Happy New Year 888

 in Uncategorized by

This is my last comment for the year as we are off to spend Hogmanay as the guests of an Ambassador in Paris. Out of deference to my family, who have had the brunt of it these last few days, I am definitely not taking the laptop, so I will no longer be able to take part in the popular new bloodsport of proving your loyalty to the SNP by being nasty to Craig Murray.

My parting thought is that, as every year of my entire life, it has been a disastrous one for the Palestinians. Yet more land occupied, settlements built, homes destroyed, olive trees uprooted, shipping vessels sunk and yet another murderous onslaught on Gaza.

I warmly recommend this rare public appearance by Col. Larry Wilkerson, ex-Chief of Staff to Colin Powell and a fellow recipient of the Sam Adams Award for Integrity. His brief musings here on Israel and Syria come from a deep store of knowledge and a razor-sharp intellect.

Do have a wonderful celebration. The future will be good. We are closer to a transformational change in society than you may realise.

Allowed HTML - you can use: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

888 thoughts on “Happy New Year”

1 … 18 19 20 21 22 … 30
  • technicolour

    Thanks to Jemand for providing an immediate example of the potential reach of this legislation, and the necessity for clarification. On Jemand’s assessment any person belonging to the Muslim religion could be described as ‘an extremist’: no other evidence necessary.

  • Jemand

    Clark, ‘yawn’. Tell that to the families of those who lost loved ones to Islamic violence.

    Pretentious liberal wanker.

  • Jemand

    How would you describe someone belonging to the Nazi party, Technicolour?

    I’m sure you wouldn’t be so accomodating of their claims to having a peaceable interest in politics. Would you now?

  • technicolour

    “Hitchens was unambiguously referring to the now widely accepted unreliability of the Hoess confession when he said “These are, however, the now-undisputed findings of all historians and experts on the subject.”

    He was not: that is a sad, toxic fabrication. He was satirising the statements of the Holocaust Deniers/Revisionists. This is Hitchens, describing an expert witness, Richard J Evans, at Irving’s trial. The extract opens with Evans’ words:

    ” “There is a difference between, as it were, negligence, which is random in its effects, i.e. if you are a sloppy or bad historian, the mistakes you make will be all over the place. They will not actually support any particular point of view …. On the other hand, if all the mistakes are in the same direction in the support of a particular thesis, then I do not think that is mere negligence. I think that is a deliberate manipulation and deception.”

    Evans’ knowledge, both of the period and of the German language, are of an order to rival Irving’s. He has little difficulty in showing that there are suspicious mistranslations, suggestive ellipses and, worst of all, some tampering with figures: in other words, that Irving knowingly inflates the death toll in the Allied bombing of Dresden while deflating it in the camps and pits to the East. And, yes, all the “mistakes” have the same tendency. In a crucial moment, Irving “forgot” what he had said about Nazi Gen. Walter Bruns, who had confessed to witnessing mass killing of Jews and had been taped by British intelligence while doing so. When it suited Irving to claim that Bruns didn’t know he was being recorded, he claimed as much. When it didn’t, he suggested that Bruns was trying to please his hearers. Having listened myself to Irving discuss this fascinating episode, I mentally closed the book when I reached this stage in it. It was a QED.

    Irving has long been notorious for his view that Hitler never gave any order for the Final Solution and that there is no irrefutable document authorizing it. In court, he was unpardonably flippant on this point, saying airily that perhaps, like some of Richard Nixon’s subordinates, a few of the rougher types imagined they knew what would please the boss. This argument has always struck me as absurd on its face in both cases, but Evans simply reduces it to powder.”

    The full piece here:
    http://articles.latimes.com/2001/may/20/books/bk-144

    “Anyhow the subject rather bores me now, but that’s the banality of evil for you” – bless you, I’m not surprised it gets boring: such a terrible, tedious point of view. Must be particularly dull to have to fabricate evidence in an attempt to support it.

  • Jemand

    “Thanks, Jemand: I think you’ve managed to prove the point quite adequately.”

    Nah. I don’t think so. You are an enabler of a diseased ideology. You and your friends lie about the true nature of this ideology. You make elaborate, meandering excuses to avoid admitting the plain and simple truth – that Islam is immoral, right out of the book.

    It’s gonna take a hell of a lot of death and social upheaval before you idiots eat humble pie and stop lending your moral support for a fundamentally immoral way of life.

  • Mary

    Of course it’s early morning in Oz hence the flurry of posts à la Habbabkuk style.

    Still ‘scraping off the whitewash’ I see. LOL

    PS How’s that nice Mr Abbott doing in his hunt for terrrrists?

  • Clark

    Jemand, I am not asserting that there are no Muslims who are also extremists. I am yawning at your assertion that all Muslims are extremists. If that were so I would no longer possess my head after organising debauched dance parties every week just round the corner from the Bradford mosque near Lumb Lane.

  • technicolour

    “It’s gonna take a hell of a lot of death and social upheaval”

    If you’re ex-forces, it’s not your fault, but I suggest you seek help.

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    Mary

    “Of course it’s early morning in Oz hence the flurry of posts à la Habbabkuk style.”
    _____________________

    That’s pleonastic, Mary.

    It’s either “posts à la Habbabkuk”

    or “posts Habbabkuk style”

    but not both.

    Thank you.

