Is Britain leftist? Ask a postman.

from socialistworker.co.uk

We’ve won! The Lefties and pinko liberals have finally taken over. You could tell by the reaction, last week, to the news that BNP chief-wizard, Nick Griffin, was going to appear on Question Time. Beyond the predictable lefty activist reactions, ordinary, mainstream people actually got involved. And properly freaked out. Radio phone-ins, blogs, newspaper columns and office coffee-points resounded to the sound of otherwise apolitical middle-classers denouncing the BNP in ways that made Joe Public sound suspiciously like George Galloway.

But never fear, oh conservative (or, indeed, Conservative) reader. Britain has not descended into liberalism or fallen into the arms of Marxist ideology. The vision of leftism sweeping the nation last week was just a mirage, a conscience-salving display by a populace that, like a grown-up hippie with a mortgage, likes to think of itself as a bit of a lefty more than actually behaving like one.

Because just as left-leaning newspapers produced posters making fun of how small Nick Griffin’s brain is (embarrassing) and right-leaning tabloids denounced his racism (hypocritical), the nation’s media showed its true political colours while covering last week’s strike action by Royal Mail staff in the Communication Workers Union – and those colours were not varying shades of red. Ordinarily impartial interviewers took for granted the belief that strike action in itself is a damaging, unreasonable and negative phenomenon. Otherwise intelligent commentators with a sense of proportion referred to their having to wait a week for internet hardware (delayed by the strike) as ordinary people’s ‘suffering’. And perhaps most remarkable of all, the Tories and Labour seemed to be pretty much on the same side: in opposition to the strikers.

Photo from socialistunity.com

The question is: why? It’s not like the nation has been crippled by strike after strike, causing constant upheaval to our lives. Royal Mail workers are not the bullies in this situation, either. They are overworked and facing privatisation (disguised as ‘modernisation’) which always means job-losses and a worse deal for both workers and consumers. The only power they have is in acting together. It’s not like the claims of government ministers and Royal Mail bosses of falling mail volumes are true (an excellent exposé of unilateral adjustments of figures and fiddling of statistics by bosses was published a week or two back in the London Review of Books and makes for fascinating reading) or even logical (can you say eBay? Amazon? Junk mail? Post ‘sent’ by ‘outside contractors’ that’s still ultimately delivered by Royal Mail posties?) It is just that the zeitgeist at the moment is pretty right-wing when it comes to strikers.

The reasons why could be debated in a whole book. But whether they are our sense of entitlement (outraged whenever we are even slightly put out), our culture’s hostility to those who seem ‘too political’ (as if that could somehow be a bad thing in a democracy) or just our subconscious belief that ‘the workers’ should be glad for whatever they get, because ‘beggars can’t be choosers’, Christians have a choice. We can go with the flow, side with the spirit of the present moment and accept, uncritically, the attitudes and viewpoints in which we are immersed. Or we can think for ourselves, applying God’s values, rather than those of the market or our privileged class, to issues in the news – hopefully siding with justice, mercy and the poor, rather than the forces of selfishness and expediency.

This originally appeared in The Baptist Times, under a different title.

Here’s a lovely video by Die Krupps about making a choice against fascism:

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a bastard with a lawfirm!

from http://rainbowwarrior2005.wordpress.com

Well, someone had to shut them up. MPs, I mean. The sound of their whining complaints about getting letters telling them to pay back expenses was distressing dogs for miles round Parliament. But the manner in which they were eventually shut up last week was, not to put too fine a point on it, evil.

They were shut up by a ‘super-injunction’, a kind of ultimate gagging order which demands that not only do you not talk about some forbidden subject, but you’re also forbidden to talk about the fact you’re forbidden. Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with their expenses.

The super-injunction was intended to stop members of the public hearing from MPs, though. Just not about themselves. It was filed by a law firm called Carter-Ruck against the Guardian (and all other media in the country), preventing them from reporting on (or reporting on the fact they were not allowed to report on) a question in parliament about how an oil company had dumped oil waste on the Ivory Coast, causing untold health hazards to the poor people living there. Oil traders Trafigura and Carter-Ruck effectively tried to silence Parliament on an issue of human rights. And for a short while they got away with it.

