Andrew Chan & Myuran Sukumaran
Nobody has chimed in on this on my feed yet, and I feel a little bit alone with this view, so I'm going to share my opinion & the reason why this issue impacts me. I apologise to those I offend in the process, but this is something I feel strongly about. I know, there's innocent people getting blown up everywhere, starving children, ISIS, & the relative coldness of your coffee this morning. If you'd prefer twitter length updates, this won't make sense to you anyway.
First & foremost, we know that the AFP was tipped off by parents to stop a son from getting in to more trouble. The AFP took that information &, in exchange for exactly what we'll never know – waited for the ill-fated duo to arrive on foreign soil whereby the pairs execution was – based on the AFP's knowledge and tip-off - entirely premeditated. This is called cold-blooded murder FYI. Cold blooded murder that was engineered by the AFP and Indonesia, a sovereign partner.
So... before we arrive at “but look at their deeds” argument, can we first settle on the AFP premeditating the murder of 2 Australians and understand that first? And that they would – and I quote - “do it all over again” - given the chance?.
The whole idea here was that an unsuspecting and obviously helpless mother was at wits end & so called upon who she felt might be a service that would protect and serve her & her son in the (tragically) only way she knew how at that time : by calling the fucking pigs (whoops). A by-product of that information was the arrest of the sons friend and so they were both sunk. Please bare in mind that these drugs, the drugs that the 2 x Australians were carrying, they were destined for Australia, to impact Australia, and where the thousands of lives you think would have been ruined –indeed lay in ruin – in Australia.
To contrast that properly for you, it is not indifferent from busting in on some plebs meth lab
out west somewhere here in Australia, then discovering that the equipment used to manufacture the drugs were Chinese or American, & so holding Cn/USA partially accountable for the manufacture. Worse more, shit luck – the dude was American that was busted, and we can see that his parcels are all heading for America , so let's shoot him in the face because Australia, but let's do that after we've given him 10 years of hard prison and the chance to reform, to be rehabilitated, to be given hope – just so we can take it all away from them & their families - brutally - because Australia.
Because Heroin. Because Hard-lines. Because the risks were known, and so because of those factors, those irrefutably strong arguments for having a man bleed out to death after 10 years of prison ; the garbage person I'll never meet, who I've never known, who's fate is indifferent to me – and yet so easy to rubbish & criticise –that person being someone who know speaks 3 languages, has doctorates, saves lives. That rubbish person who has people who want their lives to be taken in place of them......
People have offered their lives in turn for these rubbish people.
People have offered to face a firing squad and die in place of these men.
People have chosen to be potentially executed in place of these “Rubbish” Australians.
How many people do you think might come forward on behalf of you for the same? -
and remember – they're not family, they weren't friends... these are people locked up with them.
These 2 men are better than most of the people I'll ever know &, very likely you - and I've never met them before. I've spent countless hours reading over everything since it all came out, the media hype, propaganda, the documentaries, watching them slowly change over the years. I don't propose to know them better than any of you, but I know their situation most probably more than most of you.
You can claim that heroin ruins lives all you like, and you will do exactly so atop your soap-box ; looking ever so vigilantly to the far right or pretend-left from your relatively convenient & sheltered , properly purposed life.
But I do speak from experience.
I know that when someone says they speak from experience, people get weird. It's like the person that knows a thing – they're trying to undermine you somehow. I can assure you, I am not proud of these experiences. Australia is especially such that whenever a thing is unknown to another, good or bad – everyone assumes the immediate de-limb de-throne position, ready to slice the heads off any poppy-taller - perceived, fictitious, negative or positive. I'd ask you to not do that this time
So I tell you again, I do speak from experience.
I've seen deaths in my life and from pretty early on, but none from drugs directly that couldn't have been addressed in some other fashion. If it weren't for our utterly confused understanding of the world we live in and the laws that bind us, a system so efficient there's a name people quickly resource, ever the trigger-happy, in order to socially castrate any notion of there being that system or a truth other than the one that's written all over the walls / web-sites / news-stands.
A system of laws that use its own people as a lubricant / fail-safe / stop-gap & contingency at the same time.
What's it called? you guessed it, there isn't one.
I need to take off my tin-foil hat and stop watching conspiracy shows.
That was the name, all of it.
Long name for a system, huh?
