Witnessing and Exploitation in Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields

Tamil protests in Canada which has the largest Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora population. (Image: 松林 Ｌ)

by Elliot Adams

Many broadcasters are using the summer evening slow hours to drop some emotion bait for the September-November documentary award-season. Long-running documentary series are wheeling out their larger set-pieces for this year, as This World did with their excellent ‘The Invasion of Lampedusa’. There have also been suitably emotional and shocking standalone efforts, like Terry Pratchett ‘s insightful video essay on assisted suicide, Choosing to Die, or More4′s The Pipe. But the most controversial so far has been Channel4′s documentary Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, which I finally managed to catch a last night and is still available internationally online.

It contains some of the most shocking images ever broadcast on Channel4 we are told in a trite and hackneyed introduction from Jon Snow, very much in the style of Sheriff John Bunnell from World’s Wildest Police Videos - which is appropriate because the show that follows is very much Jon Snow’s Most Shocking Genocides by any other name.

They allowed the narrative of the documentary to be shaped by what un-aired clips they had and made no mention of events that they didn’t have new shocking gory footage of, for instance little was said of the concentration camps that hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians were forced into – these are termed ‘welfare villages‘ by the Sri Lankan government, a chilling amelioration that belies the horrifying truth that sexual abuse, torture and starvation is endemic in these camps and at one point thousands were dying in the largest camp every week.

Civilians trapped between their own soldiers and the Sri Lankan army who were bent on state-sanctioned genocide

Interview questions also never really go beyond the obvious, often merely reiterating what has already been said or was explicitly shown in video footage. At its best, the narration of the new footage points out the disparity between the State’s account of events and what is being shown – particularly when showing that key LTTE figures were summarily executed after their surrender was accepted (and in one case sexually assaulted, probably raped) rather than Killed In Action as claimed. At its worst, it is sensationalising and exploitative – building up the emotional impact of the images, providing callous atrocity as a form of entertainment. But perhaps this was to be expected, this is after all the broadcaster that gave us the exploitative modern-day freak-show of its Bodyshock series, trailers for which stopped just short of calling out ‘Roll up! Roll up! ladies and gents, with terror and revulsion feast your eyes upon The Girl With an Arsehole on Her Face!’

Issues of sensitivity and its limited depth aside, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields gives a compelling and seemingly accurate account of the unlawful behaviour of military forces in the northern theatre of the latest civil war.

We’re shown targeted shelling by Sri Lankan forces of crowded hospitals(to such a degree that doctors requested the Red Cross to stop sharing hospitals’ GPS locations with the Sri Lankan government) within civilian camps in areas the government had laughably designated ‘no-fire zones’. We see a sustained and targeted campaign of extermination against the civilians who had fled to the no-fire zone, and then once the government designated a new one on the east coast we are shown how the armed forces cut the zone in two with a sustained artillery barrage so they could arrest those who fled east and herd them into internment camps . Tamil civilians found themselves trapped between their own soldiers (who weren’t willing to let their human shield leave) and the Sri Lankan army who were apparently bent on state-sanctioned genocide.

Tamil civilians fleeing Killinochi (Image: Tamils Rehabilitation Organization)

All journalists, NGOs, international observers and most UN staff had been expelled from the region before the government’s offensive. Consequently the majority of the footage used for the documentary was from shot by civilian amateurs and by victims themselves. The story their footage tells bears witness to crimes against humanity committed by both combatant factions, neither showing much concern for the suffering and deaths of those whose lives they were fighting over. But the last portion of ‘Killing Fields, introduced by another Jon-Snow-channelling-John-Bunnell introduction, was made up largely of the trophy videos filmed on the perpetrators’ mobile phones. It is this last third of the documentary that has proved the most controversial.

Clips of dead child soldiers, mutilated Tamil civilians, bound and helpless prisoners being executed and the naked corpses of raped Tamil women being piled on trucks while those throwing the bodies joke about which one has “the best figure.”

A particularly disturbing moment is when one soldier remarks, ”I really want to cut her tits off. If no one was around”, in Sinhalese. Humanity has been lowered in your estimation so much by this point that you find yourself reassured that this implies someone in the Army’s command structure wouldn’t approve of further mutilations.

