And this is what we call progress, take two.

It is sometimes hard to know what to write about, yet one feels compelled to write at times, to share a thought, insight, opinion however trivial, (or tainted with personal propaganda it is.)Perceptions and opinions rule us all. They are a product of our upbringing, culture and influences. Are we really independent then? Or merely shaped by a mould? Perhaps we give ourselves too much credit when we think we have acted in an independent rational manner, after all lagging behind some of our lofty ideals is a fallible human being.

If you looked at the website I posted yesterday, what did you think? The image of a dog who had had all its paws cut off by an irate neighbor. An army of militant vegans ready to take on the establishment. To some it would be an appealing image, much the opposite to others. The march of science in the name of progress and a countless amount of life lost and tortured along the way. One must not neglect the benefit testing has had for humans either. What must then be determined is if products are essential or if they are not, cosmetics out, medications stay, if one believes one type of life is worth more than another. After all is that not just another view we have inherited from our culture?

This is not an endorsement, but potentially it could be.

This is not an endorsement, rather a link to a website I stumbled upon, that might deserve further investigation.

http://negotiationisover.com/

And to follow on from yesterdays post, a campaign by GetUp!

It's hard to believe -- but a few days ago the Rudd Government announced that it will stop processing asylum-seeker applications from Afghanis & Sri Lankans fleeing persecution in their war-torn countries. Take a stand against this shameful policy, click here to send Minister Evans a message.

http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/EndMandatoryDetention&id=1012

Putting the Pope on Trial.

Putting the Pope on Trial
Posted April 13, 2010

International law presents a radical challenge to the powerful: they could be judged by the same standards as the rest of us.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 13th April 2010

Confession and repentence are not among the Christian virtues practised by the Pope. He has apologised for the rape of children by Catholic priests in Ireland; but this is one of the few paedophilia scandals now shaking the Church in which neither he nor members of his inner circle were involved. He condemned the Irish bishops’ “grave errors of judgement” and “failures of leadership”(1), but of his own grave errors and failures - in Munich(2), Wisconsin(3) and California(4) - he says not a word, except to dismiss the issue as “petty gossip”(5). His response to this scandal reminds you of the origins of the verb to pontificate.

Shut out of his closed, self-regulated world, the victims of sacerdotal rape could only rage in frustration. Until now.

Over the weekend the authors Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens announced that they’ve asked lawyers to prepare a case against the Pope(6). A few days ago in the Guardian Geoffrey Robertson, the barrister they are consulting, explained that senior churchmen who protected paedophile priests, swore their victims to secrecy and allowed the perpetrators to continue working with children committed the offence of aiding and abetting sex with minors(7). Practised on a large scale, this becomes a crime against humanity recognised by the International Criminal Court. This is the general Vatican policy over which the then Cardinal Ratzinger is accused of presiding. When Benedict comes to the UK in September he could, if Dawkins and Hitchens get their warrant, be arrested.

At last we are waking up to what international law means. For the first time in modern history the underlying assumption of political life – that those who exercise power over us will not be judged by the same legal and moral norms as common citizens – is beginning to crack.

International law is the belated reply to one of the oldest surviving aphorisms in the English language. There are half a dozen versions, but the best-known is this: “They hang the man and flog the woman / That steals the goose from off the common / But let the greater villain loose / That steals the common from the goose.” This is the way we thought it would remain. The powerful were licenced by our expectations to carry on committing great crimes, while their subjects were punished for lesser offences. No longer. Picture the Pope awaiting trial in a British prison, and you begin to grasp the implications of the radical idea which has never yet been applied: equality before the law.

At the same time as Dawkins and Hitchens laid out their case, the barrister Polly Higgins challenged our perceptions of what legal equality means. On Friday she launched a campaign to have a fifth crime against peace recognised by the International Criminal Court(8). The crime is ecocide: the destruction of the natural world.

The laws of most nations protect property fiercely, the individual capriciously and society scarcely at all. A single murder is prosecuted; mass murder is the legitimate business of states. Only when these acts are given names – genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes of aggression - do we begin to understand their moral significance.

