Hands up how many people out there ever heard of Rohingya, North-West Burma? Ever heard of Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi? Did you know that she was given the freedom of Dublin in 1999? At the time she was under house arrest, but she accepted it in person in 2012. Nope, I didn’t know any of that myself. I copied the above information from the Journal.ie, as I hadn’t a clue what all the hoo haa was about.
Unless you were on a remote island or living in another dimension, you can’t but have noticed that Bob Geldof handed back his freedom of Dublin award yesterday, as he didn’t want to be associated with Ms Kyi, or should that be Mrs Suu Kyi, or, oh so what ,you get my meaning. Actually, I didn’t know that Bob had the freedom of Dublin either, such things don’t really register with most people. So, for the record, he can’t graze his livestock on St Stephen’s Green anymore or whatever other nonsense these things involve. Sky News covered it, BBC News covered it, there were gazillions of news channels talking about it, such was its importance and significance.
Bob is getting a bit of flak on social media too, because he took a knighthood from the Queen. Now, I’m really sorry about this, but I didn’t know he had a knighthood either. This is all way too much for me to take in. So, heretofore, he is known as Sir Bob.
Now, while I do admire the likes of Sir Bob and Bono for their efforts and how they use their fame or status to highlight a problem, I suppose it must be a good thing. I’d rather they just played good music however. Well actually Sir Bob never really played good music. With the exception of Rat Trap, the rest of his music was awful tripe. Let’s admit it; he was shockingly bad at Live Aid.
How many people heard of August Landmesser? To cut a long story short, he was a shipyard worker in Nazi Germany. He is alleged to be the person in the iconic photograph taken in Germany, 1936. As the other people around him give the Nazi salute, one person is seen with his arms across his chest, refusing to comply. One small statement, with the possibility of serious repercussions for him, but he’s not afraid to make it. Imagine if 1930’s Germany had social media, imagine reading the comments.
Anyway, I digress. I’m a peacenik, I deplore war, I despise death, destruction and the obscene disgusting amounts of money that are thrown into a death machine. I despise the way scientists are employed to find new ways to kill, maim and torture human beings. I despise how certain countries can find huge amounts of money to buy weaponry but can’t afford basic healthcare for its own citizens. It’s disgusting that children go to bed hungry at night, how people scream in agony suffering from dreadful illnesses, while billions can be found to murder and main other innocents.
Did you know that more than 3000 Palestinian children were killed between September 2000 and April 2017 (Source: Middle East Monitor). Did you know that according to a 1999 Unicef Report, 500,000 (that’s half a million) Iraqi children died due to economic sanctions. Bear in mind now that this is “before” the invasion in 2003. So many people have died and have suffered in Iraq, that there is even an Iraqi Body Count website. It counts the amount of people killed, since Mr Bush and Mr Blair decided to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom, (I like to refer to it as Operation Iraqi Liberation or OIL for short). I’m sure the innocent Iraqi people will be forever grateful to them.
Sarajevo, Somalia, East Timor, Crimea (our Russian friends would hate to be left out of proceedings), Afghanistan, it never ends. Even Mr Obama, now he was lovely wasn’t he, he authorised 563 drone strikes, killing between 300 and 800 civilians, depending on which report you believe. A lovely man, he even won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his efforts.
This guy stood in front of an excited crowd in Dublin telling us that our best days were ahead of us and coined that ridiculous phrase “Is Féidir Linn”. Every time I see a bumper sticker on a car with those words, I want to rip it off.
Because, in Ireland, we’re a slightly complicit too, as we continue to allow the use of our airports to the war machine. It’s amazing that there hasn’t been one check on any aircraft, to ascertain what they are carrying or what they are using our airports for. The “economic benefits” are more important than the deaths of innocents.
We like to get our heads patted by our superiors, telling us how good we are. I often wonder why the Irish authorities don’t just examine a few planes, just to shut up people like me. I mean, it would put the argument to bed for all time. “There you go, we examined half a dozen military planes and we found nothing, now, shut up and move on”.
But, imagine if they examined a few planes and found something. Imagine if they found that our superiors were telling lies. Imagine if weaponry, or god forbid some misfortunate human being, was being transported through our airports. (We have a nice clean name for those flights of misery; we call them “Rendition” flights. It sounds much better than torture flights). Imagine if our supposed neutrality was ruined, if our good international reputation was in tatters, all the hard work and wonderful achievements by Irish peacekeepers over generations, destroyed. As for the political fallout, that would be devastating. No political party or individual would ever recover from something like that.
So, it’s easier to fob people off, tell them to shut up, get them to sit down, be good boys and girls. There’s nothing to see here. While the minions are castigating each other, they will leave the establishment alone, so everybody’s happy and that’s good, right.
It’s easy to sit behind a computer screen and knock the likes of Sir Bob and Bono. It’s simple to criticise them over their financial affairs and call them hypocrites. It’s an Irish tradition to knock people down; we hate to see anybody up on a perch and god, whatever you do, don’t cosy up to her majesty, that’s beyond the pale. We hate it when a person does something out of the blue that we weren’t expecting, when they catch us off guard. If that’s something good, there must be an ulterior motive, so we better get them down to earth and fast.
I started out on this piece and the plan was to jump onto the bandwagon and give out about Sir Bob and Bono. I mean everybody else is doing it, so why shouldn’t I. It would be more in their line to pay their taxes, get down off the moral high ground and leave the rest of us alone. They have a cheek, licking up to the Queen and then try to dictate to the rest of us how to live our lives. But you know what, maybe they have a point and for all the posing and publicity, maybe their hearts are in the right place.
In the words of Edmund Burke, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”.
(Photograph taken from Internet)
The Unknown Bike Rider 