There is a troubling air of spectacle in the way these images are treated though, through its commentary and the questionable choice to put a cheesy horror film soundtrack behind footage of war crimes – this incidentally, by displacing the atrocities from their callous and everyday context, was every bit as inappropriate a choice as the Benny Hill theme tune would have been. It wasn’t the same atrocity exhibition being put on by those filming these war crimes, it was a more human form of exploitation – using these images purely for their shock value.

To be honest I wasn’t that disturbed by what I saw. I am both a very jaded horror film fan and have never shied away from real-life footage of this nature – to be honest I had already seen much of what was included in Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields circulating on the internet. I’ve seen people killed literally in front of me, and while I was shocked at the time – it hasn’t stayed with me as trauma. So perhaps I am just failing to understand the effect these scenes have had on some viewers, but to me it was the way in which they were broadcast that was troubling and I wasn’t the only one.

Even those who felt the way ‘Killing fields handled events was laudable made comparisons between its later footage and horror film excess. Most eloquent among detractors, who felt the scenes shouldn’t have been broadcast, was Serena Davies writing for The Torygraph;

Watching these films made me retch and I wonder quite what the purpose was of viewers being exposed to such horror. Snow said he believed the films should be made public, but why to the British public? Should untutored members of another nation, one on the other side of the world and with no claims now over its former colony, be the people to bear witness to such grotesque behaviour, watching a sequence of these squalid little films and adding a final violation of the victims’ privacy? Surely they are a matter for the experts, for the international arbiters of justice and human rights. In this instance, TV, with its sensationalising soundtrack and its graphic intimacy, seemed the wrong way to present yet another reminder of man’s capacity for evil.

Another obvious critic is the Sri Lankan government. They have released an official statement registering their concern at the ‘distress’ possibly faked footage may have caused viewers, and trying to portray their cover-up attempts as part of an effort to heal old wounds.

The Sri Lankan government is concerned about the distress the images in the Channel 4 film aired without any guarantee of their authenticity might have caused to the viewers … This is an exercise which is carried out by a small section of international media at the behest of certain parties with vested interests and it caters only to the interests of separatist forces living outside Sri Lanka, the final objective of which is to push Sri Lanka back to war, by way of lacerating the wounds that the country is attempting to heal.

This is almost verbatim their response to the last broadcast of evidence of these war crimes, but both sets of footage have been independently authenticated by the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions. The Sri Lankan government’s seeking to pretend that these events are now just a painful history to be forgotten and healed is not just disingenuous - I think it is a fundamental misapprehension of how social trauma heals, the same one I feel critics like Serena Davies are labouring under.

I’m going to make a few gross simplifications here, so sorry for that.

In the foundational texts of trauma studies, for instance the works of Cathy Caruth, trauma is often identified as a problem of knowing or witnessing. On experiencing a traumatic event, the individual is overwhelmed by the impossibility of ‘being there’ and cannot cope with, or integrate, the emotions and ideas involved with that experience into their own personal narrative. With this gap in their own history, rather than remembering the trauma per se they are compelled to return to it. This is a post-Freudian notion, but should not be confused with the Freudian concept of repressed material returning subconsciously. Trauma here returns literally, the victim is compelled to repeat or re-enact the trauma through flashbacks, nightmares, emotional states or – most tragically – through a physical repetition of the traumatic event. Victims of these traumas often organize their entire lives around repeated patterns of reliving and warding off the influence of these traumatic memories.

Now obviously nations are not people, it is not merely a matter of up-scaling. In dealing with this international trauma, neither Sri Lanka, the Tamil people nor the international community should be thought of in such away. But the central issues remain the same. In national social trauma there is always a problem of witnessing, either through the dissociative effect of trauma, but on a mass-scale, or through other forces(often those who caused the trauma) co-opting the traumatised into a narrative that prevents it from being adequately and accurately integrated into their history. Some peoples have combated this by ‘re-storying’ their narrative, as post-colonial authors like Chinua Achebe have tried to when confronting imperial literature for ownership of their people’s traumatic colonial history.

