After such an extended break from blogging, you will be deeply disappointed that I restart with something as mundane and trivial as Jeremy Clarkson. I have defended the man in the past, because I much enjoy Top Gear and consider that much of what he has been criticised for in the past had been an amusing winding-up of the po-faced of the kind I employ myself. But nasty, indeed vicious bullying of a subordinate should always be a sacking offence.
That did not ought to be the question, though. He hit someone and they had to go to hospital. Where are the police? They are incredibly fond of sweeping up scores of teenagers for thought crime, but here we have an actual violent assault that spills blood, and it seems completely out of the question the perpetrator is brought to account. Why is that? I had a personal experience a couple of years ago when I was very mildly hurt – less than young Oisin – in an assault, and the police insisted on arresting the perpetrator despite my repeated requests to them not to do so. They told me rather firmly that the idea that it is the victim who has a say in pressing charges, is a myth. Why was Clarkson not arrested?
I cannot in my mind dissociate this from the non-arrest of Jimmy Savile for his crimes, despite their being well-known and reported at the time. That seems to link in to the wider paedophilia scandal, and the question of why no action was taken even in the most blatant of cases when there was compelling evidence, such as that of the extremely nasty Greville Janner MP.
But then I think still more widely as to why, for example, Jack Straw has not been charged with the crime of misfeasance in public office after boasting of using his position to obtain “under the radar” changes in regulations to benefit commercial clients, in exchange for cash. I wonder why a large number of people did not go to jail for the HSBC tax avoidance schemes or the LIBOR rigging scandal, which involved long term dishonest manipulation by hundreds of very highly paid bankers.
At the top of the tree is of course the question of why Blair has not been charged for the crime of waging illegal war. The Chilcot Inquiry heard evidence that every single one of the FCO’s elite team of Legal Advisers believed that the invasion of Iraq was an illegal war of aggression. Yet now the media disparage as nutters those who say Blair should be charged.
Then I think of all the poor and desperate people who get jailed for stealing comparatively miniscule amounts in benefit fraud, or the boy who was jailed for stealing a bottle of water in the London riots.
The conclusion is that we do not have a system of justice in this country at all. We have a system where the wealthy and governing classes and those associated with them enjoy almost absolute impunity, broken in only the rarest of cases. At the same time those at the bottom of the pile are kicked hard to keep them there. There is no more chance of justice against those in power in the UK than there is of the killers of Nemtsov being brought to book in Russia.
But what has really scared me is this thought. This situation has been like this my entire life: and I have reached the age of 56 before I realised it. A very great many people have still not realised it at all.
What does not scare me is this. I realise that if the system of justice is completely corrupted, then there is no obligation on me to follow the laws of the state. In fact it would be wrong of me to do so. I must seek my ethical compass elsewhere than in the corrupt power structure which weighs so hard upon the people.
@Node
18 Mar, 2015 – 8:24 pm
It is a long blog post that I linked to, and kudos for reading it all.
The blogger uses his real name and is not much older than me. I was also living in London at the time, and, whilst I was never in the police force, it all rings true with my own experience.
The Keystone Cop inquiry set-up by Theresa May is one of the most breathtaking and/or incompetent cover-ups I’ve ever witnessed.
But it all gets dumber and dumber, and then it gets even more dumber and dumber.
Hey, all go post pictures of your fluffy cat on the CIA’s Facebook – and give them your phone number, so that they can track you to the nearest metre 24/7 – and go watch celebrity chefs in the jungle, inbetween endless sport fixtures that are obviously more important than life on Earth.
Dream on, RD! Maidan allowed the neo-Nazis to really come out and show their true colours… in parts of the country where they would have been least wanted, such as Kharkov, Mariupol, and Odessa. They may not be more than 5% in number, but sufficiently numerous to cause fear and hatred in good people of Ukraine who may dare to challenge a view (and rewriting of history…) that portrays Stephen Bandera as a national hero..
