This opinion piece by Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, eloquently outlines what I think has been the biggest single blunder of the West, in its relationship with Russia, since the end of the First Cold War in 1989: the expansion of NATO to the doorstep of Russia.
This expansion championed by the Clinton administration in the late 1990s, tweaked a long held, and after the Nazi invasion of 1941 which resulted in 20 million Soviet deaths, an easily understood paranoia of Russians to perceived encroachment from the West.
That, despite protest from Moscow, the USA and Europe pushed NATO into former Soviet and Warsaw Pact states bordering Russia, was an act of hubris that is now reaping the blowback that everyone should have expected.
This is not to excuse Putin, who owns his own despicable place in history, but it has provided him with an all too Trumpian looking nationalist fig leaf to justify his tantrum smackdown of Ukraine, for daring to want to leave his putrid umbrella of influence.
ps. In light of Putin’s own fascistic behavior at home and in invading Ukraine, it’s ironic that he claims to be doing it to ‘deNazify’ Ukraine; which unlike Russia, at least has the seeds of a democratic future…
This is the darkest day for Britain since the Second World War and a day that also marks the beginning of the end of the UK.
What a scared, narrow minded, backwards little country England has become? There are millions of people who don’t look like Boris Johnson who will be waking up in England today shit scared of the mobs that will now feel that their neo-fascist inclinations have been vindicated. Not everyone who voted for ‘Brexit’ is a football hooligan but you can bet the house that every single one of those neo-nazi thugs voted with Boris and his band of extremists. Within 3 months (unless in the interim, he becomes the most reviled man in the Britain), Boris Johnson will be hoping to be the prime minister of the UK. This was always his objective, and what a self-serving and miserable objective that was. Boris will be well pleased with himself but his reckless indifference to the welfare of his fellow citizens, most of whom do not have his intelligence, knowledge, political judgement or privileged Etonian background, is gobsmacking in its audacity.
So craven is this lust for power, I think many would suggest, it’s a safe bet that if David Cameron had supported ‘Brexit’, Boris would have led the campaign to stay.
Scotland, who overwhelmingly supported the vote to stay in the EU, will surely now vote to leave the UK and to remain in the EU, before the final English exit from Europe within the next 2 years.
Northern Ireland also voted heavily to remain in the EU so it’s very likely that there’ll be a renewed push for Irish unification and continued EU membership (as part of Ireland). As part of Europe the border between the north and the rest of Ireland, had become nebulous and increasingly unimportant with residents freely crossing north and south. With ‘Brexit’, Britain will have only one land border between itself and Europe and that will be the contentious border in Northern Ireland. The reinstatement of formal border controls between the two parts of Ireland (one British, the other, Europe), will only heighten the separation and open old wounds and renew tension and troubles. Northern Ireland, Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness (Sinn Féin) has already called for an Irish unity vote. It’s hard to imagine that the Good Friday accord, that ended the violence in Northern Ireland, won’t be severely tested, with the fury this vote will unleash in Belfast.
And apart from the turmoil that this vote and the disintegration of the UK will bring to Britons, there’s also the inevitable retribution from Germany and France that will follow this vote. As an example to the rest of Europe, they will be relentless in punishing Britain for ‘Brexit’. They will ensure that there’s no business-as-usual in trade and access to the EU. Doors will close, phone calls will go unanswered and a big chunk of Britain’s biggest industry, financial services, will move to Dublin and Frankfurt.
When the dust finally settles on this calamity, England will shrink into real obscurity. Sooner than might otherwise have happened, Britain, as we know it, will cease to exist and in all probability, will have a doubtful hold on its UN P5 place, and with it the last vestige of its hollow imperial greatness. What a great price Britain will pay for Boris Johnson’s hissy fit vanity project. And what a great price they will bear for David Cameron’s lack of leadership and courage to face down the call for this referendum in the first place.
There are clear moments in history when leadership failure has had catastrophic consequence: one when Neville Chamberlain arrived back in London waving his capitulation to Adolph Hitler and proclaiming he’d achieved “Peace for our time”, months before Hitler invaded Poland; and another when David Cameron secured his place as prime minister by agreeing to this referendum but at the cost of the very country he so desperately wanted to rule.
With this cataclysmic vote, the march towards a new neo-fascist rise in Europe now seems almost unstoppable. Hungary and Poland already have Eurosceptic far right governments with neo-fascist undertones. France’s own far right National Front, who are also campaigning to leave the EU, is already the second largest party in that country. Even Denmark, a former poster child for progressive social and economic values, has lurched troublingly to the right under its new radical hard-right prime minister and, has distanced itself from the European project.
