R.I.P.
Michael Brown
Eric Garner
Tamir Rice
Akai Gurley
All the black American women killed extra-judicially by police in the US but who remain anonymous and disrespected because of their sex.
All black victims of US police violence
Aboriginal people who have died in custody in Australia or been killed extra-judicially
All victims of racial profiling – US, UK, Australia
(I haven’t mentioned white victims of violence in this post because the issue in question is the fact that black people in the US, the UK and Australia face institutionalised racism in a way not experienced by white people.)
I was castigated recently on Facebook by a Republican supporter living in the south of the United States for daring to comment critically on events in the U.S. But I am old enough to have grown up in the shadow of Nazi Germany when too many countries turned a blind eye to the mass killings in the concentration camps or refused refugees from Nazi Germany. I recall the photos in the newspapers taken in Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and many more death camps of the skeletons of those who died in those hell holes and the living skeletons of those who survived this appalling evil.
We live in an international world these days – wherever injustice now occurs, people around the world are aware of those injustices. I believe it is my duty as a citizen of the world to stand up, speak out and be counted as much as I am able when social injustice occurs. I hope that if social injustice occurs to me, I will have people standing at my back too. Because we don’t belong to one country. We belong to the world. I may live in North Cyprus but I abide by the following three precepts:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
- John Donne -
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
- Pastor Niemoeller on Nazi Germany
(Pastor Niemoeller could also have included gypsies, the mentally and physically disabled, communists, persons of religion who opposed Nazism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, among others, who ended up in Nazi concentration camps)
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
-British statesman, Edmund Burke
