Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Category: ENGLISH (Page 22 of 28)

There a few posts written in English

Dead Rat

31.03.2018 /

There is a dead rat somewhere. The question is: Where?

For one thing, there is this business of the expulsion of Russian diplomats from western countries. Journalists everywhere keep clamouring for evidence of the Russian government’s involvement in the Salisbury incident, and Boris Johnson is quoted as replying that Russia’s complicity is “rather like the beginning of ‘Crime and Punishment’ in the sense that we are all confident of the culprit, and the only question is whether he will confess or be caught.” To which a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson is said to have asked Mr Johnson whether he managed to make it past the beginning of the novel, quoting another line from the book: “From a hundred rabbits you can’t make a horse, a hundred suspicions don’t make a proof.”

Now they are saying that it’s “not just Salisbury”, it’s a “reckless pattern of behaviour”, and they mention Crimea. So let’s take a look at Crimea.

The 2014 referendum (which overwhelmingly supported reunification with Russia) was undoubtedly flawed and certainly very disputed. Nevertheless, there seems no doubt that only about 10% of the Crimean population spoke Ukrainian as their native language at the time and that the majority of Crimea’s inhabitants have considered themselves ethnically Russian for a very long time (67% in the 1989 census, 60% in 2001 and 65% in 2014). In addition, after the fall of the Soviet Union, exiled Crimean Tartars started returning and made up more than 10% of the population. (Source: Wikipedia 31.03.2018)

Much as the Crimea affair was irregular, the Russian side was very understandable given the country’s long-standing friction with Ukraine. Have we forgotten the sources of that friction? Have we for instance forgotten the pipeline through Ukraine from which Russian gas was “diverted” by Ukraine for years?

Do not misunderstand me: If the Russian government did indeed carry out a public liquidation in Salisbury, I’m all for the expulsion of Russian diplomats. It’s just that the Western hand in this matter does not seem clean. So whose hands are dirtiest?

Why is so little mention made, on the British side, of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a case that seemed pretty cut and dried at the time. Even the Russian media thought FSB was responsible. This puzzles me, so I have been reading about it.

Both the murder itself and the British investigation into it appear to have been fairly clumsy affairs, for one thing, and if the Russian secret service was responsible, clumsiness would not have been expected. As for the British, they vociferously requested the extradition of a Russian suspect, failing to remind the media that no civilised country ever extradites its own citizens.

Russia, on the other hand, requested the extradition of Boris Berezhovsky, whom they claimed they suspected. Now there is every reason to suspect this was a front on their part, but there appears to be no doubt that Mr Berezhovsky was a crook who had helped himself most liberally to taxpayers assets when the Soviet Union was dissolved. True, he was not the only one to do so, but people who go to court claiming three billion pounds in damages, as he did in London in 2012, are not your ordinary paper thief.

The British refused to extradite him. Moreover, they have been protecting a number of other personages that are lining UK banks with their assets. I quote the Telegraph:

Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, has ordered a retrospective investigation into past cases of “investor visas”, which are open to people who stake £2m or more in the UK.

The visas are a way for the super-rich to fast-track their residency and citizenship in Britain.

About 700 Russians were granted the gold-plated visas between 2008 and 2015, the Home Affairs Committee was told.

So Mr Berezhovsky was not the only Russian crook in the UK. Needless to say, the British do not extradite their citizens either, but granting rich Russians fast-track citizenship takes care of the issue. (I refer to Mr Berezhovsky in the past tense. The findings of his death coincided with suicide. Of course many people assume he was killed, but there was no evidence. The Russian state or the Mafia?)

The Telegraph politely refers to these “about 700” people as “super-rich”. Permit me to use a different word: “Mafia”. State-sponsored public liquidations have rather gone out of fashion, whereas Mafia liquidations are still bread and butter in many countries.

Finally, I wish to make it very clear that I’m not saying the Russians “didn’t do it”. I’m just saying that some pieces of the puzzle just don’t fit. There is a dead rat somewhere.

Democratic deficit

29.03.2018 /

After two world wars, Europeans had had enough of wars, and so we saw the slow but inexorable development of the EC, which has evolved into the EU.

Now, it is true that many considered this multinational organisation a bureaucratic and undemocratic mastodon, and for many years the Scandinavian countries, for instance, refused to join, with good reason, you might say. There are certainly grounds for maintaining that joining the EU weakens national sovereignty, and there is undoubtedly the matter of the “democratic deficit”.

