(Theme song to Yellowjackets)
Monday, 3 July 2023
Saturday, 1 July 2023
Watch Max Blumenthal address UN Security Council
If there is anyone who believes that NATO, i.e. US support for Ukraine and its supply of advanced weaponry to the Zelensky regime, is on account of its support for that country’s self-determination, then I can only suggest that they consult a psychiatrist.
How can the United States, which launched a war of aggression against Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 and which supports Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians, be seriously concerned with the principle of self-determination?
To those who have any doubts about what is happening and the threat it poses to the survival of humanity, I recommend that you watch the video below of a speech by Max Blumenthall of the Grayzone, which was targeted by Paul Mason on behalf of British Intelligence. I’m not sure how Max managed to address them but the video is well worth watching.
Below the video I have included a transcript of the speech. Please watch and share.
To those who don’t understand the background to what is happening in Ukraine or the possible consequences of provoking a nuclear war, I recommend the two following videos of talks and interviews with John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at Chicago University and a member of the realist school of thought.
Tony Greenstein
Thank you to Wyatt Reed, Alex Rubinstein and Anya Parampil for helping me prepare this presentation. Wyatt has first hand experience with the subject as a journalist whose hotel in Donetsk was targeted with a US-made howitzer by the Ukrainian military in October 2022. He was 100 meters away when the strike hit, and was nearly killed.
My friend, the civil rights activist Randy Credico, is also here with me today. He was in Donetsk more recently, and was able to witness regular HIMARS attacks by the Ukrainian military on civilian targets.
I’m here not only as a journalist with over 20 years of experience covering politics and conflict on several continents, but as an American dragooned by my own government into funding a proxy war that has become a threat to regional and international stability at the expense of the welfare of my fellow countrymen and women. Continue reading at TG.
Friday, 30 June 2023
Sunday, 28 May 2023
Forget those moments of embarrasing social ineptitude ! A thing of the past are they!
We've all been there: at that dinner-jacket-only cocktail party, right when the hosts start rolling out the canapees and suddenly you need to solve a sophisticated differential equation! You try and make a swift escape to the bar area but the damage is already irreversibly done!
Well, no more. Look at this Android-based math solver app, called Maple Calculator:
Cin cin!
Friday, 26 May 2023
The Debt Machine (AlJazeera) - MUST WATCH
A look into the global economic system, focusing on the role of debt and Europe’s debt crisis spiraling out of control.
Filmmaker: Laure Delesalle
Debt drives financial markets, creates profit and generates an endless cycle of production and consumption.
Many aspects of modern life revolve around credit. Our homes, cars, schools and government expenditures are financed by borrowing. Debt has become the engine of growth, the lifeblood of the economy. It is a machine that creates more and more debt, day after day.
This debt machine has grown to epic proportions, and now seems to have spiralled out of control. Public debt, the debt held by governments, is soaring.
The Eurozone is having a much harder time than other economies emerging from the crisis of spiraling debt. Why? How can the debt be repaid? And how can we ever get out of the spiral?
This documentary takes viewers on a fascinating journey through the rugged landscape of economics and finance. Fast-paced and dynamic, it recounts the history of sovereign debt from the late Middle Ages to the present day and offers unexpected exit routes to safeguard the Eurozone from future crises.
Caught in the debt spiral
“Government debt is not in itself a problem”, explains Karine Berger, MP, Commission of Finances, French National Assembly.
“Every country has debt. And since we have economic growth with the creation of new wealth every year, debt is ok.
That’s the assumption. The problem is when your debt gets out of control, when it gets so big that you no longer control the process and its growth year after year.”It's a debt machine, yes. When you're on it, it's very hard to get out of it.
BY LEE BUCHHEIT, INTERNATIONAL LAWYER, NEW YORK CITY
Wednesday, 24 May 2023
Now Protest Is a Moral Duty
By Craig Murray (via Tony Greenstein)
The torrential rain was shed from the policeman’s flat hat via its curved plastic peak, forming a curtain of water that flowed down in front of him, obscuring his face.
