Craig Murray is a former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan who resigned after his protests about US / UK complicity in torture there were ignored.
In this post he responds to a complaint “from Darren who objected to my rather strong and personal attacks on [Labour Party members] Margaret Curran and Doug Hoyle” in a previous post.
(I don’t usually quote this much, but Murray is eloquent in his ferocity.)
I used to be one of the most civil and orthodox people you might meet. Then I came across the hideous torture in Uzbekistan. I could give hundreds of examples. Two men were boiled alive, a woman was raped with a broken bottle, my neighbour was held down while a truck was driven over her legs, the teenage grandson of Professor Mirsiadov was abducted from outside his home and tortured to death while I was inside eating dinner with his grandfather. And I found that our government not only supported the regime that was doing this as part of the “War on Terror”, but was knowingly and repeatedly receiving and using the intelligence reports that arose from these hideous torture sessions. I then discovered we were doing this not just in Uzbekistan, but all over the world, in support of “extraordinary rendition”.
We have actively caused the deaths in agony of hundreds of thousands. And yet I found that my colleagues in the diplomatic service were carrying on politely as though none of this had happened – just as those who loaded prisoners on to cattle trucks for Auschwitz were nice people with wives and kids. And I found that at home we were supposed to conduct the charade of party politics in the normal way, as though our government’s actions were not causing screaming deaths in agony. Well. I sincerely hope that the worst that ever happens to Margaret Curran is that I called her a shrew-faced bitch. Compare her distress to that of a mother watching her children die crying with their guts hanging out. Margaret Curran is a lot better off than thousands of very real women, who were just as human as her, and whose lives the illegal wars of New Labour have destroyed.
So think about it, Darren. And fuck the politenesses of politics.
This dovetails nicely with an explanation I attempted recently as to why I’ve increasingly become such cynical ass of late (see comments at Grumpy Forrester and Preemptive Karma). Every one of them is lying to me and I can see the moment they open their mouths. And I just don’t care anymore. I’m sick of the Jew/Muslim/Christian cult, and I’m sick of the NeoLiberal globalist “neocons”, and have reached a point of no longer holding myself above violence, something, thanks to the US government, I have more experience with, and talent for, than I care to.
As a committed peaceworker, I have to agree that it’s difficult in the face of such hideous injustice not to adopt the same tools the oppressors use. As Bruce Cockburn sang, “If I had a rocket launcher, I’d make somebody pay.”
But that would make me just like them…