2009-12-25

Christmas message

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by Neil Godfrey

If I had to give a Christmas message this is it. The following news stories, one from Agence France-Presse and one from Antiwar.com, are meant to be read as a couplet.

Iraq Christians mark Christmas under threat

and

Christians United for War

Both were published on the same day, 24 December, 2009

For what it is worth nowadays, this can be found on the Wikipedia:

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, called the waging of aggressive war “essentially an evil thing…to initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”


2008-01-12

The Assyrian genocide in Iraq

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by Neil Godfrey

The Assyrian Christian population of the Middle East – Antiochian, Catholic and Orthodox – is now a fraction of what it once was, and the story of the genocide practised upon them remains largely untold. — blurb from repeat broadcast on Australia’s ABC Radio National’s Religion Report

Check the link to the podcast and / or the transcript now available.

Also check April DeConick’s Forbidden Gospels blog. I know April has taken a special interest in the fate of the Assyrians and posted more extensively on their plight.

I posted an alert to this same broadcast when first aired back in May last year, along with a fuller treatment of the meaning of the word genocide. The same program at that time discussed Christian minorities more generally throughout the Middle East, also linked on that earlier post. The podcast for this other interview is no longer available but the transcript is. For the earlier program and the additional discussion and links to Christian minorities in the Mid East see the post titled Unknown Genocide and Christians in Iraq.


2007-10-16

The Turning in Iraq has begun?

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by Neil Godfrey

It’s happening at last. Iraqis are finally coming together to form a united front for American values like liberty, the right to bear arms, to rid their country of foreign influence, and terrorists too, at last.

From The Associated Press comes the report: Six Iraqi insurgent groups announce formation of a “political council” to liberate Iraq


2007-10-02

The war from one other side: message from an Iraqi resistance

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by Neil Godfrey

Yep, it’s a propaganda video and transcript. But until we begin to listen to all sides are we not doomed to be at war without end / to the end?

A message (in English) from the Iraqi resistance

(How many in the west fed on mainstream media — that for economic and nationalist reasons tend to be megaphones for official government or corporate press releases — even know who their governments are fighting in Iraq?)


2007-08-26

Following Churchill’s Folly in Iraq

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by Neil Godfrey

An interesting set of historical echoes in a MidWeek article. (Not sure about all of Don Chapman’s analysis, especially on Iraqi attitudes to democracy and their nation — thought some recent evidence would have suggested otherwise — but an interesting recap of some facts nonetheless.)


2007-07-18

The bard says it best (article by Phil Rockstroh)

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by Neil Godfrey

Someone (sorry I forget who) observed that not one of the leaders who led the invasion of Iraq has expressed the slightest remorse for turning that country into a charnel-house. The most hope I can salvage from this is that they felt compelled to lie to their publics about their reasons for invading. (Ditto re Afghanistan — for reducing that country to a state worse than the time it had to suffer insurrectionist war after the Soviet invasion — with results even more inevitable. At least the Soviets established a reasonable sector of a civic society throughout much of that country, something the American led invasion has proved incapable of achieving.)

The reason the lying efforts of our leaders to deceive their publics — and their ongoing lies to protect their pride and justify the ongoing slaughter they have been responsible for unleashing — the reason their lying gives me hope is that it is a sign that we have moved forward a slight step morally and at least no longer tolerate outright undisguised conquest for national gain. Our publics have enough power and consciousness to require deceiving (or self-deceiving) in order to cloak the realities of power. Now, if only we can bring the media to act on behalf of a public who has a right to ask searching questions and hold leaders accountable, and no longer take the economical option of being mere mouthpieces for the numerous self-justifying press releases of those in power. . . . (Even Hitler had to avoid documentation and publicity of what he did to Gypsies, homosexuals, socialists and Jews and manufacture public-consumption pretexts for invading others — we really ARE making progress — really truly . . . . (hope hope))

The most eloquent expression of the situation now is one I read by a New York “poet, lyricist, philosopher bard”, Phil Rockstroh (philangie2000squiggleyahoo.com)

Phil Rockstroh writes:

At present, George W. Bush is unpopular with the majority of the American public not because of the murderous mayhem he has unloosed in Iraq; rather, his standing has plummeted, due to the fact, he didn’t deliver the goods.

Americans are fine with fueling our republic of road rage using the blood of Iraqis (or any other distant and darker people) as long as “the mission” doesn’t drag on too long or reveal too much about ourselves.

How did we come to be a nation of vampires who live by sustaining ourselves on the blood of others? Is our mode of collective being so toxic in the United States that a writer must bandy about metaphors culled from Gothic horror fiction to describe it?

