Friday, October 26, 2007

George W Bush om/on Propaganda (video)

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

För att motverka den rådande incestuösa förstärkningen (se video för förklaring) så måste FAKTA upprepas minst lika många gånger som de propagandistiska lögnerna. Boken The Best War Ever och videon nedan är viktiga bidrag till motpropagandan. Detta är inte minst viktigt nu när Bushadministrationen använder samma knep för att sälja Kriget Mot Iran.

To counteract the prevailing Incestuous Amplification (watch video below for explanation) facts have to be repeated as many times as the propagandistic lies. The book The Best War Ever and the video here (via Youtube) are important step in effective Counter-Propaganda. This is of course most important now when the Bush administration are using the same tricks to sell the War On Iran.

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Thursday, October 25, 2007

Christocracy High Priestess Ann Coulter on Perfecting Jews

Swedish: Kristokratin är i grunden antisemitisk (och antihinduisk, antibuddhistisk o.s.v.) eftersom fundamentalister inte tillåter att andra religioner existerar som fullvärdiga alternativ till den egna tron. Mycket av den religiösa ivern ägnas åt att omvända andra. Ann Coulter är en fullblodskristokrat. Hon är också en av de mer högljudda hatpredikanterna i USA (se länkar nedan).

Christocracy is basically and profoundly Anti-Semitic (and Anti-Hinduic, Anti-Buddhistic etc.) since fundamentalists are incapable of allowing other religions to exist as equal alternatives to their own faith. Much of the religious frenzy is directed into proselyting. Ann Coulter is a Blue Blood Christocrat. She is also the Goddess of Hate Preaching in the USA:

Coulter: "[P]rofiling Muslims is more like profiling the Klan"

Coulter lauded discrimination against Arab, Middle Eastern

Coulter: Islam is "a car-burning cult"

Coulter: "If we took away women's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president"

Coulter: "I don't think there's anything offensive about any variation of faggy, faggotry, faggot, fag

President Coulter? Right-wing pundit proposed "carpet-bomb[ing]" Iran when asked -- again -- by a Fox host what she would do as president

More from Media Matters on Coutler's Anti-Semitic remarks (O'Reilly to Coulter: "I don't even care, to tell you the truth" about Coulter's controversial comments): O'Reilly did not note that several Jewish organizations have denounced her comments, including the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

About her book "Godless: The Church of Liberalism":

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SvD kristokratins nya språkrör i Sverige?

English further down

Nyligen meddelade Per Gudmundson att han blivit erbjuden fast anställning: Jag gratulerar mig själv. Varför inte samtidigt passa på att gratulera läsarna av denna tidning till att man snart kan få öppna SvD, Kristokratins Språkrör i Sverige, till frukosten. Steget från antytt islamhat i SvD: Svenskarna som vill dö för islam till dagens öppet islamofobiska inlägg på Gudmundsons privata blogg och vidare i den renodlade är mycket kort om man skrapar på ytan.

Hitchens om islamofascism

I USA pågår Islamo-fascism awareness week, nyttan av vilken man kan diskutera. Det har föranlett Christopher Hitchens att reda ut varifrån begreppet kommer.

Taget helt ur sitt sammanhang kan det ju vara bra med en vecka som gör USA medvetet om de fascistiska dragen i den militanta islamismen (som om något annat hördes där). Det borde dock förvåna att Gudmundson låter två militanta f.d. vänsterextremister som (ex)leninisten David Horowitz , initiativtagare till "awareness week", och (ex)trotskisten Hitchens bli språkrör för denna "upplysningskampanj". Det finns inget som tyder på att dessa neokonservativa herrar lämnat det totalitära bakom sig.

Som framgick i Target Iran: Robertson and Podhoretz on Antisemitism så ser vi idag en ohelig allians mellan den ogudaktiga neokonservatismen och den gudsfruktande kristokratin. Vad som inte framgick där är dels de rötter som neokonservatismen har i det som idag kallas extremvänstern, särskilt trotskismen, och i vilken utsträckning den kristokratiska rörelsen lånat metoder från kommunistisk infiltration, cellbildning, maktövertagande genom att dölja sin ideologi o.s.v. Neokonservatismen är inget annat än samma mentalitet som präglade (präglar?) trotskisternas "ständiga revolution", fast med andra förtecken.