This obviously reaffirms the fact that you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that global capitalism kills ordinary people and tries to control our politics and media (you don’t need ‘Illuminati’ when you have old-fashioned greed), but it also reaffirms that parliament is important.

Which flies a little in the face of much of the news last week. Now don’t get me wrong. I think the MPs who were vociferously complaining last week are in need of a jolly good hiding. Possibly a public hiding. Cries of ‘getting this letter made me feel like a criminal’ will get nothing but a deeply ironic ‘boo-hoo, diddums’ from me until those same MPs do something about racially-profiled stop-and-searches taken out on ordinary, non-criminal citizens every day. Objections that ‘the relevant authorities okayed it, so I am not going to pay it back’ will find me and others metaphorically spitting on them unless those MPs change the system where over-paid tax-credits to poor families have to be paid back regardless of whether ‘relevant authorities’ made the mistake.

Some MPs clearly need to grow up and realise that they are citizens in a democracy, not special little princesses. But despite what many newspapers have said, they are not fat-cats either. Yes, they earn more than enough to be able to pay for their own bloody gardening as far as I’m concerned. But they are not bankers and they are not Royal Mail bosses (similarly-whiney in the face of their own immensely undeserved privilege and wealth though they may be.)

That said, the job they do is special. Because it’s in our name. And when it comes to doing that job, gags on what the press may report are just plain wrong because they threaten our ability as citizens to make informed decisions about what our government should do, threatening the very core of democracy itself.

Of course, if a minority of MPs keep moaning unreasonably and the media keep reporting the story as if they were a majority, then the general public is likely to become so disenchanted with politics that soon people like Carter-Ruck and Trafigura may not even need injunctions, super or otherwise.

This first appeared in the Baptist Times in October 2009,under a different title.

At least it wasn’t Homer

From Chinadaily.com

Marge Simpson ‘posed nude’ for Playboy Magazine last week. Sounds like spoof news from The Onion or Daily Mash, I know. But much of last week’s news had a spoofy flavour. Like Prince Philip ranting, in classic grumpy old man fashion, that ‘you practically have to make love to’ TV remote controls in order to get them to work, and NASA ‘bombing’ the moon.

Actually, Mrs Simpson (née Bouvier), one of the lead characters on TV’s longest-running sitcom (and a cartoon) did not ‘pose nude’ as the Telegraph (and Independent) said – the ‘photoshoot’ only contains ‘implied nudity’; and NASA did not ‘bomb’ the moon (the Telegraph and others again), just crashed a rocket into it in search of ice.

Obviously, newspapers using misleading words to make stories more interesting is about as surprising as the fact that Prince Philip really did say that stuff about remotes. And when we’re misled about cartoons (who, let’s face it, are no Jessica Rabbit), it probably doesn’t matter. But when it’s about the Archbishop of Canterbury and the war in Iraq, it does.

Last week, The Sun ran a story that claimed: ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday hijacked a service honouring the sacrifice of British troops in Iraq – to spout an anti-war rant.’ And that sounds awful, doesn’t it? But it’s not true. Or at least, only as true as Marge posing nude, judging by The Sun’s own quotes.

The Archbishop ‘hijacked’ the proceedings by being their main preacher. Which is like saying David Cameron ‘hijacked’ the recent conference in Manchester with an attack on Labour.

From getreligion.org

And his disgusting ‘anti-war rant’? It included this venom: ‘Reflecting on the years of the Iraq campaign, we cannot say that no mistakes were ever made.’ Shocking, I know. He also suggested that we should think more carefully the next time we were asked to send young people to die. Which is crazy, right? I mean, as I’m sure The Sun would agree, give them better equipment, but don’t think too hard about starting wars. It is far less dramatic.

The Sun’s story not only suggested that the content of the speech was inappropriate for an occasion where our troops’ sacrifice was honoured, it suggested that to make such a point at all was disrespectful to those who’d died. And this is an argument and an attitude that is trotted out all too often when nations have been at war.

