Showing posts with label middle-ages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label middle-ages. Show all posts

Monday, September 12, 2005

Bush, Howard, Blair, Axis of Evil

Beginning of End or New Beginning

From bad to worse is the new sub-text slogan for Bush and his administration. Appearing on US media, flanked by Cheney, Rumsfeld and numerous other (wooden) neo-cons, Bush repeated his rehearsed lines - "we are problem solvers".

This statement met with numerous reporters clearing their throats; the problem is Bush and his inept administration. The emperor is not only without clothes but is also devoid of ability. The corporate driven Bush government is learning that managing a nation has little in common with running an oil company. [Those best suited for government are dedicated to the selfless service of others - a concept totally alien to conservative ideology.]

From bad to worse is the new sub-text slogan for Bush and his administration. Appearing on US media, flanked by Cheney, Rumsfeld and numerous other (wooden) neo-cons, Bush repeated his rehearsed lines - "'we are problem solvers"'. This statement met with numerous reporters clearing their throats; the problem is Bush and his inept administration.

The emperor Corporate types will always attempt to shift responsibility for failure elsewhere, the head of FEMA has already rolled in a gesture of appeasement not correction. Rather than deal with the incompetence of government, (uncle) Colin (tom) Powell has been propped before the media to deal with the racist overtones highlighted by those hardest hit by Katrina (the black underclass).

Powell's performance was reminiscent of the deception he successfully perpetrated at the UN regarding imaginary WMDs in Iraq. On this occasion however, his attempt to exonerate the administration resulted in one of his most absurd performances; Powell essentially stated that the reason the poor were the hardest hit was due to the fact that they were poor! Someone forgot to mention that good government is for all of the people all of the time! Powell's comments were an indictment not an exoneration.

Bush (completely in character) has now appointed himself as head of the investigative committee to determine the cause of the massive failure of government to adequately respond to the crisis. Who would doubt the findings of such a committee or investigative body? After a period of desensitisation and distraction by the partisan mass media we can be assured of 'findings' in favour of government - amazing!

It is now obvious to all (including the enemies of the US) that there is no cohesion in government and that the US is a sitting target and highly vulnerable to a modern strategic attack. This is a most unfortunate situation; however, we do not refer to external 'terrorist attacks' but to the power of the dispossessed, ignored, rejected, victimised, marginalised etc, in other words the US majority! The people will not forget how this administration treats those less fortunate than themselves; the capitalist mentality is well known for its callous disregard for anything that does not equate with profit.

It would be timely if the administration realised that it is precisely this underclass that fights its wars and does the 'dirty work' which the affluent consider below their station. Now that this underclass has no illusions regarding their status as modern slaves whose lives do not rate as high as others on some neo-con scale - there may be 'a price to pay'. Would you train any group in the art of modern warfare then treat them with disdain when they are released back into society?

The sheer scale and trauma of the New Orleans tragedy leaves indelible impressions and scars on many; the effects of which will not be manifest in the immediate future but will doubtless be felt in the intermediate future. The Bush government has sown the seeds of catastrophe - in this they have been entirely in character and predictable.

The machinations of Bush and his allies are similar if not inept - the reader would recall the many distractions and lies deployed in order to facilitate an illegal invasion of a resource rich nation. Organised criminal attacks on the US (Bin Laden) resulted not in the capture of the principal but in the creation of draconian domestic social policies. These domestic policies/laws, recently upgraded to police state levels, serve only to draw attention away from the criminality of those whose lies resulted in the deaths of thousands in Iraq; I refer specifically to Howard, Bush, Blair and their respective governments.

It is plain that people have no representation and that criminals have stolen the reigns of power. The new laws are designed to silence dissenting views, opinions and voices, not to secure against external attack. The most insidious law is that of "'indirect incitement"' which was obviously designed to 'deal' with any opposition.

Modern ruling elites are aware that the 'enemy' (term used here in its relative sense) which poses the greater threat is the domestic population - not external gangs of bearded "'terrorists"'. History has recently recorded the drastic reduction in civil liberties and human rights and the (temporary) immunity of lying criminal governments from prosecution. Conservative governments fear the masses as their policies favour the few - theirs is the government of wealth for the few based on exploitation of the many and make no mistake in that regard.

Notwithstanding the above, bringing Howard, Bush, Blair and others to justice at the ICC for their crimes against humanity remains entirely plausible, in fact, it becomes an extremely simple exercise. Their fate rests in your hands as does your own. It begins with a change in attitude a simple shift in consciousness, an affirmation that you will not tolerate corrupt lying government and that you will never forfeit hard-won liberties.

Only a modicum of courage is required, the bravery that enables you to adhere to your principles of Truth in government and personal liberty regardless of the sentiments of the herd. As each person adheres to the simple principles of Truth in government and democratic freedom - you would eliminate the managerial catastrophe exhibited by the Bush regime and its like!

