Phil Mirzoev's blog

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Prosecution of genocide denial: repressive use of criminal law by state

All those laws against genocide denial (be it Holocaust denial in Germany or the newly introduced legal nonsense in France about Armenian denial) are just a glaring example of repressive use of criminal law, which is neither compatible with the legal logic or ethics of criminal law, nor with the norms of a modern civil free society. And I am telling this despite the fact that I myself neither deny those mass those massacres that took place in Armenia, Germany etc, nor consider the present history education in school enough and proper for future generations to draw all the due lessons from those terrible historical events and state crimes.
The more the misuse of criminal law is escalated and promoted by Western states and governments, the farther the freedom and the rights-based democratic foundations are eroded - be it the prosecution of 'genocide denial' or the ban of face veils or prosecution of Wikileaks. This is a crystal clear measure, a litmus test, showing what the real trajectory of Western semi-democracy is: states seem to take to repressive use of the criminal law club. What's next?
The very formulation of those anti-denial laws is absurd, cos you cannot make a state of disbelief or denial of anything a crime (at least if you don't live in a place like Ottoman Turkey of the 1900s or Germany of the 1930s). Even more to the point, the very (and the only) UN-chosen definition of 'genocide' is an artificial construct, a deeply ideological conception, which may not reflect the reality properly or even may be immoral in itself in the eyes of many. The very definition of genocide, at least in the highly arguably and dubious form it is now, could be a subject of disbelief and rejection. That means for example, that if I don't recognize the validity, essentiality and even moral relevance of the term 'genocide' (in the legal sense in which one should apply and consider now this notion), I can be technically considered as being in denial of Genocide. To put it more simply, I for example recognize the terrible mass killings of Jews, Poles, Gypsies by the Nazi butchers, and I reckon those terrible acts as one of the most terrible crimes in human history, but I consider them so NOT because I believe in the notion of genocide in the form it's now formulated, but because for me the main point is the CRIME of a STATE against human and people LIFE. For me - I took myself here just as an example - the crimes of Hitler wouldn't have been less heavy, atrocious and punishable even in the least bit, if his government had killed not only Jews but Germans too (like Stalin did to Russians) and if OFFICIALLY Hitler's government hadn't declared Jews as a kind of genetically inferior people. Yet, in the eyes of the present definition of the term 'genocide' those crimes should be considered qualitatively lighter if the above conditions had existed in reality. I don't fully believe in the term 'genocide' in the form it's now, I reckon it itself to be racist based in a way. So, I suppose, I myself could be in future prosecuted for 'genocide denial'
The genocide now just blurs the line between the responsibility of any state for mass killings and torture of its people, and the crime of technically discriminating against ethnicity/nation as such. So in my opinion the notion of genocide is still very much cynical (putting the value of human lives much lower than the value of formal ethnicity, which in itself is not a proved essential notion and can be reasonably put into doubt as such by some scholars and ordinary people) and ethically dubious to say the least.
There's a different aspect to this problem of 'genocide denial', concerning responsibility - an aspect of possible insult to a group of people, whose relatives died in the genocide etc - but that is absolutely another story: those questions can, should and MUST be resolved within the framework of the CIVIL law. There must be established sufficiently thought-out civil law mechanisms that should allow those, who consider themselves victims of some kind of ethnic or 'historic insult', to initiate civil proceedings against those, say, 'deniers' and claim a good compensation in the form of money, apologies etc etc. But they must PROVE it in a civil court in the first place.
To add one more point about the genocide definition: now as such, the UN formulation is not only ethically ambivalent and confusing, in my opinion, but damaging in practical terms, because it provokes and gives all the grounds and possibilities to the most fundamentalist's radical nationalistic core of people withing different nations to most cynically CAPITALIZE on the DEATH of thousands of, in essence, people (whom they, without asking them, include in the same imaginable ethnic body to which they relate themselves), who had time ago fallen victims of mass killings and tortures conducted by one state or another for a set of reasons not always fully known and even able to be known and cognizable at all (but, de facto, accompanied by the state impunity and the self-proclaimed right of those butcher-states to dispose of people's lives at will). Good thing for those radical nationalistic beneficiaries, is that those killed are SILENT and UNRESPONSIVE, we cannot resurrect those Jews, or Armenians and ask their opinion or judgement. This thing is quite devilishly exploited by the very right nationalists.
For example, in my opinion, those among Armenians who feel that they can capitalize on the notion of collective responsibility in direct or any indirect way, will be for as much of the world's attention to the issue of genocide as possible (of course, there are also millions of other Armenians, and, like me, non-Armenians who very deeply sympathize with the victims of Turkish butchery and want to make the history as true and clear, as possible, but for whom the tragedy is not an element of a potentially successful PR campaign and a tool to extract moral debts and exclusive position - something, what I call 'racism inside out').     
All in all it's beneficial to engrave in the stone of the world history the position of your ethnicity as an uncompensated victim, cos in this case the descenders (and also self-proclaimed 'quasi-descenders') of those who actually lived in the times of the actual genocide, can reckon on indirect compensation (but 'never-ending' at the same time, cos those killed can never be resurrected, nor can they be asked their opinion on whether their death has been redeemed) and sometimes on direct compensation.
The idea is that some nations can put themselves in a position of always having a positive moral account balance with the rest of the world and morals as such (not to be confused with justice) have always been used by human creatures to derive benefits and compensations.
Many Jews CAPITALIZED politically economically etc on Holocaust - the same story (don't get me wrong, it in no way reduces the terror and absolute hell on earth of Holocaust and the necessity to prevent and remember such apocalypses) That's the point of radical nationalistic stance and the 'beauty' of it, because one cannot ask those killed - neither Jews nor Armenians - about their opinion in the discussion, nor can one return the compensation to THEM. So in practice one group of people at one time is KILLED ruthlessly and another group of people, publicly stating their belonging to one metaphysical 'nation-body' with those killed, tries get the actual compensation and benefits, assessable material part of which sometimes is no trifling at all...
It's not meant to say, that among those who call themselves Armenians or Jews, there are not those who, as their first priority, want historical truth, memory and recognition of the facts of genocide, but such groups are not those who influence the decisions made in France about laws against Armenian genocide denial. Besides you don't need to be Armenian to be in favor of historical truth. I am not Armenian, but I am for good history text books and good memory of this tragedy, and better and more fair historical education in schools.
Just to amplify a bit on what I said in the beginning, one of the most unpleasant problems, about which few people like to talk about, is that the very UN-confirmed and used notion of GENOCIDE is itself racism based in a way - it puts the value of national belonging HIGHER that the value of human life, it puts the crime against nationality as such HIGHER than crime of a state-sanctioned mass killing of human beings. In other words, if Hitler or Ottoman rulers would give purely technical reasons for their crime (not specifically racist) then according to today's laws and legal views, the crimes were much less substantial. Excellent example of this is Russia, which in Stalin's times exiled, imprisoned and killed a huge number of different ethnic minorities (and not only minorities in the case of so called golodomor), but the main justification used by Russia - used quite successfully, mind you - is that 1. They also killed many Russians in the process 2. The primary cause was the state security, not specific racism-based or ethnic-inequality-based theories and philosophies.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Comments on the controlled explosion theory of the 911 attack

