Fahrenheit 451

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 

24 February 2012

NOT SO FRIENDLY FIRE IN AFGHANISTAN

A soldier from the Afghan army, which is supposed to be fighting on the same side as the western occupation forces, shot dead two US military personnel in Afghanistan yesterday 23 February 2012.

The killing is presumed to be in retaliation for the burning – allegedly by mistake – of copies of the Koran a few days earlier by American soldiers at the US airbase at Bagram.

Violent protest has been raging in Afghanistan for four days now since the desecration of Islam’s holiest book.

Twenty-three people have been killed, including 12 today 24 February, and dozens injured, most of them Afghans, as security forces sought to restore calm.

Today, the bloodiest day of the protests so far, hundreds of Afghans marched towards the palace of Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, while on the other side of the capital protesters hoisted the white flag of the Taliban. Chanting “Death to America!” and “Long live Islam!” protesters also threw rocks at police in Kabul, while Afghan army helicopters circled above.

Yesterday demonstrators burned cars outside a Norwegian base in the north of the country, while in Kapisa province north-east of Kabul a French compound was attacked.

In Jalalabad protesters burned an effigy of Obama and oil tankers were set on fire.

One protester, 18-year-old Ajmal, told Reuters: “When the Americans insult us to this degree, we will join the insurgents.”

According to the BBC report on 22 February, the US embassy in Kabul was on lockdown with all travel suspended.

US President Barack Obama has sent a letter of apology to President Karzai.

Kabul resident Mohammad Naseer Malikzai told the BBC: “The American apology is useless.”

The BBC’s Andrew North, in Kabul, said that after previous incidents, many Afghans find it hard to understand how US forces could have allowed the Koran to be burned. Muslims consider the Koran the literal word of God and treat each book with deep reverence.

Only ten months ago, in April 2011, the news that US pastor Terry Jones had burned a copy Koran in Florida sparked protests that lasted several days. Seven foreign UN workers were killed and 13 Afghans.

The latest US gaffe comes only weeks after uproar followed the publication of a video showing four US marines pissing on a group of dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. At least one of the dead fighters is covered in blood. A man’s voice is heard on the video saying: “Have a great day, buddy.”

Meanwhile, a report by Emma Graham-Harrison in today’s Guardian newspaper, says that about half a million Afghans have fled their homes because of violence.

According to her report, conflict is spreading even to once relatively peaceful parts of Afghanistan and UN figures show that last year UN more than 3,000 civilians died across the country.

“We left because of war, and the bombardment from American planes,” said Wakhil Khoja Muhammad, who three years ago abandoned his home in southern Sangin, one of the most fought-over districts in the country, for a makeshift camp in Kabul.

 

 

Afghanistan is occupied by the International Security Assistance Force, a United Nations-mandated military alliance led by the US and including troops from up to 46 countries, including the United Kingdom. The occupation and accompanying war has now lasted for over 10 years. The US alone is thought to have about 90,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan, including 20,000 marines. The foreign troops have been fighting al-Qaida, the Taliban and other native opponents of foreign military occupation.

Antigone1984 comments:

Oh dear!

 

Time to go home, guys.

 

You would think that after more than 10 years in Afghanistan – and nearly nine in Iraq – the US occupation forces would have discarded their initial preconception that the Muslim world was “all towel-heads and sand” and have somehow cottoned on to the fact that Kabul was not, after all, just a poorer version of Columbus, Ohio.

 

But no.

 

Cultural sensitivity has never been a major priority for military occupation forces anywhere and it seems that the US in particular just doesn’t get it.

 

To its cost, one might add.

 

Following the Koran burning incident, the top US officer in Afghanistan, General John Allen, has apparently said that all foreign troops there will be trained within the next two weeks on how to identify, store and handle religious material.

 

Too little, too late. The horse has bolted and they are proposing to close the stable door.

 

Tough luck, dudes.

 

You lost Iraq and now Afghanistan is fast slipping away.

 

Time to check out and head for the hills.

 

The Rockies, we mean, not the Hindu Kush.

 

Unbelievably, Washington’s principal concern is said to be the fear that the latest incident could damage its efforts to cut a deal with Kabul to keep “some” US troops in Afghanistan after the scheduled retreat in 2014.

 

Yes, that’s right. They actually want to stay on.

