13 things everyone should know about the ECHR

Priti Patel's Rwanda deportation flight was never actually intended to take off.

It was a £500,000 publicity stunt designed to ramp up the culture war against the European Convention on Human Rights, and the court that protects these rights and liberties.

The Tory ploy was to deliberately try to break the law, in order to claim that the nasty Europeans are preventing us from doing what we want to, and agitate for Britain to leave the jurisdiction of the ECHR.

Given that the UK government is intent on whipping up culture war propaganda against it, here are 13 things that people should know about the ECHR:

It's got nothing to do with the EU

The ECHR has absolutely nothing to do with the EU. It's an independent institution established in 1950.

So all these far-right polemicists shouting "leave means leave" over the Rwanda situation are either thick as mince, or being deliberately misleading.

Churchill's finest legacy

Winston Churchill was a true enigma of a man. A right-wing racist who despised Indians and set soldiers on British workers, but a war leader in the fight against Nazism, and a man who promoted the idea of internationally accepted human rights to prevent the horrors of fascism from happening again.

The development of the ECHR was supported by both Churchill and Labour PM Clement Attlee, meaning anyone who wants to rip Britain out of of the ECHR is trashing the legacies of the favourite 20th Century Prime Ministers of both the right and the left!

Protection from fascism

The ECHR was designed to protect European citizens from fascism, and make sure nothing like the horrors of the Second World War could ever happen again. So you've really got to wonder about the true motivations of any government that wants to drag their country out of it.

The life's work of Johnson's own grandad

Boris Johnson's own grandfather James Fawcett was a member of the ECHR from 1962-1984, serving as its President from 1972-1982. He dedicated his life's work to human rights, and wrote books on international law, and the application of the ECHR.

It's not just an indication of the decline of Fawcett's family lineage that his own grandson is the radical-right philistine who is intent on wrecking his life's work, it's indicative of our national decline too.

For all of our many faults, Britain was once a great nation in some ways, stocked with decent, honest, earnest men like Fawcett who worked for the betterment of humanity.

These days we lift up and celebrate the absolute worst among us, like the bone-idle, incompetent, lying, philandering oaf who is intent on wrecking the life's work of his own grandfather, purely because he knows contemptuously undermining human rights and international law plays well to Britain's depraved hard-right capitalist media.

These days it's all about self-interest, not the betterment of others, and it's a crying shame that we've fallen so far as a nation in just a couple of generations.

Red meat for tabloid-addled reactionaries

It's hard to imagine the warped mindset of the kind of tabloid-addled reactionary who desperately wants to see their own human rights ripped up, purely because they're angry that their beloved Tory government couldn't unlawfully deport a few poor refugees, who they've never even met, and know nothing about.

But this kind of rabidly right-wing ultranationalist reactionary is Johnson's base. The Tories knew they couldn't win elections without attracting the millions who used to vote for UKIP and the BNP, so this policy of destroying our human rights is red meat, intended for their consumption.

ECHR protects British rights

We regularly hear about how the ECHR protects immigrants, by preventing the UK government from defying the law to deport them, but it also protects the rights of British citizens too.

It was thanks to the ECHR that the bans on homosexuality were lifted in Scotland and Northern Ireland; employers were prevented from discriminating against their workers on religious grounds; teachers were banned from brutalising children with corporal punishment; the ban on people in Gibraltar voting in general Elections was lifted; and the multiple rulings to protect the British public from police brutality.

A very British institution

The ECHR was largely drafted by British lawyers, and British judges have always been major players in the institution, with three of Britain's eight ECHR judges having served as president of the court (Nicholas Bratza, Humphrey Waldock, A.D. McNair). 

Only France and Italy out of the other 46 member states have even had two presidents of the court, and many nations have never had a single one.

Leaving would be Putinesque

In all of Europe, only Belarus has never signed up to the ECHR. The only countries to have walked out of it are Greece, after they suffered a violent military coup in 1969 (then re-joined 1974), and then Putin's Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

Do we really want to join the brutal Papadopoulos Junta and Vlad Putin's Russia as the only European regimes to have torn up their own citizens' European rights?

