Myra Hindley :: essays research papers

A sadistic temptress, the aid and probable prompt of an evil and cold blooded killer. Or a 'political prisoner being used as a scapegoat by politicians and the media'? This is a very sensitive subject and people often respond with fear and anxiety when we decide to examine things like the Moors murders. We are told that our curiosity is 'unhealthy', and that wanting to know,or openly debate about a matter which is 'naturally' closed, can only be the desire of a sick mind. We are encouraged to turn a blind eye and leave well alone. It is obvious to me that to wish to examine something is not to condone it. Yet when somebody tries to ask questions about taboo subjects today, they are assumed to be sympathetic to the subject, maybe even a little deranged, and certainly suspect. They become an outcast, and this coming adrift from the herd is also something which many fear. Many say better to be seen to be part of the lynch-mob than to become its quarry but these are the people who don't have the strength of character to even attempt to be the quarry. During their trial, neither Hindley nor Brady showed remorse. Both were sentenced to life. They are still in prison at this time. The judge has stated that she will indeed spend the rest of her days in prison with no chance of ever being paroled, so why does she still argue against the judges decision ? A lot of pressure is put on Governments to keep Hidley inside and whether or not she is to be released is now often stated in party political statements prior to elections, as it is feared that the overriding pubic opinion could win or lose elections. On November the twenty - first supporters of Hindley called for a review of sentencing procedures after Jack Straw reaffirmed the decision of his predecessor, Michael Howard, of never releasing Hindley from prison. The ruling came under immediate attack from penal reformers and civil liberties campaigners. Myra Hindley is still petitioning for her release On October the seventh, 1998 Hindley concluded a hearing at the Court of Appeal trying to overrule her "whole-life tariff." In her new attempt at overturning her life sentence and win the right to a parole hearing, Hindley claimed that she can prove that she took part in the Moors murders only because Brady abused her, and threatened to kill her mother, grandmother and younger sister if she did not comply with his wishes.

