Burma: This Time Around, It's No Longer An Internal Issue

It's really hard to imagine that a cyclone has ripped through a country and have it affect over half the population. But it's true. The death toll by all accounts is pushing 100,000 people. Over a million have been made homeless. Entire villages and towns have been wiped off the map. No warnings. As if the people of Burma have not suffered enough.

It must be said that it's very hard to keep away from "talking politics" in this situation. The regime which rules Burma is oppressive and paranoid - look at the way they have behaved. There are countries which have pledged millions of dollars in aid, yet to get aid into Burma immediately is taking time as the regime are reluctant to issue visas! They are deliberately prolonging the process. Only a deranged group of despots such as they could be stupid enough - and heartless enough - to prolong aid to people who have been without food and water for five days. An interesting episode in the pages of Burma's history.

Sending metta to the people.

Intrigued

I'm wondering what the People's Liberation Army of the People's Republic of China are doing in this shot. It has been suggested that the soldiers here are about to change into monk's robes to initiate riots in a Tibetan city. Certainly it's happened in Burma. I don't want to believe this is the case here, but if anyone has any comments to leave offering an alternative explanation (Andrew Xu, maybe you could help me with this one) I'd be very interested to read them. Love, light and peace.

One World, One Dream

Watching the Olympic Torch relay yesterday was amusing in places yet in other parts quite worrying. We were treated to the spectacle of an ariel view of St. Pauls Cathedral surrounded by an array of colours; people flying the Tibetan national flag and the sight of a red city bus into which the torch and it's "protectors" (Chinese heavies) had to retreat on the orders of the Met Police (British heavies). The clipped BBC voice of the commentator sighing and admitting: "well... it seems the Olympic Torch relay has been completely hijacked by the Free Tibet movement..." left me with a dry smile.

The protesters - naturally - were not resorting to violence, but attempting to grab or extinguish the torch, or simply obstruct the path of relay, but the simple fact that the protesters far outnumbered the supporters of an event such as this pleased me. You see, I still don't believe that the Olympic Games in Beijing should be boycotted. A boycott would sorely disappoint the people of China and the athletes. Both of whom have been waiting for this moment for years. But I do stand in solidarity with the people of Tibet. The policies of the Chinese totalitarian government (see previous post, read your human rights reports, meet any exiled Tibetans or watch hidden camera footage if you don't quite believe it... etc, etc) leave Tibetans inside Tibet completely voiceless. Why should we not use our liberty to show solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Tibet?

A Chinese official was interviewed during the course of the relay, trying to persuade us that an event such as this must not be used as a political platform. Yet the CCP leave us no other option to show our frustration. China right now seems to want to have it all. They want our money in trade and tourism but if we so much as criticize their human rights record we're suddenly expected to shut the fuck up and mind our own business. They are too used to going unchallenged.

China says it maintains a "non- intervention" policy with foreign countries. Well let's take a closer look here. They are occupying foreign land in Tibet for a start. No matter which side of the spectrum you stand, it must be accepted that in the period prior to the communist invasion in 1950, Tibet was a wonderfully free and sovereign nation. China has annexed Tibet, raped the land, tortured its people, suppressed their culture and calls this "liberation". It hardly sounds like a "non- intervention" policy to me.

China's "non- intervention" policy supports without exception the military junta of neighbouring Burma. They supply the Burma regime with weapons, military vehicles and ammunition. China has successfully vetoed a UN Security Council resolution which would have called on the junta to improve their human rights record and successfully transfer power from the military to an elected civilian body. China's financing of the brutal regime in Burma, which practises ethnic cleansing and torture and uses rape as a weapon of war, does not sound like a "non- intervention" policy to me.

Should we discuss China's "non- intervention" policy in Darfur? China is the biggest trading partner of the Sudanese government. The genocide carried out by the Khartoum regime in the region of Darfur is supported by China as it provides major military assistance to Sudan. China has even defended the actions (note: how exactly do we defend a genocide?) of the Sudanese regime at the Security Council of the UN. China has the influential power to help end the violence in this region. It chooses not to. It follows the Bush example of Profits Before Lives. The situation is deteriorating and Beijing's ties to Khartoum grow closer and closer. Last year the trade between China and Sudan doubled. It does not sound like a "non- intervention" policy to me.

