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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

18 Apr - De 'Spin'

The Holocaust Boomerang Effect
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/206732-The-Holocaust-Boomerang-Effect
In case you didn't know, in Britain the Holocaust is part of the National Curriculum. Thanks to the 'The Holocaust Educational Trust' our children are guaranteed to learn how bad the Nazis were. This is probably much easier for our kids to acknowledge than to look into the ways in which the embarrassing legacy of the British Empire reverberates throughout almost every contemporary disastrous conflict on this planet. It is deemed far easier for our kids to learn about Anne Frank than to absorb the fact that Britain is directly responsible for the robbery of Palestine and the Palestinian ordeal. Learning about Auschwitz is also far easier than accepting the devastating reality created by Britain's latest illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a colossal crime which has cost more than 1.5 million innocent lives so far. Thanks to The Holocaust Educational Trust we can brush history and our current crimes aside. Learning about the bad Nazis is far easier on our children than learning about the complicity of Britain in the holocaust. I guess that toughening British immigration laws to stop Jews escaping to Britain in the 1930s is not a prominent chapter in our kids' text books.

The Holocaust Educational Trust was established in 1988 says their official website. "Our aim is to educate young people from every background about the Holocaust and the important lessons to be learned for today."

Wonderful, I think to myself. My 9 year old son told me that a Shoa guru visited his school recently to talk about the holocaust. My son raised his hand, he wondered whether the lesson of the holocaust could be applied to the Palestinian ordeal. "We are not here to talk about politics" answered the 'trusted' trained Shoa mentor. For my son the message was clear: The Jewish people's suffering is universal, other people's suffering is 'politics'.
( I'm a bit surprised that this author conflates ethnicity/religious beliefs with national policy undertaken by extremists underwritten by the United States and United Kingdom both; i.e. Israel is not Jewry. The popular polls do not reflect popularity of spending the national tax collections to thieve foreign resources and turn them over to private hands.)

The Really Really Long War
http://www.truthout.org/the-really-really-long-war58553?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TRUTHOUT+%28t+r+u+t+h+o+u+t+%7C+News+
Politics%29 
Let's imagine that the Cold War was a detour. The entire 20th century, in fact, was a detour. Since conflicts among the 20th-century ideologies (liberalism, communism, fascism) cost humanity so dearly, it's hard to conceive of World War II and the clashes that followed as sideshows. And yet many people have begun to do just that. They view the period we find ourselves in right now — the so-called post-Cold War era — as a return to a much earlier time and a much earlier confrontation. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aren't discrete battles against a tyrant (Saddam Hussein) or a tyrannical group (the Taliban). They fit together with Turkey's resurgence, the swell of Muslim immigration to Europe, and Israel's settlement policy to form part of a much larger struggle.

Welcome to Crusade 2.0.

For those who see Islam as a civilizational threat, the key dates aren't 1945 or 1989 but rather 1683, 1492, 1099, and 732. The very mention of these watershed years stirs the blood of the modern-day crusader. In 1683, thanks to the intercession of the Polish cavalry, Christian forces beat back Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Vienna, preventing Islam from spreading to Western Europe. In 1492, Christian armies recovered all of Spain from Muslim rulers. In 1099, during the first Crusade, the European army seized Jerusalem. And in 732, Charles Martel led the Franks in a victory over the forces of the Ummayad Caliphate, ensuring that Islam would not spread beyond its conquests in Spain.

Today, many Europeans are enlisting in a modern crusade. They see the threat of 732, with Islamic immigrants coming in from North Africa and bringing their culture and customs — like the mosque and the veil — to secular France and multicultural Switzerland. They see the threat of 1683, with Turkey planning to join and then take over the European Union. And they stand with Israel to protect Jerusalem from the demands of Palestinians and their supporters in the Arab world.
( Politics of the ridiculous : official 'blaming the victim'  posited as 'analysis' rather than the demagoguery of the thief. )


Gods and Monsters: Fighting American Wars From on High
http://www.truthout.org/tom-engelhardt-gods-and-monsters58552?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TRUTHOUT+%28t+r+u+t+h+o+u+t+%7C+News
+Politics%29
In the last week, we've seen -- literally viewed -- a modern example of what it means in our day to act from the heights, and we've read about another striking example of the same. The website WikiLeaks released a decrypted July 2007 video of two U.S. Apache helicopters attacking Iraqis on a street in Baghdad. At least 12 Iraqis, including two employees of the news agency Reuters, a photographer and his driver, were killed in the incident, and two children in the vehicle of a good Samaritan who stopped to pick up casualties and died in the process, were also wounded.
Without a doubt, that video is a remarkable 17-minute demo of how to efficiently slaughter tiny beings milling about below. There is no way American helicopter crews could know just who was walking down there -- Sunni or Shiite, insurgent or shopper, Baghdadis with intent to harm Americans or Baghdadis paying little attention to two of the helicopters then so regularly buzzing the city. Were they killers, guards, bank clerks, unemployed idlers, Baathist Party members, religious fanatics, café owners? Who could tell from such a height? But the details mattered little.
The Reuters cameraman crouches behind a building looking, camera first, around a corner, and you hear an American in an Apache yell, "He's got an RPG!" -- mistaking his camera with its long-range lens for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The pilot, of course, doesn't know that it's a Reuters photographer down there. Only we do. (And when his death did become known, the military carefully buried the video.)
Along with that video comes a soundtrack in which you hear the Americans check out the rules of engagement (ROE), request permission to fire, and banter about the results. ("Hahaha. I hit 'em"; "Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards..."; and of the two wounded children, "Well, it's their fault bringing their kids into a battle.") Such callous chit-chat is explained away in media articles here by the need for "psychological distance" of those whose job it is to kill, but in truth that's undoubtedly the way you talk when you, and only you, have god-like access to the skies and can hover over the rest of humanity, making preparations to wipe out lesser beings.
Similarly, in pre-dawn darkness on February 12th in Paktia Province, eastern Afghanistan, a U.S. Special Operations team dropped from the skies into a village near Gardez. There, in a world that couldn't be more distant from their lives, possibly using an informant's bad tip, American snipers on rooftops killed an Afghan police officer ("head of intelligence in one of Paktia's most volatile districts"), his brother, and three women -- a pregnant mother of 10, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager. They then evidently dug the bullets out of the women's bodies, bound and gagged their bodies, and filed a report claiming that the dead men were Taliban militants who had murdered the women -- "honor killings" -- before they arrived. (This was how the American press, generally reliant on military handouts, initially reported the story.)
Recently, in the face of some good on-the-spot journalism by an unembedded British reporter, this cover-up story ingloriously disintegrated, while U.S. military spokespeople retreated step by step in a series of partial admissions of error, leading to an in-person apology, including the sacrifice of a sheep and $30,000 in compensation payments.
Ceremonial Evisceration
Both incidents elicited shock and anger from critics of American war policies. And both incidents are shocking. Probably the most shocking aspect of them, however, is just how humdrum they actually are, even if the public release of video of such events isn't. Start with one detail in those Afghan murders, reported in most accounts but little emphasized: what the Americans descended on was a traditional family ceremony. More than 25 guests had gathered for the naming of a newborn child.
In fact, over these last nine-plus years, Afghan (and Iraqi) ceremonies of all sorts have regularly been blasted away.
















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