Ake,

You aren't a racist.

But you do play dangerous games with inflammatory ideas.


An analogy would be:

You aren't an arsenist, but you do drop a lot of lit matches.


The inflammatory ideas you play with don't need to have life breathed back into them.

Human beings are not as evolved as we like to give ourselves credit for.

It is only sixty years since the whole of western Europe was a war zone and one side was fighting for the right to murder millions of people in the most unhuman way possible.

This horrific propensity for humans to turn on each other out of sheer evil intent still exists today. Cambodia, Zimbabwe, East Timor, Rwanda, Uganda, the former Yugoslavia, the miiddle east etc etc


I've said to you before that we live in unique times. The peace that surrounds us in western europe is a striking phenomenon of history and should not be taken for granted. It is very fragile and its integrity depends, not on anything concrete, but on two abstract concepts.

The first, is Money - something which only exists in the abstract and because we all agree it does.

The second, is democracy - a less easily definable concept, but one which still only exists because of popular consent.

Essentially, democracy is about recognition of the rights of the individual within society.

Democracy as we know it has only truly existed in the west since ALL citizens were granted a political voice and that was as recently as the 1960's.

The peace that we live in, flawed as it is, our rights and freedoms and the reassurance given us by our ideology of rule of law as opposed to whim of despot, is only fledgeling and its opponents still live amongst us.

thousands of years of human habit doesn't go away over night and democracy is still struggling out of its coccoon.

We may debate how our democracy is shaped, and whose rights should be given precedence and why, but we must be very careful that we do not allow democracies enemies to chip away at the rights of vulnerable scapegoats, or to undermine it in other ways.

Democracy must be inclusive and it must be allowed grow and spread.

I would add briefly that by its very nature it can't be forced on anyone.

In 20 years zimbabweans may find that they have the freedom and luxury to pontificate about how Tsvangirais economic policy made him the "real" fascist. But those who live under Mugabes Jackboot today are under no illusions about the reality of the state of Zimbabwe.

There are numerous political parties all hoping to shape democracy in the image of their ideals.

The BNP hopes to undermine and destroy democracy and to do so they put false and unsupportable information about.

This involves tapping into peoples thousand year training in scapegoating and warmongering.

The factually unsupported statements that you have lent support to on the subject of immigration, moslems etc are passed around the populace like potentially dangerous flu variants.

One day humanity could be infected by one that does immeasurable harm and our assumed immunities could prove ineffective as they have before in this country and in every other country around the world.


This issue is not the same as other political issues for that reason.

It is about anger, blame, scapegoating and hatred. And we must not let it take hold.