Very Strange

A huge row has erupted today over a YouTube video that appears to show four US Marines urinating on the bodies of several dead Afghanis or Taliban. An investigation has been instigated and threats of prosecutions and even imprisonment if this video is genuine and leads to the identification of those involved.

Now, any decent person would find this act utterly appalling and disgusting but that said it is hardly surprising and in some respects understandable. In order to fight effectively soldiers must be trained and encouraged to ‘de-humanise’ their enemy, to think of them as less than animals, so with such a mindset pissing on their dead bodies wouldn’t seem, to the soldiers, as the abhorrent act that it would and does to us.

What is strange though to my mind is, that it is ordered, approved and applauded for the military to riddle the enemy with bullets, to throw grenades at him and blow his body into little pieces or to drop bombs on a village killing or maiming the innocent as well as the enemy and ultimately to drop a nuclear device over a city and kill millions.

Let’s stop the killing first and then there’ll be no bodies to urinate on.

Remembrance Day

Yes it’s perhaps right and proper that we set aside a specific day to remember the dead in past and present wars. The trouble is that the reasons that they died are carefully put to one side, artfully concealed from scrutiny by the mass of the population. History, sadly very limited now in our education system, is, in any case, framed and taught by the victors.

All wars have at their root cause, greed. Greed by those have the most wanting to protect that which they have and more likely wanting more. It is not though, those with the wealth and the power who fight and die, it is those over whom they excercise that power. With guile they manipulate information and even, as we have seen in recent times, give false information to engender fear, outrage and an acceptance of war and the media, being a part of this covert system, willing participants in the deception.

On remembrance day thousands will bow their heads and pay homage to the fallen, in Wootton Bassett the funeral prossession of the next funeral of yet another dead young man,  will pause for flowers and the flags of old soldiers will be lowered. The events will be broadcast but little if any mention will be given of the hundreds maimed whose lives will never be the same. For every soldier killed there will be five times as many at least severely injured. Even as I write the rehabilitation centre Hedley Court is expanding to cope with the increasing numbers of double and treble amputees. In Afghanistan alone since 2006 – Jan this year 7000 civilians killed and how many severely injured? Who will hold a ceremony for them? Who here will remember them even though we did the killing?

Trident Replacement

This new government is quite obviously incapable of thinking things through as can be seen by the Child Benefit debacle but they have excelled themselves on Trident.

Liam Fox has just announced that they will be replacing the Trident nuclear missile system at a cost of £20bn. Yes £20bn at a time when we are told there are huge cutbacks in social services to be made. We all know as well that a government estimate for cost usually doubles particularly when it comes to defence spending.

Even the most fevered mind would be hard put to come up with a scenario in which a British Prime Minister would actually give the order to destroy 10′s of millions of people. As for being an independent system everyone knows that it depends entirely on the USA for the missiles and for the guidance system that can be switched off at any time. Even the regular refurbishment of the nuclear warhead carried out at Aldermaston is done by an American owned company.

Apart from France no other mainland European country has these weapons; are they all shaking in their boots because they haven’t got some? I suggest not, they are spending their £20bn plus on better lives for their citizens.

Finally this decision  is nothing more than encouragement to countries, like Iran, to develop their own nuclear capability on the grounds that if Britain says that they are essential for it’s defence then it must also be essential for theirs. There was an acronym for this idea during the cold war; MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. The madness goes on.

Terrorist Threat Heightened

Let’s see now, we were told that it was necessary to invade Afghanistan in order to negate terrorism threats here in the UK.

Hundreds of our military have been killed, many hundreds more have had arms, legs, genitals blown off, thousands of Afghanis killed and maimed and the financial costs run into £billions. The result of all this terrible waste? A higher level of threat of a Mumbai type attack on the streets of London and other cities.

Money to burn in UK

The financial cost to the UK of the Iraq & Afghanistan invasions have now passed £20 billion. That figure does not include the wages of the troops and neither does it include the ongoing cost of caring for the wounded who must now be in their thousands although detailed figures are not released.

We are of course, still in Afghanistan with troops numbering over 10,000 and so the cost is ever increasing and not just the financial cost with the numbers of the military killed now reaching 300 wasted young lives.

As has been said by many people, not just me, this escapade cannot be won so if you find yourself in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging. We will get out eventually without a satisfactory conclusion, so why not do it now and save enormous sums of money that we cannot afford and lives too. Perhaps then it will not be considered so necessary to impoverish so many of our own citizens.

A Degree of Commonsense?

Why don’t they ever learn? Politicians I mean and the answer, I suspect, is that they have little or no commonsense and worse still they think that the ordinary voter doesn’t either.

Take the three main contenders for leadership of the Labour Party; all are white, male, in their 40′s, all read Philosophy, politics and economics and all of ‘em did it at Oxford. I don’t know precisely but Cameron and Clegg did similar. I would like to suggest that all politicians must have a degree in commonsense but unfortunately I don’t think that commonsense can be taught, it’s something innate but develops through adversity which is something few politicians experience much of. Those that do rarely seem to rise to positions of power and perhaps why this should be so is a future topic.