So, with that knowledge, and knowing what we know about China's treatment of her own critics within the People's Republic, we cannot be expected to shut the fuck up and allow the one-party government to carry on regardless. The protests on the streets of London and further voices of objection on the streets of Paris is a result of China's continual human rights abuses and her arrogance in suggesting we all mind our own business when it comes to concern about her non- interventional foreign policy.

It could all be so much different, as Johann Hari (not a writer who I'm usually an admirer of, but who in this case seems to be bang-on) of the Independent puts it. He proposes that the athletes of our "free (ish)" world united behind a few demands. From Johann's magnificent column in todays Independent:

First: release China's 10 greatest human rights activists. Top of the list is the Chinese hero Hu Jia. He is a 34-year-old father rotting in jail because he campaigned for the rights of Aids victims, and against the environmental destruction spreading across the country. We're going to need Chinese allies like him in the years to come, as the Great Leap Backwards of global warming intensifies.

Second: invite the Dalai Lama to Beijing, and talk to him. Just talk. When I met the Dalai Lama a few years ago, he said he would do it. This is in China's interests too: the younger generation of Tibetans coming up behind him are less prepared to offer up the other cheek for a kicking. Israel has learned the hard way that if you react to largely peaceful protests against occupation – like the first Intifada of the 1980s – with beatings and bullets, you face rockets and suicide-bombers further down the line. China still has a chance to stop that shift – just.

Third: allow a real UN peacekeeping force into Darfur. Since 2003, the Chinese government has been covering at the UN for the genocidal Sudanese government, in return for full access to the country's oil. They will only vote for a peacekeeping force if the Sudanese government – the murderers – retains the right to veto the arrival of any troops. As the limping, bloodied people of Darfur told me last summer as they filed across the border, this Chinese clause makes peace impossible.

And finally, allow us to set up a website that breaks through the Great Firewall of China, explaining why we have laid down these conditions.

I'm a supporter of the Beijing Olympic Games. Having lived and worked in China and have people I love all over that country, I am hoping to see the Games commence without any trouble. Having spent a great deal of time in India with friends among the community of Tibetan exiles in Dharamsala, I hope one day they will be able to return to their country safely and with liberty. Naturally I'm hoping to see China choosing dialogue instead of armed repression in Tibet.

One World, One Dream.

To read the full text of Johann Hari: Boycotting the Beijing Olympics won't work, but here's a proposal that just might, go here.

Thinking About Tibet

"You cannot have harmony under the gun"

The Tibetan uprising which was quashed by Chinese authorities last week has left me feeling frustrated and disturbed. Frustrated for the Tibetan people – repressed for far too long – and frustrated for the Chinese people, whose freedom of thought is limited by the great propaganda machine of Beijing. It could only be in China that a man of such character as Tenzin Gyatso - the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet - could be described by a Communist Party leader as a "wolf in monk's robes, a devil with a human face but the heart of a beast" and have a billion people believe it.

Since China invaded Tibet in 1950 under the banner of "liberation" under Chairman Mao, 1.2million Tibetans are estimated to have been killed under the Beijing regime. "Liberation" has been a continual diet of forced labour in concentration camps, torture, discrimination and forced birth control. Chinese settlement in Tibet has grown to render the people of Tibet a minority in their own land. China has ripped apart the natural resources of Tibet: one-half of Tibet's natural forest has disappeared since the invasion of the Chinese. Tibet has been used as a dumping ground for nuclear waste by the Chinese - something the Chinese government has freely admitted. The vast majority of prisoners held in Tibetan prisons are monks and nuns. They are routinely subjected to beatings, torture using electric shock batons, denied sufficient food and medical treatment, held incommunicado and without charge. In 1959 the Dalai Lama escaped to India on foot and has remained in exile ever since, with thousands of Tibetans risking their lives to join him. What we have seen in images from Lhasa is a consequence of over fifty years of brutal repression.

