Meet the new world, same as the old world

From the inimitable Eric Blair*:

When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being unemployed. I was very ignorant, but not so ignorant as to imagine that when the loss of foreign markets pushes two million men out of work, those two million are any more to blame than the people who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep. But at that time nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking about ‘lazy idle loafers on the dole’ and saying that ‘these men could all find work if they wanted to’, and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves. I remember the shock of astonishment it gave me, when I first
mingled with tramps and beggars, to find that a fair proportion, perhaps a quarter, of these beings whom I had been taught to regard as cynical parasites, were decent young miners and cotton-workers gazing at their destiny with the same sort of dumb amazement as an animal in a trap.



*aka George Orwell of course

Devolution

For 50-odd years, Israel was the only true democracy in the middle east. It appears, this has gradually ceased to be true. Consider, as of the moment in Israel, it is:

- Illegal to call for a boycott of goods manufactured in the occupied territories
- Illegal for a citizen to marry a woman from the occupied territories and bring her to Israel (if she's Arab)
- Illegal to commemorate the expulsion of Arabs from Israel in 1948
- Illegal for Arabs to serve in the army (and to enjoy the privileges that this service subsequently brings)
- Anyone convicted of 'assisting terrorism' has their citizenship stripped from them
.... and more beyond.

Sic transit gloria populi

Orwell, right again

Is it inevitable that anything will decay into its' opposite? Contemplating the violent racism of Israel, it's hard not to conclude so. To quote one of its founding fathers, Uri Avnery:

THE ARCHBISHOP of New York announces that any Catholic who rents out an apartment to a Jew commits a mortal sin and runs the risk of excommunication.

A protestant priest in Berlin decrees that a Christian who employs a Jew will be banished from his parish.
Impossible? Indeed. Except in Israel – in reverse, of course.
The rabbi of Safed, a government employee, has decreed that it is strictly forbidden to let apartments to Arabs – including the Arab students at the local medical school. Twenty other town rabbis – whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers, mostly secular, including Arab citizens - have publicly supported this edict.

.Welcome to America

We are ruled by charlatans and cowards. Our economy is in the tank, we know what to do about it, and we're just not going to do it. The charlatans prefer instead to stand by and let people suffer because that's politically useful, while the cowards let them get away with it because it's politically risky to fight back. Ugh indeed.