“If you tell a lie long enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Goebbels had a point. Try googling “When was America discovered?” . Immediately “1492” pops up, and the man who made the discovery is declared to be Christopher Columbus. Uh-uh. What they really mean is “When did the white man first come to America?” Long before 1492- thousands of years, maybe – the native people of America had ‘discovered’ and lived in this amazing territory. The year 1492 marked the year when their persecution and destruction began. But that’s not the truth that schoolchildren are fed. It’s as if the native people weren’t real people.
Actions, of course, speak louder than words, and sometimes show those words to be pious or even hypocritical. For example, the United States is probably the world’s major force in the drive to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. On the face of it, this is good: the fewer nuclear weapons in the world, the safer is the world from disaster, deliberate or accidental. Weapons of mass destruction are dangerous – you’ll remember that they prompted the invasion of Iraq. The fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found didn’t overly bother the US or its favourite servant boy, Tony Blair.
In its pleas for non-proliferation, the US rarely adds “Believe us, we know what a disastrous idea they are”.That’s a pity because they do know. They are the only country in the world ever to have used such weapons, killing and horribly disfiguring tens of thousands of innocent people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet the US and Britain work on the assumption that of course they are civilized states so it’s OK for them to pack a nuclear punch; but to let rogue states like Iraq have nuclear weapons would be unthinkable. And it’s highly likely that Israel is in possession of nuclear weapons, but that doesn’t keep US and UK governments awake at night.
It’s in the area of non-nuclear weapons,however, that Britain by its actions lies most consistently. There hasn’t been a British prime minister in the last fifty years that hasn’t urged the Irish people, especially those here in the north, to settle their disagreements peacefully and through politics, and to lay aside the gun.
Does Britain put these wise words of her prime ministers into action? Um, no. In fact, it’s worse than that. Here are a few facts:
- Britain sold £82 millions-worth of arms to Israel during David Cameron’s time in office. These were almost certainly used in the bombardment of Gaza in 2009, with Israel being accused of war crimes.
- Since 2013, Britain has sold Turkey almost £450 million- worth of arms. The Turkish army has been locked in a vicious conflict with its Kurdish minority.
- Since 2013, Britain has sold over £115 million in arms and £40 million in combat vehicles to Egypt. Two years earlier, Britain sold Egypt tear-gas which they used on their own citizens.(Sound familiar?)
- Since 2010 and the Arab Spring, Britain has sold Bahrain some £50 million worth of machine guns and assault rifles. Last February, the Bahraini army were believed to have used teargas and water cannon to crush pro-democracy demonstrations.(Sound familiar?)
- In the past two years, Britain has agreed arms deals worth £388 million with the United Arab Emirates, £170 million with Qatar and £120 million with Oman.
You see the direction this is going: Britain will sell weapons to just about any state they can find to buy them. Supposing some enterprising group were to set up a stall in East or West Belfast (or both) and offer to sell citizens AK 47s or rocket-launchers or car-bombs. The outcry would naturally be massive. People may have their differences, but supplying them with lethal weapons is no answer to those disagreements. Certainly that’s the message Britain has preached here for fifty years and more. This message appears not to inhibit them from selling infinitely bigger assignments of weapons to states with dubious human rights records.
Still, look on the bright side. This is one industry which Britain will be able to continue engaging in profitably, regardless of the BREXIT decision.
When the small man behaves like this, it is called rash and irresponsible. When the war mongers do it, it is called good business. I think hypocrisy is the best word for it. Keep this post in mind when the TV news shows pictures of starving children and bombed out cities and the crocodile tears shed by the bleeding hearts. I wonder if Corbyn got in would he put a stop to it? A brilliant article for reference and should be shared as widely as possible.
” I wonder if Corbyn got in would he put a stop to it?”
Would he even be able to? I doubt it. So many fingers in the firearms money pie.
“One day at a time…”
In a recent BBC World News report about events in Syria, the issue was referred to as a “mini-world war III”. Another report addressed waves of American bombers pounding the Syrian village of Tokhar with 500 pound bombs. After the raid, 95 people lay dead in the northern end of the village.