Crucial to the Irish Peace Process

Boris Johnson has already made his contempt for the Irish Peace Process absolutely clear by barefaced lying that his Brexit deal wasn't going to create a border down the Irish Sea, creating a border down the Irish Sea, and then defying international law with his efforts to rip up the Northern Ireland Protocol after having told everyone it was a great deal, and signing us up to abide by it.

Britain can't quit the ECHR without ripping up the Good Friday Agreement, which stipulates that the UK have the ECHR enforceable in Northern Ireland.

This latest attack on the ECHR demonstrates that Johnson's contempt for the Irish Peace Process knows no bounds.

Internationally accepted rights, or a set of Tory allowances?

The Tories want to tear up the ECHR and replace it with a British "Bill of Rights" which will be drawn up by ministers from the billionaire-bankrolled Tory party!

What kind of idiot wants to have their internationally accepted rights lobbed in the bin, so that the radical-right ghouls Johnson has surrounded himself with can decide what rights and liberties they will and won't allow us to keep?

Know your rights

The first 18 Articles of the ECHR are the most fundamental. Most of the rest relate to technical details of how the court functions. Here are the rights that Boris Johnson and the Tories are seeking to rip up:

Why the British press hate it

Johnson is intent on attacking the ECHR because Britain's rabidly right-wing corporate media outlets hate it.

The main reason they hate it is because of Article 8, which guarantees British citizens the right to privacy, and prevents them from engaging in the phone-hacking and private surveillance scandals that led to the Levenson Inquiry.

They're still furious that they can't hack into our phones, private communications, medical records, etc ... to do stuff like leak gossip about celebrities and their families, smear left-wing and socially progressive figures, and release the private information of dead British soldiers.

Why the Tories hate it

The Tories hate the ECHR for a very similar reason to the right-wing capitalist media; it constrains their ability to make life worse for people.

• Whenever they want to deport immigrants (or black British citizens) they detest having to try to do it in a way that complies with the ECHR rules.

• When they defund the justice system and scrap entitlement to Legal Aid, they know that they're denying people the right to a free and fair trial.

• When they implement mandatory unpaid labour schemes for the unemployed, they know they're trampling over people's right not to be subjected to forced labour.

• When they bring in legislation to erase our ancient British right to participate in non-violent protest, they know they're attacking our rights to free expression, assembly, and association.

They hate the ECHR because it stands in the way of them being the vicious, malicious bastards that they really want to be.

Conclusion

I'm fairly certain that few could read all of this and still conclude that they want the Tories to trample all over Churchill's finest legacy by walking out of the ECHR, to join Belarus and Putin's Russia as Europe's only non-signatories.

You'd have to be the worst kind of simpleton to imagine that Johnson's billionaire-bankrolled Tories are better placed to decide what our fundamental rights and liberties should be, than a Europe-wide panel of human rights advocates and legal experts.

The big problem is that the kind of low-information voter this malicious anti-ECHR rabble-rousing is aimed at doesn't have the intellectual rigour to actually learn about the issue they're being programmed to froth about, or the patience/comprehension ability to read a detailed summary, if they were ever to somehow come across one.

it's bad enough that decades of failing education and exposure to radical-right capitalist media has created such an enormous demographic of reactionary low-information voters, but that the government actively panders to them like this is a national disgrace.

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OR

Theresa May's Putinesque propaganda war

Interfering in other countries' democracies, channelling public funds to shady operations that attack and smear opposition politicians and undermine the freedom of the press, maintaining secretive networks of loyalist journalists and civil servants at home and abroad, spreading social media disinformation, electoral cheating to maintain power, and all as the head of a political party bankrolled by dodgy Russian oligarchs.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this is a description of Vladimir Putin and his regime, but in fact it's Theresa May and the Tories.

Anyone who has paid the remotest attention to how the Tory cabal funds itself will know that they've racked up more than £3 million in donations from dodgy Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies since 2010, including the sale of direct personal access to government ministers just weeks before the Tory government quashed Labour moves to clamp down on the tsunami of dodgy Russian cash flooding into the City of London.