On the other hand, where is there no “democratic deficit”? Personally, I’m not really sure what “democracy” means, in spite of all we can read about the topic in various sources. Forget about the ancient Greeks, for a moment, though the concept is said to stem from them; in Athens only a small proportion of males, i.e. landowners, were “eligible” to vote, as it were. So Athens doesn’t really count as a model.

In modern-day western societies, we see more or less fascist movements gaining ground through fair elections. We also see elections that are not blatantly unfair but dubious. I won’t detail what I mean by dubious – each country has its own turgid electoral issues with or without the involvement of the Russians, fake-news factories, abused Facebook data etc. Be all that as it may, we are left with a lot of question marks regarding even so called “fair elections”.

Regardless of our doubts, however, most of us in the west still agree that we value certain standards of law. We need to trust that our courts and law enforcement are politically, financially and personally impartial and just. Most of us also firmly adhere to the importance of civil liberties.

So where does that leave us?

I knew a man who used to say, “nowhere in the Bible have I found any statement to the effect that parents must love their children”. I believe him. He had actually read the Bible many times. The Bible only commands us to love and obey our parents, and that’s it.

I find a parallel in our faith in “democracy”: We believe in it as though it were the Bible, but nobody requires us to vote for what is best for the country, for society or for humankind. All a voter needs to do is to vote for whoever will best serve his or her personal interests. Now.

Right. And now we have a situation of impeding serious climate change. Left to choose between a policy that will impose inter alia serious restrictions on personal travel and make a dent on our personal finances, or, on the other hand, business as usual, what do you and I choose?

And we have a situation in which parts of the world population are destitute, desperate and/or even angry. Do we choose to leave them to their own devices, put them into concentration camps, or even exterminate them? Or do we consider a different order?

Finally, we have a situation in most western countries where a growing proportion are growing poorer by the year, where the welfare state is crumbling and where young women are increasingly reluctant to bear children for fear of what the future may bring. It is very tempting to blame “the others”, i.e. China, Russia, the immigrants, and all the oddballs that make a society colourful. Are there any other sources of concern?

The EU may be a bureaucratic mastodon, but from my perspective, the EU is a relatively civilising force in Europe at the moment. Not that I trust the EU. The EU was from its inception, and still is, a fundamentally capitalist animal. But so far, no successful alternative to capitalism has been devised. (Russia and China are, after all, as capitalist as the rest of us.) The EU aims, at least, to resist individual countries’ and companies’ attempts to undermine the rule of law, and to defend civil liberties. The EU even defends, to a certain extent, its members’ welfare state. And the EU realises, unlike most of us, that in the end, we will all be the losers of climate change.

There is no punch line here, except that if you are itching for a new war, you may not be disappointed. I only hope that the majority of Europeans take to their senses. Soon.

 

Gabriel

16.03.2018 /

I can’t get Gabriel out of my head.

He disappeared on 27 February. I saw it on the news and since then, for some reason, the little boy has haunted me. The whole business has seemed so utterly improbable in every way.

He left his grandparents’ house to go and visit his cousins, just a hundred metres, or so, down the road, but apparently he never got there. The reporters have taken us back and forth that short stretch of dirt road time and time again, telling us, the viewers – and repeating time and time again – that nothing, absolutely nothing dangerous lay along the road. No pond, no bog, no cliff….

Above all, no crime could possibly have befallen him in such a godforsaken place with only 73 inhabitants (according to Wikipedia). Everybody knows everybody, and you simply cannot hide.

We were shown pictures of him, an eight-year-old with a beautiful smile on his cheerful face. His mother spoke to the TV-cameras, begging for help – she too was beautiful, I thought – explaining that he was a very good little boy who liked drawing fishes and who wanted to be a marine biologist. “If anyone out there is keeping him, please, I beg you, bring him back safe and sound,” she said. I was obviously not the only one who was moved by her appeal, because around 5000 people came to that desolate little village to comb the surrounding countryside.

Day after day, Gabriel with the sunny smile was the centrepiece of the evening news. Nor was there any escape from the agonised faces of the boy’s father and his girlfriend. There were endless search parties crossing drab, treeless hills that were almost the same grey-green colour as the Guardia Civil. Grim looks in every face. All of Spain held its breath.

