What do you make of a situation where a UN investigator reads a certain name, and says “out of nowhere, I was overtaken by a host of disparaging thoughts and almost reflexive feelings of rejection”? He says he didn’t even read the email about that person, because he’d been convinced this wasn’t a topic he wanted to be thinking about.

Fortunately, he changed his mind a while later, because this case concerns an idea someone had that might just have been the way to begin to sort out our corruption-laden business and political world.

Resolutions and solutions

It’s getting to the stage now where we feel the need to re-assess everything we see that happened before October 7^th, 2023 just as, a couple of decades ago, a chasm opened up in the way we viewed everything before and after September 11^th, 2001.

So here, in this post-Oct 7^th world, let’s look at a book published by a United Nations special rapporteur, way back in 2022, when we still thought the UN might be of some use to us.

I didn’t realize until recently that UN special rapporteurs aren’t any kind of employee. They are volunteers, usually academics, voted into honorary roles to look in detail at issues, cases or trends that affect UN decisions. They aren’t tied to the ‘positions’ of any countries, and they aren’t allowed to take instructions from any politicians.

I only found that out when I was on the women’s campaign, and Reem Alsalem made that intervention in the Scottish government’s deliberations, to let them know what, actually, most women instinctively know and what, actually, helps or hinders the struggle against male violence against women and girls.

Now, I think that if there is any value at all left in the United Nations, that value rests in its special rapporteurs. Nils Melzer is a special rapporteur on torture. He wrote his book to be “a wake-up call to the general public”. He thought we should know that the UN is seriously dysfunctional, that atrocities of corruption and cruelty can happen, and no-one gets to know about it. He wanted to show us “a generalized systemic failure gravely undermining the integrity of our democratic institutions…” you see why I’m writing this now, I hope?

He says it’s about “the integrity of our constitutional institutions”, he says “the future of democracy is at stake” and he says “I do not intend to leave to our children a world where governments can disregard the rule of law with impunity, and where telling the truth has become a crime.”

Did you notice the signs of something (not really very) carefully hidden in my header pic? I did that because I wanted to tell you about Melzer’s book before we all started thinking about that name he mentioned, the one that inspired “a host of disparaging thoughts and almost reflexive feelings of rejection.”

What stories have there been lately where a mass of media nonsense and politicians’ word-mongering engages our prejudices, blows our critical thinking off course and drives a wedge between good people?

This could be about Corbyn, anti-Semitism, Trump, Brexit, COVID, sex self-ID, Russell Brand or now, above all, Israel. Melzer though, back then, before 7^th October 2023, was actually talking about Julian Assange. About how he’d ignored the case for quite some time because “out of nowhere, I was overtaken by a host of disparaging thoughts and almost reflexive feelings of rejection.”

I’m writing this today because recent events have inspired many of us to re-assess what we believe. We have had such a fire-storm of failed propaganda from Israel over the last six months, and such a distressing spectacle of failure from the United Nations and obvious, desperate lies from politicians, that masks seem to be slipping left right and centre. This year, that meme about April Fool’s day struck an extra chord for me – the one that says, “April 1^st – the one day of the year when everyone looks critically at what they see online before believing it.”

Neutrality

Once Melzer did take up the Assange case, he found himself being obstructed and tutted at by others whose views had been led by the government/media narrative about Assange. He says he was accused of losing his neutrality. He says that was nonsense, because “once the investigation of a case leads to the conclusion that serious human rights violations have indeed been committed, I cannot be expected to remain neutral between perpetrators and victims.”

Now isn’t that exactly what the government/media narrative have always tried to make us do over Israel/Palestine? Before October 7^th last year, how many of us ever managed to keep sight of the fact that Israel is a violent, occupying force, and Gaza has been under siege, and regularly bombarded, for years?

How many stories that should have had a very clear right and wrong have been fuzzed out by the “bad behaviour on both sides” tactic, that leaves us nothing obvious to do about whatever it is?

Propaganda on overdrive

Of course, looking critically at what turns up in front of your eyes doesn’t do the whole job. There is no case of right and wrong that’s so perfectly clean cut that all the bad behaviour is on one side, but you can’t read between the lines of an article that simply did not get into your newspaper, nor can you weigh up mitigating circumstances that no-one has given you the merest hint of.

We need to get the habit of looking in places where people write about, talk about, try to do something about, all the hidden things. Now, in the messy haitus between the mainstream Israel narrative breaking down, and the politicians finding their footing again and selling us a compromise story, now is the time to look back and see what each of us may have missed, or got wrong, or wrongly believed, along the way.

There will be stories that fooled me, and there will be stories that fooled you. If you don’t believe me you are (to quote Victoria Smith) underestimating the amount of bullshit there is out there. I know which ones she got wrong. I wonder if she knows any I got wrong. That’s why I don’t revile or ‘cancel’ people I think have got things wrong. I save that for the blatantly corrupt, conscious liars who are raking in the profits of their lies.

I was quite pleased with myself the other day because I put out an article pointing out the propaganda-wranglers’ damage-limitation line (blame Netanyahu and move on, changing nothing) the day before Caitin Johnstone did. (You may not agree with CJ on everything — probably I don’t either, but she’s one of the most efficient mainstream narrative-busters I know).

Showing off aside though – the Israel/Palestine situation has brought all kinds of things into view that we really need to think about – racism, colonialism, militarism, the disgusting products of the disgusting, out-of-control arms industry, the appalling unaccountability and dishonesty of politicians, the helplessness of the UN in dire situations, and more.

Please let us all be vigilant now. Don’t let the government/media circus put all those important issues back behind their smoke screens.

“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” — Nelson Mandela

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Kay

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