Det auktoritära draget kommer tydligt fram i den här tidigare publicerade videon Pat Robertson Nazi Moment med ett helt samtal mellan Robertson och Horowitz om The 101 Most Dangerous Professors in America på The Christian Broadcasting Network, d.v.s. Robertsons gigantiska medieföretag.

Personen som syns t.v. en kort stund i början är David Horowitz. Det är alltså inget problem för en person som påstår sig kämpa mot extremism - den islamistiska varianten - att lovordas av en av de mer extrema kristokraterna i världen. Det går att fylla spaltmeter med allt Robertson ägnat sig åt från att skylla 9/11 på synden i USA till homofobiska utfall. Detta är lite mer konkreta och väldokumenterade beröringspunkter än när Gudmundson försökte smutskasta bl.a. Noam Chomsky för att Usama bin Ladin nämnt honom.

När kommer Gudmundson och svenskans ledarredaktion att överhuvudtaget nämna den militanta kristna högern som ett hot värt att ta på lika stort allvar som islamismen?

Ett litet, litet avsteg från det rena kristokratiska argumenten (mot islamism, demonisering av islam i största allmänhet o.s.v.) kan möjligen skönjas i

Fortsatt stopp för kreationism på biologin

men det är långt ifrån entydigt vad Gudmundson och SvD egentligen vill ha sagt. "Regelverk är bra", men sen då?

Will Svenska Dagbladet become The Voice of Christocracy in Sweden?

A short summary in English: Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) is the second most important daily newspaper in Sweden. Per Gudmundson has been a very controversial blogger on the far right here in Sweden. Since a few days back, Gudmunson will be a permanent member of the editorial team on SvD. There he will continue to spread anti-Islam opinions and be a voice for extremists like David Horowitz and his Islamo-fascism awareness week (still only on the blogg). There is no Christo-Fascism-Awarenes to be seen in SvD or on the blogg. Not a single word about the continuing take-over by the Christocracy movement in the US. Not a single word about the more neutral concept The Christian Right, apart from denouncing its mere existence. Period.

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Monday, October 22, 2007

Amerikanska Fascister: Den kristna högern och kriget mot Amerika

English version below

Swedish: Är inte fascism ett alldeles för starkt ord när det gäller den mest militanta kristna högern (som är en väldigt stor grupp i USA)? Chris Hedges, en veteran inom amerikansk journalistik (krigsreporter och NYT byråchef m.m.), tycker inte det utan skriver en bok för att varna. Robert D. Steele, en veteran inom amerikansk underrättelseverksamhet, håller med och klämmer till med Christo-Fascism, en etikett som nu också spetsats till ytterligare på Bloggar.se sedan en tid tillbaka: .

Det är också mycket motiverat att varna för och idag, men om det bara stannar där...... Typiskt exempel i Svenska Dagbladet: Svenskarna som vill dö för islam. När ägnar sig t.ex. SvDs ledarsida någon gång åt att titta på den infytelserika kristna högern? Den finns ju knappt, enligt dessa ensidiga ideologer. Islamister är oftast utanför samhället. Kristokrater sitter i ledande postioner över hela USA. En liten pik slinker också med i form av Ingen undgick väl sommarens ”läkare utan gränser” i Storbritannien, och den stora förekomsten av ingenjörer i terroristgrupper är väl belagd.

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America

The Swedish introduction got a bit too long again. There is really no genuine Christocratic Movement here in Sweden. But don't worry. The creeping global fascism will simply take another route here. National Socialism with a distinct racism profile, propaganda against islam - above once again on the editorial page of Svenska Dagbladet - and a general attack on pluralism and tolerance. This will make it easy for the government to install a surveillance regime. 'We must protect our citizens'.