On 3 March, a shirt belonging to the boy was found.

Then I left Spain and thought I had heard the last of the matter. But no. One day I stumbled across El Pais, and there he was on the front page. On 11 March, they had found him. Dead. In the boot of a car. “We wept when we saw the body,” said one of the officers in charge of the investigation.

Apparently Guardia Civil had suspected the murderer ever since the shirt was found. For various reasons, they believed it had been placed there by the person who found it. They kept the suspect under close surveillance, and in the end, they intercepted her car as she was moving the corpse.

Yes, her. The murderer was the father’s girlfriend. She had played the prominent part of grieving, close relative before the press, weeping and giving several interviews.

I just can’t get Gabriel out of my head!  That is why I have to write about him. I keep seeing the countryside, plain and dispassionate, the very antithesis of violent crime. And I keep wondering: What motive could possibly be strong enough to warrant the killing of a bright and sunny-tempered eight-year-old?

And I keep thinking: If a woman is capable of doing that and, having done so, of feigning the intense commiseration and grief of a deeply caring, kind, attentive and loving partner, while in constant limelight day after day – 12 days in all – what are other women capable of doing?

Already, all the details of the matter are on Wkikpedia.

Paradise on earth

24.02.2018 /

From my rooftop terrace in the old town on top of the cliff, I might perhaps be excused for imagining that this is a beautiful world. Squinting against the sun, I see undulating green fields, pink almond blossoms, pale against the rich green foliage of orange trees, frolicking birds, a twinkling river – all carefree under a warm mid-February sun. From my long walks in the mountains just a few kilometres away, I know that some wild animals still survive , and even here, in this very village, by the river, there are exotic birds and otters. On one of my walks near the town I actually saw a mongoose.

Yes, this part of the world is without doubt beautiful, at least for some of us, it is.

A financial crisis struck Spain in 2007, and banks had to be bailed out with tax payers’ money. Now, they say, the crisis is over, but a large part of the middle class has been pauperised since 2007, as by a stroke of lightning. More than 37% of those who are 25 or younger are still unemployed.

As for this village, time has forgotten it, has passed it by. In the old town, many have moved out, and lots of the town’s 16th–19th century mansions have been partially or entirely abandoned and left to crumble, while people who still live here try as best they can to whitewash their erstwhile seigniorial dwellings in time for Easter every year.

My neighbours live on what they can gather from day to day. Wild asparagus, for instance, which is sold in the streets, or snails. But Spain is still, after all, in the EU, and people are not allowed to die of starvation. There are social services. And neighbours help each other as best they can. One neighbour is nearly a hundred years old, and her mind has long departed. Her six children take turns nursing her. Lifting her out of bed, dressing her, feeding her, taking her to the toilet, putting her to bed… They have been doing so for years. And years. And years.

This is a kind village. A very kind village. Very little crime. You can walk safely home at night.

Meanwhile, hearing the faint echoes of the news, I ask myself: Why is mainstream media so pusillanimous about discussing the essence of each disaster? I mean ALL mainstream media, not just US media, though my example now is about the NRA: Just exactly what is the National Rifle Association? What is the socio-economic profile of its members? What is the average level of education of its members? What are the NRA’s links to the Republican Party? How much does the organisation as a whole plus individual members pay to maintain their political sway, officially and unofficially? And not least, what is the extent and the nature of the NRA’s links to the arms industry?

Such questions are important, are they not? Why do I hear so little about them? True, I am not a US American. But are these questions loudly addressed in the USA? Do US Americans understand why the NRA holds so much sway? For that matter, do US Americans understand why they are being ruled by a Donald Trump?

Semantics

19.02.2018 /

I need not remind you that what we imagine we know about the past tends to be what victors of the past wanted us to believe. Ever since barons, of one sort or another, came into existence, they made sure to hire and overpay the most talented bards to sing their praises. In our day, we have the media. Running an attractive media outlet costs far more than consumers are willing to pay, and modern barons are happy to sponsor those who tell their side of the story.

I have just been to Cordoba, Spain. There are many reasons to visit Cordoba, one of which surpasses every other. True, you may not share my tastes, but the Mesquita in Cordoba is the most sublimely beautiful building I have ever visited! To my mind, neither the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg nor the Acropolis in Athens nor any Gothic cathedral hold a candle to the Moorish Mesquita in terms of transcendental architectonic harmony.

