Don’t comment on anything, no seriously I mean it, don’t say a goddamn thing that might even possibly lead to any kind of philosophising whatsoever. Take the soapbox break it up and use the shards to light a barbecue or something, then sit around play some pop songs on the guitar, drink some beer, talk about each other and how you’d really like to get laid, play games to fill in the fact no one has anything to talk about and doesn’t want to anyway.
The quiet life as much as it reduces us to the simple robots that John Nash once mistakenly thought we could be is nonetheless the only way to forever keep out of the firing line.
Equally the less you say, the less you can be proved wrong.
Why? Because there are a myriad of opinions and beliefs that mingle and clamour for attention and every now and then when the brain slows and the reactions become sluggish you trip and fall under the weight of so much dissent and end up buried under a landslide of belief.
Pass me another beer would you and if you open it for me I’ll even play a Backstreet Boys cover on the guitar…you like that don’t you, murky, tired and rusted I’ve even forgotten how much I can’t stand them.

Nonsense and meaningless words, symbols that mean nothing without prior attatchment, here’s wishing we were better than we are. This end for no can do, this end for the searching through the sludge and coming up with nothing more than an inability to get anything done.
Even talking heavily about what it is you could do, might do, maybe will it is as though everything you try is like trying to remember some incantation given to you in an alien tounge, when the aspirations land like snowflakes into the palm of your hand so that for just a second you can consider them, consider what they could be or what they could mean before they melt, disappear, become so much flowing liquid which passes through your hand and seeps into the earth.
This is where nothing is enough in both senses.

David Davis’ resignation of his parliamentary seat in protest of the government’s success in the first stage of getting the 42 day holding limit passed is as far as I can see a display of principle in a world of smoke, mirrors and timidity. Davis is not a man I agree with on many points of view but on this issue he gets my full support. Mr Davis plans to stand in a by-election within his constituency of Haltemprice and Howden on a civil liberties ticket. However whilst his stand is admirable and his actions commendable he may have simply shot himself in the foot, I hope for his sake that this is not the case and it would indeed be a downright shame if a politician who had the nerve to display principle over ambition lost his seat.
His actions highlight the dissent that David Cameron has done well to keep under wraps, redesigning the Conservative party to be smiles, kittens, fluff and bubbles has been a difficult process not in the least because there are seperate elements within the party that would rather say what they think and be unpopular than chase middle england across the polls, David Davis with his belief in a death penalty for premediated murder is one such individual who who for the sake of appearances has had to keep his opinions to himself or bring upon the party the label of nastiness that has hounded them for so long.
Well before I write anything else that sounds sympathetic to Conservatism, and boy oh boy do I dislike Conservatism (just for the record here) I think a little bit of analysis wouldn’t go amiss. Mr Davis has received widespread support amongst the grass roots of the Conservative party but it is clear that he has not just burnt but devastated with high charge explosives any bridge he may have had with David Cameron, his replacement as shadow Home Secretary by Dominic Grieve was described by Cameron as ‘permanent’. In Mr Davis’ actions he may well have dealt a body blow to his former  leadership rival, one that the Prime Minister will be all too happy to take advantage of in his slow and lumbering way. He has highlighted the disunity within the Conservative party and by doing so has taken the media spotlight away from the dubious bribery and mirky dealings that saw the DUP side with Labour to pass the bill by 9 votes. Equally, given that public opinion seems to be so inexplicably in favour of the odious 42 day holding limit legislation, that Mr Davis, as well as derail his career and lose his chance to serve as a Home Secretary in any future Conservative administration, may even lose his seat in the Commons
The Sun, that fine organ of sensitve, non-reactionary, level headed views will be more than adequetely represented in the upcoming Haltemprice and Howden by-election by an ex-editor of the rag called Kelvin Mackenzie, a vocal supported of the 42 day limit. Whilst David Davis will stand unopposed by both the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party and whilst it would be a major upset for a politician of Mr Davis’ calibre to be ousted by a rabid little demogouge like Mackenzie, who can tell what may happen with regards to public opinion and it’s sometimes surprising ability to humble those whose Achilles heel happens to be democratic accountability.

