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Chain yourself outside the Syrian embassy.

12 people said 'Do this!'

Comments / Votes

Bart
Bart
February 6 2012  | LoveUnlove

@fetapapa, can you give some explanation? Why the syrian embassy? (Why not the Israeli one (suppressing palestines)? US (engaging wars allover)? China (letting children work)?

Thierry
Thierry
February 7 2012  | Bart loves thisLoveUnlove

Bart! Let's have a talk about that ''suppressing palestinians'' one day.
Dat politiek correct links gepapagaai vanuit de luie westerse design stoel zet geen zode aan de dijk natuurlijk ;)

fetapapa
fetapapa
February 7 2012  | LoveUnlove

Hi Bart.

Good question.

I'll start with Chinese children working. It is a hard situation working in your childhood, but at the end of the day children have been offering to the family budgets across places and for millenia. To me this is a simple offer and demand case. We ask to pay as little as possible for our products and care not who makes them. And the rest is a simple free-market process. You can say that the government does wrong by letting kids work, but if they actually prohibited them from working, it would mean that they prohibit families from a better quality of life or from saving something to invest toward a better future. To me, if one would want to protest against kids working, they'd better do it at the offices of an exploiting company or at a consumer fair rather than the embassy.

Now to the tricky part: the US and Israel embassies.
I have been protesting outside their embassies a bunch of times. They have not stopped their attrocities, so it took me a bit to justify why they lost priority over Syria. The reason is of course that the crime in Syria is brutal and is happening NOW and an act of protest is most meaningful at the time of crime. Now, that the hits are the most severe and now that the UN security council pretends to be dealing with the issue

There is a follow up question though which might be more interesting. If there is an ongoing crime (famine, palestinians or american wars etc), it only gets the world's attention only for the first few days.
Quickly other events occupy out tv sets and consequently our minds. This is sad, unjust and for a while, I felt guilty for focusing solely on a contemporary issue instead of an ongoing one. But then I remembered Kundera's "Grand March of History" (in the unbearable lightness of being). The crimes go on, but the stage of history has only space for one event at a time. The problem is that the event's time in the global stage is disproportionate to its importance...

In page 140 Kundera writes:
"Franz had the sudden feeling that the Grand March was coming to an end. Europe was surrounded by borders of silence, and the space where the Grand March was occurring was now no more than a small platform in the middle of the planet. The crowds that had once pressed eagerly up to the platform had long since departed, and the Grand March went on in solitude, without spectators. Yes, said Franz to himself, the Grand March goes on, the world's indifference notwithstanding, but it is growing nervous and hectic: yesterday against the American occupation of Vietnam, today against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia; yesterday for Israel, today for the Palestinians; yesterday for Cuba, tomorrow against Cuba— and always against America; at times against massacres and at times in support of other massacres; Europe marches on, and to keep up with events, to leave none of them out, its pace grows faster and faster, until finally the Grand March is a procession of rushing, galloping people and the platform is shrinking and shrinking until one day it will be reduced to a mere dimension-less dot."

So, accepting the notion of 'the Grand March of History" and the small stage for world events, makes me feel less arbitrary for my choice. What do you think?

Bart
Bart
February 8 2012  | LoveUnlove

@fetapapa: i did not at all thought your choice was arbitrary, i was just curious about your arguments. I do by all means agree with you; i should read the unbearable lightness of being (never read it, i must admit).
@thierry: i knew i would get a reaction on that one. Happy to accept that invitation!

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