Oliver Craner

droid

droid

Well-known member
My uncle is big into family trees and has done a ton of research. In the last 10 years Ive discovered that on my mothers side:

  • 1 great grand uncle was executed by the British during the war of independence.
  • 1 was machine gunned by the British after the occupation of the four courts
  • 1 fought and died in Spanish civil war at the age of 17 (there's a song about him).
  • My grandfather was imprisoned by De Valera for IRA membership in the 30s.
  • My grand uncle was involved in arms shipments for the IRA in the 40's.
  • At least 40 relatives emigrated and most of one branch of the family died during the famine.

And thats just one side. This is not unusual and we are not a nationalist family by any stretch (and dare I say it, we got off very lightly by 20th century standards) but the effects echoed through the generations in ways I cant even begin to describe. A tiny fragment, a snapshot of one portion of one family... expand this exponentially, multiply by larger social, political and economic traumas and you might come to some understanding of a fraction of the suffering of the victims of unrestrained global power, or at least, be open to that understanding.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
It's different isn't it? Thirdform constructs arguments out of names. Carlyle, Lenin, Mao, Nietzsche. Theories on top of theories create impossible multidimensional structures. Whole bodies of knowledge, whole conceptual constructs meshed and bolted together. Droid is talking about actual events. Things that happen. The deaths and imprisonments and exiles of individuals.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
It's the exact opposite of the thirdform approach. One is in the air the other is on the ground.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Does bring up an interesting point about why some people might be more naturally politically engaged than others.

I wonder often why I have absolutely no interest in politics, it's something I've tried to interest myself in, like football, and I can't make it stick. My mind starts drifting off very quickly, whereas if I'm reading an essay about Flaubert or something (or about a serial killer, more likley) my cerebral ears prick up.

My parents were pretty apolitical and growing up as a white middle class man in oxfordshire was hardly the recipe for wokeness. But one of my closest friends at school grew up in the same circumstances and ended up chaining himself to nuclear power stations and so on.

Not proud of this lack of engagement, ashamed of it rather, I suspect it's to do with my extreme introversion and hatred of confrontation.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
droid said:
The colonised, the enslaved, the bombed, the wretched of the earth, they do not have the luxury of debating the merits and morality of sanctions, collateral damage, interventions & market solutions. They know all too well what these euphemisms mean, they bear the long ache of the wounds, the trauma resonating endlessly through their national psyches - whilst the denizens of pirate states play their adolescent word games of justification.
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The flipside of this is that you're deciding, for and on behalf of Iraqis, that they were better off under a kleptocratic dictator who committed genocides against his own people.

On balance I think that this does not, in itself, justify the invasion, especially considering all the various consequences it's had in the world far beyond Iraq itself. But arguments can be made in favour of it that are equally emotive to your argument against. A decision not to invade is also a decision. It's a calculus of kilodeaths either way.
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
-- We asked Amnesty International for broadbrush statistics on Saddam's crimes and were sent a report: 'Human rights record in Iraq since 1979' (K:\Press\Countries\Middle East and North Africa\Iraq\Iraq crisis 2002-3\Iraq's human rights record\Human rights in Iraq since 1979.doc).

The crimes are indeed hideous, peaking on several occasions: thousands were killed in Halabja in 1988, with thousands more killed in the crushing of the Kurdish uprising in the north and Shi'a Arabs in the South following the Gulf War in 1991. Amnesty writes of several hundred people, many civilians, killed and injured in southern marshes in 1993.

As for the last ten years, Amnesty reports of 1994: "scope of death penalty widened significantly" with "reports of numerous people executed". In 1995: "hundreds of people executed". In 1996: "Hundreds of people executed during the year, including 100 opposition members". In 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000 the same words are used: "Hundreds of executions reported". In 2001: "scores of people executed". In October 2002: "some improvement" with "release of thousands of prisoners, abolition of certain decrees prescribing the death penalty. Jan 2003, repeal of Special Codes on branding and amputation - no longer permitted." These were, we can guess, cynical acts of desperation by Saddam Hussein facing imminent attack.

Amnesty "continues to receive reports of human rights violations, including arbitrary arrests and the continuing policy of expulsion of Kurds from Kirkuk to Iraqi Kurdistan". Amnesty has also collected information on around 17,000 cases of "disappearances" over the last 20 years, the real figure may be much higher.

These crimes are hideous enough, of course - Saddam +was+ a murderous Third World dictator - but notice that the numbers of killed are reported in the hundreds every year, not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, and not millions.--
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In June 2007, a British polling firm, Opinion Research Business (ORB), conducted a further study and estimated that 1,033,000 Iraqis had been killed by then.

