keaton
Big heart, hot blood and balls. Big balls
- Nov 18, 2004
- 9,895
Personally i think anyone that can get angry at having to have a three minute's silence is seriously messed up and needs to look in the mirror and realise quite how much of a prick they've become.
For the purposes of intelligent debate this is from today's Guardian
"A time to mourn
The EU has requested that member states come to a standstill at noon today to observe a three-minute silence for victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Is this just a shallow, belated gesture - or the best way to show our solidarity, asks Blake Morrison
Wednesday January 5, 2005
The Guardian
I remember a cartoon about western aid from decades ago. In the first frame a small boy playing with his food is told to eat up: "Think of the starving millions," his mother scolds him. In the second frame, he dutifully tackles his greens. In the third, having cleared his plate, he answers the phone: "It's the starving millions here," the voice at the other end says, "We just called to say thanks."
On the face of it, today's three-minute silence in memory of the tsunami victims - a silence ordained by the EU and sanctioned by Tessa Jowell - is a similarly pointless exercise. What good will it do the people of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and other devastated areas that we hang our heads for 180 seconds and fly flags at half-mast? Could any gesture be more futile? What those countries need from us is that we put our hands in our pockets, not stand with them stiffly at our sides.
There are other reasons for resenting the act of piety. It is state-imposed rather than an expression of collective will, prearranged rather than spontaneous, ritualistic rather than innovative. And given how slow western governments were to pledge assistance, it also has an air of atonement about it. Ten days on, now that European political leaders have returned from holiday, we, the public, are formally being invited to recognise the scale of the catastrophe.
But in many living-rooms across Europe, recognition began as early as Boxing Day, when it was already clear that the tsunami must have brought greater destruction than first reports suggested - when even those of us with no knowledge of the region realised that once television crews and relief agencies penetrated less accessible coastal areas, the estimates of the death toll would rise. That's why private donations quickly outstripped those pledged by governments. And why black armbands were worn (and a one-minute silence observed) at football matches on December 28. It's not we who have been laggard in acknowledging the tragedy but our political leaders, none more so than Tony Blair, whose slowness off the mark this time contrasts markedly with his quickness four months into his premiership in 1997, when he astutely gauged, gave voice to and in some small measure helped to create the lachrymose public response to the death of Princess Diana.
To the sceptical, today's three-minute silence can't help but seem a shallow and belated gesture of sympathy. But to refuse to observe it just because Blair, Bush and various tainted western agencies approve of it would be perverse. Public silence in medias res - abandoning normal routines to remember the dead - has been a powerful tradition since the Armistice. And if the greatest natural disaster in our life time isn't worth commemorating, then what is?
"Calumnies," Ben Jonson says in Volpone, "are answered best with silence." Catastrophes, too. Even those of us who work from home, alone, with no one to monitor us, will find it hard not to do the right thing at midday. It's true that the expression of public mourning has become so familiar of late that its rituals are at risk of losing all meaning. The bunches of flowers tied to lampposts where pedestrians or drivers have died. The candles burning for Princess Diana. The football players standing with their heads bowed round the centre circle every time a famous manager or former player passes away. It's hard to say when exactly Britain lost its stiff upper lip - after Lockerbie? Gazza's tears during the 1990 World Cup? Dunblane? But we can no longer be accused of emotional nullity. We may not keen or wail but when it comes to public tragedy we know how to put on a good show.
That's all today's silence might look like: a show. But what other mark of respect is there? How else to express pity for the victims, empathy for the survivors, and incredulity at the vastness of the death toll? "An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent," Edmund Burke wrote of the events in Paris in 1789. Mass loss of life brought about by political upheaval demands analysis; so do acts of terrorism. The many words written about 9/11 can be justified as an effort to understand what brought it about and to limit the possibility of something similar happening again. Even Princess Diana's death involved theories of blame and avoidability.
But the tsunami, as a natural disaster, defeats words. Some of its effects might have been diminished by an early-warning system, but nothing could have stopped it happening. And if helplessness in the face of nature makes us lost for words for once, if only for three minutes, that's surely appropriate.
It is also heartening that a developing-world catastrophe should make it into the pantheon of western mourning. I can't remember this happening before - not with the Bhopal gas explosion 20 years ago, not with the massive earthquake in Bam near Tehran in 2003, and certainly not with Bhuj, in India, when an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale struck in 2001, killing 30,000 people, 10 times as many as were to die in the World Trade Centre nine months later.
The cynic will say: "Ah yes, the disaster only became newsworthy this time because western tourists were among the casualties; if the victims had all been brown-skinned, the story would have disappeared by now or never have made it beyond page 19 - Earthquake at Sea, Only Johnny Foreigners Dead." It is certainly true that the presence of westerners has helped swell the media coverage in the past 10 days, and that the tales of European survivors have a voyeuristic fascination. The Swedish woman photographed running not away from the tsunami, but towards it, so as to rescue her children; the Brit who tied his wife and children to a tree with beach towels; the surfer who caught the ultimate wave.
