Violence Begets Violence

It's killing time again in the Gaza Strip.   And it sickens me.  It sickens me that the Palestinian resistance is so bent on meeting Israel's violence with violence.

Israel is a psychopathic state.  It is mass-murderously and criminally insane.  It clearly intends to eventually dispossess most of the people living in the West Bank and Gaza.   Blind Freddy can see that.

But what really saddens me to the point of despair is that the lunatic strategists on the Palestinian side seem to think that the sustained campaign of indiscriminantly firing hundreds of Katyusha rockets into Israel is anything other than a mad death wish.

I guess the teachings of Buddha, Jesus, and Gandhi cannot penetrate the war-maddened minds of the poor Palestinians.   They clearly fail to understand that a massive peaceful people power uprising is the only way they will ever win in their struggle against Israel's evil agenda.

But what would I know... I'm only a fucked-in-the-head Vietnam veteran...

Go on you mad bastards, kill, kill, kill...  You're playing right into the hands of the Israelis.

It is to weep...

The Abuse Of Courage And Trust

Corporal Dan Keighran, by all accounts, well and truly deserved the highest military honour the nation can bestow, the Victoria Cross.   Absolutely.

His is the third Victoria Cross awarded to soldiers who fought in the Afghanistan War.

At the award ceremony, Prime Minister Julia Gillard is reported to have said (in part):  "We acknowledge them because it is always important to accurately record the history of our nation and what makes our nation and these acts of courage speak to who we are as Australians."

Well, well, well... "...to accurately record the history of our nation..."

OK then, let me do my bit to accurately record the history of our nation.  Let me go into those great internet archives with these words:

We should never have joined the Americans in that evil war.  The Afghanistan War was an act or retribution and revenge for another evil act.  An act that should have been dealt with very differently.  An act for which the Afghan people (who had nothing to do with al Qaeda) did not deserve to die in the hundreds of thousands.

America likes to think of itself as a Christian country and yet there is nothing Christian about waging war.  Especially a war driven by the lust for revenge and retribution.  And Australia's history is forever tarnished by our participation in that war.

It is a gross abuse of our soldiers' courage and trust to send them into wars they should not be sent into.  Our politicians, and the Generals who did their bidding, should be held in disgrace for having sent Australian soldiers into the following follies of America's self-serving foreign policy:

The Vietnam War
The First Gulf War
The Second Gulf War
The Afghanistan War

Let the history of our nation record this too, Prime Minister Gillard! 

And please stop telling all those lies, Prime Minister Gillard.  You're no better than John HoWARd and his war glorifying and war justifying predecessors.  STOP IT, PLEASE !!!

From Little Things Big Things Grow

"A RARE fire tornado has been witnessed near Thargomindah (Qld) where grassfires have been burning for days."

Full story here >>>

This got me thinking... 

Four thousand years ago, they'd call it God's wrath, and weave it into their story telling. 

One thousand  years later, someone would write it down and call it The Word Of God.  Another 1000 years later, the world's first recorded hippie, socialist revolutionary,  and proponent of non-violent political struggle, would go on a recruiting drive and try to expose a whole lot of crap being spoken in the name of an imagined, anthropomorphised "God" thingie which is said to have attitudes amazingly similar to the misogynistic, control-freak male leaders of that period.

The ruling clerics and their occupying Masters get spooked by the hippie and have the dude crucified.  But the power of the myth makers (today we call them historians) is strong, and stories are told of him being the Son of God, rising from the dead, and, in true General Macarthur style, he is said to have proclaimed "I shall return!".  It is not known whether or not he smoked a corncob pipe nor whether or not he wore aviator style sunglasses.

Two thousand years later George W. Bush imagines this anthropomorphised "God" thingie telling him to invade Iraq.  No one sections him, and a war crime of humungous proportions ensues.  No one arrests him or takes him to The Hague to answer charges.  He is American and is therefore above International Law.  That his mantra was "They must respect the Rule Of Law" is quickly forgotten by the historians weaving the next set of lies to be taught to unsuspecting school children in the future.

But I digress...

What Motivates Bloggers?

What is a blogger doing when s/he enables the comments facility on their blog?

I think such bloggers fall into one of the following categories:

[1] The Approval Seeker: "I will only allow those comments which agree with or praise my brilliantly intelligent and beautiful posts. My blog is a tool for my journey through life which I have decided is a popularity contest in which I must look good at all costs.  I like Facebook and Twitter."

