Metro Gael

Amnesty International: The filthy public relations whores of fascism

2011-08-27T16:12:00.000-07:00

Death squads have been released upon the people of Tripoli. We can even see them on the screens of their friends in the corporate media. We can see them firing their guns in the air and at everything that moves. We can see them looting houses, rampaging through the city; these hoards, these bandits, cheered on by ruthless intelligence agents posing as journalists.

Hospitals are over flowing with dead bodies, people are being beheaded in the streets, black people are being lynched, tortured, beheaded, eviscerated. The mainstream press even admits that thousands of Gaddafi supporters have been massacred. They call it ‘settling of accounts’ as though it is perfectly normal, perfectly acceptable. After all, these people supported Gaddafi, so they deserve to be raped, tortured, burned alive, beheaded.

We have reports of patients being taken out of hospitals and murdered. Yet Amnesty International, in order to deflect from the atrocities of the NATO death squads, suggest that some of the patients in the hospitals could have been murdered by ‘Gaddafi’s forces’.

Now where did you get those rumours Amnesty International? Why do you suspect that a government currently under siege from the combined forces of the richest and most powerful nations on earth would have the time or malevolent will to go into hospitals and murder the patients there, murder doctors who they so desperately need? Why haven’t you investigated the PROOF of rebels going into hospitals in Benghazi, dragging Libyan soldiers out by the ears and hanging them over the entrances?

They even filmed it for you and posted it on the internet. Do you have any other sources of information other than NATO and their death squads? Why haven’t you investigated it? Is it okay now Amnesty International, is it okay now to behead black people? Or is this all part of Gaddafi’s ‘propaganda’ plan? Were the beheadings carried out under ‘Gaddafi’s orders’?

Muammar Gaddafi who so hates the black race that he set up the African Union, Muammar Gaddafi who so hates the black race that he wears the portraits of all the African heroes on his robes, the African heroes murdered by the CIA and their cronies since Black African countries achieved independence, thanks to training and funding from Tripoli? Are you afraid Amnesty International? Afraid of losing your credibility by criticizing the powers who fund and promote you?

Why didn’t you investigate the outrageous racist allegations that the Libyan forces were using ‘black mercenaries’, allegations which lead to the massacres of hundreds of black Libyan families right throughout this war? Why didn’t you condemn the disgusting use of the term ‘African mercenaries’? Did you not know that Libya is in Africa? Did you not know that there are thousands of black Libyans serving in the Libyan Armed Forces and police, just like America, Britain, France and other countries?

Why are you continuing to cover for NATO’s crimes? Why haven’t you condemned NATO’s arming of the rebels, in violation of international law? Why haven’t you condemned NATO’s deployment of mercenaries, in violation of international law?
NATO have carpet bombed Sirte yesterday.

Did you hear about that Amnesty International? So far more than 400 civilians dead. NATO’s hoards are systematically terrorizing the people of Tripoli, all of whom support Gaddafi. We know this because they all demonstrated that support throughout the war. We saw them on the streets of Tripoli on July 1st, all 1.7 million of them, waving green flags and holding up portraits of their leader.

We know this because you cannot bomb a country for six months, day and night, bombing and bombing and bombing and killing and killing , just like Vietnam, just like Laos, Just like Cambodia, just like the bombing of over 30 countries by US imperialism in the last century, you cannot bomb a country and expect its inhabitants to like you. It did not take long to oust Ben Ali of Tunisia nor Mubarak of Egypt, because neither of those leaders had the overwhelming popular support of Muammar Gaddafi. That’s why the target of NATO bombings is not ‘Gaddafi’s forces’, the target is the Libyan population.

Why have you not published more information about your directors, Amnesty International? We know, for example, that the mastermind of Al Qaeda, former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Bzrezinski, was one of your directors when his Al Qaeda thugs were raping and mutilating men and women in socialist Afghanistan during the 1980s, while you only concentrated on harassing the legitimate government of the country which was trying to stop them!

What a disgusting and discredited cabal of liars you all are! We will expose you Amnesty International, we will expose you for the scoundrels that you are, the scoundrels that you have always been, the whores of Western imperialism that you have always been.

When humanity needed independent humanitarian observers most, you were always on the side of the North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation, the US/EU rapists of the planet. You, who thrive on ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the form of depleted uranium bombs, cluster bombs, death squads and mass murder, which you pathetically attempt to attribute to the victims in order to protect the perpetrators.
In order to maintain your credibility among the uncritical, you sometimes make concessions to truth, you sometimes admit that the ‘good guys’ nominated by the Western military-industrial-media complex, have committed some crimes.
Yet, you know what is happening on the ground; you know this is a colonial war of conquest; you know that the rebels are deranged psychopaths; you know that many of them are not even Libyan; you know that they are raping women en masse; you know that they are lynching and torturing black people and you know that the Libyan government had one of the best human rights records in the world ; you know that it was the Gaddafi Charity Foundation that revealed and condemned abuses of prisoners in Libyan prisons; you’ve read the UN report on human rights in Gaddafi’s Libya; you know that political prisoners in Libya were Al Qaeda, the same people who are now slaughtering the civilian population, lead by NATO special forces, Apache helicopters and ceaseless bombardment from the air. You know this is imperialism; you know that it is NATO and not the Libyan Armed Forces who are committing war crimes and crimes against humanity . You know all of this because you are part of it. You are an essential part of it all. You provide ‘humanitarian’ and ‘human rights’ cover for the crimes of imperialism.

The richest and most egalitarian country in Africa is being bombed into the stone age and ‘human rights’ groups are doing everything they can to make us love it. Amnesty International are nothing but the filthy public relations whores of fascism.

From the makers of "Gaddafi is killing his own people" Doha studio presents" The Libyan Revolution"

2011-08-23T01:03:00.000-07:00

picture source:http://cyaegha-c.livejournal.com/460657.html

Surpassing previous mass media fabrications, both in scale and boldness, yesterday morning's Al Jazeera mise-en-scène will surely go down in history as one of the most cynical hoaxes committed by corporate media since the manipulated pictures of Iraqis topplying Saddam Hussein's statue after the US invasion in 2003.

On the morning of August 22nd 2011, Al Jazeera aired a 'live' report from Green Square in Tripoli,which claimed to show the capture of the Libyan capital by rebel forces. Scenes of jubilation and euphoria enveloped Al Jazeera's reporter Zeina Khodr as she declared: " Liya is in the hands of the opposition''

The images were immediately reproduced throughout the global media complex, with headlines trumpeting the 'end of the Gaddafi regime' and editorials throughout the corporate media world speculating about the post-Gaddafi future of Libya.

Gaddafi's sons were said to have been arrested, and more defections were announced. The Libyan capital was, we were told, now in the hands of the rebel forces. For many, it seemed a fait accompli.

In fact, the Al Jazeera pictures from Green Square were an elaborate and criminal hoax. The report had been prefabricated in a studio in Doha Qatar . This information had been passed onto Libyan intelligence and the Libyan people had already been warned about the qatari psyops a couple of days previously on Rayysse state television.

The Al Jazeera hoax was intended to create the impression that Tripoli had fallen so as:
(1) to break the Libyan resistance by creating panic and chaos in the Libyan captial.
(2) to provide cover for the massacres of civilians that would occur in the days following the declaration of rebel victory.

In other words, the media would provide cover for the war crimes and crimes against humanity that are necessary in order to subjugate the Libyan Jamhahirya to Western corporate interests.

Shortly after the Al Jazeera pictures were released, this author contacted independent reporter Lizzie Phelan in Tripoli. Miss Phelan was able to confirm from what she described as realiable sources that the Al Jazeera pictures were false.

By the end of the day, it emerged that all the twitter lies emanating from the criminals in the National Transitional Council were also, unsurprisingly, false. Gaddafi's sons had not been arrested, and the rebels were not in control of the city.

In the meantime, Lizzie Phelan, Mahdi Darius Nemenroaya and Thierry Meysan have receieved death threats from CNN producers staying in the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli. After the arrival of thousands of NATO/Al Qaeda terrorists, a brief period of chaos ensued in the city.

When many of the mainstream reporters abandoned the Rixos Hotel, Libyan authorities discovered that most of them were CIA and MI6 agents working undercover as journalists.

At present, Mahdi Darius Nezemroaya, Thierry Meysan and other real journalists remain trapped in the Rixos Hotel. Nezemroaya was fired upon by a NATO/rebel sniper when he attempted to place a press sign on top of the Rixos hotel to protect the building from NATO bombardement.

Reporter Lizzie Phelan contacted a friend yesterday to say that she had been threatened by CNN personnel and had been blocked from using facebook and email.

Below, you can see the warning given to the Libyan people by state media of Al Jazeera's coming psyops. The presenter tells the viewers that Al Jazeera have produced a simulation of Tripoli's Green Square, and that they are going to use this to produce a gigantic fiction of 'liberated' Libya.

The picture above proves that the producers of the Al Jazeera hoax are no Dutch masters, as the glaring discrepancies between the real Green Square in Tripoli and the Al Jazeera version are patently obvious. The differences between the architecture in Green Square in Tripoli and the pictures shown in Al Jazeera are well documented in the video below.

While the Al Jazeera mise-en-scène is entertaining, the leading actress Zeina Khodr is unlikey to receive awards for her rather slugish performance. She said her lines rather mechanically, as one who was not particularly enamoured of the script, or perhaps it was the far-fetched aspect of the entire screen play that bothered her.
This media hoax is another poignant example of the desperation of NATO, who have ruthlessly bombed a sovereign nation for 6 months and have so far failed to effect regime change. It also proves yet again the role of the corporate media in disinformation and war-mongering.

From Operation Odyssey Dawn to Operation Siren: Colonel Gaddafi as Homeric Hero.

2011-08-22T05:52:00.000-07:00

Since renaissance times, graduates of Greek and Latin literature in Britain, France and other imperial countries were often recruited by the secret service agencies. There were several reasons for this: graduates who could read the classics of Greek and Latin literature in the original languages tended to have good analytical and linguistic skills and a deep knowledge of history and culture.

Attention to detail and the capacity to read complex codes and signs are essential for intelligence work. On October 29th 2010, the British newspaper Express quoted the head of Britain’s secret service MI6 Johnathon Evans, a classical scholar, saying that classics should be taught in state schools “on the grounds that learning Latin and Greek would help “develop the kinds of skills that would-be spies need”.[1]

Given the centrality of Greek and Latin in the education of the European aristocracy in the past, it comes as no surprise that the current war on Libya was baptized “Operation Odyssey Dawn”. Scholars of the centuries identified many of the locations that feature in Homer’s epic poem in Malta, Sicily and the Mediterranean Sea where NATO’s air and sea forces are currently based.

European elites clearly see this current military adventure as akin to the trials and tribulations of Homer’s hero Odysseus who spent 10 long years attempting to return to his homeland of Ithaca after the Trojan War to liberate his palace from treacherous suitors who were attempting to woo his wife Penelope in his absence.

After many adventures and mishaps, the Homeric hero finally returns to Ithaca, joining up with his son Telemachus(the far-fighter), killing all the suitors occupying his palace.

But the question concerning Libya is: who is playing the role of Odysseus here?

The eponymous hero of Homer’s epic poem is described by the Greek bard as resourceful, wily, smart, fearless, charming, righteous and intelligent. Homer’s most frequently used epithets for Odysseus are‘polytropos’, of many twists and turns, ‘polymeros’,many-faceted and ‘metis’, cunning.

The most distinguishing aspect of this war has been the inversion of language to represent a false reality. So, the ‘protection of civilians’ means the bombardment of civilian targets; the Gaddafi regime means the majority of the population of Libya who support their government; ‘rebels’ and sometimes ‘revolutionaries’ are the euphemisms used to disguise jihadist terrorists’; the crimes of the rebels have been ascribed to the government forces and rebel retreats have been presented as advances.

It is hardly likely, therefore, that NATO considers their hated enemy, Muammar Gaddafi as an Odyssean hero fighting to free his country from greedy parasites. Yet, like Odysseus, Gaddafi has resisted NATO’s bombardment for 6 months.

Like Odysseus, part of Gaddafi’s country is currently being occupied by violent and treacherous parasites in the service of NATO. Like Odysseus, Gaddafi has managed to escape capture and death from the most gigantic and formidable forces on the planet.

Many classical etymologists derive the word Odysseus from the Greek ‘odyssomai’(ὀδύσσομαι ), meaning “to be wroth against, hated”[2]

Is there any other figure in the international media today more hated, more demonized than Muammar Gaddafi?

In Homer’s Odyssey, the suitors who occupy the eponymous hero’s palace attempt to persuade his wife Penelope that Odysseus is dead, that he will never return and that she should choose a new husband.

The international corporate media have been spreading the same lies and rumours about Gaddafi since the outbreak of the war in March this year.

When hostilities began in February, the British foreign minister William Hague declared that the Libyan leader had fled to Venezuela. The claim was false.

Claims were recently made that Gaddafi’s son Khamis had been killed. The claims were false. On Sunday August 21st International Criminal Court prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo-the man who told the astonishingly absurd lie about Gaddafi ordering Viagra for his troops so they could rape women-- told Reuters news agency that Gaddafi’s on Saif Al Islam had been captured by the rebels.[3]

Ocampo’s claim has been dismissed by Mathaba news agency. [4]

Gaddafi has continued to survive. Whether one likes the guide of the Libyan Green Revolution or not, it is clear that the Libyan people love their leader and that he is a man of unquestionable ability.

Only a leader of Odyssean qualities would be capable of resisting the aggression of the most powerful nations on earth for the best part of 40 years; instituting a political system that has the support of the people; creating the wealthiest and most egalitarian country in Africa and finally, surviving continuous aerial bombardment, economic blockades and invasions of foreign mercenaries for 6 months.

Did the planners of Operation Odyssey Dawn unwittingly dramatise themselves as the vengeful god Poseidon , punishing a superhero protected by Athena, the goddess of wisdom?

Operation Siren: psychological warfare to break the Libyan resistance.

According to the French newspaper Le Parisien on Saturday August 20th, the spokesman for the National Transition Council in Benghazi , announced the commencement of Operation Siren. The operation is being carried out by NATO forces in conjunction with rebels on the ground and aims to take Tripoli by ousting Colonel Gaddafi and his regime, [5] according to the Libyan NCT spokesman,

In book 12 of Homer’s poem, Odysseus and his men confront the challenge posed by the enchanting sounds of the Siren’s song. In Greek and Homeric mythology the Sirens were bird-women and seductresses who lured unsuspecting sailors to shipwreck and destruction.

The songs of the sirens were said to be impossible to resist but Odysseus had previously been warned about the nefarious bird-women by the sorceress Circe;

‘To the Sirens first shalt thou come, who bewitch all men, whosoever shall come to them. Whoso draws nigh them unwittingly and hears the sound of the Sirens' voice, never doth he see wife or babes stand by him on his return, nor have they joy at his coming; but the Sirens enchant him with their clear song, sitting in the meadow, and all about is a great heap of bones of men, corrupt in death, and round the bones the skin is wasting. But do thou drive thy ship past, and knead honey-sweet wax, and anoint therewith the ears of thy company, lest any of the rest hear the song; but if thou myself art minded to hear, let them bind thee in the swift ship hand and foot, upright in the mast-stead, and from the mast let rope-ends be tied, that with delight thou mayest hear the voice of the Sirens. And if thou shalt beseech thy company and bid them to loose thee, then let them bind thee with yet more bonds’[6]

Odysseus survives by asking his men to bind him to the mast of the ship so he can hear the sirens. knead honey-sweet wax, and anoint therewith the ears of thy company, lest any of the rest hear the song / the sailors put wax in their ears so they won’t hear the song and be drawn into destruction.

The Parisien report goes on to claim that it is no longer possible to evacuate foreign nationals in Tripoli as a Maltese ship which was due to evacuate Polish citizens has come under fire. However, the report does not say who exactly fired on the ship. According to the Polish foreign ministry, negotiations are underway with the rebels in order to secure the evacuation of Polish citizens in the country. [7]

However, the Reuters version of the same report gives more information about Polish citizens attempting to flee the besieged city of Tripoli. According to the report, 250 Polish families are currently in Tripoli.

“The ministry was not immediately available to confirm the report.

Poland has evacuated most of its citizens from Libya and moved its ambassador from Tripoli to rebel-held Benghazi, but some 250 people from mixed Polish-Libyan families have stayed behind, the ministry official added.

One family had hoped to leave on the Maltese ship, the MV Triva 1”. [8]

The above-cited French newspaper did not mention that the report had NOT actually been confirmed by the Polish foreign ministry and the Reuters report states that out of 250 people of mixed Polish-Libyan families only one family hoped to leave on the Maltese ship.

Both the Reuters and Le Parisien reports also claim that ‘heavy fighting’ has broken out in Tripoli between “remnants” of the “Gaddafi regime” and “rebels”, who, it appears, are about to capture the Libyan capital.

Le Parisien quotes Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini saying that “the tragedy is coming to an end” as the rebels will soon capture Tripoli. Frattini also assures Italian companies that previous contracts signed with the Gaddafi government will be respected as soon as the NTC takes over. [9]

What is the significance of the Maltese ship here? Why is NATO so concerned about getting a ship into Tripoli to evacuate foreign nationals when the unconfirmed reports cited only one Polish family hoping to flee the Libyan capital? To whom is the NTC president talking when he warns of a ‘catastrophic end’ for Gaddafi and his people?

Is NATO attempting to use a ‘humanitarian’ vessel as a Trojan Horse to deliver terrorists to Libya? Is another humanitarian narrative being written to justify NATO troops on the ground to ‘liberate’ Tripoli? Why do the reports not confirm who exactly fired upon the Maltese ship? Why does the report state that officials are negotiating with rebels to bring the ship into Tripoli? The rebels are not in control of the city.

Independent reporter and political analyst Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya has claimed that NATO is now embarking on a sophisticated psychological warfare operation to create panic and fear among the Libyan population in order to break their resistance to NATO’s terrorists. It is clear that Operation Siren is the name of NATO’s new terror campaign.

The same reporter told Russia Today that he had been fired upon by snipers. Nazemroaya also said that a CNN producer had issued death threats to CNN journalists in the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli.

The websites of Libyan state newspapers Al Jamahirya, Al Yosberides, Azzaf Alakhdar and Al Fair Aljadeed have been suspended.

NATO may now attempt to cut power and communication lines in Tripoli, create a state of chaos and fear in the streets, backed up with a mass rumour campaign in order to break the resistance of the Libyan people and prepare the conquest of Tripoli.

There have been reports in the Libyan television station Rayysse of an elaborate hoax prepared by Al Jazeera in which scenes of Tripoli being overrun by rebel forces are fabricated.

Rayysse reported on Friday August 19th:

“an anonymous source reports that NATO will try its last card, it seems that they have reproduced the background of Tripoli in a studio in Doha, Bab Aziziya in particular, and that they are going to simulate a takeover of Tripoli, after they cause a general blackout, cutting electricity and transmissions. The aim is to break the morale of the brave Libyans and fool them, so as to lead the city and the country into a chaotic state.”[10]

This morning August 22th Al Jazeera broadcast a report from Tripoli’s Green Square which they claimed was now in control of the rebels. The reporter Zeina Khodr declared “ this city is now in the hands of the opposition”

In a message on facebook, independent journalist Lizzie Phelan, who has been reporting from Libya since the start of the war declared:

“I now have from reliable sources that the Libyan army is still in control of Tripoli. Al Jazeera footage of Green Square was fake. Gaddafi went to Green Square with his sons. Things are much calmer now”

Al Jazeera, the television station owned by the Emir of Qatar, has been a driving force in the media war on Libya since the start of hostilities there. In February the Qatari station aired a video which they claimed showed peaceful protestors in Benghazi being fired upon by ‘Gaddafi’s forces’.

The video was subsequently located and published on the internet.

It clearly shows pro-Gaddafi demonstrators being fired upon by unknown snipers. The video was edited by Al Jazeera to suit their agenda of demonizing the Libyan government and creating the pretext for “humanitarian” intervention by NATO and the Gulf dictatorships.[11]

In a press release on August 21st, Libyan government spokesman Dr. Moussa Ibrahim, confirmed that over 1300 people had been killed and 900 injured in Tripoli within 12 hours of rebel attacks. Although dozens of rebels have been captured and they have not captured the city, the final phase of NATO’s brutal destruction of Libya is likely to end in a bloodbath. [12]

In spite of media claims of ‘game over’ for Gaddafi, the Libyan armed forces have cleared the rebels from Misrata, Zawia, Garman, Sormon and Sabratha in the last few days[13] It is clear that the majority of the Libyan people still support Colonel Gaddafi.

Conclusion.

Though the mainstream media chant about “Gaddafi’s last stand”, Operation Siren is the last desperate attempt of the North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation to enslave the Libyan population. If this war is not stopped now, there will be a humanitarian catastrophe in Libya.An anonymous NGO report published on August 21st states on the 108morris108 channel on utube states:

"All the carnage was distant until night fell then the sea boiled over with small fast boats that dumped ten or more special forces and Al Qaida killers at hundreds of points along the beach in and around Tripoli. The slaughter began at that moment. The distraction of the small gangs inside the city proved successful and allowed the unfettered invasion from the sea. Killing hundreds of thousands of Libyans in the next few days may be the result of this full fledged attack on a sovereign nation by NATO" [14]

NATO's rebels are facing a population of over 2 million Tripolitan citizens who have been armed by the government. These brave people, ignored by the world, will fight for the rights and freedoms that are theirs, the cities and towns that are theirs, the future of their families and children.

NATO’s sirens may beam their evil songs but the people of Tripoli are singing back to them. “Alla, Muammar, Libya bas” The Libyan people have three muses, Allah, Muammar and the land of Libya.

Perhaps NATO thinks it is winning this media war. But they would do well to consider the fate of the Sirens before committing ground troops to crush the Libyan people. The medieval writer Stephanus of Byzantium tells the story of a competition between the sirens and the Greek muses. When the sirens won the singing competition, the muses plucked the feathers from their wings. The sirens turned white and fell into the sea.

[1] http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/208177

[2]http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Do%29du%2Fssomai

[3] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/21/us-libya-rebels-tripoli-idUSTRE77K2EX20110821

[4] http://mathaba.net/news/?x=628171

[5]http://www.leparisien.fr/intervention-libye/libye-pour-isoler-kadhafi-les-rebelles-lancent-l-operation-sirene-21-08-2011-1573322.php

[6] http://www.literaturepage.com/read/theodyssey-177.html

[7] http://www.leparisien.fr/intervention-libye/libye-pour-isoler-kadhafi-les-rebelles-lancent-l-operation-sirene-21-08-2011-1573322.php

[8] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=maltese-ship-heading-for-tripoli-un

[9] http://www.leparisien.fr/intervention-libye/libye-pour-isoler-kadhafi-les-rebelles-lancent-l-operation-sirene-21-08-2011-1573322.php

[10] http://libyasos.blogspot.com/2011/08/al-jazeera-and-nato-planning-major-scam.html

[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb2qL9UOxuA

[12] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbjSPHOdZQ&feature=share

[13] http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1108/S00205/susan-lindauer-libya-gadhaffi-retakes-key-towns.htm

[14]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFGsmJMd_fo&feature=player_embedded

More NATO crimes against humanity in Libya: A letter to the "Irish Anti-War Movement"

2011-08-11T16:15:00.000-07:00

During the nights of the 8th and 9th of August, NATO jets bombed a refugee centre in the little village of Zliten, near the Libyan capital Tripoli. The NATO missiles blew 86 unarmed civilians to bits. 33 of them were children. Nato has denied the charges but the video below provides the dirty, incontrovertible proof of NATO's war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Since NATO began this war of aggression against Libya five months ago, under the fabricated pre-text of 'protecting civilians', they have failed to 'pacify' the North African nation. What is the reason for this failure? The reason is simple: Libya is one of the most democratic countries in the world and the Libyan people do not want to give up their hard-earned freedoms to be occupied by foreign powers and their corrupt domestic puppets of the so-called National Transitional Council.

The Great People's Socialist Libyan Arab Jamahirya is run by over 460 people's committees. There is no central government in Libya; rather,each resident of the country is a member of a local popular assembly. As Geoff Simons writes in his wonderful book 'Libya: the struggle for survival':
"The aim has been to sustain the sovereignty of individual Libyan citizens through the creation of popular assemblies(mutamarat) and committees(lijan; in such a system that the committee is pervasive at every political level and in every social sector.Every resident belongs to a sovereign popular assembly at the district level; members meet for an annual week of evening sessions to receive reports on local matters and to agree an agenda of important issues(such issues can range widely; from the relation between law and Islam to foreign aid, from policies on expatriates to economic development). The chairman and other mandated delegates carry the findings and conclusions of the meetings to the annual National Assemby which in turn takes its majority decisions to the secretariats"

The entire Libyan population is armed and the overwhelming majority of Libyans support the guide of the Libyan Green revolution Muammar Gaddafi. Now, you may not like the eccentric looking Libyan leader, dear reader, but the Libyan people do. There are no examples in human history of unpopular autocrats arming the entire population. Unpopular regimes never arm their subjects, for obvious reasons.

The NATO-backed rebels have never had popular support among the Libyan people. They are comprised mainly of the Libyan Islamic Fighting group, a rebel army formed by the CIA in Sudan during the 1970s when the country was ruled by CIA operative Gaafar Nimeiry. There is also CIA group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya and other motley factions who would like to see a restoration of the British puppet Sanusi monarchy, and there is, of course,the ever nebulous international conspiracy called Al Qaeda. The city of Darnah in Eastern Libya has always been major recruiting ground for Islamist terrorists. One of the Al Qaeda leaders currently fighint NATO's war is Abu Sufian Ibhramhim Ammed Amuda bin Qumu. Bin Qumu was a former detainee in Guantanimo Bay. He was trained in the CIA-funded terrorist camps of Afghanistan during America's covert war against the Soviet Union. He was moved to Guantanimo Bay after the American invasion of Afghanistan and has now been deployed to Libya to fight against the Libyan republic. Other CIA/AL Qaeda operatives are Al Hasidi and Khalifa Hifter.

The 'rebels' of Benghazi have received extensive military support from the Qatar dictatorship as well as media cover and propaganda from the television station owned by the Emir of Qatar, Al Jazeera.

Working in conjunction with Western intelligence, Al Jazeera/Arabic and Al Jazeera/English have marketed themselves as 'independent' television stations. This marketing involved mild criticism of Israel and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
However, since the CIA-fomented war against the Libyan people and the covert war against Syria, Al Jazeera has been the most important asset of the Pentagon's information war.

Judging by the TOTAL silence of the so-called 'anti-war' groups, it would appear that Al Jazeera and the pentagon have won the war thus far. Although Al Jazeera have been caught lying over and over again about Libya and Syria, Trotskites and many other 'leftists' do not seem to have noticed.

The Irish trotskyites and their European counterparts are a good example of this unfathomable gullibility. These soi-disant'revolutionary socialist' and 'anti-capitalist' groups have backed the CIA contras in Benghazi against the popular democratic Jamahirya.

The utterly risible views of these groups emanate principally from such eminanet intellectual fraudsters as Gilbert Ashgar and Noam Chomsky. Both of these authors swallowed the lies of Al Jazeera, CNN and BBC hook, line and sinker and they've been joined by a chorus of prattling sycophants.

In an interview Noam Chomsky gave with the BBC on March 8th 2011 after the CIA-backed uprising, he called the Benghazi rebellion a 'popular revolution' and Al Jazeera was, he stessed, "one of the best news services in the world".

Unsurprisingly, that is also the view of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who recently praised the quality of debate on Al Jazeera and complained about news stations such as Russia Today that were winning the media war against U.S imperialism. So Chomsky and Hillary Clinton are in perfect agreement on the outstanding quality of Al Jazeera!

In the above-mentioned interview Chomsky gave to the BBC, the MIT professor and 'cognitive scientist' went on to call Muammar Gaddafi a 'brutal dictator'. Muammar Gaddafi left office in 1974. Since, then, he has held no official function in the country, other than a highly symbolic role as ideologue of the revolution; his high prestige and devotion to the green revolution have given Gaddafi enormous symbolic power, such that when he speaks for or to the nation, everyone listens. Have you read any of Gaddafi's speeches Mr. Chomsky? Or his Green Book? Obviously not.

Gaddafi is not a dictator. He does not have the powers to override decisions of the general congress. For example, many years ago, Gaddafi advocated abolishing the death penalty in Libya. He proposed the motion to the General Congress and it was unanimously rejected.

On 16th of February 2009, Gaddafi addressed the Libyan government, criticising them for corruption and demanding more direct redistribution of wealth. The Libyan guide proposed that the government be dismanted entirely and that all oil wealth be distributed evenly among the people.

That motion was rejected by the members of the General Congress who were the object of the Colonel's criticism and who are now trying to kill him, his family and everything that the country has achieved over the last 40 years. For example, Mahmoud Jabril, head of Libya's National Economic Development Board, which had recently been closed down due to corruption, and Abud Ajleil, the ex-justice minister, were staunchly opposed to Gaddafi's revolutionary plans.

To return to the BBC Paxman/Chomsky interview, when the BBC presenter asked "the greatest intellectual of our time" if he thought that a NATO intervention would 'bring democracy' to Libya, Chomsky replied " I don't think so".

Now, imagine that! Mr Chomsky, the guru of the left, doesn't THINK that a NATO intervention will bring 'democracy' to Libya; he's not SURE if a violent intervention by imperialism will 'protect' the Libyan people. Here's an except from the Paxman/Chomsky interview:

Paxman " we have an obligation, do we not, to behave responsibly"
Chomsky: "yes"
Paxman : "And you're saying that we should simply not get involved"
Chomsky: "there may come a time when it would make sense for the West to become involved, in spite of its horrendous record of atrocities and crimes in that region too going way back, but the question is has that time come?"

Chomsky and his cohorts never once questioned the avalanche of lies diffussed by the corporate media against the Libyan government, the FACT that its rebels were armed from the start by Western intelligence agencies working from Egypt.

The fact that the rebels attacked police and army headquarters, buring officers alive and mutilating their bodies, invading people's houses, raping and mutilating women, beheading their victims, lynching black people, indulging in cannibalism. All of this has been well documented, yet Chomsky has nothing to say about it. He calls Benghazi 'liberated' and only trusts the pronouncements of the 'world's best television service' the afore-mentioned station owned by the pro-US dictator of Qatar.

That Chomsky has been able to present himself as a serious leftist for many decades is indeed a tribute to his skills as a 'cognitive scientist'

Shortly thereafter, the leader of the "Irish anti-war movement" Jim Roche, echoed his master's voice by telling the Irish times that the NATO intervention in Libya was 'unlikely' to bring democracy and freedom. Many of these Africa-hating, Gaddafi-hating, Trotskyites tend to justify their hostility to Gaddafi by citing his raprochement with the West after 911.

Gaddafi certainly tried to make friends wih the west after the bombings in New York, but that was because 1 he knew that if he didn't they would invade and occupy his country 2 Gaddafi had also been fighing Al Qaeda in Libya for many years( they had been supported by Britain and the USA). During the 1990s, M-I6 ,working through a London Al Qaeda cell, attempted to assasinate the Libyan leader. Gaddafi knew all along what the real meaning of "al qaeda" was and he did not flinch from speaking his mind after he had established friendly relations with the West.

In an interview with Larry King of CNN on 28/9/2009, Gaddafi reminded the American presenter that the 911 terrorists had been trained in the United States and not in the caves of Afghanistan and that the occupation of that country was therefore wrong.
The notion, therefore, that Gaddafi was a puppet of the west is patently false.

Although 'friendship' with the west was costly for the Libyan people, it also enabled them to have the crippling sanctions lifted and Gaddafi was quick to use his new international 'friendship' with the West to criticise them all over the world. This was particularly evident in his speech to the UN on Sep 23th 2009. Have you read this speech "Irish anti-war movement"?

So, why did the west bomb Libya?

1 Libya was the richest, the most egalitarian and democratic society in Africa. They were setting a bad example to other African countries who serve Western interests.

2 Libya has the biggest oil reserves in Africa. Imperialism rather likes owning oil.

3 Gaddafi was resolutely opposed to Africom (you haven't heard of Africom "Irish Anti-War movement?" look it up!

4 Gaddafi opposed French president Nicholas Sarkozy's plan for the Union of the Mediterannean which would bring North Africa under the rule of the European Union.

5 Gaddafi wanted to create a counterweight in the world to NATO called the South Atlantic Treaty Organisation. He was working closely with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to achieve this so that poor countries would be able to protect their resources from Western pillage.

6 Gaddafi wanted to create the United States of Africa: one federal state with one powerful military to protect the continent from foreign domination.

7 Libya was investing heavily in education, health and telecommunications systems throughout Africa, financing Africa's first satelite system which became operational in 2007. It was thanks to Libya that Africa underwent a telecommunications revolution in recent years. Bad news for US and European corporations seeking to dominate the African market.

8 The Great Man Made River Project( have you ever heard of that my dear Trotksyites?). Bringing the water under the Sahara desert for thousands of kilometres to supply Libyan cities with fresh clean water, the Great Man Man River Project is, without question, the greatest humanitarian infrastructual project in the history of humanity.

The GMMRP was financed and built by Libyan money made from oil-sales after the West lifted the sanctions against them. But the ambitions of the Libyan government did not stop there;they hoped to become self-sufficient in agriculture by irrigating the desert, turning it into fertile arable land. Now there is nothing that irks Western GMO crop corporations than countries becoming self-sufficient in food. Not bad for a 'brutal dictator'eh Chomsky? One further point here: The CMMRP was built by Libyan engineers. When Gaddafi took power in 1969, there was not a single engineer in the illiterate land. Now, Libya has the higest literacy rate in Africa.

9 Gaddafi proposed a one-state solution for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Gaddafi's reasoning was simple. Palestinian arabs already work in Israel and the West Bank is split off from Gaza. It is impossible to construct a viable Palestinian state. The logical conclusion is therefore for the Israelis and Palestinians to live together in a democratic republic. Whites and blacks did not form separate states in South Africa, so why should Apartheid Israel be any different? Gaddafi has some experience in the politics of apartheid. It was in Tripoli in 1981 that the first pan-African conference on apartheid was held. Did you know that my dear Trotskyite 'socialist revolutionaries'? Chomsky HATES all talk of unity between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Chomsky is, of course, on his own admission a Zionist of the 'left wing' variety.

10 Libya had put billions of dollars aside to create an African Monetary Union and African Central Bank to free the continent once and for all from foreign debt slavery.

11 Libya has lots and lots of gold. So much gold in fact that it accounts for as much as half the UK's holdings, and the UK robbed most of the gold they could find during the 19th century. Gaddafi was getting a little worried about the value of those paper notes printed by the privately-owned Federal Reserve in New York which it uses to control the world economy. Gaddafi wanted Libyan oil to be paid for by a gold-backed dinar. This would have turned Libya and Africa into a superpower. Bad news for the resource-robbing West.

12 NATO, the EU and the USA do not like Muammar Gaddafi's model of direct democracy as it allows ordinary people to participate in running the country. Western paliamentary democracies serve the interests of the banks, corporations and financial elite. Gaddafi's vision of popular democracy is a threat to the interests of that financial elite in Africa.

