Coming soon: An essay on connections between a Tiananmen Square account and the science fiction of Cordwainer Smith (Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger )

WWW--Like most of my observations, this comes through serendipity. In 1989, I was told some very shocking accounts behind the violent repression of the student democratic forces by the Red Army troops in and around Tiananmen Square. This was told to me by a Chinese exchange student in his 30s, and he told me without any prompting.

He was an unassuming man with a family who had absolutely nothing to gain in telling me any of it. I have, therefore, little reason to think it's an inaccurate or false account, not that I make any claims that it could be corroborated.

We spent an entire summer doing student painting with him and lived in the same married housing units as him for a few years, he was a very kindly person who's probably instructing at the college level nowadays. This story still shocks me, but when I was recently introduced to the writings of American sci-fi writer Cordwainer Smith (the pen name of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger).

Linebarger's father was close to the Chinese nationalist movement in the 1930s and his godfather was Sun Yat-Sen, practically the George Washington of modern Chinese nationalism. As a result of his ties with China, Linebarger became an expert in Far Eastern studies in academic settings. He also worked in the earliest incaranations of the American psychological warfare sections during WWII. We'll leave it at that for now...

Food for thought until we meet again:
http://www.cordwainer-smith.com/foundation.htm

On the "torture flap" and all the waffling in DC: Bust Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Rice, Miers, and the OLC attorneys

WWW--This is getting good. To say that I'm enjoying the shit storm created over the release of these torture memos, the narratives coming from former participants, and the formation of a coherent time line, would be an understatement. This could have a good effect on reining-in our intelligence community, and more. Reactionaries of every stripe are going to complain that this is "going to hamper the CIA, et. al.," which misses the point: actions defined as internationally illegal and barbaric behavior by them isn't necessarily going to make us any safer, quite the opposite.

But the the public has to be engaged in this, and so far, they are in a major way that's not showing any signs of cresting.

We could be seeing the radical reformulation of our foreign policy dialog inside and outside of the State Department and the executive branch. Why? Because the Bush II administration was so incompetent, so blustery in their criminality, that they didn't think that they had to cover their tracks much--not that they cared to most of the time, they thought the fix was on permanently. Who and what made them think that? Who gave them that blank check? Few buy the justifications these days. However, there still seems to be an increasingly isolated segment of the public that thinks George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, and the rest of the Bush II administration were somehow protecting us through methods that were proven useless in obtaining information centuries ago.

Torture doesn't work.

My advice to concerned members of the public who find the use of torture by our government unacceptable: sign any petition (once!), call your elected representatives, and make one hell of a lot of noise about your concern over this until we see some real action, some real justice. Until then, all bets are off, so keep hammering!

Why is the Obama administration waffling back-and-forth on this? Some of the torture memos came out because they knew a whistle-blower was going to leak them to the press and watchdog groups. Nonetheless, it was a brave move to release them in unredacted form, and I applaud it. But the Obama administration doesn't yet know what to do about it, and the reasons are simple and complicated: yes, they have qualms about how the Bush II administration implemented torture against individuals captured in the field (oftentimes just taken off of the streets of another nation), but I think they want to keep this gun in their pockets for a rainy day.

Does it matter? It might not. This whole scandal is broader than just one incident: it's an internationally sprawling and seemingly endless string of incidents that constituted official policy under Bush II, a secret one. Interestingly, the former president isn't taking any potshots at President Obama on torture...only the factions of Karl Rove and Richard Cheney are. This speaks volumes as to who was the genesis of the policy, it could be isolated primarily to the last vice president.

However, none of this matters. George W. Bush was our standing president, regardless of whether he abdicated his responsibilities to Vice President Cheney. For this reason, there must be accountability because we are a nation of laws and precedents. If the Bush II precedents stand on torture and numerous other matters, we're no longer a democracy. Motivation enough for you now?

One thing's certain: There's a war for the minds of Americans on this issue being fought by Rovian operatives within the mainstream media, and they and the Obama administration are losing control of the debate to the public. This can only be a good thing. The groundswell is here, now.

The Forgotten Genocide: Stalin's Purges

Russia/Central Asia--Why don't we hear about this more often? Why are we constantly inundated about the Shoah/Holocaust, but not the liquidation of tens-of-millions of ethnic and dissident groups and individuals under Stalinism?

The answer should be pretty obvious, and saddening: they don't have advocacy groups with the resources, they are history's losers without any voice because they were powerless then and are today.

In this world, the weak are to be scorned, if remembered at all. During the Cold War, our government used these victims of Stalin as propaganda, a secondary abuse and exploitation of their lives (and deaths). Did we ever care? Of course not, the State Department of the United States of America didn't care at all, and welcomed the rise of a 'strong man' in Russia just as they did in Germany around the very same time.

Historians estimate--though we will never truly know--that somewhere around 20 million human beings were murdered under Stalin's orders by the NKVD/KGB. Today, we're hearing that it was all about "ideology," which is partly true, but what it was really just a human disaster. The West not only didn't care, but was responsible for some of the depredations and couldn't be bothered to intervene (there are no humanitarian invasions), let alone to stop the slaughter indirectly.

Yes, today, we're being told it all began in 1937, but it's not true. The slaughter's beginnings were significantly earlier if one considers Lenin's and Trotsky's use of 'the terror' against all enemies of Bolshevism--even the Soviet councils in the cities, as they were the first to be targeted by Lenin and his gangsters. The terror began during the Russian Civil War in which millions died, and even more would perish during the collectivization programs in the Ukraine during 1932-1933.

Grain was taken from the peasants and sold on the international market to pay for a disastrous process of rapid industrialization. Western nations had no problem accepting the transactions of grain for equipment and other resources. Estimates for this particular period are six-to-seven million dead alone, and it was most certainly "systematic."

