Death of a Nation - East Timor

John Pilger om Vestens støtte til Suharto

Følgende er et uddrag fra John Pilgers artikel "Suharto, the Model Killer, and His Friends in High Places." Read it and weep.

To understand the significance of Suharto, who died on Sunday, is to look beneath the surface of the current world order: the so-called global economy and the ruthless cynicism of those who run it. Suharto was our model mass murderer – "our" is used here advisedly. "One of our very best and most valuable friends," Thatcher called him, speaking for the West. For three decades, the Australian, U.S., and British governments worked tirelessly to minimize the crimes of Suharto's Gestapo, known as Kopassus, who were trained by the Australian SAS and the British army and who gunned down people with British-supplied Heckler and Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica "riot control" vehicles. Prevented by Congress from supplying arms directly, U.S. administrations from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton provided logistic support through the back door and commercial preferences. In one year, the British Department of Trade provided almost a billion pounds worth of so-called soft loans, which allowed Suharto to buy Hawk fighter-bombers. The British taxpayer paid the bill for aircraft that dive-bombed East Timorese villages, and the arms industry reaped the profits. However, the Australians distinguished themselves as the most obsequious. In an infamous cable to Canberra, Richard Woolcott, Australia's ambassador to Jakarta, who had been forewarned about Suharto's invasion of East Timor, wrote: "What Indonesia now looks to from Australia … is some understanding of their attitude and possible action to assist public understanding in Australia…." Covering up Suharto's crimes became a career for those like Woolcott, while "understanding" the mass murderer came in buckets. This left an indelible stain on the reformist government of Gough Whitlam following the cold-blooded killing of two Australian TV crews by Suharto's troops during the invasion of East Timor. "We know your people love you," Bob Hawke told the dictator. His successor, Paul Keating, famously regarded the tyrant as a father figure. When Indonesian troops slaughtered at least 200 people in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, East Timor, and Australian mourners planted crosses outside the Indonesian embassy in Canberra, foreign minister Gareth Evans ordered them destroyed. To Evans, ever-effusive in his support for the regime, the massacre was merely an "aberration." This was the view of much of the Australian press, especially that controlled by Rupert Murdoch, whose local retainer, Paul Kelly, led a group of leading newspaper editors to Jakarta, fawn before the dictator.

Here lies a clue as to why Suharto, unlike Saddam Hussein, died not on the gallows but surrounded by the finest medical team his secret billions could buy. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s, describes the terror of Suharto's takeover of Indonesia as "the model operation" for the American-backed coup that got rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. "The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders," he wrote, "[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965." The U.S. embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a "zap list" of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, the BBC's south east Asia correspondent at the time, told me how the British government was secretly involved in this slaughter. "British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust," he said. "I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time…. There was a deal, you see."

The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called "the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in southeast Asia." In November 1967, the greatest prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco, Siemens, U.S. Steel, and many others. Across the table sat Suharto's U.S.-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A U.S./ European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia's bauxite. America, Japanese, and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When the plunder was complete, President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations on "a magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened." Thirty years later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete, the World Bank described the Suharto dictatorship as a "model pupil."

Kilde

Se John Pilger's film "Death of a Nation" om East Timor ovenover dette indlæg.

Dagens Citat: Chomsky om undertrykkelse

Most oppression succeeds because its legitimacy is internalized. That’s true of the most extreme cases. Take, say, slavery. It wasn’t easy to revolt if you were a slave, by any means. But if you look over the history of slavery, it was in some sense recognized as just the way things are. We’ll do the best we can under this regime. Another example, also contemporary (it’s estimated that there are some 26 million slaves in the world), is women’s rights. There the oppression is extensively internalized and accepted as legitimate and proper. It’s still true today, but it’s been true throughout history.

One Day = $720 Million

Neoliberalisme og udviklingsøkonomier

Den tidligere CIA-analytiker og professor emeritus i politologi, Chalmers Johnson havde forleden en ret interessant artikel på Truthdig, hvor han gennemgår den prisvindende Cambridge-økonom Ha-Joon Changs nyeste bog "Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing World".

