A must read from Open Democracy. Robert Semeniuk reports from the Thai border.

When freedom is denied, the vulnerable become invisible and human rights are held with little respect. Burma spends 2-3% of its budget on health and 40% on its 400,000-strong armed forces. The dictatorship has created a new capital, Naypyidaw, 460 kilometres north of Rangoon; a fortress with boulevards, new buildings, highways, and apartments, carved out of virgin jungle. This is a regime that seeks isolation, the better to sustain its power.

In the meantime millions of Burmese people suffer - from diseases such as malaria, from crushing poverty, and from political repression and denial of their civil and human rights. The accumulating wave of protests from below in August-September 2007 fused their anger, desperation, and longing for a better life. The response from above has been pitiless and continuing persecution. The world looks on and sits by.

It is general sport to take people who are dead some time then dump on them for reasons best exlained by later conditions. Terry Eagleton has just been doing that with Kingsley Amis via views on Martin Amis. The elder Amis, according to Eagleton, was a compound of every bad -ism that can be assembled. He was racist, misogynist, anti-semitic, homophobic. The lot. On the other hand the family says what the family says (see the Telegraph linke below). As for the younger Amis he is, says Eagleton, the BNP in training.

The Guardian gives space to Eagleton. The Telegraph offers the Amis family response.

The trouble with name calling is that it eliminates any need for argument or evidence. It is calling for immediate mob justice. That leaves me feeling that whatever the case on Amis I would prefer his corner to Eagleton’s.

The passage in Eagleton’s CiF piece that commentators have tended to pick up is this:

But there is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment.

Well, yes. It is only this civilisation that has been wreaking untold carnage throughout the world, not Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Sotuh American dictators and dozens in the Arab world, never mind certain African states, emperors and presidents past and present, and if some people in London or indeed Manchester get themselves blown up here and there, they get no pity from Eagleton as it is just the “sticky end of the same treatment.” If all civilisations that have wreaked carnage are subject to the same treatment, just blow the world up now.

Oh but leave the Guardian. And definitely leave Professor Eagleton.

George Galloway praising Che Guevara in The Tehran Times.

What a heady mixture of anti-imperialist wankery.

Isn’t it time Galloway started a foco in Afghanistan or somewhere?