 

The imperial mindset is such that they are incapable of believing that the long-suffering peoples of the countries they occupy just can’t wait to see the back of them.

 

The US Empire has military bases in more than 150 countries. It needs them to maintain its military supremacy and suppress any threats to its global dominance.

 

Which is why the Yankees never want to go home.

 

 

 

IRAQ CONVULSED BY VIOLENCE

Meanwhile, not far away in Iraq, at least 55 people were killed across the country yesterday 23 February in attacks mostly aimed at security forces. According to a report by Associated Press, the apparently co-ordinated bombings and shootings occurred over a few hours in Baghdad, where most of the deaths occurred, and in 11 other cities. Government offices and restaurants were hit and there was a blast near a primary school. At least 225 people were wounded. Iraq’s interior ministry blamed the violence on al-Qaida.

Readers of Antigone1984 might like to reconsider this extract from our post “Lessons from Mencius for Warring States” published on 1 January 2012:

The Iraq War has ended after nearly nine years – the length of the Trojan War – with the US army retreating ignominiously to Kuwait, its request to continue to use Iraq as a base for further military operations being rejected by the very puppet dictatorship it put in place. The US leaves behind an Iraq torn apart by sectarian and resource-linked strife and under the sway of an Iran that is currently Washington’s public enemy number one. The war saw 4500 US soldiers killed and 32 000 wounded.  Up to 600 000 Iraqis died, while an estimated 3.5 million Iraqis were displaced. Highlights of the conflict included the alleged war crimes committed at the siege of Fallujah in November 2004, the US torture factory at Abu Ghraib, the dehumanization of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, alleged British torture in Basra, etc.

The war in Iraq confirmed widespread predictions that it would be a replay of the 1964-75 Vietnam War (the US massacre of civilians at My Lai, the carpet bombing of Hué, etc).  The Americans, like the Bourbons, had learned nothing.

On 15 December 2011, at a departure ceremony in Baghdad, the US furled its flag. According to the Guardian newspaper (16 December), “The prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and the president, Jalal Talabani, did not turn up to the ceremony, with uniformed US soldiers belatedly moved into seats carrying the two Iraqi leaders’ names.” It was the ultimate humiliation for a nation which had spent an estimated one trillion dollars on the war. At a ceremony at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on 14 December 2011, US President Barack Obama told a military audience that the country they were now leaving represented “an extraordinary achievement” and said that “everything that American troops have done in Iraq – all the fighting, all the dying, the bleeding and the building and the training and the partnering, all of it has landed to this moment of success”, adding that “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq” (Guardian, 15 December). The next day, 15 December, at the US leaving ceremony in Baghdad, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta told the departing soldiers: “You will leave with great pride, lasting pride, secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people to cast tyranny aside.”

A few days later Iraqi vice-president Tariq al-Hashimi fled from Baghdad to semi-independent Iraqi Kurdistan after Prime Minister al-Maliki had branded him a terrorist. At the same time, Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq was warned by al-Maliki to stay away from the Iraqi Parliament. Finally, on 22 December 16 bombs exploded in Baghdad. By the end of the day, 63 people had been killed and 185 injured (Guardian, 23 December).

This was the “sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq” that America was leaving after nearly nine years of war.

 

———–

Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, Military, Politics, USA | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Eurozone desperate to avoid plebiscite

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

23 February 2012

 

EUROZONE DESPERATE TO AVOID REFERENDUM IN IRELAND

The following text includes extracts, in italic type, from an article by Denis Staunton in The Irish Times today 23 February 2012. Antigone1984 has highlighted some of the text in bold.

Germany’s Minister for European Affairs has confirmed that European Union negotiators sought to design the euro zone fiscal compact in such a way to avoid a referendum in Ireland.

Michael Link was visiting Dublin yesterday 22 February 2012 for talks with ministers, officials and members of the Oireachtas (the Irish Legislature).

According to The Irish Times, Mr Link said that Ireland’s constitutional requirements would also help determine the draft, at the European Union summit on 1/2 March 2012, of rules governing the role of the European Court of Justice in enforcing the new pact.

“Also there, we are trying to design everything that is on the table in a way which would be okay in the eyes of the [Irish] Attorney General and the Irish Constitution so that no referendum is needed,” he told the paper. 