Conflicting reports dealt with one more major American victory while others suggested it was the most recent case of civilian casualties by the United States. Residents claimed that the people killed, consisted of men, women and children seeking shelter from just one more aerial bombardment in 11,000 U.S. strikes since 2014.
While only 158 executions were carried out in Saudi Arabia last year, Esteemed Blogmeister, 2016 got off to a much better, erm, head start when, as early as January 2 no less than 47 condemned prisoners were topped.
Why this sudden spike has happened in the sphere of yikes ! is not explained. Perhaps the (gulp) decapitation grants for the public executioners have been increased?
One mentions these pat stats in passing because of its relevance to the most morally superior country on planet earth (c.f. , the Dirty Thirty Years War in Norneverland when it managed to keep its hands phenomenally clean, and which po-faced policy seems to have served as a sort of Pontius Pilate scheme for the subsequent Rainbow Revolution).
Of course, it is the RR which has made the Free Southern Stateen (for it is it !) a moral benchmark for the rest of the less civilized world. (We modestly say so ourselves alone).
Saudi law allows the death sentence for a vast variety of offences ranging from rumpy pumpy of the prohibited variety all the way to sorcery and witchcraft itself. Sodomy can qualify a lad or a lass to be either beheaded in the Saudi equivalent of Swords or riddled with bullets in the Saudi version of the Stonebreakers’ Yard.
The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia is located at 6, Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin 2. Surprisingly, it has never had its nous picketed by, say, Amnesty Ireland. (see sodomy, and punishment associated with, above). This address may not be quite as (gasp) toney as it used to be, considering the life of the former occupant of the Georgian house two doors down, has gone rather awry, in recent times. That would be The Life of O’Reilly, m’lud.
Just as well that Saudi Arabia does not play the game of Paudi, GAA. Otherwise such sorcerers as the dystopian Diarmuid Connolly of Dublin would have to be excluded from playing away games there.
Hmmmm.
Now, there’s the Holy See and then there’s the Holy Sand.
Unlike the latter, the former’s ambass was summarily turfed out of the land of the Bog-Oak Monolith in 2011. This came as no surprise as the soggy ground had been already laid when the former president of the stateen, south of the Black Sow’s Dyke, Mary 1, had gone bald-headed where no head of state have previously cat-walked , into the Vat.
That she subsequently had no probs entering The Lands of Sand while wearing a burqa, is easily explained by the following obs : her full name is Mrs. Robinson (nee de Burca).
As you have forensically pointed out, EB, it would appear that it is the Holy Sand rather than the Holy See which is the hub of arms trafficking . So, from where did we in the Free Southern Stateen get the notion that we are squeaky clean when it comes to non-violence; more into peace rather than pieces.?
Unless of course our squeaky cleanliness comes from our (gulp) subliminal admiration/ sneaking regard for Squeaky Fromme, the lissome lass who, after being indentured to that apostle of benignity, Charles ‘Charlie’ Manson, went on to achieve individual notoriety by taking a pot-shot at President Ford of the USA. The miss missed.
The guile-wells of the Royal Saudi Embassy in Dublin keep bubbling discreetly over, the diplomatic outpost of a culture which dictates that the only ameliorating facet of adultery is when a lad or a lass engages in rumpy pumpy with a member of the opposite sex who is on the uber-plumpy side. ).
Less Merchant and Ivory, more Mills and Boon in a Mohammedan sense. This is thoughtfully taken into account and the death penalty reduced accordingly to a hundred lashes (for lass as well as lad).
While diplomatic relations with Old Red Socks have been restored by the Free Southern Stateen (with the tacit if reluctant approval of The Unionist Times) this does not mean that the RCs are immune to the odd hundred lashes.
Right now it is one particular branch of the Old Red Socks franchise which is being confined to the Stocks and subjected to the Tomato Treatment, tomatoes red, tomatoes rotten. That would be of course the favourite butt of the Dough Brigade, and soon to be a do-do order, the Christian Brothers.