American readers need no longer introduction to Chris Hedges, one of the more famous journalists and authors among the literati population. But just in case: here is a long interview with Hedges on Truthdig.com where he also talk about one of his other books “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” - Below is an article where Hedges himself summarizes the ideas behind the book American Fascists.

The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age -- he was then close to 80 -- we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.

Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" were stories of this failure -- personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers -- those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.

Robert D Steele, on the other hand might benefit from a short introduction. He is simply one of the most knowledgeable persons in the USA when it comes to intelligence/espionage, war on terror, the current state in the USA, and you name it. A short biography on The Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College offers a few hints of his background:

Mr. Robert D. Steele

Position: External Researcher

ROBERT D. STEELE is a retired Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer. He is the founder and president of Open Source Solutions, Inc., and is an acknowledged expert on computer and information vulnerabilities. Mr. Steele holds graduate degrees in International Relations and Public Administration from Leigh University and the University of Oklahoma. He has also earned certificates in Intelligence Policy from Harvard University and in Defense Studies from the Naval War College.

To this you can add some info from the Steele Bio from wikipedia:

Robert David Steele Vivas (b. July 16, 1952 New York City), is a former Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer for twenty years and was the second-ranking civilian (GS-14) in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988-1992. Steele is a former clandestine services case officer Central Intelligence Agency. He is the founder and CEO of OSS.Net, Inc. as well as the Golden Candle Society. Steele also was a member of the Adjunct Faculty of Marine Corps University in the mid-1990's.

The reason why Steele is mentioned here is that he is one of the most productive reviewers at Amazon.com, today as the number 41 review on the Amazon list of reviewers. He is simply a superior reviewer, so why bother to re-invent the wheel when we have Steele?

Robert D Steele review at Amazon.com:

Last Call for Sanity in Face of Christo-Fascism,

March 14, 2007
Of all the books I have read, inclusive of a good number on religion, on knowledge, and on the pathologies of power, this book is perhaps the single clearest, most up to date, and most compelling definition of the extreme right in America as the world's new fascists.

I created the image that I am uploading with the review several years back, when Condi Rice and others had the temerity to call General Tony Zinni a traitor when Zinni, the most recently retired Command-in-Chief of the US Central Command, made a clear public case for NOT invading Iraq. Collin Powell was more subdued, saying "if you break it, you own it," but Bush-Cheney do not compute nuances, and were not listening. They both reflected this book's basic premise, that when dissent is considered treason, one is dealing with a neo-fascist regime.

The author is uniquely qualified as both a graduate of a top-level divinity school, and a world-class investigative journalist, to make this case.

He opens the book with an annotated list of fourteen features of fascism that set the stage, and I list them here because of their importance--buy the book to get the whole picture:

  • 1. Cult of Tradition
  • 2. Rejection of Modernism
  • 3. Action for Action's Sake
  • 4. Critics are Modernists
  • 5. Dissent is Treason
  • 6. Fueled by Frustration
  • 7. Lacking Identity, Contrives Birthright
  • 8. Humiliated and Delusional vis a vis external enemies
  • 9. Pacifism is evil
  • 10. Elitist contempt for weak (similar to poorest of whites contempt for hard-working blacks)
  • 11. Cult of Hero, Cult of Death
  • 12. War as Sexual Sublimation
  • 13. Selective Populism (generally White versus All, but Colored can "Become" White)
  • 14. Newsspeak, Hijacking of Language

This very educated and quietly balanced author cites Karl Popper's seminal work on Open Society and its Enemies on the pathological outcomes from faith in excess, faith that is intolerant of others. It is clear throughout this book that America is under siege from two faiths in excess--the external far enemy of violent intolerant Islam, and the more subversive internal danger of neo-Nazi fascists in waiting, mobilizing the dispossessed whites who do not read a lot, and get "all they need to know" from Pat Robertson's 700 Club and other similar self-serving channels whose primary role is to raise cash for the Hitler's in Waiting.

