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I C T U R E O F T H E D
A Y
In an essay entitled
"Eyes wide shut?" published in the April 30,
2005 issue of The New Scientist, Patricia Churchland
tackles the ever-thorny problem of consciousness. In brief,
she argues that neuroscience will provide the key to understanding
consciousness as it elaborates four conditions:
- We understand how macro events emerge from the properties
and organisations of the micro events;
- novel phenomena can be predicted;
- the system can be manipulated;
- and it is clear at what level of brain organisation
the phenomenon resides.
In the coded language of neuroscience, the term "macro
events" refers to consciousness, which, according
to Churchland and many, many others, "emerges"
from the "properties and organisations of the micro
events, that is, the workings of the brain". In other
words, consciousness emerges from evolution when the appropriate
level of complexity is reached in the nervous system.
It is neither the cause, the foundation, nor the prime
mover of that evolution.
Churchland admits that "science is moving forward
on the problem, but has not yet nailed down the answers
- and no one really knows what the answers will look like."
She admits, as well, that "neuroscience is a very
young science, still in search of its own exoskeleton
- the fundamental principles that explain how nervous
systems work. Although an enormous amount is known about
the structure and function of individual neurons, how
macro effects emerge from populations of neurons remains
poorly understood."
Fine so far. She sets out her ideas and her belief that
consciousness will ultimately be explained through work
on neuroscience: "a theory of consciousness will
co-evolve with an understanding of the fundamentals of
brain function."
But as she admits, we aren't there yet, so she cannot
know this to be the case. It is, one might suggest, an
intuition.
The trouble is that Ms Churchland spends a large portion
of her essay criticising intuition in the domain of consciousness
research, as long as these intuitions do not agree with
her own. One in particular receives a severe dose of ridicule:
Among these intuitions is the idea that there could
be a zombie like me in all respects - all, save that
it lacks qualia.
A lack of qualia means it doesn't have the "experience"
of redness when it sees a London bus, but like me would
say: "Look! There is a red London bus." Incredibly
(I'm not making this up) zombie-me would have exactly
the same conversations about conscious experience that
I do. For example, we both say: "When I dream,
I am aware of actions, such as flying, but not aware
of how bizarre those actions are." The difference
is that zombie-me has neither experiences nor qualia
to talk about.
Could there be such a zombie? "Perhaps not,"
says the purveyor of zombies. "It is a thought-experiment-zombie."
Fine. But so what? "Well, the mere imagining of
such a thing entails that consciousness cannot be a
property of the brain..." Good grief. As a colleague
once muttered in despair, this argument is not even
wrong.
Dennett is right about most of the philosophically
pampered intuitions, especially those bravely predicting
that "science can never, ever explain consciousness".
These intuitions and the arguments they spawn have been
repeatedly exposed as confusions, fallacies, circularities,
failures of imagination, arguments from ignorance and
just plain bunk.
Ouch! Unfortunately, Ms Churchland's belief that the
answers will come from neuroscience is as much an intuition
as her zombie example. Moreover, there is an awful lot
of evidence that supports the existence of such zombies.
It has been gathered through observation, it is repeatable,
and it allows one to make predictions. This evidence would
also be dismissed without a thought by Ms Churchland because
it is not "scientific" according to her unfortunately
limited idea of what constitutes, or could constitute,
science.
Could her limited view of science be related to the question
of the existence of zombies?
First, let us do a thought experiment. Imagine a philosopher
and neuroscientist who is herself a zombie. Her standards
of what constitutes experience and an inner life would
be limited to zombie experiences. When a non-zombie described
his or her experiences to her, she would interpret them
according to her own experiences. Those aspects that were
foreign to her would either be reduced to fit her own
experiences or would be rejected as impossible.
Isn't this what we see over and over again in the split
between the materialists and the idealists in philosophy,
in the split between science and mysticism, in the split
between those who believe that there is nothing after
death and those who have a deep conviction that there
is? One would think that, if we really are all just 'one
race', and after thousands of years of argument from both
sides, the question would be resolved one way or another.
Can we take the lack of resolution as evidence that the
question goes to the heart of human experience?
Interestingly, many of those who would argue there is
something more to consciousness than can be explained
by neuroscience have the conviction that a scientific
answer could be found if science was to open up its horizons,
while those who hold the opposing view completely dismiss
the need for science to incorporate lessons from other
domains. This suggests to us that the experience or consciousness
of the hard-science proponents is more restricted than
that of those who are more open. The hard-science proponents'
experience might be a subset of the experience of the
others. This implies that while the "zombie"
scientists could never understand the other group, the
other group could understand the limits of the zombies.
The distinction between zombies and others is the distinction
that we draw between 'organic
portals' and 'potentially souled individuals'. What
is missing from the scientific and philosophical debate
in academia is the understanding that the difference in
experience between the two types of people has to do with
their ability to perceive what the esoteric Tradition
calls the 'A' and 'B' influences, not their different
experiences of the colour red. The zombies, or 'organic
portals', are only equipped to perceive the 'A' influences.
These are the trappings of the material world, the influences
that are related to our basic desires for sex, food, and
security. Grand and elaborate scientific and philosophical
theories can be formulated based only upon those influences.
These theories can be complex and accurately describe
the world from the point of view of the 'A' influences,
but they are missing a part of the world that the organic
portal does not experience and therefore does not even
recognise is missing. For them, these theories do take
in all the available data because the rest of the data
is not available to them because the data falls outside
of their range of perceptions.
Unfortunately, as we have discussed elsewhere,
the very capacities that form the basis for a belief in
the afterlife or in the reality of there being "something
more" to life can often be hindrances in getting
ahead in our world. In this case, those who hold the reigns
of power and decision-making, including within the sciences,
would tend to be those of one persuasion, the 'zombie'
or 'organic portal' persuasion. Their standards would
be the standards of society, and therefore those who have
a larger experience would be continually forced to reduce
their knowledge to conform to the standards of those who
set the rules, or who hand out the science grants.
And that is, in fact, what we see around us. Scientists
who wish to investigate data that fall outside of the
realm of experience of the zombie, or organic portal,
are ridiculed, their grants are denied, and if they push
hard enough, their careers can be ruined. The dominant
scientific paradigm is as entrenched as the belief of
Bush's supporters that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction
and that he was involved in 9/11.
Churchland ends her essay with the following:
But the unglamorous truth is that science will come
to understand the components of consciousness in pretty
much the same way it has come to understand the nature
of life.
And that is precisely what worries us.
In the following round up of recent news with commentary,
notice your reaction to the various stories and when you
find yourself asking the question: "how can a section
of humanity engage so apparently carelessly in such inhuman
acts?", realise that this question goes to the very
heart of the reality of human life on earth and leads
us to perhaps the "secret of secrets" that has
been the sole purview of certain secret societies and
groups over the millennia. |
News Round Up |
Signs of the Times
Analysis |
Painting a stark portrait
of just where the Bush regime's priorities lie, three
US government departments went out of their way to protect
ducklings in Washington DC last week while, at about
the same time, the offspring of Iraqi civilians were
being peppered
with bullets by the US military. As Cheney repeats
the tried and tested mind-numbing mantra that al
Qaeda is still 'very active', to wit:
"The enemy that appeared on 9/11 is wounded
and off-balance, and on the run -- yet still very
active, still seeking recruits, and still trying to
find ways to hit us,"
(is anyone getting tired of this hubris yet?) Dick
continues:
"despite efforts to improve security, "America
is safer, but we are not yet safe,"
"safe" being the point in time when people
like Dick and George have finished their little game
of global domination and half the planet, and half its
population, are destroyed,
Condi Rice has decided to quit trying to publically
"terrorise" (i.e. to make into a terrorist)
Venezuela President Hugo Chavez and take a leaf out
of the CIA's book and go undercover:
Rice
Ducks Venezuela Spat After Attacks Backfire
Sun May 1, 2005
By Saul Hudson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice has discarded her failing tactic of confronting
Venezuela publicly in favor of working behind
the scenes in Latin America against a country she
says threatens the region's stability.
And just in case you were wondering about the nature
of the 'threat' that Chavez poses to 'the region' and,
by implication, the USA, consider the following list
of 'evil' policies currently being implemented by the
Venezuelan government:
The
Venezuelan government is creating three new ministries
to address economic and social development needs,
in an attempt to translate President Hugo Chávez's
triumph in the Aug. 15 recall referendum and the current
windfall oil profits into further advances
and improvements for the poor.
Chávez announced the creation of ministries
of housing and food, and of a third that he said "could
be called the ministry of 'the people's power',"
which will link the roughly 20 public agencies whose
mission is to provide small loans and microcredits
to individuals, companies and productive enterprises.
Chávez also called for "strict enforcement
of the 'Land Law' against the latifundium" (Latifundismo
is the term used to define the situation where a large
percentage of land in a country is owned by a tiny
percentage of the population. Ed)
The president also ordered the allotment of an additional
100 million dollars to 10 special plans -- known
as ”missions” -- that provide food aid
and have greatly expanded health and educational coverage
for the poor.
Last year, the government's social programmes absorbed
between 1.5 and 2.0 billion dollars, according to
independent estimates (official figures have not been
made available).
The ”missions” have benefited
millions of people from the lowest socioeconomic strata
in oil-rich Venezuela, where more than half of the
population of 25 million lives below the poverty line.
Chávez said the social programmes
”must gradually become basic institutions of
the new social state,” thus forming part of
a broad new social safety net.
”With respect to fiscal questions, we will
follow an expansionist policy in terms of public investment,
which will bolster and attract private investment,”
he added. ”We will not follow the prescriptions
of the International Monetary Fund, which order tight
fiscal policies and cuts in social programmes.”
Marino Alvarado, president of the local human rights
group Provea, told IPS that ”the main task in
Venezuela, for both the government and the opposition,
is fighting poverty.”
Out of a total 12 million economically active people,
15.5 percent are unemployed, according to official
figures, while one out of two work in the informal
sector of the economy.
The question of food is one of the government's
major concerns. Among its numerous social programmes,
it has created a network of shops that sell food at
subsidised prices in poor neighbourhoods, as well
as a network of community soup kitchens.
In Venezuela, the cost of the basic food
items needed by a family of five exceeds the minimum
salary, which stands at 168 dollars a month, and 12
percent of people over the age of 15 suffer a nutritional
deficit.
In his frequent public appearances, the leftist Chávez
often expresses his frustration that Venezuela must
import staple products that it could be producing,
like corn, beans, chicken or sugar.
Nationally produced food only covers 60 percent of
the population's minimum requirements of proteins
and calories.
Land ownership is heavily concentrated in
Venezuela, as in much of Latin America, in ”latifundia”,
or great landed estates. According to the National
Land Institute, which oversees the government's land
reform and redistribution efforts, 60 percent of arable
property belongs to just two percent of landowners.
Under Chávez's land law, punitive
taxes are charged for estates over a certain size
that have left land lying unproductive, after which
the government can intervene and expropriate idle
land.
In addition, the state is repossessing state
land that was illegally occupied by large landholders,
for redistribution to peasant farmers, mainly through
the formation of cooperatives and collective farms,
on the argument that this is the only way they can
compete with large-scale agribusiness interests.
The distributed land remains in the hands of the
state, which is to provide the new cooperatives with
housing, health care, education and soft credits.
By August 2003, 1,340,000 hectares had been
handed over to just under 63,000 families.
The president recently stated that ”Wherever
there are latifundia, wherever land has been left
unused, the hand of the state should arrive, through
the Ministry of Agriculture and the Land Institute.”
He also plans to use the army to help carry
out an inventory of unproductive rural property.
”We are not enemies of rural estates, we aren't
going to burn them or invade land,” said the
president, ”but we have a constitution
and a land law that must be respected, and the land
must be for those who work it, for planting
rice, corn and onions. We cannot have empty, unoccupied
land.”
When we understand the true nature of the American
political and economic model that seeks to concentrate
wealth into the hands of the few "elite",
and the power-hungry and ruthless nature of American
politicians, the reason that the Bush administration
would label the Chavez government a "dangerous
regime" becomes much clearer. We should remember
that the Bush administration's underhanded policy towards
Venezuela is by no means new. In attempting to undermine
the democratically elected government of Chavez, Rice
is simply following in the footsteps of her predecessors.