Only a few years ago the European Union was controversially awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with the citation: “for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”. That hope for: that peace; that reconciliation; that democracy; and that human rights is now in tatters.
They say you can be judged by the company you keep. President Barack Obama has chosen to take a stand for the criminals that Bradley Manning bravely exposed and to stay silent while this whistleblower is persecuted for causing embarrassment and discomfort to his administration.
Pfc. Bradley Manning
Check out the Iraq Collateral Murder Video that started it all:
• Watch the video:
To claim that Manning’s leaks have given aid to ‘the enemy’ because some of his leaked info was found in Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, is ridiculous. If they’d found a New York Times article with a photo of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, would they accuse the ‘Times of ‘aiding the enemy’ by providing Osama with that targeting information? Nothing that Manning allegedly released through WikiLeaks, The Guardian, The Washington Post and The New York Times, has been shown to have caused any real harm to anyone but it has revealed the duplicity of the USA’s actions in the world. For causing this dent to US pride and prestige, Bradley Manning is to pay with the loss of his liberty for a very long time.
I read Manning’s hour-long statement to the court at his pre-trial hearing at the end of February and cried. This young man is only 25 and has sacrificed the rest of his life for this.
Daniel Ellsberg** exposed the Johnson and Nixon Administration’s Vietnam War lies, was vilified but is now recognised as a genuine hero. Similarly, Bradley Manning will go down in history for bravely risking death by daring to expose the lies and criminal behavior of the US military (the Collateral Murder Video and the Iraq and Afghan War logs) and shining a light on the murky dealings of the US State Department with the Cablegate exposure. On the other hand, Barack Obama’s legacy will always be stained by this cruel and vindictive response to Manning’s incredibly brave, ethical act. As Daniel Ellsberg, himself pointed out: “I’m sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case”.
• Please watch this moving video and share this post if you can:
The featured celebrities involved in the project are:
Actor, Maggie Gyllenhaal; Pink Floyd legend, Roger Waters; Oscar winning director of Platoon, Oliver Stone; revered Vietnam War whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg; legendary talk show host and political activist, Phil Donahue; President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner; Pulitzer Prize winning author, Alice Walker (The Color Purple); legendary RATM and Audioslave guitarist and activist, Tom Morello; Rolling Stone journalist, Matt Taibbi; actor, Peter Sarsgaard; human rights activist and scholar, Angela Davis; music icon, Moby; artist, Molly Crabapple; environmentalist and founder of Peaceful Uprising, Tim DeChristopher; West Point graduate, Lt. Dan Choi; the famous (and arrested) Occupy Wall Street activist, retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard; the ever controversial, Russell Brand; award winning American investigative journalist, Allan Nairn; Pulitzer Prize winning political journalist, Chris Hedges; actor, Wallace Shawn; novelist and political commentator, Adhaf Soueif; and Iraq War veteran of Bravo Company 2-16, Josh Stieber, who was seen on the ground in the Collateral Murder Video and was so incensed by what he’d seen that he renounced his support for President Bush, became a conscientious objector and campaigned against the Iraq war.
**Daniel Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 with crimes carrying a possible 115 year sentence. The charges were dismissed in 1973 following revelations of illegal phone taps by the FBI.
My son Toby said, “Funny how this story isn’t given any coverage. It’s one of the biggest stories of our generation.”.
I agree… But in an age of expedience, it’s hard to measure effective journalism when the important issues of our time are things like… Kanye and Kim naming their new daughter, North West.
Letterman telling it like it is.
Yea, I know… where was I.
I didn’t get to see this 2012 clip until it was posted by a friend on Facebook.
I remember when Gasland came out and it was said by industry types in Australia, that coal seam gas would be extracted in a different and much safer way than that depicted in the film. Well guess what, that was just spin; the Frackers are doing it in exactly the same dangerous way. Even taking a benign view of Fracking in Australia, it still involves the waste of vast quantities of precious groundwater just to produce the gas. This groundwater depletion for coal seam gas production has by itself, made the extraction of water for human consumption and agriculture much more difficult.
The past informs the future and that tells us that no industrial process is without risk, it’s just a matter of deciding how much you’re willing to lose. No matter how safe offshore drilling was said to be, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico still happened. No matter how safe nuclear power plants are, according to proponents of nuclear power, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster still happened.
Whereas Fracking elsewhere in the world might contaminate one of many aquifers, in Australia, Fracking contamination anywhere in Queensland and northern New South Wales would destroy the world’s greatest aquifer, The Great Artesian Basin.
