Further to "Ghastliness"

[avevale_intelligencer]

Thinking about it, I'm wrong. The perfect defence against being found out in an atrocity against humanity is twofold. One, that nobody believes you would do something so terrible. Two, that nobody believes you could do something so clever.

To the first...how many people believe that Winston Churchill ordered that no measures be taken to defend, evacuate, or even warn the people of the city of Coventry about an impending bombing mission by the Luftwaffe, in case the Nazis realised that the Allies had broken their Ultra code? For how many people is the mythology of this incident proverbial for either the hard decisions that must be taken in wartime, or the thoughtless arrogance of people in power?

And if the answer is "but that was a war," well, so is this. The biggest undeclared war in history; the war between those who have all the power and money and will kill anyone to keep it, and those who think, at least some of the time, that other people, not necessarily themselves, might like to have a share of it. Maybe there never really was another.

To the second, well, I don't know. It doesn't seem that involuted to me, to incite religious hatred, to provoke an atrocity, to sacrifice the lives of your own people and then to try to make political capital out of it. And just because, for once, it isn't working, doesn't seem to me to exclude the possibility that that was the intention.

All this is of course empty speculation. Whether it was or was not, there will be no evidence, just as there is none for Coventry.

But if you'd believe it of a dead Brit politician, please don't think it could never be true of a live American. That's kind of rude.

Comments

[soren-nyrond.livejournal.com]

Sorry to contradict, but some of us, whilst only having a smidgen of money and power, would very much like to hang on to that (and to any more than falls off the Big People's table) and really, aren't inclined to share what I have with people I don't know, and therefore can't know if they deserve a share. I'm perfectly happy for them to glean what they can (so long as none of it is mine ... mine ... mine ...), but what I have I want to keep.

And I resent the idea that someone else thinks its worthwhile (if this is the case) to make an offensive film/video/whatever, without noticing that this puts me myself at risk. After all, I haven't bought time on every TV network on Earth to denounce the film, or taken any action to "right the balance". Which, surely, makes me as guilty, in some people's eyes, as if I'd knowingly acted in the thing, funded the post-production, and paid for the trransmission.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Those of us without, or with only a smidgen of whatever size, are the cannon fodder in the war, and we depend on our smidgens, or the aforesaid crumbs from the table, to survive. Therefore it's perfectly natural to want to hang on to what we've got, and even to want the Big People to keep what they've got in case the crumbfall dries up; to be concerned that if the current Big People are overthrown all that will happen is that a new and possibly less messy crop of Big People will emerge from somewhere and move into the vacuum. Sawing the legs off the table so that we can all reach it is a difficult, dangerous and above all scary thing to contemplate, especially in the knowledge that there are people all around us in the darkness who have never even seen a crumb, and that they are no less hungry, and no less deserving, than we ourselves.

But if you were to become, by some bizarre twist of fate, one of the Big People, I know for a fact that you would find it grotesque and unacceptable to hang on to your full and overflowing plate when you knew people on the floor were starving.

And I too resent the frod out of the idea that hatemongers don't care who gets hurt as a result of their foulness. As I do the idea that in some people's eyes inaction, or even impotence, is as bad as actual complicity. I refuse that particular catch-22, and so should everyone. We right the balance by not batting the ball back over the net, by not returning the hate with interest.

[soren-nyrond.livejournal.com]

And, further to my earlier rant, it is now on BBC News that the first *British* embassy has been attacked. As I said, the "rule" now (possibly as established by Livingstone, K; ex-Mayor, Greater London) is that If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

[howeird]

From what I am seeing in the various reports on TV, what we have is not something manufactured by any politician, but by Al Jazeera, aka the Fox News of the Arab world. They routinely look for items of this sort and then play them over and over with inflammatory commentary. Like Fox news, they "break" the news, in both meanings of the word.