Love vs. Terror

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

After years of domestic abuse, a lovely young woman (a friend of my girlfriend’s, but I met her several times) took her own life today. She leaves behind children. Her husband, the person from whom she was trying to escape for years, is today posting sympathy-begging messages on Facebook, the likes of which are stunning. At least, I am stunned.

Perhaps I should not be, as I have been writing columns for years about human rights violations in nations controlled by repressive regimes around the world. Repression and torture do not need a national policy to make them real. Repression happens on a sliding scale, from the size of a nation to the size of the back of a man’s hand. And no one can measure the cruelty of words.

I am angry, I suppose on her behalf, little good it does now. Angry that there are individuals who treat their world and their “loved ones” like a repressive nation treats its dissident citizens: he threatened her with overwhelmingly expensive legal battles to extricate herself from the pain he was inflicting on her, and she felt driven to make attempts (plural) on her own life. And then, his hands clean because he did not end her life (he also did not save it) he began to fill the airwaves with messages posted “more in sorrow than in anger” about how his wife abandoned him today. (I have this fantasy that my friends in Anonymous will launch an “Ops” attack against him. Pah. To what end?)

Maybe someone who feels the need or desire to hurt themselves today—perhaps to strike out against someone who is hurting them or perhaps because they may not want to die but they can not imagine continuing to live—may read what follows.

Perhaps publishing this phone number right here, today—1-800-273-TALK (8255)—is the only reason for this website’s existence. It is the national suicide prevention hotline number.
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On Trial for Tweets: Nabeel Rajab

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One of the inadvertent effects of Bahrain’s current campaign of aggressive repression against those it deems dissidents is the simplest one: Bahrain validates the dissidents, proves their testimonies of brutality, physical and psychological torture, and repression one-hundred percent correct.

Almost two weeks after Nabeel Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, was arrested, he finally learned today what he is charged with: two violations of Bahrain’s penal code, violations of articles 133 and 216, which carry a combined maximum sentence of 13 years in prison. The charges stem from Tweets that he published last year. Tweets. His first hearing will be July 12.

One of the other effects, of course, is this: Bahrain’s campaign of repression stokes dissent, and dissenters become easier to identify, arrest, attempt to silence. Right now, Bahrain is making life dangerous for thousands of people as it places a choke-hold on parts of its population: Shia, human rights activists, those people unlucky enough to not be born in the ruling Al Khalifa family.
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Today in History: June 26

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Journalist Veronica Guerin was shot and killed 20 years ago today by a drug gang in Dublin, Ireland.

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” … [T]o save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind; to regain faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small; to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained; to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom …”—The Charter of the United Nations

Fifty of the first 51 member-states of the United Nations signed the United Nations Charter on this date in 1945. A typo that states “June 27” is scratched out of the official document with June 26 handwritten over. It is a treaty and all members are bound by all of its articles.

A recording of Sir Laurence Olivier reading the Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations, with music by Aaron Copland (after the jump):
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