RD, Parry had great difficulty getting published in mainstream US news media after publicising the Iran-Contras affair. His Wikipedia page is interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Parry_%28journalist%29
“If memory serves, Snyder whitewashes the misdeeds of the Banderists during World War Two in his book Bloodlands.”
__________________
Then memory does not serve you well, because that is false.
Clark
I don’t doubt that the EU and the USA were supportive of those looking for an independent Ukraine – though I doubt the motive was commercial interests since the Ukrainian economy is something of a basket case – and I very much doubt that the support was military. If you want tangible evidence of foreign interference in the Ukraine e.g rigging elections, poisoning opposition politicians, economic blockades, turning the gas off, backing the blatantly corrupt former President then I would argue that Putin has a more greater case to answer. If you read Snyder and Kurkov’s Ukrainian Diaries regarding Maidan you will see that the Ukrainian desire for independence was something genuine rather than being inspired by neo cons (whatever they are).
RD, 10:11 pm; I don’t doubt the popularity for change in Ukraine, but it looks likely to me that it was used and manipulated. The Neocons are the US hawks who were behind the false case for the devastation of Iraq. Parry describes John Kerry and Victoria Nuland as Neocons, and offers some convincing connections.
So I suppose I need to ask; where do you stand on the 2003 Iraq war?
RD, surely you agree that if it was economically worthwhile for Russia to interfere in Ukraine, then it must have been economically worthwhile to US interests for the same reasons? Ukraine is a major grain producer, and Monsanto seem to have interests there since the transition of power.
Resident Dissident; “It should be noted that there were no attacks by neo Nazis or similar before the little green men ceased the Crimea and government building in Eastern Ukraine”
Far right extremists were very prominent & the most violent of demonstrators at the Maidan protests, and without their attacks it’s unlikely that things would have escalated as they did, and even then it took a massacre by mysterious snipers to ensure the implementation of the Coup;
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/25/is_the_us_backing_neo_nazis_in_ukraine_partner/
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37857.htm
Ukraine Protests Carefully Orchestrated: The Role of CANVAS, US-Financed “Color Revolution Training Group”
Resident Dissident
”the extreme right in the Ukriane have been in retreat both electorally and politically since Yanukovych fled the country”
Any evidence?
There are 30 private battalions. Two Neo-Nazi, Aidar and Azov, and another
described in this report as
”Christian Taliban”
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/18/ukraine-part-3/
Another report of fighters who have fought in Syria on the side of IS.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/27/isa-munayevs-war/
How appropriate a comparison would this be, if Wales had become an Independent country a few years ago…
Up to 50000 people blocked the centre of Cardiff again today, with no sign of the English-speaking President who it seems was forced to flee for his life. The opposition subsequently seized the Welsh Parliament and passed a motion banning the use of English in public places. The good citizens of the beautiful county of Pembrokeshire had become increasingly afraid with all the anti-English talk over several months, and this was the final straw. Happily they were protected by prompted covert action by English Armed Forces, before the county was annexed and began to organise itself for a ballot on becoming part of England. Bloodshed had been averted. Sadly, the English contingent were roundly booed in the Emergency Meeting of the United Nations Security Council.
Macky, Andy and Fedup, could you just post up who the authors of your linked articles are please? No human can read all the links coming in. It was Parry that grabbed my attention because he broke the Iran-Contras affair which we know to be true, and after that, apparently because of that, he had to move on from AP and Newsweek. It’s not just RT that suffers from propaganda by omission.
Any evidence?
Yes – the election results and positions in the government.
Peacewisher
A ridiculous strawman if I might say so.
Macky
There has been quite a lot of evidence recently that Putin may have been behind the shootings at Maidan – you can of course believe who you want, but lets just say that the KGB don’t have clean hands when it comes to manufacturing evidence do they?
As I have said already I tend to believe Snyder, Kurkov and numerous Ukrainians as to what happened at Maidan before sources close to Mr Putin. Others here obviously take a different view.