We have expounded at some length here on these pages
about the numerous CIA covert operations that deposed
Democratic South American governments over the last
50 years. One such infamous act of imperialistic intervention,
however, stands out from the rest for the fact that
it triggered no less than 40 years of civil war and
genocide in Guatemala in 1954, when democratically elected
President Jacobo Arbenz was thrown out in a bloody coup
financed by the leading American mega-corporation in
the region, the United Fruit Company, in cahoots with
the American government. The reasons given to "justify"
this affront to democracy were very similar to those
on which most of the present drive to oust Chavez sit
upon: that Arbenz was a communist. In his stead a true
mercenary was installed: Castillo Armas, whose name
interestingly enough means "Castle Arms" in
Spanish, as if the American imperialist camp were leaving
their signature in plain view for all with eyes to see.
What followed were 4 decades of civil war, "death
squads" wiping out
students labeled as leftists, murdering working class
leaders, countless civilians and native Indians, and
basically making sure that any attempt by socially conscious
sectors or individuals to try
and redress long standing injustices of all kinds were
stamped out
with ruthless and brutal glee.
Speaking of US financed death squads, news has just
come in that two
U.S. troops have been accused of arming Colombian death
squads:
Colombian police arrested two
U.S. soldiers for alleged involvement in a plot to
traffic thousands of rounds of ammunition - possibly
to outlawed right-wing paramilitary groups, authorities
said today.
The two soldiers were detained during a raid Tuesday
in a gated community in Carmen de Apicala, 80 kilometres
southwest of the capital and near
Colombia's sprawling Tolemaida airbase, where the
detained soldiers worked and where many U.S. servicemen
are stationed.
National police Chief Gen. Jorge Daniel Castro said
officers stopped a suspicious man in the area, who
offered a bribe to be allowed to go free. Under threat
of arrest, the man led the officers to a nearby house
where more than 40,000 rounds of ammunition for assault
rifles, machine-guns and pistols were found, officials
said.
Shortly afterward, the two U.S. army soldiers - apparently
unaware of the police operation - tried to go to the
house. Castro said three Colombians were also involved.
"In the course of the investigation, two Americans
arrived, they did not give a satisfactory explanation
and were put at the disposal of the Prosecutors' Office,"
Castro said.
A security guard at the Paradise complex said the
two American soldiers were taken away by police and
Colombian soldiers in a convoy of a half dozen vehicles.
In Washington, the State Department confirmed the
arrest of two of its soldiers in Colombia.
"Two U.S. soldiers were detained by Colombian
authorities on the afternoon of May 3," it said.
"We are discussing the circumstances of their
detention with Colombian authorities, but do not have
any additional information to provide at this time."
It marks the latest U.S. embarrassment in this South
American nation. On March 29,
five U.S. soldiers were arrested after 15 kilograms
of cocaine was found aboard a U.S. military plane
that flew to El Paso, Texas, from the Apiay airbase
east of Bogota.
In the ammunitions case, a police registry identified
the U.S. servicemen only as Allam Tanquary and Jesus
Hernandez. It was unclear whether Allam was a misspelling.
U.S. authorities did not provide names.
The Colombian Attorney General's Office said the
arrested American soldiers had been in contact with
a former Colombian police sergeant, Will Gabriel Aguilar,
who has been linked to paramilitary groups. Aguilar,
another retired policeman and two other Colombians
were also arrested, the police official said.
The cache was composed of more than
40,000 rounds of ammunition sent to Colombia by the
United States under its Plan Colombia aid program,
aimed at crushing a leftist insurgency and the drug
trafficking that fuels it, officials said.
The U.S. Embassy declined to comment on any possible
links to paramilitary groups, who are battling leftist
rebels in Colombia. Washington
has branded the paramilitary umbrella group, the United
Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, as a terrorist organization,
along with the two rebel groups.
The Attorney General's Office has formally opened
an investigation into arms trafficking against those
arrested. However, Colombian Attorney General Luis
Camilo Osorio said the two Americans
will not face Colombian justice because they are protected
under a 1974 treaty that gives U.S. servicemen working
here diplomatic immunity status.
Jairo Clopatofsky, a member of the Colombian Senate's
foreign relations committee, said the treaty is allowing
U.S. soldiers to commit crimes here with impunity.
He is leading a move to amend the pact.
"Colombia's hands are tied by this treaty, which
prohibits us from bringing any of these U.S. military
members to justice," he said.
The United States has provided more than $3 billion
US in aid under Plan Colombia. Up
to 800 U.S. troops are permitted simultaneously in
Colombia, according to U.S. law, to train Colombian
armed forces and provide logistical support. Up to
600 Americans are also permitted in the country as
U.S. government contractors.
Note that the arms were part of the US government sponsored
"Plan Columbia" aid program and were destined
for a Columbian group that the US government had designated
as a "terrorist" organisation. This is the
way it works folks, it's really very simple, you just
set up the threat and make that threat your reason for
staying in power and accruing vast amounts of power
and wealth to yourself. It is the same modus operandi
that successive US governments have been using for years
and is at the root of the CIA/Mossad inspired "al-Qaeda"
myth.
So as Dick and Condi continue to 'up' the terrorism
and rogue regime fear factor, the true false nature
of the war on terror can be quite clearly seen in a
report which states that, since 9/11, the good people
at the Office of Homeland Security have been failing
miserably in their "official" task to
protect the US people from further terror attacks a
la September 11th, which of course comes as no surprise
given that there is no REAL terrorist threat to speak
of. For those who want official confirmation of this
fact, we need look no further than yesterday's report
about a top secret memorandum from Head of British MI6
Richard Dearlove where he explicitly states that Bush
was fixing intelligence facts around the already decided
upon policy to invade Iraq. As Juan
Cole states:
A top secret British memorandum dated 23 July 2002
was leaked in the run-up to yesterday's parliamentary
elections in the UK (which Blair won, though his Labour
Party was much weakened by public disgust with such
shenanigans as the below). I mirror the memo below,
from the Times Online site. It summarizes a report
to Blair and others in the British government by Sir
Brian Dearlove (This is the press release when he
was appointed in 1999). The head of MI6, or the foreign
intelligence service of the UK, is known as "C."
Here is the smoking gun:
"C [Dearlove] reported on his recent talks in
Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude.
Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted
to remove Saddam, through military action, justified
by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence
and facts were being fixed around the policy.
It is not surprising on the face of it that Bush
had decided on the Iraq war by summer of 2002. It
it is notable that Dearlove noticed a change in views
on the subject from earlier visits. By summer of 2002,
the Afghanistan war had wound down and al-Qaeda was
on the run, so Bush no longer felt vulnerable and
was ready to go forward with his long-cherished project
of an Iraq War. What is notable is that all this was
not what Bush was telling us.
Bush was lying to the American people at the time
and saying that no final decision had been made on
the war.
Godfrey Sperling of the Christian Science Monitor
could write on August 27, 2002, "Indeed, Bush
has said he welcomes a 'debate' on Iraq from those
in Congress and from the public. But he has made it
clear that he will make his decision based on what
his intelligence people are telling him."
But Dearlove's report makes it clear that Bush had
already decided absolutely on a war already the previous
month, and that he had managed to give British intelligence
the firm impression that he intended to shape the
intelligence to support such a war. So poor Sperling
was lied to twice. Any "debate" was meaningless
if the president had already decided. And he wasn't
waiting to make his decision in the light of the intelligence.
He was going to tell the intelligence professionals
to what conclusion they had to come. "But the
intelligence and facts were being fixed around the
policy."
Why would it even be necessary to turn the intelligence
analysts into "weasels" who would have to
tell Bush what he wanted to hear?
It was necessary because the "justification"
of the "conjunction" of Weapons of Mass
Destruction and terrorism was virtually non-existent.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw admitted it
at the meeting: "It seemed clear that Bush had
made up his mind to take military action, even if
the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin.
Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his
WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North
Korea or Iran."
So the "justification" would have to be
provided by "fixing" the intelligence around
the policy. Bush was just going to make things up,
since the realities did not actually justify his planned
war! The British cabinet sat around and admitted to
themselves that a) there was no justification for
the war into which they were allowing themselves to
be dragged and b) that the war would be gotten up
through Goebbels-like techniques!
It is even worse. British Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith
was at the meeting. He had to think up a justification
for the war in international law. Britain is in Europe,
and Europe takes international law seriously. You
could have war crimes trials. (Remember that Chilean
dictator Augusto Pinochet almost got tried in Spain
for killing 5000 people in the 1970s).
Goldsmith was as nervous as a cat in a roomful of
rocking chairs: "The Attorney-General said that
the desire for regime change was not a legal base
for military action. There were three possible legal
bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or
UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not
be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of
three years ago would be difficult. The situation
might of course change."
The driness of the wit is unbearable. "The desire
for regime change was not a legal base for military
action"! Naked aggression is illegal, he could
have said. Then he reviews the three possible grounds
for a war. You could have a war if Iraq attacked you.
Iraq had not attacked the US. Or you could have a
war if it was a humanitarian intervention (e.g. under
the genocide convention). But Saddam's major campaigns
of death had been a decade before. Or you could get
a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing
the war, in accordance with the UN charter. But Goldsmith
makes it clear he thought you would need a new resolution,
that the old ones wouldn't work for this purpose.
The Attorney General of the United Kingdom thought
the reports Dearlove and Straw were bringing back
from Washington reeked of an illegal war. People who
plan out illegal wars are war criminals. He knew this.
He was stuck, however. They were all stuck.
The man from Connecticut with the Crawford ranch
had decided to cut down some trees. And they were
all hostages in his guest house and he was going to
put chain saws in their hands and make them help,
whether they liked it or not. Goldsmith's hands trembled
as he reached out for the chainsaw rig. He saw himself
and the others sitting in the Hague, one day, facing
the same judges that Milosevic harangued. Charged.
But it is a long way from Crawford to the Hague.
The man from Connecticut with the cowboy boots and
the fake twang would get away with it. They would
all get away with it.
But people would know they had lied.
Despite this, today, Tony Blair has somehow been returned
for another five years of government by deception. Logic,
and the law of cause and effect, would dictate that
someone must pay for the illegal warmongering of our
leaders, sadly, it is rarely ever the case that those
truly responsible are the ones to pay. The situation
in Iraq continues to spiral downwards with the threat
of civil war growing daily. As an example, the Kansas
City Star reports that:
Earlier this week, Masar Sarhan, a popular student
leader at Baghdad University, threw a party on campus
to celebrate the Shiite Muslim leaders of Iraq's new
government. Religious songs blared and students read
poetry congratulating the Shiites for taking power.
Four hours later, three gunmen followed 24-year-old
Sarhan and shot him to death blocks from his home
in the capital.
The campus, already simmering with sectarian tension,
exploded with violent demonstrations that continued
on Wednesday. Enraged Shiite students stormed the
cafeteria, overturning tables and breaking windows.
They accused Sunni students and professors of supporting
Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, which they blamed for
Sarhan's death. Police fired shots in the air to stop
the riots. The dean fled the campus and classes were
canceled indefinitely.
Sarhan's devastated relatives adopted strict security
measures during his traditional, three-day funeral
at a Shiite mosque. On Wednesday, guards searched
mourners as they entered and confiscated cell phones.
Sarhan's father collapsed inside a hall filled with
photos of other young Shiite men killed in recent
months.
Sarhan was "a quiet, deeply religious man who
was loved by everyone," said his uncle, Rasul
al-Rubaiye. Sarhan was just about to ask a classmate
to marry him. The slain man's relatives talked of
finding the killers, whom they presume to be Sunni,
plotting the sort of street justice Iraqi officials
fear could spark a civil war.
Over a year ago, veteran Middle East correspondent
Robert Fisk, a man who probably knows as much about
the complex dynamics of the Middle East as any outsider,
had this
to say about the sudden outbreak of ethnic strife in
occupied Iraq:
Odd, isn't it? There never has been a civil war
in Iraq. I have never heard
a single word of animosity between Sunnis and Shias
in Iraq.
