Ah, German hypocrisy! During the cold war, you marched waving “Ami, Go Home” placards, but still let us protect you against the Soviets. Now you moan self-righteously about the National Security Agency and GCHQ reading your emails and listening to your mobile phone. You don’t acknowledge that – unlike the US or the UK – you have had no domestic terror attack in the past 10 years. That’s because we gave you information to prevent them; guess where we got it? Anyway, your Federal Intelligence Service snoops as much as it can. Except it can’t do that much. Whereas we – oh yes, we scan! Could it be that you’re jealous?
That about sums up the American and British response to the uproar about alleged US and UK spying activities in Germany revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Sorry, friends: things are not that simple. This topic touches on historical sensitivities here. Our grandparents’ generation feared the early-morning knock of the Gestapo. During the cold war, West and East Germans alike were aware that their divided country was crawling with spooks of all denominations. We recognised that mutually assured espionage helped prop up the bipolar balance of power. (It also made for some superb spy thrillers.) Still, no one misses the sombre paranoia, reinforced in and after the 1970s by the ramping up of West Germany’s domestic intelligence services in response to homegrown terrorism.
Germans who were born east of the Berlin Wall were careful to give the organs of the Staatssicherheit a wide berth. But it was only after the fall of the Wall in 1989, when the citizens who had brought down their government stormed the secret police’s headquarters and realised the full horror of the web woven by the Stasi: neighbours spying on neighbours; husbands spying on wives. Joachim Gauck, our current president, was the first head of the Stasi Archives, the government agency that, 20 years on, continues to painstakingly piece together a full record of East Germany’s surveillance of its citizens.
Yes, we Germans have better cause than many of our allies to abhor the secret state. It’s why we don’t like closed-circuit television cameras. It’s also why our constitutional court enshrined a fundamental right of data privacy, and declared it illegal for Germany to implement an EU directive on preventive data storage.
That said, we understand that our liberal societies have enemies – and we need some surveillance to protect ourselves and preserve our way of life. We remember that some of the September 11 attackers were based in Hamburg. Like you, we’ve done a lot since then to improve our domestic intelligence capabilities. We haven’t heard many complaints about our ability to co-operate, whether in Europe or in Afghanistan. And, fair enough, this story has become fodder for an opposition desperate to unseat a seemingly unbeatable chancellor.
Rattled at first, Angela Merkel snapped: “Friends don’t treat each other like this.” Now, with her standing in the polls unharmed, Ms Merkel is calling for an EU-wide data privacy initiative.
The truth of Mr Snowden’s allegations has yet to be proved; they remain disturbing. Germany a target on the level of Iraq and Afghanistan? 500m intercepts a month? Embassies and EU representations bugged? You could try harder to dispel our misgivings. For all we know, no abuse of power was involved. But it is surely clear the intelligence services wield an excess of power. And, as we know, “power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
It is not always easy to understand where our British friends draw the line between freedom and security. But it was Barack Obama who vowed on May 23 to end the war on terror, quoting James Madison: “No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of perpetual warfare.”
Tell us about it. The phrase “perpetual warfare” reminds Germans that the most influential theorist of war without end – and of an untrammelled executive – was Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s lawyer-in-chief. It’s time for all of us to turn back the tide of executive power.
The writer is a senior transatlantic fellow with the German Marshall Fund. Her article appeared in the Financial Times
Snowden may have broken the law, but so did the Founding Fathers of America when they issued that famous declaration 237 years ago.
They did so in defiance of a powerful empire, just as Snowden has done. The world became a better place because they chose to defy the laws of their time, and Snowden’s idealistic act may leave us better off too.
One suspects that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the rest of those revolutionaries would have been thrilled.
Five hundred years ago, Snowden would have sought cover in a church. In the middle ages, the romantic hero, seeking sanctuary from charges of treason, would have thrown himself on God’s mercy. Once across the holy threshold, he would have been untouchable by earthly justice.
God is a lot less powerful these days, sadly. If there is no higher law, Snowden needs a lawless zone instead, like an airport or an embassy. His best hope is not heaven, but the Grey Area.
Why are Snowden and Assange such fascinating figures? They are postmodern outlaws who have given up the comforts of an ordinarily life to save our freedoms. They are compelling because their predicament is both dreadful and very romantic.
Snowden has made the tenuous nature of our laws and nations and conventions explicit. Borders, and international laws have become arbitrary since he has blown the whistle. The political map is just a picture with lines drawn on it now, and it depends on the backing of a very powerful force.
How powerful? As we watch Snowden’s challenge, we also see the real grasp of that power unfolding.
Snowden flew into terminal F at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport from Hong Kong on 23 June, shortly after his passport was revoked by the US authorities.
Terminal F is described by a reviewer on airlinequality.com as an “awful prison”, but it is at least connected by a mile-long walkway to terminals D and E, which are said to be better appointed. Enterprising journalists who have flown into Sheremetyevo in the hope of finding Snowden have so far failed to do so. This may be because of a relatively unusual feature of the airport, the airside wing of the Novotel hotel, where passengers in transit without Russian visas are permitted to stay.
Some have speculated that the fugitive could be holed up in one of the hotel’s spartan rooms, awaiting the call from a friendly nation to leap on the next plane out of Moscow and return to a slightly more normal life. An AP reporter who spent a night there in search of Snowden called every room he could, to no avail; his efforts to seek him out in person were thwarted by the security guard stationed outside his door. He could be in the hotel, yes. But he could be in the airport’s detention quarters, so infamous that they once featured in the UNHCR’s guide to the problems facing the world’s refugees; he could be paying $20 an hour for a spot in a VIP lounge; he could be browsing the duty-free matryoshkas, somehow unseen by the world’s press; he could be somewhere else altogether. For the time being, at least, he is out of reach.
The uncertainty over Snowden’s whereabouts only makes the question of what his life might be like at the moment more tantalising. The airport is maybe the quintessential example of what have been called “non-places”, the grey places.
The modern airport is based on the assumption that everyone’s from somewhere else, and it becomes, therefore, an anthology of generic spaces – the shopping mall, the food court, the hotel lobby – which bear the same relationship to life.
The Iranian exile Mehran Karimi Nasseri, found himself in the no-man’s-land of the departure lounge at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport for fully 18 years. There was also Ram Charan, a successful business consultant who lived entirely on planes and in hotels until the age of 67, and whose only concession to normality was a weekly parcel of dirty laundry sent to an office in the US.
Uniquely modern fugitives, they are taking refuge in uniquely modern spaces. It’s not a coincidence that Snowden is a man of the internet, a space like the airport terminal or the embassy where the conventional rules don’t apply; a space of all nations, and of none; the beginning of a journey into the unknown.
The next American Revolution will not be an event, it will be a process, writes Tyler Durden.
We naturally turn to the past for templates of the future, but history has a way of remaining remarkably unpredictable. Indeed, all the conventional long-range forecasts made in 1900, 1928, 1958, 1988 and 2000 missed virtually every key development–not just in the distant future, but just a few years out.
The point is that extrapolating the present into the future fails to capture sea changes and developments that completely disrupt the supposedly unchanging, permanent Status Quo. The idea that the next revolution will take a new form does not occur to conventional forecasters, who readily assume the next transition will follow past critical junctures: armed insurrection against the central authority (The first American Revolution, 1781), civil war (1861) or global war (1941).
I submit that the next American Revolution circa 2021-23 will not repeat or even echo these past transitions. What seems likely to me is the entire project of centralization that characterized the era 1941-2013 will slip into irrelevance as centralization increasingly yields diminishing returns.
