Aung San Suu Kyi: holding out for a hero
The closer Gordon Brown’s Courage: Eight Portraits gets to the remainder bins, the more perverse it becomes as a joke. Gordon Brown and courage in the same sentence. We laughed at the time. We’re not laughing now.
For those who don’t remember, just before being anointed New Labour leader and Prime Minister, Brown released his anthology of profiles of Edith Cavell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Raoul Wallenberg, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Dame Cicely Saunders* and… Aung San Suu Kyi. Nobody really knows why. Theories abound about the book being a rather pathetic pitch for some sort of reflected glory.
With most of them dead and Mandela already out of the nick, it’s been interesting to watch Brown’s actions for Aung San Suu Kyi. There haven’t been many. For instance, Brown’s heroine has received just five public utterances of support from her biggest fan since he became one of the world’s supposedly most powerful men, according to the Number 10 website.
So what can we expect from Gordon now that Aung San Suu Kyi is ‘to face trial for breaching the conditions of her detention under house arrest‘ (the breach consisting of being under house arrest when a bloke decided to swim a lake to visit her uninvited)?
It’ll be worth keeping an eye on the news. The Burmese junta had better back off before Gordon is forced to express regret and concern. Maybe we could bomb the top security prison where Ms Suu Kyi is being held with unsold copies of Gordon’s book.
(You can join Amnesty International for as little as two pounds a month.)
Posted on May 14th, 2009 at 9:52am under Brown, Eye Catching Initiatives, Human rights
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• 3 Comments |
Quote – “Brown’s heroine has received just five public utterances of support from her biggest fan since he became one of the world’s supposedly most powerful men…”
Shouldn’t that read ‘one of the world’s supposedly most powerful poodles’? Let’s face it, as Washington’s roving henchgoon, Britain don’t do nothing without the Don’s say-so.
In my defence, that ’supposedly’ is doing all the heavy lifting in that sentence.
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