Jiri's Blog

Testament in the Throes of Death

2011-08-28T15:14:00.000-07:00

Christie Blatchford got herself into hot water last week over her remarks on the death of Jack Layton . Her Tuesday’s (23/8) column in National Post took issue with the CBC lack of sense of measure in covering the opposition leader’s passing and the letter to Canadians composed either on Jack Layton’s deathbed by himself or near it with his collaboration and consent. Her inbox quickly became flooded by email with assorted abuse, demonization and laments from Jack’s worshippers who either never read the letter or quickly forgot what was “better” despite the Peace Tower in Ottawa chiming John Lennon’s Imagine while the great sage laid in state on the Hill.

I like Christie’s writing a lot. Like Jack, she has spunk and calls them as she sees them. And she has a keen sense in smelling humbug which of course makes her a comrade-in-arms. I agree with Christie that the letter was extraordinary sample of bad taste though the question remains on the timing of her column. My sense tells me it could have waited until Jack was in the ground. At any rate, what the column said definitely needed to be said.

Someone should have had the sense to try to talk Jack – presumably not as sharp in his dying hours - out of addressing all Canadians. It would be read as vainglory (yes, Christie is right), an essentially undemocratic pining for a one-party perfect society. What about other people, other Canadians, whose politics were not Jack’s ? Would they not feel that this upsizing of Jack post-mortem was going a tad too far and that the sense of tragic loss was being cynically misused for partisan ends ? It was poor judgment to think that perhaps all would be shamed into silence.

Stephen Lewis said in his eulogy of Jack Layton that the “testament in the throes of death” was really a manifesto for social democracy, which earned rousing applause and all the guests in Thompson Hall stood up to pay respect. One could hardly believe this was a funeral. It is sad to see the NDP so hard off it can’t think of the death of its leader in terms other than its political utility. But in one sense Lewis had it right: Jack Layton’s testament is a political manifesto. It was simply misaddressed to all Canadians instead to the rank and file of his own party, where it belongs. Surely, it would have been read by many other Canadians. Surely, some of them would have been inspired to sign up for Jack’s vision.

Of course, there is always the loony element which idealist dreamers seem to have a great success in awakening. The sad news about Jack spread fast in Ottawa last week. But one unforgettable moment that describes everything about the ueber-grief-fest for me were two well-fed women in their twenties tearing up over the letter which one of them read aloud at a local Tim Hortons. When I walked in they were in the middle even though no-one around them seemed to be interested in more than their daily dose of caffeine and sugar. But as the reciter went “love is better than anger, hope is better than fear, …..”, the manager who evidently knew the mood of the Canadians in the joint better busted the sermon “….and two donuts are better than one…..girls can you take this out some place else ?”

Fretting Fuelishly

2011-08-21T11:02:00.000-07:00

I take it that by now everyone knows gas prices are a joke. A butterfly fluttering its wings in Chongzhou will cause volatility in light crude futures in Chicago. A cellphone call to a buddy who owns a gas pump kitty-corner from you, and who forgot to adjust his price sign this morning will constantly remedy the anomaly in the market. Only make sure that you do not say what the market price is, because that would be participation in price-fixing cartel, subject in Canada to 14 years of jail and a fine up to $25 million. So to stay on the right side of the Competition Act, do not say fuelish things on your cellphone or leave paper trail. It is not an offence under the act to consult price boards of competition and make your own deduction of what the fair market price of gasoline in your neck of the woods should be at 7 am this lovely morning. I am not making this up, friends, this is the cuckoo-conomy you and I live in these days.

So what is new in all of this hullabaloo ? Actually, it is kind of getting even weirder than useless laws designed to catch a dozen idiots among thousands of petro pickpockets. President Obama created an Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group headed by the Attorney General to investigate the ever more brazen robberies at the gas pump. The administration designated hound dog is Eric Holder, the man having trouble identifying the Fort Hood shooter who describes himself as Soldier of Allah as a terrorist inspired by radical islam. Of course it produced nothing of newsmaking note in four months. But we know there are some really interesting data out there. A couple of days ago, the US Senator Bernie Sanders released the names of major traders with their share of oil futures in the summer of 2008, i.e. the names of people who drove the price of oil through the roof at the time. The data comes directly from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. "This report clearly shows that in the summer of 2008 when gas prices spiked to more than $4 a gallon, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other speculators on Wall Street dominated the crude oil futures market causing tremendous damage to the entire economy,"Sanders said in a statement. "The CFTC has kept this information hidden from the American public for nearly three years. That is an outrage."

The effect of the disclosure was predictable. The president of the Futures Industry Association John Damgard denounced the outing of this information, as threatening “derivatives trading” (oh Lord !) and jeopardizing the Commission's ability to gather such information in the future. But he does not seem to understand the basic thing: Energy commodities speculation which directly causes rapid cost escalations across the whole economy, cannot be good…..for the economy. And indeed, where the governments of the booming economies of the world protect the stability of energy supply by regulation (and subsidies), the US and Canada suffers volatility which now all but assures their GDP will continue to stagnate or tank. So it would be good - as a first thing - to separate concepts like market and criminal conspiracy.

Oh No, not ANother Hurricane..(Aug 27.)

Predictably, the news of Irene drove up the gasoline price by 10 cents yesterday. Usually, this kind of a jump in the past was occasioned by a spike in the spot price of crude, but noone seems to care about this sort of protocol these days. The price of crude may be the only truly variable cost in the production and distribution of gasoline, but the oil companies don't care. The will not be hogtied to the price of crude because in times of high prices the demand for gas is falling, and with it the total revenue. So to protect the aggregate revenues of big oil the price of gasoline will need to be re-adjusted until you pay $1.30 a liter on a $85/barrel, where you paid the same amount for $135/barrel just a little while back. The The graph showing the price relationship between crude oil and wholesale price in Canada in the last six months graphically illustrates the new pricing paradigm. (click on the graph to enlarge). The trend is closely parallel to the US which gives lie to the assertion that the fluctuations in wholesale prices (outside of crude oil) are to regional issues of distribution, currency exchange, quality of crude(!), different refinery maintenance standards and whatever other nonsense industry advocates can dream up. There is a marked push upwards for the gasoline price which faithfully follows peaks and valleys of the US development. The price of gas, in the disintegration of any semblance of market is now simply dictated by the oil and gas cartels. Unlike the rapidly developing economies of the world, Canada does not show political will to do the things necessary to counter the effects of this push to higher production costs and inflation across the board - i.e. tax the windfall profits and/or fix the allowed profit in the pricing of gasoline.

Rivers of Bloody Nonsense

2011-08-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

Much to the chagrin of the Tehran zealots , the UK riots of August 2011 will not be turning to an Islamic revolution any time soon. For a number of reasons which are not obvious to political fanatics, the unrest in Britain over the last week were not of the type that topples governments. These were calculated forays by hoods beating up on whomever looked unwilling to fight back, looting and torching and boozing merrily in the streets because, like Thomas the Little Engine, they could. It looked ugly for mostly two reasons. One, because the police was obviously unprepared to apply full force of the law to anyone other than the EDL whose civil disorder tactics are different. Two, the aerial tapes of burning blocks of buildings made it look like London was blitzed again. Disgusting as the riots were, they were simply nowhere near the levels of lethal violence recently visited in places like Hama, Benghazi or Bombay….sorry, Mumbai, (ever so sorry), places free of the brutal British cops deplored by the brothers in Cairo and students in Tehran. There were not dozens or hundreds of dead or maimed in Tottenham, Clapham, Brimingham or Manchester. So first, thank God for that !

From my perspective, much of the rioting was played up by the media to aggravate the shock and the sense of unreality, extend them as it were beyond the areas immediately affected by the riots to create a national political crisis of what was essentially a hard-to-grasp breakdown of effective policing. (The hapless BBC, realizing finally the dangers of this upsizing, renamed the “UK riots” to “riots in England” on the third or fourth day) . Again, we are not talking tens or hundreds of thousands of protesters but several hundred at a time operating in half a dozen non-contiguous areas. A swift, energetic action in dispersing the mob on Saturday, effectively televised (!) and documented in the papers, would have surely gone a long way to preventing the rampage from repeating the next few days.

Instead, what: not just incompetent arguments against time-proven, effective and non-lethal methods of crowd control, but totally idiotic tangents claiming the state is in competition for services with a vicious thug sub-culture in the chavs’ neighbourhoods, and failing to deliver on that score. It is beyond belief that a major daily would print crass psychobabble that unwittingly legitimizes (or takes as a given, at any rate) the existence of a criminal underworld in urban Britain. That mind-boggling drivel appears on the dailies’ pages on days when swift, effective restoration of civil order is called for is perhaps the most telling of all the items on the riots.

Unfortunately, it is not just the Leftist idiocies. David Starkey’s comments last Friday on BBC’s Newsnight earned him an instant label of racist and provoked the inevitable avalanche of petitions for his dismissal as a BBC commentator. I am not sure what the historian was up to: there is no doubt a gangsta culture of mostly Caribbean blacks in the working class neighbourhoods in England which dominates and terrorizes the black community and has sway over many young white yobs. This cannot be denied. It cannot be denied that the rioting has been orchestrated by this criminal underclass: it was an opportunity to loot and test the will of the establishment. So what does one do with this - essentially correct but trivial - finding ? Do we become transfixed by silly rhetoric and talking through the hat assuring everyone there is not only one version of ineffectual tattle? There were no rivers of blood or cry for rivers of blood in the riots that justified Starkey pulling out the Enoch Powell’s speech from 1968, especially since evidently had no follow-up line to a messed up metaphor for cultural pollution. He himself indicated that the motivation for the riot was a rather banal joy of looting and lawlessness (btw, common in England in advance of Robert Peel, metro policing and immigration from Jamaica or Trinidad,) and not the sort of racial dominance that Powell had in mind. There is no need to go into racially divisive apocalyptic imagery if one intends to approach the issues with a clear head and resolve to fix what needs to be fixed.

No wonder then that Starkey's half-baked ideas were immediately attacked, and he was lectured to by the two interlocutors, Owen Jones and Dreda Say Mitchell, (among other things on the value of rap in the cultural advancement of Britain). Predictably, Mitchell dressed down Starkey a day later in a column written for The Guardian. With the condescending style so dear to Jesse Jackson’s imitators, she suggested his opinions would have earned him a time-out in a school where she was a teacher. Strange idea coming from someone complaining of cultural exclusion. And surely, this would not have been a school teaching democratic principles of respecting plurality of opinions. But I guess that is part of the problem: there is no respect for the traditional ways and no workable model of something to replace them. In some quarters that dilemma can be actuated by a tweet: Lets loot & see! What gives ?

Colonel Jekyll, Mr.TypicalMale

2010-10-31T20:24:00.000-07:00

Nowhere does our doomed culture show the advanced state of dilapidation as in the view of male sexual function. The former normative model of mature male sexuality is gone and no viable successor has been allowed to enter. In the current paradigm, women rule hetero males and anything goes in homosex.

The mainstream culture (if one goes by CBC standards) has been into femdom S&M big time. The protagonists may be be somewhat off the edge of Tarantino’s vicious vixens but all the same: as long as she cracks the whip and he licks her boots, we are well within the new normal. The paradigm has - you guessed it - a low threshhold of tolerance for women in the masochist role, unless they are pushy bottoms. But even that has become questionable since the fiasco of Karla Homolka as a feminist martyr.

It is easy to see that in a disordered gender-identity culture like ours some fairly ordinary deviance patterns will be particularly difficult to grasp and handle. Take Russ Williams, the fallen commander of Canada's largest air-force base. The press had a front-page heyday with the exhibitions of his trophies, yet it remained clueless as to why this paraphilia appears to have been so very private. The picture of Russ in women's undies was top secret: for Russ' eyes only. Why ? I understand this is quite unusual in criminology. One's sexual deviance is usually validated through one's mate (if one has one). I say usually, but the statistics will likely show a large preponderance of dominance sexual displays as having some inside audience. Not with Russ. Hmmm...

What are we to make of it ? First, I think we need to admit that even if we knew everything about Russ Williams, his personal history into the smallest detail, his actions would still be a mystery. As the celebrated medieaval judge Brian observed, not even the devil knowest the heart of man ! But that is not what I am after; I do not search for some foolish lagal calculus of his motives. I am simply at a loss to understand our cultural selectors not registering the obvious clues that are all over this case.

Look at the picture above and ask yourself: is that a portrait of an alpha male in the prime of his life capturing his domestic idyll ? Why does the killer look so sheepish on the declaration of superiority and ownership of him by his mysteriously sexless madonna ? Isn't that because he has no (culturally approved) way of dominating himself, that he knows of, and can show on a photo that may be seen by others ? Like couple of kids, or something. Isn't that what the start-up rage of raiding the dressers of women in his madonna's immediate neighbourhood is mostly about? Isn't that what may account for the filling up the basement of my wife's house (as Williams refered to the couple's Ottawa property) with bras and panties of women who would do sex with Russ on top ?

Dr. Duncan Scott, a forensic psychiatrist from Queens U., who was assigned to Williams during his pre-trial detention said on the CBC Williams' Confession documentary that Williams was a bungling kind of a killer who did not plan his criminal forays. Well, yes, it is kind of obvious that his passion got quickly the better of him once he found the expression of his rage against his beloved wifey, with whom he had dinners while raping and killing women in his neighbourhood. But is Doctor Scott right in saying there is "no sample group" for the Russ Williams kind of deviance ? I am skeptical on that score.

The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Moderate Islam

2010-10-17T08:42:00.000-07:00

First off, I hope I am not breaking any news when I say that to learn something about Islam one must not get one’s schooling from American television networks. Especially not ABC's The View.

Further, I assume I need not expand on the observation that certain forms of debate (eg where one argues by appeals like 'Oh My God !') do not admit reason and therefore are not in any way informative. For example, it was plainly incorrect for Bill O’Reilly to say ‘Muslims killed us on 9/11’ as the pronoun grammatically includes the speaker himself who, by all appearances, was still alive as he delivered the line. Similarly, it is not an argument for the mosque in a building damaged by the Islamic terrorist attack on WTC to say, as Whoopi Goldberg did, there were seventy Muslims among the victims. It is not because such finding does not alter the religious affiliation of the attackers, nor the fact that two thousand and eight hundred of the other victims – the ones specifically targetted - were Non-muslims. So it would be, to an intelligent woman, plain and clear that if a New York Muslim cleric acts with a callous disregard of the wishes of the majority of those victims, he is not what he purports to be: a moderate Muslim. Further, in the uncivilized debate, Joy Behar challenged the figure of seventy percent of Americans being opposed to the mosque. Interestingly, her CNN employer’s poll in early August quoted the figure of 68%, slightly off the CBS poll’s 71% . So this figure by all appearances does not originate with a shady right-wing pollster for hire, as Ms Behar intimated.

On both sides, then there is bizarre spin-doctoring, either unnecessarily broad-brushing of all Muslims, or denying that state-sponsored, radical forms of Islam exist and are actively engaged in attempts to undermine and dismantle the civilizational foundation of the West. Unfortunately, the debate is all too typical on what passes for brains and civility on the major networks these days. There does not seem to be any common-sense, middle ground to be found anywhere. The sitting US Attorney General does not seem to know there is radical Islam, or so he would like us to believe. One can only wonder if Eric Holder would have had the same difficulty identifying the Baader-Meinhof Gang as radical Marxists.

On the other extreme, Pamela Geller, the NYC blogger who stirred up the opposition to imam Rauf’s Cordoba House project, does not believe there is such a thing as moderate Islam. Selon elle, there are moderate Muslims, but no moderate Islam.