Udrag:

In Chang’s conception, there are two kinds of Bad Samaritans. There are the genuine, powerful “ladder-kickers” working in the “unholy trinity” of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Then there are the “ideologues—those who believe in Bad Samaritan policies because they think those policies are ‘right,’ not because they personally benefit from them much, if at all.” Both groups adhere to a doctrine they call “neoliberalism.” It became the dominant economic model of the English-speaking world in the 1970s and prevails at the present time. Neoliberalism (sometimes called the “Washington Consensus") is a rerun of what economists suffering from “historical amnesia” believe were the key characteristics of the international economy in the golden age of liberalism (1870-1913).

Thomas Friedman calls this complex of policies the “Golden Straitjacket,” the wearing of which, no matter how uncomfortable, is allegedly the only route to economic success. The complex includes privatizing state-owned enterprises, maintaining low inflation, shrinking the size of the state bureaucracy, balancing the national budget, liberalizing trade, deregulating foreign investment, making the currency freely convertible, reducing corruption, and privatizing pensions. It is called neoliberalism because of its acceptance of rich-country monopolies over intellectual property rights (patents, copyrights, etc.), the granting to a country’s central bank of a monopoly to issue bank notes, and its assertion that political democracy is conducive to economic growth, none of which were parts of classical liberalism. The Golden Straitjacket is what the unholy trinity tries to force on poor countries. It is the doctrinal orthodoxy taught in all mainstream academic economics departments and for which numerous Nobel prizes in economics have been awarded.

In addition to being an economist, Ha-Joon Chang is a historian and an empiricist (as distinct from a deductive theorist working from what are stipulated to be laws of economic behavior). He notes that the histories of today’s rich countries contradict virtually all the Golden Straitjacket dicta, many of which are logically a result rather than a cause of economic growth (for example, trade liberalization). His basic conclusion: “Practically all of today’s developed countries, including Britain and the US, the supposed homes of the free market and free trade, have become rich on the basis of policy recipes that go against neo-liberal economics.” All of today’s rich countries used protection and subsidies to encourage their manufacturing industries, and they discriminated powerfully against foreign investors. All such policies are anathema in today’s economic orthodoxy and are now severely restricted by multilateral treaties, like the WTO agreements, and proscribed by aid donors and international financial organizations, particularly the IMF and the World Bank.

The Third World was not always poor and economically stagnant. Throughout the golden age of capitalism, from the Marshall Plan (1947) to the first oil shock (1973), the United States was a Good Samaritan and helped developing countries by allowing them to protect and subsidize their nascent industries. The developing world has never done better, before or since. But then, in the 1970s, scared that its position as global hegemon was being undermined, the United States turned decisively toward neoliberalism. It ordered the unholy trinity to bring the developing countries to heel. Through draconian interventions into the most intimate details of the lives of their clients, including birth control, ethnic integration, and gender equality as well as tariffs, foreign investment, privatization decisions, national budgets, and intellectual property protection, the IMF, World Bank, and WTO managed drastically to slow down economic growth in the Third World. Forced to adopt neoliberal policies and to open their economies to much more powerful foreign competitors on unequal terms, their growth rate fell to less than half of that recorded in the 1960s (1.7 percent instead of 4.5 percent).

Since the 1980s, Africa has actually experienced a fall in living standards—which should be a damning indictment of neoliberal orthodoxy because most African economies have been virtually run by the IMF and the World Bank over the past quarter-century. The disaster has been so complete that it has helped expose the hidden governance structures that allow the IMF and the World Bank to foist Bad Samaritan policies on helpless nations. The United States has a de facto veto in both organizations, where rich countries control 60 percent of the voting shares. The WTO has a democratic structure (it had to accept one in order to enact its founding treaty) but is actually run by an oligarchy. Votes are never taken.

