Pica Pica

There were about 3000 deaths, mostly children, yesterday in Africa!

Oh, sorry, I forgot, they died of malaria. That’s not news, is it?

(Thanks to Dr Crippen of the Guardian for this point.)

I read that “cybercriminals are exploiting the worldwide hysteria over swine flu to peddle fake drugs and steal credit card details”. Symantec’s Mayur Kulkarni wrote in a blog that “the scare has spawned a spamming frenzy, like sharks smelling blood in the water”.

All of which underlines my curiosity about why we are panicking at all. Where is the sense of proportion? It’s not that I want to make light of those people who have been very ill – or even died – as a result of this disease. And I do presume that the WHO knows what is talking about, and that there is indeed some cause for concern. But what has actually happened so far? When I last read the figures (and that was yesterday, so they may have gone up since then, of course) seven people are confirmed as having died of swine flu so far in Mexico, over a period of a few weeks. Mexico City is said to be nearly at a standstill. But wait a minute! In a city the size of Mexico City somewhere getting on for 1000 people must die of one thing or another every day, some of them, no doubt, from flu. In America, more than 60,000 people die of flu each year – between 150 and 200 a day. Every one of those, presumably, was as unwanted as the deaths from swine flu. So far swine flu has been responsible for perhaps a few tens of deaths.

Once again, let’s not make light of it, and if the WHO is issuing warnings, no doubt we should take them seriously. Perhaps things will get very, very, very much worse than they are now. But why is there such a panic? Do we find this more comforting to worry about than things like the global financial crisis, Robert Mugabe, the Gaza Strip of the CIA’s “renditions”? Perhaps we feel that by going around in a surgical mask we can do something about this one, where we feel relatively powerless in other areas. Or do we somehow want there to be a pandemic? Does swine flu promise to satisfy an obscure yet powerful need for danger and alarm?

Perhaps there is something I’m failing to understand, and I do hope that I’m not tempting fate when I ask – what is all the panic about?

“Senior members of the Bush administration who approved the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation measures could face prosecution, Barack Obama said today, in a surprise about-turn by the president.” So says the Guardian today.

I’d been thinking that if ever I were caught out using violent abuse to “persuade” someone to do or say what I wanted, I could have tried to imitate the American government by claiming immunity on the grounds that it was all in the past, and that we should now be trying to move forward.

(Removes tongue from cheek.) I hope this apparent about-turn is a real one!

Well if not a prize, an honorable mention at least.

There is a well known saying attributed to Lord Acton in the late 19th century along the lines of “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”. I am looking for an equally pithy phrase to express the fact that secrecy makes stupid, top secrecy makes utterly stupid.

I’m not sure how many non-Australian readers will remember the Haneef case that I mentioned in 2007 in this old message. Actually that’s a collection of old bits and pieces, so if you go there you will have to search down for “Haneef” – alternatively you can just Google the name. The point is that the way the case was handled turned the Australian Federal Police into a laughing stock, and did the same for the Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews. All the authorities tried to hide their puerile bad judgement behind official secrecy. It would probably be fair to say that the atrocious handling of Dr Haneef was one of many things that led the public to perceive the Howard Government as out-of-touch, and more interested in their own status and power than in doing things properly. I daresay it even contributed to Howard’s party’s trouncing at the election, so perhaps there really is a small silver lining for every cloud, eh?

Now we have a new example in the mandatory Internet filtering proposed by the government. It is acknowledged by almost everyone that the proposed scheme could cripple the Internet here (which is not the hottest service anyway), and that it would not in fact make any significant dent in the circulation of child pornography, since seriously illegal material is passed around by methods other than the web. Every right-thinking person is of course offended by child pornography, and this is the cloak being used to push the scheme. But we know governments, don’t we? After child pornography it will be ordinary pornography, then anything about euthanasia, then things that the government finds highly sensitive and embarassing… and on it goes.

The funny thing though is that the existing secret blacklist of sites that are being used for the “trials” by a small and shrinking number of ISPs (Australia’s third largest internet provider, iiNet, has just withdrawn from the trials, saying it could not “reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility”) has recently been made public, and can be obtained from well-known sites such as Wikileaks. Somebody at the paper has taken the trouble to look at the sites on this list, and it turns out to contain “a wealth of legal material such as regular gay and straight porn sites, YouTube links, online poker sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites and even the sites of a Queensland dentist, a school canteen consultancy and an animal carer.” In other words, if an office junior with basic internet skills had been told to go off and browse for a week to find a few sites to ban, they would not have earnt much credit for coming up with this list! Some of the porn sites may be in what many of us may find in bad taste, but isn’t it up to us to make our own minds up there?

The Communications Minister responsible for this display of childish idiocy, Stephen Conroy, is, would you believe, not just a Catholic but a member of Opus Dei! Look him up in Wikipedia.