While the corporate media have done everything in their power to present the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt as 'revolutions', the real revolution began in 1969 in neighbouring Libya. The real revolutionaries of the 'Arab spring' are the millions of Libyans who have taken to the streets day after day to protect their freedoms; protect their free health care; free education; free housing; excellent childcare; modern infrastructure;their culture; their pride, their heroic history and the leader they love.

So did Gaddafi 'bomb his own people' Irish Anti-War movment? Did you read the report of the Russian military that proved this was a lie? Did you question any of the reports you heard? Were you not suspicious being as you are, 'revolutionary socialists' of the hysterical hatred Western imperialism has always had for Gaddafi even when they shook his hand? In France, the trotskyite Nouveau Parti Anticapitalite even had the gall to criticise Chavez and Castro for supporting Gaddafi.No wonder many people in france believe they were created by the French secret service!

So, "Irish Anti-War Movement" will you jump up and down calling for the overthrow of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela next when the Pentagon funds some pseudo-leftist outfit against him,( they already are, you know), when twitter, facebook and Al Jazeera start demonising him? Do you agree with your guru's estimation of Chavez that he is becoming a little 'authoritarian'? Your left-wing guru has already been working on softening your reaction to the coming attack on Venezuela, writing letters to Chavez pleading with him to release a corrupt judge and handing the anti-Chavez propaganda to mainstream newspapers.

Will we see the same response from you "Irish anti-war movement" next time your guru appears on the BBC as another 'popular' revolution in Venezuela is presented to you on your television screen followed by your guru's approuval? I suspect we will.

Finale

So, take a look at the pictures below from the television station of the 'GADDAFI REGIME', and tell me, did they make all this up? Can NATO bomb a country for 5 months every day, bombing and bombing and bombing and bombing, tell me can they do all of this and not kill a man, not kill a woman, not kill a child, not kill a baby, not kill many of them,not maim many of them, not terrorise many of them,not murder thousands of them, not diplace and terrorise thousands of them?

Can they do all this, tell me, without destroying the life and fabric of a country, you who jump up and down about Gaza, you who rant and rave about the West Bank, are the Libyan people different? Do they deserve to me massacred? you who shout about getting troops out of Shannon and "hands off Iran" and "free Palestine" and "fuck Israel" and 'revolutionary socialism', and "anti-captialism" and "anti-war" etc.etc. Why are you now BACKING the zionist thugs of Benghazi against a popular democratic regime?

You say 'fuck Israel' but you love the Israelite Bernard Henry Lévy and his rag-tag troop of terrorists and traitors, with their Israeli-made weapons. You say you want socialism then you denounce any country that actually attempts to implement it. So here you are now once again, you Monty Python leftists, singing in unision with imperialism as a sovereign nation is reduced to rubble, chaos and despair. Shame on all of you!

The Libyan resistance will win. No pasaran!

2011-08-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

"How sweet will be the victory of the wretched, and how great! How sweet will the songs be on that golden day, and how brilliant the golden sun of the wretched as it blazes. How sweet this dangerous dream - that hopes will be realized, that wishes become true. That a dream will become reality, that the wretched of the earth will have their state." Muammar Gaddafi.

How could a being with humanity in it not love this dangerous dreamer, this wild bedouin romantic, this purger of evil, this gentle, gracious, tender, loving Shepherd of Sirte?

The ongoing Zionist destruction of Syria

2011-08-07T13:09:00.001-07:00

For the past five months, Syria has been the victim of armed gangs, emanating from Iraq, Lebanon,Jordon, Turkey and Israel. These islamist terrorists have been murdering protestors, army personnel and police. They have been committing heinous crimes against humanity, including rape, mutilation, canibalism and ritual human sacrifice. The terrorists are being coordinated by the notorious Muslim Brotherhood, who have had close links to British and American intelligence for many years.

The Wahabite terrorists are assets of Western intelligence agencies, who are providing logistic support, training, and an advanced disinformation campaign using social media in conjunction with global corporate television stations. Many of the psychopaths now terrorising the Syrian population have come from American military bases across the border in Iraq, where they have been trained.

All of this has been thoroughly documented by the Syrian authorities and independent journalists and researchers from various countries. Yet, the corporate media continues to publish lies and disinformation on a daily basis to prepare public opinion for 'humanitarian intervention' in Syria.

The French media is at the forefront of this information war with Zionist ideologues Bernard Henry Lévi and his minions pushing for more French military interventions in countries hostile to the interests of Tel Aviv.

Syria has been on the frontline of the resistance to U.S/Zionist imperialism for decades. Although it has many economic and governmental problems, Syria is a modern, secular democracy which provides its citizens with free health care, free education and strong protection and promotion of women's rights. In fact, Syria has been the home for thousands of refugees fleeing Zionist terror in Iraq and Palestine. Many Iraqis are treated free of charge in Syrian hospitals.

Syria does not recognise the state of Israel.It supports Palestinian liberation and is a strong advocate of a multi-polar world based on international law.
Unlike its corrupt Arabic neighbours, who have been capitulating to Israeli demands since 1948, Syria insists on the right of return for Palestinian refugees and the evacuation of all occupied- Arab lands by the zionist entity.

That is why the U.S, France,Uk and Israel, that is to say, the Atlantic Zionist Alliance wants to turn Syria into Iraq and wipe it off the face of the earth under the false banner of 'human rights' 'democracy' 'freedom' etc. Progressive intellectuals the world over know this, yet the vast majority of working people who read print journalism and watch programmed radio and television remain under the sophisticated perceptual grip of Zionist propaganda.

But the censorship and disinformation is most extreme in the Atlantic alliance countries as it is they who are now leading the drive towards world war. Readers of Russian, Spanish or Arabic tend to be more informed about these matters. For example, in Syria one has access to all media outlets, BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, New York Times etc. Yet most Syrians trust their own national media channels.

However, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and other sateline stations linked to US and British intelligence have had a corrosive impact on the minds of many Syrian youth. Many of the Syrian protestors are young people who have grown up watching Al Jazeera, the news station of the British/US-backed Qatari dictatorship. It should be said that not all of those protesting are engaging in such wanton violence. The CIA strategy in Syria is to infiltrate terrorists into the crowds, professional snipers who fire on the police and protestors. This creates confusion and chaos and makes it particularly difficult for the regime to mangage the situation. This is classic CIA destabilisation.

In fact, similar methods were used in the past. In 1989 in Romania, the CIA sent groups of terrorists into Timisoara to shoot on unarmed protestors. Bodies were taken from morgues, photographed en mass and presented to the media as proof that the Romanian leader was 'killing his own people'. In the video below, you can see exactly how this was achieved and the French and American intelligence officers are surprisingly honest about their role in training and directing terrorism against the people of Romania.

The true story of the Romanian counter-revolution was covered in Le Monde Diplomatique many years ago. They did not doubt then the truth about the role of US and French intelligence in the mass murder of Romanian civilians.But they are dead silent today as a much larger, more savage operation is underway against Libya and Syria.

Although AL Jazeera/English initially gained credibility for allowing more criticism of Israel, the Qatari newstation has played a key role in the Zionist destabilisation of Syria and the ongoing crimes against humanity being committed by the NATO terrorists against the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahirya. They have actively encouraged the armed rebellion of the Sanusist, Salafist counter-revolutionaries of Benghazi against the Libyan government and have refused to air the views of the majority of the Libyan people who support Colonel Gaddafi.

In short, Al Jazeera represents the interests of the Qatari monarchy, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and their Western backers, Israel/UK/U.S.
Although false leftists such as Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk and others are still clinging to Al Jazeera as a credible TV station, progressive humanity is resisting this final onslaught of Western imperialism, and there are less and less people reading the sophisticated disinformation of the above-mentioned fraudsters.

The video below is from Telesur, a Venezuelan television station. In Venezuela, the government supports independent media, while the corporate oligarchies control most of the mainstream press. The mainstream media in Venezuela is largely funded by US tax dollars taken from the American working class, in order to keep the interests of America's ruling class protected worldwide by shaping the opinions of millions of people. The mainstream media in Venezuela is violently anti-Chavez and pro-American. Such distain and open bias against the elected president of a nation would not be tolerated in any other country in the world.

The Venezuelan state-media is grass-roots and serves the interests of the general public. From my last trip to Venezuela, I can say that the working classes of that country are among the best informed in the world. One can have a far deeper conversation about international politics with a shopkeeper, or factory worker in Caracas than some of the most distinguished students and professors of our European universities. That is because they have a press which serves the public interest.

Since the start of the war against Libya and the covert war against Syria, Telesur have had reporters on the ground in both countries who have been reporting the truth on the atrocities committed by the NATO backed terrorists. In spite of over three months of war and horror in Libya and covert war against Syria, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that proves what these protests are about, the "Irish Anti-War movement" continues to support the NATO-backed contras in Libya and to denounce the government of Bashir-al-Assad in Syria.

These Monty-Python lefists are a credit to their historical lord and patron Leon Trotsky. As Lenin said of Trotsky "What a swine this Trotsky is — Left phrases and a bloc with the Right . . ! He ought to be exposed” (Lenin, CW #35 285)
The Irish 'left' are nothing but a foolish circus of petit-bourgeois Trotskyites, who are true to the anti-intellectual, anti-revolutionary antics of their historical heroes. Their bumptiousness and inspissated stupidity have turned them into a serious obstacle to a genuine people's peace movement.

Análisis de la situación en Siria par teleSUR_tv

Muammar Gaddafi. Guide of the Libyan revolution

2011-08-05T06:50:00.000-07:00

MASSIVELY IMPORTANT SPEECH BY GADAFI SPEECH ON NASSER, ARAB NATIONALISM, TUNISIA & EGYPT
Qaddafi Mentions Importance of People's Conferences in July 23rd Speech
Posted: 2011/07/29
From: Mathaba

On the occasion of the birthday of Arab African hero Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, the Libyan historic revolutionary leader gave a speech, the full text is translated here by Mathaba

Speech of Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi on July 23rd, 2011, addressing the people of Egypt:

In the name of The God [Arabic: Allah], on the occasion of July 23, the anniversary of the historic July revolution. You do not need me to remind you of the July Revolution, which has proven correct all of what Abdul Nasser said, namely that reactionism was always an agent of colonialism. Reactionism is linked to backwardness and is not linked to progressiveness.

Reactionaries are always agents of colonialism, because the reactionary ruler cares for nothing but to stay in power. He knows that he has no links to the masses. He seeks help from foreigners, so he pursues policies that serve colonialism so that he stays in power. Thus the rulers of Libya before the revolution, the rulers of Egypt who were like rulers in the Gulf who seek help from foreign bases, the American and British forces, they placate Zionism to appease colonialism, they have no dignity.

All what Abdul Nasser said was right, all he said about revolution was correct. All he said about socialism was correct. All he said about colonialism was correct. Regardless of the military aspect of July 23 Revolution, the charismatic Abdul Nasser was able to transform the revolution or the coup into a revolution that rid the country of feudalism, exploitation and capitalism and above all evicted the foreign bases.

Then it took on a nationalist trend because Abdul Nasser realized that Egypt alone would not be able to liberate Palestine and even maintain its independence hence Abdul Nasser called for Arab Unity.

If the [Arab] nation had reacted to the call of Abdul Nasser, the Arab nation would have been by now a powerful respected nation like Iran, Turkey, India or Russia. All nationalities were embodied in a state: the Toranic nationality embodied in the Turkish state, the Persian one in an Iranian state, the Hindu one in India. Except the Arabs, as the Arab nationality was not embodied in one state, thus the Arabs remained feeble entities [small states], subordinated and sometimes stricken like now in Libya, Iraq, Palestine and Somalia.

[Political] parties in Egypt were the cause of the revolution. Read what Sadat had to write at the time about the Egyptian revolution and the [political] parties. Abdul Nasser was the one who said that he who becomes a member of a party was a traitor meaning that he entered in an alliance with a group of people who share the same regional or ethnic affiliation in which he compromises the interests of the whole society.

Parties were there in Egypt, but what had they accomplished: corruption, compromising Palestine and engagement in exploitation. Backwardness prevailed and that was the reason for the strong revolt. The parties were annulled when they became irrelevant and outdated and were replaced by the Socialist Union, a coalition of the working people who have an interest in the revolution, in freedom and progress. All these powers were allied together to lead the society without right or left or centre right or center left [political positions].

Then [along] came Sadat and to appease the West he abolished all what Abdul Nasser had done including and foremost the "Socialist Union", he brought back [political] parties, he talked a lot about parties though he earlier wrote about the Egyptian revolution criticizing political parties. The return of parties marked the end of the July 23 Revolution and from that time on Egypt returned to the situation that was before the revolution or even worse. Under Sadat and after him Egypt offered whatever the West asked to no avail, the subordination did not do Egypt any good, it did not solve Egypt's economic problems nor did it give it military power, it [even] ranked below Lebanon.

What has the revolution given? Revolution means people seize power, but how can the masses govern? This is the historic question that followed Athens [ancient greek experiment in direct democracy]. The answer is in the Green Book, it is that the people organize themselves into People's Conferences [Arabic: مؤتمر ], including all adults, men and women, and power becomes in their hands, and they then appoint People's Committees.

The People's Committees becomes responsible in front of the People's Conferences: the secretariats of the basic people's conferences and secretaries of the people's committees meet in an assembly called the "General People's Congress" [or National People's Congress], each person makes [his or her] decisions at the basic People's Conference and not his [or her mere] thoughts, and those decisions made by the masses of the basic People's Conferences from across the nation are brought [to the General People's Congress].

They formulate decisions in all conferences, in a single formulation that determines the policy of the country and what the people want, and the people's committees, which were appointed by the people, execute those decisions, and everything becomes for the people: wealth belongs to the people, arms belongs to the people and power belongs to the people, media belongs to the people, and not to a certain individual.

You have seen the problems in America now and in Britain, and you have those problems too and they are present in every country, everyone wants to have a big share in the media which is funded from abroad, foreign countries make a TV station in your country, a newspaper in your country and a political party in your country.

That is not Democracy, demo-cracy means people sitting on the chairs, the word cracy was taken from the Arabic language or the Persian language, which we have taken from them, the chair was mentioned in the Quran, the word cracy (chairs) could be Persian, people on the cracy(chairs), when all the people sit on the chairs then it is called demo-cracy, and when people don't sit on the chairs then it is not democracy, then it is called political party cracy, government cracy, classcracy, but not democracy.

Democracy means people on the cracy (chairs), so how can [all the] people sit on the chairs? People organize themselves into basicPeople's Conferences, all of them, as the political system passed [historically] through the following stages: the monarch stage - this is prior or after the rudimentary stage - the first stage being monarchy, the king emerged, a person emerges who could own the land and what's on it. This is monarchy. This ended, development ended it, it is no longer permissible for anyone to own the land and what's on it, only in the Persian Gulf, since it is not Arab.

The second stage was the republic (Arabic: Jumhuriyah), Jumhur - plusiyah - means people appoint a king, a president of the republic, who is [in fact] a king appointed by the people for a short or a long period of time, the same thing.

The important thing is that the second stage was the republic is when people began to select who governs them, and the republic continued. The republic has become dull and failed and the world is suffering [under this system] and the masses destroyed.

The third stage was the Jamahiriya, Jamahir (masses) came, sinceJamahir - plus iya - becomes Jamahiriya, the first Jumhur that became Jumhuriyah, and the second Jamahir which leads to Jamahiriya, and this is the final stage and the end of the road for the problem of power, the power becomes for the people, how?

It becomes the Jamahiri system with the basic people's conferences, the people's conferences appoint people's committees, the conferences decide and the committees execute [carry out the decisions], there is the popular security, there is the armed people, the people's control, and the inciting force we call it the revolutionary committees, or the movement of the revolutionary committees that incites the people to seize power until they practice authority.

Why did you take action that toppled Hosni Mubarak? Why? We were expecting the establishment of the Jamahiriya [self-governing masses society] whether in Tunisia or in Egypt, these are the people just as The Green Book calls for to seize power without weapons and without violence, just as the explanations of The Green Book indicate, that the masses reject the political system and stage a sit-in until the political system is toppled and they replace it.

This happened in Libya in the 1969 Revolution that was carried out by the army, and people heard that the monarchy political system was toppled, the government and representative council were cancelled and there was a void, people across Libya formed the people's conferences [ مؤتمر] on their own.

We anticipated that when you toppled the people [earlier this year, that you would] replace them with a popular revolution, establishment of the Jamahiri [direct participatory democracy] system, following the disruption and destruction which you have carried out. But to put in place another president, you might have done better keeping the previous president [Mubarak] until he had finished his term then elected another president without demonstrations or sit-ins in the Tahrir square.
What does that mean? Do you want to bring a super-president? Will he be better than Mubarak? As for Mubarak, he does not deserve this maltreatment. We should not be an ungrateful nation. As Machiavelli said Rome was not an ungrateful nation. When Roman commanders lost a war they were honoured, rewarded and sent into retirement.

Who will be loyal to Egypt after this end of Hosni Mubarak [of Egypt] or even Zine El Abidine [of Tunisia]? Who will be loyal to Egypt? Hosni Mubarak was exposing himself at risk to defend you, and to die for you. He was a pilot fighting Israeli forces that attacked Egypt. Instead of being honoured, he is insulted. Who will sacrifice more than Hosni Mubarak?

Hosni Mubarak went to sacrifice himself for you and your country before you were born. He has got just two children because he was a pilot and may die at any time in battle in defense of Egypt, so he decided to have only two children to be raised by their mother, while other Egyptians have got ten or more. Every Egyptian family consists of ten, twenty or fifty. The wife is as a school followed by a queue of children. Is it reasonable?

This is the end of who sacrifice for you. I know Hosni Mubarak. He is a poor man, modest and loves you. I know him. If he did not love you I would have attacked him and exposed him like other rulers. But I know him. He begged. He came to me and asked me for ferries, when the ferry sank. He went to Saudi Arabia to beg for other ferries. He also asked me and others for train locomotives.

Who will travel on these locomotives? Will he travel in them? They are for you. Sometimes we have no morals, just as when we insult (Nasser). Abdel Nasser a hero of the Arab nation; leader of the Arab nation; a great man who struggled against colonialism and Zionism; who dared and removed the royal system, and cancelled a mistake of (Bakri) and the Egyptian people, who have brought the revolution and appointed an Ottoman officer from Albania to govern Egypt as if there was no men in Egypt to rule the country.

They came with Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali's family ruled Egypt 150 years. The family owned the whole country till Egypt became a manor of Muhammad Ali because of this mistake. Then Nasser came and said ''this cannot be. It is nonsense. We, Egyptians, are we men to be ruled by an Albanian officer for 150-years generation after generation?!

Now, without plenty of space, military, economic and security power which country can live. The 53 African countries can't live. No one of them can face the storms of this age only when the African Union becomes as the U.S, the European Union, or the Russian Federation. A European big nuclear state cannot live alone, not Germany nor France nor Britain nor Italy, but only in the European Union.

For the United States of America, if it was independent states, it would have been as weak as South America.

The Russian Federation is present, China is a giant, and India is a nuclear state and exists. A billion of ASEAN now is formed in a new country. Latin America may become a union. The Arab States will be divided between Africa, Asia and will disappear, only if the one Arab country or strong African Union is established [can they survive]. Now, whoever does not have the military, economic and security power in a large strong space [bloc], cannot live.

It is not possible to live. Egypt's currency means nothing nor that of Libya, Tunisia or Malawi. What is the value of these currencies? Who knows them? You should have a power expressing a large space such as the euro, or dollar. You should have a military force to stand against big powers otherwise what has happened to Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan will happen to you.

Who of you can defend Egypt? It is not possible. You cannot defend it. Have you got an intercontinental missile, an atomic bomb or an aircraft carrier? Without those, they will trample you as you are watching now.

In Libya, the Libyan people from Benghazi, Tubruq, or in Tripoli or anywhere else, there is no struggle for power, absolutely not, yesterday in the first month we met, we had no problem, we have no problems, we're practicing authority.

The Aggression is foreign, mercenaries made by France, the Arab Maghreb Al-Qaeda who escaped prison or who were expelled from the army. Each one took up arms and fought, not the Libyan people, here are the Libyans in the millions in the streets. In the end, I have 18 million Libyans, whom you call the Libyan tribes or the Arab tribes, who extend from Al-Minya to the desert to the west of Alexandria [in Egypt], forming a crescent until the Nile valley, we did not talk about these tribes during the Abdel Nasser era, they were third degree citizens, they had their own laws, they were Arab sheikhs and Arab tribes and they had their own system since Abdel Nasser, leader of the Arab world wanted to unite it and we did not speak.

During and after the Sadat era and due to our good relations with Hosni Mubarak, in the end we were embarrassed and never talked about them, but now enough! Everything has ended and each one is expressing himself in Egypt, we look at the Tahreer square there are 160 in a coalition, the Muslim brotherhood, libertines, our brother Coptics, nationalists and Egyptians all of them have entered [the coalition], everyone with a religious background has entered, hence the Libyan tribes, which include 18 million until now want to enter the arena, I, naturally, am afraid of them being marginalized again, and we will not accept for them to be third class citizens in Egypt, they cannot even join the army, or join politics or the army, they are marginalized, if Egypt was liberated by the popular revolution, these tribes, who are continuously calling me, should be accounted for, they cannot live marginalized from now on.

This is the era of the masses and each one wants to prove himself, naturally, we've Arab Bedouin tribes who are marginalized in Sinai and they are coherent with us in what's known as the grand Sahara tribes, naturally they tried to link themselves with us, however, I am talking about the Libyan tribes who are known by name, who part of them are in Libya and the other [part] are in Egypt, all of these tribes are an extension of the Libyan people. If Egypt is Egypt and Libya is Libya this matter should be clear, and if we're Arabs and want to be a single nation then this is another thing.

What's before us is an obscure situation, we don't know where are we heading, heading for division, disappearance, failed small states, dying nations then die. I am inviting you to meet with me, you who made the revolution in Egypt and in Tunisia, if it is a popular revolution then the people should seize power through the people's conferences and people's committees, if it were a prey and everyone wants a piece, then it is not a popular revolution! The era of the political parties has ended.

Now, it's the era of the masses, political parties should placed in museums as they are old tools, they are old moulds that cannot accommodate the facts of this era, the era of the masses, the era of the masses is the end of the road in the struggle for the people's authority, for democracy.

Democracy is people sitting on chairs, a Jamahiri system and not governmental, when one says a government in Libya they will laugh at him, this means an "antique", what's the government? Government means one governs and another who is being governed, this has no place in the era of the masses, no masses accept to be governed, they govern themselves.

No one can represent the masses, nor can anyone speak or think on behalf of another, they are there so let them think, talk, discuss and decide on their own in the people's conferences, the only mean to realizedirect popular democracy is the people's conferences [aka popular congresses] and people's committees. However, your people the Libyans are steadfast regardless of the ferocity of the attack, and you're watching, may God bless you.

We know the ordinary Egyptian individual's heart is burning and they are with us, as well as the Tunisians, and the all of the Arab world, we distinguish between rulers and the Arab people, today, we're defending the honor and dignity of the Arab world, and if we surrender, this means an insult to the Arab world. For the sake of Arab dignity, we'll not surrender, we'll die standing.

We're defending Africa, we're the gateway of Africa, we're the shield of Africa, all of Africa is behind us and with us, and the Islamic world is with us and defending Islam in front of the crusade declared by the French president, he said it, "I am leading a new crusade".

This is the second crusade, and I think it's shameful to sit and watch, counting the raids, how many raids and how many died and how many bombs were dropped on Libya. All of this will end, it will end and glory will be with the martyrs and freedom fighters, and for those who defend the Arab world, we're defending the Arab and Islamic worlds and defending the African continent.

I hope everyone would ponder these words, each one who listens and reads it one his own and not with a group, then a group comes and we will discuss it, each one should see whether these words are true or not, without any influence from anyone. I am with you, my beloved Egypt and my beloved Tunisia, I love Egypt and I hope that Egypt would not be ungrateful, and I don't want Egypt to be a failed country, on the contrary, I want it to be a leader country, now it went behind Tunisia and there is no harm, this means the leaders are the Tunisians and you followed them, however, there is no harm, even Tunisia is an Arab country.

I commend the soul of Jamal Abdel Nasser, hero of the Arab world in this day, I commend the Egyptian people. I commend the Egyptian youth, I hope that God may guide them to the path of the popular revolution and the people's authority.

Are Israel and the USA attempting to destabilise Syria?

2011-03-31T00:26:00.000-07:00

As the global media cheers on NATO’s war on Libya, the media focus is increasing on the unrest in Syria. While the Western press is claiming that Syrian forces are ‘firing on their own people’, other reports would suggest that a complex nexus of subversion could also be at work to destabilise the Middle Eastern country.
Syria has been a staunch supporter of Palestinian liberation and was opposed to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Israel has occupied the part of Syrian territory called the Golan Heights since 1967, when up to 110 thousand Syrians were forced to leave their homes.

Syria has been in the firing line of US/Israeli imperialism for many decades. In 2003, the United States Congress passed the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Act (SALSRA), which threatened Syria with sanctions if it did not follow orders from Washington.
Section 2 of the act states
“1) On September 20, 2001, President George Bush stated at a joint session of Congress that `[e]very nation, in every region, now has a decision to make . . . [e]ither you are with us, or you are with the terrorists . . . [f]rom this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime'. [1]

On Friday March 11th 2011, Syrian state media revealed that the country’s security forces had seized a large quantity of fire arms, explosives, grenades and night-vision goggles coming from Iraq.
The Syrian authorities claimed that the weapons shipment was intended “for use in actions that affect Syria’s internal security and spread unrest and chaos”.[2]
On Saturday last, Syrian state television broadcasted confessions from foreign agents of different nationalities, after they were detained following violent clashes with Syrian police in several Syrian cities.
Mohammad Radwan 3 of dual US/Egyptian citizenship, currently working in Syria, was among those who confessed to having recently visited Israel for secret talks. The Egyptian claimed he had been given the mission of diffusing images and videos designed to create the impression that Syria was about to collapse in chaos.
The American citizen confessed to having been paid 100 Egyptian pounds but that he had not yet agreed the sum to be paid for the videos.
According to Venezuelan state-media Radio Del Sur:
“There are strong links between the Israeli and Colombian paramilitaries. In 2010, President Juan Manuel Santos, said he was "concerned" about the case of Yair Klein, a former Israeli military who travelled to Colombia to train Colombian paramilitary groups and performed "services" to the drug cartels.

As recognized by Santos himself, "Klein was one of the architects of that process led paramilitary after so much violence in Colombia."[3]
Similar confessions have been aired by Syrian state television before. In November 2008 confessions from an Islamic militant group linked to Al Qaeda believed by the Syrian authorities to have been financed by the current pro-Western Lebanese leader Saad Hariri were aired on Syrian state television. As the BBC reports:

“Speaking against the same black backdrop, the men admitted responsibility for the explosion, the aim of which, they said was to harm the Syrian government.

One aspect of the "confessions" may be particularly damaging, and may have wider regional implications.
According to the televised testimonies, the explosives used in the attack were brought from northern Lebanon, where Fatah al-Islam, it is claimed, received financial support from the party of the country's pro-Western Sunni leader Saad Hariri.” [4]

Contrary to the reports of the western media, the president of Syria Bashar Al Assad remains a popular figure due to his opposition to US/Israeli imperialism in the Middle East.

Hundreds of thousands of supporters demonstrated in favour of the Syrian president in Damascus on the 29th of March 2011 in support for president Assad after his cabinet resigned.
President Assad has promised to end the state of emergency in place since 1963 as well as implementing other reforms.[5]

Hundreds of Syrian communities abroad Greece, Bahrein, India, Russia and Belarus expressed their solidarity with the Syrian president. There were also demonstrations in the Lebanese city of Al-Nabatiya in support of the Syrian president.[6]

A peaceful ‘Day of Rage’ organised by opponents of the Syrian government on Facebook, was scheduled to take place in early February but protestors failed to show up.

The recent violence reported in several cities in Syria has received extensive coverage in the western press. But the circumstances of violence remain vague. It is not entirely clear whether peaceful protestors are being murdered by the police or the police are being murdered by the protestors. Some reports claim that 7 policemen have been murdered.[7]

What is clear, however, is that Israel has been lobbying for similar military action against Syria. After a meeting with his French counterpart Alain Juppé, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman told Reuters News Agency:

“I think that the same principles, activities the Western world (has taken) in Libya ... I hope to see those regarding the Iranian regime and the Syrian regime.” [8]

Syrian authorities have accused the Israeli secret service Mossad of attempting to destabilise the country. Given the role of US, French and British intelligence agencies, backed by the international corporate media, in the destabilisation of Libya, President Assad’s claims that foreign mercenaries in the service of Israel are now attempting to destabilise Syria are highly credible.

[1] http://www.congress.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:H.R.1828:
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/11/syria-seizes-arms-from-iraq
[3]http://laradiodelsur.com/?p=17449
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7715850.stm
[5]http://www.lorientlejour.com/category/Moyen+Orient+et+Monde/article/697247/Demonstration_de_force_des_pro-Assad.html
[6]http://www.sana.sy/eng/22/2011/03/29/339199.htm
[7] http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24016
[8]http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/lieberman-west-should-deal-with-iran-and-syria-like-libya-1.351593?localLinksEnabled=false

China should be colonised says Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.

2010-12-14T01:45:00.000-08:00

The media furore over the awarding of the Nobel Prize for peace to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo is yet another egregious example of European moral decadence. The Nobel Prize for peace has always served to bolster US and European imperial interests, with past prizes going to war criminals such as Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama.
But this year's prize smacks of unmitigated pusillanimity.

Liu Xiaobo was inprisoned in China due to his subversive political activity. It is difficult to judge the particular circumstances of this repression, but let's take a brief look into this man's past.
What does Xibao favour in China? What is his vision for a 'New Democratic China'? In an interview in 1988, Xiaobo the freedom fighter said he believed China needed up to three hundred years of colonisation in order to acquire 'democratic values' comparable to the West. He has never renounced these views.

In the nineteenth Century China was occupied by Western powers. Britain's Opium Wars against China had reduced the Chinese population to servitude and misery. When the Chinese communists arrived in Shanghai in 1949, they found a city of down-trodden drug addicts. China under Western colonisation was not a democracy.
When the United States declared War on Iraq in 2003, Xiaobo told a Swedish human rights activist that he fully suppported the war.

In Xiaobo's political manifesto one can read his project for a new China. He hopes to see a radical privatisation of all land, similar to the seigneurial system of China's past, where foreign investors could buy up large tracts of land and apartments,virtually re-colonising China.

Once again the august Nobel Prize committee has chosed a champion of peace and human rights. Xiaobo has been an indefatigable proponent of war, colonisation, greed and mayhem. This man, considered a criminal and a traitor in his native country, this champion of war, advocate of colonisation and the 'human right' to exploit and be exploited, the human rights of countries to be bombed and invaded by the United States, is a most worthy recipient of this Year's Nobel Prize for Peace.

Democracy Now loves the CIA's Dalai Lama!

2010-07-07T07:06:00.000-07:00

The independent media station Democracy Now is one of the most well known 'progressive' media outlets. However, the news station has shown a startling blindness when it comes to investigating covert CIA activities. This is quite apparent from its coverage of lesser known geo-political problems and genocides caused by the United States and its allies such as the Darfur crisis, a US destabilization campaign to control Sudanese oil resources, the Rwandan genocide carried out by Pentagon-trained dictator Paul Kagame with full US backing,and of course Tibet.

Here once again Democracy Now has done its job of steering the 'left' into ideologically confused waters. Amy Goodman enthusiastically greets the Tibetan despot and CIA agent the Dali Lama with fawning questions concerning peace and human rights.The Tibetan 'exiled community' and their descendants are of course experts on questions concerning peace and human rights having enslaved and brutalized the entire Tibetan population for centuries before the arrival of the Chinese Liberation Army in 1950. One would almost suspect from Mrs Goodman's tone that she and the CIA's old tyrant in robes have some deep 'spiritual' connection.

Notice the imperious attitude of the Dalai Lama towards his servile interpreter!Tibet's spiritual leader displays a decidedly poor command of English to boot.Having spent years outside his native land, traveling the world spreading the 'message' of Tibetan buddhism, earning over 200,000 dollars from the CIA per annum for terrorist activities against the Chinese government, one would think the least he could do is employ the services of a competent teacher.Oh, I beg your pardon your holiness, I meant language serf!
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2010/5/24/amy_goodman_questions_dalai_lama_about_iraq_and_afghanistan_wars_and_about_tibet

Fidel Castro says world war is imminent

2010-07-05T14:36:00.000-07:00

La felicidad imposible
4 Julio 2010 68 Comentarios

Prometí que sería el hombre “más feliz del mundo si estaba equivocado” y desgraciadamente mi felicidad duraría muy poco.

Todavía no ha concluido la Copa Mundial de Fútbol. Faltan aún seis días para el partido final.

¡Qué extraordinaria oportunidad se perderán posiblemente el imperio yanki y el Estado fascista de Israel para mantener apartadas las mentes de la inmensa mayoría de los habitantes del planeta de sus problemas fundamentales!

¿Quién se habrá percatado de los siniestros planes del imperio con relación a Irán y sus burdos pretextos para agredirlo?

Al mismo tiempo me pregunto: ¿qué hacen por primera vez los buques de guerra israelitas en los mares del Golfo Pérsico, el Estrecho de Ormuz y las áreas marítimas de Irán?

¿Es posible imaginar que de allí se marcharán los portaaviones nucleares yankis y los buques de guerra israelitas con el rabo entre las piernas, cuando se cumplan los requisitos contenidos en la Resolución 1929 del 9 de junio de 2010 aprobada por el Consejo de Seguridad de Naciones Unidas, que mantiene la autorización para la inspección de los buques y aeronaves iraníes con la posibilidad de llevarla a cabo en el territorio de cualquier Estado y que esta vez autoriza a hacerlo a los buques en altamar?

La Resolución establece también que no se realizaría la inspección de los buques iraníes sin el consentimiento de Irán. En ese caso, la denegación sería objeto de análisis.

Otro elemento añadido es la posibilidad de confiscar lo inspeccionado, si se confirma que incumple lo dispuesto por la Resolución.

Un Irán desarmado fue víctima de aquella cruel guerra con Iraq en la que masas de Guardianes de la Revolución limpiaban los campos de minas avanzando sobre las mismas.

Este no es el caso de hoy. Expliqué en Reflexiones anteriores que Mahmud Ahmadineyad fue jefe de los Guardianes de la Revolución en el Oeste de Irán, que llevó el peso principal de aquella guerra.

Años más tarde, un gobierno de Iraq envalentonado envió el grueso de su Guardia Republicana y se anexó el Emirato Árabe de Kuwait rico en petróleo, que fue presa fácil.

El gobierno de Iraq mantenía con Cuba estrecha amistad y se le prestaba, desde los tiempos en que no estaba en guerra con nadie, importantes servicios de salud. Nuestro país trató de persuadirlo de que abandonara Kuwait, y pusiera fin a la guerra que había provocado a partir de puntos de vista erróneos.

Hoy se conoce que una mediocre embajadora yanki, que sostenía con el Gobierno de Iraq excelentes relaciones, lo indujo al error cometido.