Læs hele artiklen her

Videre læsning

Ha-Joon Chang: "Kicking Away the Ladder: The “Real” History of Free Trade" - Foreign Policy in Focus.

Læs derudover i forlængelse af ovenstående min anmeldelse af Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" der ligeledes omhandler udviklingsøkonomi og neoliberalistisme.

Saul Williams - Coded Language

Saul Williams - Coded Language lyrics

Whereas
breakbeats have been the missing link connecting the diasporic community to its drum woven past
Whereas
the quantised drum has allowed the whirling mathematicians to calculate
the ever changing distance between rock and stardom.
Whereas
the velocity of the spinning vinyl, cross-faded, spun backwards, and re-released
at the same given moment of recorded history, yet at a different moment in time's continuum
has allowed history to catch up with the present.

We do hereby declare reality unkempt by the changing standards of dialogue.
Statements, such as, "keep it real", especially when punctuating or
anticipating modes of ultra-violence inflicted psychologically or physically
or depicting an unchanging rule of events will hence forth be seen as
retro-active and not representative of the individually determined is.

Furthermore, as determined by the collective consciousness of this state of
being and the lessened distance between thought patterns and their secular
manifestations, the role of men as listening receptacles is to be increased
by a number no less than 70 percent of the current enlisted as vocal
aggressors.

Motherfuckers better realize, now is the time to self-actualize
We have found evidence that hip-hop's standard 85 rpm, when increased by a
number as least half the rate of it's standard or decreased at three-fourths of its
speed, may be a determining factor in heightening consciousness.

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging,
the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Equate rhyme with reason,
Sun with season

Our cyclical relationship to phenomenon has encouraged scholars to erase the
centers of periods, thus symbolizing the non-linear character of cause and effect
Reject mediocrity!

Your current frequencies of understanding outweigh that which as been given
for you to understand
The current standard is the equivalent of an adolescent restricted to the
diet of an infant
The rapidly changing body would acquire dysfunctional and deformative
symptoms and could not properly mature on a diet of apple sauce
and crushed pears
Light years are interchangeable with years of living in darkness
The role of darkness is not to be seen as, or equated with, ignorance
But with the unknown, and the mysteries of the unseen.

Thus, in the name of:
Robeson, God's son, Hurston, Ahkenaton,
Hathshesput, Blackfoot,
Helen, Lennon,
Khalo, Kali,
The Three Marias, Tara, Lilithe, Lourde,
Whitman, Baldwin, Ginsberg, Kaufman,
Lumumba, Ghandi,
Gibran, Shabazz, Shabazz
Siddhartha, Medusa, Guevara,
Guardsieff, Rand, Wright,
Banneker, Tubman, Hamer,
Holiday, Davis, Coltrane,
Morrison, Joplin,
Dubois, Clarke,
Shakespeare, Rachmaninov,
Ellington, Carter, Gaye,
Hathoway, Hendrix,
Kutl, Dickerson, Ripperton,
Mary, Isis, Theresa,
Hansbury, Tesla, Plath,
Rumi, Fellini, Michaux,
Nostradamus, Nefertiti,
La Rock, Shiva, Ganesha, Yemaja,
Oshun, Obatala, Ogun,
Kenedy, King, Four Little Girls,
Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
Keller, Biko, Perone, Marley,
Magdalene, Cosby, Shakur,
Those still aflamed, and the countless unnamed

We claim the present as the pre-sent, as the hereafter
We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun
We are not afraid of the darkness, we trust that the moon shall guide us
We are determining the future at this very moment
We now know that the heart is the philosophers' stone
Our music is our alchemy
We stand as the manifested equivalent of three buckets of water
And a hand full of minerals
Thus realizing that those very buckets turned upside down
Supply the percussive factor of forever
If you must count to keep the beat then count
Find you mantra and awaken your subconscious
Carve you circles counterclockwise
Use your cipher to decipher
Coded Language, man made laws
Climb waterfalls and trees,
Commune with nature, snakes and bees
Let your children name themselves and claim themselves
As the new day
For today we are determined
To be the channelers of these changing frequencies
Into songs, paintings, writings, dance, drama, photography, carpentry,
Crafts, love, and love
We enlist every instrument: Acoustic, electronic
Every so-called gender, race, sexual preference
Every per-son as beings of sound to acknowledge their responsibility to
Uplift the consciousness of the entire fucking world
Any utterance un-aimed, will be disclaimed, will be maimed
Two rappers slain
Any utterance un-aimed, will be disclaimed, will be maimed
Two rappers slain

