Qatar & The Tory Legacy

I give you enough reasons to not vote Conservative tomorrow.

Even if the chronic mismanagement of the nation's funds, the conflicts of interest rife in the front bench, the lack of empathy toward anyone but wealthy white married couples, and the suicide-pact of a no-deal Brexit isn't enough to convince you...then I will give you the one big and very current reason. One that isn't about right or left, one that isn't about welfare or austerity.

The government in general - and the Prime Minister in particular - has ties to Saudi Arabia that can't be ignored. They aren't alone in this. Saudi Arabia is a wealthy nation, and likes to disseminate that wealth amongst democracies so they'll leave it alone to continue being vaguely shit to its citizens and the citizens of other nearby nations. I touched on this in my last blog.

We sell them weapons. We sell a lot of people weapons, but the PM very recently went on something of a personal mission to sell them a shitload of weapons. Of course Trump then followed right behind her and sold infinitely more, but hey - they make more guns than we do.

It has become rather clear, in recent years, that Saudi Arabian government also has a hand in funding groups including ISIL. In the same way as the Pakistani government had a hand in funding Al Qaeda, which only became obvious when they were literally bullied into helping to find Bin Laden, who had been - to the surprise of nobody that paid attention - hiding out in Pakistan the entire time.

As people in the west have been harmed by extremists - I don't like using the word terrorist, it gets thrown around very quickly and easily - all of a sudden, the media cares. They haven't cared much about the continuous campaigns of bombing in Syria, the Yemen, Iraq, the Lebanon, and who knows where else - and the mess that is Israel/Palestine is a whole other story.

All of a sudden, as the people of Manchester and London and everywhere else that has been targeted by ISIL are pulling themselves back together, those who have been supplying the group that claims responsibility are named and shamed - and guess what? Our Prime Minister went to them on an arms sales mission, scarcely a month ago.

Saudi Arabia, probably, feels uncomfortable that the west - a long-term supplier of its military machine - is starting to take an interest in the funding of extremists. An interest perhaps peaked and aided by the report which the government is trying to cover up, but which will be leaked, I don't doubt. The report which details, in black and white, Saudi connections to ISIL and beyond.

And so Saudi needs someone else to take the heat - and someone to use those shiny brand new guns on.

Most people don't know a lot about Qatar. If you've ever heard of Al Jazeera - they are based in Doha, Qatar's capital. It's a sovereign state, set out on a peninsula. It is surrounded on most sides by the Persian Gulf, and has only one land border.

Saudi Arabia.

All of a sudden, a revelation. According to the Saudis - Qatar is funding the extremists! Isn't Qatar naughty? And half a dozen other nearby nations, including the United Arab Emirates, are going along with it. The UAE actually made it illegal to express sympathies or support to Qatar. That's serious business.

Donald Trump is in on it. He blabbed early - probably let in on the little scam when he went to visit his gun-purchasing buddies. Let slip a tweet or two pointing the finger at Qatar before Bannon or his son-in-law got the phone out of his hands.

While this pretext to war spins on the axle, Turkey shipping in troops to ward off an attack that may never happen if we are lucky, and the guns that we sold the Saudis looking like they are imminently going to pick up some dust...

...our Prime Minister determines that the way to keep us safe isn't to reverse the cuts that she, as Home Secretary, made to our police force.

It's to take away OUR rights.

You know other places that don't have any human rights legislation or protections?

Saudi Arabia. UAE. Pakistan. Qatar, to a point. Syria, now.

You know. The kind of places that fund and give rise to the kind of people that come to places like the United Kingdom, and Iraq, and Iran, and Kenya, and Egypt, and France, and Afghanistan, and Australia, and Somalia, and Iraq, and Pakistan, and India, and Burkina Faso, and Algeria, and Mexico, and Tunisia, and Cameroon, and Colombia, and Mali, and Niger, and hurt people.

That's a list of all the countries that have suffered an attack specified by their governments as terrorism...this month.

And it's only the 7th.

I urge you not to vote Tory because they are milking this tragic and awful cycle of death and extremism at both ends: they feed in weapons to get money, and at the opposite end, they demand the curtailment of the rights of the victims, on the grounds of protection.

Which is of course why they have had a huge media campaign trying to convince the British public that Jeremy Corbyn - who has persistently been on the right side of history, from the poll tax and Apartheid to nuclear weapons - is a terrorist sympathiser.

