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Letters Archive July - December 2012
[Re Life's a
gas for award-winning Kim, Dec 19, '12] Nate Thayer's piece is
back-handed praise of Kim Jong-eun. Although the hackers and papers like "The
Onion" can poke fun at the 29-year-old leader of North Korea, the man has
proved his mettle in his one year in office.
A year ago, the readers of tea leaves had come up with dire predictions on what
the "kid" - as Pyongyang watcher Leon Sigal called him - would do. And such
forecasts have gone the way of all flesh. Now incoming South Korean President
Park Geun-hye in South Korea will have to go to Pyongyang to deal with Kim
Jong-eun, or invite him to Seoul. Either way, it is an admission of the failure
of the Lee Myung-bak regime.
Nakamura Juno
Guam (Dec 21, '12)
[Re Abe will be firm but
flexible on Senkakus, Dec 19, '12] Recent events, such as the
surprising dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in the Japanese
election and the posturing of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe both before and after
the election, lead one to conclude that Japan as a nation, its political and
social elites in particular, are still living and thinking a generation in the
past. They still dream in the old paradigm - that Japan is a heavyweight in
global economic and political affairs. How soon does one forget that LDP's
devastating loss in 2009 was precisely because they were viewed as the
impediment in the China/Japan relations, and that the Democratic Party of Japan
(DPJ) was counted on to clear the slate and start things over again.
The clumsiness of the DPJ in managing the disaster and foreign affairs
manifested their gross incompetence and busted that wishful bubble, and now
they are back to square one. So Japan feels all it needs to do is be flexible
but firm, and that the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands will de facto become Japanese
territory over time?
What arrogance and delusion! Its time to wake up to the fact that Japan doesn't
call the shots any more, not even in the limited arena of the Asia-Pacific. Its
China's call now to be flexible or not, or be antagonistic to make life
difficult for you. Military and economic alliance with the bloated and decaying
US doesn't matter no squash. Indications are China's new political and
strategic agenda have changed away from one of appeasement. Antagonists be
prepared to face the logical consequences.
Chenliyen
USA (Dec 20, '12)
[Re: School deaths
terror's dark twin, Dec 18, '12] Deeply tragic as the assassinations of
school children and teachers at Sandy Hook school are, Spengler omits the
salient fact that Newton, Connecticut is the home of the National Shooting
Sports Foundation. Newton has many shooting ranges for assault weapons
shooting. In fact, gun advocates defeated any town initiatives to "control
guns", according to the New York Times Online.
It may be cruel to observe that the chickens have come home to roost,
tragically.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Dec 19, '12)
[Re: US must
strip costs, Dec 18, '12] For the US, competing against low-cost Asian
economies doesn't have to be a race-to-the-bottom proposition; that is, if
freewheeling capitalism isn't the dominant economic system du jour.
Unfortunately, my all-knowing parakeet tells me that unfettered capitalism is
here to stay, likely for a long while. On that cheerful note, happy holidays to
all.
John Chen
USA (Dec 19, '12)
Western political writers have often written in recent years of the possibility
that the Chinese state will collapse and the country will return to the chaos
of the Warlord era. Francisco Sisci's "World
won't wait for China to change" [Dec 14, 12] is a superior example. Yet
the US is at least as vulnerable as China and for similar reasons. Billy Tea,
in his "China's leaders face stark challenges" [Dec 14, 12], could easily
change "China" to "the US" and re-publish his article without other changes.
Lester Ness
Kunming
China (Dec 18, '12)
In Kim Jong-eun should
fear Sunshine [Dec 14, 12], Andrei Lankov tries to convince us that
engagement with North Korea is good and the benefits outweigh the downside.
However, for over 10 years from 1998-2008 South Korea engaged in the Sunshine
Policy with the North where they provided the North with between US$7-10
billion in aid, and for this aid they received absolutely nothing not even a
thank you. It is also quite possible that this aid kept North Korea from
collapse, thus ensuring the people of the North many more years in hell. It
also allowed the North to build weapons to kill the people of South Korea. The
people of North Korea already know the truth about the Kim Regime from smuggled
mass media from South Korea not personal contact with South Koreans and also
from the hundreds of thousands of North Koreans who have been to China.
The Kim regime exists because of the terror it can inflict on the people of the
North and their family members. Lankov calls parliamentarian Im Su-gyong a
"moderate sympathizer of the North Korean regime", who when confronted by a
North Korean defector this past June called the man a traitor. Im Su-gyong then
spoke out against a former leftist student activist, Ha Tae-Kyung, who is now
concerned with North Korean human-rights abuses and called him a betrayer who
she wishes she could kill with her own hand, and this behavior comes from a
member of the South Korean National Assembly.
In a recent AP story Lankov told David Chance that the US would have to provide
"bundles of cash" to North Korea in exchange for the North slowing down its
nuclear and missile work, thankfully that will never happen. The US reached an
agreement last February to provide food aid in exchange for a moratorium on
nuclear and missile work and a return of IAEA inspectors and the North broke
the agreement in less than two weeks. The US should hold China responsible for
its propping up of the Kim regime. Also if the South Koreans elect a person
like Im Su-gyong it is time for the US to leave South Korea. Why should the
American people pay to defend South Korea, given the growing anti-American
sentiment and especially if the leftist Moon Jae-In wins the election on
Wednesday? However, the Obama foreign policy seems to be, do nothing and hope
for the best - if you can call that a policy.
Dennis O'Connell
USA (Dec 17, '12)
[Re Kim Jong-eun should
fear Sunshine, Dec 14, 12] Presidential candidate Park Geun-hye has
already been to Pyongyang. In fact, there is a well known photo of her with the
late Kim Jong-il. We cannot say the same for President Lee Myung bak.
If Park ascends to the Blue House, better relations between North and South may
occur. Still, she has to deal with her American ally who remains firm in its
opposition to any softening of positions with Pyongyang unless it agrees to
Washington's terms.
North Koreans are not so isolated that have scant knowledge of South Korea. In
fact, they do follow, albeit secretly at times, the South's soap melodramas on
DVD, know its music, and even fashions.
To posit as Andrei Lankov does that better relations with Mme Park's government
will sow the seeds of discontent may be too optimistic. After all, the "golden
years" of the "Sunshine Policy" established patterns which did trickle down to
the people of the North. We are not dealing with year zero in dealing with
Pyongyang. It seems it is a case of picking up dropped stitches after the end
of the Lee presidency.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Dec 17, '12)
'Tis the season for neocon hysteria, fah la la la la la. Yes, sports fans,
Christmas time is here and that means the evangelical TeaBagging
pseudo-Christians are once again loudly banging the drums about the liberal
"War on Christmas." The Fox-in-Henhouse Nitwitwork is all aflutter about how
those tree-huggin' Free Love hippie types are running to and fro demanding that
taxpayer funded Christmas decorations be taken down and how their religion is
under siege by that darn liberal media and how they all feel like they're one
Obama Rose Garden mandate from being crucified themselves like their Lord and
Savior.
Of course, like everything else in the WonderCon universe, it's all a lot of
hooey. By any measure, in the "War on Christmas" has been overwhelmingly won by
Santa, Rudolf the Red State reindeer, et al. For decades, Christmas decorations
typically didn't go up until after Thanksgiving, but now Halloween is the start
date for all those anxious retailers trying to climb out of insolvency. As the
Great Depression deepens, fiscal cliff or no, watch for Christmas decorations
to be on display continuously, 24/7/365. If there ever was a War, Christmas
used nukes and its opponents water pistols.
But like all things neocon, reality is irrelevant and inconvenient. The self
victimization and persecution complex that the average white trash conservative
indulges in is what the psychologists label projection, the imposition of the
sins the projector is guilty of onto his victims. So all the hypocrisy,
discrimination and intolerance that the average WASP has exercised over
minorities for decades is reversed and subsumed within the victimizer, using a
forum, Christianity, that they perceive as their domain alone (after all, Jesus
was a tall, blue-eyed, blonde Aryan.)
In a sense, however, these Anglo-Saxons are presaging the future, a future
where they are increasingly diminishing in majority, influence and power. They
are anticipating a day when electoral blowouts like occurred in November are
the ho hum norm and they are relegated to actual compromise and negotiation,
unheard of capitulations not so long ago. So the fact that they are lamenting
Christmas' demise is a loose metaphor for their eclipse as a sociopolitical
force. Neocons are not literally being nailed to crosses but I'm almost certain
that that outcome wouldn't be nearly as painful for them as seeing another
minority elected to the Not-So-White House Anymore.
Merry Christmas
H Campbell
Texas (Dec 17, '12)
Francesco Sisci's article "World
won't wait for China to Change" [Dec 13, 2012] is well-written and
informative, as usual. But he makes a common error by calling American policy
toward China "containment".
If the idea is that the US is trying to contain the growing global influence of
China, then it contradicts every cultural, educational, and economic exchange
between the US and China for the past 30 years. Writers almost always
overemphasize the military aspects of the relationship, and thereby misconstrue
US strategy. They don't realize that the obsessive search for more military
bases and overflight rights is actually an insurance policy.
The slow process of the Chinese renewing their humanity, after decades of
socialist and collectivist dehumanization, is making a repeat of their
Mao-inspired brutality less likely. But this is still a one-party dictatorship,
with no transparency, no accountability, and no meaningful means of redress for
everyday Chinese. It's still the type of system that is capable of horror of
incredible scope.
It would be an act of stupefying naivete for the world to forget what the
Chinese have done to their own people. Yang Jisheng, author of The Great Chinese
Famine, 1958-1962, concluded that Mao's insane collectivist policies
caused 36 million Chinese to starve to death in a mere four years (Imagine, as
Yang wrote, death on a scale 450 times greater than that of the American
bombing of Nagasaki).
And, of course, the unbelievable horror did not end there. There were the
diabolical attempts to dismantle the family as a social unit. And the mass
hysteria of the Cultural Revolution was still to come. There is another, more
pernicious, interpretation of the Sino-American relationship that Sisci, to his
credit, seems to discredit as the utter idiocy that it is: That Chinese
inhumanity toward fellow Chinese is somehow the fault of Western influence, be
it Marxism, or capitalism, or Hollywood.
Interestingly, this is almost entirely a Western conceit - a sort of psychosis
of political progressives that is, in part, a subtle form of anti-Chinese
racism. This racism manifests itself in an oft-repeated pattern of describing
the West's relationship with the East, or the North with the South. For
example, when you read that some nation is ruled by a "puppet regime", and the
puppeteer is the US; or that Americans, or the West in general, are responsible
for another nation's crimes against humanity, what you are really seeing is the
author of these sentiments denying other races and nationalities "agency" - the
ability to think and act for themselves.
This is how progressives think that they are showing sympathy and camaraderie
toward their Cuban, North Korean, Palestinian, or Chinese "brothers", when they
are actually slapping them in the face. One often hears their obsequious
apologies for the failures of the North Koreans and Cubans, for example, as
being due to American unwillingness to normalize relations with them.
What an insult to the Cubans and North Koreans! It implies that they are
incapable of success without the help of the Yankees, who represent only a
small fraction of the global population. The Chinese, to their credit, don't
appear to be buying into this Western leftist claptrap. They understand that
they alone are responsible for the glories and ignominies of their past. And it
is they, and they alone, who are responsible for their future - an
unpredictable future, fraught with great promise and great risk, for all.
Geoffrey Sherwood
USA (Dec 14, '12)
December is an important month in world history, and not just because the
Mayans supposedly made a big deal about it or some Roman dude decided it would
make a good month for Christmas festivities. For Russia in particular, the 12th
month has special significance. In 1825 a group of Russian intellectuals
decided December would be a good time to conspire against the Tsar, while in
December 1979 the geriatrics in the Kremlin opted for a looong Afghan vacation.
Of course, who can forget the USSR's dissolution in December of 1991? And this
December 30 will the 90th anniversary of the Soviet Union's formal creation as
a sovereign state in 1922.
OK. So what? Why even bother acknowledging such an event, and such a loser of a
society, one that collapsed from exhaustion and internal contradictions while
trying to compete with the capitalist winners?
Well, believe it or not, the legacy of that extinct country has been profound
and long lasting to this very day. The ideals of national liberation and social
egalitarianism that the Soviet Union embodied inspired workers and countries to
fight for their freedom from exploitation. The USSR walked the walk in its
financial, military and diplomatic support for the likes of Namibia, Angola and
Mozambique in their independence struggles against racist white regimes. Nelson
Mandela himself has acknowledged the Soviet Union's vital role in ending South
African apartheid, a racist system the US propped up for decades.
Mind you, this support for liberation succeeded despite the best exertions of
the imperialists, led by the USA, to impede, frustrate and delay the
inevitable, all in the interest of racism, profits and Cold War dominoes. And
in an indirect way, the pressure that Soviet propaganda and support for freedom
of the colored peoples of the world imposed on a apartheid Jim Crow Amerika
cannot be dismissed as inconsequential either. It is no coincidence that,
during the 50s, when Khrushchev made supporting Third World revolution a Soviet
priority, that the first halting steps to dismantle segregation began in the
Old South.
Emboldened by the rising tide of social and political changes sponsored by the
USSR, black Americans sought the same liberation that their brethren in the
Third World were now enjoying. No coincidence that racist WonderWhites were
quick to damn the civil rights movement as a "communist plot." In the sense
that communism everywhere condemned Amerikan racism and encouraged its defeat,
the neocons were absolutely spot on.
Other nations were helped also in achieving the freedom Amerikans talked in
theory about all the time but did everything they could in practice to defeat.
The invaluable support provided to Vietnam enabled that small country to oust a
reactionary stooge regime, defeat the so-called US "superpower" and unify a
nation after a century of colonial oppression. Similarly, the tiny island of
Cuba, newly liberated from decades of neo-colonial subjugation and
exploitation, was able to survive decades of terrorist attacks and economic
embargoes by the United States, provide free education and health care for its
citizens and even export doctors and nurses to aid their fellow Third Worlders.
Both countries continue to inspire a Third World still bedeviled by capitalist
subversion.
Soviet accomplishments in science, most notably Sputnik and the space race,
stimulated education, engineering and scientific advancements in Wonderland
that would otherwise have languished without the paranoia and Duck 'n Cover
propaganda of the Cold War. Indeed, once the Soviet bogeyman disappeared,
Amerikan interest in science education was replaced by neo-con "Christian"
skepticism about secular science, with the subsequent deterioration in
Amerika's once vaunted lead in the sciences.
Consequently, perhaps no one misses the old Soviet Union more than us
Wonderlanders, since the current zeitgeist of seeking enemies under our
mattresses and frothing at the mouth about "socialism" was born during that
ideological struggle. Not that we haven't tried finding substitutes, But let's
face it; in the competition to Scare-the-BeJesus-Out-of-Poughkeepsie, a ragtag
gang of turbaned, bearded Muslim villains hiding in caves can't match May Day
parades in Red Square with hundreds of missiles and tanks and thousands of high
steppin' Red soldiers. Oh yes, and there's one more legacy I would be remiss in
not remembering.
The disastrous 1979 intervention into Afghanistan (another December event),
itself a symptom of the USSR's terminal illness, became a necessary segue for
yet another superpower's fruitless adventure in that morass. So, in a very real
way, the Soviet Union didn't disappear; it just morphed into a disappearing
Wonderland.
H Campbell
Texas
In the rhetoric of Empire, words are all-important commodities. They symbolize
the values and philosophies of the imperial zeitgeist instantaneously, with
nary a need for grandiose, high falutin' definitions. They are subliminal codes
that register in the superficial part of the brain as something noble and
praiseworthy and in the part that represents true personality, they register as
the sinister and malign. The Words of imperialism seduce their audience into
zigging while the Empire zags.
Take for instance the Patriot Act. The name implies that its intent is to
promote that noblest of values, selfless devotion to Amerika and Amerikans; how
could anyone be against that? The reality is that the Patriot Act allows the
suspension of constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties that are the bedrock
of Americanism. Naturally the truth belies the title, but the power of words in
Wonderland is such that the details where that ol' Debil lies is overshadowed
by the soothing character of the All Powerful Word. Perhaps that explains why
Amerikans are so willing to surrender that which they supposedly are fighting
"terrorists" to defend.
Another one that I love is "Right to Work", the laws increasingly proliferating
throughout the Empire whereby employers have the right to fire workers without
cause. Notice the operative Words here, "Right to FIRE". But if these laws were
identified by what they really meant, who would be in favor of that? Certainly
not the unions that exist to protect workers from punitive retaliatory firings
because they insist on trivia like health, safety and a fair wage. The entire
purpose of these Republikan-sponsored laws, whose title implies benefits to the
workers, is to undermine worker's right entirely and permit companies to
maximize their profits while reducing workers to chattel status.
In face, there are so many examples of WonderWords whose dictionary definitions
are the complete opposite of what the usage of the Words intends. "Pax
Americana" is another rich one being bandied about by historians these days. A
Latin word meant to invoke the peace imposed on the post-World War II world by
Amerikan economic and military domination, in reality that "Pax" defined an
unending series of wars, invasions, coups, assassinations and genocides
perpetrated by the Empire to prop up its capitalist exploitations.
The irony here is that historians are using the term in reference to the
passing of the Pax Americana as Wonderland's day in the sun sets on the
horizon, implying, I suppose, that the "peace" will end when our hegemonic
status does. In truth, when the Empire does collapse, true peace will probably
break out all over the globe as Wonderland's ability to spew violent mayhem and
death vanishes with its prosperity.
The use of euphemisms to deceive the unwary of Wonderland's true intentions is,
of course, as old as the country itself. Its Declaration of Independence
promised freedom for all men, when, in fact, only a very narrow definition of
"men" was the reality. The word "freedom" itself is so engrained in the
parroting mantra of the average Wonderlander that its meaning or validity is
besides the point. The birdbrain that squawks the Word doesn't need to know
what it means, only that it gets the cracker of social approbation.
So, when the end comes and the Empire is thrown onto the trash heap of history,
the pundits will proudly call that maggot-infested pile of junk "Paradise on
earth".
H Campbell
Texas (Dec 13, '12)
[Re: Doomsday phobia
hits China, Dec 11, '12] In trhe late 1990s, there was a big interest
in Nostradamus' books, supposedly predicting the End of Days in 1999. Perhaps
this is more US influence? Americans love prophecies about the End of Days, and
Mayan Calendar ideas have been all over the US blogosphere.
Lester Ness
Kunming
China (Dec 13, '12)
[Re Mongolia nurtures
ties with North Korea, Dec 12, '12] Mongolia is well placed to act as
facilitator in northeast Asia. As a former Comecom member and communist country
on the road to democracy and liberal economics, it has maintained good
relations with North and South Korea, Japan and China and Russia. Ulaanbaatar
is a useful back channel for these countries who more oft than not are at drawn
daggers.
Despite the successful launch of North Korea's long range missile Unha 3,
contact between Pyongyang and Tokyo, albeit it strained, will continue.
In contrast, in looking at the New York Korea Society's website, its president,
Mark Minton, is a former US ambassador to Mongolia and South Korea. His
assistant and the Society's program director have strong ties to Mongolia. One
would think that the Korea Society could play a better role in using Mongolia
as a way to talk to North Korea. Alas, it simply gets its marching orders from
Washington and Seoul.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Dec 13, '12)
[Re Hamas at 25:
Beyond the tired language, Dec 11, 2012 ] Ramzy Baroud is spot on:
Hamas cannot get a fair hearing in mainstream Western media. It tires the ear
to listen to, say, the endless tiresome words of Shimon Peres on Hamas or the
Palestinians. The BBC did us a favor by allowing a high-ranking Israeli general
to express glaring thoughts on "Operation Pillar of Freedom" which had no basis
in reality.
How long can the Israeli propaganda mill rely on a supine Western media?
Germany's abstention during the UN elevation of Palestine to a non member state
is telling enough. Although Khaled Meshaal has treated the move cavalierly
during his heady peroration in Gaza on Hamas quarter century, it has conferred
legitimacy on his movement along with its resistance to Israel's recent
blitzkrieg.
If Israel desires recognition by Hamas, it is going to have to prove its
sincerity by concrete actions. Given the Zionist state's insistence in gobbling
up Palestinian lands, that won't happen. As a result, the Palestinians - Fateh
and Hamas - will draw closer and Israel will hunker down in a ghetto of its own
choosing.
Ultimately, the US has its back, but that friendship is costly.
Abraham Bin Yiju
Palermo (Dec 12, '12)
[Re Q3 2012
Flow of Funds , Dec 10, '12] The recent mainstream media-promulgated
hoopla regarding a housing recovery has been quite puzzling, to say the least.
What data are the "experts" looking at? With persistently high unemployment
which will be exacerbated by the gradual bleeding of white-collar jobs,
stagnant wages, eventual interest-rate rises and a host of other factors, seems
to me US home prices will continue to experience tremendous downward pressure
moving forward. In finance, things rarely go up or down in a straight line; an
occasional/sporadic uptick in the home price or selling activity does not a
general recovery make. But then again, people are entitled to hope and fantasy,
I guess.
John Chen
USA (Dec 11, '12)
With Mayan Doomsday approaching on December 21, alleviating any concerns about
Christmas shopping at least, we can collectively ponder our proclivity for The
End. It's all the rage on WonderTV these last days; programs devoted to all the
ways The End can occur (asteroids, volcanoes, gamma ray bursts and the like)
and "reality" interviews with grizzled survivalists stockpiling beer and
ammunition are advertiser's delights, hoping viewers will use these apocalyptic
warnings as incentives to buy, buy, buy before The End of Buying comes. End
Times predictions, Bible-thumping evangelicals roaring on the repentance pulpit
and Hollywood planet-busting blockbusters bang the drums of doom loudly and
often for profit and publicity. What seems to have snuck under everyone's
radars is an old doomsday bogeyman that went out of style in the 90s; global
thermonuclear war.
With the USSR's collapse and our "victory" in the Cold War, the anxiety of
nuclear war vanished overnight, apparently justified by the lack of an
ideological conflict. But intentional nuclear war was never in the cards even
during the darkest days of that 45 odd year struggle; both sides knew the very
real potential for national if not planetary suicide. That does not, however,
mean that war could not have started inadvertently, and during the Cold War and
even after, numerous accidents, false alarms and technical crises have brought
us perilously close to such "glitch extinction". The history of the US Air
Force's SAC (Strategic Air Command) is rife with "broken arrows", ie, nukes
lost or damaged by aviation mishaps, some which came disturbingly close to
detonating on home soil. If even one of those had exploded, the chances that
such an event would have been interpreted as a Soviet first strike
necessitating immediate all-out retaliation would have been extremely high,
given the prevailing "use 'em or lose 'em" logic.
And the USSR had its own share of dangerous mishaps. In post-Cold War 1995 a
besotted Boris Yeltsin was told that the US had launched a missile headed
towards Russia and he was minutes away from launching a revenge strike before
he was told the radar signal was that of a Norwegian weather satellite launch
(the Northern Lights incident). Not to mention the even more dubious nuclear
safeguards being taken by neophytes like North Korea and Pakistan with their
temperamental leaders and age-old animosities. And with aging nuclear
infrastructures, questionable personnel motivation and competence,
deteriorating military budgets and the basic human tendency to muck things up
at the worst possible moment, one should ponder the likelihood of an undetected
mid-sized meteor crashing into the Amerikan heartland and being interpreted as
being a nuclear-tipped ICBM launched from China. On the bright side, that would
be one way of avoiding the fiscal cliff.
H Campbell
Texas USA (Dec 11, '12)
The recent murder-suicide of an American pro football player and his child's
mother has prompted the usual superficial soul searching and head scratching
amongst sports pundits, social commentators and media talking heads.
The murder weapon itself, a firearm, prompted an ill-advised exercise of free
speech by one well-known cognoscenti who opined on the need for gun control in
a country that prizes its "right to bear arms" second constitutional amendment
far more than its wimpy first. Another well-meaning type authored an op-ed
piece about how macho gridiron heroes refuse to discuss their inner turmoils
and thus eventually explode in violence, the basic coin of their profession.
While all of these opinions have merit to some degree, they dance around the
fundamental root issue; Amerika and Amerikans cannot exist without violence. It
defines us, shapes us, inspires us. Violence is not just the first solution to
a problem; it is the ONLY solution. Violence makes America virile, manly,
strong, sexy and dominant, and don't think for a minute that WonderWomen don't
ascribe to this philosophy too; former VP nominee Sarah Palin's rifle-toting
photos were her most popular and effective campaign tools. The nation was born
in a violent "revolution". We fought a bloody fratricidal war over an issue,
slavery, that the rest of the world managed to resolve without war. We can
manufacture nothing anymore save for weapons and instruments of violence and
export them to anyone on earth for a profit.
The ease which we wage war with the flimsiest of excuses or rationalization is
matched only by the ease with which we allow guns to define freedom and
democracy. That's why the above-mentioned sportscaster who opined on gun
control was met with coordinated howls and demands for his head by white trash
NRA-card-carrying TeaBaggers looking for freedom-destroying liberals and their
blue helmeted UN-One World thought-police lurking behind every second amendment
criticism.
The fact that school shootings are now accepted as commonplace as pep rallies
speaks volumes about how Amerikans accept violence as almost a daily routine
now. The lack of news about the slaughters in Iraq and Afghanistan likewise
denotes how humdrum and routine we Wonderlanders have now woven violence into
the everyday fabric of our existences; it's simply not newsworthy anymore to
show explosions, shootings or mass killings, especially of foreign heathen
brown people, for Heaven's sake.
Try watching TV here and not seeing recruiting commercials by the Army, Navy
and Marines praising Amerika's ability to kill and maim with little or no fuss
or muss. Executions are more popular than ever, though mounting evidence points
to many of the executed being innocent of their alleged capital crimes. Abuse
of women and children are at all-time highs as men lose jobs, take drugs or
alcohol to forget their loss of manliness and then take out their impotence on
their weak loved ones. Returning vets from the illegal Wonderwars resort to
violence, murder and suicide to relief the demons their country subjected them
to.
Bullying and hazing of children are epidemic in schools, with the brutalities
increasing in violence and lethality. Saturday morning cartoons for children
routinely show bloody battles and gruesome deaths of "imaginary" bad guys.
Gridiron football's massive popularity stems from its "controlled" violence,
which inevitably, as demonstrated by the recent tragedy, spills over into their
player's personal lives. Crowds at auto racing events can't wait for the
inevitable crashes. And any film that aspires to popularity here had better
have its quota of explosions, shootings and violent mayhem amply filled if it
wants to keep WonderAudiences awake.
But the one thing Wonderlanders do NOT want to be reminded of is the
consequence of their promiscuous love affair with violence, much like a
philanderer would rather not think of STDs, pregnancies, broken hearts or
shotgun-wielding irate husbands. So you won't see the coffins of Amerikan men
and women being carried off transport planes fresh from the Middle East (and
forget about ever seeing native people's dead bodies). In all likelihood your
violent movies will show only the bare minimum of blood or death (but lots of
wrecked cars and buildings.) Executions will remain untelevised events so we
can sleep better about wrongful state murders. Camera crews at school massacre
sites studiously avoid televising any sign of carnage.
But why should Amerikan violence without repercussions surprise anyone? In a
country where cheating, stealing and lying are viewed as acceptable behavior as
long as you don't get caught, and even when you do you can always blame
society, drugs or the short-changing tooth fairy, violence is probably the
purest zero sum game there is at deciding who wins out in Amerika's Darwinian
universe. But we only want to see the winners; bloody beaten losers no longer
exist.
H Campbell
Texas USA (Dec 10, '12)
"If China thinks they can take on the world and win, they might want to call
Germany and ask them how that worked out for them." - Dennis O'Connell [Dec 6,
12]
I believe it's the USA that spent the last 60 years trying (and failing) to
conquer the world, and destroying itself in the process. China need only wait,
perhaps poke the tiger in the pit once in a while.
Lester Ness
Kunming
China (Dec 7, '12)
A recent World Bank report (done by the Potsdam Institute) states that we are
on course for a four degree centigrade increase in the global mean by 2060; and
Professor Kevin Anderson (an adviser to the British government on climate
matters) not only agrees with this, but suggests that it is likely to mean that
90% of the world's population will be culled by the various phenomena
associated with global warming by that time.
Yet - incredibly!! - the world's leaders seem oblivious of these projections -
which may turn out to be excessively conservative, if the past is any guide to
this. In my essay I note that Freud, in his 1920 book, referred to a "death
instinct"- which I reject in my essay, in favor of a non-biological
explanation. But certainly the behavior of our leaders is consistent with a
"death instinct." Perhaps you don't find this troubling, but I certainly do!!!
Alton C Thompson, Ph D
Greendale, Wisconsin (SW suburb of Milwaukee) (Dec
7, '12)
In China to rule the
seas - unmanned [Dec 5, '12], the two authors from the Colorado School
of Mines lay out their concept of how China is going to control the South China
Sea and maybe the world.
They think because China has different mock-ups of drones, "25 different models
of drones at the Zhuhai air show", this is the deciding factor. The US has
spent over 15 billion on drones over the last 15 years, and has hundreds of
operational drones with tens of thousands of hours of real world combat
experience. Comparing China to the US in drones would be like comparing my
grandmother's basketball skills to that of an NBA all star.
A check of the history of the uninhabited Senkaku Islands show both China's and
Japan's claim to the islands as tenuous, but as the saying goes possession is
nine-tenths of the law. The authors claim the drone market in Asia could be
worth billions over the coming decade. However, I don't think China will be
selling drones to South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia or the Philippine's
because of claims to those countries territories, so who will China be selling
to - North Korea?
The authors write "when China begins actively deploying drones for constant
surveillance over the islands, China will effectively be establishing
territorial domination as a persistent military presence that represents a
shift to territorial sovereignty." This is far from correct. First if the
drones get within 12 nautical miles of the islands Japan can just shoot them
down. Second the US flew around and over the Soviet Union for over 40 years and
last time I checked Russia did not come to belong to the US.
China seems determined to make enemies of all the nations of Asia with a few
exceptions like Cambodia that are meaningless in the geopolitical landscape as
they pursue their attempt to seize oil and minerals. This is an extremely
foolish policy that can do nothing but hurt China in the future. If China
thinks they can take on the world and win, they might want to call Germany and
ask them how that worked out for them. And Germany had real allies in the World
Wars, the Ottoman Empire, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Japan and Italy. Who
will China have? The North Koreans if they even exist in a few years? If China
wants resources in the future, it is a lot easier to buy them then to try and
take them at the point of a gun. I hope China will realize that before they
begin to march down the road to war.
Dennis O'Connell
USA (Dec 6, '12)
In 'Debtpocalypse'
and hollow society[Dec 4, '12] Steve Fraser seems to pin the blame for
the US's decline on "high finance", but there's no hint in the article of how
it was accomplished. It's noted that the FIRE [finance, insurance, and real
estate] industries rose as manufacturing declined, but whether one is cause and
the other effect, or whether both are effects of some other cause, is not
explained. The argument seems to be "High finance killed America because I said
it did."
GE is first implicated as one of the dastardly drivers of decline, but then
later Fraser notes that it is the sole US company among the top 10 active in
harnessing wind energy. In this case, however, no implication of cause and
effect is made although it's begging for comment: cutbacks if necessary can
indeed lead to future health - otherwise nobody would ever go on a diet. Does
GE's history support or refute the argument?
Perhaps the article wasn't meant to convince, only to reinforce existing
beliefs. But not being among Fraser's choir at Columbia University, I remain
unconverted.
Rob Brendel
Beijing, China (Dec 6, '12)
[The talented Mr
Erdogan, Dec 4, '12] Eleven days from now we will know what will happen
in the Middle East and in Turkey. The referendum in Egypt shall define the
developments in the area. A hands-down victory for President Mohammed Morsi
shall leave the Egyptian opposition reeling and Turkey on the way to an Islamic
turn. The second phase of the story is the Syrian connection. Syria is suspect
of an end to its drama with a bang, that is, use of chemical weapons. If this
doesn’t happen we shall have a Muslim Brotherhood- jihadists tussle for power
which will bring the area into a fractional sectarian slaughter. This means
that Turkey is lost as a viable Western-style democracy.
Whatever the outcome of the Egyptian referendum and the limited influence of
the US and the EU, the Mediterranean is not what we use to know. History has
turned a new leaf and we are all hanging by the thread of necessity and human
folly. There is no answer to the immediate needs of the people in states
without structure, efficiency and justice. What is left is nostalgia for the
past, and the imaginary social-historical construction of failed societies.
However, these are able to drag all into the abyss.
