How can we agree to all this mayhem and still have a clear conscience?
Don't our leaders brag we live in Christian countries? Since when did the Jesus Christ of the gospels approve of killing and injuring people, in these cases people none of us even know. Fascists could hardly be worse. So, whose trying to stop it?
We read that within two months of the outbreak of World War I, as many as 640,000 young men had volunteered for service in the British army. They gathered outside recruiting offices in crowds so large that mounted police sometimes had to be called in to control them. 90 years on, Tony Blair had to lie to the nation trying to convince it of the moral and legal justification for invading Iraq. A century after “the war to end all wars” the British seemed convinced it should have been, and a million demonstrated against Blair’s fraud. But had popular opinion about warfare really been transformed from a stance of naïve patriotic fervour, to one of widespread aversion or abhorrence?
Cambridge visiting historian, J Winter, thought it was the consequence of a process of cultural evolution:
I do think that one reason Tony Blair lied about weapons of mass destruction was because he couldn’t take the nation with him in support of war. That is a consequence of the contribution artists, poets, filmmakers and others have made to our understanding of the horrors of war. Only a fool would argue that cultural history only moves in one direction at any given time. Nevertheless, there is clearly something that has brought most people to the view that war is simply not a legitimate human activity any more. Time and again culture has shown us that the best defence we have against the ravages of war is the human imagination itself.
There is a certain absence of reality here. It is true that artists and poets were in the forefront of those objecting to the mass murder justified as war, but in the intervening decade, the establishment has pushed warfare down our throats continually, and now there seems to be no substantial body of people willing to object to us acting like fascists in invading other people’s countries and killing poor people, men, women and children in their own homes. The lauding of heavily armed soldiers as heroes is nothing less than obscene, yet the BBC TV does it ad nauseum. With Wootten Bassett no longer the featured town for public displays of sickening one-sided sentimentality, it has now found a new one in the appropriately named, Warminster.
Our utter failure to comprehend the scale of our crimes is that we soak up the propaganda of intervention in the internal affairs of foreign countries, something that for decades after WWII was wrong because it was considered as openly fascist, the very thing that the fascist countries recently defeated, like Nazi Germany and Bushido Japan, had done in their attempts at power grabbing, but following the lead of Tony Blair—a Catholic Saint in the making when the miracle appears—in West Africa and Serbia, then Afghanistan and Iraq, the invasion of other people’s countries has become acceptable as the norm, and people now write to newspapers demanding it.
Yet, while condemning Assad in Syria for killing allegedly 8000 of his own people, the figures of how many people we are killing in Afghanistan are never published except as journalistic estimates, but they are not slight, and are certainly of the same order. The long term propaganda against Gaddafi ended up in another lie, a so-called no-fly zone, which even the Russians and Chinese were willing to accept, but which turned out to be a full scale air attack which destroyed the country’s main communications and fuelling centers, and killed 50,000 people, according to the government of the anti-Gaddafi victors. Everyone knows that at least a million people were killed in the Bush/Blair WMD attack on Iraq, and the Clinton/Blair sanctions on medicine and supplies that preceded it.
Do we seriously expect that we can treat people like rats and expect them not to bite back? Six British soldiers were killed in one explosion, to be accompanied by the usual BBC and Sky sentimentality, and mock shock.
“Ingrates! We try to help them and this is what we get.”
Just what would these people do if a foreign army landed in this “Sceptred Isle” and started to kill us in our homes, streets and fields? We certainly would not feel gratitude for the brave foreigners dying to “help” us.
Well, get real! Nor do the Afghans, and nor will the Syrians, if we try the same trick there, and nor will the Iranians, who are the real object of this continuous war build up, and propaganda.
Now we hear from politicians advocating the mayhem and their brain-dead supporters—including some parents of the dead, but not others—that we ought not to stop because, if we did, “our lads” will have died in vain. Does anyone seriously buy this? We have to keep sending in battalion after battalion to lose their lives until maybe we might win. It is the gambler’s insane way to recoup his gambling debts. Double up, each time. Eventually he must win. Yes indeed, if he has infinite resources to risk. In this case lives! These dolts are gambling with the lives of our own youth, and are murdering mostly innocent peasants abroad, assuming that we must win before our resources run out—before we run out of young men.
