When Nelson Mandela spoke to me, I was sure the world was going to get better…(503)

In a very early post on this blog I wrote an account of Meeting Nelson Mandela

 

More recently I was scanning a piece in The Guardian about the whole collapse of hope and momentum in S Africa since Mandela died. A little disingenuous one might conclude considering the collapse of hope and absence of positive momentum here in the UK and the rowing back of social and political gains and collapse of social infrastructure since the Thatcher years – and all without the challenges faced by that troubled country…

 

One strong recollection of the day was the euphoria over his release and how ecstatic I was when I met him in Glasgow and how convinced I was that this was a sign that anything could change for the better.

 

I'm not someone who idolises people. I never had posters of popstars on my walls as a teen even but I was star struck that day and as brimming with hope as everyone else. I felt an echo of it when Obama was elected - and now it all seems to have turned to ash.

 

I don't get it.

 

It’s like the table was spread with a very appetising buffet - someone finally took the covers off but we let a handful of yobs in, they stole anything good, trashed everything else and left decent folk with scraps and wreckage...

‘Most Dangerous’… (502)

…is what rubbish Rishi tells us the next few years in the UK will be.

Like everything else he burbles out these days – no one can really get a handle on this.

What is most likely is that desperation at his own inadequacies and a potential Tory wipe-out at the election we are all literally gagging for – has turned to mad diversion tactics with a whole heap of incendiary fear mongering to pepper it all.

How should one respond?

I mean other than completely losing your mind and running down the street naked screaming at the diseased pigeons…

How about this

Dear Rishi,

If you are poor or a migrant or mentally ill or on an NHS waiting list or living in a house with RAAC concrete or going to a school with RAAC concrete or if you are elderly relying on home care or if you are working mad hours to pay your massively increased mortgage or if you are stupid enough to go swimming in the coastal waters around England or a river or if you are under threat of deportation to Rwanda for the sake of a right-wing headline or if you are a child living in damp, insecure housing or in the centre of one of our increasingly polluted inner cities or sleeping on the streets or cycling on pot-holed roads or waiting for an ambulance or struggling with the anxiety of life lived in perma-debt OR if you’re a child in Gaza being bombed with UK supplied armaments – a decade and a half of Tory mismanagement have already made life pretty bloody dangerous - you out of touch twonk.

Alternatively…

You could just go full child and (as I lived in Newcastle for many years) try this little ditty…

You can have a Rishi

On a little dishi

You’ll get a squishy Rishi

When the votes come in…

Dear Gaza, for what it’s worth – 3 out of 4 countries in the UK union care… (501)

As the world burns – only the cold, hard horror of Gaza can chill us to the bone.

It is popular in the right-wing press and for bought-and-paid for politicians to sneer at climate change in a way that helps the world ignore that once again – it is the poorest who suffer –at least at first.

Somehow – the world also seems to be able to ignore militaristic man-made horrors – Gaza, Ukraine (yes – the Western Media even seems to have tired of a conflict where White people are dying). Yemen barely features.

Right now Vietnam and Thailand are seeing their hottest ever temperatures. Delhi is burning. Meanwhile the hideous miscalculation of America and its long-term ‘special friend’ Britain - both still arming Israel as a further descent into madness - has paved the way for the imminent onslaught of Rafah.

No moral person can seriously claim that Netanyahu is anything other than insane if he thinks this will a. bring remaining hostages safely home b. lead to real future security for Israel.

At this point, it’s anyone’s guess what his actions are intended to achieve.

The death toll mounts. The suffering deepens. The destruction is almost total.

A few blogs ago, I posted that The Ghosts of Gaza would be waiting for UK politicians come the general election. In the local elections last week in England there was evidence that The Gaza effect is there. This is small beer in terms of global considerations except that it shows that the politicians are, again, out of step with the people. At least that is how it appears.

As The UK Conservative Party implodes in government – all their talk is how to stay in power and nothing at all to do with what is good for the people of Britain never mind anywhere else in the world. However, The Labour Party under Keir Starmer has followed the Tory line on Gaza – they in turn have followed the terrible missteps of Biden on this issue.

Looking at the UK and US you could be forgiven for thinking there is nothing more important for the world to focus on than (US) a rapist conman prospective Republican candidate – falling asleep and farting in court or (UK) the lunatic remnants of The Conservative Party showing the public just how much money they can waste with their cruel, unworkable Rwanda migrant deportation policy.

But know this – the UK is made of FOUR nations. Only England has failed to call for a cease fire in Gaza. The 3D governments – devolved administrations of Scotland, Ireland, Wales – have all called for an immediate end to the suffering.

Here in Scotland the (now –ex) First Minister called for a ceasefire last year. Once Stormont was up and running in Ireland – their First Minister used her inaugural speech to call for a cease fire in Gaza. And even in Wales where Labour is the largest party – The Parliament, without Labour’s support, managed to win a vote overall on the subject of calling for a cease fire. So – of the four nations of the union THREE have supported an immediate ceasefire.

It’s a small thing. A very small thing. But for what it’s worth

We care in Scotland

They care in Ireland

They care in Wales

Gaza and those in Israel who genuinely care about the future of the region - please know this… 

The only thing killing humans faster than Putin / Assad / Netanyahu - is the climate crisis...

 ...as we can see from the unprecedented broiling going on right now in Thailand and Vietnam++

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As it is again BANDCAMP Friday - Friday 3rd May - do check out my family audio environmental story-poem - Casey & the Surfmen

or

If you prefer environmental dystopian sci fi - check out my novella

Zero One Zero Two

Gaza; the pitiful Western aid drip alongside weaponry to kill those same people is the most nauseating, immoral juxtaposition of modern times. (500)

Early on in the collective punishment of Gaza, I referred to IDF tactics as tantamount to a grouse shoot. Palestinians have nowhere to run. The world knows this. Equally, we could talk about ‘fish in a barrel’… Any way you put it, the killing is beyond barbaric.