Everything centralized, from the Federal Reserve to the Too Big To Fail Banks to Medicare to the National Security State depends on the Federal government being a Savior State that must ceaselessly expand its share of the national income and its raw power lest it implode. All Savior States have one, and only one trajectory– they must ceaselessly expand and concentrate wealth and power or they will fail.
They are like the shark, which dies once it stops moving forward: the Savior State must push forward on its trajectory of expansion or it expires.
Stasis is not possible, nor is contraction; the promises made to the citizenry cannot be withdrawn without political instability, but the promises cannot be kept without fatally disrupting the neofeudal financialized debtocracy.
You see the dilemma: The Savior State cannot stop expanding, but the financial system that generates its revenues can no longer support its vast machinery of debt and phantom collateral. This is why I suggest all the centralized concentrations of wealth and power will either implode or fade into irrelevance.
If all the phantom wealth and collateral vanishes in a market clearing event, the Federal Reserve will simply become irrelevant to the vast majority of people. A handful of nimble speculators may well benefit by picking over the carcass of financialization and centralized omnipotence (i.e. central banking), and perhaps the 1/10th of 1% will still have enough assets influenced by the Fed to care, but the forces of disruption will replace centralization with decentralization.
Here is another example: Medicare may not cease to exist, but it will become increasingly irrelevant to most people because it will not longer function. The remaining doctors willing to treat Medicare patients will be working 13-hour days for sketchy pay, and as each one burns out and leaves the system, the system contracts. Eventually it contracts to the point of irrelevance.
The revolution will be in work and social innovations enabled by technology. The conventional view is that technology will magically enable the permanence of the present; this will be proven incorrect, as what technology enables is not the waste, entitlement and centralization that characterize the present but social innovations, some of which are already visible.
If we sought to summarize the profound transformation ahead in one sentence, it would be this: wages are no longer an adequate model for distributing the surplus generated by the economy.
The current Savior State model responds to this by increasing taxes on the dwindling minority with fulltime jobs and increasing entitlement payments to all those without government or private-sector jobs. This model will collapse, politically, socially and economically, as no society or economy can squander half or more of its productive labor force while increasing the burden on the dwindling cohort of productively employed. The inevitable result of this dynamic is a destabilizing Tyranny of the Majority. Tyranny of the Majority, Corporate Welfare and Complicity (April 9, 2010)
Technology is not just disrupting old industries and companies, it is disrupting the entire Savior State/cartel-capitalism model. The disruption has barely begun, but it will pick up speed over the next decade.
I suspect the next American Revolution will begin in the 2015-16 timeframe. A series of interlocking crises will lead to reforms that preserve the Savior State/ cartel-capitalism for another few years, at a lower level of consumption, i.e. burn rate.
But the process of revolution will be far from complete; this initial response of the centralized neofeudal debtocracy will buy time for the Status Quo, and every conventional onlooker will be infused with optimism and hope that the system established in the Great Depression, World War II and its Cold War aftermath–the secular religion of consumerism (i.e. aggregate demand), permanent war footing and the National Security State, and universal dependence on the Savior State and its ceaseless expansion of concentrated wealth and power–will continue.
But this Springtime for the Savior State/cartel-capitalism partnership will be brief, and by 2018-19 all the systemic flaws and disruptive trends will reassert themselves with renewed vigor.
The entire current model of governance, social order and the economy will be revolutionized not by overthrow but by the process of irrelevance. What will become relevant will no longer be in the control of the Savior State or its partner, financialized cartel capitalism.
Those currently holding all the concentrated power and wealth cannot believe they will become irrelevant, but that’s the result of projecting the present as if it is permanent and immutable.
The new system will be better, more humane, more flexible, more transparent, with more opportunity, for it will be everything the current corrupt, sclerotic, parasitic and exploitive system is not. – Zero Hedge
Gideon Rachman writes in the FT that Obama’s liberals were living in a fantasy world of expectations. It has taken a long time, but the world’s fantasies about Barack Obama are finally crumbling. In Europe, once the headquarters of the global cult of Obama, the disillusionment is particularly bitter. Monday’s newspapers were full of savage quotes about the perfidy of the Obama-led US.
Der Spiegel, the German magazine that alleged that America’s National Security Agency has bugged the EU’s offices, thundered that “the NSA’s totalitarian ambition … affects us all … A constitutional state cannot allow it. None of us can allow it.” President François Hollande of France has demanded that the alleged spying stop immediately. Le Monde, Mr Hollande’s home-town newspaper, has even suggested that the EU should consider giving political asylum to Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower.
But if liberals wanted to compile a list of perfidious acts by the Obama administration, the case of the bugged EU fax machine should probably come low down the list.
More important would be the broken promise to close the Guantánamo detention centre and – above all – the massive expansion of the use of drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, It has gradually dawned on President Obama’s foreign fan club that their erstwhile hero is using methods that would be bitterly denounced if he were a white Republican. As Hakan Altinay, a Turkish academic, complained to me last week: “Obama talks like the president of the American Civil Liberties Union but he acts like Dick Cheney.”
Obama campaigned with the human rights rhetoric of Jimmy Carter but has governed like Henry Kissinger.
It is not entirely Mr Obama’s fault that he became the vessel into which liberals all over the world poured their fantasies. Of course, like any politician, he pumped up expectations when running for office. But when Obama-mania really took off in 2008, it swiftly moved into a realm beyond reason. What was candidate Obama meant to say to the 200,000 Berliners who turned out to cheer him that year – “Go home guys, this is silly”? When the new president was given the Nobel Peace Prize, simply for existing, all he could do was graciously accept.
It is perfectly legitimate to argue that Mr Obama should have done more to cut back the rapidly growing secret state that he inherited when he took office. The combination of a “war on terror” and the new world of “big data” has created possibilities and pressures – and Mr Obama may have made some wrong calls in response. Yet the US president has had to balance a variety of pressures – including the continuing existence of a terrorist threat and the entrenched power of the intelligence world.
Mr Obama was living in a real universe, full of hard choices. It was his overheated critics who lived in a fantasy world. – FT
The horror started just before midnight on Wednesday this week.
After listening to the latest television news about the health of Nelson Mandela, a South African family living not far from the former President’s hospital unit turned in for the night.
But Roelof and Laura du Plessis, a married couple with four children who live on a heavily fortified farm outside Pretoria, did not have a peaceful night’s rest.
In fact they were about to become the latest victims of what white pressure groups in this troubled nation say is nothing less than a savage war against them.
Hearing noises outside their home, Mr du Plessis, 46, got out of bed and ran outside.
To his horror, he found his 19-year-old son being held with a gun to his head by a gang of five armed black attackers.
Father and son were ordered to lie on the ground. The invaders did not ask for money or the keys to the expensive vehicles in the drive. They were there only to terrorise and kill.
Hearing voices outside, Laura, 44, came out of her bedroom to investigate — and her torch illuminated an awful scene as the gang pointed guns at her husband.
Her son managed to get up and sprint off into the darkness when the men were confused by the flashlight. But Du Plessis was not so lucky.
The intruders opened fire at once, shooting him six times through the throat, lungs and abdomen.
As he writhed on the ground in agony, the men ran off into the night leaving empty bullet cartridges littering the yard.
In the darkness, Laura attempted heart massage on her husband, who could still talk despite his appalling injuries, but to no avail.
When I arrived at the farm on Thursday and was invited in by Mrs du Plessis, I found her with blood still caked under her fingernails after she’d cradled her dying husband.