The latest nonsense from Osborne and Cameron that they will ‘consult’ with the public over where cuts should be made. The public have commonsense to know that they will have no impact at all on what the government has already decided and the same goes for Labour’s ‘Great Debate’. Those in power though do not have the commonsense to see that the public sees straight through them.

Commonsense decrees that if the Soviet Union with hundreds of thousands of troops and little concern for delicacy could not defeat the Taliban then we wont so why do they continue to try at such vast human and financial cost.

Commonsense says that if we are bristling with nuclear missiles we can’t expect other nations not to want some to defend themselves against us. Commonsense says that if we get rid of them we will aid global nuclear disarmament and save ourselves hundreds of billions of Pounds into the bargain.

Commonsense says that if we stop waging war somewhere in the World, as we have done for hundreds of years, we will save more money and have less or no enemies and more friends.

If hospitals ‘under perform’ against some target and get fined for it then they will have less money for patients. Commonsense? I don’t think so.

Governments say that the top earners need huge salaries and massive bonuses as an incentive to work hard but that the rank and file can have a wage freeze or a cut to help the economy. Any commonsense there?

Commonsense said that Cameron is a much stronger character than Clegg and that if they struck a deal then big Dave would eventually walk all over Clegg and the Lib/Dems would suffer in the long run but he still went ahead. (time will tell if I’m right on that one)

I could go on but I’m sure you get the picture. What we need is a degree of commonsense but not a Degree in commonsense.

AWRE Aldermaston – Heard of it?

Today CND along with other Peace groups and including two Nobel Peace Prize Winners,  are today blockading the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) at Aldermaston. So far I have not heard one word about this remarkable event on BBC news and there is nothing at all on the BBC web site. I find this more than just curious and I have a great deal of trouble in suppressing the thought that the BBC, as an undoubted part of the establishment, is keeping this news very, very low key.

Billions of Pounds are scheduled to be spent on ‘upgrading’ this place which for decades has seen out taxes spent on unusable,  Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD’s) and we’ve heard that acronym before haven’t we? In these times of near economic collapse the time is even more right to recognise that these weapons have no place in the modern World and their only purpose is to prop up the ego’s of those in power.

Afghanistan Casualties

It was bad enough before but the ever rising number of our troops seriously injured in Afghanistan has now reached such a horrendous pitch that our hospitals are under great pressure to cope.

The rising number of soldiers killed, three this week so far, is terrible enough and rightly deserve the, albeit somewhat muted, publicity but we hear very little about the mutilated and crippled, the blinded and the brain damaged. Not surprising that injury statistics are shrouded in mystery otherwise perhaps, just perhaps, the nation as whole might re-discover it’s spine and demand an end to this horror.

This invasion is unwinnable, will make no difference to our security and the cost in financial terms runs into tens of millions of Pounds that we cannot afford.

Palestine/Israel

So, President Obama is to hold talks with Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president in the vain expectation that some progress might be made. Hammas who were fairly elected and control Gaza are not even invited.  What is most likely to happen is some vague statement will be released and nothing will change.

Admittedly a solution will be hard to achieve but actually the ‘problem’ is simple. The problem is that a huge area of land was taken from the Palestinians at the end of WW2 and given to the Jews by the powerful nations who won the war. Since then Israel, as it became, has stolen more land on a regular basis. Some of the best agricultural land taken and has built settlements for it’s expanding population. In addition it has made life as difficult as possible for the Palestinians.

Israel depends on the USA for it’s military might and vast financial handouts. Should the US withdraw, or threaten seriously to withdraw, it’s support of the Israeli state unless it got back behind the original agreed borders, then Israel would have little choice than to talk meaningfully and peace would have a chance to grow and flourish. To be elected in the US a candidate generally requires the support of the huge Jewish vote and therefore this is unlikely to happen. More land will be stolen, more lives will be blighted and lost, both Palestinians and Israelis. Unless a US President of immense courage and stature should be elected. Is this Obama? Maybe but I doubt it.

Lockerbie Bomber

As could easily be expected there is an outcry over the release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi. The media naturally trying to make conspiracy connections between his release and lucrative oil contracts in Libya and seemingly unable to accept that the Scottish Justice Minister was simply following the legal process in Scotland which includes mercy in exceptional circumstances.

The cry, largely from the USA, that he should have been kept in prison to die is a cry for vengance and not for justice. He is going to die in the next few weeks or months and whether he was guilty or not and there does at least seem to be grounds for doubt, is not the point. In releasing him Scotland has shown that it’s values are greater than those of terrorists and of those who advocate revenge.

It is of no surprise that the strongest condemnations have arisen in the US and in particular from the US administration. This after all is a nation that still executes people, many of whom are mentally ill or who were under age at the time of their offence. A nation who kidnaps people and secretly transports them to imprisonment, without trial, in foreign lands and which authorises torture.

We have nothing to learn from the US, the so called ‘Christian’ country but they have much to learn from this courageous, difficult and merciful decision by Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill.