The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
I was very ill with COVID March/April 2020, so I had good reason to study what was real and what was twaddle and what was propaganda.
It was abundantly clear by mid March that New Zealand, Vietnam, Australia's State Governments, Taiwan, Finland, Norway, China and all the other Governments and countries populations that chose the strategy of stopping the spread internally, eliminating community transmission within their jurisdictions, as well as quarantining borders to prevent importing the virus, (rather than trying to control a slow spread internally aka 'mitigation' and continuing more or less unrestricted international travel) were taking the optimal public health and economy supportive approach.
Events - actions taken and outcomes that followed - have proven that to be the case. On every measure of health, economic performance, civil liberties those countries that opted to stop the transmission of the virus in their communities have done much, much better than those that allowed the virus to spread, thinking they could somehow control the virus and protect their economies.
Anyone who denies this very simple fact is being either silly or toxic.
Denial can be silly or toxic - either way it amounts to an avoidable tragedy.
Citizen denial is just silly.
Government denial is toxic. News Media Denial is toxic.
Why not stop the spread of the virus, as a way to both prevent further fatality and disease and to avoid future lockdowns, now? People's welfare, mental health and general stress levels do much better under elimination strategy.
These are very difficult times, for everyone.
And leading into the spread of the virus, and the disease, there was a surge of chronic stress induced by a culture of acquisitive competitive 'meritocracy' grounded in free market fundamentalism exacerbated by 'Austerity' policies mandating vast cuts to social welfare, health and social care programs based on a series of outright lies about fiscal policy and fiscal possibility pre-existed the pandemic.
Allowing the virus to spread led to repeated lockdowns which added to the stress the more vulnerable among our population were dealing with. Stopping the spread, as Vietnam, New Zealand and a good number of other countries chose has demonstrably led to much better outcomes, on every available measure bar international tourism.
Why are the English Government and others wilfully ignoring the widespread evidence that is right before our eyes, the evidence that 1.8 billion people are being protected by elimination of community transmission strategy.
How could they all ignore something so blatantly real?
The UK governments, the UK Press News Media, the Labour Party front bench, The Churches, the Green Party , the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party and all broadcasters of TV and Radio refuse to bring that evidence up for detailed discussion.
What is that?
How could anyone let that slide?
This is to me where the government position is weakest.
They cannot argue all that evidence away without lying or making up stuff .
That is why they dismiss it out of hand, refuse to discuss it. They can’t handle it safely for their objective, because any acknowledgement of that evidence undermines their positions, and their policies.
Why do they dismiss Elimination of Community Transmission?
I think it is in part because doing so requires that the state resources and empowers local government to support all the people to stop the spread, to be helpful, to prioritise help for the local population to take best care of one another and that is too close to socialist practice for neoliberal free market fundamentalists to allow. That cat must remain in the bag.
How does the language of 'freedom' and 'restrictions' emerge to dominate the public discourse, that is to say the discourse published by official news media, mirrored by leading politicians and pundits. What does it seek to 'stimulate' in significant cohorts of the population?
Where the evidence leads is that stopping the spread of the virus in the community offers the best chances of freedom preserved, and allowing the virus to spread reduces all our freedoms, not least when the spread of infection runs out of control, impacting services visibly. For the English government that visibility is about optics, not people's welfare.
It's not a good look, denial.
In my view Sir Keir 'less with the evidence' Starmer is daily betraying the working class he purports to represent by not bringing that evidence up every time he sits opposite Johnson, every time he speaks to the press. He is also betraying everyone else.
Just one short sentence is all he needs to say "Elimination Strategy is working for 1.8 Billion people" and "You do know that spread is placing them at greater risk than their own governments are."
I even have a pithy slogan for him.
"Stopping the Spread is Spreading the Love!"
One breaths worth of words, at the start or end of every briefing, statement or public utterance. Such a small effort, for such a huge benefit.
Never in the field of population level health care has anyone avoided so small an effort in order to avoid so huge a benefit to so many whilst blatantly supporting a government that is causing immense deliberate harm whilst pretending to be a political opposition. Not quite as pithy as the Churchill original.
The dynamic of the slow spreader Governments, the English, Brazilian, Indian and other NeoLiberal Free Market Fundamentalist governments who for whatever reason have chosen to allow spread of the virus have literally made the virus more dangerous and the populations they govern more vulnerable on very front.
What drives that kind of policy decision making, most recently articulated by Savid Javid, the English Health Secretary, as not 'cowering before the virus'. The little bully.
"With income distribution at current levels, roughly half of the working population in both the US and the UK would be unable to survive without external help. Most people regard this as a sign that the system isn’t working properly, and they view providing the help as an intrinsic part of a civilized society.
To a market fundamentalist, though, these people are simply not worth what it costs to keep them alive. Their existence is not cost-effective, and being forced to sustain them is an unjustified burden.
Market forces, they say, are meritocratic – and the problem is that these people have too little merit.
Ira Sohn, Professor of Economics at Montclair State University, has pointed out that with technological advances, many of these people (i.e. people who have to work for a living) will no longer be needed at all:
The prospects for adopting labour-saving technologies in many of the labour-intensive sectors in the economy are improving annually: self-checkout at supermarkets, self-check-in and -out at hotels, self-ordering and bill settlement in restaurants, self-administered health diagnostic tests and so on all translate into a reduced need for workers per dollar of gross domestic product on the one hand, and fewer total workers along with higher levels of GDP on the other.
Horses were used extensively on the farm and in transport in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Europe, but once mechanization and electrification were implemented, and the railroad, automobiles and buses became commercially viable as transport alternatives, owning horses became a hobby of the rich, and the horse population declined quickly and dramatically.
The same can probably be said about humans in the 21st century: we just don’t need that many of them – and, in the rich countries, they are expensive to ‘produce’ (prenatal and postnatal care), ‘assemble’ (nurture and educate), and ‘maintain’ (from adolescence to death). As technology continues to become ever more capable and most humans, frankly, do not, there is less and less need for workers to produce the goods and services required by society.
It is a try out, as in it is a trial, as in a well-dodgy experiment based on a fallacious position - ignore known evidence and let's see what happens.
They are exacerbating matters on every front, deliberately. Worse they are taking a huge risk because we know that the virus's evolutionary pressure will find ways to escape vaccines precisely because it is allowed to spread.
And it is the spread among the vaccinated who have not yet met the virus where that evolutionary step will occur, not among the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated have already generated variants out of our various conditions. Proving that the virus can interact with different environments and make changes that increase it's ability to thrive.
Suggesting to the vaccinated that they should go out and risk contracting the infection in order to assure economic recovery is a nonsensical suggestion. The economy would be in much better shape adapted to a successful elimination of community spread strategy.
Tourism, for example, does not have to be international. There are plenty examples of tourism consumers and providers successfully adapting to the current situation, where people take their holidays more locally, putting cash back into their own economies.
All live events and hospitality industries do much, much better under elimination strategy.
Health care does much, much better under elimination strategy.
Everything that affects ordinary people's welfare, mental health and general stress levels does much better under elimination strategy.
Remember each of us is not safe until all of us are safe. This applies to this virus as it does to the matter of climate change, for example. Or poverty. Or air pollution.
Stopping the Spread is spreading the Love.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Grooming others vulnerabilities is as low as it gets, in terms of everyday abuse of power."
Johnson, and many of the people entrusted with the power to govern, are men who went to English Public Schools, all male boarding schools, where they learned early to behave in the way we are seeing them behave today. In such schools, the children are forced to learn to 'live with the un-natural situation' by denying their vulnerability. I know this from my own experience. 12 years of 'elite' Catholic Boarding Schools distorted my emotional and psychological being. It is not a normal, healthy environment for any child to grow up in.
This begs the question: are such men as they have become truly fit to Govern the shared commons for the entire population of the UK?
Boris Johnson, centre front, at Eton. Photograph: Richard Shymansky from News Syndication/Gillman & Soame UK Ltd / News Licensing
Richard Beard has written about that experience, because he too endured the English Boarding Public School system, and he has been writing about the psychological harms, all avoidable, caused in those schools and was instrumental in setting out the awareness of how this dynamic afflicts those who seek out the power to rule, and in turn how that afflicts us all.
Q: "Boris Johnson and David Cameron attended similar schools at a similar time. How do you think it shaped them?
A: (Beard) In so many ways. Almost every day I read the paper and think, yes, I recognise that. Recently, it’s the idea that you just have to live with stuff – with Covid, for example. Just as at school you just had to live with your parents leaving you behind, with the daily authoritarianism, with not going home for weeks at a time. This is a very private-school idea – you just have to live with social injustice."
The Bullingdon Club - Ruling Class Scions at Play?
In this video (see below) Prime Minister Johnson, of England publicly and brazenly implies that countries like New Zealand, Vietnam, China, Finland, Iceland and others were 'panicking' and taking 'medically irrational' action that would cause economic harm in the face of a global pandemic of the SARSCOV2 virus, and he rejects taking appropriate action. The outcome of his decision compares adversely with the outcomes in those other 'panicked' countries on every rational measure - in terms of public health, mental health, economics and civil liberties. The lack of empathy and concern for the vulnerability of the population, for whom he has taken responsibility, to this new virus is astonishing!
The evidence for this is incontrovertible. Johnsons brazen rejection of elimination of community transmission at that precise stage amounts to a deliberate, intentional conscious act of national, population level abuse. News Media has protected the Johnson misGovernment. Labour, under Starmer, has supported the Johnson misGovernment and ejected from Parliament the leading voices that might have voiced a more rational and honest opposition.
Are we learning to live with a culture of abuse. Habituation to distal power and powerlessness, poverty, war and corruption as 'part of the Human Condition', part of 'Human Nature'? Is this the 'new normal'?
Britain Is a Conquest Word.
Great always referred to the dominance of all of these Islands and their peoples by the English Ruling Oligarchy. Patriotism is an abomination, if there is poverty structured into the situation of that Nation. Patriots scream, they wail and cry' Freedom!' but they never, ever seek to abolish poverty within their territory.
The so-called United Kingdom was united by conquest, violence and guile, never by free choice of a free people. Unlike the EU. Which was chosen, by every country that joined, pretty much.
Thus it is logical the political inheritors of the conquerors, the asset owners who ruled the British Empire which conquered the Ottoman Empire during WWI and carved it up, badly, also supported the creation of the State of Israel, as a mother supports a child. Israel is a bastard child of the British Empire. Partition has long been a strategic policy imposed to impede others from making progress.
"There's horrible, horrible people floatin' about......"
Mhairi Black speaks about Westminster, the House of Commons, and the reality of what goes on in that building.
"People who you see, and ask how has no one evaluated you yet? - there's something seriously dark in that person's thinking."
Ayn Rand Fan Club?
People like Ayn Rand fan Sajid Javid who accuses people who care for others of 'cowering before the virus', people like Cyril Smith a known child molester, who remained unmolested by the Police throughout his odious reign oft terror, people like Tony Blair who lied and manipulated others to prosecute a number of lethal wars, people like George Osborne who used lies to push Austerity which caused deliberate harm to hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people like Winston Churchill who ordered Greeks who collaborated with the German Nazi invaders to attack and murder other Greeks who had fought the Germans, who wanted a democratic Greece freed from Monarchy. Churchill even paid them to do this dirty, bloody job. People like that who cause harm to others in pursuit of personal power.
Venal, cruel, adept at grooming ordinary citizens into carrying out extraordinarily cruel behaviour and murderous action.
We citizens who live here in England are ruled by a culture of professional bullies who pose as democrats, who offered up a carefully engineered toxic mime of democracy to the people, the people who had no option other than to accept that offer or face violence (Peterloo, Orgreaves, Grenfell, COVID19) - violence can present in many ways, including deliberate negligence and harassment.
Perhaps in the midst of this deliberately mismanaged epidemic, more of the English people are seeing this, if only because the steel hand has shed the velvet glove at home and the most vulnerable are being thrown under various buses.
Freedom and Opinion
The Freedom Day, and the Freedom from Tyranny March where the attendees were encouraged to identity, locate and document Health Care Professionals who were compared to Nazi Medics indicted at Nuremburg, many who were hanged, the implication that HCPs should be executed. Incitement.
Exploiting emerging vulnerability
The English Government aka The English Ruling Class are adept at exploiting every emerging vulnerability within the population they Rule over, and they are so good at it, that they can enrol enough of the vulnerable into performing actions of collective self harm whilst believing the exact opposite, inciting the gullible to go further than what would be considered rational, to act in utter confusion and cause more damage to the welfare of the shared commons, and maintain the status quo.
Take for example the way they turned a peace oriented unemployed militant working class into foolhardy warriors who would die in their hundreds of thousands, by deft use of using propaganda, in just a few short months as The Great War loomed, is a fine example of this capability.
World War 1, as it has since been named, which was a European War, it was not really a 'World War' although the British drew in working class males from across the Empire to slog it out in the bloody, shit filled, gore dressed trenches.
Fighting for Freedom, inspired by the Rulers. Freedom Day!
Learning to live with all this.
"Learning to live with....." is a song of submission.
Learning to live with Misogyny.
Learning to live with Racism.
Learning to live with Poverty.
Learning to live with Warfare.
Learning to live with Pollution.
Learning to live with Conquest.
Learning to live with Bullying.
Learning to live with Occupation and Settlement.
Learning to live with 'The Virus'.
and why not
Learning to live without Misogyny.
Learning to live without Racism.
Learning to live without Poverty.
Learning to live without Warfare.
Learning to live without Pollution.
Learning to live without Conquest.
Learning to live without Bullying.
Learning to live without Occupation and Settlement.
Learning to live without 'The Virus'?
The shutting down of self empathy that being bullied all the time can induce reduces empathy for others. To merely survive by shutting down. Taking no preventative steps.
The habituation of survival of the fittest can lead to abandoning the more vulnerable as 'weaklings'. Open up, save 'the economy', save our 'mental health', give us back our 'Freedoms'?
The accommodation to Sexism leads to suppression of the true self which is more than the perception of one's sex, which is an accident of birth rather than something one chooses. One can choose gender, as gender is a cultural perception. Culture can and does change.
The acceptance that the poor will always be with us is submission to the unjust concentration of both Wealth and Power as 'normal' part of the human condition. It is no such thing.
And something within my being rejects all those submissions, all those accommodations even though I do understand that these are coping mechanisms, and they have some merit.
Even as I understand those useful forgetting's are the Emperors clothes that I wear, which I don to protect me from going crazy with despair and horror, something within bridles at every injustice, every act of exploitation and every selfish, immature, dehumanised action that undermines the shared commons, every piece of litter dropped that I see as I walk my local streets and parklands rankles yet still stimulates away at my humanity. I am not alone in this.
Learning to live with our national domestic abuser, learning to live with Johnson, Trump, Bolsonaro, Hitler, Cromwell, Saddam, Netanyahu is not at all learning to live well.
Sajid Javid accused those who wish to protect the vulnerable and the economy at the same Time as 'cowering' from the Virus.
Mr. Javid, a banker, who has zero expertise in Health Care Systems, who is now the political controller of the English Health Care System, is a man who was among those who organised the fraudulent CDO scam, which crashed investment banks and others who had bought the dodgy CDOs.
He personally profited hugely from all of that and paid none of the costs, he got away with it, he then entered politics, in 2010, and has been an ardent supporter of Austerity (ideological abuse of vulnerable people based on a deliberate lie) and today he demands we all learn to cease 'cowering' from the virus, he says we must learn to live with the virus' in order that we also continue to live with his fraudulent culture.
I refuse to 'learn to live with' that.
I will have to endure it all, for I am impotent. I am a tiny, weak individual citizen. But I will not submit, go silent, turn away, ignore the injustice or flee to the safety of myth, theory and selfishness. At least not today I won't.
