I am not the Robot Tourist

I heard a little bit of Jenny Murray's 'Don't get me started' slot on Channel 5 and was rather non-plussed. Don't get me started on euthenasia.

David Aaronovitch, however, has used his slot on 'Don't get me started' to give an airing to the saner side of the British left, i.e. those who do not see it as justifiable to support Hizb-allah, Hamas or the Iraqi 'resistance'. In his documentary he may not have interviewed anyone who disagrees with him, but that is part of his point: i) given the evidence, anyone on the left who supports Hizb-allah is deranged and shouldn't be heard; ii) leftists who support Hizb-allah already get so much press and make so many protests, now this is his turn. You can watch it via YouTube with the following links (thanks to harrysplacevids for recording and uploading it):

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Weirdly enough my main moment of enlightenment regarding the middle east was a couple of years back when I was looking through some of the user pages of www.perlmonks.org and came across a picture of some boys in the balcony of an appartment block (of the type you see in most British cities) about to throw or drop concrete blocks and it was captioned something like: Naughty Palestinian boys throwing stones again. Since then I've read lots of Mark Steyn and looked up littlegreenfootballs.com and read things like http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mftoc.html. I can't excuse everything Israel has ever done, but the Israelis are clearly not as evil as they are often made out to be by their enemies.

And before you even think it, I know David Aaronovitch is a very Russian-Jewish name, so of course he _would_ support Israel, but he is not necessarily supporting Israel, he is showing up Israel's enemies for what they are really, and the moral bankruptcy of those, especially on the left, who support Hizb-allah.

I do not advocate unthinking solidarity with Israel, but all those who support the intifada, Hamas, Fatah, Hizb-allah, etc., should remember that as Mark Steyn often says, the Jews are the canary in the mineshaft of history. If a group starts advocating the killing of Jews (or Zionists), watch out, they'll be after you next.

I read a lot (well everything) of what Mark Steyn writes (www.steynonline.com) and geopolitics fascinates me. I started to write him an email about his recent Macleans article (http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/article.jsp?content=20060529_127469_127469) and was going to write about how the USA should do some empire building before China does. But then I realised the vanity of it all (as Qoholet might say: a chasing after the wind). Sometimes I may be too fatalistic, and Christians should certainly not be fatalistic, if there's something we can do to improve a person's life, we should do it and not simply accept suffering and injustice, so Christians should not simply allow a repressive regime to take over. But neither should we be blind to our motives.

If I simply wanted the USA to build a big empire because I thought my quality of life would be improved I would become disappointed. Markets (including capital markets) may be more often right than wrong, but at some point markets are governed by people. People make mistakes that can lead to market crashes and (hopefully only relative) impoverishment. People can also make decisions based on greed, leading to some getting and some having to do without. Even if I was more altruistic and wanted other people's lives to be improved by the free(ish) movement of capital I would be disappointed. For instance, the 9/11 hijackers were not impoverished, desparate people, they had benefitted from 'Western' education, 'Western'-style free trade, 'Western' technology and the wealth our 'Western' societies create.

The empire we must aspire to is God's kingdom. It will not be brought about with weapons and weapons will not be needed to maintain it because God will rule in His people's hearts. God's kingdom will obviously not be a stagnant command economy, but neither will it be a chaotic market-based ecomony. It won't even be a third-way.

I am not for one minute favouring Hu Jintao, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro or Robert Mugabe and the despotic, corrupting and destructive regimes they run, over Tony Blair or George W. Bush, but we must not get distracted by the leaven of the Herodians (i.e. the pursuit of power and wealth for the their own sake). We need to focus on the Gospel and how to reach lost souls now, whether they are gripped by the dark regime of a power-mad despot or the bright seduction of the love of money.

In any case markets need honest people to run them in a spirit of openness and that sort of person is generally only found because of the salt and light effect of the Gospel.

But to really show how futile chasing after the wind of geopolitics is, we must never forget that permanence is an illusion. History may repeat itself, but usually in ways even the greatest scholar could not predict. China's peasants in the interior may rise up against their repressive local governments and the country could become 2, 3 , 4 or more different states. China's Christian population may reach the tipping point where the Communist party cannot fill all the positions of government with its apparatchiks. Or even an obscure, but influential man could be asassinated, which happened before and led to one near global war, the overturning of huge empires and the creation of the Soviet Empire; then indirectly to a another, more global and more deadly war, the stand-off of the Cold War and it's 'minor' skirmishes like Korea and Vietnam, etc. What I mean to say is, we should not forget: 'events [happen], dear boy...'.