I’m afraid it’s come to that: We are a people who psyches have grown monstrously distorted from an addiction to imperial power and personal entitlement. (Imagery of Smurfs and Teletubbies won’t rise to the analogy, albeit as terrifying as those demons of hell-bound cuteness are.)

The corporate culture of exploitation has begot a hellscape of narcissists. It is an authoritarian culture riddled in kitsch and cruelty, in nationalistic hagiography and displaced rage — all the distortions of national character inherent to privileged grotesques and ordinary monsters.

A narcissist’s actions are monstrous because his only love is the image of himself wielding control and power. (Does this remind you of anyone, perhaps someone who struts about in a flightsuit — someone prone to proclaiming himself “the decider” — someone who grows intoxicated to the point becoming insensate from a whiff of his own pheromones as he swoons in macho-narcissistic self-worship?)

And what about the everyday monsters, those who feel nothing — not outrage, not remorse, nor sorrow — by the conscience-devoid attempt made by our vampiric leaders to sustain “our way of life” on Iraqi blood?

Are you not a monster as well when you feel nothing before immense human suffering? If you are impervious to, grown inured of, or have chosen to remain ignorant of the agony of the Iraqi people, then you might as well join the ranks of the undead — because the distant landscape of corpses in Iraq and Afghanistan matches your internal deathscape.

” Bush is unpopular with the majority of the American public not because of the murderous mayhem he has unloosed in Iraq; rather, his standing has plummeted, due to the fact, he didn’t deliver the goods.”

In short, our empire’s dependence on the resources (the life’s blood) of others renders us a nation of vampires. Moreover, the corporatist character (our national character) is defined by the vampire’s trait of taking, never giving. Accordingly, what do the big monsters at the top take from us, the little monsters?

In short, our empire’s dependence on the resources (the life’s blood) of others renders us a nation of vampires. Moreover, the corporatist character (our national character) is defined by the vampire’s trait of taking, never giving. Accordingly, what do the big monsters at the top take from us, the little monsters?

To name one: our time, the precious hours of our finite lives. The corporatists are Time Vampires: For a moment, reflect on all the hours of life you’ve wasted away — in office cubicles, in commuter traffic jams, in the addictive pursuit of consumer dreck, or simply numbed-out and exhausted, rendered inert from the incessant, soul-sucking stress of the corporate state.

The corporacracy devours our time and, like the charges of a vampire, has made us dependent and slavish in return. In our bloodless enslavement, we lose the vitality borne of existing within life’s inherent mysteries and grow estranged from the deep resonances of participation mystique.

How does one begin to take back one’s soul from these elitist usurpers? Start with this: The ebullient skepticism engendered from calling out soul-numbing, self-serving authoritarian lies.

In an era as perilous as ours, it’s imperative we act with utmost urgency. Yet, tragically, the exigencies of our age are being played out against a panorama of longer, more stressful work hours, superficially ameliorated by a mass media culture comprised of ceaseless trivia and mindless distraction.

This pathology began years ago when our ancestors offered up their life’s blood to the early corporatists of the Industrial Age. Henry Ford was a gray ghoul who measured out our flesh with his productivity-measuring stopwatch; he was a cunning practitioner of the black art of convincing human beings they’re mere cogs in an inhuman machine. It was only a short trudge from there through history’s slaughterhouse to Adolf Eichmann, insulated within his vampire’s coffin of cold calculations that shielded him from the horrific implications of the system of mechanized extermination he devised.

The corporate vampire’s creed is defined by ruthless efficiency; the fear of a “loss of productivity” is the driving force of the death machine. The system is so ruthless and inhuman that it must conceal its true face, hence the rise of the telegenic undead known as the corporate media. Do not look to them to report the facts of our condition: After all, a mirror can’t reflect the image of a vampire. A vampire is empty to the core; therefore, there is nothing to reflect.

Furthermore, his emptiness is the progenitor of his destructive nature. Rather than face himself, his appetite for death will devour all in its path: rain forests, Arctic glaziers, the people of Iraq, the hours of your life, as well as your inner being.

It is the force that holds Democratic politicians in the thrall of their own fecklessness, because they answer to the same blood-sucking, corporate masters as the rest of us. Quite simply, they’re afraid of their bosses too. The Washington Beltway is a version, in miniature, of the entire soul-dead, American corporacracy. The careerist politicians within the Beltway are afflicted with the same diminution of choice — the same hyper-attenuation of the will to freedom — as the rest of us.

And what remains for us: an existence (or lack thereof) within this hierarchical hellscape of narcissists. What sort of a pathetic mode of being is this, a life shackled to the service of a monstrous system wherein one must evince the obsequies of a vampire’s bloodless lackeys?

To reverse this situation: Now is the time to drag the lies of the corporate state into the sunshine where they will writher to dust. We are not powerless: We live in a world where our collective, hidden intentions are made manifest by our outward actions.

