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A petition to free Mr Kambaksh can be found at the Independent here.
Musings, articles and sundry postings of a Geordie class warrior, adhering to the Orwellian maxim: "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
A petition to free Mr Kambaksh can be found at the Independent here.
Ford and Kissinger assured Suharto that they would not oppose the invasion. Ford was in fact explicit: “We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem and the intentions you have.” Whilst Kissinger expressed concern that the use of US made weaponry may cause embarrassment, added: “It depends on how we construe it; whether it is in self defence or is a foreign operation. It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.”
Commented Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch Asia: "One of the enduring legacies of Suharto's regime has been the culture of impunity,"
a selection of declassified
Just spent the last half-hour reading President Bush’s State of the Union Address from last night in anticipation of writing something significant here. Cutting through all the
As far as this blog is concerned, with its penchant for news on the increasing global surveillance society we live in, Bush also urged lawmakers to endorse a new surveillance bill that would grant immunity to telecom companies that aided warrantless spying on
Said Bush:
“One of the most important tools we can give them is the ability to monitor terrorist communications. To protect
In light of what happened on Monday - when Democrats in the Senate temporarily defeated an effort by Republicans to pass a bill that also expands the government’s authority to conduct warrantless spying powers – this reeks of emotional blackmail. Here’s Bush bullshitting at its best, and it’s got naff all to do with terrorist threats, defending
As I write, the fate of the surveillance legislation is uncertain. Though the Democrats blocked a Republican-led effort to end debate on the issue, they lost a measure that would have granted a thirty-day extension to continue discussion. But a dozen or so Democrats have joined Republicans in backing telecom immunity and from what I can make out the big vote on the issue is tonight. And it looks like the repukes are gonna have it their way. The totalitarian global state edges nearer.
Me, I prefer Bush when he told it like it is, no bullshit. Below is Bush as we best remember him and here presenting a previous State of the Union Address.
Further to the posting yesterday, and the need for the master class - via the media - to continually control our thoughts, here’s a snippet that takes the topic a step further.
Back in 2002, Adam Curtis and the
In this clip, we see a pattern that Bernays used over and over again: namely, turn a harmless entity into a fearsome enemy through lies and manufactured news items. Then use the "threat" to justify attack. The subject of this video is Bernays’ campaign against the democratically elected government of
In his best remembered work, Propaganda (1928), Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
"The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
Exactly 120 years later, John Pilger would comments in a lecture given here how, on March 16, 1968, the day of the infamous My Lai massacre (when US troops slaughtered almost 500 mainly women, old men and children in cold blood) there were 649 reporters in Vietnam. Not one of them reported it.
“None of this prevents journalists from bleating ad infinitum about the need to present all sides of an issue and to maintain the objectivity to ensure they can do that. I have always found such arguments particularly offensive. No one gets into a position of authority in a capitalist newspaper who does not accept the basic premise that its central purpose - apart from making money - is to propagate the values of capitalism...."
With the arrival and popularity of the internet and the consequent boom in computer use, opportunities for access to real information are now at an unprecedented high, giving anyone interested a chance to find out for themselves the real story behind news that the media otherwise would have us believe is inconsequential. There are literally terns of thousands of independent websites out there, as well as blogsites exposing the lies, the deceit, the fraud that goes on every day. The ‘information revolution’ has placed a wonderful tool at the disposal of the working class. But a tool is only useful if used correctly. If we fail to use this tool to help us pursue our own class interests, then this ‘information revolution’ becomes just so much mind-numbing entertainment the masses will get addicted to and which the ‘powers that be’ will eventually use to steer our thoughts away from the pressing matters of the day. Maybe there was more to Tony Blair’s plans to get a computer in every home by 2005 than we think! Would he really promote computer use if he thought the masses would be accessing informative websites in their spare time, websites that might expose the truth, which might reveal the true nature of the beast?
As I’ve spent most of the day answering political questions via Yahoo Answers, this evening, Class Warfare takes time out for brief a diversion into the realms of conspiracy theory. Yeah, I know, socialists are not supposed to be into conspiracies – seeing it as safer to analyse things from the official version, thus, in my view, helping to maintain the official version. One thing I just will not swallow, though, is the official “Warren Commission” report of the Kennedy assassination, that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman who fired three shots at the president. Jeez, anyone looking at Kennedy getting his brains blown out can see that the bullet comes from the front
Strange coincidences
Prescott Bush, banker to the Nazis and grandfather of George W. Bush, sponsored the rise of an obscure
Richard Nixon hired a "gofer" to assist him with his campaigning and other matters: Mob - connected Jack Ruby who later moved to
Just days after the Kennedy assassination, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover pointedly mentioned "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" in a memo discussing the reaction of right-wing Cubans to the assassination. Two of the boats used in the infamous
Richard Nixon and George Bush are distinguished as being among the only prominent people in America who later claimed they could not remember where they were the day Kennedy was assassinated. (Fast forward to the 45 minute mark.)
And that's just the tip of the iceberg...
After six days of siege, you couldn’t help smiling, if not cheering, seeing, TV footage of Hamas knocking a ginormous hole in the wall that has cut Palestinians in Gaza off from the outside world, with 350,000 Palestinians going on a spending spree for fuel, medicine, and other supplies that have been cut off during the blockade.