Konsekvenserne af USAs outsourcing

I en artikel for Information Clearing House med titlen "The state of the union: meaner, not leaner", skriver advokat og lektor ved NYU William A. Cohn lidt om konsekvenserne af den enorme udlicitering der har fundet sted siden 9/11:

According to the Wall Street Journal, US private federal contractors now total more than 7.5 million, which is four times greater than the federal workforce itself. With federal contracting expenditures approaching half a trillion dollars a year, having doubled during this decade, the US national debt has now surpassed $9 trillion for the first time ever. Outsourcing is supposed to save money, but the New York Times found that less than half of the government’s private contactor actions in 2005 were even subject to open competition.

The Wall Street Journal reports that more than 40 cents of every dollar paid by US taxpayers now goes to private contractors, performing functions including oversight, security and tax collection. Even the most secret and politically sensitive govt. jobs, such as gathering intelligence, legal compliance, budget preparation, and counting the votes in elections are increasingly contracted out, despite a law prohibiting the outsourcing of “inherently governmental” duties. The US government spent $43.5 billion on intelligence gathering operations in 2007, of which about 70% was paid to contractors. Private contractors handle sensitive personal data, take minutes at top-level meetings on national security matters, review and oversee the performance of other contractors, and even help the govt. to determine what services it needs from contractors. The largest source of govt. contracting growth has been the burgeoning national security industry, most notably at the Department of Defense and the newly created Dept. of Homeland Security. Christopher Hellman, fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, reports that while last year the total US federal budget was roughly $2.8 trillion dollars, $1 trillion of that was spent on security.

According to an October 24th New York Times report, “The Bush administration has doubled the amount of govt. money going to all types of contractors to $400 billion [in 2006; up from $207 billion in 2000], creating a new and thriving class of post-9/11 corporations carrying out delicate work for the government. But the number of govt. employees issuing, managing and auditing contracts has barely grown.” Critics contend that a lack of accountability, and the ensuing fraud and waste engendered by present govt. operations, undermines the core principle that democratic governance is built on a social contract whereby those elected act for the common interests of the people they are supposed to represent.

Vedrørende Blackwater:

Blackwater – a case of lawless disgrace

The September 16, 2007 killings of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad by private security guards of the US govt. provides a useful case study of the pitfalls of outsourcing traditional military and other governmental functions.

A lawsuit filed in US federal court on November 26th on behalf of five Iraqis who were killed and two who were injured during the shootings accuses an estimated dozen Blackwater bodyguards of ignoring a direct order to stay with the official they were assigned to protect, and, under the influence of steroids, going on a crazed shooting rampage in a section of Baghdad known as Nisoor Square.

Investigations by the US military, FBI and also the Iraqi government found no evidence in support of claims by Blackwater employees that they were fired upon and were therefore acting in self-defense. The US Army investigation determined that there was “no enemy activity involved” and described the killings as a “criminal event.” There is also evidence that Blackwater employees tampered with the crime scene in a cover-up effort. Yet Blackwater continues to receive lucrative govt. contracts and the State Dept. reportedly gave bonuses for “outstanding performance” to officials with direct oversight of Blackwater. How can this be?

