Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Most apposite Lawrence of Arabia quote of the week

Me, your Highness? On the whole, I wish I'd stayed in Tunbridge Wells.


Runners up include:

Look, sir, we can't just do nothing.
Why not? It's usually best.

Does it surprise you, Mr Bentley? Surely, you know the Arabs are a barbarous people. Barbarous and cruel. Who but they! Who but they!

A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.

No, they're still there, but they've no boots. Prisoners, sir. We took them prisoners; the entire garrison. No, that's not true. We killed some; too many really. I'll manage it better next time. There's been a lot of killing, one way or another. Cross my heart and hope to die, it's all perfectly true.

Well, General, I will leave you. Major Lawrence doubtless has reports to make upon my people and their weakness, and the need to keep them weak in the British interest... and the French interest too, of course. We must not forget the French now...

I can't make out whether you're a bloody madman or just half-witted.
I have the same problem, sir.


Fingers crossed. Hopefully the Royal Navy will be able to whisk out all the British Nationals in Beirut before one of them gets blown to bits, makes the front pages and people start to ask ‘Why is our government sitting back and doing nothing to stop this fucking insanity!!?

We wouldn’t want that to happen would we.

As long as it's only 'rag heads' getting killed we can keep well out of it. And if the situation ever settles down again we can send our people back in there as if nothing ever happened.

The hypocrisy of this entire business; from our politicians, from the media, nauseates me.

How can anyone, in Israel or elsewhere, honestly or sanely believe that bombing a country into the stone age will make the world a safer place?

And I fear that at some point down the line we may all end up paying for what is being done, and not done, in our name.

I feel ashamed.

But, hey, I live in a democracy so there must be something I can do, however small, to influence the actions of my government.

Yeah, right.

3 comments:

Shahid said...

You're doing what you can, this blog is proof, but democracy, even when it works, of any kind is broken. And I think we're all beginning to realise that.

Anonymous said...

Democracy is tyranny; further, it enfeebles freedom of speech. "Freedom of expression should not be measured by how likely the average person is to be silenced, but by how likely someone with something to say is." Democracy has the effect of silencing people who have something to say (remember Norman from Swansea?).

An ongoing illustration of the above point is a comparison between an average Joe with an ink stained thumb and one of these chaps.

zee said...

democracy is one of those things that always seems to be used as a weapon by the powerful...and when the tides begin to turn and the weak begin to get a glimpse of their own true power, along come the powerful and use 'democracy' as a shield, enabling them to remain as the superior power.