I say our species knows already how to live well on this Earth - and that means to live as nurturing partners with all living systems, co-operating with life rather than trying to dominate and exploit. I say the Dominator Culture is the thing that blocks all such effort and intention to live well.
Culture change does not need to be a revolution or an evolution, just an awakening, a remembering of who we truly are, followed by daily action, individuals working as part of a collective, autonomy and sovereignty intact. The Egalitarian way lies ahead of us. Elimination of community transmission is a co-operative task, and where countries have managed to limit the virus and even eliminate it with their communities that co-operation is realised through daily effort.
Here the spreaders are also splitters. The divisive, argumentative, opinionated argy bargy 'culture wars' are designed to undermine the population that is co-operating, keeping the virus at bay, even as they are told to reach out for 'freedom' : and they are mostly failing, people's willingness to care for one another remains stable, strong, constant, and even though the splitters and spreaders have the biggest marketing budgets, the caring is holding strong, quietly resisting.
The Johnson Government claims kudos from the success of the NHS Vaccine rollout, the European and English collegiate development of the Vaccine, and rejects responsibility for the harms associated with rejecting elimination strategy has caused, and most people in England see right through that.
Let us make an honest forum of this English Parliament - people's lives, welfare and businesses depend on this being done!
My previous blog touched on the use of 'apology' as a defence mechanism of the powerful, when they are caught out and asked to account for harms they have occasioned. Dawn Butler has done nothing to apologise for, when she called out some of Johnson's lies in Parliament, yesterday.
All of us living in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have witnessed Boris Johnson, the English Prime Minister, utter outright lies, time and time again. Johnson's reputation as an issuer of lies dates back to his first days in journalism in the early 1980s.
A journalist, Peter Stefeanovic, crafted a short video, laying out some of Johnson's lies, and providing the evidence that these were, indeed, outright lies, which Johnson uttered in Parliament. Peter made the video to put pressure on UK News Media to write about these lies, not least because those lies have enabled political behaviour that has caused hundreds of thousands of fatalities, millions of cases of chronic disease and immense economic harm by recklessly rejecting elimination strategy back in February 2020, and maintaining that 'epidemiologically stupid' policy ever since.
That video has now reached 27 million views. Here it is.
27 MILLION VIEWS! 27 MILLION!!!
Working TOGETHER we have sent a powerful message to UK News shows if they won’t hold this Prime Minister to account for his rampant lying in Parliament we will do it ourselves!
Dawn Butler, MP for Brent, in London stood up in Parliament, on July 22nd, and pointed out some of these lies, and called out Johnson as a liar. In so doing Dawn Butler has broken a rule of the English Parliament, which states that MPs must not use 'unparliamentary language' which includes calling another MP a Liar. There is no offence of lying to the seated, assembled House of Commons. The Speaker asked Ms. Butler, twice, to withdraw her comments. Ms. Butler refused to do so, and the Speaker then ordered Ms. Butler to leave the chamber, and be escorted off the Parliamentary property.
Dawn Butler has done every citizen within the United Kingdom a huge favour, a profound honour.
Here is that exchange.
Ms. Butler has done every citizen living in the UK a huge favour. She has started to break the taboo, to weaken the spell.
Here is Ms. Butlers statement to Bylinetimes TV.
Here it is, everyone. @DawnButlerBrent’s exclusive statement for Byline TV on today’s events in Parliament.
She called Boris Johnson a liar and was thrown out for it - but decided it had to be done to highlight the erosion of our democracy. pic.twitter.com/dqTBjutKSR
I want every MP, in every Party, who understands that Johnson's lies have caused avoidable deaths, his lies and the lies of this Government have led to avoidable chronic disease for millions of citizens, the lies of this Government have ruined businesses, to stand up, and to call the lies out, in defence of his or her constituents right to health, as a matter of duty of care - or lose their seat, never to return.
Johnson is not the only one, but we must start somewhere.
I would urge Conservative MPs to take the bully by the horns, I would suggest that it is much better to be fired by a liar Prime Minister, whose lies have caused so much avoidable harm, and be recorded in history as a genuinely honourable MP than remain seated in that situation, supporting such odious harm causation.
