Sigh. Sometimes I wish I was religious. Life would be so much easier if I didn’t have to worry about justifying the things that I say with “evidence” or “reason”. It’d be brilliant to be able to shout my mouth of about anything and then just say “This is true because I believe it is true” and then raise my eyebrows, sort of raise my palms and pull a wry grin as if it were self-evident. Because I don’t do that already.
I mention this because of the recent news of the Catholic church re-admitting (recommunicated?) a bishop who is a holocaust denier. Whilst probably not the worst thing a Catholic bishop could do, it doesn’t exactly help brush away the… y’know… well known association between the Nazis and the Catholic church.
What’s most stunning is that the holocaust denier who the Pope has let back in isn’t even an ex-holocaust denier – they haven’t made him hold a press conference and say “What I ACTUALLY meant to say was…” – they’ve just let him back in.
I know that Catholic church is supposed to be pretty big on “forgiveness”, but this just makes them look really inconsistent. That’s right – a religion is being inconsistent! It took them hundreds of years to forgive Galileo for proving them wrong, and the best part of two millennia for them to forgive the entire Jewish population of the world for killing Jesus, and John Lennon was forgiven for claiming the Beatles were bigger than Jesus in four decades. By comparison. the lesser sin of denying the holocaust gets only a twenty year penalty.
There’s a staggering video on the BBC News website (seriously, give it a watch) of him denying the Holocaust in November 2008. He really doesn’t help himself by using the phrase “quote unquote ‘The Holocaust’”.
I like though how he’s clearly trying to position it as some sort intellectual disagreement. Betraying the rich history of his church, rather than saying something anti-semitic he tries to cite the evidence. “As far as I’ve understood the evidence…”. Obviously this strikes me as quite an odd thing to say, as it clearly implies that he’s somehow managed to miss all of the actual evidence, like… I don’t know… the gas chambers for a start?
Then again, I guess this is also a man who having presumably considered the “evidence” believes there is a magic psychic man in the sky who hear his thoughts and will grant wishes. And he probably wears a skirt too.
The upshot of this is that we have the following confirmed: You’ve more chance of becoming a Catholic bishop if you’re a holocaust denier than if you are a woman.
I was delighted last week to see the inauguration after what felt like an eternity of “transitioning”, and the end it brought to the nightmarish Bush administration.
I’m fully confident that the prediction made by Hillary Clinton last February that if Obama were to win the election that “The skies will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect” will happen any day now – especially now that Dick Cheney’s power is limited to scaring the children who can’t run away faster than his wheelchair can move and the only big red buttons George Bush has access to are on his Lego Duplo playset.
Okay, fine, I admit it – a “George Bush is stupid” joke is both easy and now, dated, and it is actually much more complex than that. He actually plays with Lego Technic.
It really has been a stunning turnaround for America. Two years ago it was less popular than a kick in the face and now it enjoys an unprecedented amount of goodwill. And what’s more, this is all down to one man: Barack Obama.
At the moment I think we’re at the point where we’re about to find out if all of those high hopes were justified, or whether we’re about to be bitterly disappointed. Is the Obama Presidency going to be the best thing or ever, or is the whole world queuing up at the cinema to see The Matrix Revolutions, excited by the hype, blissfully unaware about what is about to unfold?
I think if Obama wants to “win” his Presidency as convincingly as he won the election, then he needs to start thinking now about his legacy and what to do next. One mistake a lot of Presidents make is not considering this early enough. Clinton tried to sort out the Middle East only when he realised if he didn’t he’d be indelibly linked to Monica Lewinksky, and Dubya tried the same thing only last year when he realised that “starting a horrible war that has killed thousands” doesn’t look very good on his CV for getting a job afterwards.
In eight years time (trivialities of “another election” aside) President Obama will be homeless, much like the rest of us may be by then, so he needs to start thinking now about what he’s going to do next. Sure, he could mill around in the library that every President gets built in their name (that’s right: at the moment some poor architect, somewhere is planning the George W Bush Library), but I think that Obama should consider a career as an in-car satellite navigation voice for his post-Presidency career.
When you’re lost he’ll take you in a New Direction. When you’re waiting at the lights he’ll give you hope for the Change You Need. The Obama satnav could be bundled with the road-maps for peace (and western Europe) – and if he stops working or won’t turn left or right and insists on staying in the centre, there’ll always be the old fashioned Joe Biden A-Z in the glove compartment as back-up.