For more about the 42 day limit and how to get involved against such an authoritarian measure please peruse Amnesty International Blogs ,go to the Liberty website or get some background information and find out what you’re losing by studying what you have in the Habeus Corpus Act of 1679

The carnival atmosphere of the by-election run up is in full swing in Henley as the big three duke it out for the now vacant position of MP left by Boris Johnson moving on to better and bigger things (like having an even bigger scope to plunge himself into media savaging and inexplicable hero worship) Labour, like a tired old sheepdog panting it’s last ragged breaths, is so woefully behind that the only decent thing to do would be to take it out back and blow it away with a shotgun. I’d just like to point out that in this analogy no animals were harmed, unless you count Labour frontbenchers.
The field is left open for a showdown between the Liberal Democrat candidate Stephen Kearney and the Conservative candidate John Howell and in the true spirit of things the buckets are filled and the mud slinging has begun.
Having dung emptied over your head is not new in politics, the earliest mention I can think of would be during the consulship of Julius Caesar in 59BC when Marcus Bibulus got himself a dry cleaning bill and a half by virtue of a bucket of dung and some rather dismissive political tactics. It’s not the most impressive way to win an election but sometimes, when the truth outs its the only way to do so and lets face it, in a mediocre world its easier to make your opponent look stupid than it is to make yourself look better.
However the latest news from the front is that John Howell, who is campaigning on a ‘protect the greenbelt’ ticket works as…

“a consultant to the management team of Dialogue, a leading communications firm in the planning sector, and to Savills Hepher Dixon where he also provides communications and political lobbying consultancy on large and contentious land and property developments“.
(WriteAnglePR) 

This has led to Chris Rennard of the Liberal Democrats denouncing John Howell stating…

“People will be shocked to learn the truth that he is closely tied to developers who are desperate to build in controversial locations. This is grade-A hypocrisy.”

Ah, but where to start, now you see it might come as a bit of a surprise that this issue might not be fired up into a ‘big, bad wolf Conservative git’ story seeing as I detest the Conservative party and am in fact a member of the Liberal Democrat party but, perhaps, due to my declaration of interest this article might just be of some use in that it’s as non-partisan as I can make it.
Given that the nature of John Howells consultancy is in “persuasion” and given that it’s main clients are companies hungry to tuck into Green belt as though it were a freshly cooked pie sitting undefended on a window ledge; he is actually in a perfect position to prevent them from descending like the four horsemen upon the fields on Oxfordshire county.

“Grayling, shadow work and pensions secretary, who is organising the Henley campaign, said: “This is just mudslinging by the Liberal Democrats”.He said Howell had recently worked on one major project in the centre of Leicester for the company on public and planning consultation for the developer.His other work had been in Horsham in West Sussex where he sided with protesters against developers.”

Lets quickly deal with this Hypocisy business, the Labour Party is looking to build thousands of homes on Green belt areas over the next ten years and the Liberal Democrats have supported them and here we have the problem with mudslinging in that it tends to go everywhere and unless you’re squeaky clean, which in politics is unlikely to say the least, it’ll find you and at least some of it will stick. Grade A hypocrisy indeed.
A Conservative spokesman stated that…

“He was also furious that the Liberal Democrats should attack the Tories over the issue - since Liberal Democrat-controlled Oxford did want to develop homes in the green belt.”