I think that would be a good advert for each and every MPs next election campaign.
Honest History is a political and social good.
So let's take a quick and honest look at the issue of lies uttered in the English Parliament, Commons and Lords, and understand why it has been an essential part of Empire, Oligarchy and the Ruling Class to lie to the people of England, and to our legislators.
1. The English Parliament has never been fundamentally honourable. Operating as a hierarchy of Wealth, Power and Violence, it cannot, by definition and intent, operate with honesty, transparency and probity. Some honourable MPs have sat within it. yes. The presence of honourable people within a dishonest forum does not make that forum honest, especially if they are prohibited from calling out those who are lying. by a rule that stipulates doing so as 'disorderly conduct' which avoids the issue of the actual lie being referred to.
2. Lying is normalised by the English State, and this has always been the case. The State must lie to protect State Secrets among other things.
3. Read Late Victorian Holocausts and examine Hansard during the Irish and Bengali Famines. There are many, many lies told as truth to mislead the parliamentarians and the public.
8. Dawn Butler is breaking the spell. Let's all do this together, all of us. Let us take every step to confront the Bullies and the Liars, and let us make Parliament and politics more honest, and thus safer for the people it is meant to serve, in terms of duty of care to a whole population.
9. I want each constituent across England to speak, write, tweet and text every MP, in every Party, who understands that Johnson's lies have caused death, chronic disease and ruined businesses, to demand your representative in Parliament must stand up, and call the lies out, or lose their seat, never to return. Johnson is not the only one, but we must start somewhere. Start here, start now.
#TruthSetsUsFree
10. Let us make it a criminal offence to lie in every deliberative governance setting, from the local Parish council to Parliament. If the lie is proven to be malicious, then make it a mandatory 10 year sentence, with no parole, as the most serious indictment.
There can be no excuse for anyone undermining the process of deliberative governance and law making by lying or by any other action with the intent to mislead, manipulate or groom the intended audience.
That is a total betrayal of the trust inherent in Democratic Governance.
#JohnsonsLiesKill
Let us make an honest forum of this English Parliament - people's lives, welfare and businesses depend on this being done!
Here are two more of my songs, about confronting the Bullies, because we the decent majority of human beings really need to confront this cultural adverse behaviour now, in order to generate the national and international legislative and practical co-operation needed to handle climate change, environment degradation, structural poverty, pollution, war fare and other pressing problems.
These problems that every single one of us are facing right now, right here, will not be resolved unless we all build social human solidarity. Honesty in our legislatures is the key.
I am 62, and it is probable that I will not live to see the problems worsen, I will not be around when my grandchildren are faced with extreme situations in terms of climate, environment, warfare, poverty etc., and I could claim none of this is going to be my problem, it will not affect me. I know that that is such a selfish, myopic stance that I would be utterly disgusted with myself if I was to assume that. How totally immature!
No, we adults, every single one of us, owe a debt forward to all successive generations to try our very best to clean up any mess we have been part of making. That is real adulthood.
The Dominic Cummings road show is back in town. Cummings is spilling the beans on some of the inside stories around this English Government. Cummings is as culpable for the avoidable harms not avoided as any in office today. He remains unrepentant. His apology rings hollow, even as he eviscerates his colleagues in public.
He should be prostrate on the floor, tears streaming from his eyes, wailing his sorrow for what he has occasioned since 2016, on so many matters of critical national political behaviour, action and outcomes. He should be begging for forgiveness, for his part in rejecting Elimination of Community Transmission strategy.
Cummings should be opening up to tell the fullest truth telling possible, in order to bring to an end the non-avoidance of avoidable harms, in order to cease this headlong rush towards a health disaster for the English population, in order to make the case for elimination strategy that expert epidemiologists, public health professionals, nurses, doctors, teachers, parents up and down the country know we need to implement and resource, fully and at pace.
He's none of that. He is still playing everyone. His outing is not altruism or genuine honesty.
