Lying the Truth

Four Months later, Nothing has Changed.

2009-07-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

I have not blogged for 4 months for several reasons. One of them being that I got totally discouraged with the Obama "change" that did not happen. And when the opposite of positive change happens day after day, I had to get away from it for the time being.

However, I only could stay away from the daily doses of disgusting news for so long and decided that writing about what keeps me occupied is like a good dose of medicine every time I post my thoughts about the destruction we encounter every time we get onto the Internet. It does not matter if anybody reads these rants or whatever they are.

Four Months later, Nothing has Changed

Obama, the Messiah Orator, has been a total disappointment from day one, January 20, 2009, the day of his inauguration. The promise of real change that made believers of a lot of the feeble minded masses turned out to be a hoax and a nasty one for that. A short list of Obama created miracles:

1) We are leaving Iraq, but we are keeping at least 50.000 troops plus an unknown number of mercenaries in place to accommodate the proper and smooth takeover of Iraq's oil fields by the world's major oil companies.
2) We are "not" leaving Afghanistan, that is until we get thrown out of the place. In the meantime we will murder and torture as many Afghan people as we can.
3) We have extended our destructive behaviour in a major way to Pakistan where under our tutelage the Pakistani army has managed to kill scores of people in Waziristan and make up to 2 million people refugees in their own country. Another inhumane feat of US meddling in affairs we have no business meddling in. Our drones will continue to mass murder innocent women and children.
4) We are not sure when and who is going to teach Iran a lesson in humility by destroying their nuclear facilities, however you can bet your boots that it will happen while Obama is President and that Israel will be the main destroyer of human live (again) with the encouragement of the US Congress.
5) We have made sure that North Korea is on its way to make a few more nuclear bombs which eventually we will force them to use so we have an excuse to obliterate the place with our newest nuclear weapons.
6) The employment rate is soaring but we have decided that only banks and US automobile companies need massive taxpayer provided bailouts. The ordinary man or the "mob" as the elites see them do not need any help to self destruct.
7) We have bankrupted the country and it is only a matter of time when the rug will be pulled from under our manipulated and criminal financial system.
8) As a result we will feel obliged to rain more murder, torture and mayhem on the people that hate us because of our freedom.
9 We have become a fascist, totalitarian corporate owned state with a President as figurehead unable to change anything for the good of the common people. Greed rules, corruption is the standard and God bless America.

I will be back with more on both the American and Canadian political systems, the people who call themselves our leaders and the threat they present to the survival of humanity.

Hans Denee

The United States of America: the Bankruptcy of a Totalitarian Kleptocracy.

2009-03-04T13:25:00.000-08:00

Six weeks into the Obama Administration's building on the legacy of criminality of its predecessor we are faced with the possibility of a total collapse of the integrity of society as a result of the ongoing destruction of the financial and economic systems by the government and its powerful insiders.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are doled out by the insiders (Geithner, Bernanke, Summers et al), without supervision, to the financial institutions controlled by the elites. A war "without end" in Iraq, a "bigger" war in Afghanistan and possible new wars/escalations in Pakistan and Iran. A trillion dollar Defense Dept. budget and a one and three quarter trillion budget deficit financed through the use of that great invention, the Printing Press. Renditions will continue and so will Torture, however this time around we promise to do a better job of hiding these criminal acts from the mob. Putting innocent people away in our world wide network of dungeons will continue and of course the right of habeas corpus will not apply to these so called terrorists. We will continue to be the lapdog of AIPAC, LIKUD and the extremists in the Israeli government. We will not talk to the democratically elected government in Gaza or to Hezbollah in Lebanon for that matter. Iran remains on the top of our "destroy" to do list because Israel and AIPAC say so.
We are an Empire now and we make our own realities on an as need basis. We are also on the road to our Economic Demise in the near future; a demise accelerated by hubris, greed, self delusion and economic collapse. We preach to the choir but are morally and ethically challenged and our hypocrisy does know no bounds. "Do as we say, not as we do", should be our national forehead sticker.

This may be a good time to reflect on our involvement in what is being done in our name by the power elites and the corporations that control what is now without a doubt a Totalitarian Kleptocracy in which "democracy" is managed as a way to subdue, dumb down and control the mob.

As the willing participants in this grand scheme of lies, manipulation and deception we should have anticipated the outcome that is now staring us in the face; moral, financial and economic collapse. Aggressive wars, the military industrial complex and Ponzi schemes is what is left of the American Dream; national bankruptcy will be next.

We are today confronted - close up - with the scheming elites who made our jobs disappear, stole our money and took over the government by corrupting the election process with the use of their lobbyists on K street. Their aim is to keep control over the government, our money and the mob, if necessary with the help of the armed forces and National Guard.

Call it Managed Democracy or a Managed Police State; it is all a matter of violation of humanity, you and me.

Hans Denee

Reflections on Pain and Desperation.

2009-02-04T15:09:00.000-08:00

It took a long two years to elect Obama and a mere two weeks to come to the conclusion that nothing ever changes in the centers of power in this world.

The overwhelming pain that comes with denial and hope is a reminder of false promises and misplaced euphoria. The mind absorbs the pictures through a foggy lens of believe into the possibility that a better world can be reached if only the picture would get sharper and images of torture, murder and rape could be dissolved into a resolve to help the unfortunate and threatened multitudes that stare at us through our lens with that look of helplessness and angst. The burning of the images into our collective brains should stop us cold and make us reflect on our guilt of living a live of greed and excess and being unable to show or feel compassion for the dead, mutilated and raped. We have degenerated into a mirror image of the people we despised and who brought us Auschwitz, Gulags, Sabra, Shatila, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon/06, Gaza/08/09, Zimbabwe, DR Congo, Ceylon, Yugoslavia and Darfur. We do not care about the people we rape, torture or murder and more often than not, we blame our victims for their demise and misery. The power elite's propaganda machine has turned us into willing objects of deceit and lies. To see and understand the reality of a world gone astray once again, is a possibility to be avoided at all cost in case the masses might get the wrong idea. Dumbed down and terrorised by our glorious leaders, we submit our "useless" selves to the manipulations of our chosen torturers.

We have all become desensitised to the crimes committed by our leaders in our name and prefer not to think about the consequences of our murderous actions in far away places, occupied by people who "deserve" what is coming to them. Our self righteousness and moral supremacy dictates that whatever we do to our perceived enemies is always good, but whenever those enemies defend themselves against our often illegal and criminal actions, they are in the wrong; we call them terrorists and worse. In our manipulated way of thinking - assuming we are still able to think at all - we are the ones who are defending ourselves against the evil of unknown foreign entities that are out to kill us. It will never occur to the masses that we are brain washed and terrorised into believing this fairy tale of permanent danger to the Homeland. It is really sad to observe the acquiescence of the American People to the demolition of their constitutional rights, together with a general approval of all forms of illegal government behaviour including the officially sanctioned use of torture on bought and renditioned people that are no threat to us. In our infinite stupidity and immorality we have become what we are afraid off, terrorists, rapists and murderers without a conscience or empathy. We do not longer protest the unjust actions of the power elites or for that matter the greed and criminality of the people that have wrecked the financial system, instead we stay quiet afraid to make a stir.

Silence is our way to approve of the crimes committed in our name.

Hans Denee

It would be nice if .................

2009-01-27T14:19:00.000-08:00

................................Stephen Harper would get a heart with brains attached so that he stops speaking his mind without checking his heart first.

1)In stead of blaming the Palestinians in the Gaza Ghetto for the death and destruction visited upon them by the IDF, he could have shown some empathy with the hundreds of children, women and men that were murdered by the Israelis in their so called act of self defense. The people of Gaza have been mistreated by the state of Israel since 1948, when the Jewish terrorist organisation Irgun, expelled the Palestinians from their lands in what is now called Israel and herded most of them into the Gaza strip. In the last two years the state of Israel has been slowly strangling, suffocating and starving the one and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Ghetto. On November 4, 2008 Israel proceeded to kill 6 Palestinians and provoked a rocket response by Hamas. Hamas was prepared for a renewed cease fire, however Israel had been planning the onslaught on Gaza for months. Next time Mr Harper opines about the situation in Israel, the West bank and Gaza, he should show some balance, heart and spine, assuming he has these things.Stand up to the Israeli propaganda and call war crimes and murder of innocents for what they are, "CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY".

2)This would help the child soldier Omar Khadr who has been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for the last 7 years to come home to Canada and receive the help he obviously needs. Every government in the western world, that had its citizens imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, has pushed Washington to return their citizens, except the soulless Harper government. Omar Khadr was 15 years old when he was captured by the Americans in Afghanistan; he has been tortured by the Americans. Mr Harper and his judicial advisers know that everything that has happened to Omar Khadr is illegal under International laws and the Geneva Conventions. As a willing participant in the immoral and illegal schemes of the American government, the Harper government and Mr Harper in particular have shown us the immorality of Canada's Politicians.

3)It would also get us, as a country, out of Afghanistan in a hurry; a war we decided to fight instead of going into Iraq with the much maligned Americans. Canada has no business being in Afghanistan and has lost more than 100 soldiers there in the last 5 years. Canada's Afghanistan war is a war of aggression and interference in the internal politics of a country on the other side of the globe. It is a war that the United States with the help of NATO cannot win; the British twice and the Russians once tried to conquer, occupy and control Afghanistan without any success. With a mindless determination the Obama administration is slowly but surely extending the Afghanistan war into a war with Pakistan, blind to the consequences of antagonising one hundred and fifty million Muslims in that country. Canada will be sucked into this coming disaster, unless we decide to quit now, go home and become a peace keeping country again.

4)The economic disaster that has struck the world in early 2008 should have been recognized by these charlatans, before they were forced into retreat after an offensive October economic update, that ended in the prorogue of parliament until January 26, 2009. In order to save their collective behinds, they have been playing nice with the Canadian electorate and the opposition in order to come up with a budget that hopefully will stop the economic boogie man from wrecking the Canadian economy completely. The Harper government's partisan tactics in October, 2008 have resulted in the delay of preventive measures for the last three months.

Maybe, next time check your "warm" caring heart before using your "icy" self centered brains Mr Harper; we may even become to like you, if only a little.

Hans Denee

Captive Nation; how Gaza became a Palestinion Prison.

2009-01-23T09:22:00.000-08:00

January 26, 2009 Issue Copyright © 2009 The American Conservative
Captive Nation PDF
How Gaza became a Palestinian prison
By Avi Shlaim
The only way to make sense of Israel’s senseless war in Gaza is through historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On June 2, 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by “an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders.” I used to think that this judgment was too harsh, but Israel’s assault on Gaza and the Bush administration’s complicity have reopened the question.
I served loyally in the Israeli army in the 1960s and have never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the 1967 War had little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic, and military control over the Palestinian territories.
With a population of refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza’s prospects were never bright. Yet this is not an instance of economic underdevelopment but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into hewers of wood and the drawers of water—a source of cheap labor and a captive market for Israeli goods. Local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination and establish the economic underpinnings essential for independence.
In 2005, Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25 percent of the territory, 40 percent of the arable land, and the lion’s share of scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in unimaginable misery. Eighty percent still subsist on less than $2 per day. Living conditions remain an affront to civilized values, a powerful precipitant to resistance, and a breeding ground for extremism.
In August 2005, a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout, withdrawing settlers and destroying the houses they left behind. Sharon presented the withdrawal as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible.
The real purpose behind the move was to redraw the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to peace but to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral move undertaken in what was seen as the Israeli national interest.
Israel’s settlers were withdrawn, but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip. The Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and terrorize the hapless inhabitants.
Israel portrays itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognize the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely a terrorist organization.
America and the EU joined Israel in demonizing the Hamas government and trying to bring it down. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied.
Israel’s propaganda machine purveys the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antiSemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics. But the truth is that the Palestinians are a normal people with normal aspirations. They want a piece of land on which to live in freedom and dignity.
Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it moved toward pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire. But Israel refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.
It continued to play the old game of divide-and-rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel supported nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. American neoconservatives participated in the plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to preempt a Fatah coup.
The war on Gaza is the culmination of confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people who elected it to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas until it agrees to a ceasefire on Israel’s terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians are seen by the world as a humanitarian problem, derailing their struggle for statehood.
As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression, but the asymmetry of power leaves little room for doubt as to who the real victim is. To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak—terror. The damage caused by these primitive Qassam rockets is minimal, but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Israel has the right to act in self-defense, but its response has been disproportionate. In the three years since the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis have been killed by rocket fire. In 2005 to 2007 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.
Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas—and Israel’s record is one of unremitting brutality toward the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel maintained the blockade after the ceasefire came into force, which in the view of Hamas leaders amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip. Officially, 49.1 percent of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing civilians could protect Israel. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment forbidden by international law.
The brutality of Israel’s soldiers is matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. Its core messages are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel’s objective is the defense of its population; and that Israel’s forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt civilians. But it was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire, with a raid into Gaza on Nov. 4 that killed six Hamas men. Israel’s objective is not just the defense of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002: it involves concessions and compromises.
Israel’s record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with “an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders.” A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses WMD, and practices terrorism—the use of violence against civilians for political purposes.
Israel’s real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbors but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians are of course free to repeat lies and mistakes. But it is not mandatory to do so. __________________________________________
Avi Shlaim is author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and Lion of Jordan: King Hussein’s Life in War and Peace. This essay is adapted from a piece that originally appeared in The Guardian.
The American Conservative welcomes letters to the editor.Send letters to: letters@amconmag.com

Israel, a Wasteland of Criminals and Murderers.

2009-01-20T16:20:00.000-08:00

As predicted, this little Olmert/Barak/Livni - for political reasons - war has ended just in time for the American masses to welcome their Messiah on this January inauguration day. Olmert claims they won and the stack of dead children's bodies was well worth it; it is now up to us (Israel) to decide how much, if any of the devastated areas in the Gaza Ghetto is going to be rebuild. In other words, as little as possible so we can make their (the Palestinians) lives even more miserable than before we started this evil little mas murder campaign. The murderers of more than 1,400 Palestinian children, women and men are gloating over their perceived victory over a defenseless people locked up in vast Ghetto. Their self congratulatory chest beatings are accompanied by a vast, world wide, Jewish propaganda network that hopefully convinces most of the uninformed Westerners, that this war was a just war, a war for self defense. The "real" story and history gets drowned out by the beat of the propaganda drums in Washington DC and most European Capitals; Israeli brain washing and intimidation techniques, that ensures that otherwise "reasonable" people like Merkel, Sarkozy, Brown and Obama unconditionally back the Israeli claims of a "JUST WAR" out of self defense. One just has to look at the votes in the Congress last week by these so called "honorable" men and women; 95 % plus, in favour of the war crimes committed by the Israelis in Gaza with American made weapons, so generously donated by generations of Washington DC war criminals. The cowards on both sides of the Atlantic dare not utter one word of disagreement with the actions of the gangsters in Tel Aviv; they know that the Jewish wrath will be swift and devastating if they object to the murderous actions of the State of Israel.

The problem for Israel, the USA, Canada and the Europeans is, that multitudes of informed people all over the world recognise atrocities when they take place on Al Jazeera English TV; we also know about Falluja in Iraq and all the other crimes perpetrated by the Americans in that devastated land, including the more than 500,000 dead children as the result of the UK/USA embargo since 1991. The propaganda that comes from our elected politicians and their helpers in the mainstream media is slowly becoming an obsolete tool. Most of us get our information from independent news providers, blogs and websites; we may still read news papers on line and visit different tv stations, but this is generally to affirm that our own research is the right way to go. The Israeli, American, Canadian and European propaganda machines are just that; trhough propaganda and terror the politicians want to control the thinking and beliefs of their citizens, citizens who assumedly are uninformed and not interested in getting objective information about events that take place through the actions of the corrupt politicians they elect.
These politicians and the power elites they represent, (unless they are able and willing take control of the Internet), will be lamenting their loss of control over big segments of the population when more and more of us refuse to be terrorised by their propaganda any longer and use our information to force these same politicians to abide by our rules and the laws of the country we all live in.

No matter how well organised the Israeli propaganda campaign may be after this devastating attack on the Gaza Ghetto, the world knows that they and our own politicians are lying to us. There can be no justification ever, for what happened in Gaza in the last three weeks, like there can be no justification for what happened in Lebanon in 2006, in Iraq since 2003, Afghanistan for more than seven years now and what may happen soon in Iran, Syria and Pakistan. Unjustified mass murder by an occupying country, be it Israel or the United States is considered "a crime against humanity" and war crime. Aggressive wars, and these are all aggressive wars, are also crimes against humanity. The "leaders" who instigate these war crimes and crimes against humanity should all be indicted and put on trial in the International Court in The Hague; these include members of the Bush and Olmert administration.

Only through massive pressure from below will corrupt politicians change their murderous and criminal behaviour; it is up to us to organise and create a future where "greed" is indeed a dirty word and murder, torture and rape as tools of the aggressor are abandoned for a peaceful coexistence. No more Empires please and no greater Israel for that matter.

Hans denee

A World without Hope in a Time of unmitigated Disaster.

2009-01-14T13:57:00.000-08:00

January 20 in Washington DC will not be a happy "Inaugural" day but more like an unhappy "Undertaker" day for the remnants of the United States Empire. Bankruptcy is not an option and Chapter Eleven not a way to a restoration of American morality and integrity; the creditors will have to take their losses as the corruption in politics and beyond has created an irredeemable polity of crooks, torturers and murderers. With the disappearance of the previous, devious, couple of Bush/Cheney, the scene is set for an oh so fake imaginary renewal of what we have been made to believe are age old US ideals; from shining city on the hill to Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Bagram Air force base in Afghanistan and Guantanamo in, the place we hate most of all, Cuba. Those are the places we identify with American "largesse" of torture and murder of often innocent people sold to the United States by greedy crooks in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan for an amount of money equal to the 30 pieces of silver Judas received for his treacherous behaviour as mentioned in the Bible. This American "largesse" extends to the millions of dead men, women and children in Darfur, Congo, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and many other places devastated by American influence gone wrong. That shining city on the hill looks today more like an extended dung hill straddling the world through more than 700 American bases, designed to deliver misery and disaster to the citizens who oppose them.

The incoming Obama/Biden regime with its promises of false hope will be defeated by the sheer size of the calamities that the previous owners have left behind; from lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to an economy completely wrecked by the greedy crooks of Wall Street and a national debt going into the stratosphere. This defeat will be swift and final; the damage done is to great to be repaired by anyone, least a cacophony of former Clinton officials who laid the foundation for all these disasters in the first place. Once it becomes clear, that no amount of "printed" money is going to save the place, desperation will force the power elites into new wars in order to keep the masses from taking up arms against the Washington criminals.

Who can still believe in "change" or for that matter salvation after we have been confronted with a list of Obama appointments that promises a continuation of the policies of the Bush/Cheney regime and most likely worse. With People like Rahm Emanuel and Hillary - I am a tough bitch - Clinton, Robert Gates and a whole assortment of more or less unsavoury characters that reminds one of the Mafia, the promised change will be a change for the worst. Not only in the United States itself, which by now is a nominal police state, but in particular for the denizens of the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan and a score of dysfunctional African countries. The explosion of raw power as visited upon the people of Gaza and the West Bank by Israel today, will now reach many others who refuse to abide by the edicts of a "derelict" United States of America.

We too, may soon experience the depravity that the Iraqi and Palestinian people have tried to survive in the last 10 years; the depravity of the US and Israeli politicians and their armies of well trained torturers and murderers. We too, will have the experience of what it means when there is no escape from our torturers and live descends into the chaos of trying to survive without the means to do so. Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Darfur, Somalia, Zimbabwe; all places from where escape is impossible and the barbaric nature of humans is exposed as for what we truly are, inhumane monsters.

Hans Denee

Israel, a "Rogue" and "Gangster" State.

2009-01-13T13:47:00.000-08:00

Oxford University Professor, Avi Shlaim calls Israel a "Rogue" and "Gangster" State led by "completely unscrupulous leaders".

I would like to expand on this description of Israel to add the United States of America as a "Terrorist, Rogue and Gangster" State led by "corrupt and criminally insane leaders".

These two so-called Democratic States are becoming the bane of our fragile world with their endless wars and refusal to engage in diplomacy to solve problems that cannot be solved with the use of their weapons of mass destruction. Israel, since its foundation in 1948 has used aggressive war, intimidation, terrorism, murder, apartheid, starvation and degradation to suffocate the Palestinian people into leaving their land or else be "shoahed" by the IDF "Einsatz Gruppen". The Israeli story of being the innocent"victim' and their right to"self defence" is utterly ridiculous in the face of the mass murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children, unable to defend themselves against the Israeli War Machine of F16's, tanks and gunboats with their bare hands. The Israeli propaganda machine is working overtime to brainwash the Western World into believing that when Israel slaughters innocent bystanders by the hundreds, it has the right to do so, because it is "self defense". The problem with this unique Israeli perspective is, that since Israel is almost always the "Aggressor", it are the Palestinians that act out of self defense. Israel took their land and homes and herded them into the Gaza ghetto and the ever diminishing space of the West Bank. Eight hundred thousand of them went into the diaspora and are not allowed to ever get back to their place of birth. Israel controlls every aspect of their lives and makes sure that they are as miserable as is possible without exterminating them all just yet. But the final aim is "Shoah" of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. The hypocrites in the Western World are all silently and approvingly watching while this genocide takes place under the auspices of LIKUD in Tel Aviv and AIPAC in Washington, DC.