Nicholas A Biniaris (Dec 6, '12)
[Re: The talented
Mr Erdogan, Dec 3, '12] The Middle East, much like the world at large,
is undergoing fundamental transformations. According to a recent Japanese
article, the Chinese People's Liberation Army could one day replace the US
military as the main security provider for the region. While that idea doesn't
sound far-fetched, what also isn't difficult to foresee is China becoming
Israel's protector in the not-too-distant future. Though the area's Muslims
don't necessarily trust Anglo-American intentions, Beijing doesn't suffer that
handicap. With greater Chinese involvement and some outside-the-box thinking,
the hitherto elusive peace can hopefully/finally be achieved in the Middle
East.
John Chen
USA (Dec 5, '12)
There really should be a bipartisan law passed in the US Congress banning the
remake of classic/cult Hollywood movies. Such a prohibition would have spared
me and the critics' two wasted hours of our lives watching the inexecrable
remake of the 1984 Cold War film Red Dawn. The original, released in the
midst of the Reagan crusade against global communism, had Soviet, Cuban and
Nicaraguan hordes conquering the Amerikan Midwest but being heroically
challenged by an intrepid band of teenage guerillas. Though unquestionably
cheesy and jingoistic, that film had a certain charm totally lacking in the
"update." I say "update" because evidently the Einsteins who decided the movie
needed a 21st century cloning also decided that the now defunct USSR would
simply not do as a brutal invading superpower.
OK, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say the modern geopolitically
aware Amerikan teenage audience member would indeed be offended at not being
able to find the Soviet Union on a modern map of the world, thus requiring a
substitute superpower that does exist today and would make a plausible invader
of the United States. Hmm... let's see, who would fit that bill... large,
powerful country... that would have the economic and military wherewithal to
attack the world's greatest military power... perceived by every Wonderlander
as a real threat to WonderSecurity... ??
Oh, yes, of course, the answer is obvious: North Korea!
Yes, in a scenario that in itself deserves some kind of Academy Awards
recognition for both Most Ridiculous Premise and Craven Supine Surrender, the
finished film had identified the invading hordes as Chinese, and I don't mean
from Taiwan or the local Panda Express. But evidently the People's Republic
became aware of this demonizing depiction of the debtor nation being foreclosed
by the debt owner. So a few arm twists and reminders of losing the lucrative
Chinese cinema market later and voila! No longer would it be the People's
Liberation Army ransacking the Homeland, but a suitable replacement Asian
bogeyman was needed. Who else could sub for the PRC but that mighty mite of
starving, bankrupt Fifth World semi-states, whose grocery stores are stocked
with nothing but nukes and missiles, China's nettlesome neighbor, the
Democratic People's Republic.
With the miracle of modern cinematic technology, Chinese flags were transformed
into North Korean flags, Chinese letters on propaganda posters became Korean
script and Korean was the language yelled by the Asian troops at the heroic
teenagers. The released product has nary a mention of China, but it does show
the Russians standing side by side with those nasty Orientals.
One can't help but wonder why Cuba was not selected instead. I would have loved
to see bearded Cubano soldiers escorting a wheelchaired, cigar puffing Fidel
Castro down Wall Street, triumphant at last over the yanqui imperialist.
Alternatively, as a way to neatly segue from the absurd to the entertaining,
they could have had the South Korean pop star Psy, acting as the new DPRK
dictator Kim Jung Un, lead his occupying troops and newly vanquished Amerikan
prisoners in a flash mob rendition of Communism-Gangnam Style.
Sadly, given the script revisions, deciding to play such an invitation, nay,
screaming demand, for comedy instead as a straight shoot-'em-up drama doomed
the movie in more ways than posing a preposterous proxy Asian villain nation.
However, despite the terrible acting, direction and dialogue, the film's ending
assured it of a benign reception by its target TeaBagging, flag waving, Bible
thumping trailer trash audience. It shows the valiant teenagers storming a
North Korean "re-education" camp and the newly liberated patriots waving the
Stars and Stripes over their reclaimed soil. I couldn't help but snicker
though; I swear I saw a "Made in China" sticker on that flag.
Hardy Campbell
Houston, Texas
USA (Dec 5, '12)
[Re The 1930s
all over again , Dec 1, 2012] Professor Reuven Brenner's five societal
means of capital collection are both interesting and thought provoking. During
the past generation of bubble economies in much of the advanced nations and a
few of the up-and-comers, the first three means were either unavailable or
abandoned, leaving "government" as the undeclared source of sustenance for the
past decade and a half. It is now becoming clear that this fourth source is
nearing exhaustion, and "crime" is emerging as the last resort.
The US started the ball rolling in the Balkans, and now Japan, Philippine,
Vietnam got the clue. Never mind that Diaoyutai and the South China Sea region
have not been contentious for generations, the US declaration of a Pacific
pivot is a golden chance to act. Inciting war with China surely seems like a
cure-all: 1) If they win, China and its vast wealth will become victory
dividend; 2) If they lose, the reigning leadership can blame China for the
sorry states of affairs and their inability to repay debts. Besides, there is
the slight chance that the US might actually jump onto the wagon and implement
the much thought about final solution to the so-called China Threat. There
seems nothing for them to lose!
Chenliyen
United States (Dec 4, '12)
Much hubbub in Wonderland these days about us becoming the next Saudi Arabia of
natural gas. That's assuming, of course, that the drilling technique known as
fracking continues its relentless steamrollering over increasing concerns for
the health, safety and well being of its citizens.
The gathering protests and publicity over the very real contamination of
underground aquifers, lakes and rivers caused by fracking, including an award
winning documentary and an upcoming Hollywood film, are making the oyl bi'niss
and the GOP (Greedy Oil Panderers) nervous. Little wonder that several Repukes
in Washington are already questioning the "scientific objectivity" of a CDC
(Center for Disease Control) report that will expose fracking as a very real
environmental hazard that will dump hundreds of unregulated toxins and
carcinogens into the air and water.
That doesn't concern the capitalist roaders though, who are protesting, not the
scientific facts, but all those lost jobs that such a report could cost the
beleaugered WonderEconomy. Not to mention the "energy independence" the
Repunkicants keep insisting is necessary for us to resist those evil Muslim
countries God has for some reason blessed with "our oil." This charming concern
for jobs as opposed to health or the environment comes from the same party that
bent over backward to excuse BP for its callous incompetence in the Deepwater
Horizon disaster that killed a a dozen men and polluted the Gulf of Mexico.
These tools of Big Oil and Wall Street have no problem with miniature Deepwater
Horizons popping up all over Amerika because of fracking disasters so long as
their buddies here in Houston fork over some of those fracking profits for
their next political campaign, junkets to Tahiti and personal bank accounts.
The irony is that many of the poor slobs who will have to live with the
cancers, illnesses, poisoned lakes, flaming tapwater, destroyed lives and
chronic unemployment due to ruined health typically vote for the conservative
Repubs.
Even these TeaBaggers may be seeing the light. This is not to say that the
frackers won't continue to exploit ignorance, fear and greed, that unholy
trifecta that nourishes and sustains the GOP, but expect the NIMBY (Not In My
Back Yard) movement to gain momentum. Having said that, and knowing how corrupt
and venal Wonnderland's politicians are, it is easy to predict that fracking is
here to stay, public health be damned.
H Campbell
United States (Dec 4, '12)
[Re Powering up Asia's
super-grid, Dec 1, 2012] It's obvious upon reading this article that
John A Matthews is unfamiliar with Buckminister Fuller's late 1960s proposal
for a globe-spanning interconnection of electrical grids. He should have done
this background work.
As well as this, he should have done background on Greg Palasts, whose has done
excellent analyses and exposure of why privatized electrical markets and line
ownership is a very bad idea. Enron wasn't the first case, nor in isolation.
Not doing this indicates a - 'green as a blackjack table" - approach rather
than the sound engineering and control required. Any guaranties that small roof
solar arrays can feed into this system at same rate, for instance? Any
efficiency standards required before and during this conversion?
This is a vital matter, and has very important implications. But setting up new
choke points for monopolist parasitic bankers and welfare queens needs to be
avoided at all costs. Todd Millions
(Dec 4, '12)
[Re Palestine
scores victory at the UN, Nov 30, '12] Before the vote in the UN
General Assembly (UNGA), Haaretz announced that Israel had lost Europe.
The US and Israel and their camp followers suffered a major setback after the
strong vote elevating Palestine to the status of a "non member state". Like its
admission to UNESCO, Palestine has the right to challenge Israel, say, before
the International Court of Justice for expropriation of land in the West Bank.
For domestic reasons, the Obama administration impotently, like King Canute,
can command the the tide of international support of the right of Palestinians
to have a state of their, but to little effect. The US can has done much, and
will continue to do much, to frustrate a two state solution. Subjectively, its
unbridled support of Israel leans towards the expansion of Israel to the banks
of the river Jordan.
Yet time is not on America's or the Israel's side. Significantly,we see a
joyous Mahmoud Abbas being embraced by Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu moments after the UNGA vote. Israel chose the wrong "enemy" when it
humiliated Turkey, the only Muslim nation that consistently supported it from
1948. Now it's reaping the backlash to its arrogance.
Abraham Bin Yiju
Palermo (Dec 3, '12)
In a clear demonstration that God did not create all human beings equal, the
Republikants in Texas continue to deny that evolution is a valid scientific
belief. They base this conviction (and oh how I wish they all were!) on their
religious faith in the literal interpretation of the Bible as the living word
of God Himself. As such, they read how God created the world in seven days and
so on and so on, ergo, ipso facto, the world is only 4,004 years old (dependent
on which wacko you listen to) and thus an evolutionary process requiring
billions of years to create life on earth and intelligent humanity is clearly a
ridiculous concept.
Thus, in one fell swoop, these neocon-nuts expose their ignorance about by the
Bible itself and science. Now, I won't claim to be an expert on the Bible, no
sirree, nor will I profess to be a scientist. But neither expertise is required
to reveal these no-nothing evangelicals as nano-intellectual frauds.
Let's start with the Bible. If, as these "Christians" claim, it's the Word of
God, which Bible gets this title? There are numerous editions used by various
churches and denominations around the globe, which share many of the same
sacred canonical texts but also differ in many others. Does that make some
deficient and wrong or does only the King James Version favored by Wonderland
white trash reflect the correct Word and all others are heretical tomes? And
what about the ancient church fathers who waited until 400 years after Christ
died to more or less agree that a Bible was even needed (and even then couldn't
all agree what books belonged in it)?
Where was the Word of God during those four centuries of persecution and
martyrdom when His Word was most needed? And if it was the Word that could only
be interpreted literally word for word, why was a tortured process required by
the early church fathers to write a Nicene creed that explicitly said things
the Bible did not?
That's about as non-literal as you can get, and was achieved to clarify
theological concepts that a literal reading of Scripture would only obscure,
muddy and confuse. Which merely emphasizes how clueless "modern" Amerikan
"Christians" are about the roots, culture and history of their faith. Rational
minds can only conclude that the Bible is not to be read literally, making any
attempt to use it to discredit natural selection as a valid theory worthless.
Science has confirmed the validity of Darwinian evolution beyond a reasonable
doubt, making the "theory" description itself more a political statement than a
factual one. Proof positive of this occurs daily in every hospital on the
planet, where microorganisms subjected to relentless biochemical attack by
modern medicine evolve every minute to develop ever greater resistance to
increasingly impotent drug treatments. The prevalence of deadly superbugs like
MRSA could never have come about without evolution.
Next time one of those Repubichairs wind up in a hospital and discover first
hand the painful evidence of such infectious evolution, I trust their Bible
will offer them literal comfort.
Hardy Campbell
United States (Nov 29, '12)
[Re Abetting
murder in Gaza, Nov 27, '12] The US department of state is not
completely clueless when it comes to Gaza. Seasoned analysts know the score,
but, alas, they are in a minority. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has
swallowed whole hog the Negroponte doctrine of Israel above all.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to Mahmoud Abbas and not Gaza is an
example of how wrong footed US policy is. Abbas is damaged goods. Only Hamas'
support can rescue the Palestinian Authority from certain decline. Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu's fumbled blitzkrieg in Gaza put US
influence in the region in danger.
Although for domestic reasons, Obama won't "throw Netenyahu under the bus",
Washington, like it or not, directly or through third parties, will have to
talk to Hamas. Proof of the Zionist state's tactical defeat is the withdrawal
from politics of Ehud Barak. He has fallen on Netenyahu's sword. More to the
point, he should have retired long ago when Hezbollah sent the planned invasion
of Lebanon to a stunning defeat.
Israel may be the strongest state in the Middle East but it is showing obvious
chinks and rents in its armor, and in even the medium term is on the short end
of the stick.
Abraham Bin Yiju
Palermo (Nov 28, '12)
Cooking is an integral part of the entire Wonderland Thanksgiving experience.
The hours spent roasting turkeys, baking pies and brewing holiday cheer are all
part of this uniquely Amerikan festival. Which is as it should be, since
"cooking" in a more figurative sense has also become quintessentially Amerikan.
"Cooking the books" has traditionally referred to accounting shenanigans where
businesses hide losses on balance sheets.
Of course, nowadays we have a fine historical record as evidence, with Enron's
crimes competing with the likes of WorldComm and others for Poster Bad Boy
acclaim. Even when not approaching Enronian proportions, Wall Street firms
beholden to quarter conscious shareholders regularly manipulate earnings and
liabilities reporting to boost their stock prices and their CEO benefits
packages in the short term. The SEC looks askance at such quibbles, which would
require upsetting firms that may employ SEC staffers in the future. But similar
efforts at deception, factual manipulation and out-and-out cheating in other
fields are equally prevalent, though they often hide under the rubric of
incompetence or ignorance.
The CIA are past masters of this, of course; they were confidently predicting
decades of continued Cold War with the USSR just as that state entered its
death throes and then forecast American troops tripping over all those no-show
WMDs in Iraq.The Pentagon practically wrote the book on cooking weapons systems
test results in order to continue congressional funding, ignoring bad results
and emphasizing marginally good outcomes. The generals are also well trained in
the subtle art of disguising casualty figures, bloating budgets and reporting
disinformation to fool their political overseers. Yet despite such poor track
records of ineptitude and malfeasance, both agencies continue to have their
black budgets funded generously and without question or scrutiny.
Schools are also very prone to lying about students exam scores in order to
continue state funding and preserving teachers' jobs. Pharmaceutical drug tests
are typically manipulated and distorted to reflect positive results, with
deleterious side effects minimized if mentioned at all to a victimized public.
Attorneys, police and judges regularly cherry pick, destroy, forge, plant or
hide evidence to arrive at predetermined legal outcomes, usually dependent on
plaintiff's financial or racial status. The budget gurus in Washington take the
cake, platter it's served on and entire baking factory when it comes to
barbecuing the economic books, regularly fudging statistics to make the
president look good.
Naturally, all of the above crimes and misdemeanors do not go unexposed
forever, but when revealed, the media usually devote minimal attention,
especially when other earth shattering events like a Kardashian date or
Twilight liaison competes for cybertime. That's because cooking books is and
will continue to be the best, if not only, way for Wonderlanders to convince
themselves that they're not sinking into a pit of quicksand once certified as
solid concrete.
H Campbell
USA (Nov 28, '12)
[Re Post-US
world born in Phnom Penh,
US pivot bumps Asian economic reality and
Obama the Pivot] As the ghost of Macbeth might adjudge, President
Barack Obama's Asia pivot is slowly becoming "a tale full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing". Though the end of US global dominance is in fact far from
nigh, every empire, as told by the "syllable(s) of recorded time", ultimately
morphs into "a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and
then is heard no more". "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" a new dawn will
awaken, just as surely as the world makes its immortal turn.
John Chen
United States (Nov 27, '12)
The persistence of the Tibetan movement seems, on its face, laudable. The idea
of an oppressed and gentle people valiantly resisting a large neighbor's
aggression through decades of exile, isolation and persecution lends itself
easily to western romanticizing and cheerleading. Amerikans, in particular,
love underdogs, especially orange robed ones that tour the world preaching love
and understanding and Tibetan independence.
Don't get me wrong; on the face of it, the Dalai Lama is as fine a human being
as has ever wrapped himself in the mantle of defender of the downtrodden. But
the idea that his advocacy of the Lost Cause that is Tibetan independence has
survived to this time by virtue of his articulate oratory or the innate
goodness and justice of his people's dreams is beyond naive.
Simply put, the Tibetan "cause" has been financed, sustained and promoted by
the CIA since the 1950s, all in an effort to give grief to the ChiCom Yellow
Hordes we were convinced were a fortune cookie away from overwhelming the Free
World. The Tibetan refuge in Dharamsala, India, was funded by the Amerikans,
and used to recruit young Tibetans to infiltrate back into Chinese Tibet to
spy, sabotage and prepare for a day that never came. Since 1962, when China and
India exchanged blows ostensibly over worthless ice and rocks in the Himalayas
(but actually China's payback for Indian support of the Dalai Lama after the
failed 1959 revolt), India has steadfastly stood by its displaced neighbors.
This is in a very small measure India's way of avenging its humiliation in the
border war, but also serves to remind China that India can still cause trouble
for the Middle Kingdomers in their backyard. It also serves Western liberals
and neocons equally well, providing the former with another human-rights cause
celebre and the latter with small payback for Korea, Vietnam and our
infinite debt. The big losers, of course, are the Tibetans themselves, many of
whom still hold out hope that their resistance to assimilation will someday pay
off.
The Dalai Lama's complicity and culpability in perpetuating this charade is,
naturally, beyond dispute, just as it is incontrovertible that he is purely a
creature of the US CIA and Indian Intelligence Bureau, neither famed for their
sensitivity to human rights or oppressed peoples. The fact that he shares the
"honor" of having won a Nobel Peace Prize with war-maintaining US President
Barack Obama says volumes about relative morality, public gullibility and the
value of spin doctors.
Hardy Campbell
Texas (Nov 21, '12)
[Gaza crisis has
more to come, Nov 19, '12] The Zionist establishment has long planned
the current blitzkrieg against Hamas and the civilian population of the Gaza
Strip. For months now, the Israeli press have floated stories about Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plans to strike Hamas where it hurts before
national elections.
The military establishment is now engaging in "cutting the grass" - an
Orwellian formulation aimed at paring back Hamas' defense of its people and
territory against Israeli drones, assassinations, and low grade stealth
warfare. The current "Operation Cast Lead" - like air and naval campaign seems
like a meat tenderizer aimed at softening up Gaza for Israeli control.
It won't work. Hamas is not backing down. And armed with better rockets, not
only is Jerusalem and Tel Aviv with in reach, but Hertzaliah and northern
Israel, too.
Netanyahu is mulling put boots on the ground, but an troop assault on Gaza will
force Egypt to rethink relations with Israel and the public outcry in Jordan
will force a weakened Abdullah to abandon cooperation with the Zionist state.
The Israeli prime minister did everything to thwart Obama's re-election, but he
will have to rely on his sufferance and ultimately swallow American demands for
peace.e.
Internally, the peace forces are isolated. Netanyahu's "jolly little war" has
guaranteed his re-election, playing on massive fear as Israeli rush to air raid
shelter.
The Israeli leadership has to recognize they cannot continue doing business as
usual. Time is on the Palestinian side as it gains wider support in the Arab
and Muslim world and as it gains the sympathy of non Muslims elsewhere.
Ultimately, Israel, like the kingdom of Judea, if its loses the support of a
larger protector state runs the risk of sinking into a Levantine decline.
Abraham Bin Yiju
Palermo (Nov 20, '12)
[Re China's carrier
forces US Navy rethink, Nov 15, '12] Captain Yoon does mention that
China's newly acquired aircraft carrier is an outdated retrofitted 1990s ship
purchased from the Ukraine. Symbol or not, this purchase is a modest step in
the development of the Chinese navy's "blue water strategy".
China's demonstrated determination to extend its tradition power and influence
in the East China Sea and the South China Sea has long worried US military
thinkers. The Obama administration has responded by proclaiming a forward
Asia-Pacific doctrine which sees the Pacific as an American lake.
The new Chinese leadership may not be willing to play the old German Imperial
game of forced-march shipbuilding and boldly challenging US naval strength.
Internal pressures in China may also modify a muscular blue water strategy, as
disaffection with communist rule deepens and spreads.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Nov 19, '12)
The China challenge: War
or peace[Nov 14, '12] by Francesco Sisci, is an interesting and subtle
article. He somehow did not notice, however, that 1) the US is a very war-like
and racist country, given to attacking some other country (Iraq, eg) nearly
every other year; and 2) that nearly all the horrors that have happened in
China over the last 100 years have been due to one or another attempt at
Westernization. Perhaps it is Western countries, especially my native USA,
which need to change?
Lester Ness
Kunming, China (Nov 16, '12)
[Re White House
gets 'Legacy' opportunity,November 9, 2012 and
Fog of war obscures Netanyahu's Iran order, November 7, 2012]
Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and his Republican friend, Mitt Romney,
bet on the proposition that they can, with impunity, lie and it will be ignored
by the voters. Furthermore, in regard to Netanyahu, he can bully the president
of the United States. In light of the November 6 election results in America,
how did that work out for Romney? Netanyahu and the Romney campaign, to their
detriment, underestimated the innate wisdom of the voters to see through their
"malarkey." The Israeli prime minister, despite mouthing the words, has never
believed in a two-state solution and has used Iran as a foil to hide that fact.
And now, like his Republican friend, is relying on a narrow, extreme, right
wing coalition to return him to office. Will Netanyahu suffer the same fate as
his friend Romney? It remains to be seen. But just like the Republicans learned
the hard lesson of betting against the American voters, my bet would be on the
wisdom of the Israeli voters.
Fariborz S Fatemi
Virginia, USA (Nov 16, '12)
The worldwide music phenomenon Gangnam Style by the now ubiquitous South
Korean rapper Park-jae Sang aka "Psy", is a ridiculously catchy song and funny
video. Try going anywhere in the electronic universe and not seeing or hearing
either the original video or the endless panoply of parodies, spoofs and
satires. I for one love the imaginative energy and skilful use of rhythm, beat
and non-sequitur imagery in the video, which uses the upscale Gangnam district
of Seoul. as its setting.
But what is even more fascinating to me is the kind of analysis and reaction
the planetary popularity of Gangnam Style has inspired by fans, pundits,
critics and social intelligentsia. To Amerikan audiences, notorious for
rejecting "Things Not Made Here", the song starring an unknown, pudgy,
30-something Asian singing in Korean should be the quintessence of rejectable
material. That instead it has taken by storm huge swaths of the entertainment
demographics here has puzzled and baffled many accustomed to an orderly and
predictable forecasting of trends and fads.
I read blogs and web posts dissecting and scrutinizing the "hidden" subversive
messages about Korean affluence, narcissism and shallow consumerism, which
these commentators acknowledge won't really come across to viewers ignorant of
the Korean language or culture (pretty much 99% of its audience).
I read also that the Japanese are generally indifferent to the music video,
which, considering the history between the two countries, perhaps should not be
a shock. Still, it is amusing that the rest of the world is enthralled by
"Gangnam Style" but are young Japanese immune to its charms simply because they
look down on Koreans as former colonized slaves?
China's reaction, on the other hand, has been enthusiastic, even to the point
that Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei parodied the video to make a point about
liberty and freedom of expression. But some in China are perplexed why their
massive country can't come up with their own version, wondering what it is
about their society that stifles such unorthodox creativity.
Obvious answers aside (see Ai Weiwei) , China's obsession with the song has
even made semi-plausible suggestions to make Psy an intermediary for
negotiating the ongoing Senkaku-Diaoyu islands dispute between China and Japan.
Stranger things have happened. In Wonderland we twice elected a B-List
Hollywood actor who loved riding a horse on his ranch almost as much as he
loved ruining the country with his voodoo economics. And Obama has evidently
seen the video and thinks he can master the song's silly Horsey Dance in time
for his inauguration. Watch out budget deficits!
Hardy Campbell
Texas USA (Nov 16, '12)
[Re The Levant
braces for regional war, Nov 13, '12]If Victor Kotsev thinks that the
way things are shaping up on Israel's borders that it might lead to a replay of
the Yom Kippur War, he is misreading history. For months now, Israel has been
threatening an "Operation Cast Lead" like action against Gaza. Syrian shells
falling on the occupied Golan Heights has less to do with an action against
Israel than a broadening of the ongoing civil war in Syria.
Any war launched by Israel may very well serve the right wing Zionists designs
to expand illegal settlements in Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem, and
guarantee Netanyahu's re-election. But, it weaken Israel's standing in the
region even in the medium run and wipe out any semblance to "Israel as a beacon
of democracy."
Abraham Bin Yiju (Nov 14, '12)
[Re: China,
Russia and Obama's second coming, Nov 9, 2012] It might be a bit too
early to mention China and superpower in the same sentence just yet, since the
Middle Kingdom still faces a number of high hurdles ahead. That said, with
president-in-waiting Xi Jinping being a shrewd and pragmatic politician, China
should be in good hands for the next decade. As for President Obama, so long as
the US doesn't cede too much ground to China on the world stage during his
second term, he will have done a commendable job (at least geopolitically).
Though that expectation may seem lamentable to many, the cold reality is that
China's historic ascendance is not to be denied, regardless of what America may
or may not do. The wheel of fortune, as they say, goes round and round; at
least the United States will with no uncertainty remain the sole and undisputed
superpower in four years.
John Chen
USA (Nov 13, '12)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu woke up the morning after President
Barack Obama's re-election with egg on his face. He played big and hard to
defeat the 44th US president and lost big. Suddenly Netanyahu's opponents
realize that he is the wrong man to deal with Washington.
Obama's striking victory was a wake up call that Israel cannot lose its
protector's support. The president is not Jimmy Carter but he has a margin of
flexibility to deal better with the Palestinians and force the Zionist's right
wing to make, it is hoped, real concessions on a two state solution. More,
Obama can turn a deaf ear to the Israeli lobby. So, Israel stands at a
crossroad. Will it act wisely and well?
Since the Zionist state has moved more and more to the right, it also runs the
risk of mirroring its fundamentalist Arab neighbors in setting up a theocracy.
Abraham Bin Yiju
Palermo (Nov 13, '12)
H Campbell's letter of November 7 was very informative and it's good that
someone finally shed light on the core problem that no one discusses. However,
if I may offer a tiny piece of clarity: It is true that the Pashtuns are
frustrated and resentful due to the actions of Washington and Islamabad (and
Kabul) but I live in Pakistan and have interacted with Pashtuns from all walks
of life on a regular basis over the course of my life (in personal as well as
professional contexts). None of them buy the idea of Pashtunistan (except for
the Taliban and a handful of other political actors). There is ethnic
consciousness and a sense of victimhood among Pashtuns on both sides of the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border but the Pakistani Pashtuns have historically shown
dim interest in separate statehood. The Pashtunistan Movement had died in the
1970s and 80s because the Pakistani state integrated Pashtuns en masse into its
political system, economy and military/intelligence establishment. The Pashtuns
in Pakistan primarily want security from terrorism, stable livelihoods and
especially preservation of their deeply entrenched tribal traditions from
westernizing influences, not really independence.
Campbell has correctly pointed out Afghanistan's refusal to recognize its
legitimate international border with Pakistan since that country's creation in
1947 and its resultant sponsorship of terrorism and its own armed incursions
conducted ever since but all its efforts were frustrated because Pakistani
Pashtuns remained loyal to Pakistan. Before the mid-1970s Pakistan did not
reciprocate such aggression from Afghanistan; it is only after a communist
government came into power in Kabul through a coup d'etat and carried out the
same actions on a much larger scale than before (with Soviet support) that
Pakistan first started its counter-interventions to make sure a friendly
government sat in Afghanistan that would not infringe on its territorial
integrity. It seems that was a huge miscalculation but Kabul's recognition of
its border with Pakistan would take away the most important motivation
Islamabad has ever had to do continue its interventions in Afghanistan. After
all, the Durand Line's legality is well-established and was implemented with
the full consent of Afghanistan itself, therefore it was not an imposition
separating Afghans from their brethren, it merely formalized an
already-existing division among the Pashtun people.
With regard to Pakistan
terror toll fails to stir offensive, November 9, 2012. Pakistan is
already continually engaged in military operations all over the tribal areas
and large parts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province but the last time it launched
large scale operations against the TTP (in 2009) that group fled across the
border to Afghanistan, from where it now launches armed incursions into
Pakistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai and other government officials in Kabul
claimed back then that foreign helicopters airlifted militants of the TTP and
the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to the safety of Baghlan, Kunduz and
Samangan provinces of northern Afghanistan from out of South Waziristan when
the Pakistani army started its operation there. The Afghan National Army is
also never available to clamp down on TTP bases in the same areas from which it
routinely shells Pakistani army check-posts and border villages. The Washington
Post reported on November 7th that even American military and intelligence
officials have now admitted the anti-Pakistan terrorist organization the TTP,
which attempted to kill 14 year-old girl Malala Yusufzai, is operating from
sanctuaries on the Afghan side of the border, saying they believe Afghanistan's
government backs them. It also quoted them as saying they are unable and
ill-equipped to take action against the TTP because they are withdrawing their
forces from that country and it is an other-side-of-the-border-problem anyway.
This, even though it reported that the American drone campaign in Pakistan has
made terrorists escape to Afghanistan where they are living in relative safety.
This is why Pakistan is convinced that a hundred military operations on its
side of the border will not put a stop to the terrorism it is suffering, seeing
the lack of forthcoming cooperation from the other side.
Farooq Aziz
Peshawar, Pakistan (Nov 13, '12)
Only in Wonderland could Mitt Romney and the TeaBagging GOP (Grotesquely
Oblivious to People) have entertained any delusions of becoming the next
president. In a saner, less bizarre Alternative Universe, the Alternate Romney
would have kept his mouth shut, strutted around like a well manicured CEO with
a hot blonde wife and plastered the airwaves with silent images of his
pristinely white face next to his tawny opponent's. His Republican colleagues
running for other offices would have only mouthed platitudes about "restoring
Amerika," "democracy," and "free markets", eschewing the overwhelming
temptation that Wonderland Republicans succumbed to to blather on and on about
how they would impose their vision of God on Amerika.
In this Alternate Universe of non-committal, reasonable, uncontroversial
Republicans, Romney waltzes into the White House on a wave of nostalgia,
unfounded hope and dreams of returning to the halcyon days when alternatives to
white male rule did not exist. To Wonderland Romney's everlasting chagrin,
however, none of these conditions applied. All of the Fox Nutwork pundits are
blaming Romney's inability to "define" himself adequately for his downfall,
when in reality that is precisely WHY he lost. Romney went to great lengths to
explain to Amerikans that he was a ruthless capitalist who disdained the
non-millionaire middle class and pandered to every dollar bill that floated by
him in the wind. He did that very effectively and he did it over and over
again, at the same time his GOP mates insisted on telling Amerika that they
would solve the problem of Big Government interfering in their lives by
mandating stricter abortion laws, gutting social welfare programs, outlawing
gay marriage, expanding the military, warring with more countries, making Bible
study mandatory while eliminating talk of evolution in grade schools, make it
easier for companies to poison food, water and air and in general put
everything in Amerika up for sale. So my question is: How on earth would any
Republican with half a brain think they had a chance to win the presidency? I
know, within my question lies the seed of my answer.
H Campbell
Texas (Nov 13, '12)
[Re China 'pivot' trips
over McMahon Line, Nov 5, 2012] Has China's leadership become unhinged?
In a moment of leadership transition, looking for a "pivot to counter the
United States' diplomatic and military inroads with its East Asian neighbors"
is an act of folly. Already not restraining anti Japanese protests has
unleashed protests against the Chinese government for its sins of omissions and
commissions. Not only that no reforms are envisaged - or if they are they are
put off for another day - as the economy loses its stability.
And now, if Peter Lee is right, China looks to rip off the scab on the McMahon
Line and revive the long simmering Indian hurt of "losing" what Neville
Maxwell's 50-year-old study called "India's China War."
Suddenly, China is raising irredentist claims in the South China Sea and the
East Sea, which the Obama administration has good grounds to challenge. It
falls into line with the Obama Pacific doctrine, which is nothing more than
sweeping the cobwebs off the Teddy Roosevelt policy of following the sun, as
well as claiming the Pacific an American lake.
By bringing back claims of challenging the McMahon Line, China risks more than
countering US forward strategy, it also risks losing its grip on Tibet, too.
China, it seems, is rushing blindly into a mudslide of its own making.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Nov 7, '12)
It is curious that amongst all the topics volleyed back and forth between TV
talking heads about Afghanistan and Pakistan and the ongoing strife, not a
peep, whisper or murmur has been spoken about Pashtunistan. The pundits and
"experts" will opine sagely about terrorism, the Taliban, al Qaeda,
fundamentalism, jihad and fragile states, ie, all the stuff they extract from
Wikipedia or any random rant on Fox News, but not once will they discuss the
real reason for the cross border infiltration of guerilla groups between
Pakistan's former Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) (aka today's Pakhtunkhwa)
and Afghanistan.
Ever since the formation of Pakistan in 1947 from splintering British India,
the Pashto-speaking majority Pashtuns of Afghanistan have refused to
acknowledge the legitimacy of the Durand Line used to split them from their
brethren in Pakistan's NWFP or recognize that said province is suitably
representative of the indigenous Pashtun culture living there. Indeed, for many
years thereafter, tensions between the two countries flared up frequently, as
Afghanistan pushed for "Pashtunistan" to be created by a union of the NWFP and
Afghanistan or a separate state on its own. Pakistan, for its part, has
steadfastly refused to even discuss such an infringement on their national
sovereignty. In the meantime, neither side has been adverse to using
disaffected groups within their neighbor's borders to stir up trouble and exert
indirect pressure. This proclivity had become such an engrained habit that by
the time the Soviets invaded in 1979, Pakistan already had a long history of
supplying Kabul enemies like Gulbaddin Hekmatyar and Shah Ahmoud Massoud with
means and ways to make mischief on irredentist Kabul.
Under the rubric of "fighting communism", the Pakistan ISI continued its
efforts to control Afghanistan, rather than defeat the godless commies, which
was always Washington's priority, not Islamabad's. The ISI's efforts relied
heavily on Pakistani Pashtuns to interact and assist their Afghan brothers,
with the view that a post-Soviet Afghanistan would be compliant and easy to
manipulate, thus putting irredentism on the back burner as a Kabul priority and
in effect making Afghanistan a client state, if not a satrap. But as the saying
goes, history doesn't always repeat itself but does find different ways to
spell "Ironic".
In this case, the ISI did its job too well, making its own Pashtun citizens as
convinced as the Afghan Pashtuns that the idea of a Pashtunistan was still
sound. That's why the tooing and froing between the two Pashtun semi-states
feeds the insurgency in both countries, not because of the fictitious Muslim
fundamentalism the prattleheads in Wonderland are so fond of drooling about but
because of the Pashtun desire for a separate state devoid of non-Pashtun
interference and Amerikan paganism.
The imagery of mouth-foaming suicidal jihad is always convenient cover for the
Pakistani and US governments to trot out as rationalization for continuing the
infinite war, but in truth what the mainly Pashtun Taliban want is a pure
Pashtun state, and Islam is a useful tool in segregating themselves from the
corrupt and westernized governments in Islamabad and Karzaian Kabul. But
Pakistan and Wonderland know full well the Amerikan people will not support a
tribal border war in far off Asia unless it's subsumed by a grander, global,
ambiguous and eternal "War on Terror."
H Campbell
Texas (Nov 7, '12)
Communism as a viable state ideology has supposedly been completely discredited
by its collapse in Eastern Europe. The Fall of the Wall, the inept
Coup-that-Couldn't, the corpses of the Ceasescus, all serve as vivid reminders
of what losers the commies were.
Unless you were a commie that fought Wonderland. In a historical paradox, all
of the communist countries the US bombed, fought or invaded but didn't manage
to conquer, survived communism's so-called "collapse," while all those that we
did not war against, eg, the USSR, East Germany, South Yemen, etc, all
disappeared. Thus, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and China, all who successfully
defended themselves against Amerikan aggression, still have active, functioning
and, in one very notable case, a wildly thriving communist party.
The one other extant communist state, the Lao People's Democratic Republic,
while it did not directly fight US forces as these others did, certainly
suffered from its support of North Vietnam during the Second Indochinese War.
So here we have the secret to future communist success, get Wonderland to
invade and be plucky and resourceful enough to get Uncle Sam to cry his name
out loud and your socialist republic will not only survive but probably
prosper. That's certainly been the case for China, now on the greased track to
overtaking the US as World Economic SuperHoncho, with the smaller countries
playing catchup just because Wonderland can hold grudges against small
countries for longer than against bigger (ie, credit lending) commie states.
The added irony of the capitalist US having to borrow from a theoretically
communist China needs no reiteration here but perhaps we can seen the
far-sighted wisdom of Mao, Ho, Fidel and Kim resisting the Yankee imperialist
on the Yalu, in Hanoi, on the Bay of Pigs and in Pyongyang.
Hardy Campbell
United States (Nov 5, '12)
[Re Empire's
changing face masks old ambitions, Oct 31] The revolutionary icon Che
Guevara posited that the best way to confront Yankee imperialism, then mired in
the morass of its southeast Asian adventure, was to present it with "two,
three, many Vietnams." By creating a spreading firestorm of insurrectionary
outbreaks in the Third World, the Empire would be required, as self anointed
Defender of the Free World, to expend blood, treasure and prestige in quelling
such challenges to capitalist exploitation. Thus stretched and overextended,
the Empire would ultimately collapse.
That such a scenario did not eventuate does not mean the idea was flawed.
Indeed, whoever is behind "al-Qaeda" has evidently decided such Guevarian
wisdom needed realization in the 21st century, because Muslim jihad is
a-happenin' everywhere these days, from Nigeria to Mali to Somalia to Yemen to
Afghanistan to Pakistan to India and Indonesia. It's the new growth industry,
with simple ways to get your business started; acquire money and arms (readily
abundant from rich Gulf states and willing Western arms dealers), create an
incident (the list of options is varied, and includes crashing planes into
buildings, military coups and assassinations), incite intervention from an
indignant and heavy handed reactionary government (Wonderland no longer a
favorite here because of prior commitments but any Western state will do), then
wait for the inevitable popular uprising to provide eager recruits in the
ensuing civil war. Continue cycle until Western power cries "Victory" and
skeedaddles out of Dodge with its tail between its legs.
Afghanistan is the Poster Child for this movement, of course, with the Taliban
lined up to take over in 2014 and the Pentagon busy in fabricating excuses and
rationalizations for the NATO/Wonderland defeat. But there's other contenders,
with Mali shaping up as the Saharan version. In that case, France as the
erstwhile Western Defender of the Faith is busy recruiting the NATO-ripoff
ECOWAS as its stooge proxy, but don't worry, French troops will be in the mix
somewhere. The Empire, meanwhile, will be licking its wounds and trying to
stave off its creditors while it devises ever cheaper ways to wage imperial war
on two, three, ad infinitum fronts.
H Campbell
Texas (Nov 1, '12)
[Re Insider trading,
Chinese style, Oct 31, 2010] The Bo Xilai saga, the revelation of
Premier Wen Jiabao's alleged financial mischief and the Ningbo unrest all
represent positive social developments for China (I think). While the
introduction of capitalist practices no doubt benefits the Chinese economy in
myriad ways, these incidents serve to remind the government that its primary
function remains serving the people, and that the country's well-being must not
be compromised for or hijacked by personal/corporate greed. Lest we forget,
even as glittering headlines herald China's economic progress, much of the
population awaits liberation from the manacles of extreme poverty.
John Chen
United States (Oct 31, '12)
[Re Tibetan burnings
reach new level, Oct 30, '12] The only new level reached would be the
somehow miraculous increase in the Tibetan Chinese population (aside from
security forces) from 6% or about 180,000 to surpass the total Tibetan
population of about 3 million since the last census in 2010. Tibetans make up
90% of the population, Chinese 6%.
Aussie in China
Xinjiang (Oct 31, '12)
As usual, the imperialist press circulates another rumor of Fidel Castro's
demise. Doubtless the source of such falsehoods are either the
ever-anticipating "sons of Batista" waiting in Miami for their triumphant
return to Cuba or the farmers in the Midwest hoping to cash in on a
foodstuff-selling bonanza when the petty embargo is lifted. But once again an
aged Fidel has to emerge and frustrate the death watching neocons. Of course,
he has had lots of practice. He's lived to see the 50th anniversary of the
Cuban Missile/Caribbean/October Crisis, seen six US presidents precede him into
the Hereafter and seen his socialist experiment, warts and all, survive a
multitude of economic shocks.
Castro represents much more than a long-lived anti-imperialist that has tweaked
the beard of Tio Sam so often the old bully scarcely needs to shave anymore.
Castro's revolution (and it needs to be identified as his revolution) stands
out as the last opportunity the US had to see its blind devotion to US-style
"democracy" being readily exportable to the Third World for what it was; a
delusion founded on national egomania, geopolitical narcissism, cultural
ignorance if not contemptuous apathy, gallons of wishful thinking and the kind
of arrogant pride that got Lucifer tossed out of Paradise on his luminous
hiney.
From the time of his movement's first halting efforts to survive in the Sierra
Madre, Americans romanticized the tall heroic looking lawyer and his ragtag
band of bearded guerillas as being Latinized versions of George Washington and
his hardy stalwarts at Valley Forge, fighting against infamous tyranny,
suffering in the wild for their ideals and dreaming of an egalitarian
society.We saw in Fidel an alternative to poor country revolutions turning into
communist dictatorships, with a benevolent nurturing Tio Sam standing by to
assist in the nascent democracy's struggle to become a tropical version of
suburbanized Amerika.
So, Amerikans in the '50s went Fidel batcrazy when he triumphed and said all
the right things to a fawning Wonderpublic, while back in Cuba he was doing
things quite at odds with our lofty expectations. Amerikans had deluded
themselves into thinking his revolution would be like our
pseudo-quasi-faux-pretend Revolution in 1776, where one set of moneyed white
men merely exchanged places with another set of moneyed white men, and
everything would be pretty much "Business as Usual," ie, exploiting Cuba as a
Yanqui neo-colony.
So when Fidel's actions made it clear that his was a genuine change, a change
that would oust once and for all the root cause of Cuba's problems, ie,
American subversive economic, criminal and political imperialism, well, our
indignation huffed and puffed and futilely tried to blow his house down. That
such disappointment led to the then and present status quo between the two
nations is no surprise. Nor should it have been a surprise that almost in
parallel with the US having to begrudgingly agree to refrain from military
intervention to reverse the Fidelista Revolution as a result of the Missile
Crisis, the JFK administration began in earnest its military buildup in
southeast Asia.
Having been bested by the young, handsome, virile Fidel, there was no way that
a macho, image conscious Kennedy was going to allow the elderly and frail Ho
Chi Minh to replicate the Cuban's revolutionary victory. Thus any hope that the
US could have avoided the now perpetual cycle of redeeming US manhood from the
emasculating Cuba/Vietnam debacles was doomed. I'm sure Fidel smiles when he
thinks of how his legacy will accelerate the demise of his eternal foe.
H Campbell
USA (Oct 30, '12)
[Re Gaza flares as
Qatar, Egypt take peace reins, Oct 26, '12]Has Egypt really taken reins
of the Israeli Palestinian peace process? Hardly! Cairo's intervention seeks to
stay the Zionist hand from a replay of "Operation Cast Lead". The Egyptian
"intervention" is a very temporary measure at best: a lick of iodine to take
the sting out of a festering political wound. Relief is short lived. It is
hardly a challenge to Iran, which is the Zionists bogeyman.
As Israel approaches general elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's
teaming up with his foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman's ultra-right wing
Yisrael Beitinu signals a further slide of the Zionist state towards a "final
solution" of incorporation of the West Bank into a single Israeli state. As for
Gaza, as the "New York Times Online" has reported, Israel will continue to
crush Hamas not only through military attacks and a lockdown of the Gaza Strip,
but weaken the physical being of Gazans through a calculated diet of food
imports that keeps them on the edges of starvation.
Abraham Bin Yiju
Palermo (Oct 29, '12)
It appears the Republican Party is having its annual How-Can-We-Screw-Up?
competition just days before the presidential election. Despite Mitt Romney's
admirable showing in the debates, where he demonstrated the ability to lie
while keeping the length of his nose (more or less) the same, the Repudiaticans
are scrambling to disavow any sympathy for yet another GOP politician's gaffe
on the subject they love to rant in public about, rape-induced pregnancy and
abortion. The latest comments from one Indiana yahoo about how such pregnancies
have to be allowed to come to term "because it's God's will", in the wake of
maybe a half dozen other similar insanities from other Neoconderthal hayseeds,
shows yet again how the unofficial keep-'em-kitchen-bound-and preggers
philosophy of the God's Ordained Pregnancy Party is becoming a bit of a
liability with the ladies. Still, this stupidity isn't my favorite; that honor
belongs to another Repubic-ant politico, known for his rigid anti-abortion
stance, who had an affair with a woman, who then became pregnant. This apparent
genius, who inexplicably didn't make it onto Romney's VP shortlist, taped a
conversation with the woman where he insisted that she should get an abortion.
But that's not the most intelligent part. He then re-played the tape to his
wife in order to "patch up their marriage." Not to mention his former political
career.
Ya gotta love it. In Wonderland, just when you were convinced the
Repunkicanards couldn't say or do anything more ridiculous or hypocritical if
they tried, presto, like manna floating down from heaven or honeyed milk
flooding the streets, there's yet another neocon Tea Bagger mouth opening up
like a busted latrine and astounding everyone with new nadirs of verbal
ignorance, arrogance and asininity. Even more astonishing is how little adverse
effect such pronouncements usually have amongst the hardcore neocon voter, who
froth at the rabid mouth at each Palinesque demonstration of wasted education,
braincells and oxygen. I'm convinced it's only because they can relate to such
idiots. Hmm... considering the inbreeding that goes amongst your typical
Republikan redneck trailer trash, they probably ARE related.
H Campbell
United States (Oct 29, '12)
[Re From Kuriles with
love, Oct 25] How could MKB miss the better title "To Russia with
Love", when James Bond is the name (of the game)? Japan cannot hope to achieve
any success with Russia unless she develop a foreign policy that serves Japan's
not America's interest. Japan foreign policy consists overwhelmingly of obeying
Washington's marching orders.
Whenever she tries any initiative on her own, it either fizzles out or more
often get slapped back down by Washington. Japanese efforts on foreign matters
are doomed unless Japan unlearns two bad habits: (1) trying to wag the dog
vis-a-vis using American military might to advance Japan's own interests and
initiatives, (2) surrendering the initiative to other parties both internally
and externally. Internally Japan needs to manage the far-right forces which has
successfully wag the dog (the nation of Japan) and impose the territorial
dispute over some rocks as the dominating theme of all foreign affairs.
Externally, Japan made a number of friendly gestures to Taiwan, Korea and now
Russia, but only after first miscalculating China's tough response and then US'
tepid support, making the lack of sincerity all too obvious.
The fact is that Japan had never cultivated relation with Taiwan and Korea
except as a side note to their respective US relations and sometimes their
common distrust towards China. Japan had even attempted to take a tough stand
towards Korea initially, before it became clear that the US would not escalate
a conflict with China. The US is happy to maintain bilateral relationships
between US and Pakistan, US and India, US and Maldives, Uncle Sam doesn't
encourage multilateral relations amongst India and Pakistan, and India and the
Maldives. So likewise Washington had also never encourage close ties between
Japan and Kora, and Japan and Taiwan. Letting US (the friend) and China (the
rival) control Japan's foreign agendas is the fatal flaw.
Putin would like to sell gas for much needed cash, but Russia's financial woes
isn't so desperate that he need to give any ground on the Kuriles. In fact now
that Japan has triggered the transition into a new unpleasant (for Japan)
reality, that China's military and civilian ships are a regular presence in the
disputed waters, Russia must feel Japan is in a poor negotiating position. On
one hand Japan might be pressured into purchasing Russian gas at the price set
by Putin simply to secure Russia NOT following China's and Korea's suit and
making movements on the Kuriles that would embarrass Japan.
On the other hand, Washington would not let Tokyo takes meaningful initiatives.
Washington will thaw Russo-Japanese friendship just as he does thaw
Sino-Japanese conflict.
C Chin
Hong Kong (Oct 26, '12)
Editor's note: As aficionados of 007 will recognize, the headline
for our own Mr Bhadrakumar's latest adventure in print paid homage to one of
the great Bond movies of the past (even as the latest hit Skyfall was
released) while doing double duty in relating the story to the Kuriles,
expressly so that Internet users searching for stories on the subject can
easily locate it.
The Panetta cyberhubbub about cyberwar cybergeddon and a cyberrepeat of 9-11 is
cyberironic. Forgive the cyberbole. It's just so amusing that the great and
powerful Empire, master of the skies and sea and everything in between, is all
of a sudden now whining a la Chicken Little about the threat of banks and water
and power shutting down after some turbaned fiend with a laptop goes all
medieval on our software infrastructure. The potential for this has been out
there for, what, FOREVER? Or didn't he see the movie "Wargames" in the 80s
where a teenage computer geek accesses Pentagon war games simulations of
thermonuclear war and inadvertently brings us to the precipice's edge? Methinks
the Defense Department dudes need to invest in a set of Star Trek videos for a
glimpse of the future or pick up some comic books.
If fictional drama wasn't enough of a forecast, the computer triggered Panic of
1987 should not have required a genius to figure out the inherent and
developing vulnerabilities of the technodeveloped nations' computerized
financial infrastructures, especially those in computer-obsessed Wonderland.
Whether it's Iran or China or North Korea or Israel or Vanuatu, everybody and
their brother has diligently been working on developing this technologically
"clean" method of "coercive defense." It's always been the most logical and
infinitely democratic evolutionary weapon for the weak to resist the strong, a
reserve once held by the crude nuclear bomb that, ironically, the latest
cyberattack is intended to defend. But a cybercapable Iran needing a nuke to
defend itself from Anglo-Saxon imperialism is a bit like a man needing a gun to
defend himself as he walks through a bad neighborhood en route to taking
self-defense martial arts classes. At some point Iran will wake up to the fact
that nukes are a 20th century anachronism that only its still doting father
Uncle Sam insists is needed anymore.
Of course, cyberwar MAD (Mutually Assured Destabilization) is just like nukewar
MAD; you launch against me and I'll burn you too. But with asymmetrical
dependency on computers for transacting everyday functions comes asymmetrical
levels of coercive sensitivity, so us getting MAD at Iran is not nearly as bad
as their getting MAD at us, just because our almost total reliance on software
is so much greater. And the US knows that its principal adversary, China, an
ally of Iran, is no idle spectator in this escalating tit-for-tat duel.
Panetta's concerns about Iran pale next to his intelligence estimations of
Chinese subversion potential of Amerikan computer systems. He knows the Chinese
are assiduously taking notes as Washington and Tehran exchange techno-volleys.
Let's face it, the Empire is in several pickles at once, so what's the
solution? Why, spy on your own citizens, of course! Everyone knows that
pervasive surveillance and intrusions into people's private lives has worked
before to preserve decaying carcasses, hasn't it? If you refuse to believe
this, just ask the East German Stasi (the ones not in prison). And our super
duper spies have such a good track record at preventing bad things from
happening or finding bad guys when they have oodles of info, like when they had
those opportunities prior to 9-11 to apprehend the alleged "hijackers" yet
decided to do nothing with it until AFTER 9-11. Or when they "failed" to find
Osama bin Laden for ten years, when everyone knew he was living in Pakistan.
But then his contract with the CIA expired, and so he had to also.
That's why the Empire will still want to rely on military force as a first
resort, always and exclusively, despite al the rhetoric about peaceful
solutions and diplomatic negotiations. It's really the only coercive instrument
available when you have no way of foreseeing the future, having a clue about
the present or learning from the past. Now if you'll excuse me. I have to
withdraw all money from the bank and head into my bunker.
Hardy Campbell
United States (Oct 26, '12)
[Re Exceptional
America rules,
Malign neglect vs aggressive indifference, and
US race shames China's leadership change, Oct 24] The difference in
thesis among these three articles is as stark as that between the Chinese and
American leadership transitions. Interestingly, Francesco Sisci's colorful
description of the fierce infighting within the Chinese Communist Party
actually points to a telling fact, that the CCP is a much more pluralistic
entity than the inflexible monolith portrayed in the West, with competing
factions holding divergent visions for the country's future.
As to which of the two political processes is superior or whether the
democratic election system yields the best government, global developments of
the recent decades should offer some useful (though not definitive) clues, as
will the following quotes provide some perspective and inject a dose of common
sense into the debate.
It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.
- Deng Xiaoping
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the
average voter. - Winston Churchill
Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There
never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. - John Adams
John Chen
United States (Oct 25, '12)
[Re US race shames
China's leadership change, Oct 24] Allow me to profess my two cents
worth of opinion on comparative political election processes between China and
the so-called democratic west.
In reality China's process is quite democratic, as democracy is literally meant
to be. Potential candidates for top leadership posts come through the ranks,
inconspicuously, based on their job performances since early in their careers.
Each cadre has a file that thickens to the size of an NYC telephone book by the
time he/she becomes a candidate vying for a seat on the Central Committee, let
alone for those in consideration for the Politburo. The prime criteria for
judgment are how well they are liked by the people they worked with or
governed, and what have they accomplished. In the past, accomplishments were
too heavily weighted in terms of GDP; hence the blind chase for economic
showcase trophies by mid-level cadres during the past three decades all over
the country.
Fortunately that is now changing. In any case the Politburo is not at liberty
to pick whoever they want. The candidates are narrowed by the process, over
dozens of years of on-the-job tests, and the final choices are made to promote
harmony; or at least to not stir controversy. Political stability is valued
above all else.
I knew of Xi Jinping and Bo Xilai as far back as the mid-'90s, when China was
considering replacing Governor Yuan of Hainan province. These two, then only in
their early forties, were already regarded above Du Qinglin, then the Number 2
in the pecking order in Hainan. In the end, neither were selected, but it
demonstrated to me how careful and deliberate the political process is in
China. Along the way, some rising stars make it to the top and get drafted into
the Politburo, some fall off the wayside due to political blunders. The
majority of such blunders involve corruption and antagonism with the populace.
Even much of the corruption is due to rendering favors to the people around
them so as to win a better reputation and popular support, which is seen as
their tickets to the top. From what I understand, popular support equates
democracy, does it not?
Now let's look at the West. Since the Kennedy years, firebrand speech-making
has become the prime criteria in leadership selection at just about all levels
of politics. Demagogues, intellectually shallow as the Reflecting Pond in front
of the Lincoln Memorial, grab headlines and limelight for clever sloganeering
or for having said a few cute things at the right place. Two lightweight
politicians of their era, Slick-Willie Clinton and Slimy Obama, got catapulted
into successful presidential races for having uttered some politically correct
slogans as Democrat National Congress keynote speakers.
Two other well-packaged candidates, Ronnie Reagan and 'Dubya' Bush, were no
more than puppets hoisted by their handlers. Candidates do their homework
studying the makeup of the audiences at tomorrow's political rallies and not
much else, so as to say the right things and win some applause regardless
whether such things are inconsistent with their own previous views. In any case
it seems most candidates don't really have any views - they are too dumb and
numb to hold any in the first place.
I don't know enough about the UK, Italian, or French political processes, but
judging from their latest crop of leaders, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron,
Sarkozy, Berlusconi, et al, I doubt if they are any better. Germany has had a
series of true statesmen including the incumbent Merkel, and it seems Hollande
in France will proved to be a wise choice, but to say the US race shames
China's politics is a stretch.
Chen Liyen
United States (Oct 25, '12)
Perhaps no event has had a more profound impact on Amerikan foreign policy than
one in which it had no involvement. The Munich conference in 1938, which saw
the European victors of World War One hand Czechoslovakia over to a menacing
Adolf Hitler, left an indelible mark on Wonderland's psyche. The word
"appeasement" thus became synonymous with surrender to tyrants and delaying
inevitable war. The very idea of sitting down with adversaries to discuss
negotiated solutions became viewed as feminine capitulation. Amerika resolved
to never again replace military solutions with "the Munich Way."
This philosophy, which has pretty much dominated Wonderland's foreign policy
for the last 60 plus years, assumed that had Chamberlain and Daladier told
Hitler that the only way he could acquire the Sudentland was by warring on the
West, that the German dictator would either have backed off or precipitated the
conflict that was coming anyway. What Amerikans ignored was that war was
precisely what Hitler wanted, knowing full well that England and France were
not prepared. Indeed, with the Russians at his doorstep in 1945, Hitler cursed
Munich as being his lost opportunity at total victory. He regretted
having given the West time to prepare for the approaching cataclysm.
Which merely highlights how Munich's "lessons" have been distorted by the
cultural bias and prism through which each "student" viewed it. Amerikans saw
Munich as just an exclamation point on European decadence, effeminacy and
impotence, whereas their nation, the unquestioned world winner in World War II,
would be a beacon of inspiration, ruggedly masculine and practically
omnipotent. We wouldn't have to compromise with anyone, because we would
democracy, capitalism and God on on our side. The New World was now the Only
World.
So from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, the four major wars fought
since 1945, Wonderland stood its ground against commies, jihadists and nasty
dudes, convinced that negotiation, diplomacy and compromise were liberal-speak
for Munich The Sequel. War was the only language bad people understand, so we
could ignore diplomatic feelers that could have either avoided or curtailed
every one of these wars.
Listening to the presidential debates, this machismo and
mine-is-bigger-than-yours bravado about Iran shows that this attitude has not
changed. There seems to be some sentiment amongst the politico-pundits here in
WonderStan that whoever becomes president will have to start serious talks with
the mad mullahs, but that wisdom ignores the still powerful image of Munich,
where "talk" equaled "surrender".
It may be a coincidence that the movie Argo about the "rescue" of some
Amerikans from revolutionary Iran was recently released, with its depictions of
US flag burning Muslims and hard line religious ayatollahs. But methinks that
such theatrical reminders to Wonderlanders about the nature of the Iranian
regime's anti-imperialism serves the purpose of making any serious overtures by
the US to Iran extremely problematic. Munich and its still invoked imagery of
illusory appeasement with bad guys makes war so much more acceptable as the
"only option."
Hardy Campbell
United States (Oct 25, '12)
[Re Japan's
reactionaries get marching orders, Oct 22] Things have to be near
crisis for the Obama administration to send the heavy hitter Richard Armitage,
former US deputy secretary of state, scurrying off to Japan. The US finds
itself between a rock and a hard place in the standoff between Seoul and Tokyo
over Dokdo or Takashima, according to whom you listen.
A high-powered delegation of South Koreans is in the States with a wish list
for Obama's support of South Korea's territorial irredentism. But Washington is
set to have joint naval maneuvers with Japan to counter China's claims to
islands in the East Sea.
Seems Armitage is the solution. He is well practiced in severe arm twisting.
Already Japan is showing signs of bad behavior by opening up to North Korea.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Oct 24, '12)
[Re The alliance
from hell, Oct 20, '12] Pakistan is currently at war with a terrorist
organization that calls itself the Pakistani Taliban (or TTP), which operates
from out of bases and training camps located in Afghanistan completely
undisturbed by NATO and Afghan forces - this group melted away into Afghanistan
when ISAF forces withdrew their troops and check posts located across the
border from Pakistani tribal areas as the Pakistani military launched
operations against it in Swat and South Waziristan in 2009.
TTP is the same group that has claimed responsibility for attacking 14-year-old
girl Malala Yusufzai. It is only logical that Pakistan would focus more on
terrorists that are attacking it than those that are not. The BBC has reported
that the TTP is indeed based in Afghanistan (contrary to its government's
denials) as Pakistan has insisted and that the US military declined to comment
when asked if it would launch an operation against that group, while Afghan
officials would not do so either because it "does not attack any Afghan
security forces."
Ahmed Rashid - well known best-selling author on Pakistan, Afghanistan and the
Taliban - recently wrote that "Afghans officials have quietly admitted to me
that [TTP leader] Fazlullah's actions are being backed by the Afghan
intelligence services." Moreover, UN officials in Kabul have told C. Christine
Fair that the Afghan domestic intelligence agency is supplying weapons on
India's behalf to Baloch insurgents fighting the Pakistani state. Perhaps
coincidentally, the TTP and the Baloch insurgency both began their war on
Pakistan in 2004. Even Mr M K Bhadrakumar - who has contributed countless
articles to Asia Times Online - while suggesting that the US is systematically
destabilizing Pakistan's tribal areas deliberately with the drone attacks, said
in an article that there is "a US-inspired low-intensity war against Pakistan
being waged by militant groups based in safe havens inside Afghanistan." These
incidents are being explained as pay-back for Pakistan's similar (but as yet
unproven) backing of the same Afghan Taliban that the United States is looking
to reach a diplomatic settlement with and is working with Pakistan to create a
mechanism for that group's safe entry into the Afghan peace process.
I also noted the terrorist attacks on Pakistani military installations
"including nuclear facilities" that the author of this article Dilip Hiro
talked about but the fact is that not a single one of the targets he mentioned
was a nuclear facility. The November 2007 attack on the Sargodha airbase he
mentioned was actually an attack on a Pakistan Air Force Hino bus bearing
number plate 31321 carrying Pakistani air force officers and trainees to a
nearby training center. The attack a month later at Kamra that Hiro talks about
was in fact an attack on a school-bus carrying children of Pakistan Air Force
employees.
Then Hiro referred to an August 2008 attack on "a weapons complex at the Wah
cantonment containing a nuclear warhead assembly plant," which is actually a
cluster of about 20 industrial units producing artillery, tank, and
anti-aircraft ammunition for the Pakistan armed forces employing around 25,000
to 30,000 workers; both attackers blew themselves up at the entrance to the
complex when workers were changing shifts. Finally he mentions two more attacks
at Kamra; in the one in October 2009 one suicide bomber walked up to a
checkpoint and blew himself up. The one this last August was thwarted at the
outset and its aim was to damage the aircraft stored there instead of getting
at any nuclear weapons.
The world's media and think tanks passed all of these incidents off as attacks
on "nuclear facilities," which is what Hiro himself has done without doing any
research himself (and it is also obvious where he got the idea of titling his
article "the alliance from hell"). I noted that he said the Pakistani air force
base at Kamra is "believed" to hold nuclear weapons, just like how New York
Times correspondent Declan Walsh said the facility was "thought" to store them.
Just who were the believers and thinkers? On the basis of what information from
what source both gentlemen said Pakistani nuclear weapons are "believed" and
"thought" respectively to be based at the facility at Kamra, they do not say.
This is a very noteworthy point, because there is no information available that
says for sure based on solid evidence where Pakistan's nuclear weapons are
stored or even how and in what form that country transports them. Hiro must
also clarify where he got the information that the Wah weapons complex at Wah
cantonment contains a nuclear warhead assembly plant because all such
information publicly available always uses words like "likely," "probably" and
"at least some connection" when it suggests that facility has anything to do
with nuclear development work.
Dilip Hiro made just another open-source guesswork-based attempt to figure out
where Pakistan's nuclear assets might be located; reporting on this tends to be
incredibly circular, and if you trace citations (when they exist) you almost
always end up at Globalsecurity.org or Wikipedia and so far all evidence saying
that there are nuclear weapons at Kamra is unconvincing. Also Hiro said the
distance between Kamra and Islamabad is 37 miles. It is 25 miles if you trust
the New York Times, 37 miles if you believe Mr Hiro and the Washington Post,
and 54 miles if you ask Google Maps.
The specific distance is not particularly important, except for the fact that
an attack on a military base near the Pakistani capital might seem more
worrisome than one further away. Moreover, if Hiro was going to explore a
"nuclear conundrum" between the United States and Pakistan it would have been
pertinent to discuss the much more worrying very real breaches that have taken
place in the United States' nuclear security as well instead of mentioning only
perceived dangers to Pakistan's nukes.
He has admitted that "the military planners in Islamabad correctly surmise that
Delhi and Washington would like to turn Pakistan into a non-nuclear power" but
the question is whether or not the two of them are trying to accomplish this by
consistently having their media present as attacks on nuclear assets incidents
that are actually much more benign in order to shape public opinion in favor of
intervention to denuclearize Pakistan by force.
I sincerely believe Asia Times Online as a responsible news organization should
reserve its platform for informative and meaningful analysis of issues instead
of articles like this one which is clearly a piece of yellow journalism devoid
of any true substance. Also it is not asking too much of its readers to take
any article about Pakistan written by an Indian author with a pinch of salt
even if its appearance on a renowned news agency's platform serves to put the
stamp of credibility on it.