Anyone who was paying attention during the 2017 general election will know that the Tory party is just as willing to use despicable social media propaganda to achieve their objectives as Vladimir Putin and the armies of Russia-based social media propaganda bots.

And who could forget the brazen electoral cheating the Tories got away with in 2015?

And now we're learning about the incredibly shady activities of a government funded propaganda operation called the Institute for Statecraft after the leak of a cache of damning internal documents about the global propaganda operation they're running (see here to browse the documents for yourself).

The Institute for Statecraft has been set up as a charity so as to avoid paying tax, and has benefited from around £2 million in public cash channelled through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

They've established what they refer to as "clusters" in democratic states across the developed world, including the UK, Spain, France, Greece, the US/Canada, Scandinavia, the Baltic region, and the Balkans. These shady cells act as anti-Russia propaganda outfits and also actively interfere in other countries' democratic processes.

One of the operations they're most proud of was their mobilisation against the appointment of Army reserve colonel Pedro Baños as Spain’s Director of National Security with a concerted smear campaign in the media within hours of the announcement.

They also openly brag about their interference in Spanish politics and the "silencing" of non-conformist voices on Serbian television in a document called "Top Three Deliverabilities for the FCO".

So the UK government is funding this organisation to the tune of £millions, and they're reporting back on their successes in interfering with the political systems and free press of other democratic states.

For an organisation that has been ostensibly created in order to counter Russian propaganda, this all seems more than a little Putinesque does it not?

The Institute for Statecraft operates a Twitter account called "Integrity Initiative" which, according to their Twitter bio, exists to "counter disinformation and malign influence" and "promote media literacy and media freedom".

So now we have an organisation that brags about silencing unwelcome voices on Serbian television simultaneously posing as champions of "media freedom" on Twitter!

And it gets worse. This government funded Twitter account has published several highly partisan political attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, including one Tweet labelling him a "useful idiot" and others sharing the work of bitter anti-Corbyn propagandists in the mainstream media.

So we have a shady propaganda outfit that's pretending to be a charity in order to avoid paying tax raking in £millions from the Tory government while they abuse the leader of the opposition on social media.

The channelling of public funds into a shady organisation that attacks and smears the leader of the political opposition is an absolutely appalling look for an organisation that ostensibly exists to counter Putinism.

The Tory government's use of public cash to fund a shady organisation that interferes in other countries' democracies, attacks press freedom, and bitterly attacks the leader of the opposition would be an absolute outrage under any other circumstances.

Just try to imagine it. Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister and then sets about channelling £2 million in public cash into a shady left-wing pseudo-charity propaganda outfit that actively interferes in other democratic states and bitterly smears his political opponents at home.

Do you honestly believe that there wouldn't be absolute outrage about it across the BBC and the corporate mainstream media?

But you almost certainly won't be hearing anything about this outrageous Tory scandal on the BBC or in the right-wing propaganda rags, and one of the principle reasons why is that this shady pseudo-charity has infiltrated them (especially the Times with three of their 'journalists' listed as Institute for Statecraft assets) as well as dozens of charities, think tanks, and government departments.

Another principle reason is that the mainstream media groupthink is to desperately defend the crumbling and incompetent Tory establishment out of fear that Jeremy Corbyn will actually follow through on his word and reform the political system to put the interests of ordinary people at the heart of government for the first time in decades, rather than continually pandering to the wealthy and coddled establishment cass to which most mainstream media hacks belong.

Hence this scandal will be brushed under the mainstream media carpet along with all the other outrageous Tory scandals they either forget about within days, deliberately obfuscate, or don't even bother to cover at all.

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OR

If anyone is Vladimir Putin's "useful idiot", it's Boris Johnson

We're well and truly through the looking glass now guys. 

It was bonkers enough to witness the incoherent (and quite obviously anti-Semitic) "wrong kind of Jews" vitriol that was spat at Jeremy Corbyn over the weekend for spending the Jewish religious festival of Seder with young politically engaged Jews, instead of shopping like Theresa May was, but this Boris Johnson stuff is getting truly Orewllian.