One of the threads that I have been following for some time is the resonance down through history of what appear to be repeating patterns. It is not that history repeats itself, so much as bullies behaviour does not change much. Including publicly made apologies for long denied historical harms caused to masses of people by callous Governments, the purpose of which is to retain power, status and position rather than address the harms caused as they ought to.
I have written about the similarities in English Government attitudes, behaviour, policy and outcomes when mass trauma events 'occur' at different times in History. Some situations were genuinely events that could not have been avoided, others were events entirely man made or natural events made much, much worse than they needed to be. The difference between a Volcano erupting and a war breaking out. The difference between a crop failure and a famine.
An honest study of the Irish and Bengali Famines of the Late Victorian era will reveal similarities in English Governance attitudes towards the adverse outcomes for ordinary people vis a vis the Iraq War, the COVID19 epidemic and pandemic, Hillsborough, Grenfell, Orgreaves, collusion in Northern Ireland, arming, training and maintenance of Saudi War Planes in Yemen, and the years of support for anti-Syrian violent militia who literally destroyed most of that country.
What is seen is a callous disregard, born in part by distance and class consciousness and in part by venal greed, a dismissal of the value, the human meaning of the lived experience of the most vulnerable people, harmed by the policy decisions made by the most powerful. The men and women who occupy positions of executive authority and who control a distal, leveraged institutional power are not vulnerable in the same way those who live where the policy has its greatest impact. Asymmetric has meaning in this context. An insensitive jackboot and a vulnerable ant.
"Many more loved ones will die!"
I have written about the way the people in power use apologia to defend their position and status, without changing their behaviour. They make public apologies, yet they never suffer indictments, trials, convictions or incarceration. The people who occupy distal power are immune to social material civil and criminal justice. They apologise, and reparations are not made or if they are made they are piecemeal and delivered late, after many years, to exhausted survivors who are largely forgotten, obscured by the passage of time.
Apologia - a defence of one's assumed power.
And so we read in today's Guardian News Paper the story of the Apology by the English Government of Tony Blair, issued in 1997, for the behaviour of the English Government during the Irish Famine. Blair did not write it, he did not sign off on it and he did not speak it, he did not mean it and neither did the English Establishment. It was the usual publicity promotional event, nothing more. Apologia. Sorry, not sorry.
“The key sentence in your message is the acknowledgment that the British government at the time could have done more to prevent the tragedy. This is no more than a statement of fact, and falls well short of an apology, but the British government have been reluctant to say much about this in the past,” added Holmes, who said he had checked with “all and sundry” including press secretary Alastair Campbell that it was right to make such a reference.
“I hope this does not cause you any problems. It should go down well with the Irish, and I cannot see anyone here or in Northern Ireland seriously objecting.”
The text was honed by No 10 aides from a draft by the Foreign Office. An implicit apology was exactly how it was interpreted by the welcoming Irish press who saw it as an attempt to inject fresh goodwill into Anglo-Irish relations and encourage the peace process.
That the Irish Establishment were so ready to accept it as such speaks to their submission to desired myth rather than their ability and willingness to face reality, honestly. But of course, faced with a neighbour far more powerful than they and understood to be more than capable of inflicting harm (collusion in Northern Ireland, false convictions of innocent Irish citizens jailed for decades in English jails, the financial power of the City of London were all well known to the Irish Establishment) upon anyone who challenged them, their readiness to accept the apology at face value contained some wisdom. It's not a good idea to confront a more powerful bully with the truth, in International politics. And when both leaderships are steeped in NeoLiberalism, it's even less likely that a confrontation with the truth will happen.
That said, the truth about the Famine and how it was 'managed' remains. Some harms are so great that they can never be forgotten, not least if those who caused the harm remain unapologetic. The Irish establishment tries its best to say something of the truth, without going the full hog, as this RTE article outlines.
First and foremost, Trevelyan saw his role as essentially limiting the financial exposure of the British exchequer to funding relief for the Irish poor whose lives were devastated by the failure of the potato crop over successive years after 1846.