The battle raging in my mind contemplating the conflict in the Middle East is almost as intractable as the real thing. And unfortunately, just like the real thing, I’m horrendously stubborn so the chances of the components of my brain coming to a negotiated settlement are pretty much zero.
My opinions on the conflict don’t really go much further than “please stop killing each other” and “hey, lets help poor people”. Because if they didn’t go that far, then I wouldn’t really qualify as a member of humanity.
The other day, I wrote about Gaza conflict from an international relations perspective, much to the chagrin of some of my friends. For the sake of a surprising amount of editorial integrity on my part, it turns out I was slightly wrong on some of the specifics about the sit-in protest at my university: it’s not the SWP organising it, it’s some other leftist group, and they’re pushing for the marginally more realistic goal of getting the college to revoke Shimon Peres’s honorary doctorate and to send some supplies to the bombed Gaza University. For a group of people who have been no-doubt using the word “proportionality” a lot lately, I’m still not sure what the scale-of-action to probability-of-success ratio is.
What got me to thinking about this again was seeing the Gaza protests in Trafalgar Square yesterday- when I walked through the middle of them, the speaker was saying something about burning the license fee (because of this faff)- perhaps the first time the hard/far left have ever had cause to agree with the Daily Mail about something.
So maybe peace in the Middle East can be achieved after all if such disparate dogmatists can be shown to find common cause?
But anyway, I’ve been thinking further about the role of international law in the context of the Gaza war. Despite largely writing off ethics in international law in my previous blog entry, I don’t think this is entirely true (and I wouldn’t describe myself as some sort of of Morgenthau-esque classical realist, despite how I may have come across).
Ethics have been a part of international law for a while now – the most obvious example of this would be the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and questions of validity aside (at the time in 1947, the USSR, most – if not all – Muslim countries and the obviously nasty ones like apartheid South Africa didn’t sign up to it) – and the declaration has been used as a yardstick since by which to judge countries and by which to justify actions towards them and so on. You could also point to the UN convention on genocide (that I accused the Atheist Bus Campaign of breaking) for adding a similar ethical dimension to international law – in fact, it goes a step further and commits UN members to intervention in cases of genocide, breaking the previous international convention of non-intervention.
The human rights and international law arguments are the best ones I’ve heard so far as to why Israel are cunts, and I quite agree – Israel are being a bunch of cunts. They’ve bombed schools, universities, even the UN – and it’s surprising that they don’t seem to have bombed any hospitals yet considering the big red cross marking the target on them.
What I’m struggling to understand – and would love to hear a well argued response to this question – is why the plight of the Palestinians and to a lesser extent, the Israelis has become such a hot-button issue that provokes so much spitting of venom on both sides. Sure, I appreciate that it has been going on for ages, and has a depressingly intractable theistic side to the conflict, but I’m not sure why the conflict carries a seemingly disproportionate weight amongst the general public’s more secular collective conscience.
The whole point of a law is that it is a standard that is applied consistently. The laws of physics and human laws are essentially the same – whilst only one can be broken, it is the consistency that makes a “law” what it is.
If you don’t accept this axiom, then you’re implicitly accepting the point I made in the previous blog entry that international law is irrelevant, the international system has no rules governing it (it is in a state on anarchy, as so to speak), and that states are only constrained in their actions by the limits of their power and the actions of other states.
If you do accept what I am saying about consistency being the key tenet of international law, then I would re-iterate my question: Why Israel-Palestine?
Why are Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza the issue that people seem motivated to get behind? Why don’t other cases of human rights abuses get quite such a reaction? What about Hamas’ human rights record? What about Saudi Arabia’s? What about America’s? What about Britain’s?
Similarly, if we accept the Palestinians right to self-determination and back their cause, why don’t the Kurds see rallies worldwide for their cause? They’ve spent the last 80 years being persecuted and fenced in by arbitrary borders imposed by the British too. What about all of the other nationalist conflicts? Why don’t we see protests supporting Northern Cyprus, Somaliland and Scotland? Hell, what about the Tamils? After years of armed struggle and 70,000 deaths the Sri Lankan government has recently nearly totally smashed them to bits. Why the double standards?
