Former Commonwealth Games medalist and British heavyweight champion James Oyebola was in critical condition in a London hospital Tuesday after being shot in the face outside a nightclub where he worked as a bouncer.
“Oyebola was shot in the early hours of Monday morning after asking three men to stop smoking inside the club in London’s Fulham district.”
“ ‘It is a horrible crime to happen anywhere but over nothing — an incident such as smoking — these people need to be caught,’ Detective Chief Inspector Wilson told the British Broadcasting Corp. on Tuesday.”
We agree that it is a horrible thing — but it’s not over nothing. The "nothing" in question is a statistical fraud-based national law that suffocates and forbids a right and a culture that has been installed for centuries. It is a fraud arrogantly imposed by a law. It is a law that wants to establish that "public health" has the right and the duty to command and regulate personal behaviour — while it has neither.
Incidents like this are not about cigarettes "per se". They are about social discomfort. They are about institutionally-driven hatred. They are about the institutional rot and corruption that thinks nothing of intruding in the most personal life of the citizens — as long as it can serve the interests of social engineering and pharmaceutical multinationals. The fraud-based smoking prohibition adds to an already long list of repressions and social regressions, surveillance and controls that seems to have no end, and that grows every day. No wonder accidents like this happen: people cannot take it anymore.
But the pattern of hate instigation continues: while the Oyebola incident was reported by all major newspapers in the UK because it makes "smokers look bad", the incident of the deaf smoking man nearly beaten to death at a bus stop has been reported only locally – because it makes non smokers look bad. Such irresponsible attitude by media and government will only create more social resentment and more violence.
The need to stop, zoom out and look at the grand social picture is not felt by pin-headed politicians who only know about the "health and safety" sound bites and the short-term political gains.
0 Comments