But, would German citizens have been wrong in 1939 to question whether it was right to send their young men to die for their Fuhrer? Were the veterans of the Vietnam ‘police action’ who bitterly protested the continuing war being disloyal to their living and fallen comrades? No. Because if young men and women are going to die serving a country they have committed to obey, it is up to those of us who are safe at home, not facing the danger they face, to make sure that they are not being sacrificed for nothing, or for goals that are far from righteous.

When the patriot Rudyard Kipling wrote, in 1918: ‘If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied,’ he expressed something that is too often still true today. That truth is most relevant when we honour the fallen. Pretending that is not the case or refusing at least to ask the question is not something that any Christian should be comfortable with. Regardless of what any paper says.

And, yeah, here’s who i would have picked:

Asda and arms-dealers

From Greenpeace.org.uk

ASDA nearly killed me last week. True story. I was driving to work, listening to Radio 4, when an Asda representative ‘revealed’ that he suspected that people didn’t seem to trust big businesses anymore. I laughed so hard I nearly drove into the Thames. Really, mister British representative of one of the most reviled and hated corporations in the world? You think?

Asda’s parent company in America, Walmart, came third in Corporate Accountability International’s Corporate Hall of Shame list of most irresponsible businesses in the world last year (just behind mercenary corporation Blackwater and the world’s leading rainforest destroyer). When a corporation rated less ethical than Nestle by consumers starts talking about restoring trust, that is sort of like the Conservative Party bemoaning the demise of Trades Unions.

The thing is, while supermarkets are particularly damaging to society (their size and structure drive down wages and make it very hard to compete with them if you are an independent store, as the Competition Commission amusingly ruled last week) it is not because the people running them are evil. It is not even, despite what my Marxist agitator friends might say, because the people who own them are evil. It’s because their structure and the category of organisation they fit into carries inside it the potential for great evil. Because they are corporations.

They exist to make profits. Their priority is growth, even if that growth is environmentally unrealistic or damaging to society, because corporations do not worship Jesus and they don’t worship Satan, they worship Mammon.

In pursuit of lower costs, they will cut wages and pollute the earth, because neither people nor the environment show up on their balance sheets. They will even break the law, as we saw last week as BAE systems was facing fines of up to £1bn for paying bribes to support their business around the world. Such a fine is to be welcomed, but it is only the first step.

Corporations play a massive role in our society and it is only a severely idealistic leftist who believes that can change any time soon. But if they are so inherent to our society then they must be brought back under our control.

A ‘corporate person‘ (for that is what corporations are, under law) that commits crimes again and again should not just be fined any more than human recidivists should be allowed to simply buy their way out of justice. It should be incarcerated, its assets nationalised or handed over to competitors on the understanding that if they break the law (and laws must be made with ordinary citizens, not corporate bottom lines, in mind), they too will be ‘executed’.

Of course, the huge, putrefying dead elephant in the room during discussions of this story is that BAE, the UK’s largest manufacturer, is an arms-manufacturer. They make weapons. To kill people.

The British government is blessed to live in a world so hypocritical that Libya (not even in the top 20 of arms exporters) faces a righteous campaign for restitution from the victims of its weapons, while Britain (the world’s seventh largest arms exporter) does not. Christians need to speak out when businesses harm people (and applaud strong judgements against them). But we also need sometimes to evaluate what those businesses do, even when they are not breaking the law, and speak out prophetically against that too.

Here’s a trailer for a movie about Asda’s parent company. You should really also watch The Corporation, tho.

Jordan and Obama: Exclusive Pictures!

From the Telegraph, ironically

‘Big, fat, hairy deal.’ That’s not a quote from the papers last week about G20 leaders capping bankers’ bonuses. Mainly because newspapers are not Garfield, but also because the media have, with the help of patrons like Rupert Murdoch, overcome their silly obsession with truth and replaced it with a far healthier obsession with celebrities, trivia, mindless anger and breasts. Sometimes all at once.

Big issues, questions of truth, and (the primary justification for press freedom) holding the powerful to account – giving citizens the information they need to vote intelligently – these things are either ignored or simplified into soundbite irrelevance. They are not as interesting, apparently, as the ‘he-said, she-said’ high-school melodrama that passed for news last week over whether Obama and Brown are ‘still in love’.