Hakaru Hayashi (Oct 22, '12)
Am I the only one who finds it odd and ironic that the very same neocons who
want to keep government out of the private sector are the first ones to condemn
Obama for high unemployment? If government creates jobs, that's socialism,
isn't it? If private capital creates jobs, isn't that capitalism? So are they
blaming Obama for NOT being a good socialist? Conversely, if the private sector
is not creating jobs, isn't that a failure of capitalism? Seems like the
Repunkicans want it both ways (surprise, surprise); denouncing Obama as a
"socialist" for not creating the jobs that capitalism's excesses has destroyed.
Of course, reality (I know, how irrelevant in Wonderland) differs greatly from
the black-white Manichaean universe the neonon lives in. Since the New Deal of
FDR, Amerika has sucked at the teat of Big Government's largesse with gusto,
but the Pavlovian-brainwash techniques of the GOP has created this knee-jerk
hatred of the very Bigness that makes that suckling milk possible. But it's
like that with everything in this country that makes Carroll's fantasy land a
model of Aristotelian logic by comparison.
We condemn premarital sex and out-of-wedlock babies while we plaster the
airwaves with sexual imagery to sell everything from toothpaste to alcohol. We
praise the Arab Spring's freedom movements but worry when free Arabs freely
vote for Islamicists who condemn Amerikan policies. We call ourselves a peace
loving nation but drop bombs like we drop hats. We denounce terrorist groups
who don't like us while we support terrorist groups that promote our policies.
We condemn Big Government while, we shower the biggest piece of Big Government,
the Pentagon, with unlimited resources, even those they don't want or need. We
call ourselves a Christian nation while we routinely violate every one of
Christ's teachings. We praise education but ridicule academic achievers as
"nerds" or "geeks."
We say we're for free markets yet encourage big corporate monopolies that are
anything but free. We're against government subsidies and bailouts yet greedily
accept every tax deduction we can get (which are merely another form of
subsidy.) We praise honesty and truth while we deny the undeniable facts about
manufactured terror attacks and bogus excuses for illegal war. We say we want
accountable politicians yet return the same apparently bulletproof liars to
office time after time. We denounce "socialism" and "socialized medicine" but
don't dare talk about eliminating Social Security or Medicare. We tsk tsk
doping athletes while we medicate ourselves on a daily basis. Adults decry the
use of marijuana and narcotics among the young while they smoke and drink
booze.
And the list goes on and on and on, ad Americanum. So the dichotomy of
American'ts biting the hand that feeds them should be seen as yet another
measure of how we say one thing but deep down mean quite the opposite. I love
this country.
H Campbell
Texas (Oct 19, '12)
[Re Foreign
policy in a bad world , Oct 16, '12] The United States does not face
any credible threat, militarily or financially, except in its own imagination.
Interestingly, by sowing dragon's teeth around the world, the sole superpower
is in fact providing motivation for other countries to bring an end to its
global dominance. A more peaceful world backed by an irenically bent America,
on the contrary, would promote global trade/commerce within a framework
controlled by the US and actually help extend American preeminence more quietly
and subtly. While there is undoubtedly credence to the notion that the US
position atop the international pecking order will experience gradual erosion
over time, it is simply an ineluctable outcome dictated by the inviolable law
of nature that nothing lasts forever; engaging in military adventures abroad,
guided by hawkish foreign policies, will merely hasten the realization of that
eventuality.
John Chen
United States (Oct 17, '12)
The tragedy of the Pakistani girl Yousefzai attacked by misogynist Taliban is
still painfully fresh. It serves as a stark reminder that the cultural and
ideological gulf between the West and East remains vast, despite the cosmetic
affinity around the globe for Western goods, film and food. The irony is that
while we may speak of the "West' as some unified monolithic bastion of
enlightened idealisms, in truth within the West itself there exists ever
widening chasms, pried open by deepening rifts in religion, socioeconomic's and
political philosophy. The blatant misogyny of the fundamentalists in places
like rural Pakistan and Afghanistan shocks Westerners when atrocities such as
those committed on young Yousefzai are publicized, but if they paused and
thought about the subterranean misogyny surrounding them in their supposedly
"civilized" backyard, perhaps their outrage would be muted somewhat. The
neo-con evangelicals in Wonderland slowly strangle the rights of women here to
possess their own reproductive bodies, subjecting them to humiliating and ever
tightening restrictions, if they're able to access abortion clinics that aren't
firebombed or surrounded by shrieking, threatening fundamentalist "Christian"
fascists.
Just try to find the same righteous indignation among US reporters about such
violations of Amerikan women's rights that they would show for Taliban attacks
on Afghan women. I'll save you the trouble. It doesn't exist, because if they
did loudly protest such egregious violations of women's rights, and dared to
condemn the churchgoing Bible thumpers for their rank hypocrisy, their radio or
TV station would be picketed by the TeaBagger loontoons, if not menaced by much
worse (remember the abortion clinics.) The irony of the neo-con fascination
with obedient, stay-at-home moms who have lots of babies and raise them as good
"Christians" is that their ideologies of capitalistic freedom and free markets
creates the very economic conditions that require women not only to abandon
their kids at daycare so they can make a mediocre living but also forces many
women to have abortions in the first place. In truth, there is only a razor's
edge worth of difference between the bearded Neanderthal Taliban in
Afghanistan/Pakistan and the Sunday-school-going evangelical here in
WonderStan. Just don't give that razor to either one if you don't kowtow to
their radical ideology. A pox on both of them.
H Campbell
Texas (Oct 17, '12)
[Re Norodom
Sihanouk dies, Oct 16] The last of the "demigods" has died. The French
journalist Jean Lacouture crowned the then prince Norodom Sihanouk in his
"Demigods: charismatic leadership in the third world" a half century ago.
No matter what has been said of the man, he was above all a patriot who loved
his country and his people. Much maligned, especially by thee US since the
prince spurned the simplistic notions of the US of either you're for us or
against us, for the Bandung spirit of neutralism. And the Nixon administration
engineered his overthrow, thereby ushering Pol Pot and his minions to power.
Even in the 1990s, in the cerebral salons of academe, US professors - with
diplomatic, CIA, or military careers - kept peppering Sihanouk with suspect
hoary Cold War injury. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez in his own way has inherited the
spirit of Sihanouk in our days.
May he find his just rest as he crosses the other side of the mountain to join
his ancestors. And may the record show how devoted he was to his country and
people.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Oct 16, '12)
Christine Hong in 2013:
First year of Korean peace [Oct 15], fails to inform her readers that
Kang Jeong-Koo is a pro-North Korean member of the South Korean left. Several
years ago Kang wrote an article stating that he US and the UN should not have
stepped in to stop North Korean aggression and the North should have been
allowed to conquer the South in 1950. Anyone who is not familiar with the Korea
Policy Institute should know that it is a leading North Korean apologist group
in the US. It completely ignores all human rights violations in North Korean
and blames the US for all the problems in North Korea. Kang claims that 65% of
South Koreans want to US to leave the South.
A Gallup poll from several years ago had the number at 26% with 71% not wanting
the US to pull out. South Korea is a democracy the South Korean government
could simply tell the US to leave and it would have to leave. However the US
spends billions of dollars protecting the South so if the US left they would
have to increase their defense spending.
Hong wants the US to sign a peace treaty with North Korea, however how does she
explain that North Korea on May 27, 2009 announced that it was no longer bound
by the 1953 Armistice Agreement and committed two unprovoked attacks on South
Korea in 2010 killing 100 people. The left believes that a peace treaty will
force the US off the Korean Peninsula. Several South Korean sources claim that
one of the North Korean gulags that hold around 200,000 people Camp 22 has
closed after it commandant defected to China. The Camp held around 30,000
people but only 3,000 were moved to other camps what happened to the other
27,000. Why has the world remained silent, surely the US and other nations spy
satellites most have seen something. Perhaps the Korean Policy Institute could
do a study and show how 27,000 inmates committed suicide to protest hostile US
polices.
Dennis O'Connell
USA (Oct 16, '12)
Ho hum. Another day, another Amerikan sports ikon toppled like a domino in an
earthquake. The defrocking of Lance Armstrong adds to a depressing litany of
once venerated athletes and coaches whose on and off the field activities
inspired millions but whose illegal or unethical behavior that made such feats
of glory possible were finally exposed. Armstrong's fall is particularly
noteworthy, as he had climbed the highest mountaintop of heroic achievement,
overcoming cancer, winning seven Tours de France in a row, becoming a media
darling, dating the hottest babes and collecting hundreds of millions of
dollars for his charities. But of course, as is all too typical of Wonderland,
ambition, desire and greed become the means that whitewash all ends. Not that
Armstrong still doesn't have fans who doubt the ironclad case against him. No
sirreee; plenty of red blooded 'merikans still sit in his corner, despite all
the evidence that he not only took banned substances, that he not only sold
them, but that he coerced his reluctant teammates into taking them also upon
pain of banishment from the ArmstrongSphere.
These faithful stalwarts will point to his previous 60 successfully
"passed"drug tests as proof that he is just the victim of a socialist
government witch hunt or an international French-led persecution, ignoring the
damning testimony of eleven of his teammates and hundreds of equally accusatory
e-mails. Of course, anyone with any knowledge of sports medicine realizes that
the drug pushers are always ahead of the anti-doping testers in their ability
to mask drug content in their bloodstream or urine, but that eventually the day
of reckoning arrives. It is interesting in this respect that blood samples from
the 1984 Olympics that were tested at that event using the crude techniques of
the time and found to be negative were recently retested with modern detection
methods.
Predictably, hundreds of samples that had previously been found acceptable were
now found to be drug positive, a result that compelled the doctor who had
retained these samples to quietly drop the entire matter, all too aware of the
Pandora's box of controversial worms he would be unleashing otherwise. And so
it was with Armstrong, though in his case the time lag for modern medical
technology to catch up with the masking abilities was much shorter than 25
years. Too bad for him, but on the other hand he has his millions, his hot
babes and his legion of diehard fans.
Hardy Campbell
Texas (Oct 16, '12)
[Re 2013: First year for
Korean peace, Oct 12, '12] Is there hope to think that 2013 will be the
"first year for Korean peace"? Year 60 of the signing of the Armistice
Agreement - signed by the US for the UN forces, China, and the DPRK - is fast
approaching. Yet, South Korea remains at war with the North.
So is professor Christine Hong's optimism misplaced?
The Obama administration is helping South Korea expand the range of its missile
capacity so that nowhere in North Korea is safe from a hit. If the US president
is re-elected, it is doubtful that his policy of "strategic patience" will
change.
If Governor Mitt Romney occupies the Oval Office, there is every indication
that he will harden the US stance towards North Korea. Let's look at who is
advising him on foreign policy - former ambassador to the UN John Bolton and
Robert Kaplan. Both are well known who don't walk softly while yielding a big
stick. Bolton's record on North Korea was a disaster and may have accelerated
Pyongyang's testing of a nuclear device.
Will a new president in Seoul's Blue House soften South Korea's hostile policy
towards the North? Possibly, but we cannot say for sure since with US help the
ROK is being turned into a fortress with military power to strike not only
North Korea but China and Russia's Far East.
So, 2013 doesn't look like first year for Korean peace unless there is movement
by the three signatories of the Armistice to open peace treaty discussion. If
they do South Korea may offer resistance but, in the end, bend to US pressure.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Oct 15, '12)
The routine demonization of foreign leaders we don't like is a standard feature
of Wonderism. If some overseas dude is opposed to Amerika's love of
bloodthirsty warmongering or economic imperialism or any of the myriad
injustices inflicted on the world by its insatiable quest for world domination,
there are standard ways Wonderland's media will respond: 1) He's insane, 2)
He's evil, and 3) He's a ruthless dictator who hates democracy and oppresses
his people. Usually this trifecta is guaranteed to create national contempt and
opprobrium for the foreigner in question, typically as preparation for economic
sanctions, CIA-sponsored coups or military invasion.
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, winner on October 7 of his country's presidential
election, has long prided himself as being included on this Amerikan Hit List.
He survived a US backed coup attempt in 2002, has appropriated US oil company
properties, buddied up to the likes of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Cuba's Fidel
Castro and Belarus's Lukashenko, lambasted Amerika's own tyrant Dumbya Bush in
the UN, nationalized numerous industries in his own country, distributed his
nation's wealth to help the poor, sold oil at discount prices to other left
leaning nations and in general has given The Empire plenty of reason to depict
him as a commie loontoon Latin tinpot despot who would do anything to stay in
power, including intimidating voters and stuffing ballot boxes.
But of course, reality,as usual, paints a different picture than the grotesque
mistruths slapped onto the WonderCanvas by the usual gang of hired gun
corporate teleprostitutes on Fox "News", CNN, et al. Having been in Venezuela
in the runup to the election, I saw Chavez posters next to his opponent's all
over the place. I also saw his opponent on TV, an energetic young lawyer with a
good track record in government, vigorously denounce Chavez's last 14 years in
power before cheering crowds. In other words, I saw plenty of free speech and a
vibrant democratic electoral process going on with none of the roving goon
squads Amerikan "newsmen" tried to hype as being part of Chavez's plot to hold
onto power. As for rigged voting, well, in a country where we had GOP saboteurs
and a neo-con judiciary illegally anoint a president in 2000 and tampered
electronic voting boxes in 2004 provide the same result, we are in no position
to judge any election, but so far, no one has alleged that Chavez's election
was anything but above board.
But that won't matter to Wonderlanders. No, their minds are made up. No amount
of talk about free elections or helping the poor will change their mindsets. If
he ain't fir us, he ag'in us, so, done and dusted, he's a nut job red bereted
madman with horns and a forked tail ready to devour capitalist babies on sight.
The game plan carefully sculpted by the neo-cons under that traitor Bush and
continued under his tanned twin OBushama is to marginalize Chavez, not for his
socialist dream or ambitions of regional hegemony, but, like his hero Castro,
for daring to defy the Empire for decades and surviving to tell the tale.
Nothing is a greater heresy to the WonderInquisition, because it shouts to the
world how impotent we are in "our" backyard.
Hardy Campbell
Texas (Oct 15, '12)
I enjoyed reading the latest tidy streak of commentaries offered up by your
reader Hardy Campbell. As usual Campbell was right on the money in just about
all points made, except one! One cannot draw the conclusion from the divergence
of Deutsch/Yankee behaviors on the simple conjecture of having been an occupied
nation or not. There is the glaring refutation to your thesis in the recent
example of a nation called Japan! That, of course, is the easy one to cite.
But there were many others, dating back to the Roman Empire, the Spanish
excesses in the Southern Americas and subsequent humiliating retreat, and not
to forget the sun-never-set "British Empire" even though technically speaking
UK was never occupied if you don't count the Yanks as an occupation force. I
have never sense a shred of repentance or remorse in these nations' collective
consciences; not from their political leaders to their ivory tower high priests
to their self-adoring intellectuals and artisans.
Not all the way down to their masses on the streets! Rather than erecting
monuments to pay respect to their victim, they instead showcase their pillages
in their museums. I rather think the Deutsche are the exceptions to the rule -
my hats off to such nobility! I also think the difference is in the soul - the
collective national soul, elusive as it may be. It is a matter of what a nation
collectively chooses in terms of moral values.
Chenliyen
United States (Oct 15, '12)
Memories are tricky things. In theory they capture images of things as they
really were. In reality, they tend to be fuzzy shadows, prone to plastic
manipulation as time and prejudice work their subtle influence. Lawyers make
their living proving that every day, demonstrating how easily people distort
what they actually saw into what they wanted to see. Historical memory is the
same, but acts on a collective scale to reinforce a national myth or self
image, either positive or negative. Dependent on the national zeitgeist, such
memories either perpetuate the worst excesses of such collective consciousness
or strive mightily to constrain them.
The US and Germany offer telling contrasts to drive home this point. Germany's
recent history is well known. After two massive defeats in world wars, its
history of revering militarism and the illusions of warrior glory has forced
its people to take long hard looks at its collective self to acknowledge some
disturbing truths about themselves and humanity in general. The relatively
recent collapse of East Germany's repressive dictatorship underscored this
point, adding yet another mnemonic to the long list of reminders that Germans
and Germany cannot be permitted to forget their inherited legacy of ignoring
human rights in their quest for some distorted view of utopia. Consequently,
modern Germany bends over backwards to commemorate and memorialize the victims
of Germany's excesses, strewing its cities and countryside with monuments to
the victims of Hitlerite Nazism and GDR socialism. The Germans now realize that
constant education and reinforced memory is the only way to bind their worst
tendencies, tendencies, to be sure, not restricted to one country alone.
Alas, t'were such introspection to be found in Wonderland, a nation that now
considers venerating militarism and war as the only way to define "patriotism."
Our history of violating human rights goes back even further than modern
Germany's, with the victim list including the native red man, enslaved blacks,
freedom seeking Filipinos and the list goes on and on even to this day with our
murder of Arabs and Afghans. We hide such barbarism under the increasingly thin
rubric of "freedom" and "democracy", merely the Amerikan equivalent of "Aryan
supremacy" and "socialist internationalism." If we had the same desire as the
Germans do to try and constrain the Wonderland predilection for war as the
solution to every problem, we would see a Wonderscape littered with monuments
to the red, black, brown and yellow man massacred in the name of Amerikan
exceptionalism, but you'll be hard pressed to find those.
Even such monuments as the Vietnam memorial are judgement neutral, merely
honoring the deaths of American boys while ignoring the millions of colored
people they shot, maimed and massacred in our most useless overseas adventure.
More likely, you will find statue after stature in parks all around the US
lauding its numerous war dead, with the number of wars and deaths rapidly
accumulating with no end in sight. I half expect to see memorials to downed
drones next.
Sadly, one must conclude from this disparate comparison that the difference
between the two national approaches to war and repression is that one nation
suffered not only devastating defeats but occupation and enforced
indoctrination and the other did not. The irony is that Germany would never had
undergone such a soul searching examination of how they needed to combat their
national "disease" without American's forcing them to. Perhaps we have
something to look forward to after Amerika starts their next world war.
H Campbell
Texas (Oct 12, '12)
Try listening to any political debate in Wonderland and not hearing the
"Founding Fathers" (FF) invoked over and over again to promote an agenda. They
never say which "FF" specifically, just some vague collective reference to some
alleged belief or philosophy, as if the mere mention of those dead
"revolutionaries" alone was sufficient to awe one's opponent into cowed and
acquiescent submission.
Of course, odds are good that said quoter of FF wisdom will get yet another
nugget of FF wisdom thrown right back in their face as a counter-argument,
leaving their historophobic audience bewildered. It's an easy game to play,
since the real FFs were far from universal concurrence in all aspects of the
nascent Republic's life. And even if they were, of what relevance are white
18th-century Protestant men, many of them slaveholders, each and every one of
them who violated their oaths of allegiance to their English king, to a
multicultural 21st century Amerika that has patriotic obedience drummed into
their juvenile heads from the day they enter kindergarten and pledge allegiance
to a tricolored flag?
Seems like the model of rebellion to sociopolitical injustice that our FFs
embodied would be the exact opposite lesson these politicos would want taught,
because if we were to really take the FF's lessons to heart we would be
storming Congress and hoisting our "representatives" heads up on pikes.
And what about the courageous stance the FFs took on slavery and personal
freedom for the black man? Yeah, that worked out real well also, yet another
dubious exemplar of the FFs saying one thing and doing quite the opposite. And
though the FFs claimed theirs was a "revolution," when faced with the real
McCoy in republican France, they scrambled to distance themselves from such
"radicalism."
Seems like our "revolution" was more akin to painting stripes on a kitty cat
and calling it a Bengal tiger. And for all the sturm-und-drang about "taxation
without representation," Boy George Washington had no problem sending troops
(thankfully not wearing redcoats) to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion over
extortionate taxes on booze (now why wasn't THAT a "Revolution?") And the list
of hypocrisies goes one and on about these patriotic "supermen" of olde
Amerika. So it remains a bit of a mystery to me why anyone would want to hold
these very flawed men up as some kind of icon for emulation in a world far far
removed from the one they helped create, the one today where the ideals they
allegedly promoted, freedom, personal responsibility and an honest government
with integrity, have been so tragically compromised. The seeds of that failure
were sown by the supposedly ideal Founding Fathers.
H Campbell
United States (Oct 11, '12)
Comparing imperial Amerika to imperial Rome has become a bit of a cottage
industry among historians and political pundits these days especially with
regards to the decline and fall of both. More useful, however, is a focus on
how both empires were perceived in their heydays and how they got that way.
Because one cannot understand their mutual collapses without understanding
their rise and maintenance of domination. Both embraced the RICH (Racist,
Imperialist, Capitalist Hegemony) philosophy to justify expanding their
opportunities for conquest, exploitation and monopoly all over their known
worlds. Rome's increasing appetite for the luxuries of life demanded an agenda
of neverending war to acquire more subject populaces that could feed the gaping
and ravenous Roman tax maw.
Their arrogant and undisguised contempt for racial inferiors (deemed
"barbarians" to make the resulting genocide seem more like a "civilizing'
mission) justified slaughtering natives by the hundreds of thousands, not once
but numerous times as the enslaved launched futile after futile insurrection to
oust their oppressors. But the ever victorious Romans were convinced the gods
smiled on them and blessed their piety by putting so many unbelievers under
their pitiless yoke. Paradoxically, that Rome was hated and reviled from Spain
to the Euphrates did not preclude Roman ways and customs from being slowly
assimilated by the occupied lands through commerce, local alliances with native
warlords smart enough to read the tea leaves and even the service of
"barbarians" in the Roman military.
Similarly, Amerika's Manifest Destiny, ordained by the Lord in the minds of the
pious Wonderlanders of yore, justified clearing the vast fertile interior of
forests and barbaric, heathen redmen in order to create larger lucrative
markets and sources of raw materials. However, the surrounding of continental
Amerika by immense oceans prevented the US from embarking on the same kind of
pervasive imperial land conquests as Rome, so the alternative, building an
economic empire bolstered by the occasional saber rattle, if not saber usage,
proved more profitable. Not that the US military didn't flex its muscles when
required, as demonstrated by our most significant continental land grab, the
fabricated war with Mexico (sold to the US public as a defense of freedom and
civilizing mission to the Dark Age mysticism of the Catholic Mexicans) that
would have made Julius "I'll-Have-a-Salad" Caesar or former US president George
W Bush proud.
Similar to Rome, all this market-creating activity has upset a few people
around the world, like the Filipinos, Nicaraguans, Haitians, Dominicans,
Cubans, Chinese, Vietnamese, et al, that we've killed while making the world
"safe for (our) democracy" (nothing safer than the grave, the morticians'
joke). The Pentagon now exists solely to fuel and feed Amerika's unrelenting
need for war to quell insurrectionary wildfires around the imperial globe, from
phantasmic al-Qaeda to Colombia's FARC to Uganda's LPRA. Every new 'merikan
jackboot on the ground sprouts five new rebels eager to send the yanqui home in
a box, an equation the US military depends on for infinite funding and
unquestioning patriotic drivel. But the dilemma of needing new intervenionist
wars to suppress wars caused by previous intervenionist wars plagued Rome as
well as the US, a conquest conundrum cycle that found little comfort in the
gradual diffusion of the imperialist's value systems.
Like Rome, whose alphabet is used to write these very words, Amerikan customs
and rituals have become ubiquitous despite our unpopular and arrogant behavior,
but one should not mistake adoption for affection. Indeed, the very popularity
of Roman customs and civilization ultimately undermined the empire, as all
those once uncivilized barbarians decided they could emulate Roman society even
better but without the nasty Roman part. Likewise, the Third World barbarians
we've spent the last 150 years killing and subjugating are concluding the world
does indeed need Amerikan values and qualities, just without the nasty Amerikan
part. Our Alaric will not be a bloodthirsty Visigoth sacking the once hallowed
space of Rome but a Gucci suited Asian carrying an eviction notice.
H Campbell
Houston, Texas
USA (Oct 10, '12)
OK. I'm ready. It's been a very funny joke for as long as it's lasted, which is
my entire life. But it's time to end it. Really. No kidding, I'm serious. I
want everyone who's been part of this massive "punking" of Hardy Campbell, this
absurd cartoonization of reality called Amerika, this preposterous and absurd
stupification and inanization of all things sensible, to cease and desist.
Immediately.
No more moronic blatherings dribbling out of the mouths of buffoonish Texas
Republicans. No more deification of mentally defective California governors cum
US presidents. No more collective blindness over obvious lies, propaganda and
deception. No more timid acquiescence to corporate greed, avarice and naked
power. No more surrender to the inevitability of a dysfunctional educational,
governmental and legal system. No mas, we say, to pervasive, ingrained,
institutionalized corruption in every aspect of our private and public lives.
No more glorification of high school dropouts who join the US Army so they can
murder and steal and rape in the name of "defending freedom". No longer will we
accept the Good Cop-Bad Cop routine of the two political parties who pretend to
offer alternatives to the way they will rob, cheat and steal the American
public. "Enough," we will shout at the top of our lungs, of the perverse farce
we call the "war on terror". "Basta," we will cry at the dismantling of the
middle class. "We're mad as hell and we ain't gonna take it anymore" our new
national anthem will sing to the stars.
Then I'll wake up and listen on TV to people gnashing their their teeth over
Justin Bieber's hairdo or a Kardashian fashion faux pas or Mitt Romney's latest
casual insult of "Fill in the Blank" and know that none of this has ever been a
prank on me or anyone else.
Hardy Campbell
USA (Oct 9, '12)
[Re Debt bricks in
Pakistani 'slaves', Oct 5, '12] Mitt Romney's fans seem to want to
eliminate the other 47% of Americans, the way Stalin eliminated the Kulaks.
This is short-sighted. Who will clean the toilets? Raise the food? Fight in the
wars? If Romney is as cunning a businessman as his admirers say, he will
imitate the brick-makers of Pakistan and reduce the majority of Americans to
serfdom! His fans can look forward to being serf over-seers.
Lester Ness (Oct 9, '12)
I am a regular reader of Asia Times Online's articles and letters, and I deeply
appreciate the excellent analysis provided on this site of various issues.
Forgive my intrusion into someone's private matter but I feel very negatively
about the use of your forum for what recently took place between Shayne Wilson
and Dennis O'Connell, whatever issues O'Connell has with Wilson's letters it
was highly inappropriate of him to use the kind of language that he did. I will
say nothing in defense of Wilson but I must say that calling someone insane is
completely unwarranted when he or she merely questions a claim that he holds
true but which has indeed not proven. O'Connell used guesswork and personal
deductions without evidence to make his points and reacted unnecessarily
harshly to an argument not in his favor. And he made condemnatory references to
the Taliban without seeing that the United States is reconciling with that
agency.
Just recently former Taliban members who murdered an Afghan woman on the charge
of adultery (and have no regrets) have been allowed to reintegrate into Afghan
politics and society and live as free men under a formal reconciliation program
fully endorsed by the United States. Wilson wrote an unnecessarily long letter
with irrelevant things in it but O'Connell is merely contradicting himself in
his burst of anger. We are all adults here, O'Connell should make his points
based on proven facts rather than unproven accusations and allow the
possibility of a mature debate without childish attacks on a person instead his
or her arguments.
Lisa Yu
Los Angeles, USA (Oct 5, '12)
This will be the final word on the matter in these pages - ATol
[Re The $5
trillion question, Oct 4, '12] I don't know which debate Pepe Escobar
was watching from his cave but even Democratic "owned" TV stations like CNN and
MSNBC admitted that Governor Mitt Romney swept the floor with US President
Barack Obama.
There are two visions from America. The president has the vision that people
should depend on government, suck welfare, get free health care paid by people
like me, and a long list of entitlements mercilessly abused by a dependent
class. Governor Romney drew a line between those who REALLY need a safety net
from the government and those who are a virus to this economy. Romney hammered
the failed Solyndra and green energy bullcrap. This is a clear choice and I was
wishing in my heart that Governor Romney was even blunter than he was.
In the battlefield you cannot take chances, the weaker the enemy, the faster
and harder that you have to crush him. Romney hammered Obama's hypocrisy on his
supporters. What? Do people around the world think that only unemployed people
on food stamps support Obama? Try getting into those 50K a plate fundraisers
with Hollywood Elites. All of them preaching about the environment but flying
to the event in a private jet. Romney should have asked Obama why Obama's good
friend Jeffrey Immelt has an advisory job in the White House but GE paid no
taxes last year. So Escobar which debate were you watching if watching at all?
By the way this is a rhetorical question.
Ysais Martinez (Oct 5, '12)
Many people love mysteries that make them scratch their heads with puzzlement.
There's the typical potboiler whodunit of pulp fiction, cinema and theater, of
course, where the butler or an unknown twin invariably did it. And then there's
the modern mystery, the kind the media doesn't like to probe too deeply in,
because, well, they know which side their bread is buttered on. That's because
they're real mysteries for very good reasons no one wants investigated very
closely.
Take terrorists and nukes, for example. In the wake of the USSR's demise, we
were told that nukes, nuke materials, chemical weapons and biowar pathogens
were lying around warehouses, army depots and abandoned research facilities
like popcorn littering a moviehouse floor, ready for anyone and their brother
to scoop up and sell to criminals, "terrorists" or anyone with a beef against
the West. Mind you, that was in the days before the alleged "attack" on 9/11 or
the fabricated charges against Saddam's Iraq. Consequently, those fears, though
real, were muted, devoid of hysteria, hype or delusion. But since that
September day 11 years ago, the specter of the smoking gun mushrooom cloud has
been trotted out to regularly scare Wonderlanders into forgoing yet more money,
civil liberties or common sense.
But isn't it mysterious that, despite a hostile nuclear North Korea and a
nuclear Islamic Pakistan, despite 21 years since the collapse of the
WMD-producing Soviet Union, despite prolific and profitable nuke peddlers like
AQ Khan, despite the persistence of al-Qaeda and its supposedly fanatical
America-haters, despite all the unemployed, starving Soviet scientists from the
commie biowar programs, not a single incident of even a "dirty bomb" has
occurred? Now, the neocon trashheads will thump their chests and patriotically
proclaim the efficiency, wisdom and intelligence of agencies like the CIA and
Homeland Security as being the primary reason for such a lack of WMD
acquisition by The Bad Guys. However, since I am as skeptical about the
existence of unicorns and tooth fairies as I am these alleged virtues of
Amerika's security organs, virtues they have yet to exhibit under any
circumstance, I am obliged to seek more possible answers.
Sadly, if one removes one's head from one's nether regions and excludes the
improbable, the impossible and all the other fictions that have passed for
news, facts and "government information," one is led to the inescapable
conclusion that there are no terrorist groups, at least not those who are not
financed, operated and controlled by these self-same US security entities.
Never has been. Not on 9/11, not on the WTC attack of 1993, not even the
Oklahoma City bombing. Startling as that inevitable conclusion is, it also fits
in perfectly with age old False Flag decoy-and-deceive operations that convince
the masses that surrendering their liberties in the name of security will
miraculously provide either. Sad thing is, the strategy has once again worked
brilliantly.
H Campbell
USA (Oct 4, '12)
[Re Back to
gold - eventually, October 3] Any way you slice it, the next decade is
shaping up to be one of the most important transformational periods in all of
human history. If the dollar is to lose its global reserve status, the process
will probably go through stages characterized by the coexistence of maybe two
competing alternatives. As the world slides into a prolonged and deep
recession, protectionist tendencies will likely engender the instauration of
trading blocs and the establishment of regional reserve currencies. With that
outcome, the biggest loser may well be the US. Though unfortunate, this would
nevertheless be a fitting comeuppance for the sole superpower's reckless
squandering of an historic opportunity to lead the world.
John Chen
USA (Oct 4, '12)
For those who doubt the fiendish brilliance of the Amerikan Kapitalist,
consider Unicor, the federal agency begun in 1934 in the depth of Depression
Number One. Unicor "employs" 13,000 federal prisoners to manufacture a wide
array of products for other federal entities, most notably and lucratively, the
budget-busters at the Pentagon. Statutes are on the books that pretty much
gives Unicor priority when competing with "private" enterprises trying to
peddle the same products.
This has logically resulted in such businesses crying "Foul!" That's because
the "employees" of Unicor are a Republican's dream, literally a captive
audience with no union rights, making about a quarter a day and with no 401ks
[retirement funds] to worry about funding. Imagine the hue and cry when
legislation now in the works allows Unicor to sell to private companies as
well. This will put the GOP in a quandary, though, since their parroting mantra
is "Government needs to stay out of private businessmen's hair."
With Unicor doing the same thing Amerika has accused the tyrannical Chinese of
doing for years, ie, using inmates to produce goods, the indignant
self-righteousness so characteristic of the Bible-thumping Free Marketing
TeaBaggers will be cowed into silence (at least temporarily, until the
notorious neocon short term amnesia kicks in).