[2] The Forum Moderator: "I will publish any reasonable, on-topic comment, whether it agrees with me or not. I wish to promote debate, not stifle it. Who knows, I may even learn something."

[3] The Desperado: "I will publish any comment, no matter how stupid, off-topic, vapid, or irrelevant. I am mesmerised by the comment count. The more comments my blog gets, the better my blog must be. I like Facebook and Twitter."

Feel free to submit more categories.

Global capitalism and 21st century fascism

William I. Robinson, a professor of sociology and global studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote an interesting and informative article including  the following topics:

#  Militarised accumulation, financial speculation - and the sacking of public budgets.

#  Responses to the crisis and Obama's Weimar republic in the United States.

#  21st century fascism in the United States.

#  The mortal circuit of accumulation-exploitation-exclusion.

Read the article here >>>

Do you understand now why "the left" must be demonised at all costs?

The Best Pollution Money Can Buy

Watching ABC's Media Watch last night, I think I learned a thing or two about the insanity behind Victoria's "green" electricity generation.

Fact 1:  Victoria has a bunch of wind farms generating a significant amount of clean, green electricity.

Fact 2:   Victoria uses very dirty brown coal in its electricity generators for their baseload supply.

Fact 3:   Victoria exports the electricity generated by the wind farms to South Australia and New South Wales.  Both SA and NSW use cleaner (but more expensive) black coal in their generators for their baseload supply.

If it was about making the biggest impact on reducing carbon pollution, you'd think Victoria would use their wind turbines to allow them to reduce the output from their very dirty brown coal generators, wouldn't you?

So why do they export it instead to SA and NSW?  "D'oh...it's the money, stupid!"   They get a bit more money from generators who can reduce the amount of black coal they consume. 

Carbon targets be damned!  It's about money!

And that reminds me of THIS >>>

Musings Of A Global Village Idiot

On the topic of Western "civilisation", recent and not so recent events have caused me to frequently grapple with the following questions and/or variants thereof:

[1]     Is the term still relevant to today's world?
[1a]   If so, what does it mean in today's world?
[1b]   If not, why not, and, what term should now be used to replace it?

[2]     Is "the West" the superior culture it claims to be, or is it inferior, or has it gone mad?

[3]     Should it be lauded or "dealt with"?

[4]     What should the response be from the rest of the world?

Discuss.

Lack of a sufficient number of intelligent responses over the next three months will result in this blog's closure and its removal from this interweb thingie.  That's right, I can't be bothered with a blog with which people do not interact or engage. Once again I say "use it, or lose it."

Waiting...

What's Gillard up to?

We're being kept in the dark - again.   Read this >>>

Patriot

The other day, whilst out on the highways riding my bike, a semi passed me going the other way.  As is the practice among the truck driver demographic, there was a perspex wind deflector mounted on the bonnet of the truck, proclaiming a message to the world.

And the message was:  "PATRIOT"

I was totally impressed.  A warm fuzzy feeling engulfed me as I experienced the realisation that Australia was in safe hands.

When I got home I googled "patriotism".

I think the best find was:    Global Patriot "patriotism without borders"   Well worth a read... 

Keeping You In The Dark About Agent Orange

... and a whole rainbow of Dioxin Agents Of Death sprayed on Vietnam by the US during it's "war of liberation".

From 1961 to 1971 over 77 million litres of herbicide were dispensed over southern Viet Nam by the US military through the code-named ‘Operation Ranch Hand’[...]. The Vietnamese reported early on during the operation that human health was being adversely affected by widespread dispersal of defoliants. Agent Orange, a 1:1 mixture of 2,4,-D and 2,4,5-T, was the most prevalent herbicide used [...].  (read more >>>)

They sprayed the countryside.

They sprayed the rice paddies.

They sprayed the water supplies. 

It was chemical warfare.  And it has now left a legacy of four and a half million Vietnamese, most of them  deformed children of those who lived in the sprayed areas.

One of the often quoted "reasons" for the US invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on his own people, killing around five thousand.

So, d'oh... why doesn't the US now invade itself?

But I digress...

Last Wednesday, the Governor of New South Wales, Her Excellency Professor Marie Bashir, and the Vietnam Consul General Mai Phuoc Dung, and the Vietnamese Ambassador Hoang Vinh Thanh, and playwright and actress Kate Mulvany, attended the opening of an art exhibition held to raise funds for the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.   It was a well attended event with over 300 people turning up.

