One Man's Megalomaniac Is Another Man's Despot!

We are witnessing the terrible scenes of human tragedy being played out in the Mediterranean at the moment. People are fleeing from a tyranny caused by lunatic religious bigots and the foreign policies of the west. We here in the west feel we have a right to tell people how to live their lives, often removing one lunatic who we don't like from power, only to replace them with another lunatic! This time we opened up Pandora's box! We haven't left enough tyrannical lunatics behind to fight against the religious lunatics that are spreading like a cancer not only through the Middle East but soon around the world.

The Middle East is about as stable as nitroglycerine on a rocking horse: you know that sooner or later something is going to blow up! It has been proven time after time that removing one tyrant from an oppressed country usually leaves a vacuum that is quickly fought over by people who make Hannibal Lecter look like a boy scout. This inevitably leads to even more people dying, while the whole region destabilises further!

The sight of desperate people clinging onto over-laden, dilapidated boats in the hope of reaching some safe haven, is something I thought we wouldn't see again in a modern era. There have been more people die in these recent tragedies than on the Titanic, but somehow I don't think people will be talking about this in a hundred years' time. I doubt if most will remember this in just a few years' time. We cannot go on ignoring such suffering: if this was people from Britain doing this in a desperate attempt to survive there would be an outcry of anger by the people of this country. But I'm afraid we seem to have taken the stance of 'It's not our problem' here in the UK. Well I'm sorry it is our problem, we are part of the problem.

Can you imagine what could cause people to take such a terrible risk? Knowing that their chance of survival is so slim? You can bet that by staying where they were, their chances of survival were even slimmer! The propaganda machine of the hate merchants will be working overtime, telling more disaffected youths around the world how we left these people to drown! It is not fair to ask one country to pick up the bill of trying to save the lives of these people. Our government claim that if we help them, more will come. If we don't help them more will still come, but even more will die.

Four women have just set off to row across the Pacific ocean. I wish them good luck. They are doing this, they say, to raise money for charity, which no doubt they are. But the real reason they are doing it, is for adventure. If they go missing, there will be an international effort to find them, quite rightly. This will cost millions of pounds, but we will not spend the same amount on thousands of frightened, starving people fleeing the fear of death!

We can bury our heads in the sand and hope that it all just fades away, but it wont! As the problems in the Middle East escalate, more and more people will become even more desperate and we will end up with a catastrophic loss of human life. The United Nations has a duty to step in and help alleviate this suffering. It's time to stop the useless posturing and threats, and time for action, and I don't mean war. They have to send in forces to protect communities, and they have to see that aid gets to the people who need it and is not siphoned off to feed some despot's army!

We need to stop the Mediterranean from becoming the watery dump for all the poor and desperate that are fleeing in the hope of a better life for themselves and their families!