Spying

Governments always spy. They have traditionally used  , among others ,  ambassadors  and business people  as spies, even though they were guests in other peoples’ countries. The excuse is that everybody does it and therefore….Which in  turn means that their morality is governed by business and politics ( which often is another name for business).

What still surprises us though is the amount of spying governments do. Not content with scraping in  rubbish bins on the ground, they send spies into space. And the result  is sixty million emails spied on per month in one country alone. What other spying is done we can imagine judging by  the technology available .

However there is no  use in  throwing up hands and lamenting. After all we did bring it on ourselves. We did it by saying nothing as one invasion after another was made into our personal privacy. We did not object when the cameras went up in  hotel lobbies, in the streets, even in the washrooms. We did not object when a sacred moment in human life, the moment of birth  began to be  portrayed in television  programmes not to show the sacredness of it but to give a thrill to watchers  of soap operas. There were  a few shudders of apprehensiveness when we saw the first portrayal of someone in  a  confessional box, another of those private moments in life which somebody decided should be private no longer, thus causing us no surprise when the spies bugged the boxes.

There seemed to be a grim determination  to seek out and destroy every moment which  centuries of  human delicacy  had  declared sacred,  to eliminate privacy and the  dignity of having one’s own space. We allowed it all to be invaded. And said nothing

We were told, of course , If you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve nothing to fear. Nonsense. Those who do nothing wrong probably have more to fear than anyone  else.  

Nobody seems to see the connection between the depersonalising of soldiers by giving them no privacy even in the privy – a strange perversion – and having them watched and noted and recorded on their own  approach to  warehouse, witness box or washroom. We did not object to  millions being able to  zoom in to the exact spot where we lived, did not wonder why we should allow this to be done on  us,  or on a villager in Afghanistan seconds before the drones explode. But then we did not object when the technological advance of splitting the atom  was used to eliminate Hiroshima. Now we have allowed the president of a country  to use our technology – our technology – to enable  his henchmen – and  henchwomen , sad to say – to eliminate someone thousands of miles away whom the  droning president has decided without trial is an enemy of his state. Is it really possible for the  United States of America to  stay united in their  desire to let  this abomination  continue ?

Yes, it is.  Until eventually  the united states  disintegrate just as every empire on the face of the earth disintegrates. To forecast that disintegration , or to wish it for the world’s safety is not being un-American.  It is being so pro-American as to believe that no Washington government for decades has been worthy of the American people.

When Mr Obama was elected we all hoped  the  people would have  a  renewed life in which what we called the American dream would be fulfilled for everybody.  

Our thoughts  are different now. More modest . Thoughts about  curbing this  lust for power rather than  giving more authority to the same people for more of the same.

With a mixture of horror and hope we remember the childhood fable of the Frog that proudly swelled  up so much  that………………..   

Standards

Standards of  international political behaviour are not just falling, they are being deliberately lowered in the interest of those  strong enough to benefit by it..

For many years there has been an honourable  struggle to make war and politics and economics endurable or at least  less  cruel .    

Now we are accepting , even praising, universal spying on person  and nation.

Now we are accepting that a government can fire  explosives  from the safety of its own territory into the territory of another nation with no more justification than saying it needs to.

Now we are accepting  that a government can send armed forces into another nation’s territory to seize whomever it wishes to seize and all the offended nation can do  is “demand an explanation” .  

We are accepting that governments may torture  as a normal way of getting information.

We are giving our consent to the demolition of a whole system of safeguards which  took centuries  and  millions of  lives to make even debatable , let alone effective in law. 

And  while we are doing this we are piously asking :  Why are so many of our people taking their own lives?

How can we ask such a question when we are building up a society in which , for all our pious talk , might really does mean right,  death is  our chosen  acceptable solution for  problems and  international bodies set up to protect our lives  are cynically used by the strongest to allow more of their killings to be protected by law?

Why should any of us  complain ? Most of us  have accepted every bit of it, the drones, the invasions, the torture, the packed prisons, the economic systems which do not just tolerate poverty but deliberately create it because without poverty the systems will not work,  without poverty the wars will  not be waged – although there is a strong push now to make  war using  fewer and fewer people  just as we have invented   trade with fewer and fewer people  to work in  it, trade with less workers and more consumers, war  waged without  masses of people walking to be slaughtered.  But  the nuclear weapons are waiting in the wings ready for  use as soon as the really important people find a safe refuge for themselves, whether on this earth or beyond it. , and so the masses of people can disappear anyway.

Shame on us for  allowing it  to happen.

Right of Conquest

One of the ideas that  helped to shape history but  we could usefully get rid of is The Right of Conquest.

It was believed – or people professed to believe – that when you conquer another people’s land you  own it  by Right of Conquest. It was  a way of  justifying theft and the receipt of stolen goods. It was accepted by Christians in whose Bible  the right of conquest is  glorified, however ruthless it might be. Right of conquest is still with us, but it takes different forms nowadays. Sometimes it is disguised as opening up the way for democracy  for people who are suffering from dictatorships whose badness we , and not they, define.

Historically the theft of other people’s land has been glorified even to the extent of attaching sacred names to stolen territory. Corpus Christi was never meant to be used that way. With a Bible firmly  in hand , or  stored in a locker ready for action when required, it was easy for invading Christians not only to steal territory but even to say God was the reason for it. And God was praised for it too.

One of  our  neighbours in West Belfast , Mr. Gowdy  who in his own words was educated in the university of the Universe – and often showed us great wisdom as a result – used to  sum up a segment of Irish history neatly. When  told that one of the awful things done  in Ireland was that invaders came and stole the land of the O Neills, the great Northern family, he had an immediate and devastating answer : “Yes. And who did the O Neills steal it from ?”

They must have taken it partly by armed strength and partly by craft because in Ireland the land used to belong to the people who walked on it  for the very first time, and then by their tribes and  then when  one or more families became powerful gradually  control of the land became concentrated  in them. One of  many  interesting places in Ireland is Newry, Co Down where land was thus brought into the control of local princes, who donated some of it to a monastery ( coming in from outside)and when invaders were stealing monastery lands everywhere ,  the Newry land was stolen. As usual in those days of enlightenment when monasteries were destroyed, their hospital services, their rest and refuge houses were destroyed with them, in the first massive privatisation of medical services ever to happen . Stones of the monastery buildings were used to build fine houses for the new possessors.

What they had done was justified partly by saying they were  civilising natives and partly because God wished such things to happen and largely because  the Right of Conquest was believed and acted upon with vigour in those Christian times. Happily, a lot of the stolen land in Ireland kept its old names and did not have the miserable experience other peoples had of being re-named by the thieves in honour of  St Dominic or the Blessed Virgin once the blood had dried.

It seems  now that this ancient idea of the Right of Conquest is slowly giving place to a more modern  idea, the Right of World Policing. But it is much as usual. The aims are the same, theft of other people’s wealth , the methods are the same and , not surprisingly,  the excuses are the same.  After all, they say, powerful nations have  to civilise the world somehow .And that costs money. And lives. Other people’s  most of the time.