Brown has been Prime Minister for what, a matter of weeks, and already he wants to start sending our troops to war, this time in Darfur. He is also generously promising a £100 million of our money for this too – our Gordon is ever so generous with other people’s money, it’s a socialist thing. What a total wanker. Good grief, what is it with these Labour politicians? They hate and despise our armed forces and everything they stand for, deliberately underfund them, stick the knife in whenever possible, yet when the opportunity arises to send them off to fight there’s no hesitation. Is this seated in childhood envy of the cool kid’s Action Man? Were they the ones who had to make do with a bicycle pump while all the rest were running around with plastic machine guns? Or were they the kids that got the plastic soldier shoved up the nose? Buggered if I know, but certainly once they get hold of the boy’s toys they can’t resist using them to kill.
He's got a few thousand soldiers spare now they're not needed in Northern Ireland, so I suppose he has to do something with them.
Or is the timing purely coincidental?
Whoa, Neal. What Brown got was a resolution from the UN to send a peacekeeping force of around 20,000 troops to Darfur to complement the African Union peacekeepers already there. Virtually all the UN force, as I understand it, will be made up from African nations. Again, as I understand it, if we do send troops it'll be a hundred or so specialists.
Oh, and additionally, when I get screwed for big taxes and NI I expect the money to be spent in this country, on its citizens. Brown, it seems, is intent on throwing tens of millions of our money at Africa. He wants to dance about on the world stage 'doing good'. Brown, get down off that stage and get to work on this country, the one whose citizens you are supposed to be serving. And frankly, fuck Africa.
is it bread and circuses time, we are being distracted from the real problems with all this these people have it worse, we have to go to war. to distract us from seeing the real problems..
I'm glad I found this blog before the purchase of any books…more right wing ranting in sci-fi is the last thing needed in a already crowded field of self-absorbed nationalists.
Right wing ranting in sci-fi? First off it's a giveaway using that contraction, second off you don't really know much about the 'sci-fi' world if you think it a crowded field of self-absorbed right-wing nationalists. Quite right, you are no-one.
I'm from across the pond and thats the definitive flavor of sci-fi here…look into Aismov's magazine forum boards sometime with the fans and authors posting there.
And that was a particularly pathetic and predictable attempt at a insult on the last line…but then again, that maybe all I can expect out such a small man.
Neal – you're right that Brown is doing a lot of stuff very quickly. He does want to make his mark because he wants to carry a lot of weight into the election he's going to call in the Spring, and we will get a lot more stuff before then.
To be fair to him, though (not something I'm constitutionally disposed to do) the legwork for the resolution was started by Blair a while ago – Brown only dotted the i's and crossed the t's, the way Blair took the credit for a Northern Ireland peace process that really started way back when with John Major.
I have no idea if 20,000 personnel is going to be enough. If I could do stuff like that I'd be down the bookies' all day. I do know that it's the largest peacekeeping deployment in the UN's history. It's going to cost upward of a billion quid – mostly underwritten by the Americans, which is an achievement in itself, considering there's no oil in Darfur – and if it doesn't work it could cripple the UN's credibility.
I agree there's the danger that it's going to escalate, that it's going to become an African Vietnam. But what do we do? Sit in front of our televisions shaking our heads and sucking our teeth as thousands more die over there? Because this is not global warming, where we can argue about statistics and scientific errors until the cows come home. It's a catastrophe, whichever way you juggle the figures.
You quoted Martin Niemoller a while ago, and there's another quote that comes to mind (and if anyone can remind me where it comes from, I'd be grateful) It's something along the lines of `for evil to triumph, all it takes is for good men to do nothing.' Do we just sit back and count the bodies, or do we try to help? You say `fuck Africa,' and that's one point of view. But it strikes me as being a little like watching your neighbour being beaten to death and thinking, `fuck my neighbour' and not bothering to call the police because it would use too much battery power on your cellphone.
I can't be certain but I suspect the hundred million we'll be contributing will come from the Foreign Aid budget, from projects that are already spoken for and are going to find themselves a few million quid short over the next couple of years, rather than funds that were earmarked for domestic use. Gordon's good at cooking the books like that. It wouldn't look good, with an election coming up, to commit that much domestic money.
(PS – half the fun of posting here is disagreeing with you; I love a good tussle.)
dave i think it was "The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing." – Edmund Burke
or Attributed to Edmund Burke, but never found in his works. It may be a paraphrase of Burke’s view that 'When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle' (Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, April 23, 1770)."
i wonder how much money does go to the every day people, rather than the government there..
I think if we weren't involved in so many other disputes then Darfur wouldn't be such an issue but we are. The military are stretched pretty thin. They are tired, they're under equipped and generally fed up.
mercurior – thank you. I hadn't expected it to be Burke; I thought it sounded more like Ben Johnson or maybe Thoreau.
Neal – okay, you win; we can trade quotes until we both get old. *puts on coat and goes home*