Knives don’t kill people, I kill people

‘Guns don’t kill people,” a t-shirt I saw recently said, ‘people with moustaches do.’ There are other variations: ‘Guns don’t kill people, I kill people.’ Or: ‘Guns don’t kill people, Chuck Norris kills people.’

They’re all playing on a National Rifle Association (the American pro-gun lobby) slogan that goes: ‘Guns don’t kill people, people do,’ and its logic is that we shouldn’t ban or control gun ownership, because guns aren’t the cause of violence, people are. It’s a popular idea in a country where the right to bear arms (as opposed to the right to bare arms, sadly absent from Sharia law) exists, but it’s unlikely to catch on here.

The weapon of choice in Britain, according to the news, is the kitchen knife.

Last week we learned of more youth and knife-related killings. So far, I have seen very few bumper-stickers saying: ‘Knives don’t kill people, young people do,’ and there are a few reasons. One is that the debate is a little more complex than the one surrounding guns, but the other is the well-known fact that if you try to stand in the way of a knee-jerk reaction you tend to get kicked in the goolies. ‘Panic!’ is usually what newspapers proclaim, and politicians (particularly ones in beleaguered parties) are desperate to be seen to be ‘doing something’. So they legislate.

And fair enough. The problem is serious. People are dying. Indignation and anger are legitimate emotions. But they mean that disagreeing with proposed action is often read as not taking the issue seriously. ‘Here’s the choice,’ the voice of outrage says: ‘Do you think we should implement my knee-jerk solution, or would you prefer that more children die?’ Well, gosh, that’s a tough one. I’m not sure.

Some proposed solutions last week were predictable (‘Jail! More jail! Jail everybody!’), but some were surprising and just a little weird (‘Ban kitchen knives – they’re pointy and therefore more stabby’).

While I’m not used to agreeing with Germaine Greer (Who wouldn’t love to tell her: ‘You’re a feminist? That’s so cute!’?), I agree with her that we are once again mistakenly focusing on the implement, not the force and reason behind it.

Remove pointy knives from every household and the killings will stop? I doubt it. Last week’s news also carried a story of a man beaten to death, remember? Do we really think it’s beyond our young people to learn how to slash a throat rather than stab? And when all knives are banned and they start using broken bottles, what then? Send kids to prison for longer and they will spend longer mixing with criminals and being brutalised. They will come out more likely to want to harm people, not less. Simplistic answers make us feel better, but rarely fix the problem for long.

I’m no NRA sympathiser. I think guns do kill people. But the British example proves that there is more going on than just weapons proliferation in our (or American) homes.

So do we blame TV? Violent video-games? Jazz music for songs like ‘Mac the Knife’? I’m just throwing this out there, but our post-Christian, postmodern culture has raised a generation that has no objective standard for right and wrong. At the same time, our leaders resort to violence on a massive scale for apparently no reason. Order is maintained by increasing levels of force, some of it deadly. Are we really surprised they do the same?

Twenty years ago, as Ms (Miss?) Greer pointed out, a boy with a pocket knife caused no fear. Something has changed in our society and if we keep talking about symptoms and don’t bother examining the causes, the body count will grow exponentially every year.

1968: paranoia and realism on BBC

“What worries me is the degree to which that paranoia may be operating today,” says a wheelcahir-bound, white-haired former anti-Vietnam demonstrator about how seriously police took ridiculous stories about a sinister ‘political organisation’ called The Doors were headed for Britain and that they must be stopped.

Other stories, about eggs filled with acid and planned attacks on the Daily Mirror and the Playboy Club were also widely reported and taken seriously by police. But then, that’s fair enough, because, according to one of the journalists who broke the story, the information was fed directly from special branch.

So perhaps paranoia about being involved in anti-war, anti-capitalist or other demonstrations is justified? If it is, it makes protesting all the more important.

Click here to watch the video on the BBC.

Another look at the uprisings of 1968 is available by clicking here.

Talking anti-capitalism on Premier Radio

This afternoon’s experience: sweaty palms, racing heart, a sudden loss for words. I really have to learn how to deal with cute girls wearing short grey dresses in an office environment.

On top of that not-inconsiderable stress, I then had to go on-air for the first time in yeeears, to discuss anti-capitalism. The show was the Premier Drive with Bridgitte and Dave (very friendly) and the slot was The Big Issue.

I’m hoping my fairly scattered approach to the topic didn’t do a disservice to the cause of justice, but who knows?

Favourite moment: comparing current globalised consumer capitalism to supporting slavery. And the silence that followed.