If that one reason isn't good enough, well...what's the point?

No more blogs before the results come in, folks. Let's see if we can't make the world a better place, one day at a time.

Where The Lines Meet

Everything that happens in life is down to intersections of causality.

A person crosses a street. A driver drives down that same street. Depending on the actions of each, those two actions - those two lines - can cross in different ways. In the worst way, they cross in a literal impact; but that is rare, and only happens so often due to the sheer number of cars on roads and people on pavements.

A couple meet due to actions and consequences taken all the way up to that point - their relationship forms as based on those lines, how they intersect, what they intersected with beforehand. Decisions made in the past, the results of circumstances and events, all roll forward to change the present and the future.

Everything, from important to inconsequential, happens this way.

When things happen that hurt us, that scare us, that make us angry - the temptation is to make the event personal. To make it all about us. It is also perhaps tempting to chalk it up to pure chance.

A company makes weapons, and they want somewhere to sell them. A government who are contractually bound to underwrite those sales finds a buyer. That buyer uses those weapons to murder innocents, and also sells them to those who would do the same. A man who receives weapons teaches his followers how to die for the cause the weapons are for,. A person decides to hurt other people because of a cause he has been taught is more just and valid than any other. People are hurt.

Each of these lines aside from the last features an abandonment of morality, a suspension of the concept of wrong and right. Each injury and each death caused at the far end of these lines begins with the decision to do something wrong.

It wasn't just those that deliver the final blow, though there will be those that want to get us angry, to make us hate, and will hold them up as the sole reason why this happened. These people decided to hate before the attack even happened. It's a tool, now - the line of the attacker has crossed theirs in a way that they will decide to use to push their own agenda.

How can we have stopped it?

We can't - but we can draw new lines.

We can't necessarily control the company making the weapons, but we can pick the government that rules us. That government can, then, make different decisions. It can draw different lines. Intersections that previously existed will fade away. We can choose to hate less and learn more, which will draw lines in how we are observed. We can refuse to let our decisions bring into power those immediate vultures, those who seek to turn our initial hurt into a scurrying for safety under the shadow of tyranny, or a burning rage against everything that isn't us.

That's a choice WE have to make, because that's all there is - the choices we make, and the ways in which they can change the world later. The lines we draw, and how the lines cross others.

We need to make sure we draw the best lines we can.

Will Of The People

I have come to hate the phrase, Will Of The People.

It only seems to apply when a political decision that is going to make things worse for us has the support of a vocal minority. It rarely gets rolled out when things are done that the people would actually want to happen. "Parliament Must Obey Will Of The People And Rough Up More Brown Folk", the headline will read, not "Parliament Obeys Will Of The People And Issues Free Solar Panels And Awesome Stuff To Literally Everyone".

It is another example of needing to pay attention to what politicians - and those in the public eye in general - do, rather than what they say.

Theresa May is desperate to finish off the job of total privatisation. She and hers want this country slashed to pieces and divvied up between the private investors they are mates with and married to (and sometimes actually are, let us not forget that some of these Tory bastards actually still have business interests). The thing is that privatisation is great for two groups of people only - shareholders and predatory businessfolk.

We will be told it is the Will Of The People.

It's not going to work out well for us. It didn't the last few times this happened.

Cast your minds back to the Thatcher era. Those miners were a bit upset, weren't they?

Well, that was because their livelihood was being sold down the river. Thatcher decided that, rather than subsidise the British coal industry, we would be able to import it cheaply from Germany. So, that put an end to that. Pole-axed an entire industry. Say what you want about coal as a source of energy - that literally killed off a big cornerstone of British industry.

(Out of interest, the reason why we could get it cheaper from Germany is because the German government subsidised their coal industry.)

More recently there has been the failing of British steel and Royal Mail. In the mist of time we have lost British Telecom, British Gas, and dozens of other nationalised services.

Next will be our NHS. It's been on the cards for a long time. It WILL happen.

Meanwhile, there was enough public money kicking around to bail out half a dozen banks, to refit and replace nuclear weapons that we don't need, and to underwrite the arms industry.

Is any of that due to the Will Of The People?

I fucking hate that phrase.

Solutions

This blog directly relates to the last one.

