The biggest lie in the world is in answer to the question, 'How are you?' People usually say, 'I'm fine,' but that's mostly bull. Everyone wants to display being perfect. They tell themselves and their friends, 'I drive this car, I own this house, I'm fine.' People ball up into these tight wads of repression.
My parents left Libya in 1979, escaping political repression, and settled in Cairo. I was nine.
I have seen such an immense change from the total repression and criminality of homosexuality in my lifetime. It does make me much more buoyant and optimistic about the future. If that change can occur in that time there's hope for many other changes.
If we want to protect people against dictators or repression or torture, don't you need that rule to be universal so as to not end up with a situation where we do so only when it is comfortable, profitable and safe?
We're seeing a reaction - and people taking to the streets with pots and pans - in areas where the independence movement isn't supposed to exist. People have to choose between one model and another. Everyone in Catalonia has realised that not taking part means ratifying the politics of repression of the Spanish government.
It requires an effort of logical acrobatics to believe that carnage of innocents is an instrument for freedom and elections are a symbol of deception and repression!