So I think what I’m saying to members of the Liberal Democrats and to the team working in Henley is ‘come on I think we can do better than that’.
There is a much better strategy to be pursued here, John Howell is clearly pretty keen on keeping the Green belt Green and not tarmacadamed which is commendable but if we take a closer look at his strategy that would mean that new housing projects are likely to be high density estates in and around major population centers which means that whilst the better off residents of Henley will still have the glorious view of fields and forests; urban centers will feel the added weight of increased housing, increased population and stretched public services. What this means is that those living in towns and in heavy urban districts are going to suffer somewhat when the next round of building comes a-knocking and here in lies a whole voting bloc of individuals who in the stratified environs of Henley are simply not being targeted.
John Howell might be the man to have all building work shifted right out of the Constituency and passed off on to the fringes of neighbouring Didcot or Reading, big towns, who cares? Indeed Mr Howell’s past actions have seen him protect the Greenbelt at all costs but involve himself in large scale inner city building projects which saw high density estates dumped into urban centers.
Stephen Kearney states on his website that…

“[l]ocal people should be given much more of a say about development in their area. He added, “There is need for more low cost housing to help children of local people get on the property ladder. But this should be tackled through small low impact schemes in consultation with local communities.”

The above statement is the mid ground consultation process that needs to be followed in order to tackle the contentious issue of development in and around the area, the work needs to be decentralised and as stated ‘low impact’ and it needs to be shared amongst the most likely and suitable areas. Essentially what Henley does not need is a Labour govenment who pave over the Green belt with merry abandon nor does it need a Special interest MP who protects the Green belt with the zeal of a Spartan hoplite at Thermopylae whilst using his ability to influence where development is placed to dump it all onto sidelined urban communities.
The middle ground is the involvement of all parties and all groups at a local level in order to equally distibute building projects and ensure that homes are built and the countryside is defended, urban centers do not come under added strain and the quality of life for everyone is improved.
Politics is based on trust and the word ‘promise’ means little, but Stephen Kearney is interested in representing all his constituents not his interest groups, he is seemingly free of class partisanship and consequently provides the middle ground representation that will see the views of all Henley residents represented fairly and equally in Parliament.
You see there are much better ways to proceed in poltics than resorting to mudslinging, be it my party denouncing another or vice versa it isn’t the manner in which we need to act, examples need to be set and the only real reason for mudslinging is to cover up for a lack of substance in oneself, I feel that we can all do a lot better than that

Rupert Everett did the big thing and apologised for his remarks about the British Army.

“The star of My Best Friend’s Wedding later issued a statement apologising “without reserve” to the “many in this country, and hundreds and thousands of others across the world who have lost their brothers and sisters, their fathers and mothers to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and all the countless others”.

Everett, 49, said: “I never meant at any point to question the bravery of those who lose their lives, or survive, but without arms or legs. Just seeing these people in my mind’s eye right now makes me feel a terrible anguish.”

He said he was trying to make the point that “we still go to war, but actually we haven’t the stomach for it.” He added: “I also talked flippantly about torture and our attitude towards it. I apologise.

“However, it seems to me that embracing war means accepting its underbelly as well, torture and the unspeakable violence that spirals from the battlefield to its surroundings. You cannot be politically correct in a war.

“My flippant and irresponsible behaviour arises from a deep frustration at the fact that we seem to be continually making war, dreaming up new ones, instead of doing everything we can to avoid them.”

I know what he means and the fact he has apologised is commendable, it is a difficult task seperating all this shit out and sometimes we go too far on either side, I’ve done it and believe me I’ve managed to put my foot so far in it its a wonder I ever managed to pull it back out again.
I thought, having written invective about his previous comments, it would only be fair to him to quote his apology. We all say some stupid things and the better amongst us recognise it and say sorry, thats what he’s done and that is all that needs to be said.