“The Great Artesian Basin provides the only reliable source of freshwater through much of inland Australia. The basin is the largest and deepest artesian basin in the world, stretching over a total of 1,700,000 square kilometres.” (Wikipedia).
• Also see here for a map of the Great Artesian Basin.
The Qld and NSW governments need the Fracking tax cash so in this age of short-termism, they’re prepared to give Australia’s Frackers the benefit of the doubt right up to the point when Australia’s Great Artesian Basin is totally fracked. When that inevitably happens, they’ll squeal: “it was a terrible accident” or “the company responsible will be held to account”. But by then it’ll be too late and as inland towns, livestock and crops die, who will hold our politicians to account. In the meantime, some chemical contamination of the groundwater, as a consequence of Fracking, is inevitable. It’ll just be a matter of ‘authorities’ determining how much carcinogenic water we’re prepared to tolerate.
So good on Letterman for having his rant but he forgot to mention we elect governments to prevent this sort of economic rape, so wherever it’s happening, there’s a fracking government watching.
From now on, I think I’ll replace the ‘u’ with ‘ra’ and use frack, frackers, fracking instead. Hey, it’s PG enough to use round kids and you never know it might become a byword for this evil industry.
Blows your mind eh. It’s obscene the amount of latitude, deference and aspirational support we give to this evil aspect of Capitalism. How is this level of outrageous greed possible when more than a billion humans live on less than $2 a day and at least another billion live in grinding poverty. It’s hard to imagine that any of the 1% have any ethical values when you know just how obese their wallets are.
I imagine this 1% also see terrorism emanating from the impoverished and uneducated 3rd world, as an attack on freedom or the Capitalist system (or maybe just an attack on western conspicuous gluttony to you and me); or perhaps more cynically, just the blowback cost of doing their egregious business. Oh, and they cleverly get taxpayers to pay the bill for this cost with huge increases in anti-terrorism budgets at the CIA, Homeland Security and the FBI, while slashing spending on prosecuting these same Wall Street criminals… Nice work, K Street.
Unfortunately, this video puts it more coherently than the well meaning but incomprehensibly disparate Occupy Movement ever did (apart from the ‘We are the 99%” slogan that is) … Pity… Had hopeful visions of another Bastille Day back then (with less pitchforks and muskets and more placards and bullhorns).
While Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Ted Turner are divesting their huge wealth, doing great and much needed work in the 3rd world, what are the rest of the grotesquely wealthy doing? Oxfam recently reported that, “The world’s 100 richest people earned a stunning total of $240 billion in 2012 – enough money to end extreme poverty worldwide four times over.”. This group also represents only a minuscule number of the 1% worst wealth hoarders. The World Institute for Development Economics Research at the United Nations, released a report in 2006 that indicated that the richest 1% of adults in the world owned a staggering 40% of the planet’s wealth, while the top 10% wallowed in a full 85% of global assets. On the other hand, the bottom 50% of the world’s adult population could only account for a tiny 1% of the world’s wealth. In the last 6 years, which included the GFC, this calamitous situation has got even worse. According to Oxfam’s 2012 report, “The richest 1 percent has increased its income by 60 percent in the last 20 years with the financial crisis accelerating rather than slowing the process,”.
Here’s an idea for somewhere to start… Just shutting off tax havens that enable the wealthy (and corporations) to avoid their obligations to pay tax, would raise $189bn in additional tax revenues, according to Oxfam, and that’s more than enough to end extreme poverty in the world.
Thanks to Shaun C. for sharing the video (I know the video went viral a while back but…).
A few days ago, the Louisiana legislature rejected Senate Bill 26 which sought to repeal the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act which allows for creationism to be taught as valid science in schools. Two previous attempts at repeal in 2011 and 2012 also failed.
As a high school student in 2011, Zack Kopplin started the repeal campaign with the support of 78 Nobel laureate scientists. He said at the time that he kept hoping that either an adult or an organisation would take up the issue. Dismayed that no one did, he took up the cause himself, even testifying before the state Senate. He is now a Rice University student and is still pushing ahead with this campaign.
Zack Kopplin (image: billmoyers.com)
In his most recent testimony, Kopplin was quoted by the Associated Press (May 1, 2013) saying, “This law is about going back into the Dark Ages, not moving forward into the 21st Century.” He added, “Louisiana students deserve to be taught sound science and that means the theory of evolution, not creationism.”
For me, one of the disturbing aspects of this issue is the support of likely Republican presidential hopeful, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal for the creationist cause.
Last month, in an interview with NBC, Jindal said,
“I’ve got no problem if a school board, a local school board, says we want to teach our kids about creationism, that people, some people, have these beliefs as well, let’s teach them about ‘intelligent design’…What are we scared of?”