Al-Qa'ida has never uttered a threat against Shias
- even though al-Qa'ida is a Sunni-only organisation.
Yet for weeks, the American occupation authorities
have been warning us about civil war, have even produced
a letter said to have been written by an al-Qa'ida
operative, advocating a Sunni-Shia conflict. Normally
sane journalists have enthusiastically taken up this
theme. Civil war.
I do worry about the Iraqi exile groups who think
that their own actions might produce what the Americans
want: a fear of civil war so
intense that Iraqis will go along with any plan the
United States produces for Mesopotamia.
I think of the French OAS in Algeria in 1962, setting
off bombs among France's Muslim Algerian community.
I recall the desperate efforts
of the French authorities to set Algerian Muslim against
Algerian Muslim which led to half a million dead souls.
And I'm afraid I also think of Ireland
and the bombings in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974, which,
as the years go by, appear to have an ever closer
link, via Protestant "loyalist" paramilitaries,
to elements of British military security.
But the bombs in Karbala and Baghdad were clearly
co-ordinated. The same brain worked behind them. Was
it a Sunni brain? When the occupation authorities'
spokesman suggested yesterday that it was the work
of al-Qa'ida, he must have known what he was saying:
that al-Qa'ida is a Sunni movement, that the victims
were Shias.
It's not that I believe al-Qa'ida incapable of such
a bloodbath. But I ask myself
why the Americans are rubbing this Sunni-Shia thing
so hard. Let's turn the glass round the other way.
If a violent Sunni movement wished to evict the Americans
from Iraq - and there is indeed a resistance movement
fighting very cruelly to do just that - why would
it want to turn the Shia population of Iraq, 60 per
cent of Iraqis, against them? The last thing such
a resistance would want is to have the majority of
Iraqis against it.
So what about al-Qa'ida? Repeatedly, the Americans
have told us that the suicide bombers were "foreigners".
And so they may be. But can
we have some identities, nationalities? The
US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has talked
of the hundreds of "foreign" fighters crossing
Saudi Arabia's "porous" borders.
The US press have dutifully repeated this. The Iraqi
police keep announcing that they have found the bombers'
passports, so can we have the numbers?
We are entering a dark and sinister period of Iraqi
history. But an occupation authority which should
regard civil war as the last prospect it ever wants
to contemplate, keeps shouting "civil war"
in our ears and I worry about that. Especially when
the bombs make it real.
The only thing missing from the above analysis is the
knowledge that "al-Qaeda" is a creation of
the CIA and the Israeli Mossad. The NeoCon authors of
the Iraq war game plan and the Greater Israelites in
the Likud party in Israel are clearly the ones that
have most to gain from a divided and therefore impotent
Iraq.
There is one positive sign however. The new Iraqi military
appear to be progressing well, and are beginning to
grasp the fundamentals of US peacekeeping tactics. A
recent AFP
report tells us:
Illustrating the uphill task in training new Iraqi
security forces, U.S. officers said they had pulled
another battalion of Iraqi commandos from the rebel
bastion of Samarra 125 kilometers north of Baghdad
last month after repeated incidents of misconduct.
In a March incident that sealed the unit's fate, the
commandos set a home near Samarra on fire after searching
it and finding no incriminating evidence.
We doubt that two years ago many Iraqis (or many duped
Westerners for that matter) would have counted civil
war among the expected benefits of Bush's "Freedom
and Democracy". But by now we should all be beginning
to realise that bestowing freedom and Democracy on Iraq
and its people was never the plan. The real plan was
to engage in that age old and favorite sport of the
elite: raping pillaging and plundering, or, as it is
called in modern parlance, fraud:
Fraud
allegations compound Iraq accounting investigation
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. civilian authorities in
Iraq cannot properly account for nearly $100 million
that was supposed to have been spent on reconstruction
projects in south-central Iraq, government investigators
said Wednesday.
There are indications of fraud in the use of the
$96.6 million, according to a report by the Special
Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. A separate
investigation of possible wrongdoing continues.
More than $7 million of the total is unaccounted
for, the report said. An additional $89.4 million
in payments do not have the required supporting documents.
The report accused civilian contract managers of
"simply washing accounts" to try to make
the books balance. Staffing shortages and the quick
turnover of those responsible for the cash contributed
to the problems, the report said.
Col. Thomas Stefanko, the official now in charge
of the program, wrote the investigators that he agreed
with their conclusions. Stefanko said his office had
corrected or was in the process of fixing or investigating
the problems identified in the report.
Paper trail
The money at issue is from proceeds from Iraqi oil
sales and seizures from Saddam Hussein's regime. Distribution
of the money was handled first by the U.S.-run Coalition
Provisional Authority from 2003 to June 28, 2004.
After that, the money was overseen by the Joint Area
Support Group-Central, which is managed from the U.S.
Embassy in Baghdad.
Part of the problem was a last-minute push to spend
millions on reconstruction projects before the interim
Iraqi government took over, the report said. One agent
got $6.75 million in cash a week before the handover
with the expectation that the money would be spent
before the Iraqis took power.
Controls over the cash were so lax that two of the
agents hired to distribute the money were allowed
to leave Iraq before they had accounted for all of
it, the report said. Between them, those two had been
given more than $1.4 million in cash that remains
unaccounted for, the report said.
A different agent failed to provide proper documentation
for more than $12.4 million in spending but had his
accounts cleared by his supervisors, the report said.
Yet another agent kept distributing money for three
weeks after his authority was revoked, the report
said. Told that $1,878,870 was missing from his account,
the agent delivered exactly that amount to his supervisors
three days later.
And while fat cat American politicians and corporate
chiefs stow away hundreds of millions from the misappropriation
of funds that were meant to rebuild a destroyed Iraq,
the Iraqi people are finding it almost impossible to
get any justice or compensation for their murdered family
members:
U.S.
seen as unaccountable in Iraqi civilian deaths
WASHINGTON, May 3 (Reuters) - Iraqi civilians who
have suffered from U.S. military operations face steep
obstacles in obtaining compensation for the deaths
of their loved ones or material damage, human rights
analysts say.
The case of Italian agent Nicola Calipari, gunned
down at a U.S. checkpoint in Baghdad on March 4 as
he was escorting an Italian hostage to freedom, shows
how reluctant the United States is to admit culpability,
even in high-profile cases.
The United States exonerated American forces in the
incident, but Rome on Monday blamed nervous U.S. troops.
"There is no reason to think that when a nameless
Iraqi without international connections is the victim,
the U.S. military would take it even remotely seriously,"
said Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies,
a Washington think tank that opposes the U.S. military
involvement in Iraq.
Statistics on civilian deaths in cross fire or at
checkpoints in Iraq are scarce. Any released figures
usually refer only to Baghdad and cover limited periods.
Marla Ruzicka, a humanitarian-aid worker, campaigned
to persuade the U.S. military to keep and release
civilian casualty figures and helped persuade Congress
to authorize $20 million for families of Iraqi civilians
killed by U.S. forces.
Ruzicka herself died on April 16 when her car was
caught in an insurgent attack.
Just before her death, Ruzicka wrote in a report
that she had received information from the U.S. military
that 29 civilians were killed by small-arms fire in
Baghdad alone during firefights between U.S. troops
and insurgents between Feb. 28 and April 5.
The United States allows Iraqis to seek compensation
for material damage, death or injury, but claims must
be due to a "non-combat situation" and prove
wrongful action or negligence.
An investigation by the Dayton Daily News in October
analyzed 4,611 civil claims in Iraq against the U.S.
military and found that three out of four were denied.
The average payment for a civilian
death was $4,421. In some cases, Iraqis received $2,500
sympathy payments without going through the claims
procedure.
RULES "KAFKAESQUE"
The claims process is "Kafkaesque" in complexity
and designed to frustrate most Iraqis, said a joint
report in early 2004 by Occupation Watch and the Defense
of Human Rights in Iraq, two groups monitoring U.S.
military operations.
"The U.S. military's definition of a 'combat
situation' is elastic and ephemeral, and because the
rules of engagement are secret, it is difficult to
understand what legal space exists for people to have
their cases heard and receive compensation,"
the report said.
"Because of the way the compensation system
is structured and managed, the American troops have
adopted an atmosphere of impunity. Arrogant and violent
behavior goes unpunished and continues," they
said.
"When there are civilian casualties, the immediate
commander interviews the soldiers on the ground and
makes a decision on whether it should be referred
on for further investigation. In very few cases does
it move beyond this immediate inquiry," he said.
Sometimes, the U.S. military is forced to investigate,
such as when journalists for international news organizations
are killed. Even then, critics say the investigations
have not been timely, serious or thorough.
In order to get an insight into the minds of not only
those people who perpetrate such crimes against humanity
but also those that support them, it is useful to look
again at the case of the abovementioned humanitarian
aid-worker Marla Ruzicka, who was killed a few weeks
ago in a bombing in Iraq. As noted above, Ruzicka dedicated
herself to helping Iraqi civilians obtain compensation
for the injuries inflicted on them by trigger-happy
US soldiers and, coincidentally, just before her death,
was on the point of revealing that the US military does
indeed keep statistics on Iraqi civilian casualties.
In response to the news of Ruzicka's death, arch Neocon
lover and editor of NeoCon propaganda publication par
excellence FrontPageMagazine.com, David Horowitz, commissioned
his editorialist Debbie Schlussel to give us all an
insight into the twisted and disturbing minds of Iraq
war supporters.
" ... It's time to stop worshipping at the alter
[sic] of this false heroine. There are plenty of young
American men and women ... who've been brutalized
or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But none of them
got the ... coverage that Ruzicka got--unless they
were anally raped or ... played pro football. That
should tell you ... about the media's outlook ...
: American soldiers fighting for freedom--bad; vociferous
activist bimbette ... --very, very good. While it's
a sad day when any American gets killed by Islamic
terrorists, it's measurably less sad when that American
aided and abetted them ... For Marla Ruzicka, some
might call it, poetic justice."
Hopefully, readers now have a better idea of the nature
of our 'adversary' and will take this as a warning that,
with such people in charge of the daily workings of
our planet, long before things gets better (if we can
even hope for such), they are destined to get much,
much worse. |
The murderous treatment
of European Jews during the second world war has become
almost legendary in its depiction as a unique and singularly
important example of bigoted inhumanity, carried to barbarous
extremes. No other experience from among the overwhelming
number of historic cases of mass brutality has ever achieved
such status in western consciousness, partly because most
of the other slaughters were of third world, non - white
people. But despite this specific outrage being portrayed
as an unparalleled tragedy, injustice, bigotry and mass
murder have been practiced and gone relatively unquestioned
since its occurrence, contrary to the lessons supposedly
learned from its example. Given this contradictory impact,
It should be permissible to look, as clearly as evidence
will allow, at exactly what took place, what its moral
lesson could be, what its political use has been, and
how it has helped perpetuate rather than end notions of
racial superiority and division that have dogged the world
for millennia.
The patriarchal belief systems on which Judaism, Christianity
and Islam are all based depend on faith, far more than
material evidence. What historic evidence exists is subject
to human interpretation, and as an example of how varied
that interpretation can be, we have these three religions.
All are founded on the same original story, with similar
scriptures, prophets, and the alleged word of god. Gods
words apparently say different things to different people
at different times. Religious history, in which faith
and interpretation loom large, is really not that different
from secular history.
The original story of the United States, for instance,
was one of European discovery, heroic conquest, incredible
development and national triumph. That was from the standpoint
of the official historians, before the revisionists had
their say. A more modern interpretation of that story
includes the near physical and cultural genocide of the
native populations of the continents which Europe discovered,
even though people had been living on them for thousands
of years. A newer view of American history also saw chattel
slavery as something beyond an unfortunate economic arrangement
which led to civil war and racial misunderstanding, and
more as an experience of murderous human degradation carried
to inhuman marketing extremes, with social repercussions
still apparent and still not fully understood .