American Industrialization And Immigration

This song, written for the Yiddish theatre around 1900 by Hyman Prizit and Abe Schwarz, is a fairly good summation of the essay The Uprooted, written about 50 years later by Oscar Handlin. The second great wave of immigrants during the last half of the nineteenth century consisted of peasant farmers from Eastern and Southern Europe as well as Scandinavia, forced off of lands that had sustained them for generations, no longer able to extract a living from it, or fleeing persecutions and repressive, quasi-feudal governments.The had heard of â€Å"Amerika,† where the streets were paved with gold and land was there for the taking. Often spending all they had, those who survived the crossing arrived and found the streets paved not with gold, but with the blood, sweat and toil of those who were exploited to create gold for elite ruling classes that were often more oppressive than those they had fled. The difference was in the nature of the exploitation and oppression. Whereas in the â€Å"Old Country,† physical violence had most often been the tool of oppression – Cossacks, private police, etc.– in the industrial-capitalistic U. S. , the oppression was economic. Those who controlled the means of production, then as now, though only of maximizing and internalizing profits while minimizing and externalizing costs. Human life meant nothing to the industrial capitalist overlords. Had not the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery, they would have happily enslaved the newcomers in order to keep themselves in luxury. A few of the immigrants were able to escape the cities, and even fewer managed to acquire land and establish farms.Most however found themselves trapped in a system that not only cut them off from the land, entrapping them in a virtual jungle of concrete, brick and stone, but found their very lives subject to economic cycles, manipulations and machinations they could neither understand nor control. When employment was available, the demand s of the corporate leeches robbed the immigrant laborers of the comforts of family, culture and even religious faith, since workers were often required to work seven days a week.In Ethnic Enclaves and the Worker’s Saloon, Roy Rosenzweig describes how the workers of one city were able to take back some power from their corporate overlords, and how the unique character of this city made it even possible. Worcester Massachusetts was unusual in a number of ways. Unlike many industrial towns, it was not located near a navigable river nor a source of raw materials. Additionally, during the wave of corporate mergers and acquisition that took place during the first â€Å"Robber Baron† era around the turn of the 20th century, most of the factories in Worcester managed to remain under local control.â€Å"Control† was the operative word, here; the families who started Worcester’s industries virtually controlled the community. As in large port cities such as Baltimor e, New York and Boston, the immigrant workforce was a mixed lot who often could not see beyond their own ethnic and religious differences to realize that as workers, they shared many of the same problems. In addition, the control of city politics by the industrial capitalists made it difficult for working-class people to get involved in the system in any sort of active way. This, combined with â€Å"the carrot of paternalism† (i. e., â€Å"faith-based initiatives,† charity organizations, educational programs) and the â€Å"stick of repression† (threat of firings if workers were suspected of union activity, tracking of personal information and the use of company spies) helped the elite classes maintain control over the workforce (88). As the ethnic landscape grew more diverse, the individual ethnic communities began to â€Å"circle the wagons,† metaphorically speaking; the results were an â€Å"interweaving of church, fraternal lodge and family† tha t allowed built a support system for the various communities – who were, often as not, at odds with each other.This in combination with the more structured, disciplinarian and authoritarian structure in the workplace that inhibited socialization, gave rise to the saloons – literal drinking establishments as the working class began to have more leisure time. Whereas in earlier times, drinking and socializing on the job (primarily in artisan and agricultural industries) was permissible, in the more mechanized industrial workplace, it was not (more because the bosses wanted more control over their workers rather than out of any real concern for their safety, one suspects).This also had the effect of separating the male from home and family to a greater degree (89). U. S. history appears to run in cycles, with a pendulum that swings from an egalitarian, socialistic economic model in which the economy serves the people, to a quasi-feudal, hyper-capitalistic, laissez-faire s ystem in which a few ruthless individuals claw their way to the top of the socio-economic ladder and become economic leeches, literally feeding off of the blood and sweat of honest laborers while contributing little, if anything to the betterment of society (cases in point – the Walton (Wal-Mart) family, Paris Hilton and the Bush dynasty).Like today, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a period of capitalism run amuck, justified by a sick, twisted perversion of Christianity preached by a murderous sociopath over four hundred years before in Geneva, Switzerland. Like the medieval Catholicism, Calvinism has been used to justify authoritarianism dominance by a patriarchal, self-appointed aristocracy, whose only interests are in the accumulation of wealth and power over society.Human needs and even lives mean nothing to these predators (although their Congressional lap-dogs and lickspittles are not above moralizing about a â€Å"culture of life† – as long as it involves people who are either still in the womb, are vegetative, or anyone else for whom they themselves don’t need to take any direct responsibility). The tragedy is that the concept of the sweatshop and worker exploitation has never completely disappeared, despite the efforts of the â€Å"saloons† and the union movements that ultimately grew from them.In the 1930’s, Franklin Roosevelt literally â€Å"saved capitalism from itself† with the New Deal that among other things, strengthened worker protections and the right to form a union. For about four decades, these policies resulted in the establishment of a solid middle class – corresponding to the â€Å"yeomanry† that Thomas Jefferson himself said was the bedrock of a democracy. Like the first middle class of the U. S. , which existed between 1790 and 1840, this middle class was politically savvy and involved.When this activism forced an end to their highly profitable war in Vietnam, the politicians and their corporate backers in the war industries responded with a â€Å"new† brand of conservatism which was really the same kind of predatory, â€Å"robber baron† economics that FDR had tried to end. The ultimate goal of today’s neo-conservatism is to end democracy and replace it with feudalism by destroying the middle and working classes – something Reagan and his three successors have been doing quite effectively.Since the labor laws that would have permitted a return to child labor, sweatshops and twelve-hour, seven-day-a-week work schedules would be hard to overcome, this labor was simply shipped overseas to nations where such things were permitted. This not only allowed corporate capitalists to maximize profits to obscene levels on the backs of these workers, it also robbed American workers of their livelihoods, and has put much of the middle class in such economic insecurity, they have little time or inclination for activ ism.This was made possible by a number of things: Reagan’s intentional failure to enforce the Sherman Act, and the elimination of the tariffs that financed a great deal of the federal government for 200 years. This was followed by â€Å"Free Trade† agreements that are in fact â€Å"free† for large corporate interests, but exact a heavy price on everyone else, and the transfer of the â€Å"commons† – that which the citizens of a nation hold in ownership collectively – to private, predatory, profit-driven corporations.The results are clear, if not generally spoken of my a bought-and-paid-for corporate media: 46 million U. S. citizens with no access to health care, the destruction and continuing neglect of a major port city, the rape of a foreign country on behalf of private corporate oil interests (being protected in large part by a private, well-paid mercenary army while U. S. ground troops go without the most basic necessities), the deterior ation of public education, the sell-out of U. S.industry and infrastructure to foreign interests, the near-destruction of the middle class as wealth is stolen through regressive taxes and transferred to economic parasites such as the Walton family. Handlin paints an accurate picture of a time that not only was, but is in great danger of returning. The only hope for the U. S. is suggested by Rosenzweig, which is actually being seen today on the Internet. Today’s Progressive on-line blogs and chatrooms are the new â€Å"Saloons,† where the issues outlined above – long ignored or misunderstood by a citizenry lulled by the panen et circensem of today – are finally being discussed.While the majority of â€Å"Republicrats† and â€Å"Demopublicans† in Congress continue to thumb their noses at the citizens they claim to represent as they continue to enable a dysfunctional, sociopathic, twice-unelected â€Å"president† and his fascist-leaning cohorts, today’s technology has made it impossible to hide the corruption and decay completely. History runs in cycles. Just as the last quarter-century has seen the return of exploitive Robber Baron capitalism, so has the Internet provided â€Å"Saloons† where the working class can once again take back what is rightfully theirs and create an economy that serves people – not the other way around.

Transitional Justice Is Necessary For A Nation - 2574 Words

No nation has ever started off with a clean sheet. Even some of the great nations had issues along the road of their growth. For example, when the United States first form of a government system was the Articles of Confederation, prior to the democratic form of government we have now. It is why I argue upon the basis that transitional justice is needed in order for a nation to function properly. Two nations that went through a major transitional justice change are Rwanda and Argentina. Transitional justice are judicial/non-judicial methods implemented in order to restore acts against of human rights abuses. Such methods consist of criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations programs, and numerous kinds of institutional†¦show more content†¦Furthermore, to satisfying these needs, the states have responsibilities to guarantee that the violations will not occur again, so a special obligation to modify institutions that were involved in the violations and were incapabl e of preventing the acts against human rights. A past of ignored human rights violations is more than likely to cause social conflict in the later future. Results can consist of distrust between social groups and institutions of the state, and the decrease of national security and specific goals. Then questions about rule of law surfaces, which can lead to an endless cycle of human rights violations in various forms. Based on what has been seen in countries effected my human rights violations, the feeling of justice was never present, according to the victims. Victims began taking matters into their own hands in order to protect what they held there to themselves. For example, the genocide in Rwanda and the Trials of Juntas in Argentina. From April to July 1994, members of the Hutu tribe, who thrived in the east-central African nation of Rwanda, murdered approximately 800,000 people, a majority of them natives of the Tutsi tribe. It began with Hutu extremist in the capital of Kig ali, the genocide spreading throughout Rwanda at drastic speeds. Regular citizens were encouraged by Rwandan local officials and the Hutu government to bear arms against their own