Kultur, natur og modstand
McCain påstår, han gik rundt på gaden i Baghdad uden beskyttelse, at general Petraeus går rundt uden livvagter, sender Al-Qaeda til Iran, mener, at han ville have håndteret orkanen Katrina bedre end Bush og kan i det hele taget ikke huske fra sin næse til sin mund.
Måske Obama alligevel har en chance (so help us God)?
Journalisten og forfatteren David Lindorff mener i en artikel på CounterPunch, at Obama er ved at tabe valget. Hvorfor?
Ifølge Lindorff, fordi han er ved at begå samme fejl som Gore i 2000 og Kerry i 2004: Han trækker mod højre for ikke at støde de mere “traditionelle”, borgerlige demokrater der bare gerne vil af med George W. Bush og al hans væsen, og udvisker dermed forskellen på McCain og ham selv – samme fejl, som den danske opposition med Socialdemokratiet i spidsen har gjort i mange år:
Hvis Kerry reelt var “Bush light”, hvis Kerry stod for fortsat krig med Irak, hvor Bush stod for fortsat krig med Irak, hvis Kerry stod for angreb på Iran, hvor Bush stod for angreb på Iran, hvis Kerry sagde “skattelettelser”, hvor Bush sagde “skattelettelser” – hvorfor skulle folk så ikke hellere ville have den ægte vare?
I Danmark gælder det samme – hvis Helle Thorning reelt er “Fogh light”, Lars Løkke Rasmussens økonomiske politik og George Bushs udenrigspolitik kombineret med så meget af Dansk Folkepartis udlændingepolitik, som hun kan få SF til at sluge, hvorfor så ikke hellere, hvis man endelig har dé tilbøjeligheder, gå efter den ægte vare?
Og Obama er ved at gå samme vej, kunne det tyde på. Som antydet på billedet, har han støttet et lovforslag, der legaliserer aflytning af telefonsamtaler uden dommerkendelse. Udenrigspolitisk trækker han tættere og tættere på McCain, givetvis i et misforstået forsøg på at virke “ansvarlig“. Hvis det ikke virkede i 2000 og heller ikke virkede i 2004, så virker det nok denne gang:
Obama, who ran his primary campaign as a liberal, staking out an anti-war position, has morphed over recent weeks into a Republican-lite candidate, calling for a hard line against Palestinian rights, threatening to attack Iran, calling for an expansion of the disastrous war in Afghanistan, and backing away from genuine health care reform and other important progressive goals here at home.
One might think that after watching Democratic candidates lose the last two presidential elections by following exactly this kind of “strategy,” if it can be called that, Obama and his campaign managers would have decided to try something different, but it appears that the Democratic Party at the top is hopelessly in the grip of corporate interests that favor war, free-market nostrums and corporate welfare.
Obama got where he is—the first African-American major party nominee and the first black candidate with a real shot at winning the White House—by appealing to the Democratic Party’s liberal base. Now Zogby reports that Obama’s support among liberals has plunged 12 percent. That’s liberals folks!…
How can I or any progressive vote for a presidential candidate who goes from opposing a war to saying he not only supports the idea of keeping troops in Iraq for another five years—the length of the entire WWII!—but who further says he won’t rule out attacking Iran, even if that country poses no imminent threat to the US, simply because it develops nuclear weapons—the same weapons that our putative friends, Pakistan and India, have? How can I vote for a candidate who wants to expand the military (by 65,000 troops) instead of shrinking this huge, bloodsucking parasite of an organization which is costing as much as the rest of the world spends on its armies?
How can I or any progressive vote for a presidential candidate who cannot state categorically that he will defend the Constitution by reversing all of President Bush’s abuses of power and who will not promise to prosecute the president and members of his administration for any crimes committed while in office?