The same applies to nature. The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 criminalises anyone who “intentionally picks” a single flower from a protected plant(9). But you can grub up as many as you like as long as it’s “an incidental result of a lawful operation.” Pick a buttonhole and you could find yourself in the dock. Plough out the whole habitat and the law can’t touch you.

Higgins gives some examples of ecocide: the tar sands mining in Alberta, the Pacific garbage patch, the pollution of the Niger Delta by oil companies(10). She points out that ecocide is rarely a crime of intent, but in most cases an incidental consequence of other policies. Company directors or politicians could be prosecuted individually(11), but instead of being fined they would be charged for the restoration of the natural systems they’ve damaged. The purpose of criminalising ecocide is to raise the costs of trashing the planet to the point at which it ceases to be worthwhile. This is the obvious outcome of a wider understanding of legal equality: why should private property be protected while the common wealth of humanity is not?

International law as currently applied is often described as victors’ justice: the only people who get prosecuted are those who lose the wars they fight with powerful states. It’s not even that. Last week we learnt that some 50 suspected war criminals or human rights abusers are living in Britain(12). Among them are alleged torturers who worked for Saddam Hussein’s government, one of Robert Mugabe’s henchman, a member of Sudan’s janjaweed militia and a gruesome collection of Afghan warlords. But the police have been given no budget to investigate them and the Crown Prosecution Service has no resources with which to pursue them. So, while shoplifters are sent down, alleged mass murderers walk freely among us.

So much for the prime minister’s promises. A month ago, after Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli foreign minister, cancelled her visit to Britain for fear of being arrested under a warrant obtained by human rights campaigners, Gordon Brown wrote an article for the Telegraph in which he proposed to stop private prosecutions for crimes against humanity(13). Brown maintained that the warrant was supported by only “the slightest of evidence” and that those seeking Livni’s arrest had “set out only to grab headlines.” But the evidence for the crimes against humanity to which Livni has been linked – laid out in the Goldstone report(14) and elsewhere - is massive, detailed and hard to dispute.

Brown went on to make another statement that was plainly false: “Britain will always honour its commitment to international justice. The police here remain ready to investigate cases; the Crown Prosecution Service to bring them; the courts to hear them.” His government has rebuffed calls to set up a specialist war crimes unit(15) and failed to produce a dedicated penny for the prosecution of war crimes suspects.

Then he explained his real purpose in seeking to prevent private actions. People like Livni, he said, represent “countries and interests with which the UK must engage if we are not only to defend our national interest but maintain and extend an influence for good across the globe.” Britain, in other words, will not investigate or prosecute its allies. His article demonstrated the opposite of what he set out to show: that if there is a case for prosecuting foreign dignitaries visiting this country, the authorities will take care of it. Without private actions of the kind that Dawkins and Hitchens hope to launch, equality before the law remains an empty threat.

Brown’s desperate wriggling over the Livni case suggests that governments are beginning to grasp the shocking implications of what they have signed up to. It’s time we did the same. There’s a promise implicit in international law: the end of the age of exceptions.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/letters/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_let_20100319_church-ireland_en.html

2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/28/pope-condemns-critics-catholic-sexual-abuse

3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/26/child-abuse-scandal-catholic-church

4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/10/pope-paedophile-priests-cover-up

5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/28/pope-condemns-critics-catholic-sexual-abuse

6. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7094310.ece

7. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/apr/02/pope-legal-immunity-international-law

8. http://www.thisisecocide.com/

9. http://www.england-legislation.hmso.gov.uk/RevisedStatutes/Acts/ukpga/1981/cukpga_19810069_en_6#v00030-pt1-pb3-l1g23

10. http://www.thisisecocide.com/hotspots/

11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/09/ecocide-crime-genocide-un-environmental-damage

12. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/apr/09/police-war-criminals

13. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/gordon-brown/7361967/Britain-must-protect-foreign-leaders-from-arrest.html

14. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/12session/A-HRC-12-48.pdf

15. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/apr/09/police-war-criminals

Asylum Seeking

There's been no blog entry for a while. And as always so much has gone on in this our great world. Polish Presidents have fallen to the ground from the sky, a white supremacist has been murdered in South, video from an Apache helicopter leaked. Thai's fighting for a new government. The great movement of life. Six billion stories, ever unfolding.

