Month: June 2007

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Human Rights: a reminder

I’ve had this sitting on the back burner for a while but I think it’s worth publishing today — given John Howard’s outrageous War on Indigenous Unpleasantness. Please read (or at least skim) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the newly-formed United Nations in 1948. After the bloodshed of the Second World War, virtually every nation on the planet understood that these values were What It Was All About.

To emphasize the key themes, I’ve used TagCrowd to make a tag cloud of the Declaration. Note, Gentle Reader, the most-repeated word of all: everyone.

created at TagCrowd.com

Now you can perhaps argue about the details. P J O’Rourke, for example, reckons:

All men are created equal. We hold this truth to the self-evident, which on the face of it is so wildly untrue. Equality is the foundation of liberal democracy, rule of law, a free society, and everything that the reader, if he or she is sane, cherishes. But are we all equal because we all showed up? It does not work that way at weddings or funerals. Are we all equal because it says so in the American Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Each of these documents contains plenty of half-truths and nontruths as well. The UN proclaims, “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours.” I’ll have my wife inform the baby.

High-minded screeds cobbled together by unrepresentative and, in some cases, slightly deranged members of the intelligentsia are not scripture. Anyway, to see what a scripture-based polity gets for a social system we have only to look at the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Puritans in Massachusetts.

But the core words stand out so brightly in that TagCloud. And those core words are being ignored by John Howard’s cynical intervention.

Perhaps you should ask your local MP why so few of them have been enshrined in Australian law and what they, personally, have done about that.

If they’re a Coalition MP, perhaps you should ask them why they’re being party to such a disgusting, heavy-handed approach to what is, yes, a major problem — but a problem which has been sitting there for the entire time they’ve been in government.

Production Note

TagCrowd has already removed common stop words like “the” and “of”. I’ve added a few more so the focus is on the content not the structure: “against”, “article”, “declaration”, “forth”, “held”, “including”, “nor”, “proclaimed”, “promote”, “shall” and “whereas”.

I’ve added a bunch of words to that list to remove things which are about the structure of the Declaration rather than the content, such as “whereas”.

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Releasing the Black Hawk crash video was A Good Thing

[Update 13 April 2012: It turned out that the Black Hawk wasn’t a perfectly good helicopter after all. I will eventually update this post. Perhaps. But today I’ll be linking to this post because the Department of Defence has respected the wishes of the family and not released the Inquiry Officer Report into the death of Sapper Jamie Larcombe. I think that’s wrong for the reasons set out in this post.]

Frame grab of Black Hawk helicopter crash on HMAS Kanimbla: click for YouTube videoAn open letter to family and friends of those who died in the crash of the Black Hawk helicopter on HMAS Kanimbla, and to those who survived.

I understand why you didn’t want the crash video made public. Every time you see it, you’ll re-live that crash. And every time, you’ll feel that black void of horror creeping back up into your mind. The horror may stay with you for years. It’s pretty fucked, I know.

But despite the on-going pain it inevitably causes, I think it’s not only reasonable that such videos be made public, I think it’s essential.

In 1992, there was another accident. During an army live-fire exercise, an assault rifle accidentally discharged and a soldier died. A very good friend of mine was holding that rifle. And while both a military inquiry and a civilian coronial inquest agreed it was an accident and found my friend blameless, the post-traumatic stress and guilt stayed with him for years — to the point where it became unbearable and he hanged himself at the end of 1996.

His parents were devastated. I wasn’t too thrilled either, having cut him down from the tree in my back yard and, later, helped carry him to his grave.

Some of us reckon the army hadn’t taken proper care of one of their own. The 2005 Senate inquiry into the The effectiveness of Australia’s military justice system agreed.

As a direct result of Senate recommendations, the inquiry into the Black Hawk crash was headed by a civilian judge — the first time that’d happened. And that judge declared the video should be released. It was right and proper that he do so.

Secrecy provides a breeding-ground for corruption.

Secrecy can be used to cover up incompetence.

Secrecy is, of course, essential in many military operations. But when it comes to finding out why a perfectly good helicopter slammed into the deck of a ship and then dragged two fine men to their deaths, secrecy has no place. Justice needs to be done — out of respect to those men, and out of respect to every man and woman who chooses to serve the Australian people in the armed forces.

Justice not only needs to be done, we need to see that it’s being done — and that means putting the evidence on the public record.

I’m sorry you’ve had to re-live the disaster. I know even reading this letter will hurt. I’ll have trouble sleeping tonight too, having re-lived my own story. That’s the price of Justice. It’s worth paying.

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Failure IS an option

Hugh MacLeod has written a great little piece pointing out that bravado about “Failure is not an option” is just stupid. I also like some of the comments from readers:

  • “Failure is not an option” people are invariably the ones least willing to deliver the intellectual and physical juice to lessen the probability of failure.
  • “Failure is not an option” people are invariably the same people who said, two paragraphs earlier, that they want bold, risk-taking approaches.

Failure is always an option, which of course you want to avoid, But if failure is inevitable, then fail fast — and then adapt.