What is human decency? What does it mean to be law abiding? Last year, British PM David Cameron was all too eager to talk about such things in front of the TV cameras in the aftermath of the street disturbances in the UK. Consider his following statement.
“These are sickening scenes – scenes of people looting, vandalising, thieving, robbing, scenes of people attacking police officers and even attacking fire crews as they are trying to put out fires. This is criminality, pure and simple, and it has to be confronted and defeated. People should be in no doubt that we are on the side of the law-abiding people, who are appalled by what has happened.”
Other senior politicians came out with similar sentiments.
How about we turn these words back on those who utter them? Let us hold them to account, according to the criteria that they use to judge and condemn others.
Many of the politicians who were mouthing such sentiments have sanctioned illegal wars and policies that have led to the deaths hundreds of thousands of people. Think back to the sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s that led to the deaths of 500,000 children.
But you don’t have to think back that far. In Libya, a similar war strategy was put in place to remove another leader who would not tow the line, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. From Afghanistan to Syria, such imperialism, such mass killing, continues to be justified on the basis of ‘humanitarianism’ or bringing ‘stability’ to a region. As the chaos and body-count piles up, so does the hypocrisy.
David Cameron condemned thousands of ordinary folk who took to the streets and looted stores. But in many respects, they were the victims of the ‘greed is good’ neo-liberal policies that Cameron supports.
Many senior politicians, with the media in tow, have been cheerleaders for the free market approach and the gamblers on Wall Street, or in the City of London, who have plunged millions into poverty across the world – a world reeling from the effects of the economic crisis induced by them.
Look around the UK – the social deprivation, the rich who have got even richer (according to economist John Foster, by one third in 2009 alone – equal to half the British deficit!) and the inequality gap that has become a chasm. Then ask, what are the real crimes? Who are the real criminals? Who has done the most thieving, the most robbing, the most looting? Who has indulged in devastating vandalism and created fires from Libya to Afghanistan? Who has looted from the poor across the world and, through the system in place, has ensured wealth flows from bottom to top?
Who has marched into other people’s countries and smashed them up?
Whose criminality is worse? The politicians, the financiers, the proponents of economic and political dogma, which serves as a masking device for militarism and brutality, or the folk who have born the brunt of it all and who then react? Some of the rioters in Britain used stones to mount smash and grab raids on high street stores. Better that than politicians who sanction drone attacks or the use of depleted uranium to bring killing and cancers to civilian populations.
While some working class youth helped themselves to all manner of consumer goods, just who did they take cue from? The great role models of the age, no doubt – the take now, pay later mentality of corporate Britain and the bankers – or, in the case of the bankers, take now and take again, but never pay back.
As many of their supposed parliamentary representatives continue to sanction the globalization of looting and mass killing that benefit their corporate masters, there is none guiltier of gross hypocrisy that William Hague, British Foreign Secretary. The blood on his hands not yet dry from Libya, he can always be relied on to try to cheer-lead the public into supporting military aggression abroad.
Dr David Halpin’s article that appeared on Global Research on 21 Sept (Britain’s Foreign Secretary’s Litany of Lies and Distortions) outlined the type of falsehoods that Hague specializes in. He continues to spew out lies and to demonise the Syrian regime and to soften up the public for possible British involvement in what could be an eventual military attack on Iran. Of course, this plays well to a mainstream media that has already spent years in conveying the notion Iran is run by a bunch of ‘mad mullahs’ and a crazyman president.
But this is to be expected. The British government is once more falling in line with US policy. As a client state of the US, something the Brits foolishly regard as a ‘special relationship’, Britain can be relied on to do Washington’s bidding. When the drum is beaten over the ransacking of the British embassy in Tehran or over Syria, the drum is provided courtesy of Washington and its corporate cartels. Like a clockwork toy monkey, Foreign Secretary Hague hits it on cue.
The polite mannerisms of members of the British government can be quite media-friendly. That’s what an Oxbridge background can provide. But once that veneer is peeled away, the true criminality of intentions and actions is laid bare. Look no further than William Hague.
