The Long View

Listening to reports of how a superpower is engaged in flattening a city to prepare it for elections, I drifted into thinking about the agendas of other great powers that once held sway. For a while now, I’ve been musing on the fact that though some of us get very excited about superpower meddling, in the great scheme of human affairs, it actually doesn’t matter at all.

Falluja just happens to be a very few miles from the site of ancient Babylon, and many’s the tyrant that has flattened, burned and spilled blood, around its mud bricks over six thousand years. Bush’s marines and their Islamist (or maybe patriotic, depending on your viewpoint) foes, will not be the last to struggle there for victory. In the end, their struggle for power will not matter any more than did those of Cyrus, or Nebuchadnezzar, or Alexander, or any of the other greats of history. The dust will still blow over their sun bleached battlefields, if not their bones, Americans being more inclined to take away their dead than Alexander was.

Modern Americans are certainly not the first superpower citizens to believe they are invincible, or that their system will prevail a thousand years. All of them were wrong, though probably none so badly as the little Austrian with the cropped moustache, who built his monuments for a thousand year Reich upon a pile of bones. Nevertheless, they couldn’t see the wood for the trees, and looking to the future, others will rise to take the mantle of the empire that bases all on its thirst for oil, and flattening cities in preparation for elections. They’re already on the rise – look East my friends, and in the rising sun you’ll see the next great global players. Paradoxically, they were great, when the bison roamed the plains of North America, and the people of Europe were forest dwellers frightening away spirits with their bonfires and human sacrifice.

What goes around, comes around.

Follow this link for a fascinating site about the rise and fall of civilisations:

http://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/History_n2/a.html

The Great Divide

Listening to the radio this morning, I suspect I was not alone in my discomfort at hearing the words of Colonel Gary Brandl of the United States Marine Corps: "The enemy has a face. It is Satan's. He is in Fallujah, and we are going to destroy him." It is not that I have sympathy with the fundamentalist forces, who control the city, but rather that like many Europeans, I see fundamentalism itself as the enemy. We may share with Brandl a desire to see the end of murderous savages like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but the colonel’s brand of Old Testament rhetoric, is as abhorrent to me, as any announcement from the other side.

That fundamentalists line up to fight each other denouncing Satan’s legions, leaves me with an intense unease. Are we entering a new Dark Age? Gary Brandl’s belief that Satan walks the streets of Falluja, is as much at odds with my World view, as any Islamic madman’s is, and I fear for the innocent hundred thousand people in that city, when his crusading troops of macho believers find them in their gun sites.

It was Rationalism that brought us Science, medical advance and the modern world. Fundamentalism gave us the burning of heretics, witches and a miserable self righteousness that stagnated progress for fifteen hundred years. In my lifetime, the Atlantic Ocean has never seemed so wide.

The Saddest Country

The news leaked out of Iraq yesterday that militants had murdered another twenty-one policemen, and barely raised an eyebrow in the west. Mass murder, it seems, is now de rigeur in what has become the saddest land on earth. For a moment, I was tempted to say, ‘saddest country’, but Iraq is no-longer that. Since last year’s invasion, it has disintegrated into a wasteland, riddled with the cancer of foreign psychopaths and Saddam loyalists, all intent on mass murder in pursuit of power.

That the remnants of a displaced regime would ambush coalition forces, was no surprise - that they would slaughter Iraqis like sheep, shows the depths of their unreason. Alawi may be Prime Minister, but he is beset by bearded savages that drag his country day by day into a new dark age. Whether the land was better governed by Saddam Hussein than Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or Donald Rumsfeld’s proxy - I cannot say, but which ever rises to pre-eminence, will do so on a ziggurat of corpses.

God help the people of Iraq. I have a feeling that their trials are just beginning...

Delta Boobs Sack Ellen

Flight attendant and Queen Of The Sky blogger, Ellen Simonetti has been sacked by her employer, American, Delta Airlines, for posting what were described as inappropriate images of her in the Delta flight uniform. Ellen says she had no idea they’d be upset at scenes of her charmingly draped around the cabin of one their planes. Last month’s suspension, shocked the hot hostess when the provocative pictures inflamed the airline's bosses, and yesterday, the spoil sports confirmed that she'd been fired. Now a court case is pending since Ellen has instructed Texas lawyers to bring a suit for unfair dismissal. "There are many pictures of male Delta employees (mostly pilots) in uniform on the Web. I wonder if Delta plans to fire all of them, too? I guess that would be only fair," she said.

I think it’s a pity really - with a little foresight, they could have used her obvious talents in a run of tasteful adverts.

“Wanna fly me big boy?”

“Yes please!”

She’d sell out every flight.

QUEEN OF THE SKY: http://queenofsky.journalspace.com/

Cops Down Tools

Twenty firearms officers in London’s Metropolitan Police, handed in their authorisation to carry weapons yesterday after two colleagues were suspended. A further hundred are reported to be refusing firearms duties on a temporary basis. Glen Smyth of the Police Federation, said his officers needed clarification over how they were to respond when they believed themselves to be under threat. An inquest jury into the death of Harry Stanley, returned a verdict of unlawful killing last Friday, after hearing that the 44 year old father was shot down because he was carrying a table leg in a plastic bag. Stanley’s solicitor said the jury had not believed the officer’s accounts that they thought he had a sawn off shotgun, and had not considered such a conclusion reasonable.

The people of Britain owe a debt of gratitude to skilled and professional police. We can be proud of them, but those among them who habitually back their colleagues, even when they are manifestly in the wrong, should consider whether they owe loyalty to their mates, or to the law. At the distance Stanley was shot, less trigger happy officers would have seen that possession of a table leg was no threat to them, or to anyone else.

http://www.met.police.uk/

The End Is Nigh!

It comes down to this folks - who do you want?

a) A man who squandered the worlds outrage and sympathy after 9/11 by spurning the opinions of friends to plough a lonely furrow that led to chaos in Iraq, and who in spite of all the tough talk, is still being taunted by a skinny bearded guy in a nightie?

Or -

b) Do you want a man who can speak his own language without sounding like a farm boy, who, whatever his shortcomings, at least bothered to go and fight in an unpopular war, and maybe most importantly, do you want a man who can recruit a coalition of nations to work with you in fighting extremists because he hasn’t insulted them, ignored their input and blustered at them like a bully?

Do the right thing when you vote. It matters to you, and it matters to the rest of the world.

Kilroy Was Here

Mahogany skinned, megalomaniac, Robert Kilroy–Silk warned UKIP organisers last week that the party would be destroyed unless he was made its leader. He said they had next to no members when he'd joined and now had thousands. "I have had letters, phone calls and faxes from people," he said.

I’ve had phone calls too Kilroy – people tell me they think that you’re a tosser. One or two said they think you've got the same psychotic condition as David Ike - the long time BBC reporter, who suddenly shocked the beeb by declaring on TV that he was the Son of God, and now believes that reptiles rule the planet. Actually, if Kilroy ever got his way, becoming Megalomaniac in Chief, there might be something in that reptile thing.