Well, at present we have plenty of young unemployed. They had better be ready to lose their lives as well as their incomes, if the present insane strategy is to work. Major economic crises, like the one between the world wars, ended up in mass brutality. The west is building up to a mass attack on Iran which could be nuclear, and will lead to many deaths and possibly a new World War with Russia and China.
It really is time for us all to begin objecting on a serious scale, to follow the lead of the sensitive souls who wrote moving verse, sang sad songs, made troubling images, and produced films exposing war for what it is—mass cull of human life—in the hopes that it really would end all war. Jay Winter thinks they succeeded, but we are fighting one long continuous war, and have lots of heroes, many dead and more horribly injured.
How can a mass cull of our own children be of value to us? We are not facing any serious external threat like Hitler. Our threat is right here at home. It is our warmongering rulers.
In a survey of political extremism—From Voting to Violence? Far Right Extremism—Dr Matthew Goodwin, of the University of Nottingham’s School of Politics and International Relations, and Professor Jocelyn Evans, of the University of Salford, examined a YouGov survey of 2,152 supporters of the British extreme right wing parties, the British National Party (BNP), the UK Independence Party and the English Defence League (EDL).
To call a spade a spade, these are fascist or crypto fascist parties, so the results are hardly surprising. Large numbers of BNP and UKIP supporters agree that violence between different ethnic, racial and religious groups in Britain is inevitable. The BNP holds that view more strongly. Many went as far as approving armed conflict to ldquo;defend &the British way of life”, evidently a euphemism for killing British Moslems. Dr Goodwin said:
It is current and former BNP members who are the most likely to think that violence may be needed to protect their group, and that inter group violence is largely inevitable.
Large majorities of BNP and UKIP supporters are convinced that Islam poses a serious danger to the West. Dr Goodwin added:
Both groups express high levels of anxiety over Islam and its religious institutions. Both BNP and UKIP supporters would feel bothered by the presence of a mosque in their local community, but to a much higher degree among the BNP supporters. BNP supporters in our sample are overwhelmingly concerned about immigration and Muslims, almost to the exclusion of all other issues. Both BNP and UKIP supporters are considerably dissatisfied with the way democracy is functioning in Britain, and again BNP supporters are the least satisfied.
The authors stress that the report is exploratory rather than a definitive assessment of far right views. Their intention is that this will lead to far bigger research project analysing the beliefs held by far right extremists.
We want to examine whether these views, taken from a relatively small sample, are specific to the far right in Britain. This would include a much larger national population and serve to strengthen the evidence base we have, which is currently weak compared to that on religious extremism.
No doubt a lot of ordinary British people, readers of the dominant right wing press which daily stirs up hatred for immigrants, feel the same way. The answer is not to kill people but to stop hate mongering by millionaire press barons. Certainly, if we are to believe the history of Christianity, that Christians cite proudly, making martyrs of a persecuted monority is only likely to feed religious fanaticism. The Christians boast of their martyrs, just as do the Moslems, but Christians have few martyrs these days, they have millionaire TV evangelists instead, but our insane governments are giving Moslems all the modern day martyrs they need.
Fascists always pick on some unpopular minority to foster hatred of. It is a way of uniting people who otherwise have nothing in common, except their hatred or suspicion of the minority. For Hitler it was the Jews. For the Zionist Jewish state of Israel it is the Palestinians, who are, of course, Moslems. For western fascists the Moslems are the hated and feared minority, but the fear has been engendered by western and Israeli governments grossly abusing Moslem people in their own countries for decades, and indeed centuries.
Despite the justified suspicions of Romans, Christians ended up dominant, forcibly closing all rival religions and introducing a thousand year dark age in Europe. Those who refuse to learn from history are forced to relive it, as George Santayana famously said, though few people ever took any notice, especially the far right and our right wing politicians, whose simple philosophy is “if a battalion is not sufficinet to win, then send in a division, and if that is insufficient then send in an army, and if…”. Greater force is their perpetual answer, but all they do is lose the people, causing massive bloodshed in the meantime. If there are devils in the world, these right wingers are they. They are a distraction from our real enemies, the 1% and their management and banking prostitutes.
Most Moslems by far in the west are poor, they are with us among the 99% and so are our allies. Unite with them!