Clark
Sorry, ‘Firstlook’ is where Glen Greenwald went after the Guardian.
Peacewisher, your analogy doesn’t reflect the fact that Ukraine borders both Russia and the EU, and that Russia was opposing Ukraine’s move towards the EU.
Maidan wasn’t making any demands to be more closely tied to the US. “Fuck the EU”. Neocons.
This thread seems to be getting back to the Ukraine again, which is obviously important; but it should be noted that I stayed out of the ding-dong about this in the last thread.
Perhaps I should mention what’s known as the ‘Norwegion rocket incident’, which happened in 1995 and came within a hair’s breath of causing all-out nuclear war. I’ll give a link to the PBS, because hopefully it will be credible to all sides of the debate…
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/russia/closecall/
Not quite reported by PBS is the fact that in 1995 Russia was still in turmoil and its leader was a mega pisshead called Boris Yeltsin. Despite this, the US Government decided to launch a weather satellite from Norway, right on the borders of the disintegrating Soviet Union, which at that time still had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at the west (Russia still has at least 5000 nukes on hair-trigger alert).
The story goes that apparently the Pentagon informed the Kremlin some months before that they would be launching a weather satellite right on Russia’s borders, and please don’t mistake it for a nuclear missile strike.
Apparently the Kremlin lost this piece of international correspondence, and when the weather satellite was launched from Norway, Russian missile defences went on full alert.
Boris Yeltsin, probably now on his second bottle of vodka of the day, was handed the ‘football’ (the suitcase that the Presidents of the USA and Russia have with them constantly, which enables them to launch a nuclear strike) and, urged on by his generals, came within minutes of ‘pressing the button’.
That’s how close it came in 1995, and there’s been many other incidents like it (Operation Able Archer in the early 80s was another close call – all provocked by the West).
Anyone who speaks out against this total insanity gets labelled as a ‘Kremlin propagandist’.
Russia won’t destroy the world, nor China, the totally corrupt and vile neocons are quite insane enough to do the job.
The threat..? Go look up the size of the US military compared to those of Russia and China. Go look up how many nukes China has (actually less than France, and a tiny fraction of what the USA has), and perhaps ask yourself who is on the constant war footing here.
Resident Dissident, 10:36 pm; I agree that the election results indicate a move away from the Right. But it seems that a US plot landed Kiev with the Right in the first place. This looks like just the same pattern that Pilger has described over and over again.
RD, I’m not using any sources close to Putin. I’m using Parry, who is well connected in US intelligence and politics.
RobG, I’d rather have just had a private chat with RD really. I don’t trust most of the Russian sources myself, and it was obviously going to be pointless to present those to RD. Macky linked to Pilger, but that article had no evidence relevant to Ukraine; Pilger merely described the similarities to the pattern he’d seen before.
But Parry, a former mainstream US journalist, has been finding funding and power connections within the US, and evidence that intelligence is being misreported and suppressed, just as it was to justify Iraq 2003. That has to be taken seriously.
Here’s a quote from a review of Bloodlands:
censorship and “clean-up” as moderation, is it the rule now? Or is it to squeeze out the “undesirables”? Just like the last time round.
Clark if you are too busy to read the links what does it matter who wrote what?
Fedup, in the avalanche of links that the Ukraine debate has unleashed, it has taken me a while to find the sharpest tools. Sorry to say, John Goss has produced a huge amount of chaff from RT and sott.net etc. Vinyardsaker doesn’t help much either. I need to know who I should read and why, and which links I should show to RD, whom I now hope will take the other side of this story seriously.
Parry has the US contacts. He’s asked people close to power and intelligence in the US the questions that they tellingly refuse to answer. Questions they must know the answers to. Their silence speaks volumes.
“But it seems that a US plot landed Kiev with the Right in the first place.”