All those speculations about controlled demolitions serve only one purpose: to shift the focus of the public discussion from the main RATIONAL question: what did the US government (and its agencies) really know about the terrorist acts in preparation, and what could the government obviously do to prevent it but DID NOT do? In other words, DID THE US GOVERNMENT HELP THE ATTACKS take place in one essential way or another??!!
That's the right and by the way absolutely legitimate question, because 1. Bush-Cheney team, being extremely hawkish, would have had potentially every interest in and motive for helping such like attacks and the obvious political possibilities and opportunities it would give them; 2. The US government in general case has the technical and organizational capacity and ability to help such attacks indirectly and heighten probability of such attacks to one degree or another, taking them from the category of 'almost improbable' to the category of 'quite possible' 3. It stems from the evidence already known for the public that quite probably they had the best opportunity possible for helping the 911 attack because the CIA and FBI data had just before pointed unambiguously to some terrorists efforts going on to organize some large scale attacks in the US territory (volumes have been said already on this topic. Some FBI agents, like Coleen Rowley or Bogdan Dzakovic even gave very accurate predictive assessments as to when this kind of terrorist attacks were to be reasonably expected with an accuracy of up to a one-two months).
You cannot get inside the head of Bush or Chaney (or Hitler for that matter) to look at intentions, but you can, at least in theory, establish the objective degree of knowledge and whether or not some obvious measures that ought to have been taken to prevent the apocalypse were taken by the government... No presumption of innocence in this case, cos the Bush administration was an interested party: there's a preponderance of evidence to believe that the political consequences for the Bush/Chaney team from the 911 attack were highly positive. They were hawks they never hid it, they always liked playing the war card, and one didn't need to be Einstein to predict, that the 911 event gave almost infinite freedom and public all-clear for starting any wars (any that could be physically possible without immediate disruption of the economic fabric of the US).
In the modern semi-democracies like the US the Government actually DOESN'T NEED to act directly to get as a result some terrorist acts on their home territory. If the US highest figures in power would wish to bomb the US for their own political purposes, they would try to do it with the hands of real terrorists - of course not by paying and giving them special VIP invitations, but just refraining from putting some critical obstacles in their way (cos the concentration of publicly uncontrolled and informationally non-transparent power in the quasi-democracies is HUGE - that's why they are not the true democracies). Yes it would probably require involvement of some very high figures in federal security agencies (like CIA or something), but this is not a problem, considering the objective interests of those agencies (the more terrorism the more need for them), their absolute secrecy and non-transparency (even inside themselves), intrinsic immorality, iron immunity to any checks from parallel branches of power, historical addiction to impunity and the historical experience (Bush needed some cheap falsification of the presence of nuclear sites in Iraq, and hey presto CIA in less than no time gave him a heap of very bad quality stuff (suitable only for 10 year olds), but they DID with pleasure. Simple friendly request was apparently enough.
So in my view, if the Government structure(s) KNEW about these things being prepared and they didn't do something to prevent it which reasonably should have been done, it would already give enough grounds to accuse the government in HELPING the attackers and attacks. Together with additional 5000 American boys and girls sent to their death to Iraq and Afghanistan 'meat grinder' such accusations would more than suffice to make it sensible to organize a nation wide criminal process - something like a 21th century Nuremberg - against the crimes of the US government committed against its own people (not to mention the victims beyond the national frontiers).