When asked if the fiscal compact agreed in Brussels last month had been designed in such a way that it would not need a referendum in Ireland, Mr Link replied: “Exactly”.

The German minister’s comments appear to contradict the Taoiseach [Prime Minister]’s denial in the Dáil [House of Representatives] this month of a report in this newspaper that parts of the pact were explicitly drafted to give the Government a chance to avoid a referendum.

 

ANTIGONE1984 COMMENTS:

1. As to the ferocious opposition throughout Euroland to the holding of referendums, We refer readers to this passage from our post “Not only in Ireland….!Part 4: Democracy” published on 24 January 2012:

“…..what  the EU and its member states do not want under any circumstances is to consult their citizens to find out whether the people at large approve of the austerity policies that are being enacted in their name and, arguably, to their detriment. Not only in Ireland is there a blunt unwillingness to seek the views of the electorate.  To date, throughout the Europe Union, no government has dared stage a referendum on the cutbacks. They are afraid, rightly, that they might get the answer “No”.  Which is precisely what has happened in the past – not least in Ireland – on the rare occasions that member state governments have put EU policy to a plebiscite. Instead, governments prefer, naturally, to have their policies rubber-stamped by puppet parliaments in thrall to the partitocracy.”

 

2. As to the Irish Prime Minister’s denial ’s denial in the Dáil [House of Representatives] this month of a report in The Irish Times that parts of the euro zone fiscal pact were explicitly drafted to give the Government a chance to avoid a referendum, we refer readers to this passage from our post “What would Gandhi have said?” published on 30 January 2012:

“Politicians, understandably, regularly come out as the least popular category when people are polled to give their views as to which occupations they most admire. This blog has had a long and in-depth acquaintance with politicians of all stripes, both nationally and internationally. Its conclusion is that in general, with a very few honourable exceptions, politicians are the scum of the earth. Just as the scum rises to the top, so politicians have risen to the summit of the political cesspool. They represent not the people but themselves and only themselves. The sole aim of their political activity is to secure personal preferment. It is often claimed that politicians are liars, that they do not tell the truth. The blog does not believe this. The blog does not believe that they are liars. To be a liar you have to know what the truth is. The politician has no idea what the truth is. He or she does not know what the word means. To a politician, “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” is defined as whatever he himself happens to be saying at any given moment in time. It need bear no relations to the facts nor to whatever that same politician has said in the past. Nor need it bear any relation to what he or she says two minutes later. As we have just suggested, to a politician the truth varies according to whatever suits his personal interests at the moment he is speaking.”

————–

 

Posted in Economics, Europe, Germany, Ireland, Politics | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Ἂριστον μὲν ὕδωρ³

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 

22 February 2012

WATER IS BEST

Quid lapide durius, quid aqua mollius? Verumtamen gutta cavat lapidem non vi sed sæpe cadendo.

What is harder than stone, what is softer than water? Yet the drop hollows out the stone, not by force, but by constantly falling.

Western saying¹

 

天下莫柔弱於水,而攻堅強者莫之能勝…。弱之勝強,柔之勝剛,天下莫不知,莫能行…

Nothing under heaven is softer or more yielding than water; but when it attacks things hard and resistant there is not one of them that can prevail….That the yielding conquers the resistant and the soft conquers the hard is a fact known by all men, yet utilised by none…

 Eastern saying²

 

₁ Remark attributed to Richard (d.1172), a Scottish monk at the former medieval Abbey of St Victor in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The saying is a medieval amplification of an abbreviated version “gutta cavat lapidem” (The drop hollows out the stone) much quoted by classical authors (eg Lucretius, Ovid and Tibullus).

₂ 道德經 Dao De Jing (also transliterated as Tao Te Ching): The Classic of the Way and its Power. Around 250BC. Chapter 78.

₃ “Water is best”. Pindar (518-438BC). Olympian Odes, Book 1, Line 1.

—————-

Posted in China, France, Greece, Italy | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Germany gets a new Land – Griechenland

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 

21 February 2012

GREEK PRIME MINISTER “VERY HAPPY” AT BEING HUMILIATED

Until last night Germany had 16 Länder. Last night it got a new Land – Griechenland.

Financial panzers from the German treasury will now oversee the Maximos Mansion, the official seat of the Greek Prime Minister, and tell him what he can do and what he cannot do.