Having thought about it, I think there is definitely a solution to the terrorist problem. Also to a lot of other problems. This is where it gets a little...esoteric.

The reason why the solution won't be applied isn't due to over-complication. It's the opposite. The solutions are too simple. They're also somewhat counter to human nature, which is not to be confused with humanity.

(If you need a definition as to why they're different: humanity the hand that helps you up, where human nature is the other hand that goes through your wallet at the same time.)

My solution is three steps, and step one is a constant one for me:

REDUCE POVERTY.

Poverty causes, and is a catalyst for, so many other issues that it is impossible to argue that a global reduction of poverty (even a small one) would be a bad thing. It isn't just about having money, or even the things that money can buy you. It's about security.

I'm not saying that the current Capitalist world-model is a good one, and it certainly isn't the best one. My problems with that would fill a couple of blogs in and of themselves. Fact of the matter is, though - if agenda continues to be set by those with plenty of money, and the infrastructure of society is fueled by such money, then people having more of it increases equality in a very lateral fashion.

Extremism breeds in environments of stress and tension. Intolerance thrives in such environments, though it is far easier to spread to more comfortable locales. If the environments that people live in are made better, if lives are improved, then there's less hostility to go around.

You'll notice I am not distinguishing between areas of the world when I talk about this. That's because extremism and intolerance can exist in any country, and feeds the extremism and intolerance of those it antagonises, creating a feedback loop of backlash. "Violence begets violence," Dr Martin Luther King Jr. told us, and he was right.

The second step in our solution is actually aided by the first one:

INCREASE EDUCATION.

While a decrease of poverty should naturally lead to better education as a natural process, a concerted effort to educate people better would be invaluable.

I don't necessarily just mean book learning here. Being able to parrot long words or knowing how to say basketball in Spanish or memorising sulphuric acid's chemical make-up. All these things are good, but knowing is not understanding, and understanding is key.

I was taught a lot of very useful things as I grew up and in my early adult years, but there was a lot more I had to pick up myself, and yet more that I haven't worked out yet. I was taught something about religion, and something about history, and the tiniest amount of economics - but nothing about politics, nothing about mental health, very little about how to be okay with my own company and how to avoid being drawn into the bad crowds I was told constantly to avoid.

It's hard. I know it's hard. The fact is, though - this is 2015. I am sure there must be some way in which we can teach without brutalising, traumatising or dehumanising. There must be.

With a wider base of knowledge and understanding, not only of ourselves but others, then it is far harder for the kind of thinking that allows for terrorism and its associated backlash to take root. Not impossible, but far harder.

Again. I do not distinguish on nationality or locale here. This is universal.

As step two was helped by step one, step three benefits from both:

BE LESS SHITTY TO EACH OTHER.

I've talked about this before. A while ago, but still.

To take a step away from my socially responsible language, we are shitty to each other all the time. We're shitty to each other in a lot of ways - some passive, some active. Some people's shittiness is more effective than others - they have more pull, more to gain, more to lose.

Direct shittiness is thankfully relatively rare, but still exists. Being abusive for whatever reason or over whatever perceived slight. Wishing harm and death on people, and trying to make that happen. This kind of shitty is hard to stop without changing the way people think and feel (see steps one and two), but it can be done.

It is large-scale indirect shittiness, however, that causes the real damage.

Here's some of that indirect shittiness: if a UK arms manufacturer sells something to someone and they default on the repayment, the loss is underwritten by UKEF, a government-funded export credit agency. That means, it comes out of our taxes. Effectively that means that if Gun Company A wants to sell guns to Warlords 1, 2 and 3, they don't have to care about whether or not they will actually get paid. If Warlords 2 and 3 default, then we, you and I, pay to cover their debts.

There was talk about stopping this back in 2012. But then there was talk of stopping this back in 2000 as well, so...

How is this indirect shittiness? Well think about it. Using funds provided you by the taxpayer to allow the arms industry to flog hardware around the world with little worry of being shafted? How many of those sales that have been shored up with our money have put weapons in the hands of the people we happily call terrorists? Literally not caring enough about where the guns end up, as long as we just keep selling them, even to people who can't pay.

That happened in a different market, recently. It happened with houses. In the US. In 2007. It caused the financial crisis that we are currently existing in right now. The crisis that makes it all the more bitter that what little money we have is still being used to hedge the bets of munitions firms.