This traumatic problem of witnessing was pronounced in Sri Lanka. Not only because of the massive personal trauma people were suffering (and in channel 4′s camp footage you can see this; people struck by the sight of their dead loved ones, seemingly unaware of the mortal peril they are in) or because of the expulsion of journalists and other international observers from the region, but also because the world’s media failed in bearing witness to these atrocities.

According to Jane's information group, the LTTE have carried out over 160 suicide bombings - causing serious damage to military and economic targets (Image: Duminda Jayasena)

I would argue that partly they just didn’t know how to tell the story, when they could not fit it into a normal victim/oppressor narrative. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had many of the accoutrements of modern statehood but are officially considered a terrorist organisation by some states. It was the LTTE that resurrected the use of suicide bombers, and they have been brutal and anti-democratic in dealing with opposition – they were ‘unmournable’ lives in the press.

The UK media seemed to do better than most. Though this is not to their credit, it was entirely due to the protests of the considerable Tamil population in Britain. But even these protests went seriously underreported.

Perhaps the protesters demands were too moderate to attract interest; some were calling for a secular two state solution, but most just wanted international pressure for peace negotiations. But again I believe it was the presence of the Tamil Tiger flag at these protests and the fact that the situation could not be made into an easy victim/oppressor morality tale. A tale like those that are told about Darfur, the Occupied Territories or Syria. This is an attitude that needs to change if we are to ‘heal’ the traumatic breach in Sri Lanka, find justice for victims and prevent the physical return of this trauma.

Mahinda Rajapaksa; president, tyrant, and now role model. (Image: Nader Daoud)

If the concept of that most tragic repetition of this genocide seems too abstract and shamelessly theoretical, then consider that some of the world’s most brutal regimes have been eagerly seeking president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s advice in deploying “the Sri Lankan solution” in crushing their own insurgencies. Burma’s dictator, Than Shwe, visited president Rajapaksa so he could apply methods used in Sri Lanka against ethnic groups in Burma. Then Thailand’s prime minister made a similar trip, referencing a need to learn lessons to be applied to Southern Thailand’s Muslim insurgency.

As Serena Davies found watching Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields made her “retch”, I feel similarly sickened by the idea of allowing the spread of this technique of applying illegal and merciless scorched-earth tactics against both combatants and civilians without distinction. If we are not proactive in seeking to truly heal the trauma in Sri Lanka, then these killing fields could spawn a legacy of genocides and atrocities committed against some of the world’s most vulnerable communities.

The best chance at justice and halting this process before it starts is for the UN to refer the case to the ICC, but this currently seems unlikely. UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon is still rejecting his own organisation’s report identifying Sri Lankan government complicity in war crimes and the Sri Lankan government has disbanded its token efforts at investigation before completion.

Ban Ki-Moon has suggested that he will only establish an international investigation into these atrocities with the Sri Lankan government’s consent – which is quite frankly a completely bat-shit ridiculous notion – or through a decision from UN member states in the Human Rights Council or UN Security Council. As the chances that the Russians or Chinese – both permanent members of the UN Security Council – will waver in their unquestioning support of Sri Lanka’s impunity are extremely slim, that leaves the option of compelling the UNHRC to action and to do that the press needs to first solve this problem of witnessing. Channel4′s Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, exploitative or not, is a solid first step.

Death of Brian Haw

(image: Steve Punter)

By Elliot Adams

Brian Haw is dead. This is not an obituary though, unless the circumstances of death are extraordinary, I don’t see the point of giving strangers’ deaths undue attention – no one’s life becomes more interesting after their leaving it and no one dies before their time, to me that’s what ‘their time’ means. So it goes.

I understand that Brain Haw was a great symbolic asset to the anti-war movement, with his unmovable peace-camp shaming the government on the doorstep of their seat of power. He was emblematic of everything the anti-war movement thought it wants to be, earnest, persistent, speaking truth to power, unmovable. Even his iconic fishing hat has symbolic power, it was covered in so many slogans and badges that it looked uncannily like an old-school combat helmet – a man armoured with his peaceful ideals.