Continued here

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Saturday, October 20, 2007

Christocracy and Islamism as Fiction

Swedish: Kristokrati och islamism som skönlitteratur

(English text further down)

Fanatism, intolerans och sexfientlighet skiljer sig ytterst lite mellan kristen och islamsk fundamentalism. I USA står avhållsamhet högt på Bushadministrationens kristokratiska agenda och i den islamska världen skall kvinnor gömmas undan. Samma mentalitet, men olika uttryck.

I helgens New York Times Book Review recenseras “The Abstinence Teacher” av Tom Perrotta som utspelar sig i Stonewood Heights, a “well-to-do Northeastern suburb, not liberal by any means, but not especially conservative, either”. Detta kan jämföras med Snö av förra årets Nobelpristagare Orhan Pamuk:

Snö är en politisk roman med stor giltighet i dagens Turkiet. Romanen utspelas vintern -92 i staden Kars, längst öster ut, nära gränsen till Armenien. Hit kommer Ka, poet med tolv år i exil i Tyskland i bagaget. Egentligen har han kommit för att slå sig ner i barndomsstaden Istanbul men det som lockar med resan till Kars är dels förhoppningen att återse en tidigare flickvän, dels ett uppdrag att för en tidning skildra den våg av självmord som begåtts av unga kvinnor i staden. Tar de livet av sig av politiska skäl? Har det med islamisternas framväxt att göra? Kars drabbas under hans besök av ett våldsamt snöfall och staden skärs av från omvärlden. Under tiden i staden kommer Ka i kontakt med alla de viktigaste politiska grupperingarna och institutionerna i dagens Turkiet: regeringsorganen, militären, islamisterna, kurderna, gammal och ny vänster.

Nordsteds förlag

Since the Nobel Prize (in Literature as well as other less interesting areas) is a Swedish institution, I had to indulge a bit extra in our language. This year's prize to Doris Lessing is also worth noting. Excellent choice.

Fanatism, intolerance, and sex aversion/fear in not very different when you compare Christian and Muslim fundamentalism. Abstinence education is high on the Bush administration's Christocracy agenda. Too vast a field to go into here, but a couple of links can get you started. Heritage Foundation: The Effectiveness of Abstinence Education Programs in Reducing Sexual Activity Among Youth and the US Department of Health with an entire Abstinence Education Division.

No, this is not Saudi Arabia or the Talibans with their Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. It's the U.S.A. 2007 according to the George W Bush vision of One Nation Under God.

This rather lengthy discussion was a result of this Sunday's New York Times Book Review where “The Abstinence Teacher” by Tom Perrotta is reviewed, a book taking place in i Stonewood Heights, a “well-to-do Northeastern suburb, not liberal by any means, but not especially conservative, either”.

This time, however, he sets his cast of flawed parents and un-airbrushed kids against the stained-glass background of muscular Christianity on the march. A new church, the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth, has come to town, bent on ridding the community of “all manner of godlessness and moral decay,” and the first weed their scythe of righteousness mows down is Ruth Ramsey’s ninth-grade sex-ed class. After a churchgoing snitch reports her teacher’s blasé endorsement of oral sex to her parents, the school forces Ruth to push an abstinence agenda, something she regards as “a farce, an attack on sexuality itself, nothing more than officially sanctioned ignorance.” Other secular-minded townspeople are slow to catch on, but to Ruth, who is on the crusade’s firing line, watching the Tabernacle’s influence spread feels like “living in a horror movie. ... ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,’ or something. You never knew who they were going to get to next.”

For the purposes of the narrative, Christ’s spokesman takes the form of a divorced dad named Tim Mason, a Tabernacle congregant who was booted out of his marriage after an “epic coke binge” that “ultimately brought him face-to-face with his Savior.” Mason clings to his newfound belief as if it were a life preserver. (His mother accuses him of “using Jesus like a substitute for drugs, like methadone.”) To keep close to his daughter, Abby, who lives with her remarried, irreligious mother, Mason coaches fifth-grade girls’ soccer; Ruth’s daughter Maggie is his star player. After an emotional match, in a transport of spiritual fervor, Mason leads his team in prayer — enraging his ex-wife and Ruth, and setting off a holy war among the soccer moms and dads of Stonewood Heights.