Boris Johnson scored a massive own goal  against his own government for Vladimir Putin by lying about what the British chemical weapons experts at Porton Down had said.

Whatever the British government says now, the Russians can retort with "look at the way the British Foreign Secretary and Foreign Office lied about Salisbury", and they've actually got a point, and it's all Boris Johnson's fault.

But then Boris Johnson posts a tweet crudely deflecting attention onto Jeremy Corbyn with a load of tired old "Russian stooge" nonsense, and then a load of Tory drones in the mainstream media obediently do as they've been prompted and set about deliberately switching the debate away from Boris Johnson's lie and onto Jeremy Corbyn.

So an unmistakably Tory scandal stemming from yet another Boris blunder is somehow transformed into a stick to whack Jeremy Corbyn with!

Suddenly the debate is no longer Tory lies vs Porton Down expert analysis, because it's been warped into pro-government patriotism vs Russia, Putin, treason, eek.

Of course gullible people are going to side with the government who just got exposed as liars when the mainstream media misrepresent the debate as an us against them, support the government or you're a Putin-loving traitor situation.
 

And then we have mercenary Rupert Murdoch hacks deriding anyone who criticises Boris Johnson for trapping himself in a lie as Vladimir Putin's "useful idiots".

The guy who scores a massive propaganda own goal for Russia gets a free pass, and anyone who criticises what he did gets derided as a "useful idiot" for Putin!

You couldn't make it up, except they did, and they expect people to actually fall for it!

And then to top it all off we've got the BBC pushing the kind of dangerous "scrutiny of the government is treason" type propaganda you'd actually expect to see in Putin's Russia.

The Tories and their establishment chums in the mainstream media are desperately trying to reverse reality to make people believe that:

The people who mindlessly bang the drum for war, lap up the government lies, and start playing ridiculous distraction tactic games when the government lies are exposed - they're the clear-thinking rational voices.

And the people who ask for evidence, scrutinise the government line, and criticise government ministers who get caught out telling lies - they're cultists, kooks, conspiracy theorists, traitors, Putin's useful idiots!

The thing is that there are an awful lot of people who are gullible enough to fall for this kind of Tory Orwellian reality reversal, otherwise they wouldn't try it, but then there's also another form of damage too.

Even those of us with the critical thinking skills to see through the bombardment end up disorientated and confused by the constant barrage of reality-bending propaganda. It's called "gaslighting", and it's a propaganda tactic that Putin and his cronies use in Russia in order to mindfuck their political opponents, and the public at large.

So we've got a Tory party who are bankrolled by Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies and a bunch of obsequious Tory-serving mainstream media hacks using Putin-style mindfuck techniques to disorientate and misdirect the British public, and we've got the BBC state broadcaster transmitting Putin-style pro-government anti-opposition propaganda into our homes, and now they expect us to believe that anyone who dares question any of this lunacy is a traitor and a Putin stooge!

It absolutely beggars belief that they think they can get away with it. Please just tell me that I'm not alone in realising that British political discourse has become such a ridiculously Putinesque farce.

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OR

Who has got the nuttiest Salisbury conspiracy theory?

In the feverish atmosphere in the wake of the Salisbury nerve agent attack there have been some absolutely bonkers conspiracy theories flying around.

In this article I'm going to attempt to give a measured perspective on the attack before detailing some of the nuttiest reactions.

The difference between questions and conspiracy theories

Like almost everyone reading this article, I don't have access to the chemical analysis that's been conducted on the nerve agent, and I don't have access to any intelligence that may have been gathered in relation to the attack.

This lack of information means that it's impossible to fly off into alternative explanations for the attack without the danger of wandering off into the tinfoil hat conspiracy zone.

However this lack of vital information doesn't prevent us from asking questions about the official position, which according to Tory ministers like Boris Johnson, involved Vladimir Putin directly ordering this hopelessly botched hit on a long-retired double agent.

The glaring problem with this theory is that it relies on the idea that Putin is some kind of idiot with no regard for consequences. Of course Putin is your archetypal strong-man tyrant with a disregard for human rights, but if you've ever actually paid attention to any of his speeches, he's clearly an intelligent man, not an idiot.