So an honorable mention will be awarded to whoever can come up with a really pithy version of “secrecy makes stupid, top secrecy makes utterly stupid”.

Much of the information here is thanks to the SMH.

The Sydney Morning Herald is probably the best paper around here, although the word “radical” would be a tad excessive. But this morning they not only put a story (1m 45s) about a video entitled ‘China’s brutality in Tibet exposed’ into their video section (at http://media.smh.com.au/ – though I’m not sure how long they keep their video reports there), but they even featured it on the front page! (By the way, that link just goes to the general video area at the SMH – you would have to look for this particular report yourself.)

Their front page says:

Tibet: China’s brutality on film
The Central Tibetan Administration releases ‘China’s brutality in Tibet exposed’, a documentary film of what they say are Chinese atrocities on the Tibetans.

Even this bit is not perhaps quite advised for the faint-hearted, although the paper has not shown the strongest parts of the video. The CTA clip itself can be seen at http://media.phayul.com/, and this is definitely not for the faint-hearted!

Revisiting March 10:

Loud chanting of battle cries, lots of cameras – when people have suffered, it’s hardly surprising that younger demonstrators can get carried away by the urge to somehow, anyhow do something!

Woke up before the 4:00 a.m. alarm to catch the bus down to Central Station for 5:00. The Sydney contingent was two full coaches plus a minibus. Dozing on the 4-hour trip to Canberra was slightly successful. Arrived late.

There were speeches outside Parliament House, a march to the Chinese Embassy, a touch of rabble-rousing chant, just enough to get some young ones to try to rush the police line, which makes for more dramatic footage. Chants like “Shame, Shame – China Shame”, “Stop Killing – In Tibet”, “Stop Torture – In Tibet”, some silence, some songs.

And that was it really. What’s the point? I think just being there to be counted usually has a point, though it’s obviously very indirect.

This March 10 is the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule – the Chinese had invaded in the early 1950s, of course.

Repression has been particularly savage all year, hence the general cancellation of the more joyful celebrations usually associated with the new year; that in turn, has brought more repression, with one monk setting fire to himself just last week in protest. He was shot before the flames were put out, and is presumed dead, but as far as I know nobody knows what happened to the body – “taken to an undisclosed location”, as they say.

So this year I plan to join the coach going to Canberra for the speeches-and-prayers do, provided I can manage to get up at shortly after 4:00 a.m.!

I will report back!

That was fast!

“Amnesty International is shocked and extremely disappointed by [her] comments,” the group said in statement. “The United States is one of the only countries that can meaningfully stand up to China on human rights issues. By commenting that human rights will not interfere with other priorities, Secretary Clinton damages future US initiatives to protect those rights in China.”

Human Rights Watch said progress on other issues was inseparable from progress in human rights, adding: “Freedom for the press, whistleblowers, and critics is essential to preventing environmental damage and defective products that threaten China and the world; labour rights abuses and the lack of rule of law destabilise China’s economy, which is part of a global economy; and unconditional aid to highly abusive governments destabilises international peace and security.”

Quoted from the Guardian

Last night SBS broadcast Murder in the Snow. Of course, when we see those figures falling into the snow, knowing that we are seeing, for instance, 17-year old nun Kelsang Namtso being shot dead, we react in the obvious way – outrage at the behaviour of the Chinese soldiers is not far away.

But there was something that struck me as worse. When we give guns to kids and young men, and tell them to go and “keep order” in an occupied territory, there will be atrocities. Think of the Americans at Mai Lai in Vietnam, in Iraq or at the Sand Creek massacre; the British in Northern Ireland (or, if you don’t find that convincing, go back to the days of the Black and Tans) or at the Amritsar massacre; the Japanese at the Nanking massacre; Rwanda; and on; and on.

What frightened me more was the mountaineers. There were about 100 of them in the party. Of those, two (yes, the number after one) of them, having witnessed the murder of defenceless, innocent civilians with their backs to the soldiers, saw it in the first place as their human duty to tell the story to the world. These were the Romanian cameraman Sergiu Matei and American mountain guide Luis Benitez. A couple of the others were more or less cornered into saying something later, which is some credit to them, but essentially the other 98 were more worried about their tourist visas and climbing permits than about state-sanctioned murder.

It is these “98ers” who stand by and let it all go wrong – but which of us can be sure that we are not amongst the 98? I’ve only just seen The Reader – was it not the 98ers who stood by and let Germany turn into Nazi Germany in the 1930s? Is it not 98ers everywhere who let bullying turn into bastardry and bastardry grow into atrocity?

The events of Murder in the Snow took place in 2006; it was the events of 2008 that I referred to a week ago, but in that connection I came across another graphic:

(Courtesy Lhuboom/RFA)

You can get what may have better resolution from Phayul if you want to put a copy elsewhere.