Why Dont You Blog?

Following my posting yesterday (although I doubt the two are linked), I received a message on flickr today, inviting me to join a group (No Photographs Day / 15.DEC.2008) that read:

All,
We, the photographers of the world, are at risk. More and more we are viewed with suspicion, more and more we are subject to illegal interpretations of new anti-terrorism laws, more and more are we stopped and our cameras, our film, our digital media are either confiscated or wiped by officials unaware of the real laws. More and more are we bullied, more and more are we treated with disrespect and fear.
This needs to stop.
This group is to organize a protest.
This protest will involve attempting to get *every* member of flickr to refrain from uploading *any photographs* on a specific day.
This day will be Monday, December 15th 2008.
Join the group, put it in your diaries, tell your friends, discuss in the group, tell people you know in the media, come together.
Come together before it’s illegal to use a camera in a public place.

Now, I am not yet convinced of the value this action will take, but I rarely see the point in “awareness raising” activities so that is not unusual. However, the group does address something I have begun to become interested in (which is why I have “raised awareness” of it through the medium of blog).

Added to this, it (worryingly) seems there are many groups of people who have had problems in one way or another because of their interest in photography:

• Photography is not a crime
• The Harassed Photographer
• You can’t take pictures here!

Representative or not, it is a sorry state of affairs if people in the “free” civilized societies in the west can not carry out a harmless pastime that has been enjoyed for a hundred years. Wont life be better when we carry our papers round, are stopped at random by non-Police Security / Border Guards, are monitored 24/7, have all our emails sifted through by civil servants, be imprisoned for drawings …

Welcome to the New World Order.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Popularity: 26% [?]

Hell’s handmaidenhad an excellent post showing the Kjos Ministries’ take on a (possibly imaginary) UN peace-keeping initiative (which had me wondering “And this is supposed to be bad thing?”)

It seemed worth finding out exactly what the The New World Order was supposed to represent. Obviously, my first thoughts are “Wasn’t that what Joy Division became? No, fool. The word “World” didn’t fit in the Manchester band’s name.

It’s a bit of a shock to discover that there are people so far to the right of George W Bush (Bush I) that they can present him as part of a global conspiracy to undermine America. (I can appreciate that point of view. Engagement in stupid wars that created whole new categories of enemy may indeed have undermined the US. I don’t think they mean that though.)

It’s hard to make sense of what I will henceforth, ironically, refer to as “arguments”. The difficulty comes partly because words that you thought you understood are used in new and surprising contexts. It’s as if you thought you knew what a table was, then found yourself talking to people who use the word to describe what you call a toothbrush. Globalisation for instance. I followed a dozen links and I still can’t see what they are referring to.

In fact, at the end of the New World order page, I still don’t understand their argument. They have managed to distort the views of people as diverse as John Dewey and Pastor Rick Warren. These people treat the European Union as a successfully achieved Nazi project. So, no prizes to them for succeeding in characterising even UNESCO as vaguely sinister. Well, what could be more sinisterly anti-American than international co-operation to stop kids dying?

Keep in mind, this mind-changing system has no tolerance for God’s divisive Truth. Unless Christianity blends with other religions through diversity, dialogue and deconstruction (compromising or tearing down old beliefs) our globalist leaders will continue to face resistance. That’s why Federico Mayor, former head of UNESCO used yet another crisis to fuel revolutionary fervor:
“The mission of UNESCO… is that of advancing… international peace and the common welfare…. We have witnessed… the resurgence of nationalism, the growth of fundamentalism and of religious and ethnic intolerance. The roots of exclusion and hatred have shown themselves even deeper and more tenacious than we had feared…

You might naturally assume that Mayor’s words represent a wise and concise analysis of the current (”old?”/”new?”) world order.

However, they were cited by the (unpronouncable) Berit Kjos because she assumed readers would find them self-evdently threatening, as if any Christian who read them would see the inherent danger of creeping new-world-order-ism

No, I do get it. There is a parallel universe. In this universe, the Bush dynasty is a socialist plot. Franklin D Roosevelt was a socialist visionary. The EU sucked the US dry for the funds to set it up and is now laughing behind America’s back as it builds up regional power blocs to challenge the US. UNESCO threatens the right to practise religion. The silly Oprah-publicised The Secret actually provides secret esoteric wisdom and is a cunning wile of the devil . Role-playing games lead you sites where you can meet real occultists. And so on.

This is not obviously the same universe that I live in. Or at least, it wasn’t the universe that I lived in until the wall between worlds started to give way. Now, Kaos is leaking into our universe, probably though the mini-black-holes they are creating in CERN. Where is Chakotay when you need him?

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Aside
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There are pages and pages railing against immigration. It’s all the work of the new world order, of course. (I assume that’s why the US was populated entirely by Native Americans until recently) E.g. Berit Kjos:

Why won’t our leaders enforce a simple, straight-forward immigration policy?

But Berit Kjos:

Both Andy and Berit were raised Lutheran — Andy in North Dakota, I in Norway.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Popularity: 32% [?]

On the same day on which the Metro bus paper announced that an Oxford policy studies group said that the war on terror was disaster and had resulted only in strengthening al-qaeda the news emerged that Derek Pasquill, a Foreign Office civil servant, was arrested, on 27 September, for a series of articles in the New Statesman, the Observer and Policy Exchange.

The New Statesman sees this as an “abuse of state power” and reported that

This case is said to follow the publication in the New Statesman, the Observer and in a pamphlet by the Policy Exchange think tank of a series of articles highlighting damaging and dangerous government policy. These included an expose of British acquiescence in the secret and illegal “rendition” (Rendition: the cover up) by the United States of terrorist suspects, and various revelations about government policy towards radical Islam.

This issue raises quite a few issues. Government employees are bound by a requirement of loyalty. However, if someone finds that their government has been acting in contravention of international law, doesn’t international law require the individual to speak out. Revealing policy is one thing - disagreement over policy is a matter of opinion. Civil servants are, quite understandably, obliged to keep their policy disagreements to themselves.

Acquiescence in activity that contravenes international law is a different matter. Did the Nuremberg trials not establish that “only following orders” was not an adequate defence, when those orders contravened international law?

It is hard to believe the absurdly named “rendition” is not an offence under international law. The very word breathes 1984. There is no single English word for “kidnap and delivery of suspects to places where they can be tortured” but there are plenty of English words that could be used to describe this much more accurately.

There is a fuller story on this on Index on Censorship. The New Statesman’s political affairs editor describes how he was getting so many stories on this issue at one point that it was almost impossible to keep up with them, alerting him to the existence of dissatisfaction with existing policies at a very high level:

The documents showed that senior figures in the Foreign Office believed that Britain’s policy in Iraq had led to an increase in radicalism among young Muslims, something the prime minister was denying at the time.

…..The leaks provided me with a further news story for the Observer about plans to infiltrate extremist groups, and with features for the New Statesman on CIA rendition flights, diplomatic engagement with Egypt’s banned opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the panic that had engulfed the Foreign Office as a result of the disclosures. …

……It is difficult to imagine a series of documents that could have been more in the public interest to disclose.

Hard to disagree with that conclusion.

Popularity: 41% [?]

Popularity: 41% [?]