His name was Martin. A female colleague stood in solidarity beside him. Two other female policemen were filming with a large video camera from three metres away. Thirty yards down the road were large groups of burly policemen in fluorescent jackets, and beyond them the Tactical Support Group sat behind the dark windows of their mesh covered minibuses, fingering their shields and batons.
Facing Martin were the protestors. There were six of us, average age about 70. We were all absolutely sodden through, but still clutched umbrellas and tried to find angles from which to reduce the wind driven assault of cold water. As the rain was extremely noisy, and probably we don’t hear quite as well as we used to, we kept shuffling towards Martin and leaning forward to try to catch his words, before they were blown away or drowned.
Martin was reading the riot act. Or, to be precise, he was reading an order made under the Public Order Act 1986. With no sense that he understood the absurdity of his words, he intoned:
“I reasonably believe that this assembly has been organised with criminal intent. I reasonably believe that this assembly may result in violence to persons and to property. I reasonably believe that this assembly may cause disruption to the life of the community”.
Some of my top teeth are no longer natural and I get dizzy after climbing a flight of stairs or getting out the bath. I was cold and wet and longing for a nice hot cup of tea. I felt perhaps proud, but rather puzzled, to be taken for a serious criminal danger to the city of Leicester.
Behind Martin stood the paramilitary security guards of the Israeli weapons factory. They did not look really nice. I wondered if Martin was facing in the right direction.
I sneaked this photo of one of them from the taxi as I was leaving. Not entirely what you expect to find down a wooded lane outside Leicester.
Overhead a red police drone buzzed. What it could see, that the scores of police eyes on us could not see, remains a mystery. It was possibly on the lookout for subversive messages on the top of umbrellas.
I found the police operator round the corner who, to be fair, was probably sheltering from the downpour under a tree rather than deliberately hiding behind the hedge.
The factory makes, among other things, components for the kind of drones that kill women and children in Gaza on a regular basis.
I would like you to meet Liane. One of the Palestinian children killed this week in Gaza by weaponry of the Elbit weapons company we were picketing. Whether her death involved any components made in this precise Leicester Elbit factory I do not know. It is probable.
Look into Liane’s eyes, then tell me you do not wish you had been with me, standing in the rain.
When Martin had finished speaking I replied, rather to his, and everybody else’s, surprise. He had started moving away but returned to listen.
I said that I was not an organiser of the protest, just a supporter. But the Order he had read out did not apply. We were just six people – that is not enough people to constitute an “assembly” under Part 2 of the 1986 Public Order Act.
I then went to the police camera team and said the same thing to them. As they were filming for evidence purposes to show the Order had been made, I asked them to maintain the tape for evidence that the police had been told we were not an assembly in terms of the act.
They were really not very happy about this. You could see the cogs whirring as they wondered whether they could arrest me. I presume all these police had arrived after an operational briefing that they were dealing with violent Middle Eastern terrorists, and they were having a brief bout of cognitive dissonance.
There are of course people who resolve cognitive dissonance by an immediate resort to violence, and rather a higher proportion of such people than you might expect, find their way into the police force, so I then wandered off with some friendly remarks about the weather.
I reported yesterday on the incredibly heavy handed policing of this protest. The Chief Constable of Leicestershire, Robert Nixon, has instructed the protest must be “stamped out”, according to one police officer I spoke with.
About sixty protestors have been arrested, and some 50 released on bail on condition they leave the county of Leicestershire completely.
Some have even been arrested hundreds of miles away, for the new crime of planning to attend a demonstration.
Palestine Action co-founders Huda and Richard were released last night, having being arrested Tuesday on the motorway following police surveillance #ShutElbitDown pic.twitter.com/9iClbSfSt6
— Palestine Action (@Pal_action) May 4, 2023
Earlier that day I had witnessed the police harass a mother in hijab. Two male officers, not accompanied by a female officer, arriving to quiz her on why three children present at the protest were not at school.