It might have been us, we think: we take holidays in such places, too. But as each day has passed, so attention has steadily shifted to the indigenous populations and their suffering - it is for them that we are sending our money, not to help western tourists get home again.
Looked at like that, today's three-minute silence is something to welcome - a tiny first step in the long struggle to narrow the divide between first and third worlds, to accord Asians and Africans the same value that we accord westerners. In the mourning after 9/11 and Madrid, and even Princess Diana, there was a sense of us weeping for ourselves. This time we'll be showing solidarity with a people of whose lives we know little or nothing - only that those lives have been devastated and deserve whatever little we can give.
Yes, it seems faintly obscene that we should have the leisure to stand still today, while others are frantically searching for their families or (now that such hope has faded) clearing up the ruins. But we can't all be volunteers with Médecins Sans Frontières. And a three-minute silence doesn't preclude us or our governments from pledging further assistance - on the contrary, the longer the effects of the tsunami are kept in mind, the more donations will pour in. So however much we might resist doing what the nanny state tells us, this isn't the moment to kick up a fuss. The next time a minor royal dies, by all means refuse to be silent. But today, just for three minutes, please shut up.
The history of silences
The history of the commemorative silence is debated, but the originator may have been a Melbourne journalist and first world war veteran, Edward George Honey, who was living in London in 1919. In a letter to the London Evening News in May of that year he appealed for five minutes of contemplation amid the raucous celebrations planned for the first anniversary of the end of the first world war.
He took the idea, he said, from a South African practice. "During the War, we observed what we called the 'three minutes' pause'. At noon each day, all work, all talk and all movement were suspended for three minutes that we might concentrate as one in thinking of those - the living and the dead - who had pledged and given themselves for all that we believe in."
In October 1919, Lord Milner forwarded a suggestion to King George V for a period of silence on Armistice Day in all the countries of the empire. The war cabinet approved the suggestion but amended the duration to one minute. At the suggestion of the king, the silence was lengthened to two minutes.
The silence for the fallen subsequently became a national institution, suspended only during the second world war in 1941 and 1944. However, the duration of memorial periods of silence has continued to fluctuate from event to event. At the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales on September 6 1997, Buckingham Palace announced a one-minute silence in her memory, considered more appropriate than the traditional two minutes. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 2001 merited two minutes at the instigation of the Queen. The rest of Europe observed three minutes.
The funeral of the Queen Mother in April 2002 was observed by a two-minute silence. On Saturday July 5 2003, it was back to one minute to mark the deaths of the Bali bomb victims in Indonesia. On March 15 of last year, the EU requested that all member countries observe three minutes' silence for the victims of the Madrid train bombings.
Dilpazier Aslam "
For the purposes of intelligent debate this is from today's Guardian
"A time to mourn
The EU has requested that member states come to a standstill at noon today to observe a three-minute silence for victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Is this just a shallow, belated gesture - or the best way to show our solidarity, asks Blake Morrison
Wednesday January 5, 2005
The Guardian
I remember a cartoon about western aid from decades ago. In the first frame a small boy playing with his food is told to eat up: "Think of the starving millions," his mother scolds him. In the second frame, he dutifully tackles his greens. In the third, having cleared his plate, he answers the phone: "It's the starving millions here," the voice at the other end says, "We just called to say thanks."
On the face of it, today's three-minute silence in memory of the tsunami victims - a silence ordained by the EU and sanctioned by Tessa Jowell - is a similarly pointless exercise. What good will it do the people of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and other devastated areas that we hang our heads for 180 seconds and fly flags at half-mast? Could any gesture be more futile? What those countries need from us is that we put our hands in our pockets, not stand with them stiffly at our sides.
There are other reasons for resenting the act of piety. It is state-imposed rather than an expression of collective will, prearranged rather than spontaneous, ritualistic rather than innovative. And given how slow western governments were to pledge assistance, it also has an air of atonement about it. Ten days on, now that European political leaders have returned from holiday, we, the public, are formally being invited to recognise the scale of the catastrophe.
But in many living-rooms across Europe, recognition began as early as Boxing Day, when it was already clear that the tsunami must have brought greater destruction than first reports suggested - when even those of us with no knowledge of the region realised that once television crews and relief agencies penetrated less accessible coastal areas, the estimates of the death toll would rise. That's why private donations quickly outstripped those pledged by governments. And why black armbands were worn (and a one-minute silence observed) at football matches on December 28. It's not we who have been laggard in acknowledging the tragedy but our political leaders, none more so than Tony Blair, whose slowness off the mark this time contrasts markedly with his quickness four months into his premiership in 1997, when he astutely gauged, gave voice to and in some small measure helped to create the lachrymose public response to the death of Princess Diana.
To the sceptical, today's three-minute silence can't help but seem a shallow and belated gesture of sympathy. But to refuse to observe it just because Blair, Bush and various tainted western agencies approve of it would be perverse. Public silence in medias res - abandoning normal routines to remember the dead - has been a powerful tradition since the Armistice. And if the greatest natural disaster in our life time isn't worth commemorating, then what is?