But it's got to be overwhelmingly tempting for these white trash hypocrites to
pay sub-Mexican wages to non-Mexicans who wish they could self-deport
themselves out of their Unicor jobs. It's the closest thing the Republicans
will ever have to that most beloved of their white supremacist institutions,
the cotton plantation of the defunct Confederacy. Between the boom in the
federal and state prison construction industry and federally subsidized
businesses like Unicor, locking up people on the flimsiest of pretexts look to
be the last growth industry left In Wonderland. Look for the ranks of potential
Unicor employees to swell with every passing day, as the economy the
Republicans wrecked disintegrates and more and more draconian laws are passed
to suppress dissent, anger and the Coming Revolution.
Hardy Campbell
Texas (Oct 3, '12)
[Re Israeli
hypocrisy on a nuclear Middle East, Oct 2, '12] Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu has much practice selling snakeoil. His pitch before the UN
General Assembly was flat and unconvincing. In fact, he appeared more
buffoonish than statesman-like as he held up his doom's day cartoon of how
close Iran is to making a nuclear bomb. A more telling truth is that he has
been hawking the same humbug since the early 1990s at least. A more telling
truth is the Zionist state's refusal to participate in a regional conference on
nuclear arms in Helsinki in December. Why? Obviously Israel's participation
will force its hand to openly admit possession of a large stockpile of nuclear
weapons. Not only that the conference directly challenges the Zionist state's
hegemony in the Middle East.
Abraham Bin Yiju
Palermo (Oct 3, '12)
Shayne Wilson's letter in response to my letter is the most outrageous pack of
nonsense I have read in quite some time. I can easily dismantle every single
claim that Wilson makes in his rather lengthy letter, however that would take a
letter at least twice his size. First the Taliban were given the choice of
turning over Osama bin Laden or facing attack and they are the ones that chose
attack, I'm sure by December of 2001 they knew they had made the wrong
decision. Sibel Edmonds claims that the US was using Turkey and Pakistan along
with other countries to do intelligence in Central Asia and that these
countries sub-contracted work out to Bin Laden. One has to ask the question why
Bin Laden would want to help the US especially since the US was in the process
of trying to have him killed. If the CIA was doing this it just shows how
stupid the people running the CIA are, this would be like hiring a fox to guard
your hen house.
He claims the US has removed Mullah Omar from the UN blacklisted terrorists
list, a lie. First the US does not control the UN and the UN maintains a list
of al-Qaeda sanctioned individuals according to Resolutions 1267 and 1989 and
Mullah Omar was never on the list. If you search for Mullah Omar on the US
Rewards for Justice website you will find he is still listed with a $10 million
reward. If you do a little searching you will find that Omar is probably in the
custody of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The US is still the
largest country for Pakistan's exports, more than twice any other nation, and
Pakistan's GDP is $240 billion not $500 billion.
Wilson claims that Afghanistan is supporting terror in Pakistan, now I ask him
to site a responsible news site to back this up, he won't be able. He also
claims that the US is arming the Taliban to attack Pakistan. Then he claims
that the US stopped Pakistan from interdicting the Taliban escape into
Pakistan. Wilson might want to type " airlift of evil" into his search engine
and see how Pakistan flew thousands of Taliban, al-qaeda and ISI agents out of
Kunduz in northern Afghanistan with the permission of Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld.
What I find interesting is that no US mainstream media will report or
investigate this story. The US has made more mistakes in its policies in
Afghanistan than it is possible to list, however the US has brought great
change to the lives of the people of Afghanistan - they have gone from the
pre-industrial Taliban age into the 21st Century with cell phones and computers
and education for women. The Taliban will find it very hard to drag the people
of Afghanistan back to the seventh century but I am sure they are ready to kill
millions in their attempt. Anyone that has followed the events in Afghanistan
in the last 11 years and doesn't believe that Pakistan is aiding the Taliban to
fight against the government of Afghanistan and its allies is simply insane and
I have no cure for insanity.
Dennis O'Connell
USA (Oct 3, '12)
Should the letter writers wish to continue this debate, please do so on
the Edge - ATol
[Re Palestinians
ditched; Will Egypt be next?, Sep 28, '12] Spengler says "the Palestine
Authority is collapsing" and speculates that Egypt is next. Frankly, I wonder
that he has not noticed that the US is collapsing.
Lester Ness
Kunming
China (Oct 2, '12)
I did not quite see the point Dennis O'Connell tried to make in his letter [Sep
28, '12] because war in Afghanistan was certainly not the right course of
action to take now that its catastrophic consequences are clear. I also noted
his omission of the fact that his own country was responsible for creating and
unleashing the same demons that it has fought in Afghanistan since 2001; his
own Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was honest enough to admit that, so can
he be. After all, former FBI translator Sibel Deniz Edmonds (whose testimony to
the 9/11 Commission was entirely suppressed) has said on record that
"Washington's claim that since the fall of Soviet Union it cancelled all its
intimate relationship with Bin Laden and Taliban - all those things can be
proven lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case,
because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people and it
involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11, 2001... "
A diplomatic solution in Afghanistan differentiating the Taliban from al-Qaeda
was possible in 2001 and a devastating war could have been avoided, but that
possibility was never considered. After sacrificing the lives of 2,000 soldiers
(in addition to those who took their own lives), having many more return home
with severe mental trauma, and running its own economy to the ground, the
United States is taking steps to diplomatically move closer to the Taliban,
like releasing its prisoners, having the UN remove Mullah Omar and other
leaders from its list of blacklisted terrorists, opening up the Qatar office,
and working with Pakistan to set up a mechanism whereby the Taliban can safely
join the Afghan peace process. O'Connell did not explain in his letter why a
negotiated solution was a bad idea 11 years ago when it is precisely what is
being pursued by his country today. His concern for Taliban control over
Afghanistan is pointless because after an 11 year war that faction still
controls three quarters of Afghanistan and is able to strike whenever it wants
in the heart of Kabul or the hub of British military presence in the country
(the base where Prince Harry was stationed). The United States had conceded
quite a while back that the Taliban have an undeniable future in Afghan
politics; O'Connell should not have any reservations about the Taliban because
his own Vice President Joe Biden has made it clear that the Taliban is NOT the
United States' enemy. British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond also insists on
reaching a political settlement with the Taliban on the model of how the war in
Northern Ireland was resolved via political reconciliation with the Irish
Republican Army and so he is speeding up the rate of withdrawing his country's
troops from Afghanistan.
The US$20 billion the US gave Pakistan over 11 years were in fact
reimbursements for the use of Pakistani supply routes, logistical support and
military facilities to wage the war in Afghanistan and the US withholds the
said reimbursements whenever some diplomatic flair-up takes place. On the other
hand Pakistan has borne around $70 billion in direct costs in this war as well
as another $100 billion in lost investments while the majority of the $20
billion actually went into the pockets of American workers in Pakistan through
outlets like consultancy costs and salaries. Furthermore, Pakistan's GDP is
slightly below half a trillion dollars and it receives around 11 billion
dollars in remittances from its expatriate community each year, so O'Connell's
claim that $20 billion over 11 years kept Pakistan afloat is simply false. For
its part what Pakistan has demanded the most from the US is not aid but
preferential access to the US market for Pakistani products (textiles in
particular), which the US never granted. The truth is that Pakistan has been
brought to the brink of economic collapse as a direct result of this war that
the US launched motivated solely by ambitions related to Central Asia's natural
resources. When the war began, General Tommy Franks responded to a question
about capturing Osama bin Laden by saying, "We have not said that Osama bin
Laden is a target of this effort." The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Richard Myers, similarly said afterward, "Our goal has never been to get Bin
Laden." And President Bush himself said, "I truly am not that concerned about
him."
Against better sense and the advice of Pakistan (who knew the Afghans and the
Taliban better than anyone else), the US rejected any possibility of any
diplomatic solution and conducted the whole affair for the last 11 years with
complete disregard for Pakistan's core security concerns. Once Kabul was taken,
Pakistan urged the Americans to quickly move to seize the Taliban bastion of
Kandahar down to the south but the US decided to move north and take
Mazar-e-Sharif, which bought the Taliban all the time they needed to flee
across the Pakistani border, and on top of that the US forced a halt to all
measures Pakistan tried to take to prevent that, such as fencing the Afghan
border, mining the border areas, and repatriating Afghan refugees, into whom
the Taliban blended. Then Pakistan's enemy the Northern Alliance was allowed to
take the reins in Kabul and its takeover was legitimized in the Bonn Conference
of 2001; the United States had promised Pakistan that this would not happen.
That new government began to sponsor terrorist disturbances along Pakistan's
entire western flank; armed insurgencies in all of western Pakistan grew in
intensity as the Northern Alliance government in Kabul began backing them and
terrorism coming from out of Afghanistan over the last 11 years claimed the
lives of 5,000 Pakistani military personnel and 35,000 Pakistani civilians.
Whenever Pakistan launched military operations against the Pakistani Taliban
the United States withdrew its troops from its side of the border, allowing
them to flee across into Afghanistan and set up bases there from where even
today they launch cross-border attacks on Pakistan completely undisturbed by
NATO and Afghan forces - often using American armaments that mysteriously kept
disappearing from their depots - while the Afghan National Army also often
penetrates Pakistan and attacks border villages and army check posts.
Since the first American bombs started falling on Afghanistan, the Pakistanis
kept telling the Americans "you're going to lose this war and then you're going
to make us your fall guy." That is exactly what happened, and it is the height
of intellectual laziness on the part of O'Connell to claim that a poor
middle-sized country like Pakistan whose resources and capabilities come
nowhere close to matching the United States' is somehow single-handedly
responsible for the defeat of the world's only superpower and her 40+ NATO
allies in Afghanistan using heavily outnumbered and outgunned cave-dwelling
hillbillies armed with little more than RPGs, IEDs and suicide vests. If
Pakistan was indeed sponsoring Taliban bases on its territory (a claim that the
US has never actually proven), it could still not defeat the US because the CIA
has maintained an independent spy network in that country and US Special
Forces, the Joint Special Operations Command and private security contractors
have long run covert operations against the Taliban on Pakistani soil, while
the CIA's drones have struck at will against every Taliban or al-Qaeda target
it wanted to hit there with no more than pro forma protest from the Pakistani
government. If Pakistan aided the Taliban to kill Americans one must still
explain how the money the US too has paid to get its supplies into Afghanistan
often ended up in the hands of the Taliban. It is nothing but an abdication of
responsibility to make a scapegoat of Pakistan - the country that urged the US
to pursue the same diplomatic solution in Afghanistan 11 years ago that it is
seeking today - to divert attention from the real causes of the US' failure in
Afghanistan, which lie much closer to home.
It is very regrettable that all of the above managed to escape O'Connell's
notice when he expected gratitude from Pakistan after the US kept it under
sanctions since 1989, aggravated the very real threats to that country's core
security interests after 2001, devastated its society with terrorism and
brought it to the precipice of collapse, in return for 20 billion dollars.
Also, if that amount was insufficient to make Islamabad acquiesce to
Washington, he has to consider the fact that the US spent more than $600
billion in Afghanistan but today the personnel of the Afghan police, army and
intelligence services his country built up are killing American soldiers and
keeping ties with the Taliban. I hope he won't shift the blame for that on
someone else too because his own country's officials have said Taliban
infiltrations are responsible for only a quarter of the green on blue attacks,
the rest are caused by personal animosities and cultural differences between US
soldiers and the Afghan counterparts they train. And I hope O'Connell is not
ignorant of the fact that his country and its allies immensely backed al-Qaeda
in the war against Muammar Gaddafi's regime in Libya and have again joined
hands with al-Qaeda in order to subvert and overthrow the government of Syria
while the Saudi government has kept funding al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and other
places, so an explanation would have been very pertinent in O'Connell's letter
as to how the Taliban in 2001 was doing something wrong by being allied with
that same terrorist organization.
Shayne Wilson
Dubai, UAE (Oct 2, '12)
I was quite intrigued by Professor Jeffrey Robertson's September 28
contribution: Diplomats
Tested as East Asia Tension Rise[Sep 28, '12], but I beg to differ as a
matter of opinion as regards the Diaoyu Tai issues which no doubt prompted
Robertson's thesis in the article. For 40 years, since the 1972 US shenanigans
of turning over the island to Japanese administration, China and global Chinese
compatriots practiced exactly what the professor preaches, staying cool and
amicable even while being humiliated time and time again. So where did all that
brilliant diplomacy land us? I say it is time for a change in our tactics. It
is time to shove something nasty down the Japanese throat, and see if that
won't bring more palatable results. Please also note that Western protocols and
norms in matters of diplomacy are not the only mannerism of choice. In my mind,
Westerners are not the only ones capable of statesmanship and diplomacy. In the
Far East there is a history of 5,000 years of statecraft, much of which likely
rivaled the huddles of the likes of Ernest Mason Satow, Francois de Callieres,
and Henry Kissinger. Two of the five Chinese Classics, the Classic of Rites
and the Spring and Autumn Annals, are mostly about protocol and
diplomacy, not to mention the so-called 24 Histories. In these treatises one
finds subtle tactics employed in diplomacy, but just as well treachery,
intimidations, or outright kidnap and murder. In other words, methods that
worked! I for one believe that this time around sinking a Japanese frigate or
two may well bring the Diaoyu Tai issues to a reasonable and lasting
settlement. Let's give it a try.
Chenliyen
USA (Oct 2, '12)
Dallas Darling in his article,
The weaknesses of national security [Sep 27, '12], believes the best
response the US could have implemented after 9/11 would have been "appeasement
and accommodation, and would have trusted other nations to help bring to
justice those responsible".
I guess one of those nations might have been Pakistan which was the major
backer of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. If the US had followed that policy the
Taliban would still control Afghanistan along with their friend al-Qaeda. The
problem with US policies are that they are insane. The US gets to choose
between the idiot neo-cons and the idiots in the State Department.
The US has given Pakistan over $20 billion in the last 11 years. This money
kept Pakistan from collapse and Pakistan shows its thanks by aiding the Taliban
to kill Americans and making sure the US is defeated in Afghanistan. Dallas
Darling claims that the US committed "genocidal policies" against Vietnam,
evidently Darling doesn't know what the word genocide means. Then he tells us
that the "Domino Theory never transpired", yet both Laos and Cambodia fell to
the communists in 1975. If he wants to study a genocide he might try Cambodia
where the communists killed a third of the population, but even Cambodia does
not fit the dictionary definition of genocide.
Dennis O'Connell
USA (Sep 28, '12)
I read Dr Jian Junbo's article
US pivots toward trouble in West Pacific[September 26, 2012] with much
agreement. As an American witnessing this powerful country overtake nations
through financial means, colored revolutions or downright invasions and wars, I
ask myself: How much longer before America is at war with half the world and
half the world reciprocating?"
As most know, recent increases in armament building throughout the world are
for a purpose, and a majority of those arms flow from American industries.
America's investment bankers brought-down world economies in 2008 as its
military/intel plundered the Middle East for seven years prior. President
Barack Obama continued, extended and expanded the Bush/Cheney Doctrine of
"Total War" since then. Adding to Obama's resume are unrelenting bail-outs of
Wall Street (now on a monthly basis, says the Fed); the inception of drone
warfare; the practice of targeted assassinations done openly; the suppression
of civil liberties and erection of a total security state at home; even the
criminalization of kids who step off sidewalks in New York to protest Wall
Street ... and on and on.
As an armchair moralist, I ponder the laws of the universe and ask the Tao:
Where is balance? Where is fairness? Where is justice? China's bold response to
Japan's actions over the Diaoyu Islands is fully understandable. But it must
not give-up values that carried it through its economic boom. In short, the
age-old answer of war should be replaced with virtues. Be patient and do not
react the way your adversary wishes you to react.
Do not lose morality in the face of immorality. War never solved one human
problem; war creates only destruction and death. War is not the answer. If war
is not immoral, nothing is.
Michael T Bucci (Sep 26, '12)
"It is already happening in the US, where entities like Walmart, Target and
Publix that determine prices and certainly not the producers or farmers." C
Shivkumar [letter, Sep 25]
US farmers have not controlled prices for a looooong time. In the past,
prices were largely determined by speculators, such as at the Chicago Board of
Trade, and by corporations such as Cargill, which has long had a near monopoly
on grain buying in much of the US. I do not know the current set-up but I doubt
it benefits farmers.
For what it's worth, in spite of all the Walmarts, Carrefours, etc, in China's
cities, relatively few people buy their food there. The traditional shi chang
(bazaars) sure seem to be busy. In the US, such traditional markets have
disappeared because of the guanxi (connections) of large supermarket
corporations, not the laws of economics.
Lester Ness
Kunming
PR China (Sep 26, '12)
[Re Kim Jong-eun
prepares balancing act, Sep 22] Chris Green and Sokeel Park signal
change in North Korea under the stewardship of Kim Jong-eun. Reading the
foreign press and even US media information reports are filtering through that
the cumulative seeds of almost invisible economic reform by Kim Jong-il are
beginning to sprout.
Kim Jong-eun's style is more suited to the 21st century. And on the cultural
and economic fronts, European money and collaboration are evident but not from
America for obvious reasons: nothing good can come out of North Korea!
Green and Park are on the money when they point out that huff and puff of
American diplomacy on the nuclear issue is more bluff than substance. If the US
puts forward impossible conditions which they know the North will reject, the
Obama administration has but one real option - restarting the quiescent Korean
War, now in its 62nd year.
North Korea's standpoint is colored by this war, and in this sense, Kim has to
balance reform and military preparedness. Russia's forgiving billions in Soviet
loans lifts a burden for Pyongyang.
It is interesting to note that sanctions have not stopped US executives from
going to North Korea for possible future openings to do "business" with Kim.
So, yes, there is movement in North Korea but it seems if the Middle East is
any guide, the US holds too firmly on to greying policies.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Sep 25, '12)
[Re India's
politics rule - economy be damned, Sep 21, 2012] The campaign to ensure
Foreign Direct Investment into retail smacks of either duplicity or ignorance.
Firstly there is the argument that FDI in retail is a shift away from
consumption to investment driven growth. In the convention, investment implies
an asset that is purchased to generate income or appreciate in future. In an
economic term, investment implies purchase of goods that are not consumed
presently, but are used to create wealth. Unfortunately, it is difficult to
bring FDI in retail into the latter category.
FDI in retail, despite being touted as investment, is at best consumption
infrastructure, where the economic rates of return are at best suspect or
negative as in the case of India's IT sector. Perhaps there may be good
financial rates or return. Investments required in India are in sectors that
need public goods, education, water, power, transport and communication.
Unfortunately, these are not sectors that have merited the attention of the
Manmohan Singh government, which claims to have the best economic brains!
True, there are 850 million mobile users in the country. So on the face of it
looks like penetration has improved. In reality it is a statistical aberration,
because the actual communication penetration is just about 20%. The high number
of mobile users is due to the multiple connections in urban regions. This is
the same with transport and energy usage.
Secondly, FDI in retail is expected to benefit producers, farm goods - but will
it? This is what we are told in India. Probably in ideal market conditions. But
then what exists is not perfect, but imperfect conditions. So it means that
farmers will not necessarily get a better price than what the present Minimum
Support Price offered by the states. Instead it would mean that the power of
pricing would shift from the producer to the trader, in this case organized
retail. It is already happening in the US, where entities like Walmart, Target
and Publix that determine prices and certainly not the producers or farmers. It
also means that the pricing will no longer be determined by small traders'
margins, but more by return on equity to organized retail share holders.
Secondly, will in FDI retail result in a massive increase in employment?
Investment in retail may at best result in a surge in gross job creation. But
if retail was indeed the panacea for urban unemployment, the US and Europe
would not be seeing such massive job losses. What needs to be seen is net job
creation. Again investments into organized retail may work in some countries
that have low populations, Canada and Russia, probably even Brazil. To believe
that it can be replicated in India is too far-fetched. Besides organized retail
itself is dependent on consumption. In an economy where the minimum food basket
takes away almost 60% of the household income, is FDI in retail going to help?
After all, Walmart's, Target's and Publix's shareholders also have return
expectations.
Thirdly, is organized retail the answer to food inflation as some in India's
Planning Commission have been orchestrating? The overwhelming answer to this is
no. this is because, organized retail will tend to propel a real estate boom
especially commercial real estate. A real estate boom in turn translates to
margins of the organized realty. Organized realty in turn recovers it from
consumers. Then there are shareholder expectations. So saying organized retail
including FDI is good for the economy as reform is nothing short of sophistry.
Food inflation therefore will not reduce, but actually increase, as costs
incurred get transmitted to prices.
Have any real efforts made at reforming the economy? The answer is is not
clear. That includes raising the tax to GDP ratio. Forget international levels
of 20% plus. India ratio is far lower than the Asian average at just about
8.5%. Interestingly, tax to GDP ratio in the country has actually gone down,
after the so called economic reforms began in 1992. So if the tax to GDP is
raised to 15% then even with previous diesel prices, India would have had a
fiscal surplus of 6.5 trillion rupees ($120 billion at present exchange rates)
at the present tax rates.
The second element unaddressed reforms are to savers money is safe. India
household savings are presently about 26 trillion rupees ($472 billion each
year). The actual returns on these savings are negative to inflation. Besides,
a quarter of these savings vanish in the form of non-performing loans, a
euphemism for defaults by large corporate entities in the country. It is this
money that has been siphoned out of the peoples' savings that round trips its
way back into the country as FDI from tax havens like Mauritius. It is this
foreign investment including FDI that gets rates of return of over 20% per year
that is contributing to the inflation.
So what is the purpose of these so called reform or (non-reform) that India's
journalists turned government spokespersons' are making high decibel squawkings
about? The fact is that India is in trouble. India has lived beyond its means
and is headed for balance of payment trouble. In the Jan-March quarter the
current account deficit was $21.5 8 billion and capital account deficit $153
billion. For the first time since, India's capital account flows fell short of
the current account deficit, leaving balance of payments deficit.
Two years ago, when this question was raised with some of the top economists
including Kaushik Basu, Arvind Virmani and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, they
unanimous view was the capital flows were more than sufficient to fund the
current account deficit of 4.2%. That is not happening now. The result, foreign
currency reserves that was sufficient to cover 18 months of imports a year go
is down to just seven months. The only way is to push up capital account
surpluses. So the next best option is to sell of assets wherever possible. That
is FDI and economic reforms in a nutshell in India. For those skeptical
investors carried by the India story - they can wait for capital losses to
occur when the bubble bursts. Editors of financial dailies in India will
continue calling the steps "economic reforms".
C Shivkumar (Sep 25, '12)
[Re: All-out
Middle East war as good as it gets, Sep 17] To wish and label an
all-out war in the Middle East "as good as it gets" is an exercise in madness.
I have written and published a historical novel: The Call of the Desert in
Hellas in April 2011 describing such a scenario, even before the Arab
Spring. The reason I wrote this book is to show the human folly which may bring
forth such a catastrophe. My intention was to argue against such an historical
development which, as events show it becomes, to our misfortune, more probable.
Spengler has it all wrong. The first consequence of such an event would be the
destruction of Israel, not militarily but psychologically, culturally and
economically. Who would like to live in a place of desolation? Israel will also
face attacks with biological and chemical weapons and terrorist attacks which
make life there unbearable. It is not Syria the sole possessor of such weapons
but also Egypt. Furthermore, who can guarantee the behavior of the Saudis in
such a development? Do we think that Saudi Arabia is a stable and secure
country? Do we forget that Al-Qaeda is a Saudi construct?
Iran may be a theocratic state but it is also the homeland of an ancient
civilization, Persia. Many Persians may have animosities and hatred against the
Ayatollahs but there are staunch nationalists. A war with Persia will be an
all-our war with Israel, a war in four continents and for many years to come.
It will an irony of history, among many others, that Cyrus the Great released
the Jews from the Babylonian Bondage and now the Persians are an existential
threat to the Israelis.
Secondly, an all-out war in the Middle East will inundate the Balkans, Italy
and the rest of Europe with millions of Copts, Alevis, Alewites and other
non-Muslim sects who will try to save themselves from a pogrom by the
Sunni-Shiite conflict. Economically Europe will suffer a deep recession due to
the price of oil and loss of export markets. Internal security for Europe will
be Paradise Lost with incalculable political repercussions.
The rise of the nationalist right shall be meteoric. The tens of millions of
Muslims in Europe shall not watch pathetically the Middle East slaughter
without finding ways to attack each other or the host nations, or participating
in the conflict. Europe will become the backyard of the Middle East and for
that matter of Russia and China. Lastly but not least the political foundations
of a tolerant democratic society will be shuttered with incalculable
repercussions for the core values of the West.
As for the USA it may came out of it strengthened but also in grave danger.
China will become more assertive and feel threatened by a sole USA player
standing to face it without the intermediary presence of Europe's interests. In
the event of an all-out war in the Middle East it is highly probable that China
will intervene having its interests threatened by oil scarcity and high prices.
One way or another, an Israeli attack on Iran is impossible without an
ascending China. In case this would not be the case we may come close to a Cuba
like crisis.
Finally, the environment will be further destroyed by the use of coal and
nuclear energy, plus the physical destruction of the area. The environmental
catastrophe will be a nightmare for the inhabitants as well as for the wider
area.
It is interesting to talk about civilizations, as a historical-philosophical
exercise on paper. However, it is vital to start understanding human life as a
whole as the meaning of civilization, which is under the threat of extinction,
or under a severe revision with unknown parameters for the life of
self-conscious beings.
The view "an all-out war in the Middle East is as good as it gets" is an
eschatologically motivated expectation which is nothing more than the worst
kind of the Samson Syndrome I have heard. This is not the recurring theme of
the final clash between Good and Evil found in the Avestas, the Old and the New
Testament and the Koran. This is the clash of folly with prejudice.
On the other hand the statement: "An all-out regional war is the likely outcome
sooner or later" is a realistic assessment of the situation which may bring the
contestants to their senses. The statement expresses a possible outcome of the
historical labyrinth we are in. But it is the duty of all people who live and
believe to be the inheritors of the ancient glorious civilizations and
traditions of the Mediterranean and the Middle East to realize their folly and
come to an inclusive solution. If this does not happen, this will mean only one
thing. All these ancient glories will be proven shadows of death, false
prophesies and a gross annulment of the professed words of a God who will be
seen as a destroyer rather than a creator of life. For some atheists or
agnostics as myself, who view these adventured of the human mind with sympathy
as an achievement of the social-historical imaginary, such a war shall prove
that humanity should better get rid of these ancient fantasies before it is too
late.
Nicholas Biniaris
Hellas (Sep 24, '12)
[Re Uneasy crowd control
in East China Sea, Sep 19, 2012] I am writing to urge ATOL to correct a
long-standing deficiency and recruit a suitable person to represent a Taiwanese
view(s) for ATOL. Very clearly the German Kastner is not that person. For some
years, Kastner's articles dominated ATOL coverage on or involving Taiwan. Until
recently, his articles were aligned with the Pan-Green movement, a very
important segment, if not necessarily the most balanced presentation of Taiwan
society. More recently, especially after Pan-Green 2008 shake-up taking the
movement to a less confrontational stand towards Beijing, one started to
wonder, upon reading Kastner's essays, whether his alignment with Pan-Green is
co-incidental, when they were strongly anti-Beijing.
Since the recent escalation involving the Diaoyu Tai Islands, it became plainly
evident that Kastner is quite ready to take an anti-Taiwan line if and when
Taiwan aligns with Beijing on any issue. Exhibit A is Kastner's choice to use
the name Senkaku Islands as accepted, referring to China's and Taiwan's choice
Daiyu Tai or Daiyu Islands only once and pointedly in parenthesis. Such a
practice is unheard of in any writings by someone of Chinese origin or from
Chinese community. I especially point to news articles in Hong Kong, Taiwan,
and North America, most of which are free of Beijing's control. Which name
should be used is perhaps the prerogative of each writer, but an unequivocal
preference, as Kastner has shown, is a declaration to the reader which side the
author is aligned with.
Curiously, Kastner gave a lot of air to Tokyo's and Beijing's positions (if not
without bias) and even to Americans. In the whole article there's hardly any
room for any Taiwanese views, "a notion popular with Taiwanese academics
lately" was only mentioned so that it could be summarily dismissed by an
American pundit associated with the US political and security establishment. To
most Chinese observers, there's already evidently a lot of
nudge-nudge-wink-wink between Beijing, Taipei and Hong Kong in the recent
maritime activities.
China reaps multiple strategic benefits to have Taiwan staking a claim that
Diaoyu belongs to China, without distinguishing between PRC and ROC. So China
choosing to come to the aid of Taiwan (even without request) if a circumstance
presents itself seems to be highly probable. Anyway if such a notion is
"popular" within Taiwan, shouldn't it get a non-judgmental coverage?
Further there are many points that borders on intellectual dishonesty in
Kastner's writing, eg in mentioning the three nations putting putatively
non-military assets in the arena, he failed to mention that China's ships are
entirely unarmed (if well equipped) whereas Japan Coast Guard ships spot
conspicuous cannons.
He even called China Marine Surveillance (CMS) "paramilitary". To this date,
there's been no record or even accusation of CMS having committed any violence
in their actions. Shouldn't the label "paramilitary" be reserved for
organizations having the means and/or history of killing people and blowing
things up?
In Taiwan, the Pan-Green movement is keeping a low profile, as even an
independent Taiwan would not forfeit the claim to the Islands. Short of
becoming formally a protectorate of Japan, there is simply no scenario that
would cede the islands without losing the trust of the vast majority of the
Taiwan population. In sum, Kastner's position is aligned with no one, not even
a minority voice of Taiwan.
There's no other way to describe Kastner other than to say he's anti-Beijing
which in view of current events put him in the anti-Taiwan boat also. His
position is not necessarily objectionable in and of itself, and by no means he
should be silenced. But it's a serious problem if ATOL let his voice be the
only representation from Taiwan. Considering ATOL enlists several writers
representing various segments in Hong Kong and China, even including one or two
who can articulate Communist China's line of thought, why doesn't ATOL find one
or two who would present Pan-Green and Pan-Blue's views?
C Chin
Hong Kong (Sep 24, '12)
[Re Obama rethinks
the Arab Spring, September 18] The people of Israel should be proud of
their prime minister for giving new meaning to the word "gall". He appeared on
US television last week to promote getting America into a war with Iran based
on the totally bogus premise that Iran is "racing to develop nuclear weapons" -
which by the way are the exact words he used when he appeared before the
Congress of the United States in 2002 testifying that Iran was "racing to
develop nuclear weapons".
And, since early 1990s, every year he and others in the Israeli leadership have
declared Iran will have a nuclear weapon the next year. These are the real
facts so conveniently ignored by the prime minister and his cheerleaders in the
US that gave him such a propaganda platform.
With such a fanatical and apocalyptic record, is it not time to stop taking
such pronouncements seriously? Most of Israel's intelligence and military
chiefs are opposing the prime minister's rush toward war with Iran, calling it
"messianic". For example, Meir Dagan, the chief of Israel's Mossad agency from
2002 to 2010, said such an action is "the stupidest thing I have ever heard".
Does Iran have a nuclear program? Of course. Is it a weaponization program? Of
course not. How do we know? Both US and Israeli intelligence services have said
that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. James Clapper, director of
the US National Intelligence Agency, and General Rowland Burgess, of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, appearing at a Senate Armed Services Committee
hearing, both testified to that. And, Israeli Military Intelligence Chief
General Aviv Kochavi told a recent Knesset hearing that Iran is not working on
building a nuclear bomb.
Furthermore, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors are
constantly monitoring every aspect of Iran's nuclear program under the most
intrusive inspection regime. The IAEA, in its September 13, 2012, report,
continues to say what it has said through countless reports on Iran, that "the
Agency [IAEA] continues to verify the non-diversion of declared materials at
these [16 nuclear] facilities and [nine locations outside] LOF's."
Yet, all the breathless, alarmist commentary about this report has been that
since IAEA's previous report, Iran has doubled its stockpile of enriched
uranium at the 20 percent level. But what was left out in these news reports
was that half of that 20 percent enriched stockpile was used for conversion to
fuel plates for the Tehran nuclear research reactor, to help cancer patients -
fuel that cannot be used for weaponization.