The Moors were defeated and driven out of Spain, and most of us are unaware of the remarkable scientific and artistic supremacy and – not least – relative tolerance that had characterised Moorish culture in Spain during what is known elsewhere in Europe as the “dark ages”. “We won”, as it were, and we are telling our story now, a story that centres on Western moral superiority, on the one hand, and Islamic religious fanaticism and brutality, on the other. The story is no more true than innumerable other fanciful concoctions spun out of ignorance. The ghastly war crimes committed by US soldiers in Vietnam, for instance, do not mean that US Americans are cruel monsters.

Now, telling a fib is not as straightforward as you might think. After all, incorrect facts can be gainsaid, although the correction will often only be found on the last page, in small print and long after the entire population has taken the venomous bait. In the long run, though, a mainstream news outlet would not want its reputation to be tainted as fallible, so journalists and speech writers need a more indirect approach, which is where their semantics come into the picture, their choice of words.

If you are up against a brutal dictator, and there are many of those, you may be engaging in political activism, but as soon as your authorities get on to you, they will not convict you of political activism but of “sedition”** or “incitement” for the simple reason that no self-respecting country will admit banning “political activism”. In the news, your friends will hear about a “rioting mob”, rather than about a “crowd of demonstrators”. Nobody wants to be part of a “mob” and most people are reluctant to have anything to do with a “riot”. Serious opposition to your country’s authorities will not be labelled a “rebellion” – since anyone can easily be sympathetic of a rebellion against a tyrannical regime – but as “treason” or “terrorism”.

In fact, even in a country that does not have a tyrannical regime, you risk being indicted of treason if you are some Mr Nobody who exposed your country’s war crimes. On the other hand, presidents who harm their countries past the point of no repair are very rarely accused of anything at all.

Mind you, semantics – the words that are used to describe, in this case, your political opposition – matter not only to you as a dissident, but to all who attempt to bring down tyrannical regimes. No country is an island, not even North Korea. Your country will have financial, military, strategic and other ties to other countries. The US, for instance needs to keep its military bases in a large number of minor countries and will not risk disrupting relations with a regime that has taken draconian measures against “terrorists”.

As for the rest of us, those who believe that the occupants of the White House are – ehem – whatever-we-believe-they-are, we are all “conspiracy theorists”. Those of us in favour of some redistribution of income and wealth are “populists”, and analysts who expose the inefficiency and financial extravagance of the US health system are elitist, and their arguments are merely referred to as a “narrative”, i.e. something distinctly dubious.

Israel refers to all who have the slightest sympathy for the Palestinian cause as anti-Semite. Makes my blood curdle, in fact, because I very much resent being called a racist.

Unfortunately, those of us who are referred to as populists, conspiracy theorists, elitist or anti-Semite are often no better. Referring only to myself, I have on occasion vehemently stated that so-and-so was a racist, a fascist or for lack of anything more precise, a bastard. Only recently I referred to a very prominent person as a hooker, on these very pages. I can’t say I very much regret having done so, because letting off steam feels good. My words were less elegant, though, than those used against me, and would have no other effect than to make it clear that I loathed the object in question, and that was not really my aim, which was to make the reader share my loathing.

Any political movement that is referred to as populist, elitist, anti-Semite or based on conspiracy theory will probably never seriously get off the ground, so semantics do matter.

**A recent case from a so-called Democratic country is that of Catalonia: Although the separatist movements earned a majority in Democratic elections for the second time in a row in December 2017, the Spanish authorities have indicted the separatist movements’ leaders on charges of “sedition”.

National health

06.02.2018 /

Three weeks ago I had an operation. As it happens, it was a rather large, if not life-threatening one. Yet, after exactly 48 hours, I was back home again, walking up the stairs to my flat.

Why am I telling you this? Why am I also telling you that as soon as I had woken up from my anaesthesia, I spent the rest of the day endlessly and exaltedly praising and thanking all and sundry (doctors and nurses) around me? Moreover,  I have been thanking, ever since, whoever was willing to endure my boundless gratitude for a few years without pain, without invalidity.

I am telling you because I want to extol the fabulous scientific advances made over even just the past ten years; also because in most other countries of the world I would not have been able to afford such an operation; and finally, because – well, because I am extremely lucky to live in a country with an excellent national health service.