The murdering would continue, with entire villages disappearing into the night until the invasion June 1941 by Nazi Germany. Some of these victims are finally being discovered, sometimes in mass graves in public parks, with the numbers in the tens-of-thousands at just one location. By now, any fool should know that this happened, but few care or want to learn from it. FDR's attitude towards the Soviet Union merely echoed that of the rest of political and economic class he was a part of. Rhetoric is meant to be deceiving.

Even after 1933 (the year of Soviet Russia's recognition by the US State Department) there would be a continuation of mass murder during the years of Stalin's reign of terror. Was it all on Stalin and his accomplices? Yes and no. WWI devastated the Russian Empire, and Tsar Nicholas II's decision to command the army during the war--and subsequently losing it--left a power vacuum in the region. The legitimacy of the Tsar was forever tarnished, and what infrastructure there had been in Russia was destroyed and social networks were fragmented. Chaos ruled. This created a very fertile soil indeed for anyone who claimed to have answers and who showed sureness, decisiveness, and who offered order and certainty.

But once you make extreme violence part of your approach, it's almost impossible to end it, it continues-on and spreads like a plague. Weep for the dead, they were like us.

Because of the ubiquitous uncertainty gripping Russia, and the divisiveness of the Civil War, few people trusted each other. A culture of informing on one another began to catch like a wildfire, and one's loyalty to the State under the control of the Bolsheviks became the central contention: did you support order or not? A chain reaction took-hold. History isn't simply about "bad guys" and "good guys," and people do terrible things when they're desperate. If you want a good analogy, imagine a society eating itself from the inside out, just as Germany was also doing at the same time. Both nations were socially and economically devastated thanks to WWI, the war that ruined the 20th century. Our options become radically limited once we have unleashed extreme violence on others. Consider this when reflecting on our current occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

'The Great Purge' of 1937-38 (with the subsequent "show trials") was a purging of the Communist Party's inner circles. Stalin was finishing the job of his consolidation of power, and like Hitler, he enjoyed pitting others against each other. What's unfortunate is that this purge is probably going to be confused as being the overall purge that continued unabated from Lenin and Trotsky, into Stalin's bloody-hands. Stalin was just following in their footsteps, and it's not hard to fathom that many of the millions-of-deaths also occurred simply because he was incompetent and had no idea how to rule a nation at all.

Lenin surely didn't know how to rule either, and as crazy as it sounds, he probably died of stroke brought-on by too much paperwork. We focus too much on these acts of destruction as being a sign of "power," when more often they're a sign that a Stalin's or a Hitler's reign are really bumbling tragedies of those clearly unfit to rule. Strong leaders avoid such calamities, and understand the art of compromise, the give-and-take. Destruction doesn't always mean power, but it can mean the avoidable deaths of millions. At least Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this.

LITVINENKO POISONING: A PRIVATE SECURITY HIT?

London, UK--Now that the case is a murder investigation, a reiteration is in-order. It now appears that the sushi bar was probably not the site-of-contamination, but the bar at the Millennium Hotel, or thereabouts. So? It's right next-to the British offices of two private intelligence/security firms:

The building near the Millennium Hotel [Ed.-site of a bar Litvinenko visited and contaminated] contains a business intelligence company, Titon International Ltd. — whose CEO was a former U.K. Special Services director, and Erinys UK Ltd., an international security and risk management company. Erinys confirmed that Litvinenko had visited the office "on a matter totally unrelated to issues now being investigated by the police," but declined to elaborate. (AP, 11/27/2006)

"Private" could be a coy means of saying it's an MI6 front company, a common occurrence in the world of spooks and operatives ("ops," a very old term). Could they obtain polonium-210? If they have State security-clearances, or they were 'hired' as contractors to do the hit, most-certainly.

Considering the possibility that they really are a private firm, a hit could go to the highest-bidder, regardless of nationality or motives. Since most ex-spooks and analysts have to do something after "retirement," this is a possibility--you have interlocking-networks where the State and corporations fuse.

The shadowy Titon International Ltd. and Erinys UK Ltd. have a lot of answering to do, even if it means an army of Bobbies have to drag it out of them. We can even expect deportations of some of these folks if it is found they had any involvement in the murder of Mr. Litvinenko. At-stake here is the sovereignty of Great Britain, and if private contractors were used, the finger could point to the American State Department, meaning the executive branch.

Nothing is out-of-the-question here, nothing. These are individuals and organizations that owe no allegiance to any nation or people. They are the essence of corporate-terrorism, and the public mind is in for a huge-shock. That dystopian future is upon us, unless we dismantle such organizations and neutralize their operatives. This will be a tall order.

Titon International Ltd.:
http://www.titoninternational.co.uk/

Erinys UK Ltd., Security Contractor in Iraq (works for Bush):
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Erinys_International_Ltd.

HE'S ALIVE, ASSHOLES.

Yep, Fidel Castro is still alive!

Here's a photo from Cuba's Granma service, part of a series. While the moron pundits scream that they're "doctored", we get doctored photos from Iraq and Lebanon without any comment. More of that Goebbels touch (of death). There is no press but the blogs! Journalism students, drop out, your degree is worthless...just ask Anderson Cooper.

All the stories put out there by the State Department were wishful thinking since they cannot kill him or the Cuban revolution. I know, it's sad that the Mafia and criminal corporations were run out, what a horrible shame, I know.

Anti-Castro Cubans: you are whores, lapdogs and rubes for people who view you as "spics." We on the Left pity you, you aren't even Cuban; you left the place 50 years ago. Wake up, it's over, and if Raul died after Fidel their children and other Cubans would take their places.

Chavez: how can you dislike a world leader who calls George W. Bush "an asshole"? You'd have to be one, naturally.