What we are scared of, is that the USA still exercises a critical influence in the world, so to have a person like Jindal as a potential leader of that country is frightening for the future of science and education.
For about half the last century, the USA led the world in academic excellence and scientific discovery. Then along came the religious nutters in the form of creationists who support the teaching of intelligent design as science, to help Americans find their way back to the 15th century. When I ask myself why news like Louisiana’s rejection of SB 26, makes me seethe with anger, I answer… It’s because the hubris of these closed minded politicians and the nutters they represent, causes millions of kids to be taught lies. They are sanctimonious bloody child abusers. These kids who don’t know better, rely on their teachers to safeguard their future and help them become fully functioning adults. Instead, by allowing the teaching of creationism and intelligent design as legitimate science, they’re raising a generation of kids who wont have the choice to become geologists, paleontologists, physicists, cosmologists, astronomers, anthropologists or biologists. You can’t teach the scientific method alongside creationism or intelligent design because they are incompatible. Creationism and intelligent design which is supernatural pseudo-science, cannot survive the scrutiny of the scientific method which requires that theory withstand all evidence. Creationism and intelligent design requires only that selective evidence support theory, while ignoring all evidence to the contrary. In other words, Creationists make the evidence fit the theory, not the other way round.
All natural science disciplines have provided us with overwhelming evidence that the world and the universe are billions of years old, so again they are incompatible with creationism and intelligent design which posits that dinosaurs co-existed with humans less than 10,000 years ago. All these scientific disciplines also require an understanding of the interwoven and independently verifiable history of our planet and universe not the untestable supernatural pseudo-science of creationism and intelligent design.
When you’re looking for oil, it helps if you have an understanding about the process that transforms dead organisms into liquid oil over millions of years. It helps if you know how tectonic plates have moved over millions of years so you’ve got an idea where to look. It also helps if you can identify rock stratification that has occurred over millions of years. So, if you’re a creationist who wants a job in Petroleum geology, forget it because there’s nothing in creationism or Intelligent design that will help you find oil, you need real science for that. If you’re developing new medicines, it helps if you have an understanding about how pathogens evolve and for that you need real science like evolution not creationism or intelligent design.
Louisiana is not isolated in its support of creationist pseudo-science. The rise of secular rationalism has seen Christian fundamentalists fight back with a strategy designed to circumvent the ‘separation of church and state’ by insidiously introducing this intelligent design crap-science into schools. This program is backed by the cleverly named Discovery Institute (remind you of anything? perhaps the Discovery Channel), a Seattle based right-wing Christian, Creationist lobby group, thinly disguised as a ‘think tank’. This pernicious organisation’s stated goal is to Teach the Controversy and create an aura of doubt around evolution. Its purpose seems to be to undermine the long established scientific method, which requires science theory be based on measurable and verifiable evidence, unlike the supernatural intelligent design pseudo-science which is not empirical science.
Indoctrinating kids with creationism disguised as legitimate science is the kind of blatant distortion of truth, dressed up as fact that was a hallmark of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. That’s why it makes me so f***ing angry.
More:
• Here is an excerpt from Kopplin’s 2013 Louisiana Senate testimony: Claude Bouchard, the former Director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, calls the LSEA “anti-science” legislation whose intent is to diminish the role of science in elementary and secondary schools when teachers discuss with their students such hot topics as evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.”
Dr. Bouchard says that the LSEA has economic consequences. “If you are an employer in a high tech industry, in the biotechnology sector or in a business that depends heavily on science, would you prefer to hire a graduate from a state where the legislature has in a sense declared that the laws of chemistry, physics or biology can be suspended?”
Because The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology pulled a prescheduled convention from New Orleans in response to the passage of the LSEA, the repeal of this law is important to our state’s tourism industry.
According to Steve Perry, the President of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, the LSEA “is a poor symbol of our state’s actual commitment to being on the cutting edge of modern science. And, it has a damaging impact on our bringing hundreds of millions of dollars of major international meetings and conventions in medical and basic sciences.”
Perry says “It is such an embarrassing, antiquated law to have on the books when we are making such transformational new investments in biotechnology, gene therapy, and neurosciences. With our entire country voicing the need for more investments in the teaching of science and mathematics, here we are re-living the kind of discussion the Catholic Church must have had with Galileo.”