Truancy is not in general a police matter, and if an intervention was deemed necessary it should have been carried out by a qualified local authority officer. The cultural insensitivity on display was remarkable, and it underlined the fact that every single police officer I saw over two days was white.
This picture, from a few days earlier at the same protest, illustrates it well. Leicester is a very multi-cultural city, but these are the county police.
Each time I arrived at the protest, I went walking around to count the number of police and see what they were doing. Generally I chatted with whoever was in charge, and made plain I thought they were far more heavy handed than was compatible with the right to protest.
I received a message from Palestine Action to the effect that friendly chats with the police are not really how they roll. I respect their position and its cause, but my own view is that if you treat the police officers personally as the enemy, it makes it hard to complain when they do the same to you.
On this final visit I noted, in addition to the ordinary and tactical support group minibuses; the drone squad, at least four marked police cars, the same number of unmarked cars with uniformed officers inside, and five cars parked up with occupants in civilian clothes sitting there for hours ostensibly doing nothing at all.
I called an Uber to leave. I then said my farewells, and my phone beeped saying the Uber had arrived, indicating the pick up point. I walked to the car and opened the back door – and there behind the dark windows were some burly policemen in plain clothes and a directional microphone.
The bearded driver was furious. He yelled at me “Why did you open that door?”
I replied “Well, if you will go around in disguise, people will mistake you for an Uber”.The car doors were pulled shut again in anger and the car drove off. Three different groups of policemen approached, all yelling out “Why did you open that door?” “What were you doing with that car?”
Laughing, I replied “I am sorry, I thought it was my Uber”. Fortunately that very second my Uber pulled up next to me. I got in and left, giggling away.The action at Elbit is continuous. I shall definitely be back at some stage. Please do get yourselves there. I regard it as a moral duty. We were just a few gentle souls in the rain, but I am proud to have been there.
Tuesday, 7 February 2023
Land of the Free, Home of the Book Burners...
The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2021. Of the 1597 books that were targeted, here are the most challenged, along with the reasons cited for censoring the books:
1. Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
Reasons: Banned, challenged, and restricted for LGBTQIA+ content, and because it was considered to have sexually explicit images
2. Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison
Reasons: Banned and challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and because it was considered to be sexually explicit
3. All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson
Reasons: Banned and challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, profanity, and because it was considered to be sexually explicit
4. Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez
Reasons: Banned, challenged, and restricted for depictions of abuse and because it was considered to be sexually explicit
5. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Reasons: Banned and challenged for profanity, violence, and because it was thought to promote an anti-police message and indoctrination of a social agenda
6. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Reasons: Banned and challenged for profanity, sexual references and use of a derogatory term
7. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews
Reasons: Banned and challenged because it was considered sexually explicit and degrading to women
8. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Reasons: Banned and challenged because it depicts child sexual abuse and was considered sexually explicit
9. This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson
Reasons: Banned, challenged, relocated, and restricted for providing sexual education and LGBTQIA+ content.
10. Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin
Reasons: Banned and challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and because it was considered to be sexually explicit.
Think the above is far-fetched? Think again (from Insider):
Amid the GOP’s nationwide push against teaching about race and sexuality in schools, two members of the Spotsylvania County School Board in Virginia advocated for burning certain books, according to the Fredericksburg-based Free Lance-Star newspaper. This came as the school board directed staff to begin removing “sexually explicit” books from library shelves, after voting 6-0 in favor of the removal, the Lance-Star reported. The board has plans to review how certain books or materials are defined as “objectionable,” the paper said, which opens the door for other content to be removed.
Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg both championed burning the books that have been removed. “I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said. Meanwhile, Twigg said he wanted to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”
Monday, 6 February 2023
Exactly Why and How Republicans Hate Ilhan Omar
It has literally nothing to do with antisemitism
THE HOUSE OF Representatives voted 218-211 on Thursday to kick Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., off the Foreign Affairs Committee. Why?