Bush padre atacó a su antiguo amigo dirigiendo una potente coalición con una fuerte composición árabe-musulmana-sunita de países que abastecen de petróleo a gran parte de las naciones industrializadas y ricas, la cual avanzó desde el Sur de Iraq para cortar la retirada a la Guardia Republicana que se replegaba hacia Bagdad, la que por prudencia de la Infantería de Marina y las Fuerzas Armadas de Estados Unidos -bajo la dirección de Colin Powell, general con prestigio, y posteriormente Secretario de Estado de George W. Bush- escapó hacia la capital de Iraq.

Por pura venganza, contra ella utilizaron los proyectiles contaminados con uranio empobrecido con los que por primera vez experimentaron el daño que podrían ocasionar en los soldados adversarios.

El Irán al que en este momento amenazan, con sus ejércitos de aire, mar y tierra, de religión musulmana-chiíta, en nada se parece a la Guardia Republicana que atacaron impunemente en Iraq.

El imperio está a punto de cometer un impagable error sin que nada lo pueda impedir. Avanza inexorablemente hacia un siniestro destino.

Lo único que puede afirmarse es que hubo cuartos de final en la Copa Mundial de Fútbol. De ese modo los fanáticos del deporte pudimos disfrutar los emocionantes partidos en que vimos cosas increíbles. Se afirma que, en 36 años, el equipo de Holanda no perdía un viernes en partidos de la Copa Mundial de Fútbol. Únicamente gracias a las computadoras podría sacarse esa cuenta.

El hecho real es que Brasil fue eliminado de los cuartos de final de la Copa.

Un juez dejó a Brasil fuera de la misma. Al menos esa fue la impresión que no se cansó de repetir un excelente narrador de la televisión cubana. Después la FIFA declaró que era correcta la decisión arbitral.

Más adelante, el mismo juez dejó a Brasil con 10 jugadores en un momento decisivo, cuando faltaba todavía más de la mitad del segundo tiempo del partido. Con seguridad que esa no fue nunca la intención del árbitro.

Ayer fue eliminada Argentina. En los primeros minutos el equipo alemán, a través del mediocampista Müller, sorprendió a la confiada defensa y al portero argentino logrando obtener un gol.

Con posterioridad, no menos de 10 veces los delanteros argentinos, por una del equipo alemán, no lograron un gol.

Por el contrario, el equipo alemán anotó tres más, y hasta Angela Merkel, Canciller Federal de Alemania, aplaudía rabiosamente.

Así, nuevamente, uno de los equipos favoritos perdió. De ese modo, más del 90% de los fanáticos del fútbol en Cuba quedaron estupefactos.

La inmensa mayoría de los amantes de ese deporte ni siquiera saben en qué continente está Uruguay. Un final entre países europeos será lo más descolorido y antihistórico desde que nació ese deporte en el mundo.

En cambio, ocurrieron hechos en la esfera internacional que no tienen nada que ver con los juegos de azar y sí con la lógica elemental que rige los destinos del imperio.

Una serie de noticias vieron la luz los días 1, 2 y 3 de julio.

Todas giran en torno a un hecho: las grandes potencias representadas en el Consejo de Seguridad de Naciones Unidas con derecho al veto, más Alemania, instaron el dos de julio al Gobierno de Irán a dar “una pronta respuesta” a la invitación que se le hiciera para retornar a las negociaciones por su programa nuclear.

El Presidente Barack Obama firmó el día anterior una Ley que amplía las medidas existentes contra los sectores energético y bancario de Irán, y podría penalizar a compañías que realicen negocios con el Gobierno de Teherán. Es decir, el bloqueo riguroso y el estrangulamiento de Irán.

El Presidente Mahmud Ahmadineyad afirmó que su país retomará las conversaciones a fines de agosto y destacó que en las mismas deben participar países como Brasil y Turquía, los dos únicos miembros del Consejo de Seguridad que se opusieron a las sanciones el 9 de junio.

Un funcionario de alto rango de la Unión Europea advirtió, despectivamente, que ni Brasil ni Turquía serán invitados a participar en las conversaciones.

No hace falta más para sacar las conclusiones pertinentes.

Ninguna de las dos partes cederá; una, por el orgullo de los poderosos, y otra, por la resistencia al yugo y la capacidad para combatir, como ha ocurrido tantas veces en la historia del hombre.

El pueblo de Irán, una nación de milenarias tradiciones culturales, se defenderá sin duda alguna de los agresores. Es incomprensible que Obama crea seriamente que se plegará a sus exigencias.

El Presidente de ese país y sus líderes religiosos, inspirados en la Revolución Islámica de Ruhollah Jomeini, creador de los Guardianes de la Revolución, las Fuerzas Armadas modernas y el nuevo estado de Irán, resistirán.

A los pueblos pobres del mundo, que no tenemos la menor culpa del colosal enredo creado por el imperialismo, ubicados en este hemisferio al Sur de Estados Unidos, los demás situados al Oeste, Centro y Sur de África, y los otros que puedan quedar indemnes de la guerra nuclear en el resto del planeta, no nos queda otra alternativa que enfrentar las consecuencias de la catastrófica guerra nuclear que en brevísimo tiempo estallará.

Desdichadamente no tengo nada que rectificar y me responsabilizo plenamente con lo escrito en las últimas Reflexiones.

Lukashenko. Europe's last democrat

2010-06-07T09:27:00.000-07:00

There is no other nation in Europe so maligned and demonised as Belarus. Since the pronouncement of former US Secretary of State Condolezza Rice in 2008 calling the democratically elected president of the country “Europe’s last dictator”, the image and reputation of this noble country has been callously tarnished.
Belarus is deeply familiar with the notion of dictatorship. They, more than any other country, suffered the worst of Nazi atrocities during World War 11.Belorussia has always been a multicultural country with Jews, Christians and Muslims living side by side for centuries. This deep tolerance for cultural and religious differences is still celebrated in Belarus today. Yet the European Union, Israel and their mafia don the United States, never cease from spreading atrocious lies and disinformation concerning the Republic of Belarus. This is because Belarus is a social democracy which refuses to take orders from the IMF, the World Bank and their geopolitical manifestations in the form of the United States, the European Union and their numerous vassel-states.

Unlike the crony regimes in Ireland, Romania, Poland and other states, you will not find complicity in crimes against humanity in Belarus. There are no CIA stop-overs like Shannon, no CIA run -prisons where innocent people are incarcerated without trial or due process and tortured. Unlike Poland, you will not find Belarussian shock troops in Iraq. Unlike Ireland, you will not find Belarussian ‘military advisors’ in the illegal occupation of Afghanistan. Belarussians will pay for their oil and energy resources unlike the US and NATO who will bomb and occupy all of Central Asia and most likely Iran in order to get control of oil and gaz under the pretext of ‘security'.

President Lukashenko, whose salary amounts to a modest 17,000 Euro per year, has no connections to multi-national corporations unlike the crooks in the US and the EU who accuse him of ‘human rights’ violations, corruption and ‘electoral fraud’.
Under Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus has enjoyed some of the highest living standards in the former Soviet Union with little over 1 percent unemployment. But, of course, this constitutes a severe violation of human rights. But isn’t Lukashenko the man who praised Hitler in an interview with the German paper Handelsblatt in 1995? Is that the anti-Semitic guy who called a Jewish town a pigsty. No my dear reader. That is most definitely not he! The interview with Dr. Martin Zeiner was cleverly mistranslated to include references to Hitler. This was confirmed by the interviewer himself who said “"a tape of the interview had been quoted out of context and with the sequence of comments altered” Only an idiot would fall for such lies and only scoundrels like the BBC would repeat them.

Lukachenko is a communist and has spoken out against fascism on numerous public occasions. As for anti-Semitism and the pig-sty comment, the Belarussian president was actually praising the Jews. What he was trying to say is that Belarus is trying to encourage Jews to stay and that the town in question which once had a thriving Jewish community, is now a pigsty since they left for Israel. In spite of the fact that the chief Rabbi of Belarus has praised the Belarussian president for his kindness to the Jewish community, the EU and the US seem to think that Lukachenko is ‘anti-Semitic’ and also opposes ‘free media’. In 2000, a synagogue in Minsk was the victim of an arson attack from a racist group. This patsy group claims to be pro-Lukachenko. They are one of the many groups financed by the United States. When the president condemned the attack and outlawed their racist publications, the US and the EU condemned him for ‘cracking-down’ on the ‘free media’

The list of accusations against the Belarus president is impressive and shows just how effective the agents of capitalism are at destroying social democracies. For example, Amnesty International, whose former board director was US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, published a report accusing the Belarus President of countless ‘human rights’ violations. Among the absurd claims made by Amnesty International is that the scientist Yury Bandazhevsky is a ‘prisoner of conscience’ He was arrested and charged for accepting bribes from student’s parents. This is a crime for which he was justly punished.
As for the arrest of members from so-called ‘opposition groups’ Zubr and Kmara, it is a well-documented fact that these groups are financed by the United States, who has declared itself an enemy of Belarus. The financing of opposition groups in the United States by state openly hostile to the US government is illegal, with the notable exception of Israel. I haven’t seen any Amnesty International criticism of this.

The Belaurus government has also been accused of internet censorship and media control.Th is claim is absolute nonsense. The Open Net Initiative carried out a study recently to see if the claims about Internet censorship were true. They found “found no evidence of systematic and comprehensive interference with the Net. Any regime-directed tampering that may have taken place was fairly subtle, causing disruptions to access, but never turning off the alternative information tap”
Much of this misinformation concerning the Belarus media comes from Reporters Without Borders, another phony US-funded pressure group which targets any government who does not support the Washington Consensus. Reporters Without Borders rarely criticise the totalitarian control exercised by corporations over the media in the United States.

The US finances over 300 ‘pro-democracy’ NGOs in Belarus whose job is to spread neo-liberal dictatorship and fascism to a population happy with the system they have. In 2000, President Clinton appointed Micheal Kozak as US ambassador to Belarus. Kozak is a great champion of human rights. He oversaw the ‘humanitarian’ massacres of the US –trained contra rebels in Nicaragua under the Reagan regime. The contras slaughtered entire villages killing over 30,000 innocent men, women and children. Kozak later told the London Times that the the US ‘democracy’ mission in Belarus would be similar to those in Nicaragua. The EU is firmly behind the US mission threatening sanctions and spreading lies about repression and electoral fraud. But as we in Ireland know too well, the EU seems to have a problem with election results it doesn’t like. So what can we say about Lukashenko? He is anti-racist, anti-war, anti-corruption, pro-democracy and pro-freedom. Yep, he’s definitely Europe’s last dictator!

The problem with Belarussians is that they just don’t understand what we Europeans mean by liberty, democracy and ‘European values’. But don’t worry, we’ll teach them!

On the necessity of a thorough de-Trotskization of the left

2010-05-22T08:34:00.000-07:00

"in place of finding myself face to face with a political chief who was directing the struggle for the liberation of the working class, I found myself before a man who desired nothing more than to satisfy his needs and desires of vengeance and of hate and who did not utilize the workers' struggle for anything more than a means of hiding his own paltriness and despicable calculations.

... in connection with this house, which he said very well had been converted into a fortress, I asked myself very often, from where had come the money for such work. . . . Perhaps the consul of a great foreign nation who often visited him could answer this question for us... .

It was Trotsky who destroyed my nature, my future and all my affections. He converted me into a man without a name, without country, into an instrument of Trotsky. I was in a blind alley. . . . Trotsky crushed me in his hands as if I had been paper."

Ramon Mercader, the man who saved the USSR from a fascist collaborator called Trotsky.

Reading an article by John Waters in the Irish Times recently criticising the activities of the Socialist Workers Party, I was surprised for once to find myself actually agreeing with him, but for all the wrong reasons. I can scarcely imagine ever having agreed with John Waters but I am glad to say that I do agree with him on this issue.

I was struck by the comment John made concerning the protests of the Socialist Workers Party, SWP outside the Dáil. I fully support protests but I do not,however, subscribe to the ‘ideology’ of the SWP. John, citing the work of Slavov Zizek, pointed out the paradox that radical demonstrations, far from being a critique of the bourgeois order, in fact, validate the freedoms granted under that order. There is a certain truth in this but Waters seems to think that the SWP advocates some form of radical revolutionary change. Waters, I believe, unwittingly, points at the central problem concerning the SWP, namely that it is as though capitalism itself had created the space for them to exist, that, far from offering a radical alternative to capitalism, the SWP are in fact a creation of capitalism itself.

Historically this is absolutely true. The key figure mentioned here by Waters is of course Leon Trotsky, the favourite counter-revolutionary of ‘Socialist Workers’. Leon Trotsky is perhaps one of the greatest liars in modern history and those political groups who still admire him, are tragically clinging on to a vicious falsification of left-wing history by claiming that Trotsky was the ‘true revolutionary’ and the ‘real successor to Lenin’. Lenin despised Trotsky and never ceased to point out his mistakes, his bumptious ego and his factional activity within the Bolshevik party in the former USSR. The usual phrase thrown out about Trotsky is that he was the ‘architect of the October Revolution’. This is indeed what Trotsky thought of himself but it bears no reflection on reality. Trotsky only joined the Bolshevik party when they were about to cease power in 1917. He was as Lenin described him an ‘opportunist’.

For years, he had vilified Lenin and the Bolsheviks, supporting every kind of right-wing policy disguised in left-wing jargon. Months before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 while, Lenin , Stalin and others were working indefatigably at organising party activity, Trotsky was wining and dining in New York with the high and mighty of the capitalist world. The only contribution to the October Revolution by Trotsky was his command of the Red Army. The essence of a bourgeois army commander is to dictate and Trotsky was certainly a ruthless disciplinarian and dictator. In fact, most soldiers of the Red Army hated him for his dictatorial methods. He never ceased to criticise what he called the ‘Stalinist bureaucracy’ ignoring the fact that Lenin’s chief criticisms of Trotsky concerned his ‘tendency’ to couch right wing ideology in left wing slogans and that he devoted himself almost exclusively to ‘administrative matters’, in other words ‘bureaucracy’.

However, when it came to politics Trotsky, the disciplinarian and bureaucrat, refused to submit to the agreed rules of inter-party democracy. When his own right-wing ideas were defeated at party congresses, he reacted by forming his own faction, the so-called Trotsky-Bukharinite block.

In the famous Moscow‘show trials’ of 1937, many members of Trotsky’s ‘Leningrad Centre’ faction were accused of having conspired with Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan in order to form a fascist puppet regime after a joint Nazi-Japanese invasion of the USSR. Trotsky was, of course, living in exile; but his terrorist faction had been infiltrated by the NKVD, the state security police. The prosecution produced a plethora of documentary evidence to convict the men of treason. Realising that they were caught, they all confessed to their crimes, blaming their gang leader Trotsky for their treasonous plans. The trials were observed by many Western diplomats who all concluded that they had been conducted fairly and that there was no question concerning the men’s guilt, including US president Roosevelt’s ambassador to Moscow Joseph E Davies. The Nazi minister for propaganda, Josef Goebbels, later wrote in his dairies, ‘The Fuhrer is furious with himself for having let himself be fooled by the potential of reports from his Bolshevik agents’. Hitler was indeed fooled but his arche nemesis Stalin was not! The trails were only deemed to be show trails after Soviet dictator Nikita khrushchev’s infamous ‘Secret Speech in 1956. But he has subsequently been shown by a number of historians to have been part of the self-same treasonous gang! Professor Grover Furr and Vladimir Bobrov have proven that every single anti-Stalinist tirade in Khushchev's 'Secret Speech' was a complete lie.It would not be too difficult to see why Khrushchev wanted to demonise Stalin.His economic policies were clearly a restoration of capitalism and his method of governance was far more dictatorial than his predecessor. In fact, Stalin had never been a dictator. He was elected by the party to take decisions in accordance with consensus of the central committee, who had the power to remove him at any time. As the great Irish communist Neil Goold Verschoyle pointed out:
‘Under capitalism a dictator may have great power because the powerful capitalist interests in the country agree to sink their differences and hand over the state to the control of one man pledged to suppress the people. But the Soviet Union is not a capitalist state, there are no powerful organised private interests’

Stalin offered to resign from the position of general secretary of the party no less than 4 times and criticised the 'cult of personality'on numerous occasions, a cult fanatically promoted by traitorous sycophants like Khrushchev who would later use it to denounce Stalin and destroy socialism in the USSR.

Stalin's work 'Economic Problems in the USSR' would not be published until 1978 when the Soviet Union was already in terminal decline. Trotsky's pathetic lies about Stalin and the Soviet Union were easily refuted by communist intellectuals of Trotsky's time who had traveled to the Soviet Union themselves. Jr Campbell's book 'Soviet Policy and its Critics' refutes Trotsky's lies one after the other with consumate ease. In the Spanish Civil War, the Trots helped the fascists to seize power by attacking the popular front to defend the Republic. Soviet foreign policy was based on Marxist principles applied to concrete reality. It was not dogmatic Marxism, but rather creative Marxism, that is to say Marxism-Leninism. The concrete reality after the failed revolutions in Germany was that socialism was unlikely to spread to Europe for some time. The Soviet Governement therefore judged that the best way to promote revolution was to build up socialist structures in the Soviet Union and conduct friendly relations with all other countries. The revolution would be permanent but in stages.Socialism in one country would lead to socialism in others. This policy initiatlly adumbrated by Lenin and later developed by Stalin subsequently proved to be correct with the victory of Mao in China, another revolution which Trotsky failed to understand.
By the time of the Spanish civil war, European nations were divided between bourgeois democracies where communist parties could agitate, albeit in a limited form, and fascist states where all oppposition to capitalism was outlawed. The Soviets therefore judged that a popular front composed of communist parties and progressive bourgeois elements to defend the gains of formal bourgeois democracy over fascist degeneration was the correct position to support in their foreign policy. There were, however, two principal forces that attacked this popular front, the Trotskyists and the fascists, the treason of the former ultimately leading to the rise of the latter.

The Trotskyite myth of Stalinist villainy was taken up by British intelligence agent George Orwell and subsequently re-layed by the film director Ken Loach. Shame on you Ken! Only ignoramuses, reactionaries and poor philosophers fall for Trotskyism. Yet there is, sadly, a plethora of such 'theorisits' still ranting and raving about their outcast 'prophet'.

George Orwell was not a fool but he was unquestionably a vicious reactionary. His only knowledge of the Soviet Union came, as he admitted, from the bourgeois press and, of course, Trotsky! Working for British intelligence, he submitted lists of writers who had actually visited and studied the Soviet Union for censorship; people like Anna Louis Strong, Walter Duranty, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and others.Once the left was split by Trotsky and Stalin's personality slandered by the traitor Khrushchev, the cold war historians delivered the coup de grace to history's greatest revolutionary Josef Stalin.Nazi sources of disinformation became the norm rather than the exception. Robert Conquest, another British intelligence agent, is the most notorious of the cold war sham historians.Aledandrre Adler, who has close connections with the CIA, is perhaps his equivalent in France.
By whom, then, was the ‘revolution betrayed’ to borrow another one of Trotsky’s phrases? By none other than himself! Shame on you SWP for promoting a convicted and proven fascist agent!

Iosrael san Aontas Eorpach? Is ball é cheanna féin dár le Javier Solana

2010-01-04T13:30:00.000-08:00

Is cuid den Eoraip í Iosrael, dár le Javier Solana. Bhí an t-aire eorpach um gnothaí eachtracha ag caint ar chomhdháil sa Jerusalem eagraithe ag Uachtarán na hIosraele Simon Peres. Ba ea ‘Facing Tomorrow’ téama an chomhdhála agus bhí se lán de dhaoine uaisle cosúil le Baron David Meyer de Rothshild, José Maria Aznar, Tony Blair agus mar sin de. Agus cuspóir an chruinniú? Bhí siad ag iarriadh fháil amach na deiseanna a tá ann mar gheall ar an ngearchéim airgeadais domhnanda!

Nuair a smaoiníonn tú ar ce chomh cumhachtach agus ce chomh tábhachtach is é an t-uasal Solana do bheartas eachtannach an t-Aontais Eorpaigh, tá sé soléir anois go bhfuil aicme cheannais na hEorpha ar thaobh na hIosraela agus nach gcuireann a gcuid gcoireanna isteach ar Bhruiséil ar chor ar bith!

Dá bhrí sin, ta gach seans go mbeidh iarrthóireacht na hIosraela i gcróilár na tosaíochtaí ins na blianta amach romhain agus bigí cinnte nach mbeidh aon vóta riachtanach chun doirse na hEorpha a oscailt don Stát ciníoch!

Bithiúnach eile é Xavier Solana. Is cara dlúth é le Henry Kissinger, an coirpeach cogaidh is mó ar domhan. Tuairiscítear go raibh Kissinger ar iarriadh líne díreach a fháil leis an Eoraip agus go fuar sé sin nuair a fuar Solana a phost mar aire um ghnothaí eachtracha. Mar sin, beidh sé i bhfad níos éasca as seo amach deireadh a chur le daonlathas san Eoraip agus an t-uaslathas domhanda a dhaingniú.

Os comhair na troscaireachta dúirt Solana nach raibh aon fhadhb le stát na hIosraela faoi stádus an phróiseas siochána. Má leanann an t-Aontas Eorpach ar aghaidh mar sin , beimid ag breathnú ar dheachtóireacht an aicme airgeadais feasta agus dímheas iomlán do chearta daoine. Cur i gcás, ó roinnt iarrthóirí d’uachtarántacht an t-Aontais Eorpaigh tá Tony Blair, coirpeadh cogaidh, bréagadóir agus bithiúnach amach is amach agus iar-uachtarán na fionnlainne Marti Ahtisaari, fear a bhí i bhfabhar cuimhneacháin a dhéanamh ar Waffen SS na Fionlainne sa Dara Cogadh Domhanda in 1999!

Mr. Netanyahu, open this gate, Mr Netanyahu tear down this wall!

2010-01-04T13:28:00.000-08:00

All this maudlin, sentimental, hypocritical and utterly dishonest discourse about the ‘fall of the Berlin wall’ and the destruction of the Soviet Union makes me sick!

Listening to the hollow speeches by the leaders of the imperial powers in Berlin was a surreal experience indeed. Former French president, now regent and shameless nepotist Nicolas Sarkozy, phony labourite anti-socialist Gordon Brown, new Czar of Russia Medvedev and the man himself President Obama as well as former US president Bill Clinton gloating in the audience, all overdosing in a narcissistic orgy of hypocrisy, cheered on by their media courtiers and brainwashed masses!

Angela Merkel had made her prelude to the occasion by addressing the US Congress in Washington on the 3rd of Novemeber where she thanked the United States for bringing ‘freedom’ to Germany. She mentioned Ronald Reagan’s speech where he famously said ‘ Mr Gorbachev open this gate, Mr Gorbachev tear down that wall’. I wonder when we will hear a US president say “ Mr. Netanyahu, open this gate, Mr Netanyahu tear down this wall!”. The ironies proliferated as Chancellor Merkel went on to mention the holocaust and thank President George Herbert Walker Bush for allowing Germany to become ‘partners in leadership’ after German unification. “What a generous offer” she opined. A generous offer indeed! But she forgot to thank his father Prescott Bush, the Nazi sympathiser who handled the Wall Street finances of the Third Reich both before and throughout the war! Here too the US financial elite and the Nazis were ‘partners in leadership!’

It took Germany a mere two years after reunification to resume old habits.In 1992 the US and German ‘partners in leadership’ undertook their first post war joint-venture: the rape and destruction of Yugoslavia. Germany dispatched the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) ,Germany’s secret services whose mission was to arm, train and advise the psychopathic KLA, Bosnian and Croatian rebels, their old World War Two Nazi collaborators. The result was a brutal civil war and the destruction of the peaceful nation of Yugoslavia .

Chancellor Merkel also forgot to thank the United States for giving jobs to all the unemployed Nazi criminals after the war, especially in the areas of biological warfare, military intelligence and space research. After all, what would America have become had it not been for Operation Paperclip, Fort Dietrich and German Nazis who put the first man on the moon? German and American Nazis, partners in leadership!

Since the Second World War, the United States has bombed over 50 countries, killed millions of people and imposed fascist dictatorships all over the world in order to protect the interests of America’s ruling class.

To come back to the Berlin Wall, It should be pointed out that the German Democratic Republic did not want to divide Germany, nor did it wish to build an odious wall. The Soviet post-war proposals were for a unified, demilitarised Germany which would pay reparations to the Soviet Union for the economic destruction and the deaths of 20 million Soviet citizens Germany had caused. It was the Allied Powers who refused to agree to these proposals. This meant that the GDR had to pay the reparations to the Soviet Union for Germany’s Nazi past while the West received significant US investment. It was the Western powers who decided to divide Germany when a currency reform was created for the Western zone in 1948.

But it was the Atomic re-armament of the German Bundeswehr and their refusal of GDR proposals that both East and West Germany withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and NATO, coupled with West Germany’s insistence on annexing the East which lead to the tragic construction of the wall. The GDR and the Soviet Union had a deep fear that the Allied Powers would provoke another war. But there was also other reasons for the wall which I have discussed in a previous article.

It should not be forgotten that it was the Soviet Union which had experienced the worse horrors of the Second World War, and that few if any American civilians were killed. Furthermore, the term ‘Cold War’ was invented by a US financier and presidential advisor Bernard Baruch in 1947. Josef Stalin’s project was to create socialism in one country. The soviets had no intention of embarking upon another war.

This is the inconvenient truth about the Cold War, a war faught by a greedy minority, a war on the hopes of millions to a decent life, a war on humanity. The Iron curtain that blocked out the stench of capitalist excesses has been replaced by a steel frame crushing the planet, criminalising all dissent, killing hope.

America's message to China: dump the dollar and we'll unleash hell.

2010-01-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

US President Obama’s visit to China last week to China captured much attention in the world press. Obama’s visit to China was intended to convey three key, carefully calibrated messages. The principal message was obvious: don’t pull the plug on our global empire by dumping the dollar. The second and third messages were a follow up from the first.If you refuse to take orders from Washington, we will use our human rights monopoly to break up your country into separate client states of the US.

Obama’s deeply ironic reference to the importance of human rights was carefully formulated to stress the ‘rights of ethnic minorities’ in China as opposed to human rights per se. What this means is that if China allows the dollar to fall, thereby plunging the US empire into free fall, the CIA will resume destabilisation activities in the Qinyang province and in Tibet. We saw a taste of this in Qinjang this year with the Uigur riots and in Tibet last year when the Tibetan hooligans, funded and trained by the CIA and its numerous front organisations created chaos, murdering innocent civilians and looting shops and industries.

The World Uigur Congress is based in Washington DC and, like the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan separatist movement, it is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, one of the CIA’s numerous front organisations. Like the Tibetan movement, the World Uigur Congress has close ties with Germany and its virtues have been widely extolled in the right-wing German press, which is unsurprising. After all, it was Nazi Germany who taught the US the art of mendacious propaganda and the US ruling class has proven itself to be an dedicated student.

President Obama’s coded mission in China was to make it clear to Beijing that the US does not really care about what the Chinese government does to its own population in general but that Washington is ‘concerned’ about China’s ethnic minorities. So, in a nutshell Obama’s message to China amounted to something like this: do as we say or we will carve you up into little pieces, install pre-trained puppet regimes before plundering your stocks of precious metals.

The World Uigur Congress was formed in 2004 and like the World Zionist Congress it is openly racist and religious fundamentalist. The millionaire leader of the World Uigur Congress is a lady by the name of Rebiya Kadeer. This lady does not even disguise her racist proclivities.

In an interview with Antonella Rampino of the Italian newspaper La Stampa on May 8th 2009, she put the plight of the Uigur people thus: “ As you see, you behave like I do, you have the same white skin: you are Indo-European. Would you like to be oppressed by a yellow Han communist?” Of course, the notion of the Uigurs , who are the majority in the Xinjang Autonomous Region, being oppressed is a bare-faced lie. The Chinese government has been quite tolerant of their religious and cultural identity; they are generally better off than their Han compatriots, and most Uigurs, like the Jews of pre-Nazi Germany, are quite content to live and work in the multicultural Chinese state. But the World Uigur Congress could soon put an end to that if given the green light from their Washington masters. I could say more about the historical and ideological similarities between the World Zionist Congress and the World Uigur Congress but I do not wish to break any dogmatic taboos here.

According to former FBI translator, Sibel Williams, the islamic radicalisation of the Xinyang province was outsourced by the CIA to Bin Laden's(remember him?) Al Qaeda. Williams alleges that Bin Laden was working for the CIA right up until 911. Mrs Williams subsequent dismissal by the FBI in 2002 for 'disruptive' behaviour was strongly criticised by US state department inspector general Glenn A Fine. As in the outsourcing of labour, the outsourcing of terrorism is the secret weapon of the global ruling class.

Some of the Western headlines concerning Obama’s visit to China would be funny were it not for the fact that the US empire is most likely to lead humanity into another world war. In the Ochs-Sulzberger family newspaper, known to the world as The International Herald, I read that the Chinese ‘unfree’ press did not give Obama’s visit the coverage it deserved. Other Western press outlets were outraged when the Chinese spokesman Qin Gang pointed out the embarrassing truth to Obama that the Tibetan population had been serfs of the Lama despots before the Chinese liberated them in 1952; he quickly followed up the attack by stating that Obama’s support for the Dalai Lama was ironic given his skin-colour and admiration for Abraham Lincoln. If I were president Obama I would have retorted thus " ‘touché old boy , but as you know racism has always been the tool of the ruling class to divide and crush the proletariat of the world. Are you not a communist? Have you not read Karl Marx?”

Plean na Colóime: Tá an Cholóim nasc-ghafa leis na Stáit Aonaithe anois agus tá seach-chogadh in ndán do mhuintir na Veiniséala.

2010-01-04T13:20:00.000-08:00

¿Tiene algún sentido que el gobierno de Estados Unidos invierta tiempo y dinero en construir bases militares en Colombia para imponer a nuestros pueblos su odiosa tiranía? Por ese camino, si un desastre amenaza al mundo, un desastre mayor y más rápido amenaza al imperio, y todo sería consecuencia del mismo sistema de explotación y saqueo del planeta. Fidel Castro

Nuair a vótáil muintir na Veinséala Hugo Chavez mar uachtarán na tire i 1998 , d’athraigh polaitíocht agus eacnamaíocht na tíre go radacach don chéad uair ó neamhspleáchas na Colóime Mhóir i 1820. Ba mhór an dóchas a mhothaigh muintir na Veiniséala ar an lá sin. Is tír fhíorbhocht í Veiniséala; tá morchuid na ndaoine gan dídean, gan oideachas, gan dóchas ar an taobh amhain agus olagarchacht bhrúidiúlach fhíorshaibhir ar an taobh eile gan aon chomhbhá leis an mórchuid bhocht. Choinnigh an olagarchacht saibhris na tíre ina lámha fein agus faigheann siad gach tacaíocht sheasta ó Washington chun a gcumhacht a choinnéal.

Cé go ndearna an CIA iarracht eile deireadh a chur le daonlathas sa Veiniséala leis an coup d’état i 2002, nuair a tháinig an pobal amach ins na sráideanna chun léirsiú ollmhór a dhéanamh i gcoinne na faisistithe, bhí bua tábhachtach, stairiúl ag na Chavistas. Ó shin i leith, tá geilleagar na Veiniséala ag dul o neart go neart. Ach le 95% de mheán cumarsáide sa tír ag an olagarchacht, beidh sé fíordheacair do Chavez an cogadh inmheánach leis an olagarchacht chomh maith leis an gcogadh atá a teacht in gcoinne Colóime a bhuachaint. Ach más féidir leis chomhobair a dhéanamh le Fuerzas Armadas Revolutionarias de Colombia(FARC) bhféidir go bhfuil seans acu na faisistithe a ruigeadh.

Ina ‘reflexiones’ suas luaite, altanna a scríobhann Fidel Castro faoi cúrsaí reatha, dúirt sé go bhfuil an Cholóim nasc-gafe leis na Stáit Aonaithe anois. Shínigh rialtas na Colóime conradh mileata nua le Washington le déanaí chun seacht bunáite nua mileata a bhunú sa tír. Má léann tú an conradh ‘Acuerdo complementario para la Cooperación y Asistencia Técnica en Defensa y Seguridad entre los gobiernos de Colombia y Estados Unidos ‘ is léir go bhfuil baol mór ann do mhuintir na Veiniséala ó nasc-ghabháil mheiricánach na Colóime.

Fáinne fí is ea é caipitleachas agus cogadh. San alt eile a scríobh Castro le déanaí, dúirt sé go scríosfaidh na faisithe sna Stáit Aonaithe Obama sa chéad olltoghchán eile agus cruthóidh siad leithscéal eile don chogadh domhanda. Ach dúirt sé chomh maith go bhfuil súil aige nach bhfuil sé sin fíor. Ar an taobh amháin aontaím le comradero Castro, ach measaim go bhfuil sé ró-dhéanach anois. Tá an cogoadh tarlaithe cheana féin. Beidh me ag dul go dtí an Veiniséala ar ball chun cabhrú leis an bpobal móruchtúil siúd ina thróid in gcoinne los gringos!

Gluais

Nasc-ghafa- annexed

Seach-chogadh-proxy war

Chomhbhá- sympathy.

