Is time running out?

Almost every day I see a news article and think to myself that we have taken one more step towards a society I don’t want to see.  And almost nobody says anything.  It seems that most people, like Nero, are fiddling whilst Rome burns.  There is so much more of hope in watching the latest draw in some TV jackpot or playing one of the ever more seductive on-line poker games.  Not least since the promised winnings are tax-free, at least here in Sweden.

And so few people have the time to look up and see the hints, so carefully concealed, in the Mainstream Media, that most people don’t feel the noose drawing tighter and tighter around our necks.

Like today.  I was in a bus shelter and saw a deserted copy of Metro.  In a little corner on page one was an article on how the police thought doctors were falling down on the job by not reporting those unsuitable for gun ownership.  The police wanted all doctors to start asking patients as a matter of course whether they owned a weapon, rather the way they currently ask about alcohol consumption and smoking.  Can you imagine a psychotic gun-owner telling his doctor that, yes, he has a gun, and maybe adding that he’s getting fed up with the noise being made by the local schoolkids…

I feel sorry for the Brits.  My sister still lives there, and that worries me.  A country with Theresa May for Home Secretary is in a dire position.  Here’s a list of just a few of this woman’s assaults on the rights of the citizens:

  • “Citizenship is a privilege, not a right.”  This woman doesn’t get it.  You can’t choose where you are born, but you can expect that, having been born in a country, for good or bad, that country will protect your interests including your life.
  • She has formed a habit of waiting for people whom she regards as undesirable to leave the country.  These people are always of foreign extraction, naturalised British subjects – which means that someone, sometime has thought them okay to accept as citizens – and they are usually out of the country visiting relatives.  Whilst there, their British citizenship is revoked and their passport invalidated so that they can’t get back into the UK.
  • She has made no move to quash an extradition request from the US for a person accused by the US entertainment industries of a crime which the British police – and they’re no angels of mercy – considered to be no crime at all.
  • She made no move to quash another extradition request, also from the US, for a person suffering from a serious case of Aspergers disease, and who, for a minor misdemeanor, was facing virtually a lifetime in a US prison.
  • She considers human rights conventions to be an unnecessary hindrance to the performance of her duties, and would willingly withdraw from the Human Rights convention, and presumably, as a consequence, from the European Union and the United Nations.
  • She presumably shares her boss’s, David Cameron’s view that the European Court of Human Rights should be subservient to national courts.
  • On the question of extradition she is also trying her best to extradite a suspected terrorist to a country where she knows he will be exposed to torture.  Don’t they have prisons in the UK?  This guy is a British subject, for crying out loud.

I can envisage posters all over the UK with May posing like that picture of Uncle Sam during World War I, pointing at the observer, and saying “You could be my next target”.  Unfortunately, with the state of the world as it is, as regards human rights, she could have an enormous following amongst the governments of the world, which puts us all in danger.

And I’ve not even begun to talk about Barack Obama, of whom we all had so much hope back in 2008.  Remember his slogan, “Yes, we can”?  Well, boy, has he lived up to that.  We all thought Dubbya (George W Bush) was bad with his abrogation of human rights in the cause of “The War on Terror”, but Obama has been ten times worse, with, amongst other things, his executive executions.  And the most disgusting move of all – not admittedly directly linkable to Obama – the idea that drone pilots, who sit safe in an air-conditioned room in, I believe, Nebraska, stand in line for a

combat

medal which the Air Force claimed would be of higher value than the purple heart.

I can remember the Aldermaston marches against nuclear energy in the 1950’s, thousands of people walking from Aldermaston to, I believe, 10 Downing Street, accompanied by a few British “bobbies” walking equally peacefully beside them.  Now we have a few hundred or a few thousand protesters being attacked with police who look like Storm Troopers from

Star Wars

, armed with shields, batons, tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets.  Whatever happened to “reasonable response”?

One only has to see the brutality with which protest marches are now met in every country to see how frightened the authorities are of the reactions of their people to the infamous controls being imposed upon them, and to the way in which the rights of those with financial strength are protected at the expense of the ordinary citizen.  

Take copyright.  It is not long since the fifty-year copyright on the music of the early pop era was in danger of running out.  One would have thought the copyright owners – note, not the artists – had made their pile on the music of Tommy Steele, the Beatles, Elvis Presley and many others, but suddenly they began lobbying parliaments all around the world, and fifty years became seventy years.  One suspects they are already preparing their campaign for the late 2020’s to get copyright extended to a full 100 years.

And finally the moves everywhere – Iceland was one of the first – to discuss a “legal” ban on pornography on the internet.  “To protect our children” was the reason, and who would not want to protect his children.  But censure is censure.  It’s up to parents to bring up

and oversee

their children so that they do not look at pornography, or not much.  This is not a subject for law enforcement, for who is going to define “pornography”?  The likes of Barack Obama, who defines “combat” and “immediate danger” in ways which no rational being would accept?

But “immediate danger” is what we all find ourselves in, under this insidious war on our rights and freedoms.

© James Wilde 2015