Right to speak out?
This is quite joyous. Except, of course, it isn't really. At all.
Regular visitors may remember the Carol Service in Parliament Square that we were not, fortunately arrested for holding, and then last Saturday there was a 7th July commemoration and peace vigil at the Cenotaph organised by People in Common. (Meanwhile . I and other passengers had a private ceremony at Kings Cross).
It is a disgrace that people cannot gather at the site where we remember the dead killed in bloody wars last century to remember ordinary people killed and wounded in the stupidly-named twenty-first 'War On Terrorism'. It is a disgrace, and it is clearly a cowardly, self-serving law passed because the Government cannot bear challenge or embarrassment.
It's fine to bomb other countries into democracy, is it, to bomb them so they have the right, amongst other things, to peaceful protest in public? And then to arrest anyone who, erm, tries to do the same thing over here. Sheesh.
I said it before and I will say it again: Thomas, we need you now.
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
Regular visitors may remember the Carol Service in Parliament Square that we were not, fortunately arrested for holding, and then last Saturday there was a 7th July commemoration and peace vigil at the Cenotaph organised by People in Common. (Meanwhile . I and other passengers had a private ceremony at Kings Cross).
It is a disgrace that people cannot gather at the site where we remember the dead killed in bloody wars last century to remember ordinary people killed and wounded in the stupidly-named twenty-first 'War On Terrorism'. It is a disgrace, and it is clearly a cowardly, self-serving law passed because the Government cannot bear challenge or embarrassment.
It's fine to bomb other countries into democracy, is it, to bomb them so they have the right, amongst other things, to peaceful protest in public? And then to arrest anyone who, erm, tries to do the same thing over here. Sheesh.
I said it before and I will say it again: Thomas, we need you now.
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
posted by Rachel at 8:58 pm
Good call, and not forgetting another great Thomas from that era - "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." - Tom Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government
Apparently you can get the same for wearing the wrong T Shirt on the Sussex Coast? How big IS the exclusion (ooh sorry permission) zone?
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20060107170151556