For me all these talks about the involvement of the US highest rank state figures in the 911 attack confirm some important points that don't directly relate to the tragedy as such:

1. Despite sometimes naive quality and formulation of the Americans' 'conspiratorial'  suspicions of the their own government's involvement in the 911 massacre, or, better to say, involvement of the STATE, those suspicions show a very low level of trust of the people of America to their own state (or to the state that owns them).

2. Those who don't trust the state system in the US (whether intuitively or quite consciously and reasonably) are quite legitimate and RATIONAL in their disbelief. This is one of the manifestations of the complete obsolescence of the American 'democratish' model, which, in fact, not only doesn't give to the people nearly enough power and levers to control what the state is up to, but also in this modern age very fast neutralizes and incapacitates those 300-year old 'primeval' tools.

3. Once more it confirms the old truth told by John Acton: power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Any state system, when gets more much more practical control over the people than is itself controlled starts to pursue only its own interests, becoming the main enemy and TRAITOR of its own nation: these truths have been proved by history countless times. Time for reform of the democratish system, the goal of which is using outward democratic cover and procedure to legitimize the existing state, into a real democracy, the main characteristic of which is TOTALITARIAN control of the civil society over the state power-invested structures, ABSOLUTE TRANSPARENCY, and non-stop direct participation of the society in changing the state management mechanisms and laws. NO PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE can be granted to governments (in the form it is now anyway).

See also on the related topics:
The US has a hopelessly out-of-date political system: reform urgently needed
How to avoid ridiculously 'freak' wars like in Iraq and Afghanistan in future?!
Yes, Bradley Manning and Assange deserve the Nobel prize possibly more than Obama does! 
EU tribulations have political, not economic roots: no democracy - no legitimacy
Don't be afraid of the word 'socialism' in the 21th century, it can be helpful





Tuesday, January 3, 2012

The International Tribunal in Hague couldn't care less about Assad

The fact that Hague Tribunal isn't doing NOW anything about #Assad just confirms for me once more that this institution is a sort of political concubine or or 'sex slave', which has nothing to do with the rule of law, but on the contrary slavishly follows the political decisions, fitting the law into the politics, not the other way around. The same thing happened in the case of Qaddafi when the Hague started to utter any sounds on this only AFTER Western military began targeting (unlawfully too) his living place directly with missiles... So Hague Tribunal is a very specific court which is designed not to independently start investigation and decide whether someone is guilty and administer punishment, but to kind of confirm a posteriori that a punished person is a criminal... Sadly it's just another 'sham institution' which corrodes the faith and confidence of the whole world in the West, in its intention and moral stand; which amongst many other things continues to ruin the image of the West in the eyes of the developed countries. It is very very sad because just a couple of decades ago the most progressive and educated people in the developed countries really really placed a huge amount of faith in Western political high moral principles and institutions purportedly designed to realize those principles in practice. This credit of confidence of the West was really a highly precious reserve, hugely powerful tool - a thing to keep and cherish. But by now all this 'gold reserve' has all but completely been frittered away, or, to be more accurate, just let go down the drain, alas...