Well, she is wrong. Until the house of Saud started to export Wahhabism in the 1970’s, and the US allowed itself to be shanghaied by the ayatollahs and chased away from Beirut, the Islam in the world was by and large mild. Moammar Gaddafi’s brand of revolution might have had an Islamic flavour, but its political vectors pointed elsewhere (pan-Arabic nationalism rather than jihadi pan-Islamism). There were of course strands and pockets of more conservative, stricter adherence to traditional Islamic precepts, but the belief in toppling the civilization of the West and replacing it with a world-wide caliphate, was as fringe view of Islam as Terry Jones’ baptist gospel is of Christianity today. Modern radical Islam then is a new phenomenon. It came about unexpectedly as a by-product of the petro pricing revolution in the 1970’s. Huge monetary surpluses from oil were used to export the Saudi version of Islam, first to Pakistan and Malaysia and then practically wherever the dollar is recognized as currency. The Shia response to the radicalization was soon realized in Iran, in Khomeini's Islamic Republic. Iran’s ample oil revenues also started to project politically abroad : first in Lebanon, and now in Gaza and Turkey.

So, moderate Islam continues to exist, even though it has been overshadowed lately by the politically militant forms. Tayyip Erdogan, the PM of the latest major arrivals on the Islamic political scene, Turkey, may scoff at the ‘ugly and offensive’ idea of moderate Islam . But all he is saying is that his allegiances no longer lie with the U.S., NATO or Europe. (As a matter of fact, it looks a lot like the APK, Turkey’s ruling Islamist party widely reported to have been ‘created’ by Saudi oil money is now switching allegiances to Tehran.) It is a way to say to the Muslims: the balance of power has shifted. We, the Islamic radicals, now hold the economic trump cards. The U.S. can’t do anything; the country is bankrupt, morally and money-wise. You better march with us.

Luckily for the West though, things are never simple in the Muslim world. Traditional societies have traditional views of themselves. Saudi Arabia and Iran will forever be at loggerheads. Egypt sees itself as the centre of the Arab civilization. Its intellectuals ridicule the upstart desert primitives in Riyadh. Syria will not cede its influence in Lebanon to Iran. Malaysia and Indonesia will be tied economically much more closely to the East Asian markets than the Middle East. The long term smart play for Muslims around the world would be to stay with moderate Sufism. A lot of them in the West are happy with the lives they lead and do not like the negative attention the islamist radicalism creates for their communities. But unfortunately, many Muslims remain passive in their politics, coming as they do from places ruled by brutish despots. They are frightened by the fiery sermons of the Saudi-trained clerics (for a closer look, here is a BBC documentary from 2007 as a primer). They see the mosques openly preaching sedition and separation from the state, and the authorities not stepping in and dealing with the outrage in a just, competent, effective way. In consequence, most Muslims will not step forward and confront the fanatics themselves.

How to Identify moderate Islam

The test is actually quite simple. If a person proclaims that sharia should replace the secular laws of the West, if he or she believes in a world-wide caliphate, and Islam as the only valid religion of the world, then this person is not a moderate Muslim (= a believer in moderate Islam), whether or not the believer publicly renounces terrorism. The terrorism in this position is implied. One cannot claim, as either material or spiritual need, the right to the trashing of other people’s beliefs. All true religions believe themselves unique and superior to all other religions. Islam is no exception in this. The fact that this religion spread in the world initially by military conquest is irrelevant. The fact that the Quranic idiom often points to martial valour as the truest expression of faith is irrelevant. All religions live by hyperbole. What is relevant is whether the contemporary Muslim believer grasps that hatred breeds hatred, insincerity breeds mistrust, supremacist ideology breeds resistance in fair-minded and intelligent people. What is relevant is whether the contemporary Muslim believer grasps that he only way a civilization may show its superiority is by an example in laying the groundwork for its people to lead a secure, productive, satisfying life. If this is the way of Allah, we can live side by side peaceably.

But, the intelligent woman will ask, is there such Islam anywhere ? Isn’t it just what you would like to believe ?

Well, I think there is a quite convincing proof that most Muslims do not mean to kill us. One of the curious items in the Ground Zero Mosque affair has been the silence of the mainstream American media on the unpopularity of the project in the Arab world. The pundits evidently don’t know what to make of the negative image imam Rauf has there. The scholars of the world’s oldest Islamic university, Cairo’s Al-Azhar, consider him a provocateur par excellence to a point of accusing him of playing a part in a devious Zionist conspiracy. They think the idea of a “call to prayer from the rubble of WTC” (a partial title of Rauf’s book printed in Malay) gives Islam a bad name and strengthens the association between 9/11 and Islam, on which many people in America will gladly jump and around which some will create their media personality. Far from a shield against Islamic extremists, the Park51 project will inevitably attract them (as did the Hamburg mosque where the 9/11 plotters gathered) as a place of pilgrimage. Nowhere is the unsoundness of Rauf and the builders of the Islamic center more apparent than in misrepresenting the Muslim majority view outside of the US. A poll in the moderate Arabic electronic paper Elaph in August showed that the Arab main street is aligned to the American main street in judging the Ground Zero Mosque to be a bad idea. 58% percent were against it. It appears that most people the project as an unnecessary and counter-productive provocation. Whether they are Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs or Muslims. Most would readily agree with a Muslim view of the sharia lunatic fringe which would have had no chance in attracting followers were it not for the glut of oil money in the hands of the religiously obsessed.

A control question for Joy Behar: why does a Lebanese Liberal Joseph Bishara does not believe imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is a moderate Muslim ? (answer here)

I was a Srebrenica-denier

2010-10-09T04:50:00.000-07:00

Yes, I admit it. From the distance of fifteen years it seems hard to believe that I stayed in that political heresy for so long, but it really did make sense at the time that the media lied about Srebrenica as it lied about almost everything else in the fighting in the disassembling Yugoslavia. What finally convinced of me of my folly were the first trials in the Hague, in which the accused Bosnian Serb officers did not defend themselves by saying "it did not happen" but by saying "I really wasn't involved". It could only mean one thing: it did happen.

Four years ago I wrote to a University of Philadelphia professor whose heart, like mine, was with the Serbs but who unlike me, did not find a way to deal with their ugly propaganda and their lies.

The letter comments on professor Ed Herman's essay The Politics of Srebrenica , published on ZNet a year earlier.

The unfortunate events took place in East Bosnia in the summer of 1995.

April 17, 2006
Dear Professor Herman,

I have had a long-standing interest in the history and politics of the Balkans, and special hobby called “propaganda”. Like yourself, I do not accept the official version of what happened during the breakup of Yugoslavia and consider the distortions and untruths that have flooded the media a reflection of the deeply flawed US/UN/EU policies in the region. I agree with much of the analysis that you (and writers like Diana Johnstone) have provided, regarding the causes and effects of the Balkan wars of the 1990’s. The perspective that you bring has been invaluable to me in many respects, whether it supports my own views or is at odds with them. As my overall view of the situation significantly overlaps with yours, I would like to explore – if I may interest you – the differences that we have in our respective approach to, and conclusions about the controversial subject of Srebrenica and the “politics” thereof. (Referring to your essay, The Politics of Srebrenica on ZNET, from July 2005)

There cannot be any doubt that the unfortunate events after the fall of Srebrenica in the summer of 1995 have been used, and colored, and inflated in importance, for political purposes. The hugest canard of course is the charge of “genocide” that has been slapped on all Serbs for what appears to be a large-scale week-long murderous cabal to which a small number of Serb professional officers – some technically without a country - allowed themselves to descend to. My concern is with the historical fallacy of this accusation, and the events which such charge suggests, however has very little to do with Serbs, and the need to defend their actions. It has much to do with the historical fact of genocide, and our duty to understand the motives, the aims and the root of the diligent persistence, in annihilating a population of humans. If the word should convey the ultimate horror of inhumanity, a function for which it has been designed, it cannot become an object of legalistic football, in which it is applied liberally to any war nastiness, and to incidents of episodic wartime slaughter even if they are horrific and damnable. And even more so, “genocide” cannot become a semantic turpentine which dissolves meaningful boundaries between words and concepts in which the evidence of some Serbian helicopters flying to Bosnia in violation of a self-imposed arms embargo is easily exhibited as proof of Serbia’s president planning unbridled pillage and mayhem in all of Balkans.

The singular blame for the bloody end of Yugoslavia falls on the shoulders of the EU. I would say more specifically, Germany, who pursued aggressively its own interests in the two northern republics, but since Germany was a member of EU it is reasonable to conclude it would not have acted outside that body had it had a strong consensus around the minimal exit conditions for the new constituents in the dying Yugoslav federation. Among these, the most important were guarantees – unambiguous, effective and reciprocal – of minority ethnic rights for all the successor states. As general Boyd said (in one of the docs on the Srebrenica Research Group site), once the war started, all the ethnic entities had an identical goal, the avoidance of becoming a minority within the new frontiers. The abysmal failure of Europe to enforce its standards in this respect, led directly to the rebellion of Serbs in Croatia, and the éclat of hostilities in Bosnia. The problem with Croatia was not simply that it wanted independence, but that its nationalist leaders wanted also hegemony over the region, something that the large Serb population within Croatia made extremely difficult to realize. Hence the impetus for the unacceptable state policy of Serbian assimilation/ expulsion. The aims and means of the policy were clearly demonstrated from the start and no-one can pretend they were not there for all to see.

So far, I believe, my reading of the historical wall does not diverge from yours. However, I do have a significant issue with the Serb response, in the general sense, which you will see, projects into my reading of Srebrenica. You correctly pointed out, for example, that the JNA bombardment of Vukovar, was preceded by months of terror against Serbs in the city, the purpose of which was to intimidate first the SDS activists, and then Serbs generally, by increasing the intensity of random violence against them. The official history of the war remains silent on this undeniable fact, which prefigured the vandalizing of the city by the JNA heavy guns and the first large-scale deployment of the Serbian brand of the atrocity specialists, the efficiency of which, unfortunately, appears to be many Serbs’ special pride. (In case you are wondering, I am referring to what Milovan Djilas called the Serbs’ “love of the bandit”.)

And therein lies my problem! One cannot deny the absolutely unnecessary level of violence which the Serbs unleashed, given the military situation which was hugely in their favour. The bombardment by the JNA and outrages against civilians committed by Arkan’s, Seselj’s and Bokan’s troopers cannot be excused by the murderous spree of Mercep’s HDZ gangs. (Incidentally, the Vukovar “governor” was arrested and taken to Zagreb in a trunk of a car by Croat security to be investigated for “excesses”, in advance of the first JNA shells falling on the city.).

It may be that the JNA was utterly incompetent in utilizing its overwhelming strength against a poorly defended city, but given the known hawkishness of its General Staff, it appears that it wasn’t just being ham-handed, as the Russians were during their first Chechen war in taking Grozny. No, this looks much more like bloody mayhem exacted in retribution which fell below ‘tolerable’ on the scale of humane conduct of war ! I don’t think anyone who really has a sense of fairness can fail to acknowledge this aspect of the war chapter. Furthermore, the problem appears to have been of a generic nature. The Serb shelling of Sarajevo had for most part no military purpose. Neither had the half-hearted attempt at the defacing of the Pearl of the Adriatic. General Mladic first distinguished himself in leveling the town of Kijevo. Why would anyone who holds the strategic and material advantage the Serbs had at the start of the two wars want to behave in this fashion ? Did they not realize that the lack of judgment, discipline and often a recognizable military objective, would be used against them heavily in the propaganda war?

There may be people who might say, well look, naturally the Serbs are no angels but consider the bigger picture. By the ITCY own body counting study (Tabeau & Bijak, 2004) the total proportion of Serb (16,700) to the total civilian casualties in the 1992-95 Bosnian War (55,000) seems to be very close to that of the total prewar populations. That does not argue well for the genocidal genius of the Serbs. The cynic may even point out that even if the Serbs killed 8,000 innocents in Srebrenica, they still “only” kept up with the Hadzihasanovices. All this may be true but really misses my point. We need to know what happened around Srebrenica in July of 1995 and acknowledge the vile nature of crude revenge for terrorist acts taken on Muslim war prisoners and civilians at large, if that is what really happened. Pointing from massacres on one side to massacres on the other side just won’t do as a historical method. To find out what happened, we need to put away the blinkers and prejudices and assumptions cross-dressing as conclusions of a fair inquiry. Let the chips fall where they will.

I consider it unfortunate that you began your analysis of the political uses of Srebrenica by asking the qui bono question. As a disinterested historian, I would prefer to ask first what happened, and how I know it happened, before asking – if I need to ask - who benefits from the exercise. You state, off the bat, that the “claims” of a massacre at Srebrenica were “extremely helpful” to Izetbegovic, Tudjman, and Clinton. To which I would reply, that I don’t care a hoot, and that the historical truth of an event does not at all depend on how it will be used or who will find comfort in it. The truth about the Katyn massacre, for example, was extremely unhelpful to the Allied cause and presented a propaganda windfall to the Nazis. Does it in any way help us to understand what happened and why ? The answer is, no, of course not.

You state that the Clinton officials rushed to Srebrenica to confirm the atrocity just as William Walker did later at Racak. I do not accept the link. The best I can make of it is that you seek to dismiss the reports of the earlier event off-hand, by pointing to the later one, in which a strong case for a fraud has been made. Be it as it may, the two incidents are unrelated, in the sense that nothing that happened in one can be assumed automatically to have happened in the other. The disappointment with the US officials’ curiosity should be only that it was not equally whetted by reports of atrocities in which the Serbs were the victims. Their investigating allegations against Serbs (if that is what Walker actually was doing) was correct and called for ! As for the two incidents, Racak , I believe, was demonstrably a fraudulent manipulation of corpses for the purpose of manufacturing an event. Srebrenica, on the other hand, appears overwhelmingly (on the undisputed evidence available to us all at this point) to have been a large scale massacre of unarmed or disarmed Muslim men taken prisoner by the Serb Bosnian army and security police.

There is a good historical example of the dangers of making conclusions about Srebrenica on the basis of Racak.

The 1939 invasion of Poland came after a series of diversions by the Abwehr and SS (the post office bombing in Danzig and assault on the radio-station in Goerlitz most famously) and Goebbles’ propaganda milked them as the incontrovertible proof of the Poles’ blood lust. Scores of stories of mass rapes, killings and assaults by Poles on Germans living in Poland filled the Nazi papers. In the end, the Fuehrer had no choice but to put stop to the outrage against his people and defend German interests in Poland.

In the first days of the war, another of those stories of blood-curdling, sprawling atrocity appeared in the press. It was quickly dubbed ‘der Bromberger Blutsonntag’. Thousands ethnic Germans were allegedly murdered in Bydgoscz by the retreating Polish army and the fleeing criminals who disturbed the peaceful Volksdeutsche in Silesia abducted to Poland by Versailles. Now, given the elaborate hoaxes of special SS commandos, which simulated large scale assaults by uniformed Polish soldiers (concentration camp prisoners were dressed up and then shot), the news was greeted in the West by skepticism. The Times accused the Germans of fabricating atrocities as they had done in the campaign against the Czechs. (Oddly, the British government commission of inquiry credited those as genuine before Munich). The Polish government vehemently denied that massacres took place. But they did take place, and the murders were on large scale as the city exploded into an orgy against the German ethnics. The historical chapter on the events of Sep3-4. 1939 has still not closed. The neo-nazis claim 58,000 were dispatched (as the killings spread into the countryside) , adjusted for inflation from the 10,000 that Goebbles counted. The Polish philistines seek their refuge with the figure of a few hundred Germans dead as a result of their shooting at the Polish Army out of their house windows. Some smaller incidents seemed to have happened in other places as well, and the respectable historians from both sides have been converging on the number of 5,000 as the total civilian casualties suffered by the German ethnics during the invasion. But the historically big questions to this day, is how far the massacres have been spontaneous breakout of mass psychosis of revenge for the German attack, and how far it was organized by the Polish army and intelligence, in a bizarre and crazy plot to intimidate the German-speaking population seen as Poland’s fifth column.

