mostly nuggets

blessed britons

Bristow and Purcell Lee arrived home ‘to find we had been called traitors by a senior Cabinet Minister [for going to an international conference on depleted uranium in Baghdad]’ and that their homes had been raided by Ministry of Defence Police. All computers, discs and files had been removed in search of a document which showed that the Medical Director of MAP was liaising with Porton Down Chemical Weapons Establishment over concern that DU was a contributory cause of the veterans’ plight. For eight years MAP refused to countenance such a scenario and were still denying it to the veterans themselves. In June this year, when the plight of Australian Gulf veterans was commanding extensive media coverage, all computer discs and files relating to Gulf War illnesses were stolen from the home of campaigner Philip Steele. Nothing else was missing.

mad world

The million Iraqi deaths from the “sanctions of mass destruction” of the 1990s is unmentioned in Samantha Power’s ludicrous treatise on genocide (“A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide), just as she fails to deal seriously with the Indonesian massacres in East Timor. The U.S.-coalition invasion-occupation of Iraq from 2003 has added another million to the Iraqi toll, but the idea that this is “genocide” is inexpressible in the U.S. mainstream media, which is focused on the more politically convenient killings in Darfur - attributable to a Western target, the Arab government of the Sudan, hence subject to the invidious word genocidal. This is implicit but real denial, which follows from the political basis of naming and concern.

— Edward Herman

Genocide inflation is the real human rights threat

we imagine we are seeing a lively debate

Submitted by antarchi on August 31, 2007 - 16:07.

It is one of the big differences between the propaganda system of a totalitarian state and the way democratic societies go about things. Exaggerating slightly, in totalitarian countries the state decides the official line and everyone must then comply. Democratic societies operate differently. The line is never presented as such, merely implied. This involves brainwashing people who are still at liberty. Even the passionate debates in the main media stay within the bounds of commonly accepted, implicit rules, which sideline a large number of contrary views. The system of control in democratic societies is extremely effective. We do not notice the line any more than we notice the air we breathe. We sometimes even imagine we are seeing a lively debate. The system of control is much more powerful than in totalitarian systems.

— Noam Chomsky

Democracy's Invisible Line