(I’ve actually written about these double standards before, incidentally, in another polemic contextualised by the far less emotionally charged issue of Georgia. Why does no one care about South Ossetians? I’ve no idea.)
What I think is most interesting is the implications of this ethical dimension for the international system. As I’ve described above ethics, at least in terms of the rights of the individual (some may consider the violation of another state’s sovereignty unethical) are a relatively modern concern as far as international law goes, and it’s only really since the end of the Cold War that there has been any traction behind the idea of states acting for ethical – “humanitarian” – reasons.
It is similarly interesting that prior to the UN Human Rights declaration (and I’m prepared to be proven wrong on this if anyone can provide an appropriate link) international law, and international behaviour was all about maintaining order and stability in the international system.
This isn’t surprising considering that individual states want to maintain their place in the international system and not have others meddle, and I guess because the level of slaughter that the Nazis managed wasn’t even conceivable until we had the technology of the 20th century. This preference of “order” over “justice” has long been evident even in this “ethical era”, if you can call it that. The American administrations have had no qualms backing the Saudi royal family for decades, and the Obama administration will inevitably do exactly the same (sorry, utopians, I’d dearly love to say they won’t but I’ll eat my figurative hat if this isn’t true). Even on the level of the state – which has things the international system doesn’t have like a monopoly on the use of force and the ability to enforce laws – order has often been chosen over justice in order to maintain stability. For example, when apartheid ended in South Africa, they set up a ‘Truth and Reconcilliation Commission’ to essentially let off the various bastards from the apartheid government in order to maintain precious stability.
What I’m trying to get is that challenging this notion of order being the goal of international law is fraught with danger, as it opens a massive can of worms. Take, for another example, the doctrine of pre-emptive strike. Though massively discredited now, I won’t be surprised if we hear another major power (eg: Russia) “pre-emptively” disarm a perceived threat (eg: any country from it’s sphere that dare look to the west). Or an even better example that’s relevant to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict would be that of Kosovo. The west recognising Kosovo’s independence set a dangerous precedent that will act as justification for nationalist group after nationalist group for years to come. In fact, it already has been – regardless of whether it holds holds water or not, the Kosovo precedent was used to justify the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia.
To attempt to apply ethics consistently to the international system is merely going to fog things up further. State sovereignty is, unfortunately, the powerful concept that has maintained order in the international system and undermining it is opening up the international system to almost limitless ethical dilemmas. Should we (the “international community”) be invading Israel to prevent it from killing Palestinians? Should we be going into Zimbabwe to remove Mugabe? And so on – a completely unmanageable and unenforceable scenario that would cause the international system to break down entirely.
This is what makes international relations so depressing. Any attempt to apply any level of consistency to the ethical ideas that we can use to hold international actors, be they Israeli, Palestinian or otherwise, to account, is basically going to cause the entire body of international law to unravel and reveal that the international system is in a state of amoral anarchy.
And of course, though it feels ridiculous to point out, that I don’t care about the plight of individuals caught in this international relations crossfire – I have a great deal of sympathy for people in Gaza, much like I do for the people who were being waterboarded at Guantanamo Bay or the homosexuals being hanged by cranes in Iran. And yes, I’ve donated to the DEC to actually help the people affected, just as I would if it was Israel have the crap bombed out of it by the Palestinians. And at risk of sounding even more mawkish than I already do, I think that the ethics of helping people should transcend the political conflicts, and if we’re going to campaign against human rights abuses, we should recognise all of them – not just the ones that suit the political argument that we’re trying to make. I wouldn’t march under the Israeli flag, or the Palestinian flag, just as I wouldn’t march under the British flag. I think it’d make for a much more powerful statement than the wingnuts and moonbats ever could manage alone, if people, regardless of political opinions and affiliations would protest together for respect for human rights on both sides. Not that there is a chance in hell of this actually happening.
In my most utopian of dreams, I’d prefer to see a single world state with full accountability, rule of law and a monopoly on the use of force through which to enforce international law – it’s really only under these circumstances that ethics can really count. But of course, until that happens, if you’ve managed to make it through what I’ve written above, I’d hope you’d agree that the role of ethics in international politics is much more complex.