Obama is not just losing liberals in droves. Many liberals, after all, will in the end return and vote for grudgingly for Obama, though they probably won’t volunteer to do any of the critical campaign work registering voters, promoting his candidacy or getting people to the polls. The worst part is that by becoming just another middle-of-the-road, namby-pamby, Republican-lite clone of Kerry circa 2004 and Gore circa 2000, Obama is losing the young and also the disaffected, unaffiliated voters who were flocking to his campaign during the primaries. This group of erstwhile enthusiasts is down 12 percent, too. And it’s those people—particularly the unaffiliated voters–who are raising McCain’s numbers. The Zogby poll reports that McCain’s support among younger voters has reached 40 percent—not that much below Obama’s 52 percent.
Det fremhævede (min fremhævning) er vigtigt, fordi det også betyder, at Obama kan miste noget af det, som gjorde en virkelig forskel under primærvalgene, nemlig støtte fra aktivister og græsrødder. Under primærvalgene kunne man skaffe aktivister til at stemme noget nær samtlige dørklokker i de vigtigste områder. Hvem gider gøre noget sådant for “McCain light”?
Hermed ikke være sagt, at Obama som præsident ikke ville være at foretrække. “Obama som præsident” er en forestilling, der faktisk giver håb for fremtiden. Men han har efterhånden (og forudsigeligt) trukket i land på så mange områder, at det nærmere vil være symbolet Obama og de krav om forandring, symbolet Obama vil føre med sig, der vil gøre forskellen; politikeren Obama er som en anden Tony Blair efterhånden så svær at skelne fra en republikaner, at det næsten kunne være det samme.
• S/MIME standards group debated using digital signatures on
their mailing list
– For people you know, you can authenticate messages based
on content (semantic integrity)
– For people you don’t know, a signature is irrelevant
• Also, digital signatures are just a royal pain to work with
• Result: The S/MIME standards developers decided to forgo
using S/MIME signed messages
Når doktoren selv nægter at tage sin egen medicin, siger det (ikke så) lidt om produktets kvaliteter. Det hjælper heller ikke, at håndteringen af X.509-certifikater (som bruges af digital signatur) er så uigennemskuelig, som den er, så det kan være svært at finde ud af, hvilket man bruger til hvad og hvorfor.
En læser kritiserer os i en kommentar for ikke at have en side om “sandheden” om 11. september 2001.
Nåja, jeg har da ellers skrevet lidt om det, se f.eks. her og her.
En nylig diskussion på iNorden førte mig frem til en artikel af den britiske aktivist George Monbiot, som jeg synes, siger det rimeligt klart:
To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile while persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the twin towers with explosives without attracting attention and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes and induce them all to have kept their mouths shut, for ever…
The obvious corollorary to the belief that the Bush administration is all-powerful is that the rest of us are completely powerless. In fact it seems to me that the purpose of the “9/11 truth movement” is to be powerless. The omnipotence of the Bush regime is the coward’s fantasy, an excuse for inaction used by those who don’t have the stomach to engage in real political fights.
The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a displacement activity. A displacement activity is something you do because you feel incapable of doing what you ought to do. A squirrel sees a larger squirrel stealing its horde of nuts. Instead of attacking its rival, it sinks its teeth into a tree and starts ripping it to pieces. Faced with the mountainous challenge of the real issues we must confront, the chickens in the “truth” movement focus instead on a fairytale, knowing that nothing they do or say will count, knowing that because the perpetrators don’t exist, they can’t fight back. They demonstrate their courage by repeatedly bayoneting a scarecrow.
Som Monbiot påpeger, er dette sludder ikke blot ørkes- og nyttesløst, det er også skadeligt, fordi det lægger gift for enhver seriøst arbejdende opposition. Hvilket er trist, ikke mindst, fordi der faktisk er mere end rigeligt af reelle ting at protestere imod.
Sandheden om Bush-regeringen, Al-Qaeda, Irak og Afghanistan er faktisk slem nok, som den er. Vi behøver ikke drømme umulige sammensværgelser op i tilgift.