Some voices, including some Jewish voices are being heard, decrying Israel's latest attack on 1.5 million Palestinians packed together like sardines in the Gaza concentration camp. Essays by Uri Avnery, Norman Finkelstein, Robert Jensen, Mike Whitney, Robert Fisk, Amira Hass and others are the counter weight against the Israeli propaganda offensive and describe quite often in detail the offensive lies uttered by Israeli politicians and their helpers in the American main stream media. Canada is no exception here; Stephen Harper and his government and the Canadian main stream media, like the Globe and mail and Global TV, are all defending Israel (through misinformation and plain lies) without saying a word about the right of the Palestinians to defend themselves against the barbaric suppression by the State of Israel. Like Robert Jensen writes in his essay in Counterpunch, we have to fight against the States that allow these atrocities to happen; the United States of America, Canada and the European Union who through their public actions and statements prolong the misery of 1.5 million people who do not have a place to flee to in order to escape the carnage that is being visited upon them by the State of Israel.

Where is the outrage in Canada when OUR "unscrupulous leaders" make one sided statements in defence of mass murder by Israel without mentioning the Palestinian's plight at the hands of the State of Israel? We are suppose to be a people of peace keepers who's objectivity is appreciated by many people in this world; obviously we are all war criminals now like the Americans and Israelis. Our aggressive war in Afghanistan is the best example of how our leaders are corrupting the people of this country.

It is time for Canadians to wake up to what is being done in our name to babies, children, women and men who are unable to defend themselves. Canada's power elite has te be denounced for their despicable behaviour.

Hans Denee

Israel's bombardment of Gaza is not self defence - it's a war crime

2009-01-12T13:27:00.000-08:00

From The Sunday Times
January 11, 2009
Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is not self-defence – it’s a war crime

ISRAEL has sought to justify its military attacks on Gaza by stating that it amounts to an act of “self-defence” as recognised by Article 51, United Nations Charter. We categorically reject this contention.
The rocket attacks on Israel by Hamas deplorable as they are, do not, in terms of scale and effect amount to an armed attack entitling Israel to rely on self-defence. Under international law self-defence is an act of last resort and is subject to the customary rules of proportionality and necessity.
The killing of almost 800 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and more than 3,000 injuries, accompanied by the destruction of schools, mosques, houses, UN compounds and government buildings, which Israel has a responsibility to protect under the Fourth Geneva Convention, is not commensurate to the deaths caused by Hamas rocket fire.
For 18 months Israel had imposed an unlawful blockade on the coastal strip that brought Gazan society to the brink of collapse. In the three years after Israel’s redeployment from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. And yet in 2005-8, according to the UN, the Israeli army killed about 1,250 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children. Throughout this time the Gaza Strip remained occupied territory under international law because Israel maintained effective control over it.
Israel’s actions amount to aggression, not self-defence, not least because its assault on Gaza was unnecessary. Israel could have agreed to renew the truce with Hamas. Instead it killed 225 Palestinians on the first day of its attack. As things stand, its invasion and bombardment of Gaza amounts to collective punishment of Gaza’s 1.5m inhabitants contrary to international humanitarian and human rights law. In addition, the blockade of humanitarian relief, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and preventing access to basic necessities such as food and fuel, are prima facie war crimes.
We condemn the firing of rockets by Hamas into Israel and suicide bombings which are also contrary to international humanitarian law and are war crimes. Israel has a right to take reasonable and proportionate means to protect its civilian population from such attacks. However, the manner and scale of its operations in Gaza amount to an act of aggression and is contrary to international law, notwithstanding the rocket attacks by Hamas.

Ian Brownlie QC, Blackstone Chambers
Mark Muller QC, Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales
Michael Mansfield QC and Joel Bennathan QC, Tooks Chambers
Sir Geoffrey Bindman, University College, London
Professor Richard Falk, Princeton University
Professor M Cherif Bassiouni, DePaul University, Chicago
Professor Christine Chinkin, LSE
Professor John B Quigley, Ohio State University
Professor Iain Scobbie and Victor Kattan, School of Oriental and African Studies
Professor Vera Gowlland-Debbas, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva
Professor Said Mahmoudi, Stockholm University
Professor Max du Plessis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban
Professor Bill Bowring, Birkbeck College
Professor Joshua Castellino, Middlesex University
Professor Thomas Skouteris and Professor Michael Kagan, American University of Cairo
Professor Javaid Rehman, Brunel University
Daniel Machover, Chairman, Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights
Dr Phoebe Okawa, Queen Mary University
John Strawson, University of East London
Dr Nisrine Abiad, British Institute of International and Comparative Law
Dr Michael Kearney, University of York
Dr Shane Darcy, National University of Ireland, Galway
Dr Michelle Burgis, University of St Andrews
Dr Niaz Shah, University of Hull
Liz Davies, Chair, Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyer
Prof Michael Lynk, The University of Western Ontario
Steve Kamlish QC and Michael Topolski QC, Tooks Chambers

The Gaza Ghetto and the Extermination of 1.5 million Palestinians.

2009-01-09T13:47:00.000-08:00

What is the use of the Gaza ghetto? To contain the Palestinians until they are ready to be exterminated. How will extermination take place? Through starvation and mass murder. In view of the whole world so that nobody can claim "wir haben es nicht gewusst". And the purpose of this openness is to convince the masses in the western world that this is an acceptable and necessary exercise in Israeli "humanity" as confirmed by the power elites in Washington DC and Brussels, Belgium.

Most of the Palestinians (or their ancestors) that have been herded into the Gaza ghetto by the Israelis since 1948 used to live in towns and cities across what is now the State of Israel. Their land stolen and their houses confiscated by Jewish (Irgun) terrorists under the command of Menachem Begin. They have been treated by the Israelis as the Nazis treated the Jews in Warsaw during the second world war, eventually creating the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. The only difference seems to be that the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza has been going on for more than 50 years; a long slow killing process designed and executed with barbaric pleasure by the State of Israel.

Today we watch as the IDF relentlessly murders women and children under the approving eyes of the White House, the Congress and the cowards of the European Union in Brussels. The massacres of innocent women, children and men who have no place to hide and are fighting for their survival doesn't seem to touch the western world, where the Israeli propaganda machine has turned into overdrive to convince the uneducated westerners that Israel - as usual - is the victim here and has the right to defend itself against the Hamas "terrorists". Never do we hear from our corrupted leaders, that the Palestinians have the same right to defend themselves against the murderous actions of the State of Israel who stole their land. We are never to question the Isreali motives and always approve of their murderous campaigns. Speaking up about Israeli atrocities will unleash the dogs of the Likud and AIPAC and the sounds of "ANTI SEMITE" will be heard everywhere. Interesting, that since the Palestinians are Semites, the Israeli government's verbal barrages at Hamas and the Palestinians is anti semitism exposed as a reality for a "never again" to come; this time for the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis.

Shame on Israel, the United States and the European Union; murderers, enablers and war criminals all.

Hans Denee

The United States plus Israel equals Mass Murder......

2009-01-07T12:03:00.000-08:00

......on an unprecedented scale and with a barbarity that challenges the misdeeds of previous extremist terrorist nations. When the Israelis murder innocent men, women and children under the cloak of "never again"in Lebanon or Gaza, they behave like a people that have no morality or soul; they are alive but their manipulative, propagandistic and murderous behaviour has killed their soul and therefor they are "dead" while alive. No future exists for a people that uses barbarism to conquer, occupy and enslave its perceived enemies, be they Palestinians, Iraquis, Afghans or anybody else.

In this age of an awakened State Religious Extremism and Terrorism, State run fanatics everywhere have decided that terrorising large populations of innocent people will result in their final domination of and control over these same people. In Israel like in the United States, it are the extremists, religious or otherwise who control the government that commit atrocities in the name of the people. Most of the people have been properly brain washed to accept and cheer on the party line as expressed by the government talking heads and amplified with the help of the main stream media; their glorious "Amen" corner.

When Israel goes on one of its periodic murder trips and OD's on the slaughter of innocent women and children, the Western World stands by, cheering on the murderers while "murmuring" something about restraint. Israel always believes that slaughtering large numbers of innocents will make their enemies give up and go away; it hasn't entered their mind yet, after 60 years, that they are creating blow back and worse to come with every child killed by the IDF. The 2006 war in Lebanon against Hezbollah is a prime example of how the Israelis lost and Hezbollah became a much stronger and important (partaking in the Lebanese government) opponent.

The current Israeli (Olmert) government faces an election on February 10 they would surely loose, unless they could show the Israeli population that they are as murderous as their opponents in the Knesset. Taking advantage of the dying days of the crime ridden Bush/Cheney regime, they decided to take their chances and create another bloodbath. Today it is the Gaza population that has to endure the barbaric onslaught of the IDF after years of being suffocated by Israel to a state of starvation and lethargy. Primitive rockets attacks by Hamas amateurs in Gaza, that did not kill anybody in Israel in the last 12 months, are now used as an excuse for collective murder punishment by the immoral Israeli government. It was the Israelis that broke the 6 months truce with Hamas and as a result the primitive rockets kept coming; nobody was hurt inside Israel.

The United States government being the avid supporter of anything the State of Israel does, is also the supplier of most of the weapons that Israel uses to destroy its enemies; this makes the United States a criminal accomplice to mass murder.

I am disgusted with Israel and the United States; lawless evil states where murder and torture are the "moral" standards by which their governments operate.

Hans Denee

We are All Torturers Now.

2008-12-23T14:47:00.000-08:00

It was officially confirmed this week by the "Personification of Evil", Richard Bruce Cheney. He promoted and organised "Torture" in our name in the hellholes the United States Department of Offense and the CIA have created in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, Abu Ghraib and many other undisclosed so-called black sites. The Unites States "does not do torture" according to George but we torture with a vengeance says Dick, who seems to be, in his own words, the Torturer in Chief of the last 8 years. All this torture information, available for years to those not influenced by the drugs of Propaganda and MSM, does not seem to influence the population to take a stand against this unlawfulness; as a matter of fact roughly 50% of the population believes that torture is a good thing and we should do more of it to keep us safe from the Islamofascists who hate our freedoms and are jealous of our shopping malls.

It is obvious to a few of us, that Dick Cheney has thrown the gauntlet; he is daring the next Administration and in particular the new Attorney General Eric Holder, to hold Dick, George and their fellow torturers to account for their lawlessness, prosecute them under existing laws and put them in jail for the rest of their lives. According to Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, this will not happen in the United States. Of course it won't; every torturer, murderer and rapist will be pardoned by George before he rides of to his new digs in Texas on January 20/2009.

Torture when done by Americans at the behest of their leaders isn't really torture, because when the "good"Americans torture, they do so because they have no other choice and it is the right thing to do. We excuse ourselves from the murder and torture we instigate worldwide by claiming the moral high road and self aggrandizing superiority. When others, in foreign lands we don't know anything about, torture, we call them evil dictators and political psychopaths.

The Democrats, having been enthusiastic participants in all this illegal activity, will not provide us with the special prosecutors we need to investigate the myriad of crimes committed by the Bush/Cheney clique. We have to find other ways to disrupt their lives and to eventually prosecute and imprison these evil men. Examples have to be set; our leaders have to abide by the same laws all ordinary citizens have to abide by.

Through our silence and the actions of our choosen leaders we have all become Torturers.

Hans Denee

White Trash, Creative Evil and the American Way.

2008-12-17T14:22:00.000-08:00

For all you people who believe that Washington, DC is the center of "creative evil", you are right; ask the 500.000 Iraqi children who died under Clinton's watch with the help of Madeleine Allbright. Or ask the million-plus Iraqi women, children and men who are today buried in the occupied sands of Mesopotamia. Maybe we should ask the brides and grooms and their extended families who were slaughtered by American bombs in Afghanistan or just for "fun", ask the hundreds of thousands of women and children that have been raped and murdered in Darfur. OK, you want to talk about the millions of murdered, raped and tortured bodies in the Congo, why?????

These creative deaths, engineered by the politicians in DC who are either pushing aggressive wars or sitting on their hands, are a reminder to all of us that evil, like torture "is" the American Way. Of course, we like to cover this evil with our mantle of love;"spreading our western style democracy" to these poor brown and black (aids) infested barbarians.

Ask Dick Cheney if he was the major torture instigator and promoter, and he will confirm that he was, with that devilish almost smirk on his face. Like George, Dick sure as hell isn't sorry for any of the bad things they did as an 8 year duet of evil; as a matter of fact, they are both proud of their accomplishments and neither can remember having made any mistakes. Piles of dead innocent bodies do not imperil their snow white consciences.

The criminals that have been in residence in Washington DC for the last hundred years or so, are never sorry for the dead bodies that stack up wherever they ply their murderous trade. The built in superiority of the white North American Trash justifies anything that their heinous little minds can come up with. After all, it is American moral racial superiority that commits these murders, the torture and the rapes without a blemish on their black souls.

Evil is not owned exclusively by to the tribes in DC, however, the evil that emanates from DC is the evil we ought to remember from Stalin and Hitler.

Hans Denee

Stephen Harper's Depression.

2008-12-16T11:09:00.000-08:00

After having been in denial for months about the state of the World economy and Canada's in particular, it now seems that Mr. Harper all of a sudden has discovered a Depression, bypassing the recession that normally precedes it. Two weeks ago, with an economic statement that defied reality, Stephen Harper and his finance minister Jim Flaherty obviously did not have a clue as to how bad the financial and economic situation would turn out to be. Wise guys and specialists in the field had been telling us since mid 2007 that things were going very wrong very soon and that Canada would not be immune to an economic implosion in the USA. And every day since that statement on October 30 was issued, we have been inundated with avalanches of bad news.

As is usual for politicians when they are up to no good, they begin a campaign of terror against there own citizens; all of a sudden we'll be looking into the depth of a full fledged "DEPRESSION" and things have never, ever looked so bleak. Who are we kidding here?
Be afraid, be really afraid your government is going to safe you from the economic disaster it helped create. That means massive deficit spending and the doling out of lucrative contracts to the party faith full and establishment hacks.

Living on the west coast, we listened for years to the yahoos telling us that next time a recession or something bad was coming, Canada and in particular BC would be invincible; what with the 2010 Olympics and the Vancouver housing (bubble), we would not be touched by any outside economic or financial disaster. We are so full of our selves, it must hurt big time today when reality finally sets in and the denizens of this country are facing what everybody else in this world has been facing for months, financial and economic upheaval not seen since the dirty thirties of the previous century.

Even our government now acknowledges, that we are in a dire predicament. Don't let them terrorise you into a depression; in the end it is all about power, power over us.

Hans Denee

Torturers, War Criminals and Crimes against Humanity.

2008-12-16T09:06:00.000-08:00

The beginning of the 21th century seems to be signalling a return to the barbarism of previous centuries on a scale thought not possible in the last decade of the 20th century. The list of atrocities taking place this day across the world are a reminder that nothing ever really changes as long as superiority infused maniacs and psychopaths put themselves in charge of mass murder, rape and torture for the good of the ones being murdered, raped and tortured. Power, corruption and greed cause this sick behaviour.

On the short list of countries/areas with some serious "humanitarian" problems are Israel/ Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan (Darfur), the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Russia (Chechnya), Burma, Belarus. A longer list would include the United States of America, England, the European Union countries, China, Cuba, Iran, India, Turkey and Haiti.

The main carrier and transmitter of this disease of world wide atrocities is the United States of America through its continuous manipulations and interferences and refusal to commit to some serious diplomatic engagements with anybody, anywhere. Of course diplomacy requires diplomats and not ideologues like Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and their ilk. It also requires a basic understanding of the world outside of Washington DC; an understanding of local history, culture, language and religion. But most of all, it requires the ability to put oneself on a level playing field with ones opponent where everything is negotiable without any preset conditions; i.o.w. get rid of that ridiculous "white" dictating superiority complex.

The United States government propaganda machine, amplified by the United States mass media, is a continuous Lie repeated ad nauseum so it becomes the Truth in the minds of the masses worldwide, too lazy to think for themselves and have a well informed opinion. This applies in particular to the citizens of the United States who are easily influenced by this propaganda and the accompanying religious extremism. State terrorism as applied in the United States by the federal government in DC has one purpose and one purpose only, to control the masses and stop them from having any thoughts of their own. Examples are the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act and the $ 700 billion bailout for the creators of the biggest financial debacle in a hundred years. These Acts and measures were put in place without much dissent after the propaganda machine scared the hell out of Joe Blow and his/her so-called representatives in the House of the People.

The carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Palestine, Haiti, Lebanon and Georgia/Ossetia can be linked directly to the actions of the United States Government. In the case of Palestine and Iraq the State of Israel played a crucial role while it was the aggressor in the Lebanon war of 2006. In Darfur, the Congo, Zimbabwe and Burma it are the "IN"actions of the United States government that has caused the murder, torture and rape of millions of innocent people. The United States government also stands by idle while the State of Israel is starving to death 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and in Haiti a whole population is severely under nourished.

Instead of spreading western style democracy (who really needs it?) as claimed by the likes of George W Bush, the western world has only managed to spread more hatred through its aggressive wars and bullying attitude; "do as I say, not as I do" is the modicum of western hypocrisy on display in places like London, England, Washington, DC., EU Brussels and of course Ottawa, Canada..

Extremism, lawlessness, corruption and greed are today the cornerstone of US actions worldwide. The leaders, they have no conscience and no empathy and we all suffer because of them.

Hans Denee

A Malicious Prime Minister, an Opportunistic Opposition and Democracy in Canada.

2008-12-03T14:31:00.000-08:00

For the first time in a long time (remember Pierre Elliot Trudeau?) the blandness of Canadian Politics has been disrupted by the malicious actions of a Prime Minister and his government. Deciding all by himself that public financing for all political parties will cease and desist immediately, gave the spineless Liberals and New Democrats a surprising surge of adrenalin and courage; they decided with the help of course of some old hands (Ed Broadbent and Jean Chretien) to defeat the minority government of Mr Harper and form a coalition with the support of the Bloc Quebecois to form an alternative government. Harper and his red neck supporters across the Western Provinces of the country went ballistic; some of his supporters compared this to how Hitler came to power in Germany in 1934. That tells us how informed these people are.

Obviously there aren't too many people in this country that truly believe in Democracy and have some faint idea of how democracy is suppose to work; they are also completely unaware of the fact that in a lot of European countries coalition governments are the rule and not the exception. Coalitions force men and women with enormous Ego's to sit down and negotiate an arrangement that is agreeable to everyone and also good for the country; non of this (dictatorial) one-person rule by edict that Stephen Harper was trying to introduce into the Canadian political system. Canadians do not like Unitary Executives like George W Bush who with the help of Karl Rove trashed the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Stephen Harper in his quest for absolute power seems to be able to do irrational things that back fire grandiosely and will eventually destroy his leadership and the party he represents unless he learns from his terrible mistakes soon. As may be obvious to neutral bystanders, the majority of Canadian voters did not vote for Mr Harper and his Conservatives; as a result we now have another Harper minority government that tries to rule like they have an absolute and overwhelming majority. Mr Harper will do anything to hang onto power including asking the Governor General to prorogue parliament till January 26, 2009.

As we know now, the Governor General has agreed with Mr Harper to close down parliament to save Mr Harper from guaranteed defeat in the looming confidence vote. It will buy him time to come up with a budget by the 27th of January and at the same time undermine the coalition efforts through a massive propaganda exercise. The danger for the Harperites is that more nasty economic surprises, like today's unemployment numbers, will outmaneuver their malicious undertakings. In the meantime, the Liberals should finally decide on a leader that knows how to "lead"; because if they do not present themselves soon as the alternative party to the Conservatives who can govern this country, the next elections in March 2009 may produce a Harper majority government; and that would be dangerous to all of us who are able to think into the future.

Let us also not forget that our so-called Canadian Democracy isn't even close to being "democratic"; we do not have a proportional representative system in which every vote counts; instead our "first past the post" system trashes a large percentage of the votes on election days. The voters behind these trashed votes are not represented anywhere. Anybody who is willing to spend some time looking into the statistics reflecting past elections, must notice that most majority governments in this country are backed by way less that 50% of the popular vote; in other words it is the minority that quite often rules the majority.

Another problem, and there are many, is that we do not elect our Prime Minister for a maximum of two 4 year terms. The party leader automatically becomes the Prime Minister when the party wins the election and forms the government. They are chosen by a small group of party members and the rest of us are all forced to accept their miss - management without having any say in their election to -or removal from office.

Hopefully Canada will survive the madness of Mr Harper.

Hans Denee

"Thank You"

2008-11-27T13:30:00.000-08:00

On this Thanksgiving day in the United States of America, we say thanks for:

Dick Cheney and George W Bush, war criminals and torturers supreme

Two wars we are loosing in Iraq and Afghanistan

Over 4000 dead American soldiers and a multiple of that seriously wounded

Over 1.2 million dead Iraqi people and a multiple of that wounded

Five million Iraqi refugees either in Syria or Jordan, or in their own country

All the Afghan people killed by indiscriminate US and/or NATO air assaults, in particular the people who were attending wedding - or funeral parties

The chaos we created in Somalia through our interference there with the help of the Ethiopians

The continuous disaster in Darfur we prefer does not exist

The millions of dead people in the Congo and the endless numbers of raped children and women

Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe who wrecked his country

The Haitians who are starving to death as a result of our continuously interfering in their affairs

The 1.5 million Palestinians who are literally being starved to death by God's chosen People

The financial wizards who in their eternal greed created the worst financial disaster to hit the world in a hundred plus years

New Orleans that was never really rebuilt

The demise of International - and US law

The dungeons we created in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and many other secret places

The Superiority of the American People

Thanks but No Thanks

Hans Denee

"Yes we Can" but we Won't.

2008-11-24T15:48:00.000-08:00

Since November 4, the Obama President Elect Team has been busy putting together a catalogue of RETREADS from the Clinton era. Promoted as experienced and competent individuals, not ideologues like the Neo-Cons who got us in all this quicksand in the last eight years, these people will save our collective behinds from the deep trouble we are all finding ourselves in at the end of November, 2008. Some of these people were there (Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers) when the foundations for the biggest financial disaster to ever hit this world were laid under the watchful eye of the Clinton administration. They promoted and approved of the "free for all" that became the financial sector without any rules or regulations to control the extravagances and excesses first exhibited by the Enron corporation. Now these same people are going to save us all from the nightmare that is called "Depression" or so we are to believe. At least some of the Enron crooks were convicted and went to jail; the current crop of financial criminals seems to be getting away with financial "murder" and is compensated for their crimes. This is spelled "POWER ELITES CONTROL THE GOVERNMENT AND THE CONGRESS" and Joe Blow is going to be the ultimate victim of their crimes.

It isn't much better on the War front where torture promoters (John Brennan) and warmongers (Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates) are being enlisted to do Obama's version of the Bush "creative destruction" years in Iraq, Afghanistan and God and the War Party willing Iran and Pakistan. All of course for the sake of security for the Israeli APARTHEID State and the bank accounts of the Military Industrial Complex and the Big Oil Companies.

Obviously, the War Party does not really care who is in power; they shift easily from the Bush White House to the Obama Elect White House without loosing sight of their ultimate goals of more and perpetual wars and of course more money for the Dept. of Offense. As a result, change is not coming any time soon, not in Iraq or Afghanistan or for that matter in the United States itself.

At this point in time we can only hope that the countries that have been financing our excesses will finally stop doing so; that would leave the printing presses as our only resource for financing our military and financial disasters. This could not last very long before the US Dollar would completely deflate and inflation would increase to levels never seen before in North America.

So there is hope out there, but do not put your hope in the actions of the Obama Team because you will be seriously disappointed to say the least.

Hans Denee

Collective Punishment in the Gaza Strip.

2008-11-16T10:40:00.000-08:00

The government in Israel, for more than a year now, is in the process of starving the population of Gaza slowly but surely to death through an act of collective punishment. This is a war crime under the Geneva conventions and should be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court.
The Israeli government of Ariel Sharon, when it decided to end the occupation of the Gaza Strip, had only one thing in mind; by ending the occupation of Gaza, it would give them a free hand in punishing the Palestinians living there for the sins of the few that were firing rockets into Israel in response to Israeli atrocities. Not any longer an occupying power,it made itself free from the restrictions that International laws put on the activities of occupying powers. Not that Israel in Gaza and the West bank or for that matter the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan care much about international laws and agreements or for the opinions of the rest of the civilized world about their barbarous behaviour.

So where is the outrage in Canada and Western Europe against this despicable and murderous behaviour? We, the people of the civilized world, should get up in arms against the Israeli - and United States governments for perpetrating crimes against humanity (in particular against innocent women and children). Unless we do something soon, another genocide will have occurred while we were busy deciding what Obama should or shouldn't do when he becomes President in January 2009. Who cares!!!!!

Collective punishment of a whole population is the worst crime imaginable and should never be allowed to take place in the Israeli Apartheid State by the people of this world. The world has to speak up now and denounce the Israeli State for its crimes. Where is the United Nations? Oh silly me, I forgot, Israel and the USA do not abide by UN sanctions and regulations; they manipulate the Security Council and the General Assembly to do their bidding as in the case of Iran and its so called nuclear threat.

Time to take a stand against the real TERRORISTS in this world, the State of Israel and the United States of America.

Hans Denee

Crimes and Punishment.

2008-11-06T09:45:00.000-08:00

In these heady days after the election of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States of America, we seem to forget the crimes that have been committed in the last 8 years by the current administration of George the younger and its enablers - Conservative and Democrat - in the Senate and House of Representatives. Admitting that serious crimes have been committed by a number of government officials and institutions is all but impossible in the current American psyche where the act of fellatio by Monica Lewinsky on Bill Clinton is considered a more important misdemeanor and reason for impeachment than the torture and murders committed by George W Bush and Dick Cheney. Nancy Pelosi, the darling of the Democrat's power elites resolutely took impeachment of George and Dick of the table after the 2006 midterm elections and continued to sign anything that George put in front of the corrupt Democrats. With Obama in the White House and increased Democrat majorities in both Houses, isn't it time to instruct an army of special prosecutors to delve into the crimes committed in these last eight years by the people in charge and prosecute them to the full extent of the law?

Dream on.....................................I know it won't happen any time soon, since the enablers are as guilty as George and Dick and would have to be prosecuted by the same standards and under the same laws. And who is going to call for his/her own prosecution? It won't be Pelosi or Obama or anybody who voted for the Patriot acts 1 and 2, the Military Commissions Act and the continuous funding for the "aggressive" wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

When for ten years after the second world war, a discussion about the extermination of the Jews in Europe by the Nazis was a non starter in North America and most Western European countries, we also may have to wait a while before someone in the US government will have the guts to prosecute today's war criminals and their enablers and establish a "truth and reconciliation" committee. By that time, most of these men and women may be to old to put in jail for the rest of their lives, however "old age" should never be used as an excuse for not prosecuting these criminals. In the meantime all of us can make sure that they do not have a place to hide or go to.

Hans Denee

Living dangerously, US elections and Gustav Mahler

2008-10-27T20:11:00.000-07:00

A week before that dreaded election in Torture land is taking place and there is no place to hide from the banality that is the US Presidential elections in their final throws. He says, she says, they say,..............................who cares what anybody says when it are all lies, damned lies and more damned lies, because that is what politicians do best; they lie, all the time and every time they open their mouth. So why would we pay any attention to the garbage that is being spouted by these two opponents that are both equals in their apparent lack of understanding of what the majority of the people really want and only know how to pander to the power elites that control them. The endless arguments on the Democrat's side, why we left-of-center leaning liberals should be voting for Obama, even if we do not agree with most of his murderous and bad ideas, just to make sure that McCain is not going to be elected, because a McCain presidency would mean more of the same and worse. It is called electing the best of the worst the country has to offer. The problem is of course that the choice between a war criminal and a war criminal is no choice at all; consciously one cannot vote for people who are under the Nuremberg Principles and International law considered to be war criminals since one voted for the war in Iraq and both voted for Bush's funding requests for this war to continue since 2003. Through the decisions these two men made in the past in order to promote their standing among their peers, they became accomplices in the worst crimes possible as identified in the Nuremberg trials by justice Robert H Jackson, "aggressive war, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity". The worst offenders at the Nuremberg trials were convicted and hanged for their crimes. How, barely 62 years later can we, here in the United States of America, have an election between two war mongering war criminals and believe this to be of utmost importance to the future well being of the country. Are we so blinded, manipulated and terrorised by the Bush/Cheney cabal, that we seriously believe that electing one of these criminal accomplices will make a difference after November 4?

We have lowered our standards since 9/11 to the standards applied in Germany before and during the second world war but instead of the Jews, we have chosen the Muslims to be our arch enemies to be eliminated by any means possible from the face of this earth. We have not yet built extermination camps for this purpose, but surely our worldwide net of concentration camps could be easily transformed into such a mass murder machine.

In the meantime the world is living dangerously and is on the edge of a complete financial and moral breakdown. The politicians and their legalized criminal accomplices are doing everything in their power to avoid a premature Armageddon but at the same time they are filling their pockets with more tax payer loot. The criminals who created all these financial orgies of the past 25 years, are once more being compensated for their crimes while the average Joe is being screwed out of his savings and retirement accounts. You would expect some kind of popular revolt against this kind of thievery but I guess that Joe is to busy watching "reality"shows of a different kind. The dumbing down of the masses through extensive propaganda and misinformation schemes has been a major accomplishment of the Bush/Cheney/Rove cabal. Through the mainstream media, used as the perfect amplifier, the people are threatened and terrorised into a state of denial of the crimes perpetrated in their name.

Now that we are so close to the actual election day, we can expect anything to happen to influence the outcome and the aftermath either way.

While contemplating the possible scenarios and consequences of potential desperate actions by desperate politicians I always try to imagine the worst that can happen. A minor terrorist attack orchestrated by Osama or your friendly government in DC; who would know the difference? An outcome so close, that the Republican's white(brown)shirts and the Supreme Court have to be mobilized to secure a positive outcome for McCain with maybe this time serious rioting in the streets by liberal left wingers and people whose votes have been stolen or denied by the Republican's manipulators of touch screen voting machines and invalidating ballots. An unstoppable complete financial melt down and stock market crash. Anything is possible in the days to come and don't you believe the polls, in particular the ones that predict an Obama victory a week ahead of the actual election day.

Which brings me to the music of Gustav Mahler, music so beautiful and powerful that it transcends the pain and agony I feel when I think about the moral degradation of not only our politicians but us as well. It is this music that keeps me alive and is a source of strength in times of utter despair with this world we have to live in.

Hans Denee

History is Running its Course.

2008-10-23T11:49:00.000-07:00

Like eighty years ago and many times before that, history is running its course in Europe as well as in the United States of America. All the hand wringing about how far we have sunk in the last eight years under the leadership of distant unelected bureaucrats in Europe and the distinguished wrecker team of Bush the younger and Cheney the Machiavellian, is not going to change the course that history will take and nobody will be able to influence that. The orgies of war and destruction, of financial criminal greed and insolvency and of political cowardice and corruption will not come to an end because some of us believe it is time for some drastic change. History will change itself only after the full course of disaster, destruction and mayhem has run out.

In Europe, where democracies have been undermined by the plutocrats in Brussels, the destruction of the European Union and NATO as its war making mirror image will be the result of this history running its course and we will find ourselves back in the wilderness that resembled politics in Europe in the nineteen fifties this time without the tutelage of the United States of America. European politicians like Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Merkel and Brown all have the over sized ego,s of potentates before them, like de Gaulle, Mussoline, Hitler and Churchill all of whom were involved in mass murder in their time and their respective empires. The days of direct competition and confrontation between the major countries of Europe is just a short breath away from happening again when history has ran its course. In Europe, nothing ever changes and everything stays the same. Cowardice and boot licking are the European way.

In the United States of America, being the polluting engine of this particular run of History, things will turn out far worse than anybody could have imagined in his/her wildest dreams. The "Creative Destruction" that has been US policy for the last 100 years has finally come home to destruct the United States of America once and for all. Like empires before it, the vulgarity of America has reached its limits in the destruction of everything that once kept this world more or less together and the immorality of its denizens are now on display for all the world to see. The United States singlehandedly has destroyed any resemblance of civility in this world through its actions in particular in these last eight calamitous years under the direction of a gang of lunatics and psychopaths. Aggressive wars, aggressive financial instruments, environmental degradation, one sided cancellations of international agreements, threatening any and all countries with war, injustice for everybody, illegal surveillance , religious extremism, mas murder, torture, paranoia and extreme HYPOCRISY have exposed the United States of America for what it really is; an outcast terrorist state.

The November elections, two years in coming, are not going to change any of this. Both candidates talk about the need for more wars, more troops, more money for the Dept. of Offense, more money for the criminals who brought down the financial house, more surveillance, more mas murder, more torture and more injustice abroad and at home.In a ONE Party State there obviously is no need for changes that do not benefit the Power Elite. And as long as the Senators, Congressmen and candidates for President and Vice President are owned by the Corporacy and AIPAC, they will do as they are told by their masters.

Elections do not change things, they reinforce the past.

Only dreamers can talk about the need for drastic change, knowing full well, that nothing can change until the day comes that the people have had enough and are willing to throw of the chains of the oppressor either violently or through passive resistance. November 4 is not that day; worse is yet to come and there will be darkness in our tunnel of life and death for a long time to come.

We can only hope that another world war is not going to be part of this history unfolding in front of our eyes, however if the past is any guidance that hope may be a false one. All our leaders here in North America and in Europe are stoking the fires of more agressive wars with Iran, Pakistan, Russia and when looking over the horizon of history to come, China.

War is the Health of the State and the Death of Mankind.

Hans Denee

The Myth of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny.

2008-10-09T14:22:00.000-07:00

American Exceptionalism is often thought to originate from the diversity of the peoples of this country. Unlike the British or German Exceptionalism, originating in countries with mainly Anglo saxon or Germanic peoples, the USA has a diverse population Exceptionalism.
The reasons for these Exceptionalisms are considered to be benign and the idea of giving them a negative explanation is often considered to be incorrect. However one can point a finger at a number of similarities in the Exceptionalisms claimed by a number of peoples and their leaders over the last 2000 years. One of the similarities is extreme Nationalism and the other Nationalistic Superiority either as a (white) race or as a racist religious people.

When people begin to think of themselves as exceptional, as all Colonial Powers and Religious Institutions (think Crusades) have done through the ages, mas murder often ensues as the means to change the "Other" world into a mirror image of ourselves. A country that has this Nationalistic Superiority Complex uses words like "Creative Destruction" and "Collateral Damage" (i.e. dead innocent bystanders in the shape and form of children, mothers and grandparents) and kills large numbers of innocent people without any negative effect on the National Conscience. Through massive Propaganda efforts and consistent Lies are the Power elites and Politicians able to convince the majority of the population to go along with their lies and murders. As a matter of fact, being killed for your own good, demonstrates the benevolent character of your killer; that is what the exceptional citizen is made to believe even if after a century of murder and mayhem the bodies can be counted to be in the tens of millions.

The other part of this misrepresentation is the use of the words "Manifest Destiny"; which has a religious undertone since God's name (as in God save America) is often invoked to excuse the dead bodies that pile up as a result of our "manifest" murderous actions. Every country in the history of mankind that has claimed a manifest destiny went on to murder and torture scores of innocent people for their own good, however in the background there always was the need for power and control not only over the citizens at home but over all peoples of the world and the resources they own. Manifest Destiny gives us the excuse to force our ideas, democratic or otherwise onto other peoples quite often through the barrel of a gun; the superiority of our ideas are in itself sufficient to make us believe that we are the do-gooders that blame the misery we cause on our victims as self inflicted because if they only were smart enough, they would understand that it is all for their own good.

And Exceptionalism, even if it begins as a benign concept, always ends with the murder and torture of millions of people considered to be inferior to us; the Israelis in Palestine and Lebanon, the Dutch in Indonesia, the French in Algeria, the English in most of their colonies, the Japanese in China, the Germans in most of Europe, the Belgians in the Congo, the Russians in their cold war empire and the Americans in the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq and Afghanistan all have made exceptional efforts to torture, maim and brutally kill the local populations they lorded over as colonial masters using one excuse or another to save ourselves from any guilty feelings this human destruction might cause us.

American Exceptionalism never existed and there was never a God who declared a Manifest Destiny for the citizens of the United States of America to rule over all other peoples of this world; this is self delusion on a grand scale propagandized by America's elite for over 200 years of its history. Greed and power cause the manifest destiny of humanity to be the endless sorrows we observe throughout our history and as is human, we will never learn to change our murderous, greedy nature.

Hans Denee

Observations from the Galley.(3)

2008-10-04T09:59:00.001-07:00

The galley as a place of work on a 70 ft sailboat offers unlimited possibilities to observe and influence human behavior. By being unnoticed most of the time by unsuspecting guests, it allows them to be themselves and do things that they probably would do at home or anywhere else if they think nobody is watching. It gives inside in the human psyche and the behaviour that results from believing that you are alone and unnoticed. However, some people do not care who is present or who is watching them; they do the strangest things anyway. Like climbing under a blanket on the couch in the middle of the day and begin a snoring spectacle of unheard sound effects, while others are trying to enjoy their lunch. When they wake up, they ask the nearest person if their snoring kept him/her awake; -IT IS THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY - for crying out loud.

The galley can also be a bad place to work in when it is 5 am and someone has decided that sleeping in his cabin did not work and instead is occupying the couch in the salon, snoring wildly. When you begin your breakfast preparations you are forced to listen to the frantic snoring of the couch person, sometimes for the next 2 hours.

And for one reason or another, running around in your underwear (long johns) during breakfast seems to be acceptable behavior these days. However it becomes outright offensive, when in the galley you are forced to look at the crack of someones behind when he/she bends over to ladle the porridge on his/her plate, while washing dishes.

Guests and co workers alike quite often behave like you, as the cook, do not really exist; food appears miraculously out of nowhere seems to be the thinking, whenever we want it. "Come venture with us on shore", a few hours before dinner, and of course dinner will be ready within 5 minutes after we get back to the boat; dream on! Likewise some crew members seem to think that you are a perpetual dish washing machine that preferably needs no help ever while you are cooking their special needs dinner.

One of the more confusing situations occurs, when someone has declared not to eat fish for whatever reason, and then you see him/her diving into the garlic prawns just at the time when you are ready to cook their chicken breast; what is with that?

The 2008 season is over for me and as usual, observing human behavior from the galley has been interesting albeit sometimes disgusting.

Hans Denee

Washington burns but the Circus must go on.

2008-10-03T17:36:00.000-07:00

On the day that enough of the misled Democratic Congressmen were arm twisted, bullied and threatened by Obama and his ilk into approving a 700 billion dollar bailout bill the headline news in the NYT was about the "NON" debate the previous evening between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. And not only the NYT, but all of the MSM were falling all over themselves to interpret a result, one way or another, of last evening's reality show. In the meantime the financial fires in the USA and Europe continued to be fed by increasing amounts of useless commercial paper. But so is the state of the average American, uninformed about everything but always looking for more brain dead entertainment to keep the mind away from even a remote possibility of independent thinking.

The mere idea that a bailout of some of the failed financial institutions here and in Europe will stem the tide of red ink and bankruptcies to come is wishful thinking at best and ridiculous stupidity at worst. These are band aid measures designed by former bank executives for certain large corporations (JP Morgan, Citibank) to profit from, in these the worst of times when the United States is a bankrupt entity and the American middle and lower classes are descending into a state of despair not seen since the thirties of the last century. But the election show must go on and the voters need to be presented with what I would call "worse" and "worst" choice of a next President and vice President. This farce that seems to appeal to most Americans is a cover up for the fires that are burning nation wide while new ones flare up every day of the week and contagion of the criminally instigated cancers in the financial system are now bringing down banks in Belgium, England and Germany, while the stock market in Russia (who cares!!) is in a complete melt down.

A number of Private Equity Companies with their LBO investments are most likely to go down next together with a number of hedge funds, while refinancing of debt by any company in the months to come might be considered an exercise in utmost futility.

Tax payers in North America and in Europe (other parts of the world will surely follow suit) are now being settled with payment of enormous amounts of bailout debt committed to by their governments. The Governments of the United States of America, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Russia have all committed themselves to investing massive amounts of tax payer money in a failing and collapsing financial system. That the tax payers will not be able to pay for these excesses is of no concern to the Politicians or the Elites that control these men and women. The Elites are after all cleaning up and profiting handsomely from these forced government bailouts, foreclosures and fire sales by the different FDIC's of this world; increased control over everything and everybody is a prime aim of this exercise.

In the meantime, unemployment, inflation, bankruptcies, foreclosures and Federal and State budget deficits are all up and investments, industrial production, car sales, consumption, home construction/prices and wages are all down. A Depression worse than anything we have ever witnessed in the last century is about to take hold and take everybody down with it, except of course for the Elites who are busy stealing every body's money while the fires are burning wildly all around us.

As with the threat of terrorism, this financial threat enables the elites to further their control over the average American and do away once and for all with anything that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights grants the American citizen; most amendments are now dead letters.

In reality, a people deserves what it does not oppose; in the case of the United States of America it means that the people have accepted a Fascist Totalitarian State to take care of them.

Elections will not change this fact.

Hans Denee

Observations from the Galley.(2)

2008-09-04T11:42:00.000-07:00

I am back with more interesting/disturbing observations from the galley I have worked in this summer in the Queen Charlotte Islands. Humanity is a strange lot and its behaviour can be quite surprising and embarrassing. However some people, whatever they do , (and sometimes it really gets bad and smelly) are not to be embarrassed.

When the seas get rough, and believe me, they did regularly this summer, people at one point or another like to empty the contents of their respective stomachs. The easy way to do this is, to go on deck and hang over the railing with lots of room to spare and no interference from others. Interestingly, people like to vomit down below, in the heads, on their bunks, in the salon or more interestingly all over the galley. When you tell them that that is not a great idea, they look kind of disillusioned and disgusted with you and themselves. So you lead them upstairs and make them feel better, that is after they get rid of the offensive feeling in their stomachs.
Sitting on deck with some fresh air around you, surely helps to avoid sea sickness; so why is it, that many sit down below and turn pale while they are trying to read about the world around them?

Predatory behaviour, a human trait if there is one, manifests itself in all its glory just before feeding time; lurking about, to make sure you are the first one to jump on the scallops or prawns becomes a major obsession. Monopolising the appetisers trays is also a favourite past time of quite a few of these so called civilized human beings.

It becomes downright unsanitary when people start to pick fruit out of the fresh fruit bowl, one piece at a time and stick it in their mouth, lick their fingers and sort out the next piece. What goes through their mind while doing this cannot bear any relationship to the admonitions of their mothers when they were children.

In polite society we take our shoes off when we enter some one's home; we, at a minimum, ask if that is required. So, on the boat, when the weather is bad and the boots are full of mud after our forays into the bog/forest, we march straight downstairs into the salon and drop as much mud and water all over the place as is inhumanly possible; what is with that?? Cleaning up after ourselves is not an option.

The heads have been cleaned, but within minutes the forward one has a very offensive smell emanating from what seems to be a urine soaked diaper; there are no babies/children/incontinent people living forwards as far as we are able to establish!
After removal of the offensive object we discover other urine soaked pieces of clothing. Nobody talks to us about their little accident(s), so what are we to do but to grin and bear. That is until by the end of the trip we find the urine soaked mattress and the person identified as the offender is gone.

Timing is everything they say, so if you like to avoid doing the dishes, always ask if you can help after you have made sure that the dishes have been done by others.

And there are what I call "know-it-all's"; "oh look that is halibut" - no, it is not, it is ling cod; while chopping celery, "oh you are making celery soup" - no, it is chicken soup; "I eat chicken bones" - are you nuts???

Generally speaking, the majority of our guests behave well, but it is the oddball(s) that makes life sometimes unbearable.

