Bon profit — tonight I should be eating Denise's paella (above) instead of engaging in radio verbals with the terminally ambitious Yes, the "Genocide Olympics". That's what the latest bandwagon-jumper, Edward McMillan-Scott (Tory MEP and European Parliament Vice President), busy climbing up the greasy pole and endeavoring to make a name for himself, has decided to call this month's sporting excitement.
"We Should Shun Beijing Olympics in the Land of Genocide", he says, with his full understanding of the Holocaust on display. "But there is still genocide inside China. Hundreds of thousands are in 'administrative detention'." Tell that to the survivors or my mates who lost their families in the real Holocaust.
"China’s economic boom is causing massive environmental degradation. The air in Beijing is appalling.”. And this coming from a native of a country that's been pumping carbon into the atmosphere for how long?!! And can't even meet its Kyoto promises.
Here I am, spending a lovely restful Sunday with my oldest mate, Denise, and I have to be on BBC Radio 5 Live's Stephen Nolan programme between 22:00 and 22:30 tonight in order to counter lightweight morons bashing up the Chinese — AGAIN! And I have to stay sober. Two more reasons why this Bruce Banner may well be hulking out by the time we're on air. (You can listen again for seven days.)
Oh, and did I mention Nick Clegg? Demanding Gordon Brown boycott the Olympics. Boycott yourselves in 2012, warmongering jerks with a million dead Iraqis on your lily-whites and the prospect of a nuclear strike on Iran. Why aren't you dragging that grinning monster Tony Blair, the only person who could have been a more convincing Joker than Heath Ledger, into The Hague alongside Radovan Karadic? Taking $2 million a year from JP Morgan, a US bank making money from the war that their new talent started?!! What is UP with people? Are you guys NUTS?!!!!
If I may quote myself (rather than simply repeat myself) from Wreath Lecture which I wrote in June:
Coz this is the country of Magna Carta
No longer.
The authorities here are growing stronger.
The Meaning of Life is 42
42 days detention without charge
42 days of your life writ large
42 days without a home
42 days because politicians lost their back bone.
Rendition to a torture zone
Your wife and your kids don’t know where you’ve gone
Guilty until proved innocent
Where sucking your teeth while black is an arrestable offence
A copper scrutinising every email you ever sent
Gotta fuck for food, steal for rent
Freedom of speech? What a cheek!
Satan could sue the bible for libel
Get a million pound payoff and a House of Lords title.
DNA records, CCTVs,
Media frenzied heeby-jeebies,
Asbo-land, tapping phones,
Booming business, crippling loans
For school fees in the land of the free
Hey, why you picking on the Chinese
It’s not us starting World War Three
You’ll free this land?
Iran, Iraq, I scrammed.
BTW, Denise's tiramisu is bursting with alcoholic goodness and I feel overstuffed like a turkey. Must ... get ... in ... shape ... for ... radio ...
8 comments:
Just the way you'd choose to spend a restful Sunday evening, talking to Angry Steve...
Where do these people come from? Nick Clegg? Saints preserve us.
How did it go on the radio..?
Aint is all precisely a joke as look at the war-mongering jokers such as Bliar etc etc and 2012...deffo be well out of London when that elitist jamboree happens.
Did you see the report on the news last wk about MI5 telling politicians and athletes not to use their mobile phones as the Chinese secret service will be listening in..?
Er, not like MI5 listen in to anyone or maybe they could explain the function of GCHQ ..... Oh but it is all about democracy cos we live in one apparently (unlike the "totalitarianism" of China...according to Geoffrey Howe!!)
and cos the Americans have a written constitution they can't listen in to their citizens so they by-pass that and get GCHQ to listen in instead....Good old Brits..
Oh, the hypocrisy.....and the utter cheek
Wow.
