I spent most of the Easter weekend glued to the news channels and the political blogs because it was all terribly exciting – the characters and blogs that I’ve been following for ages suddenly came alive, like it if were a TV adaption of a work of literature.
Seeing Iain Dale, Derek Draper, Paul Staines et al come to life on the screen was how I imagine it must have felt to see the Lord of the Rings films for the first time after years of being a Tolkien bore.
When they suddenly became newsworthy, it was like I already had an emotional stake in the production – whilst they were not childhood heroes of mine (a failed Tory candidate, a whiny disgraced psychotherapist and a muck-raking gossip-monger aren’t quite as inspirational as, say, Batman) – I already felt like I knew them. After all, Dale has commented on this blog, Draper apparently follows me on Twitter and Staines linked to me long ago.
So as you can imagine it was thrilling to see them get their break on TV – especially as they might have been wearing coat-tails that I could perhaps have grabbed on to.
Though this said, I don’t think the plot was up to much. The smears that Damien McBride came up with were rubbish. I mean, I understand wanting to stick it to the Tories – thinking anything but this is tantamount to mental illness in my book, but McBride’s work just smacks of over-thinking it.
One of the smears, according to the Sunday Times, was to suggest that George Osbourne once wore women’s underwear and blacked up. Women’s underwear I could believe – same if it were just blacking up – but both of these things together… really?
I think the most bizarre thing that McBride did though was to suggest smearing ‘mad’ Nadine Dorries, a relatively obscure backbencher who’s MP for mid-Bedfordshire. The suggested smear was to suggest that she’d had an extra-marital affair – which is pretty tame, not to mention difficult for a woman who has been divorced for some time. But this is stupid anyway because you don’t need to make stuff up to have a go at Dorries because she’s crackers.
Want proof? Check out this dispatches documentary following her around the time of the abortion/human embryo/whatever bill a while back – she’s seen hanging out with, and in the pockets of, young earth creationist fundamentalists and all sorts. I think there’s even a sequence in the documentary where she avoids the question of “how old is the earth?”.
She’s also a member of the Cornerstone group of Tories – a group for whom the general Tories just aren’t right wing enough for. Y’know, the unpleasant socially conservative “faith and family” types who sound idelogically closer to Mitt Romney than David Cameron. All Labour would have to do would be to point out that ‘Dave’ is backed up by this group of crackpots and the Tories would look like a right nasty bunch again.
So in a bid to grudgingly help the Labour party, as I really don’t want the Tories to get in at the next general election, here are some of my suggestions for more realistic smears that could be employed:
William Hague wears a bald cap to hide his ginger hair
George Osbourne’s wife has some mental health problems… because she’d have to in order to cope with looking at Osbourne’s face with such regularity.
Derek Draper is actually a closet member of the Conservative Party who was sent to sabotage Labour’s election chances (I’m still hoping that this is true)
Man, I’m a little bit excited that President Obama is in London. I’ve already invited him out, but he hasn’t got back to me yet. It seems a little silly, considering that the Prime Minister and Arctic-Monkeys Fan Gordon Brown is always living about five miles away from me, but to have the most powerful man in the world a mere two miles-ish from me (I worked it out), is exciting.
Apparently Barry is staying with the US Ambassador in his house in Regent’s Park. Top tip: if your garden has it’s own zoo, you’re probably a little bit too showy.
It must be an interesting visit though – I wonder who gets the bed and who has to sleep on the floor? Not that they’ll be doing much sleeping – they”ll get to stay up late into the early hours of the morning, sneaking into the kitchen to see what’s in the fridge, and discussing boys. The ambassador could tell Barry about what a bully Vladimir is, and Barry could taunt the ambassador about Hillary, who he probably used to fancy.
I bet they’re talking about how they deliberately didn’t invite me too, the bastards.
I like to think of myself as the anti-Amish. Not only do I love technology and hate Amish people, but I think that rather than steal your soul, only photography or being filmed can truly validate your existence. It’s why I moved to the CCTV capital of the world, and why today, I appeared fairly prominently in the background of a news report.
No, I wasn’t in Austria sticking up for Joseph Fritzl (though I’d still argue that the default reaction to “secret underground dungeon” is “that’s cool” rather than “that’s horrible”), but I went to a protest organised by TV’s Mark Thomas. That’s right, TV’s Mark Thomas. Not the other one.
