From Ralph12/10/05 War in TurmoilIt’s all overlapped now. The world cries for itself, the Balkan States are enemy encampments and the Ukraine bickers after having just made the most important step towards democracy since Lech Walesa gave the Polish people a voice of its own. Damn politics and damn politicians who play with our aspirations like advertising slogans. Germany elected a woman, just, and just as easily try to trash her attempt to steady a course towards a reasonable future. People want stability but just as easily they trash the streets of France with the mayhem of individual resentment, yet it is not their fault. They are ignored and frustrated. As for Iraq didn’t we bomb it into democracy? Terrific! Just what the world needs- the most powerful leader in the Western world who really and truly believes that God told him to do it. Who is he? Why is he? What is he? He is a bloody terrorist. That’s what he is. He represents a mass of public stupidity, a human tsunami who declaims that those who believe enshrined gobbledegook go to a promised land with a sacred passport and the rest of us go to hell. It is George W. Bush who has politicized religion and created Hell on earth. I want to go to hell because an awful majority have already gone there and they need me too and all my kind because we appreciate each other’s faults. My dear departed friend, Hunter S. Thompson, described Tony Blair as ‘a whimpering little whore’. Er- pretty close. Tony Blair is clever. Tony Blair could have been great, but he is now showing the signs of greatness in the wrong ballpark. He fell for the lie of an idiot and would not listen to all those millions of people who said ‘no’ to war. He is arrogant and now listens to the craven banter of those he has taught to think that if you buy two you get one free. Tyrants must be tried by international courts. Such tyrants do no recognise them. Of course. Why should they? We sold them every weapon beyond their wildest dreams and told them to carry on. Tyrants take the law into their own hands and manipulate it as they always did. We are amateurs and they are pros. We are even fooled into feeling sympathy for their present humiliation. We are fooled into believing that what we need is another mobile phone and when we use it we get told to phone back later. Don’t give in. Protest! Phone back later. Worry the bastards! Well, I used to be one of the Friends of Israel, went there, saw it all, from Golan to Gaza, walked on the Sea of Galilee for at least two hundred yards and back again, then drew it. I can still be a friend of Israel, but I need to believe in an autonomous State of Palestine, its rights and its permanence. I need to believe that our diplomatic intentions to smooth the turmoil are a wonderful and gracious gift of reimbursement of what is already theirs. It is not generous. It is right. We have blasted the very arse off Afghanistan using the Taliban as a dangerous reason to intrude. Well yes, the Taliban are steeped in bigotry and grizzle. I don’t like the sound of them but I have to rely on the press to tell me what they are like. We are selfish and self-contained and yet we want to understand a world that doesn’t understand us. We imagine that justice is ours and that it belongs to us alone. No one has the right to believe that. We only have the right to be human, be nice, be constructive, be idealistic towards your foe if you have one. Do not grieve about change. Embrace it. It is nature’s way of telling you to fuck off! Give your generosity a chance to breathe. If you have possessions, don’t smother them with your love. You will be disappointed. If you have no need of them, give them to an enemy. Stop being so ghastly as living creatures that believe that we have special privileges and strangers are foreigners. Stop believing that we are some special kind of species for whom this world was created. We are ticks on its surface along with the polar bears and the whales. We have screwed up the planet so bad it will simply self-regulate itself to regain its natural balance. I am only sorry for the polar bears and the whales. We, particularly, are unwanted. We will be eliminated and this is the legacy we are passing on to future generations, and today’s young, who are already showing signs of a mindlessness beyond their years. Last night I listened to the po-faced BBC programme Moral Maze. This one was about TORTURE, as though it was something to question and discuss. Torture, in whatsoever form it is manipulated is an abomination, a crude and savage left over from the darkest of ages. Unless you are going to kill and eat the poor fucker, what in God’s perverse and beautiful Kingdom do you think you are doing. TORTURE is out of bounds and as a practice in any form, for any reason- even as a hypothesis to maybe prevent a suspected holocaust, it is the one definitive unforgiveable sin- an abhorrent practice banished from all human activity. If I was being tortured, I would sure as hell tell my tormentors any damn thing they may want to know if it stopped them screwing my fingers off or shoving a red hot poker up my backside. But you can also be an outcast for speaking out, according to the protections sealed into the United Nations Charter which superceded the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations resolve after World War 1 (which the US refused to join) requiring member countries to respect territorial independence, while such regimes ruled the world. Hitler used it as hios own Bill of Rights. The men in brown shirts, Hombergs and leather overcoats could have you rounded up and killed like a rabid dog, for thinking an original thought. They could call it treason from behind their own wall of ‘sovereign rights’ and ‘Peace in our time’ put the final nail in the coffin of the individual’ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is’a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction’. It is a great tragedy that the rest are not taking any notice particular Dick Cheney who justifies torture as a ‘dark possibility’ of war….
Right!! That, to me is pretty clear. There are no reasons ever to even breathe the word. So if it’s a dark possibility it’sOK. There! I feel better for that modest little rant. Ralph STEADman: Copyright, © 2005 |
Contact: joe@ralphsteadman.com