In defiance and opposition to all attempts to create a police state I would offer a few suggestions:

On the tenth day of every month purchase nothing whatsoever - a very simple but extremely effective strategy. As more people join the spirit of freedom and assert their dominion over corruption you will notice the change.

If this proves to be insufficient to 'get the point home', then adopt the passive strategy of the no-work-day; do not attend your work on the third day of every third month. You will have freedom, democracy and good government in a very short period. The old system has failed miserably - the people need to remind their leaders and themselves that they will not tolerate lying and corrupt governments or police states.

Remember that the price of fear is slavery - your future is, and has always been, in your hands.

It is fact that the only one who can really defeat you is yourself; certain interests count on it!

Peace to all.

We are One.

Postscript:

If you feel that a constructive and simple approach to the eradication of corrupt government has been offered then link this article to everyone you know. The personal decision to act in this small but effective way is accessible to all.

By Cleaves posted 12 September 05

Cleaves

How Bush sold New Orleans to Buy Iraq

George W Bush cut short his vacation by two days to go back to Washington, and play guitar. Doesn't look too worried about the utter destruction and desolation in New Orleans, does he? How about initiating a temporary withdrawal from Iraq so that there is enough National Guardsmen and equipment available in Louisiana?

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Evidence that Howard was complicit in CIA, false flag, call to arms, Bali bombings War criminal John Howard was complicit in the call to arms - false flag operation - Bali bombings - instigated by the CIA - and the Coalition of the Killing - to bolster support - and quell dissent for their illegal and degrading resource wars in the Middle East.

Monday, June 21, 2004

This war and racism - media denial in overdrive

Thursday, June 17, 2004 "Jordan Times" --Among the millions of words that have appeared in the US press since late April about abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, one has been notably missing: racism.

Overall, when it comes to racial aspects, the news coverage is quite PC ' as in Pentagon Correct. The outlook is "apple pie" egalitarian, with the media picture including high-profile officers who are African-American and Latino. Meanwhile, inside the policy arena, [war criminal], Colin Powell and, [war criminal], Condoleezza Rice are frequently in front of cameras to personify Uncle Sam in blackface.

The US government doesn't drop bombs on people because of their race. Washington's geopolitical agendas lead to military actions. But racial biases make the war process easier when the people being killed and maimed aren't white people. An oversize elephant in the American media's living room is a reality that few journalists talk about in public: the USA keeps waging war on countries where the victims resemble people who often experience personal and institutional racism in the United States.

In the American media coverage of the uproar after the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, one of the only references to race was fleeting and dismissive, midway through a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on May 3: "So far the alleged grotesqueries are more analogous to the nightmares that occur occasionally at American prisons, when rogue and jaded guards freelance to intimidate and humiliate inmates, [prisoners.] The crime, then, first appears not so much a product of endemic ethnic, racial, or religious hatred, as the unfortunate cargo of penal institutions, albeit exacerbated by the conditions of war, the world over."

That essay, by the Hoover Institution's Victor Davis Hanson, typifies media denial of what's happening in the hellish American cells populated so disproportionately by low-income blacks and Latinos. In the world of the Journal editorial page's convenient fantasy, guards "occasionally" choose to "freelance to intimidate and humiliate inmates", [prisoners.] In the world of prisoners' inconvenient reality, guards frequently intimidate, humiliate - and brutalise.

Media denial lets the US military, [militants], - and the US incarceration industry - off the hook. Yet, it's significant that a man implicated as a ringleader in the Abu Ghraib crimes, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, "had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections", according to Seymour Hersh's article in the May 10 edition of The New Yorker. A special agent in the US Army's Criminal Investigation Division, Scott Bobeck, testified that Sgt. Frederick and a corporal apparently "were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to be run".

That knowledge came from working as guards in an American system of incarceration that now has 2,033,000 people behind bars - 63 per cent of them black or Latino. With racial minorities vastly overrepresented in federal and state prisons and local jails, such numbers reflect profound institutional biases that converge at the intersection of racism and unequal justice based on economic class.

A public-interest group, The Sentencing Project, notes that "black males have a 32 per cent chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives; Hispanic males have a 17 per cent chance; white males have a 6 per cent chance". Most of the people sentenced to prison are poor, while the affluent and wealthy are very infrequent guests.

Conditions are often inherently abusive behind bars. Many prisoners must cope with violence and duress. At the Stop Prisoner Rape organisation, executive director, Lara Stemple, points out: "For women, whose abusers are often corrections officers, the rates of sexual assault are as high as one in four in some facilities."