‘He was shot through the lungs and I was doing CPR,’ she told me, between huge sobs. ‘He said “please go and fetch the car and take me to hospital”. But he was too badly hurt and he died in my arms.’
In the morning, when white friends from neighbouring farms followed the trail of the raiders, they discovered the men had carefully cut through fences and skirted areas with security patrols — suggesting how closely they had planned their route of attack.
‘It is definitely coming down to a race thing,’ Laura du Plessis told me as she was comforted by her family. ‘They hate white people. We have never had a fight with any black people. I always stop and give others a lift. We employ black people.
‘My husband fought for me. I am grateful that he wasn’t tied up and forced to watch me being raped before he was killed. He was an amazing man. He was my life.’
A friend of the family, who asked not to be named, told me he was certain that the killings are part of a sinister, systematic bid to drive white people — and, in particular, farmers — out of South Africa.
‘If this was happening in any other country, the military would be deployed to protect us,’ said the friend. ‘There are gangs moving around the country targeting white people.’
Of course the violence and privations South Africa’s blacks faced under apartheid were just as unforgiveable. Certainly, there would have been more bloodletting after the white government fell in the Nineties were it not for Mandela’s message of reconciliation.
But now, as he nears death, fears are growing that a wave of violence will be unleashed against the white population.
The statistics — and the savagery of the killings — appear to support claims by these residents that white people, and farmers in particular, are being targeted by black criminals.
Little wonder that what unfolded on the Du Plessis homestead has sent tremors of fear through the three-million-strong white community.
Last month alone there were 25 murders of white landowners, and more than 100 attacks, while Afrikaner protest groups claim that more than 4,000 have been killed since Mandela came to power — twice as many as the number of policemen who have died.
It is not just the death toll, but the extreme violence that is often brought to bear, that causes the greatest fear in the white community.
Documented cases of farm killings make for gruesome reading, with children murdered along with their parents, one family suffocated with plastic bags and countless brutal rapes of elderly women and young children.
These horrors have prompted Genocide Watch — a respected American organisation which monitors violence around the world — to claim that the murders of ‘Afrikaner farmers and other whites is organised by racist communists determined to drive whites out of South Africa, nationalise farms and mines, and bring on all the horrors of a communist state’.
Indeed, a disturbing number of whites are terrified that Mandela’s passing will lead to an outpouring of violence from black South Africans, no longer contained by the sheer power of the great man’s presence, which endures today even though he stood down as president in 1999.
For its part, the ruling ANC party dismisses claims that such murders are part of any sinister agenda, pointing out that South Africans of all colours suffer violent crime, and that wealthy whites are simply more likely to be targeted.
Perhaps. But white nerves have not been soothed by the disturbing behaviour of Jacob Zuma, the ANC’s leader and the country’s third black president since Mandela.
There has been an increase in murders of white farmers in a country where there are already 60 murders each day
At a centenary gathering of the African National Congress last year, Zuma was filmed singing a so-called ‘struggle song’ called Kill The Boer (the old name for much of the white Afrikaner population).
As fellow senior ANC members clapped along, Zuma sang: ‘We are going to shoot them, they are going to run, Shoot the Boer, shoot them, they are going to run, Shoot the Boer, we are going to hit them, they are going to run, the Cabinet will shoot them, with the machine-gun, the Cabinet will shoot them, with the machine-gun . . .’
Alongside him was a notorious character called Julius ‘Juju’ Malema, a former leader of the ANC youth league, who is now Zuma’s bitter enemy and is reportedly planning to launch a new political party after Mandela’s death.
A bogeyman to white South Africans, Malema is popular among young blacks, and has also been an enthusiastic singer of Kill The Boer and another song called Bring Me My Machine-Gun.
Polls this week showed a huge surge in support among young black South Africans for his policies, which he says will ignore reconciliation, and fight for social justice in an ‘onslaught against [the] white male monopoly’.
With chilling echoes of neighbouring Zimbabwe, where dictator Robert Mugabe launched a murderous campaign to drive white farmers off the land in 2000, Malema wants all white-owned land to be seized without compensation, along with nationalisation of the country’s lucrative mines.
Ominously, Malema, 32, who wears a trademark beret and has a fondness for Rolex watches, this month promised his new party will take the land from white people without recompense and give it to blacks.
‘We need the land that was taken from our people, and we are not going to pay for it,’ he said. ‘We need a party that will say those who were victims of apartheid stand to benefit unashamedly, and those who perpetuated apartheid must show remorse and behave in a manner that says they regret their conduct.’
Enthusiastically backed by Winnie Mandela, Nelson’s second wife — who is still hugely popular in South Africa despite her suspected role in several murders — Malema is a charismatic figure who once threw a BBC correspondent out of a press conference for asking about his wealthy lifestyle.
His words have done nothing to allay the fears of white communities, some of which have taken extreme measures to protect themselves.
This week I visited Kleinfontein in Pretoria, a white-only community of 1,000 men, women and children who live behind high fences, with a gatehouse manned by men in military fatigues, who also carry out regular patrols of the grounds to prevent black intruders entering.
Anyone without an appointment with an official resident is refused entry. If they are black, they will not get in at all.
Inside, there is a shopping mall, while the town has its own water supply and sewage system. All manual work is carried out by white residents.
There is a rugby pitch, opulent homes overlooking miles of open countryside where antelope and zebra roam, and a hospital for the elderly residents.
Most crucially of all, in a country with 60 murders a day, there is no armed robbery, murder or rape in Kleinfontein. ‘An old lady can draw money here without any fear,’ says Marisa Haasbroek, a resident, mother of two teenage girls, and my guide for the morning.
‘It’s safe, quiet and peaceful. It’s not racist — it is about protecting our Afrikaner cultural identity.’
Like all the residents, she is descended from the first Afrikaners, the Dutch settlers who came to South Africa and were driven into the African interior on the famous Great Trek during the war with the British from 1899 to 1902.
Kleinfontein has been in existence since Mandela’s first presidency in 1994 — but its existence remained largely unknown until reports last year that black police officers had been barred from entry to the property.
To get round race laws, Kleinfontein insists its criteria for entry are not based on skin colour. It claims to exist to protect distinct Afrikaans-speaking people and culture, and that English-speaking white people are also banned, so the community is non-racist.
The Afrikaners, of course, were those who devised and presided over apartheid, a gruesome social experiment that did so much to divide the nation and subjugate the black population.
With Mandela on a life support machine, the founders of this community in the so-called ‘Rainbow Nation’ were this week being inundated with requests by other whites to join them.
‘I think there will be trouble,’ Anna, an elderly lady tending her garden inside the all-white compound, tells me.
‘There may be tribal warfare first between the black races. Then they might turn on us.’
Standing near a sign written in Afrikaans stating ‘ons is hier om te bly’ (we are here to stay), Marike, another resident, was convinced that there is a sinister plot to kill all whites.
‘You don’t attack farms and rape 80-year-old women with broken bottles and kill their husbands for a mobile phone,’ Marike says. ‘People say it’s not genocide — but it is.’ – Daily Mail
US President Barack Obama was met Saturday with songs, cheers and laughter from young South Africans at a university in the Soweto area of Johannesburg.
Before he entered the room, the crowd sang songs from the struggle against apartheid and burst into a lively round of Shosholoza, an old miners song from southern Africa with a call and response format that became more lively with each chorus.
As he appeared, Obama shouted out, “Yebo Mzanzi!” or “Yes, South Africa!” to jubilation from the crowd.
The president used the town-hall-style meeting, which was hooked up via video link to several other African nations, to encourage young people to innovate and act on their imaginations.