EU countries are expected to provide affordable health services to all citizens. I quote the European Commission’s 2016 report “EXPERT PANEL ON EFFECTIVE WAYS OF INVESTING IN HEALTH”

The 28 Member States of the European Union (EU) have a clear mandate to ensure equitable access to high-quality health services for everyone living in their countries. This does not mean making everything available to everyone at all times. Rather, it means addressing unmet need for health care by ensuring that the resources required to deliver relevant, appropriate and cost-effective health services are as closely matched to need as possible.

…

Between 2005 and 2009, EU Member States made huge progress in improving access to health care. The number of people reporting unmet need for health care due to cost, travel distance or waiting time fell steadily from 24 million in 2005 to 15 million in 2009. Since 2009, however, this positive trend has been reversed – a visible sign of the damage caused by the financial and economic crisis. By 2013, the number of people reporting unmet need for health care had risen to 18 million (3.6% of the EU population).

The report is worth a look, as it is well referenced and goes a long way to explain the repercussions and by-products of a population’s health.

Now, out of the global population, the entire population of the EU amounts to approximately 7%, that of Canada less than 0,5%. I suspect that the standard of life in New Zealand (0.06% of the global population) and Australia (0.325%) is comparable to that of EU countries, but I have not looked into it.

As for the rest of the world: Sorry Mac, you were born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In my country, I belong to the majority (i.e. > 50%) that is neither poor nor filthy rich. We have not only what we need; we can go abroad twice a year, and we can renew our computers every third year. But whether we belong to the blessed or the non-blessed, we have access to the same health service. The fabulous operation I had cost me nothing. Not a farthing. And the growing number of people in this country who cannot afford to go abroad twice a year and renew their computers every third year would at least be able to afford that operation or, for that matter, any other medically indicated treatment.

Yes, the number of people who struggle to satisfy basic needs is rising and will continue to do so (as you will understand if you have read your Piketty). But so far, most EU-nationals should in principle, at least,  have access to what was granted me.

Personally, though, I believe that proper medical treatment is a human right.

A new year

06.01.2018 /

What if we lived in a world where the powers-that-be set out to eradicate children who were less than excellent students, women who were less than very sexy, men who were not both muscular and smart?

Such a policy would be far more radical than mere eugenics, (cf. Nazism and Joseph Mengele), yet enterprises in this vein are not altogether unheard of. After all, the whites did go after the reds, the blacks, the browns and, most recently, the Jews; though of course the Jews were white too, which only goes to show that race really is irrelevant.

The good news is that unless some crackpot presses one of those famous buttons, the planet will survive and with it the human species, for good or for worse.

As the climate becomes ever more ornery and unpredictable, investors will be happily occupied in satisfying new consumer needs. There will be a market for protection against erratic climate tantrums: hurricane-proof and tsunami-resistant systems, self-replenishing underground lakes, desalination plants. We already have a booming industry of carbon sequestration and ocean plastic capture projects. Eventually, of course, clean energy will be the rule, not the exception, resulting in new scrambles for market positions.

The problem is that very few of us can afford having our own underground artificial lakes. Now if you are lucky enough to live in a country that requires even its wealthy  inhabitants to pay taxes, your government may be able to afford systems to protect you against extreme climatic events, at least for a few years. Provided of course that all the taxes paid are not diverted to “defence”. Parenthetically, I wish to point out that my quotation marks refer to the fact that in some countries, the word “defence” means “attack”.

The ultimate climate débâcle will not kill us all, rest assured. The one percent who can afford palaces with artificial self-replenishing lakes under tsunami-resistant, hurricane-proof, self-cleaning glass bells will need underpaid workers to man their factories, clerks to send their invoices, male and female hookers to satisfy their sexual needs, interpreters to help them communicate with competitors on other tectonic plates, nurses to tend their spastic parents and psychopathic offspring. There is hope for us all: many will find a safe haven from the vindictive climate under the wings of the one percent, also in future.

Many will not. Among those who will not, we will see blacks, browns and — oh yes — whites. Many of them. There will be devoted fathers, good musicians, kind little girls, dreamers, surfers, biologists, house painters, and geniuses. Many of these people will be stacked away in rat-infested refugee camps along the borders, where they may or may not be fed. Others will try to survive as fugitives, stealing and fighting each other over water, blankets and toilet paper.