  • Jemand

    “Jemand, even if you were right, what do you propose be done about it? Murder 1.6 billion people perhaps?”

    Find another straw man, Clark. That one has been burnt out already.

    I suppose you see only two options – mindless slaughter of over a billion people, or enthusiastic support for an ideology that hates YOU. Maybe you oughta start with withdrawing your bullshit moral support for Islam and apologising for the misconduct of its most enthusiastic adherents. That could be the start of something.

    It’s kind of funny that I was banned from an anti-Islam facebook page because I was ripping into war mongering retards who couldn’t distinguish between the patient and the disease.

  • Herbie

    Tech

    Hitch’s full piece is below. It’s a review of two books.

    I can see why some may be discomfited by it, but it’s a fair assessment of the various positions.

    I don’t see that he qualifies the TonyM quotation, and as it’s Hitch’s own conclusion it can stand alone.

    He talks about “the toxicity of the argument” at the beginning of page 2. But here he obvioulsy means something much closer to complexity than the rather negative connotation you’ve inferred.

    I think you’ve been a tad unfair to TonyM, but everyone can read it and make up their own minds for themselves.

    Definitely worth a read.

    http://articles.latimes.com/2001/may/20/books/bk-144

    Hitch wrote an earlier piece for Vanity Fair in 1993, entitled, “Whose History Is It?” addressing similar issues.

    It was very controversial.

    Can’t find it now on the web.

    But I can find a very excitable Max Blumenthal getting quite septic about Hitch for this and other forays into that holiest of holies:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/dance-hitchens-dance_b_1707.html

  • technicolour

    Hold on, you’ve gone all American. And yet while continuing to be wildly inaccurate. And in between using phrases which make no sense. “Find another straw man, Clark. That one has been burnt out already” – I mean, what? This wouldn’t pass the Turing test.

  • Jemand

    “Jemand, who do you think you’re protecting?”

    I don’t “think” I’m protecting anything or anyone. Perhaps you think that resisting a bad thing is, in itself, pointless?

  • Clark

    Jemand, there are 1.6 billion people in the “Muslim world” – I won’t arbitrarily label all those people as “Muslims”. That’s about as many people as there would be grains of coarse sand in one of those metre-cube bags that agricultural fertiliser comes in. Over time the media bring to our attention crimes committed by some of those people. You take some of those incidents, present them to us here, and ask us to generalise to the whole cubic metre of sand.

    Honestly Jemand, that’s absurd. People hold all sorts of ideologies. A few of the world’s Christians claim to have been abducted by aliens; what does this tell us about Christians in general? Nothing.

  • technicolour

    Again, this is Chris Hitchens:

    “When the first news of the Nazi camps was published in 1945, there were those who thought the facts might be exaggerated either by Allied war propaganda or by the human tendency to relish “atrocity stories.” In his column in the London magazine Tribune, George Orwell wrote that though this might be so, the speculation was not exactly occurring in a vacuum. If you remember what the Nazis did to the Jews before the war, he said, it isn’t that difficult to imagine what they might do to them during one.

    In one sense, the argument over “Holocaust denial” ends right there. The National Socialist Party seized power in 1933, proclaiming as its theoretical and organizing principle the proposition that the Jews were responsible for all the world’s ills, from capitalist profiteering to subversive Bolshevism. By means of oppressive legislation, they began to make all of Germany Judenrein, or “Jew-free.” Jewish businesses were first boycotted and then confiscated. Jewish places of worship were first vandalized and then closed. Wherever Nazi power could be extended–to the Rhineland, to Austria and to Sudeten Czechoslovakia–this pattern of cruelty and bigotry was repeated. (And, noticed by few, the state killing of the mentally and physically “unfit,” whether Jewish or “Aryan,” was tentatively inaugurated.) After the war broke out, Hitler was able to install puppet governments or occupation regimes in numerous countries, each of which was compelled to pass its own version of the anti-Semitic “Nuremberg Laws.” Most ominous of all–and this in plain sight and on camera, and in full view of the neighbors–Jewish populations as distant as Salonika were rounded up and put on trains, to be deported to the eastern provinces of conquered Poland.

    None of this is, even in the remotest sense of the word, “deniable.” Nor is the fact that, once the war was over, surviving Jews found that they had very few family members left. The argument only begins here, and it takes two forms. First, what exactly happened to the missing ones? Second, why did it occur?”

  • Resident Dissident

    “Away ya go then, Res Diss. The floor is yours.”

    There are many accounts of what Arendt said in Eichmann in Jerusalem – or you could even read the book as I did nearly 30 years ago. She most pointedly didn’t say that there wasn’t significant anti-Semitism among the German population as a whole – and the argument about Eichmann was not about whether he was an anti-Semite but whether he was a fanatical anti-Semite. No one is denying that when there is evil about that ordinary people get sucked into participating – it is only the otiose and the immoral who argue that people as a whole are involved in a process beyond their control (a view which is also downright insulting to the many brave Germans who did resist) or that individuals cannot be held responsible for their actions.

    BTW I don’t agree with the overall thrust of what Arendt says – but it is not right to stretch her arguments beyond where she herself would have stretched them in order to put them to some nefarious purpose.

  • technicolour

    And why these time-wasting attempts to twist someone else’s words to mean the exact opposite of what they actually said? It’s lame – it doesn’t even work.

1 … 18 19 20 21 22 … 30

Comments are closed.