Blackwater was founded in 1997, but its security division was incorporated in January 2002, just before the US invasion of Afghanistan, which led to its first contract, with the CIA, in April 2002. One of the key players involved in that contract and securing Blackwater’s role as the leading mercenary company of the Bush administration was Buzzy Krongard, then executive director of the CIA. Buzzy, a friend of Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, went to Kabul in April 2002 and said the agency’s new station there was sorely lacking in security. That same month, Blackwater landed a $5.4 million six-month no-bid contract to provide 20 security guards for the Kabul CIA station, and Blackwater was off and running. Erik Prince has made six-digit contributions to Republican candidates and is well-connected with right-wing power brokers, but maintains that these contacts had nothing to do with Blackwater’s growth during the Bush years from a tiny start-up to a billion dollar federal contractor.

Buzzy Krongard’s brother, the top State Department official charged with investigating allegations of fraud, waste and abuse, has the duty to oversee Blackwater. Inspector General Howard Krongard resigned on Jan. 15th amidst charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in impeding investigations of fraud by contractors in Iraq. The chairman of the House oversight committee investigating fraud in Iraq finds that “the State Dept. is acting as Blackwater’s enabler.” Just what is being enabled?

In 2003, Blackwater was awarded a $27 million no-bid contract to provide the bodyguards for US staff in Iraq. A year later, the State Dept. expanded that contract to $100 million. Blackwater now holds a contract worth $1.2 billion. Over the past 4 years, State Dept. spending on private security firms has risen by 400%, to $4 billion a year, yet few officials act to oversee the contracts. Private contractors are paid up to 7 times what US soldiers are paid, yet, according to the Times, “The State Dept. has said that it will continue to rely on contractors because, for now at least, it has no choice… the military does not have the trained personnel to take over the job.” An official inquiry by the Special Inspector General for Iraq reconstruction found that the State Dept. was unable to say what is was receiving for much of the money given to DynCorp (whose employees were implicated in sex crimes committed in the 1990s in the Balkans), the second largest private contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 3 years.

Ultimately, Blackwater continues to prosper because the State Dept. and the armed forces have become depleted and anemic. The government has ceded so many core military responsibilities to firms like Blackwater and Halliburton that it can no longer afford to fire them. An early 2007 Wall Street Journal report found that due to its increasing tendency to outsource, the US govt. is rapidly losing its expertise and competence in vital areas such as security and defense, leading to what the author calls “the outsourcing of its brain.”

Læs resten her

Drawdown

The Danse Macabre of US-Style Democracy

By John Pilger

The former president of Tanzania Julius Nyerere once asked, "Why haven’t we all got a vote in the US election? Surely everyone with a TV set has earned that right just for enduring the merciless bombardment every four years." Having reported four presidential election campaigns, from the Kennedys to Nixon, Carter to Reagan, with their Zeppelins of platitudes, robotic followers and rictal wives, I can sympathize. But what difference would the vote make? Of the presidential candidates I have interviewed, only George C. Wallace, governor of Alabama, spoke the truth. "There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrats and Republicans," he said. And he was shot.

What struck me, living and working in the United States, was that presidential campaigns were a parody, entertaining and often grotesque. They are a ritual danse macabre of flags, balloons and bullshit, designed to camouflage a venal system based on money power, human division and a culture of permanent war.

Traveling with Robert Kennedy in 1968 was eye-opening for me. To audiences of the poor, Kennedy would present himself as a savior. The words "change" and "hope" were used relentlessly and cynically. For audiences of fearful whites, he would use racist codes, such as "law and order." With those opposed to the invasion of Vietnam, he would attack "putting American boys in the line of fire," but never say when he would withdraw them. That year (after Kennedy was assassinated), Richard Nixon used a version of the same, malleable speech to win the presidency. Thereafter, it was used successfully by Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and the two Bushes. Carter promised a foreign policy based on "human rights" – and practiced the very opposite. Reagan’s "freedom agenda" was a bloodbath in Central America. Clinton "solemnly pledged" universal health care and tore down the last safety net of the Depression.

Nothing has changed. Barack Obama is a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan. Hillary Clinton, another bomber, is anti-feminist. John McCain’s one distinction is that he has personally bombed a country. They all believe the US is not subject to the rules of human behavior, because it is "a city upon a hill," regardless that most of humanity sees it as a monumental bully which, since 1945, has overthrown 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed 30 nations, destroying millions of lives.

