The Epidemic Sweeping Through European Politics
Published on
Translation by:
Morag Young
Democracy and rights need to be injected into international institutions and the European Union.
The real epidemic sweeping across China, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia is not the one attacking poultry and infecting humans but the one which is destroying lives, hope, and the well-being of real people, reducing them to the position of animals, making them sub-human. These people really are living like factory farmed chickens, packed in together without freedom all in the name of false and decaying myths. They are oppressed by unmerciful breeders who are committed to a single aim: self-preservation and the control of power. The state of the health of Asian chickens reflects the level of respect for human rights and democracy shown towards hundreds of thousands of men and women.
Rights for poultry; rights for people
In the healthy West, the first to be contaminated by bird flu have been the experts in health Ministries. The tedious existence of the officials working in a hundred international organisations which protect health, the consumer, good and bad taste – everything, in fact, except perhaps common sense - has been thrown into confusion. In stark contrast, they have stood by in silence through years of massacres, wars, cultural repression and the complete destruction of any trace of rights for millions, and possibly billions, of inhabitants in areas controlled by China, such as Tibetans and the Uygur, in Laos, and in Vietnam (the Montagnards). There was no international body to protect democracy and rights, no one even blinked an eye in the offices which are supposedly in charge, there was not a scrap of legality beyond sullen formality.
And Europe continues to prefer to protect its own. It continues to do deals with the ‘devil’, selling its soul for a plane in Beijing; a favour from the Vietnamese regime which is never refused; a bit of business; a quiet life. The worst case scenario is that the European Union will propose, as a great act of patron-and-client farsightedness, a new international treaty to protect the health of chickens but not ‘cockerels’ or even ‘turkeys’. The only thing European and Chinese ‘poultry’ need is a World Organisation for Democracy and the recognition of democracy as a fundamental human right. Even in Europe there is still a need for this vaccination.
Translated from La febbre dei “polli” della politica europea