Historic views and re-views of the past are taken by
those with possible preconceptions based on their education,
training and belief systems; historians can find selective
truth in the material evidence at hand, while creating
immaterial evidence as well, often doing so unconsciously,
without any balance, and even stressing extremes. In doing
this they are not substantially different from religious
believers who pick and choose from what material evidence
exists, if any, to fit into the belief system . God and
the accepted prophets are sited to back up whatever is
seen as good, righteous and just, and a satan, with demonic
assistants, is created to account for the evil, craven
brutality that is the darker side of human development.
Substitute us for god, and them for Satan, and we have
much secular history.
The religious or scientific system produces its historians,
who are responsible not only for interpreting the evidence
according to the preconceived rules of faith and politics,
but in many cases, for the creation of evidence to fit
within the mental structure that thereby strengthens and
reinforces the systems foundation.
This is not unique to one religious or national group,
but is common to all which have an established story of
origin, and a following interpretation of history to neatly
fit into the original premise. Given the dualism of western
religious science, logical materialists who claim physical
objectivity as their basis supposedly have nothing in
common with the magical imaterialism of religion. But
despite age old battles between secularists and deists,
neither side in this either-or conflict really knows any
more than what is believed, accepted, and verified by
the evidence that solidifies the foundation of its system
of belief. Anyone who contradicts that evidence is either
disregarded, or tossed out of the realm of accepted reality.
In the most extreme cases, the contradictor is either
imprisoned, or burned at the stake.
It is in the serious questioning of rigidly held belief
systems that humanity - sometimes - advances beyond simple
duality, arriving at a relatively reasoned interpretation
based on objective study of material evidence, free of
previously learned bias. In these cases, divine good and
demonic evil are left to the immaterialist community,
and the attempt is made to learn from previous experience
and hope for a better future that does not repeat past
mistakes. That hope is nonexistent when free thought and
critical appraisal are denied. It is in particular danger
today, more so than in the darkest ages of our past, when
wanton slaughter may have been the order of the day, but
the weapons to affect it were infinitely more primitive.
In the aftermath of the Nazi assault on European Judaism,
we have seen a modern form of biblical interpretation
evolve out of an historic event. This interpretation is
based almost as much on faith as on verifiable fact. What
should be at least fairly conclusive according to examined
evidence has become a religious belief system in which
no examination or question of evidence is allowed unless
it strengthens the already existing and accepted story.
The event is not only treated as unquestioned as the word
of god, but if dared to be questioned at all, punishable
as blasphemy. Such is the modern burden of what is called
The Holocaust, having even its name reflect a biblical
sounding event, like The Creation.
A terrible price was paid by the Jews of Europe in the
experience of this awful episode of history, but a heavy
price is still being paid, in some sense by the whole
world, but mostly by Palestinians, who played no role
in these atrocities, though they have paid dearly, and
unconscionably, in their aftermath.
The affect of the holocaust on 21st century life continues
to be as profound, and dangerous, as its impact on the
previous century. What is euphemistically called The Middle
East Problem was really created by the western holocaust,
and dumped on the people of the Middle East. The solution
to this problem involves the West confronting its own
responsibility, and ending its punishment of the Arab
world, especially the Palestinians, who have absorbed
generations of abuse and had a horrific, biblical vengeance
visited upon them for something they never did. Further,
the accepted story of the event, seemingly free of any
material forces or consequences save depravity and hatred
of age old origin, invites a fatalism which accepts ancient
beliefs in a natural evil at the core of humanity. Or
at least, a majority of humanity, which seems historically
predisposed to persecute and murder a specific minority.
There might be no better place to begin seeking a solution
than at the very event that has served to help create
the problem. But any attempt at reconsideration of this
particular tragedy in a way that questions some of the
accepted story is treated as sacrilegious, insane, unthinkable
anti-Semitism, and in the most extreme cases, as a crime
punishable by jail or deportation. This was the case with
Ernest Zundel, one among many Holocaust Revisionists who
dare to challenge religious and political orthodoxy by
questioning our understanding of a human disaster which
has helped perpetuate human disaster.
Zundel and other revisionists are called holocaust deniers
by those who label them in discriminatory fashion in order
to remove them from any serious consideration. The denigrating
label makes it seem as though they deny that any Jews
were murdered, or that Jews did not suffer terribly at
the hands of Nazis and their supporters. Calling these
people names in order to reduce them as beings is a bigotry
no different, in essence, from using derogatory labels
like nigger, spic, kike or redneck. The label's purpose
is to belittle and deform, reducing people to caricatures
and worse; beings outside the realm of acceptability and
not worthy of consideration by normal people.
There may be unsavory and bigoted types among those who
call themselves holocaust revisionists, but such people
exist in business, government and religion; do we entirely
dismiss those worlds because some of their practitioners
may not meet our standards for acceptability? Some who
claim to be revisionists simply change the pejorative
Nazi to the perforative communist and charge the same
wholesale slaughters and incredible death tolls, only
with different victims and different murderers. Far more
important are the revisionists unmotivated by anything
more than a sense of human inquiry, who simply attempt
to confront and question accepted history with as much
or as little bias as the official historians.
Zundel should be free to present his viewpoint and entertain
his beliefs, however unpopular they may be to those who
often know nothing more than what they have been told.
This biased telling of the story of individuals and events
is a problem not only of the historic past, but what we
experience in everyday life. We are fed tales which provoke
bloody warfare and are devoutly believed and supported
by some, and just as devoutly disbelieved and opposed
by others. But neither school of thought is, as yet, proposing
that all opposition to its belief system be completely
silenced, totally disregarded or jailed. Some have indeed
suffered such a fate, but they are still the exception
and not the rule. Unfortunately, among holocaust revisionists,
the rule is persecution; first, of the very idea, and
next, of the person expressing the very idea.
Our political economy of religious science depends on
the double standards of dualism, but the issue of free
speech tends to be revered by people from all sides of
the political and social spectrum. It would be better
for us all if we were less selective about where, when,
and on what subjects such freedom could be exercised.
Revisionists try to make the murderous history of the
holocaust an aspect of reality, rather than a religious
experience of unquestioned worship and sorrow. This is
their sin, but it is not only they who suffer; all who
profess a belief in freedom of expression, speech and
thought pay a price. Yet, the attack on Zundels free speech
was barely noticed by the general public. Even though
it took place in Canada, it received no criticism from
an American civli liberties community which would be totally
aroused if such blatant suppression occurred in almost
any other area of life, and in any country. But that is
not the case in the area dubbed holocaust denial, where
any outrage against free speech and free thought is not
only allowed, but righteously supported and even vindictively
applauded, wherever it occurs.
The double standard regarding this issue is among the
most troubling of our social hypocrisies. One can easily
imagine those depicted as demons, like Saddam Hussein
or Slobodan Milosevic, being regarded as heroes, had they
persecuted alleged holocaust deniers instead of operating
against Israeli and American interests, for which they
now face trial as war criminals.
Zundel may be the best known among many who are critical
of the holocaust story, but who hardly deny that Jews
were viciously persecuted and murdered by the Nazis. He
has been dogged for years because of his expressed doubts
regarding many aspects of the accepted history, and as
a result suffered physical attacks, the firebombing of
his home, and costly court cases finally leading to his
imprisonment. Among his blasphemous thought crimes he
dares to believe that all Germans were not uniquely evil,
inhuman monsters, as they are depicted in much of the
holocaust story. Germany has been the main financial backer
of Israel, contributing billions of dollars in retribution
payments, and has been most fierce in smothering free
speech when it comes to this issue. But there are still
many who believe that Germans should be judged as unparalleled
among humans for their collective sin, and this has been
internalized by its government. In keeping with its guilt
driven policies, Germany locked Zundel in jail as soon
as Canada expelled him for his crime. And what was this
offense? Under cover of visa problems and alleged influence
on potentially violent groups, Zundel was really guilty
of daring to express doubt in the official story of the
holocaust, that doubt usually being not only about the
number of dead, but also concerning the plan and method
of carrying out mass murder. His is only the most serious
and recent attack on a revisionist. Many others have suffered
loss of their jobs, physical attacks, and been imprisoned.
In several nations, it is a punishable, criminal offense
to dare question the holocaust in any ways that displease
the keepers of its official history.
The horrendous treatment of European Jews, their forced
exodus from national homelands to concentration and slave
labor camps, and their further brutalization and murders,
are believed part of a centrally planned process of annihilation.
This historically unique crime was industrialized, with
an around the clock production line of transport, gas
chambers, crematoria and almost unimaginable cruelty.
That is the brief outline generally accepted by most of
the world, or at least the western world, which might
as well be the whole world given the power balance. Of
course, gas chambers were not alleged to be the only method
employed for these mass murders, and the basic crimes
were known of before that aspect of the story was established.
But though official records and scholarship account for
many deaths attributable to other causes and methods,
the popular acceptance of the phrase six million died
in the gas chambers is hardly ever discussed as being
impossible. In fact, there is almost as much use of the
dreadful sounding six million died in the ovens, with
many believing that six million living human beings were
actually thrown into mass fiery pits. The world was witness
to the awful films of the liberated camps, the emaciated
survivors, and the piles of skin and bone corpses. It
is as if these sickening images were not enough, and even
more ghastly ones have to be created in order to identify
this as historys most terrible crime.
That such an incredible murderous deed, of such massive
proportions, was concealed from the world until long after
it took place is barely acknowledged as worthy of any
question. Several histories of the war were written at
its end which made no mention of this particular horrendous
crime. Some survivors of the concentration camps wrote
of their terrible experiences, with no mention of gas
chambers. Are we to believe that all these writers, including
Eisenhower and Churchill, were simply anti-Semites?
This awful scheme for exterminating an entire people
was ordered by passionate zealots who were motivated by
irrational hatred. Yet, conversely, it was organized by
a core of dispassionate, bureaucratic clones, and then
carried out by a stoic force of robotic killers. And this
hideous production was performed while Germany suffered
devastation in the war, with many of its people going
hungry, its economy sorely lacking industrial supplies
and its imminent defeat looming. Might there be legitimate
cause for questioning at least some parts of the generally
accepted story? Should critical reappraisal be completely
forbidden, given that this insane act of collective murder
was the major rationale for the displacement and destruction
of another people, the Palestinians, far removed from
any connection to Europe save for their domination by
its colonial power?
And considering the depiction of Germans as a collection
of homicidal monsters, couldn't one of these satanic sadists
have considered a photograph of his, and their, horrendous
work with gas chambers? Is there any wonder that the same
bureaucratic number crunchers who tabulated every single
person rounded up and sent to a camp, were unable to tabulate
the actual murders? And since all gas chambers were allegedly
destroyed by the Germans - who seemed anxious to get rid
of all evidence of the crime, but were extremely careless
about leaving alive participants in committing the crime
- isn't it worthy of question that their existence is
based on stories and confessions after the fact, with
no one actually witnessing these mass murder machines
in action?
It should not be a crime to wonder why not one actual
photo of a gas chamber exists, that all were destroyed
and only reproductions of them are offered as evidence.
The only photos are of doors or passages leading to such
chambers, and showers said to have served as gas chambers,
but these all defy logic and only serve belief. Would
we accept explanation for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
or Nagasaki by being presented with photos of roads leading
into town? Or the testimony of survivors and participants
in the bombings, but with no other evidence except their
testimony that the cities were devastated by such a weapon?
Given the overwhelming evidence that clearly verifies
the persecution and murder of so many, why is it that
this major part of the story is so reliant on after the
fact memories or detective work? That several million
people were killed this way and that not one photo exists
is certainly worthy of questioning, given that so much
else was recorded in photos and film. We have abundant
pictorial evidence of the dreadful conditions of the camps,
the horrible images that have been imprinted on us over
the years. Yet, none of these showed a gas chamber, its
ruins, or recorded comments about its existence. How can
it be a sin and why should it be a crime to question this
story? Is it odd that some might see the denial of that
freedom as part of a political program to insure that
Israel is above any criticism and kept a safe place for
world Jewry, even though its reality has been quite the
opposite? The historical record of an earlier episode
of inhuman brutality in the United States offers an uncomfortable
contrast.