While Nelson Mandela, the ailing anti-apartheid leader who Obama said was a personal hero and “one of the greatest people in history,” was still in hospital in critical condition, his spirit was felt in the room.
“Building the future you see, realizing the vision you have not only for your own country but for the world – it will not be easy,” Obama told the hundreds of young people in attendance at the University of Johannesburg’s Soweto campus.
“But as you go forward, think of the man who is in our prayers today. Think of 27 years in prison. Think of the hardship and struggles and being away from family and friends,” Obama said, referring to Mandela’s time in jail for opposing white minority rule.
Obama was quick to stress the importance of education, as Mandela had always done, saying it was the “best investment” any country could make in its youth.
Or, indeed, for its politicians. “I don’t want to reinforce for the American press here that Africa is just one big piece of land on the map,” Obama, a Democrat, said in an apparent reference to widely reported claims that former US Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin believed Africa was a country, not a continent.
He was met by loud cheers from the crowd and laughter from his travelling press corps.
The questions he received were often tough, focussing on trade, the environment, women’s rights and even a promise he made to travel to Kenya, his father’s home, during his presidency.
“I’m going to be president for another three and a half years,” he said when asked via a video link from Nairobi why he had not visited the country. “You learn as president that people not only want you to fulfil your promises but want you to fulfil your promises yesterday.”
But Obama admitted that the International Criminal Court warrant out for that country’s new president and vice president had influenced his decision.
“I did not think it was an optimal time for me to visit,” he said but pledged he would still make a trip to Kenya before his time in office ends, which would be 2017.
For many in the crowd, however, the key concerns they had were jobs and economic opportunities. They wanted clear words from the president that he envisioned an economic partnership between the United States and Africa.
“Everywhere I go in Africa, people want to break out of the dependency trap,” Obama said.
“What we need is an Africa that is building, manufacturing, creating value, inventing and then sending those products around the world and receiving products in return under fair terms of trade,” the president said. “If we do that, there is no reason Africa cannot succeed.”
Obama insisted the US was not interested in global domination, a concern often felt strongest in countries once subjected to colonial rule, which milked resources while oppressing their people.
“I was elected to end the wars,” he said, adding that he regularly visits young US soldiers who have been gravely injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“This idea that we want to get more involved militarily around the world is not true,” he said.
Obama said the US would rather be “selling iPads and planes” rather than using its military abroad, drawing applause from the crowd, many of whom snapped photos of the president and his large entourage on their smartphones and tablets. – dpa
Scene at the Medi-clinic Heart Hospital in Pretoria
by Laszlo Trankovits
“Viva Mandela! Viva Mandela!” sing the colourfully dressed women dancing in front of the hospital in Pretoria. Children bring pictures they have drawn, teddy bears, dolls and balloons, while adults lay down bouquets and greeting cards.
The closely guarded hospital is increasingly a place of pilgrimage. Behind its walls, national hero Nelson Mandela is struggling for his life.
At night, candles burn in front of the hospital. People are often seen praying together. During the day there is a lot of singing, especially the old anthems of the ANC liberation movement, now South Africa’s ruling party.
Everyone praises the achievements of the now seriously ill former president. A wealthy businessman was permitted to release 100 white doves into the sky on Tuesday in recognition of the work towards reconciliation of the father of South African democracy.
All of South Africa is agitated. Whether in offices, businesses or government offices, in the huts of townships such as Khayelitsha or the luxury villas in Camps Bay and Constantia: Everywhere, radios and televisions chatter constantly, everyone following the news spellbound.
The fate of the grand old man of South Africa is on everyone’s lips. “Let him die with dignity at last,” Cape Town businesswoman Glini Le Roux said, articulating what many are thinking.
The media, who have besieged the hospital for weeks in tents, caravans and satellite vans, have come in for criticism. Mandela’s eldest surviving daughter Makaziwe called foreign journalists camped outside the building “vultures” who were “waiting for the last carcasses.”
“There is an element of racism to their attitude. That is the image that we have as a family,” she said in a TV interview.
Mandela’s struggle is increasingly affecting public life. South Africa’s politicians have put aside all their plans. After President Jacob Zuma hurried to Mandela’s bedside on Wednesday, he announced he would not take part in a regional summit in Mozambique.
Many took this as a sign that Mandela was now dying – or even already dead, as some sensationalist reports had it. On Thursday, there was a surprise: Following his second visit to Mandela’s bedside in 24 hours, Zuma reported his condition had improved.
Mandela’s health has weighed on the visit of US President Barack Obama, who is expected in Johannesburg on Friday with an entourage of about 1,000 people.
“The US diplomats here are deeply concerned,” one of them said, given what would happen in the event of Mandela’s death and the subsequent national mourning.
They know that if Mandela died, the president’s agenda, with a visit to Soweto, academic honors in Johannesburg and Cape Town and a keynote speech in Cape Town – probably on the future of Africa – would be impossible. – dpa
The battle over the Bible and homosexuality has torn apart Christian churches and entire denominations in the United States. But what happens when that culture war is exported to other countries? Ugandans are finding out — with potentially deadly consequences.
Uganda is now considering a bill that would impose the death penalty or life in prison on gay men and lesbians for some homosexual acts.
To understand how this bill came to be, one needs to know the story of King Mwanga. In 1886, Uganda’s king ordered some two dozen male pages to have sex with him, and when they refused because of their Christian faith, he ordered that they be burned to death. Every year on June 3, Ugandans celebrate a national holiday honoring the Christian martyrs and deploring the pedophile king.
Into this climate stepped Scott Lively, an American evangelical and president of Defend The Family International. In March 2009, Lively traveled to Uganda to speak, along with two other Americans from “ex-gay communities,” about the “gay agenda.”
“The gay movement is an evil institution,” he told Uganda’s Family Life Network. “The goal of the gay movement is to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”
Then Lively, who has authored a book called The Pink Swastika, played into the fears raised by Uganda’s history.
“Male homosexuality has historically been, not adult to adult; it’s been adult to teenager,” he said. “It’s called pederasty — adults sodomizing teenage boys.”
Later in his trip, Lively addressed the Ugandan Parliament on the gay issue, recommending therapy to help people leave their gay lifestyle. A few months later, a bill was introduced to execute people for some homosexual acts.
Lively says he never suggested putting the death penalty into bill, and he says he thinks the bill goes too far.
“But the fact that they’re willing to stand up and say, ‘No, we are not going let you homosexualize our country!’ — that is a step in the right direction, and I would hope that it would spread to other countries,” he says.
Lively is considered a fringe player in the American culture wars. But in recent years, mainstream evangelicals in the U.S. have forged close spiritual and financial ties with their biblically conservative African brothers. For example, dozens of Episcopal churches and even some dioceses have left the U.S. church to go under the authority of Anglican bishops in Uganda, Nigeria and Rwanda — primarily over the gay issue.
Jim Naughton, a former canon in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., says their message plays one way in the U.S., but differently in a place like Uganda. And they should have known.
“If you go to countries where there’s already a great deal of suspicion and maybe animosity towards homosexuals, and begin to tell people there, ‘Well, actually these people are child abusers, they’re coming for their children, that they’re the scourge that is being deposited on you by the secular West,’ you’re gonna get a backlash.” Naughton says it’s like “showing up in rooms filled with gasoline, and throwing lighted matches around and saying, ‘Well, I never intended fire .‘ ”
Many U.S. evangelicals, including Lively, say they are “mortified” by the death penalty provision. Naughton doesn’t buy it.
