New Year's Revolutions

Happy nearly New Year, y'all.

Hopefully, you realise tomorrow is just another day, and you don't need to make lifechanging decisions while drunk tonight that will transform into mid-January bouts of guilt as you fail.

You could stop smoking, lose weight or try to get a new job starting any particular day. Why do it alongside the rest of the herd? Is there camaraderie in failing en masse? I don't know.

What I do know is that I think New Year's Resolutions are about as pointless as those 'Caution: Hot!' warnings on takeaway coffees - they're really only needed for the truly remedial.

So I've decided to go with some New Year's Revolutions instead. Here are the revolutions I'd like to see in 2010:

1. A Chinese counter-revolution. Seriously, fuck the Chinese Communist Party. I'd love to see them overthrown and subjected to a quick round of real people power, the human-abusing thug junta. This same prescription also applies to the scum ruling Belarus, North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe and a host of other thugocracies.

2. A drugs revolution. The war on drugs is lost. Why are our governments still fighting it? Increasingly, world leaders, health experts, religious minorities and influential commentators have come out in favour of a complete reversal of current failed policies.
I hope that either the lawmakers start listening, or else a proper grassroots movement comes along and makes ongoing prohibition unworkable for good. If the EU reverted to the Portuguese model, we might finally get a handle on drug crime and on harm reduction for addicts.

3. An economic revolution. The return of the gold standard? The end of fractional banking? Back to barter? Jail for banksters?
I'm no economist (and am suspicious of that pseudoscience in any case), so I will refrain from being prescriptive.
But since the current system just went pop for the umpteenth time, you'd like to think we might rebuild with some new method that doesn't unerringly result in a bubble and collapse every decade or two.

4. A democratic revolution in Ireland. Take a look at the Dail. Do those people really represent you? Do they look after your interests? Well, why keep voting for them?
I'd love to see an end to the cronyism, the parochial parish pump politics, the gombeens, the brown envelopes and the nepotism in Irish politics.
But that would require an electorate to grow up and take responsibility for those they elect.

What revolutions would you like to see next year? And are there any that you're prepared to man the barricades to bring about?

When the earth moves

I was in Athens during the last Olympics. One mid-afternoon, I was sitting on a balcony with a Greek friend when, literally, the earth moved.

I have to admit to squealing like a girl. We were on the fourth floor of a somewhat shoddy apartment block, after all. And when the ground beneath your feet jerks and trembles like shook cloth, it is disconcerting to say the least.

Afterwards, my friend took me out into the street and pointed out the red X marks on some adjoining derelict buildings. Those, he explained, were signs of condemnation - buildings that were no longer safe after the last large quake. What we had just experienced, he said, was just a little shudder.

Well, what they've experienced in Szechuan today is no little shudder. At 7.8 on the Richter scale, it is only marginally less powerful than that which sparked the tsunami on 26th December 2004.

This is a breaking news story and we will hear more as time progresses. But I've been to Chengdu. It's a very large city of very recently built concrete structures of high density, poor quality housing.

And I've been to the smaller towns in Szechuan too. They're even worse.

We're hearing that six schools have collapsed trapping the pupils inside. We're hearing that tens of thousands of people have been killed. I don't doubt these stories. They tally with what I know of the infrastructure of the region.

Hopefully, unlike their puppets in Burma, The Chinese Communist Party will acknowledge the need for external help in the face of a horrific natural disaster.

Hopefully, the world will not turn their face away from the innocent victims of both these tragedies, purely because their governments are incompetent, totalitarian regimes.

Hopefully, these tragedies will shake our preconceptions of the peoples of South East Asia, and our response to their tragedies will shake their preconceptions of us.

Juntas don't vote for voting rights for all

Trocaire director Justin Kilcullen has called on the Irish Olympic Committee to consider a boycott of the Beijing games in protest at the Chinese authority's tacit refusal to put pressure on their fellow-travelling Military Junta in Burma.

At the Burma Action protest in Dublin on Saturday, Mr Kilcullen stated that the Olympics had gone to China in the hope that holding such an open and global event would encourage the Chinese Communist Party to move faster on providing basic human rights to the citizens of China.

"However China hasn’t kept up its side of the contract," he said, and who can disagree?

I've written before about how China has denied its people even access to information about themselves and the regime they suffer under, by firewalling the internet.

Their pals in Burma have gone one step further and switched net access off throughout the country in the hope of preventing images of their brutality leaking to media outlets outside of Burma.

I've spoken in the past about how China has abused its military might by occupying a sovereign nation's territory and seeking to wipe them out culturally and politically.

Of course, The Karen people of Northern Burma might well see a parallel there in their own fate. They have fought an intermittent insurgency against the illegal military junta for years. They have reaped genocide as their reward.

I've even highlighted how China has behaved in exactly the same way to its own internal demands for democracy as the Burmese Junta are doing now - with military force and the shooting of unarmed, peaceful protesters.

It is therefore foolish to expect such a regime to exert pressure on an identical one to encourage a democratic process. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas, and military juntas don't vote for voting rights for all.

Nevertheless, as I wrote last week, the Chinese are in a major quandary on this one. They cannot be seen overtly supporting the suppression of a people's demand for freedom, especially by such an internationally unpopular regime.

The world has spoken in relation to Burma, but it must keep speaking out if the UN mission to Burma is to achieve anything. It must also keep speaking out in order to force change in Burma, not only for the benefit of the people of Burma, the Burmese, the Karen, the other ethnic minorities.

It must keep speaking out because only when Burma is free of this horror, can we hold out a slender sliver of hope for the people of Tibet, for the people of China itself, all of whom yearn for their own sovereignty and for democracy, for human rights and freedom.

So for all of those reasons, we should support Trocaire's call for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics.

Burmese Days

If you were a military junta that had dominated your populace by terror for decades, you'd be pretty unhappy to see your neighbouring puppet junta facing democracy protests from hundreds of thousands of civilians and religious monks.

And if you had a major world event to put on within twelve months, which you hope to use to whitewash and normalise your regime in the eyes of the world, then you'd be panicking over what to do.

Pity the poor Chinese government. Do they assist the Burmese military in viciously suppressing the demands for democracy, risking a worldwide reaction, or do they leave well alone, and risk seeing another protest in Tiananmen Square next week?

Actually, don't pity them. Instead, offer your support to the Burmese demands for democracy. Petition your local representatives. Email Bertie Ahern (he might get a chance to read them after he's finished spoofing to the Mahon Tribunal).

Congratulations are due to Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern for speaking out in favour of Burmese democracy. Ireland needs to support this burgeoning revolution. We need to call for the release of Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi now.

Otherwise, it might look like we're a bunch of racists who only support democracy when it's nice white Europeans asking for it. Nice white Europeans who we can get to come and serve us coffee for minimum wage in Dublin afterwards.