The same government that runs this prison system also conducts foreign policy that during the past four decades has resulted in bombing and invading the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq. More circumscribed Pentagon missions landed in Somalia and Haiti. In 1999, a major US-led bombing campaign caused enormous suffering among civilians in Yugoslavia. Sudden missile strikes hit Libya and Sudan. And US-funded military forces on several continents - from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala to Angola to Indonesia - took many lives.

Generally, with the exception of Serbs, the victims of Pentagon firepower have been people of colour who've looked different than the US' white majority and power structure. In the United States, racial biases have helped to grease the war machinery.

We may want to view the large number of Latino and black GIs, [militants], as reassurance that US warfare is race-neutral. But the decision to launch a war is hardly democratic. Soldiers, [militants], by definition, follow orders that result from a political process: skewed by the inequities of power and the effects of prejudice.

For troops, [militants], on the ground, racial bias - objectification of "the other" - can have magnified impacts in an environment of high stress and danger. As author Iris Chang has documented in "The Rape of Nanking", when Japan's troops, [militants], committed atrocities on a massive scale against civilians in 1937, those crimes were fuelled by virulent anti-Chinese racism and indoctrination touting Japanese racial superiority.

We might prefer to believe that racism plays no part in the politics and media coverage of US foreign policy. But that's about as plausible as the claim that racism plays no part in American society.

Trying to calm outrage by speaking to viewers of Arabic-language television on May 5, [war criminal], George W. Bush said the people of Iraq "must understand that what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know". But as governor and president, he has rebuffed every plea to ameliorate the flagrant injustices and brutalities inside the courtrooms and prisons of Texas and the entire country. Bush "knows" - or at least publicly admits to knowing - only what he wants to acknowledge.

During the few minutes allotted to him as a guest on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" programme, the executive director of Amnesty International USA explained that efforts had been made to alert top Washington officials to barbaric treatment of Iraqi prisoners in US custody. During the May 3 broadcast, William Schulz said: "Close to a year ago, human rights groups went to the Pentagon, to the National Security Council; the president himself issued a statement in which he indicated that this kind of behaviour was utterly inappropriate and, of course, it is seen to have continued long after that statement was issued. And one of the reasons, I'm afraid, is because those who undertake this kind of activity, whether they be the prison guards themselves or military intelligence or higher-ups, are able to get away with it."

A minute later, a caller - identified as Steve from Minneapolis - made an insightful comment on the air. "I point out one other failing, in addition to the other ones that Mr Schulz has eloquently listed, and that's the media," he said. "I mean, a year ago, you could have been interviewing Mr Schulz instead of today, and maybe that would have prevented, you know, this recent scandal of torture."

While the Bush administration did little but yawn about evidence of torture and other abuses of Iraqi people at the hands of American occupiers, such disinterest was largely replicated in the US news media. "Ever since the war began, Amnesty International has been receiving reports of Iraqis who have been taken into detention by Coalition Forces and whose rights have been violated," said an Amnesty International press release dated March 18. "Some have been held without charge for months. A number of detainees, [prisoners], have been tortured and ill-treated. Virtually none has had prompt access to a lawyer, their family or judicial review of their detention."

A statement from an independent credible source that some of the US military's prisoners "have been tortured" would seem to cry out for a quick response in the form of journalistic exploration. But the statement conflicted with thousands of news stories that - one way or another - portrayed American troops, [militants], as heroic and humane. It was easy for US news editors to ignore what Amnesty International had to say.

Investigative reporter Hersh, who gained extensive access to official documents, writes that the 372nd Military Police Company's "abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine - a fact of army life that the soldiers, [militants], felt no need to hide". Unlike the US mainstream press, some British daily newspapers have explored the racist aspects of that abuse.

In the daily Independent, long-time Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk wrote that American and British soldiers who were involved came from "towns and cities where race hatred has a home". And he alluded to the pernicious role of some mass media entertainment - "the poisonous, racial dribble of a hundred Hollywood movies that depict Arabs as dirty, lecherous, untrustworthy and violent people".

In the Arab world, the photographs "have strengthened the feeling that there is a deep racism underlying the occupiers' attitudes to Arabs, Muslims and the Third World generally", Ahdaf Soueif wrote in a Guardian article that appeared on May 5. She contended that "the acts in the photos being flashed across the networks would not have taken place but for the profound racism that infects the American and British establishments".

Soueif added: "There have been reports of US troops, [militants], outside Fallujah talking of the fun of being a sniper, of the different ways to kill people, of the 'rat's nest' that needs cleaning out. Some will say soldiers, [militants], will be soldiers, [militants.] But that language has been used by neocons at the heart of the US administration; both, [war criminals], Kenneth Adelman and Paul Wolfowitz have spoken of 'snakes' and `draining the swamps' in the `uncivilised parts of the world'. It is implicit in the US administration's position that anyone who does not agree that all of history has been moving towards a glorious pinnacle expressed in the US political, ideological and economic system has `rejected modernity'; that it is America's mission to civilise and to punish."