Móruchtúil- courageous

‘Does it make any sense that the United States would spend time and money in building military bases in Columbia in order to impose on our people their odious tyranny. By this route, if a disaster threatens the world, a major disaster, the more the threat will be to the empire and all will be a consequence of the same system of exploitation and pillage of the planet’ . Castro

The market is foul play

2010-01-04T13:16:00.000-08:00

Thierry Henry’s ‘main de dieu’ (hand of God) has been the thorn in the side of French society since the World Cup qualifier between the Republic of Ireland and France a couple of weeks ago . As an Irishman living in France, I have been inundated with apologies and commiserations from French friends and colleagues. I must admit I have been quite moved by the sense of fairness and sympathy which French people have expressed towards Ireland. As it happens, Henry’s infamous hand ball has in fact coincided with a national debate about French identity.
The French have always been a nation given to introspection. It that insuperable question which became the title one of Gaugain’s masterpieces ‘ D'où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?’ Where are we from, what are we and where are we going? Among the responses to the question of French identity, the values of human rights have come to the prominently fore. For the French, therefore, the French Revolution is a foundation stone of what it means to be French. But France has long ceased to be a revolutionary society. The May 68 riots were perhaps the last pathetic attempt to resuscitate French revolutionary consciousness, yet they amounted to little if nothing. In fact, French socialism died in May 68. Many of the 68ers would later prove to be among the greatest sell-outs and proselytisers in French history. The Trotskyist Lionel Jospin was one of the students in the 1968 riots is perhaps one of the most notable traitors of socialism. When France finally elected a socialist government under the stewardship of Francois Mitterand, himself a former collaborator with the Vishy regime during the Nazi occupation, the greatest privatisation programme in French history was launched. The Trotskyite dissembler Jospin called it ‘réalisme de gauche’ left-wing realism. George Orwell would have been proud of him!
Mitterand turned socialism on its head, sending military aircraft and warships to the Gulf to be used against the Iranian people in the days when Saddam Hussein was a ‘friend’ of the West. His conduct in Africa was typical French colonialism with a ‘human face’. The attitude of the French ‘socialist’ led coalition government during the nineteen eighties towards Africa’s most progressive leader Thomas Sankara is a case in point. In 1983 in the Republic of Upper Volta, Thomas Sankara took power a revolutionary coup d’etat. His programme was to educate, feed and house all citizens of the former French colony. He re- named the country Burkina Faso, land of the upright men.
Unlike Mitterand, Sankara didn’t just preach and waffle about socialism, he practised it. Unlike former Nazi collaborator Mitterand Sankara’s father faught in the French army against the Nazis during World War II. During Thomas Sankara’s short reign, female circumcision was banned, women were given full and equal rights to men, contraception was promoted and the country’s first supermarket was opened. But that wasn’t enough for Sankara. He sold the government’s fleet of Mercedes cars and replaced them with modest Renault 5s! He himself continued to live with his family in a poor mud cabin. Thomas Sankara promoted socialism,ecologism and feminism; he understood Africa’s problems and dedicated his life to solving them.
But the ‘socialist’ French government had always been less than enthusiastic about Sankara; he had been placed under arrest just in 1983 after a visit by Mitterand’s son Jean Christophe, the crook locals called ‘Papa m’as dit’ Daddy told me. In a state visit to Burkina Faso in 1984 President Mitterand warned Sankara that his socialism was going to far. In other words, France had many interests in the country which were threatened by Sankara’s reforms, such as the super rich French minority who lived in luxury from the labour of Burkina Faso’s poor. Sankara’s reforms could conflict with their priviledges. Such a threat to Burkina Faso’s plutocracy was a problem for the French ‘socialists’.
In 1987 Sankara was murdered in right-wing coup d’état lead by his friend Blaise Compaore. Many people in Burkina Faso suspected French involvement. It would be hard to blame them given the fact that subsequent French presidents have to this day greeted the murderer Compaore as a friend
It is the same old story of hypocrisy and greed. The French nation changed the world in 1789 and changed it again albeit briefly in the Paris commune of 1871. These events marked France’s claim to greatness. But where are the philosophers today? Where are the revolutionary ideas and who will implement them? What has become of this once great nation that no longer understands what it came from, who it is and where it is going?
We live in a world where the greatest liars and cheaters win the greatest prizes. It is a world of capital rights; human rights are irrelevant. In this sense Henry’s handball is symptomatic not only of the crisis in French identity. Rather, the handball is the symbol of our corrupt capitalist world. It is the hidden hand of the market ruthlessly sticking down all hope of fairness and justice, the hand that steals as it gives, the hand of treachery.

Post-democracy and the new dictators

2010-01-04T13:07:00.000-08:00

In this post-democratic age any politician who defends democracy is denounced as a tyrant or dictator. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Athmadinejad of Iran and many others have consistently been demonised in the Western press for their ‘anti-democratic’ politics. The reason for this is simple: All three leaders defend economic policies which favour the poor over the rich. This is their biggest crime. Now, before you shout me down, I should say that there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Athmadinjad ‘stole’ the presidential election this year. I have pointed out in other articles that the so-called Green revolution agenda in Iran is part of a US-funded regime change project to replace Athmadinejad with a leader propitious to US interests in Iran. It was in reality an anti-democratic agenda.

There is no doubt that most of the young people in Iran want change but this desire for change is more cultural rather than political. I spoke to many students in my last visit to Iran a few months ago. What struck me about many of them was their deeply confused reasoning on international issues. Many students I spoke to admired Israel and the United States as paragons of democracy and progress, flagrantly denying the fact that these are two of the most aggressive states on the planet, both guilty of war crimes and genocide abroad as well as deep corruption at home.

The opponents of Athmadinejad have fallen from the Scylla of Islamic theocracy into the Charybdis of Western pseudo-democracy.The problem with the Iranian opposition groups is that their opposition to the cultural politics of the Islamic Republic has thrown them back into the hands of CNN and propaganda radio stations from Israel. Moreover, many of them express views of Arabs and in particular Palestinians that amount to racism. But in the west racism against Arabs is the norm. Every time the newspapers and TV channels refer the Israeli Defence Forces combating Palestinian ‘terrorists’, they are guilty of racism as they deliberately ignore the fact that the Israeli occupied territories are in breach of international law and if you defy the law you are a de facto criminal. Therefore, the Israeli state is as such a criminal entity. Moreover, Israel’s insistence on describing itself as a ‘Jewish’ state is outright racism, as it favours one ethnic community over others. Hamas is one of the only democratically elected organisations in the Middle East and in view of the fact that Israel chooses to ignore international law, their military struggle with Israel does not constitute terrorism. Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah are no less unlawful than the IDF, they are simply combatants in a protracted conflict.

President Athmadinejad of Iran has also been demonised for his statements concerning Israel. But his statement was as usual taken out of context. He did not call for the destruction of the Jews. On the contrary, he called for an end to Zionism. There are many anti-Zionist Jews both in Iran, Israel and throughout the world. Athmadinejad has Jewish ancestry himself and is supported by a majority of the Jewish community in Iran, the biggest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel. He also has support from anti-Zionist rabbis in Israel itself.

As for Hugo Chavez, here the vitriol, lies and anti-democratic propaganda reaches dizzying proportions. Hugo Chavez is a democratically elected president. Since he has come to power, he has provided free schooling for the country’s poor, free health care through generous help from Cuba and a free press for the first time in the country’s history. He has given hope to millions of the country’s poor and has overcome a US backed fascist coup against him and an international campaign to demonise him. Human Rights Watch and Reporters without Borders are the most notorious examples of mendacious propaganda against Chavez. I will reserve discussion of Venezuela and an exposé of the lies and propaganda of Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders for another article. But before I finish, it is important to debunk one of the biggest lies propagated throughout the world concerning Chavez. Unlike the US-backed dictators the ‘human rights’ activists in the opposition promote, Hugo Chavez has consistently promoted freedom of expression and freedom of the press in Venezuela. 95 percent of the media in Venezuela is privately owned by right-wing pro-us moguls. When the ‘human rights’ opposition supported the CIA-backed coup d’etat against the democratic Chavez in 2002, the Venezuelan media applauded the re-installed fascists. Since then, they have spread the most atrocious propaganda against the president, accusing him of mental illness, among other calumnies. As the media in Venezuela refuses to recognise the democratic leader of the country, Chavez has been forced to open his own TV programme where he answers calls from Venezuela’s poor. In this Orwellian world, leaders who side with the poor, oppose imperialism and favour the interests of their people over those of the US,EU and the international cabal of capitalist hawks are subject to the most callous and outrageous calumnies. It is a deeply worrying sign of how inhuman and decadent Western societies have become when we attack the democrats and freedom fighters and defend the tyrants. The problem is now ubiquitous in this post-democratic age.

Barack Obama: Bush le haghaidh nua

2010-01-04T13:03:00.000-08:00

Le seacht bunáite mileata nua faoi thógháil i gColomóim, níos mó lastais d’airm á thraisloingiú chug Iosrael, anord agus sceimhlitheoireacht faoi lánseol san Iaráic agus an slogadh mileata meiricáneach is mó ó chogadh sa Vítneam san Afghanistáin, fuair Uachtarán na Stát Aontaithe Barack Obama an Duais Nobel san Oslo an tseachtain seo caite. Cé a chreidféa? Sa ráiteas a thug sé san Oslo, labhair Uachtarán Obama faoi thábhacht an chogaidh sa troid in aghaidh na sceimhlitheoireachta. Bhí sé ag iarraidh a chur in iúl do dhaoine go raibh an cogadh ceart agus cóir. Bhí sé ag iarraidh a chur in iúl dúinn go raibh Na Stáit Aonaithe ag iarraidh saoirse agus síochán a chothú ar fud an domhain. Ergo, bhí sé riachtanach leanúint ar aghaidh le cogadh, an cogadh buan domhanda ar son na síochána!

O togadh Obama an bhliain se caite níor athraigh Mister Change tada. I dtaobh milteata agus eacnamaíochta de, níl aon dhifríocht idir Obama agus Bush. Go tipiciúil, níl i gceist anseo ach chomhthoradh an fhoirceadail Bush. Ach i bhfírinne, tá Obama níos contúirtí fós. Ní raibh aon chreidiúnacht fágtha do pholaitíocht na Stát Aontaithe nuar a bhí Bush i gcumhacht ach anois tá fear deas, éirimúil i gcumhacht agus is breá an díoscúrsa a dhéanann sé cé go bhfuil an díoscúrsa ceannann céanna le déachtóir Bush!

Nuair a bhí Barack Obama ag canbhasáil agus ag stocaireacht d’ uachtaránacht na Stát Aontaithe an bhliain seo caite, ba mhór an dóchas a bhí agam ag an am. Shíl mé ansin go raibh rúd éigin iontach agus tábhachtach ag tarlú sa domhan. Ach bhí sé deacair ansin a chréidbháil go mbeadh athrú sunstasach docúil. Dúirt mé ansin nach mbeadh ach athrú cosmaideach i gceist agus b’sin an fáth go raibh an aicme cheannais na Stát Aontaithe ag chur chun cinn an Seanadóir Obama. Ach ag an am céanna, bhí dócas agam go mbeadh sé difriúil. Anois Uachtarán Obama sé déistin orm. Measaim nach bhfuil ifreann i ndán do mhuintir an domhain anois agus i ndeireadh na dála, tiocfaidh an t-ifreann sin ar ais do na Stáit Aontaithe féin. Féach ar na tíortha ar liosta na stát rógaire a luaigh Obama in san ráiteas: An tSiombáib, Déanphoblacht Dhoanlathach na Cóiré, an tSomáil , Maenmar, An tSúdáin agus ar ndóigh An Iaráin. Bheadh sé réasúnta do thíortha sin a bheith buartha anois agus an cogadh ‘daonúil’ a bheith i ndán dúinn mura bhfuil siad réidh cloí le leas na Stát Aontaithe agus ECAT!

Gluais

Slogadh- mobilisation

Comhthoradh- corollary

Foirceadal- doctrine

an aicme cheannais- ruling class

daonúil- humanitarian

Leas - interest

Fascism is the cornered rat of capital.

2010-01-04T11:41:00.000-08:00

Unemployment has returned with a bang to the forefront of Irish economic discourse but this time round the Irish unemployment phenomenon is likely to manifest a degree of nastiness hitherto unknown on this island. We are, after all, one of the most globalised countries on the planet with immigration figures over the last decade that have superceded many of our European neighbours. So what are we going to do about all the foreigners who now constitute the work-hungry reserve army of our national economic shambles? What are we going to do about the foreigners? The first thing that should be said about the unemployed foreigners in Ireland is that they will inevitably become new unwitting actors in the psychopathology of basket-case Ireland. In psychoanalytic jargon, the foreigner will now begin to assume the traits of a deep structural symptom; the unwanted foreigner as symptom of our national depression. But he is also a comfort to us in the sense that his foreignness enables us citizens born in Ireland to blame him for our troubles.

We can now say that the immigrant is a burden on Irish society, a ruthless opportunist, a parasite competing for ‘Irish’ jobs. We have now entered the period of radical reaction and could be facing a golden age of racism and xenophobia.

The paradox of xenophobia in modern capitalist societies is that the ruling class, that is to say, the bankers, investors, developers and their media propagandists tend to support the idea of a multicultural society. This is fundamentally different from the situation in, say, Nazi Germany during the 1930s. In today’s Europe, being racist or xenophobic is politically incorrect, whereas the opposite was the case in German and throughout Europe during the economic crisis of the 1930s. Here we can see that a fundamental shift has taken place in Europe. There are various reasons for this. The most important of course is that racism as a political ideology was based on pseudo science. But in times of economic crisis, science and rationality have very little to do with social phenomena.

In spite of the fact that anti-racism is more or less espoused by all the right-wing, neo liberal regimes in Europe today, racism is in fact on the increase and the radical right is on its way back. Two British fascists MPs were elected to the EU parliament last year. However, this new emergent fascism has fundamental differences to this social phenomenon during the last century. Spanish, German and Italian fascism were reactionary ideologies designed to counter what seemed like the unstoppable march of communism throughout Europe since the rise of the Soviet Union. Fascism is in essence the attempt to rescue a failed capitalist system by appealing to the emotions of disgruntled workers.

Unlike communism which seeks to unite and educate workers of all races and nationalities, fascism subverts this tendency by superimposing racism and nationalism upon the ignorant masses. This divides the workers and the unemployed by distracting them from the true origins of their misery. In Nazi Germany, the racist subversion took an even more perverse form. There the Jews, long associated with the ruling banking class could easily be scape-goated. The communist leaning workers would then be encouraged to the ruling class with a particular race. To the ignorant masses, it became obvious who the enemies of Germany were. This scape-goating of the Jews in particular also benefited the radical international Zionists who were also anxious to see an exodus of European Jews to Palestine. As Theodor Herzl said “anti-Semitism is our best friend”. The concept of anti-Semitism still remains, paradoxically, the best friend of Israel today as it is the only concept which could justify the occupation of the West Bank and the oppression of Gaza. It is no surprise that the neo-Nazis in Germany today support the state of Israel. Fascism is simply the attempt to defend the worse excesses of human greed by subverting rational analysis of its correlative, namely, poverty.

Speaking on the international situation in 1924 Josef Stalin said “Social Democracy objectively represents the moderate wing of Fascism" What Stalin meant by this is that bourgeois parliamentary democracy is designed to defend the interests of capitalism. When the capitalist system crashes, the bougeois liberals and social democrats will be more inclined to support the intensification of capitalism represented by fascism rather than supporting a revolutionary atlternative.This is precisely what happened in Germany after the rise of Hitler when the social democrats refused to form an anti-fascist alliance with the communists. Fascism is simply captialism's last stand.

What can we in Ireland learn from this? The problem in Ireland and throughout Europe today is that we no longer have a radical united egalitarian opposition to the boom and bust theory of political economy. There is no longer a communist international capable of uniting workers of all races and nationalities. So, what the racist reactionaries, who are very often from working class backgrounds, do not see is that the Polish, Nigerian and other foreign workers should be their allies. They have had to leave their own country to find work just like the Irish who are leaving for Australia and Canada. Yet, they too are unable to see the reality of their situation. The real enemy of paddy Irishman is not paddy Polishman or Paddy Nigerian, it is the paddies in IBEC who represent the interests of a transnational global elite that is imposing this hardship on peoples of all races and nationalities.The question then for Irish workers is not ‘what are we going to do about the foreigners’. The question is ‘what are we going to do about the dictatorship of the bankatariat? Workers of all lands unite!

2010-01-04T11:37:00.000-08:00

Pléaschán ina thóin, Al Qaeda mó thóin!

O am go chéile, cloistear scéal nua faoi bhagairt an Al Qaeda sna meáin chumarsáide, eachtra sceimhlitheoireachta eile a chuireann eagla orainn. Fear arabach gafa san eitleán le pléaschán ina thóin. Seo é an scéal nua. Go bhfóire Dia orainn, an féidir linn aon rud níos áiféisaí a shamhlú? Pléaschán ina thóin? I n’dáiríre! B’in a scéal a chualamar cúpla seachtaine o shin nuair a bhíomar ar tí ár ndeocheanna a ghabhadh siar don Athbhliain. Caithfidh mé a rá go bhfuil amhras orm anois faoina scéalta sin. Ní gá dom a rá leat nach raibh i gceist le Al Qaeda i dtosach báire ach sócmhainn do sheirbhisí slándála iartharacha.

Bunaíodh Al Qaeda san Afganastáin i 1978 agus bá tionscadal de CIA iad i gcónaí. Ag an am, bhain siad usáid as an ISI( Interservices Intelligence) de Phacastáin chun na moslammaigh a ghríosú in aghaidh na Sóvéadaigh. Cloiseann tu a lán seafóid faoi láthair maidir le ‘ionsaí’ a rinne Aontas na bPoblachtaí Sóvéadachta Sóisialacha san Afganastán ag an am. Ar dtús báire, níl sé sin fíor in aon chor. Is fíor gur ndeachaigh na trúpaí sóvéadeacha go Kabul ach bhí drogall orthu é sin a dhéanamh ar an gcéad dul síos. I bhfírinne ní raibh na Sovéadaigh ag iarraidh an tír a rialú. Tháinig siad arna iarraidh sin ag rialtas sóisialach na hAfganastáine nuair a bhí na mujahedeen/CIA ag chothú sceimhlitheóireachta ar fud na tíre. Sin difríocht mhór idir an cogadh anois agus an cogadh ansin.

Faidhmíonn Al Qaeda mar shocmhainne na seirbhísí rúnda iartharaigh ó thosaigh an scéal mór na sceimhlitheoireachta domhanda. Ní folóir dúinn é sin a thuiscint. Mar sin, nuair a chlóisim scéalta faoi fhear éigin arabach eile gafa sna san éitleán éigin sna Stáit Aontaithe, tá fhios agam céard atá i gceist anseo. Ciallaíonn sé sin go bhfuil céim nua ag teacht sa chogadh in aghaidh na sceimhlitheoireachta. Ar ball, béimid ag caint faoi sceimhlitheoireacht sa Nigéir chomh maith. Tá an cogadh ag leanúint ar aghaidh sna tíortha eile anois chomh maith. Tá an Araib Shádach, comhghuaillí na Stát Aontaithe ag píolótú thar Phoblacht Éimin faoi láthair agus beidh siad ag cabhrú le maoirseacht na Somáile ar ball chomh maith. Déan dearmad ar ‘Al Qaeda’, tá cluithe i bhfad níos casta i gceist anseo. Pléascháin ina thóin, Al Qaeda mó thóin!

Gluais

Bagairt - threat

níos áiféisaí- more absurd

sceimhlitheóireacht- terrorism

cogadh- war

maoirseacht- supervision

a ghríosú- to incite

The Somali pirates: Long may they prosper!

2009-11-01T10:52:00.000-08:00

Most of us grew up reading stories or watching cartoons and films about pirates. Hollywood’s release of the Pirates of the Caribbean films a few years ago have brought piracy back into public consciousness. But the fictional accounts of piracy recounted in children’s stories and films bear little resemblance to the historical phenomenon called piracy. It is important to bear this in mind when one hears one-sided reports about the current piracy problem off the coast of Somalia.

We should begin by asking what the word piracy means. Piracy came into English around the 13th century via the French pirate. This word in turn was derived from the Latin pirata “sailor or sea robber”. The root of the word goes back to Ancient Greek peirates from the Greek verb peiran to attack, make a hostile attempt on, try. But the Greek word empeiros gives us the English experience in the sense of a trial, risk, experiment or danger. The Greek word denoting attack, trial risk and danger is an Indo-European cousin of the Irish word for vigilance ‘aire’.

Keep these notions of vigilance, trial, risk and danger in mind we will ask: who were these pirates and what did they do? Professor Marcus Rediker of the University of Pittsburgh has made a cogent contribution to our understanding of piracy. In his most recent book ‘Villains of All Nations’ he explains the historical causes of piracy. Pirates were predominantly poor and abused sailors who worked for pittance on the international trading ships of the French and British empires. These renegade groups consisted of sailors of many nationalities and races who could no longer bear the cruelty of their masters , the inhuman hardship of their working conditions and the obscene poverty of wage-slavery on the world’s imperial ships.

Far from the covetous, one-eyed barbarians, the Long John Silvers of folklore and fiction, pirates tended to come from highly skilled sailors who rebelled against the tyranny of their imperial masters. Once they had procured their own ship, articles were drawn up governing the conduct of the pirates. These articles were remarkably egalitarian. The captain of the ship was elected by the sailors and a quartermaster was elected to administer booty and to act as a counterweight in order to keep the captain’s power in check. Profits from shipping raids were distributed equally among all the sailors. When a pirate misbehaved, a meeting of all the sailors was called to determine the appropriate punishment. Far from being criminals, the pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries developed a unique form of distributive justice; they were, in fact, proto-communists.

Once a ship was raided, the captains were often lined up on the deck before the crew. They would then ask the crew members if they had been beaten by their captain. If the crew responded negatively the captain received his just merits.

In many respects today’s pirates off the coast of Somalia are similar. They too have deep grievances with European countries. Why? Because since 1991European companies have been dumping nuclear and toxic waste in their waters; polluting their fish; scaring the skin of their children, spreading cancer among their people and destroying their livelihood. Because European, Chinese, Indian, Russian, Japanese and Korean ships have taken over their waters looting and pillaging what is left of the fishstock that is safe to eat.

According to Nick Nuttal of the United Nations Environmental programme “European companies found it to be very cheap to get rid of the waste, costing as little as $2.50 a tonne, where waste disposal costs in Europe are something like $1000 a tonne." The EU talks about the disruption of Aid to Somalia due to the actions of the pirates but the people of Somalia. As in other Third World countries, EU aid is simply the payoff to their client regimes for our looting of their resources. The looting of Africa by the west is the cause of its poverty. Aid is our way of showing we care. Letting them starve would be bad publicity.

This is the reality of the Somali piracy crisis. The Somali fishermen have organised a hitherto effective resistance to the international looting of their waters. To their credit, they have also made a huge contribution to their local economies, extracting just ransoms in exchange for the Western terrorists who patrol their shores in our name. They treat their hostages well and often pour the ransom money back into their villages, buying generators for electricity and building up the local economy while the barbarians from the USA shoot and kill them with impunity.In one of the world’s poorest countries, these Somali pirates, these vigilantes of the people, these intrepid combatants of international criminality are worthy heroes.

The Berlin Wall and the victory of the White Terror

2009-10-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

Among the many anniversaries being celebrated this year, the fall of the Berlin Wall is perhaps the most important. We all remember the sense of hope and elation which accompanied that momentous event. The oppressed people of the DDR, so long immured in a dystopian world of media disinformation, violations of individual liberties and constant surveillance by the secret police were now at last marching on the road to liberty and democracy. The evil empire of the Soviet Union which had imprisoned its citizens in a police state was crumbling before our watering eyes as we watched those moving images on TV.

Communism had failed. The fall of the Soviet Union proved that communism in practice equals fascism. How could anyone disagree with that proposition now? This is indeed the story recounted by thousands of publications and documentaries today in the ‘free world’. It is, however, a vicious lie.

Western historiography of the Soviet Union is replete with deliberate omissions, ideological distortions and in many cases, downright lies. Any serious analysis of how good or bad Soviet communism was, must take account of the fact that the Bolshevik revolutionaries, who had the support of the vast majority of Russia’s poor, were ruthlessly attacked by the White Russian counter-revolutionaries in cahoots with 16 imperial powers, who invaded Russia after 1918.n fact, White Terror occured in many countries throughout the twentieth century. Communists and the poorest classes of society all suffered the terror inflicted by counter-revolutionaries in Finland, Bulgaria, Germany, Spain,Greece, China, Taiwan and Korea.Hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered in the name of liberty. The victory speeces of history arrogantly omit this uncomfortable fact.

Our libraries and bookshop shelves are keeling over with books on the ‘Red Terror’ and the purges of Stalin, yet there are only a handful of books at most which talk about the White Terror unleashed upon the Russian population by the agents of the imperial powers. These mass murderers are presented as agents of ‘democracy’ who fought to ‘save Russia’ from the evil of Leninism. But who has read about the careers of White Guard leaders such as Lavr Kornilov who declared ‘the greater the terror, the greater our victories’. Kornilov had very little mass support but that didn’t bother this terrorist; he had the support of the Western powers and was prepared to ‘ set fire to half the country and shed the blood of three-fourths of all Russians’.

And what about White Guard general Krasnov who ordered his troops to deliberately murder workers en mass ‘"It is forbidden to arrest workers. The orders are to hang or shoot them." Who has heard of general Kaledin who declared: "The orders are to hang all arrested workers in the street. The bodies are to be exhibited for three days". What about the counter revolutionary terrorist Admiral Kolchak who was an admirer of Japanese genocidal techniques? His advice was to “follow the example of the Japanese who had decimated the local population in the Amur Region of Russia

What about General Semenov who decimated entire villages killing thousands of Russian peasants. Genocide in the Soviet Union was a result of Marxist Leninism, the so-called historians tell us. But the Russian civil war imposed by the Western ‘democratic’ powers claimed the lives of over 15 million people!

There are many more lies widely disseminated concerning the Soviet Union. I will talk about those in another article. But to come back to Berlin, was not the wall the proof that the Soviet Union was totalitarian? The Berlin Wall was constructed for two principal reasons. Firstly, many East German workers were being recruited in the West, causing a brain drain on the socialist economy. Secondly and more importantly, the CIA and their puppet agencies in Europe had undertaken a campaign of terrorism and sabotage in the DDR. The US strategy was to make communism fail at any cost. They poisoned children’s milk with soap, derailed freight trains, damaged power stations, set fire to factories and destroyed factory machinery.

The sabotage, terror and infiltration perpetrated by the CIA and MI6 in East Germany became a nightmare for the fledgling socialist state. The CIA were experts in anti-communist terrorism. They had, after all, recruited thousands of NAZIs after the Second World War and the US ‘de-Nazification’ programme had resulted in the rehabilitation of prominent ex-Nazis in the Federal German Republic, who became the zealous guardians of ‘capitalist democracy’

When the Soviets launched complaints with the UN to take action against the CIA/MI6 terror and sabotage campaign, the Anglo-American dominated UN ignored their concerns. Nobody in the DDR wanted the Berlin Wall but what do you do when you are being attacked by a neo-fascist empire? The Soviets had been attacked by fascists before resulting in the slaughter of over 20 million people. They knew the kind of fanaticism which the CIA Nazis were capable of unleashing. Terrorism and war are the dark reality of profit-driven societies.

When I lived in East Berlin I spoke to many people about the old DDR. Most of the people I spoke to had fond memories of life in a socialist society, where there was guaranteed work, free health and education and hope for the future. “Capitalism offered us wealth and liberty but now we are unemployed and poor” they would tell me. Almost all the people I spoke to hated the wall and the excesses of the Stasi but most of them still believed that socialism was possible but that history had betrayed them.

The Limerick Soviet and the concept of meitheal

2009-10-21T01:56:00.000-07:00

Bruree Workers' Soviet Mills, 1921 ( http://gaelart.net/ )

In this time of strikes, mass unemployment and general discontent, historical examples of successful worker solidarity movements could serve as useful templates for debate. Perhaps the most impressive episode of Irish working class revolt has to be the formation of the Limerick Soviet in 1919. As the war of independence was raging, the British government decided to impose a military curfew on the city of Limerick in April 1919. Limerick was proclaimed as a special military area. This policy enabled the British authorities to gather information about every worker in the city. Henceforth, all people going to and from the city would have to produce identification and receive permits from the British army. These draconian measures enraged the population of Limerick. Henceforth, factory workers would be harassed up to four times a day going and coming from work. Apart from harassment, vital supplies of food, milk and fuel were also disrupted by the military curfew. To discuss the issue a meeting was convened by Limerick United Trades and Labour Council was convened, where a motion was passed to declare a general strike in the city in protest against the British government. The Limerick United Trades and Labour Council’s proclamation was as follows:

‘The workers of Limerick, assembled in Council, hereby declare cessation of all work from 5am on Monday April 14, 1919, as a protest against the decision of the British government in compelling them to procure permits in order to earn their bread.’ For the next 14 days, the strike committee became the effective local government of Limerick. The city was being run directly by a council of workers. The Limerick Soviet was born. All business ceased in Limerick with the exception of the Post Office, which was kept busy through the international media attention the strike would provoke. Once the strike was declared all businesses of the city co-operated. But in order to feed the population, the bakers were allowed to work part-time. Farmers co-operated by delivering vegetables, meat and eggs directly to the workers at prices well below the market value. To communicate their revolutionary ideology to their fellow workers, they printed their own newspaper: The Workers Bulletin. Although the Unions agreed to pay the workers strike pay, some unions such as the National Railway Union refused. Money became particularly scarce, so the Soviet decided to print its own money! The security for the notes, which were rather like food vouchers, would be provided by the stocks of food donated from Cork, Clare and other counties.

However, the British eventually found a zealous ally in the Catholic Church who ordered the workers to abandon the strike, and they in their ignorance submitted to their ecclesiastical masters. Thus the Limerick Soviet came to an end. It could have continued for much longer had not the Church intervened. But, then, one could say the same about so many progressive moments in Irish history. However, the workers did force the British to abandon its military occupation of the city. The Limerick Soviet was not the only worker commune in Ireland at the time. Another soviet was formed in Broadford village in County Clare, when labourers took over a landlord’s estate and ran it themselves. There was another soviet in Knocklong creamery county Limerick when workers took over the premises and ran it themselves. They hoisted the communist red flag over the building with the slogan ‘ Knocklong Soviet Creamery :We make butter not profit’. There is an Irish word which existed long before Karl Marx formulated the theory of communism: meitheal- a group of workers or working party. It is a concept of worker solidarity deeply embedded in Ireland’s historical culture, a unique word the meaning of which we have tragically forgotten. It is the ninetieth anniversary of the Limerick Soviet this month. These stories and the ideals they proclaim are still too little known in Ireland today. When one considers the mess we are in now, one realises why they are consigned to oblivion like rusty machinery in the closed factories of our history.

For more on the Limerick Soviet, read the book ‘ Forgotten Revolution-The Limerick Soviet 1919’ by Liam Cahill.

The rightwing subversion of egalitarian discourse

2009-10-21T01:54:00.000-07:00

Since the rise of Obama in America, the question concerning Europe’s immigrant children has come increasingly to the fore. Will Europe produce prime ministers or presidents who are themselves a reflection of the cultural diversity of European nations? To be sure, the Americans have outclassed us in the past few months. The euphoria that follows every foreign visit by the American president is not unlike the heady days of the Beatles. But this exaggerated optimism vis-a-vis the Obama phenomenon is more a reflection of a world in despair, screaming out for an alternative to the politics of destruction than a belief that someone who transcends traditional racial codes can actually make a fundamental difference to how the world is run. Nevertheless, it is not just Obama’s race and cultural heritage that is different; his rhetoric and demeanour also mark a significant break with the past. Europe’s reception of Obama has manifested a serious contrast with his predecessor. In France, for example, the Bush years nurtured an implacable anti-Americanism throughout the French political scene. However, this anti-Americanism, widespread throughout Western Europe, was not directed at the essence of what the United States could or should be; rather it a reaction to what the US was at that time under the bellicose unilateralism of the US administration. The ‘anti-American’ accusation has too often been used by both the American right and their supporters here in Europe to insinuate an irrational antipathy to all things American among those opposed to certain if not all aspects of US foreign policy. Now, however, the tide has definitively turned. On a symbolic level, America has taken the lead internationally in terms of racial and cultural diversity. The question now is, will Europe follow suit and when will this happen?

The nomination of Rachida Dati as French Minister for Justice in 2007 has made her one of the most talked-about high-profile ministers in recent French history. The daughter of Moroccan and Algerian immigrants, the second eldest in a poor family of eleven children, Rachida Dati is indubitably a symbol of cultural integration. However, her appointment to the ministry of justice has been fraught with controversy, malicious rumours and hyper-mediatisation. Dati has an extremely strong personality. Academically brilliant, her determination to succeed knew no bounds. While she was a student in economics, for example, she tapped into every possible social network in order to meet the kind of people who could open doors for her. Her indomitable ambition paid off. At a French-Algerian cultural event in Paris she met the wealthy and influential Jean Luc Lagardere, whom she managed to persuade to support her professional advancement. After spending a few years working as an auditor for Lagardere’s company Malta Communication, she entered the prestigious École Nationale de Magistrature to become a magistrate, again with Legardere’s financial assistance. Upon leaving law school, Dati worked her way up the social and political sphere becoming the spokesperson for Nicolas Sarkozy during his presidential campaign in 2007. After his election as president, Sarkozy made Dati Minister for Justice in his new government. Dati’s unbridled ambition, Sartorial elegance, sometimes shameless opportunism, together with a peremptory if not downright dictatorial approach to legislative reform, have raised the eyebrows of many political analysts in France. But apart from her shortcomings as a politician-and here she differs decidedly from Obama in having no real political convictions- she is in a sense the symbol of the modern European Muslim woman. She recently gave birth to a daughter. But she remains unmarried and refuses to disclose the identity of the father. This is, given her Muslim background, a radical change with the past.

What the recent accession of minority races and cultures in the USA and Europe to the highest levels of political power has shown is that political affiliation and race are no longer linked. Perhaps one of the most right-wing presidents in US history nominated two black people to the post of Secretary of State. Similarly in France under Sarkozy, the racial diversity of the government has been significantly widened. This means that racial and socio-economic equality are no longer inextricably linked. This also means that the distinction between left and right wing politics has been in a sense obfuscated by right-wing governments’ promotion of minorities. Yet the struggle for racial equality was traditionally never on the right-wing agenda. The worrying issue here is that this new right-wing consensus on racial equality has resulted in an adroit side-stepping of the question of socio-economic equality, so when we talk about equality we no longer understand what it really means.

Coláiste Lurgan: an oasis of culture in the land of the philistines

2009-10-21T01:48:00.000-07:00

Those culture-vultures among you will be pleased to discover that the “crisis” has not yet inundated all spheres of Irish life. The demand for Irish language courses is rapidly increasing. An interesting example of this nascent cultural revival can be found in Connemara where the numbers signing up for summer courses in Colláiste Lurgan, the Irish language school based in Connemara have risen significantly over the past couple of years. If your hoping to sign up your teenage daughters or sons for a course there this year, brostaigh ort! Of the 1900 places for this year’s summer courses, over 90 percent of available places have already been filled. That’s a staggering 40 percent increase from this time three years ago!

It augers well for the intellectual development of the island and proves just how effective Coláiste Lurgan courses are in teaching and imparting the joy of speaking the oldest literary language in Europe. In order to cope with this burgeoning linguistic renaissance, Coláiste Lurgan have plans to build a new Le Corbusier style building which will enable them to expand their language programme as well as providing an attractive space for cultural and social activities in Irish. One look at their new high tech website leaves me lamenting the fact that the Bainisteoir Micheál Ó Foighil is not the minister for the Gaeltacht. This is clearly a man of vision: vitreous corridors welcoming the light of the Atlantic ocean, spacious rooms fully equipped with the latest in digital technology, a continental style cafeteria for students to mix and converse, theatres and audiovisual rooms to inspire creativity as Gaeilge. Coláiste Lurgan has created all its own pedagogical material utilising the best in information technology. Students taking the courses pursue a wide variety of outdoor activities through Irish. If Micheál Ó Foighil were running the department of education, this country would no longer have a problem with its own language. But the finance required for the implementation of this project will depend on the sagacity of our Government. I realise that the ‘sagacity of the government’ sounds like a contradiction in terms! They don’t exactly have a reputation for knowing what to do with our money, apart from dumping it into the banks in order to re-fuel the ignorant plutocracy. However, assuming that the present incumbents are ditched and the opposition minister for the Gaeltacht is progressive( imagine that!), the funds will be provided for this project in the next few years, thereby ensuring that at least the next generation of multi-cultural Irish people will have an educated view of what it means to be Irish. But what has been achieved so far by Micheál Ó Foighil is due in the main to his own pertinacity and he is highly critical of the government’s role in the promotion of the language. But will they listen?

I can hear cantankerous voices asking me again “but what’s the use in learning Irish?” “ what effing good is it?” You should ask my colleague Michal Boreslav Mechura, a Czech Gaelgeoir and regular contributor to this page. Ask him why, having wandered from the taverns of Bohemia, he decided to learn Irish? He not only speaks the language fluently, he writes and teaches it as well. His blog ‘An cainteoir dóchais’ meaning ‘a hopeful speaker’ is a pithy inversion of the common term ‘cainteoir dúchais’- native speaker. He organises conversation circles in Irish every fortnight in Dublin. He is another example of the contribution to Irish culture being made by so many emigrants in this country. Panu Höglund from Finnland is an Irish language blogger , who has made an enormous contribution to the promotion of Irish on the web. Ann Paluch, the Polish contributor to this paper, is another Gaelgeoir, who has presented a radio programme as Gaeilge for Radió na Life. There are many more. In fact, there are too many to name here. I have always believed that just as the culture of emigration lead to the decline of the Irish language, immigration will save it. If we could combine the energy and passion for culture of the cainteoir dúchais exemplified by people like Micheál Ó Foighil, with the originality of the cainteoir dóchais, Ireland could yet become a country worthy of its noble heritage.

On St Obama's letter to the Muslims

2009-10-21T01:38:00.000-07:00

>'the powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole'.
Professor Caroll Quiqley, Tragedy and Hope

Last week was a momentous one for the US president, starting with a visit to Saudi Arabia, America’s closest despotic friends, then Obama’s erudite discourse in Cairo where some magnanimity was shown in mentioning at least one of the USA’s nefarious interferences in the affairs of other countries, namely the 1953 CIA coup in Iran which overthrew the democratic reformer Mohammed Mossadegh.

The mainstream media were unequivocal in their praise of the US president’s diplomatic overtures, yet many people remain unconvinced of the USA’s sincerity in this regard. After the Cairo visit President Obama visited Germany and the Buchanwald concentration camp where reference was made to Mahmoud Athmadinjed’s holocaust denials. President Obama’s tour ended in France with the D-Day commemoration.

The day-day commemoration was a chance for the US establishment to remind us about the ‘good wars’ it fought to save us all from tyranny. Now, I am not going to suggest that Hitler should not have been fought and that people should have said no to world war II. However, the real question about world war II concerns the international machinations which enabled Hitler to come to power in the first place. Who were Hitler’s financiers? Who financed the rise of Nazism in Germany from 1933? How could a bankrupt economy like Germany suddenly rise to the level of a world power capable of global destruction? Why, Wall Street of course, with a little help from the Bank of England!

Hitler’s rise to power was initially facilitated by a handsome loan from the Bank of England. The governor of the Bank of England was one Mantagu Norman a close personal friend of Hjalmar Schacht, chancellor of the Gearman Reichs Bank. The pro-Nazi British aristocracy were hoping to form an Anglo-German alliance against Franco-American hegemony in Western Europe. They also hoped that a strongman in Germany would attack the Soviet Union and defeat international communism. That’s why they pursued a policy of pacification with Germany. They didn’t want to lose interests on their investments!

Internationale Gesellschaft Farben was the most powerful chemical corporation in Hitler’s Germany. It played in integral part in the rise of the German war economy, producing, inter alia, explosives, fuel and the deadly poison gaz used in Auschwitz.

IG Farben’s American subsidiary American IG Farben was controlled by many of the top-brass in Wallstreet. Paul Warburg, chairman of the Federal Reserve, Walter Teagle of Standard Oil, Edsel T Ford and Carl Bosch of Ford Motor Company were all directors on the board of the American IG Farben subsidiary. JP Morgan, City bank, Henry Ford and a host of others all traded and profited from the German war machine before and throughout the Second World War.

In his book Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, the historian Antony Sutton writes ‘Without the capital supplied by Wall Street, there would have been no I. G. Farben in the first place and almost certainly no Adolf Hitler and World War II’.

It was US loans to the IG Farben and corporations in Germany which spawned the Nazi military-industrial complex. As one US senator put it before the end of the war, ‘Farben was Hitler and Hitler was Farben’. There is also little doubt that the Wallstreet gang were aware of what was happening. The historian Gabriel Kolko writes.

‘The business press [in the United States] was aware, from 1935 on, that German prosperity was based on war preparations. More important, it was conscious of the fact that German industry was under the control of the Nazis and was being directed to serve Germany's rearmament, and the firm mentioned most frequently in this context was the giant chemical empire, I. G. Farben

The story of US financial and technological support for Hitler is far to detailed for this column. I could mention IBM who supplied the punch-card proto-computer technology for the Holocaust. There are many more examples of full-scale collusion. In short, Wallstreet and criminals of global finance were the real cause of the Second World War. Has America really progressed since then? If you look closely at the top brass in Obama’s administration you will see Wallstreet written in capital letters. Henry Ford realised the danger of Wallstreet’s little secret. In his dairy, he wrote

'It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.'

The outsourcing of labour and war

2009-10-21T01:36:00.000-07:00

Le Clem, French patriots affectionately call it. The Clemenceau Aircraft carrier has finally come to rest at Graythorpe in England where it is to be scraped. But this ship’s post marine twilight is likely to be of more historical significance than its heyday when it patrolled the Middle East.

Serving from 1961 to 1997, the Clemenseau took part in several missions to protest French interests. Most notably, Saddam Hussein’s war on Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when Western powers supported the Bagdad Butcher in his quest for regional supremacy, providing their puppet dictator with weapons of mass destruction. The USA was particularly generous to Sadam, offering him chemical weapons which he used to commit atrocities in Iran and even in his own country. The French provided significant aviation technology, while the Clemenseau took care of French ‘commercial interests’ in the Persian Gulf, protecting its capitalist looters from Iranian military boats.

The ship also played a distinguished role during the First Gulf War. Saddam hoped to regain control over the oil fields of Kuwait, a kingdom which he felt, with some justification, was part of Iraq. The American ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie brought up Saddam’s plans for Kuwait when she met him just before the war, expressing ambiguous concern but then assuring the dictator that America has “ no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America." Saddam, himself a creation of the CIA, should have known better. He fell for the trap and the US-led Western imperialist criminals went on another killing spree to ‘liberate’ the oil fields of Kuwait. The French made sure they played their part in America’s bogus war. Le Clem came in handy when it transported 40 helicopters (SA-341F/ -342 Gazelles, SA-330 Pumas), three Br-1050 Alizés and trucks to Iraq during 'Desert storm & Desert shield'.

After such a noble career of collusion in mass murder and looting, the French authorities decided it was time to dismantle their precious Clem. As the 27 ton ship contained so many noxious toxins such as lead, PCB, mercury and asbestos, there was only one option open to them: ‘outsource’ the problem to India. “The workers of Alang have nothing. Who cares if they fall seriously ill or die from our toxic waste. It’s cheaper for us and it gives these people a job.”

Outsourcing is the euphemism the plutocracy employs to cover up their despicable exploitation of the world’s poor. Sure, many of them like their sweat shops and scrap yards; are happy to have a job, buy more commodities, become credit-slaves etc. They are just like the African-American slaves who sang happy ditties in the cotton fields of South Virginia before the US Civil War. Exploitation works much better if you make the exploited believe they are free.

It was Greenpeace, the bete noire of the Elysée Palace, who exposed Alang scandal, once again. The last time they messed with the French government was 1985 during their war on Iran. President Mitterand had enough of their moralizing and got the secret service to blow them up! However, due to legal pressure from within India, the French were forced to concede and the Clem was sent to England where it lies today.

Working conditions in the Alang shipyard in India are to be expected: appalling. These people are the lumpen proletariat of the New World Order, salvaging and recycling the components of capitalism’s shipwreak. We live in a world of pathological externalization. The capitalist powers continue to grow by outsourcing labour and war. It’s the only way financial capitalism can continue to reward the few and enslave the many. There are two billion children in the world. Over half of them are living in poverty. Neither charity nor plutocratic philanthropy will do anything to change this. Mass poverty is the sine qua non for the globalisation of capital.

Further thoughts on the Irish language

2009-10-21T01:32:00.001-07:00

Irish language media took a blow recently with the news that Foinse, the Irish language weekly newspaper, was to be taken out of circulation due to financial difficulties. Nevertheless Irish academia published a positive report last week concerning the advantages of bilingual education in Ireland. The research was carried out by Dr. Judith Wylie and Dr. Gerry Mulhern from Queen’s University Belfast’s School of Psychology. The school’s research concerns the cognitive development of children educated in Irish medium schools in Northern Ireland. The cognitive advantages shown in Irish medium schools were particularly striking in the areas of short-term memory and working memory. According to Dr Wylie “Short memory and working memory are centrally important in all learning, indeed everyday tasks such as reading, reasoning and mental arithmetic rely heavily on these processes. Using standardised tests of verbal and visual memory, our research compared
groups of children from Irish-medium schools with children from the more usual English-only schools in Northern Ireland “ .

The Irish language revival movement has proved to be particularly strong throughout nationalist areas of Northern Ireland. But there was also been a significant increase shown among Ulster Protestants in the Irish language and heritage. The divide and rule policy of British imperialism in the North has often led to a warped view of Irish identity on both sides of the political divide. The Irish language is too often seen as an instrument of Irish nationalism, a way for Northern nationalists to dissociate themselves from the hegemony of British culture in the province. In many respects this is true. But there is a significant number of nationalists in the north who are deeply cognisant of the importance of Protestantism to Irish language heritage. After all, the Bible was first translated into Irish by a Protestant clergyman William Bedel in the 17th century . Queen Elizabeth herself showed a healthy curiosity in Irish. She even asked Christopher Nugent the Baron of County Westmeath to provide her with an Irish primer! The Presbyterian clergyman William Nielson was a champion of the language writing a grammar and phrase book to encourage learning of the language among his congregation. In fact, a significant number of the original Scottish planters in Ulster were Gaelic speakers. The language, then, is as most a feature of unionist Ulster as it is of nationalist Ireland.

There was, of course, a significant number of Protestant nationalists too who contributed to the revival of Irish, Douglas Hyde being the most obvious example. A survey done by Smith and Robinson in 1991 revealed that 23 percent of Northern Irish Protestants believe that Irish should be a compulsory subject in schools. This is surprisingly high given the level of cultural confusion that exists among Northern Ireland’s divided communities. There have, however, been pockets of Irish learners among Ulster’s protestants, most notably, a group of female Irish learners in the staunchly loyalist Shankill( Sean Cille- Old Church) Road. The Unionist politician Chris McGimpsey is a speaker of Irish and the Irish language daily Lá featured regular columns from the Unionist writer Ian Malcolm.
According to Dr. Reamaí Mathers of Iontaobhas na Gaelscolaíochta

“This groundbreaking work adds further evidence to the increasingly indisputable body of good science that shows that children
who are educated in Irish-medium schools are not only receiving the benefit of two languages but are also receiving tangible educational advantages. Earlier this year, Key Stage 2 assessments (Primary 7),which focus on the areas of English and maths, demonstrated that for the last three years attainment in Irish-medium education has been higher than the Northern Ireland average. What the Queen’s research provides is a deeper insight into the mechanisms at work in the superior performance by Irish-medium children when compared to the more usual English
language schools.”

There is a compelling case for Irish medium education in this country North and South. When one considers the diverse and often paradoxical ideologies that promoted the language throughout our history, it does not seem impossible that Northern Ireland could yet become the leading province promoting Gaelic culture in these Islands.

Lunar landing or lunacy expanding?

2009-10-21T01:30:00.000-07:00

The 30 year anniversary of the NASA moon landings was universally celebrated this year with universal praise of the USA’s technological superiority in furthering human enlightenment. But there is another side to the lunar story that has been carefully concealed from the public’s attention, one which raises deep questions concerning the historical narrative of human progress, namely NASA’s direct links to NAZI Germany.

When Germany lay in ruins after the Second World War, American officials gained access to the secrets of Germany’s military-industrial complex. While many soldiers and officials were horrified by the savagery of the concentration camps in such places as Auschwitz, Dachau and Dora, certain commanders saw an opportunity to profit from the research and technological knowledge of the NAZI war machine. With the Red Army triumphant in East Berlin, military strategy to contain the advance of communism took precedence of moral integrity. The Cold War had already begun. The Americans were overwhelmed by the superiority of NAZI technology and feared lest such knowledge pass to the Soviets.

The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, which encompassed all branches of US military intelligence, was determined to track down and employ these NAZI researchers in the interests of the United States. However, they failed to convince President Roosevelt of the necessity of giving high-level jobs to NAZI scientists in the expanding US military –industrial complex. William Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, expressed grave concern over certain officials desire to recruit the NAZI scientists. But many of the scientists had already been captured after the D-Day landings in 1944 by the T-Forces of the Allies. The T-Forces’s mission had been to search for NAZI soft power and employ it in the services of the Allied Powers.

When President Truman assumed power in 1945, he took of the JIOA’s plan. When the CIA was founded in 1947, the drive for NAZI expertise became a covert plan known to history as Operation Paperclip. However, when the NAZI documents were initially presented to the US State Department, they were rejected as the dossiers proved that the scientists were ardent NAZI war criminals. The refusal of the US State Department to Nazify America infuriated Bosquet Wev, director of the JIOA who commented ‘the best interests of the United States have been subjugated to the efforts expended in 'beating a dead Nazi horse’ Wev’s dead NAZI horse would soon gallop across the prairies of an liberty –loving land, corrupting it from within unbeknownst to its own people. The CIA proceeded immediately to falsify the files of the NAZIs they wished to smuggle into the United States. They did this by bleaching the backgrounds of the NAZI criminals and covering them with new ones secured by paperclips, hence the name. Many of the scientists were located when a Polish lab technician discovered a list kept Werner Osenberg, a University of Hannover engineer–scientist, head of the Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft (English: Military Research Association) the scientific research section of the Gestapo, which he had recovered from a toilet bowl!

Among the beneficiaries of the CIA covert operation were Werner Von Braun, Hubertus Strughold and Arthur Rudolf. These were to be the men who would lead the Apollo Program putting the first man on the moon in August of 1969. Werner Von Braun aged just 32 in 1945 was a key engineer for the NAZI war machine. Commandant of the SS, Von Braun was in charge of developing the V2 rockets in Peenmunde, Germany. The parts for the rocket were constructed by slave labour in Dora concentration camp. After the war Von Braun was interned in Garmisch which was under the supervision of Colonel Holder Toftoy, who convinced Von Braun to move to the United States to work for the Americans. E.W Gruhn, one of the directors of the JIOA, then began to recruit hundreds of NAZIs to be employed in prestigious US military and academic research centres. The drive to recruit NAZis proved so intense, Operation National Interest was also launched in 1947. By now Allen Dulles the director of the CIA, had established a close an amicable relationship with Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s ex chief of intelligence. Gehlen was rewarded with a position as station chief in Germany for the CIA. He proceeded to recruit old NAZI comrades, people such as Emil Augsburg and Dr. Franz Six, who had formed death scuads during the war, murdering Jews and communist intellectuals en mass. Jews would now be safe but the mass murder of communists would continue throughout the developing and third world until the end of America’s cold war. The United Stateswould never be the same again. Henceforth all qualms about past NAZI crimes were to be disgarded as NAZIs were smuggles en masse into the United States to work . In the summer of 1947 Operation ‘National Interest’ was launched. Now NAZI war criminals were to be recruited into the highest echelons of US business. Otto Ambros the director of IG Farben, the company that was financed by the US during the war and the producer of Zyklon B used in the holocaust was awarded with executive positions in Dow Chemicals, WR Grave Company and the US Medical Corps.

There were hundreds if not thousands more. The NASA NAZIs would later be given the highest awards of the from the Us Government. Strughold would even receive the Americanism Medal from the daughters of the revolution. Others such as Rudolf were later indicted for war crimes. Few were ever convicted. The lunar landing in 1969 was the triumph of a Nazified America, the triumph of criminal lunacy.

The people's palace. The moscow metro as a monument to socialist construction

2009-10-21T01:25:00.000-07:00

It is one of the wonders of the modern world,yet one which draws few tourists. Built in 1935 by Soviet governement, the Moscow Metro is more than just a public transport system. It is arguably one of the most ambitious and spectacular infrastructural projects ever undertaken.Over 7 million people use the Moscow Metro every day.

One of the many intriguing aspects of the Metro is the fact that it combines form and functionality in a truly unique way. The walls of each station, many of them curved, are covered with marble slabs while the ceilings are predominantly curved or covered by mosaics depicting the new soviet society under construction.
Mayakovskaya Metro station , for example,was inspired by the communist futurism of the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. The design of the Mayakovsky station is a wonderful mixture of Art Deco and soviet functionalism. The columns are elegant with stainless steel and pink rhodonite while the walls contain white Ufaley and Diorite marble. As you ascend the gigantic elevator tunnel guided by rows of elegant lanterns, the captivating opulence of the walls, columns and flooring gives way to a scene of breathtaking magnificence as you gaze upon the iridescent mosaic covering the ceiling of the foyer.

Designed by the artist Deinika, the mosaic is entitled ' A Day in the Land of the Soviets' As you ascend the elevator tunnel, the narrative of the ceiling mosaic begins to unfold: workers rise in the morning, amble happily into the fields and factories to work not labour, then as you traverse the foyer you are accompanied by an image overhead of workers returning to their beds at sunset. This is pure architectural ecstasy, an ingenius marriage of form and function, and perhaps even of ideology and reality in so far as the magnificence of the Metro's design is truly uplifting and awe-inspiring. This is the effect which Stalin and his architects Kaganovitch and Dushkin wanted to create.

The elaborate design of the Metro was intended to raise the confidence and prestige of the working classes. It would show to the common worker what could be achieved if wealth was poured back into society and co-operation for the common good replaced the ideology of personal greed.

In fact, due to its sheer sumptuosity the Metro became known as the 'People's Palaces' and there was much discourse in Russia at the time about what the Metro was meant to represent. There were even children's books based on the Metro. One such book called 'Ready! Stories and poems from the metro' tells of a peasant whose daughter is working in the Metro. When he enters the subway he remarks to hs daughter
"what a rich life the tzars lived. It's like a fairy tale. And the train goes right up to the palaces- so that's how it was set up"
His daughter laughs and replies " it isn't the tzars who live so well, papa, it is we. I have brought you underground'" The old man is so overwhelmed by the beauty of the metro that he decides to move to Moscow to join his daughter where he rides the Metro every day. The story is a striking illustration of the transformation of consciousness which the Metro engenders.

Each station of this underground city has its own palace, its own unique design and style, combining the best architectural paradigms from the past from Greek classicism to Gothic and Art Deco styles, the Moscow Metro suffuses the entire history of public space with early optimism of revolutionary soviet man. The Moscow Metro is also the deepest in the world and one of the most efficient. It was designed to serve as a shelter during aerial bombardment.

Whatever one may think about the legacy of Stalin, the Moscow Metro is unquestionably one of his most profound achievements. Perhaps for the first time in human history the working class people were infused with a belief in themselves(albeit deeply problematic) and the possibilities of a better future. Now SUVs, Mercs and Audis rule Moscow's streets, while the working classes roam Moscow's subterranean palaces, haunted by the unfulfilled promises of a lost civilisation.

The left boot of history. Kyrgystan's return to feudalism

2009-10-21T01:22:00.000-07:00

I lost my left hiking boot in Kyrgystan last week. I know, you are surprised it didn't make world headlines! It was, believe, me a deeply traumatic experience.Kyrgystan is a land of contradictions and contrasts; a small, poor country fighting for survival in the midst of the great imperial game being played out by Europe, US, Russia and China for control of Central Asia's natural resources. Arriving in Bishkek airport from Moscow is a perfect introduction to contemporary Kyrgystan, as one observes a company of American soldiers heading back to their military base in Manas. Kyrgystan is among the most Russian-oriented states in Central Asia, hence the American presence!

Making our way to the hostel we were accosted by a Kyrgyz lad who spoke little English and much German. He works part-time as a guide for Swiss tourists and wanted to practice German with us in preparation for the next tour, even offering to accompany us for free into the mountains of Tian Shan in the east. My girlfriend and I readily accepted, and so the three of us, an Irishman, French woman and Kyrgyz man, departed for the wilds of Kyrgystan all speaking German! I felt there was something fittingly peculiar about the whole thing!

The word Kyrgystan translates as the land of 40 maidens. On our trip around the country our guide gave us many insights into the nations troubled history. Like Irish, the Kyrgyz language has never attained the same status as Russian, although unlike Irish, Kyrgyz is still spoken by over 60 percent of the population on a daily basis. But most books, signposts and administrative paraphernalia are still in Russian. There is an interesting diglossia in this country that somehow seems to work. Most educated people are perfectly bilingual, but the two unrelated languages operated on two distinct sociological registers. There has been a concerted effort by the Governement to promote the Kyrgyz language since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 but unlike Kazahstan where the language is triving due to ambitious state guidance, the Kyrgyz authorities lack the funds and expertise to translate more books into Kyrgyz. Therefore, Russian is still the language of universities.

Kyrgyzstan also shares an important historical date with Ireland. A few months after Irish revolutionaries had seized the GPO in Dublin's nationalist rising, Kyrgyz rebels were fighting the Russian Czarist autocracy in the mountains of Tian Shan bordering China. The rebels opposed conscription to fight in the first world war and were brutally slaughtered by the Czarist forces. As many of the fighters were Bashmachis, that is to say, conservative muslims opposed to women's liberation and modernisation, the Kyrgyz slaughter known as the 'Urkan' or tragedy, was not taught in schools during the Soviet era.

Modern Kyrgystan pretty much begins and ends with the formation of the Kyrgystan Soviet Socialist Republic in 1936. Before the socialist revolution, Kyrgystan was a predominantly nomadic society. The Soviets, however, began a massage education and industrial progamme. Women were forced to burn their hijabs, attend schools and work to build socialism. The Bashmachi revolt was put down, agriculture collectivised and by the 1950s Kyrgystan was a modern and successful industrial republic with universal free education at all levels and a highly advanced free health system.

However,since the fall of the Soviet Union, Kyrgystan has actually gone backward, in some cases, it has gone back to pre-revolutionary poverty using donkeys instead of tractors, unthinkable during the Soviet era.Capitalism promised hope to Kyrgystan and delivered poverty.
As we strolled with Salamat through the many verdant parks of Bishkek, I was struck by so many poignant contrasts.Salamat's parents remember the Soviet era with fondness as they had a higher standard of living and less stress. My parents remember the past as a time of more poverty. My father came from the so-called 'free world' but did not have the money to go to university in the 1950s. Salamat's father lived in the 'unfree world' and had the luxury of free third level education and guaranteed employment. But now the Kyrgyz are free; free to be poor, free to be unemployed, free to vote for corrupt politicians, free to despair. As night throws its melancholy cloak over Bishket, a statue of Marx and Engels, deep in conversation, sits disconsolately facing the American University of Central Asia, and on the potholled roads that wind through the rugged landscape of Kyrgystan, mosques creep up behind futuristic soviet iconography.It seems that the forty maidens of Kyrgystan have, like me, lost their left boots. Thrust against its will into the piercing gaze of a globalised world, Kyrgystan hops precariously on a tired right foot!

Time to impose sactions on the US and Israel

2009-10-21T01:18:00.000-07:00

They never change, those Western bullies, USA,UK and France. 6 years after the 21st century's first genocide, namely the Iraq war, and the Western powers are ranting and raving about Iran's so-called 'nuclear' weapons ambitions. Having told us a big lie about Saddam's 'weapons of mass destruction' a few years ago, they now feel they call lie again and get away with it. It's quite easy. All you have to do is make pompous press releases threatening to bomb Iran that are predicated upon some serious and imminent threat from that wicked and barbaric land in the east. Once the nonsense is diffused repeatedly throughout our pathetic 'free press', people will eventually get the message: It's ok to drop bombs on Iran!

The nasty prejudice that premeates this propaganda campaign against Iran is that "they are all fanatics" or "those mullahs are a threat to civilisation" "imagine the threat to international security if an Islamic state got its hands on nuclear weapons!" Of course, we never talk about Israel in this fashion in spite of the fact that they have an arsenal of nukes, illegally to boot, and the fact that they regularly use weapons of mass destruction regardless of the loss of life; or the fact that Israel is a denominational state where non-jews are automatically second-class citizens, or that it it is Israel which poses a threat to peace in the Middle East, not Iran.

President Obama's rhetoric about getting tough on Iran is consummate bluff. His own close advisor and mentor Zigibniew Brzezinski has alreay ruled out an Israeli attack on Iran, going so far as to warn that Israeli planes would be shut down if they dared to cross American airspace in their new colony called Iraq. So it looks like 'Theater Iran Near Term' or TIRANNT, the Pentagon's plans to attack Iran using Israel, is off for the 'near term'. Theatre Iran Long Term is going to have to be done with words of wisdom. The Iranians have already made their position clear. They want a comprehensive end to Israel's oppression of the Palestinians; and the right to develop nuclear energy for civilian purposes. The Ayatollah Khameini, echoing Khomeini, has recently reiterated the fact that nuclear weapons are contrary to the dictates of Islam.

So there is no 'threat' from Iran. On the contrary, the threat to international security is coming as usual from the UN security council, that new US- led global dictatorship, the same criminals who starved half a million Iraqis to death during the Oil for Food campaign; the same criminals who have never imposed sanctions on Israel inspite of their crimes against humanity; the same criminals who refuse to allow the files on French and German pharmaceutical companies who sold chemicals to Saddam in the 1980s(in full knowledge of their purpose) when the US persuaded him to invade Iran.It is high time we imposed sanctions alright, sanctions on the USA, sanctions on Israel, Britain, and all other warmongers of the past ten years!

Yes, I said, Yes I will yes!

2009-10-21T01:16:00.000-07:00

So we answered that million euro question on the global political 'who wants to be a millionaire' show. We answered 'Yes', and we were Joycean to boot! Yes I said yes I will yes yes! Like a prostrate goddess pleasuring herself with the dildos of false hope, we opened our legs to the European commission. Take me, oh please take me, for if you don't I shall perish on the shores of Europe! Nothing like a good financial crisis to hoodwink the distressed rabble. The yes vote puts us 'at the centre of Europe'! Now we will have 'economic recovery', the barrage of lies and disinformation was spectacularly pinocchian. Since the beginning of the so-called Lisbon Treaty debate, those who were willing to discuss the details of the Treaty were subject to apriori exclusion; they were accussed of being 'parochial' 'backward' and 'anti European'.

We have now ratified the principal that reduces mankind to a commodity for exchange. The princical advocating the free movement of capital has superceded the dignity of man. Human being has now become human capital. In the months and years ahead we will see a new Europe emerge as European societies are surepticiously strangled by the banking interests of the world oligarchy; that is to say the emerging dictatorship of elite financial capitalism over the entire spectrum of human life.

Decisions will be made behind closed doors. This is already the case. Most legislation in the EU is decided in secretive 'trilogues' between the council, the comission and the EU parliament. Many of the 'policies' and global strategies of the EU are also discussed in private. The Trilateral Commision was formed in 1972 and was intented to be a 'think tank' of the US, European and Japanese elites, in other words a platform upon which the elites of the industrial world could manipulate democracies to further their lust for power. US senator Barry Goldwater was quite frank about the purpose of the commission when he said "The Trilateral Commission is international and is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the U.S." The same can be said for Europe today.
But as history has shown, when there is is plutocracy ( rule by wealth) there is always polemocracy ( rule by war). It is no surprise then to see that we are now moving towards the United States of Europe, shamelessly subtending our vast wealth with the military domination of other countries. Article 17(2) of the Lisbon Treaty concerns EU SOFA, the European Union Status of Forces Agreement. This is the blueprint for an EU army to be deployed wherever the Eurocrats decide is necessary to protect 'Europe's interests' The EU army will simply be the European company of the New World Order army, ie NATO. Needless to say, a pressing problem for the EU army will be domestic terrorism, as it was for Italian, German and Belgian government's in the 1970s ( gli anni di piombo, the years of weight in Italian) when NATO used fascist gangs to infiltrate so-called 'marxist' organisations to place bombs in metros killing hundreds of innocent civilians. The purpose was to strengthen the power of EU right wing governments by discrediting the left. It worked. Operation Gladio, as it was called, has never been fully investigated or debated by the European Commission. But it did happen and it will happen again whenever it is deemed necessary to curb democratic movements or drum up support for EU foreign military adventures.
Emmanuel Barroso once said that the EU is really an 'unimperial empire'. Perhaps a fitting synonym would be an 'undemocratic democracy.'!

Pax Obamana and the New World Disorder

2009-10-21T01:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it is better not to think.Thinking is stressful but thanks to the global media disinformation machine blissful ignorance is becoming easier by the day. All we have to do is shut up and listen passively as the radios and television sets beam buckets of stultifying lies into our tired ears. Last week's big lie was, of course, the now notorious Nobel 'Peace Prize'. As President Obama met with the War Council in the Situation Room of the White House to discuss the escalation of the 'just war' in Afghanistan, which has killed more civilians than combatants- a war predicated on a mendacious conspiracy theory concerning a grave threat to civilisation emanating from the villages of Afghanistan- the august Nobel Prize committee in Norway were preparing to announce this year's winner: President Obama.

President Obama, according to the committee, is to be awarded the prize for 'extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons." ...His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population' Extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy? What a load of tosh! Let's look at the facts!
First of all, it should be pointed out that Obama did not even campaign on a peace ticket. Instead of rhetoric about world peace Obama rehashed the Bush line on the threat from the US-created Al Qaeda phantom enemy. He spoke of the need for an escalation of US-NATO troops in Afghanistan to counter the growing threat to humanity posed by illiterate Pashtun tribes. He has been true to his word. Since Obama's inauguration, the US military budget has increased by more than 35 billion dollars; this at a time when American citizens could do with some financial help from their government. Bush's GWOT, global war on terror has simply been renamed. It is now deceptively entitled 'Overseas Contingency Operations'.
By the end of his incumbancy, President Obama will have the distinction of overseeing the biggest US military operation since the Vietnam War. This is truely a man of peace.
What about Isreal's war crimes in January? What did Mr. Obama say about them? Nothing. Infact, US military aid to Isreal has also increased inspite of the subterfuge about a resolution to the 61 year oppression of the Palestinian people.
As for Latin America, the USA's favourite terror victim, very little has changed. Sure, Obama looked good exchanging pleasanteries with Hugo Chavez a few months ago. But plans were already in place to build more US military bases in Columbia right along the Venezuelan border. Here also Obama the peace maker has been true to his word. During his election campaign he spoke of the necessity of 'reclaiming' Latin America, bringing them back into the fold, as it were.

What about the people of Honduras, one of the world's poorest countries? They now live under an corrupt, oppressive US-friendly dictatorship, thanks to the inimitable machinations of the White House. Zelaya had threatened to close down the US military base in Soto Cano, the same base Washington had used to arm the death scuads that invaded Nicaragua during the eighties, killing, maiming, looting and raping all before them in the name of 'democracy'. Washinton could not allow their little terror hub to slip out of their hands, so they gave the go ahead to the fascist thugs how ousted the Honduras's democratically elected president.

As for Iraq, the US administrative and military presence in Iraq is permanent. The world's biggest embassy is currently underway right in the center of Bagdad. In reality, it be be a US citadelle which will function as the shadow governement of the country for decades to come. The citadell is still under construction and, according to some reports, could be a big as 80 football stadia when completed.It will have shopping malls, bars, swimming pools etc while the local population lives in poverty and fear. This is called Pax America.

So, what has changed so far under the Obama adminstration? There has simply been a further shift in our understanding of language. War now means peace. The antonym is now the synonym. As the Roman writer Tacitus put, ' they make a desert and call it peace'.But should we expect any better from a committee that once gave the Nobel Peace prize to one of the twentieth century's more nefarious war criminals, Henry Kissinger, now the eminence grise lurking in the corridors of the Obama administration?

On the subtleties of Iranian politeness

2009-10-21T01:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve just returned from three wonderful weeks in the Islamic Republic of Iran. For Irish travellers seeking to explore that extraordinary country, a word of advice: tarof. The word tarof in Farsi roughly corresponds to politeness in English but its application involves scrupulous discretion. The Iranians are without question among the most civilised people in the world and the concept of tarof is an indispensable aspect of daily life in Iran. For Irish people, tarof should not pose insuperable problems. We in Ireland, although in a typically informal way, have our own form of tarof. I recall countless occasions in the past when my parents were visited by our neighbours. When my mother would offer tea, they would routinely refuse.

“ will you have a cup of tea” my mother would ask

“ no, I grand, I’m just after it” our neighbours would respond.

“ Ah go on, have a cup of tea” “no, no, I’m grand, don’t bother; really I’m fine, I just had five cups of tea before I left”

“Ah go on, have one cup, go on tis just made an all. Sit down and have a cup of tea for God’s sake. Go on sit down!”

“ Oh go on so. I’ll have one cup”

The Iranian tarof functions in a similar way. When offered something you must refuse even when you would like to accept it. In general, two refusals will be followed by a third offer designed to break your polite resistance. It is then polite to accept the offer, be it a cup of teas or an invitation to dinner. The Irish hold the distinction of being the friendliest people in Europe. There might be some truth in this but if there were a competition to determine the friendliest people on the planet, our Aryan cousins in the Orient would lap us ten times over.

It is perhaps one of the most grotesque injustices of our time that the international media should concentrate such inordinate resources in sullying and distorting the image of Iran throughout the world. During my travels throughout the country, one of the facetious questions most frequently asked was

“ Do you think the Iranians are terrorists?” In spite of government restrictions, most Iranians have access to satellite TV and are well-informed regarding the nasty and mendacious vocabulary diffused by the Western media which consists in demonising any country that refuses to conform to western ideologies about the good life.

On the subject of ‘Aryan’, there is, according to some Indo-European scholars, the possibility that Éireann and Iran are cognate, both being derived from the Aryan tribe. There are, however, many proposed etymologies of the word for Ireland and it remains an open question among the experts. But, there are certainly striking parallels between Irish and Persian mythology attesting common Indo-European origins.

The Persian language, although heavily coated with Arabic words since the Islamic invasion of 640 AD, is nevertheless fundamentally Indo-European. Persian or Farsi bears many curious and sometimes puzzling similarities to European languages. The Persian word for bad, for example is the same as the English, yet the consensus among linguists is that this is a coincidence. One word which struck me as I was learning the language was the word for woman. In Farsi it is ‘banu’. Could this be a cousin of the Irish ‘bean’? Speaking of women, young Iranian girls are, in spite of their hijab, exceedingly elegant. Their long coats are often worn as tightly as possible and the hejab only serves to accentuate the Parisian cosmetics, jewellery and ravishing chevelure exposed from the crown to the forehead.

But the cult of pulchritude is not only confined to Iranian women. With their manga haircuts, Italian jeans and t-shirts, Iranian lads are among the coolest dudes in the world of fashion. One of the differences between Ireland and Iran is that, whereas in Ireland it is the short-skirted ladies who are on display, in Iran it’s the men! Perfume, plucked eyes and nose-jobs are normal in Iran, even among the men. In Iran you can get into trouble if you kiss a girl on the street but kissing another man doesn’t raise any plucked eyebrows! Many Iranian men kiss and hold hands. In a country where homosexuality is illegal, it is sometimes difficult to tell who’s straight and who’s gay. What we consider effeminate is regarded as highly masculine among Iranians. By the time I left the country, I realised I had an imperfect nose, didn’t wear perfume, kiss or hold men’s hands. I must be gay! Iran is one of those country’s that makes you think deeply about everything, culture, history, tradition, religion and philosophy. It is quite simply an anthropological rollercoaster ride, a crash course on humanity. Get your visa, go there and learn but don’t forget the tarof!

Cogadh buan ar son na síochána

2009-10-21T01:07:00.000-07:00

Le níos mó ná fiche tíortha ag glacadh páirt ann, is cosúil go mbeímid ag cloisteáil tuairiscí ón gcogadh san Afganistáin ins na míosa agus na blianta atá amach romhainn. Anois tá forsaí speisialta na h-Éireann sa Khaboul chomh maith.Tá stádus neodrach na h-Éireann críochnaithe le fada an lá!

Anois tá sé deacair a rá cén tír atá níos contúirtí idir Afganastáin agus Pacastáin. Tá na hionsaithe féinbhuamaí ag éirí níos minicí agus níos measa le cúpla bliain anuas agus ní dhealraíonn sé go bfhuil aon dheireadh na coimhlinte. Dár le scríobhneoir pacastánach Tariq Ali, má leaneann Eagríocht chonradh an Atlantaigh Thuaidh (ECAT) agus na Stáit Aonaithe ar aghaidh le buamáil na Pacastáin is mór an contúirt go scarfaidh arm na Pacastáine ó chéile idir saighdúirí atá báúil do Taliban agus siadsan atá i bhfabhar na Stát Aontaithe. Is í an fhadhb sa Phacastáin ná nach aon aontacht bhuan, sheasmhach sa tír agus tá coimhlint eithneach dochúil le haon lagú an Stáit san Islamabad. Cur i gcás muintir na Baluchistáine i ndeisceart na tíre. Is áit fhíorbhocht í an Bhaluchastán, réigúin atá sínte idir trí tíortha: an Iráin, Pacastáin agus Afghanistáin.

Tá gluaiseacht neamhspleáchais ann sa Bhaluchastán le roinnt blianta anois, go háirithe sa Pacastáin. Ní raibh na Baluchastáinigh sásta riamh le buanacht an Stáit na Pacastáine mar gur mhothaigh siad difrúil ó mhuintir i dtúisceart na tíre. Fadhb eile sa Bhaluchastán ná go bhfuil Cuan Gwador ann. Thogáil an tSín Cuan Gwador agus tá sé fíorthábhachtach dóibh chun ola a iompú ó Mhurascaíl na Peirse. Dá bhrí sin, tá Beijing an-bhuartha faoi eagobhsaíocht pholaitúil na Pacastáine agus na himpleactaí do mhaithe eacnamíochta agus geopholaitíochta na Síne sa réigúin. Is cúis eile í do láithreacht na Stáit Aontaithe i bPacastáine, cur isteach ar mhaithe na Síne ann agus tá Baluchastán i gcróilár an chluithe mhóir sin. Beidh Baluchastáin uirlis usáideach eile chomh maith do na Stáit Aontaithe chun eagobhsaíocht a ghríosú san Iaráin, straitéis atá ar súil cheana le grúpa sceimhlitheoireachta darb ainm Jundalah atá maoinaithe ag an CIA.

Tá gach cosúlacht go mbeidh impleachtaí do roinnt tíortha eile ón gcogadh freisin; táim ag smaoineamh faoi thíortha cosúil le Tadjikistán ina bhfuil Ioslamachas míliteach ag éirí níos láidire ó thosaigh an cogadh san Afganastáin. Dá bhrí sin, is feidir linn a rá go bhfuil cogadh buan i gceist, cogadh buan ar son na síochána!

The Free Tibet scam: a mass media disinformation campaign to destabilise China

2009-08-16T12:58:00.000-07:00

One political subject which resurfaces every now and then is the question of Tibet. There is much sloganeering on this issue in the West “Poor Tibet! Those poor Tibetans, cowering under the yoke of Chinese tyranny! Free Tibet!” There are hundreds of ‘free Tibet’ organisations scattered throughout today’s distracted globe, ranting and raving about ‘human rights’ ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. These organisations tend to take root among the university educated European bourgeoisie, who enjoy hiking in the Himalayas, Buddhist meditation and the romance of ascetic monks locking themselves away from this cut-throat capitalist world. Given the barrage of Western propaganda in recent years from Hollywood movies to copious Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhist publications, as well as the generous funding coming from the United States and Germany in particular, the Western hysteria regarding China’s nefarious governance of the region is not too surprising.

Almost any one you talk to in Europe will express sympathy with the Tibetan separatists and almost everyone loves the Dalai Lama. But what was Tibet like before those terrible Chinese communists invaded in 1951, a pristine land of prayer and tranquillity, high living standards and deep communal wisdom, a bastion of democracy? I’m afraid not.

Tibet was an absolutist theocracy. Over 90 percent of the population were serfs who were forced to labour for the Dalai Lama (not the present one)and his clerical aristocracy.

The conditions of the ordinary Tibetans were among the worst in the world when the Chinese communists ‘invaded’ in 1951. The Tibetan slaves had no rights and lived in abominable living conditions; torture, rape and execution were the norm for the Tibetan serf. Hands were cut off; people were skinned alive; eyes were gouged out, tongues torn out; hands and legs chopped off and disembowelment was common. Children were often kept as sex slaves by the lamas who enjoyed a Sybaritic lifestyle at the expense of the entire population.

This was the brutal autocracy of the cuddly and lovable Dalai Lamas, the hideous reality which the fanatical idiots of the ‘free Tibet’ campaign routinely ignore. When they talk about the sovereignty of the ‘Tibetan people’ what they unwittingly espouse is the sovereignty of the Tibetan oligarchy. Sure, the Dalai Lama claims he wants a democracy in Tibet and he talks about peace and love. But he also supports the genocidal US-led war in Iraq and Afghanistan just as he supported the US-NATO bombardment of Serbia. He actively intervened on behalf of the former Chilean dictator and mass murderer Augusto Pinochet when he was being protected by Margaret Thatcher, lobbying for him to be released without trial.

The Dalai Lama is the darling boy of the US Congress, receiving the prestigious Congressional medal for his untiring service to ‘human rights’ throughout the world. But the Dalai Lama’s real service to human rights has been to transpose the hideous cruelty of Lama rule in Tibet into a national liberation struggle against the People’s Republic of China. In fact, there may be signs that the extraordinarily successful propaganda campaign against China is coming to an end. The Los Angeles Times published an article on the 15^th of September 1998 stating that the Dalai Lama has been on the CIA payroll for years with an annual salary amounting to a handsome 186,000 dollars. He has also received funding from the George Soros foundation and Indian intelligence. So much for the simple life of Buddhist anti-materialism! So that’s the Dalai Lama. But what about the human rights abuses of the Chinese government against the Tibetan people?

On March 18^th 2008 rioters took to the streets of Llasa looting shops, burning schools and attacking innocent civilians throughout the city. Chinese state television showed horrific pictures of Tibetan rioters stoning people to death on the streets. Smashing peoples skulls was the Tibetan ‘freedom fighter’s preferred form of execution. The Tibetan hooligans set fire to over 200 residential houses and shops and more than 80 vehicles. Even Chinese fire fighters were the object of Tibetan aggression with fire engines set on fire. Meanwhile, our so called ‘free press’ was presenting the Tibetan aggression as a violent ‘crackdown’ by the big bad Chinese government on the ‘peaceful ‘ Tibetan protestors. The BBC and CNN manipulated images to portray the Chinese police as the aggressors. The German newspaper ‘Die Berliner Morganpost’ published pictures of police officers rescuing Han people as from Tibetan aggression as more evidence of a Chinese ‘crackdown’ on the peaceful protestors. German RTL television had to resort to more absurd lies to make their point by publishing picture of police aggression in Nepal! Hard to distinguish those Asians isn’t it!

The Free Tibet scam receives most of its funding from the Frederich Naumann Foundation in Germany and various CIA front organisations in the USA. The point of the Free Tibet campaign is to embarrass and destabilise the emerging Chinese superpower by manipulating groups who have issues with the Chinese government. It has received wide support from the EU and the USA who fear the imminent eclipse of their world hegemony by China. A Canadian-Tibetan by the name of Lladon Tethong is the director of the international Tibet student movement. The 2008 riots marked her first ever visit to her beloved country. When the Chinese People’s liberation army ‘ invaded’ Tibet in 1951, Tibetan serfs were liberated from centuries of brutal Lama tyranny. The Chinese communists built schools and hospitals, the liberated serfs were given land to farm and living standards improved. If anything the Chinese invasion was the liberation of Tibet from theocratic tyranny. To be sure , the Chinese government is no paragon of freedom and human rights. There have been many abuses and excesses but the Dalai Lamas were ten times worse!. The French socialist senator Jean-Luc Mélanchon is one of the few politicians to have debunked the Tibet freedom racket in public. Tibet is and always was part of China’s multicultural society. When will the West stop interfering in other countries about which it knows little and cares less?

An lámh cheilte a mhúnlaíonn eachtraí an domhain

2009-08-16T12:46:00.000-07:00

Tá sé fíordheacair a thuiscint céard a tharla san Iaráin cúpla seachtaine o shin. Dearfá go bhfuil sé ‘fíordheacair’ dá ndéanfá tagairt don gcaidreamh tioblóideach idir an Iaráin agus an domhan Iartharach ó tháinig Khomeini i gcumhacht i 1979 agus an cur isteach seasta na Stát Aonaithe agus na Breataine go háirithe ar pholaitíocht inmheánach na tíre. Is miotas mór é go bhfuil mean cumarsáide saor againne san Eoraip. Is mean cumarsáide corparáideach, lúitéiseach ata i gceist don chuid is mó. Cuir i gcás, cé mhéad cláir faisnéise a chonaic tú san RTE nó BBC faoi stair an CIA mar shampla, agus na coup d’état frithdhaonlathach i ndiaidh coup d’état a rinne siad ar fud an domhain ó buníodh é i 1947?

Nuair a chuir an CIA agus an tseirbhís rúnda na Breataine Mohammad Mossadegh, uachtarán daonlathach, as cumhacht sa coup d’etat i 1953(Operation Ajax), ní raibh aon iriseoirí sa domhan iartharach a rá go mbfhéidir go mbeadh an CIA thaobh thiar de, cé go raibh fhios acu céard a bhí ag tarlú. Ag an am sin, bhí na meáin cumarsáide ar fud na Stát Aontaithe ag leathnú bolscaireacht i gcoinne an tAontais Sovéidigh. Toisc go raibh Mossedegh ag iarriadh ola na tíre, an chomhlacht British-Persian petroleum, a náisiúnú ionas go mbeadh an acmhainn nádúrtha sin i seilbh an phobail, bhí sé ina ‘chummanach ‘. Bhí láithreacht na Breataine an lag san Iaráin ó Réabhlóid Bunreachtúil i 1906. Mar gheall ar sin, ní raibh aon rogha acu ach glaoch a chur ar Na Stáit Aontaithe chun cabhair a fháil on CIA chun deireadh a chur ar Mhossedegh.

Ba chomoibríocht fhíoréirimúil í Operation Ajax. Bhain an CIA usáid as gach grúpa sa tír a bhí i gcoinne rialtais de Mhossedegh chun ciréibeacha a ghríosú. Fuair roinnt mullánna breab ón CIA chun a lucht leanúna a ghríosú. Chun eagla a chur ar na sluaite de dhaoine chráifeacha a bhí ag léirsiú sna sráideanna , chuir an CIA grúpaí de ghníomhaithe ar na sráideanna chomh maith agus iad ag déanamh aithris ar chumannaigh! “ Deireadh le Islam” an mana a bhí acu. Sa deireadh d’imigh Mossedegh thar lear agus chuir an CIA an Shah ar ais. Sheol Washington Norman Schwarzkoph (sinsearch) chun SAVAK an tseirbhís rúnda cruálach a bhunú. Seo é ráiteas d’Amnesty International a dfhoilsigh siad i 1976 faoi SAVAK ‘highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.

Cé go bhfuilim i bhfabhar na léirseoirí san Iaráin, táim in amhras faoi iontaofacht na meán cumarsáide anseo. Níl ach ionadaithe bréagacha iad do pholaitaíocht an nua-liobrálachais don chuid is mó. Cuireann siad an bréag amach i gcónaí go bhfuil An Eoraip agus Na Stáit Aontaithe ag iarraidh ‘daonlathas’ agus ‘ saoirse’ a chothú ar fud an domhain; a mhalairt ar fad atá fíor! Mar sin, ní léiríonn siad choiche an lámh cheilte a mhúnlaíonn eachtraí an domhain.

Iran's turmoil: what do Iran's Marxists say?

2009-08-16T12:30:00.001-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the conflicting opinions circulating throughout more progressive media outlets regarding the Iranian election results. While the mainstream media was predictably unanimous in its accusations of fraud, independent sources were asking deeper questions: what if Athmadinejad actually won? I cited the work of various investigative journalists, intellectuals, who claimed that the furore over the election and the use yet again of a colour to describe it was nothing more than a CIA remote controlled coup attempt. There is no doubt that this has been the strategy of the US National Endowment for Democracy organization for a number of years.

All this sounds a little far-fetched, I know. But then again far-fetched is what the US military-industrial complex does best. The destabilization of Iran has been official US policy for at least over two years. It was even reported in the London Telegraph May 2007. According to the Telegraph Bush had ‘given the CIA approval to launch covert “black” operations to achieve regime change in Iran.” Even ABC news couldn’t keep the secret. According to reporters Brian Ross and Richard Esposito ‘he CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community’. This is still official US policy in spite of the amiable facade of Obamism.

Speaking on Pakistan’s Pashto Radio last week, former Pakistani army general Mirza Aslam Beig claimed that the CIA distributed over 400 million dollars throughout Iran before the elections to stir up unrest. It has also been widely reported that the pseudo-leftist Mujahedeen Al Khalq, a terrorist organisation now exiled in Paris and the Jundallah Sunni terrorist organisation operating the southern Iranian province of Baluchistan are CIA assets. Indeed CIA sponsored covert terrorism in Iran has been the source of significant tension between Pakistan and Iran, with the Iranian government often accusing the Pakistanis of not controlling their Sunni extremists. Given their history of black operations installing fascist dictatorships throughout Latin America and other continents since the 1950s it would be unreasonable to exclude the hidden hand of the American or indeed British secret services in Iran’s turmoil.

So in a sense Athmadinejad and Khatemei are right to blame the Anglo-American establishment for much of the post-election trouble. But this time the Iranian government has turned decidedly Anglophobic. They have blamed the BBC for disseminating lies and anti-Iranian propaganda. Here again there is an element of truth in this. Take the BBC website headline on June 17^th for example ‘Obama refuses to meddle in Iran’. Fine, but what about the picture underneath the heading? They published a picture of an Athmadinejad’s supporters in Tehran while claiming it was a demonstration by his opponents! The fraud was exposed on the website ‘What really happened.com and the BBC later apologised for the ‘error’. It is not the first time that pictures have been manipulated by the Western media for propaganda purposes. When the US and Britain invaded Iraq in 2003, footage was released of a mob dancing around the fallen statue of Saddam Hussein. In reality there was only a few people present, but cleaver manipulation of the camera’s focal length created the impression that there were thousands of jubilant Iraqies present.

The confusion surrounding the Iranian elections is compounded when one considers the fact that socialist leaders like Hugo Chavez support Athmadinejad. To be sure, Venezuela’s president knows a thing or two about CIA dirty tricks; they created chaos in Venezuala for a brief period when Chavez was first elected, having their agents disguised as Chavistas fire on the crowd in order to blame the socialist leader. However, it is still hard to determine which side of the left/right political divide corresponds to Athamadinejad. Privatisation has been favoured by the Ayatollah Khatemei and is central to the five year economic development plan proposed in 2005. But many say that the ‘justice shares’ offered to the lowest income families from newly privatised companies are the key to Athmadinejad’s popularity. Having said that, a high percentage of both neo-liberal and hard left Iranian organisations remain vehemently opposed to Athmadinejad. The Tudah communist party, the Iranian Communist Party(Marxist-Leninist-Maoist )and the Worker Communist Party of Iran all lambast the Iranian leader in their websites. These Marxist parties are all based outside the country as they were forcibly exiled after the Islamic revolution.What is clear from all of this is that the demonstrations in Iran transcend the election issue. The people have risen up against the clerical oligarchy, not in an effort to open Iran up to the world but to open it up to Iranians.

Yet the problem for Iran is that it finds itself governed by a clerical oligarchy split between support for stronger alignment with Russia and China(Athmadinejad and Khamenei) and negociation with the US ( Mousavi and Rafsanjani). It is easy to see how the latter could be manipulated by Washington. Both Rafsanjani and Moussavi were key players in the secret Iran/contra deals during the 1980s. Secret deals with America turned Rafsanjani into Iran's wealthiest man. So, the problem for Iran is that there is conflict on three fundamental levels. Class conflict among the people; conflict regarding the country's geopolitical direction among the ruling class; and conflict between the imperial powers for a say in Iran's natural resources.

Bilingualism in a bi-polar society

2009-08-16T12:27:00.000-07:00

Irish language media took a blow this month with the news that Foinse, the Irish language weekly newspaper, was to be taken out of circulation due to financial difficulties. Nevertheless Irish academia published a positive report last week concerning the advantages of bilingual education in Ireland. The research was carried out by Dr. Judith Wylie and Dr. Gerry Mulhern from Queen’s University Belfast’s School of Psychology. The school’s research concerns the cognitive development of children educated in Irish medium schools in Northern Ireland. The cognitive advantages shown in Irish medium schools were particularly striking in the areas of short-term memory and working memory. According to Dr Wylie “Short memory and working memory are centrally important in all learning, indeed everyday tasks such as reading, reasoning and mental arithmetic rely heavily on these processes. Using standardised tests of verbal and visual memory, our research compared
groups of children from Irish-medium schools with children from the more usual English-only schools in Northern Ireland “ .

The Irish language revival movement has proved to be particularly strong throughout nationalist areas of Northern Ireland. But there was also been a significant increase shown among Ulster Protestants in the Irish language and heritage. The divide and rule policy of British imperialism in the North has often led to a warped view of Irish identity on both sides of the political divide. The Irish language is too often seen as an instrument of Irish nationalism, a way for Northern nationalists to dissociate themselves from the hegemony of British culture in the province. In many respects this is true. But there is a significant number of nationalists in the north who are deeply cognisant of the importance of Protestantism to Irish language heritage. After all, the Bible was first translated into Irish by a Protestant clergyman William Bedel in the 17^th century . Queen Elizabeth herself showed a healthy curiosity in Irish. She even asked Christopher Nugent the Baron of County Westmeath to provide her with an Irish primer! The Presbyterian clergyman William Nielson was a champion of the language writing a grammar and phrase book to encourage learning of the language among his congregation. In fact, a significant number of the original Scottish planters in Ulster were Gaelic speakers. The language, then, is as most a feature of unionist Ulster as it is of nationalist Ireland.

There was, of course, a significant number of Protestant nationalists too who contributed to the revival of Irish, Douglas Hyde being the most obvious example. A survey done by Smith and Robinson in 1991 revealed that 23 percent of Northern Irish Protestants believe that Irish should be a compulsory subject in schools. This is surprisingly high given the level of cultural confusion that exists among Northern Ireland’s divided communities. There have, however, been pockets of Irish learners among Ulster’s protestants, most notably, a group of female Irish learners in the staunchly loyalist Shankill( Sean Cille- Old Church) Road. The Unionist politician Chris McGimpsey is a speaker of Irish and the Irish language daily Lá featured regular columns from the Unionist writer Ian Malcolm.
According to Dr. Reamaí Mathers of Iontaobhas na Gaelscolaíochta

“This groundbreaking work adds further evidence to the increasingly indisputable body of good science that shows that children
who are educated in Irish-medium schools are not only receiving the benefit of two languages but are also receiving tangible educational advantages. Earlier this year, Key Stage 2 assessments (Primary 7),which focus on the areas of English and maths, demonstrated that for the last three years attainment in Irish-medium education has been higher than the Northern Ireland average. What the Queen’s research provides is a deeper insight into the mechanisms at work in the superior performance by Irish-medium children when compared to the more usual English
language schools.”

There is a compelling case for Irish medium education in this country North and South. When one considers the diverse and often paradoxical ideologies that promoted the language throughout our history, it does not seem impossible that Northern Ireland could yet become the leading province promoting Gaelic culture in these Islands.

Coup d’état sa Hondúras: tá faisisteachas na Stát Aontaithe beo beathaíoch

2009-08-16T12:22:00.000-07:00

Cé go bhfuil sé follasach go bhfuil coup d’état militeach, fasisteach, tradisiúnta i gceist i Hondúras, diúltaíonn Washington an focail ‘coup’ a rá. Ní chuireann sé sin aon iontas orm. Is stát satilíteach na Stát Aonaithe é Hondúras don chuid is mó agus sin mar a bhí sé le níos mó ná céad bliain anuas. Sna hochtóidí sheol Uachtarán Reagan grúpaí sceimhlitheoirí ann chun na mílte daoine a mharú. An réamhthéacs a bhí ag na grúpaí sceimhlitheoirí ná go raibh siad ag iarraidh dul i ngleic le bagairt an chumannachais! Cosúil le morán cogaí eile a raibh na Stáit Aontaithe thaobh thiar dóibh, ní raibh aon tuairiscíocht cheart déanta ag an meán cumarsáide ag an am.

Anois is cinneál coup d’état da samhail atá i gceist agus níl aon dabht ar bith ach go bhfuil an Teach Bán ciontach as. An fhabhb do Washington anois ná go bhfuil an comhaontas daonlathach sa Mheiriceá Láir agus Theas ag treisiú ó tháinig Chavez i gcumhacht i 2000, agus an ghluaiseacht a theastaíonn uathu a scriosadh? Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América , an comhaontas Bolivar atá ag iarraidh geilleagar difriúil a thógáil do thíortha sa Mheiriceá Theas.

Theastaigh ó Uachtarán Zelaya reifreann a dhéanamh chun tuairim na ndaoine a fháil faoi athruithe don bhunreacht. Bhí tacaíocht d’fhormhór na ndaoine ag Uachtarán Zelaya ach dúirt an cúirt ardcheannasach go raibh an reifreann sin mídhleathach . Mar sin diúltaigh an general Romeo Vásquez na hábhair toghcháin a sheachadadh. Ina dhiadh sin, bhí léirsiú mór sa Tegucigalpa chun tacaíocht a tabhairt don uachtarán.

Ansin fuadaíoch an t-uachtarán Zelaya agus thóg Vásquez an chumhacht. Cé go raibh Washington a rá go raibh siad ‘buartha’ faoi na heachtraí polaitíocha sa Tegucigalpa, bhí alán athbhrí agus neamhciontacht ina gcuid raitis: i bhfocail eile, cur i gcéill! Dúirt an t-aire gnóthaí eachtracha sa Hondúras Paticia Rodas gur ndearna sí roinnt iarachtaí teagmháil a dhéanamh le ambassadóir meiricánach ach dhiúltaigh sé a glaonna a fhreagairt.

Fuair Vásquez agus roinnt gineráil eile sa coup a gcuid oideachais mhileata sa School of the Americas i Georgia USA agus tá láithreacht láidir sheasta na Stáit Aontaithe sa Soto Cano i Hondúras go fóill, an US Joint Task Force Bravo. Eagraíochtaí eile a thugann airgead agus tacaíocht do ghrupaí frith-dhaonlathach sa Hondúras ná ‘National Endowment for Democracy’, the International Republican Institute agus the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. Tá impireacht na Stát Aontaithe an-gníomhach go fóill sa Mheiriceá Láir agus sa Mheiriceá Theas cé go bhfuil uachtarán nua dathúil acu, ní athróidh sé sin faic i ndáiríre agus leanann an ‘golpismo’ rúnda ar aghaidh.

La révolution volée:Colour revolutions and the US National Endowment for Kleptocracy

2009-08-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

Colour revolutions are the symptom of our inverted world. If we look at the global map over the past few years, we see a vast series of riots sparked by disputed election results. The countries involved in these struggles all come within the geo-political sphere of Eurasia; that is, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The mass movements of people who contested election results or revolted against their governments in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tibet, Burma, Mongolia and finally Moldova and Iran of this year were all characterised by botanic colours, rose, orange, pink, saffron, crimson,yellow, green and so on. There were also reverberations of these so-called revolutions in Belarus where rumours were spreading of a ‘denim revolution’ as well as violent protests in Azerbaijan and Armenia largely inspired by the colour revolutions in neighbouring states.

So, who is behind all of this? Who is funding, organising and co-ordinating all of these revolutions? Are they really the ‘bottom up’ phenomenon that the Western media would have us believe? Are the colour revolutions a genuinely informed expression of people’s desire for democracy or are there other forces at play? There can be no doubt about the legitimate aspirations of all these people for democracy and human rights. However, the reality is not so simple. The organisational and ideological infrastructure for these revolutions has been consistently provided by the multifarious ‘think-tanks’ and ‘foundations’ emanating from the United States and the EU. The most active of these political organisations has been the US National Endowment for Democracy, a pseudo-philanthropic organisation which works in tandem with the CIA(capitalism’s international agency) to exploit popular discontent in Eurasian countries in order to further US geostrategic interests in the region. Other key organisations include the Soros Foundation, International Republican Institute, USAID, Freedom House and The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

The reason for this funding is quite simple. The countries bordering the Caspian Sea sit on a potential fortune of untapped oil reserves. That is why the NED sent operatives into the former Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia just before the fall of the USSR to foment nationalist and ethnic consciousness in the name of ‘democracy’. Journalists, human rights groups, trade unions, fascist groups and extreme nationalists, and just about anyone who opposed the Soviet System were funded by the NED and Soros Foundation.

When the USSR fell in 1990, the independent tradition of Titoist Yugoslavia became a problem for the US and NATO. Ethnic conflict and economic collapse was to be the key to NATO’s imperialist intervention. In 1990 the US Congress passed the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act which predicated the allocation of US financial assistance on the breakup of the Federal Yugoslav Republic into separate states. The scene was being set for ethnic conflict and genocide. Meanwhile, the IMF forced the Yugoslav Prime Minister Ante Markovic to make sweeping economic structural reforms in the country. By 1991as a result of IMF policies Yugoslavian GDP had plummeted by 15 percent, industrial production by 21 percent and inflation had risen by 140 percent. The IMF then prevented the Yugoslav government from obtaining credit from its own central bank. In order to speed up the process of destruction, the US imposed an economic embargo on the country in 1992. The result was economic collapse. Unemployment would reach 70 percent with Catholic Croats, Muslim Bosnians and Orthodox Serbs roaming the streets in fascist militias all committing atrocities. By 1999, however, the recalcitrant Serbs would be blamed for the entire mess. The Western Media remained obdurately silent on Bosnian Muslim and Croatian Catholic atrocities. The Bosnian KLA terrorists had been helped by none other than Osama Bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda, the CIA’s foreign legion(at the time of course!). The US-Nato intervention in Kossovo had nothing to do with human rights or democracy. It was about the control of the Caspian Sea resources and the projection of Anglo-American/NATO hegemony over a vast region of vital economic and geostrategic interest.

The colour revolutions are nothing but a sham, a sinister and cynical manipulation programme funded by American oligarchies. Zbigniew Brzezinski (the man who created Al Qaeda) and President Obama’s National Security Advisor put it bluntly in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives where he writes ‘For America the chief prize is Eurasia’ The main inspiration for Brzezinski’s imperialist thinking comes from the 19^th century British geopolitical strategist Harold Mackinder, who also inspired Adolf Hitler. Mackinder famously said ‘Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;"who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;"who rules the World-Island commands the world.’ The colour revolutions have been among the most spectacular mass deception operations in history. They are designed to install corrupt US puppets such as Yushchenko in Ukraine and Saakashvili in Georgia.But they have failed in Moldova, Iran and Ouzbekistan. Another ruse may yet be necessary in order to ‘liberate’ the oppressed people of Eurasia.

the G8 versus the rest of the world

2009-08-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

As usual the eyes of the world were obsequiously fixed on the fat cats meeting in Aquila Italy recently for the G8 summit. We are, of course, led to believe that these men actually discuss the problems of the world with intentions of solving them. If we had a free media we would already know the agenda for the G8 summit, as it is usually in concert with the deliberations of the world’s financial elite who meet in secret to formulate policies propitious to their interests; clandestine groups such as the Bilderberg Group or the Club of Rome, the Trilateral Commission, America’s Council on Foreign Relations or its sister club in Britain The Royal Institute of International Affairs, all fronts for the insatiable megalomania and lucre-lust of the global ‘banksters’

You will probably have read nothing about a meeting of far more importance for the future of the world, a meeting that represents the aspirations of over half the world’s population and over two-thirds of earth’s nations; I’m talking about the Non-Aligned Movement. They met in Havana Cuba from 11^th to the 15^th of July. It was in the Cuban capital that the group made the widely un-mediatised Havana Declaration in 1979, the year when Thatcher came to power in Britain, declaring war on the British working class and the peasants of the developing world with her draconian ‘Third World’ debt collection policies.

The Havana Declaration advocates the "the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries" in their "struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics."^[

The foundation work for the movement was laid in the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in April 24 1955 to oppose the neo-colonialism of the United States and the grouping of countries into blocs represented by the USA and the USSR. The first official non-aligned summit was held in Belgrade in 1961. The founding fathers of the NAM were Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Only three of the five progressive leaders would survive however, Kwame Nkrumha, one of Africa’s most popular leaders and the left-leaning president Sukarno of Indonesia were later ousted in CIA sponsored military coups. There greatest crimes were that they favoured the interests of their own impoverished people over those of the US plutocracy.

The NAM is deeply critical of US global hegemony, Zionism, unfair trade practices as well as the tyrannical donor conditionalities of the IMF and the dictatorial decision-making procedures of the UN Security Council. In short, they are calling for an end to neo-imperialism. In 1976 in Colombo Sri Lanka, the leaders of 85 non-aligned states met to discuss proposals for solving the economic crisis in developing countries due to the 1973 oil-price shock. The 1973 oil price shock was the result of the Yom Kipper war between Israel , Egypt and Syria. The US Secretary of State at the time Dr. Henry Kissinger was largely responsible for the escalation of events which led to this war, carefully manipulating both sides. A radical hike in the price of oil had been agreed upon in the Saltsjobaden Bilderberg Conference of 1973 in Sweden in order to increase demand for US dollars and boost returns from Anglo-American North Sea oil investments. War in the Middle East was the result. OPEC imposed an oil embargo in protest at Israeli aggression just as the Anglo-American establishment had hoped, although Britain through Kissinger’s diplomacy escaped the embargo. OPEC conveniently got the blame for their reaction to the fabricated war. Meanwhile third world economies had to double borrowing from Western Banks to pay for the oil imports.

The Colombo meeting of NAM attempted to deal with the devastating consequences Third World indebtedness to western banks due to the oil hike scam by forming closer ties with OPEC. Kissinger was having none of it. Within months of the Colombo initiative the principal leaders involved, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India, Prime Minister Siramavo Bandaranaike (the world’s first female Prime Minister)of Sri Lanka were ousted from power, while Guyana’s minister for foreign affairs Frederick Wills was forced to resign. Foreign interference was largely responsible for the toppling of the Colombo initiative and by the 1980s children were being recruited into sweet shops run by multinationals to pay for the mammoth debt imposed on the Third World by the countries of today’s G8. This barbarous chicanery is called neo liberalism, and it is the real agenda of the G8.

From post-colonial client to post modern dictator. The rise and fall of Robert Mugabe

2009-08-04T04:44:00.000-07:00

This Hitler has only one objective: justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources. If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold’ Robert Mugabe.

Critics on both sides of the left-right paradigm generally agree on the appalling legacy of Robert Mugabe’s rule of Zimbabwe. Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media beams apocalyptic images of hunger, devastation and disease as the Zimbabwean economy continues to collapse. But the origins as well as the internal and external forces which have contributed to this catastrophe are rarely discussed in detail. Instead, Mugabe is represented as the epitome of the post-colonial, corrupt, African leader oppressing his own people in an insane attempt to preserve his brutal autocracy. Currently ranked as number 7 on Parade magazine’s World’s Worst Dictators list, Mugabe is universally accused of using anti-imperialist and anti-racist propaganda to divert attention from his own oppressive policies, blaming the West for African problems. However, few people in Europe understand the underlying features of these problems

When the Marxist ZANU party finally succeeded in ousting British imperialist rule from Zimbabwe in 1980 Mugabe became the symbol of the new progressive African leader and was copiously rewarded with honorary degrees by many Western universities.

One would be inclined to consider such Western largess unusual for a Marxist leader in the middle of the Cold War, but that is because Mugabe was forced to compromise his revolutionary principles in the interests of ‘realpolitik’. Indeed, it is highly questionable if he ever really had them to begin with. Nevertheless, the best one could hope for when dealing with a rapacious British imperial state was a meagre share for Zimbabweans of their own national resources or nothing. When the Lancaster Agreement was signed in 1979, Mugabe agreed to allow a 20 seat representation for the white minority and a twenty year moratorium on constitutional amendments. This was bad news for the landless peasants, hungry for land redistribution, who made up the majority of the population. Yet, in spite of these drawbacks, Mugabe’s progressive policies in the areas of health and education produced remarkable results. From 1980 to 1990 infant mortality rates had been significantly reduced, malnutrition rates had halved and Zimbabwe had one of the highest literacy rates in the developing world.

One of the problems in understanding the internal politics of Zimbabwe revolves around the conflicting interests of the rural landless peasants (what we in Ireland used to call ‘spalpíní) and the urban working and middle classes. Torn between the competing interests of these classes; his own desire to stay in power, and the voracious drive of multi-national companies to exploit the resources of his country for their own gain, Mugabe tended to rotate in a vortex of competing forces. If he ignored the interests of the imperials powers, they would put measures in place to ruin his economy or assassinate him as in the case of the noble Patrice Lumumba of Congo or his old friend, the great Nkruma of Ghana. Those leaders had made the mistake of putting their own country’s interests first and were consequently ousted by the CIA. On the other hand, he also had to appease the desires of Zimbabweans.

When the World Bank forced ‘structural reforms’ on the Zimbabwean economy in 1991,unemployment soared, Mugabe lost the traditional support he had enjoyed among the state sector workers and the middle classes. Another complicating factor here was the class tension between the two principal ethnic groups in the country, namely the Shoma majority and the Ndebele minority. The British always tended to favour the minority in order to divide and rule. As a result, the Ndebele tended to produce leaders of the urban trade unions rather than the peasant liberation movement. Mugabe, himself of Shona extraction, had supported the traditional class structure until the rural unrest in the late nineties, evicting peasant squaters from settler-owned land.

According to the Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, by 1991 the opposition to Mugabe was now quite diverse ‘ containing, on the one hand, public sector workers trying to roll back the tide of Structural Adjustment; on the other, uncompromising free-marketeers such as Eddie Cross, the MDC secretary of economic affairs and a senior figure in the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries, who was intent on privatising almost everything, including education.’ Meanwhile, Mugabe was facing fierce pressure from his landless veterans who wanted radical land distribution. By this stage, however, external funding for the urban trade union opposition from the US Ford Foundation, Heritage Foundation and others steered that movement in the direction of neo-liberalism; these organisations lobbied extensively in favour of a no vote on land redistribution.

Having lost the 2000 referendum on land redistribution the peasants rebelled and invaded the white-run farms. With the land revolution came imperialist sanctions and a freeze on credit resulting in economic collapse. But there were other reasons motivating the West’s desire to oust Mugabe. He had defended the Democratic Republic of Congo against the Anglo-American funded proxy armies of Uganda and Rwanda in African Great War. The imperial powers had used the Ugandan and Rwandan armies to plunder Congolese minerals. This is one of the many Anglo-American ‘little secrets’ of recent African history. Another reason they wanted Mugabe out is because he refused IMF ‘conditionalities’. The Heritage Foundation, one of the chief funders of the opposition movement to Mugabe cite his insistence on subsidies for agriculture and state-owned industries, customs and tariffs on imports and land redistribution as the chief cause of concern. There is therefore an inconvenient truth in Mugabe’s anti-imperialist rhetoric. That is why Mugabe is ‘Hitler’ and the dozens of other dictators the imperial powers support are not.

2009-08-04T04:36:00.001-07:00

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Mixed messages or mexed missages? Is Iran at the end of its twitter?

2009-06-19T15:53:00.000-07:00

The occidental media was raving about the possibility a ‘green’ revolution in Iran. Was this another CIA-sponsored postmodern revolution like the colour revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan? The consensus seems to be that the colour was a mere coincidence. It seems that Adhmadinejad chose a red ball when casting his vote while Moussavi chose green. Green is said to be a colour representing Islam but what about red? We know that Athmadinijad was promising to go the Chavez route by taking control of Iran’s oil resources and redistributing the wealth among the poor where his popularity has soared.

But Athmadinejad is no Chavez. His secret police the Bassijis look more like Hitler’s SS and many of the country’s problems are emanating from corruption of the ruling elite. If Athmadinjad has socialist tendencies they are certainly presented in the western media as of the nefarious ‘national socialist’ kind. However, we do not have a clear picture in the West of Iran and its leader.
Iran’s jeuness dorée, the educated bourgeoisie of the big cities took to the streets to express their desire to see an end to Islamic extremism, while the proletariat chanted for Mahmoud, Allah and oil revenue. We know of course that Iran was never particularly Islamic. In fact, one could say that Islamic fundamentalism was thrust upon them in 1979 and it is merely a moment in the complex and profound history of Persian civilisation.

But to come back to all this talk about Green versus Red, what should we make of this? First of all I should point out that Iran’s trouble is pretty much Britain's fault. They were the ones who planned the 1953 coup by convincing the CIA to destroy Iran’s democracy. The CIA duly obliged and Operation Ajax was a success. The Shah was put back in power, the SAVAK, Iran’s secret police, were taught all the newest techniques in covert murder and torture by the CIA; in short, order was restored. However, even the Shah, realising that it was better to be an enlightened and popular despot than a hated one, attempted to build up the country to a certain extent. It was, however, a disaster. His importation of American arms and aristocratic opulence had bankrupted the country. He then made a big career mistake. In order to save the economy he tried to raise the price of oil. “Oh no you don’t “ said Washington.

The Los Angeles Times published an article in October 17th 2008 claiming that recently declassified US State Department documents show that the Ford administration wanted an end to the Shah due to his insistence on raising the price of oil. According to the Arab historian Said Aborish the Muslim Brotherhood had always been an asset of M16 and later the CIA, but we’re not supposed to know that and neither are the Muslims! It seems M16 persuaded the French to shelter Khomeini in Paris before installing him in Tehran. There was even a joke circulating in Iran at the time that Khomeini was ‘made in Britain’. BBC Persia and MI6 flooded Iran with Khomeini’s tapes. Islamic extremists with little economic expertise were always a useful tool of Western imperialists to de-stabilise resource-nationalizing governments so that Standard Oil, PB and others could continue to plunder Middle Eastern petroleum. When the focus of Islamic rebels like Khomeini was on religion and culture they were supported; when their focus was on quasi-socialist economics as in the FLN of Algeria, they were opposed.

Top foreign policy-makers Zbigniew Brezinzski of Carter’s administration knew that Khomeini would rebel and foment a form of Islamic nationalism but the Western powers already had an answer for that: send in Saddam! It was a hugely profitable war for the US, who backed both sides. Remember the Iran-contra scandal? The upshot of all this is that it is difficult to determine what the Anglo-American establishment wants Iran to do right now. It is likely that they really want Moussavi as he seems to support neo-liberal economic policies. My suspicion is that the Israeli extreme right probably wants to see a civil war, as that would weaken Iran for the next decade or so.

So who won the election? According to the French daily Liberation June 19 ('left wing' paper now controlled by Edward de Rothshild!) Moussavi clearly won with Athmadinejad coming in third place! The Sociologist Professor James Petras, however, writes in Reseau Voltaire that this is a lie.

The French journalist Thierry Meyssan in his article 'De Mossadegh à Ahmadinejad:La CIA et le laboratoire iranien' (http://www.voltairenet.org/article160639.html) has pointed the finger at the CIA for the confusion surrounding the Iranian election result, claiming that they manipulated Iranian communications via Twitter and SMS to spread the idea that Moussavi had won. The New York Times and Reuters reported the story of US intervention but with the usual element of spin. The US State Department asked Twitter to delay their planned upgrade of the service so that Iranian communications among protesters would not be disrupted. How thoughtful of them!

Meyssan claims that the US State Department interference with Twitter was so that the CIA could stir up confusion by diseminating anti-Athmadinejad propaganda, leading to protest and chaos, their favourite activities. Many readers on the Reseau Voltaire accussed Meyssan of inveterate'anti-americanism'.His response,however,was cogent:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article160696.html

The Achilles heel for Iranian security in these troubled times is clearly the Baluchistan province to the South of the country. The Baluchistan province forms part of Iran, Pakistan and borders Afghanistan. Baluchistan is rich in oil and natural resources and is a key region for the US who have been lauching drone attacks around the city of Quetta. With reports indicating Pakistani ISI,CIA,MI6, the Mossad and Indian intelligence RAW all operating in the Baluchistani region, covert destabilisation strategies emanating from Baluchistan are an impending nightmare for Tehran. But it is unclear if the CIA and MI6 have the capability or desire to destabilise Tehran right now. They are probably too bogged down in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq to contemplate opening up a Persian pandora's box. However, NATO's escalation of violence in Pakistan could have serious implications for Iranian security if the US and Britain continue to use Baluchistani rebels as pawns in their proxy wars. The US army has been well-positioned in Balochistan with bases in Dalbandin and Panjgur. On Baluchistan's importance for the US and Britain, Majeed Javed writes:

'The active involvement of foreign agencies in Pakistan's province of Balochistan has been sufficiently proved. Pakistan's Senate Committee on Defence in June, 2006 had accused British Intelligence of "abetting the insurgency in the province bordering Iran". Also, as per Press Trust of India's press release dated 9 August 2006, Ten British MPs were found involved by the Senate Committee in its closed door session on alleged links of British Secret Service with the Baluch separatists. The British interests in Balochistan were again made conspicuous when its Foreign Policy Centre, sponsored a preposterous one sided propaganda against Pakistan by holding a controversial Seminar in the House of Commons on 27 June 2006. The Centre had collaborated with the so-called Baluchistan Rights Movement then and had invited only anti-Pakistan and self styled activists who only advocated terrorism in the province. No Pakistani scholar or elected representatives from either the central government or the Balochistan province itself, were invited for the seminar'.

http://www.inewsit.com/articles/entry/War-On-Terror-Balochistan-De-Focused-By-Majeed-Javed

The principal geopolitical concern for the US and Britain in Baolochistan is the port city of Gwadar on the Arabian sea. The Chinese in conjunction with the Pakistani government are currently developing this area as it is a key trade route to the Central Aisan republics for the Chinese. The Chinese are also involved in the ambitious gold and copper mining project at Saindak. As Pakistan is a natural ally of China, the US and Britain want to take control of Balochistan. This will inevitably lead to the occupation and disintegration of Pakistan, creating more chaos on the Iran's Eastern border. The key problem here revolves around two proposed pipe lines, namely, the Balochistani Iranian to Pakistani Iranian pipeline proposed by those governments and referred to as the peace line,a plan which is propitious to Chinese interests, or the US backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline; in other words, the war plan. In terms of geography and natural resources Balochistan is the 'black pearl' of Asia, but politically it is a potential nightmare.

The Israeli daily Haaretz published a story on 18-06-09 concerning an alleged CIA/Mossad joint-terrorist operation to place bombs in various election booths and mosques throughout Tehran on election day. The aim of the terror being to destabilise the country.(http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1094007.html) The CIA have been accused of covertly funding the Baluchistani rebels in the South of Iran since the 1980s.

The Paris-based PMOI were taken off the EU terror list this year. Many US senators and UK lords have been lobbying for the PMOI's removal from American and EU terror lists for years. The French president Nikoloas Sarkozy, succeeded in lobbying the EU this year to have the PMOI removed from its terrorism list. It is still unclear what the US-EU strategy is regarding this group.

To come back to the Iranian election again. Did Athmadinejad win or not? The American pollsters Ken Ballen of the Centre for Public Opinion and Paul Doherty of the New America Foundation conducted a rigorous poll in Iran prior to the election. This is what they have to say about the election result

'Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.

While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Moussavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.
“The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our pre-election survey. During the campaign, for instance, Moussavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over MoU.S.avi.
“Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.
“The only demographic groups in which our survey found Moussavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.”

Former Assistant Director of the Treasury in the Reagon administration Paul Craig Roberts knows a thing or two about US scheming. This is what he has to say on the matter:

"As a person who has seen it all from inside the U.S. government, I believe that the purpose of the U.S. government’s manipulation of the American and puppet government media is to discredit the Iranian government by portraying the Iranian government as an oppressor of the Iranian people and a frustrater of the Iranian people’s will. This is how the U.S. government is setting up Iran for military attack.'

"http://mostlywater.org/why_us_wants_delegitimize_iranian_elections

The problem is we just don’t know what’s really going in Iran. So, now we have complex phenomenon of class and cultural conflict in the midst of an information war. It will probably be enough to stoke Persia’s internal fire for the next few months while Washington and London have a chance to think about the next act in the region's petrodollar tragedy.

Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Obama Doctrine

2009-06-02T06:24:00.000-07:00

Six months ago we were all waxing lyrical about the political possibilities presented by the new emperor laurelled on Capitol Hill. But very few actually predicted what an Obama presidency would be like. Now it looks like new mistakes to cover old ones and monstrous lies to cover them all will continue to define US foreign policy as the permanent war economy gears up for more conflict.

Afghanistan would be a good place to start in our assessment of what the Obama doctrine is likely to be. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Obama’s Foreign Policy Advisor, coined the phrase ‘ the Afghan trap’. He was referring to the way in which the United States lured the Russians into a war in that country which they couldn’t win. It was, as Brzezinski slyly put it, “to give them their Vietnam”.

Brzezinski was one of Obama’s professors at Columbia University and played a key role in his rise to power. He was also instrumental in Carter’s accession to the White House in 1979. Carter is often presented as one of the better presidents in recent times. What people often overlook however is that Islamic fundamentalism was pretty much the brainchild of the Carter administration. As Brzezinski had played such a key role in Carter’s rise to power, he was able to steer the political gunboat of this fine young man.

The Carter Doctrine was proclaimed by the president in his State of the Union Speech in 1980. In this speech Carter articulated what would become US gospel for the next three decades, a policy that would lead to death and torture on a mammoth scale. By this stage Carter had already authorised the CIA and special forces to provoke the Russians into conflict. The Carter Doctrine states:
The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world's exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world's oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position, therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.

Next time you hear an idiot say “I don’t think the war is about oil” Ask him/her is they have read the Carter Doctrine and look out for that Sarah Palin vacuity in their eyes!

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, and now the more or less the same in Obama’s regime, was sent to Afghanistan to arm the Mujahedeen, a motley group of illiterate peasants, who might easily have been attracted by Soviet Communism had it not been for Brzezinski’s theological exhortations. “God is on your side” he told them, as the CIA with help from Osama Bin Ladin and Pakistan’s ISI, proceeded to indoctrinate the poor farmers in religious fanaticism. Madrasas were set up throughout the region, where the Mujahadeen were taught to hate the Russians for being non-muslims. They were trained in the use of the latest military equipment while the CIA and Pakstani Intelligence laundered money from the drug harvests of the future Taliban.

The result of the Carter Doctrine was 911 and a Middle Eastern war which has now cost the lives of over a million people. The inclusion of Brzezinski on the Obama foreign policy team is bad news.

In an interview he gave with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998 Brzezinski was asked if he regretted his decisions in Afghanistan. He replied “What is most important to the history of the world? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” Back then he thought the idea of Islamic extremists being a threat to the world was ‘ nonsense’. Now on his advice, President Obama, just like his predecessor, repeats the same phony mantra about US ‘National Security’ and the ‘real threat’ from the Middle East. So what then are the challenges for the Obama presidency? Well one of the problems for the new presidency was outlined by Dr. Brzezinski’s in a chilling remark which he made before a group of elites in Chatam House London on November 2008 “It is easier to kill a million people than to control them”

Resisting technocratic interpellation

2009-06-02T06:19:00.000-07:00

I resisted the Credit Card for a long time, until a few months ago, in fact. I used to get friends to book flights for me online but Ryanair put an end to my fiscal simplicity. Ryanair are masters of the art of stealth charges. You are even charged at the airport for the privilege of having booked your flight online! After I had checked in for my Paris-Dublin flight a few months ago I had to queue up again in order to pay my credit card fee of 5 euro.
Having queued up for more than 30 minutes, I finally reached the counter. “bonjour Monsieur” said the pretty lady behind the counter.

“ Bonjour Madame” said I. I reluctantly handed her my five Euro note.

“ sorry, we don’t accept notes, you’ll have to pay with your credit card” she said.

“ I’m sorry madam, I do not have a credit card but I am prepared to pay you with this real money” I retorted, politely keeping my growing frustration in check. Then, predictably, cracks soon appeared in the diplomatic equanimity as negotiation rapidly descended into all out confrontation.
“ I’m sorry but you will have to call a friend and ask them to pay for you as we cannot accept real money” she continued. “ What? This is crazy, you do not accept real money!! What is this, a scene from a Kafka novel? You want me to pay you again for the privilege of paying you invisible money, now I give you real money and you say I cannot board my flight to Dublin unless I pay you more invisible money!”
By this stage I realised I had declared war but I was not prepared to surrender. Meanwhile airport security were beginning to take an interest in the lone protester

“ I’m sorry monsieur", she said coldly, “but I cannot change the system” I was caught in an absurd ideological pincer-grip with airport security slowly advancing. As soon as she mentioned the word system I launched my surface to air missles . I knew I had no chance of winning but I decided to lose all guns blazing. “ change the system you say? Fuck the system” the four letter word is the last resort of the broken man “ and fuck Ryanair and it effing capitalist thuggery, its digital fascism. I’m sick and tired of being treated like cog in the machine, a number in the calculus, a superfluous letter in badly written book. Fuck the whole lot of you, you despicable scum!”

I should point you to you dear reader that I said this in French, so it may have sounded less offensive! By this stage other French customers in the queue behind me began to join in and for a moment I thought “ this could be the storming of the Bastille or a Rosa Parks moment”. Not quite I’m afraid. But they kindly paid the miserable five Euro for me and I boarded my flight.
A few months later, I came back to the same Ryanair counter and met the same lady. This time I decided to take a leaf from President Roosevelt’s book when he said that in negotiation you should speak softly but carry a big stick. My big stick was the threat of another vituperative onslaught. From our initial eye contact I could tell she recognised me. The cashier could probably detect the verbal arsenal behind the clenched teeth of my fake smile. I spoke softly, looked her straight in the eye and whispered “ Madam I do not have a credit card”. Then, as if for the sake of world peace, she took out her own card and paid for my flight herself. I gave her my five euro, thanked her profusely and quietly departed. You might think I was a bit extreme calling Ryanair fascists but aren’t they the airline that taxes fat people and wants to make us pay to use the toilet? Kafka once said ‘in the fight between you and the world, back the world”. I surrendered and now back the banking world by paying them for the privilege of my invisible money!

911 agus na teoiricí comhcheilge timpeall an ghréasáin.

2009-05-09T06:54:00.000-07:00

Os comhair ríomhaire le déanaí fuair mé roinnt suíomhanna idirlín faoi 911. I bhfírinne, ó tháinig an t-idirlíon go tithe an domhain tá réabhlóid mhilteanach tar éis tarlú ar fud na cruinne. Anois agus don chéad uair i stair an domhain, tá an t-eolas uileláithreach. Ciallaíonn sé sin go bhfuil deis ag gach duine a bheith ina iriseoir, taighdeoir nó bleachtaire. Is é sin le rá, is féidir le gach duine an tsochaí ina maireann muid a iniúchadh agus a scrúdú ar bhonn gan macasamhail. Is muintir na gúglachta ( google) muid anois, mar a dhearfá. Ag gúgláil timpeall an ghréasáin le cuardach ‘911 cover up, CIA’ agus mar sin dé, chuir sé iontas orm an méid suíomhanna agus físeanna atá ann a chúisíonn an CIA agus Mossad a bheith taobh thiar de na hionsaithe ar na túir sa Nua Eabhrac.

Go deimhin, chualamar scéalta mar sin cheanna agus is fíor go mbíonn conspóid ag baint le gach tubaiste a tharláíonn sna Stáit Aontaithe i gcónaí. Tugaim an t-ainm ‘danbrowneachas’ ar theoiricí comhcheilge mar sin, agus ní bhíonn morán suime agam aon aitheantas a thabhairt dóibh. Ach é sin ráite, tá rud éigin go hiomlán difrúil i gcás 911 os rud é go bhfuil daoine ardcháile den tuairim go raibh an CIA agus Mossad taobh thiar de na hionsaithe.

Cuir i gcás, Francesco Cossiga, Iar-uachtarán na hIodáile agus ollamh le dlí san Ollscoil Sassari. Fear measúil, stuama é Cossiga agus tá sé ina saineolaí faoi cheisteanna a bhaineann le cúrsaí slándála. Dúirt sé le Corriera della Sera cúpla blain ó shin go riabh sé soléir dó agus dón seirbhís rúnda na hIodáile go bhfuil an CIA agus Mossad ciontach as an sceimhlitheoireacht sa Nua Eabhrac. Níl aon dabht faoi sin dár leis. Dúirt Cossiga go raibh na hionsaithe pleanáilte chun casus belli a fháil don chogadh san Afganistáin agus Iáráic. Tá alán taithí ag Cossiga leis an CIA. Bhí siad an-ghníomhach san Iodáil le linn an Chogaidh Fhuair san oibriú Gladio. Ba í sceimhlitheoireacht státurraithe nó, sceimlitheoireacht na brataí bréagaigh a bhí i gceist ansin. Ba é Cossiga an chéad duine a labhair amach faoi.

Deireann iar-stiúrthóir na seirbhíse rúnda i bPacastáin Ginerál Hamud Gul an rud ceannan céanna. Ina theanta sin, dúirt sé go raibh an CIA agus Mossad thaobh thiar na hionsaithe sceimhlitheoireachta arís i Mumba le déanaí. Núair a fheiceann tú rudaí mar sin maile le dúrud mór d’ fíricí aisteacha eile a gheofaidh tú san idirlíon, go háiraithe sa U Tube, tosaíonn tú a bheith beaganín buartha!

Ar ndóigh, tá a fhios ag gach éinne go raibh Mossad ag obair sa Nua Eabhrac roimh na hionsaithe agus go raibh réamheolas acu faoi na sceimhlitheoirí. Agus céard faoi na Five Dancing Israelis’ na céad iosraelaigh ag rince? Gabh na póilíní FBI céad Iosraelaigh sa Nua Eabhrac díreach tar éis na hionsaithe de bharr iompair gur mheas siad a bheith ‘aisteach’. De réir an tuairisc, bhí vean plódaithe de phléascáin ullmhaithe acu. Tharla sé ina dhiaidh sin go riabh na céad fir ina bhaill de Mhossad, an tseirbhís rúnda na hIosraele. Mar sin, níor chualamar móran eile faoin scéal. Bhí tuairisc sa Teilifís na Fraince an bhliain seo caite a rá go raibh Mohammad Atta ina bhall de Mhossad, agus arís níor chuala mé aon tuairisc eile faoi ina dhiaidh sin.

Is fíor go bhfuil a lán ceisteanna le freagairt fós faoi 911 ach bheadh sé saonta an iomarca aitheantais a thabhairt don theoiric chomhcheilge sin. Ba choir féachaint ar gach taobh den scéal. Má fhéachann tú ar roinnt físeanna sa U Tube, cur i gcás, feicfidh tú fianaise a bhréagnaíonn alán teoiricí comhcheilge. Dúirt Noam Chomsky nach raibh aon fhírinne ins na teoiricí sin. Ach maireann na ceisteanna faoi Mhossad fós. Cén eolas a bhí acu? Cad a bhí á dhéanamh acu sa Nua Eabhrac? Scéal contúirteach agus rúndiamrach gan amhras, scéal a fhágann i mbun machnaimh mé go fóill.

How many years must a mountain exist before it is washed to the sea?

2009-05-08T11:42:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago I gave English lessons to a German entrepreneur in Berlin, who had set up a successful wind energy company specialising in the supply and construction of wind turbines. The company was rapidly expanding throughout Europe. I remember asking her if she had plans to expand the business in Ireland. “If I we could promote this form of energy in Ireland” she told me “ we could almost double our business. Ireland is perfect for wind-energy production. But I don’t think your Government has really shown interest in this possibility” She was right. The Irish government was, as usual, doing its best to avoid the winds of change! Their chief interests included urban sprawl, environmental and heritage destruction and the sale of our national resources.

But in these morose times, it comes as a relief to find out that something positive and uniquely progressive could still happen in Ireland. A new think tank was set up six months ago called Spirit of Ireland to explore the potential of the Irish wind energy industry. On their website they confidently proclaim
‘Ireland has enormous advantages of geography and geology. Every day and every night, truly extraordinary wealth in terms of energy blows across our land. Our place on the corner of Europe tipping into the huge Atlantic Ocean, ensures an endless supply of energy on a massive scale and of enormous value. 98% of our Energy is imported at a cost of over €6.5 billion per year. Every year! Ireland has within its reach a truly enormous and inexhaustible source of Natural Energy and Wealth. By taking energy from the wind and by building large Hydro Energy Reservoirs we can make energy from the wind fully reliable and usable’

The growth of the wind-energy industry has always been hampered by the problem of fluctuations in wind intensity and the storage of the energy. What happens when there is little wind? The Spirit of Ireland project has come up with a compelling solution to this problem. The key here lies in Ireland’s unique geography. A Russian by the name of Igor Shvets, who is professor of physics in Trinity College Dublin, (who says the country doesn’t need immigrants!) has pointed out that Ireland abounds in impervious valleys which are contiguous to the ocean. If the Spirit of Ireland project is implemented, these valleys will be dammed and hydro- storage reservoirs will be built, thereby serving as natural lakes storing water which can be used for electricity generation when the wind is down. The project website states the solution thus:

‘Professor Igor Shvets has identified suitable valleys on the West Coast, which are ideally shaped. Basic rock dams in a few valleys, will provide Hydro Storage Reservoirs at modest cost. Positioned close to the sea, water volume is not an issue. Japan’s J-Power had built a successful sea water storage facility in Okinawa over 10 years ago. Senior executives and engineers from Japan visited Ireland and confirmed the validity of this approach. Filling the reservoirs with wind energy and using it when needed means that the intermittency of the wind problem is resolved. International Consultants from Canada, the US and Norway contributed to other aspects of the design.’

Ireland currently ranks 16th in the world for wind-energy production and 9th in the European Union. But according to the Spirit of Ireland project, Ireland’s unique geology, geography and marine environment has not been adequately exploited. Ireland could become a world leader in wind industry, exporting energy to other countries and saving billions in national energy expenditure every year.

The Spirit of Ireland project aims are to create tens of thousands of jobs, achieve energy independence in 5 years, as well as saving thirty billion by reducing the importation of fossil fuels, thereby effecting a radical reduction in the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. The project includes many financial experts who estimate that a fully developed national wind energy project would add 50 billion Euro to the economy! So, perhaps therein lies the solution to our soaring trade deficit which could yet reach 50 billion Euro. This is an innovative and progressive idea. But national progress requires intelligent governance. Ah, there’s the rub!

According to the European Wind Energy Association EWEA, wind energy accounted for over 43 percent of all new energy generating capacity in the EU last year. If the Government insists on introducing its silly blasphemy laws, perhaps they should consider giving a ‘special’ protection to old Aeolus, the Greek god of the wind, or Danu, the Celtic god of wind, wisdom and fertility!
Who knows, it could yet transpire that the solution to our economic despair lies in what we all breath though none of us see; the answer is blowin in the wind.

For a breath of fresh air (sorry, couldn’t resist) see: http://www.spiritofireland.org/

Introducing 'Papal Pull' the new improved condom

2009-05-04T12:56:00.000-07:00

The encouragement to procreate by religious despots is a policy they should seriously reconsider if they want to hold on to power.

Elections are due to be held in Iran in June to decide which leader is going to lead the country out of the first decade of the 21st century. Iran is a fascinating country. The world’s first great empire in the 6th century BCE under Cyrus the Great-who some claim to have instituted the first charter of human rights-the country has nevertheless seen a long succession of despots, with the exception of the progressive Mohammad Mossedegh but the CIA put an end to him in 1953. The first thing that strikes one about Iran is its sheer youth. Over 70 percent of the Iranian population is under 30 and over 60 percent of those attending university are women.

President Obama’s address to the Iranian nation a few weeks ago was astute, particularly his decision to use the medium of the internet which the Iranian government is unable to fully control. When the Ayatollah Khomeini assumed absolute power after the 1979 revolution, he encouraged couples to have big families. He also lowered the legal age of marriage for women to 9 years! Khomeini was following the example of the Prophet Mohammad who married a 6 year old girl named Ayesha and apparently consummated the relationship when she was 9! In other words, Mohammed was a paedophile.

There are currently over 700,000 blogs in Iran and this number is increasing in the thousands every day

The result of Khomeini's procreation policy was a population explosion over the past thirty years during which time the demographical figures of Iran doubled. The problem for the clerical oligarchy now is that the majority of the population is composed of young people eager to escape the stultifying shackles of Islamic tyranny. The difference between Iran now and Iran ten years ago when Khatamei was opening up the country to progress, is the omnipresent internet. The internet has become such a phenomenon among Iran’s youth that the secret service, the notorious ‘etellat’ are no longer able to employ enough people to filter the sites and control the flow of information.

As David Macwilliams has illustratively pointed out in his book The Pope’s Children, the pontiff’s visit coincided with a baby boom

There are currently over 700,000 blogs in Iran and this number is increasing in the thousands every day. The blogosphere phenomenon has become so all-pervasive in Iranian society that both the Ayatollah himself as well as president Athmadinejad now have blogs. If you do a search in Wikipedia you can find a list of Iranian blogs in English both from inside and outside the country. Many of them make for interesting reading. For many Iranians the daily oppression is so intense, that keeping a blog and sharing one’s thoughts with the world is a form of catharsis and relief. The ironic aspect about this surge in the country’s youth is their disillusionment with the clerical oligarchy, the very people who encouraged their creation. One could argue that a similar phenomenon happened in Ireland 30 years ago. Was not the year of the Islamic Revolution also the year of Pope John Paul’s visit to Ireland? As David Macwilliams has illustratively pointed out in his book The Pope’s Children, the pontiff’s visit coincided with a baby boom.

In a sense, the encouragement to procreate by religious despots is a policy they should seriously reconsider if they want to hold on to power. Once you encourage a baby boom there is a strong possibility that that new generation will reject you and all you stand for. This is to a certain extent what happened in Ireland in the case of Catholicism and it is already happening in the Islamic Republic of Iran. On the question of contraception, the Ayatollah Khomenei seemed to have realised the danger of his earlier policy of encouraging procreation. He later came out in favour of contraception and condoms are now widely available in the Islamic Republic of Iran with the divine blessing of the imams.

This mandatory contraception policy would entail the Pontifex Maximus transforming himself into the Pro-durex Seximus, as it were

In this sense it is strange that the present Pope should be spreading disgraceful lies about condoms in Africa and denouncing an innocent sexually abused 9 year old girl in Brazil for having an abortion; strange not in an ideological sense but more in terms of totalitarian strategy. Of course, it is all part of the Big Lie which I spoke about last week. But if the church wants to hold on to power in developing countries for the coming generations, then it should be encouraging contraception and abortion. For the less young people there are, the more power for the religious despots.

For the less young people there are, the more power for the religious despots

The key then for the survival of religious tyranny would be the promotion of these two concepts. This mandatory contraception policy would entail the Pontifex Maximus transforming himself into the Pro-durex Seximus, as it were. Vatican inc. could launch a lucrative contraceptive marketing campaign; they could call the new condom ‘Papal Pull’ with the caption :“Make divine love with Papal Pull, a condom proved and tested to stop the sexually transmitted disease of life. Call your parish priest today ! Terms and conditions apply” They could even publish their message on the condom packets just like the Government warning on cigarette boxes: “Church warning: Pre-marital or extra-marital sex seriously increases your chances of going to hell!”.

Some remarks on blasphemy or the laughter induced by the sight of naked emperors and Ireland's theocratic constitution

2009-04-30T13:25:00.000-07:00

Blasphemy? http://www.experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/

'Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense' wrote Robert Green Igersoll. But alas,superstition is now a legal obligation in holy Ireland! Atheists in Irish society ought to keep their mouths shut from now on lest they be accused of blasphemy! Yes, according to new legislation “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000.” This is the atavistic hysteria of a dull-witted government going through some form of existential crisis. But more worryingly, it is a shameless attack on our fundamental liberties to think and speak whatever we wish and clearly violates articles 7, 21,18 and 19 of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.However, from a Irish legal perspective, the new legislation is perfectly in accordance with our theocratic constitution.

In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred, We, the people of Éire, Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial

You might have thought this was the opening address of President Athmadinejad to the United Nations with minor changes in nomenclature and mythological reference. Wrong! this elaborate nonsense is in fact the preamble to Bunreacht na h’Éireann, the document that provides the legal framework for the oxymoronically entitled Poblacht na h’Éireann or Republic of Ireland. An oxymoron is a contradiction in terms. As you can see from the preamble Ireland is officially a theocracy. The word republic comes from the Latin res publicae -matters of the people and is the Roman equivalent of the Ancient Greek concept ‘ democracy, rule of and by the people. The preamble states that the legal articles to follow are ‘in the name of the Most Holy Trinity’. This pious rubbish is perfectly appropriate for a catachism but we are talking about a national consitution here!

The authority, then, of the legal articles which follow is determined ipso facto by the three persons contained in the Judeo-Christian deity ‘to whom, in the end, all actions both of men and States must be referred’. The use of the word ‘must’ clearly indicates that belief in god is legally binding and universal to all ‘men and States’. It therefore enjoins other nations to take heed of divine law. Secular nations of the world, hear ye oh hear! Thus the articles which follow are laws of the Irish theocracy, their ultimate authority emanating from ‘the Most Holy Trinity’ and not from the Irish people.

If you come from a republic or a more intellectually mature civilisation, you might think this is a joke. How can religion provide the basis for civil society, I hear you ask. To anyone of reasonable intelligence, the preamble to our constitution is nothing short of a thundering absurdity. It makes a mockery of the Irish state and is a flagrant violation of any laws worthy of the name ‘civil.’ The laws of a republic are brought about by the rational consensus determining the best interests of all the citizens of that polity, regardless of whether or not they believe in gods, spirits , goblins or other supernatural entities. The constitution of a republic can provide the conditions for the free practice of all religions but cannot presuppose a theological interpretation of human nature.

The preamble to the Irish constitution not only legalises religious belief, it clearly favours one form of this psychological delusion, namely Christianity. Muslims, Jews, Hindus and all the rest are therefore legally bound to the laws of the Christian deity in its Irish manifestation. As for atheists, they obviously have no constitutional status. In fact it is questionable if they have any rights under the Irish constitution. If the laws of the land are subject to the laws of God and atheists reject the latter, are they not in contempt of the constitution? Is it illegal to be an atheist in the Irish theocracy?

The veracity of people testifying in Irish courts is still determined by placing one’s hand on the Bible. So, if I am arraigned before an Irish court for a minor offence, the basis of my credibility hinges on my belief in one of humanity’s most incredible fables! You are therefore only believable if you are a believer. This kind of thing would be laughed at in other countries such as France or Germany. But France is a real republic. The French theocracy was overthrown in the Revolution of 1789. The French constitution of 1791 opens eloquently with the declaration of the rights of man. There is no reference to the rights of God. It begins by stating that ignorance and contempt for the rights of man are the sole causes of public misery and the corruption of governments. The moral of the story? For the French republic ignorance is misery, for the Irish theocracy ignorance is 'bless'!

Ireland and the poverty of ideas

2009-04-17T05:42:00.000-07:00

"Je vais te raconter l'histoire de la philosophie. Pas toute, bien sûr, mais quand même ses cinq plus grands moments. Chaque fois, je te donnerai l'exemple d'une ou deux grandes visions du monde liées à une époque afin que tu puisses, si tu le souhaites, commencer à lire par toi-même les oeuvres les plus importantes. Je te fais, d'entrée de jeu, une promesse : toutes ces pensées, je te les exposerai d'une façon totalement claire, sans le moindre jargon, mais en allant à l'essentiel, à ce qu'elles ont chaque fois de plus profond et de plus passionnant. Si tu prends la peine de me suivre, tu sauras donc vraiment en quoi consiste la philosophie, comment elle éclaire de façon irremplaçable les multiples interrogations qui portent sur la façon dont nous pourrions ou devrions conduire nos existences..." Extract from French ex-minister for Education and philosopher Luc Ferry's book.

Our ex-minister appears on the right above conversing with the agents of Irish stulification. Read on!

While Minister Ferry was promoting the reading of Plato, Descartes, Kant and Nietzsche in French schools a couple of years ago, his Irish counterpart was sending a copy of Diarmuid Ferriter’s quasi-hagiography of Eamon De Valera to every school in the country, the very man who censored any ideas which contradicted our ‘holiest traditions’. The contrast couldn’t be more depressing

One often hears the expression ‘ time for new ideas’. But what is a new idea? What are ideas? Let’s narrow the question down: what conditions are necessary for the creation and advancement of new ideas? First of all, it presupposes an ability to excogitate, to think critically, to examine, dissect, reflect, elucidate, extrapolate etc. But critical examination of the world on an abstract level is disgracefully neglected in the Irish education system; one could go so far as to say it is scrupulously avoided. Although the Irish are wont to cite our superior education system as one of the key factors for the successes of the Celtic Tiger years, the Irish education system is, on the contrary, one of the State’s most conspicuous failures. An example of this failure is the falling number of students taking history as a subject for the leaving cert. We won’t mention the state of Irish and foreign languages! Although the study of history has increased marginally in the past few years, the numbers are significantly smaller than those sitting the exam in the 1980s. Of the 50 thousand students sitting the leaving cert this year, less than 10 thousand will write essays on history, compared with over thirty thousand in 1989. But the lack of interest shown by Ireland’s youth in history is only part of the problem in Irish education. We are facing the bleak prospect of a new generation well-versed in all the intricacies of market economics, technology and natural sciences, while ignorant of the world in which they live. It is the prospect of the ‘mindless moron, immunised for life against the contagion of thought’, as Professor Joe Lee so eloquently put it. Critical thought as a ‘contagion’ rather than an asset is widely nurtured in Ireland. But the lack of historical knowledge is only part of the problem. ‘Enterprise culture’ is what the Irish education system is about. One goes to school to learn skills that will enable one to make lots of money when one leaves. In such a society education simply becomes a byword for material enrichment.