His peace-camp meant absolutely jack all to me though. The movement that gathered around him was less a protest, and more a tea-partyesque confused outburst. His protesting was about how y’know, the man is committing genocide because of oil and stuff. His ranting about how 9/11 was an inside job and accusing tourists of sticking “broomsticks up people’s arses” was hardly a notable contribution to the debate over war in Iraq, in-a-word it was ‘confused’. As were those who gathered to support him there, a motley collection of conspiracy theorists, 9/11 truthers and a small number of genuine peace protesters – even then, their arguments and goals were ill-defined and incoherent.

Security in Westminster, especially around Whitehall, is tighter now than it was at the height of the IRA's mass murders. (Image:Stock)

It’s not that I’m some kind of pro-war Blairite nor that I’m against protesting the war, I marched through London’s streets and protested in Parliament Square with everyone else. For me though, Brian Haw’s death is something of a memento mori for those same protest-friendly streets. Thanks to the fight between Haw and the local authorities Parliament Square is now fenced off from the public and guarded by security patrols. Every key location throughout Westminster is peppered with blast barriers, anti-ram bollards and outposts of heavily armed policemen. Then when there is a reasoned protest, as opposed to aimless squatting, the police presence is easily large enough to occupy a small country.

With all the cordons, fences, concrete defences and machine-guns, approaching the Houses of Parliament feels a little like you are crossing the lines at Ypres. Compare this with the surroundings of City Hall over in the Borough’s Glass Testicle(I actually love the way City Hall looks, but it is somewhat testicular in shape), everywhere is open and there are wide public space always being used for events, socialising and protest.

Members of the voting public have less physical access to their representatives in than ever. The public is now prevented from entering Downing Street itself by massive spiked iron gates and armed policemen. Whereas in the House of Commons a bulletproof glass screen now separates MPs from the chamber, and it is rare that they will meet the public outside of carefully stage-managed events – and it is even worse in Holyrood.

Downing Street behind bars. (Image: Courtney Powell)

I used to think that the level of access we were afforded to our government was something Britain could be proud of on the international stage, it was no rarity to see protesters in the Houses of Parliament, unfurling banners from Big Ben, or – in one particularly memorable incident – laying down turf across the entrance to Parliament. Where else could you see that, when was the last time protesters re-landscaped the Whitehouse lawn? But now with our access to political representatives being increasingly sanitised, I can’t help but think that those same representatives are becoming increasingly sanitised themselves. So many of our most successful MPs are these chinless media types with enormous estates and meticulously controlled branding that haven’t worked outside the Westminster village in years – frankly, I preferred Brian Haw.

Update: Sad to hear all this stuff about how after his diagnosis Haw was taken for a ride by all these conspiracy theorists and snake oil peddlers. Apparently – I haven’t had a chance to properly confirm this for myself – the “doctor” who was treating him in Germany was no longer legally allowed to practice medicine in his own country and had some fraud and unlawful killing convictions to his name, word is he was prescribing Haw a treatment of vitamin C and Bicarb of soda. This low end of fake/alternative medicine is a shameful scam, the best thing their practitioners can do with their earnings at this stage is buy a nice suit to kill themselves in. 

PR & Journalism: The Buddy Cop Movie

(Image: Tango & Cash/Warner Bros.)

By Elliot ‘Theodore-Rex’ Adams

I’ve got a buddy cop movie pitch for you. As for setting, any generic not-quite-noir city will do – what’s import is our lead characters, PR and Journalism. Yes that’s right children, it’s time to crowbar in an overworked metaphor!

One of them an uptight manipulator who will do and say anything – regardless of how true it is – to help his shadowy client get ahead, the other a gruff maverick who isn’t above biting the PR hand that feeds him and wants to get the truth from PR’s client and loathes that he has to go through him to do so.

Forced to work together by circumstance and a temporary common purpose, they fight crime and save the world as a team, but they sure as hell ain’t happy about it.

Okay, they don’t often fight crime together or save the world you smartass – do I come round your house and deconstruct your convoluted metaphors? No.

For once my ramblings aren’t completely irrelevant, because boys and girls – this shit just got real.

A few days ago Duke Nukem Forever‘s PR drone had a minor meltdown on twitter over the terrible reviews the game was getting.