So, given that just a couple of weeks ago the Tory government pliantly did Putin's bidding by obstructing Labour's efforts to introduce Magnitsky powers to clamp down on all the Russian dark money sloshing around in the City of London, the UK housing market, and the coffers of the Tory party, why would Putin then decide to personally authorise an attack that would massively increase the chances of Magnitsky sanctions being imposed?

You can attempt to answer this kind of question in whatever way you like, but be careful you don't end up wandering off into the tinfoil hat twilight zone  ...

The fireman conspiracy

The first conspiracy theory to deal with is the idea that the attack was faked because of one out-of-context photograph of firemen with no biohazard suits standing next to people with biohazard suits.

It says a lot about the kind of person you are if you can look at a single photo and deduce a convoluted conspiracy theory from it, which you then believe without giving thought to other potential explanations, like maybe the fact that people in biohazard suits need to take off their biohazard suits at some point. 

Perhaps a much simpler explanation that the whole attack being an elaborate hoax, is that that's what was going on?
The evil mother-in-law


Then there's the theory that Yulia Skripal was poisoned by her future mother-in-law who supposedly doesn't want her son to marry the daughter of an ex-spy.

How the evil mother-in-law got her hands on a supply of highly toxic nerve agent isn't related in this particular conspiracy theory.

It was the CIA

If you really want to get into the kooky conspiracy shit, then UKIP is definitely a great place to turn. I mean who could forget the Ukipper "Somerset floods were caused by gay marriage" theory from a few years ago?

Well Godfrey Bloom has publicly stated his suspicion that the attack was carried out by the CIA in order to ringfence the budget for the military industrial complex.

It's interesting to see the way the hard-right UKIP mob have moved from adoration of anything American to outright hostility and conspiracy theorising against the US intelligence services ever since the Mueller investigation into links between Russia and the Trump campaign started getting serious.

It's all about Brexit

Another bizarre UKIP conspiracy theory is that the Salisbury attack is a false flag attack orchestrated by the British government in order to derail Brexit!

Here's what Richard Wood of UKIP told Sputnik News: 

"Theresa May has been absolutely stupid because she is now in a hole over Brexit with the European Union and the EU is doing its best to keep Britain in and we want to be out. The whole point about this fiasco is that something happened and Mrs. May is now being able to point another finger at Russia and say this is our enemy. They are finding some excuse to actually blame Russia for something else so Russia becomes a big bad man again to take the pressure off Theresa May with the Brexit negotiations because she is not getting anywhere. Everybody I speak to is not on her side and not against Russia. I do think it was staged."

Trust the UKIP loons to come up with a load of batshit crazy nonsense about how it's all a conspiracy to undermine their beloved Brexit.

It's all about the UN

Another theory doing the rounds is that the Salisbury incident was a "false flag" attack designed to ramp up international pressure to get Russia thrown off the UN Security Council.

The idea that Russia could be removed from the Security Council over this incident is as impractical as it is unrealistic.

If Russia and the United States managed to stay part of the UN Security Council together throughout the theft of US nuclear weapons secrets, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Olympic boycotts, countless near misses and sanctions impositions, and all of that, how on earth is an incident like Salisbury going to register enough impact to essentially destroy the United Nations?

Even if the endgame was to get Russia thrown off the UN Security Council, how would that be achieved given that Russia has a Security Council veto, and China (another of the 5 permanent members) would obviously never let it happen either?

It's all about football

Then there's the probably the most ridiculous theory that the attack was staged to somehow undermine Russia's hosting of the FIFA World Cup, as if football is somehow the most important thing in the world.

The problem with wild conspiracy theories like this is that there's always some absolute dullard who comes along to give credence to such nonsense. In this case the right-wing Labour MP Stephen Kinnock, who has started gabbing on about how the UK should somehow form a global alliance to pressurise FIFA to delay the World Cup until 2019 and ban Russia as the hosts!

If Argentina being over-run by one of the most violent and repressive military dictatorships of the late 20th Century wasn't enough to stop the World Cup in 1978, then it seems a tad unlikely that Kinnock is going to succeed with his plot to get this summer's World Cup taken off Russia.