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Fukushima mess: why does Japan need any government at all?

    Just cannot help but make some notes on the notorious Fukushima accident, which for me once more demonstrates that in the 21th century even in the developed countries - even in the best of the developed countries like Japan - absolutely uncontrolled self-protected governments not only don't do any good in the realm of their direct 'responsibilities' but actually do as much harm and damage to their own nations as one can imagine, quite knowingly so too. (governments in their present form within present semi- or quasi-democratic systems). Would the emergency at Fukushima have been treated better without government and its secrecy and its procedures? No doubt as ever. There are a lot of engineers and specialists in emergency treatment and institutions specializing therein around the world: they - a group of independent engineers and specialists, even institutes - would have handled the situation incomparably better, absolutely no doubt about it, if - and that's a big IF, they would have given full information access and a full mandate to assess and treat the situation. Was this simple idea evident to Japanese government? Yes beyond reasonable doubts, but their own interests, fears and the qualities of the system in terms of responsibility-apportioning wouldn't let the government to outsource the problem. Do I consider the manner of handling the emergency a crime in a moral sense against the Japanese people? Yes! Does the same old question 'why do nations need governments in the form they are if they mess more than help things?' still hold? Not a shadow of a doubt!
According to the preliminary governmental report on Fukushima nuclear accident, the next problems took place in handling the emergency:

  • delays in relaying information to the public
  • managers' lack of knowledge of procedures to deal with emergencies
  • poor communications - between the workers and the government, among the workers themselves, and between government bodies.
Also the investigation found that... just wait for it... 'Tepco staff at the plant were not trained to handle emergencies like the power shutdown..'. My God, it's just like a large group of surgeons conducting a serious operation in hospital, NONE of them knowing what to do in case of a cardiac arrest! But in the same report the authors recognize that all those cases of negligence and 'mistakes' were not prevented and foreseen by the relevant regulatory bodies, which are governmental agencies. It is the responsibility of the state to guarantee the proper standards and public safety in engineering and industrial operations, let alone NUCLEAR POWER FACILITIES AND OPERATIONS (!!). One cannot come even close to putting on an equal footing the responsibility of a commercial company that produces planes that drop from the sky and the STATE which makes the laws and by-laws allowing for such planes to be produced. HOW COME that Japan nuclear regulators - very large and expensive vehicle - hadn't enforced any procedure and standard prescribing the practice of dealing with emergency black-outs (don't forget, flooding and stoppage of pumps and generators is one of the most commonplace well known emergency problems for a huge number of production facilities)?
I am myself an engineer by education and profession, and for an engineer it sounds like Ministry of Transportation not including in the traffic code the rules regulating intersections without traffic lights. Of course, it is not that the people in those governmental agencies don't know all this stuff and its importance - of course they know all this better than I do - but just because they have no accountability, transparency and control, which just allows them sit on their asses, eat taxpayer's money and do NOTHING, they do either nothing (in the best case scenario) or they try to save their posts at the expense of the lives of thousands of people. STATE SECRECY and outsourcing of the power station operation to a commercial - that is private - operator, gives even more confidence to the government in that NO ONE among the ministers or officials would be imprisoned for life for any accident even of the scale of the Fukushima meltdown.
But of course, what struck me even more, and, I think, many other engineers around the globe, who followed the situation at the Fukushima plant back in March 2011, are these two things:
1. Some absolutely freakish, cosmically stupid actions by the company-operator (Tepco), like sprinkling the reactors with sea water (to accelerate the dissolution of the rods etc) or, even worse, making their personnel walk knee-deep in usual rubber boots on the flooded floor of the leaking power block (!!) (you don't have to be even an engineer - a good 1th year college student can understand what it means with the reported levels of radiation inside and outside the building)
 2. Absolute non-transparency, huge lack of information for public, general blabbering by officials meant to say as little as possible and as late as possible - all this was also mentioned and recognized in that report.
Of course, this next-to-zero accountability of the government during the crisis at the Fukushima plant had nothing to do with the lack of information coming from the facility and operator to the agencies. Neither did it have anything to do with the 'parental concern' of the Government with the public panic element, though they tried to play this card (for the total lack of any other excuses): at that time, after the number of dead and missing was more than 15000 and the number of homeless was six-digit, there was nothing to add to or take away from the stoic spirit of the Japanese people, though, obviously, the lack of information conveyed to the public along with the visible effort on the part of the Government to withhold as much as info and truth possible, could somewhat enhance already existing fears. The only thing that can explain the whole mess happening at Fukushima is the same old reason: the Government and the operator were worried much more about their own skins than about the best possible solution to the problem and about people, they themselves as ever were paralyzed by fear - fear of the possible responsibility. And what they did, or to be more precise, what they DID NOT DO, was motivated not by their desire to channel as much professionalism and expertise in resolving the emergency, but by their desire to understand who was risking what and to which degree and work out the best compromise route to cover up the tracks and their asses, and cloud the distribution of responsibility; to be as much on the safe side as possible from the bureaucratic point of view and laws (even if the real actions of those guys were not the best to achieve this purpose after all - here I am talking about the motivations and blockages of the system as such).
The long and the short of it: the government as ever was concerned not with the lives of the people, but with their own skin, and used to the full all the levers and the self-imposed right to lie and play secrecy and not share with anyone independent the access to and control over the situation. The government and the company-operator instead of solving the problem were playing 'Ping-Pong' of responsibility, trying to figure out how to confuse things to the maximum degree and find a reasonable 'draw' solution in this game with minimal responsibility. The problem is not that it is some unique situation, the problem is that on the contrary this is absolutely the usual way how almost everything, for which government is responsible, works under condition of secrecy. In this respect this crime - and I prefer calling a spade a spade - is not unlike the zero preparedness of New Zealand government for the recent earthquake, where about 150 people died (about the high probability of which every technical student knew and every national channel had talked), not unlike the zero preparedness of Italian government for the recent earthquake, not unlike the recent shoot-out in Norway where police couldn't reach the island during a time period of almost one hour (!!) (see about Norway http://dr-world.blogspot.com/2011/07/few-comments-on-norway-apocalypse.html), not unlike Japan government again criminally neglecting the supply of water and food to those thousands of people stranded after tsunami (the third largest world economy - Japan, even if not having enough helicopters or planes, could quite easily pay and invite the US military based nearby, let alone all the Asian neighbors' aircraft resources available for money, but people were STARVED and on the brink of death from dehydration - Japan in the 21th century, I can't believe it!).
In the world - in Japan itself, in Germany and France, in the USA, in Britain, Finland - there are thousands of EXCELLENT, world class atomic engineers and specialists in elimination of emergencies, who, if given the access and INFORMATION TRANSPARENCY, could provide the necessary help and expertise, who could solve this task orders of magnitude better that those governmental and government-appointed  'custodians', without 'heroes' walking on the flooded floor around the leaking reactor to the amazement of the shocked public around the world.
It's not that government understand all these things any worse than I do, but it's just intrinsically, structurally motivated by other things - their self-justification and saving their face (no matter how successful or unsuccessful they happen to be in the end in achieving those aims); of course, it is a kind of shameful to use external specialists and resort to the aid from other countries, and it could be dangerous for the government if professionals and institutions from other countries will find out incidentally all the drawbacks, lapses and criminal omissions at a Japanese nuclear station. So saving its face and its skin (at least political) is the first priority - for the government it's worth MUCH more than millions of Japanese lives, or any nation's lives for that matter. That is what I mean when I say that governments usually are not only useless, but they are HARMFUL and VERY MUCH HARMFUL too. They inflict damage directly or indirectly on their own people in a situation where there's every physical possibility to avoid the damage and the actual people in government KNOW this.
This is just one more example to add to the unending succession of the same sort of crimes done by governments in the developed 'semi-democratic' countries, where there has accumulated a huge deficit of effective mechanisms of public democratic control over the governments, huge lack of information transparency and accountability of the state. Other examples include (but are not limited to) wars started just at the click of fingers where thousands of citizens are killed (thousands of American boys and girls in Iraq and Afghan war for example); or the endless governmental fight with drugs which is based on the endless supply and illegal production of drugs and creating good conditions for the mafia-supported shadow drug economy (of course governments are interested in supporting the endless fight and the endless drug use and illegal trade); creating purposely conditions whereby terrorists or just lunatics can easily make their own explosives and blow them up (Norway example http://dr-world.blogspot.com/2011/07/few-comments-on-norway-apocalypse.html) or buy and carry grenades (Belgium recent example); or subsidizing an artificial external enemy just to support an artificial cold war to make the state look more needed and protecting (South Korea and North Korea example, the US war on terrorism); creating special anti-human prison conditions not to reduce crime rates and the number of criminals but to support them in order to make governmental policing agencies and functions seem more important and needed and get the proper funding; laws legalizing the private possession and carrying of fire arms by anyone who is just of age and have a driving license (or even without it) - this list can be continued.
All this adds up to the same burning question WHY do the developed 'semi-democratic' countries NEED GOVERNMENTS in their present form?! Why indeed, if the governments are the main TRAITORS of the national interests - the interests of the PEOPLE - and the main TERRORISTS who, using secrecy laws to eliminate any democratic control, TERRORIZE their own population to meet their own disgusting ends (which they have the impertinence to call national interests)?
It's not that this problem doesn't have a solution in theory: the developed countries need to switch from being SEMI-DEMOCRACIES (or quasi-democracies) to the full-fledged democracies, with a new understanding of the responsibility of the state, fundamentally new standards and conceptions of TRANSPARENCY, PUBLIC CONTROL and PARTICIPATION. New conception of criminal law and responsibility would be important too, if the governments are to be left in their present form, because the PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE cannot and should not be applied to them as in the case of usual citizens.