“I think if they were mortified, they would have been mortified immediately,” he says. “Instead they were mortified — oh, two, three months into the campaign against this thing, when it was getting real traction.”
Megachurch pastor Rick Warren is a case in point. Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, has extensive ties with religious leaders in Africa, including Uganda. Initially, he refused to condemn the bill. Finally, two months after the bill was introduced, he urged pastors in Uganda to oppose it.
“We are all familiar with Edmund Burke’s insight, ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,’ ” Warren began. He explained his silence by saying, “It is not my role to interfere with the politics of other nations,” then stated that the bill “is unjust, it’s extreme, and it’s un-Christian.”
If Warren was slow to condemn the bill, other Christian conservatives have yet to do so, says Warren Throckmorton, who teaches psychology at Grove City College and has been monitoring U.S. evangelical response. He says some of the Christian groups most publicly tied to Uganda have been the quietest. Joyce Meyer Ministries, Oral Roberts University, the College of Prayer in Atlanta — all have close ties and declined to express reservations about the death penalty.
“Silence is often interpreted as consent,” says Throckmorton, who is himself a conservative evangelical. “So I think those kinds of responses may lead those individuals in Uganda to think that perhaps what [they’re] doing really is according to the evangelical faith.”
“The question is, what’s the most effective way to deal with it?” asks Martyn Minns, bishop of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a group that broke from the Episcopal Church and is now aligned with Nigeria.
“Sometimes megaphone diplomacy doesn’t work,” Minns says. “Sometimes quietly talking to folks who will actually shape the final product is more effective.”
His group has been working behind the scenes to remove the death penalty from the bill. But Minns also says Uganda has a right to resist the wave of gay activism that he says is flooding in from the West.
“It’s hard for any of us who have not lived under colonial rule to realize how offensive it is for people who have won that freedom to now basically be told, ‘You’re fools. You’re ignorant. One day you’ll grow up and be like us,’ ” Minns says. “That comes across in a very patronizing way.”
This week Uganda’s president called for the bill to be withdrawn, saying it was harming the country’s foreign policy. The sponsor has refused to do so, and it is expected to be considered in February. But no matter what happens, the story of Uganda is considered a cautionary tale of what can happen when the West’s religious debates are transplanted to another culture. – NRP
The British-American surveillance program Tempora marks a historic turning point. Unnoticed by the public, intelligence agencies have pursued total surveillance. Governments have deliberately concealed from the public the extent to which we are being watched.
The term, “information superhighway” has always been insufficient to describe the Internet. In reality, the Web is a global communication space containing the private information of a large part of the population of every developed country. If someone were able to train an all-seeing eye onto the Internet, the blackmail potential would be almost limitless.
It is precisely this all-seeing eye that the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the American National Security Agency (NSA) have developed under the name Tempora. An appropriate real-world metaphor for the program might be something like this: In every room of every house and every apartment, cameras and microphones are installed, every letter is opened and copied, every telephone tapped. Everything that happens is recorded and can be accessed as needed.
It sounds preposterous, but it is frighteningly close to the reality that was unveiled by the Guardian on Friday. Together, the GCHQ and NSA monitor Internet traffic by tapping directly into the data stream sent through fiber-optic cables. They are able to copy and cache this data, to be sifted through later as needed.
Those behind this disgraceful program have not even bothered to deny what they are up to. The British spy agency has said it will not be commenting on the program — but said that whatever they do is in the service of the fight against terrorism and subject to strict legal controls. The NSA has been making this same argument since the Prism program was unveiled earlier this month. What we’re doing, they say, is for a good cause. It’s all regulated, and we’re only looking at the information collected when we deem it necessary.
But that’s all just pretence.
Would the public agree to the total video surveillance of their private living space because it could possibly also help in the pursuit of terrorists? Would we be satisfied with the fact that we would only be observed if some unnamed intelligence analyst considered it necessary? Of course not. A government proposing such a program would be forced out of office — and rightly so.
Where is the Outrage?
It therefore seems odd that the reactions in the Anglo-Saxon world have been so restrained. Sure, the Guardian, as well as the Washington Post, have reported in detail about the programs. Yet in the political sphere, it was mainly a few German politicians voicing their outrage.
And for good reason. The fact that the Americans and the British — it is yet to be revealed who else participated — have granted themselves this enormous power, without ever informing their own people, is a scandal of historic proportions. To the initiated, all the recent public debate about data retention, Internet privacy and the practices of Facebook and Google must have been downright amusing. The state, as it turns out, knew everything all along.
That was precisely the goal, according to the head of the NSA, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander. “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time?” he asked in an internal document acquired by the Guardian. “Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith,” he continued, referring to a GCHQ/NSA facility at Menwith Hill in northern England.
Voters Must Defend Themselves
A different quote shows that intelligence personnel lied to the public following the first revelations of the existence of the program. European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said that, in meetings with US officials, she had been assured that data from Europeans had not been collected “in bulk.” The surveillance of Europeans, they insisted to Reding, had been targeted and only undertaken in exceptional cases. That now appears to be untrue — it’s just that the mass acquisition of data in Europe is taken care of by GCHQ, rather than by the NSA.
The public revelation of these activities in the Guardian, thanks to the risky actions of former NSA worker Edward Snowden, marks a turning point. The next weeks and months will show whether democratic societies across the world are strong enough to take a stand against the unlimited, totalitarian ambitions of Western secret services — or not.
The governments of the countries in question apparently did not have the necessary backbone. They knew full well that the kind of surveillance being undertaken lacked all democratic legitimacy. But they pursued the programs anyway, behind the backs of their electorates.
It is now up to voters to defend themselves. It is up to us, whose data has landed as by-catch in the nets of Tempora. We must force our own representatives to defend our freedoms. – Der Spiegel
Having learned nothing from the catastrophes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, it seems President Obama, the equally clueless UK Prime Minister Cameron and his culturally challenged Foreign Secretary William Hague are cheerleading another bloodbath in formerly peaceful, secular, outward looking Syria.
Having covertly provided arms and equipment to insurgents from numerous different countries for over two years, they have now moved to the overt stage, a move over which even arch hawks such as former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and former Republican Senator Richard Luger, six term leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee urged caution.
Luger said such action would boost extremists, with Brzezinski dismissing Obama’s talk of “red lines” as thoughtless and risking “a large-scale disaster for the United States.”
During Brzezinski’s time as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter the decision was made to finance the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in response to Soviet deployment there. He’s had a bit of time to reflect on blowback and perhaps the 2,243 wasted US lives in that “graveyard of empires” – so far.
It seems, however, the Washington and Whitehall regimes remain increasingly disconnected from reality. In spite of the plethora of gruesome images circulating on the internet of grinning terrorists holding up severed heads, cannibalising body organs and summarily executing, they are to provide further arms to insurgency’s Hannibal Lecters. This, also regardless of the fact that Riad al-Assad, founder of the so-called “Free Syrian Army” is quoted as saying that suicide bombing is “an integral part of revolutionary action, of Free Syrian Army action.”
Meanwhile, less than a month after the murder of a soldier in London’s Woolwich by wanna be jihadists (with reported relationship to hard drugs) Britain’s increasingly rudderless ship of state allows entry to a controversial Saudi preacher, Muhamed Al Arefe, alleged to have made anti-Shia and anti-Semitic exhortations and who argues that a husband “may use beatings to discipline his wife” as long as he beats her “lightly.”
