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.