The conflicts Perrotta invents here feel both instantly recognizable and queerly portentous, calling to mind dystopic science fictions from “Body Snatchers,” to Ira Levin’s “Stepford Wives,” to Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles.” As in the Bradbury story “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed,” in which an Earth family, resettled on Mars, slowly acquires alien customs and language, the characters in “The Abstinence Teacher” shift uneasily between two tongues: the unscripted cadences of ordinary speech and the exalted language of sin, salvation and belief.

Stonewood Heights could perhaps be compared with the Turkish city Kars, the scene of “Snow” by last year's Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, also review by New York Times (in 2004):

As the novel opens, Ka has been in political exile in Frankfurt, but has returned to Istanbul after 12 years for his mother's funeral. He's making his way to Kars, an impoverished city in Anatolia, just as a severe snowstorm begins. (Kar is ''snow'' in Turkish, so we have already been given an envelope inside an envelope inside an envelope.) Ka claims to be a journalist interested in the recent murder of the city's mayor and the suicides of a number of young girls forced by their schools to remove their headscarves, but this is only one of his motives. He also wants to see Ipek, a beautiful woman he'd known as a student. Divorced from a onetime friend of Ka's turned Islamist politician, she lives in the shabby Snow Palace Hotel, where Ka is staying.

Cut off from escape by the snow, Ka wanders through a decaying city haunted by its glorious former selves: there are architectural remnants of the once vast Ottoman Empire; the grand Armenian church stands empty, testifying to the massacre of its worshipers; there are ghosts of Russian rulers and their lavish celebrations, and pictures of Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic and instigator of a ruthless ''modernization'' campaign, which included -- not incidentally -- a ban on headscarves.

Ka's pose as a journalist allows Pamuk to put on display a wide variety of opinions. Those not living in the shrunken remains of former empires may find it hard to imagine the mix of resentful entitlement (We ought to be powerful!), shame (What did we do wrong?), blame (Whose fault is it?) and anxiety about identity (Who are we really?) that takes up a great deal of headroom in such places, and thus in ''Snow.''

Ka tries to find out more about the dead girls but encounters resistance: he's from a bourgeois background in cosmopolitan Istanbul, he's been in exile in the West, he has a snazzy overcoat. Believers accuse him of atheism; the secular government doesn't want him writing about the suicides -- a blot on its reputation -- so he's dogged by police spies; common people are suspicious of him. He's present in a pastry shop when a tiny fundamentalist gunman murders the director of the institute that has expelled the headscarf girls. He gets mixed up with his beloved's former husband, the two of them are arrested and he witnesses the brutality of the secularist regime. He manages to duck his shadowers long enough to meet with an Islamist extremist in hiding, the persuasive Blue, said to be behind the director's murder. And so he goes, floundering from encounter to encounter.

In ''Snow,'' translated by Maureen Freely, the line between playful farce and gruesome tragedy is very fine. For instance, the town's newspaper publisher, Serdar Bey, prints an article describing Ka's public performance of his poem ''Snow.'' When Ka protests that he hasn't written a poem called ''Snow'' and is not going to perform it in the theater, Serdar Bey replies: ''Don't be so sure. There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens. . . . Quite a few things do happen only because we've written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about.'' And sure enough, inspired by the love affair he begins with Ipek and happier than he's been in years, Ka begins to write poems, the first of them being ''Snow.'' Before you know it, there he is in the theater, but the evening also includes a ridiculous performance of an Ataturk-era play called ''My Fatherland or My Head Scarf.'' As the religious school teenagers jeer, the secularists decide to enforce their rule by firing rifles into the audience.

As it happens Mr Parmuk has been involved in another international controvercy covered on this blog in Holocaust Competition? and Robert Fisk: The forgotten holocaust. Once again from the New York Times:

Nationalist Turks have not forgiven Mr. Pamuk for an interview with a Swiss magazine in 2005 in which he denounced the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in World War I and the killing of Kurds by Turkey in the 1980’s. The remarks were deemed anti-Turkish, and a group of nationalists initiated a criminal case against him. The charges were dropped on a technicality in January. Accepting a literary award in Germany in 2005, Mr. Pamuk said: “The fueling of anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe is resulting in an anti-European, indiscriminate nationalism in Turkey.”