If you wonder why this holocaust is not an "issue" in the current campaign, you might ask the BBC, which is responsible for reporting the campaign to much of the world, or better still Justin Webb, the BBC’s North America editor. In a Radio 4 series last year, Webb displayed the kind of sycophancy that evokes the 1930s appeaser Geoffrey Dawson, then editor of the London Times. Condoleezza Rice cannot be too mendacious for Webb. According to Rice, the US is "supporting the democratic aspirations of all people." For Webb, who believes American patriotism "creates a feeling of happiness and solidity," the crimes committed in the name of this patriotism, such as support for war and injustice in the Middle East for the past 25 years, and in Latin America, are irrelevant. Indeed, those who resist such an epic assault on democracy are guilty of "anti-Americanism," says Webb, apparently unaware of the totalitarian origins of this term of abuse. Journalists in Nazi Berlin would damn critics of the Reich as "anti-German."

Moreover, his treacle about the "ideals" and "core values" that make up America’s sanctified "set of ideas about human conduct" denies us a true sense of the destruction of American democracy: the dismantling of the Bill of Rights, habeas corpus and separation of powers. Here is Webb on the campaign trail: "[This] is not about mass politics. It is a celebration of the one-to-one relationship between an individual American and his or her putative commander-in-chief." He calls this "dizzying." And Webb on Bush: "Let us not forget that while the candidates win, lose, win again . . . there is a world to be run and President Bush is still running it." The emphasis in the BBC text actually links to the White House website.

None of this drivel is journalism. It is anti-journalism, worthy of a minor courtier of a great power. Webb is not exceptional. His boss Helen Boaden, director of BBC News, sent this reply to a viewer who had protested the prevalence of propaganda as the basis of news: "It is simply a fact that Bush has tried to export democracy [to Iraq] and that this has been troublesome."

And her source for this "fact"? Quotations from Bush and Blair saying it is a fact.

Online Papers om bevidsthed og relaterede emner

Filosofiproffesor David Chalmers har lavet en meget udførlig liste over online- tilgængelige papers vedrørende studier af bevidsthed i dets mange manifestationer samt relaterede emner, så hvis du mangler læsestof til de kolde vinteraftener, er det her et godt sted at starte.

Transcendental Kunst: Alex Grey

Vedrørende Israels kollektive afstraffelse af palæstinenserne

No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible.

Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV); October 18, 1907, Article 50

No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.

Pillage is prohibited.

Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.

Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, Geneva, 12 August 1949, Part III : Status and treatment of protected persons, Section I : Provisions common to the territories of the parties to the conflict and to occupied territories, Article 33

Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.

Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, Geneva, 12 August 1949, Part III : Status and treatment of protected persons, Section III: Occupied Territories, Article 53

Ovenstående er en ment som et supplement til følgende artikler:

The poor and the sick suffer as Israel cuts power to Gaza
Palestinian water authority: 40% of Gazans lack running water
The Lessons of Violence

Humanitarian impact of Israel's blockade of Gaza - 21 Jan 08

Socialdemokratisk retorik

Forleden kunne man læse en kronik af tre unge socialdemokrater i politiken omhandlende hvad de mente var 29 velfærdspligter, om hvilke man kunne læse at "De nye velfærdspligter skal sætte fokus på den enkeltes ansvar og forpligtelse over for fællesskabet."

En af kronikkens forfattere fik også en times taletid i Poul Friis debatprogram på P1. Hvilken af forfatterne der var i debatprogrammet husker jeg ikke, men i de ti minutter jeg kunne holde ud at høre, blev han ved med at gentage "fællesskabet....fællesskabet....fællesskabet" mens han uddybede hvad han anså for at være pligter enhver har i forhold til hans/deres idé om fællesskabet. Dette finder jeg ret problematisk for:

Hvornår opstod fællesskabet? Hvor starter og slutter det geografisk? Hvad kendetegner det? Hvem inkluderer og ekskluderer det? Hvad kendetegner den enkeltes medlemskab i fællesskabet? Er medlemskab af fællesskabet et tvunget medlemskab, eller er medlemskabet baseret på frivillighed? Er det kendetegnende for fællesskabet, at alle medlemmer nyder de samme rettigheder og privilegier? Eller er der forskel på disse fra medlem til medlem, og i så fald, hvad begrundes denne forskellighed så med?

