Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

What have the Pussy Riot activists, Julian Assange, Asylum-seekers and miners in South Africa all have in common?

They are non-people.

They are evidence of a definitive breakdown in the precondition for global, multicultural democracy;  a fair, open and transparent legal system applicable to all, without fear or favour. 

You could say Pussy Riot is the world in micro. It is a shining example of a new authoritarianism that resists fair play and reason in favour of the interests of oligarchs, imposed on the rest by force. Its logical conclusion is played out in South Africa, where dozens of miners were shot to death by socalled responsible authority, for doing no worse than asking for a living wage, from the rich platinum mine owned by offshore interests.

You wonder what incentive could have been at play for authorities to embark on a pursuit of such a brutal response to the miners?

Asylum seekers also live in dire straights, yet the ones from actual war zones, forced to flee by boat to escape, because of red tape imposed to deter their seeking of asylum also seem to have nowhere to go but a watery grave.

Julian Assange at least was lucky enough to be near somewhere where he could seek asylum, namely the Ecuadorian embassy. He too seems an obvious victim of a great injustice, pursued as he is by Britain, Sweden and likely the USA, whilst ignored by his own country and its government. So he has asked for asylum and received it.

Yet Britain seems desperate to dispute the rule of international law, in threatening to storm the Ecuadorian embassy.

What would create such a frenzy from the Brits. A love  of justice, something apparently shared with Sweden and Australia, in seeking that Assange is brought before the full magesty of the law for the planet-threatening offence of allegedly not immediately wearing a condom during a sexual frolic?

But some cynics suggest that some thing else is at play; that Assange is actually being surreptitously pursued by those Caped Crusaders for Democracy, the USA, for daring to demonstrate, amongst other things, the helicopter gunship realities of the US occupation of Iraq. T

That the USA has "leaned" on Sweden GB and Australia, to secure Assange, to make an example of him similar to whistle-blower Brad Manning for the transgressiing of the global myth of democracy under the West's direction. Certainly if Assange could be  prevented from gaining asylum, it makes it so much more difficult to re-establish the rights of others also seeking asylum, elsewhere ( which could partly also explain the Australian government's timid response to Assange's plight).

If Assange's rights are not upheld, what hope Russian entertainers, let alone South African miners, let alone asylum-seekers from war zones ? 

If the dismantling of law, its deliberat eobservance specifically in the breach, continues the only law left is the law applied to the South African miners. Any thing that still upholds the rights of the individual is under dire threat in our time, and we are all in danger because of this. 

It seems the Russian set up of stagnating oligarchy becomes the global default, eg government captured by the 1% and left operating as a facade or shopfront behind which Feudalism reasserts itself.