Mr. Pamuk’s work speaks to Europe’s growing skittishness about its Muslim population and to the preoccupation with the question of whether Islam is by nature compatible with secular European values on issues like criminal justice and women’s rights. Turkey is edging closer to becoming part of the European Union. On Thursday, though, the lower house of French Parliament passed a bill that would make it a crime to deny that the Turkish killing of Armenians from 1915 to 1917 constituted genocide — a law that contradicts Turkey’s view.

In remarks sure to further annoy Turkey, the Armenian foreign minister, Vartan Oskanian, weighed in with a message of congratulations for Mr. Pamuk. “We welcome this decision and only wish that this kind of intellectual sincerity and candor will lead the way to acknowledging and transcending this painful, difficult period of our peoples’ and our countries’ history,” Mr. Oskanian said in an e-mail message to The New York Times.

Turkish Writer Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

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Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Ethnic Cleansing in Iraq - Etnisk rensning i Iraq

Why may it look like there is a more stable Iraq with less violence today? Because the civil war between Sunnis and Shiites have moved from neighborhoods to a large-scale conflict.

Seymour Hersh: Bush 'Has Accepted Ethnic Cleansing' in Iraq

Spiegel Online: A lot of people have been saying that the US presence there is a big part of the problem. Is anyone in the White House listening?

Hersh: No. The president is still talking about the "Surge" as if it's going to unite the country. But the Surge was a con game of putting additional troops in there. We've basically Balkanized the place, building walls and walling off Sunnis from Shiites. And in Anbar Province, where there has been success, all of the Shiites are gone. They've simply split.

Spiegel Online: Is that why there has been a drop in violence there?

Hersh: I think that's a much better reason than the fact that there are a couple more soldiers on the ground.

Spiegel Online: So what are the lessons of the Surge?

Hersh: The Surge means basically that, in some way, the president has accepted ethnic cleansing, whether he's talking about it or not. When he first announced the Surge in January, he described it as a way to bring the parties together. He's not saying that any more. I think he now understands that ethnic cleansing is what is going to happen. You're going to have a Kurdistan. You're going to have a Sunni area that we're going to have to support forever. And you're going to have the Shiites in the South.

Spiegel Online: So the US is over four years into a war that is likely going to end in a disaster. How valid are the comparisons with Vietnam?

Hersh: The validity is that the US is fighting a guerrilla war and doesn't know the culture. But the difference is that at a certain point, because of Congressional and public opposition, the Vietnam War was no longer tenable. But these guys now don't care. They see it but they don't care.

There is also some talk about Iran and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad worth reading:

Spiegel Online: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was just in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Once again, he said that he is only interested in civilian nuclear power instead of atomic weapons. How much does the West really know about the nuclear program in Iran?

Seymour Hersh: A lot. And it's been underestimated how much the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) knows. If you follow what [IAEA head Mohamed] ElBaradei and the various reports have been saying, the Iranians have claimed to be enriching uranium to higher than a 4 percent purity, which is the amount you need to run a peaceful nuclear reactor. But the IAEA's best guess is that they are at 3.67 percent or something. The Iranians are not even doing what they claim to be doing. The IAEA has been saying all along that they've been making progress but basically, Iran is nowhere. Of course the US and Israel are going to say you have to look at the worst case scenario, but there isn't enough evidence to justify a bombing raid.

Spiegel Online: Is this just another case of exaggerating the danger in preparation for an invasion like we saw in 2002 and 2003 prior to the Iraq War?

Hersh: We have this wonderful capacity in America to Hitlerize people. We had Hitler, and since Hitler we've had about 20 of them. Khrushchev and Mao and of course Stalin, and for a little while Gadhafi was our Hitler. And now we have this guy Ahmadinejad. The reality is, he's not nearly as powerful inside the country as we like to think he is. The Revolutionary Guards have direct control over the missile program and if there is a weapons program, they would be the ones running it. Not Ahmadinejad.