And that’s why I can’t get my head around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
So lately I’ve waded in on some serious politics. It’s a bit of a gamble, really – there’s some actual risk involved in writing about things sincerely, rather than just a load of silly bollocks like I usually do. Unlike writing drivel, there’s a tangible risk that I could be held to account or that I could be proven wrong – something which, as every pundit knows, is a fate worse than death.
However, I have got some self confidence in what I’m saying. International Relations is What I Do. It is My Thing. I’ve got a degree that proves it, so I like to think that I know what I’m talking about. So I’m going to take a bit of a gamble – after receving some encouragement from Duncan, who has done the same, I’m going to put my head above the parapet and put my undergraduate dissertation online for all to see.
My dissertation was on the role of religion in international relations – which as far as I’m aware is a surprisingly unexplored topic. It explores the philosophical and historical roles of religion and then looks at some modern examples. And then I conclude that religion is a crock of shit.
Your mileage may vary. I got a 2:1 for it if that counts for anything. It’s basically me trying to be like a less educated Richard Dawkins.
A common belief these days is that the days of student political activism are over. Students these days are too concerned about clubbing and, er, exams, right?
This was certainly my impression until this morning, anyway, when I found out that my university’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) have taken some direct action and have started a sit-in in one of the main lecture theatres in support of the Palestinians in Gaza.
I think it’s supposed to be a clever mirror of what Israel are doing to the Palestinians. They even have a secret entrance for smuggling supplies, though rather than a tunnel, it’s a fire escape, and I’m assuming that the protesters are not shooting at university staff and using civilians as human shields.
Though I’m certainly no fan of the war in Gaza, I’m struggling to get behind the sit-in because I struggle to see how it will actually be effective.
“Mr Olmert, President Obama is on the phone and wants to speak to you”
“Tell him I’ll call back later – I’m having second thoughts about this military action because a fringe political group in a moderately well known London University have suggested that we stop!”
As I’ve previously outlined, I’m horrendously uncomfortable with the left cosying up to Hamas, and find it bewildering that any rational person can take one side or the other in this conflict. If the SWP were campaigning for “PEACE” or “HUMAN RIGHTS IN GENERAL”, I could totally get on board with their message, but by taking sides they’re being completely irrational, and are demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of how the international system actually works.
I’ve heard people label Israel a “terrorist state” today, and claim that Israel shouldn’t actually exist. Whilst the former is a great attention grabbing headline, the latter actually positions someone with that opinion as more extreme than Hamas.
Israel is not a “terrorist state”, whatever that means. Like it or not, but from Israel’s perspective, the action it is taking in Gaza is completely rational and highlights a fascinating international relations paradigm – that of the role of ethics. The one goal of a state is to survive and maintain its national security and defend its interests. Look at what’s going on from Israel’s perspective – their security is being threatened by Hamas firing rockets at them, so to protect their state, they feel obliged to respond.
Of course, as has been depressingly demonstrated, this has led to stacks of awful human rights abuses, blowing up schools and killing people – all sorts of nasty shit. But unfortunately this doesn’t matter – ethics in international relations are a relatively new invention and hotly debated by IR scholars – but in the end don’t really enter into calculations of national security. (I could write thousands of words on this to justify this point, but I won’t bore you.)
Why is the state so important? Because it gives legitimacy. If a group, be it an ethnic group, a national group or whatever have a state – a homeland – they get all of the trappings that come with such an honour: recognition, legitimacy, and most importantly, it makes it essentially illegal for other states to meddle in the affairs of the group under established international law dating back the 17th century and the peace at Westphalia. Its one of the reasons the Jews were given a homeland after that whole “centuries of persecution culminating in the holocaust” thing. It’s why persecuted groups in other countries are so keen to get a state of their own – groups like the Kurds, the Chechens… and the Palestinians. So Israel’s desire to hang on to its statehood is entirely reasonable – they just happen to be wankers about it.
It’s international law which leads me to conclude that people who suggest Israel should cease to exist are idiots. Not because I’ve any great desire to fulfill prophecy and have a Jewish homeland that Christ can return to like it says in revelations, but because to condemn the existence of Israel is to basically condemn the existence of every single other country.