Trust a right-wing Labour melt like Kinnock to hear the most bonkers conspiracy theory of all, think it's actually a really good idea, and then try to pass it off as his own policy!

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The Panama Papers

The leaked Mossack Fonseca "Panama Papers" contain some 11 million documents. That's over 2 terabytes of data, yet the way the information has been released has allowed much of the mainstream press to immediately fixate their coverage upon enemies of the west, especially Vladimir Putin, whilst including little or no information on the involvement of major western corporations and American politicians, or information on the deep British involvement in the scandal.  

The "corporate media gatekeepers"  

In an article entitled "Corporate media gatekeepers protect western 1% from Panama leak" the anti-corruption blogger Craig Murray points out that: "whoever leaked the Mossack Fonseca papers appears motivated by a genuine desire to expose the system that enables the ultra wealthy to hide their massive stashes, often corruptly obtained and all involved in tax avoidance ...Unfortunately [they] made the dreadful mistake of turning to the western corporate media to publicise the results".

In his blog post Murray goes on to reveal that the leak is being managed by an entity named "The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists" which despite its grandiose name is hardly an unbiased independent organisation, being funded as it it by entities like the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the W K Kellogg Foundation,The Sigrid Rausing Trust (the Tetrapak empire) and the Addesium Foundation (George Soros).

It's clear that an organisation that is heavily funded by foundations belonging to US based corporate billionaires have been cherry-picking the data and selectively releasing what they choose to. If you visit the ICIJ page detailing the leaks it turns out that they don't list a single US leader, politician or public official as being involved in the scandal!

The way that the initial leaks have been handled means that the focus of the mainstream media coverage has primarily been aimed at enemies of the West (especially Vladimir Putin), with most of the rest of the coverage focusing on government and public officials and their families from an assortment of countries, very few of them western countries.

The mainstream coverage of the leak has uniformly failed to point out that the main clients of businesses like Mossack Fonseca are corporations and corporate executives establishing networks of offshore shell companies. Still, it hardly seems like a surprise that an investigative team massively funded by the US based foundations belonging to corporate billionaires is not directing their focus on American involvement, or the massive web of corporate shell companies.

British involvement

Another factor to consider is the British complicity in all of this. Of course there is the headline grabbing detail that David Cameron's dad was involved, but then it's been public knowledge that David Cameron's dad Ian was a tax-dodger and that David Cameron inherited part of his dad's tax-dodging fortune for years. However the much bigger story is that over half of the 300,000 Mossack Fonseca clients are registered in British administered tax havens.

It also turns out that the UK is second most common country in which intermediaries operate (after the former British colony of Hong Kong) and that by far the most common jurisdiction of incorporation for corporate entities involved with Mossack Fonseca is the British dependency of the British Virgin Islands, accounting for more than half of the total.

David Cameron's response to the leak of the Panama Papers was to spout a bit more empty tough-talking rhetoric and to talk up a summit on tax secrecy in May.

It would take an extraordinary amount of gullibility to believe the bluff and bluster from the likes of David Cameron and George Osborne when it comes to their tough talking rhetoric on tax-dodging, when the Tory party receives millions in donations from tax-dodging individuals and corporations and is led by a guy who inherited his family fortune from his tax-dodging father!

London is indisputably the global capital of the tax avoidance industry and many of the biggest tax havens the global super-rich use to stash an estimated £21 trillion+ are British dependencies like the Cayman Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands and the Isle of Man. and the Tory party is heavily bankrolled by the City of London financial sector that has built up a lucrative trade in hiding people's cash overseas.

The idea of a Tory like David Cameron organising a summit on combating tax secrecy is like a fox organising a summit on ensuring chicken safety.

Obvious targets
 

Somehow there isn't a single US politician or official in the ICIJ list, but there are a few sacrificial lambs from other western countries. Interestingly, almost all of them have already been publicly exposed as having offshore business interests or being outright corrupt.

