E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

This blog started in 2005, and one of the first things it had to respond to was the terrifying series of attacks in 2005. 12 years later, and terribly, a mass terror attack has struck the UK - killing over 20 people, and dangerously harming many more. That many of the victims were kids and teens out to have fun at a summery concert, is all the more reason to be horrified. This was classic terrorism, meant to inflict great fear, and sorrow, and loss, on innocent people, for maximum publicity for their cause. One does not have to be political to recognise that it is wrong to kill people, except in self-defence (if even then). Politics is not going to solve this problem, however, so long as a small group of radicals seek to destabilise, weaken, even destroy, democracy in Western countries. While it is true they are unlikely to destroy the West, these acts can certainly tilt the West radically to the right, as we have seen of late. There is no tit-for-tat that can justify killing the...

BE PROUD 2016 is shaping up to be one of the worst years, at least from a Western historical perspective, since 1936. The deaths of major figures ( Bowie, Ali ) aside - and sad as these are, deaths of major figures happen annually - there are several possibly disastrous events about to occur, within months. One of these is the election of the sinister Donald Trump. The second is a BREXIT for the UK from the EU, which could trigger a European, and at the least, British, recession, even depression. And also trigger a cultural collapse of arguably equal horror. Meanwhile, the terrorist-hate attack in Orlando on the weekend, in which 49 people were killed, and as many injured, some awfully, for apparently their sexual preferences, is just sad, dreadful and heart-crushing on many levels. What a year, what a month. It is possible the UK will narrowly avert self-destruction and isolation, and vote to Remain, though currently polls strongly suggest otherwise; and it is...

2015 has been a year of outrages - terrorism - a word which may have its origins, as some rather crass pundits wryly observed, in the rampant and often cruel massacres of the French revolutionary period.  The West - no stranger to cruelty to the Other and others itself at least since its settlers and explorers raped, tortured, and pillaged across the Americas - and in two World Wars the perpetrators of the worst atrocities in human history (the Holocaust, the dropping of nuclear weapons) - has finally met its match. Civilization was once used to contrast the good with the barbaric.  The endless random killing masterminded by half-insane fanatics and fantasists, motivated by a medieval theology of incompatible Jihad, has cast itself as the new normal of barbarism. IS, the current bogeyman, though having never put forth a 9/11 style spectacular, instead went all Digital Age on our asses, chopping off heads for our apps and iPhones, smashing ancient cities for the camera...

Few wars, and few historical moments, present clear cut choices. Especially in the Middle East, a ruined region raped by successive Great Game imperial machinations for over 100 years, whose borders are debatable and often fictively imposed with force, it is unlikely any conflict will present the armchair general and seething metropolitan pundit a black and white cause for just war.  The last Good War was, it seems, WW2 - for though the motives for fighting Germany and Japan might have been imperialistic at core (protection of markets and colonies and borders; and petrol) - the Nazi regime was markedly evil, in ideology, intent, and constant deed. Never mind that Canada was anti-Semitic in the 1940s, and Churchill had mooted winnowing the weak; or that the British invented concentration camps in the Boer War; or that it was the Allies who dropped the doomsday bomb and burned Dresden - even so, the Nazi plan and the Nazi way was - and is - almost the definition of inhumanity. ...