According to the resolution, it was because “Omar, by her own words, has disqualified herself from serving on the Committee on Foreign Affairs.” It listed four statements by Omar and made pains to note that they had all been condemned by some of Omar’s fellow House Democrats for being antisemitic or anti-American (whatever those words mean in present-day politics).
Omar spoke out for herself yesterday. “This debate today is about who gets to be an American. What opinions do we have to have to be counted as Americans?” she said. “I am Muslim. I am an immigrant. … Is anyone surprised that I am being targeted?”
For her part, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said, “One of the things that we should talk about here is … the targeting and racism against Muslim-Americans. … This is about targeting women of color in the United States of America.”
The GOP’s stated rationale is obvious nonsense. On the one hand, it’s not fair to say antisemitism is the last thing the Republican Party cares about, because the last things the Republican Party cares about are racism and wealth inequality. On the other hand, antisemitism is perfectly fine with the GOP, as illustrated by (among endless other examples) its reaction to former President Donald Trump hosting a chummy dinner with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West.
In fact, you can make an argument that antisemitism or something with the same structure is fundamental to all conservative politics. They need it to hide what they’re really about.
Conservatives can’t acknowledge the obvious reality that modern societies are run by huge corporations and the ultrawealthy, because they work for huge corporations and the ultrawealthy. Instead, they’re forced to come up with nonsensical explanations for how the world works, which always involves an imagined secret elite. The Jews are a perennial favorite, but it can also be unions, or the gays, or the international communist conspiracy, or the space lizards wearing ultrarealistic human masks. In the confused minds of the right-wing base, it can be all of these at once, with Jewish Unionized Gay Communist Lizards controlling all unseen.
While it sounds a little presumptuous to say so, the explanations offered by Omar and Ocasio-Cortez for the GOP’s actions are also not the whole story.
It’s certainly true that in the past, conservatives would not have been able to abide a nonwhite, nonmale, non-Christian in any position of power. But today, the U.S. right would be absolutely ecstatic to have someone with Omar’s background on the Foreign Affairs Committee, as long as she were an enthusiastic proponent of bombing everything. This is actually a small sign of societal progress, which we should celebrate.
Omar was closest to the mark when she said this is about a particular question: “What opinions do we get to have?” It is largely forbidden in elite U.S. circles to point out the existence and motivation of the Israel lobby — because you can get called antisemitic for noting that Boeing deeply enjoys selling joint direct attack munitions to Israel or for having the temerity to agree with an Israeli prime minister. You cannot suggest, as Omar did, that the U.S. should be judged by the same moral standards as others, because our enemies kill in an irrational frenzy, while we have reasons. (This squelching of open debate is naturally led by those who proclaim their vociferous opposition to cancel culture and political correctness.)
It’s unquestionably true that the rage on the U.S. right toward Omar is greatly accentuated by her failure to be a white, Christian, native-born man. The pullulating hate that Trump demonstrated in 2019 toward her — and Ocasio-Cortez; Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.; and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. — is still bracing to read. It can only be explained as the loathing elites always have for their inferiors when they step out of their rightful place.
So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly......
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019
Trump’s tweets were also hilariously stupid, given that, of the four members of Congress, only Omar was born outside of the U.S. Pressley is from the far-away foreign land of Cincinnati.
So the right has an especially terrifying brand of venom reserved for someone like Omar. White Christian men certainly have far more wiggle room to tell the truth, but conservatives are perfectly capable of revving up their giant hate machine against anyone who wants to say things that make them uncomfortable.
The upshot here is that all of us — everyone who thinks American politics doesn’t have to be dominated by childish lies — are in this together. Omar is a truly courageous person who must be defended by everyone who values honesty. Understand, though, that this is both because it’s the right thing to do and because, if you have a similar affection for reality, you’re also on their list, and you better believe they’ll eventually get to you too.