Informed friends from the Middle East charge bluntly that he recruits jihadists, as last week in visits Riyadh and Cairo. One added:
David Cameron may as well stand at the gate (of the Mosque) and hand out arms for the ‘good freedom fighters’ who will be heading to Syria after hearing Arefe’s sickening lies, sectarian incitement and calls for jihad against the ‘infidel regime’.
This was not a low key occasion. Arefe spoke at the London Central Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre, built on land donated by King George V1 to the Muslim Community of Britain. The Cultural Centre was officially opened by the King in 1944. The Mosque, completed in 1978, which can hold over five thousand worshippers in the main hall alone, was designed by renowned architect Sir Frederick Gibberd. Quite a platform for any recruiter.
However, Obama and Cameron hardly need to arm terrorists. They are seemingly doing fine, via the US-UK-NATO last mega screw up: Libya.
This week it was reported that weapons are flooding in to Syria from a Libya awash with weapons, “with spy chiefs saying” that the country has become a supermarket “of the world’s illegal arms trade.”
“Up to 3,000 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) have gone missing since the conflict” with more than “one million tonnes of weapons belonging to Colonel Quaddaffi” looted after his terrible death at the hands of NATO’s “allies”.
Potentially that is enough SAMs to down 3,000 airliners.
The Daily Mail understands that, unsecured “ … there are now more weapons in Libya than in the entire arsenal of the British Army” according to MI6 estimates.
One internet video showed a stockpile of SAMs, which can hit an aircraft flying at 11,000 feet, in the hands of the Syrian insurgents. Used from airport perimeters anywhere, the result could be tragedy.
However, Akhbar Alaan TV reports Benghazi has been supplying weapons to the Syrian terrorists for “over a year.” With pictures they “show the shipments from Libya, via Turkey to the Syrian opposition.”
The TV station’s reporter states:
Their own Libyan revolution was supported by NATO … But these former Libyan rebels say the world is abandoning the Syrian opposition. And because of that Benghazi decided to act …
Further:
All these weapons are donated by former rebel units in eastern Libya … According to the Libyan organizer they also have shipped around 120 SAM 7 surface to air-missiles to Syria.
Rebel units were, of course, aided by US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, who arrived in a cargo ship loaded with arms (news, websites) and was murdered with colleagues in Benghazi on 11 September 2012.
According to the New York Times, Qatari C-17 cargo planes, capable of carrying a payload of over 70 tonnes, have picked up a weapons shipment at least three times this year, which were then delivered to the Turkish-Syrian border to be handed on to the “rebels”.
British-Libyan arms dealer Abdul Basit Haroun – who was a property developer in Manchester, UK for twenty years, until 2011 – has told Reuters that weapons are reaching Syria not alone by numerous flights, but on ships, concealed amongst humanitarian aid. Haroun has claimed that the authorities know about the shipment, “everybody knows”.
Further, Libyan Assembly Member Tawfiq Shehabi has said he supports the activitites of people like Haroun, who was a brigade commander during the Libyan uprising: “After the end of the (uprising) he became involved in supporting the Syrian revolution … he does a good job of supporting the Syrian revolution.”
Claims are that permission for shipments is sought from, and sanctioned by, Turkey. The UN has criticized Libya for proliferating weapons at an “alarming rate” and for “enriching the arsenals of a range of non-State actors, including terrorist groups.”
Reuters interviewed Haroun and a reporter was taken to a container of weapons being prepared for delivery to Syria “… stacked with boxes of ammunition, rocket launchers and various types of light and medium weapons.”
Arms are flown in to “neighbouring countries on chartered flights”, several to Jordan as well as Turkey, “weapons were then transferred over the border.”
In Libya, the versatile Mr Haroun “helps the government with state security, according to interior ministry spokesman Majdi al-Ourfi.”
Quite an own goal, NATO.
But no lessons have been learned. On Saturday (22 June) the ridiculously named, eleven nation “Friends of Syria”, meeting in Qatar, agreed to supply “all the necessary material” to the insurgents. Britain, with the US, is, of course, cheerleading.
This in spite of warnings from such as Charles Lister, analyst at HIS – Jane’s Terrorist and Insurgency Centre – of the danger that weapons “almost invariably end up in the hands of” terrorists and extremists, and possibly even back in Britain.
General Sir Richard Dannatt, the former head of the army, said last week he was “very much in the camp of those who would not wish to be involved and intervene in any shape or form”, with Major General Julian Thompson, who commanded British forces in the Falklands War in 1982, saying it was “absolutely ridiculous” to contemplate another intervention …and getting involved with something else” whilst still mired in Afghanistan after nearly twelve years.
“Our information from Doha says that five countries have decided to start arming us immediately, and four other countries will give us logistical and technical support and, at a later stage, arm the Free Syrian Army,” a spokesman for the opposition fighters, Loay Al Mikdad, said in an interview with Qatar’s Al-Jazeera TV.
Incredibly, with not a glance towards legality, the Doha plotters “repeated their call for the establishment of a transitional governing body to which full executive powers would be transferred … Bashar Assad has no role in the transitional governing body or thereafter.”
However, Syria is a founding Member of the UN, one of the fifty one countries who signed to the Charter on 26 June 1945. Member States of the United Nations are bound by the UN Charter.
Article 2 (4) states:
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
Article 2 (1) The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.
Article 2 (2) All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
Further:
The UN’s 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States directs:
No state or group of states has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state.
Consequently, armed intervention and all other forms of interference or attempted threats against the personality of the state or against its political economic and cultural elements are in violation of international law.
Recalling the duty of States to refrain in their international relations from military, political, economic or any other form of coercion aimed against the political independence or territorial integrity of any State,
Considering it essential that all States shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations,
In accordance with the purposes and principles of the United Nations, States have the duty to refrain from propaganda for wars of aggression.
Every State has the duty to refrain from organizing or encouraging the organization of irregular forces or armed bands including mercenaries, for incursion into the territory of another State.
Every State has the duty to refrain from organizing, instigating, assisting or participating in acts of civil strife or terrorist acts in another State or acquiescing in organized activities within its territory directed towards the commission of such acts, when the acts referred to in the present paragraph involve a threat or use of force.
End note. That Middle East “Peace Envoy” Tony Blair who lied his way into the destruction of Iraq, kissed his welcoming host Colonel Gaddafi then betrayed him worthy of any Judas, has entertained President Assad.
In 2002, when Bashir al Assad visited Britain, met the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and dined with Blair at Downing Street, it was considered bestowing an honour on the President.
According to documents, on November 14, 2002, a desk officer covering Syria and Lebanon at the Foreign and Commonwealth office wrote:
You should be aware that President Bashar of Syria will visit the U.K. as a guest of government … This will include an audience with the queen. I have been advised that we need to consider whether the queen should bestow an honor on him.
Blair is, of course, cheer leading for Syria’s destruction: “A spokesperson for Tony Blair defended the actions of the government under the former PM, stating, “Engagement with Syria and Assad in 2002 was absolutely right … Mr. Blair has said many times since that the situation has changed and Assad now has to go.”
Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist with special knowledge of Iraq. Author, with Nikki van der Gaag, of Baghdad in the Great City series for World Almanac books
Coming to a showroom near you for 2014: the first sport utility vehicle in its class equipped with a 9-speed automatic transmission. It’s also the first to offer a parallel-parking feature. And, in 4-wheel-drive models, the rear axle disconnects automatically, for fuel efficiency.
Oh, yes: its name is the Jeep Cherokee.
Hold on — wasn’t that model name retired more than a decade ago? Wasn’t it replaced by the Jeep Liberty for 2002?