• Creationist Science Committee Chair seeks to sideline Peer Review:
U.S. Congressman Lamar Smith (image : U.S. House of Representatives)
The creationist agenda has been boosted by the appointment of creationist, Texas Republican Congressman Rep. Lamar Smith, as chairman of the House Science Committee (truly ironic, given his anti-science agenda). Smith has proposed legislation, the High Quality Research Act, which implicitly provides for political judgments on research merit and could allow climate change deniers and creationists to weigh in on possible applications of research projects. Chairman Smith is pushing for the stripping of the peer-review requirement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant process and substituting a new set of politically motivated funding criteria that is significantly less transparent and not reviewed by independent experts (ie. scientists). The funding criteria also seeks to diminish the role of research that independently verifies experimental results, a result that wouldn’t displease climate change skeptics and the scrutiny averse creationists.
More links:
See Bill Moyers’ excellent April 2013 interview with Zack Kopplin (who knew that 46% of Americans believe God created the Universe and the Earth less than 10,000 years ago… scary):
Check out Kopplin’s 2011 testimony in support of repeal of the Creationist Law here:
Also see the complete Louisiana Senate 2013 hearings here (Kopplin’s testimony begins after about 80% has elapsed – look for SB 26 on screen):
• Louisiana Senate SB 26 hearings.
I think allowing creationism to be taught as legitimate science in schools is dangerous, because it doesn’t require the application of the scientific method and it therefore undermines and devalues rigorous science. Am I right?
Ted Cruz, the 42 year old Texas Senator and a likely 2016 GOP candidate for president, recently addressed the Republican Party’s Silver Elephant Dinner in South Carolina. According to Politico, “He brought the crowd to its feet by denouncing the administration for cracking down on proselytizing in the armed forces.”
Cruz was quoted saying, "The United States government has no authority to tell any American, in the military or not, that he or she cannot share their faith with others,” Cruz said, exclaiming: “You know, there comes a point where you just can’t make this stuff up!"
What The Pentagon is cracking down on is not people who pray but people who aggressively proselytize, particularly in sensitive zones like Afghanistan. Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen said in a statement. “The Department makes reasonable accommodations for all religions and celebrates the religious diversity of our service members.”
“Service members can share their faith (evangelize), but must not force unwanted, intrusive attempts to convert others of any faith or no faith to one’s beliefs (proselytization),” Christensen added.
Cultural sensitivity would suggest against a unit of the US military, headed for Afghanistan, changing its nickname from the “Werewolves” to the “Crusaders”, complete with the medieval red cross, crusader shield insignia and a crusader knight as its mascot. But the VMFA-122 USMC fighter squadron’s new commander, Lt. Col. Wade Wiegel, was determined to do just that. Equally, going into battle in Afghanistan with your “Jesus rifle” complete with the Biblical references: John 8:12 and Second Corinthians 4:6, etched into its scope, would seem arrogant and just plain stupid. But, there are Christian soldiers who were incensed by The Pentagon’s directive to scrape them off. There are many in the military who welcome the comparison with the holy wars of the past that pitted 11th century Christian Crusader Knights against Muslim warriors in almost two centuries of merciless bloodthirsty conflict in Palestine. That The Pentagon is attempting to wipe out this influence seems only sensible in a region where ‘death from the sky’ drone strikes make the locals hypersensitive and where self-righteous, Bible carrying, western Christian soldiers are not particularly welcome.
Deep within the military, though, there is also the pernicious impact of unit commanders and other senior ranks, pointedly inviting their subordinates to attend Bible classes and prayer groups. When such Bible study and prayer groups grow from small informal gatherings into large, exclusive and influential cliques then The Pentagon is right to worry about unit cohesion and freedom from religious exclusion and conflict. It’s easy to see why a minority of non religious or non Christian lower ranks might liken this type of ‘invitation’ to a subtle form of intimidation, coercion or bullying.
So when a likely GOP candidate for president decides it’s important to make a stand against The Pentagon crackdown on aggressive Christian proselytizing, he’s also making a stand for intimidation of non-religious and non-Christian minorities while also holding up the standard of the murderous medieval Christian Crusaders for the US Military.
It beggars belief that Americans just don’t get why they are so despised in the middle-east, but someone like Senator Ted Cruz goes a long way to illustrating why.
If you’re a Christian from a majority Christian country put yourself in a different space for a moment and imagine you’re a Christian from a Muslim majority country and you’re being constantly harangued by Muslims urging you to abandon your infidel ways and worship the one true god, Allah.
So, how do you feel about the possibility of aggressive Muslim proselytizing then… Not so comfortable is it?
So, why do Christians do it to non-believers and non-Christians?
I know it’s customary to subordinate feelings of ill-will towards the deceased and apply the dictum ‘If you’ve got nothing nice to say, just say nothing’, but having obeyed for several days, I found the flood of memories about Margaret Thatcher too strong.
