Teen Times: I was on holidays in Carnon, in the south of France. Our self-catering apartment had no TV or radio. The area was oblivious to the outside world. At 8am every day I would go to the small magasin du tabac and read the main articles in the three English newspapers. Music videos and motor racing was all that was on offer in the bars, writes Anthony James Mc Elwee.
At home I'm glued to news and current affairs. As the holiday progressed, being unable to hear about the G8, Live 8 or even the London Olympic bid became increasingly irritating. I even rang my aunt asking her to keep the newspapers from the major events.
After a quiet period in world affairs, it seemed that the whole year's events were happening in those two weeks.
I was reading Shooting History by Jon Snow as one of my holiday reads. It didn't ease my desire for news, but I found it very engaging. Drawing on his experience as a journalist, Snow pointed out that the Western world has not ceased its policy of colonising poor, valuable, countries.
In this book, Iraq is mentioned but not focused on. Northern Ireland is examined along with the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Uganda, Guatemala, Granada, South Africa, Russia and many other countries. Snow visited some of these during the Cold War and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Snow highlights how the neo-colonial policy topples legitimate governments or dictators in countries of high mineral wealth, oil, and those strategically positioned.
He goes on to say that the newly installed "governments" were and are all puppets of the Western neo-colonialists. If you don't have anything worth invading or seizing then you can expect to be ignored - Snow uses Uganda's brutal history as an example.
The next day, during dinner, my mother received a text from my aunt telling her that London had been bombed. I wasn't shocked; it wasn't even surprising. The Times on July 9th had the following headline: "Terrorists will fail to change our way of life, says Queen". I ask Queen Elizabeth this: do we want to continue our way of life?
A society built on the exploitation of the vulnerable countries; robbery of their little wealth and resources, slavery, war, and disregard for the environment is immoral and unacceptable.
Our way of life allows a child to die every three seconds and one-fifth of the world to live on less than a dollar a day, while prioritising the making of weapons when people don't even have water. Our society sells arms to dictators and then invades a decade later, searching for the weapons we sold to them.
Living this way breeds angry people. Who are the real terrorists? The people who are forced to fight, or the people who have the option not to fight but choose war anyway?
It's just like the English churchman and author WR Inge (1860-1954) said: "A man may build himself a throne of bayonets but he cannot sit on it".
Anthony James Mc Elwee is a pupil of Pobalscoil Rosmini, Drumcondra, Dublin 9
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