Two very similar articles in the last few days from completely different sources - I guess there are plenty of Americans who don’t fall for all the smoke-up-arse-blowing that is being done by the government lackey media.
The first from Salon:
the U.S. State Department denounced Ahmadinejad as himself little more than a terrorist. Critics have also cited his statements about the Holocaust or his hopes that the Israeli state will collapse. He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on killing Israeli Jews, even though he is not commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces, has never invaded any other country, denies he is an anti-Semite, has never called for any Israeli civilians to be killed, and allows Iran’s 20,000 Jews to have representation in Parliament.
Ahmadinejad also called the holocaust a "myth." Fuck him! A myth is something a society uses to frame their understanding of their world, and act accordingly. It’s not as if the world created a whole new country because of holocaust guilt and gives it a free pass no matter what it does. That’s Iranian crazy talk. Ahmadinejad can blow me.
Here, however (for what it is worth) is the definitive verdict of thermodynamics: water is not a fuel. It never has been one, and it never will be one. Water does not burn. Water is already burnt — it is spent fuel. It is exhaust.
Last nights Newsnight on BBC2 painted a disturbing picture of life in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe - check the link above for an outline and link to the video.
What is even more disturbing to me - with cholera epidemic just around the corner, people starving, and a life expectancy in the middle thirties for most people - is the continued complicity of the South African government and all that this implies - they are not about to condemn a brutal dictator because of the colour of his skin.
Its hard to imagine that conditions are any better for most people than during apartheid regimes of the past. The new rulers of southern Africa don’t seem to have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm - far from it, they seem to relish the prospect of grabbing power for themselves and screwing the people into the earth. There is going to be no revolution while people are busy starving. Meanwhile as the rulers in South Africa look over their shoulders in paradoxical envy, South Africa itself is flooded with poor Zimbabweans surviving as best they can in gangs that rob loot and rape.
Someone once suggested to me, that if the rest of the world threw up a fence around Africa - no one outside of Africa would give a damn. Apart from some resources - its hard to argue with this viewpoint. Is Africa going to be a mess forever? Is it all the fault of the colonial past - if so why isn’t East Asia in the same mess?