As a committed groupie of free market neo-liberal guru, Friedrich Hayek, Thatcher came to power in 1979 with the intention of sweeping away impediments to Capitalist power like the Welfare State. She was a firm believer in the Free Market but was never able to describe how a fundamental key to the beneficial operation of such a market could be achieved: perfect knowledge. When cheap horsemeat is substituted for beef, in a Hayekian, Free Market world, free of inspectors and testers (because they’re not needed in Hayek’s view), the consumer would require the supply chain be obvious to all before they could make the informed decision about buying the delicious cheaper product. As well, when strange instruments related to sub-prime mortgages were marketed to national and municipal governments around the world, the buyers completely understood that they were purchasing a toxic asset because they all knew exactly what they were buying. They also knew they were hastening the collapse of the world economy in 2008 and the onset of the current Euro crisis, with their investments. The silly idiots went ahead and did it anyway… NOT!! Hardly anyone, including the people flogging these diabolical products and the rating agencies, had any idea what they really were. So much for the Free Market. Incidentally, the 1986 Big Bang, as it’s called, was the Hayek inspired banking deregulation, championed by Thatcher, that then forced American deregulation and set in train the series of events that culminated with the 2008 crash…
Thanks Maggie!
Thatcher also trashed the legacy of Clement Attlee, the architect of Post-War Britain. Where there had been a settled consensus regarding the shared underpinning of society within the Welfare State, Thatcher proclaimed “there is no such thing as society”. She coldly advanced the notion that we are all alone as she promoted individualism, competition and greed. To those who claim she did what was necessary to reform the country, I’d say there were many paths to reform. She could have chosen something a little more inclusive like a Scandinavian model. Instead, she chose to embark on a sharp elbows era of dog-eat-dog economics, designed to create a brutal, nasty but efficient Britain. The innocent and hapless victims of this compassionless policy were further battered by slashed safety net support and a sharp reduction in the construction of public housing which caused greater hardship and homelessness (ironically, this was a program that had been championed by a previous conservative prime minister, Winston Churchill, in the 1950s). As Glenda Jackson, former Academy Award winning actress and MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, put it, “Every single shop doorway, every single night, became the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom for the homeless.”
See Jackson’s speech here:
At the time Margaret Thatcher came to power, the North Sea Oil bonanza was contributing more than 15% to Britain’s GDP. Instead of investing for the nation’s future with this windfall, as did the other beneficiary of the boom, Norway, she cut the tax rate for the rich. But despite her low-tax mantra, she also almost doubled (to 15%) VAT (Value Added Tax) which, because it’s a sales tax, hurt the poor much more than the wealthy.
Just when polls indicated she was headed for a landslide defeat at the upcoming 1983 elections, the Argentinian’s saved Thatcher by occupying the Falklands, a group of small islands they knew as the Malvinas. The Argentinian’s had claimed since the 19th century that the islands were stolen from them by the British. Thatcher’s government all but put out the welcome mat by indicating an unwillingness to defend the islands by ending their military presence (already reduced to one ice patrol vessel, HMS Endurance). Despite warnings from the Royal Navy and the growing belligerence of the Argentinian Junta, the British were conveniently ‘taken by surprise’ by the occupation. The military operation to retake the islands included the sinking of a retreating Argentine cruiser, the Genral Belgrano, with the loss of 323 lives. The Falklands war resulted in the deaths of 649 Argentine, and 258 British personnel but gave birth to the Iron Lady, wrapped her in the flag and led to a resounding election win.
When confronted by a militant union, the National Union of Mineworkers, did Margaret Thatcher attempt to find a new industrial relations path, like the Germans had done, that avoided the need for unions to use the blunt and destructive strike as a negotiation tool? Did she seek to reform unions to make them more democratic, accountable and effective? No, instead she pledged to defeat “the enemy within”, a phrase that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in Hitler’s Germany, and embarked on a long civil war against the union movement with the assistance of the police, Special Branch and MI5 (the internal spy service).
As it happened, the coal mines were at the sharp end of Thatcher’s plan to reshape Britain, not gradually as previous government’s had done, but with a short and destructive shock. Her pit closure regime resulted in untold hardship as whole towns were laid waste and communities ripped apart. By the time she’d finished applying the wrecking ball to British industry, manufacturing output had collapsed by 30%, she’d added 3 million workers to the unemployment queue and millions of families to her resume of misery.
