Name Names
I enjoyed this article by David Aaronovitch in the Times in which he says he will name the top 'homo haters' in Uganda who are doing their best to persecute and victimise gay people.
Good for him and when he does I'll share the information on the blog site because these despicable bullies deserve to be named and shamed.
Silence always encourages bullies to bully
By David Aaronovitch
Hitler intensified his persecution of Jews after a US boycott. But we should still protest at Uganda’s persecution of gays
God did not intend human beings to use their mouths for sex, except for kissing. That this information should be passed down to the youth of Uganda by its health ministry was one demand of a speech given on Monday by that country’s president, Yoweri Museveni. Mr Museveni has ruled Uganda since the days of Thatcher, Reagan and Gorbachev and has learnt a thing or two, including an understanding of the peculiar desire of “outsiders” to import oral sex into his republic. “Some of the traditional styles are very pleasurable and healthy,” the President said and added (without specifying them) that Ugandans should stick to those.
He did not go so far, however, as to pass a law saying that anyone caught engaging in oral sex should be prosecuted. Possibly he had had enough of persecuting citizens’ sexuality that day, having just promulgated Uganda’s new anti-homosexuality legislation. There’ll be longer prison sentences for Ugandan gays and a new crime of promoting homosexuality. Mr Museveni and Uganda’s parliament have joined the great global assembly of uneasy heterosexuals, who believe that gayness — left alone — will take over the world.
We, Brits, Europeans, Americans and the UN, asked them, we begged them, we told them not to do it. Far from anti-gay legislation being a reassertion of African values, we have pointed out, it was first introduced into Africa by colonial powers.
There were always homosexual Africans, as there were always homosexual everything elses. Gayness, like religion, is universal. One hears the famous statement by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that there were no homosexuals in Iran, or the MP George Galloway’s quixotic insistence that he had never met a gay Arab, and one laughs or weeps or both. What changes is only homosexuality’s visibility and that alters according to its repression. And unfortunately in Russia, India, Nigeria and now Uganda, that repression is growing.
As soon as Uganda’s law was on the statute book, a popular Ugandan newspaper, Red Pepper, hit the streets with the banner headline “Uganda’s 200 top homos named”. The paper, which itself has had run-ins with Mr Museveni in the past, praised his law and provided a list of gays and lesbians whom its readers could identify and hate. In 2011 a similar list in another Ugandan magazine led to the murder of a gay activist.
The law and the reactions of papers such as Red Pepper are hateful and — if we judge civilisation by measures such as adherence to the UN Charter of Human Rights — uncivilised. So what should we do? Should the US follow the example of the Netherlands and suspend its $400 million of aid? Should there be pickets outside the Ugandan High Commission and boycotts of Ugandan produce?
Some people, including experts on the region say no. They point out that President Museveni is an elected politician, and that the anti-gay campaign contains a great deal of electoral calculation. Part of his objective, they argue, is to be able to pose as the defender of African values against an interfering and neo-colonialist West. A West, to be crude, that has plundered Uganda’s natural resources and whose gays now come for the country’s youth.
As with Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe then (runs the argument), the more we push back against Mr Museveni, the better his chances of regaining popularity with his people. Gays may be universal but they are (save possibly for Hebden Bridge) universally a minority.
In an article on the Think Africa Press website, the editor James Schneider added a turn to this argument. Not only does a loud Western response aid Mr Museveni “but it also puts the visible gay community in Uganda at risk”. Our inconsistent response over Mr Museveni’s other great infractions, says Schneider, means that we are indulging in “phoney solidarity” over an issue which is “one of Museveni’s choosing and one over which Western pressure could in fact play into his hands [but] doesn’t make up for lost time. In fact, it could make it worse.”
But when, I’d ask Mr Schneider, were whole geopolitical hemispheres ever consistent? His sentiments could easily become an argument for doing nothing because you don’t do everything. His other point, however, that creating a fuss could just make things worse, is a powerful one because it is sometimes true.
And it is invariably made. To make the inevitable analogy, in 1933 American organisations began a boycott campaign against the newly Nazi Germany because of the action taken against Jews (includingRed Pepper-type lists in the Nazi press). After a few weeks it was assessed that things were worse for Jews, with the authorities using the boycott as a pretext to intensify their pogroms.
During the war itself the Pope, Pius XII, did not commit himself to an open statement of repudiation of fascist and Nazi treatment of the Jews and others. In 2010 Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, who had been in Pius’s Secretariat, explained that Pius had believed that any such action would have made things worse. “He worried”, said Silvestrini, “that a public condemnation of Nazism would have negative repercussions, that an explicit protest would carry more disadvantages than advantages”.
He may have been right. But just as homosexuality is universal, so too is the deployment of the argument by the oppresser that they will oppress harder if anyone complains. Iran does it. Russia does it. They all do it.
Organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were set up partly to resist this logic. They argue, in effect, that piping down, staying quiet, in the end emboldens the abuser and demoralises the victim. And if not that particular abuser and victim, then the next abuser and victim.
If I were a gay person in Uganda or anywhere else threatened by new persecution I think I’d want to feel that people around the world were looking out for me. And here’s what I can do. The author of the Red Pepper “top homos” article has a name. So does the editor. I hope that by next week I’ll have found out what they are and I can tell you.