As I walked to University today, I saw two Sri Lankan flags flying outside the rowing sheds near the University campus. I still do not know why they were, but have come up with three possibilities of why they might have been.

1) Local Sri Lankans had had a party on the river and either forgotten to take them down or had left them up as a symbol of pride.

2) They hung as a celebration/protest/reminder of the elections that had just taken place in Sri Lanka.

3) That they were a protest against the recent decision by the Australian Government to not process Sri Lankan (and Afghani) asylum seeker claims during the next six months.

I am inclined to hypothesize that it was number three and this is what I am going to roll with. Asylum seekers seem to be a divisive issue, both here in Australia and around the world. The outsider. The person searching for a better life. It is an issue that governments tread very carefully around, especially during election periods. They appeal to our humanity and can be quickly condemned, and the complexity of the issue cannot be overstated but Kevin Rudd's government has also been deceptive on the issue, much like the Howard government before.

To state the reason that a suspension in the processing of asylum claims is due to the increasing safety of civilians in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka is simply not true, a distortion of the truth for political purposes. It is about the fact that more than ever people from these countries are trying to make Australia home and that the Australian government is finding it hard what to do about the issue. If this is the case then they should say so, there is no point in lying that the security situation in Afghanistan is getting better when Barack Obama last year pledged an extra 30,000 troops to go fight there.

What a world we live in. Filled with affluence and poverty. A globalised world of haves and have nots. Dreams and nightmares. People living the good life and others trying to find it. The smugglers in the middle. Have you looked at a map and seen how much closer Christmas Island is to Indonesia than Australia?

There is no argument that Australia cannot take all the worlds refugees, or that Australia has not been benevolent to some, or that I myself am a beneficiary of the Australian Immigration system, but what does seem to be evident is that we forget when talking about Asylum seekers we are talking about families, brothers and sisters mothers and fathers who have come from scarred countries in search of something better. Only to be locked up.

We forget that there are humans behind the headlines, behind the fear and scare mongering. In the Saturday Age you could see the faces of the dreaded asylum seekers. An Afghani family, that had just arrived on Christmas island three children, one girl with just the slightest hint of beauty, excitement life in her eyes, only to go into detention a bus ride away.

Tony "Jesus didn't say yes to everyone," Abbott.

Since late March when John Brumby announced that water restrictions would be lessened, Melbourne's storage capacity has decreased by 1%. This has happened even before the new stage three restrictions have taken effect. Ads on the radio state that people can now water their gardens on odd days, but should still remember that water is a precious resource. A mixed message is being sent to the public and the Premier should be held to account. The sad reality is that in these modern days, if John Brumby is voted out Ted Ballieu will come in. Is that a really viable alternative? If the quick speaking Kevin Rudd is thrown out of Kirrabilli, the triathlete Tony "Jesus didn't say yes to everyone," Abbott would take over.

One has to be forgiven for losing hope in the political process, when faced with such choices. If such a system does exist, where we feel powerless, then what are we to do to break free of it? What needs to be done. What is the essential corrupting feature of our present society. Money? Meat? Self interest? Something needs to be changed. A new constitution written. Perhaps it is already too late.

And is this what we call progress?

And is this what we call progress? New technology, new foods, a new you. And what is stopping you/me from becoming infinite and immortal? What are the forces rallied against you/me that hinder your/our progress? We're/I'm so consumed by your/my job, studies, life, love and apathy, that you/I need a rest and sometimes. What difference can an individual/you/I make? A hegemony exists that keeps you locked down and makes you feel powerless, question what is in your power and what is not. Evil surrounds you and you wonder how things could have ever gotten this way. The unjust sight, the song, the movie, the book, the news article has an effect on you, but it is only temporary, not forever changing, not revolutionary. Our car is on fire and there is no driver at the wheel. What is the Gorilla without man? What is man without the Gorilla? The machine marches on and we feel as if we have no choice but to follow. And to what purpose? And is this what we call progress? The night outside is silent and beautiful, ever judging, ever forgiving. Redemption is only a decision away. Beauty is everywhere, we merely have to look for it, create and fight for it. Photos by Marcus Bleasdale.