Not sure whether this is funny, sad or something else but Amnesty's Control Arms group on Facebook has thrown up this fascinating blogger who uses Lego to portray human rights abuses and images of genocide.
A novel concept. The impact is probably starker considering that the medium used is so novel. I'm actually slightly worried - you don't really know whether to laugh or cry at it, and end up doing the former. The blog is not as vividly written as the Darfur tableaux shown by Amnesty, a pity because it would otherwise be a very novel way of building a unique political outlook on the world. There could also be a slight conflict of opinion in here - she seems very left-wing and try as I might, I can't get worked up about international politics or the Middle East any more. Coming from a Northern Irish Protestant background I find it hard to see the world totally black and white - I would be for Irish unity but the practical obstacles are much bigger; and Owlie, while sympathising with the Palestinian issue and hating Ariel Sharon with a vengeance, points out repeatedly that Israel has acted mainly in self-defence - up to and including Gaza. The more the Arab states around it target it, the more it is going to go overboard in defending itself; and it is, after all, one of the few democracies that exist in that region.
Legofesto doesn't touch on either situation but I find her expression lacking in subtlety, as if one side is always right and one side always wrong. I may utterly despise David Cameron and all he stands for, but I am prepared to admit he has said one thing of more than passing interest and worth in the past three and a half years - "sunlight is the best disinfectant". (It certainly has been over this spring and summer!) Not even Owlie, on the opposite bench, would say that the Cabinet lacks humanity or loves war - neither does the Shadow Cabinet. Although he did at the time vote for the Iraq War, he did come to believe we'd been duped - or that the top brass were duped. Inside Westminster, the debate was much fuller and more complete, and to give Blair some credit over this, up until Hutton and Butler (where he started to become deluded into thinking his judgment was infallible, leading to the cringeworthy interview early in 2006 when he told Michael Parkinson God told him to do it), at the time of the original debate, he came over as insecure and only believing what someone told him to believe.
This makes him foolish, in hock to his own puppetmasters and naive, but I don't think anyone did this out of a love of war, except perhaps "What a Dick!" Cheney and Rumsfeld, who can both go to hell.
Still, to do the Darfur tableaux, I think subtlety is the last thing anyone needs to have.