The cause was noble: it was calling for the government to invade Jersey.
Jersey is known to be harbouring billions of pounds, having spent years avoiding tax inspections, and is thought to have links to a number of rogue corporations and shadowy groups known as hedge-funds. What makes the need for this action even more imminent is that the UK government has in fact sold off various buildings to private companies (who then lease it back) based in Jersey – in practice, this means that HMRC, the tax inspectors who collect tax and track down people who are avoiding and evading tax rent a building from a company who avoid paying tax. You don’t have to be a genius to realise that this is not on and thus support the military action.
Brilliantly, the story made More4 news tonight. Here’s their report, in which if you look closely you can see me in a suit:
Obviously though, what with this being the future and all, it was I, the citizen journalist who beat Channel 4 to the studio. In fact, I did a live broadcast to the internet. Here’s my report, as it was broadcast live:
The Taxpayers’ Alliance, a tedious pressure group formed by some failed Tory candidates have succeeded in getting what looks like another one of their press releases printed almost verbatim in the paper again – or at least that’s what it looks like. The Telegraph are reporting that “EU membership costs each Briton £2,000 a year” – though to give it some credibility, they’ve added “Taxpayers’ Alliance claims” to the end of the headline and included a small counter quote at the end.
Whilst I can’t dismantle the story entirely – the source material is a book and the TPA haven’t put their data online as far I can detect, what I can tell is that the Telegraph’s story certainly has some demonstrable signs of playing with the numbers and is somewhat dishonest in its portrayal of the truth.
First of all, the headline is pretty misleading, and I’m struggling to work out how they’ve derived it. It seems this figure is based on this, which is explained in the following paragraph:
However, according to a Matthew Elliott, the TPA chief executive, the total cost across the EU is £495 billion or £1,968 for every man woman and child in Europe
Obviously they’ve rounded up £1968 to £2000 to make for a neater headline – but if you do the maths, then it implies that the EU has a population of about 251,524,390 – about 251 million people. Unfortunately, this means that someone’s maths (and to be fair, it could be mine) is bad – the population of the EU is approaching 500 million. “Maybe it’s just the EU15″, I thought – EU15 being the term used to refer to EU members prior to the “Big Bang” enlargement of 2004 which brought in all of the “spongeing” Eastern Europeans. But a quick Google reveals that the EU15 population has never been that small.
In fact, the only reference to the EU having a population of 251 million I can find is a line in this document about the number of people in the EU of working age – and that isn’t “every man, woman and child”.
What bothers me most though is that even if we assume that the TPA’s numbers are correct, is the distortion in the way that it has been reported. I don’t even doubt that there’s a lot of waste and mismanagement in the EU – they have two separate Parliaments and a high-speed rail line linking them for Christ’s sake, but what is happening is that it is being reported in such a needlessly emotive way that it is misleading.
Obviously from the perspective of the individual, paying £2,000 for anything sounds like a lot of money, but this not only tries to create the misleading impression that it’s £2,000 from each of our pockets (obviously though, higher earners pay more tax) It would be wrong to view it as £2,000 out of an annual salaries of the general public though – the EU isn’t just a big bucket, it’s £2000 worth of economic activity. That £2000 is going to be spent back into the European economy, and is constituted not just by income tax, but by every other sort of government income – such as VAT and fuel duty (sorry, “steal tax” in the TPA vernacular) and corporation tax. And £2000 per person viewed a percentage of a GDP of about £1 trillion suddenly doesn’t seem like so much.
Even the £4.1bn in 2007-9 going to Europe that the TPA moans about as a percentage of the UK government budget doesn’t seem like very much when you consider that for 2007-08, the UK government budget was £519,229,000,000 – the EU contribution making up 0.79% of it.
And when you don’t cloud things with the near-meaningless figure of £2,000 per person, it makes the EU seem a lot more reasonable – and though more difficult to calculate, it’s a shame the article doesn’t include any of the benefits of us paying into the EU and retaining our membership of the bloc – such as the immeasurable economic benefits of being part of the free trade area, our ability to participate in the market and so on and so fourth.
To paraphrase the comedian Chris Addison, the sad thing about “Euroscepticism” is that it contains the word “sceptic” – which implies a great philosophical tradition of inquiry and critical thought. In every other area of discourse to be a “sceptic” tends to mean that you’ve actually thought about it.