More indirect shittiness: most policy decisions we have made to do with the Middle East. Starting from year zero. Hell, imperialism as a whole and the superiority complex we have as a result has done us literally NO favours, ever. Some of that I would argue is direct shittiness, but the attitude we have now is formed on centuries of action that we had little to do with but still carry with us. Again it is the powers that be that dabble with this shittiness, drawing the lines of demarcation in Palestine, handing out support here, handing down financial punishments there. Governments use other countries like sandboxes, and then wonder why the citizens of those countries get all pissed off.

That may sound like I'm sympathising with terrorists. Understand this: I hate what they did, but that doesn't mean I can't draw a line of causality from why. Do I agree with them? No. Do I agree with what our governments have done? No. They're not mutually exclusive.

Yet more indirect shittiness can be found in the media. It sells papers to be extreme, to have eye-catching headlines, to appeal to the controversial in society. Fanning the flames of intimidation and tension leads to viewers which leads to more Good Things, and because they don't care about the irresponsibility of their actions and who may suffer as a consequence, they continue to be shitty to other human beings.

And more indirect shittiness...well, that falls at the feet of normal folks like you and I.

See, the things described above - they are huge acts of dismissive callousness. But that callousness has to come from somewhere; and if we allow for small cruelties, large ones soon follow.

Society in general looks like it rewards kindness and compassion. It doesn't. That's the message that is put out, but the reality is that it rewards inversion, huddling down against the cold alone and letting everyone else cope for themselves. As small groups and families and communities we stand together, but any further than that - nothing.

If we cared more, if we reached out more, then there'd be less anger and hatred and loneliness and fear in this world. All of the soil that extremism grows in - here and abroad - would be lessened. Lessen the soil, lessen the crop; and the returns would only increase.

The thing of it is...it all sounds so wishy-washy and hard to achieve because...well...we all know people aren't like that. Nobody believes in the things that would reduce poverty, because that means redistribution of wealth, or adjustment of current living conditions. No one wants that. Fuck those worse off than me, I don't want to be worse off. Refugees? Charity starts at home. Charity? I've got enough to worry about.

It's an austerity mindset, an enclosed and fearful mindset. It is people unwilling to help the whole because the one is more important. It's a mindset that we are born into, live in, die in. As I said earlier, it is what society wants of us.

In the end, we have made a very uncomfortable bed. We've done a lot in the past that is coming back to bite us in the present and will continue to bite us in the future; and the only way out of it is to stop making the same stupid mistakes we keep making, fix the holes in the cieling we keep ignoring, and actually do something for our fellow people.

The crying shame is that the only time the sympathy comes out is when people die. That's what it takes: the corpses of innocents.

There's our solutions. There they are. Simple concepts, achievable concepts, if only people would DO THEM.

But they won't.

Not until it's far too late.

Cause, Effect, Regret

As a child I was raised to take responsibility for my actions, something that I take quite seriously today.

No doubt every last one of you reading this blog will be aware of the refugee crisis which has only just gripped the world's media, despite being in the offing for years.

War Of The Worlds - the original 1898 story by H.G. Wells (and thus the musical), not the movies or the radio play - does a wonderful job of detailing the fear, the panic, the hopelessness and the madness of those running for their very lives. Not just running out of the house, or down the street - running without knowing an end goal, running in absolute terror away from certain doom.

Nobody does this on a whim, or by choice. It's totally against human nature to abandon everything that one has built, everything one owns that can't be carried. Also, in this day and age, one can't escape knowing that wherever they end up, they will invariably be treated poorly by at least a proportion of the local population - but even this mistreatment and malignity can't be worse than what they would face if they stayed.

In War Of The Worlds, the cause is very much an external problem - in the biggest way. Martian war machines intent on extinction. A warning from the author about war - wars of extermination, total war, war on an industrial scale. Herbert George was so devastatingly prescient, that 16 years before the First World War and over 40 years before the second, he was already speaking of the terror that would come with such mechanised destruction.

Today, though - today we can't blame invaders from outer space.

The Defence Security and Equipment International exhibition (DSEI for short) is hosted every two years at the Excel Centre in London, in September. It originated from the British Army Exhibition and the British Navy Exhibition, which (after running separately since 1976) were combined in 1993; in 1999 it was privatised.

