Never again

Yesterday hundreds of victims of the Srebrenica massacre were burried.  The BBC reports: 

“More than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb troops.  The massacre was the worst atrocity in Europe since the Second World War.  Hundreds of victims of the massacre were buried at a ceremony outside the town on Sunday.”

Its about time that the strong statements by people like Barrack Obama, the UK Prime Minister,  The Secretary General of the Council of Europe were made about the massacre.  Its a shame that more was not done at the time.  It is also a shame that there are people on the left who act as apologists for genocide.  It also showed the uslessness of the United Nations unless it has a mandate for military action and the means to employ it.

It was bad enough at the time that there was a traditional Tory government in the UK who not only refused to intervene to prevent the massacre but discouraged anyone else from getting involved, encouraging the Clinton administration’s failure to do anything involving force in Foreign Affairs because of his anti-war record.

I have recently discovered the Balkans, having never visited it before, and it is hard to believe that just 15 years ago genocide was being committed there.  But it was and it could elsewhere in Europe.  We must not let it.

And another one’s gone

Sometime in the early 80’s my father returned from somewhere with a collection of singles which had been taken off an old jukebox.  I played all the singles to see what we had got.  I say what we had got although I appropriated them, I was the eldest child they belonged to me right, and they became mine.  What had I got?  The usual mixture of fantastic music – Dylan, Lay Lady Lay – and the less inspiring down to the downright unknown.  One of the latter was a track ‘The Pied Piper’ by someone called Crispian St Peters.  I was grabbed by the positive bright start and kept by this perfect example of less than three minute upbeat pop:

No apologies for the TV show’s decision to interpret the song literally, isn’t it just wonderful?  I subsequently found another song of his, which was good but not as good and discovered that he had once claimed he would be bigger than Elvis and was better at writing songs than Lennon and McCartney.  I found out today (here) that he died earlier last month. (Telegraph obit)