I have re -read the Parry piece and I don’t think he says this – he just says that the West is ignoring the inconvenient truth that some violent rightwingers with fascist leanings are involved in the campaign against Russia. He doesn’t say that their involvement was inspired by the US – or was it part of a US plot to attack Putin.
If we’re looking to establish bona fides. we could look at the EU deal on offer. This is the one that Yanukovych ran from like the plague, instead accepting Russia’s much better financial offer.
This is when the protests escalated.
My view is that the EU deal was so bad that Yanukovych could do nothing other than reject it.
The EU didn’t want Ukraine. They were merely acting as a go-between for US interests, so they weren’t expecting to have to accommodate the Ukraine.
Needless to say, enormous numbers of young people envisioning prosperous futures in London, Paris, Berlin etc were sorely disappointed and added to the protest numbers.
But what they dreamed of was never on offer. Their dreams were used and crushed and now their environment is more bankrupt, corrupt and barren than before.
I’m sure Adam Curtis has used sentences like the immediately above, so it’s all happened before, over and over, time and time again.
And people never seem to learn.
I’m sure that’s something to do with a lack of community or even collective consciousness and memory. And that lack is filled I suppose with some sort of media community thing where peeps are but puppets to a script.
RD, yes the first article establishes the violent right-wing extremists and the widespread “Western” media denial thereof.
You need the second article I linked to for the Neocon connections:
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/11/nulands-mastery-of-ukraine-propaganda/
It’s well worth following the various links within Consortium News. Parry is hot.
Herbie, I think the EU could have started integrating Ukraine, just as it has integrated country after country. The deal is that an incoming country serves to provide cheap labour, but the EU wealth, productivity and markets raise the wealth of the incoming nation. But the integrative process would have had to be gradual.
But the Russian power wasn’t happy with it and opposed it. Eventually it was a bit of each – remember, Russia has financial influence on the EU through gas prices. Here, Macky linked this. Third section, second paragraph:
http://www.killick1.plus.com/uploads/ukraine-summary.html
Herbie, actually, compared with other sources (I forget where – try Wikipedia) the paragraph I pasted above looks to be at the pessimistic end of assessments of the EU deal.
Clark, ever the eternal optimist: you believe those mendacious agents of reaction (paid or ideological) are here debating on good faith and are open to changing their minds, as and when they are faced with a logical and sound argument.
Alas these solipsist mono track “debaters” on the other hand are reliant on your optimism, to aid these to masquerade as ordinary punters engaged in a debate, and not agents engaged in a propaganda campaign to reinforce the corporate media message, and keep the web debate centred around the prevalent and prescribed message lines.
Craig points:
When will you get scared; finding that the crooks and liars have been for long playing you, and gaming the very system that they have constituted as “civilised and democratic rules”? Fact is there is no need to rely on the same bunch of crooks and liars to fess up; “yeah we lied”!
Given the pace of events unfolding around the globe and the speed with which these events are making their way into people’s consciousness. Clearly regardless of the degrees of control and orchestration, each and every one of us can adduce our own facts separating these facts from the torrents of noise and chaff of propaganda disseminated as “news” and “analysis”. (this is reflected in the ever increasing surveillance and oppressive measures of control introduced to combat the ever increasing wave of dissent)
Your inclement view of RT singling it as the only apparatus of propaganda somehow discounts the role that bbc, nbc, cbs, fox, ……. all play in propagandising. Furthermore, the same overlooks the fact that in face of one lot of propaganda, efforts in highlighting the opposing propaganda could in fact be a step in the direction of “clarifications” of the ambiguities that surrounds the narratives of the warring parties.
Finally you are not the only one pushed for time, in fact I have forgone a precious sleep time to reply to you, which probably will be “sanitised” in the name of moderation.
peace.
@Clark. Yes, I know. Just trying to get doubters on here to think a little deeper, and see that Russia had little choice but to act. Putin had previously been ultra-cautious; I’m sure this was his least best option, but in the end it was the only sensible one.