We can’t forgive or forget the atrocities of Iran-Contra, My Lai, Wounded Knee, or the many other shameful moments in American imperial history, because the price of forgetfulness is fresh horrors, in Abu Ghraib, in Guantanamo, in Afghanistan.
Den omtalte tegneserie ser i øvrigt også ret spændende ud.
Jfr. The Guardian:
Responding to a question about whether evil exists and “if it exists, should we negotiate with it, contain it or defeat it”, McCain had a Dr Strangelove moment, almost shouting: “Defeat it! If I am president of the United States, my friends, I will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell and I will get him.”
Hvis nogen var i tvivl om, hvorvidt McCain er skingrende vanvittig den rette mand til jobbet.
Den britiske terrorlovgivning, der tillader fængsling uden sigtelse i flere måneder, har kostet den britiske statsborger Hicham Yezza adskillige uger i fængsel over en gansle absurd anklage, der dybest set var baseret på tilstedeværelsen på hans computer af et åbenbart meget farligt dokument, der ellers er offentligt tilgængeligt og var downlaodet fra CIAs hjemmeside, som han skriver i dagens Guardian:
These laws have destroyed my life.
On May 14 I was arrested under section 41 of the Terrorism Act – on suspicion of the “instigation, preparation and commission of acts of terrorism”: an absurdly nebulous formulation that told me nothing about the sin I had apparently committed. Once in custody, almost 48 hours passed before it was confirmed that the entire operation (involving dozens of officers, police cars, vans, and scientific support agents) was triggered by the presence on my University of Nottingham office computer of an equally absurd document called the “al-Qaida Training Manual”, a declassified open-source document that I had never read and had completely forgotten about since it had been sent to me months before.
Rizwaan Sabir, a politics student friend of mine (who was also arrested), had downloaded the file from the US justice department website while conducting research on terrorism for his upcoming PhD. An extended version of the same document (which figures on the politics department’s official reading list) was also available on Amazon. I edit a political magazine; Rizwaan regularly sent me copies of research materials he was using, and this document was one.
Within hours of my incarceration I had lost track of time. I often awoke thinking I had been asleep for days only to discover it wasn’t midnight yet. My confidence in the competence (and motives) of the police ebbed away. I found myself shifting my energies from remaining cheerful to remaining sane. In the early hours, I was often startled by the metallic toilet seat, crouched in the corner like some sinister beast.
Men er det ikke det værd, hvis det så engang ender med, at vi får fanget nogen tæoister? Yezza advarer om, at vi ikke må undervurdere den tortur det er, pludselig at blive indespærret uden grund:
I’m constantly coming across efforts being made to give detention without charge the Walt Disney treatment: the crushing weight of solitary confinement is painted as a non-issue; the soul-sapping nothingness of the claustrophobic, cold cell is portrayed as a mild inconvenience. Make no mistake: the feeling that one’s fate is in the hands of the very people who are apparently trying to convict you is, without doubt, one of the most devastating horrors a human being can ever be subjected to. It is (to misquote Carl von Clausewitz) the continuation of torture by other means.
“Those who have nothing to hide, have nothing to fear,” goes the tautological reasoning of the paranoia merchants calling for harsher, ever more draconian “security” measures – as we saw throughout the 42-days debate. They should read Kafka: nothing is more terrifying than being arrested for something you know you haven’t done. Indeed, it is the innocent who suffers the most because it is the innocent who is tormented the most. The guilty calculates, triangulates, anticipates. The innocent doesn’t know where to start. The answers and the questions are absolute, unbreachable, towering conundrums.