This was all agreed last night, not in Athens, but at the headquarters of the German-dominated European Empire in Brussels.

And how did the Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, an unelected career banker, react.

He said he was “very happy”.

Greece has about 11 million people. Papademos must be the only Greek who is happy at the humiliation that was heaped on his country last night by the financial barons of Northern Europe (the Germans, the Dutch, the Finns and the Austrians).

Papademos added that “today is a historic day for the Greek economy”.

He was right, in a way. It was the day that Greece waved the white flag and surrendered control of its economy to Brussels.

Blogger Zoe Mavroudi tweeted: “Every time Papademos says ‘historic day’, please replace ‘historic’ with ‘black’.”

The terms of surrender handed by Brussels to Papademos last night include the instalment in Athens of a permanent detachment of eurozone commissars with the task of supervising the Greek economy.

Retired nurse Ioulia Ioannou, aged 70, told Reuters news agency in Athens: “For the first time, I’m embarrassed to say I’m Greek”.

Talking of the planned surveillance, monitoring and supervision of Greece, the Dutch finance minister Jan Kees de Jager apparently tried to assuage wounded Greek sensibilities. According to the Guardian website, he said: “Not that the northern Europeans distrust the Greeks, or anything.”

The eurozone finance ministers agreed – in principle – to lend Greece another €130 billion. An earlier bail-out of €110 billion eighteen months ago had proved insufficient to prevent Greece defaulting on its massive debts and crashing out of the eurozone. In exchange for the new bail-out, Athens must impose ferocious new austerity measures, involving €3.3 billion of cutbacks in salaries, pensions, health and defence, on the already-hard suffering Greek population.

The deal also requires private holders of Greek debt, such commercial banks, to agree to a “voluntary” hair-cut (ie loss) of at least 53.5% of the Greek bonds that they hold. However, private bond-holders who refuse to agree to a “voluntary” hair-cut are to be given a “compulsory” one. A bill to that effect is to be tabled shortly in the Greek parliament.

Of course, to any normal rational person a “compulsory” haircut is a default. If Greece forces bond-holders to forgo more than half the money they are owed, that is a default by any definition of the term. The courts are going to have a field day with this one.

The deal is supposed to enable Greece to slash its public debt from 160% of GDP to 120.5% by 202o.

Anastasis Chrisopoulos, a 31-year-old Athens taxi driver, is not impressed by this timescale. He told Reuters: “Things will only get worse. We have reached a point where we’re trying to figure out how to survive just the next day, let alone the next 10 days, the next month, the next year.”

Protesters opposed to the bailout have been rioting in the streets for months.

But one might perhaps have expected the business community to be in favour.

Yet here, speaking about the bail-out to the BBC, is Constantine Michalos, president of the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry: “The funds that are coming in are not staying in Greece, are not being invested in Greece, are not here to help the Greeks get out of this crisis. It’s simply to repay the banks, so that they can retain their balance profit side.”

Blogger ‘Bradford’ took the same line in a comment to the BBC: “This is not bailing out Greece. It is saving the Euro project and bailing out French and German banks.”

The deal is expected to be rubber-stamped by tame legislators in the Greek Parliament (Boule) tomorrow.

However, it has also to get the green light next week from the German and Dutch parliaments.

And then the Greek government has savagely to deflate its economy in line with the orders it has received from Brussels.

However, as Antigone1984 said yesterday, most financial analysts appear to agree that the savage deflation imposed on the Greeks as a condition for getting this new bail-out mean that the Greek economy will not be able to grow enough to enable the country to pay off its debts anyway.

According to the Guardian website today, Brian Reading of Lombard Street Research has dubbed today’s deal a “suicide pact”. Sony Kapoor of the economic thinktank Re-Define, is convinced that Greece will soon need a third bail-out.

The eurozone ministers agreed the bail-out last night on the basis of conclusions reached by a troika negotiating the bail-out with Greece – the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

According to the Guardian website, Luxembourg finance minister Jean-Claude Juncker, chair of the eurozone meeting, announcing the deal, said: “This new programme provides a comprehensive blueprint for putting the public finances and the economy of Greece back on a sustainable footing and hence for safeguarding financial stability in Greece and in the euro area as a whole.”

However, a confidential report by the troika, which was leaked today to The Financial Times, appears to undercut this optimism and make one wonder how the eurozone ministers could have possibly agreed to go ahead with the bail-out.