I just spoke to a friend (English) on the telephone who lives and works in Beijing. He tells me there are police everywhere in the capital city, harassing Tibetan people in public and throwing weight around. People – Western and Chinese – in Beijing want to keep their heads down. If you join protests or speak out against the regime, he says, you simply disappear. Like him, I’m disappointed and I feel that a boycott of the Games will not help matters. I think that disengagement will only make things worse.

The Dalai Lama is such a good man. Tibetans have suffered far too much. What can we do?

Aung San Suu Kyi: Principles

What I've learned in life is that it's always your own wrongdoing that causes you the greatest suffering. It is never what other people do to you. Perhaps this is due to the way in which I was brought up. My mother instilled in me the principle that wrongdoing never pays, and my own experience has proved that to be true. Also, if you have positive feelings towards other people they can't do anything to you – they can't frighten you.

I think that if you stop loving other people then you really suffer.

As of today Aung San Suu Kyi has spent a total of 12 years and 123 days under house arrest.

Free Aung San Suu Kyi. Free Burma.

Listening To Jazz Now

Listening to jazz now, I'm happy
sun shining outside like it was my lifetime achievement award.
I'm happy,
with my friend and my dog up in Durango, her emailing me this morning
no coon hound ailing yowls
vibrant I love yous.
I'm happy,
my smile a big Monarch butterfly
after having juiced up some carrots, garlic, seaweed,
I stroll the riverbank, lazy as a deep cello
in a basement bar-
smoke, cagney'd out patrons
caramel and chocolate women in black
shoulder strap satin dresses
and red high heels.

Jimmy Santiago Baca was born in 1952 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He taught himself to read while serving time in jail for possession of drugs. First published by Denise Levertov, he has won countless awards, publishing seven poetry collections. I love him.

Melanie Phillips: Hysteria

hysterical (adj.) relating to, of the nature of, or affected with hysterics or hysteria; like hysterics; fitfully and violently emotional.

There is a newspaper here in Britain called the Daily Mail. To be frank, it's a repulsive newspaper which is skilled at pushing the buttons of OAP's and shrouding people's minds with suspicion and fear, hatred and loathing. It really is vile and sees itself as the ultimate arbiter of values in modern Britain. The overriding problem with the Mail's image of Britain is that none of us seem to live there. Listening to the vitriolic journalist and talking head Melanie Phillips earlier this week on Question Time seemed to me the Daily Mail personified. No small wonder Ms Phillips turns out to be their star columnist.

The words of Melanie Phillips are rage filled, entirely out of proportion, and peppered with assumptions.

In her book entitled Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating A Terror State Within, she tears apart any support for multiculturism, blames British society for fostering the growth of Islamic extremism here on British soil, rambles incessantly of anti-Semitic sentiment in the UK and even manages to claim that there is "a climate in Britain that has alarming echoes of Weimar in the 1930s".

Dangerous words from an extremist who sadly seems to hate everyone and everything. Read on.

When Melanie Phillips sees a Muslim woman walking along the street in Britain, she does so suspiciously and wonders whether her hijab is "a political statement of antagonism towards the British state".

Writing in the Mail on another topic - UCAS move to drive more British students from underprivileged backgrounds into a university education - Phillips screams: "Clearly, in the interests of diversity and widening participation, the only people who should go to university are the black children of lone alcoholic mothers and fathers who are doing time for drug offences, and who were brought up by illiterate foster parents who sexually abused them in a mobile home up an isolated dirt track in Cumbria."

When talking about people on the Left of the political spectrum, she describes them as "anti-Semitic and in thrall to radical Islamists". Writing in the American publication City Journal last November she claimed - absurdly - that "anti-Semitism has also become respectable in mainstream British society."