The lesson learned here I think is clear – one cannot use one wrong as a license for another wrong, and one cannot fairly conclude that a staged massacre in one instance is a guarantee that a real massacre did not occur in another, especially if we are talking wartime. The undisputable wrong done to the Germans of Bydgoscz cannot be excused by invoking the large context which gave rise to the lawlessness against them, Germany’s unprovoked all-out assault on Poland. And just like the case of Blutsonntag in Bromberg will not go away until the Poles find the decency to admit that the Nazis did not have monopoly on atrocities during WWII then the spectre of Srebrenica will not go away until the Bosnian Serbs will likewise find their way to owning up to the nastiness their army leaders unleashed on their prisoners in July 1995. For that exercise, what happened later in Racak, or how Croats behaved in Krajina, or why Fikret Alic smiled on the Trnopolje picture, become wholly redundant issues.

Your long preface about the political bonanza of false claims of massacres and the serial lying by the West about Serb aims and misdeeds fails to convince me, and no doubt will be seen by those whose attitude to the Serbs is much less friendly than mine as a calculated deception. For my own part, I am writing to you with in the sincere hope that you are not familiar with many of the concrete charges against the VRS (the Bosnian Serbian Republic Army), the substance of which has not been legally challenged by the defendants in the Hague proceedings in the eight years they have been presented there. Be it as it may, the purpose of your speculations seem clear – to deny that a large-scale massacre did take place and to deny that by now it has been established beyond reasonable doubt. This, I believe, is regrettable not only from the point of view of moral hygiene; it also has the effect of enabling and strengthening the anti-Serb propaganda.

The imperial court in Hague claims that not only there was a large-scale massacre which is undeniable, but one that was ‘carefully planned’ and executed as part of a concerted genocidal plan, which is a lie ! That lie, I am convinced could have been handled fairly easily had the Serbs and most of those who are in sympathy with them acted with integrity in the aftermath. But they did not and countered with a lie of their own. They fashioned a tale in which only minor and unauthorized excesses happened amid otherwise peaceful and orderly transfer of the Srebrenica population. The individual acts of retribution, we are told, were due to large atrocities the enemy army had previously inflicted on Serbs in the city and villages nearby ! Unfortunately, the facts of the events do not support such a view, and they are handily available through the media and on the Internet. The masses and even intelligent people will be much more inclined to accept the false, larger representations made by the ITCY than to conclude that Srebrenica was essentially a blood libel on the Serbs. Moreover, because it is clumsy and childish, the Serbian lie is much more easily tackled:

So, you are telling us that these crazy Oric hudlums were killing and burning your villages, even on Christmas, and when they accuse you of taking a big blood tax on the men of his town for what the goons had done to you, you are saying, no, we only killed a few of the guilty ones and we regret the excess !

And the longer such nonsense is repeated, the more it looks like the Serbs wanted to kill all the Muslim males to grab as much their land in Bosnia as they could, and lied about Oric’misdeeds (the poor guy, Wikipedia says, is also being tried by the ITCY but only for some police station beatings), as they are lying now about shooting max 100 men, expecting people to believe that took care of the “revenge on the Turk” the puffed up Mladic gleefully promised in front of the Bosnian Serb TV cameras during the roundups. The Srebrenica ‘deniers’ tales are self-contradictory and offend common sense. Worse still, compared to the ‘no-organized-massacre’ lie, the ‘genocide’ lie looks not just more probable and internally consistent, but more humane. In the competition of untruths, the defenders of Mladic and his cronies do not stand a chance.

I shake my head when I see that some people still want to believe that the VRS behaved honourably in the hour of its greatest temptation. They blind themselves to the obvious. Is it not strange that the two army groups involved in taking Srebrenica and securing their new lines did not produce the minimum credible number of live POWs in the pursuit of leaderless and disoriented enemy fighters ? I ignore the naive, and frankly odious, mendacity of the “Forbidden Report of 2002” from Banja Luka, in the explanation of the pathetically low numbers of male survivors and claims that hundreds of soldiers “cleared” of war crimes and kept in camps were later exchanged. It appears that many of the 164 prisoners from Srebrenica counted by the ICRC at the Batkovic camp in July 1995 were transported there directly from the city hospitals. Scores of them were amputees. The pathetic POW “deficit” itself all but annihilates the assertion that the nastiness were isolated incidents of ‘spontaneous retribution’. Sadly, the obduracy only reinforces the perception the believers want to combat – that the Serbs are irrational, vicious killers without conscience !

The question of how many people actually perished as prisoners of the VRS is a complex one and by no means settled by some self-validating assertions. You are free to disagree with the figure of 8,000 and the methods it was arrived at. However, you may not ignore a number of important revelations that have not been challenged even by the Serbs themselves. The formula of “three and five”, i.e. three thousand Bosniaks captured and five thousand unaccounted for and presumably dead at the hands of the hajduks was questioned again and again while back and the objections were repeated at the 10th anniversary (here in Canada by general MacKenzie and ambassador Bassett). But much has happened in the last five years that shifted focus in the numbers game. New grave sites were discovered. No “forgotten” survivors showed up. Most importantly, the Krstic/Blagojevic/Obrenovic trials in the Hague produced some hugely damning evidence which simply cannot be talked around. Intercepted VRS radio communications confirms large haul of male prisoners indicating between 4 and 5 thousand were in Mladic’ “care” in the first five days after the city’s fall. General Krstic’ appeal did not question the transcript or the interpretation (of the coded phrases) of an intercepted conversation between himself and colonel Beara (the man alleged to have been the chief co-ordinator of the effort), in which the latter requests ‘help’ with the execution of his remaining 3,500 prisoners. Krstic’ lawyers argued only that the conversation should have been interpreted as his refusal to help. The call was made on the 15th of July, i.e. two days after the mass shootings began. The Dutch government study of Srebrenica, whose facts have not yet been refuted, says the only hard number of prisoners in VRS custody - 6,000 - apparently originated with VRS itself (Col. Jovanovic to Major Franken), although even that tally looked like an estimate. The intercepts themselves, the Dutch concluded, support a claim of between 4 and 5 thousand prisoners killed by July 18. The study estimates the total losses of uncaptured Bosnian soldiers (through combat, suicide or exhaustion) at 1,500 which would present a credible ceiling for all Srebrenica casualties at about 7,500. Since records were not kept by either side, the investigators conclude that we will probably not known ever the exact number.

Likewise, the claim that there is no proof of the Serbs’ opening the graves and relocating the bodies will not hold water. Contrary to what you say the one “known” to the US intelligence (Konjevic Polje) was photographed and the tampering with the site was widely publicized (in newspapers) in comparing the aerial photos. As to the “mysterious” delay in the VRS order to relocate the bodies from the other sites, it was suggested - plausibly – that the VRS General Staff did not realize there were survivors who could locate the “northern” killing fields. It was when people like Rohde started to poke around that the VRS brass realized they needed to cover their tracks. Even though the ITCY has not yet heard an eyewitness who participated in the exhumations (Obrenovic’ testimony was second-hand knowledge), the prosecution facts have not yet been disputed in the trials that concluded. But despite the efforts to hide the bodies, a significant number of them was discovered and the total estimate by the 2002 Dutch report was 4,600 in mass graves, some of them still not opened. The present ITCY estimates, adjusted for commingling, hover still around that figure, even after the discovery of a new mass grave near Bratunac in 2004. Naturally not all the remains relate to casualties from July 1995, but the take is significant. While the KLA claims of mass graves in Kosovo never produced anything of note, the survivors from Srebrenica led the investigators to sites of real horrors.

The factual evidence before the ITCY and data collected by the Dutch investigatotrs, while inculpating the VRS leadership, and Mladic personally (-he is referred to in the army intercepts as the “boss” -), still looks very unfriendly to the thesis of a meticulously executed genocidal plan. From what is known and not seriously disputed, it appears Mladic and his staff took a decision (or confirmed an earlier one) on the morning of the 12th to “prosecute war criminals” among the prisoners, which was then (perhaps as early as that afternoon) quickly replaced by orders to disperse the prisoners and shoot every one of them. What exactly determined the change in policy remains unknown, but one can guess. The idea of trials seems like a non-starter for an army engaged in combat. Besides, the paperwork would have given the game away.
In a nutshell then, while the orders for the shooting and its co-ordination came without question from the General Staff, the whole process gives the impression of makeshift happenings not planned in advance, and which simply began to be improvised on a large scale after a small Serb reconnaissance detachment entered the city on July 11 and, against all expectations, found it undefended.

Several factors seem to have influenced the decision to shoot the prisoners :

The largest consideration that dominated everything in the background, should go to the historical reasons that you are familiar with. Everyone who was conversant with the issues on the ground knew, that the Serbs’ thirst for revenge far exceeded individual personal accounts to settle. Almost all the prominent military UN personnel, and a number of politicians commented in advance on the bad blood that existed between the fighting sides in Eastern Bosnia. The Dutch report noted that the hatred between the two armies facing each other was well in excess of other places. Everywhere else in Bosnia the enemies kept lines of communication open. No line to Oric existed – the first attempt at talking was made by the Serbs immediately before their offensive. They learned Oric was not there. (BTW, I am entirely ok with the thesis that Izetbegovic had a devilish plan in the pullout of the garrison, as he knew the Drina army would go berserk with the survivors. If he in fact had such a plan, my sole concern would be – and I am sure you can guess by now - with the origin of his clairvoyant powers.)

What the Dutch failed to mention in their generally fair analysis is that, on the Serb side, the inventory of wrongs did not start with the mayhem wrought by Oric. It just so happens that the region between Bosna and Drina also figured prominently among the areas where the Serb population was decimated during WWII. In many ways, Oric’ raids were simply a repeat of the assaults that the Serbs endured two generations prior and which then were still in living memory. The area quickly became a partisan territory, and, inevitably, also the Cetniks bored in. For the Ustashe, the land had a special significance, as the river Drina was the frontier of Greater Croatia (“sve do Drine”). The problem was in that there was a majority Serb population in the territory. Pavelic dispatched his most distinguished band of butchers, called “Crna Legija” (Black Legion) to fix the unfriendly demographics by cleansing the place of the “bivshi Srbi” (“former Serbs” which is how the Ustashe state officially referred to them - the double meaning in that intended !). The black shirts sacked Srebrenica in April 1942 murdering thousands of Serbs in the city and the villages around in one of the revolting mass killings in that war. “Srebrenica” then became a battle cry for the Serb nationalists. Unable to exact their revenge on the spot, the Cetniks produced an able replica of the horrors (if not one better !) taking Foca in the south as their stand-in prize in January 1943.

When Lewis MacKenzie, the UN commander in Bosnia was asked in early 1993, what he thought of creating a “safe” zone around Srebrenica, he replied he would need one hundred thirty thousand men to protect the area effectively. Commenting on the events in 2005, the former general unfortunately omitted to mention the evidence before the ITCY which inculpated the army command in thousands of deaths and which was not disputed by the defense lawyers. Equally, he did not seem to be aware that Oric operated in the vicinity well before a “safe area” was declared and that Mladic’ Drina Corps, as an army unit, was created practically out of scratch, specifically to suppress the large-scale Muslim terrorism in the Bratunac area which dated back to spring of 1992.

By mid 1993, with Mladic closing in on the pocket, even Milosevic was alarmed and leery of great bloodletting. It also appears (on Lord Owen’s word) that his personal intervention dissuaded Mladic and Karadzic from going in that year.

The psychology of the VRS highest-ranking officer needs to be taken into account as a factor. What exactly prompted Mladic to renew his push for the enclaves in 1995 is still open to debate. Without a doubt, the reasons above played a big role, even if Oric’ actions were rather subdued compared to his punitive expeditions two years prior. The most likely immediate impetus for Krivaja 95, was the relative ease with which the Croats overran the SAO pocket of Western Slavonia in May 1995 (Operation Flash). Indeed, the maneuvering of Mladic forces suggested a quick reduction and then strangulation of the Srebrenica enclave, much like the Varazdin brigade did with Okucani. Given that his relationship with Karadzic was at an all-time low, he might have concluded a decisive military victory on the ground would be treated as a fait-acompli by the politicos, as was the case with the Croats. Srebrenica and Zepa were seen as large bargaining chips for the post-war carving of Bosnia, and since the end-game was near, their possession improved the Serbs negotiating position. All indications so far (except the highly controversial testimony of Deronjic against Karadzic) point to Mladic acting alone, basically informing Pale about his decisions after the fact. Karadzic’ and Krajisnik’s fortunes were fading fast, having been fingererd by Siladzic as scoundrels who would offer Serb land for quick cash in their Swiss accounts, had to lie low for a while and accept Mladic’ rule as warlord.
The Dutchbat officers recalled that the general became extremely belligerent when the UN threatened his forces with air strikes for overrunning the “protected area”, given that UN just said “hello”, packed their bags and went home when the Croat tanks arrived in Okucani. What the Ottoman Turks knew, but evidently not the UN, is that “you never threaten a Serb”, to control him or as a way of assigning to him a role of an inferior. Mladic’ ordering cold-blooded murder easily falls into a classical stereotype of Serb reaction to injustice, real or perceived, which the psychologists describe as “victim’s rage”. Mladic, forever the macho-man, despised the UN and NATO forces as cowards who would not fight (him) like real soldiers, instead killing his men from planes they knew he could not attack. Similarly, he despised Oric as low-life, a security thug who would not face what was coming to him. Hell, if they can kill defenseless men at will, why can’t Mladic ? How can he hold his own, if he allows scruples to creep into his confrontation with sissies and degenerates ? Did the Ustashe spare his father when he fell into their hands at a time the fighting was over in May 1945 ?

Among the secondary, immediate, concerns in the decision to kill the captives, probably the most important was the VRS’ lack of intelligence about the size and intentions of the enemy fighting force which was on the loose and inflicting casualties. Mladic’ offer of “safe corridor” for the Bosniak columns made on the 19th has been taken by most analysts as sheer propaganda. Yes, but I think the motives need to be understood better. I believe that Mladic, and his Zvornik brigade commander Obrenovic, knew of the large prominent vulnerability that the prisoner situation aggravated. Their forces were now engaging around Zvornik and Zepa. They knew they were running a risk with the Bosniak forces retreating across their lines that they could be re-deployed by an energetic action from Tuzla. If the moving men met with re-inforcements, received supplies and reversed their march, they could quickly wreak havoc in the Serbs’ rear. In the scenario, the prisoners represented a prize of several thousand fighting men. Likely Mladic preferred not to take such risks, especially when the bulk of Bosniak fighters failed to materialize at an intercept point on the 12th. The offer of the “corridor” could be read as a probing maneuver delayed after the prisoner liability was dealt with and VRS lines were consolidated to a point where the general felt confident no big harm could come from the enemy calling his bluff.

Finally, given the sudden, unexpected turn of events which produced the influx of prisoners, the order to execute them quickly, probably was also a convenient way out of a logistical crisis they created. The lack of food and drink the surviving Bosniaks complained about testifies not as much to the captors’ exceptional brutality (though I have no illusions on that score) but to the lack of supplies available. The logistical woes had also to do with the local Serbs civilian population, in the area which suffered heavy casualties from Oric’ raiders. Indeed, there were reports by both sides of “spontaneous” attacks on the prisoners, from among the soldiers and civilians. The situation quickly became critical in Bratunac where the civilian authorities were in open rebellion against the army demanding the immediate removal of the prisoners. With both the Zvornik and the Bratunac brigades engaged, the number of soldiers and MPs available to guard the prisoners was inadequate. Alternately, the “shortage” may be explained as reluctance of the commanders to get involved in an atrocity and a gross violation of war conventions. Much of Krstic’ and Obrenovic’ legal posturing at the Hague would suggest that the senior officers, outside Mladic’ personal retinue, would fall in the second category. (We will see if this hypothesis holds in the coming trial). All of this naturally created dangerous internal tensions and a risk of mass break-outs of prisoners. The first large-scale killing in the warehouse at Kravica almost certainly came about as a result of a disturbance among the prisoners, and not as a scheduled execution. The Serbs reported that their soldiers started to lob grenades from the outside when a group prisoners overpowered a guard, took his submachine gun and started shooting. The Kravica incident bespeaks of lack of provisions, manpower, and administration for the new POWs which with the hostility of the locals were powerful factors in the regrettable events that followed.

You say that justice cannot be one-sided or it ceases to be justice, and of course I agree. The ITCY record has been abysmal, both in administering justice and its custodial care. Nothing speaks of the incompetence of the court as the (late) judge May dismissing as “irrelevant” the evidence of the Jasenovac camp in 1940’s as important in shaping the Serb Krajina’s view of the regime in Zagreb in 1990. The obscenity of such a ruling whether made through ignorance or sheer ill-will cries to heaven. The case of Milosevic being deprived of the results of his health-report, especially given what was in it, also shows a pitiful lack of integrity and equity in the court’s operation. Even if there was compelling evidence the noxious substance was self-administered, the court had an absolute duty to inform Milosevic instantly and take appropriate measures to stabilize his health. As it was known to the jailers that the prisoner had a history of depression, a thorough exam should have taken place to ascertain the motives for his endangering his health.

But whatever the woes, something needs to be done.

I can’t help but notice the generally poor record of most of the Serbian leadership in the post-Titoist times in defining and executing policy initiatives. Instead of allowing the army to march directly into Zagreb (which was undefended) and send the Tudjman policy architects to prison or back to exile, Milosevic let it get bogged down in a crazy demolition job in Vukovar and suffer a huge black eye in public relations as a result. The lack of initiative, and meaningful objective, led to a loss of vital JNA garrisons and the momentum in Croatia, creating a Sitzkrieg which effectively stripped the Serbs of their military assets. On the political front, Milosevic, could not effectively control the Knin and Pale local agendas, and tipped his hand in dealing with a U.S. State Department underling, who he knew was hostile and intent on blackmailing. His legacy of hedging, missing opportunities and atrocious PR skills vis-à-vis the Western media has been passed onto the current Serbian leadership.

Carla del Ponte, on her last visit to Serbia, should have been publicly challenged for Milosevic, and invited – as a gesture of goodwill and compromise - to prosecute Mladic in Belgrade. Have Tadic and Kostunica not realized how much has changed in the Franco-, and German-US relations since 1999 and the silly relic that the ITCY has become of past European complicity in the hapless US 1990’s intervention in the Balkans ? Would France and Germany not be warming to the idea that Serbia appears to be a threat to Europe only in Washington’s late edition of global strategy, now disjointed and self-defeating to a point where it can be held in check by provincial satraps who can control a few dozen suicide bombers ? Instead, Kostunica in Paris appeared on the defensive, bobbing and weaving, forever pledging to “respond to his obligation” to deliver Mladic to the Twisted Swiss Sister in the Netherlands.

As for the Bosnian Serbs, their idiotic “Srebrenica report” of 2002 , followed by a pathetic apology in 2004 are again nothing if not the wrong responses to pressure. They should have gathered the best they have (including English translators) and put together a cogent, truthful account of what happened, carefully going through all the evidence with the historical background of the animosities.

So opportunities have been lost, but Belgrade still can come to the rescue and put together something solid and dignified for all Serbs. It is absolutely imperative that the Serbs produce an authoritative version of the events in East Bosnia by themselves and for themselves, across the current borders. No chest beating, no hair pulling - just the truth ! They and only they possess still undisclosed facts which will help to shed light on the end of the much abused “UN safe area” of Srebrenica. The Dutch report opened a beam on a little known, but absolutely critical side view – the shock and panic that the initial reports of Srebrenica ‘liberation’ created in Belgrade among the senior politicians and the military. Stories like the ‘Cosic’ mission’need to be presented in order for the outside world and posterity to grasp the complex relationships between the Serbian political entities and their leadership. I am heartened by the public revulsion in Serbia the Kandic’ videos have produced. And again, it does not matter what her ulterior motives were (or if there were any), because this wound of Srebrenica needs to be kept open until it is properly treated and has a chance to heal. Otherwise it will continue to fester, in a society dominated by fear, lies, corruption and murder.

So professor, here are my two cents worth for the debate. Next month, the Srebrenica Mega-trial of Nine is scheduled to begin at the Hague, and the media circus will start again. I thought, perhaps you might want to look at this again and update yourself on the developments. If you want to discuss further, by all means, I am yours. Fare well !

Best regards,

Afterword: Professor Herman never responded. The trial of the remaining Srebrenica officer was concluded in June 2010, after many delays, and resulted in the conviction of two Mladic lieutenants (Vujadin Popovic, Ljubisa Beara) for ‘genocide’. No credible evidence was presented from the Serb officers’ defense to dispel the accusations of organized mass killings.

Flying and Landing in Allah's Way

2010-09-11T13:41:00.001-07:00

Among all the strange events this week, a little diddly protocol lapse during an Iftar gala hosted by the State Department on Wednesday caught my attention. The annual dinner for the country’s Muslim leaders and diplomatic corps of the Islamic world during the Ramadan became de rigeur under the Clinton administration and continued with Condolezza Rice.

There is, I suppose, no great harm in a little patronage gesture to celebrate a religious minority, even though I am frankly puzzled by the insistence on calling the event Iftar. I understand it is a Muslim religious festivity, a communal meal breaking the daylight fasting during Ramadan. The ceremony seems meaningless to non-believers who presumably eat during the days of the month during which, according to tradition, prophet Muhammad received his first revelation. It seems to me then that if some gesture of inclusiveness during this special time for Muslims is due, it should come from them. The remarks by Barack Obama that the tradition of American presidents hosting Iftar dinners for Muslim guests goes back to Thomas Jefferson are a bit cockeyed urban legend to justify the new nomenclatura. According to the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, the Tunisian envoy in question declined an invitation to dine with the President at three-thirty in the afternoon explaining his religious duty. The courteous president simply rescheduled the invitation to an hour after sunset.

No matter: the issue I really have is with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s protocol regarding the Florida cuckoo believed to be a pastor by fifty lost souls. First off though, in case you did not know, an insane man in Canada decapitated a passenger on Greyhound bus and consumed part of his victim last year. No editorial or diplomatic activity issued from this incident that would give cause to riots and large scale property damage. No speeches by religious leaders, politicians or dieticians followed to quell fear of the Scots of being targeted by the Chinese. But naturally I understand that the Secretary just could not pass the book-burning threat in dignified silence after the Defence Secretary himself picked up the phone to beg the pastor to spare American lives in Kabul.

To Whom Is the Quran holy ?

I have no big criticism of what the Secretary of State said but I do take exception at her describing the book as ‘the holy Quran’. She should have chosen her words more carefully. She could have said ‘Muslim holy scripture’, 'Islam's holy book,'or as the New York mayor did, ‘a book which his holy to Muslims’. If I were an American I would be outraged at the insinuation that somehow the book deserves to be held up by objective standard as some sort of a national treasure which is above criticism. No way the Quran should be burned. It needs to be read by everyone in America and the West; it needs to be studied, appreciated, remembered and referred to when pointing to Muslims things which we (Non-muslims) have insurmountabe difficulty with, that is, if we are referred back to Islam's seventh-century scripture as the last valid standard of civility.

Examples: Quran preaches religious apartheid explicitly denying the ecumenical character which would justify Mme Secretary (who is a Christian) appealing to it as 'holy' on religious grounds.

Muhammad vowed,

I do not worship what you worship, nor do you worship what I worship(sura 109:1).

Of course that was the kinder, gentler prophet of the early days when he believed that there is no compulsion in religion. Later revelations were not so easy going or forgiving to the unbelievers :

Give courage to the believers. I will cast terror into the hearts of the infidel. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off the tips of their fingers. (sura 8:12)

As for instructions how to deal with dignitaries such as the Secretary who curry favour as hosts with the believers in their religious festivities,

...do not take from among them [infidels] friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah’s way; but if they turn back [to their homes], then seize them and kill them wherever you find them(sura 4:89).

Whatever one may say, all of what the book says about the relations of the Muslim community to the outside world – which the religion's founding dynasties sought transparently to conquer and subjugate – should be totally unacceptable as a blueprint for modern, secular state based on principles of peaceful co-existence among nations, and the rule of globally recognized principles of justice. The First Amendment guarantees everyone the right to practice the faith of their choice. However, it should be unacceptable for an administration official to accede to claims of one religion over others by calling its scripture 'holy' without qualification. This is especially a case with a minority faith whose traditional religious precepts for dealings with outsiders are at odds with the elementary rules of civilized norms of behaviour, and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (Just in case you missed it, the 1948 UDHR was replaced in the Islamic world in 1990 by its own separate charter, the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam . Needless to say, the new document is wholly rooted in sharia, and therefore does not guarantee decadent 'western' heresies such as a freedom of religion or the equality of genders. )

Madam Secretary seems oblivious to the bigger picture and what message she, as the senior administration official projects is sending to the Islamic world. First and foremost she needs to grasp that contrary to the disinformation of the major U.S. media outlets, the new flames of passion are to ensure her willingness to fly in Allah’s way, not that of some random Christian fundamentalist firebug. When fanatical mullahs and imams send vicious mobs into the streets of Kandahar, Peshawar, Isfahan or Bandung and threaten Americans everywhere on the globe it is to strike terror in her heart and in the heart of those presently administering the self-destructing ship that is America.

It is frankly unbelievable to me that there has not been one major commentator in the US who would point to this tactic. These violent street protests and large threats are not spontaneous cries of the ordinary Muslims. They are either carefully orchestrated media events or a happy feeding off them by the religious leaders. They have but two simple aims : to intimidate Americans and to divert attention from the real issues. The real issue in this case - let us not mince words or be inoffensive in the face of a ghoulish provocation - is assuring American compliance in a memorial to the Islamic fanatics and mass murderers who assaulted the United States as the symbol of political and economic power in the world nine years ago on this day. Mr Rauf says he acquired the precious location to push back against the extremists. Does that mean al-Qaeda was bidding too to acquire the property ?

The Importance of Being Terry Jones

The Terry Jones’ shenanigans are not so much a media conspiracy as they are an exhibit of the detached bottom in the manufacturing of news. The Guardian’s brief history of the media escalation is very revealing in this respect. It seems clear though that the hype around Jones outside of the U.S. was fuelled or controlled by the mosques and madrassas and turned on full throttle after Obama back-pedalled on his support for the Lower Manhattan project, messing things for himself and creating a surge of public opposition. To stem the growing uproar, the Florida pastor was dressed up as the ubiquitous American ugly bigot who threatens peaceable Muslims, and impassionate pleas (and threats) were rained on him to call off his ‘International (Good Lord!) Koran Burning Day’. Obvious attempts then were made to paint the critics of the Islamic centre project on Ground Zero, as part of a socially retrograde red-neck elements in American society led by a Quran-burning zealot. To this end Jones was 'invited' to New York to meet Mr Rauf. Whatever was or was not promised, it is clear that the clever clerics shanghaied the hapless twit, in linking his idiocies explicitly to his opposition of the great project of peace, dialogue and healing in America. Would any reasonable person give quarter to one like Terry Jones, and those like him who oppose the holy project ? Of course not. Terry has been sent packing without being allowed into the presence of the imam.

The UA Flight 175 Landing Gear as Islamist Relic

So, barring a miracle (of common sense and goodwill prevailing), the shrine to the landing gear of the UA Flight 175 in which the great majority of the 65 souls on board was flown in Allah's way against their will on September 11, 2001, shall be erected. The symbolism of the locale is crystal clear and accessible to both friends and enemies of the US, home and abroad. This is where some of the wreckage of one of the two flights to Allah landed and gutted the building on that day of divine judgment. It is hallowed ground for the martyrs who sacrificied their lives in jihad against the great Satan.

This is Mr Rauf's project as it is seen by everyone, especially the insane leaders of the mosques convinced in the just cause and reality of their world conquest. He himself markets his mosque as

dawah (invitation or summons to become Muslim)from Ground Zero!!! The picture to the left is his Malaysian publication, titled: A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawah in the Heart of America post 9/11. Only the American idiots don't get it. They, with small exceptions (some of whom are sadly but inevitably idiots of a different kind), are mesmerized like the hapless townsfolk of Constantinople by the whirling dervishes under their bastions coming at the head of great armies of Mehmed II.

By the way, do not get me wrong on this: I am a great admirer of Rumi (the founder of Mawlawi Sufism and the whirling dervish dance) perhaps the greatest mystical poet of any age or culture. Here is what he says from beyond space and time, as an American on 9/11 2010:

You wreck my shop and my house and now my heart,
but how can I run from what gives me life ?

I am weary of personal worrying,
in love with the art of madness !

Tear open my shame and show the mystery.

How much longer do I have to fret with
self-restraint and fear ?

But finally, (I hope I understand Rumi's mystery well): who cares if American elite has suddenly lost the grasp of what makes a man, a woman, or a nation respected among their peers ? Who cares if Muslims are insensitive to people who do not know how to respect themselves ?

In the embrace of God, every thing is holy: those who lie mutilated on the ground; and those who mutilated them in whatever cause under heaven. The universe is unfolding as it should.

The World According to Irshad Manji

2009-04-15T07:39:00.000-07:00

Irshad Manji (The Globe and Mail, Apr. 14) is outraged. The Afghan president signed an obnoxious piece of legislation recently giving free rein to all manner of women abuse in the dwindling areas still under his control. But, lest you confound the moral aversion to forced sex and wife beating of Ms Manji to that of Sherlock Holmes, the columnist does not see the ‘problem’ primarily in terms of the ‘recalcitrant Taliban or gutless central government’. No, the problem lies elsewhere, she says.

It’s something called ‘asabbiya’, or ‘tribal solidarity’, which she believes was imported into Afghanistan with Islam and the Arabic influence. In arid, mountainous, remote areas like Afghanistan, according to the father of sociology (one Ibn Khaldun, if you wonder) the kinship bonds conspire against central governance and degenerate into ‘feelings of group superiority’. In that land and climate, with Islam, says Manji, you get a cycle of vendetta, and countervendetta. In the end the warlords could be more legitimate than any democratically elected parliament – more legitimate because they are more authentic to the Afghan experience. And hence since this appears to be sort of a logically self-imposed backwardness and poverty, Ms Manji no longer supports the Canadian military mission. She can’t see a way to win.

There is something – and pardon me for speaking frankly – distinctly cuckoo about Irshad Manji’s view of the world. On surface she may echo the long-held verity that Afghanistan is ungovernable which at this particular juncture bespeaks of growing resignation in the West to a defeat by the Taliban. This of course does not come out of a choir which Ms Manji conducts.

It is just that the ideas in Ms Manji’s head are as chaotic as the current Afghan politics and to a degree reveal the prevailing confusions that make any effort to bring stability and civility to the region an impossible dream.

The warlord system in Afghanistan has very little to do with kinship solidarity imported from Arabia. Rather, it reflects the ethnic makeup of the country and the derelict, subsistence-level economy, that replaced the Soviet-subsidized system after 1991. The warlords are either the fittest of the heroin-producing drug lords or their military allies. According to the Wold Bank 2006 report the minority who survived the ineffective war on drugs by Karzai and his US advisors, have become more powerful than ever. Like in pre-1999 Chechnya, radical Islam and shari’a are used to control the population. Like in Caucasus, (and to a degree in the Balkan conflicts) the tough guys compete in religious orthodoxy when fighting each other. In 1990’s the religious laxity of the warlords cost them dearly against Taliban. They will not make the same mistake again. Additionally, the clamour for retrograde laws assures the powerful kingmakers that they have leverage with the central government and that it will not plot with the infidel to harm their business.