Thanks to those of us who are elected to serve the one percent ( I am glad that I don’t have much longer to live) they will be spared from having to inbreed and give birth to three-headed babies. Pity. I would have loved to learn the eugenic outcome of a hundred years’ inbreeding. Would mating emperors create smarter babies than the rest of us do now?

Finally, bearing in mind that we are facing a new year with a few quite sinister clouds on the horizon, I would like to add that sometimes things turn out very much better than we feared. Nevertheless, we should all — young and old and in-between — be a little alert, to say the least. Is there anything we can do to make things better, for instance?

And — sorry to say this — but please take a look at my post “Encryption“, just to be on the safe side.

Jerusalem

06.12.2017 /

The website of El Pais had an unusual headline this morning, one that seemed to suggest an alliance between the Pope and Iran: “El Papa e Irán se unen al intento de evitar que Trump lleve la Embajada a Jerusalén“. Later in the day, El País changed the headline, but the fact remains that Iran and the Pope agree on one score, at least.

This is a memorable day. Not only did the Pope and Iran appear to join forces, if only for a brief moment, but Finland is celebrating the centenary of its independence, and Trump ended, presumably once and for all, any US pretence of being an honest broker in the affairs of the Middle East. Trump’s announcement today, when he declared that henceforward the US embassy in Israel will be in Jerusalem, paved the way for a great leap in terms of Russian and Chinese hegemony, something you may or may not welcome.

For my part I doubt there is less injustice and poverty in Russia and China than in the US. Moreover, much as I criticise the US, this much must be said for the country: I am absolutely sure that it treats political opponents far more leniently than Russia and China.

However, outside the country, the record of disastrous US interventions all over the world knows no parallel. I put to you that accumulated US crimes against humanity, or complicity in such crimes, outnumber even those of WWII Germany.

Moreover, there is every indication that human impact on the climate will see dramatic consequences within a very short space of time. The US has turned its back on the Paris accord, whereas China seems determined to make a tremendous effort to help save the climate, and that may perhaps be worth more than political freedom. We shall see. All indicators appear to suggest that saving the climate may be worth considerable sacrifice.

Back to Jerusalem: The speech held today by the Emperor could have been written by one of Netanyahu’s script writers. It was not so much about America and American interests as about Israel, which it lauded at length as a successful democracy.

Now I assume that what is usually implied when we speak of “democracies” is not merely the right to drop a piece of paper in a ballot box. I have never been to Israel, so I must ask: Is Israel a democracy?

In Israel, are all permanent residents, regardless of race, gender or religion,

  • equal in every way before the law?
  • equally allowed to purchase and keep property and to keep inherited property?
  • equally entitled to education, health care, employment and social services?
  • equally entitled to the protection of the courts and law enforcement?

If the answer to all of these question is “yes”, well, then Israel has made, unbeknownst to me, a very good start and merely faces the challenge of upholding the law. There are some other industrialised  countries that also find this difficult, most notably the USA, where blacks need to remind the public that “black lives matter”. Racism is not theoretically condoned in the USA, so I suspect that discrimination of blacks is also a consequence of a political  system that systematically favours the wealthy and chastises the poor.

But if the answer to any of these questions is “no”, the country is not a democracy, but something rather more systemically antediluvian, governed by rules that are alien to the industrialised world, though still, perhaps common in some primitive societies.

If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, I repeat, Israel is pursuing a path that is alien to the common good, I’m afraid,  one that is similar to and as ignoble as that of systemic anti-Semitism.

 

Did the US ever apologise?

18.11.2017 /

In my previous post I spoke about sanctimonious know-alls. Well, after yesterday’s admissions, watch me now: I intend to be as sanctimonious today as I darn-well please.

Remember the war on Korea? No, you wouldn’t, because it’s rarely talked about and certainly nothing to be proud of. All we ever see of it are replays of the comedy Mash. Those who were naive enough – and most of us, then, were very naive, indeed – to take note of Foxy News probably swallowed the bait and believed the war was being waged in defence of democracy. But US defence of democracy can most kindly be compared to a series of raids of army ants. The purpose of the war was to limit the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, which may be fine and dandy – depending on how you look at it – except that Korea belonged by rights to the Koreans.