Why then Netanyahu's constantly crying "wolf" and his "direct appeal to the
American public" in the middle of a presidential election? Perhaps he thinks,
by his incessant focusing on Iran, he will not have to focus on the thorny
problem of achieving a two-state solution with the Palestinians. And, by
his"brazen" actions through fear mongering, he can bully the President of the
United States. With such gall, the prime minister has set himself up for a rude
awakening, when his buddy Mitt Romney is resoundingly defeated.
Fariborz S Fatemi
United States (Sep 21, '12)
[Re US loses sense
over embassy protests, Sep 19] It was apparent from the word go that US
was taken off guard with the outbreak of the "Arab Spring". If it had any
contingency plans, the Obama administration was slow into putting them into
effect. The overthrow of Qaddfi brought it some good will, yet, even that,
couldn't overcome the complex, multiple stirrings within the Arab world, as
events in North Africa play out. Still, the Obama administration is trying to
make find the straw to build bricks of a more realistic policy in the Middle
East, seemingly. However, Syria might try the US up.
As for the Republicans, they are wedded cheek to jowl to right-wing Israeli
policy. "Mother Jones" has released the full video of Mitt Romney sales pitch
to his backers last May. His understanding of the Palestine question is not
only highly questionable but it shows a washing his hands of solving a thorny
matter. Let chaos prevail, he seems to say.
Palestine is an issue which unites and divides the Arab world, and for someone
who wishes to become the 46 president of the US to indulge in foreign policy
anarchy is symptomatic of how far the standard bearer of the Republican party
and its members have strayed into la la land.
Abraham Bin Yiju
Palermo (Sep 20, '12)
[Re All-out Middle
East war, as good as it gets, Sep 17] In his recent column, David
Goldman writes, "All-out regional war is the likely outcome sooner or later. We
might as well get on with it." When he uses the word WE, does he mean by this
he intends to join in the carnage, or simply stand on the sidelines as another
bleating cheerleader? How easy it seems, to send others to their destruction.
Hasn't the world suffered enough from these warriors?
G Wenk
United States (Sep 20, '12)
[Re All-out Middle
East war, as good as it gets, Sep 17] Will Spengler enlist in the
infantry?
Lester Ness, Viet Nam vet
Kunming
China (Sep 20, '12)
[Re Putin opens
Benghazi door for Obama, Sep 14] Thanks to M K Bhadrakumar for another
excellent article. Indeed Putin shows a lot of wisdom in his response to the
Benghazi event. He sent the right signal, whereas, indeed, China's message was
purely pro forma, "devoid of any empathy". However, it's inevitable no one will
enter, or even peek through the door that Putin opened. In the Western media,
Russia's statement was carried only by Chicago Tribune and New York Times. The
former stripped the statement down to a pro forma level, whereas NYT chose to
highlight Putin's "hardline" position, clearly no one in the Western world
noticed any door opening.
In the final analysis, it's actually better to get politely ignored after
sending a generic get-well card, as China did, than to get rebuked after
extending an olive branch, as Russia did.
Dr Core (Sep 18, '12)
[Re QE forever,
Sep 17] QE3 was no surprise, and because the Federal Reserve can continually
pass out monetary salve to soothe the country's myriad structural ills and
social angst, the US will be in a better shape than just about everyone else
for the foreseeable future.
All the while, a highway robbery under broad daylight is being perpetrated
against the rest of the world courtesy of Fed policies since the majority of
greenbacks reside outside the US. But indignant as other countries may feel,
this arrangement can/will continue for quite some time, until the house of
cards comes tumbling down and wholesale financial troubles/pain find their way
to American shores.
John Chen
United States (Sep 18, '12)
[Re US election sets
poser for Taiwan, Sep 14] Jens Kastner shows that politics is replete
with rhetorical expressions. There is an unsubstantiated presumption in "We
remain committed to a 'one China' policy, the Taiwan Relations Act and the
peaceful resolution of cross-strait issues that is consistent with the wishes
and best interests of the people of Taiwan.".
The fact is that one cannot rigorously debunk the suggestion that peaceful
resolution is not the wish of the people of Taiwan. First, no one can declare
the wish of the people of Taiwan without confirmation. Moreover, conformation
is impossible because there is no internal legislative procedure to ratify such
a wish, and, even if there were, there is no platform for Taiwan to articulate
such a wish, as Taiwan has no diplomatic space. Second, if the people of Taiwan
really want eventual independence, their wish cannot be peaceful resolution. In
fact, objectively speaking, the only chance for Taiwan to avert eventual
reunification is by the mainland side losing a bitterly fought war.
Nonetheless, by electing President Ma, whose platform is peace, most can
presume that most people in Taiwan want peace, with or without the salient
consideration that longer and longer period of peace means eventual
reunification. In fact, Ma’s obsession with peace can be likened to obsession
with oxygen: peace will exist in great abundance across the Taiwan Strait
during his terms in office. Period of peace means the mainland side
accumulating greater and greater advantages. Taiwan’s abjectly exposed energy
supply will eventually be targeted with very limited use of force executed, but
with enormous intimidating standby against Taiwan’s retaliation to break free.
When the mainland side starts to harass Taiwan’s energy supply with very
limited force, perhaps beginning 2030, and for another decade with increasing
baldness, how would the USA respond? Would the USA in turn harass Chinese
energy supply? The answer eventually will be no. Why? It will be the very
presumption that exists even now: the people of Taiwan want peace. This
presumption will be very attractive and logical to the USA when the time comes,
and the people of Taiwan would want it to be attractive and logical to the USA,
otherwise there will not be peace. It will be to the “best interests of the
people of Taiwan” that the USA does not in turn harass the Chinese mainland’s
energy supply.
Jeff Church
United States (Sep 18, '12)
[Re Japan and China on a
conflicting course, Sep 15] Once again the US has put its nose into a
territorial dispute involving contradictory claims of ownership of rocks in the
East China Sea by Japan and China. The recent announcement by Washington to
locate a second missile defense radar on Japanese territory is a clear warning
to China.
US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's ingenuous claim that this new radar base is
not aimed a China is a cause for disbelief, since his claim that it will also
serve as a deterrent to North Korea's ICBM's aimed at the American homeland
strains credibility, in the light of what we know of Pyongyang's "success" in
sending aloft long-range missiles.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Sep 18, '12)
[Re Mr Blowback
rising in Benghazi, Sep 14] Apparently Mr Escobar believes that
insulting a religion is a reason to legitimately kill anyone. Does Mr Escobar
suggest that I kill my neighbor when he is mowing the lawn on a Sunday because
I am Catholic and Sunday is a sacred day for me? Does he suggest that a mob of
Americans go out and execute the producers of South Park, Family Guy,
and Saturday Night Live who constantly mock Jesus?
The West is a Godless, irreverent place. An artist depicted a Bible in urine, a
cartoon shows the Blessed Virgin Mary bleeding off her butt, a movie and show
depict Jesus as an idiot, fraud, and charlatan, so what? In a secular democracy
with freedom of speech, anything, absolutely anything, is fair game. I would
not call those people Christophobes. They just don't give a piece of crap about
my religion and that is perfectly fine with me.
Oh Mr Escobar, why don't you have the balls to explicitly say that in the West,
in free countries, we should have laws that condemn blasphemy ONLY against
Islam, but blasphemy against Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc is fair game?
Why is it that only when Islam is insulted there are such demonstrations of
violence?
See, if the folks attacked the American embassy for political reasons, that
makes perfect sense. Absolutely perfect sense. But when a mob attacks an
embassy because an insult to a religion - which is fair game in a democracy,
republic - then you have to wonder why there is only one religion on Earth
where film makers and journalists have to go into hiding when they insult it.
Mocking Christ is enlightening in the West and may land you a job in the State
Department, but mocking Islam is blasphemous and a sacred cow. Please don't
kill me! Jesuschrist! Ysais Martinez
United States (Sep 14, '12)
[Re The day
that didn't change a thing, Sep 11] This is a dark reading of the world
since 9/11. If Michael Robeson means that Muslim extremists have relented in
their war against the US, he has a point, in spite of fighting the wrong war in
Iraq and the killing of the 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, and the Arab
Spring.
It isn't for nothing that the Salifist in Libya chose 9/11 to attack the US
Consulate in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of four Americans, including
the popular US ambassador Christopher Stevens. They used as a pretext a video
posted in California two months ago disparaging Islam and its prophet Muhammed.
Of course, they held their fire strategically until the 11th anniversary of
9/11.
On the other hand, the rise of right-wing extremism in Europe and the US has
its roots not only in the swelling immigration of Muslims, but also in the
fallout of the US made global recession of 2008. That economic tsunami
exacerbated social, class, and economic disparities which directly attacked the
material and psychological stake of the majority white population.
Abraham Bin Yiju
Palermo, Italy (Sep 14, '12)
[Re Clinton's strained swan
song in China, Sep 10.] Peter Lee writes: "Washington owes Beijing a
thorough, convincing explanation of the true intentions of its pivot policy".
Probably our Fearless Leaders in DC have been listening to those prophecy
preachers who claim that China is the King of the East in the Book of
Revelation.
Lester Ness Kunming, China (Sep 11, '12)
[Re Can North Korea's
agony find an end?, Sep 10.] Melanie Kirkpatrick writes with a pen
dipped in Dickensian ink. She reports the terrible torments and sufferings that
a 20-year period of starvation, natural disasters, and bureaucratic mis-steps,
as well as the use of food as a political weapon by the US, South Korea, the
EU, and Australia denying the DPRK of aid.
Kirkpatrick uses Chinese sources as well as testimony from North Korean
refugees and account of South Korean Christians. At times, she goes over old
territory, but is short on solutions other than regime change. It might do her
to pressure the Obama administration to resume the food it gave to NGOs for
distribution to North Koreans it cut off in 2008. Not that would show a concern
for the "starving" North Koreans.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Sep 11, '12)
[US eyes spoiler role in
Japan-China dispute, Sep 4, '12] A good case can be made for the US'
strategy of having its cake and eating it too in the matter of China's
territorial disputes on the seas. Let's us no forget that it was US secretary
of state Hillary Clinton who fired the first shot against China's claim to a
large portion of the South China Sea. Nor can we lose sight of the US hand in
the building of a naval base in Jeju island, South Korea, with an aim to
dispute China's claims to islands in the Yellow Sea, involving South Korea,
Japan, and possibly Taiwan.
And suddenly, the Obama administration's foreign secretary appears on the scene
as honest broker to claim turbulent waters in favor of an accord which it
surely has a hand in writing. The ploy is cynical for sure, and mirrors the
sleight of hand Teddy Roosevelt played in coming up with the Portsmouth Treaty
a century ago.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Sep 5, '12)
"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." So famously said the immortal
character of Gordon Gecko in the 1987 film Wall Street. He said this in
the context of ambition and desire collaborating to make economies "efficient,"
a term liberally interpreted by the real life likes of the Gecko-inspiring
Michael Milken and Carl Icahn to justify pillaging, looting and dismembering
dozens of companies for their non-human assets and leaving thousands
unemployed.
That was in the Reagan Era, when any and all white collar crimes to make oodles
of cash were tacitly encouraged by the ascendant neo-cons, convinced that
unrestrained capitalism was the key to Morning in Amerika and victory over the
command economies of the Soviet Bloc. And why not? However you want to define
greed, it is as quintessentially a human activity as digestion and respiration,
and more to the point, as Amerikan as law suits and Hummers. You can argue that
America's Manifest Destiny was simply an extension of this relentless struggle
for ever more, land, wealth, markets, and Empire. The urge to expand, to
conquer, to monopolize, to Christianize and dominate was ingrained in every
pioneer eager to clear unproductive land of all those uncivilized brown people
who wasted God's bounty.
In the US TV series, American Greed, Ponzi scheme after insurance fraud
scheme after Medicare ripoff scheme by a parade of intelligent, well groomed
and erudite scammers, con artists, lawyers, doctors and industrialists is
exposed, but they all share one thing in common with their ancestral pioneers;
an insatiable desire for more at any cost to others less industrious,
imaginative or ruthless than themselves.
In some sense, these modern pioneers of 21st-century finance view their victims
through the same prism of condescending contempt as their predecessors, who
were convinced that social Darwinism and God's grace preordained their
acquisition of wealth, by fair means or foul. Ironically, in some cases, the
American Greed miscreants actually have bona fide successful businesses in
addition to their criminal activities, but always the lure of bigger paychecks
makes illegality more attractive. For many, the collapse in 2008 of the
financial bubble that made their crimes possible in the first place rewarded
their greed with long term, federally funded vacations. But what the TV series
fails to explore in the same depth as the greed of the obvious villains is the
corresponding greed of their victims, who enter into these questionable
financial liaisons with the expectation of easy money reserved for "special"
people like themselves. Despite their confessed acknowledgement that the
returns offered seemed too good to be true, time and time again their greed
convinced them that common sense, along with their hard earned money, needed to
take a holiday.
In truth, the boundary between victim and victimizer in Wonderland is as thin
as a dollar bill or a voting chad; we vote for politicians who rig rules and
laws to allow Wall Street to engage in a bacchanalia of banking banditry that
we eventually pay for a hundredfold, we fork over cash to smooth talking, well
dressed snake oil salesmen promising early retirement (which turns out to be
theirs), we buy up the latest sexiest Facebook-like IPO anticipating quick
profits that quickly turn into losses, we buy lottery tickets instead of food,
we scan the Internet for get rich quick schemes that drain our back accounts.
What Mr Gecko didn't mention is that Greed, like Goya's Saturn, is a profligate
father that has to devour its children to survive.
H Campbell
Texas (Sep 5, '12)
[Re The nudists and the
diplomat's daughter, Aug 31, '12] Paul French has done a bang up job in
trying to "solve" the mystery of the gruesome disemboweling of Pamela Werner.
He has proved a relentless gumshoe journalist. Michael Rank's review suggests Midnight
in Peking is a page turner. And it is. Yet, he omits mention of Edgar
Snow's first wife Helen Forster Snow aka Nym Wales, a neighbor the Werners and
the incidental role she played in the tragic death of Pamela Werner. Anyhow,
ATOL readers should be encouraged to read Midnight in Peking for a slice
of time when unequal treaties fostered an eerie atmosphere of crime, rapine,
drugs, and foreign intrigue.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Sep 3, '12)
[Re Mitt's
secret weapon may keep bombing, Aug 30, '12] Perhaps Muhammad Cohen
should consider the state of American voters and the Republican Party in the
last decade. What I mean is that, regardless of the majority polling against
most of the positions that Republicans take, feckless Republicans do not feel
obliged to change their positions. In fact, many Republicans double down,
betting that voters will either not vote out of disgust with Republican
obstruction, categorizing both parties the same, or vote against their own
interests, reacting to the racist bent of the conservative media and Republican
Party regulars and the savvy propaganda campaign waged by an intensely unified
and over-financed party of plutocrats. As Cohen pointed out, challenged voters
chose George W Bush for two terms, the first with the aid of the Supreme Court.
In addition, with the results of the 2010 election, Republicans have reason to
believe that millions of American voters will vote against their own interests.
Jim
Southern California, USA (Sep 3, '12)
Oh that Hillary! Running to and fro and sounding man-tough about disputed
islands and Chinese aggressiveness and all in all making the case she should
have stuck to small town country lawyering and covering up her hubby's multiple
dalliances ( the former just a hobby, the latter a full-time job.) But all this
trouble could be avoided, if only the Chinese would read Amerikan history,
especially Island Imperialism 101, the primer Wonderland has used for the last
200 years to secure, tame and dominate troublesome hunks of water-surrounded
rock. Instead of the Chinese respecting Taiwanese sovereignty, despite everyone
on the planet recognizing Beijing's territorial rights, they should be doing
what the US did to Hawaii in 1898, subverting the economy and politics of the
independent kingdom and ultimately staging a coup that had the "winners"
requesting Amerikan "protection" and annexation. Or take Cuba in the same year,
where we manufactured a fake crisis over the USS Maine's internal magazine
explosion into a cause celebre that had us running the stooge Cubans for 60
years until Castro's liberation.
Grenada is a humorous variation of that theme, with a commie coup serving as
the excuse to send in the Marines to rescue US medical students that found out
they were in "danger" from the reds only after the war was over. That was
taking island invasion to the level of opera buffon, just the kind of
knee-slapping militarist comedy the Reaganauts specialized in (too bad for them
Lebanon wasn't water logged - that joke wasn't nearly as rib tickling). And
let's not forget Diego Garcia, that lagoon island in the Indian Ocean where the
ruling Brits colluded with the Yanks to exile the natives to a hellish
hand-to-mouth existence on other islands, despite court rulings that this
deportation was illegal. Since when has Wonderland ever let a thing like the
law stand in their way? But those obstinate, aggressive Chinese just refuse to
take pages from Amerika's imperialist notebook, and continue to abide by
international law, negotiating their disputes instead of creating a crisis that
they can militarily exploit for conquest. How on earth does Beijing think it
can ever aspire to international leadership and planetary superduperpowerdom
with that attitude?
Hardy Campbell
Houston
United States (Sep 3, '12)
To understand Wonderland, to get a sense of what motivates a nation that bombs,
invades and tortures at the same time as it proclaims its love for mankind and
respect for human dignity, one must understand the Christian Bible. But not the
whole thing! Heavens, it's a big tome with lots of confusing language. No, the
only part if the BIble you need to understand is the last canon, the Book of
Revelation of Saint John the Divine (for most Wonderlander "Christians", it's
the only part of the Bible worth reading.) Not that you will understand it in
the sense of knowing what it's trying to say, because there has been no
consensus about that for the last 2,000 years. Its imagery of weird beasts,
horrible happenings and The Final Battle between Good and Evil has allowed
every interpretation under the sun to justify whatever agenda one wishes to
promote, from wild hedonism to ascetic seclusion to unrestrained war to pious
obedience. And that is what one needs to understand about Amerika and its love
of apocalypticism, the belief in an End Times that will reward the just and
punish the unjust.
This inherent conviction that Wonderlanders represent God and Good girds us for
the coming final struggle with Satan and Evil, whose minions on Earth have
included royalist Brits, red Indians, blue coated Unionists, gray coated Johhny
Rebs, spiked helmet Huns, goose stepping Nazis, buck toothed Nipponese, pajama
wearing Viet Cong, and up until now when turbaned al-Qaedists compete with
wine-sipping Democrats and Gucci-suited Republicans for Evil Doer of the Week
accolades.
The Book of Revelation, also known by its original Greek title, the Apocalypse,
is an especially important template for the right wing TeaBagging Christian
Zionist evangelical movement to aggressively seek confrontations with whatever
entity they perceive as the latest Anti-Christ, a bogeyman that resists Amerika
and its civilizing, Christianizing mission. They promote policies that they
believe will hasten the return of a righteous Jesus with a sword in his hand to
smite Amerika's enemies down with. They see imperialist Israel as an essential
element in provoking the End Times and if that means risking nuclear war with
Iran or China or Russia, so be it, they say; it was so prophesied in John's
strange visions received from the Lord on the island of Patmos.
Of course, that is the basic problem with this controversial canon; its
inconsistencies, allusions, metaphors and poetic allegories say whatever one
wants it to say, with the affirming knowledge that you have God's full support
to justify whatever crime you commit as a result. Thus Amerika uses its
conviction that it is the faithful and the chosen spoken of in Revelation to
permit it to wage war against "evil" without an iota of concern for hypocrisy,
cruelty or sin. At the End, God will not only forgive Wonderland but make it
His New Jerusalem on earth, a shining beacon of democratic freedom and
capitalist indulgence. At least, that's the bet in Vegas.
H Campbell
Houston TX
USA (Aug 31, '12)
[Re: The
Iran-India-Afghanistan Riddle, 28 Aug, '12] This article's author
rightly notes that Afghanistan does not recognize the Durand Line (the
international border between Pakistan and Afghanistan) in defiance of its
legality, which Afghanistan itself ironically played the greatest role in
establishing. In addition, Afghanistan has repeatedly committed covert
interventions on the Pakistani side of that line and used Pashtun nationalist
sentiment to seize the large swathes of Pakistani territory it lays claim to
while Kabul has also historically allowed the use of its territory by Indian
intelligence as well as Pakistan's own subversive and separatist elements for
their designs against Islamabad. This was the very reason Pakistan responded in
kind and intervened in Afghanistan to place a government in Kabul that would
not pose a threat to Pakistan's territorial integrity. To this day the Afghans
are unwilling to contemplate whether their own country bears any share of the
responsibility for what they suffered, whether Pakistan acted out of imaginary
or very real fears to its security.
Contrary to Afghanistan's illusory fears, Pakistan is no longer interested in
bringing the Taliban into full power in Kabul like in 1996 and is stressing the
importance of an "Afghan-led and Afghan-owned" peace process that would lead to
a political order that accommodates all Afghan factions in a national unity
government. Afghanistan's commitment to hostility against Pakistan based on
fears of a new Pakistani-sponsored Taliban-led government is indefensible
because many others countries, most notably the United States, have also
accepted that the Taliban have a political future in Kabul; Afghanistan's own
government, police, army and intelligence services are forming links with that
faction.
Today peace and a "rational foreign policy" are perfectly possible and the
prospects are entirely in Afghanistan's own hands. Instead of continuing to
invite and provoke the very Pakistani retaliation it so deeply resents and
fears, Afghanistan can rid itself of its worries by recognizing the Durand Line
and forever renouncing all claims to Pakistani territory, and by stopping the
use of its territory for activities against Pakistan by a variety of elements.
Already considerable progress has been made in the reconciliation and
normalization process between Pakistan and India as well as Pakistan and Iran;
Afghanistan must also join in this process. However, this article did not
mention the transit trade deal signed in 2009 under which Pakistan has
permitted Indian traders to transit their produce through its territory,
greatly reducing the cost to India of trade with Afghanistan.
India claims to have pulled out of the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline
project out of fear of having its energy security rest on a gas pipeline
running through Pakistan. Strangely it never raises the same objection when it
comes to the upcoming TAPI gas pipeline that will also run through Pakistan
before reaching India. Furthermore, Pakistan made a number of proposals to
allay India's fears in this regard which the latter rejected and India finally
withdrew from the project altogether when the United States offered it the
civil nuclear deal. The most likely explanation behind India's U-turn on the
IPI project seems to be American pressure.
Shayne Wilson
Dubai, UAE (Aug 31, '12)
[Re The Taliban's
al-Qaeda problem Aug 29, '12, and
Hindu flight from Pakistan 'a conspiracy', Aug 28, '12]. In "The
Taliban's al-Qaeda problem", Aasim Zafar Khan has made a very insightful and
informative analysis of the Taliban's relations with al-Qaeda and the wider
conflict, but he fails to note that American authorities have never charged
Osama bin Laden with carrying out the 9/11 attacks, they have wanted him only
in connection with the bombing of two American embassies in Africa in 1998.
Mullah Omar had never refused to hand over bin Laden; all he asked for was to
see evidence implicating him in 9/11 (evidence which the US evidently did not
have) and for him to be tried in a neutral country under Shariah law.
Considering the disastrous consequences of an ill-thought 10 year war whose
repercussions will continue to have destabilizing spillover effects on the
entire region for decades to come, it is now clear that accepting Mullah Omar's
conditions was the right way to go. That would have done a much better job of
breaking the Taliban's ties with al-Qaeda but the United States committed a
grave blunder by refusing to differentiate between the two groups for the
longest time until it lost the war and was forced to seek a face-saving exit
from Afghanistan.
Furthermore, it is now well established (and shown in reports by Asia Times
Online as well) that the Western powers and their regional allies have joined
hands with al-Qaeda to subvert and overthrow the government of Syria - US
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself admitted the US and al-Qaeda are on
the same side in that war - and it is also a fact that al-Qaeda led the
NATO-backed rebellion that toppled Muammar Gaddafi's government in Libya. Saudi
Arabia is also known to provide massive levels of funding to al-Qaeda. The
United States is pursuing an untenable policy of fighting al-Qaeda in Pakistan
and Afghanistan but sleeping with it in Libya and Syria.
In regard to "Hindu flight from Pakistan 'a conspiracy", the reaction from the
Pakistani authorities to the news of the flight of Hindu families to India was
very predictable and a highly politicized law enforcement apparatus could be
expected to allow the atrocities against the Hindu community to continue. The
only place where this article is wrong when it claims there is little
indignation from the nation as a whole. There have been extensive media
campaigns to raise awareness on the issue to force the authorities to act, and
large numbers of people all over the country, especially the affected areas,
have turned up in protests and made their voice heard on various platforms, not
least in public opinion surveys and online forums.
The real problem is not securing public support for the rights of religious
minorities; it is generating political will on the part of law enforcement
authorities and ruling parties to take action in the matter.
Shayne Wilson
Dubai, UAE (Aug 30, '12)
In China not to pick
that East China Sea fight [Aug 29, '12] by Jens Kastner, the author
correctly recognizes the present contrast between the Chinese government and
the people in regard to impending military actions; however, he makes a faulty
assumption about the effective role of the US. He states "The powerful backing
of the US-Japan defense treaty makes Japanese concessions almost completely
unnecessary, and Beijing understands that it must first isolate Tokyo from the
US if it wants to force the Japanese to the negotiation table and make them a
head shorter there."
The truth is that the US can only establish an irrelevant bottom line of
non-violence now and within the next few decades. It is neither possible nor
necessary for China to "isolate Tokyo from the US". The US cannot effectuate
much favor toward Japan because China will not need to get even close to the
bottom line of violence to draw Japan into negotiation; yet, any rash US action
could lead to violence.
Time is on China's side. With 11 times the population of Japan (but less than
one-fifth the per capita GNP) and several times faster rate of economic growth,
it will be just a matter of time, 20-30 years, before China accumulates
distinct commercial and military advantages over Japan. Commercial advantage
will be the predominant means to pressure Japan and military advantages will be
the background of implicit threat.
What can China do then to draw Japan into negotiation? After another 20-30
years, waves of unarmed Chinese could attempt to land on the islands without
resisting the Japanese coastguard. What could Japan do to the waves of citizens
of its largest trading partner and military superior? What could cause Chinese
citizens to prefer Lexus over BMWs, or to not fear his or her Lexus being
vandalized in China? China will eventually need only to create the right degree
of tension for its commercial advantage to be salient and effective.
Yes, eventually Japan will have to negotiate while the USA points perfunctorily
at the irreverent bottom line.
Jeff Church
USA (Aug 30, '12)
[Re Olympic glory
divides Tibetans, Aug 29, '12] Tibetans might not have heard of the
name of Sohn Kee chung, a gold medal Olympian in the marathon at the 1936 games
in Berlin. Owing to the imperial Japanese policy of forced Nipponization of
Korean names, he competed as Son Kitei. Only a good many years later did Sohn
receive his recognition that he was a Korean Olympian, not a Japanese gold
medal winner. In fact, he carried the torch in the 1988 games in Seoul. His
case, however, is worth remembering for Tibetans at home and in exile.
So even though Choeyang Kyi won a bronze medal as a Chinese competitor in the
20-kilometer race walk, it does not mean that China's harsh colonization of
Tibet has worked. Sohn's example is instructive since he points the way to a
future day when Kyi will receive her due recognition as a Tibetan Olympian.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Aug 30, '12)
The latest fuss over ballistic missile defense brings us full circle to the New
Cold War, or Cold War II as Hollywood would sequealize it. The ABM Treaty of
1972 between the USSR and Kissingerian Amerika represented one of those rare
moments in world history when common sense, realpolitik and morality
intersected. For that reason alone, you knew it could not survive forever,
though for decades both antagonists recognized its mutually assured benefits.
But the siren song of technology, with its forever promise of sweeping the bad
old out for the good new, proved too much for the Republican neocons who
dominated that senile old fool Reagan. Convinced the commies had gotten the
better deal all along, they jumped on whatever developing technology offered
the hope of tearing that treaty down and protecting Amerika from red nukes.The
neocons, who came to embrace anti-science as their fundamental sociopolitical
perspective, cherry picked what their ideological brother scientists
half-promised in some undefined future, turning a bread crumb into an entire
bakery.
Nuisance details like repeatedly failed missile tests, computer systems
breakdowns and in the best case scenarios of even the most ardent necon
scientist, millions of Amerikans dying due to inevitable defense leakage,
dissuaded them not a whit. The Pentagon colluded, of course, arranging simple,
"slam dunk" and thoroughly unrealistic tests to justify pouring more taxpayer
money into the program, cooking the unrealistic test results after they failed
to make them look like successes, lying about Patriot anti-missile performances
in the First Gulf War and justifying NATO "protection" on the fringes of the
defunct USSR and Red China with some preposterous hoohah about threats from
Iran, "terrorists" and green-skinned invaders from Mars.
These two nations predictably protested about reneging on the 1972 treaty,
which made its abolition even more paramount to the ascendant barbarians of the
WonderRight, convinced in their primitive zero sum walnut brains that it was
the only thing standing in the way of a New American Century. The 40th
anniversary of that treaty's ratification by the US just passed, with the
treaty itself a post-9-11 victim of Dumbya Bush's decision to withdraw America
for the first time from an international treaty, yet another pathetic legacy of
that plutocratic traitor.
But the New American Century isn't working out quite the way the neoconmen
planned; Russia is resurgent and bold, China rich and confident, Amerika weak
and entangled, with the likes of Iran, Pakistan and North Korea defiant and
undeterred. Some may argue this geopolitical environment makes a defense shield
even more necessary, but then the French made this argument about the Maginot
Line too, didn't they?
Indeed, I see the eagerness to push the technology as tacit admission by
Wonderland that it has no more cards to play on the geopol chessboard anymore,
much as the decadent policies of the Third Republic made "impregnable" defense
systems essential to its pretence of Great Powerdom. With its gee whiz
technoarmy being defeated by ragtag Third World insurgencies, the only way to
salvage a reputation built on Hollywood PR and smoke and mirrors is to trot out
shiny computers, exotic software and tail finned rockets to promise tough-talk
protection from a threat that will never materialize. But don't tell the
neo-nutjobs which large Asian country makes many of their precious shield
system components. I know, dontcha just love irony?
H Campbell
Houston TX USA (Aug 29, '12)
[Re: Into the
monetary vortex, Aug 28, '12] This is an excellent analysis. As long as
the American consumer, faced with uncertain financial future, is reluctant to
spend, and overall wages growth stays anemic, monetary velocity should remain
low, keeping (hyper)inflation at bay.
John Chen USA (Aug 29, '12)
[Re A playboy for
the Pamirs, Aug 27, '12] Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar should have more
sense that to call the Aga Khan a "playboy". Obviously Bhadrakumar does not
have slightest notion that Karim Aga Khan is the spiritual leader of millions
and this is disrespectful.
Aziz Bhimani (Aug 28, '12)
[Re North Korea
on the Nile, Aug 27, '12] To catch the reader's attention, Spengler has
dubbed Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi's Egypt "North Korea on the Nile." A
snappy headline, but little else. Morsi has inherited the legacy of 30 years of
Mubarak's mismanagement. So, burdened with the past, he is trying to break out
of the box, and is willing to calm tensions in his neighborhood. In a way, he
is taking a page out of Nasser's playbook to restore regional harmony of sorts.
His approach as it pertains to Iran, Syria, and Israel goes against the grain
of US and Saudi and Israeli strategy. And for that aid and oil will be denied
progressively to Morsi, while crocodile tears will be shed for the plight of
the long suffering Egyptian masses.
It might be worthwhile to point out that under Mubarak, Egypt bought rockets
from North Korea and an Egyptian billionaire entrepreneur signed a long-term
contract to wire the North up with a country-wide computer network. Egypt is no
North Korea, and to call it so is to strain at gnats.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Aug 28, '12)
Every addict justifies their habit in characteristic ways, typically by denying
they have a problem in the first place and when that strategy fails, boasting
that they can kick that monkey off their back whenever they so desire. Sadly,
this rationalization merely highlights the tragedy that inevitably follows,
when the denier spirals down into degeneration, apathy and collapse. So it is
with America's insatiable appetite for Empire, an affliction now so engrained
in our zeitgeist that to suggest we not intervene in other nations' affairs is
often considered unpatriotic, if not inhumane and evil.
We have used imaginative combinations of rationalization, as any self
respecting addict is expected to do, ranging from vengeance/human rights (our
first taste of the imperialist narcotic, the war with Spain) to
communist-battling/ democracy promoting (Vietnam) to WMD busting/bad dude ass
kicking/Muslim democratizing (Iraq II.) But as with every junkie, more and more
frequent usage of the same drug is needed for the same high as before, so now
Amerika has multiple wars and subversions occurring simultaneously and on a
continuous basis, with future conflicts on the drawing board.