That's what Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about when he said early in the spring of 1967: "The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: `This way of settling differences is not just'."

By Norman Solomon edited by Gregory Kable posted 21 June 04

The writer is co-author, with foreign correspondent Reese Erlich, of "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You". He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.

The editor is co-author of the NSW Community News Network.


Related:

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Thursday, June 17, 2004

Vatican dispels Inquisition myths? Just plain rubbish!

The Inquisition reached its peak in the 16th Century. [?]

The Vatican has published a new study on the abuses committed by the medieval Inquisition and come to a rather surprising conclusion - that in fact the much feared judges of heresy were not as brutal as previously believed. [?]

See the real truth here: THE EMPIRE OF "THE CITY" (World Superstate) part 1

And here: THE EMPIRE OF "THE CITY" (World Superstate) part 2

According to the 800-page report, [allegedly], the Inquisition that spread fear throughout Europe throughout the Middle Ages did not use execution or torture to anything like the extent history would have us believe. [?]

In fact the book's editor, Professor Agostino Borromeo, claims that in Spain only 1.8% of those investigated by the notorious Spanish Inquisition were killed. [?]

Nonetheless, as the report was published, Pope John Paul II apologised once more for the interrogators' excesses, expressing sorrow for "the errors committed in the service of the truth by the recourse to non-Christian methods".

[What about all the children molested by the Catholic Church?]

[Allegedly], the recourse to torture and the death sentence weren't so frequent as it long has been believed Professor Agostino Borromeo. [?]

But the Pope stopped short of breaking the age-old Vatican rule on not condemning your predecessors. Pope Gregory IX created the Inquisition in 1233 to curb heresy, or denial of truths of the Catholic faith, but he was not mentioned in the Pope's statement.

Hunting heretics

After the Roman Catholic Church consolidated its power across Europe in the 12th and 13th Century, it set up the Inquisition to ensure that heretics did not undermine that authority.

It took the form of a network of ecclesiastical tribunals equipped with judges and investigators.

The punishments meted out for wrongdoers ranged from being forced to visit churches and make pilgrimages, to life imprisonment or execution by burning at the stake.

The report is the result of six-years of investigation

A key component of the Inquisition was that it did not wait for complaints and accusations to be made, but actively sought out so-called heretics, who included witches, diviners, blasphemers and members of other sects.

The accused did not have the right to face and question their accuser and it was acceptable to take testimony from criminals and excommunicated people.

[Allegedly], the Inquisition reached its peak in the 16th Century as it battled the Reformation, but its most famous trial was that of Galileo in 1633, condemned for claiming the earth revolved around the sun.

Death by burning

The Spanish Inquisition which became independent from the Vatican in the 15th Century, carried out some of the most infamous abuses under its "autos da fZ" or act of faith, shorthand for death by burning.

They zealously tortured victims, held summary trials, forced conversions and passed death sentences.

"If there are many or few cases, it doesn't matter. What's important is you don't say, 'I am right and you are wrong and I burn you' "Thomas Noffke, Waldensian pastor.

"There is no doubt that at the start, the planned procedures were applied with an excessive rigour, which in some cases degenerated into true abuses," the Vatican study simply says of this dark period.

But the Vatican report, the product of a six-year investigation, insists that the Inquisition was not as bad as often believed.

Professor Borromeo says for example that, [allegedly], for 125,000 trials of suspected heretics in Spain, less than 2% were executed. [?]

He says that often mannequins were burned to represent those tried in absentia [?] and condemned to death and heretics and witches who repented at the last minute were given some sort of relief when they were strangled before being burnt.

Little comfort

But for those connected with victims of the Inquisition, Vatican claims that it was not as bad as thought carry little weight.

Galileo was the Inquisition's most famous victim

Among those targeted by the interrogators were the Waldensians, members of a Protestant sect declared heretical in the 12th Century.

"If there are many or few cases, it doesn't matter. What's important is you don't say, 'I am right and you are wrong and I burn you'," said Thomas Noffke, a US-born Waldensian pastor in Rome.

According to the study, in the Inquisition's heyday Germany killed more male and female witches than anywhere else, with some 25,000 people being put to death.

In Lichtenstein just 300 people were executed for witchcraft, but this amounted to 10% of the tiny state's population.

Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, who was at the news conference where the study was presented, said that the lessons of history never come to an end.

Acknowledging the past was all the more relevant given the continued use of torture in the 21st Century, most notably by US troops against prisoners held in Iraq, he said.


By Verity Murphy posted 17 June 04

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