Hans Denee

Iran, Israel and Nukes; why the different treatment?

2008-07-24T16:50:00.000-07:00

In our daily lives, when we deal with our children, it seems logical to apply the same principles and standards to all of them; in other words, we try not to favour one over the other or apply different rules depending on who is in trouble. Why than is it acceptable in International (USA orchestrated) Politics to treat one State different then the next one, based on race and religion. Or is that pure malicious behaviour on the part of the Americans?

The State of Israel has a large arsenal of nuclear weapons that it plans to use to keep their exclusive nuclear power status in the Middle East, well let us say EXCLUSIVE. The State of Israel is not abiding by the rules of the IAEA and the NPT and refuses to become a member of this organisation. Like India and Pakistan, the State of Israel operates outside the internationally accepted organisations in order to achieve their aims of nuclear weapons without supervision from any of the UN organisations. The United States, Great Britain and France have all conspired to let Israel develop these nuclear bombs.

The fanatics that form the Government of Israel with the help of their murderous brethren of AIPAC in Washington, DC and a coterie of religious zealots in the United States of America have all but decided that the rules that apply to other nations (Iran) do not apply to them, because they are Jews and the Holocaust exclusively grants them the right to annihilate any country they deem a threat to that nuclear EXCLUSIVE. The State of Israel through its aggressive wars in the Middle East and through their Apartheid policies in Gaza and on the Westbank, is a criminal entity under every internationally judicial accepted norm and the people involved in executing these policies should be brought up to the Hague for War Crimes and prosecuted accordingly to the same rules that applied to the Germans during the Nurnberg trials.

So why do we treat Israel with satin gloves and harass the hell out of Iran and Syria when it comes to nuclear weapons or anything else for that matter? Where is the logic of applying different rules under the same circumstances? That is if we assume that the circumstances are indeed similar. Israel has nuclear weapons, so why isn't the Un Security council forcing the State of Israel together with Pakistan and India to abide by the rules set out by the IAEA, i.e. inspections on a continuous base of all nuclear facilities including the ones that are manufacturing the nuclear weapon systems?

The answer is a relatively simple one; The State of Israel with the assistance of Aipac has a stranglehold on American Foreign Policy insofar as it concerns the greater middle East where its aim is economic and military supremacy. The United States Congress conspires with the White House Criminals to cover up the criminal actions of the Jewish State and encourages the right wing Jewish extremists to expand the wars in the Middle East as they see fit in particular where it concerns Iran, Syria and Lebanon. An aggressive war against Iran started by Israel would give the United States the opening it is actively seeking to demolish most of Iran's nuclear facilities with the hoped for by product of regime change in that country. That dream of the war mongering Neocons of course would not be fulfilled. Iran, when attacked by the Israel/USA war machine, will do everything in its power to create as much of a disaster for the attacking parties as it is humanly and militarily capable off. Think about sky rocketing oil/gasoline prices and the collapse of the world financial system as some of the results of an attack on Iran.

The United States Congress at this very moment is considering resolution 362 that will amount to a naval, land and air blockade of Iran and constitutes an act of War on behalf of the United States of America and Israel. With all the self serving talk by Israeli and American politicians about the Iran (non existent) nuclear weapons program, we seem to loose sight of the fact that it is Israel that has these weapons and refuses to have their nuclear programs scrutinised by the IAEA. Not one American, British or Un official ever talks about Israel giving up its nuclear program and bombs in exchange for a nuclear free larger Middle East. And why is that? Are they all afraid of the Israeli and AIPAC extremists that promise to make anybody, who speaks out against Israeli Nukes, Israeli racism, torture and murder, the subject of scorn and labeled an anti Semite?

It is time to stand up against the torturers and murderers amongst us, and let true diplomacy take place to solve this crisis and avoid another war in which thousands of women, children and innocent bystanders will become "collateral damage".

Hans Denee

The World as we know it is about to come to a Cataclismic Conclusion,

2008-07-22T15:35:00.000-07:00

of which there is no escape here on this earth for anybody, rich or poor, white or black, Christian Jew or Muslim; we all will suffer the worst set back in the history of humankind. Climate change, water shortages, food shortages, oil shortages, economic and financial chaos and endless wars all conspire with the politicians we choose to represent us to make what will happen next to be the ultimate disaster to befall humans in the last 2000 years.

We, the people choose this course of total self destruction in our desperate efforts to stave of any changes that might effect our current living - and consumption conditions. In our current state of denial and terror we are unable to see clearly where the Power Elites and the Politicians are steering us.

The North American and Western European Political systems are morally bankrupt and are at this stage in time morphing into Fascist Totalitarian Police States where Racism and Cultural intolerance are celebrated as standards we ought to live by. The deterioration of the State as a provider of Torture, Injustice, Rendition, Murder and Social and Financial upheaval is a sure sign that we have resigned our responsibilities as "we the people", ultimately in charge of our own destiny. For the promised protection by our rulers against invisible enemies, we have given up our rights to freedom and justice.

Through Propaganda, Manipulation and ceaseless Terror have the Power Elites been able to stupefy the masses into believing that leaving it up to the Politicians to decide on what (illegal) actions to take,will not only keep them save, but at the same time eliminates any personal involvement in the ensuing massacres.

What you do not know, does not and cannot hurt you; Ignorance is bliss.

The Surveillance State with Kafkaesque Military tribunals for anybody deemed an "unlawful combatant" ( whatever that means), and the promise to tighten the noose around the necks of citizens and foreigners alike, in a bid for absolute dictatorial power over the citizens of this world reminds one of other countries in different times who failed miserably in achieving their goals of world hegemony.

The current meltdown in the world financial system together with the decline in moral judgement by our leaders and the collapse of the justice system will ultimately lead to the complete collapse of our democratic system. In exchange for which we have choosen the criminal surveillance and murder/torture State.

Those who do not know History are doomed to repeat it.

Hans Denee

AIPAC and the Cowards that Grovel at its feet.

2008-06-09T13:25:00.000-07:00

John McCain of course, Hillary outdoing him and last but not least Obama, our latest spineless wonder to emerge as a bought coward by the same people that brought you creative destruction in Iraq and promise more of the same in Iran and all over the Middle East; Israel really wants to test its nuclear weapons and preferably sooner than later. Any excuse will do; Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Palestinians.

Hopping onto the bandwagon of AIPAC's yearly ritual of offensive (to every thinking human being) propaganda and dire threats is a who of who of Washington DC and Tel Aviv politicians, each one trying to outdo the other in its praise and support for the State of Israel and its murderous policies and vile actions. Each one threatening to unleash more of the same in the Middle East - and that does not include the peaceful promotion of democracy - all for the sake of the protection of the State of Israel.

US politicians, all bought and paid for by the Racket on K.Street and black mailed by powerful lobby groups like AIPAC, are without an exception cowering in their boots, afraid to speak truth to power.

So why then would anyone be surprised (Chris Hedges seems to be in www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080608_the_iran_trap) with Obama's murmurings at the yearly AIPAC carnival last week? He is owned/threatened by the money providers/black mailers of the US corporate fascist state and would not dare speak up about Israel's atrocities in the occupied territories that resemble the South African APARTHEID STATE of not so long ago.

Obama as a politician with a large ego and little experience is not the second coming of Christ or the saviour that so many simple minded people in the USA want him to be; he is, like all the other politicians bound by his ties to big money and for that reason has to speak their language of threats and war, because "War is the Health of the State" (Randolph Bourne), financed by the Federal Reserve (www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/war-andinflation.html).

The Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) has absorbed and eliminated most functions of the democratic state and is now in the final stages to obtain absolute control over the people through the use of massive illegal surveillance and spying operations combined with threats of terror and incarceration. Our politicians believe this to be a good idea and as a result we and our children will be living in a perpetual state of war with the rest of humankind.

Politicians like Hillary, McCain and Obama have lost their soul and morals a long time ago to the devil of this MIC; they sold their freedom of thought and expression in exchange for the promise of earthly prestige and money. For them it is all about the power, the control and the money and the people be damned.

Why would anybody be so naive as to put faith in these individuals? Their only goal is to prolong and worsen our misery for the sake of their glorious ego's. And ego means war, all the time, anywhere we choose; aggressive, murderous war.

Hans Denee

Observing Human Behaviour from the Galley.

2008-06-08T11:57:00.000-07:00

As the cook on a 68' sailboat that carries a crew of four and up to 16 guests, I am in a unique position to observe human behaviour at its best and its worst.

"Manners" quite often are in short supply and human expressions of not having any at all are on display all the time. It sometimes comes down to a free for all, where a person or persons will/can not wait till the "breakfast is ready" announcement has been made and get there hands on anything that is not kept hidden in the galley till such time.

Muffins will be torn in half and the other half deposited back into the basket. Fingers will be used to pick preferred pieces of fruit out of the fresh fruit bowl, sometimes over and over again. Sneezes will not be discreetly subdued against one's arms, but blown freely all over the morning's breakfast or for that matter the afternoon's lunch and/or evening's dinner table.

The most annoying ones are the lurkers and vultures, always ready to jump on the food as soon as half of it is on the table and quite often lurking about for quite some time to make sure they are the first ones to dive into the food.

And of course a sick person who helps him/her self to the First Aid Drawer has to sneeze all over the first aid supplies, preferably multiple times. Or the seasick person who throws up all over his/her cabin instead of over the railing designed for that stomach upheaval.

Luckily there are exceptions to this sometimes disgusting human behaviour, when everybody in the group waits till the table is set, the announcement has been made and a prayer by one in the group confirms what my mother told me at a very young age; "Amen" is the sign to dig in.

Hans Denee

Torture, Silence and Enablers.

2008-06-06T13:52:00.000-07:00

Today, in North America and Western Europe , through the silence of its leaders and citizens, more than 700 million TORTURERS have been identified; they have been silent in the face of overwhelming evidence that most of their leaders approve of torture to obtain information from an individual that can and will be used in a "kangaroo" court of their choosing, military or otherwise.
Not only do they approve of direct torture by their respective "security" institutions (CIA, M16), they also have a penchant for kidnapping and renditioning persons of interest to certain countries where torture has been an age old tool to silence one's enemies. Through their silence these 700 million "plus" enablers have turned these first 8 years of this new century into what in History will be labeled "The Coming of the Second Dark Ages"; when civilization took a turn into a black abyss of unknown depth and by doing so, relegated the lessons learned from the past century's mistakes to the dustbin of History.

To walk this road alone in the knowledge that worse is yet to come but nobody seems to care is a devastating experience of insoluble truth.
When people are afraid and terrorised into believing that whatever is done in their name is always done for their own good, the truth becomes a mangled and manipulated reality, magnified by a constant stream of propaganda and lies.

What is done in our name - and some of our leaders are extremely proud of their accomplishments - amounts to a repeat of the worst atrocities known to men and women since the beginning of time. Obviously we again are living the destruction created by ordinary-evil men through their thirst for power, unquenchable greed and utmost stupidity.

What really scares me is, that the average person does not seem to realise how much live has changed in these last 7 years and that much of these changes are taken for granted and considered necessary to give them that feeling of safety when BIG Brother is watching over us 24/7. We really do believe that we are still FREE and not the prisoners of the system that has been built around us and is today enveloping us as a virtual prison from which there is no escape ever. Brain washed and unable to think for our selves, we have granted our freedoms to our leaders to do with as they see fit and as a result we have become their slaves.

It amazes me, that so called intelligent human beings can fall for the same scam over and over again and never realise that the perpetrators are the same, albeit with different names, in different disguises and in different countries.

Only hope will keep me alive; or should I know better?

Hans Denee

Haida Gwaii; Islands of peace and tranquility.

2008-06-05T15:08:00.000-07:00

I have just come back from my first trip to Haida Gwaii this year. After a very cold and sometimes uncomfortable 5 day delivery from Vancouver to Morresby camp, the weather improved, the moment we welcomed our first guests on board.

Nothing was easy on this trip because two days before our departure from Vancouver, I injured my right foot and ended up hobbling around in a walking cast; doing that on land is one thing, on a sailboat it becomes a rather unique experience that from time to time can be very painful. Alas, I endured and finished the trip without having to compromise on the quality of the food provided to our guests.

The magic of Gwaii Haanas is something to behold and savour; it cannot be described, one must be there and open his soul to what is........ the humpback whales, the sea, the snow covered mountains, the birds, the Haida villages, the Watchmen, the quiet and the spirits of the Ancestors.

After living in the city for 7 months, being here is like coming alive again after a long hibernation in a grey, cold, wet and tumultuous world. I feel privileged to be able to come to this magical land of the Haida people and be invited to their table. To have a relationship with some of them that transcends the daily routines of live and makes you feel like part of their family.

We visited the museum, that is now open to the public, however a lot of work is still to be done; the official opening has been delayed till August 23 after the death of the chief of Skidegate this spring in a terrible boating accident.
We were invited for lunch in the long house in Skidegate and met many of the elders that were on the "naming" trip in 2007.

I am looking forward to my next trip to this land of magic and spirituality.

Hans Denee

"Above all, however, they tortured because they were torturers"

2008-04-23T21:01:00.000-07:00

These are the words of Primo Levi, written in his book "Survival in Auschwitz", the account of his ten months in the German death camp.

The words apply to the people mentioned in the torture memos recently disclosed in the NYT; George W Bush, Richard Bruce Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, George Tenet and John Ashcroft. They are the torturers in charge of the torture done by their underlings in the CIA, the Dept. of Offense, the Dept. of Homeland Security and most of the Police forces in the tortured United States of America. They have provided all the cover needed for the real torturers to do their work in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and many undisclosed locations around the globe and away from the public eye.

Not that the public seems to care that the country now has a reputation comparable to Russia under Stalin, Germany under the Nazis, Argentina under the Generals and Chile under Pinochet. Torture after all is a necessary evil if the men and woman in charge say so; why quibble about laws and legalities when you want the government to protect you from those evil Islamic terrorists? Torture them to death any time but do not involve us the people in these nasty and murderous schemes; we are too busy to decide who the next Torturer in charge will be after the current ones leave for greener pastures. We are being terrorised by our leaders and will do anything for our protection, even if it means that innocent people are tortured to death on our behalf.

That torture has become a hallmark of US foreign and domestic policy (remember Jose Padillo, an American citizen) is not surprising if one considers the personalities of the people involved in defining these policies. What is surprising to an outsider is, that the American public has quietly acquiesced to the gradual demolition of what was once a democratic state however with a questionable election system. Today, when torture, rendition, imprisonment without right to a trial, rape and mass murder, are accepted by most as the norm by which to measure today's State of the Union, a Union that is dissolving into the mirror image of the Nazi corporate fascist state, nothing stands in the way of the murderous collapse that is about to befall the terrorised citizenry of a once great country.

There are many dreamers in today's United States of America, who believe that with every next election things miraculously will change for the better, like in 2006. The election of 2008 will not change anything because the public has already decided what it wants; "to be protected by their leaders at any cost". Both the Republicans and the Democrats offer the same medication: more of the same, more aggressive wars, more torture, more renditions, more rapes, more lifelong imprisonment without the right to a trial and of course the 24/7 spying on everyone by not only your government but your neighbours as well.

What we are witnessing today is the collapse of the American Empire and the consequences for the rest of the world are becoming a menacing reality. Collapsing empires have a tendency to run amok and create mass destruction; of their real and perceived enemies without any regards for the fallout of their irrational actions on the rest of humanity.

Once torture becomes the standard by which we live and die, we are doomed as a nation and as a people. We all become TORTURERS.

Hans Denee

Self Deception, Hypocrisy, Paranoia and Hubris.

2008-03-06T11:52:00.000-08:00

On The day that the US House of Representatives in a vote 404 -1 condemned Palestinians in Gaza, the State of Iran and the State of Syria and lectures the Saudis to condemn the Palestinians one does not need to ask the question of who controls the US Congress. As another act of self deception, with the pressure applied by AIPAC, and all morals in the gutter that is Washington, DC, the hypocrisy of the cowards that have been elected to this Immoral Institution knows no bounds.

That the State of Israel is the ultimate Terrorist Organisation that murders and tortures at will and applies collective punishment to defenseless people on a scale not seen since the Nazis applied the same rules in occupied Europe, seems not to matter to the 404 morally bankrupt, corporate bought and intrinsically corrupt people that occupy the US House of Representatives.

The aim of the State of Israel and for that matter the United States of America is to "Shoah" the Palestinian people from their lands in the Gaza and West Bank. In every which way possible; outright mass murder, kidnappings, starvation in isolation, bombings of electric and water utilities and direct attacks on hospitals, the State of Israel with the support of its American enablers steps closer to this Palestinian "Shoah". The inhumanity of the United States of America and the State of Israel, always using the Holocaust as an excuse and in the process degrading this Holocaust, is on public display, every day of the week. American hypocrisy and self righteousness as a means to justify its Barbaric Acts can only be compared to the Fascist and Communist Dictatorships of previous generations. The bloodshed continues on a scale incomprehensible to ordinary people not caught in the crossfire of US hegemonic actions.

Hans Denee

Make Belief Presidential Elections and the Irrelevance of a Bought Congress.

2008-02-04T14:33:00.000-08:00

In the shallow world of American Main Stream media frenzy, the Republican's and Democrat's nomination process is put on equal footing with the whereabouts of Britney Spears and the mutterings of Paris Hilton. Nominees are celebrities for the simple reason that they are running for their respective parties, and in particular since one of them is black, the other a woman, the third one a war mongering old geezer and the last one a religious extremist. If George W Bush and Dick Cheney agree and cooperate, one of these four unsavory characters will be elected President of what is now a Rogue Surveillance State where intimidation and fear will keep the subjects in line and the corporations happily occupied in their criminal business activities worldwide.

Of course, there is no guarantee that Tricky Dick Cheney and Lying George W Bush will allow for the elections to actually take place in November of 2008. In the hoopla that is the nomination circus, the majority of the people seems not to notice that the surveillance noose is being tightened around every body's neck at the same time as the White House confirms that water boarding is taking place and legal because of the say so of George W Bush. Every week one little step closer to that Fascist Totalitarian State that still has Democracy written all over it if only because the majority of the people are not informed about their State of the Union. Why would a cabal of murderous white men give up the power they have amassed in the last 7 years with the help of a compliant Congress, if in the Acts that have been passed in these seven years they have an assortment of options at their disposal to continue their reign uninterrupted for some time to come?

How hard would it be for these manipulators to create a National Emergency and declare Martial Law proclaiming all along that whatever it is they have decided to do, is for the protection of all of us from ourselves and those nasty Islamic Terrorists? And Joe Public, afraid as always, will surrender the last of its liberties and rights to the Despots we created ourselves willingly. That will include our right to vote, at least temporarily.

Until 2006, when the Republican dominated Congress rubber stamped everything and anything the White House demanded with the help of many Democrats, we always could hope for a change if and when the Democrats would take over Congress in 2006. Well, the Democrats took over both Houses in the 2006 elections and continued to rubber stamp everything that the Bush/Cheney junta demanded with the help of all the Republicans. They quite often put up an admirable show of resistance, but people in the know were aware of the theatrics involved. The irrelevance of Congress is comparable to the irrelevance of the Reichstag during the Nazi years in Germany in the nineteen thirties of the past century. Corrupt and bamboozled, manipulated and terrorised by the White House occupiers and their chosen enforcers.

Nothing and nobody can save us now.

Hans Denee

Of Evil Men, Corrupt Politicians and Ignorant Bystanders..

2008-01-15T09:52:00.000-08:00

In today's United Sates of America, taken over by Ideologues, Kleptocrats, Christian Jihadists and the Criminally Insane, the evil of men is exposed on a scale not seen since the times of Stalin and Hitler in the Europe of the first half of the last century. The emergence of catastrophic evil in the halls of power of Washington DC, planned for years by the Neocons and their hangers on, is not a surprise to students of history and human kind. The evil of men as exposed in the history of humanity is one long lament of war, death, torture, rape, lies, propaganda, manipulation and power. The power to control, corrupt and dehumanise the ignorant bystanders used as tools in their own demise at the hands of these Evil Men .

When today we look at the men and women who are part of the United States Government we cannot help but see the most corrupt and power hungry group of evil humans since the dying days of the Roman Empire. The self importance of these people as expressed in their threats to the rest of humanity is mind boggling. The superiority complex and self righteousness that fuels their Hypocrisy, Paranoia and Bullying of others must be seen as a sign of insecurity and mental degradation caused by these and other delusional thoughts and feelings. The superiority of Empire and the callousness of its inhabitants are creating havoc and lawlessness in the world not seen since the days of the Nurnberg laws.

Many of the corrupt Congressmen and Senators have taken it upon themselves to instruct the rest of the world, what to do and how to behave under threat of force to be applied by the almighty United States of America against any country that does not grovel at the feet of these inhumane monsters. The most amazing thing in all this is, that they refuse to see themselves for what they really are; enabling corrupt criminals. Instead they still believe that they are the good guys and whoever argues against their immoral actions is the enemy, a terrorist or mentally deranged.

These so called elected officials have two things in common; they have no decency or morals and their self interest trumps all other considerations be they social or humane. They are exposed, when they blather on and on in their Capitol, as the cowardly spineless wimps they have become in their quest for power and money. They do not care for the ignorant masses, except to manipulate them into believing that it is all for their own good, even if it means the creation of a surveillance state that would make Stalin proud.

To enable the enablers, the Ignorant People are manipulated into believing that their enabling will lead to security for them and their families. However in order to be able to transfer this believe into the Ignorant's minds, they have to be terrorised psychologically first and by threat of physical force later. The terrorising of the Ignorant People through propaganda and manipulation of the mind has been very successful and the groundwork has been laid for the implementation of a surveillance police state to be fully implemented at any time that the President decides. He has been given the power by his enablers to call for a State of Emergency and bring in the Army and National Guard whenever he feels the need to do so. Only naive dreamers believe that this will never happen in what they still believe is the only democracy on this earth.