“…nevertheless, continue as unspoken litmus-tests of what's been dubbed ‘electability.’ Abortion rights remains the principal issue, while AIDS, adolescent sex, homosexuality, pornography, sex predators and even adultery hover over the primaries like unholy ghosts…. While little will probably differ among the final candidates' stands on the
Meanwhile, the acceptance of capitalism’s profit orientated morality leads workers into the most extraordinary acts of self-damage. They willingly place themselves into the police and the armed forces, undergoing training in the most advanced methods of coercion or of destroying homes and killing their fellow workers. They come to this through something called discipline – which capitalism prizes highly – but which is really a form of controlled insanity.
Former armed forces chiefs from the
· Political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism.
· The “dark side” of globalisation, meaning international terrorism, organised crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
· Climate change and energy security, entailing a contest for resources and potential “environmental” migration on a mass scale.
· The weakening of the nation state as well as of organisations such as the UN, Nato and the EU.
Orwell was spot on: "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a face... forever"
‘Guido Knopp, who has written a number of books on Hitler and his inner circle, said the video, which surfaced on YouTube last week, "inevitably" recalled Goebbels' speech in a Berlin sports stadium when he asked "Do you want total war?" and the crowd thundered "Yes!"’
Brown is drawing up plans to expand the number of permanent members in a move that will provoke fears that the veto enjoyed by
Brown has mooted the modernisation of international institutions for the 21st century, particularly the UN, created in 1945, to reflect the “world's new challenges and power bases” during his four-day trip to
The Prime Minister believes the UN is punching below its weight. In 2003, it failed to agree on a fresh resolution giving explicit approval for military action in
UN reform is highly sensitive issue, especially in the US, so Brown and co are yet to publish official proposals fearing widespread opposition. Thus Brown is trying to build a consensus for change first.
His aides are adamant that the British veto will not be negotiated away. One option is for the nations who join not to have a veto, at least initially. In a speech in Delhi, Brown said : "I support
He has also disclosed a plan for the UN to spend £100m a year on setting up a "rapid reaction force" to stop "failed states" sliding back into chaos after a peace deal has been reached. £100 million? Peanuts! The
But Brown wants the World Bank to lead to lead the struggle against climate change, though as The Independent reported, the World Ban is the last organisation to be trusted with the environment and climatic change:
As part of his fantastic package to help the poor in less developed countries, Brown is to bring back honorary knighthoods and other awards for cricketers from Commonwealth countries. He said: "Cricket is one of the great things that bind the Commonwealth together. It used to be that great cricketers from the Commonwealth would be recognised by the British nation I would like to see some of the great players in the modern era honoured."
Make no mistake about it; Brown's trip to
Today, the third Monday in January, is Martin Luther King Day, a national holiday in the
This is the speech he gave in opposition to the Vietnam War. He was murdered a year later.
It is shocking in its relevance to the situation today. Just as King here says "There are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty", we have Bush telling the American people: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."
Yet you won't see this speech on
My objection to this speech, the references to God aside, is that rather than King seeing the Vietnam war as an imperialist war, he cites the fact that the US government spent $500,000 on each Vietnamese soldier killed while back home they spent £53 on each poor classified person and says: "I was increasingly compelled to see this war as an enemy of the poor and attack it as such." There is no class analysis of the war in Vietnam. He does have a point, however, in identifying that there was an irony in that black people were sent 8,000 miles to fight for freedom in South East Asia when they had no freedom in South Georgia; how white and black soldiers were asked to die together in Vietnam when back home they were no allowed to sit in the same school room.
"You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry ... Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism … There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1966
"The movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, Why are there forty million poor people in
"We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing'-oriented society to a person- oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
"The dispossessed of this country the poor, the white and Negro live in a cruelly unjust society. they must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at
hand, to lift the load of poverty."
It’s got to that stage now where I’ve just switched off listening to news and reports of the
In the quest to preserve the deception that the average American has a real stake, control of public opinion is crucial. So the media functions to peddle distortions and untruths that blur this reality, to keep public opinion placid and render ordinary working people isolated and ineffective, so leaving the interests of the ruling class unchallenged and supreme. The US media add credence to the myth that the Presidential election carries real choice by eagerly analysing every minute perceived difference between the candidates (witness, if you will, the palaver over which candidate is the most religious) bombarding the electorate with patriotic oratory and fine sounding ‘promises’ while enthusiastically expounding the lie that the candidates share a common interest with ordinary working people. Their propaganda is heavily loaded with corporate and business ideology and praise for the virtues of the ‘free-market system,’ designed to perpetuate the fallacy that capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked, indeed synonymous.
And what is incontestable is that the outcome of the election will not be of benefit to the
"Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago,
"... But in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating
More Quotes
"...The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world's paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the
Zbigniew Brzezinski's Background
According to his resume, Zbigniew Brzezinski lists the following achievements:
Harvard Ph.D. in 1953
Counselor, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Professor of American Foreign Policy,
National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter (1977-81)
Trustee and founder of the Trilateral Commission
International advisor of several major US/Global corporations
Associate of Henry Kissinger
Under Ronald Reagan - member of
Under Ronald Reagan - member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
Past member, Board of Directors, The Council on Foreign Relations
1988 - Co-chairman of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force.
Brzezinski is also a past attendee and presenter at several conferences of the Bilderberger group - a non-partisan affiliation of the wealthiest and most powerful families and corporations on the planet.