See also:
How to avoid ridiculously 'freak' wars like in Iraq and Afghanistan in future?!
Yes, Bradley Manning and Assange deserve the Nobel prize possibly more than Obama does! 
'A letter to a friend: don't have illusions, there are no good governments'
Some extra about the moral political crisis in the Western semi-democracies  

Why the US doesn't apologize for its recent killing of Pakistani troops

Monday, December 26, 2011

Hyundai pays tribute to Kim Jong-Il. What's next, tribute to Hitler?

Oh My GOD! The head of South Korean car-producing giant Hyundai arrived officially in North Korea to pay last tribute and mourn the deceased butcher and terrorist Kim Jong-Il!! Just pinch me, I can't believe I am not asleep! Of course everyone remembers from the history books how British, French in American corporations in the 1930s with full clout and support of their respective governments vied for the honor and privilege of taking and serving large industrial orders from Hitler's Nazi Germany(more often than not those were military-related orders), but what you can see now is something completely surrealistic: to put a proper analogy to this Hyundai official visit one should imagine something like Ford visiting Germany (with the permission and full support of the US Government too) AFTER the end of the second world war in order to PAY tribute to the dead Hitler with the aim of promoting national economic interests... My foot! Even the best satirists and comedians in the 21th century cannot think up in their wildest imaginings plots which could be even closely comparable to the political realities in terms of the bottomless abyss of cynicism and immorality of things done by governments of so called developed countries all around the world without a blink.
By the way,  I don't believe for a minute that South Korea government is really interested in the collapse of N Korean regime & in unification of the split nation, and such visits like this one of Hyundai just confirms me all the more in this disbelief. In many ways South Korean state does its best to preserve the status quo in North Korea, that's the anti-human weak regime, for as long as possible. If there was really political will to destroy this awful formation and unite the split nation - thousands of families - I honestly believe it would have been done LOOOOOOONG AGO without too much difficulty too. But the short-term interest of every incoming government is much higher that the lives of their brothers on the other side of the border and the tragedy of the split nation. No one wants to take this responsibility but, instead, everyone among the politicians wants to have a comfortable enemy nearby to lessen their responsibility for truly important things and hype their role as a defender of people from that enemy... - a form of state terrorism, so to speak, where people pays authorities for their own fears supported by these authorities.
If there were a real interest in coping with N Korean regime, there are a lots of good things and guaranties that South Korea could offer to those political 'clowns' in exchange for a fast reform or even revolutionary reform dismantling this extremely weak formation in matter of years. But that's not what South Korea government is concerned with, and its Western Allies (who love spouting about democratic values so much) for that matter.

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Why the US doesn't apologize for its recent killing of Pakistani troops