• David Cameron's deceased father (exposed as a tax-dodger years ago)
• Michael Ashcroft (who got to sit in the House of Lords for over a decade despite being a tax-exile)
• Jérôme Cahuzac (a disgraced French politician who is on trial for tax fraud)
• Pilar de Borbón (a member of the Spanish royal family that has been embroiled in one corruption scandal after another for years)
• Micaela Domecq Solís-Beaumont (the wife of the agriculture minister in easily the most corrupt Spanish government since the fall of General Franco)

It's pretty amazing that practically the only western politician to get named in this scandal who doesn't already have some kind of dodgy background is the Prime Minister of Iceland.

What's still to come?

It's worth pointing out that there is still an awful lot of information to be released, so it's entirely possible that the ICIJ team could play it out like the Snowden leaks with a gradual drip-feed of damning revelations stretching out for months. An optimist might expect some actual revelations about US politicians at some point and some damning details on the corporations that make up the majority of the company's client base.

Conclusion

It doesn't matter how optimistic you are about future revelations, the complete lack of information on corrupt US officials in the original tranche of leaks is deeply suspicious, as is the lack of detail on the corporations and corporate executives that make up most of the Mossack Fonseca client base.

Directing so much attention towards enemies of the west (with just a small selection of extremely obvious targets in the west) the ICIJ have helped much of the UK mainstream media to frame to debate on this tax-dodging scandal as being some kind of foreign problem, rather than a problem that the British establishment, British overseas territories, and no doubt a lot of British corporations, are deeply involved in.

Whether facilitating the mainstream media framing of the debate like this was done intentionally or not, because of the way it's been presented it's given an awful lot of British people an excuse to shrug the whole lot off as largely foreign corruption, when British overseas territories are at the very heart of it..

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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How bigotry and cowardice are becoming fundamental Republican "values"

The contest to lead the Republican Party into the next Presidential election would be a hilarious spectacle if it weren't for the very real fear that the American public might well end up electing the likes of Donald Trump or Ben Carson as their President (and the commander of the most powerful military the world has ever seen). 

This fear is not without reason either. Not only did the American public (kind of) elect George W. Bush in the first place, they actually re-elected him despite the fact that he let 9/11 happen on his watch, then gave the Islamist fanatics the stateless chaos they thrive in by attacking Iraq when not a single one of the 9/11 terrorists had anything to do with Iraq (15 out of the 19 were Saudi Arabians)!

Bigotry and cowardice

Donald Trump and Ben Carson seem to be engaged in a competition to come up with the most reactionary, bigoted and unconstitutional declarations possible. Whether it's plans to create a Nazi style national database of Muslims, or to impose Christianity tests on Syrian refugees, the Republican Party seems to have fully embraced religious bigotry and outright cowardice as core principles of Republican politics.

Nazi undertones

Many people have drawn parallels between the Republican Party proposals for a government blacklist of Muslims, and the treatment of Jews by the Nazis.When challenged about the similarities between his policy of discrimination against Muslims and the policies of discrimination towards Jews in 1930s Germany, Donald Trump simply evaded the questions.

Rabbi Jack Moline of the Interfaith Alliance attacked Trump's plans to create a Nazi style Muslim blacklist by saying "My father was in World War II, and he fought to preserve America against what the Nazis were doing," he said. "This is exactly why there is an America, to not be like that".

Victim blaming

The evidence is absolutely clear that the atrocities in Paris were masterminded and carried out by French citizens, not by Syrian refugees. Yet the Republican Party have taken to openly fearmongering about Syrian refugees, who are fleeing exactly the same breed of Wahabist fanatics as those who carried out the Paris atrocities.

Using fear over what happened in Paris to attack Syrian refugees is about as clear an example of victim blaming as it's possible to see. 

American values?

As an outsider it's absolutely amazing to see how these leading Republican candidates seem to be getting away with such openly bigoted policies. I always thought that stuff like religious freedom, the separation of church and state and the provision of a safe haven to the victims of religious persecution were fundamental, pretty much unquestionable American values? Yet here we have people like Trump and Carson shitting all over these American values, and somehow maintaining their popularity.