Anyway, if you wanna listen, go to the Premier Drive and find the on demand bit and maybe i’ll be on?

Why the world is starving

Ah you’ve gotta love the rich and powerful. Eventually no-one will. Well, maybe God, but if you read the book of Amos, you get the feeling that love won’t make them feel a whole lot better.

For a while now we’ve been reading and hearing about the global food crisis. It’s been blamed (by the rich and powerful, and their spokespeople, neoclassical economists and market traders) on real shortages caused by two things. Alternatively, on the rise of India and China (who happen to be our economic competition) and on the rise of bio-fuels (which happen to be symbols of environmentalism).

Call me cynical (hell, you can call me Jenny von Westphalen, but call me…) but I find it all too convenient when all our problems are blamed on those who challenge our dominance of the world, so I was already dubious about blaming China and India, but then I read this article in the New Statesman. Even without it, when people say: ‘blame China! Blame India!’, I can’t help but wonder: So we should blame India, that generally slef-indulgent country with all those over-fed masses for using up all the world’s food? Do you know how much food we throw away in this country? In America? And we should blame China for finally wanting to start feeding its people properly. Yeah, bad China! Outside! Go to bed without any… oh, hang on.

So maybe it’s biofuels? That would, after all, be very useful (and let’s face it, it has been very useful, if only in terms of planting the idea in people’s minds) to opponents of the environmental movement. People and businesses who would like to stall or at least slow calls for action on climate change (large emitters, oil-heavy industry, etc) would obviously like biofuels to be seen as a failure. Not necessarily because of any direct competition it might pose, but because the failure of the great white hope of biofuel will be seen as material evidence that we really should rush into this saving the planet thing. see how much damage it can do. The loons who deny the damage our industry and lifestyle are doing to the planet, love the biofuels=starving children meme, because it makes people nervous about aiming for change.

But what is to blame for the food crisis, according to both the NS article and BBC Radio 4’s investigative programme,  File on 4, is commodities trading. That’s right, global capitalism’s ‘invisible hand’, the great balancer, the market (you should say it in a different voice, it’s special), the  mechanism that is supposed to keep things from getting out of hand in a capitalist society, may actually be causing starvation.

Of course, anyone paying attention to the World Bank and IMF’s policies over the last 40 years (not to mention wealthy nations’ trade agreements with the developing world), knows that has often been true, at least indirectly. But this is altogether less oblique. Essentially, the popping of the credit/housing bubble in international markets has meant that funds and businesses that speculate on markets had to find more stable stuff to trade and buy speculative futures in. The are they chose is Commodities, and that includes both oil and food.

Food prices have shot up over the last year, and that’s because there is what one trader on the Radio 4 programme referred to as a flood of money coming into commodities. Basic supply and demand means that if there is a fixed supply of a product (say food) and suddenly a lot more demand (say, in the form of billions more dollars than usual looking for a safe investment), the price will go up. Here in suburbia, the West, whatever you want to call the pockets of First World we live in from Cape Town to New York and London, it becomes a little more expensive to eat, to drive. In the developing world, people die.

And yet, we still go blindly on as if ‘the market’ is not causing problems, operating on the same assumption we’ve operated on for so long: that it will ultimately save us. It won’t. It will save the rich and it may not hurt us all that much (though when that bubble pops and the market crashes, don’t be surprised if it does) but read Amos again. Ask yourself if the principles there might just be true for today. And then ask yourself again whether it’s all so hunky dory.

Here’s a great podcast to download: File on 4: Why are food prices so high?

In case that doesn’t work, the download page is here — just click ‘download episode’.

Alternatively, you can go here and either click ‘listen again’ or just read a shorter version of the story.

If you hurry it will still be available to download/ for listen again. It really is worth hearing.

Free-range pensioners?

Yay! It’s ethical investment week! And I’m already sick of fair-trade chocolate. And free-range eggs, organic tomatoes and sweatshop-free pashminas. Because they’re not enough. I want more. I want free-range pensioners, I want organic humans, a fairly traded sense of security and independent information. I want security without cruelty, locally grown justice.

Let’s talk Free-Range pensioners. Last week we read the news of yet another pair of octogenarians, married for 60 years, who were about to be split up by Social Services. The system created to care for them was going to split up two old people who have forgotten how to live without each other.

The Daily Mail will no doubt call it a disgrace and a failure by the Labour government. And possibly somehow related to asylum seekers and Muslims. It certainly is disgraceful and it is a failure by government. But if we viewed pensioners and other vulnerable people in our society as Free-Range, we could avoid all this. As with chickens, Free-Range pensioners would be treated as individual lives, whose quality was more important than numbers on a balance sheet. Of course, Free-Range pensioners are currently only available to families of above average means, so let’s campaign to make them standard across the industry by objecting to the New Labour/Conservative belief that public services should be run and treated like businesses. Chickens, eggs or human beings, if profit and targets drive us, quality of life will suffer.

