Thought for the Day - 18/03/03
Well, we’re into the final countdown, and any moment now we will switch from counting hours to counting our casualties. Now, admittedly we are unlikely to suffer the ½ million direct Iraqi casualties estimated by the UN and the World Health Organisation, not to mention any associated refugee crisis, with its hunger and disease, but nonetheless thousands of our young men and women are about to risk their lives.
At such times, it can be seen as unpatriotic and undermining troop morale to question the legitimacy of a war, the purpose or reasoning behind it, or the stated aims and sincerity of the political leaders who have forged it. But the democracy that we are supposedly fighting for requires freedom of expression. In our system, you can’t have a government without an opposition. Democracy enshrines the right to disagree.
Now, kings have traditionally granted freedom of expression to their jesters, who could ridicule the king’s decisions. Nowadays, however, those jesters are not part of the royal court, but comedians and clowns on our TV. On Friday night, as the climax of weeks of intense efforts by clowns across the UK, Comic Relief announced that we had raised a total of £35m to use as charity.
Muhammad, the most laughing and smiling of men, was renowned for the extent of his charity, and his community thrived as it followed his example. Giving and sharing makes us all stronger, whereas the destruction of warfare may benefit the victor but is inevitably detrimental to the majority.
With cruise missiles costing about £1million each, the efforts of all those Comic Relief clowns will be destroyed in the first few minutes of this war. Fortunately, in a democracy we have a right to look at our kings and our clowns and say whose actions we feel displays the greater intelligence.