Oliver Postgate
FIFTY YEARS OF WHAT?
Posted by Oliver Postgate - 20 February 2008 09:48
An exchange of atom bombs is nothing but a festival of mutual suicide - Oliver Postgate continues his God dialogues
“Lord, look down upon your world!” commanded the Devil.
“Why should I?” replied God. “It stinks.”
“I said look! not sniff. Look down on a single moment sixty-two years ago. The moment in which you remade time. The moment when you allowed mankind to see itself as it was, in a single flash of eternity.”
“OK. So I let them drop an atom bomb on Hiroshima. It was a strategic ...
DIVINE LAW
Posted by Oliver Postgate - 18 February 2008 11:10
The separation between law and religious injunction has got to be absolute and stay that way, otherwise fear will come back into the land
Unusually for him, the Devil was wroth. In fact he was hopping mad and made no secret of it. “Hey!” he bawled in a voice of flame, “What have you been up to?”
“Nothing evil.” said God. “Just tidying things up a bit. You know.”
“I do indeed! And a right pig’s ear you’re making of it! It’s my job to sow discord among the teeming masses so that you ...
WHERE HAS ALL THE MONEYGONE?
Posted by Oliver Postgate - 11 February 2008 11:17
Oliver Postgate makes a welcome return to newstatesman.com relating a dialogue between god and the devil about cash
“Belt up!” said God in a voice of thunder. “Stop niggling about your home-made house rules. What I want to know is important – What happened to all that money?
“What money?” asked the Devil.
“There’s this joker in France who says he has “lost” something like forty billion pounds of other people’s money! Well then, where is it? You can’t lose the entire wealth of a nation, even ...
The last dilemma
Posted by Oliver Postgate - 16 March 2007 12:37
The Clangers creator highlights humankind's crucial choice
The fervent Channel 4 programme "The Great Global Warming Swindle", produced by the 'denyers', and its slating and rejection by the 'disaster crusaders', has taken the debate about the likely future of the world out of science, which is necessarily inconclusive, and into the realm of pseudo-religion.
Now you either 'believe in' one future or you 'believe in' another. Both attitudes are rich with indicative examples but apparently without sufficiently ...
Politicians cannot save the world
Posted by Oliver Postgate - 16 February 2007 17:23
Oliver ponders the dangers faced by the world
Do you remember the Nuclear Arms Race? For years it seemed as if mankind was going to commit suicide in a nuclear holocaust. The conviction that the competitive accretion of nuclear explosives, enough to cause general annihilation many times over (and also, ‘collaterally’, poison the world), was a form of defence seemed to be indelibly cast in the minds of politicians. It was only eventually shifted by the sudden application ...
Three cheers for the New Statesman
Posted by Oliver Postgate - 29 January 2007 12:01
The Clangers and Bagpuss creator urges you all to pray that it's not too late to tackle global warming
It is devoting a whole issue to publicising the likely effects of climate-change, just as they were being publicised three years ago and also almost twenty years ago (by Mrs Thatcher!).
Nobody took any notice then either. Why not? Because the basic situation is too simple and the solution is not what is called ‘politically realistic’.
What is this ‘political reality’?
Well, it certainly has nothing to do with real ...
The economics of conquest
Posted by Oliver Postgate - 02 January 2007 16:50
Only a reinvigorated United Nations can bring the world's aggressors to heel
The other day I heard John Bolton - who lately resigned his post as US representative designate to the United Nations - saying how unforgivably evil it was of the Syrians to (allegedly) assassinate certain Lebanese politicians who were thought to be obstructing Syria’s ambition to gain political control of Lebanon. If true, that is certainly a despicable thing to do, definitely not the sort of behaviour we expect from ...
Oliver's Christmas message
Posted by Oliver Postgate - 19 December 2006 10:31
A poem in true keeping with the spirit of the season
GREETING
I will not lumber you with love,nor climb on you to measure you for sins,nor wipe you over with forgivenesses,nor kick your shins,
I know your eyes do ...
The Four Feedbacks of the Apocalypse
Posted by Oliver Postgate - 12 December 2006 10:16
A call to guard our future and the future of our children against the self inducing effects of global warming
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your eyes, and also, if you have tears to shed, prepare to shed them now. For I am not joking. I write about the future.
Not so much about our own future, but about the future of our children and of the world in which they hope to live, the world whose atmosphere we are fast poisoning beyond recovery, the world that is moving inexorably ...
What is Trident?
Posted by Oliver Postgate - 05 December 2006 11:58
Why the government should bide its time over the UK's nuclear deterrent
I ask this seemingly simple question while the White Paper on its proposed renewal is being published, because, quite frankly, I don’t think many of the people discussing the subject really know what Trident is, or rather, what it is for.
What Trident consists of is well known. Britain and the US have sets of submarines which take turns to go out and lurk under the oceans where they can’t ...
A new statesman?
Posted by Oliver Postgate - 18 November 2006 10:55
The Bagpuss and Clangers creator issues a stark warning about the fate of the planet unless some tough choices are taken
Yes! Yes indeed! If there’s one thing the world needs most urgently just now it is a new statesman, or come to that, an old statesman or stateswoman, one, or half a dozen even, who can draw the world’s attention to the sorry state it has got itself into, and persuade it to sort itself out.
Where would such a statesman start? What qualities would be needed? Courage, certainly. Also ...
