denial
war crimes: a strategic blunder
Submitted by antarchi on October 24, 2010 - 20:55In his introduction to Animal Farm... George Orwell writes that the British (the audience for which he was writing) should not be too complacent about his satire on the crimes of the totalitarian enemy. He said in free England unacceptable ideas could be suppressed voluntarily, without the use of force. He says the reasons are that the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. In the more modern period, generally, the media are either big corporations or parts of mega corporations or closely linked to the government. The other reason—maybe more significant—is just that if you have a good education, you would have instilled into you that there are certain things that it just wouldn’t do to say.
For example, you don’t say or even think that the invasion of Iraq is a criminal aggression of the kind for which people were hanged in Nuremberg, that what you say was a strategic blunder1 was precisely what the Communist party said in the 1980s. They were under coercion. In the West, it is not coercion, it is just voluntary submission to an intellectual culture which remains overwhelmingly within narrow limits that restrict analysis, reporting, and condemnation of government action. Take this morning’s (October 5) New York Times. There is an article by a good correspondent, Steven Lee Myers, who says that Iraq is having serious problems with sectarian conflict, with chaos, which are all the results of democracy. I don’t think so. I think it is the result of the American invasion. But you can’t say or think that.
defending ahmedinejad (apparently)
Submitted by antarchi on October 1, 2009 - 18:42Is Ahmedinejad anti-semitic, is he holocaust denying - and does it matter? Should we bother to defend him if we think that he is not?
I think we should. Partly because he deserves, as any human being does, to be considered innocent until he has been found guilty, but mostly because this story about Ahmedinejad is being used to sell another war. Whatever he is, he is not deserving of a war, nor are the people in his country who will suffer it.
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the 12 warmest years
Submitted by antarchi on June 23, 2009 - 00:57The 12 warmest years on record within the past 150 years have been during the past 13 years: 1998 was the warmest, followed by 2005, 2002, 2003, and 2004.
genocide inflation: kosovo
Submitted by antarchi on December 21, 2007 - 20:08[Genocide inflation] occurred before and during NATO’s 78-day bombing war on Yugoslavia and takeover of Kosovo. The pre-bombing propaganda barrage claiming Serb misbehavior was massive, and then during the war itself there was a stream of hysterical claims of indiscriminate killing, official U.S. claims of Bosnian Muslim deaths reaching 500,000, with a very profuse use of the word “genocide.” After the war, the claimed deaths quickly fell to 11,000, and one of the greatest forensic body searches in history produced only 4,000 bodies (with some 2,000 still reportedly missing).
genocide in one small town
Submitted by antarchi on December 21, 2007 - 20:05the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 has survived as a now institutionalized “genocide.” But it has done so in the face of intractable problems: the NATO-organized and compliant Yugoslav Tribunal identified it as such by finding that there could be genocide in one small town, where the genocidists had bussed to safety all the women and children of their target population, and where the claims of 8,000 executed have never been verified by forensic or credible witness evidence of anything like this scale of killing. It lives on by virtue of its political utility and aggressive challenges to its truthfulness as “revisionism” and “denial.”
genocide denial: iraq
Submitted by antarchi on December 21, 2007 - 19:30The million Iraqi deaths from the “sanctions of mass destruction” of the 1990s is unmentioned in Samantha Power’s ludicrous treatise on genocide (“A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide), just as she fails to deal seriously with the Indonesian massacres in East Timor. The U.S.-coalition invasion-occupation of Iraq from 2003 has added another million to the Iraqi toll, but the idea that this is “genocide” is inexpressible in the U.S. mainstream media, which is focused on the more politically convenient killings in Darfur - attributable to a Western target, the Arab government of the Sudan, hence subject to the invidious word genocidal. This is implicit but real denial, which follows from the political basis of naming and concern.