Yesterday I was down in Portsmouth for a radio interview and having arrived early decided to get myself a coffee and wilt in the sun, going past the Guild Hall I saw a crowd of young children, some probably aged only 7 years old or so engaged in a form of protest regarding climate change. I was struck with a rather peculiar feeling that persisted for some time. They were all pretty well organised, their teachers were with them and I’m not sure what institution organised it or what was really going on, just that it was a group of children and they were protesting about climate change. The feeling I had was one of mixed hope and sadness because the group of children I was watching were the ones who even more than my generation are going to have to deal with the fallout of any form of global warming, overpopulation and the likely fuel crisis as oil becomes increasingly expensive and rare. It reminded me of the stewardship mentality that was plugged into me when I was being dragged against my will to church as a young boy and I realised that however people might like to decry climate change as being non-existent we were, as a whole, failing these children pretty badly. So much for the sadness, the hope was founded in the apparent passion of the children and the fierceness in their voices. It was in short great to see children being active, being involved and clearly believing in what they said, I felt that their passion was that which could become anger later on and all I could feel as regards such anger was that it was justified and perhaps it was necessary.
Then the greatest and most crushing blow to any chance that the hope may take precendent was dealt by my sudden awareness that all the passersby were laughing at the children with heavy derision, not the pleasant smiles of amusement or admiration but simple derisory snorts, a couple of people even had the presence of mind to drop their litter in the Guild Square before wandering off down the highstreet.
A little while later, sat in the sun with a coffee and glad to have put my guitar down as the sun seemed to turn me into so much sluggish inefficiency I saw all the litter strewn across the streets, smelt the heady smell of petrol and I wondered how we could be so dismissive of a generation that are growing up with such a spectre looming over them, in a sense how we can be so dismissive of ourselves?

By WENN world entertainment news - Monday, June 9 11:20 am

From www.yahoo.co.uk. 

“Outspoken actor Rupert Everett has sparked fury from British soldiers after branding them “whining wimps” who are “pathetic” compared to recruits in the days of Victorian Britain.
The Stardust actor, whose own father was a major in the British Army, made the controversial comments in a TV documentary he has filmed for the UK’s Channel 4 about 19th century soldier Sir Richard Burton. The star compares modern day soldiers to old fashioned recruits, insisting British fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan constantly “whine” about facing the risk of death.And the 49-year-old insists soldiers have no right to complain, as enlisting to the Army is the same as having a death wish.He says, “The whole point of being in the Army is wanting to get killed, wanting to test yourself to the limits. Now you have to fly 15,000 feet above the war zone to avoid getting hit.”I don’t think there is any point in having wars if that’s how you’re going to behave. It’s pathetic. All this whining!”And the star doesn’t only blast the state of the British Army, he also attacks the US and their cultural identity following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York in 2001, branding the country as a “blobby” nation.He adds, “I’m totally off the States now. The reaction to 9/11 and then George Bush - really, they’ve got very blobby as a nation.”Now they are whiny victims whose language is entirely taken from two TV shows - Friends and Sex And The City - and there’s nothing sexy about them any more.”And that kind of semi-blindness about the rest of the world, which was attractive when America was exciting, is really unattractive now.”

