UNITED NATIONS — The Security Council on Wednesday broke its protracted impasse over responding to the bloody repression of the protest movement in Syria, issuing its first denunciation of the violence there since the uprising began five months ago and putting the onus on President Bashar al-Assad's regime.
Second came denunciations by the soda industry and at least one so-called "consumer" group funded by them.
On both occasions after they said this, my mates were shocked when, rather than being grateful for the suggestion, I embarked on a two hour, Hugo Chávez/Fidel Castro style, Marxist denunciation, first of all TV talent shows such as Strictly Come Dancing and then secondly of the supposed skill that its contestants are being judged on – ballroom dancing.
Toje responded by mentioning Martin Luther King Jr., a rejoinder that struck me as odd; King received the prize 49 years ago, and more than two years passed after then until, in April 1967, he angered the White House with his first full-throated denunciation of the Vietnam War.
The president followed up on Monday with a second, more comprehensive public denunciation of "the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans".
(The first was Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin & the personality cult).
The sixth shifts to a denunciation of civilians who turn a blind eye to war's devastation.
The 16 Satires appeared in five books, and each anatomises a different aspect of modern life; the longest, the sixth, with its hair-raising denunciation of the disgraceful behaviour of women, fills a whole volume.
In late August, half a million protesters gathered in front of the west gate of the Shwedagon Pagoda, a historic rallying point against colonial rule, to hear Aung San Suu Kyi give her first public speech, a vigorous denunciation of the regime and a call for democracy.
The denunciation in the seventeenth century by the Catholic Church of the Copernican concept of a heliocentric system of planets; the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in 1925 in Tennessee; and the death of the Russian geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, in a Soviet prison camp in 1943 for being "an enemy of the people" are among the most egregious examples of enforcing the official doctrine of their day.