Source: @TI
Thursday, 2 February 2023
Labour's Sturmer: witchhunter supremo
From: London General Date: 24 January 2023 at 20:09:05 GMT
To: stephenkapos@gmail.com
Subject: FAO: Stephen Kapos
Dear Stephen,
It has been brought to the attention of the Labour Party that you have been advertised as a speaker for an event entitled ‘Zionism During the Holocaust - Reclaiming the Memory of All Those Who Died’, hosted by Socialist Labour Network on Friday 27th January 2023.
In line with Labour Party rules, Socialist Labour Network is a group which the NEC of the party has determined is incompatible with Labour Party values. Any support for the organisation would likely be deemed in breach of Party rules and may lead to expulsion.
Yours sincerely,
London Labour
To: London General
Labour Party
26th January 2023
Dear London General,
Thank you for your emailed letter of the 24th of January giving me advance warning that I am likely to be expelled from the Party if I were to speak from the panel as a Holocaust survivor at the SLN (Socialist Labour Network) Webinar on the 27th January — on Holocaust Memorial Day.
The Holocaust is the most important single example of genocide, which at its worst descended into an industrial process of mass murder of millions.
As a child survivor and one of the fewer and fewer still living direct witnesses to the Holocaust I feel a compelling duty to bear witness and speak out about it at any platform that would invite me and to any audience ready to listen.
I am an activist for Palestinian human rights and an active member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in its Camden Branch. The defence of Palestinians living under a brutal occupation is very important to me, particularly as a Holocaust survivor. Palestinians live under a system of apartheid as recognised by Amnesty International and other major human-rights organisations. Those are my political beliefs which I claim are protected characteristics under the Equalities Act 2010.
I am not a member of SLN nor have I been following its activities, but via the book to be discussed on the 27th I have a general understanding of SLN’s views on present-day Zionism (as a political movement ) and on some of the actions of the Zionist movement during the Holocaust and WWII. I am in sympathy with some of those views on the grounds of my political beliefs mentioned above. I have personal experience of the Kastner project in Hungary which was driven by Zionist ideology.
My father was a victim of Kastner’s scheme and ended up stranded in the Belsen and Theresienstadt concentration camps. I was myself briefly interned in a Kastner-run detention camp in Budapest.
You make mention of Labour Party values.
I learnt about Labour values during my party activism in the period when Frank Dobson was our MP and I worked in a warm and friendly atmosphere prominently on various election campaigns.
Those values were very different to that of the present leadership whose values permit intimidation, banning of discussion of some of the most vital political topics, disregard for the Party’s own rules, and for natural justice, the drastic reduction of inner party democracy, extreme factionalism, lack of support for striking workers.
I do not share these values.
Please accept my immediate resignation from the Labour Party effective from tomorrow, i.e. from the 27th of January 2023. Your attempt to effectively bar me from speaking about the Holocaust on Holocaust Memorial Day was the last straw for me.
In the short term the Tories are self-destructing which may well bring the Labour Party into government soon.
In the long term this period of the Party’s history will be remembered with shame: this was when MacCarthyism was revived and imported into the Labour Party — and into the political life of the UK itself.
Yours sincerely,
Stephen Kapos
Copies to : Sir Keir Starmer MP,
The Secretary, Holborn & St. Pancras CLP.
(pls forward)
With thanks toTony Greenstein.
Tuesday, 31 January 2023
The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire | Documentary Film
In the days of the British Empire, London served as the world's most impressive financial center. As the empire began its decline, anti-colonial sentiment became more rampant and greater numbers of British territories began to strive for independence. The financial stronghold of its capital city began to deteriorate as well. The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire recounts how the country transformed to become a global financial power in the face of these challenges, and how their continued prominence shapes the world we live in today.
The City of London banking network began constructing a web of overseas jurisdictions in the wake of the empire's demise, and hid these monies offshore where they were sheltered from meaningful outside scrutiny. They started to indulge in unregulated forms of lending using U.S. currency. This wealth was accumulated through any means necessary, including a laundry list of nefarious acts of fraud, tax evasion, drugs and arms trading, and additional covert operations. It's a system rife with corruption. Some of the money was stripped from poor countries, depriving these struggling economies of their capacity for badly needed growth and infrastructure development.