Alas, as with every junkie, such an orgy of unrestrained indulgence brings a
heavy toll on the once vibrant; tired, haggard Wonderland is staggering out of
the meat grinder knowns as Afghanistan just as it sees Syria, Iran, the South
China Sea, Somalia, Lebanon, Mali, Uganda and a whole host of juicy, plump
imperialist targets looming, but it just can't muster the same
brown-people-killing energy and capitalist-enslaving enthusiasm as before.
That's because the once lethal teeth are falling out, the pure white skin is
blotched, pock-marked and gray and the previous steel-hard bones are
crystalline brittle and fractured.
Mind you, Amerika the Aggression Addict is putting on a brave face, pretending
to be fully functional and fit as its economy sputters after the latest
ineffectual "stimulus" injection, its military faces more drug-fueled suicides
than enemy-caused deaths and its maleducated, pot smoking children can't spell
"CAT" without spotting them the "C" and the "A" and allowing Google access for
the rest. Wonderland will continue to act as if everything's fine, until the
day it slumps dead in the alleyway of history, a syringe of imperialism stuck
in its collapsed veins.
H Campbell
Texas (Aug 28, '12)
[Re: Will Iran be
US's Melos?, Aug 23, '12] Peter Jenkins has made a very convincing case
for respecting international law before contemplating war on Iran, but the
almost perfect counter-argument to his case - one that the US and Israel very
often refer to but which the Athenians weren't smart enough to use - is that of
self-defense. As long as you can make your aggression look like a desperate
self-defense measure taken only after all other options were exhausted, all
your illegal actions will would a legal cover and you can get away with murder,
notwithstanding that there is no real, hard evidence that Iran is actually
developing nuclear weapons. I think it was very important to explore this facet
of the issue in Jenkins' otherwise very well-written article.
Shayne Wilson
Dubai, UAE (Aug 27, '12)
The recent revelations, accusations and prosecution of the Texan cyclist Lance
Armstrong, winner of 7 consecutive Tours de France, has once again knocked down
an American sports icon to whom almost superhuman qualities were once ascribed.
This, on the heels of the legendary football coach Joe Paterno's fall from the
lofty summits of gushing adulation, makes a shibboleth of Wonderlander's
penchant for idolizing and idealizing their athletic heroes. Armstrong's
alleged sins, taking performance enhancing drugs, garner him entry into an
already crowded pantheon of sports gods caught "juicing up" for fame and
fortune. But in the grand scheme of all things Wonderish, in a country where
popping pills or drinking energy boosting beverages to stay awake to do an
ordinary 9-to-5 job is considered acceptable, how evil can Armstrong's
transgressions be? Eyeglasses or lasik eye surgery certainly enhance one's
blurry eyed performance, but would one expect to be busted for that boon to
productivity?
And can anyone not characterize fat reduction surgery as artificial enhancement
of one's physical appearance as well as performance? I won't even get into
Viagra or tranquilizers or a whole host of chemicals the pharmaceuticals have
concocted to supposedly make us feel, look and play better, none of which would
be deemed illegal or cheating. Somehow those are all OK, perhaps because we
non-athletes acknowledge our frailty and need for help, while our demigods must
prescribe to standards of excellence no one else would even think of or
tolerate.
The fact is Sir Lancealot is just another Wonderlander trying to nudge his way
to a little more fame than the rest of us, and he allegedly did what anyone
else would do - resort to the medicine cabinet of molecules that we have pushed
into our face everyday to be stronger, harder working and more virile
'merikans. I say, make 'im a poster boy.
H Campbell
Texas (Aug 27, '12)
[Re Kim will dance to
his own tune, Aug 23, '12] It is true that Kim Jung-eun is striking out
in a new direction, but he cannot fully break with tradition and history.
Exposed to the larger world by education and training, the young general's
outlook presents many advantages for the North. This has already resulted in a
better calibrated policies for economic development and national security
Even in the short run, and in spite of North Korea being on a war footing since
the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, Kim is going to benefit from the
slippage of US influence seen as the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and the
new Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi attend the Non-Aligned Movement summit in
Tehran.
Already the US encirclement of North Korea by its neighbors has broken, for
Japan is willing to go to North Korea to iron out outstanding issues. On the
other hand, the building of a light water reactor signals a push to renovate
North Korea's aging electrical infrastructure. Such a development opens the
threshold to better economic development.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Aug 24, '12)
[Re: Letter from Fariborz S Fatemi, Aug 22, '12] I have always been most
interested in letters from this particular author and note, to the best of my
recollection, none of these welcome contributions have ever been refuted.
However, what has long fascinated me is Fariborz S Fatemi's signature, "Former
Professional Staff Member House Foreign Affairs Committee United States". Could
one deduce, drawing lines between Fariborz S Fatemi's professed opinions here
and the polar implemented policies of the United States government, that they
choose to ignore sound advice? This leads one to the conclusion that in common
with so many governments, the United States only accepts advice which
reinforces previously held dogma.
Ian C Purdie
Australia (Aug 23, '12)
[Re The Shah's
example to 'pious' leaders, Aug 17, '12] What revisionist nonsense.
After more than 30 years since the demise of that hated tyrant, to try a
rewrite is not only a disservice to the historical record, but an affront to
the truth. To suggest that despised regime should be an "example to 'pious'
leaders" is a lie that must not be allowed to stand.
The people of Iran remember how that quisling was used to overthrow the
freely-elected, Constitutional government of Iran, led by its national heroes
Dr Muhammad Mossadegh and Dr Hussein Fatemi. Imagine if that constitutional
government had thrived, what Iran would look like today. It would have been the
constitutional democracy to be emulated and the envy of all the countries in
the region, including Israel.
That is the example that could have been followed. If you want to know about
the Pahlavi reign of terror, you have to ask the hundreds of thousands who were
its victims. And visit the graves all over Iran of those who died at the hands
of his secret police. The crimes of his victims: having the courage to speak
out and write against his regime. His torture chambers were legendary, where
his victims were hanged by meat hooks, forced to sit on hot plates and bones
broken at random, to name a few methods. In short, he had created a police
state that would be the envy of any tyrant.
Furthermore, while he and his collaborators squandered and stole the oil wealth
of the country, his fellow citizens lived in holes in ground in the capital
city. When Pahlavi was overthrown, the illiteracy rate in the country was 90%.
The quote "We shall leave if the people do not want us," is laughable. Day
after day, for long periods, the people shouted their opposition from the
rooftops and poured into the streets by the millions in every village and town
across Iran. Pahlavi and his apologists had no choice but to flee for their
lives. They did not leave on their own volition, they were forced out. It is
unfortunate that today you have selective amnesia that pretends that despicable
regime did not use the barrel of the gun. It did for 26 years to keep itself in
power and that led to its undoing.
Fariborz S Fatemi
Former Professional Staff Member House Foreign Affairs Committee
United States (Aug 22, '12)
[Re President
Ryan, Aug 17, '12] If Paul Ryan is a "vigorously Austrian candidate,"
the Ludwig von Mises Institute can feel free at any time to break ground on the
new George W Bush wing.
Jon Shackelford
West Sacramento, CA(Aug 20, '12)
[Re: The pan-Afghan
imperative, Aug 17, '12] While this article's authors lament
Afghanistan's perpetual ethnic divide, they resort to Pashtun chauvinism to
incite picking a fight with another country. Herein lies their
self-contradiction - it is precisely this prolonged abuse of Pashtun ethnic
consciousness by Afghanistan that has alienated its ethnic minorities, who now
harbor separatist sentiment. It has also hurt the Afghan Pashtuns: instead of
focusing on building a pluralist multi-ethnic society Afghanistan prioritized
"Pashtun awakening" and its "sacred tribal structure" whose inseparable
features include blood feuds lasting for generations and a conservative,
introverted worldview strongly averse to progress and modernism. In any tribal
society, a person's only loyalty is to their tribe instead of their country; by
institutionalizing racism and tribalism and using them as the basis of foreign
policy, Afghanistan created for itself a society marred by endless inter-tribal
and ethno-sectarian bloodshed and a country incapable of functioning as a
modern state, far behind the rest of the world in every human development
indicator. In its drive to make land grabs in Pakistan, Afghanistan has long
chosen to sacrifice its own stability and national unity, which in turn has
worked to destabilize its neighbors. Judging by the content of this article,
which is after all written by foreign policy strategists working for a think
tank, the Afghans do not seem to have learned from their mistake.
Afghanistan's territorial claim on at least half of Pakistan stemming from its
refusal to recognize the Durand Line - whose legality and moral legitimacy are
well-established so I don't need to explain them here - is well known. From
1948 until 1979 it exploited Pashtun nationalism to incite separatist sentiment
among Pakistani Pashtuns, who for their part always refused to play along. It
also repeatedly launched armed incursions during that period to seize the said
territory by force only to be beaten back by the Pakistan military, while
regularly giving shelter and support to anti-Pakistan terrorist, separatist and
subversive elements, yet Pakistan for the longest time never responded in kind
to this belligerence. It is only after Afghanistan became communist and - now
enjoying Soviet backing - started harassing Pakistan more brazenly that
Pakistan finally decided to intervene to ensure that only a government not
hostile to its core security interests is in power in Kabul.
After the Soviets withdrew, Afghanistan descended into anarchy and the ensuing
mess was dumped in Islamabad's lap as the US abandoned the region and imposed
sanctions on a Pakistan housing five million Afghan refugees. Already
threatened by Afghanistan's historic expansionist designs and now being left to
manage the war-torn nation on its own, Pakistan naturally acted to ensure
Afghanistan would never be a threat to its security and territorial integrity
again. After all, anything that happens in Afghanistan has extremely
destabilizing spillover effects on Pakistan; Pakistani intervention was thus a
measure of self-preservation motivated by legitimate security needs, not an act
of predatory aggression. Besides, Pakistan is certainly not the only one who
has ever interfered in Afghanistan, so have India, Iran, Uzbekistan,
Tajikistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, the UAE, Russia, Germany,
Britain and the United States.
This article's authors did not note developments over the last few years. The
Taliban are no longer dependent on Pakistan, who for its part is no longer
interested in bringing them to full power like in 1996; Pakistan has instead
reached out to its erstwhile enemy the Northern Alliance and its foreign
backers Iran, Russia and India. This year the Pakistani foreign minister and
prime minister had very cordial meetings with the Northern Alliance's leaders
and Islamabad has for quite a long time urged the Afghans to reach consensus
among themselves as to what kind of political order they want before anyone
else can meaningfully assist them, being committed to supporting an
"Afghan-led, Afghan-owned" peace process that accommodates all Afghan factions
and players. All parties in this conflict seem to understand that a government
of national unity in Kabul is in the best interest of everyone.
This article, very typical of Afghan political discourse, consists of little
more than a lengthy tirade of self-pity and resolute refusal to take any
responsibility for Afghanistan's own misfortunes and soured foreign relations.
While complaining about Pakistani intervention, it was Afghanistan who started
this dynamic by her own actions. While resenting Pakistan's strategic depth
policy, Afghanistan has never minded giving strategic depth to anti-Pakistan
elements like the TTP, Baloch separatists and Indian intelligence, allowing
them the unimpeded use of Afghan territory to foment instability in Pakistan.
While decrying Pakistani intervention, Afghanistan invites intervention by a
number of other countries for their own geopolitical ambitions especially if
they aim to harm Pakistan.
While justifying her narrative by references to Pakistan's supposed oppression
of a Pashtun people longing to break free, Afghanistan does not realize that
the vast majority of Pashtuns live in Pakistan (the country they chose to join
in a July 1947 referendum) and identify themselves as Pakistanis, their
economic and social development is much more advanced than that of Afghans, and
they are fully integrated into Pakistan's economy, society and political and
military establishment - which is precisely why the Pashtunistan movement died
out - and they have no desire to unite with Afghanistan. While denouncing
Pakistan's historic ties to the Taliban, the Afghans do not condemn the United
States, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Iran for diplomatically
accommodating them, at a time when personnel from Afghanistan's own police,
army and intelligence services are killing ISAF soldiers and maintaining links
with that faction. Although this article calls for Afghans (except the Taliban)
to band together against foreigners, the Taliban refuse to negotiate with Hamid
Karzai's government precisely on the grounds that it is an American puppet.
While rejecting any power-sharing arrangement between the Afghan government and
the Taliban, this article in the very next sentence longs for a national unity
is not possible without the said "unholy alliance" between the two sides, as
NATO has learned after losing a ten-year war.
However morally questionable Pakistan's actions may or may not have been, the
Afghans do not yet seem to have considered addressing and resolving the factors
that have for so long provoked Pakistani retaliation. Instead, Afghanistan
seems resolute in its untenable historic policy of maintaining territorial
claims across the Durand Line and using Pashtun ethnocentrism to that end in
the same ways that have caused so much division mutual hostility among the
Afghan people in the past, all the while allowing the use of its territory for
spreading terrorism and instability in Pakistan. This article's policy
recommendation for Pakistan contravenes the long-established approach in
international relations whereby even if you don't like your neighbors you still
have to work out ways to live with them. The moralist and fundamentalist
worldview prevailing in Afghan political discourse has it that if you don't
like your neighbors, you fight them to the death. It's not hard to imagine what
reaction this would elicit from Pakistan, but the real question is whether
Afghanistan will realize its own folly in perpetuating this self-destructive
dynamic any time soon.
Shayne Wilson
Dubai, UAE (Aug 20, '12)
[Re Romney's China hand
sails into rough sea, Aug 16, '12] Though his selection of Wisconsin
Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate was a highly risky move, now that
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has shown a willingness to tread
a more centrist path, he actually has a rather decent chance of winning the
election in November - especially if the stock markets engage in a cathartic
tanking reminiscent of 2008, and every Tom, Dick and Jane thinks Armageddon is
upon us and wants a change in the White House.
John Chen
USA (Aug 17, '12)
China's winning strategy
in Africa [Aug 14, '12] by Brendan O'Reilly is an observant article but
it still misses the central thrust by selecting the word "strategy" in the
title. Indicated is "instinct". Economic focus is the natural instinct of a
developing country that has a history of economic success. A once economically
successful country, China, lost ground through a Western racist, colonial
mentality, ultimately having opium coercively imported and enervated much of
the population for over a century until the world wars, and then suffered from
Japanese atrocities. It is now still a developing country with one- tenth the
per capita GNP of the USA. To suggest that China might have foreign policy
focus of democracy and promoting human rights is quite unrealistic, or even
absurd.
China's diversification of goods market into less ideological charged countries
(poorer and more culturally rooted) will give it more leeway in the future.
This will be most important when China starts to harasses Taiwan's abjectly
exposed energy supply with great restraint. But even such diversification has
other major economic benefits significant enough for it to be instinctive, not
strategic.
Can one expect a working man to refrain from buying good tasting candy for his
kids at a low price from a street vendor who is prone to domestic violence?
Should a major retailer boycott a major candy maker who has unfair labor
practice to induce improvement?
Jeff Church
USA (Aug 16, '12)
[North Korea targets
Japan relations, Aug 15, '12] Let's say that both Japan and North Korea
see a mutual benefit to reset relations. As Takahashi Kosuke pointedly remarks,
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak committed a major diplomatic blunder with
his "controversial visit to the disputed Dokdo islets" as he calls them or
Takashima as Japan claims them, on the eve of South Korea marking its
liberation from Japan on August 15, 1945.
Lee's opportunism has cost him dearly: the Obama administration's united front
against North Korea is broken. The South's president sought to bolster his
regime which is sinking under the weight of corruption charges and high handed
methods to control public opinion in times of high youth unemployment and
social unrest. Lee's gambit may tilt the odds away from the election of his
Grand National Party's Park Geun-hye in December's presidential elections.
On the other hand, the Kim Jong-eun government is leaving no stone unturned to
improve its regional standing. And, Japan was quick to show Lee that it too
could play hardball. Not only that two cabinet ministers visited the Yasukuni
war shrine. Lee is reaping the whirlwind of his own opportunism.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Aug 16, '12)
Uncle Chicken Little (AKA Wonderland) has predicted the end of humanity, the
space-time continuum and all kinds of fried food unless Europe mimics its
Hezbollah fixation and denounces it as a Iranian proxy-terrorist entity. The
Europeans, on the other hand, much bemused by Wonderland's genuflection and
glutus maximus-bussing of its Zionist masters in Tel Aviv, New York and Miami
Beach, considers Hezbollah a force for social good in Lebanon. They understand
that in the Zionist-meddled state that is now beset with Syria's travails a
group such as Hezbollah acts a mediating influence, rather than the mad
dog-mouth foaming jihadists that every red blooded neo-con in Amerika knows
they are.
So as in many things Wonderish, Europe yawns at the increasingly impotent and
irrelevant blusterings coming from the US and moves on, secretly aiding and
abetting Iran in its successful embargo busting (evidence of this was the
"revelation" of the UK Standard Chartered Bank's activities), and humoring the
Sick Old Man on the Potomac as he wheezes and coughs his indignation at all
those nasty "terrorists" being coddled by liberal Europeans. Funny that
Wonderland forgets about all the terrorists it's been supporting for years,
terrorists that the world calls Israelis.
H Campbell
Texas (Aug 16, '12)
[Re Finding hope in
the Swat Valley, Aug 15, '12] The Pakistani army is the only one that -
in addition to pushing the TTP [Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan - the Pakistani
Taliban] out of the Swat Valley - has provided any real governance and overseen
the entire re-construction process. It is also the one who is staging festive
events and rehabilitating people affected by the conflict. Everything mentioned
in this article has been made possible almost entirely by the efforts of the
army.
This is because the civilian administration of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province has
failed to fulfill its responsibilities in managing post-conflict Swat, which is
to be expected when officials of the province's ruling party are themselves
wholly dependent on the army for their own security. That party's leader has
been in hiding ever since he survived a TTP-launched assassination attempt in
2009.
In addition to the geographic extent of areas where the Pakistani military is
engaged in operations against Taliban militants enjoying safe havens across the
border in Afghanistan, the army is also engaged in reconstructing and
administering cleared areas and fending off cross-border attacks by the Afghan
National Army and the TTP. This has overstretched it and constrains its ability
to wage another large-scale operation despite American pressure to do so.
Waqar Ahmed Pasha
Rawalpindi, Pakistan (Aug 16, '12)
[Re Beijing's winning
strategy in Africa, Aug 14, '12] "America will stand up for democracy
and universal human rights even when it might be easier to look the other way
and keep the resources flowing," US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Too bad that at home, she and her administration stands for secret arrests,
secret prisons, death by drone sans trial, etc. I'd like democracy and human
rights, too!
Lester Ness
Kunming
China (Aug 15, '12)
The celebration of an American athlete after securing a silver medal in the
Olympic 1,500 meter race has raised more than a few neo-con eyebrows here in
Wonderland. Not because he failed to wave an American flag as he circled the
track, but because he also waved a Mexican flag. The runner, born in Mexico but
raised here by his illegal immigrant parents, is catching predictable
America-Onlyers wrath by questioning his loyalties; if he loved Mexico so much,
why wasn't he running for the Mexican national team? Of course, in the
Talibanesque universe of the average red neck Tea Partyer, the universe is a
rainbow of red, white and star spangled blue, distilled to pristine patriotic
purity with no semblance of confusion about nations of birth and nations of
citizenship. But if you were to ask them who they loved more, their mothers or
their wives/children, do you think they would understand the analogy with this
runner's expression of appreciation for two countries, one that birthed him and
the other that nurtured him?
What makes this sort of primitive and typically Republican zero summation
mentality especially lamentable is that occurs in the context of that most
international of human celebrations, the Olympic Games, where athletes from all
over the world, many born in nations other than the one they compete for,
express their humanity in more ways than just running and jumping for pieces of
metal. But what does one expect from a nation that uses its flag as a
blindfold?
Hardy Campbell
Texas (Aug 13, '12)
[Re Costs stir Korean
unification dreamers, Aug 8, '12] The idea and the hope of
reunification of a divided Korean peninsula is like a stock exchange: it has
its good days and bad days, depending on which which political winds blow. At
present, as Andrei Lankov notes, in South Korea, the idea is at a low, but in
North Korea, which has never abandoned its enthusiasm for reunification, it
remains higher. Like the Jewish prayer calling for "Next Year in Jerusalem,"
Korean reunification is an aspiration that remains an ideal without an expiry
date.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Aug 9, '12)
Permit me to make a few observations on Hjalmar Eriksson's letter about Hardy
Campbell . [August 3] Hardy Campbell 's letters are among the best on Asia
Times Online.
I would suggest Eriksson re-read and analyze his own letter. The majority of
people voting in an election is not necessarily the majority of people in a
country, so his conclusion here is not necessarily correct. Generally speaking
Campbell's letters describe things as they actually are in the US. The last
seven lines of Eriksson's letter (what should be the final paragraph) indicate
A: He has drunk the Kool Aid, B: He is living in an alternate universe or C: He
is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
Brodir Mann (Aug 7, '12)
I like Hardy Campbell's critiques! He says nothing Mark Twain might not have
said a century ago! If the average American were half has critical as the
average Israeli, our country would be far better off! Frankly, you would do
well to give Hardy Campbell a column and relegate Spengler to the letters page.
Lester Ness
Kunming
China (Aug 7, '12)
[Re Kim Jong-eun comes
of age ... As the old US comedian Jimmy Durante said, "Everyone is
trying to get into the act." Kim Jong-eun cannot win. When he first took over
the reins of power, Pyongyongolists like Leon Sigal dismissed him as the "kid,"
- wet behind the ears, no experience, a cat's paw of the corps elite. Now,
Leonid Petrov sees him as a ruthless leader - an apple fallen not far from his
father's tree. Any new leader changes the team around him. This is almost
axiomatic in politics.
What is disturbing to those who spend their career poring over North Korean
arcana is the breath of new air sweeping over the country. It is as though the
old shibboleths no longer have value, and these watchers on the towers have
lost the north star to guide them. So, we get a mishmash of the old porridge.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Aug 6, '12)
[Re Marketing guru
chooses a tough sell, Aug 3, '12] Though without the benefit of having
actually read this book, I do believe the author's appraisal of China's
political system isn't nearly as misguided/naive as Muhammad Cohen portrays.
With all things considered and relatively speaking, China's central government
is indeed honest overall and does have the country's and the people's best
interests at heart. Although flawed in myriad ways, where the Chinese political
system currently falls short in a big way largely relates to poor
implementation of central-government policies at the provincial and local
levels, which are beset by graft and corruption. By comparison, here in the US,
the state governments appear to be more in tune with their people's needs,
while Washington seems rather solicitous to the wishes of special-interest
groups.
John Chen
USA (Aug 6, '12)
I'd like to add to Hardy Campbell's letter from August 2. British swimmer
Rebecca Adlington last year in a race swam a last 50 meter split of 28.91
seconds, 0.02 faster than Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen, and Adlington did that in
a 800-meter race, two times the distance of Ye's 400 meter race. How come
American swim expert John Leonard never mentioned any suspicion of Rebecca
Adlington's time but said Ye's time was "impossible"? If John Leonard can't
give doping evidence on Ye, he is guilty of defamation. The most likely reason
Leonard is so sure Ye Shiwen used drugs to achieve her time is because as
executive director of the American Swim Coaches Association, he knows American
athletes rely on doping to get their gold medals and world records.
Tang Yun (Aug 3, '12)
[Re The rulers
of the Hong Kong game, Aug 2, '12] Since the handover of Hong Kong in
1997 back to Chinese rule, Beijing has been careful not to rock the boat for
fear of being perceived as meddlers in the territory's internal affairs. That
strategy, however, inadvertently played in to the hands of Hong Kong's moneyed
elites, allowing them free reins at money-gouging at the expense of the people
and the overall economy. Now that we know capitalists are incapable of policing
themselves for the greater good of society, it's time for the central
government to play a bigger role in managing Hong Kong's growth and development
going forward.
John Chen
USA (Aug 3, '12)
I am a Swedish/American man who lives in Colorado, USA. I have been reading
your publication since 2007 specially Pepe Escobar, Spengler (then David P
Goldman), and the letters section. I enjoy both viewpoints since there isn't
just one way to get to the truth and whether we like it or not; we have all had
a racist thought or some prejudice during our lifetime. It is our flawed human
nature and I still wonder what happened during evolution that we are so
complex.
Like I said, I enjoy reading the letter section and I am fascinated by the
intelligent readers that you have and baffled by the stupidity of some of your
readers. I want to point my direction to Campbell from Texas and his diatribe
against America. I honestly feel for the man because apparently he is trapped
in this country plagued with Christians, whites, and blatant racism.
However, you cannot accuse America of turning you around at the airport.
America's imperialist ambitions, war mongering, and extremely divisive foreign
policy are fair game for criticism but Campbell disproportional criticism of
this country is overwhelming and I find it odd that you ATOL publishes his
letters when they are all about the same subject and filled with opinions.
I contrast his letters with the letters of other folks and the difference is
abysmal. Some people present a lot of facts in a calm manner and we all respect
that. Being half-Swedish makes me appreciate the goodness of social democracy
and the insanity of American politics and its stupid battles over religious non
sense, gays, the right of a woman to choose etc . But any time we criticize a
power house like America, we must do it with facts so the criticism contributes
to something. For example implying that whites would not vote for US President
Barack Obama is insanity, the majority of people that voted for Obama were
whites. So that is not true.
Proclaiming Chinese superiority in the Olympics is crazy and so is that
American coaches somehow resent that is far from the truth. In 2008, Chinese
Olympic staff called for random tests for American swimmer Michael Phelps. No
one ever said that it was because the Chinese resented the greatest Olympian of
all time, it's just routine and part of the system. And finally and this will
make Campbell cringe with anger: not all cultures are equal. The rule of law,
freedom of speech, freedom of expression, a high standard of living, freedom of
the press, organization, cleanliness, and opportunity to earn a decent living
is superior and better than the rule of chaos.
Hjalmar Ericksson (Aug 3, '12)
[Re: Philippines
arms itself with new pacts, Aug 1, '12] Within the next 18 months or
so, I believe an opportunity will likely arise for China to settle its maritime
disputes. If that scenario comes to pass, we will also have a chance to gauge
whether the new batch of Chinese leaders is inclined to continue with the
"harmonious society" theme espoused by the country's current leadership, or to
hearken to Chairman Mao Zedong's famous (and herein adapted) maxim that
"(geopolitical) power comes from the barrel of a gun".
John Chen
USA (Aug 2, '12)
The Olympics always serves as a good barometer of Wonderland's anxieties,
hypocrisies and neuroses. During the Cold War, we were convinced that the only
way godless communists could possibly beat Iowa-corn and Texas-beef fed
'merican athletes was through cheating, vote rigging and illegal drugs, which
neatly paralleled how cynically we thought about their politics, society and
economics. Nowadays the new Chilly War with China finds the same mindset
prevailing once again. When a young Chinese girl recently swam a blistering
circuit of the Olympic pool in world record time, exceeding even some men's
records for the same distance, grumbles and suspicions were muttered from some
US coaches, dubious that such an unprecedented achievement was feasible without
illegal chemical help. It is irrelevant whether or not this was indeed the case
(indeed, my money is on most if not all athletes being on some kind of
"edge-acquiring" drug); what is noteworthy is the nationality being criticized,
America's newest bete noir, the Chinese. Would a Wonderlander have questioned
an English lass or German fraulein who performed similarly? Somehow I doubt it.
But just as we Wonderlanders chafe at every new demonstration of Chinese
encroachment on traditionally American socioeconomic monopolies, such as
finance and trade, so too must we question their achievements in sport,
convinced that no yellow skin could ever be physically superior to a white
skin. Racist, to be sure, and thus as 'merican as imported apple pie, but more
to the point, this reluctance to concede to The New Enemy any potential at
"true achievement" denotes a last pathetic sanctuary of rationalization, denial
and self-deceit.
So for every Chinese rocket launched into orbit or new supersonic jet streaking
over the Strait of Taiwan, Wonderlanders smugly assume the technology was
pirated from some white company. For every new African mine opened or trade
deal with Latin America made by Chinese firms, Yanks nod knowingly at the
inevitable corruption and kickbacks "illegally" used. For every manufacturing
success driving yet another US firm to extinction, Amerikans know that slave
labor and dumping practices can be the only explanation. I believe Aesop had a
fable about the red, white and blue fox sneering at the out-of-reach yellow
grapes as being too bitter for consumption. The fox wound up dead from
starvation.
Hardy Campbell (Aug 2, '12)
[Dalai Lama stirs
controversy in Kashmir, Jul 26, '12] As the saying goes, "a picture
tells a thousand words". The picture on this article showing Dalai cuddling a
mature "baby" and coaxing him for a smile
(http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page.html) reminds me of the way of
campaigning politicians. If Dalai is not a politician, what is he in this
picture? A clown?
Wendy Cai
USA (Jul 27, '12)
[Re Small peninsula
shapes global history, Jul 26, '12] Phd candidate Makar Melikyan has
done well to remind us that July 27 marks 59 years since the the 1953 Armistice
Agreement put the 1950-1953 Korean War into a holding pattern. Many other
American-led wars have started and ended since then, save Afghanistan. Will the
Korean conflict rival the Anglo-French 100 years war?
Melikyan's conclusion that "peace can only be won by the Koreans themselves"
has some truth, yet it obscures the complexity of the issue: what began as a
civil war soon became dominated by a US-led UN coalition and China sent in
volunteers to prevent any hostile US-dominated presence on its borders.
Even today, China's backing of North Korea is still based on that strategic
goal. Equally absent from Melikyan's conversation is the fact that South Korea
has never signed the Armistice. And while Sino-US relations have improved and
Beijing has an embassy in Seoul, the US and certainly South Korea are in no
mood to conclude a peace treaty with North Korea - a demand Pyongyang has long
maintained and repeated.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Jul 27, '12)
The modus operandi of the racist Republican Party, whose opprobrium towards US
President Barack Obama is based entirely on his mixed race, is to use "code
language" to convince voters that a vote for the incumbent president is a vote
for an alien, anti-American darkie who hates whiteys, Christians and
capitalists.
Of course, they have nothing to base this on other than the fact he is darker
than Mitt Romney and his father was an African. But facts have little to do
with the subtle campaign to identify their enemy as "The Other," a person
fundamentally different than your average Wonderlander. What is supremely
ironic about all this is the fact that the Republican nominee is a Mormon, an
adherent of a religion that nominally identifies itself as "Christian" but
which in fact is less Christian than Islam. Mormonism is a cult that, were it
not so rich and influential, would be construed as being on a par with
Satanists and people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.
Indeed, Mormons believe that they will achieve some kind of deification in the
distant stars, so the analogy with alien abductees may be most apropos. If this
religion had been born in the Middle Ages, all of its followers would have been
burnt at the stake for its rank polytheistic heresy. It is so fundamentally
alien in all respects with orthodox Christianity that its official title
"Church of Latter Day Saints" is some kind of inside joke, like North Korea
being the "Democratic People's Republic."
So why o why are the Democrats not highlighting this bizarre affiliation of
Romney, and showing how pagan and alien their hero really is? Why don't they
inform "normal" Christian voters that the Mormon church's rituals and beliefs
are weird, surreal and blasphemous in the extreme? Oh right, they don't want to
make one's faith a subject of political debate; that would be sooo un-American.
But questioning one's "Americanness" because of his parenthood and skin color
is very Amerikan, isn't it?
H Campbell (Jul 27, '12)
[Re Seoul takes aim at
Internet critics, Jul 25, '12] South Korea has to be judged by its own
laws and behavior. Under the presidency of Lee Myung-bak, the cold war against
North Korea has taken on renewed vigor and life. We can never forget that South
Korea is in a state of war with the North: it refused to signed the 1953
Armistice Agreement.
So, we should not blink twice when Lee's government enforces anti-communist
laws. No matter the pull on Southern heart strings for the long desired wish of
reunification with the Motherland, as the iron fist of the state will keep the
majority of South Koreans in their place when it comes to improving relations
with the North.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Jul 26, '12)
[Re India bowls for
better ties with Pakistan, Jul 24, '12] This article's content shows
why one must always exercise extreme caution whenever reading anything about
Pakistan that is written by an Indian.
Pakistan has asked India to hand over evidence of confessions coming from Abu
Jandal, the Yemeni al-Qaeda operative suspected of involvement in the Mumbai
attacks. India must allow Pakistani authorities access to him, which did not
happen in the case of Ajmal Qasab. Hopefully Abu Jandal's case will not end up
like that of David Headley, the ex-US intelligence informant whom for two years
the Indian government and media highlighted as the key man who would expose the
Inter-Services Intelligence's (ISI's) role in the Mumbai attacks, until he told
a court in Chicago that the ISI's leaders were unaware of any plot to attack
Mumbai.