"Calumnies," Ben Jonson says in Volpone, "are answered best with silence." Catastrophes, too. Even those of us who work from home, alone, with no one to monitor us, will find it hard not to do the right thing at midday. It's true that the expression of public mourning has become so familiar of late that its rituals are at risk of losing all meaning. The bunches of flowers tied to lampposts where pedestrians or drivers have died. The candles burning for Princess Diana. The football players standing with their heads bowed round the centre circle every time a famous manager or former player passes away. It's hard to say when exactly Britain lost its stiff upper lip - after Lockerbie? Gazza's tears during the 1990 World Cup? Dunblane? But we can no longer be accused of emotional nullity. We may not keen or wail but when it comes to public tragedy we know how to put on a good show.
That's all today's silence might look like: a show. But what other mark of respect is there? How else to express pity for the victims, empathy for the survivors, and incredulity at the vastness of the death toll? "An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent," Edmund Burke wrote of the events in Paris in 1789. Mass loss of life brought about by political upheaval demands analysis; so do acts of terrorism. The many words written about 9/11 can be justified as an effort to understand what brought it about and to limit the possibility of something similar happening again. Even Princess Diana's death involved theories of blame and avoidability.
But the tsunami, as a natural disaster, defeats words. Some of its effects might have been diminished by an early-warning system, but nothing could have stopped it happening. And if helplessness in the face of nature makes us lost for words for once, if only for three minutes, that's surely appropriate.
It is also heartening that a developing-world catastrophe should make it into the pantheon of western mourning. I can't remember this happening before - not with the Bhopal gas explosion 20 years ago, not with the massive earthquake in Bam near Tehran in 2003, and certainly not with Bhuj, in India, when an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale struck in 2001, killing 30,000 people, 10 times as many as were to die in the World Trade Centre nine months later.
The cynic will say: "Ah yes, the disaster only became newsworthy this time because western tourists were among the casualties; if the victims had all been brown-skinned, the story would have disappeared by now or never have made it beyond page 19 - Earthquake at Sea, Only Johnny Foreigners Dead." It is certainly true that the presence of westerners has helped swell the media coverage in the past 10 days, and that the tales of European survivors have a voyeuristic fascination. The Swedish woman photographed running not away from the tsunami, but towards it, so as to rescue her children; the Brit who tied his wife and children to a tree with beach towels; the surfer who caught the ultimate wave.
It might have been us, we think: we take holidays in such places, too. But as each day has passed, so attention has steadily shifted to the indigenous populations and their suffering - it is for them that we are sending our money, not to help western tourists get home again.
Looked at like that, today's three-minute silence is something to welcome - a tiny first step in the long struggle to narrow the divide between first and third worlds, to accord Asians and Africans the same value that we accord westerners. In the mourning after 9/11 and Madrid, and even Princess Diana, there was a sense of us weeping for ourselves. This time we'll be showing solidarity with a people of whose lives we know little or nothing - only that those lives have been devastated and deserve whatever little we can give.
Yes, it seems faintly obscene that we should have the leisure to stand still today, while others are frantically searching for their families or (now that such hope has faded) clearing up the ruins. But we can't all be volunteers with Médecins Sans Frontières. And a three-minute silence doesn't preclude us or our governments from pledging further assistance - on the contrary, the longer the effects of the tsunami are kept in mind, the more donations will pour in. So however much we might resist doing what the nanny state tells us, this isn't the moment to kick up a fuss. The next time a minor royal dies, by all means refuse to be silent. But today, just for three minutes, please shut up.
The history of silences
The history of the commemorative silence is debated, but the originator may have been a Melbourne journalist and first world war veteran, Edward George Honey, who was living in London in 1919. In a letter to the London Evening News in May of that year he appealed for five minutes of contemplation amid the raucous celebrations planned for the first anniversary of the end of the first world war.
He took the idea, he said, from a South African practice. "During the War, we observed what we called the 'three minutes' pause'. At noon each day, all work, all talk and all movement were suspended for three minutes that we might concentrate as one in thinking of those - the living and the dead - who had pledged and given themselves for all that we believe in."
In October 1919, Lord Milner forwarded a suggestion to King George V for a period of silence on Armistice Day in all the countries of the empire. The war cabinet approved the suggestion but amended the duration to one minute. At the suggestion of the king, the silence was lengthened to two minutes.
The silence for the fallen subsequently became a national institution, suspended only during the second world war in 1941 and 1944. However, the duration of memorial periods of silence has continued to fluctuate from event to event. At the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales on September 6 1997, Buckingham Palace announced a one-minute silence in her memory, considered more appropriate than the traditional two minutes. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 2001 merited two minutes at the instigation of the Queen. The rest of Europe observed three minutes.
The funeral of the Queen Mother in April 2002 was observed by a two-minute silence. On Saturday July 5 2003, it was back to one minute to mark the deaths of the Bali bomb victims in Indonesia. On March 15 of last year, the EU requested that all member countries observe three minutes' silence for the victims of the Madrid train bombings.
Dilpazier Aslam "