Alle disse spørgsmål må der, i mine øjne, svares fyldestgørende på, førend begrebet ‘fællesskabet’, og nogen som helst tale om forpligtelse overfor dette, kan siges at have nogen som helst form for legitimitet og førend begrebets anvendelighed kan siges at være rimeligt begrundet. Indtil da vil jeg tillade mig at postulere, at det at tale om ‘fællesskabet’ som et overordnet begreb er ganske problematisk, og at ‘fællesskabet’ for mig forekommer mig at have nogenlunde samme begrebslige værdi - eller måske snarere mangel på samme - som ‘danskhed’, ‘almenvellet’,‘sammenhængskraften’ og andre begreber som ikke er klart afgrænsede, hvorfor deres anvendelighed er højst tvivlsom.

I mine øjne eksisterer der ikke noget man kan kalde fællesskabet, hvorfor det følger, at tale om forpligtelse overfor et sådant, er ganske meningsløs. Derimod mener jeg, at man kun meningsfuldt kan tale om medlemskab af diverse fællesskaber, og at det er kendetegnet ved medlemskabet af hvert af disse, at det for det første er baseret på frivillighed, og dernæst, at den grad af forpligtelse man føler overfor hvert af disse fællesskaber, er direkte proportionel med hvor stor betydning medlemskabet og de øvrige medlemmer af disse fællesskaber, har for den enkelte.

Dagens citat: George Berkeley om filosofi

Philosophy is just the study of wisdom and truth, so one might reasonably expect that those who have spent most time and care on it would enjoy a greater calm and serenity of mind, know things more clearly and certainly, and be less disturbed with doubts and difficulties than other men. But what we find is quite different, namely that the illiterate majority of people, who walk the high road of plain common sense and are governed by the dictates of nature, are mostly comfortable and undisturbed. To them nothing that is familiar appears hard to explain or to understand. They don’t complain of any lack of certainty in their senses, and are in no danger of becoming sceptics. But as soon as we depart from sense and instinct to follow the light of a higher principle - that is, to reason, meditate, and reflect on the nature of things - a thousand doubts spring up in our minds concerning things that we previously seemed to understand fully. We encounter many prejudices and errors of the senses; and when we try to correct these by reason, we are gradually drawn into crude paradoxes, difficulties, and inconsistencies, which multiply and grow upon us as our thoughts progress; until finally, having wandered through many intricate mazes, we find ourselves back where we started or - which is worse - we sit down in a forlorn scepticism.

- George Berkeley “Principles of Human Knowledge” udgivet i 1710.

Hitler om propaganda i Mein Kampf

Der var engang hvor politikere var ret åbenmundede omkring deres metoder, mens det i dag mere synes at være tilfældet, at en hær af spindoktorer og/eller såkaldte pressemedarbejdere hverves, for at undgå at det der menes, også er det der siges. Med Hitler forholdt det sig anderledes, han skriver for eksempel følgende - og ganske skræmmende, men det er jo Hitler - om brugen og nytten af propaganda:

“The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case,all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. If this principle be forgotten and if an attempt be made to be abstract and general, the propaganda will turn out ineffective; for the public will not be able to digest or retain what is offered to them in this way. Therefore, the greater the scope of the message that has to be presented, the more necessary it is for the propaganda to discover that plan of action which is psychologically the most efficient.