During the wretched historical period of American lynching,
more than two thousand blacks were dragged from their
homes or prison cells and publicly hanged, often having
their bodies literally torn apart after killing. These
bestial events were sometimes viewed by hundreds of people
in an often festive atmosphere of collective madness.
Countless photographs exist of these bizarre, barbaric
affairs, with families proudly posing, even smiling, in
front of a brutalized black body hanging from a tree.
There may be legend and myth surrounding much of this
period, but there is undeniable evidence of the bloody
deeds in these photos, some of which were made into postcards
and mailed to friends and families, later becoming exhibits
at museums and galleries.
Should this terrible episode of American history be offered
as proof that we were the most beastly race on earth?
Far worse than later Germans, who didn't gleefully photograph
their atrocities and happily share those photos with friends?
Why not try to learn more about this sordid past, rather
than simply see the atrocities as acts of a deranged people,
having no basis in material history save as a description
of mass psychosis, based on age old biblical hatred of...Africans?
After all, we have no historic verification for how many
Africans were murdered during what was called, less biblically,
the passages, when slaves were stuffed onto ships like
animals, and beaten, starved and drowned while crossing
the Atlantic Ocean, with death toll estimates ranging
from a few to many millions. Has it been blasphemy to
examine that history, as closely as evidence will allow,
in order to arrive at something approximating what actually
took place? Does any reexamination of this brutal period,
including a revisionist pointing out that some slaves
lived in more material security than some workers, indicate
a form of slavery denial?
We certainly cannot change the fact of inhuman chattel
slavery in our past, nor the tremendous impact it has
had on our national development. But confronting our past
might help us change the present. Nearly half the prison
population of the USA is black, and ghettos and poverty
wracked communities still number black residents in the
hundreds of thousands. That should be reason enough to
want to learn more about that past and how it affects
our society today. Really confronting such questions and
seeking answers based on social justice and humanitarian
values could mean social revolution, but even if we don't
go that far, knowing more can at least help us mythologize
less.
We would not make the crimes committed by the Nazis any
less horrid by removing myths, legends and emotional slander
from the very real pain and suffering they caused. What
of the many alleged tales of their ghastly practices,
like making soap from the body fat of dead Jews, stuffing
pillows with their hair or making lamp shades from their
skin? Some of these are still repeated by those who simply
accepted any tale of German degeneracy, no matter how
mindless sounding or lacking any basis in fact. The generally
accepted and horrendous enough toll of a million deaths
at Auschwitz was once believed to be more than four million.
These inflated death toll figures and tales of bizarre
brutality are no longer tolerated by anyone with claims
to serious scholarship, with agreement here between revisionists
and the official historians of holocaust studies.
Survivors are no less cursed with memories of an awful
reality when these kinds of exaggerations are faced as
fabrications born of panic, gullibility, and retaliatory
hatred. This at one time unquestioned parade of inhuman
horrors became part of accepted history and helped lead
to the birth of a new nation, Israel, established as a
haven for the persecuted survivors of this bloodcurdling,
genocidal campaign conducted by the Nazis.
Israel's existence since its origin in 1948 has remained
critically unquestioned by the mainstream west and its
officially sanctioned political opposition, mainly because
of the horrors the world learned about the holocaust.
And learned, and learned, and relearned. Hardly a day
passes that some TV program, film, workshop, museum display,
lecture or school curriculum is not dealing with what
took place, in horrifying detail. People are gripped and
shaken by the vicarious experience of this tragedy, recreated
in veritable theme parks of misery and suffering. They
are compelled to wonder how people could perform such
contemptible violence, and how it could have happened
without outside intervention. But these same people still
support doctrines of racial supremacy and the mass murder
of war ; they draw no connection to the lesson supposedly
learned from the holocaust tragedy, since that lesson
seems specific only to that single experience and its
relation to the unquestioned need for Israel as a haven
for Jews.
State organized violence, human persecution and bigotry
continue, and civilized populations still tolerate racial
and colonial policies that treat people and their homelands
as worthless, unless owned, occupied or exploited by superior
beings. These matters are relatively unquestioned by many
who are moved to tears by the story of the holocaust,
since that event is treated as an almost separate reality
from human history, let alone the sub category of Jewish
history, whose thousands of years seem reduced to about
five during the war. And Israel is still perceived by
many as a home for people rejected by the world, with
no place else to go. This is a gross simplification, but
so is the larger story. Israel did not just happen in
1948, though that might as well be the case given popular
ignorance of its history.
In the late 19th century, when the European Zionist movement
for a Jewish homeland was established, most Jews wanted
no such home. They were content being citizens in the
nations where they had become part of the fabric of life,
having worked hard to overcome bigotry that saw them as
other. Many of them took serious issue with Zionism, which
existed long before most Nazis were born, let alone in
power. This historic fact is not just overlooked, but
is unknown to people who think of Zionism only in its
modern socialistic form of the kibbutz, and see Israel
as something that happened purely because of the Nazi
assault on European Jews.
Among several proposed sites, Palestine was the biblical
real estate most desired by many Zionists as a national
homeland, since it was believed to be their source, even
by allegedly secular Jews who claimed to be atheists.
That contradiction still prevails; one can strongly assert
no belief in god, while accepting a homeland for Jews
in Israel, because that land was promised to them by...god.
The holocaust helps make it possible to overlook this
contradiction by siting the Jewish tragedy at the hands
of the Nazis as verification for the need to create Israel.
And even though most of the world's Jews are moved to
at least psychologically support Israel's existence, they
have never been there and have no plan to even visit,
let alone become settlers.
The fact that as late as 1942, some Zionists and Nazis
were discussing the island nation of Madagascar as a possible
homeland for Jews - with as little concern for the native
people there as in Palestine - is another little known
aspect of the relationships between two groups proposing
the same alienating idea, along decidedly different lines;
that Jews did not belong with others and should be living
in their own, separate country .
With no consideration for some of these matters, we inherit
a history with little if any context, negating any awareness
of events that lead to or connect from one to the other
in any understandable, if occasionally mind boggling way.
Things suddenly happen, with no explanation for events
other than their being caused or provoked by saintly angels
or demonic monsters. Are their material, worldly reasons
for these events? Where do these situations and creatures
come from? We are not to ask once the story, the gods
and the demons have been established. That is, if we wish
to remain helpless creatures shaped by history, rather
than active beings who play a conscious role in its creation.
The revision of all history, literally to look at it
again, is necessary if we wish to create a future without
repeating past mistakes. The maligned school of holocaust
revision could make a contribution towards understanding
and peace, rather than represent a criminal assault against
political religious belief, as it is portrayed. Taking
a new look at any part of history, recent or past, may
lead to greater awareness of material forces which are
controllable by humans. This contradicts the fatalistic
view of humanity as inherently beastly and in need of
control by elites, which are usually working for god.
This biblical notion at the core of many human acts of
mass murder flies in the face of real human experience
and calls for more, not less questioning of what we are
told about anything.
Whether it is fed to us as legend, myth or alleged fact,
nothing should be treated as unquestionable. Facts are
too often based on as little proof as the legendary and
mythological. For a recent, obvious example, we need look
no further than weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Thousands
of people are dead and a government was destroyed because
of those alleged weapons, which do not, and did not, exist.
The suffering of the Jews in Europe during the second
world war would not become less tragic under critical
appraisal, though its political impact might change, and
this is the major reason for its being kept an untouchable
topic. In order to maintain Israels position as a special
nation, the myth of the Jewish people as a forever endangered
species is perpetuated. The holocaust is seen as the culmination
of a long history of murderous persecution of Jews by
the rest of the gentile world, with no allowance for anything
but continued misery and eternal threat. This incredibly
negative and narrow view estranges people from humanity,
and in so doing helps create a warped history of isolation.
A contradictory ideological need to be separate and different
from them, while humanistically desiring similarity and
equality with them, can only prolong the problem of what
is called anti-semitism, despite that language confusion
which so labels Europeans who are no more Semites than
are people from Finland or Nigeria.
Given the verifiable history of Jewish persecution in
the past, can that possibly justify the persecution of
Palestinians in the present? Assuming that there was indeed
a plot by European gentiles to murder all the Jews of
the continent, why should people who have no real or fictional
connection to such a sin be the ones to pay the awful
price of its atonement? And even if it is necessary to
insist that one inhuman episode was unique and different
from others, that one suffering was more painful than
another, how can any benefit be gained by causing still
more suffering? No horror experienced in Europe should
serve as rationale for punishment inflicted on people
other than Europeans, if any at all are to still be paying
for this experience of inhuman slaughter among, sadly,
many such historic experiences. A more recent human disaster
can offer several comparisons, even if only in the treatment
of the story.
As an example of how closer examination of events which
take on near legendary proportions can lead to better
understanding, consider the disastrous day Americans remember
as 911. It did not become less tragic when investigation
revealed that the original estimated death toll of nearly
50,000 was actually just over 3,000. The bereaved were
no less saddened, the nation no less shocked. Nor, unfortunately,
were political forces swayed to change their policies
based on this lowered figure. But history was served in
moving the story from exaggeration, arrived at during
chaotic moments when all matters were barely verifiable,
to the actual human cost and impact of all those deaths.
Lowering the death toll was not a form of 911 denial,
and it did nothing to change the essence of the event.
Many still believe it was the worst thing to ever happen,
if limiting the area of events to the USA. But far more
people have been killed in bombings in other countries
than died that day in America, and to acknowledge that
fact - still generally unacknowledged - might help to
better understand why this act of terrorism might have
taken place, rather than viewing it as a gesture of sadistic
madmen who didn't like our style of dress, our democracy,
or our social behavior patterns. Were they simply anti-americans,
for some ancient, irrational biblical reason? Or were
there social and political as well as religious motivations
for their murderous attack? Would it hurt us to move beyond
simplistic, reductionist explanations in order to arrive
at some understanding of material reality that might help
our relations with the rest of the world?
The reexamination of 911 did not overlook the enormous
cost in death benefits and the number of hustlers who
rushed to claim money, posing as kin of those who allegedly
perished. In this, it bore a relation to what some call
the holocaust industry, referring to the money making
aspects of that tragedy that entice scam artists as well
as legitimate victims. Finding an actual, verifiable death
toll saved money for insurers, but the material evidence
was examined not only to save money, nor to hurt the memory
of survivors, but to help see the disaster from a more
reality based perspective. We are still learning about
the poorly reported and even more poorly explained 911
events, and the wars and further terrors they have unleashed
in Afghanistan and especially Iraq. Many still believe
that Arabs had nothing to do with them, and that they
were organized and executed by the U.S. government. Others
claim it was the Israeli Mossad, and some believe it was
the act of a vengeful god, punishing us for whatever sins
these divinely oriented conspiracy freaks perceive. But
none of these theories, though they may be argued, laughed
at or ridiculed, are forbidden. Nor are those who entertain
them threatened with jail. This is as it should be, but
isn't, where the holocaust is concerned.
Israels seemingly spontaneous immaculate conception in
1948 is no more materially verifiable than the older religious
legend, but is as devoutly believed by a community of
the faith. The Palestinian people who lived in what later
became Israel were conveniently removed from material
or critical consideration. They were denied as a people
and never considered as humans of any importance, so it
was easy to buy them out, kick them out, or wipe them
out if they resisted. Their painful history of injustice
has outraged most of the world, as evidenced by countless
votes in the United Nations which go against continued
theft of Palestinian land and brutalization of the Palestinian
people. But the nature of their suffering receives hardly
a blink from the center of global power in the USA, where
real Palestinian deniers are an infinitely greater problem
than any alleged holocaust deniers.
The American government and major opinion shaping institutions
have participated in the creation of Israel as a lily-white
land of suffering inhabitants, first escaping the horror
of the Nazis, and then preyed upon by the dreadful Arabs,
portrayed as bloodthirsty demons anxious to push Israel
into the sea, as one of the favored slogans has it. This
colorful defiance of geography and politics may have actually
been expressed as a desire by some witless opponent; more
likely, it came from an Israeli and has become useful
to repeat in provoking fear and anxiety among Jews all
over the world, as the horrible holocaust story is rerun
in their imaginations each time a threat to Jews is perceived
or alleged. And these threats usually seem to happen in
a social vacuum, occupied by an innocent people in a rarified
world befitting a fairy tale as much as a physical reality.
The contradictory notion of Jews as a historically blessed,
special, privileged sector of humanity, and at the same
time as a historically scorned, hated and brutalized group
as well, is reinforced by the conflicting histories of
Israel, Palestine, the holocaust experience and the status
of Judaism in the world today. To say that a people hated
and persecuted by the gentile world - which means just
about everyone else - for thousands of years, and then
slaughtered in the worst pogrom of them all, could become
powerful enough to hold sway over governments and public
opinion is dismissed as just another form of anti-Semitism.
The mere mention of Jewish power, exercised in obvious
fashion and so acknowledged by many Jewish groups and
publications, reduces not only Zionists but large segments
of the gentile world, including its left wing, to screeching
charges of anti-Semitism at those who defiantly refer
to the power that dare not speak its name. But the U.S.
government and media and their global subordinates do
not hesitate to follow the story so outlined, perpetuating
the myth that becomes reality when so many not only believe
it, but act on that belief.
Jewish ethnic and cultural gifts to the arts and sciences
have made incredible contributions toward making the human
community whole. Biblical and ideological Judaism contradicts
that wholeness by treating the rest of the world as other
and insisting on its own uniqueness. Much of the world
is drawn to the warm, humanistic culture, while it is
repelled by the cold, alienating ideology. Just as mainstream
science and much non-biblical religion reject difference
and see humanity as one race with common origins, a biblical
fundamentalist view holds to an ancient notion that divides
us into a deity's less or more favored races. The political,
economic and psychological burdens of maintaining such
older belief systems are at the root of a global crisis.
In an all too real sense, we continue struggles with believers
in immaterial legend and fable, while reality demands
that we wake up and face a material world threatened by
our wasteful and destructive divisions. These ancient
belief systems might be beneficial if their humanitarian
messages of equality for all took precedence over their
patriarchal teachings of the godly superiority of only
some. We face failure as long as we continue to pay only
halfhearted lip service to the wise words of their most
loving prophets, while we pay wholehearted debt service
to the false words of their most hateful profiteers.
Human suffering and brutality are a sad part of our history,
but we needn't mythologize their experience or make them
special; rather, we need to understand that they impede
our development. We can learn from our most terrible mistakes,
but not if we fetishize and treat them as unique, almost
divorced from history rather than representing a terrible
example of our worst behaviors, practiced in the selfish,
short sighted ignorance that continues to rule our relations.
Our bloody past and present make it clear that it is possible
to slaughter hundreds, thousands, even millions of people,
without an extermination plan or gas chambers.
History is full of wholesale massacres, of people being
regarded as worse than insects or rodents, and barbarically
murdered in horrendous acts of brutality. Some of these
were perpetrated over many years, some over a few weeks,
some a few days, and some, instantly. During the same
war that killed so many European Jews, the cities of Dresden
and Tokyo, among many others, were reduced to ashes in
firestorms that killed tens of thousands of people in
a matter of minutes. These poor souls were indeed, burned
alive, and there was no need to deliver them to death
camps or crematoria; the crematoria were delivered to
them. Yet these and other brutal acts of mass murder were
written off as excusable acts of war that killed the enemy,
said enemy deserving such a fate for being part and parcel
of the war. Had the outcome of that war been different,
how many allied generals would have been tried for these
mass murders, and been executed as war criminals?
Why does one horrible slaughter receive an unending stream
of commemorations and reparations, while hundreds of others
are barely a drip in the brain pan of humanity? Why does
the holocaust loom so large, and yet serve as a rationale
for the brutalization of a people who had absolutely nothing
to do with Nazis or Europe? And who can certainly not
be guilty of anti-Semitism, in as much as they are, unlike
the ashkeNazi Jews of Europe, Semites themselves? Could
a better understanding of what happened to the Jews of
Europe, and of the underlying causes that brought about
fascism, help the world to better understand itself?
It can't possibly hurt us to learn what was at the root
of the Nazis blind hatred of communism, democracy and
Judaism, and why they linked those hatreds, rather than
continue accepting ridiculous notions that reduce world
history to perverse psychosomatic disorders. What role
did material events play in the creation of national socialism
in Germany, and how widely was it supported by other nations?
Contrary to simplistic belief, which has it that the world
instantly opposed the demonic evil of the Nazis, many
western powers were quite fond of the Nazis rabid anti-communism
and their strengthening of German finance capital. It
is possible to learn more about a terrible episode of
history without denigrating those who suffered, but also
by not making a totally different kind of human out of
them, thereby perpetuating a dangerous myth of original
difference when we most need to acknowledge that we are
all members of the same human race.
Fear of present victimization because of past history,
whether based on fact or fiction, is not healthy for any
individual or group of human beings. Rising above our
past mistakes, our legends and our superstitions in order
to deal with real problems can contribute to growth in
knowledge and assurance of a future possibility for all
of humanity. That assurance is a necessity for the success
of the human race, and not just one nation, sect, religion
or clan.
Seeing the rest of humanity as historically bent on persecuting
and eventually murdering all Jews is hardly the healthiest
way to sustain religious, ethnic, national or personal
survival. One has to major in the inhumanities to entertain
such dreadful thoughts. When carried for generations,
they cannot help but lead to more suspicion, misunderstanding
and divisions which help create the inhuman mental and
physical horror that was the reality of the Jews in Europe,
and is the reality of the Palestinian people now. Bigotry
and murder do not need commemorative death tolls or special
killing machine techniques to make them worse or better;
they need to stop.
The revisioning of the holocaust might help Israel, Palestine
and Judaism itself by confronting contradictions based
on ancient beliefs which have no place in the modern world,
and which help create misunderstanding and murder the
longer they are accepted. Controversies involving which
war, which mass murder or which act of totalitarian brutality
was worse than another can only make it seem that some
were better than others. But it is all acts of brutality
that must be seen as the problem, and not just one in
isolation, if we are to arrive at a solution.
If we do not learn from history, it is said that we are
condemned to repeat it, and that has been the case with
the Jewish experience of one war, and the resultant Palestinian
suffering that could lead to a greater war. Coming to
grips with what was called the final solution could bring
about confrontation with what could be humanity's final
problem of racial and ethnic hatreds which are used to
help perpetuate ideologies of domination. We need a peaceful
final solution in confronting the greatest problem humanity
has ever faced. Nuclear and biological weapons have replaced
the more primitive bloody tools of the old political testaments
and while we have seen what those weapons could do, we
have not yet fully realized the lesson of their creation.
They are products of age old biblical inhumanity, brought
to modern technological perfection in exercising mass
murder in post biblical fashion. We have to become a civilized
people and learn to work together, before we revert to
primitive savagery and literally blow ourselves apart.
The holocaust was representative of the darkest side
of humanity, but unfortunately, it still covers many with
its shadow. Bringing light to such darkness involves much
more than rethinking one episode of history, but given
its enormous impact on collective consciousness, this
one issue could have an affect on many more. They may
seem an unlikely source, but holocaust revisionists could
help bring about an enlightenment that enables us to see
through inherited doctrines of ignorance and bigotry,
kept alive by political and biblical systems of superstition
which contribute to furthering the danger to humanity.
Confronting the real tragedy of what was done in the
past, and the role it has played in furthering human suffering
and injustice in the present, will be necessary for us
to end such suffering in the future. The hateful anti-Semitism
that was at the core of Nazi treatment of Jews cannot
be forgotten, but it shouldn't be remembered by developing
a ridiculous philo-Semitism that places one event, nation
or people above critical reproach. Like the Zionists and
Nazis who agreed that Jews were different from everyone
else, this is either/or dualism at its worst. Just as
past bigotry and brutalizing of Jews has scarred humanity,
so does present bigotry and brutalizing of Palestinians
disfigure us all. And just as we demythologize the American
story and create a more hopeful future by doing so, we
need to demythologize the mass injustice in Europe, and
the mass injustice it brought about in the Middle East.
Two wrongs do not make a right, any more than two lies
can make a truth. And while the truth may not set us absolutely
free, it could certainly help us move closer to relative
freedom.
Copyright (c) 2005 by Frank Scott. All
rights reserved.
This text may be used and shared in accordance
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for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication
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WASHINGTON —
A recent FBI interrogation of an Israeli defense expert
may indicate that the Justice Department's investigation
into the contacts between America's pro-Israel lobby and
a Pentagon analyst is broader in scope than previously
believed.
The expert, Uzi Arad, head of the Institute for Policy
and Strategy at Israel's Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya,
said that two months ago FBI agents interviewed him about
his contacts with the Pentagon Iran specialist, Larry
Franklin. During the hour-long interview, he said, the
FBI agents brought up the name of an American Jewish Committee
official, Eran Lerman, who is a former senior official
in Israeli military intelligence.
Franklin was arrested and charged Wednesday with "disclosing
classified information related to potential attacks upon
U.S. forces in Iraq to individuals not entitled to receive
the information." The Justice Department did not
name the individuals who allegedly received the classified
information from Franklin, but media reports claim they
are Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, two former officials
at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who were
recently dismissed by the pro-Israel lobbying organization.
Arad's comments, an unusual disclosure of a small wrinkle
in the otherwise ultrasecretive FBI investigation, may
suggest that the FBI is investigating more than the alleged
unlawful contacts between Franklin and Aipac officials.
Franklin is the first person to be indicted in the FBI
investigation. Rosen and Weissman have not been charged.
Initially, press reports said that Rosen and Weissman's
alleged transfer of secret information by Israeli diplomats
was the focus of the investigation. The questioning of
Arad may confirm speculation by some in the Jewish community
that the investigation is related to a larger inquiry
into Israeli or pro-Israeli attempts to influence America's
security establishment and its policy in the Middle East.
Arad said the FBI agents asked him, among other things,
why he had sent to Franklin, less than a year ago, a research
paper by Lerman on ways to re-energize America's relationship
with Israel. "They asked me who was Eran Lerman,
although they clearly knew who he was," Arad told
the Forward in a telephone interview.
Arad was a policy adviser to former Israeli prime minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and once headed the research department
of Israel's Mossad intelligence service.
Lerman joined the staff of the AJCommittee in 2001. Kenneth
Bandler, a spokesman for the AJCommittee, said he had
no comment on the FBI's questioning regarding Lerman.
Arad said that his strategic policy institute had commissioned
Lerman to write the paper. He said that he did not remember
sending the article to Franklin but that the FBI investigators
showed him a letter that accompanied the article, carrying
his signature. Arad said he explained to the investigators
that this was a mechanized signature on an information
package sent en masse to a mailing list of several hundred
former participants in the Interdisciplinary Center's
annual strategic-affairs conference, commonly known as
the Herzliya Conference.
Franklin attended the December 2003 Herzliya Conference,
though he did not deliver an address.
In his paper, Lerman wrote that the once-dynamic U.S.-Israel
strategic relationship had fallen into a "maintenance
mode" in recent years and ought to be re-energized
for the benefit of both countries. At the December 2004
Herzliya Conference, Lerman delivered an address based
on his research paper.
Arad said the FBI agents asked him about his conversations
with Franklin at the conference and several months later
at a meeting between the two in the Pentagon cafeteria.
He also said that both conversations were brief and that
he could hardly remember their content. The FBI interview
was also brief, as well, he noted.
It was arranged in haste, as Arad was rushing to catch
a plane from New York to Israel, and took place in a car
while he on his way to the airport.
This week, Franklin handed himself in, and was scheduled
to make an initial appearance at a Northern Virginia court
by press time.
In a statement, the Department of Justice said that Franklin,
58, surrendered to authorities at the FBI's Washington
Field Office following the filing of a criminal complaint
Tuesday and the unsealing Wednesday of the indictment
against him. The statement notes that the violation Franklin
is charged with carries a maximum penalty of 10 years
in prison.