No, in today’s media, personalities trump policies and celebrity break-ups, boob-jobs and binge-sessions beat examinations of our society’s core values almost every time, so why would the press identify the G20 news as a red herring?

After all, when a radio show in which the most serious issues of the day are given a maximum of five minutes’ coverage is the flagship of thorough engagement with thought-provoking issues and no-one thinks that’s shallow, we’re in a bad way.

And let’s be fair: the media may well have stooped to a low level, but it was our level, after all. We buy, watch and listen to this rubbish, avoiding anything serious that cannot be reduced to a one-sentence quote or a caricature polemic and then act startled when that is the majority of even what serious media outlets produce.

You can only chuckle so long at how hateful the Daily Mail is before you have to actually decide never to buy it again, no matter how good the free DVD is. Women can only complain so many times of being treated like airheads before they really have to reconsider ever buying Cosmo or other such drivel again. We can only claim, as Christians, to care about the world, if the media we consume cover something other than the exclusively Christian ‘world’ of worship leaders, female minister debates and the latest charismatic controversy.

Because if my favourite magazine is either a glorified gadget catalogue or a publicity brochure (complete with reviews) for Hollywood or the music industry, I am not helping. If it’s a buyers’-guide to what new cosmetics and new clothes (they must always be new, the GDP and animal testing labs around the world depend on it) will make you less of a failure as a woman, you are not helping. If the paper we habitually buy is more concerned with Jordan the glamour model than Jordan the home of the terrorist captured in America last week, then we are part of the problem.

The papers and media, in their role as our watchdogs and our voice should have said of the bonuses issue, not just occasionally, but in big, bold, Maddy-level letters, followed up by pages of argument and real investigation: ‘This is not enough. This entire system is rotten. You are just throwing us a bone, not changing anything. You’re about to cut public spending on human beings in order to buy WMDs. We can see what you’re doing and we won’t stand for it. We’re not idiots.’

But they didn’t. And we sit placidly by. So we probably are.

Here’s a bit from Jon Stewart’s America, which you should either read or listen to, about the Media. Funny but not clean 🙂

Henman shoots fan

From the Telegraph

With the highest death-rate of any sport, you’d think it was dangerous enough without cheating. But some adrenalin-junkies just don’t know where the line is, do they? Yes, the high-profile, high-stakes world of Lawn Bowls was rocked (or rolled) last week by allegations of match-fixing. I can’t really back up the ‘death-rate’ thing, by the way. It’s just something my grandfather (a keen bowler into his 80s) suggested to me while telling me about friends who shuffled off this mortal coil as they shuffled onto the green. But the match-fixing scandal is very real. The New Zealand national team has been accused of deliberately losing to Thailand (rather than playing for a Thai, ba-boom.)

And this comes after a number of sex-scandals (or, specifically, ‘gender scandals’) in athletics, an apparently deliberate motor-crash in Formula One, and a rugby player going all Bella Lugosi with fake blood recently (he was no-doubt punished because if you can’t rustle up some real blood in rugby, of all games, you’re probably not fit to play at club level).

With recent news of Serena Williams threatening to kill a line judge (I swear I’m not making this up), one assumes that it is only a matter of time before Linvoy Primus punches a referee in the face and Kaka murders a nun for drug-money.

from actsport.com.au

Personally, I am delighted by all this news. Mainly because it takes some of the heat off the world of music for a while. And while I don’t give a bunny’s bum about sport, music is something I care about. And now Eminem, Marilyn Manson, and (depending on just how out of touch the moral crusaders in your church are) Michael Jackson can breathe a sigh of relief (well, most of them can), knowing that they will not, for a while at least, be scapegoats. Sports stars will.

Whenever sporting celebrities are caught doing things they shouldn’t I am puzzled by the public reaction. If a professional tennis player tests positive for marijuana, he could be banned from competing, even though I’m pretty sure, judging by the Cheech and Chong films I’ve seen and the slow-moving stoners I’ve known, that the drug could hardly be described as ‘performance-enhancing’. The hypothetical ‘grass-specialist’ would be punished, as some in Athletics have been, for ‘setting a bad example,’ particularly to children.

