Labi Siffre - Into The Light

Journalism Is Not A Crime

TAKE ACTION - ADD YOUR NAME - PLEASE

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions/free-al-jazeera-journalists-trial-egypt

Al Jazeera journalists Mohamed Fahmy, Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed are on trial in Egypt for ‘broadcasting false news’ and giving a platform to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The three detained journalists are prisoners of conscience, persecuted for simply doing their jobs. Please call on the Egyptian authorities to release them, and ensure a fair trial for all.

TAKE ACTION - ADD YOUR NAME - PLEASE

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions/free-al-jazeera-journalists-trial-egypt

Thank you

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Falsely Claimed Moral Authority

Belief is
To
Religious Belief

As
A Scientific Theory is
To
A Theory

Or
A life
To
A “lifestyle”

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"It's Old, Let It Go"

History looks at

And listens to

Those who say

"It's all in the past"

And laughs and laughs

And laughs and laughs

And laughs and laughs

And laughs

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More Remembrances To Come

When will the world grow weary
Of leadership from these strong
Weak men?

Not soon enough and certainly they
Pay no heed to the voices of the dead
Though piously they "Remember Them"

By adding more flesh to their ranks
For which these strong weak men
Will assume for themselves

The right to receive
Wealth by book deal and lecture tour
Boardroom elevations, our respect in honours

Whatever is your nations equivalent
Of dollars

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Politics and Religion?

It is a moral duty to oppose
Philosophy that condemns without evidence
Of the God it wields as a political weapon
Religion is Politics

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Ariel Sharon : More Ethnic Cleansing by Stealth

Discomforting Truths Nº 349

War here is endless
And we have learned
Having people to hate
And killing them makes
Us feel superior
In control
We have the power
To Rape
Mutilate
Dictate
War
Has been
And is
Good
For us
Why would we stop
We will not
Stop

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Critical Thinking

 

(my title : cartoon by Joel Pett)
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Prime Minister's Questions - Time For Change

Prime Minister’s Questions should be reformatted so as to be less of a grandstanding gift to the PM (of any party) while spurring the PM to be less dismissive of the electorate (on whose behalf the questions are asked).

Perhaps the number of questions should be halved & the questioner given the right to respond to the PM’s answer thus encouraging more pertinent responses than - We are spending more money - or merely - We’ve done more than those on the benches opposite did (Nya-na-na-na-na! Ya boo sucks!).

A format akin to a weekly grilling of the PM by a select committee would be, for “Hard working British families”, a more fruitful method of interrogation. Questions from party stooges along the lines of - Would the Prime Minister agree with me that he/she is doing a wonderful job? - should be barred.

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A Response To The Fight Over Reproductive Rights

“Until men are bound to, determined to and required by law to share equally in the personal, intimate, care and nurturing of their children yes, I believe women have the inalienable right of self-determination in matters of reproduction until the moment before birth.

Without that equality of responsibility and equality in the financial, career and life impact that childbirth brings, I see no reason why men deserve a voice in this.”

. . . Labi Siffre

Mandela - a judgement

In 2001 on my website of that time "Breaking The Bloody Glass" I wrote a series of essays/articles under the heading "Letters From An Alien". One of them was titled "Mandela - a judgement". I re-post it here at the request of "maddogmaxim" in his response to my post "Nelson Mandela, thank you"

I post it without alteration but with this additional comment: I hold Desmond Tutu in very high regard.

Mandela - a judgement
© labi siffre July7th 2001

Some may view the next sentence as morbid but I must write this now in order to avoid being a cowardly vulture after the events. In the not too distant future Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu will die. There will be obituaries. Both men will be eulogised as courageous. Mandela in particular will be noted for his moral weight. After twenty seven years of unjust imprisonment by racist, murderous hypocrites, followed by his adherence to a non-racial agenda - free of revenge and translated into political power - he is one of very few politicians whose ethical stature is such as to embarrass the usual self-serving political pragmatists into a semblance of ethical behaviour. Desmond Tutu's quest for healing through his Truth and Reconciliation Commission will be noted alongside and seen as a duality with Mandela's let bygones be bygones approach.

The plaudits will pass; soon after to be replaced by questioning followed by criticism with accusation lurking in the wings. There may be suggestions of financial or sexual impropriety: holidays, houses, cars for family members - paid for out of government, party or church funds or merely given as gifts (better refused?) from admirers of these extraordinary men who subsequently passed them on. Hints of sexual excess or infidelity will ooze from digital quills though Mandela's twenty seven year confinement may clip the wings of all but the most imaginative of investigative journalists.

Did Desmond Tutu ever wear a tutu? Perhaps The National Enquirer, Daily Mail, News of the World or The Sunday Times have already done that one. If not they probably will.  And what exactly did he get up to while ministering in the flesh pots of Golders Green, St Alban's and Bletchingley in Surrey. After all it was the permissive 60's. Did the future Bishop inhale? And of course there is that embarrassing BBC interview with journalist Mark Lawson on The Big Question re:God and Apartheid - painfully naive or intellectually dishonest? Well, Tutu is a Christian so he has to be one or the other.

The careers and behaviour of their respective children (four each) will be scrutinised and any faults or weaknesses discerned in the offspring will be shown to be signs of more serious paternal weaknesses and failings - pointing to even more serious political weaknesses and failings.