Add to that the West’s attempt to assuage its guilt with a trickle of aid while a. selling arms to Israel and b. refusing to call for an immediate ceasefire and anyone with an ounce of humanity is feeling queasy.

Would-have-been-in-jail-by-now if not for the invasion - Netanyahu -cares nothing either for the remaining Israeli hostages. In the shoot anything that moves – or doesn’t – or is surrendering approach, IDF actually gunned down, in cold blood, three who were clearly unarmed and pleading in Hebrew. There is nothing about his destructive madness that makes sense in the short, medium or long term.

However, for those who want to swallow Netanyahu’s line that a huge proportion of the 34k dead people of Gaza are Hamas (which gives this tiny population proportionately the largest fighting force that ever existed – a fiction way beyond Blair and Bush’s fictional Iraq WMDs) let us then simply ponder the 13k+ dead children.

For Western politicians to be crowing about an infinitesimally small amount of aid while not just tolerating the slaughter but abetting it is perhaps the most sordid, dishonest, nauseating humanitarian outrage and immoral juxtaposition of the modern era.

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“We should always be aware that what now lies in the past once lay in the future”… (499)

F. W. Maitland (English Law Historian -1850 – 1906)

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So – more quoting this week. Maybe there just no longer seems much point in writing out what is obvious when it has been so very obvious for so very long.

At the weekend I got into a poignant discussion with my young cousins’ Ukrainian girlfriend. A sparklingly intelligent young woman, making the most of her displacement and trying to live a normal life while worry clearly accompanies all her thoughts and actions concerning her internally displaced family back in Ukraine.

OF the many interesting things she said, there was a central point that many would do well to remember in relation to the hysteria over migrants and in particular the government’s mad obsession and ludicrous incompetence (not to mention criminal waste of money) over the laughably insane Rwanda scheme. In fact it is a point that we’d do well to keep front and centre of any discussion relating to migrants or refugees, debate now derailed by the rabid right wing. That point is that she would not be here if it were not for the situation in Ukraine.

Do we really need to be reminded that people do not just up- sticks and risk their lives or leave their homes and families without good cause? It seems we do.

The reason I tie in this family snippet with the quote above is many fold but most urgently this –

Maitland was writing not just pre-WWII but pre WWI. In fact his seminal works were written in the C19th and yet the point he is making (and this is very broad brush) is that there may be and possibly is always a point in time when we have the option to change humanity’s direction of travel. History is what has happened but history is happening all the time. At some point in the not too distant future – will historians point to this current mess and the chaos in the UK and US – and say – ah yes – at moments up to and during 2024 when opportunities arose to halt the descent into the hell of all-out global war – no one seized those opportunities? No one attempted to divert the cataclysm.

I’ve already alluded to the Tory Party’s addiction to Russian oligarch money and – when he was PM - Boris Johnson sneering at the military advisors who warned him of an imminent invasion by Russia. While no one would impute Chamberlain with Johnson’s venality back in September 1938 – it’s hard not to think of the challenges surrounding Hitler’s claims over The Sudetenland and his land grab in Czechoslovakia and not draw comparisons with recent activities in Crimea and now the full scale invasion of Ukraine.

At what point could Hitler have been stopped? At what point Putin?

Are we at another Sudetenland crisis? Have we past it already?

At the moment – all the West are doing, while more Ukrainians die, is preventing Ukraine from losing outright. Putin is not being stopped and voices are growing concerning how to placate him. 

Really!

I would regard myself as a pacifist – broadly – but even I know that if someone is smacking you around the head with a baseball bat, you don’t stop and wonder if you tied a ribbon around the bat and offered them a cream cake – they’d stop and go away.

And if we do let this situation slide – we need to be clear – any conflagration in the 21st century would make WWI and WWII look like a drunken brawl after a bad wedding – just look at the horrors of Gaza. Yes The Somme is a stain on humanity in terms of trusting young soldiers’ lives lost – but then what is 13,000 dead Palestinian children? Think of the image in the early days of Putin’s madness – of the pregnant young Ukrainian woman with the smashed hip being stretchered away from a bomb site screaming to be allowed to die.

So let us draw on that 19th century wisdom and apply it to the humanitarian apocalypse we may be stumbling into – today – tomorrow or next week because surely – we don’t want to make that type of history again. 

We’ve walked this dark road so often… (498)

In last week’s post, in a cursory glance at how the lunatics have taken over the asylum, I asked – ‘who are these people’ and responded to my own question – not only do we know - we knew.

Well – there is nothing like talking yourself in times of madness.

But as a brief side-note to that – one might ask how did these monsters seize power; from Trump to Netanyahu and from Vladimir Putin to Geert Wilders and, while he’s never won an election (you’d not think it from the amount of prime time the UK press has lavished on him) Britain’s Farage, who now poisons the UK body politic like a mega-virus.

Well – the response to ‘how?’ is almost as depressing as the response to ‘who?’ It’s depressing because we know exactly how these things occur, we’ve been here so many times before and have done nothing to effectively prevent a re-occurrence.

To short-circuit this post I’ll simply quote from Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason – which discusses – among other things – the madness of the invasion of Iraq and the poisoning of American politics by the lunatic, racist right.

“Throughout history, our innate fear of others-who-are-different-from-us has combined all too frequently…to unleash the most horrific violence and oppression…Moreover, this deadly form of exclusivist group passion can be virtually invulnerable to reason. So it is especially useful to demagogues who learn how to fan it and exploit it to gain and consolidate power.”

                                                        Al Gore

                                                        The Assault on Reason

                                                        (chpt 2)