To cut a long story short, there is no written book of international law – there is no great overseeing arbiter of the international system who governs relations – international law is predicated entirely on a set of norms and precedents, and to try and justify the existence of a state is stupid. States an inherrently silly construct – but we’ve decided that’s how best to organise the international system, so we’re stuck with them. If the “logic” that Israel shouldn’t be allowed to exist because it’s only a relatively new creation, then really we may as well be arguing that the whole Meditteranean basin and most of Europe is ceded back to Rome, as it used to be part of the Roman Empire.
The international system works on the basis of “Look who’s here… now get over it”, and these are the circumstances in which settlements should be negotiated. The only real difference between the establishment of America and the establishment of Israel is that we probably have video footage of the latter.
Basically my reaction to people vehemently taking either side in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is, to borrow Ben Goldacre’s catchphrase, “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that”.
Things I might expand on in the future/if challenged
Human rights in the context of the international system
The legitimacy of the state in a post-globalisation world
Why I’m writing about moderately academic topics on my silly blog rather than in essays for university
When I got off the tube earlier today I was surprised to receive a flurry of texts and tweets telling me some exciting news: My appearance on the Weakest Link was being shown again on BBC One! It was recorded in November 2007 and first shown on March 3rd 2008. If you missed it first time around or want to watch it again, it’s going to be on the iPlayer for the next week.
I had an amazing day on Saturday, of the type which could only really take place in London. I spent the day at the Centre for Inquiry’s ‘Weird Science’ lectures with my friend Eve. It was pretty excellent – basically Dawkinistas preaching to the choir about how excellent rational inquiry is and how shit creationism is, which is just the sort of thing I like.
The line-up was immense too – there was Richard Wiseman talking about psychic dogs, Chris French talking about psychology and conspiracy theories, Stephen Law, author of the superb Philosophy Gym, explaining how creationism is unscientific and talking about the philosophy of evidence based reason, and ended with Ben Goldacre telling us stories about bullshit science that appears in the newspapers and how I think my job actually makes me partially complicit in it.
This was held at the Conway Hall near Holborn… but it wasn’t the only event being hosted there that day. There was also this:
I assure you that this is 100% real.
The reason I give all of this exposition is because it juxtaposes brilliantly with what I did yesterday evening. Having spent the day surrounded by the most rational people in London, in the evening we – Eve and myself, joined by our friend Sinead – went to a party organised by Eve’s aunt in Peckham, to celebrate the end of the Bush administration. It was a ‘Bush Burning’ party and was being held at a squat. In Peckham.
It was certainly something that a few months ago I’d never have thought I’d do – I mean, a squat… in Peckham? I’d have to be a right plonker to go, right? The chances of being murdered would be ridiculously high.
The bus to Peckham was quite ominous. As we descended further into the depths of the (dare I say) slightly Birmingham-esque south London things became a whole lot bleaker. They say where the trains go prosperity will follow, citing the trans-American railroad or London’s own Metroland metropolitan railway as an example – the opposite seems to be true too. The tube rarely dips south of the river, and as a consequence, Peckham seems pretty grim.
We knew we’d got to the squat when we saw some metal gates that had been hand painted and covered in pictures of sunbeams and the sort of hippy tat that allows a place to be described as unique or having ‘character’. The trouble was the gates were locked. So how else could we get in? On the wall adjoining the gates there was a wooden doorway – like a shed door complete with shed door handle – and we could see the glow of light eminating from behind it. After dithering for a while, we determined that this must be the way in.
Opening the door was quite a shock. Rather than seeing unemployed wasters with scented candles doing some collectivised farming like you might expect at a squat, we instead saw what looked like a very close approximation of a third world sweatshop. Hidden away in darkest Peckham in a building partially constructed inside a railway arch, there were Chinese people manufacturing clothes on large industrial machinery in a rudimentary factory. It didn’t look like the sort of place that would allow the workers to take breaks or unionise. When a rather angry looking manager came over to the three of us, we discovered that his dodgy factory was not in fact part of the squat.
So we waited around outside and just as we were planning to leave, Eve’s aunt, the organiser of the party, turned up to let us through the gates.
I don’t think she was the most “conventional” of aunts. I get the impression that she’s probably never been to a WI bake sale or that sort of thing. What was a little surprising was that she was much, much cooler than her niece (or me, for that matter). Despite obviously being about twice my or Eve’s age, she goths up considerably – big boots, black chains and all – she wouldn’t look out of place in Camden.