Now I very often hear questions like 'why doesn't Obama apologize for killing Pakistani troops' etc. It needs some sort of short clarification. 
The question 'why Obama doesn't apologize' is basically incorrect, just because within the American state system of coordinates the value of people lives beyond its borders is ZERO in the general case - it was so, it is so and it will be so in the foreseeable future.
A much more relevant question is 'why should he apologize?'. But not the other way around just because the modern state-nations structurally are not in the habit of apologizing, and the bigger a state the less desire it has to apologize for anything. They, if you like, are intrinsically immoral. That's how the modern (as a matter of fact very obsolete) state models work (even the so called democracies): what's done by state has the benefit of presumption of being morally right - not the other way around. The value of lives and national dignity of OTHER nations in the eyes of the US are no more than a PIECE of SHIT pardon my French  - that's how things are, were and will be in the foreseeable future. I am not very happy to remind about this unfortunate reality, but that's the way it is. Only AMERICAN PEOPLE can sometimes FORCE the US semi-democratic state to recognize something or apologize, but even in those rare cases it takes sometimes decades and thousands of lives. Moreover because there are no real democratic mechanism of control by the American people of what their state is up to BEYOND national borders, the probability that Americans will force their state to apologize to some fellow human creatures in some other part of the world is ABSOLUTE ZERO. 
You may as well ask why the US don't want to apologize to Japan for nuclear bombing of its civilians in WW2, or why Israel isn't in a hurry to apologize to Palestinians for the criminal blockade and occupation, or why Russian state is in no mood to apologize to the Chechen people... or why Turkey doesn't think of apologizing to the Armenians etc etc. That's the essence of the antique 'state-nations' - even 'semi-democratic' ones amongst them. The prestige and the presumption of the morality and justifiability of what is done by a state, especially beyond its borders, is granted at a fundamental level. Such things as Nuremberg process or recognition of the massacre of Polish elites by the Soviets and such like is a HISTORICAL and very very RARE EXCEPTION, caused by a very very specific set of circumstances and overwhelming proof of the scale of the crimes. So the question is, in my view, absolutely INCORRECT. To pin one's hopes on some miracle in this sense is also unreasonable because Obama, with all due respect, is not Vaclav Havel and can never have been one - Vaclav Havel is phenomenon that is impossible in usual, steady political conditions, kind of ' a freak of nature' bound with transitional revolutionary processes.
One can with the same vain hope expect Obama to apologize to own nation on the behalf of the state for thousands upon thousands of American girls and boys uniform KILLED in the Iraqi war (an tens of thousands more mutilated for life) which was started under the 100% false excuses and grounds from the first. It is not a matter of who is president - Obama is the best imaginable president for the US for my taste, but it is a matter of the antique political SYSTEM, of its intrinsically immoral core, which is based not on pursuing fairness and justice in the context of the absolute universal value of human life, but on the primacy of 'state national interests' and the state presumption of innocence and good intentions. Hence the state FORCE defines what is moral, not the other way around. So the question is not about Obama, the question is about the structure of the US state and the continuity of state interests. Only HUGE pressure and a very specific set of external circumstances could FORCE American government to give an apology to Pakistani nation of to anyone else for that matter.
A MUCH more relevant question in my humble opinion is that HOW DARE the US in the person of its president even MENTION some kind of moral grounds and make ANY kind of moral judgements about other parts of the worlds in which it has its interests and presence (including military one). I can perfectly understand why the US state treat any other nation and people beyond its border as historical manure in deed without even bothering to reliably hide or cover the fact, but how can it be at the same time so BRAZEN as to EVER allude to some kind of MORAL grounds - that's what is completely beyond me! How can the US in those circumstances seriously believe that there is still something left of their moral authority and image - that's a real puzzle.

See also on the close themes:
'A letter to a friend: don't have illusions, there are no good governments'
Some extra about the moral political crisis in the Western semi-democracies  
How to avoid ridiculously 'freak' wars like in Iraq and Afghanistan in future?!
Yes, Bradley Manning and Assange deserve the Nobel prize possibly more than Obama does!
America refused to teach Arabs democracy, then Arabs will teach the US democracy!

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

ECB starts printing money big time: nightmares come true!

The European Central Bank said it injected a record 489.19 billion euros (US$641bil) into eurozone banks in its first-ever three-year refinancing operation.
Sounds really apocalyptic but at the same time prosaic and predetermined. One can only imagine the dialog that took place between Angela Merkel and Sarkozy, it could have been something like this:

MERKEL: I am not sure... I do have some bad feelings and premonitions about unconditionally subjugating the one and only healthy donor-type economy in eurozone - Germany - to the parasitic majority of the whole company.. Don't think I am too scrupulous, but it looks a bit alarming in terms of possible historic responsibility...
SARKOZY: Oh, my dear Angela, come on, we live only once. Let's do the usual thing we in democratish countries always do in such situations - borrow from our children and grandchildren and postpone the big crash for several years... Even if it means a total collapse of the EU, this will not happen tomorrow and all those journalists and publicists, never mind our lot - politicians - will be saying that you just 'made a mistake' but you tried your hardest to save the whole thing... Nobody can accuse us of a CRIME we are protected by the 'half-democracy'. We just make sometimes mistakes... Nothing criminal... Lets live in the present - in this day - you and me have only a few years left in office... Let's not over-complicate things.

