Sam Thomas

24 out of the 28 shops in the road I work in were flying the Union Jack today, depressing.

Patriotism is a disease.

17 hours ago

How hard it is to grow old, when we have missed our life… How sad it is to feel the mind declining before it has done its work… The tragic solemnity of existence strikes us with terrible force, on that morning when we wake to find the mournful words too late ringing in our ears! Too late, the sand is turned, the hour is past! Thy harvest is unreaped—too late! Thou hast been dreaming, forgetting, sleeping…

Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime (via whyexistence)

17 hours ago -

38

in-the-midst-of-winter:

The Diamond Jubilee is a joke…

Britain shouldn’t be celebrating an old woman sitting in a chair for 60 years.

It’s that simple.

The Queen does not represent us. Any of us. Monarchy in Britain serves as a reminder to the absolute brutes that we have been over the past millennia, not something to be celebrated.

The kind of family-run politics we condemn in Syria, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain is the same kind that keeps Queenie in power here, though of course, she isn’t tyrannical or even powerful at all — all the more reason she is redundant.

We should celebrate when we have made reparations across the world, when it’s appropriate, not because we get an extra day off work.

When we have apologised to the Palestinian people for appropriating their homeland, giving it away without their permission and oppressing them while Zionist invaders gained a political grip, then we can celebrate.

When we apologise to the the Afghan people for occupying their land on three separate occasions, ~~despite getting our arses repeatedly kicked I might add~~, going as far back as 1839, dictating them a puppet leader and continuously and indiscriminatingly imposing mass suffering, from starvation to innocent civilians being massacred, then we can celebrate.

When we apologise to the Iranian people for instigating a coup against their democratically elected leader because he was cracking down on Britain sucking Iran dry of her natural resources, which only she has the right to, then we can celebrate.

When we apologise for the people of so-called ‘British India’ for taking their land, taking their women and passing off their magnificent creativity as our own, then we can celebrate.

When we apologise to Iraq for facilitating, and engaging in, the death of 1,300,000 people, for destabilising their country, starving millions and leaving even more homeless, injured and exiled, and when we apologise for the absolute tragedy in Fallujah, then we can celebrate.

I fear that I’ll be here forever if I have to list the brutish acts the British have engaged in, and those I’ve listed are only relatively recent, but I’m sure we all know about the horrors of empire, imperialism and conquest that stretch back even further — my mass burning of witches in the name of the monarchy, the mass burning of protestants and Catholics in the name of the monarchy, etc, etc

People have an extremely short conscience.