The Russian news service, Novosti, yesterday reported that two Estonian farms are declaring their independence from Estonia. Their leader is quoted as saying, "We no longer want to live in bourgeois Estonia... with raging unemployment and corruption, and where everything depends on NATO and the Americans." What they didn't report is even more interesting, especially given the McCain campaign's vice-presidential problem.
Read the inside scoop of what Putin offered Bush by Clicking here.
The US, acting its favored role of the psychopath, is doing its best to precipitate WW3 and the Ironical Chronicle is writing about the early experiments with television. Go figure!
You can find out a lot about this fascinating history (before it's too late) by clicking here.
Today, the German Party of the Left published a call for nuclear disarmament. I expressed my disagreement with their recommendation in a letter to a friend.
You can read my translation of the Party of the Left's press release and my "Letter to a friend" by clicking here.
On July 18th, The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the German equivalent of the New York Times, reported on the resurfacing of a long-lost, unpublished short story by German author Hans Fallada and dated August 7, 1941. In the story several people tell what they miss the most as the result of war-time shortages. The story is interesting on at least two levels: its value as a historical document and whether or not it is propaganda. In the course of researching background material for the story some interesting information turned up.
You can read my translation of the story and the background information by clicking here.
On July 13th, Frank Rich broke through one glass ceiling at the NY Times, the one that prohibits calling the upper echelon of the Bush regime war criminals. He names names and even hints that some of these criminals might wind up in the dock, which, in my opinion, is pure wishful thinking. In fact, Rich implicitly accepts the regime's core propaganda theme, that it is "fighting terrorism." I explore this theme in this essay and draw some logical conclusions from it.
Read the two essays by clicking here.
On July 6th, Frank Rich published an excellent critique of the banality of the current US presidential election. At about the same time I had been working on a cartoon which said essentially the same thing, but carried the theme a bit further. In my commentary which accompanies the cartoon, I develop the theme to the conclusion that US presidential elections have become rituals, the purpose of which is to create a patriotic population available to the state for its purposes, the most extreme of which is the waging of war.
See the cartoon and read the two essays by clicking here.
Suicide attacks against the enemy have long been a strategy of a people faced with a highly unfavorable balance of forces and yet unwilling to surrender. This would ordinarily be considered the ultimate heroism, but to the propaganda apparatus of the stronger side, where victory takes precedence over objectivity and no virtue can ever be attributed to the enemy's forces, a different interpretation is required.
True to its role in the service of the state, the NY Times decided to initiate a propaganda attack against the suicide bombers of the Iraqi resistance. Its strategy was conditioned by the additional requirement that the war in Iraq be kept out of the US presidential election campaign. Mindful of this, the Times decided to interpret suicide bombings as a sign of the desperation of the Iraqi resistance and thus signaling the imminent victory of the US aggression against that country.
This will presumably be interpreted by the certifiably patriotic candidates as a signal not to undermine this critical phase of the subjugation of Iraq by something as trivial as making it a subject of democratic debate.
Read my satirical comments by clicking here.
The"weapons of mass destruction" lie is now the equivalent of a deteriorating cubic yard of manure on the White House lawn. The Bush regime, its mass media cohorts, and its long list of client states are successfully busy ignoring it. But the war the lie was meant to justify has not gone away and is definitely not ignorable. The fall-back rationale is the traditional one for imperialist states, "We do it for their own good!" Unfortunately, Bush's repeated use of this traditional imperialist rationale for the US invasion of Iraq is threatening the very paradigm upon which it rests, the superiority of US institutions. For the US propaganda establishment, the preservation of this resource is critical. In the face of its deterioration, the US elites are taking steps for both its long-term restoration and short-term damage control. These are, in the context of the quadrennial electoral pageant, a pseudo regime change led by a half-black man, a judicial decision not helpful to the US concentration camp in Guantanamo, and an essay in the NY Times explicitly dedicated to refurbishing the "American Exceptionalism" paradigm. Read my comments on the latter by clicking here.
The NY Times has a secret crush on him, but with internationally hated, lame-duck Bush on million dollar round-the-world junkets, the Times, and the State Department, is faced with the problem of spinning away the virtual ignoration of the leader of the Free World. Fortuitously, we have the Times' spun article on Bush's June 10th visit to Berlin and the German Left party's commentary on the same event. Read them side by side by clicking here.