Threatening to blacklist journalists and critics from receiving review copies of future titles if they didn’t provide a positive review of the apparently execrable Duke Nukem Forever – I’m not entirely convinced that it isn’t secretly a work of genius, maybe more on that later. He later tweeted that he was irked by the game’s Metacritic score, saying that “for a game with such a large marketing budget and name recognition, [it was] shockingly low.”

He has since apologised to those who were sent review copies of Duke’ and performed some wider damage control. But much internet drama has already ensued.

Journalism is too old for this shit (Image: Lethal Weapon/Warner Brothers)

To be honest, despite the fact that the PR drone has clearly misunderstood the function of reviews – they are not a measure of marketing wankery spending – those who were outraged by this are fundamentally misunderstanding the function of PR.

PR is not a friend of quality journalism, PR is a temporary ally who would prefer if the quality gaming press was declawed entirely and by some accounts has been trying to do just that.

By the industry’s own admissions PR doesn’t have a duty to tell the truth, PR doesn’t have a duty to get their client’s games fair coverage in quality publications. PR’s only duty and purpose here is to gain it an mild first reception in the press, as such, review copies serve the same function as NDAs – to give exclusivity to publications that will not harm sales.

If you are a proper journalist and could potentially give that game a range of evaluations – positive or negative – then why should the PR goblins take that chance and give you a review copy. When they could so easily give one of their limited supply of review copies to an amateurish operation they can manipulate, or media giants like Sky that can likewise be manipulated because they are so out-of-touch with technology they still preface everything with ‘Cyber-’, e.g. ‘Cyberhackers’.

together they fight crime! (Image: 48 Hours/Paramount)

The only thing that is surprising about what Redner said is that he said it in the first place. Several people over the years have told me of similar blacklisting measures – it is rarely talked about in print, but apparently a commonplace practice regardless. This is why so many online reviewers rarely score anything outside of the 60% – 95% range; a larger scale gives the illusion of range, while pressure from PR is limiting evaluation to a narrower spectrum.

But my feeling isn’t that games journalism necessarily needs to shake off PR involvement, nor that PR should be attempting to do the same to journalism. They need to work with their respective buddy cops(just reminding you of my shaky premise for this post) to learn to better deal with each others foibles and clean up this city one scumbag at a time provide fair and insightful reviews.

Preventing Terrorism With Petit-Fascist Distractions?

Home Secretary Theresa May accused past anti-extremism strategies of engaging with groups that they "should have been confronting" and proscribing (image: ukhomeoffice)

By Elliot Adams

I’m unsettled by the shift in purpose in the governments counter-terrorism measures. I was rather hoping this would be one of the issues where the Lib-Dem part of the coalition won out over the Tories. Unfortunately, in the run up to last week’s release of the government’s updated Prevent counter-terrorism strategy there were numerous concerning hints in the press that this was not going to be the case.

These showed a coalition that was shifting from a strategy of preventing violent extremism by engaging with non-violent radical groups, to one of pursuing extreme views(violent and non-violent) and survielling the communities that harbour these views.

Notably, there was the revelation that National Health Service doctors will be required to identify and report people who may be “vulnerable” to future recruitment by terrorist groups. This was one example of how the new Prevent is intended to bring an end to “ungoverned spaces” in education, in the NHS, charities and discussion forums. To this end, May criticised Muslim organisations for allowing extremist speakers – and under the updated Prevent allowing such views to be discussed could lead to the gathering of organisation members being proscribed.

Furthermore, in a stunning bit of scape-goating that could not possibly aid efforts against radicalisation, May accused Universities of “complacency” in tolerating radical views on campus. I had a crack at this on the day Prevent was published, needless to say I think such attitudes do more harm than good.

I’ve had a more in depth read through of the publication since, and I find myself returning to this issue of refusing to engage with – or even to outlaw – non-violent Muslim groups that give air to extreme views(it is almost entirely Islamist extremism addressed by Prevent, despite a few cursory nods to extreme right-wing or Irish terrorism).

In the past, to counter violent extremism, previous governments have worked with groups like Jamiat-e Islami who were ideologically supportive of some forms of non-violent political Islamism.

