Passionate and brave

Passionate and brave To East Finchley and the wonderful old Phoenix Cinema fleapit last night to see The Constant Gardener, adapted from John Le Carré’s novel. The shivers weren’t entirely from Bill Nighy’s suave villain — the heating was off.

The hero and his wife lose their lives exposing a pharma company’s conduct of reckless drug trials among poor Africans, far from the supervision that protects patients in rich countries, and the collusion of the British government in this. (See BUKO Pharma-Kampagne.)

That is passionate and brave, but as long as we persist in spinning tales of noble individuals fighting evil corporations and governments, nothing changes. Phrases such as Big Business, the Establishment or the System serve only to mask the fact that there is no one here but us chickens. Our governments and businesses are driven by our profit motive, our greed, insistence on our comfort before their health.

In demonising our governments and businesses we are children blaming an imaginary evil twin. It is our dark side these organisations manifest, knowing they will be rewarded if they keep their unsavoury work out of sight, and allow us to bask in the sunlight of our own self-approval.

It is our greed and fears our governments and businesses represent when negotiating the terms of trade that keep so much of the planet in poverty. We can enjoy the moral buzz of deprecating all this but nothing changes until we first acknowledge and then refuse our complicity in it. It is our heel that grinds the world’s poor. The cloak of ‘market forces’ provides a disguise sufficient only to our self deceptions.

We strut on the world’s stage crowing our nobility, democracy and good intentions, oblivious to the evil that we do.