Kate Mulvany, who suffered from her father's exposure to Agent Orange while he served in the Australian Army in Vietnam, read extracts from her play "The Seed".

As part of the extensive publicity disseminated about this event, all of the major print, radio, and TV media outlets were sent press releases notifying them of this event well in advance.

NOT ONE OF THEM ATTENDED !!!

SHAME, SHAME, SHAME !!!

Graffiti

Lachlan Ridge sent me this.  I think he was prompted by a previous post here.

BTW, Lachlan's doing it tough at the moment, so he's a bit too distracted to post here at the moment.   I hope things pick up for him soon.

When No News Is Too Much News

The following was a Channel 10  newsbreak a few minutes ago:

"Sydney's coldest morning in a year!"

D'oh...

Really?

You mean it was just as cold this time last year?

Is that Gina Rinehart's idea of news?

Training The Taliban

What if the Taliban's strategy is as follows:  As each insane act by the NATO troops and each senseless drone attack  drives large numbers of new recruits towards the Taliban, these recruits are encouraged to join the Afghan National Army.

Think about it.

The NATO mentors would  be training the Taliban, arming the Taliban, clothing the Taliban, feeding the Taliban, paying the Taliban, and sheltering the Taliban.

Now tell me that this is not a strategy the Taliban are employing.

Open Season On The Greens

During a dinner conversation last night a friend expressed the opinion that the Greens were to blame for the failure of the offshore processing (of asylum seeker "boat people") legislation to get enacted.

He is a typical victim of Tony Abbott's Liberal Party spin machine. He has been sucked in by Abbott's "blame the Greens" rhetoric.

The Libs could easily have agreed to the Gillard government's Malaysia-Nauru compromise offer, and thus the Greens' "intransigence" would not even remotely have been able to prevent the legislation being enacted.   It would have been an example of bipartisan compromise.

This entire "blame the Greens" hysteria ignores the fact that no major policy back-down was required for Tony Abbott to agree to the legislation.

The Greens, for their part, were merely being true to their long-established onshore processing policy.

Thus, to blame the Greens is to be sucked in by Tony Abbott's Greens-bashing tactics.

Wake up, Australia, the problem is not the Greens, it's Tony Abbott.

Be careful what you vote for - you might get it...

A Free Range Philosopher Rants

 I offered this up when asked why I cancelled my subscription to a left wing publication:

...all I wish to say is that I'm more of a free range philosopher than a politician, and left wing politics, as far as I've been able to discern, is just as toxic as right wing politics. 
Two things in particular stick in my craw:
[1]   I find Anarchism (in all of its manifestations of shiny, smooth rhetoric) to be too destructive to be of any good.  In more than nine years of rubbing shoulders with left wingers I've not been able find one who can give me satisfactory answers to my questions about it.    All I ever get is dismissive, evasive, and glibly supercilious sophistry.  And dogma.  I get tons of dogma. 
[2]   Political non-violence is a "core value" of mine.  I can find only lip service to this concept whenever I dig deeply into the mutterings of those on the left with whom I have been engaged.  All manner of rationalisations, justifications and hypocrisy emerge when discussing this topic.  I am still a "lefty" at heart, but I have lost all hope in the left as a viable political force capable of toppling the right without it surrendering the temptations of violent revolution.    And violent political action is something to which I will never lend my support.   The power of the teachings of Jesus and Gandhi are dismissed derisively as being naiive by those who cling to the idea that political violence can be justified.   The devastating power of non-violence as an absolute political strategy by a mass movement is not fully understood by the dominant ideologues on the left (or the right, for that matter).

They probably have no clue as to what I'm talking about.   All the more reason to stop buying their rag.

War with Iran before November 6?

 Well, this guy thinks so:  >>>

Agent Orange and Agent Blue

A poem by Denis Kevans:

Agent Orange and Agent Blue,
We make real good things for you.
Sweat and slog in mud and slime,
Lots of unpaid overtime.
Planes fly past us every day
Trailing a lovely, misty spray.
All the way from the USA,
All the way with LBJ.

Sweating skin, and nightmares, too.
Agent Orange and Agent Blue.
Agent Orange and Agent White
Wish that I could sleep at night.
What was that the doctor says?
 Somethin's wrong with the baby, Les.
 Agent Orange and Agent Blue,
 Now we know what you can do.
You stripped the leaves from off the trees,
You poisoned the Vietnamese.

