Tag: politics

all you need is love

Love

Everyone needs love. Everyone without exception. So why is there so much fear around and so little love? Let’s look to our leaders.

Come election time they’re full of love. They love babies, especially if there’s a camera around. They love Jesus but precious few of them follow his humble example. They love their country but they rarely leave their privileged lives to join the common folk in defending it. They love the planet but the millionaire class they belong to continues to rape it for profit.

Millionaire class? Yes. Most American lawmakers are at least 12 to 18 times wealthier than most of the citizens they represent. The position is much the same in Britain, France, the world over. Don’t believe me? Then let Google be your friend. Our politicians’ love of their constituents doesn’t come cheap.

Now hate, that’s altogether different. Our leaders are very good at hate. They’ll whip up hate against anyone and anything that threatens the status quo. Strip away the economic gobbledygook and the moral hogwash and their isms amount to little more than keeping themselves and their powerful pals in charge and the rest of us in our place.

And we are so easily kept. A terrorist incident or two ratcheted to the max by their media-owning friends and we are only too willing to accept yet more surveillance, more erosion of freedom, more control. Meanwhile the same media pumps out an endless stream of perfect images of imperfect celebs to keep us believing that impossible dream. Throw in a few mega-rich preachers to lend the Almighty’s authority to their morally vacuous politics and it’s job done. In his song ‘Working Class Hero’, John Lennon put it better:

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free,
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see

We live in a world divided by race, state, class, and anything else the hatemongers can think of. From birth to death the majority of us are told what to do and when to do it. Who to trust and who to hate. What to think and when to keep our mouths shut. If you doubt this then try stepping out of line a few times instead of kissing arse as part of your daily diet.

Like any other commodity our worth is our weight in imaginary dollars. If this was not the case no civilised country would permit homelessness and hungry children. Not surprisingly then that we pursue self over selfless, I over I&I, and profit over everything. Love hardly gets a look in but fear is everywhere.

Now here’s the hippy-dippy bit so feel free to mock as you wish.

I believe that love is the default state for human beings but that we are taught to hate.

So, incidently, did Oscar Hammerstein II, the lyricist of ‘South Pacific’:

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

And so did a Nazerine who, when you look beyond the sophistory spouted in his name, was a simple man unafraid and unashamed to stand with the poor and the powerless against those who sought to exploit them.

From the Roman Empire to the American Empire and all the empires in between the rich and powerful have sought to pervert and ridicule the simple notion of universal love, the final commandment to love one another. For they know only too well that if we learn not to hate and not to fear we might just find the courage to take their power away.

Love is all you need.

apology

“Chinese people in the UK say they are facing increasing levels of racist abuse – and some have had “coronavirus” shouted at them in the street.

One Chinese community group in Birmingham received a Facebook message that said: “The disgusting, barbaric animal cruelty you people do – you all deserve to get the virus.”

Chinese students in Cardiff have told Sky News they have faced abuse while walking to their lectures.”

Sky News

The UK was never the shining beacon of racial tolerance that some would have you believe but in recent years the rise of nationalism has helped embolden our otherwise cowardly racists.

We can all understand people’s concern about the coronavirus virus outbreak but to use it as an excuse for racial abuse is totally unacceptable.

The supposedly intelligent students of Cardiff who indulge in such racism should be doubly ashamed, except of course that shame is not a component of the racist mindset.

The majority of Britons are not racist, we are sorry that some of us are.

jews and goys

My first school was a Jewish school, just round the corner from the East London Synagogue. Only a handful of goys attended. I sat next to an olive-skinned girl called Sharon. Neither of us knew what a Jew or a goy was or wasn’t.

My mother and me lived in one room in a slightly bomb damaged house otherwise occupied by Eastern European refugees who’d fled the persecution of World War II. Upstairs a fat women called Irene provided paid services for lonely gentlemen. She was not a Jew either

I had an ‘auntie’ Flo and an ‘uncle’ Israel, and three kittens that went blind from an unknown cause. Auntie Flo had a big voice and a mountain of red candy-floss hair. Uncle Izzy was a squat little man, almost a troll, but with a heart as big as a house. Both fed the children of the square on demand with tastes still to be surpassed, goy and Jew alike. I can still taste Izzy’s baked chicken and tomato rice and feel Auntie Flo’s warm embrace.

By age ten the community had dispersed. Jews to other Jews, supplanted without a trace of irony by poor immigrant Muslims, while we state-dependent goys, without the benefit of tradition and identity, to whatever public housing scheme the government allocated. But for the purchase of two jam doughnuts from a famous and fabulous Jewish bakers in Whitechapel Road our paths were not to cross again.

Until…

… decades later I am on an American cruise ship bound for St Petersburg, Russia. My wife and me take our place at dinner and are joined by a couple, the male of which by way of introduction proclaims loudly:

“I am a Jew and we are from Australia“.

Slightly nonplussed (are Jews so rare in Oz that it warrants an announcement?)

I reply simply, “I am not”.

This is not well met by our Aussie dinner companion who continues to insist that he is a Jew from Australia seemingly expecting an appropriate response. (Does he think I’m a Mossad agent who’s forgotten the secret codeword?)

In an effort to lighten the mood I attempt a weak joke about which of us murdered Jesus but dinner continues as dourly as it began. Utterly baffled, we rush dessert and depart, thankfully never to meet them again.

——————————

I am now an anti-Semite. Not that my affections have changed or because of my experience of half-mad Australians. Not by choice. But because the New Right whose influence is now grossly over represented in England have labelled me as such and anyone else who doesn’t nod along with every squawk and action by the state of Israel.

Goys will be goys, I guess.

fuxit

These people have spent their weekend celebrating Britain’s exit from the European Union. They don’t care that they or their children won’t gain by a single penny from Brexit, or that not a shilling will trickle down from the millionaires and billionaires who will. Waving flags and singing patriotic songs about a long dead empire is enough. If they were American they would cheer for Trump.

On Monday they will return to the mundanity of their humdrum lives while their beloved sceptered isle continues to spin around an insignificant speck of buggerall lost in a galaxy just one of billions.

This land gave humankind William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton and the Beatles, and yet it comes as no surprise that the English and monkeys share a common ancestor.