Recently Franklin was transferred from the Office of
the Secretary of Defense, where he served as an Iran desk
officer, to a less sensitive position in the Pentagon.
The criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court
for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleges that on
June 26, 2003, Franklin had lunch at a restaurant in Arlington,
Va., with two individuals, identified as "U.S. Person
1" and "U.S. Person 2."
At the lunch, according to the Justice Department, Franklin
disclosed classified information that has been designated
"Top Secret" and related to potential attacks
upon American forces in Iraq. The government claims that
neither of Franklin's lunch companions has the security
clearance to receive the information.
Allegedly Franklin told the two individuals that the
information was "highly classified" and asked
them not to "use" it, according to the Justice
Department statement.
This portion of the Justice Department statement implies
that Franklin's lunch companions — alleged in press
reports to have been Rosen and Weissman — knew that
they were handling information from a highly sensitive
document. According to press reports, the FBI is investigating
claims that after the lunch the two former Aipac officials
transferred the secret information to an Israeli diplomat
in Washington.
The Justice Department statement says that a search of
Franklin's Pentagon office in June 2004 found the June
2003 classified document containing the information that
Franklin allegedly disclosed to the two individuals.
The criminal complaint against Franklin also alleges
that on other occasions he disclosed, without authorization,
classified American government information to a foreign
official and to members of the news media. In addition,
according to the Justice Department statement, about 83
separate classified American government documents were
found during a search of Franklin's West Virginia home
in June 2004, most of them classified as top secret or
secret.
The dates of these documents spanned three decades.
The investigation into this matter is continuing, the
Justice Department stated.
The charges against Franklin disclose several other new
details:
• According to an FBI affidavit that accompanies
the charges, Franklin admitted during an FBI interrogation
in June 2004 that he provided the information contained
in the secret document to the two individuals.
• The information that Franklin is charged with
disclosing is related not to Iran — contrary to
previous reports — but to "potential attacks
upon U.S. forces in Iraq." The government's main
concern, according to the FBI affidavit, is that such
information could be used to harm the United States by
"a country's discovery of our intelligence sources
and methods."
• Contrary to previous media reports, charges against
Franklin do not allege the transfer of a secret document.
Instead it is charged that he "verbally disclosed"
information that "was contained" in a top-secret
document. The distinction is important, legal experts
say, because verbally transferring such information is
a less serious offense.
• The document in question, according to the affidavit,
was marked "on the first and last pages with a caption
in all capital letters," which identified it as "TOP
SECRET with a denomination of its SCI [Sensitive Compartment
Information] status" — the highest security
classification. |
How does one figure
it out? There’s the United Nations, our government,
the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the
Council on Foreign Relations, and then there’s
the environmentalists and their two-forked leadership
– The Nature Conservancy and The Wildlands Project.
It’s complicated, we’re busy, and it’s
all a thorn in our sides. But understand we must because
all the above are a highly organized and tightly knit
entity. How does it all work? And where do average people
fit into world governance? Let’s take another
stab at the big picture, for it is an ugly picture if
you are of a religious or patriotic bent.
Let’s begin with the “underling society,”
also known as “civil society.” Civil society
is what the ones at the top call us, and us includes
all ordinary people - globally. There are too many of
us, according to the United Nations and the world’s
elite (Bilderbergs, Trilateral Commission, Council on
Foreign Affairs, global philanthropic organizations,
environmentalists, and the world’s elite think
tanks).
We are problematic because we want and need too many
things, like land, water, money, jobs, etc.. We are
also problematic because those in high places find the
ordinary to simply be unfit. They don’t like our
looks, our ways, our health, our living standards, our
Gods, our colors, and they especially don’t like
all our cultural modi operandi. We offend them and we
are seen as inferior life forms. That is why their social
systems are totally and completely closed and militarily
guarded. They do not intermix with the common man, and
the common man never sees them. The closest we ever
get to them are via some, but not all, heads of state.
Elite groups and commissions and their banks, conglomerations,
and philanthropic organizations control the world and
its money. The United Nations is one of their pawns.
I suggest to you that in the not too distant future,
a highly respected someone will take the reigns of the
United Nations. We’ll see if I’m right.
The elite, through their philanthropic foundations,
bankroll the movers and shakers of the world. They fund
their foot soldiers, so to speak, which carry out their
corporate ambitions and missions. The business decision
to create one governing body over the world’s
people was made many decades ago. This is an amazing
research project if one is so inclined, but for the
sake of this article, the elite wanted to own the Earth
in full - specifically all the Earth’s land and
water.
In most of the world, private property is unheard of
and unknown. In most countries, the government owns
all land and water, and people are only granted permission
to occupy land and to have access to water. When you
read of the many, many genocide slaughters throughout
history, and of displaced people having to walk into
other countries searching for mercy, food, water, and
health care, you can understand that the inability to
own land and to have water rights is extremely dangerous.
Why? Because governments change and are overthrown,
and because people who are incapable of owning land
are at the mercy of people in a social class that, historically,
finds the underclass offensive. If in doubt, read any
history book from any century and in any country, including
our own. There is a terrible human compulsion to loathe
and fear under-classes. Why? Because the love of money
damages, corrupts, and pollutes the human mind.
Classism has always been the very root of all wars
and all greed. Equally, revolutions have always been,
throughout all written history, a result of classism
and greed. Humans who come to see themselves as superior
to other human beings have caused every single war and
atrocity in human history – every, single time.
And the current corporate-socialistic-capitalistic global
governance momentum is just another formula for human
catastrophe and carnage. It’s been proven over
and over and over again that countries cannot operate
with elite monarchs over an under-class. It does not
work, and globalizing this effort is pathological madness,
and it is absolutely based in greed and profits.
Sadly, the globalization plans of the elite are advertising
their efforts as the democratizing of the world. That
is a lie. What they are doing is implanting consensus-based
local governance, which removes elected officials and
replaces them with local leaders chosen by the elite
and their corporations. And only those locals who comply
with pre-planned consensus missions will earn livings,
have food, have a place to live, and perhaps be allowed
to live. History also very aptly demonstrates what happens
to those who rebel against rules and norms of monarchies,
oligarchies, dictatorships, king-ships, and the like.
The taking of private property is well underway in
the United States, and all new housing, minus the mega-mansions,
are ALL deed restricted. Equally, all watersheds are
being taken and they will continue to be taken. Executive
orders and hidden legislation have all but destroyed
our voting powers. I strongly urge you to read the Executive
Orders issued over the last 40 years. You will be dumb-founded
and you will be terrified. I also challenge readers
to research and study the history and historical funding
of “eugenics.” It is something you need
to know.
I fear government by elite society. History tells me
that I must, and it also tells me that I need look no
further than the contemporary Middle East to understand
that people who own nothing are disposable for almost
any reason. Civil society is under-valued and dispensable
if not serving the profits and other desires of elite
owners, who may be corporations, commissions, banks,
or monarchs and dictators by any other name.
If we lose our American land and water rights to elites
of any kind – be they government departments,
commissions, organizations, stakeholders, councils,
environmental non-profits, or to anyone, we are totally,
100% vulnerable to and reliant upon their decisions
including, and not limited to, who lives and dies. Truth,
and this truth lies within the pages of all documented
human history. |
BOSTON - Governments
must speed up the approval of new flu vaccines and the
resources to inject them or the next pandemic will kill
hundreds of millions of people and bring the global economy
to a halt, a leading expert on infectious diseases says.
The next global influenza pandemic
is a when-not-if scenario, writes Dr. Michael Osterholm
in this week's New England Journal of Medicine. Current
limited stockpiles and the lead time needed to develop
new vaccines means "we would be facing a 1918-like
scenario," Osterholm writes.
The 1918 influenza outbreak killed up to 100 million
people worldwide, when the world's population was a third
of the size it is today.
Placing that pandemic in today's population could mean
1.7 million deaths in the United States and 180 million
to 360 million deaths globally, continues Osterholm, who
is the director for Infectious Disease Research and Policy
at the University of Minnesota.
Governments need national and international co-ordination
to prepare vaccines and the means to administer them,
he writes.
Vaccine research on all contagions remains basic at best,
Osterholm writes. Government investment must increase,
especially to develop a new process to test vaccines without
using chicken eggs. That technique takes at least six
months.
"We need a detailed operational blueprint of the
best way to get through 12 to 24 months of a pandemic,"
writes Osterholm.
A leading contender for the next pandemic could be the
H5N1 virus known as the Asian bird flu. Experts say it
is on the verge of jumping to humans. |
Provisions in the so-called
"Patriot" Act allowing federal agents to obtain
library and bookshop records without a search warrant
should be allowed to sunset at the end of this year as
scheduled, American Library Association (ALA) President
Carol Brey-Casiano said during a Washington press conference
earlier this week.
It has always been possible to obtain
search warrants for this type of information, so long
as a judge can be persuaded that a crime has likely been
committed or a conspiracy is likely to be in the works,
she explained.
"The government does not need the
additional powers allowed it under Section 215 of the
Act," she said.
Section 215 granted federal LEAs authority to demand
information without a judge's approval, and imposed a
gag order prohibiting trustees of the data from informing
the target of the search, or informing any other person
not involved in satisfying the demand. Although most businesses
are subject to it, the provision came to be known popularly
as the 'library provision,' due in part to strenuous ALA
objections to divulging the reading and research habits
and potential thought crimes of library patrons.
The 'library provision' is among fifteen controversial
items originally scheduled to sunset in January unless
Congress approves their renewal, as it appears poised
to do. The Bush Administration has
been fanatical about renewing each of them, insisting
that they have effectively prevented further terrorist
atrocities, although no evidence has been produced to
back up these claims.
Library confidentiality and the burden of convincing
a judge to open records of patrons' reading and Web surfing
habits constitute a terrible risk, the Administration
believes. During hearings on Capitol Hill last week, US
Attorney for the District of Columbia Kenneth Wainstein
made certain to reveal that two 9/11 hijackers had used
library computers to buy airline tickets via the internet.
House
Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (Republican,
Wisconsin) pounced on the tidbit, claiming that Wainstein's
"newly released information demonstrates the critical
importance of Section 215...to help disrupt and prevent
future terrorist attacks."
The National Review obediently accommodated
the Chicken Little chorus by running an alarmist column
entitled "On Borrowed Time," elaborating numerous
connections between terrorism and library use, and predicting
doom if federal LEAs are not permitted to "remain
vigilant in the stacks." Other known terrorists had
visited libraries too, readers of this FUD masterpiece
will be shocked to learn.
Meanwhile, the ALA has met with US Attorney General and
former White House torture apologist Alberto Gonzales
in hopes of amending the provision so that at least library
patrons can feel secure that their choice of reading materials
and preferred Web sites won't become part of their secret,
permanent records so easily.
Gonzales has said that he would consider an amendment
allowing data trustees (e.g., librarians) served with
subpoenas to contact a lawyer before fulfilling its demands.
This would not give any rights to targets of the searches,
or lift the gag order, however. And since it's more or
less customary for agents to allow people served with
subpoenas to contact a lawyer to advise them, Gonzales
is offering something that's already pretty well established.
But at least it would be a recognized privilege, not a
courtesy subject to interpretation, which is an improvement
over current practice, ALA Washington office Executive
Director Emily Sheketof told The Register.
ALA's meeting with Gonzales was reportedly cordial and
serious, and Sheketof says that he seemed both attentive
and willing to make a good faith effort to address the
ALA's concerns. However, being attentive
can sometimes mean little more than devising a more targeted
and legally-rationalized refusal to budge, and
Sheketof did not express much optimism that Gonzales would
yield on any of the basic provisions of Section 215.
Nevertheless, there is a small bright point on the horizon,
in the form of the SAFE Act, a bill introduced by US Senators
Larry Craig (Republican, Idaho) and Dick Durbin (Democrat,
Illinois), which seeks to undo some of the more objectionable
features of the "Patriot" Act.
