A Plague on Both Your Houses
The slaves revolt: Judgement Day for our modern Athenian Democracy
It is a sign of humanity’s lack of intelligence that it has developed judicial systems based solely on its own survival and benefit. Our criminal, civil and international law draws up the Earth’s boundaries, helps to equitably split up marriages, and defines a million types of “ownership” of land, resources, and, until recently, other people. The International Declaration of Human Rights is perhaps the most selfish, irrelevant and narrow accord of them all, outlining in detail how all humans have an equal right to food, freedom, education. I used to defend it passionately when I gave speeches against the death penalty, in the days when I was heading up the Amnesty International team in my university. Not anymore. Not because it is wrong, but because it is irrelevant.
The International Declaration of Human Rights is the equivalent of the rules of the Athenian democracy, or even the British Parliament of the 18th century: all members of the democracy are equal as long as they are men, not slaves, and own large plots of land so they can qualify to run for office. It excludes all others, in the same way that our legal system excludes the rights and wishes of “everyone else”: all of the other 8 million species that inhabit this planet and feed from the same pot that we do. If they all cease to exist, our existence will be untenable and irrelevant. And this is not human law, it is nature’s law.
Religion functions in a very similar way to our judicial system, having been nothing but a tool that served capitalism, racism and the interests of the oligarchy in power under the guise of the search for salvation and equality. The very existence of the Protestant church is down to Henry VIII wanting to divorce his wife. The catholic Pope wouldn’t allow him, so he invented a church that would. Belgian missionaries in king Leopold’s Congo colluded with homicidal slave capitalists to further each others’ interests. It wasn’t until the current year, 2020, that the king’s statues were finally attacked. We are only beginning to uncover the filthy monstrosity of our so-called civilisation that lies under the statues of our spiritual “leaders”: they are nothing but stinking turds gilded in gold stolen violently from the Americas by the Spanish conquistadors.
What our laws and religions still disregard, to this day, is that the other 8 million species on this planet also have the right to existence. The right to their own land, their habitat. The right to prosper, and thrive. They are the modern slaves of the Athenian democracy. They are the ones that have been paying far too high a tax all along. But we know very well what happened to Athenian democracy, and to the fake early British parliament. They imploded under their own arrogance, succumbed to devastating plagues, and were eventually reformed.
So, a plague on all your houses: religion, capitalism, and the judicial system.
George is an author, researcher, chemist, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons , join his mailing list, or enjoy his books
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