Tell me why, and tell me how,
Tell me nothin’, Mr. Dow.
Hitler had another way,
Brought the people to the spray.
Come on Aussie, you’re the pea,
The only white who’ll fight for me.
Tell me how, and tell me why,  ...
Tell me why they had to die?

Agent Orange and Agent Mal,
Thanks for all your help, old pal.
Look at the lovely misty spray,
All the way from the USA.
All the way with LBJ,
All the way to the judgement day.

And...

As John Pilger reports*:  "In 1970, a US Senate report revealed that "the US has dumped [on South Vietnam] a quantity of toxic chemical amounting to six pounds per head of population, including woman and children". The code-name for this weapon of mass destruction, Operation Hades, was changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand. Today, an estimated 4.8 million victims of Agent Orange are children."


*But wait...  there's more!  So much more!  >>>

What Would Jesus Say?

As some of you might have guessed by now, I have a wee bee in my bonnet about the Vietnam war.

As a result, I have, in the past, found myself receiving psychiatric treatment and psychological counselling from a government approved and funded treatment facility called St John Of God Hospital run by a tentacle of the Catholic church.

As a result of this past association, I receive, at about this time every year, an invitation to a gathering of veterans at said hospital.  Here are excerpts from this year's invite:

"You are warmly invited" ( to their Vietnam Veterans Day) "Service of Celebration"

"We look forward to sharing this important celebration with you."

They requested I send them an RSVP email.  So I did.  This is what I said:

Dear RSVP,

I would be pleased to attend, but alas, only in the role of guest reader of the sermon at your "Service of Celebration" on 2 August 2012.

Here is a summary of the sermon I would deliver:

==============================================

Celebrating the killing of four million people, most of them civilians, in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, in what has rightly been called The American War.

Celebrating our erstwhile government's toadying up to the American Empire by sending our troops into that war.   

Celebrating the Christian churches' tacit (and sometimes not so tacit) support for this war, their blessing of the troops, and their celebration of those poor sods' "service" (to a foreign power) every Anzac Day, Veterans Day, and Remembrance Day.

Celebrating the 500 dead Aussies.

Celebrating the thousands of Aussies wounded.

Celebrating the tens of thousands of Aussies psychologically scarred for the rest of their lives.
 
Meditating upon the teachings of Jesus.  (A reading of the Sermon On The Mount would precede this.)

Meditating upon what Jesus might say about the evils of capitalism and the beauty of socialism.

Meditating upon what Jesus might say about all this celebrating and justifying and glorifying of war.

Meditating upon what Jesus might say to the Christian churches making millions (from the public coffers)  from the treatment and care of veterans of wars the churches failed to adequately oppose.

===============================================

The sermon would then be followed by a rousing rendition of Onward Christian Soldiers during which the veterans would be encouraged to jangle their war medals to simulate the sound of tambourine accompaniment.

Please let me know soonest regarding my offer of reading the sermon.

Happy celebrating, guys.

Gerry (......)
Vietnam veteran and peace activist.

Requiem For George

Last November my partner and I bought our tickets for this year's Blue Mountains Concert Society's programme.  One of the performances we (she) had chosen to experience was by the Sydney Chamber Choir.

Yesterday, realising that we were going to that event in the evening, I decided to familiarise myself a bit with what we were in for.  So I threw myself into the interwebs, and thus the penny dropped about why the venue chosen for this event was a Catholic Church.  It was to be a performance featuring Duruflé's Requiem.

Well, as long-time readers of this blog would know, on a good day I'm an agnostic and on a bad day I'm an atheist, so when I saw that I was in for an evening of listening to liturgy and funeral music in a Catholic Church, I went nuts.   At first.  And then the second penny dropped.

Last Wednesday, George, a friend, passed away.   What better way to reflect on the memory of George than during a Requiem Mass designed to assist the spirit's passage to the eternal light. 

Æternam habeas requiem.  May you have eternal rest, George.

Like Paradise

On the ABC news last night, an Aussie soldier being interviewed about the conditions on Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan, uttered this gem:

"It's like paradise really.  We've got KFC, and F-18's flying overhead."

Tragically, I could not detect even a hint of irony when he said that.  The guy appeared to mean it, 100%.

Is that the level of intellect we're now recruiting into our army?  Then again, that's probably the level of dumbness you need in order to convince them that the Afghanistan war is:-

[1]   Necessary.
[2]   In Australia's best interests.
[3]   Good for the Afghan people.

I was equally dumb when I believed the exact same crap fed to me about the Vietnam war.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.