What about organically grown humans? I’m thinking human beings, born in the natural way, conceived in the natural way (I’m aware there are a range of options in both, space for ‘free choice for the discerning consumer’) that don’t require the DNA of animals to make them more perfect than God intended. News last week suggested we may be further than we’d hoped from the Organic goal in terms of fetuses, but we can still choose organic for ourselves. Applying a label reading: ‘“and it was very good” – Gen 1:31’ to your and everyone else’s body, face, skin and hair would be a good start. Convincing people that outside of illness they are probably beautiful as they are is another.

A Fair-Trade sense of security is trickier. Like a lot of Fair-Trade products, it’s likely to cost more. And the first few versions are likely to be unpalatable. The key is to keep pushing them in your church. So at last week’s news that the UK was debating whether to carry on using cluster-bombs (a weapon many civilized countries have discarded as barbaric and cruel), consumers of a secure life should have made it clear that they no longer wanted to buy that life if it came at the expense of the lives of poor people around the globe. More than that, for our sense of security to truly qualify for Fair-Trade status, we should avoid buying security that is linked to ‘sacrificing our children and killing all our enemies’ as Larry Norman once put it. Fair-Trade security is, of course, not just an international issue. It should not harm the domestic market for liberty and democracy either…

And so on. We do-gooders need to expand our horizons from coffee, chocolate and Freeset bags. A just world will require more than consumer influence. It will take democratic power. Government can legislate that every aspect of our lives, every product we consume, is free of the taint cruelty, economic injustice and environmental damage. And as with slavery before it, so far no major party has suggested taking that line, because it threatens the god our society really serves. So how okay are we with the sacrifices Mammon demands? And how much do wee really care about being ethical this week?

Indiana Jones and the forests of shrinking

Trust issues (or: how i learned to stop worrying and love the West)

Here’s an all-age sermon illustration. Grab a kid by the wrists and play this game: Tell them to make a fist and to try and punch you. Then, when they do, use your superior strength to make them smack themselves in the face. Two things will happen. 1) You will probably appear in a black and white NSPCC advert, and 2) Once you’ve let go, the child will never trust you again. Not even if they’re drowning in a stream and you’re the only person on shore. Now think of Burma.

Last week’s news was dominated by the fact that the Burmese government has been refusing entry (or slow in granting it) to foreign aid-workers, particularly British and American ones, following the devastating cyclone of a few weeks ago.

Why, every piece seemed to demand, are they being so unreasonable? Why are they so paranoid? The answer may lie in the fact that many voices have been calling darkly for ‘more than quiet diplomacy’ in dealing with Burma. That, and the fact that the USA (no great friend of the Junta) has a battle-ship stationed off Burma’s coast.

Now, I’m not going to defend an oppressive regime. But I am going to suggest that the incredulous howls of ‘why don’t they trust us?’ are not just naïve but stupid.

One commentator last week suggested that the reason the media cares about the Burmese cyclone victims (rather than starvation victims in the Niger delta) is because the story has a hook: the Burmese government are bad – Buddhist monks were callously crushed for opposing them quite recently.

But do you know who (not counting the Japanese on their WWII rampage) crushed them last? We did. George Orwell, who served there under British rule, wrote in detail of Buddhist monks’ hatred for the British. In 1938, it was the British, not the military Junta, who fired into a group of protesters, killing 17. It was Britain, not the military Junta, that exiled the Burmese monarchy (or what was left of it) to India (what, no Olympic torch Free Burma demonstrations?). It is Britain that has declared war on Burma three times.

So when considering their reluctance to accept our help, let’s consider a hypothetical situation. If we suffered an earthquake and Iran, North Korea and the Taleban offered us help, would we be keen?

The hypocrisy of demanding the Junta focus on human life rather than political paranoia and then our speaking of little but opportunities to change their politics is matched only by the arrogance of assuming that only Western countries deserve sovereign control of their borders.

Last week’s Sunday Times carried two book reviews that put into perspective why some countries don’t always trust the intentions of the West. One chronicled the creation of Israel by Western powers (which, as we know, turned out peachy and everyone already living there agreed it was a good idea, well executed). The other told the story of Western governments forcing a population control agenda on the developing world, using, among other methods, forced sterilisation and contraceptives deemed too dangerous for Western women.