I’m not sure if anyone is really qualified to speak as to the efficacy of this, but to me this just makes sense in our national context. Many British Muslim families are of fairly recent immigrant origin, with early migrant communities being built at a time when their countries of origin were held together by a political Islamist social infrastructure. Therefore, the ideologies of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood shaped these communities on an organisational level.

Despite their possibly illiberal views, they were non-violent, connected and were a valuable communication point between these British Muslim communities and the anti-terrorism initiatives of the Police and government.

But the updated Prevent, precludes such communication. Prevent claims that the real problem is a dangerous ideology shared by both non-violent and violent groups, and as such, the government should not work with them at all.

Adding to these problems is that ‘extremist’ isn’t adequately defined in Prevent, nor has it been outside the report. It apparently encompasses those who have ‘un-british’ values, those who do not engage in ‘full participation in society’ and those who ‘implicitly tolerate the killing of British soldiers’.

But this is so vague you can contort it to include just about anyone you want to, This is the rare occasion that I agree with the Archbishop Cranmer Blog that “By codifying a set of values to which Muslim groups will need to subscribe, the Government is effectively reintroducing a Test Act: only those who profess adherence to the orthodoxy will be eligible for … government engagement.”

This will make impossible many valuable partners for the government and police against terrorist security threats. The little guidance Prevent gives on the matter implies that problematic views on gender rights would be enough to exclude a group, which is a subject that could exclude even moderate faith groups.

I understand the hesitancy to engage groups with Islamist influences that may have sympathy for more violent organisations, but we already have heavy-handed and impractical laws that forbid such groups from inciting violence
or religiously-based hatred. The conviction rate with these laws is miniscule, but as these groups haven’t even been threatened with prosecution surely they should be acceptable on those grounds?

To counter Islamist terrorism I can’t see why we wouldn’t want to work with – rather than against – the British Muslim community. They have been conducting a debate on these issues for a long time and, I think, because of these in-group discussions the influence of Islamism is nowhere near the strength it once was. I fear the attitudes revealed by Prevent risk undermining moderate positions in that debate, and legitimising more radical elements by publicly making a Pariah of politically-engaged Muslim groups.

What Your Email Address Says About You

by Elliot Adams

It says absolutely bugger-all, contrary to popular belief it is just an email address.

Your handwriting says nothing more about you than how you hold your pen and how you have learnt to scratch out your rudimentary mark on pieces of paper with an inkstick. Your preference for the colour red doesn’t mean that you’re “optimistic and can’t stand monotony”, it means you like the colour red. Your hair does not, as some claim, reveal the inner workings of your sexuality, it is a hairstyle not a psychiatrist – the difference is subtle sometimes, but concentrate and you’ll get it. One “professor” may claim that your sleeping position shows your personality and garnered much coverage of his claims, but as his website brags of their ‘holistic methods‘ I’m willing to guess this is utter bollocks too. Your lipstick, browser, iPod, sneeze, car and alcohol are not magic – though the latter may sometimes feel like it, especially absinthe. They cannot tell the future or read your mind, not every choice you make will reveal a fundamental unshakable truth about your personality.

If you really want to learn the deep secrets of your personality and how they are revealed by everyday minutiae, then there is but one way;

Take a square of paper and fold the corners into the centre, flip it over and do the same on the other side, pull the new corners in and up towards each other making a pyramid and pulling out the finger tabs at the bottom – congratulations you have made a fortune-teller.

Image: Paul Blais

Now slap yourself across the face and grow the fuck up.

-

Addendum: If you are a journalist and have covered one of the above as though it were a story, I want you to follow this slap up with some cigarette burns to the eyelids, well done you rightfully self-loathing hack. Stop crying, journalists do not cry.

Universities “complacent on Toryism” Islamic Extremists Warn

Worthy organisations like the Bullingdon Tory Studies Club, which were set up to monitor Tory extremism and promote more moderate views, have in fact become Tory recruitment centres giving the world the extremism of David Cameron and Gideon Osborne.