Ms Manji’s perspective, which she calls ‘muslim feminist’, seems innocent of such trivial matters. According to her, Islam cannot be blamed in the cries for the heads of the Islamic apostates in Kabul. According to her, the Koran is perfectly clear on the subject: ‘there is no compulsion in religion…full stop’. She does not seem at all bothered that so far, in all places where shari’a prevails a different part of the Koran has been cited for the death sentences passed on those who decided Christianity or voodoo suited better their spiritual needs: But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; (Sura 4,89). Most readers of the Quran, including all four of the legal Islamic authorities, agree that once you come in to Islam, you may not leave. I have yet to hear an imam who says differently. And on the moslem feminist issue, well Islam is a religion where wife-beaters are ok if they don’t overdo it (Sura 4,34). But I am sure Ms Manji would have a way to explain that too to the Kandahar schoolgirls with scars from acid in their faces.

What You Don't Know About the Bailout

2008-10-01T15:29:00.001-07:00

Mark Steyn is not getting it. On his blog yesterday, he cheers for Mark Levin’s idea of eliminating the US corporate tax as a way of providing “liquid refreshment” to the ailing US finances. He thinks it would be better not to eliminate the tax altogether, but to reduce it “dramatically”. He asks - the drain hoping to be mistaken for a plumber - if it is not reasonable to expect a Republican Washington after a decade to be down at least to the corporate rate of Sweden.

Hell Mark, what are you trying to do ? Turn the army of corporate tax lawyers into a bunch of nickel-and-dime bush-leaguers ? This is not Russia, ya’know, where a prez can invite the oligarchs for a friendly chat in a Kremlin rococco hall, and and lo and behold, the big boys do feel persuaded to do their citizens’ duty in preference to seeing the bolshevik hordes storming their palaces. They didn’t tell Putin in 2000: ‘Yeah, sure, Volod’a, we’ll have our tax experts look at what we should be paying Caesar’.

Come to think of it, maybe a bit of class warfare would be good for America. If for nothing else then to declaw the arrogant neocon visionaries. Krauthammer, last week traced the credit orgies, that date from the Reagan’s years and the deregulated S&Ls, to Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. He believes the ‘pressure’ on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and down the line of money lenders, was created politically since that time, by bipartisan agreement to use government power to expand homeownership to people who had been shut out for economic reasons or, sometimes, because of racial and ethnic discrimination . Sure, Charles, the social conscience of Wall Street is to blame ! The money men were only trying to help in a good cause. Just as we all thought.

It is interesting to note that the big popular revolt against the package, the avalanche of phone calls and e-mails to the Capitol was nowhere reported, nowhere analyzed, nowhere acknowledged, until perhaps today on CNN, which reported with a number of days of delay, that the initial reaction of the street was 10 to 1 against the package. The fever has subsided now, we were assured, and the breakdown for and against is now 50-50. Well, is it ? Can you imagine no major poll has been taken on this mammoth “rescue plan” ? Does this seem real ?

The news organizations suddenly seem so inexplicably clumsy, and so circumspect as to what they will allow us to hear or see. Do we not have the right to know that 200 US economists have signed a petition denouncing the original Paulson plan ? Why would the major news outlets not report that a significant number of academics did not believe the plan was sound and some (many ?) do not think a bailout of $700 bln is even necessary ? And why has an Army brigade been assigned to the “Homeland” ? Did not know that either, did you ?

But you do know that there is no freedom of media or diversity of opinion in Russia, don’t you ? Ok, great ! But just in case you want to check what a popular Moscow TV commentator has to say on that, watch this. Yep, diversity of opinion is what we need.

Hello, Michael Moore ! Are you having fun yet ?

America Alone: the antithesis

2008-09-27T14:57:00.000-07:00

Here is an open letter I wrote to Mark Steyn, a little while back, appraising his AMERICA ALONE. I am posting it here as I thought a little bit of black humour might be in order during the weekend of wait for the trillion dollar respirator that Nancy Pelosi has promised to keep the brain-dead American Finance alive.

December 22, 2006
Dear Mark,
reading as I was your magnum (opus) in the week in which the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton select crew of idiots forgot to recommend to Dubya he convert to Islam before asking Ohmygodwhatajerk for help in Iraq, I had more fun with “America Alone” than you can imagine. Seriously: I was breaking into howling fits just looking at the cover with the star-spangled chiffon getting surrounded by the Paki-Saudi federation (if that what the green rags were suggesting). So, it’s the End of the World as We Know It, hey, Mark ?

I am sure relieved to read that it’s only the Caliphate that’s upon me and my dwindling brood, if I hold onto the idea that socialized medicine is part of the Western Civilization as I want to know it. I don’t mind, really. It’s nothing much compared with the scare of my farts turning into naphtalene balls in global flash freeze, that Al Gladbag and his camp of nuts threaten me with. Me, I scare easily but you ain’t got nothing compared to that ! Besides, I read Sax Rohmer when I was eleven. I also read the books of Karl May at that age, his volumes on Wild, Wild, Wild West in America where he was Old Shatterhand and volumes on the Near-to-his-Heart Orient of despots where he morphed into the noble prince Kara-ben-Nemsi (which I am told in Arabic means, if-you-are-running-with-a-tail-between-your-legs-make-sure-everone-knows-you-are-executing-an-exit-strategy).

Mark, I love the tough talk from a barbudo (; I almost ordered the t-shirt too) ! Of course the Arabs are “hard” by nature – my history tells me, only if they don’t have opposition – and the European chickenshit which craves 30-hour work-week, 6 weeks of vacation, and state-run dental plan for kids is just too “soft” as an opposition. Did I mention Euro-Disney ? Ok, I’ll get to that later.

But you are right, the Euros have grown too wimpy. In the old days, if mass laziness erupted and the drinking classes opted to disown the curse, to live off soup kitchens and under the bridges, an economic crisis all but destroyed the diligent enterpreneurs. Today, the bums get welfare, and with so much Chinese labour and Japanese robots that you can cover the whole Earth knee-deep in cheap junk in just six months, the horrid effects of laziness do not stick out so much. But the Big Nanny sure found a new way to torture the rich: the “antisocial” social democrats have all but destroyed the future of the young turning them into burlaks of social security payouts for their dole-addicted moms and dads. Oh, you don’t know what burlaks are. Sorry, here you go . Not a bright future, is it ? I am sure it scares the living shit out of coke-snorting execs of tax-proof multinationals. It does not scare me but I sympathize. The fear of the paranoiac, my mom used to tell me, is just as real ! Now of course, Gladbag prefers Theo Colborn’s version that makes PCBs and dioxin concentrations recorded on Baffin Island the reason for my getting sexually defective, and our boys staring squarely into the catastrophy of deformed organs and anemic sperm count (see Cloborn/Dumanoski/Myers, “Our Stolen Future”, with foreplay by Al Gore).

You know, I’ve been thinking: how come someone as bright as Mark Steyn can’t see the obvious. It’s the idea of Europe uniting, stupid ! Surely, it’s a sign of the Apocalypse. The Wart on the body of Asia shall writhe in plagues of locusts and Saracens, who will chastise all paleface, but especially the Danes who knowing better caved in and signed for Maastricht European Butter – the grade Maria Schneider fetches Brando in Ultimo tango a Parigi. You contempate the French national soccer team and you know something is terribly wrong with the sense of identity of the current breed of Europeans. Call me racist, I don’t give a hoot! I take one look at Vieira, Henry, Trezeguet, Wiltford, Djibril Sisse, lined up before a kickoff fidgeting through, or trying to lipsync, la Marseilleuse, and I know that these are not Frenchmen. And sure enough, when it comes to a decision on the field to exact a price for a slur on the honour of his sister by SpongeMarco Quadratipantolini and grin-and-bearing a tired putain gavot for the glory of France, it’s a head-butting no-brainer to Zizou.

But you see, the interesting thing on the shifting demographics of Europe (and the U.S. which you deal with only in passing), is that the falling birth-rates do not explain the place being overrun by people and culture hostile to its makeup. There is no war between the Arab countries and Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Denmark to account for the influx of bearded and veiled foreigners to those lands. There is no way the differential birth rates between Muslims and Swedes should play a significant role in the demographics of Sweden, unless the Swedes are dead resolved to be overrun by Muslims. So, the problem may be not so much birth rates – which seem to be lowering, as a general rule, with rising standard of living – as it is immigration and naturalization policies. And there, the sick-man Europe copies America as diligently and/or shamelessly as Die Harald Schmidt Show copies David Letterman’s nightly dose of cynicism for the urban insomniacs (even to the top-ten lists, for crying out loud). So consider it possible that Europe has really wanted to be Die Vereinigten Staaten all along (in the Karl May way), and if it fucks itself up in the process of creating das echt-amerikanische Schmelztiegel of humanity, it has very little to do with the excesses of the homegrown Left. Much more with the Give me Your Tired, Your Oppressed, Your Tyrannized ! The Lying Bitch was made in Paris too, by the way ! The truly oppressed did not dream of Democracy and Liberty in Amerika; by a large margin they dreamt of making tons of money off suckers dumber than themselves.

The copying of things American comes mostly as a cultural reflex, although sometimes, once upon a Clinton, the State Department gets involved directly. When the new Czech state made a feeble attempt to control the influx of the Carpathian Roma in 1994, Washington underlinks bullied Klaus just short of threatening to send in the bombers. At issue was the “unfair targeting of an identifiable ethnic group” in requiring that an applicant for Czech citizenship, if not native, produce a proof of two-year residency, and – therein the blatant discrimination - a clean criminal record (in any jurisdiction) for the last five years. Can’t do that ! You can’t ask an illiterate, unemployed, wandering nomad to keep his nose clean that long ! So what, he sells drugs, he is involved in international prostitution-slavery rackets, he may own an army of underage pickpockets, he cares a flying fart about Czechs and their history, he can’t speak the language ! Is any of that a reason why he should not be a Czech citizen ? Is that any reason why he should be discriminated against ? No way ! “NO HISTORY, NO BULLSHIT”, as Richard Holbrooke used to check Milosevic at Dayton whenever the former commie banker thought a few shots of rye would soften the American view regarding the origins of ethnic tensions on the Drina. And to drive home the American point of view, Holbrooke eventually used Albanian narco-mafia to drive the Serbs out of their Holy Land.

But as I said, Europe mostly copies the US voluntarily. The problem is that, because the Overseas Nirvana which Europe dreamed up has evolved differently, there will always be no-fly zones on the mutual admiration map between the two versions of the West. Ergo, I don’t think you can Americanize Europe or vice versa, either from the Left or from the Right. What appears to you as sissy statism, has had a long history and came to be built into a consensus within the states on the Continent, states which were much varied and more class-conscious than America ever was. Nothing speaks better of this than the history of social security. It saw the light first in Germany, in the years of its aspiring to the status of a world superpower. When the scandalized Junker deputies protested to Bismarck who introduced the old-age pension and health insurance acts, that this was socialism, the old man snarled back: “call it whatever you want, it’s all the same to me”. According to your theory the Hun should have been hamburger the moment Limeys and Frogs took a run at their trenches in Belgium in 1914: fucking statist sissies who need a doctor and a pension to fight for their Kaiser. Well ok, it would have been a walkover, you say, had the Frenchies not dragged in the dole in 1905, and the fox-killing foggies did not give in to the Mob on the poll tax. But you know what ? I think, Bismarck was a smart man. He took the wind out of not just Lasalle’s sails but destroyed the Marxist litanies in Germany for two generations. Made patriots out of Bolshevik scoundrels like Kautsky and Bernstein. Drove Lenin nuts. Hell, even he signed up with Kaiser eventually, and wore a toupee for a while !

On second thought, let’s not do Euro-Disney. But I tell you, very often America exports sick shit to Europe (and Canada). Take for example fist-fucking,….naw, not that either, better let’s do Catharine Mackinnnon: you know the feminist jurist who says that if woman says she was raped, and it turns she is mentally ill, she was still raped. But where Mackinnon has been laughed off as a legal loon in the States (I think her’s was the only case in modern history that the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed without a comment – the Minneapolis anti-pornography by-law), in places like Canada or Bosnia she is worshipped as demigod. Thanks to Cathy, who authored here in Ottawa a bizarre piece of legislation which requires a man to take “reasonable steps to ascertaining he has obtained consent to sex” before erection, no male can ever have any degree of certainty about anything happening between the sheets any more. I wrote to our Minister of Justice (Alan Rock) with a request to explain to me the requirements of the mysterious new section 273.2(b) of the Criminal Code, i.e. how to make love to my wife and stay legal in Canada. What does 'reasonable' mean in this sudden state intervention into necking and foreplay ? Am I supposed to obtain some sort of a token nod or wink, or should I be asking my wife something formally to satisfy the requirement that I take reasonable steps toward ascertaing that I have a state-approved licence to proceed cautiously in a limited and non-exclusive act of lovemaking to my beloved with due note that such is subject to instant review and renewal if said respondent to sex appears uninterested or falling into a state of stupour in which she is incapable of consent in accordance with s.273.1(2)b, etc, etc...and would it please the Minister to inform me if French kissing is considered a form of criminal suasion when administered for the express purpose of obtaining connivance in more flagrant acts of debauchery with a view to the requirement of s.273.2(a)(ii), prohibiting 'recklessness'. The office of the Justice Ministry informed me dryly that: '...these provisions have been in effect for just over three years and the case law is developing. However, no two cases are exactly the same. It is not possible to lay down guidelines for what may constitute reasonable steps. Yours very truly…’ Ach so, I get it ! Cathy can’t tells us what the untried test of honest belief in consent is because we have not thrown enough men in jail yet for us to know exactly what it is that they should be doing ? Hmmm…, makes you kind of wonder what her definition of a ‘lawful burden’ on a defender would be. Me, personally – maybe I am weird - I would prefer to be told what it is that I should be doing before being thrown in jail because I didn’t.

So, let’s just say I have some sympathy with the European stereotype of viewing the Americans generically as cuckoos. Dennis Hopper did a great job in animating the Angst in Wim Wenders’ Der Amerikanische Freund in case you are pining for a great Euroflick and are tired of Isabelle undressing for her pimp as Violette Nozière. But even one better, Henry Miller came to animate the part to 1930's Paris in person.

Miller’s sole interests in life were to drink, to whore and to write, which horrified George Orwell who had, but a little while before, done the same things in the same place, except as a committed socialist. What horrified Orwell of course was that Miller drank, whored and wrote first-class smut without the need to commit to a belief in a bright future for humanity. To Orwell who met Miller on his way to Spanish civil war, where he would find himself unable to shoot at a fascist bathing in his underwear, where he would himself get shot through the neck, and where he would discover that his beloved Leftie friends exhibited all the traits they despised so in the fascists, to this man it was incomprehensible at the time, that the American literary genius would be happy the way he was. And Miller was content, at the knowledge that the world (as we know it) was doomed, not because of a manic Austrian corporal and his Latin buddies, not even because of the Red menace, but because his pickled brain knew the American Dream would slowly poison the very idea that lies under all cultures, namely the idea that human life has a meaning. Here is what he wrote:

'Nobody thinks any more how marvelous is that the whole world is diseased. No point of reference, no frame of health. God might as well be typhoid fever. No absolutes. Only light years of deferred progress. When I think of those centuries in which all Europe grappled with the Black Plague I realize how radiant life can be only if we are bitten in the right place ! The dance and fever in the midst of that corruption ! And syphilis ! The advent of syphilis! There it was like a morning star hanging over the rim of the world.....Aye, the great world of syphilis is setting. Low visibility: forecast for the Bronx, for America. Low visibility accompanied by great gales of laughter. No new stars on the horizons. Catastrophes...only catastrophes ! ....I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night setting in and the mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots.'