Men er det ikke at gøre for meget ud af det – han bliver anholdt, kendt uskyldig, renset og løsladt, og så er den potte ude. Har det ikke været det hele værd, så, hvis den samme procedure kunne forhindre et angreb eller to? Hicham Yezza, der betegner sig selv som en intellektuel, der pludselig så hele sin eksistens mistænkeliggjort (“a vocal opponent of the Iraq war yet owns all of Christopher Hitchens’ writings; admires Terry Eagleton yet defends Martin Amis; interviews Kazuo Ishiguro, listens to Leonard Cohen, goes to Radiohead concerts”), tegner et noget mere dystert billede af den grundløse isolationsfængslings konsekvenser:
Outside, lives are shattered, jobs are lost, marriages are destroyed, minds are damaged, friends and families are traumatised – often irrevocably so. My parents, whom I wasn’t allowed to call, could barely get any sleep throughout the ordeal. Many of my Muslim university friends were, and still are, worried about being targeted themselves. For most of my loved ones, despite my innocence, nothing will ever be the same again. I’m now jobless, facing destitution and threatened with deportation from the country I’ve called home for nearly half my life.
Dystert, og desværre kun alt for overbevisende. Go read!
Online-leksikonnet Wikipedia kritiseres ofte for ikke at være helt pålideligt og for ikke at vægte sit stof rigtigt, fordi det ikke har nogen egentlig redaktion.
Den danske udgaves opslag om Jyllands-Posten er dog særdeles informativt hvad avisens historiske rødder angår:
Historisk er avisen kendt for at indtage en klar højrekonservativ linje. I 1920’erne og 30’erne vakte avisen opsigt med dens udtalte sympati for fascismen og forståelse for det tyske nazi-diktatur. Da Benito Mussolini i 1922 blev leder af en fascistisk koalitionsregering i Italien, skrev avisen: “Den meget stærke mand, som Mussolini ubetinget er, er netop, hvad det misregerede italienske folk trænger til” [1]. I 1933 argumenterede avisen sågar for indførelse af diktatur i Danmark: “Nu ved vælgerne, at folkestyret er forvandlet til et rent partistyre, uden hvilket saglige hensyn skubbes til side for de partipolitiske. Og derfor kan man gå ud fra, at et flertal af vælgerne oprigtigt ønsker diktaturet som den eneste udvej til sunde forhold i statsstyret”.
Avisen var også meget positiv over for Adolf Hitlers magtovertagelse i Tyskland og Weimar Republikkens fald. Avisen skrev således i marts 1933: “Der vil også kun blive grædt tørre tårer ved Weimar-forfatningens grav . . . Hvor ejendommeligt det måske end kan lyde, er den kun 12-årige tyske forfatning med dens enkammersystem, dens lave valgretsalder – 20 år – og forholdstalsvalgmåden nemlig allerede forældet…” og senere samme måned: “Det tyske diktatur betyder således både en fordel og en fare for Europa. En fordel, fordi der derved er rejst et stærkt bolværk mod kommunismen, og socialdemokratiet på samme tid er blevet sat grundigt på plads. Og en fare, fordi det foreløbig ikke kan undgå at forøge spændingen og nervøsiteten for en ny krig.”