Nelson Mandela has confirmed that he sought and received financial aid for the ANC from some political figures we, in the morally superior first world, consider beyond the pale - for example: $60m from Indonesia's ex-president Suharto a man responsible for repression and atrocities in East Timor and for the financial looting of his own country. The question of whether it is ethically correct to receive money from a regime which denies human rights and commits crimes against humanity in order to fight another regime which also denies human rights and commits crimes against humanity is a complex one - unless, I imagine, one is in the position of having to make such a choice at a time when the good guys are giving aid and comfort to the murderers of your people. In that circumstance the question might well become academic.

As for letting bygones be bygones: suppose after a hectic morning of unexpected and unavoidably long phone calls accompanied by the tears and needs of children with tummy aches followed by a flat tyre and traffic jams you are late, but after finding a place to park your car and then running the 400 metres almost as fast as in your distant school past you reach your place in the gallery at the Truth and Reconciliation hearings where you listen to a white South African secret service agent confessing to the torture and murder of a dozen or so black prisoners, safe in the knowledge that he will be granted amnesty.

You leave the hearings feeling shattered and depressed by what you have heard only to find on reaching your car that in your hurry not to be late you had failed to notice the no parking signs and have been awarded a parking ticket which you can ill afford. You consider the two crimes and the two punishments (torture, murder, amnesty - weighed against careless parking and a fine) and realise that Desmond Tutu through his Truth and Reconciliation Commission has writ large - heinous crime does pay as long as you say you're sorry (though you needn't mean it) - and as a result has destroyed the very basis of law in South Africa no less thoroughly than did the apartheid regime itself. As you see, I have doubts about letting bygones be bygones.

I believe that black South Africans have displayed remarkable forbearance in not wiping out the white population of that country in a display of justified anger. Perhaps black South Africans realise better than I (a distant and comfortable observer) that in the struggle for freedom a small but dedicated number of white South Africans also put their lives at risk (some died) to oppose the apartheid regime and the evil men and women who operated it. Perhaps black South Africans realise better than I that in order to halt the cycle of bloodshed and killing, the victims of oppression, by rejecting revenge and retribution, must once again prove themselves stronger than dictatorships, torturers and murderers and the well dressed, comfortably housed, silent majority who support them.

As for the questioning followed by criticism followed by accusation: I have no doubt they will have their day. My respect for Nelson Mandela will remain, undiminished (I never expected him to be a saint). My assessment of Desmond Tutu, not as favourable as some would expect, might even improve.

© labi siffre July7th 2001

Nelson Mandela, thank you

 

 

The philosophical bottom line

Theism is extremism
There is no evidence of God

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Breaching the coast

On newly acquired legs
Would they have acted differently
Had they suspected the sand would bloom
Blood fed
With superstition and wilful ignorance
Claimed as sacred?

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Waiting for a Song

I am a British atheist advocate
Of the republic form of government

To sing, I have
No national anthem of meritocracy

Instead, a paean
To the smoke and mirrors celebrity
Of God, royalty, vacancy

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Religious Scholars

Theologians gather to interpret what
The perfect God they invented meant
Cos the perfect God they invented
Cannot write so good as to be,
Without murderous ambiguity, understood.

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Evolution, hurry up!

Certain they're pleasing
That for which no evidence exists

They kill children of all ages
In the name of that
For which no evidence exists

As an encore, demanding respect
For their belief in that
For which no evidence exists

They kill more
Then more then more then more
And insanely often get it

("Respect", that is)

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Wanker

Anders Behring Breivik sane; fatally
Stupid no revolutionary
Lacking in vision a dull recycler
Of a many failed past

Praised of course
By other losers; the easy way out
Has always brought honors
From slurried followers

In the pot of human progress remember
The invention of bread is of more import
Than the invention of gunpowder will ever be

And the children of Utoya will forever have
More substance than the wanker who killed them

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19365616

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Language

I talk

To wild animals

They understand

Perfectly

I am

Human

They keep

Their distance

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The Price Of Brief Lifespans

Our present is the past recycled

Our disasters are second hand

Our fashions though louder are merely awesome

Only our adjectives change

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If It Ain't Got That Swing

The day doesn’t fall, we shove it
Over the hills and far gun shots
Scream; the street cries
Blood streams from bags of lies

More fall to their knees in prayer mode
(Brown nosing always sells) by the time
The cops come we’ve stripped the bodies
Of cash keys shoes phones

Spiritual things we respect
In this hood; tradition flowers
On all four corners of the crosses we wear
Bouquets of jacked justification

"To smell the next crash
You have to live" we sneer
At battered wives "why don't you leave?"
So why don't we, homie?

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(N)o (R)eality (A)pplies

Guns don't kill people

People kill people

Tragically there are so many people

With guns

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Birth of an Artist

The family visits The Tate

Through her burqa’ she sees

A reason to change

Her family

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The Tate

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In a World of Heroes Martyrs & Decency

To improvise relevance
When you’ve lost interest in, or faith in,
Or hope for your species

Self-named with no sense of irony
“Wise man”, Homo Sapiens is problematic
Except, today the news

News of the death of a precious fluorescence
In a dull spread opacity of near stagnant water
The death of Vaclav Havel, playwright,

Political prisoner constantly caused with kindness
To lead, of necessity not profession, no place-man,
In deed the right man in place

On the body politic there’s less
Than a hand space for such, and seconds only
Room for any to make a scratch; what good

To scratch water? Still, the memory of a hot bath
Mid hypothermic death is mockery and comfort
Besting mockery alone; screw that

Push hope aside; resolve to die standing
A living fluorescence
If only for the sense of it
The loss of it
The will of it

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The Public Interest

It's good to know
Journalists don't
Have affairs
Produce casually
Begotten Kids
Commit adultery
if they did
They'd report it
Surely
They'd report it

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