blessed britons

The Baath party regime of 1968 was also immediately welcomed by Britain: ‘The new regime may look to the United Kingdom for military training and equipment and we should lose no time in appointing a defence attache’, the ambassador in Baghdad wrote. The regime’s new Defence Minister, General Tikriti, was invited to the Farnborough Air Show and was told by the ambassador that ‘it seemed to me we now had an opportunity to restore Anglo/Iraqi relations to something of their former intimacy’. In reply, ‘General Tikriti said that during the Ba’athist regime of 1963 he had greatly appreciated the cooperative attitude of HMG’.

— Mark Curtis

Unpeople

mad world

On 14 August, you are invited to "an audience" with Bill Clinton in London. You have a choice. You can attend the "breakfast and speech" or the "brunch buffet and speech". These will take place in the white elephantine Millennium Dome, where a place in the "Kings' Row" will cost you £799. Last year, Clinton made more than £5m granting "audiences".

— John Pilger

Good Ol' Bill, the liberal hero

Germany

bombing dresden

Submitted by antarchi on July 23, 2007 - 02:23.

Winston Churchill, who was Prime Minister when the city of Dresden was indiscriminately saturated with fire-bombs in February 1945, leaving 135,000 dead, and who had approved the general strategy of bombing urban areas, confined himself to this comment in his memoirs: 'We made a heavy raid in the latter month on Dresden, then a centre of communications of Germany's Eastern front.'

4,000 Roma gassed

Submitted by antarchi on July 15, 2007 - 14:35.

On December 16th [1941], Himmler issued the order to have all Roma remaining in Europe deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau for extermination. On December 24th, Lohse gave the additional order that "The Gypsies should be given the same treatment as the Jews." At a party meeting on September 14th, 1942, Justice Minister Otto Thierack announced that "Jews and Gypsies must be unconditionally exterminated." On August 1st, 1944, four thousand Roma were gassed and cremated in a single action at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in what is remembered as Zigeunernacht.