The term ‘role model’ is bandied about a lot in such discussions, but I want to say that if we’re looking to people whose major achievements in life revolve around strength, stamina and coordination to be our ideals for morality, that seems a little like asking bikini models to inspire the scientific community or Jeremy Clarkson to teach us about politics. Sure, it may sometimes work, but it’s a little silly to expect it to. Not to mention unfair. Like denouncing high salaries for footballers without denouncing the salaries of executives.

The last people in the world who should buy into the ‘sportsmen and women should be good role-models for our kids’ nonsense are Christians. We know that no human but Christ is perfect, we know that all have sinned and we know that prophets and teachers of God’s truth often turn up in unexpected forms. We should be the first to explain to children that sportspeople are just people, and we should be the first to cut them some slack when they fail and fall.

Paranoid vs prophetic

‘Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts,’ William S Burroughs said. Of course, that’s what a paranoid person would say. But I think it’s true in the case of a view I happen to hold.

The view, expressed many times by politicians, charities and justice campaigners over the least few decades, is that corporate wealth and power dominates and distorts the democratic process.

It’s called paranoid (usually by fans of the status quo, Conservative politicians and those working for wealthy, powerful corporations), but last week’s news highlighted its veracity.

In a discussion with Alistair Darling over whether G20 finance heads should radically limit potential bonuses in The City, the central question was the influence banks and bankers wield. If we threaten to crack down on banks and bankers too hard, won’t banks and bankers leave Britain? This is something that clearly frightened the Chancellor. Jim Naughtie rightly asked the question: ‘Do financial institutions in this country have too much influence?’

photo from Guardian

When we consider that the public, to whom a democratic government is responsible, is being ignored in its desire to see banks and bankers brought in line, in favour of keeping banks and their shareholders happy (as we’ve seen so many times before when the subject of taxing large corporates has cropped up); then the answer to Naughtie’s question is clearly: ‘Yes.’

What kind of mafioso-style hold does the banking sector have over Westminster, that it can fail catastrophically, threatening the entire society with collapse, and the response of a supposedly left-leaning government is to allow those responsible not only to retain their liberty and profits, but also control of the economy?

If the nation’s citizens have saved these banks, why are they still effectively privately owned? Why, indeed, are they oriented towards making profits at all, if their most important function to the UK is providing employment and safeguarding savings? Surely a large nationalised bank (or ‘banks’ for those who still believe in the illusory ‘power of competition’), operating in the interests of ordinary citizens, its clients, rather than making profits for shareholders or bonus-huffing City glory-boys would be a better idea? Surely it would be a more democratic idea?

But that’s not how our society rolls. All three of our major parties still campaign for economic growth while pretending to care about the climate change that is the necessary result of that devotion to growth. All three parties fear and cow-tow to large financial institutions and rich individuals while professing a belief in democracy, which sees no difference between the rich and the poor citizen. Despite the opportunity for radical change afforded by the obvious failure at a practical level of the system of capitalism (which was always defended as being practically valuable if morally suspect), all three parties have done nothing since the crisis began but try to tinker with a machine that is not just fundamentally broken, but actually dangerous when functioning correctly.

Calls are often made for Christians to get involved in politics at a party level. I have made them myself. But I want to say that if Christian politicians are not speaking out like Amos against this ‘shadow cast on society by big business’ (as John Dewey described the mammon-worshipping politics of the 20^th Century) and making every effort to oppose it, then they needn’t bother. They are part of the problem. It’s not a conspiracy, just a failure to be prophetic.

Powell to the people?

Enoch Powell: Was he: A) A dangerous bigot and blot on the history of the Conservative Party? Or B) A bit of a hero?

To answer ‘B’, you have to one of those people who think it was a mistake to intern British fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, during WWII. Or a regular reader of The Daily Mail. Or Daniel Hannan.

Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP, who last week, on American TV, cited Enoch ‘rivers of blood’ Powell as one of his political heroes.

