Would you call a country in which female circumcision is
practiced civilised?
Would you call countries like Ruanda and Congo civilised?
Or indeed would you call any country which has an army
consisting of boy-soldiers civilised?
Would you call a country in which women are treated like
second class citizens and/or chattels civilised?


.. . . or a country which executes the mentally ill, has the highest gun
crime rate in the world, has the highest proportion of its population in
prison (mostly ethnic minorities) of any country in the world, produces 25%
of the world's pollution whilst having only 4% of the world's population,
produces and exports the highest quantity of lethal weapons in the world, is
the only country ever to have used nuclear weapons against civilian
populations, has over 50% of its population suffering from obesity, is
responsible for attacking more countries in the 20th century than any other
country in the world, and has kept hundreds of foreign nationals imprisoned
for years on end without charge, trial or representation in cages exposed to
the elements, in violation of the Geneva Convention? A country which
provided targeting information for Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons in the
Iran-Iraq war, uses radioactive waste in its battlefield munitions, and
whose covert operations have resulted in the deaths of millions of civilians
worldwide, and the destabilisation and overthrow of such democratically
elected heads of state as Salvador Allende of Chile? A country whose use of
chemical and biological weapons has left the soil of countries like Vietnam
and Cambodia poisoned for generations after its genocidal attacks, producing
horrific birth defects to this day?

Civilised?

Andrew