Again according to the Guardian website, the report paints a dire picture of the Greek economy, warning that it was likely to miss its targets and predicting that Greece’s banks would require a larger recapitalisation programme.

It even admitted that Greece’s fiscal outlook had deteriorated so much that its debt-to-GDP ratio could still be 160% by 2020!

“Given the risks, the Greek program may thus remain accident-prone, with questions about sustainability hanging over it,” it added.

The final word might be given to a blogger called “The Bandit”. Commenting on the BBC website, he said: “Another day and yet another deal! 

It’s time for the Eurozone and all those connected with Greek lending to call it a day and face up to reality instead of continuing to pile more cash into a dead donkey.

 All pre-Eurozone countries existed before the Euro and they can exist again.”

The six countries signing the seminal European Economic Community Treaty in Rome in 1957 declared in its preamble that they were “determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”.

An “ever closer union” can be interpreted in many ways. To the Greeks today it means a bear hug.

The Northern Bear crushing the life out of the Greek Evzone.

————–

Posted in Austria, Europe, Finland, Germany, Greece, Netherlands | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Anyone for Baden-Baden?

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

20 February 2012

GRAECA FIDES, NULLA FIDES

This is a German quotation translated into Latin. It is attributed to the current German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. It means “you can’t trust the Greeks whatever they say”.

Schäuble is scheduled to meet with the other eurozone finance ministers today Monday 20 February 2012 to decide whether to bail out the heavily indebted Greek economy for the second time in only 18 months. They got €110bn last time. Now they need another €130 billion – at least. Schäuble has just got a written pledge from the two main Greek political parties promising that they will do whatever he tells them to do by way of spending cuts. But Mr Schäuble is not a happy bunny. He does not appear to be 100% convinced that the Greeks will come good on their pledges. He has made it clear that he is unwilling to pour money into “a bottomless pit”. German money, at any rate. His deputy Steffen Kampeter is quoted as saying: “We expect the Greeks to rise to their responsibilities. This Monday we will see whether Greece delivers or whether we will be forced to decide on another course of action, one that is not desired.” Now what would that be? Sounds a bit like a threat to us. Maybe a threat to kick Greece out of the eurozone? Who knows? This is what is known as “solidarity” among the Europeans. Think snakepit. That’s probably what they mean by “ever closer union”. Moreover, as you can imagine, the Greeks are not happy bunnies either. And that goes right up to the top. Greek President Karolos Papoulias has reportedly said: “Who is Mr Schäuble to ridicule Greece? I don’t accept insults to my country by Mr Schäuble.” Ouch! Today’s meeting should be fun! With any luck, it could well end in fisticuffs! In any case, most financial analysts appear to agree that, whatever the outcome today, the savage deflation imposed on the Greeks as a condition for getting the bail-out mean that the Greek economy will not grow enough to enable the country to pay off its debts anyway. It’s a catch-22 situation. Damned if I do and damned if I don’t.  I’d say that lot are up the creek without a paddle! Many Germans take their summer holidays in Greece.  We can’t imagine they will be very popular there this year. Particularly Mr Schäuble. Best give Naxos a wide berth this time. Anyone for Baden-Baden?

—————

Posted in Economics, Europe, Germany, Greece, Politics | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Cimon retaliates, Ephialtes murdered

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

19 February 2012

DEMOCRACY ABOLISHED IN GREECE

Democracy has been officially abolished in Greece, the cradle of western democracy.

Both main political parties – the Panhellenic “Socialist” Movement (Pasok) and the conservative New Democracy (ND) party – have signed statements pledging  that – no matter what happens in the Greek parliamentary elections in two months’ time – they will not renege on an austerity package just approved in the Greek parliament (Boule).

On 12 Febuary 2012 the Boule, which is controlled by Pasok and ND, ignored mass protests and voted by 199 votes to 74 to adopt the savage cuts in public spending demanded by Brussels, Frankfurt and Washington in exchange for an international bail-out loan to stave off national bankruptcy.

The troika negotiating the bail-out with Greece – the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – made it crystal-clear to the Greek party bosses, George Papandreou of Pasok and  Antonis Samaras of ND, that unless they signed a pledge that the austerity measures were irreversible, regardless of the democratic vote in April,  there would be no bail-out.

