Its all a problem of perspective. Bit like a one-eyed man at a 3-d movie. But what’s happening in Egypt is a bit too gory for even Hollywood, at the moment.

A court in Cairo yesterday sentenced 529 people to death. All in one go. A 45 minute ‘hearing’ but don’t ask me what was actually ‘heard’ because neither defense lawyers nor witnesses for the defence were allowed in the room. Fair enough, I’m da judge, its my fucking court, I’ll do as I please. Also you really can’t knock this process from a viewpoint of efficiency and ergonomics. To reach that endpoint in Britain would take 15 years of costly, agonising, protracted trials and tribulations. And that’s before all the appeals and ignoring the fact that we don’t do ‘death penalty’ here, even when it is warranted, for people driving at 28mph in the fast lane.

But this is not Britain, nor the USA, nor even Russia (where those 529 would have all just simply ‘vanished’ while in custody anyway and their bodies laying the foundation of the next Putin monument). Its Egypt. Where they overthrew their old president in favour of Mr Morsi, the ‘people’s choice’. Then decided they hated him more than his predecessor and ousted him, leaving a militarised vacuum and 529 of his loyal supporters on death row.

And all this is only odd, bizarre, disgraceful and evil when judged through the eyes of Western democratic and judicious process. And its not our choice. Nor our place to make judgments. Expecially as Egypt’s judges are apparently brilliantly efficient at making their own, without all that messy, drawn-out and human rightsy bollocks getting in the way.

Egypt, like Syria, Lybia, Bahrain, is stuck in the quagmire resulting from the Arab Spring. They all wanted to depose old tyrannical, hereditary leaders and embrace the democratic ideal, but they lack the understanding of it and the committment to it. In the west these concepts are fundamental to our lives, ingrained in the collective conscience. In America kids in school recite the constitution every morning, whilst eating their doughnuts. But in many countries they never adopted this type of society. Instead of democratic debate they have screaming whilst firing rifles in the air. They’d rather maintain their feudalistic regimes, hoping that the new dictators they implement will be kinder to them than the last. It all becomes a matter of who is the loudest screamer with the most bullets.

But that’s their way. And its their countries. And who are we in the West to go round forcing our ‘way’ upon peoples just because we think they’re better? We’ve done that before in the Crusades and rammed Christianity down half the world’s throats, quite literally on pain of death. And that wen’t well.

There are no absolutes, only differences. We generally don’t sentence hundreds of people to death without what we perceive as a trial, they don’t have to put up with Nick Clegg.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx