Timeline

"Mother Jones" has made a timeline showing the history of the Iraq War. It is called Lie By Lie.

UK torture camps after ww2

Photographs of victims of a secret torture programme operated by British authorities during the early days of the cold war are published for the first time today after being concealed for almost 60 years.

more: The Guardian

The Poisoning of the Well

Of Paradoxes and Manna from Heaven

By Manuel Valenzuela

01/19/06 "ICH" -- The rise of Christian fundamentalism in the United States is a profound paradox, a reality that in the natural evolution of human endeavor should not exist, an anathema to the inevitable progression of humanity and civilization, a manifestation that is at odds with what we would expect to exist in the wealthiest, most open and some would say the most learned nation the world has ever seen. Yet, not only does this variant of extremist religion exist in the land of plenty, it thrives, becoming a growing threat to the continued vitality of the nation.

Indeed, a movement already clandestinely growing and attracting more souls before 9/11 was given a gift from the heavens, quite literally, on that fateful day, creating images and emotions that transformed the way millions of Americans saw the world. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, terror fell from the sky like the vengeance-filled thunderbolts of Zeus, spawning a fear and insecurity never before seen inside a nation that had never been attacked on its continental soil. The world was transformed, along with the psyches of millions of people whose beliefs ratified in their minds that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a religious manifestation conjured up by God himself. Paranoid, afraid, uncertain and insecure, thinking themselves living in a troubled world on the verge of its last throes, millions traumatized by the events of 9/11 turned to fundamentalist religion for the salvation reserved for the end of days, answers to most troubling questions and the false comfort that religion offers in times of cataclysm and need.

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more: Essays & Articles

Ahmedinejad denies Holocaust!

Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has just called the Nazi Holocaust a "myth".

That means, that the priests in power in Tehran has just placed themselves in the same category as neo-nazis and the like. That is what everybody should know, and take extremely serious. If the current Iranian regime gets nuclear weapons, you are dealing with nukes controlled by nazi-like people. This should of course be prevented, by all effective means.

An invasion by US is out of the question, if it resembles the invasion of Iraq. Israeli air-strikes might very well trigger ww3. So what is the solution?

As far as I know, Iran would need probably 5-10 years to develop nuclear capacity. At the same time, the regime does not seem to be totally stable, with a growing opposition - including priests and clerics no longer supporting the concept of "Islamic State". So the only possibility might be to support this opposition in various ways.

Today they are voting in Iraq, but the outcome of this is very unclear for the moment, I think. If you try to imagine a stable, reasonably democratic Iraq, which is also "Islamic", but in another way than Iran - one could hope that this new model/system could be exported to Iran?

UK helped Israel getting nukes!

According to BBC News the UK has secretly helped Israel develop nuclear weapons, by supplying them with heavy water - which is neccessary for this purpose.

This was in conflict not only with the UN but also the policies of USA at that time.

I don't think it is only the arabic world that will be outraged by this news in the near future.

It is probably like pouring gasoline on a fire, I think. You can only expect some kind of explosion.

I guess one of the more important reasons why Iran might be trying to get nukes is - Israeli nukes.

This irresponsible act by UK probably makes nuclear proliferation more likely.

Ukraine demands 'genocide' marked

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has called on the international community to recognise the 1930s Great Famine as Soviet-enforced genocide.

"The world must know about this tragedy," he said, at the opening of an exhibition dedicated to famine victims.

Millions of Ukrainians starved to death in 1932-33 as USSR leader Joseph Stalin stripped them of their produce in a forced farm collectivisation campaign.

A small number of nations have already recognised the famine as genocide.

source: BBC News

1984 (2)

My first post about "1984" was also posted on Usenet, where it was answered with the following text from "SmirkS":

The institutionalization of militarism under the guise of national security was a logical expression of the aspirations articulated by the Council of Foreign Relations before and during the Second World War. This development was recognized by the historian Charles Beard, who charged in 1948 that Franklin Roosevelt had deliberately led the nation to war and knowingly violated the Constitution to do so. Beard warned at that time that Madisonian principles of checks and balances were in jeopardy and that the executive branch would gain control of foreign policy and war making in the postwar period through the expansion of state secrets. It is tempting to interpret military growth and foreign policy adventures after the war as the inevitable components of a grand conspiracy among elites to build and consolidate the American empire. But a conspiracy theory must be cautiously applied even though there is overwhelming evidence that postwar policies were determined in a conscious and coordinated fashion, for it must take into account the genuine divisions that existed among elites about how to handle the Soviet Union. Roosevelt himself seemed to adopt the position that the Soviet Union was entitled to a sphere of influence of its own after the war, and he proceeded to emphasize policies, such as strongly supporting the United Nations, that would have consolidated a grand area for the United States excluding Eastern Europe. To the ideological right of Roosevelt were influential policy makers like Averill Harriman and George Kennan, who saw the Soviet Union as an expansionist power that needed to be contained without the constraints that might be imposed by a United Nations. Their containment strategy envisioned a military buildup complemented by aggressive diplomatic and economic initiatives. More thoroughly conservative advisers like Dean Acheson favored provocative military measures. Even further to the right stood fanatical anticommunists and opportunists like Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, who argued that the Soviets had penetrated the halls of government within the United States and who advocated "rolling back" the Soviet area of domination rather than merely "containing" it. (Nixon, however, became more pragmatic as his career progressed.) Even if Roosevelt had not died and been succeeded by the hawkish Harry Truman, developments at home and abroad would probably have accelerated militarization and propelled U.S. foreign policy rightward. The desire by both liberals and conservatives to purge the labor unions and the Democratic party of leftist influence undermined elites who favored a pragmatic orientation towards the Soviets. Stalin's pathological behavior toward his real and imagined political opponents strengthened those who sought to recast the Soviets in place of Nazi Germany as the incarnation of an evil empire that could be deterred only by an aggressive foreign policy backed by a worldwide military presence. The theory of "totalitarianism" helped legitimate the new national security state by providing the theoretical underpinning for casting the Soviets in the role of aggressor. Proponents of the theory argued that Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany were alike because both regimes were characterized by a single party dominated by a charismatic dictator driven by an imperialistic ideology, who used terror and imposed state control over the economy and communications system. It did not seem to matter to promoters of the "Communist conspiracy" theory that there were fundamental differences between the histories and regimes of Germany and the Soviet Union (or that many right-wing policy makers in the United States continued to feel sympathy for the Nazis). The theory was useful in creating an image of an aggressor who would this time be deterred, not appeased-a new enemy that was particularly dangerous because it sought to spread an anticapitalist ideology. Within the United States, those who sympathized with socialism, Marxism, or communism, or even with civil rights groups, were defined as threats to the security of the nation. Legislation like the Smith Act of 1940, a wartime act aimed at Nazi sympathizers, was now turned not only on Communists but on anyone suspected of holding leftist ideals. In 1950, the Internal Security Act was passed, requiring communist or "sympathetic" organizations to register with the Attorney General, who possessed the authority (under the Smith Act) to declare certain organizations a threat to national security for allegedly advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government. This provision was routinely applied to organizations that had never advocated such a position. Together with the National Security Act of 1947, these pieces of legislation remain as the cornerstone of the government's authority to suppress internal dissent under the guise of national security. In 1948, bombers capable of striking the Soviet Union with atomic weapons were placed in Britain, and General Lucius Clay, who headed American occupation forces in Germany, tried to convince President Truman to provoke a war with the Soviets. But the Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb in 1949 raised doubts about whether the United States could confront the Soviets without fear of unleashing atomic warfare. The planners were forced to return to the drawing boards. The result was NSC-68, a document that became the Magna Carta of postwar national security doctrine. It laid a blueprint for moving beyond the concept of defense to the idea of aggressively challenging Soviet interests by any means short of declaring war. In the document, secretly approved by the National Security Council in 1950, foreign policy planners argued against negotiating differences with the Soviets until a new, more terrifying weapon, the hydrogen bomb, could restore unquestioned U.S. military supremacy. In the meantime, it advocated an alliance system dominated by the United States and a buildup of conventional military strength so that U.S. objectives could be met short of resorting to nuclear arms. Military planners and political leaders realized that implementing this grand design would require mobilizing the American people into a permanent state of quasi-war. Accordingly, an emotional substitute for an official state of war would have to be devised. In 1944, Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric and later Director of Defense Mobilization under President Truman and Secretary of Defense under President Eisenhower, warned in an internal memo that "the revulsion against war not too long hence will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome. For | that reason, I am convinced that we must begin now to set the machinery in motion for a permanent war economy.'' Almost forty years later, Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan, argued that "democracies will not sacrifice to protect their security in the absence of a sense of danger. And every time we create the impression that we and the Soviets are cooperating and moderating the competition, we diminish that sense of apprehension."