In the American context, that would be like praising Strom Thurmond, a symbol of America’s struggle against civil rights and for segregation of the races. In Britain, Powell’s name carries similar baggage, and while there may be aspects of his politics or career that were untouched by racism, praising him (let alone calling him a ‘hero’) sends as clear a message as a Communist who praises Stalin for his agrarian policies or a Cambodian who thinks Pol Pot was a snappy dresser. No unlobotomised British politician could fail to see what praising him suggests.

The point is that even though America may have missed the significance of the remark, we should not.

The reason we should not ignore the remark is because Mr Hannan represents Britain in the European Parliament and he represents a political party that is widely tipped to win the next election. What he says and how he is treated for saying it by his superiors should be of concern to us. A few weeks before praising Enoch Powell, Daniel Hannan was also in the American media, this time attacking the NHS, calling it ‘a 60 year mistake’.

At the time, David Cameron distanced himself from the comment, calling Hannan ‘eccentric’.

And the fact that Hannan has not been punished or even reprimanded by the Conservative Party at the time I write this makes me wonder about the polls that show the Tories in the lead in public opinion. Labour has certainly made gross and disgusting errors during its time in power. So many, in fact, that many disillusioned leftists, liberals and citizens concerned with the social justice that Labour has traditionally fought for have deserted the party and are dismissive of its politicians as hypocrites, liars, and, worst of all from their perspective, Tories.

In many ways, unfortunately, they are right. But is the answer, for a liberal, to vote for a party that has many of the same faults you despise in New Labour, just amplified? Is the answer, for a Christian who is more concerned for the lives of the poor in Asia and Africa than the bankers Gordon Brown has supported rather than punished, to vote for a party that has consistently decreased the UK’s international aid budget and whose members don’t see international development as important?

Who do we vote for when none of the three main parties are even considering a platform of zero economic growth (essential, many academics believe, if we are to combat climate change and the worst excesses of unfair trade)?

I refuse to believe that the answer lies in doing nothing and absenting ourselves from politics to pray in a corner. If party politics is how decisions are made, then that is what we must get involved with, denouncing racism, a lack of concern for the poor and unjust wars as we go, in whatever party we support.

I know who i’m not going to vote for.

Americans, conservatives and shouting about God

Al Megrahi. From the Telegraph

Americans hate me.

well, not all Americans. But some of them, I think. The good people at Associated Baptist Press don’t hate me (though neither they nor their publishers necessarily share my views or the views quoted in my columns etc etc…), but some of their readers probably have a healthy distrust of my views.

In a week when we’ve heard about the resurfacing of a woman abducted and abused for many years by the worst kind of psychopaths, it’s a tough time to plead for mercy as I did in my Lockerbie column below. But I stand by what I said. If a man has served several decades in prison, he has not ‘escaped justice’. Just because mercy comes as a result of a flawed process, that does not make it any less valuable to its recipient. And a terminally ill, internationally infamous man does not pose a threat in any significant sense.

There were probably many good reasons to stone the woman caught in adultery, according not only to the social norms of the day, but the laws of God as understood in those days. But there were better reasons not to. I just think we Christians need to be careful of inadvertently becoming part of the mob baying for blood. Even if we feel right.

This is not, as some might think, the exclusive province of the Left or Right, however much our personal politics would have us believe that. Well-meaning leftists may call for death to bankers or arms-dealers as much as right-wingers might demand ‘the chair’ for terror suspects.

Jesus confounds both. He annoys what we might call the ‘Right’  (people who place a high premium on ‘doing things right’, on decency, on rules, on people making their own, self-reliant way and the strong being in charge for a reason) by being lax about the Sabbath, being soft on crime and ostensibly opposing ‘family values’.  Then, he goes to the house of a proper collaborator with the Romans, someone who was so deep in bed with an oppressive occupying force that any liberal worth their salt would have to freak out and call Amnesty International, just to get their bearings. He heals the child of an occupying soldier, thereby alienating anyone from the ‘Left’ (we who are not afraid or ashamed of weakness; we who are willing to cede power to an authority that does good, we that at the same time think personal moral freedom is sacred and who really don’t trust people who carry weapons or invade countries). He refuses to take sides along the lines we have drawn.