By Elliot Atherton-Adams 1st Earl of Edinburgh

Extremist Islamic group,  Harkat-ul-Jehad, have accused top British Universities of complacency in dealing with people openly preaching the kind of extremist views one would normally expect to hear from the Conservative party. These Universities they warn, have become a training ground for Tory extremist groups.

Hafiz Saeed from the influential terrorist thinktank said, “Too long has Oxbridge been complacent in tolerating Tories on campus. They are completely blinkered, I think they have secretively placed a fatwa supporting of Tory extremist preaching on their campuses.”

Harkat-ul-Jehad has claimed that Oxbridge universities were at risk of becoming “recruitment centres for Conservative Future[a.k.a. 'The Cameron Youth]‘.

Guy Maquillé the National Union of Students president shares a concern about the threat identified by Islamic extremist groups.

“There has indeed been growing problem of conservatism within universities, these Tories have braisenly peddled attitudes to public services and society that amount to anti-Western propaganda.

He went on to say that there has been an increasing problem on campus of pelting the poor with pennies and taunting the underclasses. There had been troubling incidents of “barbour-jacketed, hunter-booted toffs chasing the the working classes through campuses for sport on horseback”. Most disturbingly, there is evidence of students in possession of copies of Tory literature, for example the novels of Edwina Currie – we can only hope that the dangerous deviants checking these books out of the library will be executed in due course.”

However, the Prime Minister’s lib-dem vassal, assures us that there is “no case for claiming that universities are complacent about Tory recruitment on campuses.”

“We have to distinguish between extreme views, and violent extremism. We must allow Tory perspectives that do not break the law to be expressed, no matter how repulsive and offensive we find those perspectives.”

He claims, “British universities are working with student associations and the police to swiftly deal with anyone who is dismantling welfare, the NHS or other public services.”

Tory propaganda being circulated in universities

Gerald and Ollie, two young British Tory students in the Purple Turtle Union Bar however paint a different tweed-shaded picture. It is a portrait of Britain under Tory law; horseback hunting of single mums and ‘hoodies’ would be legalised, Thatcher would be made Britain’s patron saint, double-barrelled names would be compulsory, the BBC would be replaced with mandatory clockwork-orange-style Sky news propaganda absorption sessions and Cameron would rule over us from atop a throne made from union leaders’ skulls – while Andy Coulson and Gideon George Oliver Osborne squatted at his feet rasping and picking their teeth with the bones of librarians.

Gerald made his position clear, “Labour left our university system infested with the working classes, the burden of poor students is one we all face, we are all in this together, we simply need to drive these rapscallions into the ocean and make it impossible for the damnable poor to go to university in the future.”

“Whiff whaff?” enquired Ollie, confused.

There are many young Tories in our universities like Ollie, who clearly lack the capacity to notice their indoctrination into more extreme forms of Toryism, “this the sad fact we need to address” says Hafiz Saeed, so that “our universities return to being a mecca for “only those with a healthy thirst for knowledge and burning hatred of the decadent west.”

Addendum: apparently a fellow by the name of ‘Spacey‘ fabricated a similar  comical confabulation over on his blog – so all credit to him for that, and clearly being a gentleman of infinite jest.

100 Apologies on Twitter in Malaysia Defamation Case

Malaysian courts have given a modern take on being forced to repeatedly chalk up your misdemeanors on the classroom blackboard, Bart Simpson stylee.

He is spreading the apologies over the next three days and in accordance with the court order is typing by hand the hundred tweets which must come from his own account.

Fahmi Fadzil  has been ordered to apologize 100 times on Twitter, after tweeting to his mates that a pregnant friend of his wasn’t being treated particularly well by her employer – Female Magazine.

It’s yet another example of how people are starting to be held legally accountable for the utter guff they bleat on the internet, and to be honest I rather like it as a solution – it befits the absurdity of the transgression, which really just amounts to ‘talking bollocks’.

I rather hope that all the people who were tweeting various rumours about who had taken out superinjunctions and why, or tweeting spurious claims about Obama’s birthplace, will soon receive court orders ordering them to tweet ‘sorry guys, I’m full of shit’ a few hundred times.

No word from anyone’s legal representation on who suggested the terms. At this moment, Fahmi Fadzil has 76 apologies left to tweet.