The bill has good bipartisan support on the Hill and
is enjoying a boost from lobbying by the ALA, ACLU, and
numerous other outfits. So, while the "Patriot"
Act looks set to have its permanent Gestapo provisions
kept nearly intact, and its purportedly temporary ones
renewed with only cosmetic modifications, there is always
the possibility that the Safe Act could make it moot.
Assuming, that is, that Congress can override the inevitable
White House veto - hardly a bet that we would make. No
wonder the Administration shows so little inclination
to compromise on the "Patriot" Act in exchange
for ditching the Safe Act. |
COLUMBIA, MO. - Though
news scandals have the public questioning the media, a
U.S. study says journalists are more ethical than most
people would think.
Despite high profile fiascos involving everyone from
New York Times reporters to CBS News producers to White
House columnists, University of Missouri professor Lee
Wilkins and her colleague Renita Coleman, professor at
Louisiana State University, say that journalists are considerably
more ethical than the average adult.
Wilkins and Coleman, both former journalists, spent two
years interviewing 249 print and broadcast journalists
across the U.S. and administering the Defining Issues
Test, a widely accepted method of assessing a person's
moral development created about 30 years ago by psychologist
Lawrence Hohlberg and the University of Minnesota.
The test, which has been given to more than 30,000 people
in numerous professions since the 1970s, describes six
ethical dilemmas and asks participants what they would
do. Also, participants had to answer questions about what
motivated their decisions and rank the importance of each
factor.
"We did not really think that journalists would
come out as high as they did," Coleman told the Associated
Press.
Journalists ranked fourth on the list, following the
top-ranked seminarians or philosophers, medical students
and practising physicians.
Professions on the list that journalists beat include
nurses, orthopedic surgeons, members of the Navy and business
professionals. Junior high school students and prison
inmates scored the lowest.
The study, first published in the autumn 2004 issue of
Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly, also says
that:
* "There is more to being a journalist than learning
to write in inverted pyramid and mastering nonlinear
editing. Thinking like a journalist involves moral reflection,
done at a level that in most instances equals or exceeds
members of other learned professions."
* A person's level of education is a factor. "When
analyzing the journalists' ranking against other professions...
all the professionals who rank above journalists have
more formal education than the bachelor's degree of
most journalists."
* "When ethical problems are professionally focused,
journalists perform even better. This suggests that
giving journalists the opportunity to work through more
ethical dilemmas, whether they are real... or hypothetical
in seminars and workshops, bodes well for the profession."
* Journalists who had experience with investigative
journalism scored significantly higher than those with
a more general assignment. "This study [adds] empirical
evidence to the qualitative work that suggests investigative
reporting builds ethical muscles."
In the study, Wilkins and Coleman stress that the test
measures what action the participants say they should
take in an ethical situation rather than what they might
actually do in the situation.
In January, the two researchers also published a book
about their findings, entitled The Moral Media: How Journalists
Reason About Ethics.
Despite the study, a Gallup poll of about 1,000 people
conducted in the U.S. last November revealed that only
23 per cent of the public believes TV reporters have "high
or very high" ethical standards. Newspaper reporters
fared slightly worse, with 21 per cent of the public rating
their ethical standards as "high or very high." |
Springtime on the Columbia
River usually means hordes of Chinook salmon swimming
up the river, nourishing on their way centuries-old Indian
traditions and a voracious commercial fishery.
This year, however, thousands of salmon seem to have
gone missing — and no one knows why.
"We’ve got a big mystery on our hands, a run
of salmon that seems to have disappeared," said Stuart
Ellis, a harvest management biologist with the Columbia
River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.
Scientists had initially expected this year’s salmon
run to number about 225,000 fish swimming past the Bonneville
Dam where they’re counted. But, as of last Thursday,
scientists had only counted about 26,000 since the beginning
of the year.
A group of fish managers and tribal representatives met
Monday to revise their estimate, knocking the number of
fish they expect to pass from the original estimate of
225,000 to an unofficial guess of between 70,000 and 100,000.
Harsh consequences
For the first time the Indian tribes — who have
for centuries relied on the salmon for their cultural
and economic well-being — have been forced to get
the fish used in their springtime ceremonies from other
sources, some donated from sympathetic fishermen downstream
and others from freezers storing last year’s catch.
Charles Hudson, the manager of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal
Fish Commission, said that the effects of the dearth of
Chinook this year run deep, deeper than just having to
rely on frozen fish for the annual ceremonies.
The tribes also depends on the fish for much of their
daily food, and were initially given a seasonal allotment
of 25,000 fish to feed about 20,000 people this year.
So far, tribal fishermen have caught under 5,000 fish,
according to the commission's statistics.
The tribes are also dependent on salmon for much of their
economic sustenance, but it looks as though that will
also be jeopardized this year.
"It looks very likely that there will be no —
zero — commercial fishery this year," said
Hudson.
Significant drop in tourism
On April 20, federal fish managers shut down the entire
Columbia River above the Bonneville dam to all commercial
and sport fishing.
This has resulted in commercial fisherman losing one
quarter to one third of their profits for the entire year,
according to Oliver Waldman, the executive director of
Salmon for All, a fisherman’s advocacy organization.
"They’re broke," he said. The Chinook
are their most important catch, the most valuable fish
on the West Coast, netting the fishermen $5-6 per pound.
Now, however, "the fishery is sitting at the dock,"
Waldman said.
Bill Witt, who owns a fishing guide company that runs
frequent trips on the Columbia, estimates that if the
river is closed until June, his business will lose at
least $25,000, about one-tenth of its income for the season.
Within four days of the fishery shutting down, Gimme-A-Go
Fishing Adventures lost about $3,000, according to its
owner, Jon Ball.
"I’ve been sitting at home. I had the last
three days off," he said on Tuesday. He had to cancel
all of the river tours he had booked for the weekend,
as well as a television feature that was to be filmed
from his boat.
Ball noted that it’s not only sportsmen like himself
who depend on the sport fishing industry, but also the
riverside towns who rely on tourists and fishermen to
rent hotel rooms and visit stores and restaurants. Now
none of those businesses are getting the expected seasonal
rush.
"Everybody’s screwed," said Ball.
Unsolved mystery
So what happened to the fish?
Were they victimized by the wily sea lions that have
discovered how to climb fish ladders at the Bonneville
Dam, sitting there all day and devouring the unfortunate
fish that try to swim past? Has there been some significant
change in ocean conditions that have killed thousands
of fish? Or is there some secret black market downriver
that’s catching all the fish as they try to swim
up the river?
Sea lions are easy targets of the public and the government
fish managers, who have begun to blast fireworks on the
Bonneville Dam fish ladders where many lions have taken
up residence. But even the hundreds of sea lions that
now live around the dam couldn’t eat nearly enough
fish to account for the tiny run.
The fish market is also closely monitored by government
regulatory agencies, so a massive black market is highly
unlikely.
Scientists say they haven’t seen any evidence of
a dramatic change in ocean conditions that could cause
so many fish to die, but that could be a likely problem,
according to Steve Williams, the assistant director of
the fish program at the Oregon Department of Fish and
Wildlife.
Such changes could include increased predation of the
fish, or a change in water temperatures. Williams said
scientists have not been able to pinpoint what changes
have occurred that have hurt fish populations.
Williams noted that the annual springtime smelt fish
run up the river was also nearly nonexistent this season.
Smelt runs have not in years past been accurate predictors
of salmon runs up the river, but both fish would be susceptible
to altered ocean conditions, so the same problem could
be to blame for reduced populations of both fish.
Most people involved have established their own theories.
Ball, the fisherman, said he suspects the salmon have
been tricked by lower water levels caused by last summer’s
drought into delaying their run up the river. He said
he also thinks the sea lions may have quite a bit to do
with it.
Ellis and Williams both agree that none of these problems
individually should take all the blame. If anything, the
low numbers of salmon are the result of a number of factors
influencing their ability to swim past the Bonneville
Dam to their upstream spawning grounds.
Room for optimism
Williams said that despite the dismal numbers and initial
panic, he and others are now looking at the salmon run
with "slight optimism."
"Last week we were definitely in crisis mode,"
he said. But the increase in the number of fish making
their way upstream is cause for optimism, he said, and
he expects the run this year to at least hit the minimum
expectation of 70,000 fish.
Williams also said that the commercial and sport fisheries
might, if the count continues to trend upward, be opened
again soon. He said fish managers are evaluating the necessity
of the closure on a weekly basis, and could decide as
soon as next week that salmon numbers are sufficient to
warrant it reopening.
Even if the fishery were to reopen soon, however, it
would be too late for many of those people dependent on
the fish. Most of the Indian celebrations are done for
the season, and most of the commercial fishermen have
departed the salmon fishery, looking for greener pastures
in other Pacific Northwest regions.
"They’re hoping, with a great, fervent hope,
that the Alaska season will bring some revenues to them
and their families," said Waldman, of Salmon for
All. Even if the river were reopened to the fishermen
next week, they’ve already departed north and couldn’t
be repositioned for the Chinook catch.
Scientists are careful to note that the fish count continues
through early June, but say that even if it turned out
that the run was simply delayed this year, or even if
daily counts jumped into the thousands, this year’s
run still won’t come close to the numbers initially
predicted. |
Some say it looks like
the Hound of the Baskervilles, others mention the cartoon
character Wile E. Coyote.
But this, apparently, is the beast that has brought
terror to an upmarket town and caused anxious residents
to look over their shoulders at night.
Cynics claim it is the product of fertile imaginations
- or one or two gin and tonics too many.
But
more than 20 sightings have been reported in the last
few weeks, leading to a local illustrator compiling
an artist's impression.
Amateur photographers, meanwhile, have been descending
on the area in the hope of getting a shot.
Roaming thick woodland
Dubbed The Beast of Green Drive, the mysterious creature
has been spotted roaming in thick woodland at a beauty
spot.
About as tall as a collie dog but with huge ears, a
large mouth and a lolloping gait, the peculiar animal
has caused a frenzy of chatter in the normally sedate
Lytham St Anne's, Lancashire.
The creature, according to witnesses, is seen mainly
in the largely wooded area of Green Drive, where there
is plenty of brush and scrub to conceal a large animal.
Sandra Sturrock, who was walking her dog when she came
faceto-face with the beast, said: "I caught sight
of something large ahead of us. It was like a large
collie, light in colour with large sticking-up ears.
"It was watching me and my dog. I stood completely
still for several minutes trying to see it more closely.
I called my dog and put him on the lead and slowly inched
towards the animal to get a better look but it ran off.
I then went to where it had been and my dog went mad,
sniffing all round the area."
She added: "I have never seen anything like this
before.
"I lived in Cheshire for ten years and frequently
saw foxes and the odd deer.
"They usually disappear quite quickly and do not
remain watching you.'
Huge ears and a large mouth
Willie Davidson, 59, a painter and decorator, said:
"I was playing bowls near Green Drive when I heard
a snarl behind me. It was like a monster out of Doctor
Who and it needs tracking down."
Another woman, who did want to be named, said: 'I was
walking along the drive when I saw it in the fields
alongside.
"I have no idea what it was. I could tell it was
the size of a labrador, but looked more like a hare.
It can't have been either - it was surreal."
One theory is that it could be a muntjac deer, one
of the last remaining from a herd brought to Lytham
Hall by the local squire over a century ago.
Illustrator Sam Shearon came up with his drawing after
speaking to several witnesses.
A spokesman for Lancashire Police said: 'We have checked
local zoos and farms, but nothing seems to be missing.
It is very bizarre.
"We have handed it over to the RSPCA to investigate."
Apparent sightings of animals not native to the UK
have been on the increase in recent years.
Panthers are occasionally reported, with police marksmen
called in last year after a farmer said he saw a large
black cat on his land in Anglesey, North Wales.
At RAF St Mawgan in Cornwall, three members of staff
spotted a large black cat - similar to a puma or panther
- through their nightvision lenses.
Also in Cornwall, the infamous Beast of Bodmin is still
believed to be roaming farmland killing sheep and lambs.
Experts at Chester Zoo were baffled after being shown
the drawing of the The Beast of Green Drive.
A spokesman said last night: "It does not look
like any mammal currently alive. It looks more like
a mythical beast to us." |
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