Cyber Coward: Being with people who make you feel alone

Being diagnosed with cancer is something that many will face alone whether or not that should be so. Being in remission and discovering that others don't consider your survival is something to celebrate. It offers a perspective of one's own value which few would want to contemplate.,

In my experience, however, there was a more extreme example, being hounded online when raising awaremess of a human rights issue. It was about children who were considered of lesser value, disposable. They were not held or hugged.

After a visit to a facility for disabled children, known as a psychoneuroligical internat, my colleague observed:   "Many seem to develop inexplicable digestive problems as if in their misery, they stare into the abyss and simply decide that they don't want to be here any longer" 

Our expose of childcare conditions at Torez in Ukraine would make waves in country, but it would take another 5 years before the story appeared in mainstream media,. with a report for the Sunday Times.

Through these 5 years we were threatened and defamed and in the end the perpetrator gloated over my colleagues death The primary medium was Google blogspot. They were asked to take acttion against the anonymous source.

To the activists he worked alongside however my colleague was considered a hero for taking a stand

Google did nothing, so I responded by publshing the passport details of the perpetrator. Google took action against me, removing my blog post.

I was also threatened with legal action with a telephone call from one Prudence Blackwood, a QC who turned out to be the perpetrators sibling. THis was revealed by a Google search returning a recent deletion in Google Cache. In other words, this QC wasn't quick enough in covering her tracks.  It was a genealogy site which offered some insight in the stability of their family, They were dysfunctional - hardly spoke to each other, it read.

Given the Google motto of "Don't be Evil" it really begs the question as to whose side Google is on. At the moment it looks like its those who want to suppress human rights activism and members of the legal profession with something to hide. This does not correspond to what they say in the meda about screening requests.  

Today I don't want a friend to be forgotten, nor those he spoke of in 2006:

"Ukraine just can't afford to do more than let a lot of them die."

"In fact, Ukraine CAN afford to do more than let these children die. To date, to this moment, Ukraine has not bothered to try.

That is a fact that I will defend with my life.

The why and wherefore behind that fact is a tale of neglect and horror indefensible in any presumably civilized country."

As the Sunday Times would put it 5 years later:

"The violation of human rights in Ukraine is one of the pressing issues of our day. The suppression of freedom of speech, the control of the right of assembly, the oppressive use of the tax police and the blatant banditry of the road police however all pale into insignificance when compared to the wanton starvation of disabled children by those whom the state has empowered to protect them."

As my late colleague wrote in later years:

"We research and design regional and national programs.  More about these programs are in the "Projects" section.  We continue throughout with advocacy and activism in raising awareness of stakeholders we aim to help: vulnerable children, and people in poverty, first.  

These problems almost always stem from government corruption that was a way of life in the USSR, and remains so to varying degrees.  Hence the overall process of what we do in promoting change inevitably runs into varying degrees of conflict along the way.  Dealing with such things as threats and smears is as much a part of projects as the hope and good will built within communities for standing up to it.  Hope, good will, and improved lives far outweigh the stresses and strains mounted by corrupt government officials, so strife and institutional resistance to change are taken in stride as part of the change process."

It was Leo Tolstoy in The Law of Love and the Law of Viloence, who wrote:

‘Each step we make today towards material progress not only does not advance us towards the general well-being, but shows us, on the contrary, that all these technical improvements only increase our miseries. One can imagine other machines, submarine, subterranean and aerial, for transporting men with the rapidity of lightning; one could multiply to infinity the means of propagating human speech and thought, but it would remain no less the case that these travellers, so comfortably and rapidly transported, are neither willing nor able to commit anything but evil, and the thoughts and words they pour forth would only incite men to further harm’

There is perhaps only one defence against tho who do evil, whatever technology throws at us