It was, for example, a fundamental mistake to ridicule the worth of the enemy as the Austrian and German comic papers made a chief point of doing in their propaganda. The very principle here is a mistaken one; for, when they came face to face with the enemy, our soldiers had quite a different impression. Therefore, the mistake had disastrous results. Once the German soldier realised what a tough enemy he had to fight he felt that he had been deceived by the manufacturers of the information which had been given him. Therefore, instead of strengthening and stimulating his fighting spirit, this information had quite the contrary effect. Finally he lost heart.

On the other hand, British and American war propaganda was psychologically efficient. By picturing the Germans to their own people as Barbarians and Huns, they were preparing their soldiers for the horrors of war and safeguarding them against illusions. The most terrific weapons which those soldiers encountered in the field merely confirmed the information that they had already received and their belief in the truth of the assertions made by their respective governments was accordingly reinforced. Thus their rage and hatred against the infamous foe was increased. The terrible havoc caused by the German weapons of war was only another illustration of the Hunnish brutality of those barbarians; whereas on the side of the Entente no time was left the soldiers to meditate on the similar havoc which their own weapons were capable of. Thus the British soldier was never allowed to feel that the information which he received at home was untrue. Unfortunately the opposite was the case with the Germans, who finally wound up by rejecting everything from home as pure swindle and humbug. This result was made possible because at home they thought that the work of propaganda could be entrusted to the first ass that came along, braying of his own special talents, and they had no conception of the fact that propaganda demands the most skilled brains that can be found.

Thus the German war propaganda afforded us an incomparable example of how the work of enlightenment should not be done and how such an example was the result of an entire failure to take any psychological considerations whatsoever into account.”

Ricky Gervais - The Bible

Dagens Citat: John Stuart Mill

“A government cannot have too much of the kind of activity which does not impede, but aids and stimulates, individual exertion and development. The mischief begins when, instead of calling forth the activity and powers of individuals and bodies, it substitutes its own activity for theirs; when, instead of informing, advising, and, upon occasion, denouncing, it makes them work in fetters, or bids them stand aside and does their work instead of them. The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for benefial purposes – will find that with small men no great things can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”

- John Stuart Mill ‘On Liberty’.

Ytringsfrihed?

§ 140. Den, der offentligt driver spot med eller forhåner noget her i landet lovligt bestående religionssamfunds troslærdomme eller gudsdyrkelse, straffes med bøde eller fængsel indtil 4 måneder.

§ 266 b. Den, der offentligt eller med forsæt til udbredelse i en videre kreds fremsætter udtalelse eller anden meddelelse, ved hvilken en gruppe af personer trues, forhånes eller nedværdiges på grund af sin race, hudfarve, nationale eller etniske oprindelse, tro eller seksuelle orientering, straffes med bøde eller fængsel indtil 2 år.
Stk. 2. Ved straffens udmåling skal det betragtes som en særligt skærpende omstændighed, at forholdet har karakter af propagandavirksomhed.

- Straffeloven

Der tales så ofte om ytringsfriheden, og om at vi skal værne om den og den beskrives oftest som noget helligt, som ikke der ikke bør røres ved. Disse er selvfølgelig ganske legitime holdninger, men problemet er bare, at de forudantager, at befolkningen rent faktisk har frihed til at ytre sig, men sådan forholder det sig, som ovenstående paragraffer fra straffeloven illustrerer, ingenlunde, idet lovgivningen kriminaliserer en lang række ytringer.

Nu kan man selvfølgelig mene, at det er dumt at tilsvine andre på grund af deres hudfarve, seksuelt eller religiøse tilhørsforhold, hvilket jeg da ingenlunde er uenig i, men derfra og så til decideret at kriminalisere sådanne ytringer er der godt nok et stykke, og denne kriminalisering har da også den ret uheldige konsekvens, at den umuliggør nogen som helst tale om ytringsfrihed. For det, at man kun har ret til at ytre sig inde for en statsdikteret margin, er ikke ytringsfrihed, men derimod blot en begrænset ytringstilladelse.

Ytringsfrihed må altså med andre ord, af nødvendighed, omfatte retten til at ytre hvad som helst, for at være ytringsfrihed.

"Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech."

- Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992).

I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.

- Francois Voltaire