Where to start? I mean really where do you start on this one?
Let me just open with the view that I don’t really know who Rupert Everett is, from the article I guess we can assume he is some type of actor and clearly from the article he feels he can insult and belittle the efforts of every individual who signed up for the British Armed Forces on the basis that he is above and beyond the rest of the mortal crop.
If the whole point of joining the Army is wanting to get killed then I guess we could state that signing up for every job that has a risk factor greater than 0.00 is a thinly veiled suicide attempt. The point, oddly enough, about signing up for the Army is not so much to get yourself killed but to survive the situations you find yourself in, if the point was to get killed then we’d be seeing a lot more deaths in both Iraq and Afghanistan as soldiers threw themselves in front of heavy machine gun fire and drove into roadside traps in plastic pedal cars. Believe it or not but many British soldiers and soldiers of all nations feel that they are providing a valuable contribution to their country by taking on difficult and dangerous circumstances with the aim of succeeding in their mission objectives. Such is the problem with the existence of both state and war in that both sides will feel that they are doing the right thing, cue death, misery and suffering.
Mr Everett raises the interesting point that in comparison to 19th century recruits, the current quality of soldier is somewhat lacking in both courage and realism which is odd granted that he has spent very little time on the front line, or indeed on the back line, you could say he was dropped behind enemy lines just perhaps a little too far ie in New York but then you could say that he was talking with little qualification.
Importantly it raises the question, ‘If the 19th century recruit just got on with the job and died with little complaint then is this a better state of affairs?’ Such a situation speaks volumes of the social values that supported such a system of unquestioning subservience to authority as well as highlight the background to the bloody slaughter of the first world war which was a product of the very ’shut up, get on and die hideously’ mentality behind so many young men who served and died in that futile and pointless conflict. Essentially what Everett seems to be saying to us is that there is no point in having a war if we don’t enter it with a mentality that will precipitate mass slaughter of both sides, war should be as bloody as ever. The fact is that war is as bloody as ever and the dangers soldiers face are more real than the set of a dumb television series and if there is anything that we can hold on to it is that instead of thousands of body bags coming back from the front it is the hundreds, not much of a consolation to those affected, not much at all but the less people who die the better. Not that this is much of a consolation to the thousands of dead Iraqis and Afghans either but I’m not defending war or these wars in particular, I am defending the soldiers who are involved because by and large it is not they who are at fault.
Additionally Everett says that you have to fly 15′000 feet above the battlefield and I fear he may be getting confused between Ground forces and the Airforce, not to split it down into simplistic terms, and certainly I’m no military expert but Ground Troops…are…involved…in…direct…combat…with…the…enemy…and…they…are…in…very…real…danger…of…being…hit.
It is pilots who drop fly over the battlefield and the only time that you tend to get an overlap is when ground troops are being transported by air either to or from a combat zone in which they face the possibility of being blown up and shot.
As for whining and complaints I’m not too sure what Everett is on about, is it whining to ask that you be given the adequete tools to do your job? Like some body armour for instance? If politicians insist on starting wars and putting soldiers in harms way then maybe they would like to arm and equip them properly and before any accuses me of being a war mongerer let me just remind everyone that I didn’t start these damnable wars, didn’t want them, don’t bloody support them but refuse to become some kind of radical asshole and denounce everybody who enlists in the Army, Airforce or Navy, essentially there is not a great deal of difference between me and someone who does other than they have made a very different decision about where to go in life, as yet I’ve not and I’m not so stuck up my own ass as to feel that I am right and everybody else is wrong.
However as far as I’m concerned Everett is full of bullshit and whilst I could get behind a statement that went something along the lines of ‘I’m sick of war, I’m tired of all this militarism, why don’t we just get on for chrissakes!’ I can’t get behind a statement that simply derides and ignores an important element of the whole issue of war and seems with twisted logic to demand that more people die and less people complain about it.
As a general point of agreement semi-blindness as regards the rest of the world is not an attractive quality, but when was it ever an attractive quality and how could it be? Yet tarring all of Americans with the same brush based on the sycophantic, sociopaths that you tend to find in ‘Everett’ type circles is neither correct nor fair and anyone who can make such crass generalisations is clearly not regarding the full picture.
Really how I got myself worked up about the dumb comments of a dumb actor I don’t know perhaps in that comments such as these are precisely the kind of thing that people mistake for anti war activism and this is not what anti war activism is about in any way, shape or form. Anti war activism is about reducing the death toll, preventing war, understanding why and how wars ever even start and seeking to tackle those issues so that we can have a future to look forward to. It isn’t about insulting people and infuriating thousands.