Times: Iraqi police ‘linked to ethnic cleansing’

THE soulful sound of koranic recitals for the dead reverberated from 22 homes lining a narrow, dimly lit street in the old Baghdad neighbourhood of Iskan in the early hours of yesterday morning.

In one house after another, the soothing voices mingled with the sobs of wives, mothers and sisters over a hum of visitors’ murmured condolences.

The walls of a small nearby mosque were draped with 22 black cloths on which the names of the husbands, sons and brothers being mourned will be inscribed in white paint, as is the custom in Iraq.

The grieving families in this predominantly Shi’ite district had collected their dead — all Sunnis — on Friday amid fury at the execution-style murders of the men and terror at the spread of sectarian killings in the run-up to this Saturday’s referendum on a new constitution.

Many believe the killers’ aim is to drive them out in a campaign of ethnic cleansing that is polarising communities, casting suspicion on the Iraqi police and undermining confidence in the ability of the Baghdad government to maintain security.

Some relatives of Iskan’s dead have already packed up and moved to Sunni areas where they feel safer.

The murdered men’s bodies were shrivelled beyond recognition when they were found where they had lain for a month in the desert more than 70 miles away, near the town of Badra.

But the blindfolds wrapped around their heads were intact, along with the cuffs of metal, plastic and rope used to bind their hands. One or two shots fired into each man had ended their lives.

“Why were they killed? What did they do?” shrieked one mourner as he prepared for a street procession of coffins to their place of burial on Friday.

The answer is difficult to discern. What is known is that all the Sunni victims were married to Shi’ite women. However, this is not uncommon in Iraq and is thought unlikely to be the motive for their murder.

One clue may lie in the alleged presence of Iraqi police officers when the men’s killers came to take them away. According to witnesses, about 40 police vehicles and four-wheel drives from the interior ministry stormed the district in the early hours of August 8.

This is really not news. Note the date on the article below.

Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold

Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale.

By Patrick Cockburn in Khanaqin, North-East Iraq

Published: 20 May 2006

The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height of the fighting in the 1990s when each community fled to places where its members were a majority and were able to defend themselves. "Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you," warned one of four men who called at the house of Leila Mohammed, a pregnant mother of three children in the city of Baquba, in Diyala province north-east of Baghdad. He offered chocolate to one of her children to try to find out the names of the men in the family.

Mrs Mohammed is a Kurd and a Shia in Baquba, which has a majority of Sunni Arabs. Her husband, Ahmed, who traded fruit in the local market, said: " They threatened the Kurds and the Shia and told them to get out. Later I went back to try to get our furniture but there was too much shooting and I was trapped in our house. I came away with nothing." He and his wife now live with nine other relatives in a three-room hovel in Khanaqin.

The same pattern of intimidation, flight and death is being repeated in mixed provinces all over Iraq. By now Iraqis do not have to be reminded of the consequences of ignoring threats.

In Baquba, with a population of 350,000, gunmen last week ordered people off a bus, separated the men from the women and shot dead 11 of them. Not far away police found the mutilated body of a kidnapped six-year-old boy for whom a ransom had already been paid.

The sectarian warfare in Baghdad is sparsely reported but the provinces around the capital are now so dangerous for reporters that they seldom, if ever, go there, except as embeds with US troops. Two months ago in Mosul, I met an Iraqi army captain from Diyala who said Sunni and Shia were slaughtering each other in his home province. "Whoever is in a minority runs," he said. "If forces are more equal they fight it out."

It was impossible to travel to Baquba, the capital of Diyala, from Baghdad without extreme danger of being killed on the road. But I thought that if I took the road from Kurdistan leading south, kept close to the Iranian border and stayed in Kurdish-controlled territory I could reach Khanaqin, a town of 75,000 people in eastern Diyala. If what the army captain said about the killings and mass flight was true then there were bound to be refugees who had reached there.

