History Archives

Bono to Canada

January 4, 2007 09:35 AM

The Third World encroaches further.

Canada police find head of stolen Ukraine statue

By Cameron French Wed Jan 3

TORONTO (Reuters) - The desire to cash in on soaring copper prices is being blamed for the theft of a bronze statue brought to Canada over 50 years ago to commemorate Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko.

Police recovered the head of the 3-meter (10-foot), two-tonne likeness this week at a metal recycling business just west of Toronto.

They are now hunting for the body, which is estimated to be worth somewhere close to C$20,000 ($17,000) in scrap metal, but has a far greater value to the 1 million strong Ukrainian diaspora in Canada. ...

"We do (see a lot of scrap metal theft)," said Halton Region police public affairs officer Peter Payne.

"But this is the first time in (the area) we've ever lost a valuable piece of metal artwork that's been reduced to scrap. It's pretty unfortunate."

Bronze is largely made up of copper alloys. Copper has approximately doubled in price over the past two years. On Wednesday the copper price in London was $5,855 a ton.

Earlier in December, a 250 kilogram (550 pound) copper statue of Greek mythological figure Atlas was stolen from in front of a metal fabricating company in north Toronto. The statue was later recovered and a man was charged.

Link · History | Humor | Ukraine

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Amen

October 3, 2006 06:03 AM

Victor Davis Hanson despairs of modern Europe. Who doesn't? But his piece today is still worth quoting at some length for the clarity it brings to the present circumstances.

But now all that hard-won effort of some 2,500 years is at risk. The new enemies of Reason are not the enraged democrats who executed Socrates, the Christian zealots who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity, or the Nazis who burned books. No, they are a pampered and scared Western public that caves to barbarism — dwarves who sit on the shoulders of dead giants, and believe that their present exalted position is somehow related to their own cowardly sense of accommodation....

Note also the constant subtext in this new self-censorship: fear of radical Islam and its gruesome appendages of beheadings, suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, barbaric fatwas, riotous youth, petrodollar-acquired nuclear weapons, oil boycotts and price hikes, and fist-chanting mobs.

In contrast, almost daily in Europe, “brave” artists caricature Christians and Americans with impunity. Why?

For a long list of reasons, among them most surely the assurance that they can do this without being killed. Such cowards puff out their chests when trashing an ill Oriana Fallaci or Ariel Sharon or beleaguered George W. Bush in the most demonic of tones, but prove sunken and sullen when threatened by a Dr Zawahri or a grand mufti of some obscure mosque....

So the present generation of Europeans really is heretical, made up of traitors of a sort, since they themselves, not just their consensual governments or some invader across the Mediterranean, have nearly destroyed their won freedoms of expression — out of worries over oil, or appearing as illiberal apostates of the new secular religion of multiculturalism, or another London or Madrid bombing.

Europe boldly produces films about assassinating an American president, and routinely disparages the Church that gave the world the Sermon of the Mount, but it simply won’t stand up for an artist, a well-meaning Pope, or a ranting filmmaker when the mob closes in. The Europe that believes in everything turns out to believe in nothing....

Those in an auto parts store in Fresno, or at a NASCAR race in southern Ohio, might appear to Europeans as primordials with their guns, “fundamentalist” religion, and flag-waving chauvinism. But it is they, and increasingly their kind alone, who prove the bulwarks of the West. Ultimately what keeps even the pope safe and the continent confident in its vain dialogues with Iranian lunatics is the United States military and the very un-Europeans who fight in it.

We may be only 30 years behind Europe, but we are not quite there yet. And so Europe has done us a great favor in showing us not the way of the future, but the old cowardice of our pre-Enlightenment past. [author's italics]

Can't add much to that.

Link · Europe | History | Modern Islam | War on Terror

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The Grass Grows and Grows

August 19, 2006 05:58 PM

It has emerged that the "conscience of Germany" served in the Waffen SS as a teen - a secret he had managed to hide for more than 50 years. Who would have believed it? Okay, other than me, who would have believed it? Okay....

Link · Europe | History

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Heavy Weighs the Crown (of Thorns)

August 19, 2006 09:47 AM

In an otherwise almost perfectly unhelpful review of European hostility toward Israel, the Economist magazine did include one detail that caught my attention:

It is also often the right in Europe, linked with anti-Semitism in the past, that is most supportive of Israel today. Britain's Conservative Party, for instance, not always known for its admiration of Jews or Israel, is now the most pro-Israel party. In Italy, which invented fascism, Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and Gianfranco Fini's formerly neo-fascist National Alliance, are more pro-Israel than the government. In Spain, the centre-right opposition was highly critical of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister, when he donned an Arab headscarf to show solidarity during the Lebanon war. [My emphases]

Is this guy for real? Sheesh.