This, of course, does not mean that certain actions or opinions are neither right nor wrong. It just means deominsing ‘the other side’ is not a good enough reason to call for blood.

from jennabarney.blogspot.com

I like the story of Elijah waiting for God to pass by, as it was told to me in church recently. Elijah, the great prophet of God is terrified, because people are trying to kill him. God promises to appear to him and the result is terrifying. A terrible, storming wind, a fire, an earth-quake all take place and God is in none of them. Then God talks in a whisper, as if saying to the fire and brimstone prophet: you communicate me in such violent, aggressive ways, and to be sure I have that power and that authority. But this is where I am: in the gentle words, in the quiet authority.

(Of course, what follows is quite a lot of killing of Elijah’s enemies, which it would be too cozy to ignore, but that does not mean we get to decide when that’s okay.)

Point is: we should all stop shouting, okay? And by ‘we’ I guess I probably mean ‘me’. Nice.

Here’s a cute video that this post reminded me of. It features one of my favourite Americans and one of my favourite Brits:

Lockerbie: Terror and Compassion

Terror and compassion

Convenient. That’s what the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was, last week. Not just for the terminally-ill Libyan, convicted of the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, but for BP, Marks and Spencer, Shell and several other British companies who stand to make a lot of money from trade deals with Libya that are now more likely to go ahead.

Vast numbers of pundits, from anti-corporate lefties to President Obama (and the usual right-wing tabloid outrage-mongers) have criticized the move. But some (including Britain’s most decorated foreign correspondent, Robert Fisk, who believes Megrahi was released to save Britain the embarrassment of an appeal) have cast doubts on whether Megrahi was ever guilty.

But if we are going to invoke the importance of the rule of law and legal process in declaring that irrelevant in discussing his release, then we must accept that freeing or transferring prisoners on compassionate grounds is perfectly legal under Scottish law and Megrahi was eminently eligible for such compassion.

But was the compassion moral? Personally, I believe that those who serve a God of mercy should also show mercy (there are so many verses that support this view that the Bible itself must be profoundly embarrassing to Christians who oppose it.) But the mercy here is not even the peculiarly Christian mercy of radical forgiveness. It’s not like he was just found guilty and Britain has said ‘ah…bygones..’ and set him free. He is dying, after serving over twenty years in prison, and he wants to die in his own country. Surely even those Christians who find it hard to obey Christ in loving their enemies could stretch their under-exercised mercy at least that far?

‘But what,’ asked many critics last week, ‘about the families of those lost at Lockerbie?’ How would they have felt about the hero’s welcome Megrahi received? Angry and upset, and legitimately so. Particularly because many of those greeting Megrahi as a hero will not have assumed him an innocent victim of a miscarriage of justice, but a victorious military hero. This is undoubtedly wrong.

But ask yourself this: If you were the mother or brother of a civilian killed by British or American forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, how would you feel about the honours bestowed on our soldiers when they come home? How do the families of those killed on Iran Air flight 655 in 1988 feel about the American military man responsible (Captain William C Rogers) not only walking free, but training other military personnel in combat?

If our objections to such an argument centre on the difference between war and terrorism, I would say that such a distinction really depends on which side you’re on. The guerilla tactics used by Americans against Britain in 1776, by the Boers in South Africa in 1899 and by Jews in Palestine (also against Britain) in 1945 could all be termed ‘terrorist’ inasmuch as the term is applied to Afghans fighting foreigners on their soil today. But to the families of civilians killed, I suspect it doesn’t matter much who did it or what you call it. And I’m not sure God is that concerned with our semantics as to whether we are legally ‘at war’ or not, either.

Does that make Megrahi’s welcome less upsetting and more acceptable? No. But we run a serious risk of Godless hypocrisy when we fête our own side’s soldiers as heroes when they slaughter civilians (whether in Dresden, 1945 or Khanabad, 2001) and denounce others for the same myopic and worldly attitudes. Every civilian death, whether ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’ should for Christians be cause for mourning, self-examination and, sometimes, repentance. May God have mercy on us all.