Back from the laundrette

Beautiful sunny autumn Sydney day today. Day after Mardigras. Clear blue sky, sunshine, welcome chill.

So. What to blog. It's been a while. Week is an eternity in blog days. Reminds me of those kids books, where the children step into a magical new world and time passes five times quicker and before they know it they've matured into adults. Then the door beckons and back to reality they go. Oh well, here I am stepping through the door again.

Bush and Rice are so farcical they're beyond satire - doing well enough at ironyising themselves without my assistance. A US president and secretary of state endlessly replaying "Syrian troops and intelligence out" through various media outlets while Iraq is still crawling with US troops and intelligence is hardly worth blogging about. The comedy is baudelaire enough as it is, to shine a blog torch on it would do little other then play for a shadowy moment with grotesque distortions that already exist.

So I'll blog about China instead.

China's leadership has been killing, torturing, sending to forced labour camps and generally trampling all over it's own population en masse for decades - but do we hear US president or secretary of state championing war-driven "pro-democracy" campaigns against Chinese officialdom? No. We do not. And why is that - well, because China is huge and war with China would result in a bloody mess. Messier then Iraq I mean. A US driven offensive against China would result in severe global chaos. Almost definitely a full blown third world war and most likely nuclear war.

So what does the pentagon (and it's financier) do instead? It disables smaller surrounding targets by de-activating small-nation weapon programs via UN weapons inspection teams, by crippling small nation economies with UN sanctions, by occupying small nation territories with UN "peace-keeping" forces and ultimately by moving in with war apparatus a'la Afghanistan, Iraq and now perhaps Syria.

Those tiddlywink manipulators in the Whitehouse seriously think that occupying the Mid-East and controlling Mid-East oil fields is going to give them the upper global hand in the event of possible future clashes with China.

In the meantime foreign trade officials turn a convenient blind eye to human rights abuse in China, while foreign diplomats arrange grand sporting occasions with China's diplomats. Because in the meantime China is a cheap western production house (balanced perilously on slave labour) with an unknown but by all indications fairly capable nuclear arsenal. Because China is the third cold-war bit-player, a possible ally and a possible antagonist. Because China is going along with the US "war on terror" by holding it's own mock trials and subversions of justice in the name of national security. "Strike hard" urges Luo Gan, and strike hard China does. Imprisoning and executing it's population for public holiday entertainment.

Yes this is all related. We ordinary people simply cannot move forward and build a peaceful world unless we are willing to denounce all war and focus not only on our own misfortunes but on the misfortunes of other ordinary people in other lands. The desire for peace and human rights is the desire of any global citizen. We are all, ordinary people, in this together. Let us not lose sight of the fact that while a handful of fraudulent pro-war miscreants attempt to create disruption through confusion, that most of us just want to get on with our lives, freely and peacefully.

No War. Human Rights for All.