Yet now, in a time of heightened sensitivity over stereotypes, years after ethnic, racial and gender labeling has been largely erased from sports teams, products and services, Jeep is reviving an American Indian model name. Why?
“In the automobile business, you constantly have to reinvent yourself, and sometimes it’s best to go back to the future,” said Allen Adamson, managing director of the New York office of Landor Associates, a brand and corporate identity consultancy.
Jeep, a division of the Chrysler Group, explained that its market research revealed a marked fondness for the name. The 2014 version, said Jim Morrison, director of Jeep marketing, “is a new, very capable vehicle that has the Cherokee name and Cherokee heritage. Our challenge was, as a brand, to link the past image to the present.”
The company says it respects changed attitudes toward stereotyping. “We want to be politically correct, and we don’t want to offend anybody,” Mr. Morrison said. Regarding the Cherokee name, he added: “We just haven’t gotten any feedback that was disparaging.”
Well, here’s some: “We are really opposed to stereotypes,” said Amanda Clinton, a spokeswoman for the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. “It would have been nice for them to have consulted us in the very least.”
But, she added, the Cherokee name is not copyrighted, and the tribe has been offered no royalties for the use of the name. “We have encouraged and applauded schools and universities for dropping offensive mascots,” she said, but stopped short of condemning the revived Jeep Cherokee because, “institutionally, the tribe does not have a stance on this.”
So far, marketing materials for the 2014 Cherokee model have eschewed references to, or portrayals of, American Indians and their symbols. That’s a far cry from the excesses of past years, when marketers went beyond embracing stereotyping to reveling in it. Indeed, Chrysler’s restraint seems an indication of just how much things have changed.
For decades, American Indian tribal names have helped to propel automobiles out of showrooms. Return with us now to the era when Pontiac’s sales brochures carried illustrations comparing its 6-cylinder engines to six red-painted, feathered cartoon Indian braves rowing a canoe.
Or review Pontiac’s marketing copy, which proclaimed that “among the names of able Indian warriors known to the white race in America, that of Pontiac, chief of the Ottawas and accepted leader of the Algonquin family of tribes, stands pre-eminent.” Of course, the visage of the chief was appropriated as a hood ornament.
Many other tribes were adopted as marketing tools. Long gone is the Jeep Comanche pickup truck, sold in the late 1980s, along with the Jeep Comanche Eliminator.
Certainly, American Indian names are still in the market: consider Indian motorcycles, about to resurface under yet another new owner, Polaris Industries. And Chrysler’s full-sized S.U.V., the Grand Cherokee, introduced in 1992 as a larger version of the Cherokee and still a market leader. In fact, its success was a reason for the revival of the Cherokee name for a midsize S.U.V.
American Indians have hardly been alone in the cavalcade of automobile cultural stereotyping. In the 1950s, advertising for the Studebaker Scotsman didn’t actually use the word cheapskate, but prospective buyers were informed that “when you and your family sit in your thrifty Scotsman…this great Studebaker body cradles you, your family and friends in safety.” It should be noted, though, that the Scotsman featured cardboard door panels and its hubcaps and trim weren’t chrome-plated: they were painted silver.
While there is no indication that the General Motors Viking was discontinued in the early 1930s because of protests by outraged Scandinavians, it’s a certainty that no automaker’s copy writers would dare write today that “the development of the Viking car closely parallels the development of the Viking youth in attaining manhood,” where “only those best fitted for leadership survived to contribute to the strength and superiorities of the race.”
Moreover, in the Roaring Twenties there was no apparent feminist backlash against the Little Jordan Tomboy. The cover of its 1927 advertising brochure depicted a smart, stylish woman in jodphurs and knee-length boots, clutching a riding crop. The purple marketing prose stated that “I am the Little Jordan Tomboy,” with “a thousand miles of open road before my saucy nose.”
Also hard to fathom today is the Studebaker Dictator, “Champion of its Class,” discontinued after 1937, when the rise of Hitler and Mussolini gave the model name an unpleasant odor.
In the late 1920s, the quest for association with high-profile leaders led the Windsor Autoworks in St. Louis to shamelessly place a color portrait of the Prince of Wales on its 1929 brochure for a new vehicle, The White Prince. Buckingham Palace was not amused, and expressed its displeasure.
American Indians have long opposed derogatory sports-team labels and likened fans’ use of war paint to the derogation of African-Americans with blackface. The N.C.A.A. has forbidden the use of nicknames, as well as mascots, logos, signs and band uniforms that are “deemed hostile or abusive in terms of race, ethnicity or national origin.”
In 1994, St. John’s University in New York changed the name of its sports teams from the Redmen to the Red Storm. Also gone are the Miami Redskins and the Marquette University Warriors; the Southeastern Oklahoma State University Savages are now the Savage Storm.
The Washington Redskins have resisted; so have the Atlanta Braves, opposing a name change or the discontinuation of its tomahawk chop. But the Braves’ team mascots, Chief Noc-A-Homa and Princess Win-A-Lotta, have been remaindered.
Even aside from the use of an American Indian tribal name in the Jeep Cherokee, the risks are high in the introduction of any vehicle. Automobile experts estimate the cost of renewing a nameplate like Jeep Cherokee at more than $50 million.
Why, given these risks, return to a discontinued brand? “Coming up with new names is very expensive these days,” said Mr. Adamson, the brand consultant, explaining that trademark research, focus groups and legal due diligence can be costly. The growing quest for viable names — and the third-rail of stereotypical labeling — are possible explanations for the advent of such hard-to-spell monikers as the Volkswagen Tiguan, and the growing adoption of concocted names like Acura, Elantra, Infiniti and Lexus — as well as the proliferation of alphanumeric designations.
“New models have all of these three-letter-code designations that mean nothing to me,” said Stephen W. Hayes, a Manhattan automotive historian and a collector of printed auto memorabilia, of nameplates like MKX, RX 350, F-150, 328i, QX56 and GL450 that populate the auto world. “Companies don’t name their cars as colorfully anymore.”
Nevertheless, “just the name of a brand itself is one of the most powerful marketing tools you have,” Mr. Adamson said. “Automobile brands define who you are, and Cherokee summons up rich associations.”
The Jeep Cherokee was a winner from the start, introduced in 1974 as a sport utility vehicle with the latest gadgets. Recent market research revealed that “there was so much passion behind the Cherokee,” Mr. Morrison, the Jeep marketing director, said. “What was really interesting was that people’s fondness for the Cherokee was greater than that for Liberty.”
Giving the new Jeep its old tribal name may have seemed just another acceptable risk. “Names can be polarizing, and can cause controversy, so you have to be careful,” Mr. Adamson said, but opposition to brand names has become something of a national pastime. “Anytime you introduce a name, someone will be upset.”
A name that has zero associations is even more likely to sabotage a new model’s introduction. “If you have a name that offends nobody, then you end up with a forgettable brand” that won’t cling to the memory, Mr. Adamson said.
I have now had the chance to read Obama’s Report on Nuclear Employment Strategy of the United States, that just came out on Friday, June 21, 2013. The critical passage can be found on page 5:
“The 2010 Nuclear Posture Review established the Administration’s goal to set conditions that would allow the United States to safely adopt a policy of making deterrence of nuclear attack the sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons. Although we cannot adopt such a policy today, the new guidance re-iterates the intention to work towards that goal over time.”
In other words, “nuclear deterrence” is not now and has not been the policy of the Obama administration going back to and including their 2010 Nuclear Posture Review as well. Since “nuclear deterrence” is not now and has never been the Obama administration’s nuclear weapons policy from the get-go, then by default this means that offensive first-strike strategic nuclear war fighting is now and has always been the Obama administration’s nuclear weapons policy. This policy will also be pursued and augmented by means of “integrated non-nuclear strike options.” Id.