Papandreou, who is slated to lose the election anyway, apparently signed unconditionally but – according to a report in the Guardian newspaper on 16 February 2012 – Samaras, whom opinion polls expect to win most seats in the next Boule,  added to his statement the following rider: “Policy modifications might be required to guarantee the full programme’s implementation. We intend to bring these issues to discussion along with viable policy alternatives.”

It remains to be seen whether the eurozone ministers who are due to meet tomorrow 20 February will agree to gloss over Samaras’s weasel codicil and give their okay to the bail-out.

It also remains to be seen, given popular revulsion at the austerity package,  whether Samaras will in fact do as well in the April election as the opinion polls have been suggesting. Given the turmoil in Greece over the past couple of years, it would be a wise man who could predict the outcome. The hard left, for instance, have been threatening an upset. We shall see.

The situation in Greece proves the truth of the old adage: “If voting changed anything, it wouldn’t be allowed.” The troika is allowing the elections in Greece to go ahead provided that they don’t change anything.

Some 2500 years ago – in Athens in 462 BC – the powers of the Areopagus, the  conservative-leaning judicial and political council composed of elder statesmen and old freddies and championed by the influential military commander Cimon, were transferred to democratic institutions  (popular courts, elected councilors and an assembly of all citizens) in a reform engineered by Ephialtes (who was murdered for his pains in 457 BC, Cimon living on until 449 BC).

ATHENS, 2012

Ephialtes! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

the Hellenic Democratia  hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient Grecian dower

Of inward happiness………

 

 

With apologies to Milton and Wordsworth.

———————-

Posted in Economics, Europe, Germany, Greece, Literature, Politics, USA | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Homo politicus est

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

18 February 2012

MAN A SOCIAL ANIMAL

“ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῶιον………‘ο δὲ μὴ δυνάμενος κοινωνεῖν ἢ μηθὲν δεόμενος δι᾽ αὐτάρκειαν….ἢ θηρίον ἢ θεός.”

“Man is by nature a political animal…..He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.”

Aristotle (384-322 BC). Politics. Book 1,  1253a,  2-3 and 27-29.

—————–

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Where Engels Fears to Tread

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

17 February 2012

FROM OSCAR TO STALIN

“You wrote for the New Statesman? What did you write about?”

“Gramophone records”

“To sit on the fence is to stand on the wrong side of it – line him  up, Gollancz.”

“Yes, Commissar.”

This nugget, which still has political traction, is extracted from ‘Where Engels Fears to Tread’, a mock review of a non-existent book ‘From Oscar to Stalin’ by a fictitious author Christian de Clavering who progresses from Eton, Christ Church and the Café Royal to his ultimate destiny as a Communist  Party Commissar. The review is included in a collection of essays, ‘The Condemned Playground’ (1946) by the English literary luminary Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), who based de Clavering on his Eton and Oxford contemporary, the aesthete Brian Christian de Claiborne Howard (1905-1958). We have taken the liberty of changing Connolly’s “be” to “stand” on the grounds that it reads better – something of which Connolly would assuredly have approved were he still alive.  There’s not much he can do about it now, in any case.

In an interesting aside, of no particular relevance to today’s thought for the day, Wikipedia credits Brian Christian de Claiborne Howard with coining the remark “Anybody seen in a bus over the age of 30 has been a failure in life”, whereas these days the quip is almost always said (wrongly) to have originated with Margaret Thatcher, who was UK Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. The remark is said to have come into wider parlance when used by Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, in her memoir ‘Grace and Favour’ (1961).

 —————–

Posted in Literature, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Holocaust and the Palestinians

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

16 February 2012

Technical note: we are currently having difficulty connecting to the internet. Until the problem is resolved, the quality and regularity of our postings may be affected.

We continue the process – started on 30 January 2012 – of publishing as posts selected extracts, sometimes updated, from our Mission Statement. Today we consider Israel.