She even hates her fellow British Jews who have had the audacity to question the Zionist movement. Writing in the Jewish Chronicle last year, Phillips lashed out spectacularly at the board of Independent Jewish Voices in an article named The Jewish Enemy Within: "They are against the way Israel behaves. They are against the defenders of Israel... For the terrible thing is that, far from being silenced, Jewish voices like these are in the very forefront of the hate-fest against Israel. Martyrs of dissent? Hardly. They are the British arm of the pincer of Jewish destruction."

Frightening stuff. One must, in a way, feel pity for Melanie Phillips. Any critic of her views places her on the instant defensive, claiming that she's been "misunderstood" or "misrepresented". Reviewing Londonistan, the writer William Dalrymple describes her as someone who shows "no evidence of having spent any time in Muslim company, or of having set foot within the Muslim world". I'd say Melanie Phillips not only shows her ignorance towards Islam but also to British society itself.

Phillips - by all accounts once a brilliant writer - is emerging as a firm believer in sectarianism and as a writer who is just a few small steps away from inciting religious hatred. Hysterical - as the word to describe Melanie Phillips - seems so be so spot on.

Melanie Phillips personal blog - and I'll let it speak for itself - can be found here.

In My Head

I've felt totally uninspired to write lately. However, I just watched the sun rise over the River Dart Valley - glorious - and it's made me go all fucking gooey and so here I am sharing my thoughts. I've seen a few sunrises of late; I just spent a week on a working retreat, chopping logs, cooking, meditating and playing about on my guitar (fast becoming the love of my life). There's nothing like meditation (in this case just taking time to breathe properly for a while) to bring me back down to earth. What kind of society do I live in? I have to drop out for a week on retreat to take time to breathe. Or maybe it just says more about me than the culture in which I exist. Who knows?

More than once this week I've heard the chattering classes refer to 2008 as the end of the capitalist empire. For sure, Britain seems to be an increasingly difficult country in which to make ends meet. Generally I hear people not asking to live their lives in luxury but just to live without laying awake at night worrying about debt. The Labour Party - whose slogan must surely be Tory Policy Wrapped Up in A Red Rose - seems to believe in nothing these days apart from retaining power and supporting an ongoing war. Blair, Brown, whatever. Give me a leader with conviction. I try to remain optimistic.

Who will become the next President of the USA? So much emphasis has been placed upon whether it will be a black man or a woman. Just so long as the next president of the USA drops its destructive and confrontational attitude, ends the use of torture on political prisoners held without charge, respects international law and the right for entire nations to live in peace without fear of an invasion, then I really don't give a fuck about the colour or gender of the next president of the USA. It kind of reminds me of Bill Hicks talking about the prospect of female priests: "Give me a priest with three testicles and twelve titties... I'm just not interested."

Amy Winehouse has gone and scooped five Grammy Awards; each and every one of them deserved. She's a damn fine talent, one of our greatest for a long time. I honestly believe that. I'd quite like to see her straightened out just a little bit. Not too much though.

I'm becoming quite sick of Facebook. Within eight months I've gone from "in a relationship" to "its complicated" to "single" to "looking for whatever i can get". I've had sheep thrown at me, I've been hugged, slapped and poked by people who I wouldn't even consider talking to down the pub. People have crawled out of the already rotting wood of the framework of my life and haunted me. This fucking networking site has caused me spectacular headaches. I've spent fucking hours on the thing. I publicly renounce it. .

Some beautiful words now just to finish off this little post on this blog of mine, which is fast becoming a hotbed of pessimism, by Henry Miller:

"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."

Tony Benn: Unity Needed

Benn speaks at the World Against War conference. London, December 2007. Wise words indeed. (Where have all our decent politicans gone?)

Deciding Our Fate By Our Actions

"The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear"

"We achieve everything by our efforts alone. Our fate is not decided by an almighty God. We decide our own fate by our actions. You have to gain mastery over yourself. It is not a matter of sitting back and accepting"

"The struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma is a struggle for life and dignity"

Aung San Suu Kyi, the world's only imprisoned Nobel Prize winner and the undisputed leader of the people of Burma has been detained under house arrest for a total of 12 years and 72 days.

Free Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Free Burma.