Now, it must be stated that the only weaponry of Mass destruction ever uncovered in a CBS school was the leather strap : notorious for its rendition of the biff riff, in the hideous manner of a Palm Court orchestra, but hardly fit to be classified in the same category of the w.o.m.d. wombed out to Saud Arabia by Mother England.
One suspects that the average Yemeni, now subject to having ‘British bunker buster bombs ’ rained down upon his house, would swop places with the average Eamon who had his palms whacked by the leather of a Christian Brother, a generation or more ago..
Yet, it is the lamentations of the latter and the CB biffs he once shifted , which has miffed the monominded media on sniffy Liffeyside.
Started with that Monument to Moral Probity, Gay Bryrne ( :this parking space is reserved for future Brownie points from Buck Pal. ) , whinging seventy years on to the cameras of RTE about the lederhosen, oops, leather wielding CB’s in Synge Street school.
Eh?
So backsides were yet to be thwacked, dollops of wallop never doled out and spankers only indulged in flagellation under the green, white and orange flags of the the Chriztian Brothers?
Deaglan de Breadain (don’t let the Lephrechauny name con you ) took up this Synge Song blue in his old Shinner –bashing haunts of The Unionist Times, by scribing that ‘the most striking part of Gaybo’s narrative was the introduction which saw him walking along the railings and informing the viewers that, as a schoolboy ‘he used to be consumed with foreboding and fright and anxiety’.
Ochone, and sob, blob and blubber.
One had the impresh that The Great Shakes had covered this ground as far back as the 1570s, but with a tad more finesse:
-Then, the whining school-boy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school’.
Nearer home, and nearer in time, in the 1770s:
-A man severe he was and stern to view
I knew him well, and every truant knew
Well had the boding tremblers learned to trace
The day’s disasters in the master’s face’.
This was penned by Oliver Goldsmith, of course, whose statue stands outside TCD: the Village Schoolmaster – at least one of these literary instances – was not of the Popish persuasion and neither was he a CB. One can state the latter, erm, categorically.
Perhaps, the Synge Song Bluesboys (the letter columns of TUT are re-inventing the spiel as a result of the de Breadain broadside) are unfamiliar with the above writings, the merest tip of a not so niceberg.
Meanwhile, the address of the Irish Embassy in Saudi Arabia is P. O. Box 94349, Diplomatic Quarter.
When it comes to fumbling in the greasy till of Saudi, Paudi has no qualms. And a, erm, Riyad is definitely never out of the question.
Btw, did one mention that the Irish Ambassador is a woman, not ?
Hypocrisy, it seems, is part of the British mentality and in its blood. “Do as I say, not as I do”. Political Unionism has hypocrisy streaming in its blood. But there again according to a recent research article, over 75% of the North’s population is genetically Irish, not British. (Over 50% of the Scottish population is genetically Irish, not Scottish/British….). So the claim “Ulster is British!” is not only geopolitically wrong (Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal are in the Republic) but genetically wrong.
This Hypocrisy from the British isn’t only seen in Politics, it occurs in Sport too. Just today I read a BBC article talking about the “ugly divide” amongst Croatian fans. Some of you who watched the Euros may remember during the Croatia/Czech Republic game some of the Croatian fans throwing flares onto the pitch and fighting amongst themselves. It caused a 5-10 minute stoppage in the game. The article goes on to dig up the dirt on the Croatian fans and paint them in an ugly light.
But by far the most troublesome fans at the Euros weren’t Croatian, it was English fans. From Day 1 of the Euros the English were rioting, attacking French civilians (including an old man, who was brutally punched out cold as footage showed) and wrecking French City Centres. The BBC at the time sought to excuse this or blame it on others, specifically the Russian fans, even though no Russian fans were involved in trouble before the English started. The trouble only stopped when UEFA threatened to suspend the English and Russian teams from the tournament.
Of course, there was no mention of this in the article.
Everybody has the tendency to be a tiny bit hypocritical, we’re just human. But the British really do take the biscuit.