Throughout the film, we are presented with a tale of two Londons. One is the bustling epicenter much romanticized by the United States and other parts of the world while the other is a freewheeling market run by elite business players who cleverly shirk the gaze of international financial regulations.
"In Britain, bankers are a protected species," confesses one interview subject who is part of a chorus of whistle-blowers, financial insiders and social justice activists who populate the film. We are told that as much as $50 trillion dollars reside in overseas accounts that act as tax havens; many of the most robust of these havens are British.
The end result is a system that works to benefit the wealthiest individuals. Meanwhile, the hard-working taxpaying citizens continue to struggle and suffer.
Featuring a collage of authentic newsreel footage and insights from a team of top financial investigators, The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire is immaculately researched and well presented portrait of a complex global conspiracy.
Directed by: Michael Oswald
Full film below, also on NetFlix.
Saturday, 28 January 2023
Free Julian Assange!
Why is this award-winning publisher imprisoned for exposing war crimes? pic.twitter.com/h1x7ULrzZz
— Assange Defense (@DefenseAssange) January 23, 2023
Monday, 23 January 2023
'The Divide' (again on Netflix)
As many Western countries have become richer, they've seemingly become unhappier; with fearful communities, health problems and violent deaths becoming more common not less. The Divide weaves together seven stories to paint a picture of how economic division creates social division. The film depicts the startling truth of struggling to make ends meet in America. Together, it ties the mentality that developed countries have become based around consumerism, materialism and the idea of happiness that these objects and actions should be in your life, despite that they seem to be perpetuating the individuals struggle. The Divide also showed that inequality can come from the people; how they view your "image", status, and neighborhood in which it can displayed either wealth or poverty.
(Synopsis from Wikipedia)
Thursday, 19 January 2023
Kidnapped by the CIA: The case of Khalid el-Masri
The 2004 kidnap and torture of Khalid el-Masri exposed the CIA’s rendition programme and its effects which are still felt today.
In 2004, German citizen Khaled el-Masri disappeared near the Macedonian border. He was kidnapped by the CIA, taken to a secret prison near Kabul and five months later dumped in a forest in Albania.
His case was one reason why the CIA’s “rendition programme” came to light. Agents were abducting people suspected of being “terrorists” and torturing them to extract information.
El-Masri has spent nearly 20 years trying to get an apology from the United States, so far in vain. This is the story of an innocent man caught up in the geopolitical power struggles of the post-9/11 years.
Source: Jeera.
Sunday, 15 January 2023
U.S. INVOLVEMENT IN THE GIGANTIC 1965 INDONESIA MASSACRE
The 1965 coup and its hideous aftermath is covered in detail in the recent book “The Jakarta Method” by former Washington Post reporter Vincent Bevins.
Indonesia was governed from World War II until 1965 by President Sukarno (some Indonesians have a single name) who had previously led the resistance to Dutch colonization. This made the U.S. increasingly unhappy. Indonesia was enormous, with the world’s sixth-largest population, and the PKI was the third-biggest Communist Party on Earth, after China’s and the Soviet Union’s. It mattered little to the American government that Sukarno was not himself a Communist, or that the PKI had no plans or capacity for violence. It was bad enough that Sukarno did not leap to put the Indonesian economy at the service of U.S. multinationals, and that he helped create the Non-Aligned Movement of countries that wished to stay out of both the Soviet and American blocs.
The U.S. goal, then, was to extract Sukarno from power in favor of someone reliable (from the American perspective), while creating a pretext for the Indonesian military to destroy the PKI. But how to make this happen?
Howard P. Jones, the American ambassador to Indonesia until April 1965, told a meeting of State Department officials just before leaving his post, “From our viewpoint, of course, an unsuccessful coup attempt by the PKI might be the most effective development to start a reversal of political trends in Indonesia.” This, he believed, would give the army a “clear-cut kind of challenge that would galvanize effective reaction.” A British Foreign Office official made the case that “there might therefore be much to be said for encouraging a premature PKI coup during Sukarno’s lifetime.”