A few hours ago now Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail poured a Molotov Cocktail and sat back, ready to watch the PC brigade scream. Today (Monday)’s Daily Mail frontpage has one of those frontpage stories that’ll make you tut and say “typical Mail“. But it’s so typical in fact, that I think it’s worth digging a little deeper into it.
It screams “ANOTHER BLOW TO FATHERHOOD” in that way only the Mail can do. No – it’s not a sympathetic piece supporting say, Fathers 4 Justice and their campaign for father’s rights – the Mail branded those “morons” long ago. It’s in fact some thinly-veiled homophobia, of course. “Now IVF mothers can name ANYONE as ‘father’ on birth certificate – and it doesn’t even have to be a man”, the paper tells us.
Now obviously the Mail can’t just outright attack homosexuals – even it knows these days that it isn’t really on – and besides, the Mail is the voice of silent majority – shouting would be to surrender to the politically correct Brussels bureaucrats that really run this country. So it has had to opt for some euphemistic language instead.
Critics said a woman could list her best friend on the birth certificate. The word ‘father’ may even be replaced with the phrase ’second parent’.
Don’t worry they’re not lezzers, they’re just good friends.
The second parent, who will have to consent to being named, will take on the legal and moral responsibilities of parenthood.
This raises the spectre of a legal minefield in which female ‘fathers’ will fight for visitation rights and be chased for child support payments if their fragile relationship with the mother breaks down.
Obviously any relationship between women is going to be fragile because who’s going to beat them into behaving?
Making its agenda slightly more obvious, the paper tells us:
The regulations are part of the controversial Embryology Bill passed by Parliament last year. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority said they will give lesbian couples in civil partnerships who undergo IVF the same rights as married heterosexual couples.
So we get it, this is a Bad Thing, right? But how can we know for sure – what we need is an expert opinion. Maybe a Doctor could give us some insight:
Dr Trevor Stammers, a GP and lecturer in healthcare ethics, questioned the strength of the relationships or friendships between the mother and ‘father’.
He said: ‘There is no doubt from sociological evidence accumulated over the past few years that children do best in a two-parent married family with heterosexual couples being the married parents.
‘It probably will be the child that is the loser but by the time we find that out, in 15 or 16 years, a huge amount of damage will have been done.’
Dr Stammers, has been described as a GP and lecturer in healthcare ethics. He makes quite a damning judgement of the moves here – I wonder what informs his ethics? Oh, he wouldn’t happen to be the same Dr Trevor Stammers who is head of the Christian Medical Fellowship, would he? Oh, he is. I wonder how much of his “sociological evidence” was found in his Bible?
The Mail also cite another professor:
David Jones, a professor of bioethics, likened the role of second parent to that of godparent. He added: ‘This sounds like social engineering on the hoof.’
David Jones is a professor of bioethics – that’s an important sounding role. He must definitely be an expert. Oh wait, here he is – it looks like he isn’t a scientist, or a professor of say, sociology, both which would make his contributions relevant – he’s a Professor of Theology. He’s a Professor at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham – which when you look at its mission statement, reveals in it’s first line to be aiming “To advance education, in such manner as befits a Catholic foundation” and that “The mission of St Mary’s is to provide high-quality academic and professional higher education within a collegial ethos inspired and sustained by Christian values”. The website also reveals that Jones doesn’t have anything even resembling a science qualification, having stuck with theology. No wonder the anti-abortion Society for the Protection of Unborn Children are such big fans of Prof Jones’ bioethics course.
There’s a name on the St Mary’s website that sounds familiar too. Dr Trevor Stammers? Why do I recognise that name from somewhere? It makes me wonder how much of this story is verbatim from a press release.
Still, maybe the Mail’s other sources of commentary are more objective?
Philippa Taylor, of Christian charity CARE, said: ‘We are going to get to the point where a birth certificate is not going to be a true statement of anyone’s biological heritage.’
Oh. At least they’ve admitted that this lady is head of a Christian charity. Though what a quick Google reveals is interesting: the evangelical organisation started life as the Nationwide Festival of Light – which Mary Whitehouse had a prominent role in. No surprises there then.
So what about our elected representatives – what do they have to say? I hear that there’s some cross-party concern about this change for birth certificates.