The idea of shutting the door to Syrian refugees (unless they pass some kind of warped Christianity test) seems about as contrary to proclaimed American values as is possible to imagine. Not only is turning away the victims of persecution on the basis of their religious beliefs contrary to the American principle of religious freedom, it's also an appalling display of ignorant cowardice in the wake of the Paris atrocities given that the perpetrators were French and Belgian citizens, not Syrian refugees.

Collective punishment

Using the Paris atrocities to call for state sponsored discrimination against all Muslims in the United States is appalling stuff. Since when was it an American trait to collectively punish all people within a particular group for the actions of a tiny minority within that group?

In fact, given that this global wave of barbaric Wahabist terrorism has been carried out by non-American Muslims, it's possible to argue that the Republican Party are planning to collectively punish a group of people (law-abiding American Muslims) for the heinous actions of people completely outside that group (non-American Wahabist fanatics) 

Hypocrisy

Maybe it's worth comparing these Republican calls for collective discrimination against Muslims with the way they might react to calls for some kind of government blacklist for gun owners in response to the appalling killing sprees that keep happening in American schools and colleges? 

Surely they'd argue that it's wrong to clamp down on millions of law abiding gun owners due to the crimes of a small minority?

Of course the Republicans would wail and scream at any proposals to monitor and discriminate against all gun owners, but they seem incapable of seeing their own hypocrisy when they decide they want to collectively punish all American Muslims for the crimes of Islamist fanatics from elsewhere in the world.

What about Saudi Arabia?

  

Instead of fearmongering about Syrian refugees and devising plans to collectively punish American Muslims for the crimes of foreign terrorists, perhaps it might make a little more sense for American politicians to reappraise their relationship with the barbaric Saudi Arabian regime? 

What kind of country would turn on its own citizens whilst simultaneously supporting a savage regime that does stuff like sentencing people to death for the "crime" of renouncing Islam, or beheading a teenager, sewing the corpse back together and then publicly crucifying it as a punishment for the "crime" of promoting democracy?

15 of the 19 terrorists on September 11th 2001 were Saudis and the barbaric Islamist fanatics committing terrorist atrocities all over the world follow the same brand of militant Wahabist fanaticism as the Saudi regime, yet leading Republicans would rather clamp down on law abiding American Muslims rather than confront Saudi Arabia over their role in spreading their dangerous fanatical Wahabist ideology all over the world.

Where are the Republican moderates?

Surely there must be someone within the Republican Party capable of seeing that mass discrimination against law abiding American Muslims is an unjustifiable response to the actions of non-American Wahabist fanatics elsewhere in the world?

Assuming moderates within the Republican Party still exist, and that the whole show hasn't been completely taken over by TeaBaggers, why are they so quiet? Where are the Republicans asking questions like whether the maintenance of a government religious blacklist goes against the First Amendment right to religious freedom? Or how does the maintenance of a massive government blacklist for all Muslims fit in with the small state ideology that the Republicans claim to support?

To an outsider it really does seem like the lunatics have taken over the Republican Party asylum, and that there is nobody with the requisite level of sanity to restore some semblance of order.

Conclusion

Perhaps the most embarrassing thing for Americans must be that these Republican anti-Muslim policies are a display of appalling cowardice on the international stage. 

Do Americans really want their politicians to foster and project such ignorant fear of displaced Syrian women and children when France is still vowing to take in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, despite what happened in Paris? 

Do Americans really want their politicians projecting such ignorance and cowardice when Vladimir Putin is so determined to play the fearless Islamist-killing hardman on the world stage?

In the UK David Cameron has so far resisted the cowardly (and staggeringly impractical) petition to "close the UK borders until ISIS is defeated", so do Americans really want their politicians to come across as even more cowardly and opportunistic than the dish-faced, over-privileged walking embodiment of incompetence us Brits have to suffer?

Is this kind of ignorant bigoted cowardice really the kind of image Americans want their politicians projecting on the world stage? Somehow I doubt it. But then I was naive enough to think that the American public couldn't possibly have been crazy enough to re-elect George W. Bush, and I was proven wrong, so perhaps ignorance, bigotry and cowardice are what the American public want from their politicians? 

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