While the figure of a million people killed was shocking, the Lancet study had documented steadily increasing violence in occupied Iraq between 2003 and 2006, with 328,000 deaths in the final year it covered. ORB’s finding that another 430,000 Iraqis were killed in the following year was consistent with other evidence of escalating violence through late 2006 and early 2007.

Just Foreign Policy’s “Iraqi Death Estimator” updated the Lancet study’s estimate by multiplying passively reported deaths compiled by British NGO Iraq Body Count by the same ratio found in 2006. This project was discontinued in September 2011, with its estimate of Iraqi deaths standing at 1.45 million.

Taking ORB’s estimate of 1.033 million killed by June 2007, then applying a variation of Just Foreign Policy’s methodology from July 2007 to the present using revised figures from Iraq Body Count, we estimate that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed since 2003 as a result of our country’s illegal invasion, with a minimum of 1.5 million and a maximum of 3.4 million.

These calculations cannot possibly be as accurate or reliable as a rigorous up-to-date mortality study, which is urgently needed in Iraq and in each of the countries afflicted by war since 2001. But in our judgment, it is important to make the most accurate estimate we can.

Numbers are numbing, especially numbers that rise into the millions. Please remember that each person killed represents someone’s loved one. These are mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sons, daughters. One death impacts an entire community; collectively, they impact an entire nation.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/03/15/iraq-death-toll-15-years-after-us-invasion
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droid said:
...whilst the denizens of pirate states play their adolescent word games of justification.
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...
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Oi fellas, take it to another thread. This thread is for me, droid and vim to enact a subtly homoerotic becket play with each other in which we could discuss “craner”; an anthropomorphisation if our sexual longing for one another who never actually manifests.
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
...it's voices speaking for a moment, it's bodies groping their way, it's the air, it's things, it's the air among the things, that's enough, that I seek, like it, no, not like it, like me, in my own way, what am I saying, after my fashion, that I seek, what do I seek now, what it is, it must be that, it can only be that, what it is, what it can be, what what can be, what I seek...
 
yyaldrin

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
let's not forget saddam hussain was a cia asset. one of many brutal dictators put in power by the usa/uk to prevent grassroots democratic and social forces to come or stay in power.

In the middle of the Cold War the CIA took Iraq very seriously. In 1959 Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "Iraq today is the most dangerous spot on earth." More specifically the danger to western interests came from an intense, unmarried army officer with a thin voice called General Abdel Karim Kassem, who had just overthrown the Hashemite monarchy installed by Britain to rule Iraq at the end of the First World War.

As soon as he took power in 1958 Gen Kassem began to offend Britain and the US. They suspected his alliance in the streets with the powerful Iraqi Communist Party. He withdrew Iraq from the Baghdad Pact, the US-backed anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East. He appointed British-trained leftist bureaucrats to run government ministries. Most important, in 1961 he nationalised part of the concession of the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company and resurrected a long-standing Iraqi claim to Kuwait.

Britain had lost its primacy in the Middle East with its failure to overthrow Nasser in Egypt during the Suez crisis in 1956. The US was taking over its role as the predominant foreign power in the region. The CIA decided to use the Ba'ath party, a nationalist grouping with just 850 members but with strong links to the army. In 1959 a party member named Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, aged 22, had tried to assassinate Gen Kassem in Baghdad, but had been wounded in the leg.

In return for CIA help Mr Aburish says the Ba'ath party leaders also expressed willingness "to undertake a 'cleansing' programme to get rid of the communists and their leftist allies." Hani Fkaiki, one of the Ba'ath party leaders, says that the party's contact man who orchestrated the coup was William Lakeland, the US assistant military attache in Baghdad.

Accused by the Syrian Ba'ath party of co-operating with the CIA, the Iraqi plotters admitted their alliance but compared it to "Lenin arriving in a German train to carry out his revolution." Warned of plots against him, an over-confident Gen Kassem said: "I myself am the father of conspiracies."
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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...ddam-on-the-bloody-road-to-power-1258618.html
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Can anyone map out an action plan? Both a series of steps for us, the community, to take, individually and in concert, and for craner to take (god helps those who help themselves) ?
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The campaigns against the Kurds and marsh Arabs are universally regarded as genocides. Recall that genocide is the attempted destruction of a people, of a culture and a way of life, not just a mass killing, and that is exactly what was done to the marsh Arabs. It's the same use of the word 'genocide' as the sense in which Israel is accused of the commission of genocide against Palestinians.

And estimates of the death toll of the campaigns against the Kurds start at 50,000 and go into the hundreds of thousands. Droid, you are literally a genocide denier at this point.
 
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