond Tutu

antarchi's quotes

one population was white, the other black

Submitted by antarchi on October 29, 2007 - 02:24.

In 1982, Britain's treatment of the Chagossians was being contrasted in the United Nations with its expenditure that year of £2 billion defending the rights of the Falkland Islanders. The Falklands and the Chagos each had a population of 2,000 British citizens. One population was white, the other black. While the Argentine invasion of the Falklands was furiously resisted by British forces sent 8,000 miles for the purpose, the American invasion of Diego Garcia was accommodated in every detail by the British government, which even arranged for the inhabitants' expulsion.

antarchi's quotes

ethnic cleansing in palestine

Submitted by antarchi on September 25, 2007 - 22:48.

The prime ethnic cleansing tool is, forever, land grab of Palestinian property in conjunction with expansion of settlements. Various stages of annexation process are in evidence in the originally rural part of the West Bank, constituting 60 per cent of its area. By now, nine per cent of the West Bank land has been transferred to the direct control of the settlements. A recent Peace Now investigation (July 2007) revealed that only twelve per cent of this land is being used at all. "The state earmarks huge tracts for the settlements, out of all proportion to their size, in order to prevent Palestinian construction in those areas. Yet once an area is closed to Palestinians, the settlers begin seizing adjacent Palestinian lands, often privately owned, that lie outside their jurisdiction".

— Victoria Buch

antarchi's quotes