So pray for Burma. Pray even for regime change. But let’s not pretend they’re being completely unreasonable when they’re being justifiably cautious, and let’s not pretend that the numbers dying because of their callousness in responding badly are anywhere near those dying due to our callousness in keeping the world’s poor in chains to feed our growing bellies and taste for stuff. There is a plank in the eye of the resource-devouring West and Christians here have a duty not to ignore it if we’re to do our duty of pointing out the terrible, brutal speck in the eye of our country’s enemies.

Josh Wilson: ‘Trying to fit the ocean in a cup’ review up

New review up. Josh Wilson and his soundtrack to the summer for rich white kids: a waste of time or something deeper lurking?

Click here to read more.

Terrorists for peace

The world’s most famous terrorist may be forgiven. No, not Osama. Mandela. News last week revealed that Nelson Mandela might be removed from a US official list of terrorists whose travel to the US is severely restricted, only about eighteen years after those mamby-pamby liberals in the Apartheid government removed him from theirs. Any moment now they’ll remove Mother Theresa from their ‘most wanted’ list and un-ban the dangerous anti-capitalist movement known as the Order of Friars Minor (sympathisers call them Franciscan monks).

As the US Congress debated whether to remove Mr Mandela and the ANC (the only democratically elected party in South Africa’s history) from the terrorism list, I’m pretty sure former members of the Apartheid government had no trouble travelling to the USA, being on no such list.

This raises important questions, but, sadly, I’m unsure we Christians are ready to ask, never mind answer them. We are called to follow the Good Shepherd, but we are not, I think, called to be mindless sheep, conformed to and unquestioning of the political assumptions of the society we live in. Yet can we honestly say we resist the temptation to side with the most popular, the most powerful, the strongest opinion in society?

If we don’t, it’s forgivable. The rich and powerful are very good at letting only one side of any story be told. Many Germans were apparently unaware of the death camps until after the Second World War. Many white South Africans were so propagandised that they never questioned Apartheid’s ethics. British slave-owners assumed their right to own human beings. And Christians were among all three of these groups.

We are obviously not so conformed as to think Mr Mandela is a terrorist (though, it is no longer in anyone’s interests to say so, so we shouldn’t be too proud). But what of the man recently imprisoned here for supporting terrorists financially? Where do we stand on that? The Tamil Tigers, who he supported, are guilty of many terrible crimes, of course. But, then, so are their enemies, the Sri Lankan government, if Human Rights Watch is to be believed. It’s certainly not illegal to support them.

There is a fine line between terrorist and freedom fighter. And I’ll be honest with you: I am deeply conflicted about the use of violence against injustice. I empathise deeply with the frustrations of oppressed peoples, but I can also never see Jesus picking up a gun and shooting someone.

The broad definition of terrorism, according to the American government, is ‘the calculated threat or use of violence with the aim of intimidating and provoking fear and damage in order to achieve political, religious, ideological and other goals, typically directed against civilian populations.’ Nelson Mandela did that. But then so did the UK as we bombed Afghanistan in 2001 (and said publicly that we would continue until the population gave up Osama). Former Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, was himself head of a terrorist group (LEHI) that killed Brits, Arabs and Jews in Palestine as part of their struggle for freedom from occupation – does that sound familiar?

Terrorism does not cease to be terrorism just because you won the Peace Prize, but we put it into context. We seem to be very willing to do that with some agents of terror and less so with others. Are our reasons any different from those who do not serve the Living God? Terrorism is still terrorism if you use fighter jets instead of Molotov cocktails and bomb-vests. Christians should always see violence against civilians as a heinous crime and tragedy, but we should also be aware that there may be more Mandelas out there than we have been led to believe.

This is a pretty important issue for all of us, so i ask that you take into account the analysis Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Noam Chomsky in the video and links below. (please ignore the silly conspiracy stuff at the end of the video. One can’t control who posts this stuff on YouTube and what they tack onto the end of lectures.)

Some rather thought-provoking links on terrorism:

Amnesty International lecture on the War on Terror — Noam Chomsky

On the Afghanistan War, American Terrorism, and the Role of Intellectuals — Noam Chomsky interviewed by Suzy Hansen

International Terrorism: Image and Reality — Noam Chomsky

Jonathan Langley = Slacker

Okay so I have been outrageously slack in updating this blog since January.

I have said 200,000 Hail Maries, bleached my hair (and eyes) to look like that guy from The Da Vinci Code and will now try to make ammends. By killing Tom Hanks. And uploading some columns.

below should be some new ones.

Many sorrynesses.

Jonty