One day they will — as sure as eggs is eggs — come to Britain and we can tell them what we thought of their journalism.
Hitler intensified his persecution of Jews after a US boycott. But we should still protest at Uganda’s persecution of gays
God did not intend human beings to use their mouths for sex, except for kissing. That this information should be passed down to the youth of Uganda by its health ministry was one demand of a speech given on Monday by that country’s president, Yoweri Museveni. Mr Museveni has ruled Uganda since the days of Thatcher, Reagan and Gorbachev and has learnt a thing or two, including an understanding of the peculiar desire of “outsiders” to import oral sex into his republic. “Some of the traditional styles are very pleasurable and healthy,” the President said and added (without specifying them) that Ugandans should stick to those.
He did not go so far, however, as to pass a law saying that anyone caught engaging in oral sex should be prosecuted. Possibly he had had enough of persecuting citizens’ sexuality that day, having just promulgated Uganda’s new anti-homosexuality legislation. There’ll be longer prison sentences for Ugandan gays and a new crime of promoting homosexuality. Mr Museveni and Uganda’s parliament have joined the great global assembly of uneasy heterosexuals, who believe that gayness — left alone — will take over the world.
We, Brits, Europeans, Americans and the UN, asked them, we begged them, we told them not to do it. Far from anti-gay legislation being a reassertion of African values, we have pointed out, it was first introduced into Africa by colonial powers.
There were always homosexual Africans, as there were always homosexual everything elses. Gayness, like religion, is universal. One hears the famous statement by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that there were no homosexuals in Iran, or the MP George Galloway’s quixotic insistence that he had never met a gay Arab, and one laughs or weeps or both. What changes is only homosexuality’s visibility and that alters according to its repression. And unfortunately in Russia, India, Nigeria and now Uganda, that repression is growing.
As soon as Uganda’s law was on the statute book, a popular Ugandan newspaper, Red Pepper, hit the streets with the banner headline “Uganda’s 200 top homos named”. The paper, which itself has had run-ins with Mr Museveni in the past, praised his law and provided a list of gays and lesbians whom its readers could identify and hate. In 2011 a similar list in another Ugandan magazine led to the murder of a gay activist.
The law and the reactions of papers such as Red Pepper are hateful and — if we judge civilisation by measures such as adherence to the UN Charter of Human Rights — uncivilised. So what should we do? Should the US follow the example of the Netherlands and suspend its $400 million of aid? Should there be pickets outside the Ugandan High Commission and boycotts of Ugandan produce?
Some people, including experts on the region say no. They point out that President Museveni is an elected politician, and that the anti-gay campaign contains a great deal of electoral calculation. Part of his objective, they argue, is to be able to pose as the defender of African values against an interfering and neo-colonialist West. A West, to be crude, that has plundered Uganda’s natural resources and whose gays now come for the country’s youth.
As with Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe then (runs the argument), the more we push back against Mr Museveni, the better his chances of regaining popularity with his people. Gays may be universal but they are (save possibly for Hebden Bridge) universally a minority.
In an article on the Think Africa Press website, the editor James Schneider added a turn to this argument. Not only does a loud Western response aid Mr Museveni “but it also puts the visible gay community in Uganda at risk”. Our inconsistent response over Mr Museveni’s other great infractions, says Schneider, means that we are indulging in “phoney solidarity” over an issue which is “one of Museveni’s choosing and one over which Western pressure could in fact play into his hands [but] doesn’t make up for lost time. In fact, it could make it worse.”
But when, I’d ask Mr Schneider, were whole geopolitical hemispheres ever consistent? His sentiments could easily become an argument for doing nothing because you don’t do everything. His other point, however, that creating a fuss could just make things worse, is a powerful one because it is sometimes true.
And it is invariably made. To make the inevitable analogy, in 1933 American organisations began a boycott campaign against the newly Nazi Germany because of the action taken against Jews (includingRed Pepper-type lists in the Nazi press). After a few weeks it was assessed that things were worse for Jews, with the authorities using the boycott as a pretext to intensify their pogroms.
During the war itself the Pope, Pius XII, did not commit himself to an open statement of repudiation of fascist and Nazi treatment of the Jews and others. In 2010 Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, who had been in Pius’s Secretariat, explained that Pius had believed that any such action would have made things worse. “He worried”, said Silvestrini, “that a public condemnation of Nazism would have negative repercussions, that an explicit protest would carry more disadvantages than advantages”.
He may have been right. But just as homosexuality is universal, so too is the deployment of the argument by the oppresser that they will oppress harder if anyone complains. Iran does it. Russia does it. They all do it.
Organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were set up partly to resist this logic. They argue, in effect, that piping down, staying quiet, in the end emboldens the abuser and demoralises the victim. And if not that particular abuser and victim, then the next abuser and victim.
If I were a gay person in Uganda or anywhere else threatened by new persecution I think I’d want to feel that people around the world were looking out for me. And here’s what I can do. The author of the Red Pepper “top homos” article has a name. So does the editor. I hope that by next week I’ll have found out what they are and I can tell you.
One day they will — as sure as eggs is eggs — come to Britain and we can tell them what we thought of their journalism.