And I don't know what to make exactly of this next bit.

Emanuele Ottolenghi, an expert on Israel and Europe at Oxford University, argues that “Europeans see Israel as the embodiment of the demons of their own past.” The European Union is supposed to have traded in war, nationalism and conflict for love, peace and federalism. But Israel now reminds Europeans of darker forces and darker days.

Ottolenghi is a well-regarded and widely published scholar. I doubt the quote is meant - or that the author intended - to suggest that, in the image of Israel, the European elites see a reflection of their vulgar past and are repulsed by it.

Rather, I think it's meant to suggest that, in today's "progressive" Europe, Israel is a pesky reminder of their culpability in genocide, and Europeans resent that.

So how does that account for the hostility toward Israel? Why can't the Europeans just feel guilty for their betrayals and resolve never again - well, from here on out, at least - to allow genocide in their midst?

Because the oversized moral vanity of today's European progressives cannot allow it. The acceptance is too painful. The Europeans therefore seek to rationalize their culpability by reference to the putative culpability of Israel - Jews, that is - in comparable crimes.

This is not precisely - or rather, exclusively - a matter of antisemitism. It is not a conscious or unconscious wish that someone will "finish the job" that Europe started. The impulse can best be expressed as: If only the Jews would stop provoking, people wouldn't see the need to slaughter them every so often. In this view, people who seek explicitly to kill Jews - let's say, Hamas or Hezbollah - are cast as the original victims, as people who can't be held responsible for their actions because they've been driven to extremes by Jewish aggression.

European antisemitism is a factor, without a doubt. The Economist suggests that attitudes toward Israel have shifted across Europe as Israel has transformed, becoming more powerful and more aggressive. Maybe so. But Israel has nothing on Iran, or North Korea, or China, or even Russia, when it comes to extraterritorial threat - and yet a solid majority (60 percent) of Europeans consider little Israel to be the greatest threat to world peace? Guilt alone cannot account for an outlook that ridiculous.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a Polish acquaintance recently. She was lecturing me on the need to understand why someone would strap explosives to himself, walk into a pizza parlor, and blow up a bunch of strangers. I told her that there is no way to understand this - that nothing could be "understood" to induce someone to do something so depraved. It is the act of someone too sick with purposeful hatred to act otherwise. Yet I couldn't budge her. She steadfastly maintained that one shouldn't be too quick to reach judgments - this failure to "understand" is what starts wars etc. At least this appeared to be her attitude... until she told me (in order to reveal her ecumenism) about a visit she had made at some point to a women's social event at a synagogue. All was fine there until one woman evidently felt moved to suggest that Jews were the "chosen" people of God. Yeah, I know. It's not like that's explicitly stated in the Torah or anything, right? Still, this was evidently the first time she (a Catholic) had encountered this perspective. And it was traumatizing. According to her, she suddenly felt physically ill, disgusted, disoriented to the point she had to flee the premises lest she make a scene. Now, if you're asking me whether I believed her story, my answer is no. Maybe she was at a synagogue; maybe this business about the Chosen People arose; but beyond that I'm skeptical. (For that matter, I don't think I've ever heard a Jew utter the words "Chosen People" without the accompaniment of an ironic smirk. History demands irony in such instances.) Nevertheless, I couldn't help being struck by the contrast in attitude. Here she was, almost perfectly ambivalent about suicide bombing - but undone by what she took to be the suggestion that Jews were somehow superior in the eyes of God. (She better not read the Koran!) I wondered whether this dichotomy might have something to do with the fact that Poland contributed the greatest share of Jews to the gas chambers. They were The Chosen, alright.

Link · Europe | History | Jews | Middle East

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echo of yesteryear

February 25, 2006 12:35 PM

On the 50-year anniversary of Khruschev's "secret speech," which began the de-Stalinization of Soviet Russia, Seamus Milne of London's Guardian newspaper revives the voice of the useful idiot.

But in any case, none of this explains why anyone might be nostalgic in former communist states, now enjoying the delights of capitalist restoration. The dominant account gives no sense of how communist regimes renewed themselves after 1956 or why western leaders feared they might overtake the capitalist world well into the 1960s.

True, you don't hear much these days about how we once hilariously believed the Soviet Union would pose an economic threat to the West. Ten minutes here in Kiev would have dispelled that nonsense. Some of us no longer fear the Cuban economic miracle, either.