She opened up the gates and led us to the squat building. To get there we had to walk through what you might generously describe as a “garden” or “car park”. There were parked cars, caravans and greenhouses (I wonder what they were growing…). Of course, it was unlit – the perfect place for committing murder (we were in Peckham).
The squat itself is a former community centre that was abandoned by the council so the squatters moved in. If you want to get a feel for it, imagine basically a cross between Byker Grove and a crack den.
Taking a deep breath, and with a great sense of trepidation, we stepped inside. And what we saw was a shock: It was actually pretty cool looking inside. There was a stage, a bar and a proper sound system setup – all without having to go the trouble of worrying about things like live music performance licenses, permits and fire exit that The Man tries to force them to have. Screw the law requiring fire exits to be clearly labelled and lit at all times… that’s just The Man trying to tell us where to go in the event of a fire.
There were sofas around the edge of the room and hanging from the ceiling was a spinning yellow polystyrene “smiley face” on one side of the stage and, bizarrely, a cut-out of the word “innit” spiinning on the other. I’m probably not selling this very well, but essentially it came across as cool and trendy, and untainted by the commercialism of, er, legitimate musical venues. Basically it was punk as fuck. This was underlined by the soundman having a mug that had the Starbucks logo modified to say “Fuck off” on the side.
As you might imagine, it was like a different era – not only were there mentions of the miners strike and the struggle of workers, but people were flouting the ban and smoking indoors. I don’t think they were just smoking tobacco either – there was a horrible stench of drugs that wafted across us with some regularity, and I’m about 60% sure there was a man there who was casually toking on his crackpipe. I don’t know what a crackpipe specifically looks like, but there was a young man smoking a pipe, and he didn’t strike me as the Tony Benn type.
The first act on stage merely confirmed the punk credentials of the squat, as if being a legal-grey area, grassroots organisation full of crackpipes and crackpots was not enough. He was a “punk poet”. Attila the Stockbroker, as he called himself, performed some poems that totally stuck it to the man. I’m not normally a fan of poetry – in fact, I like to think that I’ve built my reputation on the back of my loathing of the so-called “artform”, but Attila won himself an awful lot of goodwill from me when right at the start of the set he denounced literature student-esque poetry as being rubbish (confirming my opinions) and then launching into some good old fashioned left-wingery:
The next people on stage were a succession of acoustic artists who had a common theme linking their songs: they were all about the Bush administration. Much like Attila’s poetry, these hard lefties were not familiar with allegories or metaphors, so the songs were pretty transparently political. Excellent.
After this came the main event of the evening: the purpose of the party. The Bush Burning.
In the garden area a bonfire had been constructed close to a wooden frame containing effigies of Bush, Blair and Brown. As you’ll see in the video, it was actually a lot more disturbing than we were expecting. Whilst burning a Guy on bonfire night is all good fun, there’s something that seems slightly more sinister about implying the death of still living people. What’s more, given the ramshackle nature of the squat, there were a lot of visual echoes of mob justice and lynchings and the like – for people who minutes earlier were singing songs about how international law had been broken and the like, they seemed awfully keen on the extra-judicial killing of these effigies. Sure, it was only symbolism, but it still left something of a nasty taste in your mouth.
That said, the taste could have been the embers raining down on us from the fire that looked as though it could get out of control. I’m no council bureaucrat (though I’d love to be), but I’m pretty sure there must be some rules on starting big fires like that, without so much as a fire extinguisher or healthy and safety officer to hand – London doesn’t have a particularly good record with fires, after all. (This said, if the fire had spread, this blog could make me the new Samuel Pepys).
After this, we all traipsed back inside the squat to see an old-fashioned sounding punk band play some songs. I say “old fashioned” because the members of the band were my parents age, played three chords and had one song where the only lyrics were “money talks” shouted over and over again. It was punk as fuck.
We left shortly after this on the basis that going home any later than midnight in Peckham is almost definitely going to get us murdered. Over all it was an amazing, bewildering and bizarre experience – similar to the rap battle in that respect.
I feel so conflicted. Against my better judgement, I’ve got into watching the latest series of 24. I just can’t help it – it’s so damn compulsive. Sure, it jumped the shark several series ago and the story lines are pretty much a case of ticking boxes that you’ll be well aware of after watching a couple of series (Jack goes rogue? Check. There’s a mole in the government? Check)… but once you start, you just can’t stop watching.