Right afterward the Indian media began running content attacking his
credibility as a witness. American authorities too suppressed his case because
carrying it on further would have led to a string of revelations extremely
embarrassing for the American government. Despite Headley's confessed links to
the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the US government felt the need to place a $10
million reward for evidence that could secure a conviction against the LeT's
leader Hafiz Saeed for his alleged role - meaning Pakistan was telling the
truth when it insisted India has given it insufficient evidence on which to
convict Hafiz Saeed and the other accused. Headley's case revealed that India
had been warned several times in advance of the Mumbai attacks but did nothing
to prevent them.
Neeta Lal omitted the fact that to this day India has stonewalled every attempt
by Pakistan to conduct its own independent investigation of the Mumbai attacks.
After years of resistance India in 2012 grudgingly admitted a Pakistani
judicial commission but prevented it from accessing the scene of the attacks,
key officials and witnesses as well as the sole surviving assailant Ajmal
Qasab, whose confession is what the trial in Pakistan is based on. This is
precisely why a Pakistani court called all findings of the judicial commission
"illegal" and inadmissible as part of the evidence against the accused.
The allegation quoted in this article that Pakistan's government manipulated
the courts into protecting the accused is baseless given the mutually hostile
relations between the military, executive and judicial arms of the Pakistani
state. In a long list of cases the government has stonewalled the courts and
recently passed legislation granting all cabinet ministers immunity from
contempt of court proceedings. The military is also unhappy with the courts' as
shown in [Pakistan's
courts take on the ISI, Asia Times Online, Jul 18, '12]. The same
government (which is after all trying hard to improve ties with India as Neeta
Lal too acknowledges) cannot possibly manipulate the same judiciary to protect
the accused in this particular case.
Amidst her lamentations about a Pakistani hand in the Mumbai attacks, Neeta Lal
did not mention the terrorism that India also sponsors against Pakistan. India
for four years blamed the torching of the Samjhauta Express train (which killed
42 Pakistanis) on Pakistan until the real perpetrators turned out to be high
ranking officials within India's military and intelligence - all of whom to
this day remain free men. It is interesting to note that the head of India's
Anti-Terrorist Squad in Maharashtra state, Hemant Karkare, was conveniently
killed off in the Mumbai attacks right when his investigations had started
uncovering intimate links between ultra-right-wing Hindu terrorist outfits and
high-ranking officials within India's military, intelligence and key
ministries, this even while according to [India's
Muslims and Hinduism's moksha, Asia Times Online, Jul 25, '12], India's
counter-terrorism measures unfairly target Muslims, who now live in a climate
of fear. India did blame the 2002 Gujarat pogroms on Pakistan until they turned
out to be a state-sponsored atrocity staged by India's then ruling party the
Hindu extremist BJP; the prime perpetrator, the governor of Gujarat Narendra
Modi, to this day has never been prosecuted for his actions.
India has similarly pressured Pakistan for two decades to release Research and
Analysis Wing (RAW) operative Sarabhjit Singh from death row, even after
Pakistan released two other RAW agents; all three of them have admitted to
carrying out terrorist attacks in Pakistan that killed scores of people. India
so far has refused to apologize or compensate for the actions of these three
individuals - who after all worked in their capacity as agents of the Indian
state - nor has it given any assurances it will not send operatives to carry
out terrorist attacks in Pakistan in the future.
Another noteworthy event was what transpired in the 2009 meeting between both
countries' prime ministers at Sharm-al-Sheikh, Egypt, because the meeting's
joint declaration led Indian PM Manmohan Singh to face allegations of a
"sell-out" to Pakistan. In 2011 India withdrew its list of 50 wanted terrorists
it insisted were in Pakistan when a few of them turned up in India, one of them
in a jail at a Mumbai police station, while India has so far taken no action of
the most-wanted list Pakistan had given it. And recently, Indian intelligence
plastered the portraits of seven Pakistani nationals on their country's media
who allegedly had entered Mumbai to launch fresh terrorist attacks. Within
hours all seven of them turned up in a Pakistani TV talk show, working as
merchants and security guards at a local shopping mall.
I am deeply curious as to how all of these things managed to escape Neeta Lal's
notice while she wrote on how terrorism works to bedevil bilateral ties.
All of this does not speak well of the credibility of India's political
offensive against Pakistan on the issue of terrorism. If Neeta Lal is going to
quote an Indian who "felt very, very strongly the way [his] city was held to
ransom", she should know that there is a long list of things the Pakistanis too
"feel very, very strongly" about but are willing to set aside in the larger
interest of enduring peace in a nuclearized region. India must reciprocate and
stop obstructing justice in the Mumbai attacks case while merely employing the
issue as an instrument of political browbeating and using it to slide under the
rug real bilateral core issues like Kashmir and water.
In the interest of keeping its readers more accurately informed, Asia Times
Online should desist from routinely publishing one-sided articles about
Pakistan that are based on propaganda rather than truly informative analysis
from a knowledgeable and impartial commentator.
Waqar Ahmed
Rawalpindi, Pakistan. (Jul 26, '12)
As we approach October and the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
much will be said about how brave JF Kennedy was, how scared the Russians were,
and how infuriated Castro became. As in all fairy tales, there's enough truth
in all these to perpetuate popular mythology and enshrine them in the Museum of
Legends, Lies and Libels.
No fantasy is more hallowed in Wonderland than the myth of American victory in
the showdown over nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. Mind you, this fiction was
spun out of the whole cloth of clever US propaganda, a media and public
enthralled with every action by Kennedy and a tightly controlled Soviet press
that decided to get out of Dodge with their hard fought victory over the
imperialists without further ado or bluster.
"Wait a minute," you say indignantly. "The Russians lost. They withdrew the
missiles. How else can that be perceived but as an American victory?" Well, for
starters, remember how Khrushchev decided to put missiles there in the first
place; their Caribbean socialist prize, Cuba, had been invaded a year before by
a vacillating Kennedy, who subsequently made it clear he would stop at nothing
to remove Castro and communism from that nearby island. Khrushchev also
considered that, since the Amerikans had nuclear missiles sitting right on
Russia's doorstep in Turkey, he could squash two capitalist birds with one red
missile deployment in a win-win scenario.
If he got away with it, it's a Soviet win; Cuba is protected and a strategic
imbalance is addressed. If the Yanks call his bluff, the worst that can happen
is he gets a guarantee of Cuba's socialist experiment surviving and the Turkish
missiles are removed, yet another Soviet victory.
The latter is precisely what happened, though many historian careers have been
greased by the plethora of Armageddon scenario books written about how close we
came to global thermonuclear war, they have almost always accepted the thesis
of humiliating Soviet climb down without considering how it all ended to
communism's benefit. In fact, Castro's socialist government survives to this
day, outlasting a petard-hoisted Kennedy, the USSR and a bitter but impotent
50-year old embargo, while Russia's existing strategic parity is a direct
result of the Soviet leadership, bereft of their Cuban launching base,
addressing the strategic balance with a massive arms buildup.
To just add a big commie red cherry to the Soviet victory pie, consider how a
rattled JFK felt compelled by his setback in the crisis to commit US forces to
Vietnam, a commitment that would ultimately end in imperialist defeat. Kennedy,
however, failed to see that defeat personally, as those historic chickens came
home to roost in Dallas just 13 months after his Cuban "victory."
Hardy Campbell (Jul 23, '12)
[Out with the old guard
in Pyongyang, Jul 20, '12] Here's a thought. Is the recently dismissed
Army general Ri the same Ri Song-ho who helped negotiate the February 29 "leap
year" food aid agreement with the US - an accord which the Barack Obama
administration almost immediately cancelled? If so, this dismissal has wider
implications.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Jul 23, '12)
[Re Pakistan's
courts take on the ISI, Jul 18, '12] Although the Pakistan People's
Party (PPP) stands to gain the greatest benefit (and a sense of vindication)
from the country's Supreme Court's decision to ban the Inter-Services
Intelligence's political cell, one must not forget that it was the PPP's own
founder, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who had created that cell in the first place, and
used it against his political rivals and other dissidents until his government
was overthrown in a military coup. This is hardly the action of a champion of
democracy, the rule of law and human rights, which is what the PPP portrays him
as today.
This and the other landmark decision of Pakistan's Supreme Court's - discussed
in the seventh paragraph of this article regarding abducted terrorist suspects
- establish that no element, least of all state institutions, will be able to
disregard the country's constitution in their operations any longer. More
importantly, they serve to challenge the democratic pretensions of certain
Western nations.
On February 2, 2012, Der Spiegel published a damning expose on how pervasively
the German domestic intelligence service, the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz
(BfV), spies on the country's elected MPs while it has failed to fulfill its
primary internal security duties in the way of tracking down and dismantling
the cells of neo-Nazi terrorist organization Zwickau. As of the date Der
Spiegel published that expose on, German courts have given the BfV virtually
complete freedom to do this even in contravention of the country's
constitution. Similarly, American courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of
giving all executive state agencies free rein in practicing on their own
citizens as well as foreigners torture, warrantless arrests and eavesdropping,
rendition and targeted assassinations without any due process of law, with
victims barred from even having their claims heard in court.
While the intelligence apparatus in supposedly progressive democracies is
shielded from any accountability or judicial review while operating outside the
law, democratic values and the rule of law are truly being entrenched in
Pakistan at a time when that country is fighting a war on its own soil against
national security threats far greater than those that the United States
routinely uses as pretexts to justify morphing into a police state and riding
roughshod over key provisions of its own constitution. Hopefully the world will
be mindful of this fact next time Pakistani courts are censured for their
supposedly anti-democratic war on the PPP by the think tanks and media outlets
of the very countries that are in no position to do so.
Waqar Pasha
Rawalpindi (Jul 20, '12)
The row over US Olympic team uniforms not being "Made in Amerika" is the latest
flailing and wailing, whining and pining of the Empire over Days That Will
Never Return. One WonderPolitico suggested piling up all those Chinese-made
outfits and setting them alight; perhaps by the fiery glow thus generated he
could read newspapers around the globe describe how ridiculous, hypocritical
and two-faced he and his fellow clowns make the country look. In many ways,
though, it is fitting that this "controversy" arose in the athletic arena,
where oftentimes weak impotent teams try to compete against opponents with
superior speed, agility and teamwork by crying "foul" while flopping over at
the barest pretense. By running to the World Trade Organization referee over
China's supposedly numerous trade violations, the US hopes that the yellow card
can be shown to those unfairly harder working and more productive Chinese.
The toothless Amerikans are thus pretty much conceding they can't compete on a
level playing field, so they invent excuses like currency manipulation, dumping
practices, etc., which are the economic equivalents of diving and feigning
injury on the pitch of global trade. Instead, they want the referee to penalize
the Chinese, which I guess in theory will make Wonderland somehow more
competitive with the commies, who read our books on capitalist strategy and
decided they can beat us at our own game. Only the US can't play that game
anymore; it doesn't have the skill, the will or the team spirit required to
compete with dynamic and better educated countries who strive for a collective
national good. So all that's left is howling at the moon and making hollow
gestures that show how pathetic the once mighty have sunk. The hypocrisy of US
politicians decrying their athletes being garbed in Chinese threads is
illustrated by the lack of concern about components of US military equipment
being made in China, which for some reason no outraged congressman is
suggesting be scrapped. Of course, doing that would jeopardize the one activity
we're still good at, the Bombing Third World Countries That Can't Defend
Themselves Event. And no WonderPolitician is going to upset that gold medal
parade.
H Campbell
Texas (Jul 19, '12)
It may be premature to say this, but Wonderlanders may be starting to get "It."
The current storm over Mitt "The MittiGator" Romney's tax records and his
job-killing gig at Bain is persuading many that the erstwhile GOP nominee is
not quite the patriotic, job-creating Buddy-to-Joe Blow he purports to be. The
"It" of which I speak revolves around whatever subject the perpetrator is
sturm-und-dranging about the most in public. If he's thumping his Bible and
damning gays, chances are good he's a Ted Haggard partying with male hookers.
If he's a saint of college football, pretending to be only concerned with young
people's integrity and morals, odds are fine that he's a Joe Paterno
cover-upping pedophilia. If he's a Secretary of the US Treasury loudly
proclaiming the soundness and security of the Wonderland financial system, put
all your money on it being Henry Paulson days before the 2008 crash. And rush
over to a roulette wheel next time you see some multi-medalled Secretary of
State confidently announcing "slam dunk" evidence of WMDs in Iraq; put all you
money on the color saying "Red Faced Colin Powell." If you're a womens-rights
supporting Democrat denouncing as false claims that some blonde bimbo's love
child is yours, my life savings yell "John Edwards."
And so on and so on, a monotonous litany of "experts, "men of God", and "gurus"
parading before cameras and getting sanctimonious and self-righteous about
this-or-that, only for us to inevitably find that not only are their feet made
of fine red Texas clay but that their tongues would put most cobras' to shame.
So here's hoping that when we listen to another pie-in-the-sky fantasy about
bombing Iran or rebuilding our industrial base or paying off our debts or being
able to have multiple simultaneous wars with nary a financial repercussion to
worry about, a light bulb will go off over more and more WonderDunderHeads.
That's assuming, of course, those bulbs are fueled by that energy independence
the "experts" tell us is just around the corner.
Hardy Campbell
Texas (Jul 17, '12)
[Re Fury grows at
Islamabad's NATO u-turn, Jul 11, '12] For a piece written by an
investigative journalist, this surprisingly had very little truly informative
value. Sumbal wrote that the LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba] "has been accused of
launching many terror attacks in India, most notably the 2001 assault on the
Indian parliament and the November, 2008 attacks in Mumbai." While the LeT has
certainly been "accused" of those things, Sumbal did not mention that actual
investigations into both incidents and the other "many terror attacks in India"
have been remarkably unforthcoming in implicating that organization. He also
failed to mention that the LeT's parent organization, the JuD [Jamaat-ud-Dawa],
is jointly engaged with the government of the Pakistani province of Punjab in a
program to de-radicalize and rehabilitate militants operating in that country
and pull them out of a life of terrorism.
I also noted Sumbal's mention of the US bounty on Hafiz Saeed for his "alleged"
role in the Mumbai attacks. He did not tell his readers that the bounty was not
for apprehending him but is in fact a reward for whoever can produce evidence -
the kind that is actually admissible in a court of law - implicating him in the
Mumbai attacks; the US State Department Spokesman Mark Toner admitted that
Washington has no such evidence during his daily briefing on April 4, 2012.
During that same briefing he dodged a journalist's question as to why that
evidence could not simply be taken from the Indian government, which has after
all insisted for more than three years that it has given Pakistani authorities
all the evidence they need to try and convict Hafiz Saeed for his role in that
atrocity. Perhaps coincidentally, the bounty was placed right around the time
when he intensified his political campaign as top leader of the Defense of
Pakistan Council (DPC) against the drone attacks and re-opening of NATO's
supply lines.
This article's content is true at some places. It is true that the DPC was
never prevented from reaching the Pakistani parliament despite Interior
Minister Rehman Malik's warning to that effect. That warning certainly was a
message to the Americans that Pakistan is serious in putting a stop to banned
outfits, but another important explanation behind it was that Pakistan's
current government was using the same tactic for holding on to power that
General Pervez Musharraf used to employ: projecting itself as the sole
protector of US interests in Pakistan then dangling the (non-existent) threat
of an Islamist takeover in the eyes of the Americans in order to frighten them
into throwing support to the government in power. This is why the government
gave a warning without acting on it.
Sumbal has accurately said that "the organizers [of the DPC's long march] claim
there are more than 500,000 participants, but the real number is likely closer
to 50,000." It unnecessarily got intense coverage in the international media
when it did not get nearly as much attention in Pakistan itself.
Sumbal said "credible sources have confirmed that militants in Balochistan,
[FATA] and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province have vowed to block and burn any
trucks carrying NATO supplies" and that "officials say that Pakistani
intelligence agencies' backing of the banned organizations' protest signals a
policy shift away from the US." Exactly who those "credible sources" and
"officials" were, he did not say, nor did he show any real and proven link the
DPC or Pakistan's intelligence agencies have with the said militants.
For an investigative journalist he simply used anonymous sources to peddle
unsubstantiated claims that have widely circulated in the (sensationalist)
media as though they were established facts and hardly did any "investigation"
of the information on whose basis he wrote this article. No inside information
has been revealed here; just unproven allegations that were already doing the
rounds of media coverage.
Shayne Wilson
Dubai, UAE (Jul 16, '12)
The ability to predict the future has been valued throughout the eons by every
human society. Soothsayers, fortunetellers, palm readers, crystal ball peerers,
all have been hailed and feted by the rich and powerful in order to protect or
increase their wealth, legacy and power. For most of humanity's existence,
these "experts" have relied on astrology, Tarot cards and other superstitious
musings to prophesy disaster or fortune, prosperity or poverty, victory or
defeat. But with the Enlightenment, science, mathematics and and their
supposedly superior abilities in these prophetic arts supplanted the ancients,
making finance, industry and society controllable, manipulable and eminently
predictable. Or so we hoped, here in Wonderland.
Alas, while the instruments of rationality have done their job, the human
propensity to cherry pick, sugar coat, twist, spin and mutilate the information
thus provided to say what we want it to say, and simply look the other way or
bury our head in the sand when it doesn't, renders all these marvelous
developments of our superior sapient mind nothing more than sculptures of vain
vanity.
From the cold calculus of Vietnamese body counts by the supreme Randtionalist
McNamara to the voodoo hedgefunding of LCTM to the casino engineering that
destroyed the Challenger space shuttle to the epic mortgage meltdown of 2008,
Wonderlanders have cooked their books to make Gucci silk purses out of warthog
ears, turning Nelson's eyes to bad news and spinning emperor's clothes out of
the whole cloth of surreal optimism.
This trend continues to this day, ignoring the reams of financial data that
shows the US in hopeless and eternal insolvency, shoving our collective heads
up our collective derrieres when the catastrophic failure or education dooms us
to perpetual Third Worlddom, and dreaming of a democratic world that gives a
tinker's damn what Amerika stands for anymore. It doesn't take an Oracle of
Delphi to guess what direction in the Toilet Bowl of History we'll be swirling.
H Campbell
United States (Jul 16, '12)
[Re North Korea's
culture of bribery, Jul 12, '12] Is Andrei Lankov suggesting that North
Korea is following China's road to capitalism in contrasting Kim Il-sung's
reign with his son's and now grandson's?
Asia Times Online's readers would be better served with a comparison of the
"culture of bribery" of the two Koreas. As yet, no one has opined on the arrest
of South Korea's president's Lee Myung-bak's brother for bribery.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Jul 13, '12)
The release of an internal investigative report conducted by Penn State
University into the sexual abuse of children by one its employees and the
subsequent cover-up and howls of collective defensive protest that followed are
prototypically Wonderlandian.
Indeed, the entire scandal of the revered assistant football coach who abused
young boys under the every noses of the allegedly "clueless" administrators and
the hallowed head coach, Joe Paterno, is all too reminiscent of countless
"silent conspiracies" that regularly afflict Amerika.
The standard response is straight out of a Wonderland University course called
Cover-Ups 101; 1) Deny as preposterous, 2) Discredit the accuser, 3) Stonewall
all inquiries, 4) Organize collective protests opposing such "lies", 5) Show
shock when the truth outs, 6) Point fingers at everyone but yourself, and
finally, 7) Vow retribution against "them."
From the sinking of the USS Maine to the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the
John F Kennedy execution to the Tonkin Gulf Incident to the Watergate Scandal
to the 9/11 cover-up to the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction lies, this
pattern of denial, obfuscation, feigned outrage and scrambling for cover
exhibited by Penn Staters is as Amerikan as an apple pie disguised as pumpkin.
The Pentagon are unquestionably past masters of this, having to regularly lie
about soldiers killing each other in drug induced fury or helicopters crashing
because of poor maintenance or male troops raping female troops, but the rest
of Amerika, as shown by Penn State, have been assiduously taking notes.
To be sure, the good folk at that stained university are saying all the right
things and shedding the right amount of tears, but many of the rest of us, like
myself, want to be sure no amphibious carnivore is the source of such
expressions of grief. Tearing down the statues and removing the name of the now
defrocked Paterno from school buildings would be a start, but methinks we shall
not soon see such real expressions of outrage anytime soon. Like all good
Wonderlanders, relying on amnesia and selective denial is almost always a safe
bet to whitewash the nasty history we want to just go away.
H Campbell
United States (Jul 13, '12)
[Re A Hydra in
Damascus, Jul 12, '12] "[A]after all his [former UN secretary general
Kofi Annan's] reputation is on the line" ... Annan did not have much of a
favorable reputation before being chosen as the UN/Arab League envoy. Whatever
reputation was left has already been washed down the toilet for not being brave
enough to publicly spell out the truth for all to know. Keeping silent and
speaking from both corners of his mouth is no longer diplomatic behavior, it is
purposely hiding the truth.
Saila (Jul 13, '12)
Nothing warms the cockles of my patriotic, left wing socialist heart than
reading or listening to the rants of loony toon right-wing mad doggers frothing
at the mouth about "regime change" and "Bye Bye ayatollahs" and a 1,001 other
fantasies, delusions and hallucinations about Wonderland's perpetual bogeyman,
the Islamic Republic of Iran. Mind you, for the majority of such addled
Amerikanazis, Ike's still in the White House, Ozzie and Harriet is everyone's
ideal of middle class wedded bliss and a buck'll keep your T bird running long
after your daddy takes it away.
These are days that will never return, of course, but for these TeaBaggers,
Kermit Roosevelt and a new compliant Iranian prime minister are still just a
phone call away. So they can blather on and on about war with Iran until the
cows come home and deposit Repukican wisdom all over their front lawn, but the
fact remains Iran is a country that can and will fight back, something the US
last tried in Southeast Asia 40 years ago with, shall we say, unhappy results.
While the average redneck white trash neocon dreams of Iranian regime change,
the Persians, who have withstood invasions, wars, conquests and plagues for
2,500 years, await Amerika's extinction change. Guess who the gods on Mount
Olympus are putting their money on.
Hardy Campbell
United States (Jul 12, '12)
[Re More revealing than
Mickey, Jul 11, '12] The BBC airwaves crackled on the weekend with news
of Mickey Mouse in Pyongyang, with a snide coolness that only the British can
deliver. Yet, as James Pearson indicates, seasoned Pyongyongologists rarely go
below the surface of the change that is going on in the North.
Not to put a fine point on it, Kim Jung-eun's youth announces change: we are
witnessing, if you will, at first, a flowering in cultural life to match the
plate shifts in unannounced economic reforms.
As corruption and malfeasance make headlines in South Korea, in North Korea new
winds of youth and hopeful transformation are in evidence.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Jul 12, '12)
I read in New Carrier,
New war scenarios, [Jul 11, '12] Carl O Schuster telling the world how
the Chinese have duplicated this or that technology from the West or Russia. It
seems that the Chinese are incapable of any original thought or product
development. I could tell that the article was written by an American by the
first paragraph. I wonder does it ever occur to Americans that a country may
want weapons for defense? Back to the point of this letter ... I am long
married to a Chinese lady who works for a major US chemical company. She was
recently given a whopping 50% increase in salary for contributing a very
innovative suggestion about a chemical process which improved quality and cut
costs dramatically. I feel very proud to have married the only Chinese person
out of 1.3 billion who is capable of independent, innovative thought and didn't
need to copy anyone.
Ken Moreau
New Orleans USA (Jul 12, '12)
[Re Strait history,
Jul 7, 2012] Iran won't close anything. The US and Iran are a game for each
other. Iran likes to feel important, and the US loves to use Iran for
propaganda purposes. The fact is that in a kill-all, "Totaler Krieg"
conflict, the US could very easily reduce Iran to ashes in a heart beat and all
of its neighbors for that matter, just like Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a small
taste of American deadly and brutal military might.
The problem is that in today's world the most dangerous war is the war of
public opinion. You don't want to lose that war - ask Israel if - regardless of
the truth - it's funny to be labeled the villain. Plus wars destroy the souls
of nations. I wonder when the US and Iran will stop barking at each other. They
won't fight. Not one shot. You have to give it to the mullahs. They are quite
entertaining and their threats are very amusing. Thanks to them we will have
headlines for years to come.
Ysais Martinez (Jul 11, '12)
[Re Strait history,
Jul 7, 2012] "If Iran does attempt to close the Strait, US President Barack
Obama should use this chance to bring about regime change in Iran." - Dennis
O'Connell, USA, [letter Jul 8]. Yes, don't jump out of Osama bin Laden's trap!
Instead, continue to bankrupt the US's finances and debauch its morals with yet
another unwinnable war! Vietnam and Afghanistan all over again!
Lester Ness
Kunming (Jul 11, '12)
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich in
Strait history [Jul 6, '12], wants us to believe that unless the West
lifts its pressure on Iran, Iran will close the strait of Hormuz and is
entitled to do so. The Strait is between 32-34 miles (51.5 - 54.7 kilometers)
at its narrowest not 21 miles (33.7 kilometers) as everyone on the Internet
seems to want to claim.
That means around 10 miles (16 kilometers) of the Strait is international
waters, also the entrance to the gulf in on the Oman side of the center line.
Iran has no legal right to stop a foreign flagged ship in international waters
without the permission of the nation to which the ship is registered. If Iran
does try to stop the flow of oil, it will indeed be a crisis needing an
immediate solution.
The world will want the Strait opened as soon as possible and it will fall on
the United States to do it, and I believe the liberal European nations and
China will look the other way as the US does it - there will be little sympathy
for Iran. Iran does not want to give up its right to enrich uranium and someday
achieve a bomb, but its economy and oil industry are coming under massive
strain.
Right now most of Iran's oil tanker fleet has been filled with crude and are
steaming around in circles in the gulf. Oil is not like a light switch that you
can turn on or off; closing an oil well is a time-consuming, complicated
process. If Iran does attempt to close the Strait, Obama should use this chance
to bring about regime change in Iran.
Hatred of the US in the main raison d'etre of the Iranian state and that will
never change until the fascist theo-thugs that rule Iran lose power. Iran has
already committed numerous acts of war against the US but for some reason the
US has done nothing. In early 2007, Iranian general Ali-Reza Asgari defected to
the West - that was over five-and-a-half ago and his story has never been told.
I believe the reason the US has not allowed his information to leak is that if
the American people knew the true story of Iranians actions against he US they
would demand war, as he had inside information about the Iranian bombing of the
marine barracks and US Embassy in Lebanon. I believe Obama will lose the
upcoming election because of the economy; however, a military win over the
Iranians would definitely boost his chances, regime change even more so. If
your enemy sticks his head in a guillotine it would be impolite not to pull the
lever. Bon voyage mullahs.
Dennis O'Connell
USA (Jul 9, '12)
[Re North Korea's pools
of prosperity, Jul 6, '12] Assumptions about North Korea's economic
change and uneven growth have been disregarded by almost everyone; in fact, any
improvements are often dismissed as froth. So, reading Andrei Lankov's article
is of interest. Political economists like Ridiger Frank have long kept track of
small but fundamental indications that North Koreans economists have had a good
grasp of reality since the defunct Soviet Union cut off its purse strings.
The North is not unaware of reforms in Vietnam, for example; North Korea tilts
towards smaller communist countries for obvious reasons. Saying this, Pyongyang
follows its own star. So, North Korea's detractors write about an unchanging
Democratic People's Republic of Korea - it is what they expected to see, so
they saw it.
Nonetheless, Lankov's analysis has a worm in it: the dismissal of the true
nature of natural and man-made disasters as they pertain to North Korea's
agriculture. To imply that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) tend to
inflate near starvation conditions to inflate their own importance is an
unworthy accusation. Food is being denied to these NGOs for political reasons
by the US, South Korea, Australia, and the European Union.
Nakamura Junzo
Guam (Jul 9, '12)
I have a lot of shall-we-say "politically incorrect" T shirts that people
regularly comment on. A popular one in particular evokes a topic of some
dispute; it shows a photo circa 1900 of North American Indians holding rifles,
with big capital letters underneath saying "Homeland Security; Fighting
Terrorism Since 1492." A recent movie made by neo-con scalawags attempts to
embarrass UN Officials by asking them for a definition of terrorism, which that
august body has failed to agree on themselves.
What the right-wing fool doesn't realize is that, this failure is a good thing
for the United States, since, as suggested by my T shirt, by a goodly number of
posited definitions, Wonderland would qualify as the world's greatest terrorist
state by a wide margin, leaving the likes of Muammar Gaddafi's Libya or
Hezbollah-loving Iran in the dust. Interestingly, in a textbook approved by US
universities to teach courses on terrorism, this delicate topic is avoided by
being careful to ensure that "acts of war" disqualify the kind of violence the
US routinely engages in as being "terrorism". But even granting that the
indiscriminate murder of Iraq or Afghan citizens during occupation gives Uncle
Sam a Get-Out-of-Murder card, Wonderland still earns the tag of terrorist
sponsor, aiding and abetting such terrorist groups as the Cuban "liberation"
gang Alpha 66, which has killed numerous Cuban and foreign citizens with CIA
help, or the anti-ayaltollah Kurds who perform murders and bombings in Iran
with Amerikan help.
Little wonder that the United States of Assassination avoids too strict a
scrutiny of the definition, since its Office of Homeland Security categorically
refuses to call the bombing of abortion clinics within its borders terrorist
acts, which would tick off the neo-Taliban Christian right wing which avidly
and clandestinely supports Pro-Life crimes (how's that for an oxymoron among
the morons?) So I've arrived at my irrefutable definition of terrorism;
"Violent acts committed by people we don't agree with and never by Americans."
Hardy Campbell Non-Terrorist Texas (Jul 6,
'12)
[Re Banning
circumcision is dangerous to your health, Jul 2, '12] I am fed up and
disgusted by your "Spengler". This article claims nothing less than the end of
the German people if they interfere with Jewish circumcision, which according
to him (and Mosaic law) is the only source of divinity. By extension, the
entire world's population exists only at the whim of this self declared
"divinity".
Jews number about 15 million worldwide, or less than 0.5% of the world
population. Muslims, who also practice circumcision, are well over a billion,
or close to 20% of the world. In Germany they outnumber Jews by at least 20:1
and are multiplying much faster than the ethnic German average, therefore by
the logic of this article should be very much espoused of life as preached by
"Spengler". Yet they are dismissed with contempt as mere imitators.
In Spengler's world, the 99.5%-plus non-Jews of the world do not exist or are
obviously subhuman since they are not part of the "divine", or the self
appointed "chosen people". I am sure this encompases the vast majority of Asia
Times Online's staff and readers and all their families. What are we then -
rejects of the Creator?
Anyone who dares to comment on, let alone criticize such casual dehumanization
of almost the entire world's population (past, present and future) will be met
with screams of anti-Semitism. This is for you "Spengler": your messianic
pretensions of "the eternal people" are Anti-Human Race.
Kali Kadzaraki
Texas USA (Jul 3, '12)
All hail the Spanish football team for their glorious triumph in the Euros
(note, not small "e" euros.) Their teamwork, passing and dribbling skills make
them contenders for All Time Numero Uno. Let the debate begin about Pele's
Brazil, Beckenbauer's West Germany, et al; the fact remains none of those teams
won three international trophies in four years as Spain has. The argument gets
fierce when we compare the individuals on the Spain team versus the greats
adorning the rosters of other great squads, but those are like debates about
the transmission of a Maserati versus the suspension of a Lamborghini. Mute,
and totally beside the point. Individuals do not win championships, teams do.
Likewise, when Amerikans on this upcoming Fourth of July wax eloquent about
past Wonderland heroes, they speak of great individuals who never lost sight of
the collective goals that promised prosperity for all. Contrast that mindset
with that of he so-called "leaders" of today, who scramble like surprised
roaches for their own aggrandizement and have no problem undermining the
foundation of American prosperity, the middle class. Like footballers who
dribble, shoot and score for their own fattened contracts but whose teams lose
regularly, they benefit no one but themselves while their companies/government
squander billions and fire thousands. There is no "I" in team, as the Euro
2012-winning Spanish team eloquently displayed on the pitch, nor is there a
dollar sign. But in a nation where the personal acquisition of money at
enormous social cost is paramount, the concept of individuals working together
for all is damned as "socialism," "class warfare" and "redistribution of
wealth." Little wonder many Wonderlanders despise football. Viva Espana!
Hardy Campbell
Texas (Jul 3, '12)
May, June Letters
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