Coincidentally enough, this is exactly what appeared to happen. On September 30, 1965, a group of young military officers kidnapped six Indonesian generals, claiming that they planned to overthrow Sukarno. All six generals somehow soon ended up dead.
Suharto, an Army general who was, fortuitously, not targeted, announced with his allies that the dead generals had been castrated and tortured by female members of the PKI in a “depraved, demonic ritual,” according to Bevins. Years later it was discovered that none of this was true; all but one of the six generals had simply been shot
To this day, it’s impossible to say what truly happened. Bevins lists three theories. First, the leader of the PKI may have helped plan the events of September 30 with contacts in the military. It may have been the young members of the military acting alone with no PKI involvement. Or Suharto may have collaborated with the September 30 officers, pretending that he would support them and then betraying them as part of a plan to seize power for himself.
In any case, Suharto certainly seemed to have a plan ready to execute. Soon afterward, Sukarno was out and Suharto was in charge. Then the killing began, in what the Indonesian army internally called Operasi Penumpasan, or Operation Annihilation.
The butchery lasted for months, into early 1966, with the New York Times referring to it as a “staggering mass slaughter of Communists and pro-Communists.” The U.S. was not only aware of what was happening, but was also an eager participant, providing lists of PKI members to the Indonesian military. One American official later said, “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.” According to Time magazine, there were so many corpses that it created “a serious sanitation problem in East Java and Northern Sumatra where the humid air bears the reek of decaying flesh. Travelers from those areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies.”
New York Times columnist James Reston soon wrote about these events under the headline “A Gleam of Light in Asia.” Americans needed to understand these “hopeful political developments,” including the fact that the “Indonesian massacre” could not have occurred “without the clandestine aid [Indonesia] has received indirectly from here.” Recently declassified records illustrate just how right Reston was.
Suharto ruled Indonesia brutally for the next three decades, remaining a key U.S. ally until he fell from power in 1998. Only now, over 57 years since the coup, is the Indonesian government barely beginning to face its own past.
“Acknowledging some of the crimes of the Suharto regime is a start,” says Bradley Simpson, a historian and expert on this period. “But President Widodo must do more to initiate a long overdue process of accountability and restitution for victims and survivors of the 1965–1966 killings. So do governments like the United States and Great Britain, which were willing accomplices in the Indonesian army’s campaign of mass murder.”
There is no sign of that happening in U.S., however. Obama, with his direct personal knowledge of Indonesia and this history, might seem to be a natural leader for this process. But you shouldn’t get your hopes up. He also explains in “Dreams From My Father” that he learned in Indonesia that “the world was violent … unpredictable and often cruel.” His stepfather, he records, taught him that “Men take advantage of weakness in other men. They’re just like countries in that way. … Better to be strong. If you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who’s strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always.”
Source:@TI.
Sunday, 8 January 2023
Bolsotrumpo Supporters storm the Brazilian Congress
Supporters of Brazilian far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro have stormed the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential in the capital, Brasilia.
Videos on social media showed Bolsonaro supporters smashing windows and furniture of the national Congress and Supreme Court buildings and climbing the on the roofs on Sunday. The Congress building is where Brazil’s Senate and Chamber of Deputies conducts its legislative business.
Images on TV channel Globo News also showed protesters roaming the presidential palace, many of them wearing green and yellow, the colors of the flag that have also come to symbolize the Bolsonaro government.
Security forces used tear gas in an apparently failed effort to repel the demonstrators. Local media estimated about 3,000 people were involved in the incident.
Reporting from Rio de Janeiro, Al Jazeera’s Monica Yanakiew, said that Bolsonaro supporters have been camped out in Brasilia since the former president’s election loss to left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in late October.
Source: Jeera.
Sunday, 1 January 2023
A Plausible Tory Policy?
Mitchell and Webb - Kill The Poor
Nah. They wouldn't, would they? As someone stated, the poor are a great gold mine for the rich!
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