Instead of a comprehensive reform of the financial capitalism and democratization of the EU, they decided to do what almost all observers and analysts expected them to do in the end (you don't need an Oxford degree to make such predictions in the modern 'decomposed' Western political world): they 'leveraged' an already existentially dangerous structural problem. Instead of 'germanization' - okay, if somebody don't like this term, let them have Finlandization or Scandinavization - of those pseudo-democratic, American type oligarchic pluto-klepto-cratic neighbors like Italy or Greece - parasitic in essence (by no means do I blame the victimized people of those countries, rather the system and the state), they on the contrary bend down the heart of the European economy - Germany - to the dictates of its ill - now quite possibly terminally ill - members. They decided to treat the economic drug dependence with additional unending mega-shots of 'the financial heroin' - just to postpone the debts of the southern countries by loaning times more money at the expense of increasing the debts even more - to a fatal extent. And, mind you my dear reader, all those people in power KNOW what they do and all the consequences, which in my humble opinion, makes the difference between a mistake and a crime.
You also don't have to be Adam Smith now to understand that the huge economic problems of Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain etc, possibly even France, are to do with structural problems of those economies, with the structural problems of their political models (especially in countries like Italy and Greece) and structural problems in the format of the eurozone - both political and economic. Those countries are in essence oligarchic plutocracies (which mistakenly considered by some credulous people to be democracies), where there's a continuity of interests of successive governments, which themselves in essence are nothing more than an appendage of the powerful rich group(s) - a kind of lackey, or doorman at the doors or the club, the owners of which never have been the peoples of those countries. Of course every new government in Greece borrowed as much as possible using state bonds just to stay in power and satisfy the ever-increasing appetites of their master - wealthy 'elites'. Now, when the situation came to a head in such countries as Greece where the minimum supply of liquidity is coming to an end (the state and banks just don't have a minimal amount of money to sustain the basic economic mechanisms, after all those huge loaned money just drained in the private pocket of the wealthy 10% of the population), they decided to pump an additional amount of this 'heroin' DIRECTLY through the bank system, and institutionalize this approach via change of the ECB role to a KIND OF Fed. Reserve of the US (which Germany resisted so long but unsuccessfully in the end). That means in essence printing money, and indirectly using taxpayers' (predominantly German taxpayer's) money for covering the losses of the banks which are too big to fail (mainly German and French banks financed the Greek banks directly or via government and now the insurance company called 'taxpayers all over the Europe' must cover this megatheft for free - see http://dr-world.blogspot.com/2011/11/greece-will-fail-without-euro-just.html). Immediately and unsurprisingly the banks on the first day of the auction grabbed almost 500 bln euros (!!) from ECB, and this is only a start. Looks like a 'safety shot' in the head of the economic union of Europe.
The second problem is the same old problem, which, in my view, from the very start of the EU became a time bomb for the very EU: the total absence of democracy in the very foundation of the EU (never mind eurozone), and, hence, legitimacy (http://dr-world.blogspot.com/2011/01/few-words-about-eu-good-idea-but-in.html). The use of Central Banks in itself for printing money and pumping liquidity into the banking system is not necessarily bad at all times, but the problem is that within democratic national systems, e.g. in the case of the USA, Japan, England etc, the emission and REDISTRIBUTION of money supply has legitimacy with the people (at least nominal), and the people, at least nominally, have the power to influence the policymakers directly (through local and general elections), influencing through them what can be an UNJUST and unbalanced redistribution of money and credit power in the national economy - there is at least on paper a democratic feedback and a place for the people in this pact between the state institutions. But nothing of this sort do you have in the EU - The Soviet Union of European Governments and Functionaries. Germans are 120% sure that the actions of the ECB are aimed at stealing their purchasing power and the value of their savings (which is 120% true too) just to save the foreign fat cats (who give nothing instead) and their own fat cats (in the form of their bankrupt banks).
And there's nothing that Germans can do about this within the EU bureaucracy's rules and so called 'laws' (a union which is in essence a form of usurpation of national sovereign powers and democracy, because it is not democratic in itself). This leads the whole system directly to a political crisis of an immense scale. But European 'leaders' just continue - knowingly so - to inject the 'heroin' into the poisoned bloodstream of the system, robe their taxpayers without saying a WORD about the critical situation with democracy and legitimacy of this whole rosy house named 'EU' (I am really amazed by the fact they call themselves 'leaders' since in my simple mind, leaders are exemplified for instance by some Roman generals or Emperors who to heighten the moral and hope of their armies get ahead of everybody else and demonstratively risk their life to start a crucial attack and fundamentally change the course of the fight. The image of the miserable self-interested and cynical RATS, whose only task is getting rid of all kind of responsibilities, staying in power  as long as possible thanks to political prostitution and appearing even before their own public only in the presence of heavy security and behind the bullet-prof glass of their tank-like automobiles, doesn't easily fit into my old fashioned conception of leaders).