It’s easy to dismiss Miller as a derelict, an obnoxious dopey without breeding, culture, sense of uprightness, decency. But it is also possible to see him on those terms as a self-parody of America, and ourselves in Black Spring of his history where we witness its spreading democracy in the world. Having defeated the false messianic hopes of an evil empire, America embarked on a great virtual crusade against the terror of the homicidal urge itself ! In the name of deferred progress ! In the name of liberty ! In the name of homeland security ! Think of it as America's greatest project, its most noble effort, its final destiny ! No, you don’t even be an anti-Yank to think that way: the Americans’ are no more guilty of spreading a cultural disaster than a friendly dog is in spreading infected fleas.

I am not saying it’s that way, Mark, I am saying, consider it. Think it possible that Charles Dickens is not the evil that we should fear the most. Maybe, the greater danger is the Lone Superpower Narcissus torn between two Grand Lunacies, transfixed like Buridan’s ass between the Leftist and Rightist Utopias. The self-destructive struggle between the thoughtless, futureless America as a 24-7 pandemonium of self-seeking and self-gratification and the America obsessing as a self-glorified multi-culti SuperVirgin liberating the world from immigration paperwork and fighting Evil on a shoe-string budget, has now been playing out in Iraq where the Hapless Granfaloon has been taunted and dissed, and fought to a standstill by a swarm of bare-assed suicide bombers. And that, my friend, is the reality of America going solo. Methinks, anyhow.

Best,

...............................

Godzilla Market or Frankenstein Socialism ?

2008-09-26T09:04:00.000-07:00

No surprises in the news today. The Paulson bailout plan is nowhere near ratification. Washington Mutual was gobbled up by JPMorgan Chase yesterday, the largest US bank ever to go under. Sadly, neither Obama nor McCain seem to have a grasp either on the magnitude of the problem or the root cause. Their objections to the bailout are political tripes, and a guarantee that the economy will get a lot worse before it gets better. Of the politicians (I am aware of) speaking on the bailout, only Ron Paul seems to have a handle on where the problem is and what must change for the American economy to recover. I do not agree even with him.

Actually, Ron Paul does not agree with himself. He relies on F.A. Hayek and the Austrian school, economists who warned of the perils of credit expansion by central banks’ pushing down the lending rate. Better than to continue to artificially stimulate the economy, they said, let the credit slide, and bad debt liquidate itself. Works fine in theory and perhaps in practice where the market really “controls” supply and demand of money. But Ron Paul himself doubts that we have a “free market” today. So, my first question to Ron Paul would be: if the market itself is no longer operating on some standard of undisputed objectivity, what is the guarantee that it can correct the huge discrepancy between the nominal and actual value of assets ?

It is my view that we have nothing like a free market, and especially not, if we consider the global nature of today’s economy. Indeed, we live in the “flat world” of Thomas Friedmann (though I am puzzled by the metaphor) where the markets are manipulated wholesale, one by multinational oligopolies, and two – surprise, surprise – by governments. The fastest growing economy in the world is China, ruled by the communists, who have absolutely no reserve about regulating economic activity to conform to their view of what markets actually should do. Are there dangerous fluctuations in the supply of energy ? Let us regulate. Strategic reserve of crude and processed oil will be legislated to remove the price bulges. This stabilizes manufacturing sector as it provides for more predictable cost structures. Russia, as an oil & gas producer goes one step further – they re-nationalize the industry. Not by decree, but by making the market “unfriendly” to smaller operators, and operators in general, if they are not pliant to the planners' directives. We then have in front of us a very flexible market which readily responds to corrections of economically and politically (!) undesirable events and trends. The failure to “control” the market, or do it in a fashion that threatens the global economic community and/or its big players, will unleash its destructive forces. Much like Godzilla, the market will wreak havoc on pitiful dwarfs who want to play with yesterday toys in today’s world economy.

The US will have to learn how to play the global market game.

I agree with Congressman Paul that the economic ills are much bigger than toxic mortgages or over-extended credit. Kevin Phillips’ ‘Bad Money’ I think describes the problem in all its terrible splendor. The productive U.S. economy has been shrinking for decades, losing steadily its capability to create tangible value. The manufacturing sector’s share in the GDP is a mere 12%. After oil, the consumer goods, are the largest contributor to the trade deficit which now exceeds $800 bln $ a year. Massive restructuring of the economy, one restoring trade balance and productive capacities of the US, one investing consistently in value-add economic activities is, probably the only sane way out of the mess. Only one I can see, at any rate. Milton Friedman has lost his argument with David Ricardo. The Chinese economy is the proof.

The intrinsic danger of a bailout without a “new deal” on the structure of the US economy, comes from the Frankenstein nature of a socialism based on a failed monetarist model. Privatizing profits while socializing losses, won’t do as a policy. Politically, it is abhorrent to the idea of democracy, economically, as Ron Paul points out, it only masks the problem and defers the solution. For all intents and purposes, one needs to start with the admission that the U.S. financial system is insolvent and will become bankrupt without an immediate and resolved push for a radical reform.

A Tale of Two Samaritans

2008-09-21T14:37:00.000-07:00

Anatole France is not a household name in the U.S. He is the satirist who wrote L’île des pengouins, une farce mordant featuring the misfortunes of a penguin colony accidentally baptized by a myopic priest and acquiring human nature in consequence. France is also remembered for his saying that the rich and poor are, in the wisdom of the law, equal, and prohibited to sleep under the bridges, beg in the streets and steal bread. This week it is worth while to recall the great literary provocateur, whose books were placed on index librorum prohibitorum by the Vatican, in connection of the bailouts of the markets. Two major rescue missions were announced to protect some people in imminent danger of breaking the law.

One was unveiled by the president of the United States, who plans to bail out “the financial sector”, or whatever remains of it after hurricane Ike. It directs the Treasury to buy out the toxic mortgages to relieve the banks and the remaining two brokerage giants - up to about $700-billion mark, which the Treasury would, ……ehm, ehm, ...have to borrow. How that sort of appropriation can be made in a democracy has not been revealed. The only people known to have that kind of cash would be the Chinese communists who, while the Yanks got distracted by chasing rag-assed suicide bombers in Iraq and Afghanistan, amassed reserves of about 1.7 trillion US$. But if the U.S. lets China to buy out New York City and L.A., then naturally the Times and the Post can’t badmouth the Central Committee over lobbying and influencing U.S. elections (if it is allowed for the local insolvents) , let alone badmouth them over Tibet, when the Dalai Lama has been ready to make a deal with Beijing for years, graciously settling for Lhasa's autonomy within China.

The other rescue mission was announced in Sochi, which I am sure everyone knows is a major Russian vacation resort on the Black Sea, where the U.S. Navy is currently showboating and as of Monday kept afloat by new Treasury short term bills . The last issue gave close to nothing in yield, which strikes sheer terror in the enemies of pax Americana from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.

The plan of the Russian prime minister has called for a massive buyout of Russian securites badly mauled after the Georgia war. This has happened mostly in response to the U.S. generated anti-Russian mongering. The Moscow stock exchange stocks lost about 40% and Putin shut it down. But Putin’s One Russia is strong and has money to throw around. The bailout will not touch its Reserve Funds, including the National Welfare Fund which the Federation uses to manage hyper-liquidity, foreign cash reserves, excess inflation, and fluctuations in resource earnings. The little vindictive man did not think it was necessary. The Federation Reserve Funds combined stand at about US$ 180 billion.

It appears then that the “law of the markets” is quietly settling the difference of opinion between the US and Russia on the most important man on the planet, Mikheil Saakashvili. The US Treasury appears much worse for wear than the Russian, which is good to know. At any rate, I am sure that the poor will be thrilled to learn the stocks have rebounded from the scare and the American bankers and Russian investors are safe in their homes for now.

The Long Shadow of Kosovo

2008-09-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

I commented years ago, when Richard Holbrooke played his KLA card against Milosevic in Kosovo, that it looked like the losing move in the game of U.S. patronage of Europe. Strategically it was a horrendously dumb idea, morally, a cynical self-damnation. It was of course not the first time that the United States allied itself with some hugely dehumanized figure or regime. Stalin’s USSR or Pol Pot’s Kampuchea would be two elementary examples. But this was hugely different. There was very little known about Stalin’s repressions and atrocities before the Iron Curtain fell and likewise about Pol Pot’s killing fields before he was driven into the jungle. The regimes in both countries were entrenched without US help. The context of the Stalin’s alliance was a world war against Nazism and Japanese militarism. The support for Pol Pot was dictated by the logic of a global rivalry with Soviet communism. The Sino-Soviet split produced a strange bedfellow for the US.

In contrast, Clinton and Albright knew full well what sort of people they were making use of against Milosevic. KLA would have had no chance to turn itself into a popular nationalist movement , because political resistance already existed in Kosovo, one which was democratic and non-violent. No objective necessity, or palpable pressure, existed to force the U.S. to call on the likes of Hashim Thaci for help. The U.S. knew from day one, that it engaged a gang of criminal misfits and degenerates. Carla Del Ponte’s book, published after prime minister Thaci declared Kosovo independence, did not break any big news for people who followed the conflict. In 1998, the KLA were terrorists with links to Iran and bin Laden. The State Department knew that. Richard Holbrooke may deny he made a deal forgiving Karadzic the bombing of Sarajevo bread-lines, but he may not deny that KLA figured in Clinton Administration books as a terrorist organization when he started to talk to them.

The Kosovo adventure had predictable consequences for U.S. prestige in Europe and within NATO. The NATO-occupied province of Serbia soon became a by-word for lawlessness and corruption and soon the “liberation” model began spreading to southern Serbia and Macedonia. Before it was contained, most of continental Europe from Athens to Stockholm scorned the U.S. policy in the Balkans. The Italians were first to have had their doubts about the Kosovo project, being the natural transit point for Albanian drug trafficking (and prostitution rackets) that had just secured a better supply line. France also dissented early, and was never quite on side for the U.S. joyride of humiliating Russia in the Balkans. It was the French press which first cast heavy doubt on the authenticity of the “Racak massacre”. Schroeder’s support for intervention of Kosovo was a shock to his party and most of the German public opinion. The “humanitarian war” did not have many takers, and a wave of criticism hit the media after Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade, in a repeat of an unprovoked attack of 1941. By the time the bombs fell, most of Europe knew about the Rambouillet “annex” that Milosevic refused to sign, which gave NATO the right to occupy de facto any part of the Yugoslav rump. The secret part of the proposed text was put on the KLA Web site by mistake. A number of documents from German courts and Foreign Office Reports were collected and published on the Web by a lawyers organization. They showed duplicity in the claims of genocide against ethnic Albanians. . The war against Milosevic’ Serbia was waged under false pretenses.

The useless war for Kosovo would have cost the U.S. dearly no matter what followed. Europeans had wars waged on their soil in the 20th century and do not particularly care for the experience. In Europe you don’t cry “war”, for the same reason you don’t cry “wolf”. Even more so. But as it happened, barely a year after the Pristina noise finally died in the villages around Nis and Tetovo, the Americans were proposing another excellent war-game adventure in Iraq. Not being able to implicate Saddam in 9/11 - the idea of a Baathist and a Wahhabi plotting , being essentially an junior CIA analyst’s wishful thinking, the Gringos declared him in possession of WMDs. This would be a somewhat more realistic scenario because Saddam was gung-ho on acquiring them in the past. The problem was that Saddam, who had his reactor smashed by the IAF, who was unceremoniously run out of Kuwait, and who laboured for a decade under heavy economic sanctions did not look anything like his former self. It would have been no problem for the U.S. to clone him into a Moammar Gaddafi. The “old” Europe was very suspicious of US motives to remove Saddam and did not go along.

Sixth year into the adventure, the US and its Coalition of the Willing (East European Shitdisturbers) have not stabilized the place they took in three weeks. Iraq, essentially a structure created by British colonial expedients out of three culturally disparate regions would not have survived as a state, had it not been for a ruthless dictator. The U.S. did not think it wise in 2003 to rebuild Iraq’s statehood on the brilliant model of McArthur-occupied Japan. Instead it tinkered trying to find a “democratic” formula to neutralize the numerically dominant Shi’ites (who are hated by everyone else: the traditionalist (Saudi-allied) Sunnis, the western-leaning Sunnis, the Wahhabi-allied Sunnis, and the Kurds). The foolishness of this enterprise is still not apparent to Washington, which apparently believes that Iraq does not work politically because it is being undermined by the meddling of Iran. So, let’s - as Weird Al Yankowich would – “Bo-, bo-, bo-, bomb, bomb, Iran” (on the tune of Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann). Ahmadinejad is now the extended point of the Axis of Evil, the other member having suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and likely hence unable to continue to threaten the security of Lehman Brothers, etc. And this time, we know for sure that the Axis man enriches uranium.

I wonder if senators McCain and Obama have any inkling of the huge political losses the U.S. has suffered in Europe in the moral debacle that was and is Kosovo. It makes no sense to commit to Iraq without a political end-game. None exists today, and will not materialize unless the U.S. radically changes its foreign policy course and starts investing in the ideas of a “concert” that Metternich orchestrated for Europe between Napoleon and the Revolutions of 1848. To win the old Europe back should be the US foreign policy’s primary objective. The further and final integration of Russia into Europe and the world economy, is a big piece of that policy. The best and perhaps the only way how to pacify the Bear, is to let him on the honey. The Russians want peace and prosperity, first and foremost. Listen to Medvedev : get rid of the Sovietologists; get some Russologists !. This, the U.S. can do at no cost to anyone.

The alternative of course is to let the absolute power corrupt the US absolutely. To go into Iran, or doing it without the big players on side, is to continue on the path of the lone geopolitical suicide bomber. That much should be clear by now.

The New York Times' Witless Boobs

2008-09-18T05:57:00.000-07:00

In the serial lying of Saakashvili, the latest chapter is perhaps the most revealing. Does the guy really take the whole world for witless boobs ? Well, it appears that at least The New York Times has been taken by the latest shenanigans of the hysterical Georgian president or willing to indulge a twit, who, standing next to the US Secretary of State, accused NATO of complicity in the deaths of innocent Georgians in his war with Russia.

So let’s look at the so called ‘fresh evidence’ that the paper famously sees fit to print.

Essentially, Saakashvili is trying to make us believe that a fighting force of Russian armour passed through the Roki tunnel early in the morning (before 4am on the 7th August), which information forced him to order twenty hours later an all-out onslaught on Tskhinvali held by Ossetian military units and a force of about 500 Russian peacekeepers manning 18 observation posts .

The critical elements of this information and its import are these:

1) When - at what time - did president Saakashvili learn of the armoured units entering South Ossetia ? How does this ‘fresh new information’ square with what president Saakashvili and people in his government publicly said and did on the 7th and 8th August ?

2) Did the two Georgian brigades which attacked and entered South Ossetia know about the large column of Russian armoured vehicles moving south ?

3) How does the president explain the delay in the deployment of the fighting armoured units which, according, to the timeline published by Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia , were first deployed at 18:44, August 8th at Tskhinvali ?

18:44 A motorcade of Russian tanks, armored vehicles and trucks loaded with different kinds of weapons reach Tskinvali by the Dzara by-pass road, 2 kilometers west of Tskinvali. The Russians opens intensive fire towards Georgian forces located in Tskinvali and on the neighboring heights. A second motorcade, which also came from Russia via the Roki tunnel, is stopped near the Georgian government controlled area of Dmenisi, 7 kilometers north of Tskinvali, and Russians open heavy fire toward Georgian forces.

And why does the MFA timeline record 05:30 of August 8th as the entry of the first Russian troops through the tunnel ?

5:30: First Russian troops enter through Roki tunnel South Ossetia, passed Java, crossed Gufta bridge and moved by Dzara road towards Tskhinvali.

Both texts are here .

To understand the issues and the gullibility of the NYT crew that prepared the report let us consult the timeline of major events in the war as prepared by professor Nicolai Petro of the University of Rhode Island.