Yes that may be paranoid about the mobile phones...but it is a fact. The Chinese govt. MIGHT listen in, espacillay to prominent people such as politicians and athletes. Unlike GCHQ etc. they are NOT accountable as to who, when and why and what they do with that information. Would it not be irresponsible to NOT warn them to be careful, and have someone arrested?
And using the Holocaust to dismiss any other genocide is just sick. Sick. I too know people who lost family to the Holocaust. This is NOT to say Jews do not deserve their own voice and space to remember, but to say nothing that can ever happen is as bad...is an insult to the memory of those who died in ALL genocides and their loved ones.
You remember your post on Israeli army shooting? "How dare you single out Israel, when OTHER countries do bad stuff TOO and IRAQ!" would sound moronic, no?
Read Isabel Losada's For Tibet With Love.
Read accounts of people tortured with electrodes to their genitals. They die. Or are never the same again. I was shaking after reading that.
China is an oppressor.
Not YOU, not Chinese PEOPLE or Chinese culture, but China.
Butterflywings,
Is China oppressive? Yes, sadly, it is. And for those of us who hoped China's socialist aspect would win out and offer a beacon to the rest of the world, that is a bitter pill to swallow.
There are valid criticisms due. The death penalty, organ harvesting, corruption, the fact that individuals can become not only millionaires but billionaires off the labour of others is an affront to everything I believe in.
However ...
1) GCHQ is not accountable to you or to me.
2) The Chinese government may be paranoid and brutal but the term "genocide". Does not fit. There is no industrialised wiping out of a people based on their race. The Jews weren't taught their own language in state schools, if there had been a one-child policy in Germany I doubt the Jews would have been exempt from that as the Tibetans are. I have no sympathy for the Tibetan theocratic elite who owned 95 percent of their fellow Tibetans and denied them human rights. But, yes, I'd like to see the Tibetans people enjoying greater autonomy and having their grievances heard.
3) Torture is wrong, vile, sadistic and futile. China should end it, and the West should stop waterboarding and sending its opponents under rendition to regimes which carry out our torture for us.
I object to the West's hypocrisy, the use of China's faults as a diversion from huge changes for the worse in our bit of the planet, and the blatantly xenophobic and racist tone of much of the ranting.
Thank you for at least making it clear in your last sentence that you are not coming from that space.
pretty dodgy comparison, still if enough mud is thrown around maybe it will distract?
a very poor political argument, akin to the SWP's "oi, look over there!" tactic
good about the protest tho, not they'll get much publicity tho
let's have a few more rants about the Dali Lama, that way you don't have to think of Tibetans as real people :)
Few weeks ago there was a small demo against Mugabe in Belfast. I thought it was great, and the best thing was that the Zimbabwean refugees had organised it themselves.
Yesterday I passed by an Amnesty demo over human rights in China. I'm sure their hearts are in the right place, but in a city with a big Chinese community it would have been nice if there were at least one or two Chinese faces there. It would have added some credibility. But I didn't see any.
"It would have added some credibility."
faces or not
does that detract from the plight of Tibetans?
no, of course, not
ever consider that maybe those "faces" are a bit scared of the Beijing dictatorship and the ramifications of protesting?
maybe there's more than one reason for these things?
This organ harvesting thing is a bit of a joke.
Firstly, let's have a look at it mathemtically:
According to certain groups, over 100,000 people are executed in China every year for their organs. And in a XXX report, organs cost between 50 to 100,000 pounds - depending on which organ. Using the lower figure, therefore, annually China receives over 5,000,000,000 pounds year in organ harvesting! And how the hell can you hide/transfer that amount of money?
Secondly, If anyone bothered to look at the different lists of people waiting for organ transplants around the world, you will find that the list continues to grow every year. This means that if there was this so-called organ harvesting it must be a very very very very very small harvet as it is making zero impact!
I conclude that I do not refute that the practice does not exist. In fact I beleive that it does, and not just in China. Human greed make it such that we do do these things for our own gains. It is sickening.
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