What he shared with the politicians and indeed the British Establishment as a whole was an ideological outlook that saw the Great Famine as an opportunity to bring about far-reaching reform of Irish society, clearing the land of the poor, developing commercialised agriculture, and making the Irish economy more ostensibly modern.
Sir Charles Edward F. Trevelyan, K.C.B. Engraved by D.J. Pound from a photograph by John Watkins, Parliament Street. Image: Getty Images
Let the Herd take it on the chin, protect the Hoard. The past 18 months described in one sentence in the 'United' Kingdom.
Others tell it like it was.
Ireland 1845-1850: the Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept it "Perfect."
"This book, alone, provides the covered-up facts of 1845-1850 Ireland. There was no famine in the ordinary sense of that word. It was genocide perpetrated by more than half of Britain's army (67 regiments of its 130 regiments total). They removed, at gunpoint, Ireland's abundant meats, livestock, and food crops to the ports for export; thus starving the people. The book's colored map shows the locations of lengthy deployments of each of the sixty-seven regiments while they removed livestock, meats, flour, oatmeal, and other food crops to the ports for export. The same map names the locations of some 180 of the resultant mass graves."
The impoverished Irish native Catholic population, subsiding on potatoes, working for their Anglo landlords, were left to rot as their crop rotted. There was plenty of food, readily available, within spitting distance. It went to market, under armed guard. The Irish workers were deliberately impoverished by centuries of 'Austerity' policies designed to impoverish them, render them submissive and weak.
'Toraidh' is an Irish Gaelic word for a certain kind of egregious thief. It is also the roots of the English word 'Tory'.
Credit where credit is due?
Blair did not initiate the Northern Ireland peace process. It was initiated by Catholic and Protestant women finding solidarity in each other, building a peace movement, confronting the men of violence in their communities, building bridges across the divides, even as the British Security State was waging covert warfare from within both groups of paramilitaries and their communities. These women persisted with their humane struggle to bring the violence to an end. Mo Mowlem, Jeremy Corbyn and others followed pathways worn in by the ordinary women, the mothers, aunts and sisters of Northern Ireland.
Blair took the credit that others built up over decades.
The English Government of 2020/21 is no different.
They and those they truly represent are not bothered by the costs they have imposed upon the English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish peoples by their rejection of Elimination Strategy. They have no plans to ameliorate the situation going forwards. Herd Immunity is now the obvious strategic position, and by mass infection.
Even as they claim kudos for the 'world beating' vaccination, developed by a pan European collective effort, administered largely by the NHS and volunteers, of which the best that can be said is the Johnson administration did not impede it in the same that the way they have impeded effective find, test, trace, quarantine and isolate systems that could suppress community transmission of the virus.
We have ample evidence of this Government exploiting the epidemic to enhance their own power, to enrich themselves and their crony associates, to bring in profound and damaging changes across social and health care provision, to avoid dealing with climate, environmental and other pressing problems.
Their latest wheeze is to recruit the youth in this task.
Disco of Malign Intent.
Saying to young people, whose development of their frontal cortex is yet to complete, and in the middle of an intense national level surge of infection via a new more transmissible variant that has vaccine escape, that they can and indeed should (to save the night time economy, do your patriotic duty) attend night clubs, knowing the frustration and intense desire of that cohort to socialise, to 'party like it's 2019' again, given the pressures they have had to endure these past 16 months of daily mismanagement, misinformation and blatant grift, suggesting that they 'take personal responsibility' rather than the government delaying opening up, maintaining legal provision (so called legal 'restrictions') to prevent spread of the virus and then say that in one and a half months time, for Health and Safety of the whole community, they would need proof of double dose of a vaccination to attend club nights (as a 'nudge' to increase vaccine take up) shows that they really do not care about the adverse effects of their policy on people - they want people to endure mass infection in the hope or gamble that this latest scheme will work.
The question is simple - the economic costs of zero community transmission strategy and quarantine borders with known benign outcomes vs the human and economic costs of slow spread towards herd immunity, with repeated cycles of re-opening and shut down as the viral infection spreads in waves, wave after wave into an indefinite future of unknowable adverse outcomes.
