I am told that a week or two ago two friends if mine (M and R) were discussing some articles which I had written, and R said to M that my views on politics were radical, and M passed this comment on to me. I had never before been told that this was so, and this made me look in The Concise Oxford Dictionary (Eighth edition, 1990) at the definition of the application of the word to politics. I found "advocating thorough reform; holding extreme political views; revolutionary".
This was for me a surprising description, since I am commonly told that I am a dry old lawyer hopelessly out of date and unwilling to approve changes in law arising from modifications in generally accepted morality. I had become accustomed to being treated as a hyper-conservative holding on desperately to outmoded views of the immutability of justice.
I have to leave it to others to decide which I am, if either, but in my own defence I feel it right and proper to state clearly that I have strong views (which do not change with fashion) that justice is unchanging and cannot be modified for the convenience of politicians or anyone else. It can be convenient to act as though certain persons have fewer rights than others, and we saw an extreme version of this when the Nazi rulers of much of Western Europe treated anyone who fell within their classification of "Jews" as being Untermenschen and thus allowed them absolutely no human rights.
A lesser discrimination was applied in Northern Ireland where anyone who came from a Catholic background could not even apply for jobs, particularly the better ones, in certain industries. Now we see it in the Near and Middle East where the rulers of the USA and their Zionist masters treat the indigenous inhabitants as though they did not exist as human beings. One only has to hear on the radio or on the television how many invading soldiers from the USA have been killed by local resistance groups in Iraq, but only a vague idea of what number of the resistants have also been killed, without any clear definition of how that number is made up, particularly when the dead local people include a considerable proportion of women and children.
This is even worse in Palestine, where we are regularly told of the horrors of the death of two or three 'Israeli' civilians, especially if they include a woman or a child, but only have cursory coverage of the far larger number of Palestinian civilians, often women and children, who are callously killed as so-called "collateral damage" during targeted assassinations of resistants to the invaders. The figures are eloquent once one examines the body count on each side in this unequal combat between the "Israeli Defence Force" (an orwellian title is ever there was one, to remind us that thieves fight hard to defend their booty) and the persecuted indigenous people, since the number of dead among the invaded is many times that of those among the invaders. Furthermore, it is unfair to count adult (or even adolescent) settlers as though they were civilians, since they are commonly heavily armed and have shown themselves very willing to use their weapons against innocent unarmed genuine civilians whom they have deliberately displaced from their homes and lands.
Apparently, it is radical on my part to point out such unfairness, and to insist on equal justice for all, whether or not they can be considered to be among our "friends". Many in the establishment in the USA apply entirely different standards to the actions of those with whom they feel "comfortable" to the acts of those whom they see as being different. This explains the absolutely crazy "War on Terror" so dear to President George W. Bush and his gang, where reckless murder by their "allies" (such as the Zionists) is treated as being necessary for "security" while much lesser actions by those (such as Hamas) who refuse to be their "allies" are classified as terrorism.
My radical policy is quite simply to apply equal justice to all, and not to pick and choose between persons and groups on the basis of whether or not we like them. If this is in fact radical, then it shows that the state of our world is far worse than it is claimed to be by the establishment, and I have now come rather to like the idea of applying this interesting word to my political views. Until now, I had more or less come to accept that I was considered by many to be so conservative and old-fashioned in my stubborn refusal to believe that the correct (i.e. highest) standard for justice should be lowered, or even that it properly can.
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