The United States of America today resembles a rogue, out of control, State with a bunch of elitist criminals running the place into the ground at an alarming speed. Self interest, self aggrandisement and greed have become hall marks of today's politicians who could care less about the unwashed masses except that they have to be controlled in order not to upset their bubble in DC.

Hans Denee

Why we should Fear the Future because of the Past.

2007-12-30T12:35:00.000-08:00

Informed people are aware of the duplicitous actions of their government and are prepared to fight the consequences of such actions. They also understand that their government, lies, manipulates and propagandizes the truth into a false reality that benefits only the elites that control the structures of power.

The problem today is, that so many smart people are so uninterested in - and uninformed and ignorant about what the government is doing. And not only are they ignorant, they jump on the government orchestrated bandwagon without hesitation and are blind and oblivious to the surveillance state being constructed around them. They accept any and all government explanations for the need to torture, murder, rendition and spy; which most of the time comes down to:"we have to do it for your own protection". And the smart, uninformed people are led like sheep to be properly slaughtered at the right moment.

That moment is about to come in the New Year when the elites under the cover of a presidential election will close down society as we know it for good and turn it into a surveillance and concentration camp society in which everybody is suspect. The election will be - like the last two elections - manipulated into a Republican winner take all. An incident will be created to terrorise the populace into voting for the candidate who will complete the transformation from democracy to a fascist police state. While the foundation for the police state has been put in place by the current administration, the next one will severely curtail every body's freedom of speech, movement and employment.

At that point in time we will have no choice but to go along with the "system" as the Germans went along with the national socialist system forced upon them by the Nazis after the 1933 elections that they did not win. Since the 2006 midterm election, the Democrats have proven to be perfectly willing to enable the criminal misdeeds of the current administration and its ideologues and in reality expand on the crimes that are now reported on an almost daily basis. And the people have accepted the crimes of their leaders as not really being crimes because of the say so of these leaders. We have all become compliant with - and afraid of the "thought police" that is now monitoring our communications and actions and we will be further terrorised into becoming the cowards we really, deep down, are.

The lessons from recent history are, that it can happen anywhere the people are too frightened to stand up to the intimidation, manipulations and terror by the leaders they elect. We have witnessed the catastrophe that befell the Germans when the people went along with the manipulations, criminal acts and brutal force of the Nazis and we must surely be aware of the millions of people that were murdered in Stalin's gulags. More recently we have witnessed the disaster that is Zimbabwe, conveniently forgotten by our MSM.

History, so often forgotten or manipulated, should be a lesson for all of us; a lesson to learn not to make the same mistakes over and over again, but instead to avoid the pitfalls of history in the present for a better future.

Hans Denee

The Murderers we elect to Torture us to Death.

2007-12-11T15:23:00.000-08:00

It finally seems to dawn on the ignorant masses in the United States of Hypocrisy that their elected representatives from the president down to the corrupt politicians in the Congress are all enablers of murder, torture and rape and therefor ARE mass murderers, torturers and rapists. Not that it makes any difference to the average American ignorant, since he/she tacitly approves of the criminal actions of their chosen ones. Patriot Acts, Military Commission Act and Presidential Dictates have upended the constitution and nobody cares, least of all the Democrats in Congress. They do not care, because they like the opportunities these laws offer them once they recoup the presidency in 2008; conservatives and democrats have the same goal and that is absolute power and control over the ignorant masses.

Everything has been put in place since 9/11 by the Bush cabal to take over the country, lock up dissidents (that is you and me) and organise death squads once the "decider" decides that a state of emergency is now in place for whatever obscure reason. The concentration camps have been built, the mercenaries are at the ready, the judicial system has been dismantled and the torturers are ready for us. Now we just have to wait for the other shoe to drop. I am sure Dick and George will come up with some sort of creative terrorist event that will scare the hell out of all the ignorants and will give them the carte blanche they want to finally shut down what once used to be a democratic state. And nobody cares.

By the time the dirty deed is done by this administration or the next one, it will be too late for anybody to claim ignorance, innocence or injustice. Every people gets the political system it deserves and longs for. In the US case it will be a duplicate of the fascist Nazi system of the nineteen thirties with the Jews being replaced by the Muslims as the enemies of the state, everything else to be the same. As soon as well known dissidents begin to disappear, it will be come clear to the cowardly masses that they should be afraid and keep quiet or they will be next in the line up to the torture chambers that by now have been set up across the land with the experienced help of the CIA torturers of historic fame in the rest of the world. Torture is coming home and nobody will be exempt from its terror. And nobody cares.

The Congress (Conservatives and Democrats) in lockstep with the White House has created the foundation for the disaster that is about to be visited upon the American people. With the help of a bunch of immoral lawyers and political opportunists they have created a fascist dictatorial state and nobody is aware of it. A state that is lawless and advocates agressive wars and the use of torture, rendition and murder as appropriate measures to achieve global hegemony and complete control of the Homeland under the disguise of the GWOT.

When the people will be tortured and disappeared as they did in Argentina and Chile in days past, it may finally dawn on the ignorants that nobody is to be blamed but themselves for the misery that has descended upon them.

It is too late now for a change in direction and as in 1933, the coming disaster has to run its course, even if it means the end of what is often cynically called "civilization".

Hans Denee

Life's a Fleeting Moment.

2007-11-15T14:13:00.000-08:00

"Alles Vergangliche ist nur ein Gleichnis" (all things transitory are but a parable) as in the final chorus mysticus of Mahler's eight symphony (Johann W. von Goethe, Faust II).

Human beings are such transitory things and our life's stories are the parables. Short lived and just a speck in time, our existence is terribly overrated. Our self importance and egotism are the downfall of us all and in the process we have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that this world of ours would have been much better off without us. Unable to live with each other and for each other we decided to fight each other from day one. We have failed miserably and seem to be unable to understand the premise of our existence, to live in harmony with each other and be the guardian of what was given to us, a beautiful natural world.

When we look around us today, in a world gone mad once more, we must notice the failings of our existence as they relate to our consumption madness and shopping mall addictions. We have guttered our lives and enslaved it to a behaviour of parasitic abuse of the world's resources. We claim to be "happy" in our daily lives and pretend to be "Christians" of one sort or another, while most of us wouldn't recognise the words of God or his Son, if the bible were read to us out loud from beginning to end repeatedly. We are the evil that is destroying this world without any regard for those (our grandchildren) that will inherit the mess we created. Why would we, the superior white race, care for anybody but ourselves?

In our corrupted greed, we have all become torturers and mass murderers, not only of human beings, but of the natural world around us. We have destroyed our environment, our food and our reason to live. We are terrified and cling to our fake Religions and fake Gods for our final redemption; not being aware that there is no redemption for evil doers.

We are doomed to completely destroy what keeps us alive and nothing will stop us from our own annihilation.

Whatever will be left of this world when it is finally done with us, will hopefully regenerate into the beautifull place it once was before we began to destroy its beauty.

Hans Denee

The Road to Fascist Purgatory, Again!

2007-11-14T13:39:00.000-08:00

On the road to Hell on Earth we meet with the likes of Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Bush the Younger while the bystanders along the road - the Kleptocracy, the Fundamentalist Jihadists and Corrupt politicians - are egging the Dictators on, we are reminded that every so often we have to take this road as penance for the absolute stupidity of humankind. Not all of us seem to know why we are on this particular road with not a shopping mall in sight and always accompanied by some scary people from the Homeland Security Dept., the FBI, the CIA and the Dept. of Offense. Ignorance can be bliss, except on the road we are travelling on at this very moment when the course of our History, once again is being decided upon by a group of irresponsible fanatical ideologues with no morals or respect for human life.

The problem is that there is nobody to blame but ourselves; we cowardly went along with them when they terrorised us into given up our freedom for their protection; we stood idly by when they proclaimed that Torture is what we do, Rendition is the way to do it and Murder is the ultimate aim. We continued on our merry shopping ways, oblivious of what was happening to us and what was being done in our name to other human beings. We are afraid now because it is too late to turn the clock back; we are in the middle of what other people before us in history have experienced, a Fascist Murderous Kleptocracy. While on this road, we spy on our neighbours, declare all Muslims our arch enemies and continue to feel sorry for ourselves. Why do we deserve to be in this situation, we the superior Americans?

To our absolute horror, we find out, that we missed the fork in the road that could have saved us, because we were too busy blaming others for our misery and mistakes but there is no way back since the road behind us has disappeared into killing fields so large, that death reaches past the horizon where the souls of the innocents are crying in vain for our mercy and understanding. We have nothing to offer but more of the same; terror, torture, rendition and murder. The long road to hell on earth is actually getting shorter every day we travel its maimed and dead bodies and the abyss we should - but we do not - expect to see any time soon is now staring us in the face. We are blinded by our paranoia, hypocrisy and belated, "if I would have known, I would have done it different", laments. Not that we really care about who and how many we killed on the last stretch of road, we are ready to kill more of those nasty Islamo fascists that hate our freedom on the road ahead of us; that is unless we reach our abyss before we can do more harm to the people we hate.

The road ahead looks ominous; (Austria and Checho-Slovakia are behind us but Poland is around the corner and as soon as we get there, Holland, Belgium, France, Denmark, Norway and Russia are in our sights), or is this the road to Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Lebanon after we travelled through Afghanistan and Iraq and left a trail of destruction, and millions of dead and displaced people. They are building our empire of bases and prisons along the way and are preparing us for the all out assault on what is left of our Rights in conjunction with a nuclear escalation of their "war on terror". We should have known, but we decided to ignore the lessons that History teaches to all who are willing to listen.

The future is definitively not us.

Hans Denee

Lying the Truth, Torture and Denial.

2007-10-12T12:03:00.000-07:00

Twice he told us that we "do not torture" and we know that he was lying every time these words came over his lips. George W Bush, the self proclaimed unitary "decider" once again could not tell the truth to the American and World public and instead resorted to utter unconvincing lies that could not cover up the underlying truth, that yes, the USA has been torturing people whenever and wherever it suits the cabal that is currently the Government of the United States of America.
Torture as described in the UN Convention Against Torture of December 9, 1975 www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html and as confirmed in US law, see http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/05/24/usint8614.htm, is a criminal offence punishable by up to 20 years in prison or death.
The disturbing facts of Abu Ghraib and the further admissions by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales confirm to even the most biased person awake today, that torture has become a US passion that cannot be punished because of the say so of a former drug addict, the President of these United States. The laws regarding torture have been proclaimed as being quaint and out of touch with today's reality of perpetual war; a war without end against "blow back" terrorism and the citizens of the United States itself.

We all know, that not only does the USA torture its prisoners at home and abroad, it also renditions them to other countries to be tortured www.maherarar.ca/mahers%20story.php. Denials and cover-ups by the United States of America under the ridiculous claims of "national security secrecy" have only magnified the criminal behaviour of the US Government and its vassals world wide.

We have to ask ourselves these two questions; why are Americans allowing their Government to illegally torture its prisoners and why haven't we heard protests about this illegal torture from Canada and Western European countries. The answer to the first question is, that Americans are afraid www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/12/4502/ of their Government today. The second question may have a similar answer as the first; Canada and Western European countries are afraid of reprisals by the US Government if they do not toe the US line on its Foreign policy; the better description of this is bullying your so called friends into submission through threats of retaliation.

And so far, the United States Government of George W Bush is literally getting away with torture, mass murder, rendition, creative destruction, extortion and massive surveillance of its citizens not to mention the surveillance of most everybody else in this world. There is no worldwide movement by concerned Governments to try to contain the damage done by the Cheney - Bush cabal since September 11/2001 and to stop the same cabal from escalating the existing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into WW IV as Norman Podhoretz www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20071008_book_excerpt_the_israel_lobby/ is so feverishly praying for.

Its feels like we are all frozen in the headlights and are unable to move, knowing full well, that this oncoming tsunami of world wide destruction will descends on us at high speed. We seem to be paralyzed and incapable of stopping this fascist machine that has turned the USA into a Police State and exhibits all the same criminal characteristics of the Nazis during their time in power in Germany from 1933 to 1945.

We need to wake up and speak out against the atrocities committed by the US Government and it agencies here and abroad. We cannot be afraid and we shall not be silent unless we become accomplishes in these crimes committed in our names.

Hans Denee

Codepink and the right to protest in Canada.

2007-10-11T09:22:00.000-07:00

We are seeing the slow creep of the American Police State coming across the border into Canada under the guidance of our wannabe Emperor Stephen Harper. Not content with micro managing everything in Ottawa into absolute secrecy, his Government ordered the "Stop and Return" of Medea Benjamin and Ann Wright of Codepink USA who were on their way to a Toronto Stop The War Coalition meeting. The excuse being used by our border "Police" is that the names of these two women were on a list, produced by the FBI (remember Edgar Hoover? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover) and normally containing the names of murderers, suspected terrorists and other convicted criminals.

Helloooooooo, these two women are peace activists!

The crimes of Medea and Ann are, according to the FBI, misdemeanor charges for arrests while peacefully protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is absolute insanity to refuse entry to people who peacefully protest against their Government's crimes. Canada used to be the "Peace Keepers" country of this world, however with our participation in the war in Afghanistan we have exchanged our traditional role as a peace making nation for that of a warmongering nation under US and Nato tutelage.

In democracies like ours, people must speak out against their Government's misdeeds without fear of reprisal. Mis demeanor charges for arrests while protesting these misdeeds should not stop anyone from protesting against their Government. Instead of denying Codepink peace activists entry into our Country, we should invite them to tell truth to power about war crimes committed in our names.

Hans Denee

We are Killing "Today" while the "Future" is already Dead.

2007-10-02T11:21:00.000-07:00

We have definitively murdered the "Past", ignored the "Present" for too long, are now killing "Today" and are blinded by a "Future" that is already dead because we killed it unconsciously with our arrogance, hubris and decadence.

The "Past" (history) does not always repeat itself in exactly the same way as it occurred there and then. Historians - a suspect group - have a difficult time establishing what really happened in the past; from the creation of the bible and the Torah to the mass murders in Nagasaki and Hiroshima history has told us lies with a reassurance that would make Goebbels and Rove blush.

Nevertheless, we are told that history will repeat itself even when history itself is a lie and an invention of persons with inflated ego's. There is no precedent for the bible or the Torah in history and the nuclear bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of innocents in Nagasaki and Hiroshima had no previous history either. The bible and the Torah were a new phenomena in history as was the Koran some 300 years later and nuclear devices had never been used as a tool of mass murder before in history.

When history repeats itself, we often do not notice, because the way it repeats itself is cloaked in a disguise that makes it impossible for most of us to understand what is really happening. New bibles have been written and new interpretations of the Torah have been adopted by different people through the centuries. Sixty two years after the nuclear decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the United States has decided and so has Israel, that the use of nuclear weapons in any war of aggression is a clear option. Religious extremism based on interpretations of questionable historical documents, like the New Testament, calls for Armageddon and Rapture, while the political extremists in the United States and Israel call for WW IV using nuclear weapons against innocent women, men and children.

By confusing history with reality and propaganda with the truth, we have murdered not only the Past, but truth as well and through the abuse and neglect of the Present we are destroying Today and Every Day on our journey to the dead Future.
We are intent on destroying ourselves through our persistent ignorance of the reality of Today, obscured by our arrogance and self righteousness. Instead of a bright future, we are giving away a dead future to our children and grand children while still believing that we are doing the right thing; like destroying the earth with our greed and the need for aggressive nuclear wars directed at politically convenient enemies.

The fact that we never learn from our mistakes and recently have decided that we do not make mistakes, is a reality that will bring an end to humanity. Terror, Hypocrisy and Paranoia identify us with previous generations that came close to annihilating themselves; this time we have created the men and the tools to put an end to this world, once and for all.

Hans Denee

The American Love of Torture, Destruction, Murder and Crimes Against Humanity.

2007-09-25T09:56:00.000-07:00

America, once the land of great opportunities, has become the land of the oppressed; willingly one might add, since no major protests have accompanied the descend into the fascist totalitarian dictatorship created by the Bush - Cheney cabal in the last 6 years. Nationalism may be at the root of this phenomena like it was the root cause of National Socialism in Germany in the nineteen thirties. Ignorants and patriotic cowards seem to have a love for tyrants who promise them security in exchange for giving up their rights and freedom; usually this is accompanied by threats of imagined terror, doom and gloom. The people in their desperate need to be protected by the State are quite willing to become the tools the State needs in its quest for absolute control over its citizens, oil and the rest of the world. It is a gradual but often brutal process in which the elites of both parties agree to laws that neuter the populace into a state of complacency and submission. Once this zombie - like mood of the people is achieved, further restraints are legislated on the freedom of the citizens; the State and its accomplices - forced or of their own free will - , spy on the citizens 24/7 through the use of massive computerised data collection programs.

Accompanying this downward spiral in moral rectitude is the sudden embrace of the use of torture by the general populace at the recommendation of the elites and its lawyers. No major protests were heard when Abu Ghraib was revealed to the masses or when Potus proclaimed, that the Torture of people was the new policy of the CIA and other nefarious security agencies in the employ of the Dept. of Offense, the State Dept., the Dept. of "Heimat" Security and various police and prison security forces across the land. Torture is now firmly embedded in the American Psyche; not as something amoral, but as a necessary tool to arrive at the truth. Never mind that every interrogation expert in the world tells us, that torture does NOT work. To understand what torture does to a human being, every American should be forced to read the writings of Jean Amery in his book "At The Mind's Limits".

A sure sign of our reverse altruism is the havoc and destruction we have created over the last one hundred plus years across the globe; from the Philippines to Vietnam, from Chile and Argentina to Cambodia and from Greece to Afghanistan and Iraq, we have directly or indirectly caused the destruction of whole countries and societies. Justification for our noble deeds is always our purported moral superiority forcing us to free and democratise the oppressed peoples of the world. It is our God given duty to force this freedom onto the "Low Life" that inhabits this earth, if necessary by brute force. And more often than not, we wreck and occupy a country and proclaim that our creative destruction is all for the good of the people we are in the process of liberating ( from themselves). Any time we fail (like in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan today) we blame our victims for the misery we create.

"MURDER" should be our middle name, since we do it with such a vengeance, supported by the fundamentalist extremists and the corporacy that benefits from the wars we start and loose. Millions of people have been murdered by our Dept. of Offence, the CIA and our well paid Mercenaries. Murdered, for their own good, by the morally Superior Americans, who combine Religion (GOD), Greed and Self righteousness as the reasons for their illicit behaviour. We are so morally bankrupt, that today we refuse to count the people we murder in Iraq and Afghanistan, suggesting that only American dead soldiers are worthy of being counted; not that we really care about how many Americans are being butchered in our never ending search for dominating the earth and its vital resources. We murder, because we are murderers.

All of this brings us to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity as defined by the Nuremberg Trials. When carefully rereading the Summation for the Prosecution by Robert Jackson at the major Nuremberg trial, one cannot but come to the conclusion that the George W. Bush regime in the 6 years since 9/11 - 2001 has committed three of the main crimes as listed by Robert Jackson in his summation.
These are:
1) The seizure of Power and the Subjugation of the USA to a Police State,
2) The Preparation and Waging of Wars of Aggression and
3) Warfare in Disregard of International Law.

American Politics today is intellectually bankrupt and morally perverse and as a result millions are dying because of a lie; a lie repeated Ad nauseam.

Hans Denee

"None Dare Call It Genocide" by Lew Rockwell.

2007-09-24T08:35:00.000-07:00

None Dare Call It Genocide
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

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How comfy we are all in the United States, as we engage in living-room debates about the US occupation of Iraq, whether "we" are bringing them freedom and whether their freedom is really worth the sacrifice of so many of our men and women. We talk about whether war aims have really been achieved, how to exit gracefully, or whether we need a hyper-surge to finish this whole business once and for all.
But there's one thing Americans don't talk about: the lives of Iraqis, or, rather, the deaths of Iraqis. It's interesting because we live in an age of extreme multiculturalism and global concern. We adore international aid workers, go on mission trips abroad, weep for the plight of those suffering from hunger and disease, volunteer in efforts to bring plumbing to Ecuador, mosquito nets to Rwanda, clean water to Malawi, human rights to Togo, and medicine to Bangladesh.
But when "we" cause the calamity, suddenly there is silence. There is something odd, suspicious, even disloyal about a person who would harp on the deaths of Iraqis since the US invasion in 2003. Maybe a person who would weep for Iraq is really a terrorist sympathizer. After all, most of the deaths resulted from "sectarian violence," and who can stop crazed Islamic sects from killing each other. Better each other than us, right?
Well, it's about time that we think about the numbers, even though the US military has decided that body counts are not worth their time. Opinion Research Business, a highly reputable polling firm in the UK, has just completed a detailed and rigorous survey of Iraqis. In the past, the company's results have been touted by the Bush administration whenever the data looks favorable to the US cause. But their latest report received virtually no attention in the US.
Here is the grisly bottom line: more than one million people have been murdered in Iraq since the US invasion, according to the ORB. Yes, other estimates are lower, but you have to be impressed by what they have found. It seems very credible.
In Baghdad, where the US presence is most pronounced, nearly half of households report having lost a family member to a killing of some sort. Half the deaths are from gunshot wounds, one-fifth from car bombs, and one-tenth from aerial bombs. The total number of dead exceeds the hugely well-publicized Rwandan genocide in 1994.
You are welcome to inspect the detailed data.
Aside from the astonishing detail, what jumps out at me is the number of dead who are neither Sunni nor Shia. It is also striking how the further geographically you move from US troop activity, the more peaceful the area is. Americans think they are bringing freedom to Iraq, but the data indicate that we are only bringing suffering and death.
If you have ever lost a family member, you know that life is never the same again. It causes every manner of religious, social, and marital trauma. It's bad enough to lose a family member to some disease. But to a cold-blooded killing or a car bomb or an airplane bomb? That instills a sense of fury and motivation to retribution.
So we are speaking of some 1.2 million people who have been killed in this way, and that does not count the numbers that were killed during the invasion itself for the crime of having attempted to oppose invading foreign troops, or the 500,000 children and old people killed by the US-UN anti-civilian sanctions in the 10 previous years.
And let's not flatter ourselves into thinking that these are nothing but ragheads killing each other for no good reason. Just this past weekend, there is an example in point. Some of the legendary contractors for the State Department were driving through the Sunni neighborhood of Mansour in Baghdad. They were driving their SUVs when witnesses reported an explosion of fire that lasted 20 minutes. The SUVs drove off, leaving at least nine people dead on the road.
Why? No one knows. Sure there will be investigations. There have already been apologies. The company in question has had its license to practice occupation revoked by the Iraqi government. For how long, no one knows. But these are merely symbolic gestures. There will be no justice, and no forgetting.
To the extent anyone pays attention to this stuff, they only hear the words of the State Department spokesman: "The bottom line is that the secretary wants to make sure that we do everything we possibly can to avoid the loss of innocent life."
In light of the one million plus figure, such statements come off as evil jokes. The US has unleashed bloodshed in Iraq that is rarely known even in countries we think of as violent and torn by civil strife. It is amazing to think that this has occurred in what was only recently a liberal and civilized country by the region’s standards. This was a country that had a problem with immigration, particularly among the well-educated and talented classes. They went to Iraq because it was the closest Arab proxy to Western-style society that one could find in the area.
It was the US that turned this country into a killing field. Why won’t we face this? Why won't we take responsibility? The reason has to do with this mysterious thing called nationalism, which makes an ideological religion of the nation's wars. We are god-like liberators. They are devil-like terrorists. No amount of data or contrary information seems to make a dent in this irreligious faith. So it is in every country and in all times. Here is the intellectual blindness that war generates.
Such blindness is always inexcusable, but perhaps more understandable in a time when information was severely restricted, when technological limits actually prohibited us from knowing the whole truth at the time. What excuse do we have today? Our blindness is not technological but ideological. We are the good guys, right? Every nation believes that about itself, but freedom is well served by the few who dare to think critically.
An essential postulate of the Western idea, or so we tell ourselves, is the universal and ultimate value of human life. And indeed it is true. No person or group of people is without value – not even those whom our own government chooses to label the enemy.
September 18, 2007
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail] is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of Speaking of Liberty.
Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com
Lew Rockwell Archives

A Tsunami of Lies.