The commercialisation of Irish education is a deeply worrying development. The problem is that the Irish state does not have a philosophy of education. State schools are left to the Church to run; here it is hoped that the combination of a ‘ Catholic ethos’- a term meaning ‘the mindless indoctrination of questionable values’, and ‘enterprise culture’- a term meaning ‘ the tendency to see the goal of life as the production of profit’ , this rabid anti-intellectualism is what the Irish education system fosters and nourishes. In France the contrast couldn’t be more pronounced. There the study of history, geography and philosophy are obligatory for all students sitting the French equivalent of the Leaving Cert. All French students have to spend at least a year studying philosophy before leaving school. That is why France has contributed more than any other country to the domain of the human sciences, philosophy, social science, political science, anthropology, sociology etc. This level of intellectual debate is essential in a multicultural society. The former French minister for education Luc Ferry is himself a highly acclaimed philosopher.
In Ireland, philosophy is not only not obligatory, it is not even an option on the curriculum. Critical thinking is subject to a priori exclusion. This is one of the reasons why multiculturalism in Ireland could become a problem in the near future. When an ‘enterprise culture’ is promoted over a philosophical culture, in other words, when mindless mercantilism triumphs over critical reflection, minds close early on and prejudices ossify. This ignorance about our own past and that of the world, coupled with an inability to think for ourselves constitutes what Joyce called a metaphysical ‘hemiplegia’ or paralysis affecting Irish society.

Morevover,the continuing centrality of the Catholic Church in Irish education is nothing short of a national disgrace, and this absurd situation will ensure the continual stultification of Irish society into the future.

Irish GDP. Gross Domestic Propaganda. On the horrors of national constipation

2009-03-05T09:00:00.000-08:00

It seems the average debt-encumbered worker is now going to have to foot the bill for the Government’s feckless economic banquet over the past decade; perhaps banquet should be spelled with a k.When the Irish export boom slumped in the first few years of this century, the Government decided to keep the Tiger economy myth going by borrowing from abroad. This ridiculous credit bubble was handled by what we might call the GPE, the Government’s Private Executive; in other words, the banks. The GPE helped to keep the dream-reality going by kindly ‘helping’ people to buy ludicrously expensive homes, or perhaps we should call them, domestic investment projects (Dips, for short!). Meanwhile the Government collected the revenue from Stamp duty as the newspapers continued to publish copious property supplements designed to induce the naive to buy houses paid for by the bank’s virtual money. According to the economist Patrick Honohon, foreign loans to Irish banks jumped from 10 percent of GDP in 2003 to a mind-boggling 60 percent in 2008. The result was an orgy of property development. The banks borrowed the money from abroad and the people borrowed the money from the banks while the Government collected the taxes from all the borrowed money. This enabled to Government to stay in power claiming that the economy was flying, albeit on virtual fuel. A few years ago, when some analysts ( very few in fact)were beginning to spread rumours that the Celtic emperor may not be wearing any clothes, they were denounced as pessimists and cynical gainsayers or even worse conspiring ‘Marxists’, the ultimate pejorative term in Modern Ireland. The standard critique of those on the left was that they had nothing to offer but ideology. The Government, on the other hand, had no ideology. Neo-liberal capitalism was ideologically neutral, common sense, human nature etc. In reality the Government had a surplus of bad ideology and a deficit of good ideas.
The country was a bit like those cartoons where the central character,suspended in mid-air, only falls when he looks down. It was the unconscious conviction that the artificial air of mindless optimism would keep the whole fraud going. Now we have finally understood the meaning of our much vaunted GDP: GROSS DOMESTIC PROPAGANDA.The media never ceased to remind us that most people earned over 30 thousand Euro a year.Irish people were rich, the richest people in Europe. We were the living proof that liberal capitalism had triumphed over the ideological battles of history. George Bernhard Shaw famously said that an Irishman’s heart is nothing but his imagination. I’m beginning to wonder if the Irish have an unusual capacity for ‘wild imaginings’. But seeing as we’re on the subject of mass overindulgence perhaps we could reformulate the Shavian dictum thus: An Irishman’s fart is nothing but his constipation! I believe constipation is either caused by overeating or a bad diet. It can be particularly embarrassing when sitting in the intense silence of waiting rooms, for example. It’s as if the pious propriety of social convention is being irreverently attacked by the rankling rumblings of intestinal flatulence. At this bleak moment in history, Irish society resembles a patient suffering from acute constipation. The bowels of our society are making lots of embarrassing noises while the Government, our national face, blushes in the waitingroom of the IMF desperately hoping to be supplied with enough Senokot to ease its bowels and flush the problem down the ideological toilet. I think it was the scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam who said ‘stercorum cuique sum bene olet’- everyone’s shit smells good to themselves. This could certainly be said of the Government. Perhaps it is time to ask the question: is not our national constipation the consequence of the Government’s pathological desire for a perverse form of olfactory pleasure? Or perhaps we could put it this way: are we being forced to pay for ideological overfeed, for a meal we never ordered?

The Tale of the Sheep and the Tiger

2009-02-27T06:38:00.000-08:00

While taking a stroll through the Jardins de Luxembourg in Paris last week I spotted a photography exposition evoking ideas associated with the 27 states of the European Union. Naturally enough, my first thought was ‘what images would they choose to represent Ireland? The theme for the selection of photographs seemed rather random. There were three photographs representing each country, one of the parliament and the other evoking cultural and environmental themes. Having passed images of British industry in the 50s, the Berlin wall and the sky-scraping financial district of Paris’s La Defense, my irrepressible and perhaps fatuous sense of national pride filled me with fervid anticipation of the photographs representing Ireland. Then, there it was: a green field with sheep on it overlooking a blue sea. It was the classic cliché, the postcard image, a brochure for Bord Fáilte etc. I wondered if this was really the Ireland of grass and tree, stone and sea, the island of romantic dreams, Yeats country, or rather an ‘abode of lost ones each searching for its lost one’, the land of throes and interminable woes, Beckett country. Looking again at the sheep I was tempted to ask: who are the sheep in the photograph? Who are those woolly grazers oblivious to the world? Then an outrageous thought beset me .We are the sheep gently poised on the side of the cliff moments before the waves of the world financial crisis wash us away. We are the lost sheep of Europe, a bloated ovine carcass rotting upon the shores of the western Atlantic. There’s a thought to be going on with!
When I went home that night, I reflected again on the idea of the Irish landscape and the ovine hypothesis. As we all know, sheep are rather gregarious creatures; when one of them leaves the flock the others tend to follow. But how could one tell this particularly Irish fairytale? Once upon a time we (the sheep) were ruled by the British, let’s call them the dogs.(no offence intended!) Now the sheep didn’t really like being ruled by dogs but they did what they were told. Then one day, a few brave lambs decided they’d had enough and so they started a revolution. At first the rest of the flock almost choked on their cud. They repeated what their masters told them and called the revolutionaries a pack of black sheep. But when they saw the terror of the dogs they rapidly sheared their wool and disguised themselves as wolf-hounds. The dogs panicked and left but were soon replaced by a pack of real wolf-hounds, the Church. The sheep capitulated. As luck would have it, the sheep eventually realised that the wolf-hounds couldn’t really bite and so they happily returned to their old pastures. But grass was scarce and some had to leave the country. Thousands followed. Then one sunny day, a strange creature with stripped skin arrived on the island. Let’s call him the Celtic Tiger or neo-liberal economics. The tiger inspired shock and awe among the flock. He was wild, exotic, exiting and seemed to have magical qualities. Some distrusted him but the tiger was very cleaver. He said. “Hey, you too can acquire stripped skin and large teeth if you do as I say, and if you follow me you will run just as fast as I! So let me by your guide and guardian.” The sheep followed. Now the problem with tigers is that they need jungles in order to survive and sheep are not too comfortable in jungles! The tiger decided to create an artificial jungle by taking the sheep’s wool. It was proof of his magical powers. The sheep thought it was a great idea and happily donated. However, as the jungle got bigger it became more and more difficult to find the tiger. Some began to doubt if he really even existed. Then one day, a storm blew the woolly jungle away and the poor sheared flock was left bleating upon the Atlantic shore. The tiger had abandoned them in search of new flocks. The end.

Gaudeloupe: the wraith and wrath of France's past

2009-02-21T07:55:00.000-08:00

When Barack Obama was elected American president over a month ago, the French satirical journal ‘Le Canard enchaîné ’ published a picture of the new president with his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy. The famous slogan of the latter ‘ yes we can’ was mordantly juxtaposed with Sarkozy’s rhyming imitation, “Yes je crâne ! ”-yes I boast! The accession of the first black president in US history sparked off a series of lively debates in the French media on the question of racial and cultural diversity. Could France follow the American example and elect a black president? What measures are needed to address the question of race and socio-economic equality? France’s historical cubard contains many restless squelletons most notably the legacy of its African and Oceanic colonies. Serious discussion of French atrocities in the Algerian war of independence remains, according to many polemicists, quite mute. However, just as this debate was taking place in the cosmopolitan salons of Paris, workers in the French Carribean island of Gaudeloupe were taking to the streets en masse. In spite of the fact that the general strike has paralysed the French island for over a month, reporting on the Gaudeloupean crisis has been surprisingly scanty until now. Yet the signals were given to Elysée Palace as early as December 8th 2008 that workers had had enough of exorbitant prices and meagre wages. Paris ignored the warnings. On the 20th of January the Committee against extreme exploitation (LPK) launched a general strike crippling the island’s economy. Yet, it took the French government 10 days before asking the Secretary of State for overseas territories Yves Jégo to visit the island in an effort to resolve the crisis. Since then, the situation on the island has intensified with riots and larceny on the increase. On February 18th a syndicalist was shot dead after leaving a meeting. According to reports, a gang of youths mistook him for a police officer. The procrastination of the French government coupled with the incendiary comment by the president that the behaviour of the rioters, whom he described as hooligans and delinquents, proves that the conflict can no longer be considered social, have radicalised the animosity of many Gaudeloupeans. The protesters are demanding a significant increase in their salaries. The French Prime Minister Francois Fillon has proposed an increase of 200 euro per month. It remains to be seen whether this measure will suffice to quell the flames of discontent that have gripped the island in the past few months.
The Guadeloupean crisis raises serious problems for France and indeed Europe. As a department of France, it is also part of the European Union. However, along with its neighbouring island of Martinique and the South American country of French Guyana, it forms part of the only EU region inextricably linked to the history of slavery. Conquered by France in 1635, it has remained in French possession ever since. To finance their sugar and cane industries, the French imported slaves from Africa to work in the new colony. Slavery was temporarily abolished in 1794, only to be re-introduced under the dictatorship of Napoléon in 1802. Slavery was finally abolished in 1848. However, after the abolition the French government continued to maintain the sugar and cane industries, the only difference for the slaves being that they were now free to earn a meagre wage with which to buy their own food at high prices. In 1971 the Martinique poet and French deputy declared that the new capitalist system was even more colonial than the old. Much of the old slave businesses stayed in the possession of white colonial families whose descendants still have a monopoly on the island’s industries today. In spite of their traumatic past, Gaudeloupeans are proud of their French identity. Unlike their neighbours in Haiti who secured independence in 1804, Gaudeloupe sought equality at the heart of the French Republic, creating a concept of identity which transcended geographical and racial boundaries. They represent in this sense the essence of French republicanism, yet the historical wounds of institutionalised racism have been re-opened by what many perceive as the blind indifference of the French government to France’s most impoverished region.

On Seán Eoghain O Tuathalán or John Toland: The oracle of the anti-christians

2009-02-10T04:23:00.000-08:00

In the windswept peninsula of Inisowen in County Donegal in the year 1670, a child was conceived whose perception of the world would change the course of European history. His name was Seán Eoghain Ó Tuathalán or Janus Junius Eoganensius or Joannes Tolandus Hibernicus or as he is commonly known today John Toland. We don’t know much about his early life. Some biographies relate that he was the son of a Catholic priest and a prostitute, a common phenomenon at the time.

However, the Scholars in the Irish college in Prague where Toland studied for a while, wrote him a testament in Latin claiming he came from a noble Gaelic family. At the age of 16 Toland converted to Protestantism. He received a thorough grounding in Theology, Greek and Latin in Londonderry before departing for university studies in Glasgow and Edinburgh, where he received a Master of Arts in 1690.

Toland continued his studies in Holland at Leiden University, at the time, a bastion of liberal thinking founded by William of Orange. In Holland, O Tuathaláin frequented the coffee-houses and taverns meeting all the greatest minds of his day. It was here that he came across the works of the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, whose radical ideas were to have a profound effect on his subsequent writing.

Having imbibed the liberal intellectual spirit of Holland, Toland went to Oxford where he read the philosophy of John Locke. Locke had argued that there was no contradiction between reason and religious faith. Toland decided to test this idea through a thorough examination of the bible. The result was a book that would send shock-waves throughout Europe. 'Christianity Not Mysterious; or, A treatise Shewing That There Is Nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, nor above It, and That No Christian Doctrine Can Be Properly Call'd a Mystery'.

Toland’s book asserted that Christianity did not contain any mysteries. These so –called mysteries, he argued, had been invented by priests to frighten and hoodwink the ignorant. Christianity Not Mysterious proved to be a best-seller throughout Europe. Its radicalism was such that it provoked over 50 separate publications attempting to refute its ideas.

The Irish parliament immediately ordered Toland's book to be burned and sent out a warrant for the author’s arrest. Toland fled to Oxford, where he would remain for a number of years. But it wasn’t long before the Gaelic philosopher would be the source of controversy yet again. In 1698 he published his monumental biography of the poet John Milton, where certain passages casting doubt about the authenticity of the New Testament caused outrage. However, his work Anglia Libera, which argued in favour of the Hanover succession, won him favour among the British authorities. He was employed by the British government as a foreign diplomat, frequenting the Court of Prussia, where he greatly impressed the Princess Sophia.

Toland also corresponded with the German philosopher Gotfried Leibniz, whose letters reveal a deep admiration for Toland’s genius mixed with a degree of reservation concerning his radical anti-religious views. Toland’s conversations with Princess Sophia resulted in a book entitled ‘Letters to Sophia’ where he argued that motion was an intrinsic quality of matter, thus refuting the Cartesian conception of the world.
Toland’s writings are said to be in the range of 30 to 100 books and pamphlets. He was the first thinker to argue for the naturalisation of the Jews in Europe. During the course of his career Toland became increasingly atheistic. His opposition to established religion was argued in his book 'On Christianity, Judaism and Islam', three religions which he described as the three 'great frauds of humanity'. However, his magnum opus is generally considered to be his book written in Latin entitled Pantheisticon. Combining many ideas from Ancient Greek and Roman authors, this work proposed the concept of pantheism, which means that God and nature are one, and that the study of nature is the only true knowledge.

Toland’s works so obsessed the French philosopher Le Baron D’Holbach, the first confessed atheist, that his friend Denis Diderot, described its reception among the French intelligentsia as being like a bomb! D’Holbach immediately undertook the translation of some of Toland’s works into French. Diderot and Voltaire read the Irish philosopher with devotion. Toland also undertook a number of significant translations, the most important of which were works from the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno.

Later in Life, Toland, who spoke over 10 languages, turned again to his native Irish. He studied documents pertaining to the Celtic languages in Oxford and tried to show that the Ancient Order of the Druids represented a more primitive form of his own thinking. He is also said to have translated part of the Gaelic historian Seathrún Céitinn’s Foras Feasa ar Éireann.
Described by eighteenth century Irish philosopher George Berkeley as the 'first free thinker', and by Johnathon Swift as the ‘oracle of the anti-Christians’, this Gaelic, British, European, republican, cosmopolitan genius has, with the exception of a few scholars, has been hitherto ignored by the Irish intellectual establishment. However, new editions of his works have recently appeared in France, where he has even been compared to Nietszche and Marx. Italian scholars have been studying his works for over fifty years, dedicating a research institute in the University of Florence to his name.

Seán Ó Tuathaláin is one of the greatest geniuses Ireland has ever produced. His overwhelming erudition and the radicalism of his ideas make him a man centuries ahead of his time and as the French scholar Albert Lontoine has noted, 'dangerous for his epoch'. But how could a philosopher of such importance still remain unknown in Ireland? That is perhaps a question best asked of the Catholic Church, who controlled our philosophy departments for decades since Irish independence, stifling intellectual debate with pious medievalism.

De non existensia Dei. Poland's intellectual slumber

2009-02-10T04:16:00.000-08:00

The snow fell interminably as I took a bus for Auschwitz. It was early January 2005, 60 years after the liberation of the concentration camps. All I can remember of the journey was the pale, grey empty sky covering a vast expanse of forest. I looked attentively through the windows of our shabby bus for signs of life amid the winter desert. Nothing. Auschwitz is perhaps the only place of pilgrimage worth visiting in Europe. Unlike religious places of pilgrimage dedicated to the infusion of superstition and lies, Auscchwitz confronts us with pure mortality, that to which we are all heading and from which none of us can escape. This is not a holy pilgrimage, it is a hollow one. Going to Auschwitz is like drinking a cold stiff coffee. It is deeply unpalatable but it wakes you from your slumber. Yet, strangely, slumber is one of the first words that occured to me when I visited Krakow that January. Krakow is a fine cultured city yet plagued by unemployment and deep-rooted religiosity. If you go to Krakow on a Saturday night or Sunday morning you will see throngs of young people huddling into the local churches to worship. It is not uncommon to see young men and women attired in full ecclesiastical garb traversing the public squares. For a country with a highly educated population like Poland, it is surprising if not paradoxical that so many should practice religion. Coming back to my hostel from my trip to Auschwitz, I did a search on the internet for Polish philosophers. I wanted to see if this intellectual obsequiousness had always been a feature of Polish life. Could Auschwitz be the reason for the return to religion? Yet, how could they not realise the intrinsic connection between fascism and Christianity? How could modern Poland not see that the only reason their beloved church didn’t murder the same amount of people so quickly was because they didn’t possess the same technology during the 500 years of the infamous Inquisition?
For the most part, my googling left me disappointed. That is until I made a happy discovery. I stumbled upon the name Kasimierz Lyzcynsinski. According to Wikepedia, Liszinski was a ‘Polish noble, landowner, philosopher, and soldier in the ranks of the Sapheia family, who was accused, tried and executed for atheism in 1689.’ As a landowner, Liszinski also functioned as a podsedek, a Polish term for a magistrate dealing with land ownership issues. Liszinskis’s downfall came when he got into dispute with a the nuncio of Brest in Lithuania ( then part of the Polish kingdom), by the name of Jan Kazimierz Bzroska, who owed Liszinski a considerable sum of money. At the time, Liszinski had been reading a book by the theologian Henry Alsted called Theologica Naturalis, who had attempted to prove the existence of God. Unimpressed by Alsted’s thesis, Liszinski wrote in the margins ‘ ergo non est Deus’, therefore God does not exist. When he discovered this, Bzroska quickly informed the local clergy, who immediately ordered an investigation into Liszinski’s writings. It wasn’t long before they discovered the philosopher’s magnum opus boldly entitled ‘ De non existensia Dei, on the non-existence of God. Liszinski was tried and sentenced to death. Among the extracts remaining from this important book are the following.
“that Man is a creator of God, and God is a concept and creation of Man. Hence the people are architects and engineers of God and God is not a true being, but a being existing only within mind, being chimeric by its nature, because a God and a chimera are the same’
Liszinski goes on to proclaim
‘Religion was constituted by people without religion, so they could be worshipped although the God is not existent. Piety was introduced by the impious. The fear of God was spread by the unafraid so that the people were afraid of them in the end. Devotion named godly is a design of Man. Doctrine, be it logical or philosophical, bragging to be teaching the truth of God, is false, and on the contrary, the one condemned as false, is the very true one’
Liszinski also claimed that when intellectuals would try to explain to ordinary people how they were been duped by the church, they in their ignorance would attack those who were trying to free them. For his good sense Liszinski’s tongue was cut out by burning iron and his hands were burned over a slow fire before his head was chopped off. I guess it was the Catholic Church’s way of proving to him the reality of hell! What a pity Liszinski has been forgotten in modern Poland! On the Liszinski Wikipedia page you will find a link to a society dedicated to the promotion of reason in Polish society called racjonalista. Though hopelessly outnumbered by a population slumbering in religion, these intellectuals are nevertheless a ray of hope in a country suffering from the post-traumatic disorder of history.

El ultimo brigadista Irlandes

2009-02-10T03:57:00.000-08:00

Bob Doyle (1916-2009) Commemoration(The last Irish Brigadista)O'Connell Street, DublinOil on canvas / Ola ar chanbhás50cm x 60cm / 19.7 in x 23.6

On the 22 of January this year, one of Ireland’s last true communists died. Bob Doyle was born in Dublin in 1916 to a poor working class family. Bob had a difficult childhood.While his father was away at sea, his mother was interned in a mental asylum. Bob was sent to a convent to be educated. In his memoires, he recalled the peculiar mixture of nationalism and anti-semitism inculcated by the nuns. Bob, like so many of his generation, was brought up to be an obsequious Catholic. Yet ironically, it was the Catholic Church which inspired his conversion to communism. On the 27th of March 1933 in the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin, Bob listened to a sermon by a Jesuit priest condemning all forms of socialists whom he described as ‘vile creatures’. After the service, a mob of up to a thousand parishioners marched to Connolly House, the meeting place of Irish socialists, and set fire to the building. This virulent mixture of racism and anti-communism was propagated by a newspaper called Catholic Mind. In may 1934, an article appeared claiming that ‘ the founders of communism were all Jews’. The article goes on to name Marx, Engels, Lenin and a host of others in an evil Jewish conspiracy to take over the world! Ireland’s love-affair with fascism was eloquently expressed by the Fine Gael leader John Aloysius Costello, who wrote in the same year ‘The Blackshirts have been victorious in Italy; and Hitler’s brownshirts were victorious in Germany, as, assuredly, the Blueshirts will be victorious in the Irish> Free State.’In his book ‘An Irishman’s Fight Against Fascism’, Bob recalled his shame at having been among the Catholic mob> that attacked Connolly House. However, soon thereafter, he met Kit Conway who explained socialist theory to him. Bob soon became a committed communist vehemently opposing the rise of the staunchly Catholic blue-shirt fascists lead by Eoin O Duffy. In 1936, when the shadow of fascism was spreading throughout Europe, he enlisted with Frank Ryan, Micheal O Riordan and others as a brigadista of the 15th> International Brigade in the Spanish civil war to fight for the republicans. The trauma of Spains’s fascist past is still being felt today. Since the election of Zapatero in 2004- whose form of Neo-republicanism has been largely influenced by the Irish philosopher Philip Petit-the legacy of the Spanish Civil War is being discussed more openly. The divisions remain, with Aznar’s right-wing Parti Popular and the Catholic Church eager to promote historical amnesia, so that their support for Franco’s brutal dictatorship may be forgotten. One wonders how far the Catholic Church will go in their attempt to re-write history. Following the example of the previous Pope, Benedict XVI has recently attempted to cover up the crimes of his church by beatifying Pope Pius XII, a Nazi sympathiser. The Pontiff, himself a former member of the Hitler Youth, has recently re-instated Bishop Williamson, who denies that the Holocaust ever took place. None of this is surprising, as the evidence of history proves the ideological link between fascism and the Catholic Church. What is surprising, however, is that extreme> right-wing ideology has not yet been fully eradicated from mainstream European societies, and that there is a dangerous apathy shown by many to confront it. Responding to the financial crisis shortly before he died, Bob Doyle regretted that capitalism continues to oppress the> workers of the world. When the racist Eoin O Duffy died in 1944, he was given a state funeral. The Irish state, yet again, paid its respects to a Nazi sympathiser. There was no such funeral for Bob Doyle, a true republican with the courage to take up arms in the fight for social justice. The fact that the Labour Party would ally itself in the last general election with a party historically linked to fascism, shows the absurdity of the Irish democratic system, which consists principally of the right-wing Fianna Fáil and their opponents, the even more right-wing Fine Gael! I was amused by former TD Noel Tracey’s statemention November 7th last year accusing RTE of being ‘left-wing’. Needless to say, I am looking forward to ‘Red’ Telifís na h’ Éireann’s documentary on the history of Irish communism!

An labhróidh Washington le Tehran? An labhróidh Tehran le Tel Aviv?

2009-02-10T03:51:00.000-08:00

An labhróidh Washington le Tehran? An labhróidh Tehran le Tel Aviv?

Ní chloistear mórán faoi choimhlint i bPailistín faoi láthair. Tá an olltoghchán Iosraelach faoi lánseol, ach cé go mba sin ceann de na cúiseanna chun an cogadh a fhearadh, ní dhealraíonn sé anois go raibh an beartas sin rathúil. Sular sheol siad na trúpaí chun Gaza, dúirt rialtas na hIosraele go raibh sé mar aihm acu, Hamas a scriosadh agus a chur as feidhm. Ach tar éis níos mó na 1330 daoine maraithe agus 5450 gortaithe, tá Hamas fós ann agus, de réir cosúlachta, ag bailiú nirt.
Tá muintir an domhain ag feidheamh le ráiteas Obama faoin gcogadh sa Mheán Oirthear. Shílfeá go mbeadh dearacadh agus straitéis eile aige chun dul i ngleic le coimhlint den chineál sin. Go deimhin, ba chomhartha maith é cinneadh Obama George Mitchel a sheoladh don réigiún. Ar a laghad, tá taithí chuimsitheach faighte aige ón gcloimhlint i d’Tuisceart na hÉireann. Tá sé tharr am anois don Teach Bán ról níos pragmataí a ghlacadh sa Mheán Oirthear. Anois agus na Stáit Aontaithe ag ullmhú a dtrupaí a tharraingt as an Iaráic, tá comharthaí ann go bhfuil an cúlra geopholaitiúil ag athrú sa réigiún. Tá an Iaráin ag oscailt an dorais do dhioscúrsa leis na Stáit Aonaithe , comhartha eile go bhfuil teacht i láthair Obama ag spreagadh athrú intinne sa Phoblacht Ioslamach. Má labhraíonn Washington le Tehran, d’fhéadfadh sé an seanchaidhreamh a bhí idir an dá tir roimh an réabhlóid ioslamach i 1979 a athbunú.
O bunaíodh Poblacht Ioslamach na Iaráine i 1979, bhí drogall ar rialtais na Stát Aontaithe taidhleoireacht shaoithínteach a chur i bhfeidhm le rialtas na hIaráine. Ach nuair a tháinig an Ayatollah Khoméini i gcumhacht san Iaráin i 1979, bhí sé brea sásta dul i ndáil chomhairle le hIosrael. Bhí gá do Therhan margadh a dhéanamh le hIosrael chun gunnaí a cheannach. Bhí a fhios ag Iaráin go mbeadh sé usáideach dóibh a bheith cairdiúil le Iosrael dá bharr. Ach céard faoi ráiteas d’Athmadinijad cúplá bliain ó shin go raibh sé ar intinn aige Iosrael a scriosadh? Chuala mé taidhleoir Iaráineach sa Radio na Fraince an tseachtain seo caite agus é a ag maíomh nár aistríodh na focail an uachtaráin go ceart. Bhí sé a rá, dar leis, go mba choir go scriosfaí an sionachas. Bheul, b’fheidir go raibh mícheart againne. Ach ta rud amháin soléir anois: má fheicfimid rapprochement idir na Stáit Aontaithe agus an Iaráin, ta sé dealraitheach go laghdóidh sé sin an brú faoi Iosrael deireadh a chur ar a dhaorsmacht faoi mhuintir na Pailistíne. I ndeireadh an lae, is muintir bhocht iad na Pailistínigh agus is beag an meas atá ag na rialtais arabacha eile sa réigúin ar chearta daonna a gcomharsana

Sarko's sober sermon

2009-02-10T03:50:00.000-08:00

On Thursday January 5th the French president Nicolas Sarkozy participated in a televised debate to discuss his new rescue package for the French economy. The financial plan comprising 1.4 billion euro will be used to re-finance the banks. The president also intends to invest in infrastructure and social projects. In order to save France’s disappearing automobile industry, professional tax will be cut from 2010. Since the financial crisis struck last year, France’s chief car manufacturers have hit an all-time production slump, with Renault, Citroen and Peugeot all closing factories. Outsourcing of manufacture to poorer countries such as Roumania and the Czech Republic has led to a serious rise in French unemployment. Sarkozy hopes that the removal of corporation tax will remedy this problem. Watching the debate, one got the impression that this was a man feeling the pressure. On the eve of the formation of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, the French president seemed acutely aware of the growing opposition from the resurgent left.

In spite of the democratic appearance of such a public debate with the president, his interrogation by three regular French news readers was far from rigorous. The general strike which has brought Guadaloupe to a standstill over the past few weeks was not even broached, and what about his famous ‘plan banlieu’, the ambitious development plan for France’s troubled suburbs? Nothing.
The only independent journalist who was allowed to question Sarkozy was the conservative Alain Duhamel, who has recently written a book called La Marche Consulaire ( The Consular March) comparing Sarkozy to Napoleon and the current financial crisis to the aftermath of the battle of Waterloo! The president managed to evade the vexed question of French purchasing power, which is considerably weaker than that of Germany. French teachers are among the lowest paid in the Euro Zone.
When it came to the question of Europe, Sarkozy referred to Ireland twice. However, this time there was no mention of the no- vote on The Lisbon Treaty. Instead, Ireland was mentioned as one of the worst cases of the financial capitalist catastrophe! Needless to say, the United Kingdom was also criticised for its role in the sub-prime mortgage scandal. It would be easy to forget, considering the ebullience of Sarkozy’s recent anti-capitalist rhetoric that this was the man who proposed to introduce the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model into French society during his 2007 election campaign. His slogan then was ‘travailler plus pour gagner plus’ - ‘ work more to earn more’. The thirty-five hour limit on the working week was to be reformed so that people could be encouraged to work themselves to death! Mr Sarkozy also expresses a considerable antipathy for rogue traders, in spite of the fact that one of his many recent constitutional reforms proposed the suspension of custodial sentences for financial misdemeanours.

One of the most interesting developments in French politics since the financial crisis is that both left and right ( at least in France) seem to agree that capitalism as we know it is finished. However, the difference is that Sarkozy and the right want to rebuild capitalism with more secure foundations, whereas the French left –an here one can exclude the Parti Socialiste, as they abandoned socialism long ago- want to see an end to the so-called ‘free market’. The French president has a rather idiosyncratic way of speaking. He frequently follows a statement with the question ‘pourquoi’-why, before proceeding to hammer home the answer. He also makes extensive use of repetition. These rhetorical devices have not gone unnoticed by Olivier Besancenot, the leader of the aforementioned NPA. Speaking on France Inter last week he said:
‘ He wants us to learn his policies off by heart, in spite of the fact that there is a considerable number of people in this country who know what they are and do not want them!’.
Besancenot is right. According to a recent survey, only 37 percent of the French population are happy with the performance of the French president, with over 60 percent expressing serious discontent. Nicolas Sarkozy showed remarkable dexterity in answering a range of highly predictable questions with platitudes and rhetorical flourishes. But, the real debate is heating up outside the Elysée Palace, and as the general strike on the 29th of January showed, French workers are becoming increasingly hostile to a Sarkozy’s relaunch of a bankrupt system.

On the importance of Scythian discourse.

2009-01-27T07:46:00.000-08:00

From his home in near the Black Sea, a young man named Anacharsis made his way to Athens in the early 6th century BCE. At that time Athens was the centre of the civilised world, a metropolis teeming with innovative politicians, philosophers, poets and artists. Anacharsis was a Scythian, a culture which most Athenians would have considered to be the epitome of barbarity. The ancient historian Herodotus, for example, describes their dipsomania, and how they rode horses bare-back and apparently smoked a form of marijuana! For the Greeks, the Scythians were decidedly inferior. Incidently, various accounts of Ancient Ireland derive the Latin word for Irish scottus from Scythia, claiming that this Indo-European tribe came to Ireland via Egypt, Spain and finally the Atlantic coast. This mytho-historical origin from such reputed barbarians was used by the English renaissance poet Edmund Spenser , who lived in Cork, to justify English rule in Ireland.

In spite of the fact that his mother was Greek and he was raised bilingual, Anacharsis was not readily accepted in his new land. When he arrived in Greece he is said to have visited the home of the illustrious Solon the archon, or ruler. Solon was also a philosopher and renowned poet and it is probably for this reason that the intellectual Anacharsis decided to make his acquaintance. When he arrived at the home of the Greek archon , Solon asked him the purpose of his visit. Anacharsis replied “ I have travelled here from afar to make you my friend”. Solon was not interested and retorted “ it is better to make friends at home”. Anacharsis’s riposte was pungent “ Therefore it is necessary for you, being at home, to make friends with me”. Solon was deeply impressed by the sagacity and wit of his interlocutor and decided to offer him the traditional Greek hospitality. The idea of hospitality plays a central role in Ancient Greek culture. They called it xenophilia, literally love of the stranger. This was also a feature of Gaelic culture. The brú or hostel provided food and raiment for the passing traveller and was a common feature of the ancient Irish countryside.

Anacharsis’ was noted for the frankness of his speech. This irreverent directness became known as Scythian discourse. His outspokenness and love of knowledge made him popular among the Greeks. He was the first metoi or foreigner to be made a Greek citizen and the first foreigner to be inititiated into the Eleusianian mysteries, the equivalent of becoming a member of Aos Dána in Ireland or the Academie Francaise in France, I suppose. He is said to have written a book comparing the laws of the Greeks to those of the Scythians. His comparison of laws to spiders’ webs, which catch the little flies but let wasps and hornets escape has not lost its relevance today. The Scythian sage exhorted moderation in all things. Coming from a binge drinking culture, he had seen the effects of over-indulgent bibulosity. He couldn’t quite understand why the Greeks starting their drinking sessions with small jars and when they were drunk, finished them with big ones! He described the vine as containing three clusters of grapes: the first pleasure, the second drunkenness and the third disgust! When he was asked to describe the safest ship, he replied “ the one brought into harbour”. He was once reproached for his Scythian origins and his reply is one which any foreigner whose nationality is criticised should remember. He said “well, my country is a disgrace to me, but you are a disgrace to your country!”

Anacharsis represents for me the model foreigner. He came to Greece to learn from them yet, on the contrary, he was not averse to teaching the Greeks a lesson or two. What he perceived as progressive in Greek culture, he attempted to introduce in his own country, though this eventually cost him his life! Nevertheless, the very phrase Scythian speech is what the encounter with other cultures is all about. He openly expressed what he felt about his new adopted country. Perhaps in this sense Scythian discourse is what Meto Eireann tries to promote. In providing a forum for the immigrant, the outsider, the foreigner to openly express their views on Ireland, we are followers of Anacharsis or proverbially Scythian Speakers.