blessed britons

On his arrival at Belmarsh in 2001, G was put together with the other detainees in what is known as "the unit", a prison-within-a-prison built for IRA prisoners during the Troubles. "We were kept a minimum of 22 hours in the cell and never saw the sky," says G, who did not see his wife for six months. "When she was finally allowed to visit, there was a screen and we had to communicate by phone." The then home secretary, David Blunkett, declared that he and other detainees could not be deported to Algeria because they would be tortured. "But it was apparently OK to keep us in prison indefinitely here. In Britain, animals have rights; I have fewer rights than an animal."

— Paul Donovan

mad world

Dr Robert Hare, a psychologist and internationally renowned expert on psychopathy ... told us that many of the attitudes people adopt and the actions they execute when acting as corporate operatives can be characterised as psychopathic. You 'try to destroy your competitors, or you want to beat them one way of another,' said Hare, 'and you're not particularly concerned with what happens to the general public as long as they're buying your product.' Yet, despite the fact that executives must often manipulate and harm others in pursuit of their corporation's objectives, Hare insists they are not psychopaths. That is because they can function outside the corporation... Businesspeople should therefore take some comfort from their ability to compartmentalise the contradictory moral demands of their corporate and noncorporate lives, for it is precisely this 'schizophrenia'... that saves them from becoming psychopaths.

divide and rule

CYPRUS

Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 12:15.

For Britain, Cyprus was a Mediterranean stronghold it had not the slightest intention of relinquishing. Indeed, upgrading its strategic role as soon as British garrisons in the Canal Zone were judged insufficiently secure, the High Command in the Middle East was transferred to the island in 1954. A year later, the colonial secretary – now Conservative – told the Commons that possessions like Cyprus could never expect self-determination. Nor, since London refused to allow any legislative assembly in which the four-fifths of the population in favour of Enosis would enjoy a majority, was there any question even of self-government.
Perry Anderson in The Divisions of Cyprus

Login to post comments
Read more
Comments

backing the turkish pogrom

Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 11:53.

In September 1955, as Cyprus was being discussed at a three-power conference in London, the Turkish secret police planted a bomb at the house where Kemal Ataturk was born in Salonica. At the signal of this ‘Greek provocation’, mobs swarmed through Istanbul looting Greek businesses, burning Orthodox churches, and attacking Greek residents. Although no one in official circles in London doubted that the pogrom was unleashed by the Turkish government, Macmillan – in charge of the talks – pointedly did not complain.

antarchi's quotes