THE HOLOCAUST DOES NOT JUSTIFY ISRAELI PERSECUTION OF THE PALESTINIANS

Antigone1984 believes that the systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews by the Nazis in World War II was the greatest crime in the history of humanity. This is the first thing to be said. We stick by it whatever else we may say on the subject of Israel. However, we condemn without reservation the persecution by Israel of the Palestinian Arabs. It is a well-established psychological fact that those who suffer abuse subsequently abuse others. This is what explains psychologically, we believe, the brutality of the Israeli Government and Army towards the Palestinian Arabs. The Israelis are avenging themselves on the Palestinian Arabs  for the suffering that they themselves endured in the Holocaust. But it was not the Palestinian Arabs who were responsible for the Holocaust. We have consistently maintained that, if there were any justice in the world, the State of Israel would have been founded in Bavaria. This is a view that receives no coverage in the western media. It is a view that has been censured by the BBC. The Zionists wanted land and they wanted it in Palestine. At one point, in the heyday of the British Empire, when Britain ruled the waves,  the British Government is said to have offered the Zionists land in Kenya. But the offer was reportedly spurned. The Zionists wanted land in Palestine, the ancestral homeland of the Jews. This was understandable: what people, after two millennia of wandering, would not want to settle again in the land of their distant forefathers? However, there was a little local difficulty. Palestine was already occupied – by the Arabs – who had happened to live there for the two millennia in question.  So the Arabs had to go. What we have seen in Palestine since the foundation of the State of Israel is a progressive land grab. It is not justifiable on the grounds of what the Nazis did to the Jews.

———————-

Posted in Germany, Israel, Justice, Military, Politics, UN, USA | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

War and the USA

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 15 February 2012

We continue the process – started on 30 January 2012 – of publishing as posts selected extracts, sometimes updated, from our Mission Statement. Today we attack the warfare culture of the United State.

KILLER NATION

Antigone1984 believes that the greatest danger to world peace comes from the United States and its satraps. The USA is the killer nation. It is not for nothing that every second film that comes out of Hollywood shows a killer with a gun in his hand. The aim of US foreign policy is to make the rest of the planet subservient to the interests of the US Government (we are careful not to say “the interests of the US people”). It is for this reason that the US has military bases in more than 150 countries. But there is nothing new in the US appetite for war. The country owes its existence to emigrants from Europe driving the native American peoples off their ancestral lands and massacring them if they resisted (compare the seizure by Israel, “the 51st State of the Union”,  of Palestinian land since 1948). Killing by the US continues to this day with the slaughter of Pakistani civilians and soldiers by remote-controlled US drones operated from mainland America. My Lai, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Baghdad, Kabul: these are just a few of the deadly landmarks of recent US invasion and domination. Torture and rendition for the purposes of torture are the Empire’s stock-in-trade. In 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama developed a new niche in the killer market: the targeted assassination of suspects without trial (Osama bin Laden and the US/Yemeni citizen Anwar al-Awlaki). So  much for the rule of law, which is supposed to constitute the bedrock of western society, that which distinguishes us from the barbarians outside the gate. The reality is that the rule of law is dispensed with when it clashes with realpolitik.

The US is also a major killer of its own citizens. According to Wikipedia, it ranked  fifth among the countries of the world for the number of judicial murders carried out in 2010. The world’s number one superpower came next after such stalwart champions of human rights as the People’s Republic of China, Iran, North Korea and Yemen. The blog believes that no nation which commits judicial murder is civilised. By this token, the USA is firmly outside the pale of civilisation.

By way of a postscript to our condemnation of the USA as a killer national, consider this news item in the UK’s Guardian newspaper for 1 December 2011: “An Arizona gun club is offering a chance for children and their families to pose for photographs with Father Christmas while holding weaponry such AK-47 rifles and grenade launchers.”

The US drive towards world domination is aided and abetted by its “allies”, satellite nations whose governments, bribed or browbeaten, are too cowardly to stand up to the bullying of Uncle Sam.

Why do we single out the United States? After all, other nations also behave brutally with a cavalier disregard for human rights. For instance: Russia, China, India and Saudi Arabia. We single out the United States because it is the most powerful state of all. As of now, it is the only superpower. And of the only superpower, the leader of the western world, the world has a right to expect great things. It has been sorely disappointed. The United States invariably acts on the basis of narrow national self-interest, as defined by the political clique which happens to be in power in Washington at any particular time. We are not talking here about ordinary Americans, with whom we have no quarrel. We are talking about the US political establishment. However, some might think that a nation gets the government it deserves. After all, someone voted these guys into office.

 ——————

Posted in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Military, Politics, Torture, UN, USA | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment