I HAVE BEEN MORE OR LESS UNABLE to keep up with my commitments of late due to a series of factors involving excess of work, illness to my good lady wife and a lack of anything out of the ordinary to write about, given that government incompetence and economic failure have become our daily bread, No one in their right minds expects to see a "recovery" (whatever that might be) for the next twenty years or so and so most of us who are living off accrued income and investments are forced to simply watch our income be reduced.
HOWEVER, ON THE FOREIGN FRONT, I have been paying some slight attention to the activities taking place in Syria. When, when what seems years ago, the soi-disant Arab Spring began, there were foolhardy journalists in the left-wing press in the United Kingdom, the openly socialist BBC, and the occasional article in the United States press (just to show balance) who heralded a "new dawn" of democracy in countries that had previously had a dearth of rights for the common man.
THE CURRENT SITUATION SEEMS to suggest that the new aurora has not been a great success. Tunisia has no apparent government at the moment, Libya is utter chaos with the only law being dictated by firearms, Egypt is a mystery even more unfathomable than Russia used to be, and Syria is, as I suppose everyone knows, a disgrace beyond belief in present times.
PHOTOGENIC BASHAR HAFEZ AL-ASSAD, the current leader of Syria (above), is relying on the fact that there has to be some limit on how many 19-year-old boys the United States of America and the United Kingdom are prepared to sacrifice in order to depose vile despots. This is particularly sensitive after we have seen over the last ten years that "the new guys" in power are usually not much better than the ones that we sacrificed thousands of our soldiers to replace.
YET, WHAT HAS PROVOKED me into writing this is the fact that Bashar stated last week to the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar that he deserved to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after it was granted to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) watchdog currently destroying his regime's massive chemical arsenal.
AFTER THIS STATEMENT, EYEBROWS WERE RAISED, as we sometimes say, but not mine. I cannot see any reason why the bloody hands of Bashar should not be given a Nobel Peace Prize. After all, last year it was given to the European Union, a much-hated organisation that has been destroying the lives of over a hundred million people through its idiotic Euro currency and common policies on agriculture, condemning most of southern Europe to poverty, misery and -- increasingly -- suicide or emigration to Germany, which is more or less the same thing.
BASHAR, IN MY OPINION, WOULD BE a worthy successor to the sinister Barroso, the vague and incompetent Von Rumpoy and the hated Angela Merkel at the EU, although at least Bashar and his assassins put their victims out of their misery very quickly.