After all was said and done I was left sitting on a red leather seat looking round at the debris and thinking to myself that ‘when I decide to abandon myself I do so with little reserve’. Tony, the barman having put out the fire that had been spread with lighter and spirit on the top of the bar was setting about the business of sweeping the jagged hills of broken glass into towering glittering mountains of dripping intoxicant and faded potential. Whilst he busied himself with the inevitable cleanup of such an event, She came over with a steaming mug of tea and a first aid box and gave me a smile that I never really understood but yearned for all the same.
‘You’d better take your coat off’ she said placing the tea on top of the round table next to me, I did as I was bid, feeling the soreness in my back and the sharp pain in my left arm.
She tutted as she fussed about the cut on my arm and I, feeling rather nonchalant about it all, picked up my tea and took a sip, it was as can be expected, extremely hot and it burnt my split lip with an intensity that I appreciated all the more for the extremity of the pain. Focused and concentrated it drew all the feeling of my body into one single point and then set it together as one almighty stinging sensation. I happily continued to press my lips against the side of the cup surfeiting myself on the feeling as though once I had had enough the pain would go away.
She finished patching up my arm, it was nothing more than a scratch but she fussed about it as though I had received a mortal wound, standing up she ruffled my hair as though I were nothing more than a child and in that moment I was nothing more than a boy, if I ever had been anything else. Perhaps all we do is fool ourselves into thinking that the mutlitude of changes we go through, the seemingly endless vagaries of fate and cicumstance make us grow up and become something better than we were. As well She knew and as well I knew, we could be no more better than we ever were because there was no ultimate end other than to simply exist and sometimes in simply existing we were worse than we could ever have been as the most juvenile savages we might have been in our past. All these thoughts and yet still we were just two individuals in a beat up bar, listening to a uncaring jukebox and smelling the heady mix of a hundred different types of spirit smashed and mingled upon the floor.
Regardless She gave me my coat back and asked if I would like to head upstairs and I smiled and shook my head because I didn’t belong there and never had done, it might have confused her somewhat because I had put up such a spirited defence when the option had been there to simply walk out of the door and onto the misty streets of the City. If She wanted an explanation she was not going to get one from me because I didn’t know myself.
She gave me back my hat and told me that I could come back anytime, the drinks were on the house, my money would be no good in this joint, all the usual rewards that would simply make me all the worse. I thanked her and I promised her that I would be back, because at least then, although I was lying to myself, I was telling her the truth and in that I could at least claim to be partly right.
Stepping out onto the street I reached for a cigarette and lit it whilst staring into the expanse of dark swirling mist lit only by the sodium glare of the streets that we here in the City term the ’sky’ a dark joke that shows that we can still keep our sense of humour.
Around me I heard the echoes of the sounds of this endless night, people laughing, singing, shouting, screaming like a cross section of the human condition given a lubricant of alcohol and set freewheeling like a riderless carriage down a cobbled street. Shake, rattle and roll and eventually you fall apart or you crash and whichever you do it ends up pretty much the same, just the pieces lying in a chaotic heap and the ghost of yourself flung headlong into the mist.
I drew on the cigarette, counted out the wad of notes I had, that never seemed to run out and never seemed to be enough and then keeping my hand within a moments distance from the butt of my gun, headed off into the night.

The problem with war is that it is such an attractive concept to those primal instincts to go kill, destroy and plunder and given the penchant that mankind has for frequently tearing itself to shreds it is unfortunately a regular practice to resort to.
So.
The job of the Anti War movement is to somehow undercut such an activity with something just as attractive to primal instincts, distinctly anti-competitive and of course something that can be recoursed to with greater frequency than gunning each other down.
I give you.
www.masturbateforpeace.com.

A rallying cry to all the men of the world, submit yourself to a higher concept, stop tanking and start wanking, it builds your biceps and what can go wrong other than a nasty eye injury if you don’t take enough care.

And for all you ladies out there, don’t feel you may be left out, masturbation is not a solely masculine activity, join the anti-war effort today.

Make love (to yourself) not War!

Amnesty International has released it’s report on the use of the Death Penalty across the globe during the year 2007. It estimates that official executions claimed the lives of 1252 individuals with the largest amount of executions taking place in the People’s Republic of China. The official count in China stands at least 470 but there is strong evidence that there have been executions carried out in secret and China jealously guards the true figure. The worst offenders after China were Iran (317), Saudi Arabia (143) and Pakistan (135).
Saudi Arabia, whose Monarch was invited for tea with the Prime Minister and the Queen, has been responsible for the execution of people younger than 18 years of age, a gross violation of International Law. It is joined in this dubious distinction by Iran and Yemen.
Some of the people who were executed were convicted on charges that don’t even have the pretence of justification

“Ja’Far Kiani, father of two, was stoned to death for adultery in Iran in July.

A 75 year-old North Korean factory manager was shot by firing squad in October for failing to declare his family background, investing his own money in the factory, appointing his children as its managers and making international phone calls.