In her relations with the rest of the world, Margaret Thatcher had a mixed record. She could claim most of the credit for softening up the stridently anti-communist Republican Party in the USA to the idea that it was OK to deal with the Communist USSR, when she famously declared that, “I like Mr. Gorbachev; we can do business together.”. This was a year before he became Soviet Leader and it certainly gave US president Ronald Reagan the necessary cover to seek a deal with the Soviets. In 1979, she was also instrumental, with the assistance of Australian negotiators, in reaching the Lancaster House Agreement which settled the Zimbabwe independence conflict. Not so laudatory, was her well known and blatant racism (something Australian Foreign Minister, Bob Carr recalled well). She also famously found herself on the wrong side of history in supporting the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa against the international community’s call for sanctions, even welcoming South African prime minister, P. W. Botha, to Britain in 1984. This stand put her sharply at odds with other Commonwealth countries, including Australia and Canada who were at the forefront of the sanctions movement. Thatcher went even further, branding Nelson Mandella a terrorist.
Her support for Chile’s murderous Pinochet regime represents another low point. Thatcher never resiled from her position, even publicly and warmly meeting with Pinochet after he had become an international pariah in the decade before his death. In 1999, the reason for that unwavering support was revealed: Alone among Latin American countries, Chile had provided extensive covert support to the British during their 1983 Falklands war with Chile’s neighbour, Argentina. This action, which almost certainly guaranteed British success, was undertaken at great risk to Pinochet as Chile were greatly outgunned by Argentina and could have suffered grave consequences if this complicity became known.
Unfortunately for Margaret Thatcher, distant memory hasn’t rehabilitated her legacy, as Thatcherism, the ideology that polarised much of the Western World, is still very much alive and cruelly unwell. The divisiveness of her government is also still very raw for many of those old enough to remember. As well, she had the bad fortune to die at a time of rising unemployment and widening economic inequality, declining upward mobility, and entrenched and worsening poverty (fittingly ironic, given she had a big hand in creating those conditions). As well, there is a worthy reminder of her reign in David Cameron who has instituted a deep austerity of his own, with massive welfare cuts, in the middle of a long and painful recession. The offspring of her policies are still being born into a Britain where the process Thatcher began, continues with cuts to disability pensioners and the backdoor privatisation of the cherished NHS (National Health Service).
I think, as well, salt has been ladled into the open wound by Cameron’s insensitive decision to give Thatcher, what amounts to, a State funeral (minus the actual lying in state but with everything else, including the traditional gun carriage). Little wonder then, that the cruelly intentioned, Wizard of Oz song, Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead, has become the anthem of her death and has rocketed to the top of the charts.
For the geeks:
To get a flavour of the times, here are several films that depict Thatcher’s Britain – a land of poverty, violence and racism – including: Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985); Riff-Raff (1991), directed by Ken Loach who slammed Thatcher as “the most divisive and destructive Prime Minister of modern times” and called for her funeral to be privatized and handed to the lowest bidder, consistent with her economic policies; Brassed Off (1996); and Billy Elliot (2000).
My previous post, The Last Civil Right? Same Sex Marriage:, has generated a bit of heat on Facebook with comments suggesting that in 1967, when the bulk of churches stood against interracial marriage, they were simply reflecting a society with similar attitudes. The argument follows that the churches are doing the same now.
In my previous post I did mention that some churches, including the United Church of Christ support marriage equality. The Anglican’s progressive American Episcopalian branch is another wonderful exception. With same-sex marriage now legal in Washington DC, Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington DC, recently announced that The Washington National Cathedral (an Episcopalian church), where the nation gathers to mourn tragedies and presidents, will soon begin performing same-sex marriages. Unfortunately, the main body of that church, the Anglican church in England continues to stand alongside the Roman Catholics, as one of the main churches vocally opposed to marriage equality. Jeffrey John, the Anglican dean of St Albans in the UK, recently accused the church of pursuing a “morally contemptible” policy on same-sex marriage. He writes that, by setting themselves against same-sex marriage, the bishops of the Church have prioritised the union of the Anglican Communion over the rights of gay Christians. “Worst of all, by appeasing their persecutors it betrays the truly heroic gay Christians of Africa who stand up for justice and truth at risk of their lives. For the mission of the Church of England the present policy is a disaster.” See the whole Guardian Newspaper report here:
• Anglican stance on same-sex marriage ‘morally contemptible’
There’s a reason why the churches have emptied in the most religious country in Europe, Roman Catholic Ireland. I know the Anglican Church is experiencing the same sort of ‘West vs. the Rest’ crisis that’s decimating the Catholic Church in Europe but they both need to decide whether they prioritise expedience over principle.
If the churches were purely political organisations, then it might be reasonable for them to simply reflect or lag behind community consensus or act expediently. But the churches set themselves as moral and social arbiters and as such they should bravely and with principle, lead the community by advocating for tolerance, social inclusion and progressive social policy. Alternatively, they can continue to choose, as they did in 1967, to identify themselves with intolerance, prejudice and exclusion. If the churches continue in that direction, they’ll accelerate their irrelevance to the West and soon exist only in the third world.
I’m almost afraid to ask for comments on this hotly debated issue.
For those old enough to remember, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), was a challenging and controversial film. At that time (only 46 years ago) interracial marriage was unthinkable and strongly opposed by the church as well as being illegal in 16 states in the USA and opposed by 72% of the American public. Running against the tide in 1967, the US Supreme Court ruled against interracial marriage prohibition in Loving v. Virginia. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who penned the unanimous decision, wrote in words that echo strongly for same-sex marriage: “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival… To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.” Today, such relationships are barely noticed let alone condemned (except by a small minority in the deep south).
Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in two landmark cases related to same-sex marriage. The Court is being asked to rule on the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act (1996), which defined marriage as between a male and female and also required the US federal government to deny benefits to same-sex couples, married in states that allow same-sex unions.
It seems that the last great Civil Rights issue is in the balance and once again, just like they did with interracial marriage in 1967, the churches stand on the side of prejudice (with a very few exceptions like the 1 million strong, United Church of Christ).
So while great strides have been made in recent decades to recognize the civil rights of the LGBT communities, there still exists one glaring inequality that defines them and their life partnerships as inferior and somehow frivolous: Marriage inequality.
Marriage today, particularly in the West, has moved away from being an exclusively religious institution and is now celebrated in many ways: in churches; synagogues; court houses; city halls; parks; and sometimes, in less solemn, perhaps even frivolous settings.
Some are religious ceremonies while many are very secular. Generally though, they have one thing in common: they celebrate the love, joy and commitment of two people to each other in the company of friends and family. For most, this is one of life’s highlights but it is one that is wholly denied to gay people and relegates gay relationships to being somehow less worthy and legitimate than those of straight people.
I have no problem with religious people defining for themselves the nature of their creation, their relation to a deity and dogmatically ordained relationships between people within their faith. I similarly have no objection to religious celebrants, declining to marry same-sex partners. I do however, object strongly when those same people seek to impose their definitions on the rest of society. The religious might believe that their deity created marriage to foster procreation but the reality is that marriage was a device developed thousands of years ago, long before Christianity, Islam or Judaism, to ensure property ownership and inheritance. Whatever the view, the decline in formalised religiosity in the West has paralleled an increasing view that marriage is not a necessary precursor to procreation. At the same time, I believe there is a growing identification with the notion of marriage as a desirable way of publicly demonstrating and celebrating the commitment of two people, including mothers and fathers already in a family, to each other. As well, I think many people now see the legal responsibilities inherent in marriage as somehow affirming their willingness to more permanently commit to each other.
Many countries have approved or are in the process of legislating marriage equality, including: Andora, Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Columbia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Nepal, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and Uruguay, although I’m ashamed to say, not my own (Australia). In the traditionally conservative United States, same-sex marriage has been legalised in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, Washington, D.C., the state of Washington and the largest state, California (barring the success of Prop 8, currently before the Supreme Court). Even in the UK which is currently ruled by a right-wing coalition government, the Conservative Party are pushing ahead with marriage equality. British Prime Minister, David Cameron, In a speech to his Conservative Party in 2011 said: “I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative.”
The conservative fall-back position for those opposed to same-sex marriage, seems to be: that some form of civil union might be possible. While civil unions do legally cement a gay partnership contract in much the same way as a marriage, they do so without the equality of status and celebration conferred by a straight marriage. And worse, such a confirmed legal status further entrenches the inferiority of gay relationships by only recognising their legal but not societal status. Allowing civil unions but not marriage, is akin to legally granting an African American the right to travel at the front of the bus but with a big sign fixed to his seat patronisingly proclaiming “We whites have to let you ride but you’re still BLACK!!!”, thus perpetuating the myth that being white (or in this case, straight) is still somehow superior.
At a time when family and society’s bonds are being increasingly challenged, why would we not take the opportunity to help place family and relationship commitment more firmly at the core of our communities by affirming the role of marriage as a desirable and cherished family institution not just as something religious people do before they procreate.
It’s time to remove one of the last signposts of gay inferiority, reach out the hand of inclusiveness to all people and support the affirmation of family and committed relationships intrinsic to marriage equality for all.
Has this issue reached a tipping point or are the forces of prejudice like the leader of the conservative Liberal Party in Australia, going to be able to hold back what seems like the inevitable tide of history?
Zak From Downunder 