2007-09-21T13:02:00.000-07:00

Politicians lie; of course they do, but they do it for the good of you and the nation. People lie; of course they do, but they do it to save face, their ass and/or humiliation. When politicians lie, the truth has no meaning other than becoming a lie to the politician since his/her lie is the new truth, created to enhance the politician's standing among the cabal of corrupt peoples trying to convince or threaten the uninterested citizens in believing that it is all done for the good of the nation and to protect its uninformed citizenry.

Lying us into a truth we do not recognize or understand is the ultimate aim of our not so democratically elected representatives and rulers who use threats and manipulation into terrorising us; to give up our Independence and Rights and become the slaves of our ignorance and angst. And so we are, through the use of hubris, being manipulated into consciously accepting the irresistible lies of our leaders as true and factual whereas they are actually lying the truth.

Being terrorised into a state of permanent inability to think for oneself is the ultimate aim of the ruling class; when manipulation of the mind has become the tool by which they rule our lives and deaths. Of course, a government by itself is not capable of controlling the minds of its people; it needs the cooperation, forced, manipulated or freely offered by the media through its control over the content that streams of the newspaper pages and off the screens in our living rooms. Gullible as we are, they know that we seldom dare to question the lies these people proclaim to be the absolute truths, accompanied as they most often are by threats of possible further restrictions on our freedom of movement and speech.

So we cower in our homes, afraid of the terror that has been instigated by our rulers but do not recognise as our government's terror and power over us. We become helpless and hopeless and decide to go along with everything our leaders proclaim to be of the utmost importance to us the beaten down citizenry. We do not care how many people, mostly innocent, are being murdered in our name, because we have been told that we are the good people who only kill the others for their own and our good. We cannot do anything wrong and never make a mistake; God is on our side and never on the enemy's side. They are the terrorists and we are the do-gooders,; "if only these poor black/ brown/ yellow people would accept our humane reasons for killing them". We never do anything but for altruistic reasons; even if it means wiping out all the Muslims in this world.

Our minds, through propaganda, manipulation and extortion , have become the properties of the state, free to use for whatever criminal enterprise the state proclaims to be of importance for our "freedom" and our "misfortune"; a well balanced campaign to keep control over us, the brainwashed citizens.

Politicians lie, women and children die; a reality observed through the centuries but never more true than in today's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where the percentage of innocent people being killed has never been higher. However, since we do not count the people we murder in the two countries we illegally occupy, why bother our conscience.
Therefor the question must be asked: do we still have a conscience, a moral conscience, that tells us the difference between right and wrong? Or is our conscience being controlled by the manipulations of our leaders into believing that rendition, torture and murder are now legal means to fight the often imaginary enemy. Of course, it is only legal when we do the torturing and murdering; when the enemy applies the same rules, we scream in disgust about the barbarism of this (created by us) enemy. When we kill women and children, it is called an accident or collateral damage or we just deny that it happened. In contrast, when the enemy kills women and children, we call it wilful murder.

What has become of us in less than six years resembles the state of the German people in 1939 after 6 years of National Socialism, just before Poland was attacked.

Iran will be next and history will repeat itself.

Hans Denee

"Keiner Kommt Davon" (Nobody will Survive).

2007-09-21T10:36:00.000-07:00

During the Cold War, a war created by the establishment in the United States of America to grow the Military Industrial Complex into the most profitable and power full Institution this world has ever seen, a book was written in German by Hans Hellmut Kirst with the title "Keiner Kommt Davon". This book tells the story of an incident that takes place in Poland during the Cold War that triggers a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and The United States of America. Predictably nobody survives as the fallout of a multitude of atomic bombs spreads into every corner of the world and silently but very painfully kills everybody.
As a novel, published in 1979, when the crisis (Berlin 1949, Hungary 1956, Cuba 1963) of this Cold War were slowly fading away, it was an interesting story, but not very convincing to the 1979 and thereafter readers. If it would have been published in 1956, most readers would have acknowledged the real possibility of such a criminal enterprise taking place in Europe at the time.

We have arrived at a new time in another century with some old and some new world players but with the same machinations as before; only the names change, but the aims are the same - absolute world power through the use of preemptive military and if necessary nuclear strikes. As a matter of fact we have come so much closer now to the possibility of a world devastated by nuclear war since the United States of America (the current Bull in the china shop) has given itself the right to nuke any state or country on this planet, preemptive when "THEY" decide to do so.

It may be obvious to only a few at this very moment, that the use of the nuclear option as it is called, will be imminent when the USA and Israel decide that the time has come for preemptive strikes at Iran initially and other countries in the Middle - and Far East consequently. Do not expect Russia and China to stand by helplessly for long; these two countries will be sucked into the maelstrom created by the American and the Israeli military actions and the world will become a "Hell On Earth" for every living creature.

At this time in history there is no avoiding the calamity that will befall us all. The clock that began ticking on September 11, 2001 is now only seconds away from midnight doom. With the help from psychopaths and criminally insane people in the White House , the US Congress, AIPAC. the AEI and Norman Podhoretz, lately seconded by newly chosen war hawks like Stephen Harper in Canada and Nicolas Sarkozy in France., this cabal of murderers and torturers is gong ho to extend their murderous enterprise to all corners of the world. Anyone hoping that the Democrats would be willing to stop this rush to self destruction should have been reading up on the history of the Democrats in power in the last hundred and seven years; as warmongers, only the neoconservatives beat them at their game, while the truly conservative libertarian people, detest war and government.

So, it is no longer an "IF" but only a "WHEN" the dogs of nuclear war will be released to the enjoyment of the Armageddon loving religious fundamentalist extremists in the United States of America and when we all will fade away into the end of a history filled with blood, religious terrorism, hubris, paranoia and hypocrisy.

Nobody will survive the future of a world gone insane and hope, in this case, does no longer apply.

Hans Denee

The Israel -Syria and the USA - Iran wars of 2007 and 2008.

2007-09-15T16:40:00.000-07:00

We are currently being set up by the elites in Israel and Washington DC with the help of AIPAC and the likes of Alan Dershowitz and Norman Podhoretz for the beginnings of what Podhoretz calls WW IV or the war against Islamo Fascism. A war that in its next stages will involve Syria, Iran, Israel and of course world's greatest democracy, the United States of America.
The nasty work of murdering millions of innocent women, children and related bystanders will be shared this time around. Since all this coming mass murder is exclusively for the greater good of Israel, the IDF will take on Syria while the US offensive forces will try to obliterate Iran simultaneously. It is hard to see that when these dogs of war are let loose on Syria and Iran, the rest of the Middle East will stand by and behave as if nothing is happening in their neighbourhood when the smell of death permeates all corners of the landscape and many millions will flee their countries.

A certain side show will occur in that part of Lebanon where Hezbollah rules and the Palestinians in Gaza and the West bank will most likely refuse to sit on their hands any longer to accommodate the creators of their Apartheid misery. Israel may have to fight three fronts once it attacks Syria and defeat like in the 2006 Israel - Lebanon war is very likely.
So, the conflagration will spread through the Middle East and beyond and will eventually include Turkey and Pakistan; when the Kurds decide that in the chaos of war all around them, this is the time to once and for all create a wider Kurdish State and Musharraf is removed from power and the Muslim radicals take over control of the State's nuclear bombs.

The above scenario, promoted by many of the neocons, The White House and most of the Republican and Democratic presidential wannabees, will unfold as soon as the people of the United States have been sufficiently indoctrinated into believing that no other course is available then the preemptive course. An incident will than be created to excuse the criminal bombing of the whole Middle East into the stone age.

The drums of war are getting stronger every week with false testimonies by General Petraeus and belligerent speeches by the naked emperor, never mind the continues lies uttered by Dick - Rasputin - Cheney and his war promoting allies like Joe Lieberman and John McCain. War it seems is now unavoidable and just a matter of time; time to set us all up into believing that more mass murder in our name is an unavoidable but good thing as it will protect us from the Muslim masses that want to come to the USA to kill us all because they hate our freedom; a freedom that is turning us into a fascist totalitarian state with the help of lunatic neocons, big arms business and radical evangelicals.

This coming war, procured by the Criminal in Chief and his admirers, will affect us all and not in any positive way. The world economy for one will be wrecked beyond recognition and memories of the dirty thirties will sound like really happy times compared to what we and our children will experience in the years to come. Nobody in the western world will escape and only the industrial military complex may temporarily continue to reap war's profits; profits that for all intent and purpose should be labeled "BLOOD" profits (as in blood diamonds). As for the rest of the world, their economies will be wrecked also, but China and Russia and to a lesser extend India will be standing by as the western world obliterates itself and dark ages descent on North America and Western Europe. Our arrogance will finally fade away from public display as we dwell again in caves and fight our competitors for scraps of food. The end of what has been so often mislabeled as the "Western Civilization" is complete.

Hans Denee

Be Afraid, be Very Afraid.

2007-08-03T14:31:00.000-07:00

I am afraid, terribly afraid and I lay awake almost every night, worrying not so much about what the so-called terrorists might be doing next to us innocent people, but what the self declared emperor and his entourage in Washington DC have in mind for us when the mitts come off and the terrorists among us (that is "you and me") are being relocated to those brand spanking new concentration camps that Cheney's friends are currently constructing for that purpose.
"You and me", because we dared to dispute the cabal's logic about going to enter into an aggressive war with a long ago defanged tyrant; we were antiwar from day one and we expressed this loud and clear to whoever was standing close enough to hear us. For expressing our sincere feelings about our leaders disabilities and paranoia, we have been declared enemies of the state or in other words enablers of those other terrorists.
Protesting the war, reading the wrong articles or wearing the wrong T.shirts all mean the same thing to the elites that rule us today; we are the traitors and we have to be silenced. First, maybe an intimidating visit by the FBI or some other security agency will put enough pressure on us protesters to keep us quiet but if that does not work, more drastic measures are in order to protect the state from us. And please do not show your distress by hanging the flag upside down; police officers will be dispatched poste haste to arrest you for such a flagrant abuse of your own privacy. This is all for our own good, to protect us from ourselves.

Of course once the new concentration camps will be officially opened by Dick and George with a massive display of power and oratory, things are going to change for us and for them. We -being traitors and terrorists - will be declared illegal enemy combatants to be tortured to death and disappeared without a sign or the right to defend ourselves. For them - the geniuses that they are - it will open the road to a future war crimes trial that in my opinion should take place in New Orleans so that at the same time they can be tried for gross neglect of duty in response to the Katrina Hurricane. The prosecution will be formed by prosecutors from all the countries that have suffered in the last one hundred and ten years from attacks, war crimes and mass murder by the United States of America; this will include New Orleans, Vietnam, Greece, Argentina, Chile, The Philippines, Afghanistan, Iraq, and many other countries that have suffered from the foreign policies of the United States of America. Jurors should come from the same countries, but defense should be exclusively American under the brilliant leadership of Alberto Gonzales, the current Attorney General.
Until that war crimes trial is going to take place however, we are all at risk of being quietly dispatched to the great hereafter.

That is why I am so afraid these days; afraid of the terrorists in the White House and the psychopaths they employ. And as with any kind of psychologically deranged people, you do not know what they will do next and why. But we can expect, that whatever they do it will affect our lives in a negative way.

So, the terrorists are among us and we know who they are; why is it so hard to arrest them, bring them to trial and convict them of their obviously heinous crimes? Who is protecting these criminals from the justice they deserve and why is the circus that calls itself the Congress assisting these criminals in their murderous behaviour? Is it not time for the people to stand up for their rights and execute their responsibilities under the law and make citizen arrests of the hoodlums that have messed up the country?

When do the people finally wake up and take charge of their destiny?
It better be soon or it will be too late.

Hans Denee

Democracy Destroyed.

2007-07-31T13:49:00.000-07:00

Three articles I read online in the last few days make it clear, that major economic and constitutional crisis are looming in the United States of America.

The article by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. "It's the 1930s All Over Again" on www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/1930s-again.html. is a sure sign, that the USA is progressing rapidly towards a repeat of the dirty nineteen thirties. Just a matter of time and the whole house of cards will collapse with the help of Republicans and Democrats alike.

The article by Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis on www.commondreams.org/2007/07/31/2874/ and the one by Glen W. Smith on www.truthout.org/docs-2006/073107E.shtml are painful reminders that things will get much worse and that unless Congress manages to win the standoff with the White House over Executive Privileges and rails in the Imperial Presidency of Bush/Cheney, the United States Congress will be relegated to the dustbin of history in 2008 like the German Reichstag before it in 1933.

The patriot Act, followed by a number of Signing Statements and the now infamous Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006 plus numerous Executive Orders since 9/11, is in effect the equivalent of Hitler's "Enabling Act" of 1933 which destroyed the democratic system of checks and balances in Germany and allowed for the creation of the Third Reich.

Through his numerous ( 200 plus) Signing Statement, George W. Bush has made it clear that he is above the laws as enacted by Congress and is not bound by any of them.

The Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006 basically closed the door on what is left of democracy in the USA; it gives the President dictatorial powers while stripping the right of Habeas Corpus from any one person (including American Citizens) he decides to be an unlawful enemy combatant.

The Executive orders that have been raining down on us ever since the MCA was signed into law by George W. Bush in October 2006, have all reinforced the power of the Unitary Presidency and further undermined the supervisory role of Congress.

Congress has to destroy the barriers put up by the Bush/Cheney administration and its advisors and should not hesitate to impeach the President and Vice President without any further ado.

Time is running out and so should patience with the cabal that brought you torture, rendition, murder, war crimes and agressive wars

Hans Denee

"The Elders",

2007-07-28T12:45:00.000-07:00

I just cannot get over it, but all at a sudden in my daily newspaper (The Globe and Mail) two "positive" articles were printed in less than a week's time.

One was about our previous Prime Minister, Paul Martin, and his efforts to bring education and a better life in general to Canada's Native People. Having been involved myself recently with the efforts of the Haida people of the Queen Charlotte Islands to re-establish Haida names for most of south Morresby Island (see my blog post from July 7 - 2007; "Haida Gwaii, a trip with a purpose"), I fully support Mr. Martin's efforts to right the wrongs of the past and bring light to the future for our Native People.

The second article brings the institution of "The Elders" ,as it is known to native people all over the world, to the White Men's world. Created by the fertile brains of Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel, "The Elders" will be using their collective skills and experience to find peaceful solutions to the world's most urgent problems. A small group of leaders, all of them Noble Peace price winners, are the founding members of "The Elders". Among them are Desmond Tutu, Graca Machel, Kofi Annan, Ela Bhatt, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Jimmy Carter, Li Zhaoxing, Mary Robinson and Muhammad Yunus. Funding for "The Elders"'s work will come from independent sources, including Branson and Gabriel.

We finally may see some kind of counter balance to the actions of the evil people that are currently in the process of destroying our world. It may be too late to stop these mass murderers in their tracks, but it surely is worth the effort if for no other reason, that there is no other choice open to us.

This group of people, not corrupted by politics, big business and fundamentalist extremists, might come up with a form of problem solving that might even appeal to some of the evildoers in charge of so many countries on this planet; rogue nations like Israel, Iran, Zimbabwe, Egypt, The United States of America, Burma, Syria, Saudi Arabia, England, Russia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, China, Sudan, etc.etc..

Assuming a great sense of urgency exists, one hopes that the Israel/ Palestine quagmire and the Middle East problem in general will be on the top of the agenda and immediate action will be taken to begin to unravel the mangled mesh of 60 years of mismanagement, terrorism and "creative" destruction.

We should all applaud this "Elders" initiative and promote the idea, that a group of independent "wise" people can save us from ourselves.

Hans Denee

The smooth Convergence of Democracy and Dictatorship.

2007-07-27T10:13:00.000-07:00

George's latest Executive Order - http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/07/20070717-3.html - grants the Treasury Dept. in consultation with the State Dept. and the Dept. of "Offense" the right to seize the property of anyone he deems threaten his and Dick Cheney's criminal Iraq war policy.

We have arrived at the gates to Dictatorship Hell where the Potentate in Chief issues a continuous stream of Executive Orders that become instant law without any scrutiny by the elected representatives in the Congress and where said Potentate has issued a torrent of "Signing" Statements regarding the laws enacted by this same Congress.

The current stalemate between members of Congress and the White House - http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072607R.shtml - about how far reaching George's Executive Privileges as the Unitary Executive as a matter of fact exclude the elected Congress from interfering with anything the Potentate proclaims on any given day of the week, on any subject and including everybody, in particular American Citizens, will have to be broken to decide if the United States of America is today a Rogue Totalitarian Dictatorship or barely a Democracy in the hands of a Criminal Executive to be prosecuted for all its crimes.

And all this has been accomplished in a mere 6 years while your government expertly applied the threats of terror to your freedom and ingeniously used the tools of propaganda and manipulation to scare the hell out of you and take most of your rights away.

Today we have arrived at the crossroads where in theory but not in practise just yet, any American Citizen can be disappeared in the maws of the US Security apparatus, never to be heard from again. A matter of time maybe or a matter of waiting for the unexpected to happen to for once and for all pull the curtain down over the rights of the citizens of the USA.

Once the curtain comes down, hell has arrived in our middle and the local forces of evil will be mobilised by the Potentate in Chief to dispose of any and all enemies - perceived or otherwise - of the State. Concentration camps, torture, disappearance and murder will become the tools of the State together with spying on everybody by everyone and the creation of special courts to deal with these perceived enemies of the State.

The Average American Citizen, ill informed about anything of real importance in this world, does not have the faintest idea about what is going to happen to her/him. History is about to repeat itself and they all think they are FREE.

Hans Denee

American Atrocities and War Crimes.

2007-07-12T13:40:00.000-07:00

The saintly pictured American armed (offensive) forces are as murderous as the special "Einsatzgruppen" of the Nazis who wrecked murder and mayhem in Eastern European countries and in particular the Ukraine during Hitler's march against the Russians in 1941/1942.
This was made crystal clear in an article available online from "The Nation".
Some of the details are available on www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/hedges; interviews by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian of US combat veterans of the Iraq war.

The only difference seems to be that the German einsatzgruppen were organised as part of the invading armies with the specific purpose of disposing of the Jews, gypsies and other undesirables whereas the American murderers in Iraq established themselves spontaneously as disposers of human life that was inferior in their minds.
Organised from higher up or tolerated by the higher-ups once it established itself as a murder machine, what is the difference if you replace Jews by Muslims?
We aren't told about systematic mass murder here (yet); the einsatzgruppen killed large numbers of innocent people, sometimes 10.000 - or more in a single day; but the fact that so many are involved makes you wonder how many tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been murdered by the Americans in the last 5 years, one, two or a dozen at a time.

The depravity that comes to the surface in these interviews, confirms what everybody except the Americans seem to understand, that any unjust war always deteriorates in the mass murder of innocent women and children. Only Americans can come up with slogans like"collateral damage" as a way to wash their hands of the blood of the innocent people they just murdered.
The American armed forces do not do Iraqi body counts, so it will be up to others and history to record the war crimes of the American Veterans and their Masters committed in the senseless destruction of this ancient country.

Reading these stories makes you sick to your stomach, mad as hell at everything American and at the same time gives you a feeling of helplessness and total depression.

We are talking war crimes here, from the President down to Jo the army specialist, who just wiped out another Iraqi family. However, nothing is being done about it since the average American seems to think it is all right to torture, maim and murder innocent Iraqis. The hypocrisy of the Americans speaks volumes when they chide other countries for their human right records while ignoring their own history of mass murder and torture.

The clouds of Fascism that darkened Europe in the nineteen thirties are now clouding North America and not much can be done about it until the American public wakes up to the nightmare created by their "leaders". Things will most surely get worse before they get better; the United States of America is just one terrorist act away from a final plunge into a fascist totalitarian dictatorship under its self appointed leadership duet of Dick and George.
Only the uninformed and terrorised American citizens - in complete denial - may still believe, that they are 'free" , the rest of the world knows better.

Where is the decency and compassion of humanity in this time of despair?

Hans Denee

PS. Also please read the article by Chris Hedges on www.alternet.org/waroniraq/58101 of July 27/07.

For complete historic information about the German"Einsatzgruppen", please read "The Destruction of the European Jews", third edition, volume 1, by Raul Hilberg.

Beware of a God who talks to the President of the United States of America.

2007-07-10T11:43:00.000-07:00

We all hear voices in the night - in our dreams - telling us fantastic stories and reminding us of nasty things that may go boom right here and now. Psychopaths translate these voices into driven actions, often with deadly results. Not being aware of their split/multiple personalities, they become confused about what and whom they are and resort to sometimes extreme behaviour that put their own and everybody else's life in acute danger. When God is mentioned as the one doing the talking, things become serious because when God talks, we are supposed to pay attention, not that God has ever talked to me personally. So when George W Bush claims that God (the Devil in sheep's clothes) told him to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq we were all in awe about how this God choose George as his willing servant. The fundamentalist extremists were applauding George for his direct contact with the Almighty (Devil). And they egged him on in his quest for the destruction of multiple countries and the murder of millions of innocents.

Killing in the name of God is an age old religious adage that has caused the death of untold millions over the centuries. When God tells you to kill it is all right, never mind that one of the 10 commandments in the bible, dictated by God, explicitly says "Thou shalt not kill".
This is very confusing; is there one God, who doesn't remember what he wrote eons ago, or are there multiple Gods all with their own agendas? I imagine it may depend on what you have been sniffing or smoking during your lifetime and what kind of skeletons are threatening to fall out of your closet at any time.
As a handy smokescreen we invent our personal Gods who exclusively talks to us and nobody else. Lately however I haven't heard many intelligent people telling us that God told them this, that or the other; as a matter of fact nobody besides George has been claiming that God told them what to do. So, what to make of this? A case of schizophrenia or multiple personalities or simply too much boozing and doping in that before "Born Again" life.

It really doesn't matter much to the victims of George's God telling him to go and kill, maim, torture, rendition and imprison without a trial; they do no longer have a voice to be heard by the masses with their heads in the shopping mall sands; who are scared silly of the terrorists created and invented by George and his God and rather be spied upon by George and his security agencies then stand up for themselves and their civil rights.

The terror this government exercises over its citizens, together with the propaganda and lies and the media culpability threatens to bring down not only the United States of America, but the rest of the world as well. Compare it to the almost daily news stories we see on our TVs about the father/mother, who hates his/her wife/husband, kills her/him AND HIS/HER CHILDREN. If the USA wants to immolate itself with the help of its chosen Gods, why not go ahead, but leave the rest of us out of it. Our Gods do not promote murder and war crimes; our Gods promote looking after each other no matter what the other's colour or beliefs are.

Hans Denee

The Criminals, the Criminally Insane and the Innocent.

2007-07-09T14:22:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the United States of America, a country that prides itself on being the only real Democracy in the world from which all other countries shall learn either voluntarily or at the end of an American gun. American freedom fighters are today stationed in more than 700 bases across the globe. Many countries have felt the democratic abuse of these American freedom fighters and millions of people were murdered in the process. From the Philippines and Mexico to Cuba, Greece, Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Somalia, Lebanon and Iraq (twice) America's freedom fighters have caused the death of untold millions of low life local barbarians. America the good had to kill them in order to save them.

There never is a question in the mind of Americans about their superior goodness in regards to forcing democracy (or is it corporacy) down the throats of the undemocratically ruled unwashed barbarians in foreign lands. It does not matter that in most cases we do not know anything about these barbarians or their quite often thousands of years old culture. In our endless goodness and with a superiority complex to match, how could we do anything wrong? No wonder, slogans like "Creative Destruction" and "Birth pangs of Democracy" have popped up in the last few years in these less and less democratic United States of America. And why is it, that when real democratic elections are being held in places like Lebanon or Palestine, we berate the voters for voting in the wrong party; the party WE do not like. And to cover all the bases, the parties, groups or tribes we don't like we call terrorists as we did with Nelson Mandela while imprisoned in Apartheid South Africa or Mordecai Vanuunu in Apartheid Israel. We are the do-gooders who murder people for their own good and then blame them for their misfortune. We wreck countries , like Iraq, and then demand that the lapdog government we put in place abides by the benchmarks we set for them.

We are the criminals who cannot do anything wrong and if we get caught, God forbid, by the special prosecutor we are assured of immediate commutation of our sentence by the Criminally Insane in charge of this ultimate democracy where spying on everybody, torture, rendition and indefinite jail without a right to defend oneself in court, are the modern equivalent of fascist Germany's nineteen thirties laws.

With the help of the fundamentalist extremists and the extremist Israeli lobby in Washington DC, The United States of America has managed to turn itself into a rogue state in less time then it took to fight WW 2. A rogue state where paranoia, like in Stalin's Russia has become the order of the day and creative destruction is applied daily to the constitution, the bill of rights and the Judicial system. Where justice has become injustice, wrong has become right and lying is now the truth and the majority of the population has succumbed to the terror that has been applied by the criminally insane and their cohorts.

The innocents that have been murdered by us and the relatives that survive to date surely won't understand what all this creative destruction was all about; they are either dead, or they are mourning the dead. The citizens of Dresden in 1944 or the citizens of Okinawa in 1945 never understood why they were singled out for the warcrimes of the British and the Americans for no other reson then mad political expediency. The two million -(plus) Iraqis who are now in a new diaspora of America's making must feel thankfull for their freedom to do so. WE gave them that freedom but we won't let them come to the USA.

God save America and to hell with the rest of the world.

Hans Denee

Guilt and the Sins of the Parents; Coming to Terms with History.

2007-07-08T10:48:00.000-07:00

To blame a current generation for the mayhem and murder perpetrated by the parents is often regarded as a wrong approach to coming to terms with what happened since this new generation wasn't part of the parent's sins at the time of execution. A disconnect between two generations is created as an excuse without the realization that such a disconnect in practice is impossible since the sins of the fathers have been visited onto the children for thousands of years. The parents, being responsible for the upbringing of their children, imprint their morals and beliefs onto the children and as a result these children become part of the actions of the parents. The responsibilities of the parents and the children become inter connected and inseparable; the continuity of the generations passes the guilt for what happened on to the next generation in perpetuity.

Coming to terms with the calamities of history is no easy task; we defensively proclaim, that the responsibility for the massacres of the past always rest with the people of the past and not with us. We can proclaim innocence and wash our hands of the dirty deeds of our parents, however deep down we know that this is not possible and that the crimes committed by the previous generation makes us all accomplishes today.

If guilt is a negative and ignorance a positive, how will we ever cope with what happened in the Concentration camps of Nazi Germany, the murder of millions of Vietnamese by the Americans and the current slaughter of Iraqis by these same Americans? We have to acknowledge our participation in these atrocities through the realisation that we cannot separate ourselves from our parents and grand parents. They are us and we are them and so we are the ones that have to come to terms with what happened.

How do you come to terms with a crime so big, that it baffles the imagination; the Holocaust? Why did they do it and how could they do it; the ordinary people who executed the orders as if it was routine to poison and burn thousands of real people every day. Was it all in a day's work? Was the mind numbed and self preservation the ultimate goal? Was there any guilt after the war was over? Did they come to terms with what they had done and tried "to mend the world"as Emil Fackenheim wrote in his book?

They did no such thing; they denied guilt and knowledge of the disaster and refused to talk about it for 10 -15 years after it happened. And so did the Dutch, the Americans and the British. It took until the late fifties for the realisation of what really had happened to sink in and become public notice. By that time a new generation could begin to claim innocence and the old one claimed "wir haben es nicht gewusst" ( we did not know what was going on).

Which brings us again to guilt; the guilt I feel for what happened in Holland during 1940-1945 and in the concentration camps in Germany during the same time. I was born in the winter of 1944, so why should I feel guilty for what happened in those dark days in the Netherlands never mind, what happened in Auschwitz - Birkenau.

The problem is, that I have not found a way to exorcise the guilt from my mind for what was done by humans to other/fellow human beings. I simply cannot pass the divide that was created by our ancestors, a rupture in the history of mankind.

Hans Denee

Haida Gwaii, a trip with a purpose.

2007-07-07T10:24:00.000-07:00

My second trip to the Queen Charlotte Islands/Haida Gwaii was full of purpose and history. Five Haida Elders together with seven Haida leaders and program managers came on board on the 20Th of June for a circumnavigation of Morresby Island. The main purpose of this trip was to establish Haida names for all those bays, islands, mountains, trails and village sites whose names were lost since the late nineteenth century when most of the Haida people suffered death from smallpox and other diseases introduced by the white men. Of course names existed, but they were names created by English and Spanish explorers of the 18Th and 19Th centuries.

The Haida language has been reborn, after years of neglect, under a program called SHIP which stands for "Skidegate Haida Immersion Program", young and old and many non-Haida people are enrolled in this Haida language program. And such a beautiful sounding and meaning full language it is; full of words with descriptive meanings and melodious sounds.

Through quite often multiple daily sessions, while we were sailing past parts of the islands, words and names were created by the Elders through the trigger of memories combined with the visual aspects of being there. The connection with the past and the will to preserve for the future what is the Haida language and culture made this a successful "naming" beyond expectations. The future maps of Haida Gwaii will proudly show these names and all foreign introduced names will be expurgated.

We stopped off at old village sites and made offerings of food and tobacco to the ancestors and thanked the creator for their existence that made it possible for us to be here today. We connected spiritually with the past at beeches and in caves were the ancestors had dwelled hundreds or thousands of years before and we found peace and reflection. Spiritually and emotionally we gained from these experiences and we felt good about it.

It has been called the trip of a lifetime, never to be forgotten and indeed history was made and this trip will be mentioned in the Haida history forever. I am very happy to have been part of this historic sailing. We successfully completed our trip in Queen Charlotte City on July 2/07

Currently the Haida Heritage Center at Qay'llnagaay - Sea Lion Town - is being completed; please visit www.skidegate.ca/qay.html.

Hans Denee

The Final Destruction of this World by the United States of America.

2007-06-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

We are in the final stages of the planned annihilation of most of the world's citizens by the corrupt, immoral and brain challenged US Congress under the direction of the George W. Bush government. The refusal by a majority of these elected (by AIPAC Zionists, Religious Fundamentalists and Corporate Bribers) representatives to even consider a way out of the 100 year quagmire, that the government has bamboozled the citizens of this country and most of the rest of the so - called western world into, will lead shortly to massive conflagrations, the likes of which have not been witnessed by anyone before in history.

The planned assault on the Islamic world and the determined association of Islam with evil will lead to the holocaust of not only the Muslims of this world, but also of the white race that for over a thousand years has been able to portray itself as the saviour of human kind. Throughout history, the manipulations of corrupted politicians, religious extremists and corrupting big business, have resulted in endless wars and hundreds of millions of murdered innocent people. The final assault on the people of this world is now being prepared in Washington DC by the government of Dick Cheney and its puppet George Bush. Forces of the Trotzkyite neocon establishment from all over the western world and Israel are combining their rhetorical powers to terrorise the citizenry into believing that an ultimate war of civilizations, one directed against the Muslim world, is absolutely necessary in order to save us from these evil barbarians. World war 3 will be fought on the streets of the Middle East and in the big western cities. There will be no escape and nobody will return alive. Through the use of nuclear weapons by the United States first and other nuclear powers consequently, most of the world will be devastated by nuclear fallout and death will come indiscriminately to everyone - white or coloured, Muslim, Born again Christian or Jew.

ULTIMATE GREED and OIL may be part of the underlying reasons for this new world war as is the "safety" of Israel, but the big lie repeated over and over again will be the fight against ISLAMOFASCISM to lull the populace into believing that if we do not annihilate the Muslims, they will through a new caliphate overpower and defeat us. In the end we will defeat ourselves because we do not want to know what is being planned in our name; we are afraid and cowardly hide behind the propaganda expended through the mass media in their papers and on their TV screens. We do not dare to think for ourselves any longer in case we may arrive at the truth; the truth that we have been manipulated and propagandized by the government into total submission. In our state of terror, we have decided to give up all our rights in exchange for a little safety that the politicians will not give us and as a result we deserve the destiny that awaits us.

These then are the final days of western civilization; a civilization bathed in blood for its entire presence and decidedly not a civilization at all. We will all perish because WE are the evil barbarians.

From Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun.

2007-06-07T15:14:00.000-07:00

40 Years After "the great victory"--Israel's Occupation of Palestine has turned this event into a disaster for Israel and for the world
40th Anniversary of Israel's Takeover of the West Bank and Gaza[Please circulate this to everyone you know, and put it up on your blogs and websites]

The Occupation:

Immoral & Self-Destructive--How to End It and Build Lasting Peace
by Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor, Tikkun Magazine & National Chair, NSP
From the moment that it started, Israelis with a desire for peace and reconciliation with the Palestinian people urged the Israeli government to allow the Palestinian people freedom and national self-determination. It was not Israel, but Jordan, who occupied Palestine in the early years after Israel had been created, from. And it was not the Palestinian people, but Egypt, Syria, and then in a lame way Jordan who seemed to threaten Israel's existence in the months of April, May and June 1967 until a preemptive strike by Israel followed by a decisive victory in the 6 Day War gave Israel reason to temporarily occupy land that was recognized by an international community as Palestinian (though, to be fair, we need to acknowledge the double-standard of the Arab states and the U.N. in never passing any resolution demanding an end to the occupation when it was being done by Jordan in the West Bank and Egypt in Gaza).Unfortunately, the passion of religious Zionists for a return to the ancient borders of "The Land of Israel" combined with a misguided pragmatism by those who were concerned with security, and a political desire to show that Israelis were "tough" and not "idealistic" or governed by merely moral concerns, led the Labor (weakly socialist) government of the time to embrace occupation, and the consistent rejection by Arab states of any notion of recognizing Israel played into the hands of the right-wingers in Israel who insisted that "security concerns" dictated a need to hold on to the territory.Had Israel held on to the territory in a way that sought to encourage reconciliation, it could have built apartment buildings throughout the West Bank and Gaza (despite the desire of some leaders to reject any cooperation with the occupiers, the lure of decent housing would have soon broken such a boycott), built the infrastructure of Gaza and the refugee camps of the West Bank so that they became desirable places rather than hell holes, provided every child with a decent education in both Arabic and Hebrew that told the story of the Jewish people and its desire for reconciliation with the Palestinians, and integrated Palestians into the Israeli economy or helped them develop an independent economy (if it was two states that they were after).Instead, like occupiers around the world from the U.S. dealing with Native Americans to the French dealing with Algerians to the Soviets dealing with Afghans to the Chinese dealing with Tibet to the Iraqis dealing with the Kurds, Israelis treated Palestinians with arrogance and insensitivity, sought no integration or economic advancement for the Palestinian people (yes, the refugees were far better off in Jordan by the 1990s than they were in the West Bank), and sought to balance the growing popularity of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) by encouraging the growth of Hamas. In the most cynical move of that sort in the past years, Israel withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005 while refusing to negotiate with the PLOs moderate and peace-oriented leader Abbas, thus allowing the Hamas forces to claim credit for the Israei withdrawal ("we drove them out with force, not with the weakness of the Abbas/Fatah strategy of negotiated peace"), which contributed to the Hamas' electoral victory in 2006.Any accounting of the last forty years cannot put all the moral failures on the Israeli side. The continued support by the Palestinian majority of political forces (first embodied in the PLO till it changed its line in 1993, now in Hamas) that reject the right of Israel to exist as a state has played fast and loose with the justifiable fears of the Jewish people whose experience of statelessness (including statelessness in Arab and Islamic countries) was always coupled with second-class status of roughly apartheid dimensions, special taxes, and vulnerability to occasional (in Arab lands) or systematic (in Christian lands) violence, murder, rape and then genocidal policies.The acts of terror against civilians in Israel undermined the peace movement and contributed decisively to the election of militarists, just as the 9/11 terror in the U.S. led to the dramatic strengthening of fear and militarism that provided the foundation for the war in Iraq. These random acts of violence are immoral and cannot be called "understandable" as a way to excuse away the stupidity that they represented except for those who really do seek a full annihilation of the Jewish people and consciously wish to undermine those seeking peace and reconciliation and a two state solution. Nor can Palestinians plausibly call their liberation movement "non-violent" when it has particular non-violent demonstrations: a non-violent movement has to be non-violent in principle, articulating that principle and rejecting as a traitor to that movement anyone who resorts to violence.Still, the overriding fact is that the primary cause of the violence is plain for all the world to see: the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and villages in 1948, the subsequent refusal of Israel to allow those refugees to return to their homes, and then the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and the harsh way Israel implemented the occupation including systematic and well-documented torture and other human rights violations. In my book Healing Israel/Palestine (North Atlantic Books, 2003) I tell the story in a balanced way that acknowledges the way each side has been insensitive to the needs of the other and how both sides have contributed to the fundamental impasse.Yet it's hard to deny that Israel's overwhelming military power, its ability to dictate conditions for any negotiations, its daily abuse of Palestinians (from the road blocks to the withholding of Palestinian tax monies to the incarceration without trial of tens of thousands of Palestinians to the frequent killings of Palestinian civilians so that ten times as many Palestinians have been killed in recent years than Israelis), the testimony of Israeli military experts who can show that in an age of rockets and guided missiles that holding on to the West Bank provides little security advantages?all these contribute to the growing world consensus that makes Israel one of the least respected countries in the entire world (confirmed by a British poll in March of 2007). Israeli behavior might have led to anger only against Israelis, had it not been for the fact that virtually every organized Jewish community in the world claims that Israel is "the Jewish state" and then contributes large sums of money to support its activities. But Jews cannot have it both ways?either Israel is a state like other states, having no special relationship to Judaism or the Jewish people except that a lot of Jews live there (as they do in the U.S. as well), or if Israel is in fact a manifestation of the Jewish people and Judaism so that Jews and those friendly to the Jewish people are expected to support it, then Jews cannot be surprised if anger at Israeli policies slips over into anger at the Jewish people who claim to overwhelmingly support that state. And that anger grows dramatically when AIPAC manages to convince otherwise liberal or progressive elected officials that they dare not speak publicly the upset they feel at Israeli policy, lest they face an organized campaign to label them as "anti-Israel" and defeat them in elections by providing financial and political support for their opponents. The anger grows stronger when Jews and non-Jews encounter the efforts in the organized Jewish community to suppress debate, and when hundreds of thousands of the members of that American Jewish community join in labeling as anti-Semitic or as "self-hating Jews" those who critique publicly Israeli policy.We have no sympathy with those who hate Jews for any reason, and insist that generalizing to an entire people from the behavior of some, even their elected government or the state that they support, is illegitimate. We don't accept anti-Americanism from those who rightly are outraged at US policy around the world, and we don't accept anti-Semitism from those who are outraged at Israeli policies. But we also recognize that if the public perception continues to be that large majorities in the Jewish world stand behind Israeli policy no matter how destructive or immoral, the likelihood of real anti-Semites becoming successful in manipulating the legitimate moral outrage people feel toward Israeli policies. So Israel's policies are not only immoral, but also self-destructive.We have a great deal of compassion for people on all sides of this struggle.Jews as a people, both in Israel and around the world, are a traumatized people suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). In my lifetime one out of every three Jews on the planet were murdered. Is it a surprise that our people are completely disoriented, and though seeming to function in a rational way in pursuing their own personal self-interests, are actually unable to think rationally about their own survival as a people, but instead simply are acting out on others the trauma that was acted out upon us. Similarly, though we are very critical of the role Arabs played in the period before the creation of the State of Israel, we have compassion for how the trauma of the expulsion from their homes and the subsequent life in refugee camps and under Israeli occupation has led to Palestinians also becoming a traumatized people suffering from PTSD and unable to think rationally about their own survival as a people, instead embracing one false messiah after another from Nasser to Arafat to Saddam Hussein to the current leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah. and embracing armed struggle when it was obvious that violence and terrorism had only impact: to strengthen the hands of the most hateful and militaristic elements in the Jewish world. The political terms of a settlement are well known to all?and you can read them in detail in my book The Geneva Accord and Other Strategies for Middle East Peace (North Atlantic Books, 2004). The Saudi plan takes a major leap in that direction, and many of its details make sense (but not the desire to have Jews give up all claim to the Wall and to any part of the Old City of Jerusalem). But all that political detail is ultimately irrelevant until there is a more fundamental change: an opening of the heart of Israelis and Palestinians to each other, a willingness to hear and really try to understand the others' historical experience, an acknowledgment of wrong-doing and willingness to enter into a process of repentance and atonement for the way each side has been cruel and insensitive to the needs of the other, and a genuine openness to lasting peace and reconciliation in a spirit of compromise and caring for the other.And this is where people in the U.S. could play a role. If instead of lining up behind the extremist elements in the Jewish world or the Palestinian world, the people who really cared about peace in the Middle East were to talk in ways that were compassionate toward both sides, and consistently challenge those who sought to demean "the other," they'd begin to have an important impact on both American and Israeli dialogue. And if these same people were to challenge the Strategy of Domination, both in Israel/Palestine and in the U.S. in all its relations with other countries, they could transform the public discourse in the U.S. and that would have a tremendous impact on what happens in the Middle East.As long as people in Israel/Palestine remain trapped in the Strategy of Domination, there is little reason to hope for a lasting settlement beyond another false start like that which was negotiated in the Oslo Accords. If, instead, either side were to adopt a Strategy of Generosity toward the other, or if we could popularize a Strategy of Generosity in the Western world, there would be major breakthroughs toward peace in the Middle East. Imagine, for example, if Israel were to start on a massive house building project in the West Bank and give the housing they were building to Palestinian refugees, and were to not only release funds being held of Palestinian tax money but were to grant a general amnesty of all Palestinians held in Israel jails, and the government of Palestine were to publicly announce the creation of new textbooks that told the story of the Jewish people in Arabic in a sympathetic way and required teachers to go to trainings led by peace-oriented Israelis about how to teach that material, and were to openly repent for the deaths of Israelis at the hands of terrorism, what an impact these deeds would have on the consciousness of the other side. Imagine if both were to embrace the strategy of domination in their own communities and say to their own people: we cannot win this struggle by hoping to dominate the other side, but we could by acting in a spirit of generosity that showed the other that we cared about their well-being and not just our own.That's why, in my view, it's so sad to witness peace groups in the U.S. or Israel or Palestine who can vigorously support new negotiations but who cannot speak out in a clear and strong way to affirm the humanity of the other, to lament the pain that the other has experienced, to publicly repent for acts of oppression and violence done by their own side, and who cannot publicly challenge those who demean either side of the struggle. It takes little courage to denounce; it takes great courage to affirm the decency of the majorities on all sides of the struggle. When I wrote my book Healing Israel/Palestine (North Atlantic Books, 2003) and its follow up The Geneva Accord and Other Strategies for Middle East Peace (North Atlantic Books, 2004) it was with the intention of showing how to read the history with compassion for both sides. Needless to say, it was ignored by the left media which frequently seeks to demean Israel (yes, Amy Goodman, I mean you, and yes, Pacifica, I mean you, and yes, ZNet and CounterPunch, I mean you) and by the mainstream media which primarily seeks to portray Israel as the "righteous victim" in the same way that the Left seeks to portray Palestinians as the only "righteous victim." Compassion for both sides, a switch to The Strategy of Generosity, an insistence on educating one's own group to the need to have an open-heartedness and generosity of spirit toward the other side, including the pathologies on the other side and acknowledging the pathologies on one's own side?these are the only realistic ways to achieve peace. Use this as your criterion when you assess any given political move, demonstration, article, speech or whatever in the synagogues and mosques, in the Left media and in the mainstream media, in the organizations claiming to be pro-peace or for liberation, and in the symbolic gestures that each side takes.Anything short of this is a utopian fantasy. Politics is a manifestation of the spiritual and ethical consciousness of humanity, and it will never solve problems until we are willing to work simultaneously on all the different levels. Till that happens, we can only grieve at the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the start of the Occupation.Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine www.tikkun.org and National Chair (with Cornel West and Sister Joan Chittister) of the interfaith organization The Network of Spiritual Progressives. www.spiritualprogressives.org . His latest book is The Left Hand of God: Healing America's Political and Spiritual Crisis (paperback, 2007, Harper San Francisco). He is rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue which meets in both San Francisco and Berkeley, and invites you to share High Holiday services with them this coming September. www.beyttikkun.org Rabbi Lerner can be reached directly: rabbilerner@tikkun.org .YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE RELIGIOUS TO BELONG TO THE NETWORK OF SPIRITUAL PROGRESSIVES (NSP). While many members are Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccas, Sikhs, Sufis, Ba'hai, etc., many of our members are "spiritual but not religious" people who don't practice any particular religion but are very attuned to the New Bottom Line that is at the center of the NSP vision (please read our vision at www.spiritualprogressives.org). Please join the NSP to help build this kind of compassionate voice described in the article above. TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Send an email to Noah@Tikkun.org and in the subject line, and in the first line of the email, simply say Unsubscribe (and then put your name and email address).
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Misinformation, Preaching, outright Lies and Silence.