“Mustafa Ibrahim, an Egyptian national, was beheaded in Saudi Arabia in November for the practice of sorcery.”
(Amnesty International)

The use of the death penalty is unjustified in any circumstance but it becomes even less defensible when individuals are losing their lives on the most spurious of charges, and it stands that whilst the UK may have done away with it’s ‘bloody code’ there are plenty of states around the world that refuse to do so.
The guise of moral crusader has never been credibly worn by the United States and it continues to undermine it’s own justifications for figureheading (at least ostensibly) the spread of ‘western, liberal democratic’ values by appearing as the 5th worst offender in the Death Penalty rankings.
So here we go again and undoubtedly people get bored of reading my repeated complaints that the UK government does not stand for the principle of Human Rights unless it happens to have some ulterior motive for doing so. I’m not going to apologise and I’m not going to stop repeating myself on this matter because like it or not it is of the utmost importance, that anyone can determine that the injustices propogated by a cynical administration can be ‘boring’ is frankly beyond me.
As the death toll of British troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan continues to rise, this country has slowly come round to the alleged benefits of military intervention in two states who had previously been ruled by tyrannical regimes in which human life was cheap and human rights an alien concept. We seem to be happy about turning a blind eye to the continued abuses within these states that take place with the full consent of the Coalition supported authorities; last week in Iraq, 28 people were executed after hastily convened and unfair trials, hundreds of people have been executed since the reintroduction of Capital Punishment by the Iraqi Authorities in 2004. It’s reasons for being reintroduced? To curb violence within the country and act as a deterrent, I think it would be fair to say that it has failed miserably.
In Afghanistan, the treatment of women continues to be as near to atrocious as it was under the rule of the Taleban with women being denied equal access to education and justice as well as suffering as a result of the prevailing cultural attitudes and societal codes, according to the the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) 165 women committed suicide in 2007 in order to escape abusive situations. As the figures might suggest they are still provided with little to no recourse by the Afghan authorities, indeed women have been imprisoned for transgressing societal codes which maintain their basis in the middle ages.
However the prevailing mood in the West appears to be that we brought democracy and freedom to these countries and we’re all tiring of the old arguments that these were political dirty wars sold to the public in the name of furthering Human Rights. It happened and, yes there was some nastiness involved but it’ll all come out in the wash eventually and at least the administrations are ‘our bastards’ not someone elses.
Yet this government refuses to condemn the actions of states that trample Human Rights with merry abandon, China, Saudi Arabia being the most notable examples, it evades it’s own lack of logic and provides an incoherent front in which clearly Human Rights are not an absolute but something to be weighed against practicality and efficiency and dealt out when the conditions may or may not be right. They can also be retracted or ignored altogether so whilst the UN votes 104 to 54 to end the use of the death penalty, Western backed administrations continue to use it whenever they feel like it.
It is not just the major and high profile cases in which states execute their citizens but in the widespread lack of Human Rights and the repeated violations against the Articles across the globe. Too many to list but the treatment of individuals and groups in countries across the world is abhorrant and yet largely ignored by Western governments unless there geopolitical interest and an excuse is needed.
The aggressive overtures of the USA toward Iran are frequently backed up with criticism of Tehran’s Human Rights record, which is particularly atrocious, but when it comes to Saudi Arabia, or China, when it comes to the use of the Death penalty in Iraq or the degrading treatment of women in Afghanistan the US remains strangely quiet. Commitment to principle is not a matter of only making it an issue when it is expedient to refer to it, it is something that remains a central directive and catalyst of change. To only make an issue of a principle in order to apply as much garnish to a turd so that people might eat it, is not principled but oppurtunism masquerading as a moral mission.
For more information on struggle for Human Rights across the globe take a look at the Amnesty International website
Sign up, get involved, make a difference and don’t let the Government and it’s affiliated cynics drown you in apathetic acceptance, it is within the power of society to make this world a better place to live and that is a principle worth upholding.