Therefore the entire 2013 NPR and Obama’s recent nuclear arms “reduction” proposals must be understood within this context of the United States pursuing an offensive, strategic first-strike nuclear war-fighting capability as augmented by non-nuclear strike forces:
“After a comprehensive review of our nuclear forces, the President has determined that we can ensure the security of the United States and our Allies and partners and maintain a strong and credible strategic deterrent while safely pursuing a one-third reduction in deployed nuclear weapons from the level established in the New START Treaty.” Id. at 6.
And we know now for sure that all the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) systems that Obama is currently in the process of deploying in Europe, Asia, and the United States, on land, at sea and perhaps in Outer Space are designed to provide the United States with a strategic, offensive, first strike nuclear war fighting capability against Russia and China and Iran and North Korea and Syria for starters. The latter three because the United States has taken the position that they are not in compliance with their obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: “…the United States has relied increasingly on non-nuclear elements to strengthen regional security architectures, including a forward U.S. conventional presence and effective theater ballistic missile defenses…” Id. at 9.
So the United States government is currently preparing to launch, wage and win an offensive, first-strike strategic nuclear war against Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Syria. All the rest is just palaver. Including by our Dissembler-in-Chief. An “honors” graduate of Harvard Law School.
Francis A. Boyle is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School. He has advised numerous international bodies in the areas of human rights, war crimes, genocide, nuclear policy, and bio warfare. He received a PHD in political science from Harvard University.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court today issued its long-awaited ruling on affirmative action — but didn’t offer a definitive opinion on whether colleges may consider the use of race in admissions.
Ruling 7-1, the court found that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit erred in not applying “strict scrutiny” to the policies of the University of Texas at Austin. The case is Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, in which Abigail Fisher, a white woman rejected for admission by the university, said that her rights were violated by UT-Austin’s consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions decisions. Fisher’s lawyers argued that the University of Texas need not consider race because it has found another way to assure diversity in the student body.
The decision said that “good faith” by the university would not be enough to justify the consideration of race. But the decision — by Justice Anthony Kennedy — does not offer an opinion on whether the University of Texas can produce sufficient evidence. Rather, it faults the appeals court for not reviewing that question using the high bar of “strict scrutiny” for the consideration of race.
The Supreme Court did not — as some thought it might — reverse past decisions that allowed colleges to consider race. In fact, the conclusion of the decision states that colleges must meet the requirements previously given by the court to justify the use of race. Quoting from the landmark 1978 Bakke decision, today’s ruling says: “In order for judicial review to be meaningful, a university must make a showing that its plan is narrowly tailored to achieve the only interest that this Court has approved in this context: the benefits of a student body diversity that ‘encompasses a . . . broa[d] array of qualifications and characteristics of which racial or ethnic origin is but a single though important element.'”
It is likely that today’s ruling could mean that — after another round at the Fifth Circuit — the case could return to the Supreme Court.
Moments after the decision was handed down, Michael Olivas, an expert on higher education law (and a defender of affirmative action) e-mailed: “Affirmative action lives on by a thread, and demography will start to assert itself.” Olivas is director of the Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance at the University of Houston and author of Suing Alma Mater: Higher Education and the Courts (Johns Hopkins University Press).
The Record So Far
This website, maintained by the University of Texas at Austin, includes briefs and prior rulings in the case ofFisher v. University of Texas at Austin, in which Abigail Fisher, a white woman rejected for admission by the university, said that her rights were violated by UT-Austin’s consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions decisions.
Fisher’s argument was that past Supreme Court decisions have allowed colleges and universities to consider race and ethnicity only if diversity could not be achieved in race-neutral ways, so the University of Texas had no legal need to consider race. The university in turn said that the percent plan provided it with only a limited level of diversity and that it had the right to take additional measures to assure a greater level of diversity. Most major college associations backed the University of Texas, as did many civil rights organizations. Asian-American groups split on the case. – Inside Higher Ed. Read the full article here.
Information that NSA leaker Edward Snowden is exposing can lead to trials against those involved in war crimes in Afghanistan or Iraq or in money laundering and that is why “the West is so afraid,” investigative journalist Tony Gosling told RT.
The 29-year-old whistleblower – who was charged with espionage in the US for revealing secret surveillance programs – arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong on Sunday. Snowden is on his way to a third country via Russia.
Gosling says Snowden’s got his options rather limited. “The real impact of what he’s done here is only now starting to be realized. Not only is he exposing the criminality of the GCHQ – the signals intelligence part of the British intelligence services – and the NSA, but he is also showing that much of that intelligence contains information which may bring criminal prosecutions. For example, of war crimes, or criminal prosecutions against bankers, people who’ve been doing money laundering, such as Lord Green who was in charge of HSBC. There’s a vast amount of information there.
“There’s one thing I can tell you though, is that he won’t be coming to London. He doesn’t want to end up in the Tower of London like Julian Assange, fugitive, is at the moment.
“Here in Britain, we have a very poor record. Although the government and many of our media talk about protecting whistleblowers, the fact of the matter is if you blow the whistle on anything really big and important, or, in fact, even some trivial things, you’ll be bullied and you’ll be taken out of your job. And there’s total hypocrisy. One of the reasons for this is the way our entire network of government is paid –tax-payers money that is paying for all this intelligence service stuff.
“Sir Malcolm Rifkind, for example, who chairs the Intelligence and Security Committee, is supposed to oversee all this secret stuff. He is actually also employed by financial services firm that works for defense contractors. We are losing any kind of proper democratic oversight of these intelligence services. And that’s one of the things that Snowden has started to expose.
“If I were him, I’d actually be thinking about maybe not going to South America but looking at Iceland. It has got a couple of very useful institutions. IMMI, the Iceland’s Modern Media Institute, which has been set up by the parliament to protect whistleblowers and to make sure that Iceland is seen is a safe heaven. There’s also the AWP, the Associated Whistleblowing Press in Iceland. These are really great institutions which have started to emerge now in Europe as a resistance to the intelligence, really, I suppose the military-industrial complex and the financial cults in the European world, taking over so much of our public life, essentially – leaving our democracies in tatters.”
Gosling thinks Moscow will probably be a transit point, because maybe it would be a little too explosive for him to stay in Moscow for too long.
“I think what’s happening now is that there’s a lack of faith in much of what our intelligence services are up to. When we’ve got no proper democratic oversight of them they are running of on their own.
“The money system as well is involved in it. This is why I point out that much of this intelligence will be to do with economic warfare. We’ve got many new types of warfare in the world – economic is just one of them. Another one is psychological warfare which is using media wars, attacking the reputations of individuals and countries around the world. So, those are the sorts of information that contained in these PRISM leaks that we are now starting to see.
“There have been serious crimes over the last ten years – particularly since 9/11 when the war on terror started – in Afghanistan, Iraq, in places like Yemen, Pakistan where many people were murdered through the use of drones and hellfire missiles completely illegally by mainly three countries – Israel, the US and the UK. But this is what people don’t necessarily understand: there will be information that Edward Snowden has that can actually bring some of these people to trial. That’s why the West is so afraid. If Britain was serious about any kind of real justice, we would be able invite him to London and say, ‘Yes, you can tell all your secrets or stories to people here in Britain, you’ll be safe here.’”
Gosling says Snowden is actually exposing criminals “and the criminals are going for him now”. – RT
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By Constanze Stelzenmüller.
