World unites in suspicious activity

The 21st Century is a depressing era.

Across the world, extremism is on the rise, hate is being mongered, and fear is spreading around the globe faster than chlamydia through Birmingham*.

For lefties like me, there seemed no hope of a brighter tomorrow, where the nations of the world work together in unison, where shining examples blossom around the planet in a whirl of collaboration and community that transcends mere borders.

I’m pleased to say, dear readers, that I was wrong.

They’ve been secretive. They’ve been cunning. The didn’t want to let the world know until they were absolutely sure they had it cracked. But they’ve done it. They’ve achieved the dream.

Law enforcement agencies have achieved global bastardry. From Manhattan to Mogadishu, Moscow to Manchester, police and intelligence services have ushered in a brave new dawn of skulduggery, deceit and outright criminality.

As is so often the case, our American cousins have led the way. After leaked details of their in-no-way-sinister Prism system for ‘keeping an eye on persons of interest’, or really anyone for that matter, they’ve started to make some hilariously open threats to any country they even suspect of thinking about harbouring Edward Snowden. They also claim that they have no idea where Snowden is, which is like when you play hide and seek with your 4 year old nephew, who’s hiding behind the curtain with a leg in clear view, repeatedly shouting “I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE HE COULD BE!”.


World Hide and Seek Champion 2013

World Hide and Seek Champion 2013

Either the Americans have him and are giving him a tiny off-the-record talking to or the Russians really are hiding him/having a tiny off-the-record chat with him. So your four options are a) America kidnaps somebody illegally again, b) Russia disappears somebody again, c) Russia is a bastion of human rights and freedom of speech and the American intelligence community cannot find one man even after he told them which hotel he was staying in or d) Snowden is fucking epic at hide and seek.

There was also the tragic and absolutely not fishy death of Michael Hastings in a car crash which looked in no way like an explosion last week. His final email to colleagues will assure everybody that nothing dodgy was going on with the FBI.

Back on this side of the pond, the police are doing their level best to become a byword for dodgy. Phrases like “Did you see those two blokes exchange that package and then that money? That looked well police.” and “I can’t play football tonight, my knee’s a bit constabularied.” have sprung into common parlance following a long line of dick manouevres, many emanating from the Met.

Today it was revealed that the Met bugged Duwayne Brooks, friend of Stephen Lawrence, as well as trying to smear his family. Classy. On another note, whenever I hear or read the word smear my brain auto-completes the sentence with “with grease”. No idea why.

It’s also been recently revealed that everybody is now an undercover police officer. It’s highly likely that there hasn’t actually been an extremist group in the UK since about 1974. The EDL is simply a colossal waste of public money as it comprises 2000 police officers who meet up every Sunday to try and bomb a mosque, smash up three pubs and then report to their commanding officers that the’re getting close to earning the trust of the other members.

This also explains why a bomb going off outside a mosque is a disturbance, and a bomb going off outside a church is a terror attack.

Tommy Robinson is actually a 21-year old female officer with a fabulous makeup artist and a flair for acting. Abu Hamza is a PCSO called Gerald who’s been assigned to desk duties after a slightly over-enthusiastic stint as a mental cleric. At weekends he still uses the hook for children’s parties, where he dresses as a pirate.

“I’m proud to do terrible things for the country I love”, said Gerald. “It’s what separates us from the animals.”



*Birmingham. Official STD capital of the UK.


“Killing is wrong, Mr Gaddafi. We’ll kill you if you kill people.”

“Hypocrisy and double standards”. These tenets are actually written into the UN Charter, just in Latin so that everybody thinks it means something like “Peace and kittens for all”.

In recent days, the entire UN, namely France, the US and the UK, have arbitrarily decided that it doesn’t much like the violent rumblings in Libya and has come up with a masterplan: prevent the aerial bombardment of Libyans by aerially bombarding Libyans.

If the majesty of this plan wasn’t quite evident enough, then the added spice of shelling Gaddafi-friendly tanks, which are approximately the size of a tank, with smart bombs so smart they eviscerate everything in a 200ft radius should be enough to make even the most venerated military tactician doff the proverbial cap.

"We only got the tank. Those cars were already on fire."

The justification is stunningly arrogant: “[The Libyan opposition have] expressed a clear and overwhelming wish for Gaddafi to go and we agree with that too.” – David Cameron

Fair enough, Dave, but it’s not the Libyan people en masse; a significant minority must still be loyal to the scruffy old tyrant else he’d be out on his arse already. In addition, DC himself isn’t exactly the most popular PM at the moment, but as yet I haven’t heard the unmistakable roar of an F-16 haring towards Downing Street recently. There’s still time.

Of more pressing concern than whether Ban-Ki Moon will crack out the jets next time students take to the streets is the question of what on earth the UN is playing at. This, of course, is a question which has followed the organisation since roughly the very beginning. The majority of the time the international community is perfectly happy to sit back and have a nice cup of tea whilst oppressive regimes tear their people to shreds. In Rwanda they actively stood there and watched, and that’s not an isolated occurrence.

So the incisive international action in Libya seems a little baffling, especially given that Yemen, Syria, and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia are also currently engaged in enthusiastically ‘repressing’ their own civilians. Apparently the UN doesn’t agree with those people.

The befuddling lack of any kind of consistency only serves to highlight that the whole institution stinks to high heaven when it comes to interventions. Whilst ostensibly an egalitarian forum for collective action, the major behavioural pattern effectively mirrors the whims and cares of the dominant states. Big guns like, big guns get. Big guns no like, Big guns veto. Simples.

“Col Gaddafi, we strike at you safe in the knowledge that the whole world is behind us. Except most of the world, but it’s okay because we can’t really pronounce them and they’re probably not important. I mean, pretty much all of them agreed with the whole no-fly zone thing but then I guess they didn’t see the obvious inference that we saw that by having a no-fly zone you automatically have to bomb anything that moves in order to enforce it, but I suppose that’s not their fault and we’ll just decide for them anyway and we’ve decided that the best way to stop things from flying is just to bomb everything on the ground in case it does start flying and breaks the no-fly zone rules, I mean you wouldn’t think tanks and buildings could fly but I saw an ant do it once so you can’t be too careful, know what I mean?”

The organisation is almost set up not to work; the security council and the veto are utterly ludicrous and do nothing except block majority-led consensus. The self-appointed permanent members effectively decide on all matters of international peace, and a no vote from any of them means no resolution and no UN backed action, which then leads to the big states going off and doing it anyway. Hi Iraq. Obviously this shuts out the rest of the world, unless you’re on the non-permanent committee that year, in which case you don’t have a veto anyway so you might as well be wanking furiously in the corner for all the effect your nation has on proceedings.

If there is to be a global forum for action on international peace, then fine. But let the whole world decide, and let it decide on the appropriate action too. Hold states who invade other nations without consent accountable, properly, and don’t let the big players get away with this cavalier bullshit.

The western powers have got a tentative agreement to stop the Libyan conflict being horribly one-sided, and have used that as an excuse to launch a bombing campaign against somebody they don’t like. The UN shows itself to be either a puppet to western whim, as it has this week, or incapable of holding the west to account when it goes on oil jollies around the globe.

Global democracy? Bollocks.