I watched one of my friends & and at the time girlfriend lose their lives before my eyes because of our Governments failure to deal with drugs without profiteering as a primary motivation. In that sense, the lives of Brian Hollingshed / Vicas Dubey / Chis Knock & , at the time, partner Christie Sattis. : their deaths, the protracted result of the carpet-brushing & alienation tactics used by sensationalist government-fuel-media-propaganda , a government that ultimately ensured that the masses would not say lives were lost because of their outright illegality, or because of the crimes committed in perusal of them, or because of the shady ingredients used from the suffocation of legal resources, because of the quality of the labs set up, the very product of the laws them-self, or because there was nowhere to retrieve help when it was needed most, and because of the systematic ostracism and wide-spread condemnation from the dirty-thug-derro-gross-disease that was in-fact not the drug, but the manipulation of the majority to agree with a thing being repugnant because it suited a governments agenda.
At the funerals, I said much of what I'm saying now, but I was younger and had less patience for giving a shit about anyone understanding. I knew it'd never happen.
How easy we all are to truly believe a thing is wrong or bad because on the face-value of it, it is.
A few adds, a few posters, a few news stories – boom, we're fucked. In comes the new epidemic, let's deal with the scurge, the plague, the destroyed families, the ruined lives, the every other big scary words campaigns.
But it was Heroin that killed them.
What's the drug the government is doing the same thing with now?. Heroin still exists – but do you still see all the posters? Adds? Campaigns? No? Wondered why? - reread the above if you are honestly not following.
It's never the drug – it's always about what's costing the government money or what the government can profit from. Target the most popular thing, force the methods used to make it underground, make everything including the precursors illegal, send a disingenuous but ultimately harsh message out that – should you be caught – you'll go to gaol for a very long time – thereby lending credibility to that mongrel system, & that the appearance of the law is being upheld which is of paramount importance in the process of bending or breaking it. Perfect.
Most would argue that Heroin took my friends lives in the 90's , because that's what we're supposed to think, and that's what you have probably thought all of your life – Heroin kills people. Drugs kill people. You've seen people O.D, we all know about that girl, that guy you know or knew of – it happens so rarely we can all remember the girl that died on the Red Mitsubishi years ago, and so we use that to rebut , and we use it because when the thing happens, when someone dies, the government is all over it. “You just never know what they put in these things, it's filth, these labs that they use – you just never know”.
Wait a minute, you all but putt the labs there yourself? And now you're blaming the guy you just sent to prison for 20 years?.
Am I the only person who sees that person go to gaol as a direct result of stealing a government opportunity for cash and nothing else? It's just revenge dressed in morale-value horse-shit that's quite effective spun to make you all shut up and agree with it.
.Everything : this war on drugs : it's effective because there's not enough people pulling their heads out of their asses and asking themselves why things are so linear, why things are wrong? - and then asking themselves - ok – so if I go back even further, would it be wrong if it was legal?. Nobody is saying lets legalise heroin and feed it to 5 year olds, but just consider there being avenues other than punish / kill / destroy / mame / kill / terrosists / kill / mame / lives ruined / Crisis / Punish/ Justice / Kill / Justice / Terror / Police / Serve / Protect / Police / Justice / Serve / Crisis / Drugs / Destruction / Families shattered / Justice / Drugs.
I just narrowed my own narrative, but are you becoming a little bit more aware of what you buy in to daily? Or are you still telling yourself you know but don't care?
Do you know what a hot-shot is? Do you understand how these deaths occur? When there's too much? Why people reach that stage, and yet seemingly nobody had any idea? Why they hid it from everyone and weren't able to seek the proper refuge? Do you think you know? Or is your lack of understanding (or absense of the capacity to understand if you wanted to) the issue?
Because we're led to believe it's a disgusting, atrocious, dirty, nasty, foul, cancerous disease- just like every other drug that will ever exist that the government can't strictly control (and so regulate).
Take cigarettes, the government can regulate them, how many people die from cigarettes? How many people die from Heroin? How many snow-peas just popped open in anyone who's read this far's brain?
Don't be OK. Don't just live with it. Start movements, sign petitions, be a voice, lose friends in the process, make enemies – anything... but, with this specifically. I don't know how else to say it – these 2 young Australian men with futures brither than most of our own are about to be murdered in cold blood and there is no other truth more true. If you enjoy the idea of them bleeding out on the ground ad-gladium, now is the time to remove me from your life forever. I do not want to know you - as if the world was up to you, I'd be dead also.