Courtesy of Samarth Goyal, Hindustan Times
As we return to work this week, many of us refreshed by a joyous occasion, let’s not forget that it's almost a year since the terrorist bombing in Manchester England on 22 May 2017 in which dozens of mainly young people were killed, maimed or sustained lifelong injuries, physical or otherwise. Of course, let's not forget that since 22 May 2017 there have been many other terrorist attacks not just in Europe; in addition, across the USA dozens of children have been shot dead in schools.
On 11 September 2017, while remembering those who died on 9/11 and all those who suffered one way or another from the May 2017 Manchester bombing, I published an article entitled "Amazon, Facebook & YouTube should be ashamed of supporting terrorism". Since then many months have elapsed and little has been done.
Neither the UK nor the USA has done enough to remove the homicidal trash off websites that profit from assisting or encouraging terrorists and lunatics to commit atrocities. A few democracies, such as Australia and New Zealand, have tried but so far as the UK and USA are concerned the response has been pathetic. There are no excuses for that and as for "school shootings", the surreal placatory words from Donald Trump on 1 March 2018 not unexpectedly soon fell on stony ground about two months later when he attended the annual NRA meeting in Dallas.
In the UK every Member of Parliament should be ashamed of Parliament’s collective inability to deal with terrorism on the web. We should be on a war-footing as should the USA. After all, at the start of the Second World War, political correctness didn’t get in the way of arresting Nazi sympathisers living in the UK and the USA reacted not dissimilarly immediately after Pearl Harbor in 1941.
This inaction makes most UK politicians look as pathetic as their counterparts in the USA who have failed their nation’s children through their collective inability to come together to radically amend the USA’s anachronistic gun laws. It appears that democracies are their own worst enemies and our enemies know that as has been shown of late by those interfering with democratic election processes all over the world.
These two historical bulwarks of democracy, the UK and the USA, seem to have reached the Stagnation Bar in the Last Chance Saloon and that applies to more than just reasserting core democratic values over political correctness so far as legislating to try and curtail massacres. Are the UK and USA to be run by terrorists under the guise of freedom of speech or by unelected billionaires like Facebook’s Zuckerberg or Amazon’s Bezos who either think they are above the law and/or can’t even control the contents of their flagship websites? Perhaps the USA should close down Congress and formally hand their responsibilities over to the NRA?
It’s time to take strides to shore up our once great democracies before they implode to the sound of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic weapons. Guidance on all these homicidal mechanisms and in some countries the mechanisms themselves or their components can be obtained online more often than not from the most popular websites in the world. Let's give our politicians a tough time and let them know what we think of them. You could start by sharing this article with them and asking them why haven’t they done anything? Alternatively sit back and watch democracy perish as more innocents die and pray you only have to watch it on TV.
Bill Fairclough, Faire Sans Dire
This article was first published on 20 May 2018.