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Tuesday, August 19, 2008 |
Stern: "Gerhard Schröder kritisiert den georgischen Präsidenten, und schon stürzen sich deutsche Politiker auf ihn. Dabei hat der Altkanzler nur ausgesprochen, was sich andere nicht trauen. Nicht Schröder, sondern Huber mangelt es an Realitätssinn.
Ich habe es geahnt, es war nur noch eine Frage der Zeit, bis wir Deutschen mit am Rad des Kaukasuskrieges drehen."
Translation: "Gerhard Schröder has criticised the Georgian president, and immediately some German politicians are jumping on him. And the former Chancellor has only spoken out loudly what others did not dare to say openly. Not Schröder but Huber is lacking sense of reality.
I had a presentiment it was just a matter of time before we Germans would join turning the wheel of war in the Caucasus."
Independent: "Messrs Miliband and Cameron want Georgia to join Nato. Such thinking is muddled, dangerous and defies the lessons of history.
It remained for a former Tory foreign secretary to dash a little cold water of sanity on these overheated effusions. On Friday Sir Malcolm Rifkind chided the folly of making threats about the use of force when these are obviously not going to be carried out. And the day before he had said, 'I think people in both the United States and in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in western Europe will have to ask very clearly how important is Georgia to them.
'There was a lot of talk about how Georgia should join Nato and if only Georgia was a member of Nato this wouldn't have happened, and so forth. I think that is frankly totally unconvincing.' The truth is surely as Sir Malcolm says: 'The United States, Britain, France and Germany are not going to go to war with Russia over South Ossetia, however sympathetic to the people of Georgia we are.
So Nato membership is not the answer.' Is it too late for our politicians to learn again that kind of plain speaking and common sense?"
11:49:58 AM 
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Telegraph: "With every telephone call, swipe of a card and click of a mouse, information is being recorded, compiled and stored about Britain's citizens.
An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has now uncovered just how much personal data is being collected about individuals by the Government, law enforcement agencies and private companies each day.
In one week, the average person living in Britain has 3,254 pieces of personal information stored about him or her, most of which is kept in databases for years and in some cases indefinitely."
It stands to reason that when New Labour is replaced in Britain by the Tories, the Telegraph will justify the same measures.
Multichannel: "Cable One last fall conducted a six-month trial of a network-based technology that tracks consumers' Internet movements in an effort to amass refined data on Web-surfer habits that can be sold to advertisers at premium rates."
NYTimes: "The Police Department is working on a plan to track every vehicle that enters Manhattan to strengthen the city's guard against a potential terror attack, the department's chief spokesman said.
The proposal - called Operation Sentinel - relies on integrating layers of technologies, some that are still being perfected. It calls for photographing, and scanning the license plates of, cars and trucks at all bridges and tunnels and using sensors to detect the presence of radioactivity."
It is very likely that this plan will not work when needed, like the whole defence system of the US east coast was 'malfunctioning' precisely and uniquely on 9/11. It's one more project to increase surveillance of the population in case of civil disturbances.
WorldNetDaily: "In a ceremony that received virtually no attention in the American media, the United States and Canada signed a military agreement Feb. 14 allowing the armed forces from one nation to support the armed forces of the other nation during a domestic civil emergency, even one that does not involve a cross-border crisis.
The agreement, defined as a Civil Assistance Plan, was not submitted to Congress for approval, nor did Congress pass any law or treaty specifically authorizing this military agreement to combine the operations of the armed forces of the United States and Canada in the event of a wide range of domestic civil disturbances ranging from violent storms, to health epidemics, to civil riots or terrorist attacks."
Our governments are no longer democratic; they make decisions without consultation through the proper democratic channels. So all this surveillance is not about the 'war on terror', it's about expected civil unrest.
Civil unrest is bound to happen when the full scale of the economic debacle will become clear and millions of people will be reduced to poverty and will revolt. That's what all the prisons and surveillance is about.
TimesofMalta: "The probability is growing that the global economy - not just the US - will experience a serious recession. Recent developments suggest that all G7 economies are already in recession or close to tipping into one. Other advanced economies or emerging markets (the rest of the eurozone; New Zealand, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, and some Southeast European economies) are also nearing a recessionary hard landing. When they reach it, there will be a sharp slowdown in the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and other emerging markets.
So every G7 economy is now headed toward recession."
In a situation like this, some nations might resort to war to get its population behind their governments which would allow them to introduce stringent measures of control and repression against social unrest. Saakashvili comes to mind. The West would very much like to get control of the Russian oil fields. The warmongers in the West are already raising their voices, McCain, Miliband, Merkel and Saakashvili.
The West is trying to force a new imperial order on the whole world, the world order Saakashvili emphatically mentioned.
But a new world war may just shift the balance away from the West, which is on its knees already economically.
11:27:13 AM
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Whenever imperial powers want to attack or intimidate other nations, they start a huge propaganda campaign to justify their illegal and brutal actions. That is what is happening at the moment with the Georgia problem.
A cynical Saakashvili deliberately provoked an attack from the Russians, to put the West before a fait accompli. And the fundamentalists, the imperialists in the West are gladly jumping on the bandwaggon. The propaganda machine is working full time.
They blow up the few victims on the Georgian side and make light of Georgia's own greater crimes. It is happening right before our eyes.
Photos are being staged, corpses (or living people?) are brought out of hospitals and put in striking positions, then the local population is asked (in exchange for some money, of course) to make an impressive pose inspired by the theatrical paintings of a century ago.
Yesterday, all day, we were bombarded with 'news' that the Russians were refusing to retreat from Georgia, all the while showing us images of Russian troops retreating, not really fast, but still retreating. The integrity of our media is at stake here.
It's a disgusting scene. Some media are denying the destruction at Tskhinvali, stating that there are enough buildings still standing, and refuse to comment on the civilian victims fallen there. If there is one thing sure it is that there were more civilian victims in South Ossetia than in Georgia, something the West obviously wants to play down as much as possible. This propaganda game is reaching indecent proportions.
Human Rights Watch accused Russia of using cluster bombs; in fact, the Russians haven't used that many bombs at all, contrary to countries like the US and Israel who are using cluster bombs on a huge scale. How many victims are there on the side of Georgia, 10, 20, 50, 100? Certainly less than in South Ossetia killed by the Georgians. But anyway, any victim is one too many, from whatever side. Saakashvili deliberately created a war situation and knew he was killing civilians; that is a war crime. The purpose was ethnic cleansing, the driving away of the local population. The reporting on this event is very one-sided. It would have been unreasonable not to expect a counter attack from Russia on grounds of humanitarian intervention, something the West is always invoking when starting illegal wars, like in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Then there was the case of the Russians ordering a few Georgians to clean up a street, which was dubbed 'forced labour'. The sky is the limit in the propaganda war.
And some are already thinking of starting another war.
FPIF: "Though the national sentiment favors wrapping up the Iraq War, there exists a small but powerful movement for starting a new military conflict with Iran. The bipartisan drumbeats for aggression reverberate throughout the corridors of Congress. House Resolution 362 and Senate Resolution 580, for example, call on the United States to prevent Iran from 'acquiring a nuclear weapons capability through all appropriate economic, political, and diplomatic means'.
The 'squeeze Iran' and 'confront Iran' positions are strongly encouraged by the increasingly powerful Zionist Christian Fundamentalist community. About 5,000 people from across the United States attended the third annual Washington-Israel Summit, organized by Christians United for Israel (CUFI). There, the 'Iranian threat' loomed as a pervasive theme."
Christians for war? It looks like religions are again being used for political reasons. One more reason to see the belief in God as an aberration.
11:02:46 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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