At least we can be grateful that Truman explicitly forbade MacArthur to use the atomic bomb, and effectively sacked (or “recalled”) him in the end. Korea had to be permanently divided.

Source: Britannica

You will, however, remember Vietnam. Not because Foxy News finally owned up to the facts, but because so many US soldiers came back in coffins, if at all. Students protested against the draft, parents protested against loss of their sons, and footage and snapshots of US war crimes found their way to international news channels.

Did Foxy News admit that in South Vietnam, the US was supporting a nest of Frankensteins, a vicious dictator and his ghoulish wife and collaborators? Still, the dictator’s acts were not as embarrassing as the Buddhist monks setting fire to themselves in protest. (See the famous Malcolm Browne photo here.) Even McNamara was appalled, and the US eventually decided to allow a military coup against him – so much for “democracy”.

Now the war on Korea was probably no better. As in Vietnam, the US started by playing its cards through a puppet. In fact, they were the ones who installed the extremely brutal dictator Syngman Rhee in the first place.

The press is currently hounding the North Korean dictator. I can’t say I like him either. But had I been born in a country that had been destroyed almost down to the last blade of grass due to the hubris of a bully from the other side of the Pacific, I would have dreamt of revenge too.

Yes, I know I sound horrible. But think of how little North Korea must feel with a Trump riding his gilded horse into battle against the entire world, against the planet, no less. Mind you, it’s not just Trump, nor even Bush or Reagan or even Foxy News; it’s a narrative, a particularly dangerous narrative: Always the biggest, the best, the greatest, almost at any cost. Ordinary US Americans gain no benefit from that venomous narrative, which is fed to them from the day they learn to say “ma-ma”. No benefit at all.

There are those who do, though.

Annoying the general public

17.11.2017 /

I’m writing today in response to this: http://www.musicradar.com/news/5-reasons-why-your-protest-song-is-making-things-worse

Mind you, it’s well worth reading as the guy evidently has a point – five, actually – as well as a sense of humour.

And he’s not the only one who’s sick and tired of bedraggled lefties who go on and on about “the scourge of neoliberalism”, and by sanctimonious organic know-alls who insist that the apocalypse is nigh and that we must all repent, otherwise all, except those who can afford to move to Mars, will suffer a hideous, worse-than-death demise.

Most people are pissed by self-righteous, better-than- you, priggish, self-disciplined and more often than not neurotic, self-denying would-be saints who refuse to go window-shopping, refuse to splurge, refuse to eat T-bone steaks, and whose faces are perpetually warped by disapproval.

In short, by people like me.

“Look out the window,” people like me say, as though we were the only ones who ever notice what goes on in the world. “Now Saudi Arabia has even kidnapped Lebanon’s PM, with the blessing, of course, of Emperor Trump”. And since most people haven’t noticed that Lebanon’s PM has been missing for 13 days, and since they really don’t see that this concerns them, our making such a fuss about the matter annoys them. Understandably.

In short, most of the general public, if not the general public as a whole, is annoyed. The “green” people disapprove of how we live. The lefties disapprove of just about everything. And the rest of the population disapproves of both the green people and the lefties and the immigrants. What a lark!

So, what to do? Should people like me just pack up and go tend our gardens?

I know, yes, I really recognise, that by labelling anti-immigrationists “racist”, we are making things worse. I must confess that when I read that “Police estimated 60,000 people took part in Saturday’s event, in what experts say was one of the biggest gathering of far-right activists in Europe in recent years” (source: the Guardian)  my first thought was to demand that Poland be kicked out of the EU. But what good would that do? The EU is disintegrating in any event, and the best we can hope for is that it will survive a few more years. In the mean time, calling people “racist” is not a wise move.

Twenty years ago, and even five years ago, I would never have thought I should hear myself wish the EU well. Now I have come to understand that war is not something Europe has grown out of. People are, it seems, still mere primates in spite of their highly developed brains. War may come to Europe again sooner rather than later.

No, I shall not pack up and go tend my garden! I intend to continue weaving my own way through media outlets, trying to understand what is happening and why. I shall continue to try to understand why most of us act as we do, and why we allow “Democracy” to be so terribly abused. From time to time, I shall continue to express, on this site, my understanding, the understanding of a cetacea paellicius, no more, no less. In short I admit the writer of the article referenced above has a point, or five, but I also insist that defeatism is not a solution, just an option.

It is not my option.

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