There seems to be nothing in the public statements Saakashvili made either on the 7th or 8th August which would indicate his knowledge of the report of the ‘armor and men’ in the tunnel early on the 7th August. He appeared on Rustavi 2 TV, in mid afternoon of August 7th with a bizarre account of an assault by the separatists to which he was forced to react by ordering an immediate ceasefire. He promised an amnesty if the “separatists” lay down their weapons. He addressed the Russians as Georgia’s “natural ally”. He was merely asking that the “so-called ministers” of the South Ossetia government who were Russian return to Russia. He said he was in contact with the Russian Foreign Ministry: We are in permanent contact with the leadership of the Russian Foreign Ministry. The Russian Foreign Ministry is trying - as they say, they are trying but not managing - to get the separatists to cease fire. (Russian FM Lavrov denied such statements were made by his people.)

Not a word was breathed about Russia’s escalation of the conflict by moving combat troops into South Ossetia. The ceasefire was cancelled within three hours, ostensibly because the Ossetian militias broke it.

The next day (8th) on CNN evening news, Saakashvili first said that Russians were bombarding Georgia and “just” starting to move their armour into Georgia, then corrected himself saying that they actually began moving “yesterday”. He denied he was talking to Russian authorities, in direct contradiction to his public statement of the previous day. Evidently, even on the eighth, Saakashvili knew nothing about his forces only responding to Russia inserting combat troops into South Ossetia. He did say that Russia was looking for a “suitable pretext” to attack his country, which apparently they found "yesterday". He did not elaborate what pretext Russia actually used to move its armour from North Ossetia at the time it did.

The most damning piece of evidence against Saakashvili’s hopeless fumbling and dissembling, was the appearance of general Kurashvili, the chief of Georgia peacekeeprs, on Georgian TV (at 19:05, Aug. 7 accourding to Petro) announcing the cancelling of the ceasefire and the decision of the country’s leaders to “restore constitutional order” in the Tskhinvali region. This was – consistent with Saakashvili’s speech of earlier that day – an operation against the separatists, and against them only. The operation was code named “Clear Field” and was co-ordinated by the Interior Ministry.

There are also other indications that the Russians really were responding to Georgia’s attempt to reattach South Ossetia by force, rather than attacking for some obscure reasons. If they acted before he assaulted Tskhinvali then why ? What was the context ? And how does one explain that the Georgian troops did not expect to be attacked by the Russians ? Or at least this is what some have said.

The timeline of the Russian side supports their story. They say they were surprised by the attack, scrambled for response and went to the UN Security Council for a resolution. Only after they were rebuffed there (6:51 am 8th, see professor Petro's timeline) the first bombs fell on Georgia. The Russians claim that their first combat armour entered through the tunnel at 2:30 pm ( the 8th ) and indeed that squares with its first deployment about 50 km south four hours later, by Georgia's own account.

So far, the best theory why Georgia did not defend the Roki tunnel, came from the former Georgia’s Defence minister Irakli Okruashvili now exiled in Paris. Military plans to attack both South Ossetia and Abkhazia existed. The operation launched by Georgia on Aug 8th was different only in that it did not attempt to shut down the tunnel connecting the Ossetias. The over-confident President apparently believed Russia's use of the facility would be blocked diplomatically by the US. But much to Mikheil's chagrin, the Russians did not follow the script after being snowed by the Security Council.

The “early” appearance of the Russians at the tunnel, as reported by Tbilisi (per professor Petro timeline on the 7th and 8th ) simply does not look real, as the Russians, a day later passed through the facility and down the roads with minimum opposition. Saakashvili's self-correction on CNN on the time of the Russian armour deployment was interesting. I believe it relates to an early version of his lie, that was to make the Russians diplomats trying to stop him at the UN in New York, look like deceivers. This would also explain the 5:30, 8/8 "time stamp" issued by his Foreign Ministry.

The nutty theory that the Russian actions were “unprovoked” and that Saakashvili was simply forced to level Tskhinvali to intercept the neo-bolshevik hordes pouring out of the Roki tunnel, may not even originate with the Georgian authorities. The idea was making rounds weeks ago on the chat circuits after a Tbilisi blogger let out the trial balloon. Again, one would expect a team of professional reporters of The New York Times to be familiar with the facts and relevant events on which they are reporting and make use of them to put the would-be revelations in a proper context.

God bless the Internet.

A Message for Sarah Palin

2008-09-14T12:27:00.000-07:00

September 14, 2008

Dear Ms Palin,
tried to contact you through your governor’s office but could not get past the ID panel as my address is outside of the US. So I have decided to post my message to you on my blog instead. I remain confident that if you are meant to receive it (both literally and figuratively), God will arrange for it.

I am a Canadian, and of course our two nations being so close, and the US so much bigger and powerful than us, we will be with the U.S. wherever the U.S. goes, whether or not we actually want to go there. That is why I think you should be exposed to as many views from Canada as possible, even the seemingly ‘Neanderthal’ ones such as mine.

I hold no grudge against you, nor do I have a problem with anything you have done or said, nor do I have any opinions about your family or its size in relation to the extent of your public responsibilities. Quite to the contrary, I believe you to be a bright and capable chief executive of the state of Alaska. Nothing else really matters, beyond this and your confidence in accepting the nomination of being a presidential running mate. It is up to the American people to judge whether to entrust the Republicans and you with the office, and how much your own view of your preparedness for it is relevant in making that call.

The writing below is from a discussion I participated in in 1999, on one of the usenet groups. I have decided to share it with you to give you a sense of the complexities of the world on the outside of Alaska you would be facing.

As, I am sure you are aware, Russia is no longer in the state of disarray as I described it nine years ago. If that is so, much credit for it goes to Vladimir Putin who, like yourself in Alaska, took on big oil in Russia and made it serve the people of his country, ….well, perhaps somewhat more forcefully. He has managed to consolidate Russia and make it more confident in its ability to counter American policy if it becomes too aggressive in Russia’s neighbourhood.

FYI, in case you are curious, the former Yeltsin’s National Security Advisor, Alexander Lebed (mentioned below), who in the years of deep decline teased about the possibility of nuclear exchange with the U.S., is no longer with us. He became a governor of the largest Siberian region and later opposed Putin’s policy of one Russia. He died in a tragic helicopter crash in 2002.

I wish you the best, and remain yours,

……..

James hit on a theme which has exercised me personally for some time and which I consider of primary importance in uderstanding the current Balkan events, our failing grasp on reality, and our possible demise as species. It's the problem of 'cultural feminization' (or obversely a 'rapid cultural demasculization') and its destructive power as it projects on the civilizing institutional framework in the West. The lament lies with our emotional brain so brilliantly exposed by Arthur Koestler and so ingeniously described by Oscar Wilde in The Ballad of Reading Gaol: 'each man kills the thing he loves'.

The NATO propaganda in the Kosovo crisis has a strange new and yet familiar clamour about it, a quality of 'protesting-too-much'. The idea of throwing bombs to save lives, or threatening war to produce goodwill, or dropping cluster bombs in 'good faith', all have insanity written about them, yet it is a constitutional insanity of homo sapiens, not individual pathology. Consider Exodus 4.21: And the Lord said unto Moses. When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart , that he shall not let the people go. Well, this is the Omnipotent's idea of negotiations, Madeleine Albright's infallible instinct telling her what comes after Rambouillet: (Exodus 7.3-4) And I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders, in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth my armies, and m y people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgements. Of course in Madeleine's Testament Egypt shrinks and Egyptians are exiled, but that's a detail. What is important is 'the idea of having the sentence first', the realization of that we possess the technological means of destroying utterly those whom we don't like without having to worry about the consequences.

In the fifties, the American neuropathologist Paul MacLean postulated the thesis of 'limbic system', to this day unchallenged view that our emotional undercarriage is structurally a hostile reptilian brain which is telling us when to placate by submissive rituals (,or to love,) and when to hate. It is also the unique feature of our mental equipment - which explains a lot about the 'victim-striking-back' mentality - that the agressive expansive infantile feelings are neurologically bound to the fright syndrome. In other words, the sensations of Omnipotence carry along with them feelings of acute insecurity. (I find it fascinating that in all the great religious experiences, Jesus', Paul's, Mohammed's, Gautama's, their godlike ascension is immediately followed by a struggle with the 'devil'.)

Our psychohistory of the last five thousand years can be understood in terms of the struggle of the two brains: the neocortex (the machine) has attempted to exercise control over the inveterate ambivalence of the emotional brain (the ghost) to the proposition of life, and its denial of death. This struggle has taken on the form of cultural competition among the different human tribes for an optimum control of productive resources. Cultures clashed in wars and the one better equipped neocortically to handle life's challenges prevailed and imposed its mentograms on the simpler, more primitive or bashful rivals. In this manner we continued to develop culturally until we reached a stage in which viable competition for better mentograms has come to a screeching halt. We have arrived at the end of History of Francis Fukuyama, although he seems quite innocent of the strange reasons why it happened.

Today, at the end of that road, we do not live in the best possible worlds but in one which is suppressing vertical selective social processes which enable us to develop. The VSSPs, as I call them, have been biologically the domain of human males. We have developed in cultures through the stratifications of males in functional hierarchical societies. The primaeval hunting band and its organization gradually gave way to a multiplex of male hierarchies within modern societies which controlled discrete resources and processes and which assured quality by individual and group male competition and separating its members by abilities into ranks. As a result of this cultural competition of male societies, the neocortical imperative and techniques of resource management have conquered the existing human cultural varieties, interconnected the world in a single communication network, and created technologies and organizational blueprints which can sustain human life almost effortlessly.

Unfortunately, at the very moment of triumph of human intellect comes a strange Moebius-like reversal in fortune. Our progress is killing us with kindness by assaulting the very cultural foundation upon which it is built. The neocortical societies are constructed on the premise of control and supression of strong instinctual drives in its individual members and maintaining a level of discipline which allows them to execute complex social functions. But at a certain point in the development of these societies the high level of material comfort, and its effortless acquisition begin to militate strongly against mental organization based on self-denial, transcendent values and the acceptance of self in a subordinate role within a hierarchy. In the measure that these are defining structural elements of male psychology, these societies become feminized, 'flatten out' as it were, and become transformed from a functional manifold striving for excellence to an endless variations on a theme of catering to the immediate needs of members with an overriding emphasis on security which so characterizes human childhood.

There is an immediate danger lurking in this blueprint. When the pundits asked Einstein what he thought changed with the advent of the A-bomb, he said: ‘everything’. The old method of cultural competition - war - became outdated by the accumulation of military technology.
Of course it did not disappear overnight, but its very nature changed. Henceforth, it was not possible to destroy the 'enemy' in war without certain high probability of destroying life itself. So the purpose of war became self-defeating. Some old warriors just could not grasp it. McArthur, who so volubly echoed Einstein's sentiment in Tokyo Bay on the day of Japan's surrender, ended up cursing Truman for refusing to escalate Korea to a nuclear war with China. But Truman was a 'neocort' man; he calculated that the use of nuclear weapons against China would have opened up the US to a likelihood of nuclear attack from Stalin because in the days before MAD, the first strike conferred a huge advantage on the aggressor. By the time of Vietnam, MAD as the new paradigm of 'war-as- self-destruction' so thoroughly confused the politicians and military planners that it ended up on a note of bitter defeat for the U.S.

Yet as we progress along the path to the matriarchal setup, which by the way has absolutely no idea what to do with the human male, the previous complex technological organization is still capable of delivering the self-destructing blow. The unleashing of a nuclear holocaust becomes a distinct possibility because the male neocortical politics of 'balance of terror' have been taken out, together with the logic of a geopolitical strategy. Russia has been devastated by the Western policy of minimization of her influence, and the internal economic decay brought about by dismantling the old communist planned economy and replacing it with the soft, postindustrial, highly-speculative finance bazaar which now utterly dominates. But Russia's nuclear arsenal still counts 7,500 ICBMs and it has passed into the hands of an increasingly unstable and decaying social and political structure. Given the pathetic decline of the Russian military, and the increasingly derelict state of the society itself, coupled with the famed Russian moribund view of life, the scenario of Russia-as-the-nuclear-Cain has acquired an increasingly probabilistic shape. Russia has become so destitute that nuclear-death blackmail may actually become an attractive option in the postcortical Thatcher-Albright-Amarpour version of Balkanized politics. General Lebed, about whom we should be worried because he is a smart chap who does not scare at all ("he who shoots first, laughs last", he once said), has been making noises about escalating the Yugoslav crisis to a tactical nuclear level. He means business because he knows when people have been pushed down culturally to an apocalyptic stupor where they will not feed themselves, the threat of nuclear craters becomes an alternative promise of liberation. He is a tough cookie (said to be a wife-beater) who sees the Western political elite as a spineless bunch of spoiled-brat Marx-sucking sissies - 'chicken-hawks' as Michael Harris calls them - utterly woman dominated, and personally cowardly men: men without qualities. He just might be tempted to trade "cities" with the Clintons. Perhaps, all it might take is another "bad" winter.

There is another scenario perhaps even more likely to materialize. Benjamin Barber's response to the MacWorld neocort rule takes shape in the classic Jihad's limbic response. Not able to comprehend that the push for world integration comes as a result of a historical process of cultural selection, the Jihad forces, among whom Islamic fundamentalism leads the way, resist furiously the agenda of globalization. The Islamic jihad groups, the political wreck of the Left splintered into an anarchic nebula, and the far-right acephalitic mob, will probably acquire one or more types of weapons of mass destruction (Lebed has already announced that 160 of Soviet suitcase nukes went "missing"), and they will assault the civil society of the West, at random, with total disregard to human life. The pseudo-politics of Osama bin Laden will align with the Theo Kazcynski's and Timothy McVeigh's. It will not be a meeting of minds, but a fusion of the diseased human emotional undercarriage. The new paradigm of war will then announce itself as a 'generalized paranoia in the process of getting rid of itself’.

...............

Pumping Cash

2008-09-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

Friday morning, driving junior to school past the first gas holdup station, it was noted that the gas price jumped by 10% or 13 cents a liter.
(note to my American readers: “liter” is the unit of measuring liquids everywhere in the world except the US and the U.K. Britain has been in the process of adopting a “rational measure system” since Bishop John Wilkins proposed it to the Royal Society in 1668. The use of non-metric system in U.S. commerce contravenes the Metric Conversion Act signed into law by president Gerald Ford in 1975. 1 liter=0.264172052 US gallon. ).

As is our wont, Gab (my 12-year old) and I speculated on the causes of the sudden jump in the retail price of gas, which as Gab pointed out to me already was proportionately higher on a $106 a barrel than it was on a $147 a barrel three months ago.

Putin bombed the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, I offered. Noting instantly the sarcasm in my voice, he dismissed that possibility. “Naw, I don’t think so”, he said confidently, not wanting to get into too much detail in the geography of that supply line. So, what about a coup in Nigeria ? “Is Nigeria an oil producer ?” he asked. “Big time”, I said. “Possible”, he said. “Naw”, I said. “ It is more likely that a Saudi crown prince had dysentery.” “What’s that ?” “Bad case of shits, like you had in the spring.” “Definitely, a possibility”, he said. “Of a connection ?” He gave me a look of disdain, which he sometimes uses when he is unsure what I am saying. “Don’t think so.”, he then said thoughtfully. “ It’s more likely another hurricane.”

“Yep, there is one in the Gulf right now, heading for Texas.” “I think you hit it right on !”

“But, dad, wasn’t it like…. the prices went up after a hurricane and not before ?” “Excellent observation !”. My chest was swelling in pride over my son’s progress in reading out the designs of petro pashas in picking the consumer pockets.

“Yes, you see, even with Katrina, 3 years ago, the excuse was that a large refining capacity was shut down. Therefore, the oil companies said, there is demand for oil that they cannot satisfy with the production being crippled by the hurricane damage, so they have to jack up the price. So, the gas price went up. But, you see Katrina was not the first hurricane and oil price was never that sensitive to weather before. Why ? Because, there is something called a “refined fuel reserves”, which means gas already refined and ready for shipment. So, if the normal forces of the market prevailed and competition existed among the oil companies, they would – and they did in the past – keep enough supplies of refined oil and gas to deal with any short “dips” in production. So, e.g. Shell having more gas ready than Exxon would help Shell to sell more gas than the competitor during bad weather season. But as it is, instead of competing, they start jacking up the wholesale price right away, or even ahead of storms. Which means easy profit, because this does not cost them extra in making the gas. Get it ?”

“Yep, makes sense”, said Gab while stepping through his pre-selected radio stations. He already knows the gas prices are a ripoff, this is too much information.

If They Want Security They Should Ask Klaus

2008-09-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

A friend who saw my last blog (School of Lies) said this was ethnic humour that could not reach the masses. I told him that my blog page is not written for the masses. I don't care about the masses. The idea of the masses stands and falls with the assumption that stupidity is a contagious disease.

So what’s with Klaus anyhow; the guy is a twit. He worships Milton Friedman. He is a smokers’ rights advocate even though he never smoked himself. He went to the UN to argue that global warming is a loony-left conspiracy. He comes across like a regular David Warren(a local pundit who holds similar views, but advocated in the past – half-jokingly - also the levelling of Fallujah, and rebuilding it as a giant parking lot to a Wal-Mart). Well, yeah, I said, but I was not talking about the guy’s passions; les goûts et les coulers on ne discute pas.

So what was I talking about ?

Well, for all his colourful provocations (the Czech president) Vaclav Klaus, happens to have had a fairly decent record as a prime minister, actually some would say a stellar record, compared with what followed after him. But above all, and what relates to his dislike of Saakashvili directly, Klaus happens to be the architect of the Velvet Divorce. He let the Slovaks go ! He conceived a plan for the breakup of Czechoslovakia and negotiated it with the Slovak former heavyweight boxer (Meciar). If memory serves, it is still the only template available for a bloodless, civilized breakup of a country.

So,.....

it should come as no surprise that Klaus sees the Georgian president as a bully of Abdul Nasser's shoe-size, and his actions on par with the follies of the Pan-arabic fanatic in 1956 and 1967 that started both times with closing the Straits of Tiran to Israel. Klaus does not concern himself much with who fired the first shot in the night of 8/8/8. He understands the problem, and knows instinctively what it is about. The posturing of Georgia toward the two enclaves is all too familiar to a president of a nation which, but for a few intellectuals, would have been itself extinct two hundred years ago. By the early 19.century, the Czech language had no literature. It was a patois of peasants. The towns had very few Czech speakers and even fewer who had any education. There was nothing to read. The co-founder of modern Czech linguistics, Josef Jungmann, wrote his History of the Czech Language in German, the language of the oppressor.

The Western media are mostly clueless about the plight of the Abkhaz and the Ossetians.

There is no such thing as South Ossetia for the Georgian integrists. To them, the Ossetians (a tribe of the ancient Alans) were pushed south to Caucasus from the nothern plains and eventually wandered into the medieval district of Samachablo in the region of Shida Kartli. Georgian propaganda does not even acknowledge there is a distinct ethnic group of Ossetians who are a large majority in the “Tskhinvali region” . The offical line is that the land was taken over by Kokoity separatists. One of the first acts of Zviadist Georgia in 1991 was to make Georgian the only official language in the Thskhinvali administration offices. As that was not ok with the locals who for the most part either did not speak Georgian or knew it only as a third language (after Ossetian and Russian), Zviadist paramilitaries were dispatched to restore order. The shooting began. It is a matter of some irony that those who, like Christopher Hitchens, disclaim any resemblance to Kosovo, overlook that Georgians claim Samachablo as part of the historical kernel of the Georgian state.

Abkhazia, on the other hand, was never a part of the ancient Kartli kingdom, but it is the view of patriotic Georgian historians that it always belonged to Georgia anyways, whatever Georgia actually was at the time. The Georgians were there first. The Abkhaz wandered in afterwards. (Actually, in case you did not know, the Georgians were the first homo erectus human prototype to walk out of Africa. I kid you not !) It is true that the Abkhaz from time to time in the past were dominated by the Mingrelian west-Georgian kingdom of Imereti, but a sober second look would see the land as a Caucasian region very distinct from Georgia, historically and demographically. Its integration into the Czarist Russia followed a different path than Georgia’s and came later. But no sober looks will be forthcoming and the reason is simple. As professor Hobsbawm once put it aptly, “historians are to nationalism, what poppy is to heroin addicts”. Even the human rights people in Georgia, who are asking forgiveness from the Abkhaz, do not find it prudent to mention the causes of their contrition. It is just one of those things you don’t say in Tbilisi: many of the Georgians expelled from Abkhazia (and some who were brutally murdered after Sukhumi was retaken by the Abkhaz forces from Shevardandze in 1993) were the grandsons and granddaughters of the immigrants into Abkhazia brought there by Lavrentii Beria. Beria (a Mingrelian by birth) was Stalin’s most prolific killer and his first lieutenant in the region after it was assigned to Tbilisi in 1931, as part of the Transcaucasian SFSR. He was a notorious madman, and I mean notorious. The 1984 Soviet film classic by the Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze, “Monanienba” (Repentance), is known to every Georgian who finished high school. Abuladze could only hint at Beria, because one could not make a historical movie about Beria in the Soviet Union. Not even in the eighties.

The denial of the two peoples’ existence, and oppression which in both regions outlawed the native scripts, and replaced them with Georgian alphabet, would be enough for me, a Czech by birth. I would say to Saakashvili, bud, you will have to live in a smaller Georgia. You have no idea how to run a federation, and after fifteen years of these people seeing an unstable, immature, violent Georgia, it is time to let them go. There has been enough bloodshed and rancour and it is sound and fury about nothing. Let the Abkhazians and Ossetians go ! Let them go ! In the name of decency, let them go, and find a different role to play than a U.S-financed resurrection of Queen Tamar! Of course, I am a blogging nobody. So please refer to the sitting Czech President, if you want your people to live in a smaller Georgia but one way more comfortable with its neighbours, with Russia, and ultimately - with itself.

Yes, we are all Georgians, and we are all Caucasians out of Africa, just like senator McCain and the archaeologists say. So what's the big deal letting the Georgian separatists in Sukhum and Tkshinvali govern themselves as once the Georgian separatists in the American colonies demanded as their God-given right to liberty ?

Oh Say Can You See ?

But I have no illusions about how far anyone would get with Mikheil. He argues even with the sane half of himself. Take a look at a most revealing interview of him. It comes at the end of Kira Kay’s excellent report made for the Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting. Watch how he answers the question whether Georgia would use force to retake Abkhazia the night before he launched the assault on South Ossetia. Then ask yourself: If I was Putin or Medvedev, would I want to be dealing with Saakashvili ?
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School of Lies Handy in Understanding Georgia

2008-09-10T08:07:00.000-07:00

As someone who grew up in Eastern Europe in a period of History’s relentless push to communism, I learned early to detect when the official sources lied to me and how to deal with it. The ability to understand the meaning, and to plumb the depth, of a lie was every intelligent man’s or woman’s basic survival skill. If you as a pioneer (communist boy scout) could not find a way to a red-star badge of a Young Builder, that was awarded for 100 hours of community work by putting in 10 hours, then you were a born sucker. No twelve-year-old could possibly spare two and a half weeks of precious life cliping shrubs, painting school-yard fences, and picking up back-alley garbage for a stupid badge. But everyone had to have one. Not having one meant you did not know how to work the system, or, God forbid, you engaged in sabotaging the inevitable victory of communism in the world.

As I grew up, I learned to distinguish among different types of official lies. The Young-Builder-red-star-badge lie would be an example of Harmless Bullshit, of the Bonding Lie class. It prepared you for the rock bottom rule of the socialist economy: you pretend to work; the state pretends to pay you. Then there was the necessary Noble Lie. An example of a Noble Lie would be: “the Red Army liberated Prague on 9th May 1945”. Everyone knew that the Vlasov Army chased the Nazis out of the city the day before. But you could not say that because Vlasov’s men were double traitors: first they betrayed the Great Stalin, then the Nazis, to save their own skin in both cases. So, it was only fair to lie and give the credit to the Great Stalin.

Which brings us to the Dialectical Synthesis. The Dialectical Synthesis was technically not a lie. It was a process whereby something that used to be true, no longer was true based on the historical practice of socialism. So e.g. the Party determined at the XX. Congress, that Stalin was not Great at all and removed his corpse from the Red Square mausoleum. What the Party discovered was that Stalin had a cult of personality, which meant that Stalin made many serious mistakes because he did not believe in the collective leadership of the Party, like Nikita Sergeevich. Which of course was a couple of Noble Lies: one, Stalin did not make any mistakes - he murdered millions, which you could not say because that could sabotage the inevitable victory of communism in the world, and two, Khruschev himself liked to throw his weight around, which would be unfair to say considering he was not engaging in gross violations of socialist legality (which meant he did not kill Bulganin after he removed him from the Poliburo).

Another important type was a Lie for the Protection of the Socialist Establishment in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. A classical example of that would be in president Novotny's favourite saying: “we have not promised you a rose garden”. That actually was a Silly Lie because he was promising that all the time, and usually in the very sentence that followed. No, the “Protection Lie” was that president Novotny had brains. Now, if you ask why is that not a Noble Lie, you don’t understand. The guy was an execrable idiot and everybody knew that ! It was necessary to protect him because most people bought into socialism knowing full-well it was a shameless racket. And from there it follows that we had all sorts of Cheap Automatic Lies like the one that said ‘99.9% voters endorsed the candidates of the National Front’ in an election. It’s not that there never were any Florida-style recounts. It went well beyond hanging chads. Everyone clued in on what the bosses wanted, so no counting was necessary in the first place . The containers were sealed and delivered with the prescribed quota of approved candidates. No sweat, no Michael Moore bitching !

So, what do I think of the Saakashvili account of the night of 8. August ? I knew you were going to ask (harmless bullshit) and I was going to get to that (fake).

Well, to someone like the current president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, it would not be a mystery. He had the same schooling in Lies as I did. Vaclav Klaus was in Tokyo on urgent business (diplomatic lie) when Saakashvili’s Flying Circus arrived in Prague. From Japan, Klaus took a solemn moment to embarrass the Czech government, its NATO allies and EU partners by telling it like it is. Unfortunately, due to the circumstances calling for a “Protection Lie” (described above) applied in the western media, the wire was picked up only by ITAR-TASS .

So what do we know about the night of 8/8/8 ? Saakashvili now says he dispatched one third of his army to the ‘Tskhinvali (in case you ever wondered, it is pronounced: '[hiccup]' + ‘invali’) region’ to intercept the invading neo-bolshevik hordes that just emerged out of the Roki tunnel. Under normal circumstances this would be a Big Fat Bold-Face Lie. If he was so concerned about the Russians coming through the tunnel, why would he be wasting time for hours reducing the only city in the province to a Vukovar ? A city that had only a few hundred Russian peacekeepers ? But things are never that simple in politics. We are not dealing here with a person who cares for convention , even in the basics of presidential protocol. So it is not clear whether he actually remembers what his top peacekeeper said on TV just before the battery of GRAD rockets opened up on the sleepers in Hiccup- (don’t say ‘hiccup’, do a hiccup!)in-valley. He said that he was going in to restore ‘constitutional order’ in the region. It was a police action ! (Actually that was a Half-Truth; the shelling and assault of the army were coordinated by the Interior Ministry). You would have never guessed from the way Mikheil spoke about Hiccup-in-valley (I knew you could do it !) that the bombarded sleepers were ethnics who mostly do not speak Georgian, or speak it as third language (after Ossetian and Russian) . But the wording had a special significance in the Caucasus. Putin used the same words ('restore constitutional order') as Russia’s prime minister in 1999 to send armour to Chechnya. There was of course a slight difference, lost on a man who does not know that wearing a tie does not imply chewing it. Putin walked in on a Chechen warlord by the name of Basayev and his ally, the Wahhabi warlord al-Khattab (an old pal of the Devil himself), who invaded the neighbouring Dagestan to recreate imam Shamil's islamic confederacy in North Caucasus, defeated by imperial Russia in 1859. Putin wiped out the Chechnya-based marauders in short order, and the FSB eventually hunted down and killed both mujehadin (,actually all the big Chechen islamic warlords). Obviously, there would be a lesson there somewhere to a reasonable leader of a nation of 4 million trying to negotiate a new territorial arrangement with Russia (140 million people) led by a smart judo black belt. Well, evidently not Mikheil.

So I would say, yes it looks closest to a Protection Lie for the Eventual Establishment of NATO in the Caucasus. My guess is that most of those who have no interest in that racket would not see Saakashvili any different than the Czechs and Slovaks saw their president Novotny in the 1960’s.

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Palin the Phantasy Woman

2008-09-08T07:03:00.000-07:00

There have always been things that genuinely puzzled me about the U.S. One of the first indelible shocks after I immigrated to Canada from communist Eastern Europe was a Billy Graham’s crusade I saw on TV. I had no clue. I knew it had to do with a religious revival, but I had no reference to what ‘religious revival’ looked like or what it was for. The purpose of the 60,000 that gathered to listen to Billy’s thunderous oratory was a complete mystery to me. Billy was incoherent. I was (and remain to this day) at a loss to understand what asking Jesus to come into one’s heart in a football stadium could do for anyone.
Similarly, I could not figure out Wonder Woman. Nothing in my cultural baggage could explain to me the need of women to identify themselves with such an obvious ripoff of Superman. Superman was easy to figure out: it was a compensatory phantasm for premature ejaculations. Anyone who wetted his pants as a teenager in a spot of heavy petting knows the import of instant change of clothing and the essential power to fly off in a jiffy on a heroic mission away from the mess and her doubts of your manhood. But why would women want to copy this particular escapism ? Is it some sort of erectile difficulty envy ?

Reading Bernie Quigley’s idolatrous odes to Sarah Palin last week is another ‘one of those’. Why would a wise guy like Bernie be falling all over himself in superlatives over the Alaska governor ? Yes, yes, she is bright and confident and very good-looking. She has the gift of the gab and definitely lights up the campaign, adding a buzz of genuine flakiness to the utter boredom and banality that McCain and his people have diligently worked to spread across the land. But it would be apparent to a college freshman with a gift of insight that a woman who describes herself on a national convention floor as a pitbull with a lipstick is not assessing herself as primarily brainpower.

Perhaps there are things about America an outsider will never understand. There appears to be a streak of phantasism that runs inside the heads of American politics which on occasion displaces contact with reality. I can think of no parallel to this phenom anywhere on earth. This is not ideology, or some hopelessly misplaced idealism, as it is sometimes made to look. I am talking intermittent suspension of cognitive function in waking states on which the American political soul depends as dolphins do on surfacing to get air into their lungs. Give'em a spot of sheer triumph: Carter’s Iran hostage rescue mission, Reagan’s “outlawing” the Soviets in a press conference, Madeleine Albright’s impassioned radio appeal in heavily accented Serbo-Croatian during Rambouillet urging Serbs to turn against Milosevic, Dick Cheney’s last week’s mission in Baku, telling Aliev to stop selling oil to Putin.

How else does one explain the nomination for VP by the managers of McCain, a septuagenarian presidential candidate who had a recent bout with malignant melanoma ? They landed on an attractive woman 2nd year governor, a post to which she rose from mayor of a town of 9,000. Eight years in politics; BA in journalism from Moscow, Idaho that is. A superstar ! Meteoric riser ! Don’t think about it ! Just play it ! She is an epoch-maker of the statue of Washington, Lincoln, F.D.R. says Bernie. Must be because she theoretically could be. And if the pundits ask stupid question just refer them to the inanities of her putative elders-and-wisers, the Establishment politicians. That will do the job ! Go girl; you can’t really screw up if you are rapture ready, can you now ?!
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