This is why Gothic — even b-movie — metaphors are not an overwrought description of our present condition. Ergo, by the vehicle of cultural collaboration, we are a nation of world-destroying, b-movie monsters — we are a hack-scripted, second-billed feature at the drive-in movie of existence — a laughed-off-the-big-screen of the cosmos, box-office poison of a people.

We are soul-sucking creatures of kitsch. Flesh-eating zombies of conformity. Road-rage werewolves. Right-wing, talk show demons whose wrathful voices rage into empty air. Hungry ghosts wandering the aisles of supermarkets, convenience stores, restaurant chains and the food courts of shopping malls.

We are: The Fat, Mindless Blobs That Ate the Planet.

To survive, first, we must find the monster within, then drive a stake through its heart.

(Copied from http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18027.htm with permission of the author.)


2007-07-12

Defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq inevitable

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by Neil Godfrey

….. according to Micahel Scheuer, former CIA head of their bin Laden unit. (Why? Our leaders don’t care to understand Islamic extremism, dismissing it ignorantly as hatred of Western culture). Check The Age article at:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18001.htm


2007-05-31

An untold genocide and Christians in Iraq

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by Neil Godfrey

The links in this post are of real-life here-and-now importance, I think, more than most others on this blog. They point to recent radio discussions about Christians in Iraq but their importance is not just for the sake of the people directly concerned, but also for the potential they carry to inform us about today’s role of Christians in the U.S. and some closely related nations. Continue reading “An untold genocide and Christians in Iraq”


2007-04-18

The US can now be proud of Iraq

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by Neil Godfrey

America has without question successfully exported their way of life to the Emerald City in the Middle East, Baghdad, enjoying as it does the equivalent of 2 Virginia Techs every day!


2007-04-17

Faith based empire

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by Neil Godfrey

Amazing. Conquer a country and then select the loyal and the willing, the politically correct, often the youth with no experience, to run the country, flick off with scorn anyone with real knowledge or skills relevant to the country, — then set up your new ruling body in a sealed off area that is a little america, where once a year they have a cultural evening of entertainment to show what the culture is like on the outside — that’s how Rajiv Chandrasekaran discovered the US has misruled Iraq from the “green zone” in Baghdad! He discussed his experiences in “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone” (2007). Haven’t read it, but listened to a lengthy interview with him on Late Night Live last night.

Among the highlights:

A young man less than a year out of college with no experience in the stock market was put in charge of getting Iraq’s stock exchange up and running again. Result: he had it shut down for a year despite many locals willing and able to get it going immediately.

At the time of massive unemployment Bremer’s first task as he saw it was not to create jobs but to sit down and re-write the TAX laws.

Americans are so fearful of being poisoned that they import all their food into the Green Zone from outside Iraq. This includes pork and ham which of course is offensive to local Muslim workers in that zone.

Many employees in the Green Zone demonstrate not the slightest interest in life or the country outside concrete walls of the Green Zone.

But one thing not in the book, the comment on the recent bombing inside the Iraqi parliament — now that could well be a turninng point, as the bombing of the Shia mosque was that triggered the sectarian war. Without the most basic security able to be given the (supposed) rulers . . . .

And despite all the hype at the time on how hard it would have been to get past the security to blow themselves up, Rajiv explained it was not difficult at all. The only places where one goes through endless security checks is the entries to American areas. The parliament was being guarded by Iraqis with minimal checks.


2007-04-12

America’s plans for Baghdad

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by Neil Godfrey

This was originally planned to be my main blog but it is too painful by half to maintain the way I once intended. Just to hear the news brings pain. But it is the most important one in intent so must get back to it somehow.

Meanwhile, do have a look at Robert Fisk’s latest. And keep in touch with http://informationclearinghouse.info

We did what we could in the streets back in 2002 and 2003/4 to stop all this shit but I can’t believe our warnings of what would be the consequences of US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were so underestimated. Well, we got it pretty right with Afghanistan (we warned women would not be better off, that the drug trade and warlords would return, and that we’d have to settle in for a long long very long war just like the Russians and the Brits before us) — but who could have foreseen that Iraq would descend to worse than a war for liberation (or civil war if that’s what you were predicting). Trust old Negraponte from his days as ambassador to Honduras to be given just a few months in Baghdad to see the same rival killings in his wake, only on a worse scale. — How encouraging to see Shias and Sunnis come together on the 4th anniversary of the American invasion to demand the liberation of their country! How “surprise surprise” to see not a hint in Washington that it even was the 4th anniversary of the “liberation” (Russian and Nazi style) of Iraq.


2007-02-03

The Myth of an al Qaeda Takeover of Iraq

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by Neil Godfrey

Related current article: The Myth of an al Qaeda Takeover of Iraq