Fiddling whilst the rest of the world burns?

• Terror alert across three continents: Read more in The Guardian

 HORRIFIC TERROR ATTACKS struck across three continents today, in Tunisia, Kuwait and France, leaving many dead and injured. 

TENS OF MILLIONS OF DESPERATE REFUGEES, ASYLUM SEEKERS AND DISPLACED PEOPLE are fleeing war, terror and poverty in what the United Nations has described as, 'the world's worst refugee crisis since records began.'

ISIS MILITANTS ARE BOLDLY MARCHING ACROSS THE MIDDLE EAST, gaining huge expanses of territories and leaving a trail of industrial-scale deaths, enslavement and terror across Iraq and Syria, threatening their very existence as nation states. 

RUSSIAN PRESIDENT, PUTIN, IS OUT TO ‘TAKE CONTROL’ OF ALL UKRAINE, having already annexed part of the country, Reuters reported today. 

CLIMATE CHANGE REPRESENTS THE ‘BIGGEST GLOBAL HEALTH CRISIS OF THE 21st CENTURY’ a commission by University College London reported today, predicting that this will increasingly cause heat waves, floods, droughts, storms and pandemic infectious disease patterns, pollution, malnutrition and mass migrations.

The kaleidoscope of horrific events now crystallising across the world is making this one of the most dangerous times facing the planet that most of us alive today can ever remember. 

And in Britain? 

The country's time and energy are being spent contemplating whether to diminish international human rights protections by abandoning our 60-year commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights. Our time and energy are being completely absorbed and engrossed by a referendum, to be held in one-or-two-years-time, on whether Britain should remain a member of the European Union. 

If historians survive in future to tell the story of our times, I seriously wonder if they will look-back aghast at how our eyes were distracted and taken off the world’s most serious events whilst we wandered down a cul-de-sac of rather irrelevant issues by comparison. 

Might future generations consider Britain’s response to the current world-wide crises of Biblical proportions and conclude, “Britain fiddled while the world burned”?

*The phrase, “Fiddling while Rome burns” means to occupy oneself with unimportant matters and neglect priorities during a crisis. The source of this phrase is the story that Nero played the fiddle (violin) while Rome burned, during the great fire in AD 64.

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• Click the arrow below to listen to an 11-minute radio interview on why Britain should do more to help asylum seekers

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Other articles by Jon Danzig:

• The photo that alerted the world
• UK SOS! Our human rights are under attack
• Should prisoners be allowed to vote?

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