Frank Rich, the NY Times' OP-ED columnist and critic, just saw the recently opened revival of the 1949 hit play South Pacific and described his reaction to it in his column. It disturbed him that the otherwise likable principle character, US Navy nurse Nellie Forbush, is a racist. This apparently did not disturb the Times nor the mostly white persons who saw the play in 1949. Rich glosses over the dilemma, but its ramifications are important enough that it was worth an essay in the Ironical Chronicle. Read it by clicking here.
While the Congress gives war criminals like Bush and Wall Street swindlers a free pass, it sticks it to the rest of us. By now this is obvious to everyone but the US media, who are paid to treat this as top secret information. Surprisingly, there was a security leak in the NY Times today. In one paragraph they included a statement from a law firm specializing in bankruptcy law from which one could reasonably conclude that the US is not a democracy. Since the NYT is the Government's "Newspaper of Record" and the US government uses Democracy the way the Third Reich used Master Race theory, namely as a rationalization for world domination, this is quite surprising. Read about it by clicking here.
You might wonder what a 1910 comic opera by Richard Strauss set in Vienna in the 1740's has to do with the solemn American procedure for choosing a president. Well, a columnist for the NY Times has discovered that the former is a metaphor for the latter. Read her column and my commentary by clicking here.
January 30th was the 75th anniversary of Hitler's appointment to the Chancellorship of Germany. The German newsmagazine Spiegel posted a 5˝ minute film clip of the political machinations which preceded Hitler's appointment. The narrative account, through omission, distorts the history, but it, along with some of the video, is still interesting. I have supplied English subtitles to make the clip understandable to non-German speakers. Access it by clicking here.
On February 22nd, The New Yorker magazine
published a video that featured the artist-illustrator Steve Brodner's theory
that Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Democratic nomination for president
could be divided into three phases. In the first two phases he compared her to
Admirals John Paul Jones and Chester W. Nimitz, respectively. In the third phase
he compared her campaign to the Titanic.
My comments on this analysis
and two versions of the video can be accessed by clicking here.
On January 24th, The London Review of Books
published an essay by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm on his personal
experience of the Weimar Republic. It was interesting reading but, to my
surprise, I found there was a lot that Hobsbawm left out. In my commentary I
added things that I thought he should have included.
Read it by clicking here.
Apparently realizing how bad its article of January 30
commemorating the 75th anniversary of Hitler's appointment as
chancellor was, the Times let British Third Reich historian Ian Kershaw make a
second attempt. The result is a big improvement, but Kershaw has his limitations
too.
Read about it by clicking here.
Glen Greenwald, in a column in Salon.com published on January
30, 2008, describes what the oft-used word "bipartisanship" really means
in US politics. A minor reinterpretation of his analysis suggests a mechanism
for running a capitalist one-party state under the guise of a constitutional
democracy, a sort of Madison Avenue Totalitarianism Light®.
Read about it by
clicking here.
Today is the 75th anniversary of Hitler's
appointment as Chancellor of Germany. This is the event which determined the
history of the remainder of the 20th century and probably forever. By
any measure, the most significant event to flow from it was the catastrophe of
the second World War. This event, in fact, was the initiator of a whole series
of catastrophes. The physical violence unleashed in WW2 made it necessary to
introduce the term megaton and for the first time in history civilian
populations in cities were made primary targets for destruction, either by tens
of thousands of conventional bombs from hundreds of airplanes or one nuclear
bomb from one airplane. Overnight, capitalist democracies were legally converted
into dictatorships, the better to ready them for the coming combat.
The NY
Times had to recognize the anniversary, but its perspective, given the
seriousness of the event, is surprisingly parochial. It's as if, for them, the
other catastrophes didn't matter and, if we can avoid another Jewish Holocaust,
World War 3 will be just fine, thank you.
Read about it by clicking here.
Israel, in the current phase of its attempt to emulate the
European theft of America from the American Indians, is attempting to starve the
walled-in Palestinians in Gaza into submission. The reaction of the US elites to
this Zionist wall and the break in it is instructive.
Read about it by clicking here.
The NY Times today reports that the Maryland city of Baltimore
is suing the Wells Fargo Bank for additional municipal costs and loss of revenue
caused by the mortgage foreclosures which are part of the, by now notorious,
subprime loan crisis. The Ironical Chronicle, ever desirous of assisting the
states, has a suggestion for their fifty governors.
Read about it by clicking here.