Thankfully though, it’s only fiction – no one would really think that its appropriate for a federal agent to suffocate a suspect with a plastic bag, right? It’s not like Fox News would ever cite 24 as justification for advocating torture, surely?
Oh.
What amazes me is how it blurs the lines between fact and fiction. Does this open the door for citing The Dark Knight and the threat the Joker poses as a reason to keep close surveillance on all citizens? Or are the risks posed by Jumanji enough to justify banning board games and/or Robin Williams?
You’ve probably seen in the news recently about the Atheist Bus Campaign, a group led by Ariane Sherine and Richard Dawkins who are putting advertisements on the sides of buses and on the tube saying “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”. But what no one seems to have noticed yet is that the apparently well-meaning group are attempting to commit a crime against humanity and break international law.
For you see, the Atheist Bus Campaign is attempting to advocate a non-theistic worldview, and by extension, are hoping to erradicate religious belief. You might think this is a noble goal, but the United Nations don’t think so.
In 1951 the UN Convention on Genocide became legally binding and it has remained so ever since. The document outlines the definition of genocide like this:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
The Atheist Bus Campaign, by buying advertising space on public transport, is committing acts intended to destroy in whole or in part a religious group: specifically, all religious people. And though Richard Dawkins hasn’t yet taken to roaming the streets of London yet shanking anyone who looks even vaguely pious, these adverts, like all adverts, are an attempt at controlling people’s behaviour – they’re deliberately inflicting on believers conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of religious beliefs.
And this isn’t even considering point (e) – surely by forcing kids to take science lessons and teaching them about reason, logic and evidence basedempiricism kids are being systematically taught not to be theists. Therefore, keeping creationism out of the classroom is essentially a crime against humanity.
Interestingly too, this entanglement with the UN convention on genocide does seem to debunk one of Richard Dawkins’ major arguments that no atrocities have ever been committed in the name of atheism. Unfortunately for Dawkins, it turns out that it is he himself who is committing a crime against humanity in the name of atheism.
Sure, the UN convention on genocide has been criticised by legal scholars and philosophers for concentrating on the outcome rather than the means in defining genocide, but this is an irrelevant point – the law is the law after all.
Thankfully, he’s not entirely crackers – in the linked article is he agrees that creationism is a unscientific nonsense, or a “crock of shit” to use the scientific jargon, but he does still display the sort of spectacular cognitive dissonance required to be a moderate theist – say what you will about fundamentalists, but at least they’re relatively consistent.
He said of creationism that it “is the fruit of a fundamentalist approach to scripture, ignoring scholarship and critical learning, and confusing different understandings of truth” and that “The argument for intelligent design may have some appeal for many Christians but is ultimately a negation of what science is about, which is to make a hypotheses from what is observable and then conduct experiments in a constant process of testing.”
What I always find to be remarkable about these moderates is the pick and choose nature of this – Carey rejects Genesis, but presumably (and you’d imagine so considering that he’s a former Archbishop) believes in Jesus and all of the miracles and all that. Why can’t he apply that same level of scholarship and critical learning to a man who can allegedly defy the laws of physics and perform some impressive party tricks? Even if the “But Jesus is New Testament! The old testament is all rubbish now” defence or even the “The Bible is full of allegory” line, it doesn’t really explain why Carey really doesn’t like the gays, which as I understand it are only mentioned in the old testament, in fairly ambiguous terms.
Of course, he also stuck it to Dawkins and Hitchens and the like, slagging them by saying that “The attacks on the World Trade Centre, Pentagon and the White House woke us all up to a resurgent and militant Islam which remains an active presence seven years on. For some writers, such events are illustrations of the evils of religion – all religions.”
9/11 was a damn good example of religious lunacy – he’s got that right, and also rightly implies that 9/11 woke up a lot of people to what religion can do – but is displaying that amazing cognitive dissonance yet again if he’s implying that it was a freak occurrence. I’m tempted to upload my dissertation on the role of religion in shaping the international system to offer a drop from the ocean of counter-examples. But lets face it, we already know most of them.
Apparently this is taken from a lecture to the University of Gloucester, where Carey remarked that 9/11 is the “date that symbolises a growing split between faith and reason”. I didn’t realise that faith and reason were ever close friends.
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