For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment, captured even by critical films and books of the post-Stalin era such as Wajda's Man of Marble and Rybakov's Children of the Arbat. Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination....[snip]

So you're telling me I can learn to read, hold a job, experience "social and gender equality" and strike a blow against western hegemony -- and all I need to do is submit to the whims of the state, live in permanent terror of denunciation and maybe lose half my family in one misguided social experiment or another? Where do I sign up?

Part of the current enthusiasm in official western circles for dancing on the grave of communism is no doubt about relations with today's Russia and China. But it also reflects a determination to prove there is no alternative to the new global capitalist order - and that any attempt to find one is bound to lead to suffering and bloodshed....[snip]

Of course. That must be what They really want. As Stalin himself might say, that's why they must be killed.

Link · Europe | History | Journalism | Russia | Ukraine · TrackBack (1)

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Your tax dollars at play

February 16, 2006 11:31 PM

Sure, the EastCoast/WestCoast rivalry in hip-hop may help explain the murders of prominent rappers such as Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. But what explains the EastCoast/WestCoast rivalry? The voters of Georgia's 4th Congressional District sent Cynthia McKinney (D-EastCoast) to Congress to find out.

(Note: The following exchange is excerpted from a real interview. Seriously. No, I'm not kidding.)

ThugLifeArmy.com - After the records are released then what would be the next course of action by you and others?

Rep. Cynthia McKinney - Some records are already released that throw doubt on the officially unsolved murder of Tupac and the police version of the death. It seems clear that Tupac, who came from a family of very militant Black Panther activists, would himself have been followed and surveilled if not attacked by the FBI and their counter-gang programs. In the past this sort of surveillance was called COINTELPRO or Counter-Intelligence Program and aimed at peace, civil rights and militant activists who were working for social change. It not only surveilled people but it infiltrated groups with informants and provocateurs, created fights within groups, spread rumors about leaders, and created the conditions that led to political assassination, framing and imprisonment or destruction of progressive organizations. Senator Frank Church and others held hearings in the 1970s that exposed and made illegal some of the excesses of the FBI, CIA and military intelligence agencies. Soon Church and others on his committee were voted out of office with the help of intelligence agency support for other candidates. Even before 9/11 ongoing programs against Central America activists and youth culture musicians and leaders that looked exactly like COINTELPRO were exposed. After 9/11 Atty General Ashcroft and others called to renew the powers of COINTELPRO and even tried to pretend 9/11 happened because the CIA. FBI and DIA had their hands tied behind their backs the the Church committee rules. If the released records reveal that federal, state and local government agencies and police were violating Tupac's rights or setting the stage for his murder, there should be an outcry for a full investigation, criminal charges, demotions or firings of intelligence agents involved, and a change in the power of intelligence agencies to continue these practices. [Emphases mine]

Yes, indeed. How many more rappers must die before we clean up our intelligence services?

Of course, when "setting the stage" for a political assassination, it helps to have for a target a loud-mouthed, pistol waving jackass with the words THUG LIFE tattooed across his belly. Hell, I'd whack him, and without any prodding from the government.

Side note: Can you imagine being demoted for your role in the Tupac Shakur murder? Can you imagine joining the intelligence services only to find that you've been assigned to the Gangsta Rappers desk? Can you imagine that Tupac Shakur must be killed, but Chuck D still walks the streets? Has Chuck D complained?

You might ponder these questions as you fill out your application for the Citizens Advisory Committee -- but only if you're black! The rest of you just wouldn't understand....

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From Russia, With Chutzpah

February 13, 2006 04:40 AM

NIKITA KHRUSCHEV'S great-granddaughter, Nina, introduces a less familiar legacy of her famous forebear: freedomishness.

While it hadn't gone far enough in demystifying the totalitarian system, [Khruschev's "secret"] speech had launched the period known as the thaw, when millions of Soviet citizens were released from the gulag, and opened the door to a more frank exchange of ideas and to a limited flow of foreign visitors and goods. The freedoms that the former communist countries enjoy today have flowed from the cracks in the system that Khrushchev introduced with his speech of Feb. 25, 1956....

Wow, and to think it only took 50 years for all this flowing from cracks to become a trickling stream of stunted liberty! Of course, Hungary got to express its gratitude for this thaw to the column of Red Army tanks that rolled in later that year. (Oh, c'mon, Mister Stingy -- at least Khruschev started the ball rolling. People ought to be grateful for that - hlm. I agree! Now excuse me while I turn to my assailant here and thank him for no longer clanging my head with a pan.)

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