I thought it was too dangerous to go beyond the town into the Arab part of Diyala province, once famous for its fruit, since it is largely under insurgent control. But, as I had hoped, it was possible to talk to Kurds who had sought refuge in Khanaqin over the past month.

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Friday, October 12, 2007

Robert Fisk: The forgotten holocaust

Holocaust Competition? - Förnekad förintelse

There we could learn about the US House of Representatives' Armenian Genocide Resolution [30KB PDF, BBC] and how the President of the United States of America objected to this.

The Independent gives more details today:

Robert Fisk: A reign of terror which history has chosen to neglect

Published: 12 October 2007

The story of the last century's first Holocaust – Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones.

Turkey's reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to "resettle" their Armenian population – as the Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe – the true intentions of Enver Pasha's Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite clear.

On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document exists), Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. "You have already been informed that the government... has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience."

These words are almost identical to those used by Himmler to his SS killers in 1941.

Continued at Robert Fisk: A reign of terror

Here you will find even more in-depth coverage:

Robert Fisk: The forgotten holocaust

The killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War remains one of the bloodiest and most contentious episodes of the 20th century. Robert Fisk visits Yerevan, and unearths hitherto unpublished images of the first modern genocide

Published: 28 August 2007

The photographs, never before published, capture the horrors of the first Holocaust of the 20th century. They show a frightened people on the move – men, women and children, some with animals, others on foot, walking over open ground outside the city of Erzerum in 1915, at the beginning of their death march. We know that none of the Armenians sent from Erzerum – in what is today north-eastern Turkey – survived. Most of the men were shot, the children – including, no doubt, the young boy or girl with a headscarf in the close-up photograph – died of starvation or disease. The young women were almost all raped, the older women beaten to death, the sick and babies left by the road to die.

The unique photographs are a stunning witness to one of the most terrible events of our times. Their poor quality – the failure of the camera to cope with the swirl and movement of the Armenian deportees in the close-up picture, the fingerprint on the top of the second – lend them an undeniable authenticity. They come from the archives of the German Deutsche Bank, which was in 1915 providing finance for the maintenance and extension of the Turkish railway system. One incredible photograph – so far published in only two specialist magazines, in Germany and in modern-day Armenia – actually shows dozens of doomed Armenians, including children, crammed into cattle trucks for their deportation. The Turks stuffed 90 Armenians into each of these wagons – the same average the Nazis achieved in their transports to the death camps of Eastern Europe during the Jewish Holocaust.

Hayk Demoyan, director of the grey-stone Museum of the Armenian Genocide in the foothills just outside Yerevan, the capital of present-day Armenia, stares at the photographs on his computer screen in bleak silence. A university lecturer in modern Turkish history, he is one of the most dynamic Armenian genocide researchers inside the remains of Armenia, which is all that was left after the Turkish slaughter; it suffered a further 70 years of terror as part of the Soviet Union. "Yes, you can have these pictures, he says. "We are still discovering more. The Germans took photographs and these pictures even survived the Second World War. Today, we want our museum to be a place of collective memory, a memorisation of trauma. Our museum is for Turks as well as Armenians. This is also [the Turks'] history."

The story of the last century's first Holocaust – Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones. Turkey's reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to "resettle" their Armenian population – as the Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe – the true intentions of Enver Pasha's Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite

clear. On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document exists) Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. "You have already been informed that the government... has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience." These words are almost identical to those used by Himmler to his SS killers in 1941.

Taner Akcam, a prominent – and extremely brave – Turkish scholar who has visited the Yerevan museum, has used original Ottoman Turkish documents to authenticate the act of genocide. Now under fierce attack for doing so from his own government, he discovered in Turkish archives that individual Turkish officers often wrote "doubles" of their mass death-sentence orders, telegrams sent at precisely the same time that asked their subordinates to ensure there was sufficient protection and food for the Armenians during their "resettlement". This weirdly parallels the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, where officials were dispatching hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers while assuring International Red Cross officials in Geneva that they were being well cared for and well fed.

Continued at Robert Fisk: The forgotten holocaust

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