I’ve had it on my mind recently to check out the website of Amnesty International. I do recall clearly that, when I was a student, it was an organisation so esteemed that it was generally held to be the very highest arbiter of human affairs among anybody who was anybody. Why, the mere utterance of its name was sufficient to bring on paroxysms of crippling guilt and po-faced righteousness in equal measure
So I moseyed along to their website to see what they had to say for themselves these days, and guess what I found? Well, according to Amnesty the way to ‘Stop the Terror’ is to abolish the trade in small arms.
They’d be better off trying to stop the proliferation of the word sustainable which pops up all over their website like a plague
Now, in fairness to them, they do highlight the fact that small arms are used by tyrannical governments, guerillas and criminals to bully and kill innocent civilians but what they speciously fail to realise is that abolishing the means of self-defence is not the way to discourage them
Oh and there’s a lot of other guff about the diamond trade being (shock, horror) unregulated and a general lamentation about the slow progress of World Government under the strict auspices of the UN (which they clearly worship). In short it is more or less everything that can be expected from your average post-modernist left-wing lobby group
Of course, there is nothing wrong, indeed there is everything right, with campaigning against government abuse and torture of citizens but there is a great deal wrong with their promotion of ‘entitlements’ as ‘rights’ and with their underlying assumption that all human life can be preserved and sustained by writing lots of noble things on lots of bits of paper and entrusting their stewardship to diverse grand-sounding conventions and bureaucracies. Some people don’t quite get it. These guys don’t get it at all
Far from being a ‘Candle in the Darkness’, Amnesty International is just another one of those organisations that know everything about human rights and nothing at all about human liberties
