A tale of two battles
Bob Ellis
No-one has yet suggested bombing the Vatican and pursuing the Pope through the sewers of Europe till he is caught and riddled with bullets in order to stop priests buggering choirboys in Boston, Chicago, Dublin and Sydney. But a precise mirror image of this is how we behaved in Afghanistan.
If we bomb it flat, we were told, and pursue Bin Laden through the caves of Tora Bora and the mud huts of Waziristan until he is caught and riddled with bullets, al-Qaeda won't hijack planes and blow up trains any more. And the world will live at peace.
We were told this eight years ago. And we believed it.
It's a curious premise to base a war on, really. Yet no curiouser I suppose than saying Saddam has nuclear weapons and he won't use them if 32 nations invade his country, he will bury them in the sand. But there you go.
It's the sort of thing that lately, since we have stopped thinking connectedly, we have been persuaded to believe. Like, if we shoot a pregnant woman, a policeman, a lawyer and a girl who is engaged, shoot them dead in a single town in broad daylight and cover it up and say we never did it, that town will soon forgive us and join us in a war against its neighbours.
We did this last month in Afghanistan and we still think the war there is going well.
We are doing really dumb things lately and imagining we'll win 'hearts and minds' by killing people for things they haven't done and declaring we 'acted appropriately, within the guidelines'.
Let's consider for a while the comparable crimes, or iniquities, or sins, or misdeeds, or culpable errors of Osama bin Laden and the Pope. Osama's followers killed 3,000 people in New York and around 700 more by terrorist acts in London, Bali, Madrid and Mumbai in the past eight years and desolated maybe 20,000 lives of the relatives of the dead.
The Pope's followers desolated, perhaps, 100,000 lives (or this is my guess) by sexual depravity in the past 80 years and killed, perhaps, (this too is my guess, I ask for yours) no more than 5,000 smashed and embittered Catholic boys and girls they drove to suicide or drunken oblivion and early death in those years.
The crimes are comparable pretty much and well-attested and well known from enquiries here and in Germany, the US and Ireland. Why then do we not bomb the Vatican and obliterate Italy for harbouring this criminal mastermind, this known protector of evil predators? Why do we not pursue him through the sewers of Europe and riddle his corpse with bullets?
Can it be, perhaps, because we think Italians and Germans are in some way superior to Afghans or Saudis or Palestinians? Can it be because we believe Catholic priests have a right to hurt little boys and Taliban mullahs and chieftains no right to hurt little girls and young women?
Why do we do this? Why are we not bombing the Vatican?
Is there a racial component in our inconsistency? Do we think we should bomb brown people but should not bomb white people? Is that it?
One wonders now what should be done with buggering priests and those that hide them from our detection. Clearly bombing Italy and Ireland is an insufficient solution, to judge by what little effect our bombing and rocketing and random arrest and rendition to houses of torture have had on the Taliban thus far and their hold on the minds of their people.
One wonders what we should do.
Under our terrorist laws, if you fail to report an imminent act of terror (and if raping repeatedly a deaf and speechless little boy is not an act of terror it's hard to say what is) you go to jail, and for 48 hours or 50 days, depending on the country, you can be 'questioned' without a lawyer.
Under these existing laws 100,000 Australians could be locked up for concealing vital information, and perhaps they should be. Certainly this would be better than bombing all of Sydney, where the crimes took place. But it feels a little harsh somehow, to me at any rate; especially since a lot of the covering-up was done by the parents of the children victimised, and other adjacent pupils and priests and nuns, not guilty themselves of any abuse but not wishing to make waves.
They are not exactly innocent, but they are not entirely criminals either.
What should be done?
Well, there are precedents. I remember Scientology being outlawed in Victoria 40 years ago for a lesser abuse of vulnerable minds and souls. I remember Holocaust Denial being made an imprisonable crime a decade ago and David Irving being put in jail for it in Austria.
I remember office harassment being made a sackable offence around the same time. I remember a female parliamentarian losing her career for speaking sternly to a waiter only a year ago. And I saw this week on The 7.30 Report a suggestion that schoolyard bullying (which also causes suicides) be made a notifiable crime with at least theoretical periods in jail or a padded cell for offenders.
What we should do, perhaps, before we do anything, is make a pertinent comparison.
If an Australia-wide child care corporation had been shown to have covered up 1000 cases of child rape by its teachers it would have been wound up, its assets seized and sold, its CEO arraigned for criminal neglect, its employees held for questioning, the offending perverts jailed or put in madhouses, its name eternally stained.
Yet precisely this kind of crime has occurred in another institution responsible for the care and shaping of children, the Catholic Church.
Should it be outlawed?
Or is it, simply, too big to fail?
Just asking.
It is worthwhile, I think, to make these connections, of how forgivingly we treat the First World rich and the contrasting way we treat the Third World poor. How we treat the crimes of Christians and of heathens in very different ways. It shows how crazy we have lately come to be, and how justly we are despised by the Islamic world, and the Communist world, and many of our former colonies.
If we do this violence to the Taliban for the way they treat their women and children, why not the Catholics too?
Why not bomb the Vatican, and riddle the Pope with bullets as he staggers out of the flames?
Now, the article is obvious hyperbole, but lets get something straight: The Roman Catholic Church is an international criminal organization. Some say (and rightly so, as it's a very charged word) that "terrorism" doesn't apply where the RCC is concerned. This is correct in the fact that except in Ireland they don't go around blowing up buildings.
However, there is a far more insidious form of terrorism at play in the RCC.
So, since when is the Catholic Church not guilty of terrorism? Their murderous anti-contraception campaigns in AIDS riddled Africa have killed far more innocents than any Al Quaeda plot. They tell the people that condoms spread AIDS, inflicting both a religious and pseudo-scientific terror to prevent the use of life saving means on an ignorant populous. The Catholic Church is nothing more than a murderous child sex ring and any government in collusion with them is just as guilty.
They ceased to be a religious entity in the USA when they began endorsing political candidates. In any sane world, their assets would be seized, their records combed through, and the guilty parties arrested. The UN should demand the surrender of Ratzinger or begin imposing sanctions against Vatican City. Italy should be pressured by the European Union and the world community at large to dissolve the popes private little kiddy-fucking playground.
Aside from the abolition of one of the single most evil institutions in human history, there are other benefits. The RCC has for millenia hoarded precious historical documents, artifacts, and works of art in their library. Who knows what treasures await and what mass of historical information could be found?
It's high time the boil on the ass of the Earth that is the Roman Catholic Church be lanced. Only when the filth and pus drains can the human race salvage some manner of dignity it has suffered without for almost 2000 years.
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