I juni 1933 skrev avisen yderligere blandt andet: “Mussolini reddede Italien fra den kommunistiske syndflod, som et udueligt parlamentarisk styre havde gjort det modent til, og ingen kan vel bestride, at hans diktatur har været en velgerning for det italienske folk. Tyskland stod foran en lignende katastrofe, da Hitler banede sig vej til magten, og det kan derfor ikke undre, at han foretager en kraftig udrensning i de marxistiske partier, der har hovedansvaret for den skæbnesvangre udvikling . De partipolitiske godtfolk, der bavler mest om demokrati og frihed, er her som alle andre steder de sletteste statsstyrere, og de må følgelig sættes helt ud af spillet, inden genrejsningen kan gennemføres…” [2]
(…)
Den 15. november 1938, blot få dage efter krystalnatten, hvor nazisterne i Tyskland ødelagde mere end 1000 synagoger, flere tusinde jødiske forretninger og hjem, og fordrev omkring 30.000 jødiske mænd til koncentrationslejre, bragte Jyllands-Posten en leder hvori man udtrykte sympati for aktionen og for det nazistiske syn på jøderne. Avisen skrev blandt andet: “Naar man har fulgt Jødespørgsmaalet i Europa i Aartier, kan man til en vis Grad forstaa Tyskernes Animositet overfor Jøderne, ogsaa hvis man ser bort fra de Raceteorier, der betyder saa meget i den nationalsocialistiske Verdensopfattelse […] Vi ved, at Titusinder af Jøder fordømmer de jødiske Forretningshajer, de jødiske Pornografispekulanter og de jødiske Terrorister. Men alligevel kan det ikke benægtes, at de Erfaringer, som Tyskerne – som mange andre Fastlands-Folk – har gjort med Hensyn til Jøderne, danner en vis Basis for deres Forfølgelser. Man maa indrømme Tyskland, at det har Ret til at skille sig af med sine Jøder.” [5]
Og tiderne har ikke ændret sig meget siden da – ser man på avisens lille stunt med Muhammed-karikaturerne og på avisens ledere om emner som arbejdsløshed, indvandring og muslimer eller integration, ser man at Jyllands-Posten har været hundrede procent på linje med de allermest rabiate høge på den internationale højrefløj – en slags Dansk Folkepartis menighedsblad i tiende potens.
Og ser man på avisens historie, opdager man altså, at det ingenlunde er tilfældigt: Også i trediverne var Jyllands-Posten fascisternes og medløbernes avis. Carsten Juste og Flemming Rose kommer ikke ud af intet, men følger en stolt tradition.
… det er i hvert fald det indtryk, man kan få efter at have læst de danske aviser.
The Guardian fortæller som en slags modvægt om, hvordan det ser ud for øjenvidner i den syd-ossetiske hovedstad:
“The Georgians could not get tanks through these narrow streets. So first they turned it to ruins with a Grad attack and tried to punch through here to the centre of the city. There was heavy fighting in the streets. I think more than 500 bodies were pulled out of this part of town.”
Asked if there had been atrocities against civilians the Colonel replied: “I personally saw one man beheaded lying in the street and others say they witnessed civilians who had been finished off with a shot to the back of the head.”
Hvis man har så travlt med at holde orden i sit “eget land” – hvorfor så en sådan brutalitet overfor civile?
Georgiens “demokratisk valgte” præsident (som i virkeligheden kom til magten ved et kup, hvorefter hans styre blev blåstemplet ved et valg, hvor han fik 96% af stemmerne – lyder mere bekendt, end godt er) er nu i øvrigt i selvsving over, at USA ifølge ham vil overtage landets lufthavne og havne og tage sig kærligt af russerne derfra.
Noget tyder dog på, at det ikke kommer til at ske sådan foreløbig (man har da altid lov at håbe).
Last year US embassy employees in the heart of the Green Zone complained that they were ordered not to wear body armour and helmets if they were photographed or filmed standing beside John McCain because their attire might seem to contradict his claim that Baghdad was a safer place than was being reported. When Vice President Dick Cheney visited there was a ban in the Green Zone on sounding the siren which normally gives a few seconds warning of incoming rocket or mortar rounds. Cheney’s staffers thought the sirens’ menacing wail might suggest to American television viewers that all was not as well in Iraq as the vice president was claiming. In the case of Barack Obama’s visit on 21 July much of central Baghdad was closed down to guarantee his safety, deep though he was within the Green Zone. A friend called Gaylan had taken his car out to get its air conditioner fixed in the Karada district of east Baghdad when US troops stopped all traffic at 12.15pm. Caught in the torrid heat of the Iraqi summer, he and other drivers were not allowed to move again until six in the evening.
Ingen rører sig, mens operation photo op er i gang! I grunden utroligt, at det amerikanske militær vil lade sig misbruge til den form for “tryghedsteater”; mindre utroligt, at irakerne er trætte af en så arrogant besættelsesmagt og gerne vil have dem hjem.