2007-06-03T15:36:00.000-07:00

Fifty five years ago, in 1952, I was 8 years old and attending the "Christian School with the Bible" in a town called Harderwijk in the Netherlands. Prayer, bible readings and hymn singing were part of the curriculum. Teachers were figures of authority in those days and their teachings considered the truth; no discussion and no questioning allowed.
During dinner (at 12 noon), at home, verses were read from the bible using on of those blocks that peels of a page for every day of the year. There never was any discussion about what was read that day; it was accepted as gospel. My parents were Dutch reformed but in the lighter more modern way; driving to church on Sunday in the car was not a sin.
I entered High school when I was 12; the "Christelijk Lyceum Nassau Veluwe". No more bible readings, prayers or hymns; instead a steady diet of languages, math., sciences, geography, history and biography. Six classes a day, 5 days a week. Teacher authority was almost never questioned, however debate about any subject was almost Nil.
In this environment, shortly after the Second World war, acceptance without questioning was the right thing to do. But of course we had questions; we wanted to know what happened during the second world war in Holland or how come the Dutch are always portrayed as very liberal which you wouldn't know it if you grew up in a town like Harderwijk. We were told that the Dutch were the good guys who took in the Portuguese Jews in the 15Th century and the Huguenots in the 16Th century; of course they forgot to tell us about the murder and mayhem caused by these same Dutch in the Far Eastern countries they colonized. Likewise we learned about Anne Frank and the heroic fight of the Dutch army (on bicycles) against the Germans at the Grebbeberg and the February 25/1941 strike at the Waterloopplein in Amsterdam as a protest against the German prosecution of the Jews. We weren't told about the paid informers ( DFL 7.50/Jew) of which there were plenty, the decrepit state of the Dutch army in May 1940 and as a protest in 1941 it was the last one, brutally crushed by the Germans. Today we read "In Depot" by Philip Mechanicus and Etty Hillesum's "An interupted Life and Letters from Westerbork"

We did ask questions but there were no answers, not at school and not at home,not about the bible or the war or the history of the country. Whatever information we received in school, was cleansed before hand by the authorities in charge of the Ministry of Education; certain books were allowed to be used in class while others were banned from use in schools. Holland the good could or would do no harm.
When growing up, living in Amsterdam as a student, I got hold of the Jacob Presser books about the "Ondergang" ( persecution and destruction of the Dutch Jews 1940 - 1945). The year is 1965, 20 years after the end of the war and 15 years after the "Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie" gave Professor Presser the order to write this history.
It was like nobody wanted to talk about what really happened in those terrible years, least of all about the fact that a much larger percentage ( 100,000 out of an estimated 140,000)of Dutch Jews perished in the concentration camps then of any other country occupied by the Nazis. In a speech by Prime Minister van Balkenende at the festivities of the 60 year anniversary of the end of the war he mentioned the fact, that today the Dutch have still not come to terms about what happened to the Jewish population in 1940 - 1945. Guilt does not necessarily suit the Dutch National Character; we are the good progressive Dutch. That we are also racists and bigots has not helped us on our way to redemption from our war - sins. The silence is still deafening today, 62 years later.

Religion, another Dutch stronghold, as we can see in the political parties and radio stations of that 1950 - 1965 time, actually had a strangle hold on public live. Political parties - with the exception of the Liberal party and the labour party - were organised according to religion; Roman Catholic, Dutch "Hervormed", Dutch Reformed etc. with the radio stations to match the political parties and their Christian indoctrinations. A tight and puritan country if there was one; aware of its many misdeeds but not willing to talk about them.
For a thousand plus years the churches (first the Roman Catholic church alone and later in combination with the Reformed Church) have terrorised the Dutch people with murder, mayhem and threats of hell. Nobody dared question the authority of the churches until the sixties and seventies of the last century. And now we know, that it was all a big lie based on power and greed. The simple fact, that in the 17Th century you could buy your place in heaven through the purchase of an "Aflaat" letter may seem ridiculous today, but was a legitimate way for the church to enrich itself and keep the faithful under control.
Today we can read books like "Surpassing Wonder; the invention of the Bible and the Talmuds" by Donald Harman Akenson and we visit sites like the Jesus Seminar & Westar Institute or the History News Network and Yad Vashem. We learn that by hiding the truth and reality our teachers and parents were maybe trying to protect us from ourselves or worse yet were lying to us about the realities of a cruel and murderous humanity. Religion in itself isn't wrong, but throughout history we watch human beings murdering and torturing fellow humans in the name of their Gods. Religion is a personal thing and should not be forced on others; it also should not pervert politics as today it does in many countries. Corruption and religious perversion of politicians eventually leads to a totalitarian state.

We should all speak truth to power and encourage discussion about the realities of the world today, good and bad. We cannot stick our head in the shopping mall sand forever and hope that terrible things will not come our way; we have to face the problems we create head on and try to solve them , not through wars but through discussions and negotiations on the basis of equality of the participating partners. We face problems today because of our actions and the actions of our forefathers. These problems, in an age of Nuclear Bomb proliferation, cannot be resolved by intimidation, manipulation, bullying or war (preemptive or otherwise). A casual response to the major disasters of this new century will only lead to the death of hundreds of millions of people. We cannot allow our elected politicians to destroy our world.

Torture and Silence; how we all become complicit in torture when we remain silent.

2007-06-02T09:29:00.000-07:00

I wrote this essay in early 2005 when Abu Ghraib came in the news thanks to Seymour Hersch. Today the White House is in the process of specifying what kinds of torture will be condoned in your name. The silence of the people and the acceptance of torture as a means to dehumanize humans has to be broken.

Torture and Silence.

If we don’t write about it or talk to others about it, torture has a tendency to become a generally accepted form of obtaining “necessary” information to protect the Homeland. So, it disappears into the background, where the average citizen does not have to concern him/herself with the fact that it actually takes place. Takes place in their name, because their leaders have decided that it is an acceptable way to obtain that “necessary” information. But torture away from the Homeland has a tendency to make a quiet appearance in this Homeland, unannounced and protected by silence.

Is that not the same silence that we heard in Europe before and during WWII, when Nazi-Germany decided that torture serves all ends?
Or the silence, so deafening, that it still reverberates in countries like the Netherlands (where I was born), 60 years after it took place.
The silence that accommodated the disappearance and murder of millions of Jews, Roma and others in NAZI-occupied European Countries during WWII.
The silence that means we are partaking in this torture of human beings and therefore are guilty of torture.

But there cannot be any further silence.
We have to speak out against torture, unless we become accomplices. Torture should never happen to any human being, because “Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the World. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the World, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained” (Jean Amery).
So why are we silent today, yesterday and tomorrow? Have we not learned from past atrocities? Does silence make it go away, like we all hoped, after the end of WWII that not talking about the Holocaust for 10 years or longer would make it go away, and anyway it probably never happened.
But it did happen! The Holocaust is a rupture in the history of humankind.
And it is happening!

Are we like the Germans in the 1930’s, who thought they were free, while torture took place in their midst? Do we believe we are free, while our freedom is being eroded one little step at a time? Has torture become part of us, like it became part of the Germans? Jean Amery writes: “The NAZIES tortured, as did others, because by means of torture they wanted to obtain information important for National policy. But in addition they tortured with the good conscience of depravity. They martyred their prisoners for definite purposes, which in each instance were exactly specified. Above all, however, they tortured because they were torturers. They placed torture in their service. But even more fervently, they were its servants”.
Have we put torture in our service and therefore, have we all become torturers? Only if we remain silent, will we become the servants of torture.

Politicians and their lawyers may be willing to bend the laws to suit their purposes. But the “people” should not be misled by the tongue-twisting language that is used in their justifications. Torture remains torture, no matter the fancy words used to make it different.
Totalitarian States, accused of torture, always deny its existence and point to other States that employ torture as a means of obtaining “necessary” information.
The pressures a modern Totalitarian State can exercise over the individual are frightful. The weapons are substantially three: 1) direct propaganda or propaganda camouflaged as upbringing, instruction and popular culture, 2) the barrier erected against pluralism of information, and 3) terror (Primo Levi).
Persistent misinformation and terror lead to war, torture, murder, manipulation and the end of Democracy. Accommodated by the silence of “the people”, totalitarianism takes shape behind the closed doors of power and “the people” are doomed to one day wake up and find that they have abdicated their rights and freedoms and become prisoners of the Totalitarian State.

May 2005.
Hans Denee.

The Freedom to Torture and Terrorize: Ideology and the rise of Fascism and Totalitarianism in the United States of America.

2007-06-01T14:46:00.000-07:00

When a government decides that playing by generally accepted rules is not longer applicable to a current or changed situation, it challenges the people to go along with its newly chosen path, however destructive it may be. And the people will follow suit when suitably terrorized by the government into accepting its lies as the truth. Nationalism, the preoccupation with daily life and the gathering up of more material goods, all form a basis for this terror to be effective. Nationalism, often confused with Patriotism, is the extreme feelings of love for the “Fatherland” that with the help of government propaganda leads to a polarization in politics and a division in the country that causes terrorism.
The brown shirts, as part of Hitler’s NSDAP party, terrorized all other political parties, in particular the Communists and Social Democrats, out of existence through brute force, intimidation and murder. For the rest of the population to remain quiet while this is happening, requires that the terror being applied by the government is of a threatening nature to all. But the main reason for its effectiveness is that it is being tied to a central issue. In Germany, the Nazis created the Communist problem as the central issue to achieve the people’s agreement with its policies. In the USA, the UK and other western countries today it is Islamic Terrorism that is used as the central issue in convincing the people to give up their rights for a promised bit of extra security from this terrorism. As with the Reichstag fire in Berlin in 1933, the terrorist attacks in the USA in 2001 (a disastrous failure to act on specific intelligence information) and the Madrid and London bombings more recently are used by the Governments involved (except in the case of the Madrid bombings) to manipulate the people into giving up their freedom, liberties and civil rights. As Benjamin Franklin wrote, “they that can give up essential liberties to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”.

The fact is that a majority of the people, when conveniently terrorized after the event takes place, is willing to sacrifice their rights for a little extra security. In poll after poll, this majority of the people expresses its fear and the government, with intent to do so, turns this fear into laws that absorb the rights of the people. Sometimes these laws have sunset clauses and have to be renewed in time. Through the terror a government can apply to its people, renewal with further restrictions on their rights attached, pass into law as a matter of fact. The extra safety promised, in lieu of giving up one’s rights seldom emerges in reality as the purpose of the restrictions and limitations of the people’s rights, is the concentration of all power in the government. In addition to restricting rights, the government in all its capacities (Defense, Homeland Security, FBI, Secret Service, CIA, NSA and the multitude of other secret and security services) expands the surveillance over the people. Confinement and disappearance without charges or judicial involvement becomes a tool to further terrorize the people. The government is now willing and able to operate outside the laws of the Country and for that matter outside the laws of the World.

Ideology, carefully honed over time, becomes the basis for every action and reaction. Lies, repeated ad nauseum, are becoming the truth. New realities are created by the government and its agencies and the people are gradually and unknowingly manipulated into this new situation where they become the oppressed, while believing they are still free.
The two ideologies of the last century; National Socialism under Hitler in Germany and Communism under Stalin in The Soviet Union, were based on views towards world hegemony through war and transforming this world into the ideological views of these two men.. A strong sense of racial superiority in the Nazi ideology explains the viral anti Semitism that lead to the concentration camps and the murder of millions of Jews, Roma and others. In the Soviet Union it was the Paranoia of Stalin that led to the gulags and the murder of tens of millions of its citizens.

Totalitarianism is a latent danger in every society that claims to be a democracy and is not to be confused with dictatorship. In a Dictatorship the people are terrorized through kidnappings, torture and murder. In a Totalitarian State there is no longer much need for physical terror once the totalitarian state is established and the people willingly and obediently do as they are told.*
As a latent danger, the possible occurrence of totalitarianism in a democracy is not recognized by the people of these democracies. Saying - it can never happen here - confirms the political blindness of the people in most so called free societies. Totalitarianism does not happen overnight. It takes shape gradually based on ideology that was formed over many years. Most of it happens behind closed doors and in secret, while through mass propaganda and manipulation the people are molded to accept their fate without question.

When a government through its ideology, lies the truth * consistently and is actively assisted by what we call the intimidated mainstream media, the roots for a Fascist Totalitarian State are taking hold with the help of Big Business and fundamentalist Christianity. The control big Corporations and Christian Fundamentalists have over the ideology of the government comes through the use of bribery, blackmail, intimidation and propaganda.
As the two groups, exclusively supporting the government, their influence is overwhelming the Liberal Democrats who still dare to speak their mind. The remaining Democrats have been terrorized into siding with the government and quite often have even more extreme plans than the government currently is willing to entertain.
It is then; that we arrive at what resembles a one-party state controlled by an ideology that makes world domination its primary goal no matter the cost in blood and money.

Hans

* Hannah Arendt; “The Origins of Totalitarianism”.

Silence and Peace in the Queen Charlotte Islands/Haida Gwaii.

2007-05-31T09:43:00.000-07:00

This month I travelled to Haida Gwaii on board the 68 ft sailing vessel "Island Roamer" with a crew of 5 and 12 guests. I was the cook on this trip. Before the guests came on board in Morresby Camp, the crew delivered the boat from Vancouver to the Queen Charlotte Islands.

The 12 guests are "birders" with additional interest in whales, otters, historic native sites and the beauty of the islands.

Arriving in Haida Gwaii is being delivered from the mad consumer world we live in today. The beauty, silence and spirituality of these islands beckons for self reflection without the need for outside help. The peacefulness and tranquility that radiates from this landscape hidden behind the smokey grey haze of clouds and drizzle unburdens the soul and frees it from the baggage that came with it to Haida Gwaii. Free of this baggage the mind gets purified by the surroundings and the feelings that this place of great history is the magic world that may not exist. There is tragedy in these travels to Haida Gwaii; we visit the sites of ancient villages - their totem poles slowly decaying - abandoned at the end of the 19th century. No Haida people live in what is now Gwaii Haanas National Parks Reserve on south Morresby; a place protected from logging, mining and tourism in general; a sacred place imbued with the 10.500 year history of the Haida people.

In this magic place where the spirits of people past can be touched by the minds of the willing we are challenged to remove ourselves from the world we just arrived from, a world with no magic and spirituality but empty minded shopping malls. The distance we travelled to get here is not great, however the distance the mind travels while there is infinite. It is an environment with its snow capped mountains and foggy fjords and bays that cannot possibly be described in words, because of its spirituality and the feelings of being connected unconsciously to the past of something more powerful than anything one has ever experienced in his lifetime. This is a place to come back to find peace in the silence with the whales, the otters, the birds and the spirits of the people that once lived here.

Hans

The silencing of Cindy Sheehan.

2007-05-30T09:33:00.000-07:00

"Good Riddance, Attention Whore" is the letter in which Cindy explains why she decided to abandon the peace movement and go back to look after her remaining children; broke, without a husband and disillusioned with the American people who in her words have to help themselves if they want to be saved from the looming disasters created by the Bush administration.
Obviously, the American people are too busy with their "Consumption culture", too naive, too ill informed and too full of them selves, to realise the world we live in today equals the world the Europeans lived in during the period 1934 to 1939.

A rogue regime in Washington, DC. has been established by the electorate with the help of the Supreme Court and the assistance of the Congress, whose motto today must be "hear no evil, see no evil". The undermining of the rights of the people with the quiet acquiescence of the people will eventually lead to a totalitarian state in which a nominal democracy covers for the fascism behind this "democratic" smoke screen. Meaningless elections will be held while real opposition to the two party system will be forcefully discouraged.

They have silenced a woman of great courage; they have slandered her and they have accomplished what they set out to do; silence anybody who speaks truth to power and challenges the elites. But when Cindy goes home, we will not be silenced and we will continue to speak up in her absence, for her and for ourselves. We will be the bad conscience of the nation till the nation wakes up from its politician's induced trauma and terror.

Cindy laments the comatose nature of the American people, terrorised by their government into giving up their freedom in exchange for a little security that this government is unable to give and has no intention of providing. "Creative destruction", as in Iraq and Afghanistan, best describes the undermining of the constitution by this government. Through the legal manipulations and interpretations of rogue lawyers, like John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales, the establishment of the unitary executive, preventive war policy, rendition, murder and torture have been accepted by the American people as necessary to protect the Homeland from the people that hate us. It may not dawn on most of us that the people who hate us may have valid resons for doing so. What we need most urgently now is a national self examination of our conscience, ethics and morals; an examination that will hurt anyone who objectively puts him/herself through this process and realises that the road we are on is a disillusion.

In honour of Cindy, we must continue to break the silence forced upon us by the powers of state and not let intimidation and hate stop us on our path to a future of peace and freedom in all the world.

Silence is not an option.

Hans

We cannot be silent and will speak to our collective conscience.

2007-05-29T10:34:00.000-07:00

Silence kills and absolute silence kills absolutely.

Today we face the destruction of our collective conscience by the Bush administration through its terror, manipulation, intimidation and sheer propaganda campaigns, aided by the mass media who refuse to objectively report on what is happening in our world. As a result we are lulled into the belief that we are still a free and democratic nation, an example to the world around us. Whereas the world around us sees us as the biggest threat to peace since the second world war began in 1939.

If we as a nation and the world we all live in, is to survive the onslaught of this administration on our morality and decency, we have to speak out against the lies that have created a nightmarish landscape of ever further escalation into the dark abyss that not long ago the German people descended into. We have to speak truth to power and will not accept the assault on our conscience that threatens to blind us to the reality of today. The reality of descending into a fascist corporate/fundamentalist democracy; democracy for the corporatists and fundamentalists and by the corporatists and fundamentalists; dictatorship for everybody else.

We are not the murderers and torturers this administration wants us to be. We are a descent people that believe in and have a need for the Geneva conventions to protect the world from mass murder and torture of innocent peoples. We will speak the truth - murder and torture is wrong - to whoever we meet today, tomorrow and every day after that. The conscience of the people needs to be stirred in order to save the nation and the world from the disaster that awaits us all if we insist on silence.

Silence kills and keeps on killing.

Hans