Geraldine Smith, Labour MP for Morecambe, said a birth certificate should be a true record of a child’s genetic heritage. She added: ‘I don’t think the state should collude with parents to conceal the true genetic identity.’
Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said a father played an essential role in the development of a child. He added: ‘The present Government seems not to care a damn about families.
At least Ann Widdecombe, a woman who quit the Church of England and joined the Catholics because it was too liberal for her, is fairly honest about her intentions:
Tory MP Ann Widdecombe said the change would destroy the ‘basic nature’ of a man and a woman bringing up a child together as parents.
These are MPs in the Commons though. What about the other Chamber, the Lords? That’s where respectable peers, who are able to take time and deliberate in a calmer, less confrontational manner are able to go over bills with a fine tooth-comb to make sure all of the technical details are sound.
Baroness Deech, a former chairman of the HFEA, said the practice would lead to the ‘ falsification of the birth certificate’.
A bureaucratic concern – falsifying birth certificates could create some problems. On a completely unrelated note, Baroness Deech has happened to be absent on every vote on equal gay rights.
So I’m not saying that the Daily Mail is homophobic or anything – well actually I am. It’ss just funny how every source of comment in a story happens to come from either an anti-gay (not to mention anti-abortion, etc) member of the legislature, or a couple of Christian sources (a religion that doesn’t exactly have a tradition of tolerance). What makes this even worse is that Mail have deliberately hidden the affiliation of these people to various religious organisations and the like, which makes the whole thing fundamentally dishonest.
This time there’s apparently 120 Labour MPs ready to rebel over the part privatisation of the Post Office. I think it’s about time – in fact, I think that it doesn’t go far enough: we need to shut down the Royal Mail entirely.
For too long, the meddling nanny-state has had a near-monopoly on delivering letters. Why doesn’t the state trust us to travel and take written communications and parcels to people ourselves? Why must the Post Office provide a service to take my letters to whoever I want them delivered too when I am capable myself of driving the letters to their destinations myself?
What makes me even more is the government’s sick profiteering. Stamps are merely a stealth tax imposed on us by literal paper-pushing bureaucrats.
And don’t get me started on the speed camera-like ruse of legally imposing occasions like Christmas, where it is almost obligatory to send greetings cards and line the pockets of the Hallmark-industrial-complex.
Like most people, I was pretty pleased when President Obama in one of his first acts as President, announced that he was going to shut down Guantanamo Bay, the Cuban peninsula resort of choice for suspected terrorists and “enemy combatants” since 2001. This move has been welcomed since Guantanamo was becoming a bit too commercial, with some travellers apparently now preferring lesser well known “black sites” in Eastern Europe, in Poland and Romania.
Obama said that he’ll shut down the camp “within one year”, and this is an important caveat because he needs a year to figure out what to do with the people inside. Unsurprisingly due to this he has been dropping massive hints at the likes of Britain and Germany to take a few of them off his hands.
As a leading participant in the whole ‘War on Terror’ scheme, I think it’s Britain’s international duty to take on our fair share of detainees. Unfortunately though this will only shift the burden on to us: where are we going to put them? We need our own Guantanamo Bay to deal with these people. And I think I know just the place.
If you look at the criteria for a prison in which to illegally hold people for years without charge, then you’ll need to find somewhere a bit out of the way, away from civilisation, and somewhere fairly unpleasant, perhaps somewhere that’s a bit of an international pariah and a no-mans land – these are dangerous terrorists after all. We’d need to find somewhere which has accommodation just about meets the Geneva convention criteria. So isn’t it obvious?
We turn Butlins Skegness into Guantanamo Bay.
The camp site is almost ready as it is. All we’d have to do is give the Red Coats brown shirts and they’d be set for almost all of the activities carried out at Guantanamo. There’s a swimming pool for waterboarding – and a water slide to act as a reward for good intelligence. And as for the widely known practice of using western music to disorient suspects, then Butlins is already set up for this – every night the Butlins cabaret belts out some extraordinary renditions of the most intolerable pop classics.
I’m sure with capacity like this we could even take on and house suspected terrorists from other countries in exchange for a weekly rent.
And most amazingly? There’s actually already a precedent for this. A few years ago the Irish government turned a former Butlins site into a detention centre for a group of foreigners some people will happily conflate with terrorists: asylum seekers.
The only drawback is that sending suspected terrorists to Butlins wouldn’t exactly downplay any accusations of torture.
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.
