I don’t often remark upon the goings-on in foreign countries but this one (h/t Boing Boing) got me going, to be quite honest.
Robert Graves records in his autobiography that during the First World War the Germans, outraged at British atrocities, made a number of complaints to the referees.
They considered that .303 Ball Mk.VII was atrocious, because its projectile ‘tended to turn on striking’.
They also (as a warrior nation with rather firm ideas about who was and was not entitled to participate in a war between gentlemen) objected to the British and French use of what they called ’semi-civilised troops’. The Ghurkas (with the British) and the Turcos (with the French) were naturally singled out as being savages unfit to fight civilised Germans; rather more surprising was the inclusion in the list of the Canadians and Australians, who were, according to Graves, addicted to the habit of murdering prisoners.
Of course Australians no longer do this, and nowadays, it seems, indulge their taste for atrocity solely by inflicting upon a hapless planet some of the worst television broadcasting that it has ever seen.
The Canadians, on the other hand, appear to miss the old days. They have yet to be reported as having driven prisoners into a cellar, dropping a live grenade into the pocket of each as they did so.
But seizing, handcuffing, imprisoning and substantially fining someone for failing instantly to obey the arbitrary and trivial command of a ‘police officer’ (in this case, to hold on to an escalator handrail) is certainly a step towards restoring the Canadian reputation established during WWI.
Before anyone starts bitching about the hypocritical, ungrateful, po-faced, holier-than-thou British, I feel that while on the subject of atrocities we should remember Lord Kitchener, who is often credited with having invented the term ‘concentration camp’, and of course Oliver Cromwell, who, however apposite his remarks to Parliament may now seem, is often credited, certainly in Ireland, with having invented the concept, if not the name, of ‘genocide’.
The root of atrocity and the shadowy motivator at bottom of the Kitcheners and Cromwells, all too human, is the omnipresent and universal psychology of the bully. This always tries to break out. In the stress of warfare, (largely to-day conducted as a branch of the entertainment industry which is ‘government’) even kindlier folk go off the deep end. Now however that we have on-line ‘virtual reality’ gaming and consensual sadomasochism, these people can be diverted with these play toys; or, if they will not, they must in any case be kept definitively /out/ of ‘power’. It’s no good for them as so many (one day to come, /former/) ‘clients’: and it is no good for us as free men and women.
The first thing to do therefore, for instance in America, is to reduce the trinket of federal power by starving government and making it, once again, small and weak. (/This/ is the hidden message to us all of our anorexic daughters, after all!)
Government in any case already is trivial; but, like a badly raised child, it rummages in the drawers of other people when visiting and is entirely too pesty….
The metaphor of government as a badly-raised child is a damn good one and I’d be surprised if I didn’t steal it, sooner or later.