DSEI is, essentially, one of the world's biggest arms fairs. The scale of the technology and hardware on offer is immense, and includes such articles as "suicide" drones and self-guiding bullets. Armaments of all shapes and sizes line the metaphorical shelves of the exhibition, and a significant proportion of those shopping are from established Middle Eastern governments.

Here and there, one can find indications that those who organise DSEI hope that their goods won't be used for internal repression - though at least once, a couple of companies have been thrown out for setting up stands with electric batons and metal shackles, which have an uncertain usage in a military non-internal fashion. This also seems to imply that it's perfectly okay to deploy an Accuracy International AX50 long-range anti-materiel rifle against anyone outside of your own borders, but shooting your own people with it is a big no-no.

DSEI is only one of the many arms fairs that occur the world over. A quick search reveals over a dozen more. It is reckoned by the SIPRI military expenditure database that the value of the arms trade is over $1.5 trillion a year. To put that in perspective, $1.5 trillion is:

• More than Australia's $1.44 trillion GDP, making the arms trade the twelfth biggest economy on earth (just behind Canada at $1.77 trillion).
• Enough to build a thousand top-of-the-line 862 bed hospitals like the Parkland Memorial hospital in Dallas TX.
• Greater than the estimated value of the entire Premiere League, given each club's individual purchase value as a whole.
• Enough to buy the 4 biggest cruise liners on earth (Allure Of The Seas, Oasis Of The Seas, Anthem Of The Seas and Quantum Of The Seas) 300 times over.
• Over two million average London houses - or over five million average UK houses outside of the capital.
• Sufficient to give every single refugee in the world (60 million approximately) an average UK lifestyle for a year, with change.

That's quite a lot of money.

Am I drawing a connection between the highly valuable nature of arms sales and the current crisis? Well, yes, actually. I genuinely am. The arms industry makes itself fat off the willingness of nations to make war, and refugees flee crisis - crisis such as their nation being attacked by an unrelenting enemy.

Am I suggesting that IS buys all its weapons from DSEI? Not at all. Assad's regime, however - I'd be very surprised to find no guns in their hands that were tendered at a global arms fair. I might also imply that various groups the world over have armed organisations like IS with weapons that they would acquire from the companies selling at events like the DSEI. Remember in Rambo 3, wherein the CIA were selling/giving weapons to the ever-so-brave Afghan mujaheddin in order to combat the evil Russians?

Of course, those US-made Stinger missiles - so crucial for bringing down the Russian HIND helicopters that dominated the Afghan battlefield - got turned on the benefactors when the mujaheddin became the bad guys...

...in short, rich governments with access to weapons have a habit of arming people, either by selling them or through some kind of political deal. Those people, well. They go on to do what they want. Sometimes what they want is evaporating Palmyra and  killing people indiscriminately.

So when good old Ronnie Reagan was talking about trickle-down economics - which has proven to be an excuse to make rich people richer and poor people poorer - perhaps he was talking about how the consequences of our actions will trickle back down to us.

We made money. We made money buying and selling weapons. Weapons are being used to fuel a massed panic flight from the levant; and now, those refugees have turned up in the kind of countries that sell those weapons.

This is the literal trickling down of the investments made in the eighties. Much like the financial crisis of the past decade - this is the seed we have sown, the bed we have made. Or at least, the bed that was made by those making the money selling the weapons and deregulating the financial sector.

As a child I was taught to take responsibility for my actions - to give credit where it is due, and criticism where it is needed. If we as a civilised nation were to profit from the wars and military brutality that has been so endemic across the world in the past three decades, then we as a civilised nation have to shoulder the burdens of those consequences. It's the only decent thing to do.

Of course, the true victory of the profiteers is now, they have a lot of other people singing their same song. Public opinion is on their side, at least in the UK, and that's a fact that actually makes me feel slightly ashamed.

The most successful squadron in the Battle of Britain was Polish. They defended OUR homeland, when we took them in from THEIR homeland after it was invaded. They fought to the death, literally, to defend us. At the end of the war, we hung our heads in shame, and let the Soviets take their homeland away.

I like to think we're better than that, now.

(Of course it bears mention that after WW2 ended we took in record numbers of refugees, and vastly increased public spending despite being in a time of austerity, and we did alright - but that's a factoid that most are happy to ignore.)