Revolution and humility

I borrow here an anecdote from Borroka Garaia Da[es], it happened at a conference in Caracas by the historical Sandinista Comandante Tomás Borge, recently deceased. A member of the public asked him:

    Comandante, why was the Sandinismo defeated?

And Borges replied:

    Because we lost our humility.

No tax amnesty for fraudsters in the Basque Country (unlike in Spain)

The ultra-conservative government of Spain proclaimed days ago, amidst draconian budgetary cuts (which do not affect the military, police nor the monarchy) that they would also apply a tax amnesty to fiscal fraudsters if they declared their hidden properties paying an extra 10% only. 

This has not been welcomed by almost anybody and the four Basque chartered governments are already rejecting to apply it. Gipuzkoa and Biscay, ruled by Basque nationalists, have already declared that they won't implement this measure because they find it ethically unacceptable. 

In the regions of Araba and Navarre, ruled in coalition by both Spanish nationalist parties (PP and PSOE) the key is the position of the Spanish socialdemocrats, who have already declared that won't support this pro-fraudster measure, making effectively impossible for the PP to impose their pro-rich doctrines so bluntly. 

Source: Gara[es].

Arundathi Roy's great remarks

A. Roy

I though that I was the only one pondering that countries like China, India, Brazil... are colonizing themselves, establishing internal differences so parts of the nation (but never all nor even most) can enjoy the privileges of the First World without conquering the rest of the planet themselves. 

But I am glad to discover that others have realized the same. Indian journalist Arundathi Roy observed the same phenomenon and her vibrant English explains it much better than I could ever do probably. 

From the original article at Revolution in South Asia:

"We are living in a country where simultaneously we are trying to make the discourse of democracy sophisticated while we are colonizing ourselves". 


She said the most successful "secessionist struggle" in India is "the secession of the middle and upper classes into outer space from where they look down and say ‘what’s our bauxite doing in their mountains, what’s our water doing in their rivers, what’s our timber doing in their forests."

Also a warning on the militarization of alleged democracy, not just in India:

"We are at the moment facing the prospect of a militarized democracy, if that isn’t an oxymoron."


"Isn’t it a generic problem of capitalism?" Mr. Bhaduri.

"It is a generic problem," Ms. Roy concurred.

And on nonviolence under extreme circumstances:

When you have 800 CRPF [Central Reserve Police Force, a paramilitary force deployed to fight country’s internal insurgencies] marching three days into the forest; surrounding a forest village and burning it and raping women, what are the poor supposed to do? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Can people who have no money boycott goods? What sort of civil disobedience we are asking them to adhere to?

And on the empty reality of a democracy without social justice:

What if they were to turn around and say to us tell me one democratic institution in this country where I can appeal and where I can get a hearing? I can guarantee you there is no answer to that question today in India.

The revolving door: Ashcroft to be "ethical expert" of Blackwater

We have ethics!

Do you remember that masterpiece of the Coen brothers before they became too famous and predictable: Miller's Crossing? It used to be a fetish in my friends' group in the early 90s. We watched it once and again because we just loved the dialogues. 

Dialogues like the oscar-deserving monologue by John Polito (left) in which he, a mafia boss, tries to persuade his rival (Albert Finney) that "we have ethics", that he is somehow better than the devious character embodied by John Turturro... 

Similarly the mafioso organization Blackwater (oopsa, now Xe Inc.), best known for murdering a lot of Iraqis some day they went on preventive "shoot first, ask never" rampage, has decided that they need some sort of "ethics" or at least a pretense of it. For that reason they have hired Mr. Waterboarding, formally still known as John Ashcroft, attorney general under that criminal buffoon of George Bush Jr. 

Ashcroft: from waterboarding to ethical advisor

Obviously both share the same empty sense of ethics. Would he be for real, they could also hire the character played by Polito in the film. 

Or maybe someone can make a new film in which Ashcroft's character has an even better (and even less credible) monologue about ethics... it could be a cult movie.

The case also illustrates how the infamous revolving door works in Washington, where businessmen become politicians and then businessmen again, serving once and again the same masters: the corporate world, which pays their campaigns and everything else but taxes. 

Source: Argenpress[es].

US 'apologizes' for experimenting with human beings in Guatemala

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a formal apology yesterday for the experiments carried in the 1940s by the US military, in which hundreds of Guatemalans were intentionally infected with sexual transmission diseases (STDs), specifically syphilis and gonorrhea in a most cruel experiment, comparable to what the infamous Dr. Mengele was doing in that same decade in Nazi-dominated Europe.

It is estimated that at least one third of the human "lab rats" were not given any treatment.

The abuse was only recently exposed by Dr. Susan Reverby. And only after media exposure, the White House considered necessary to issue the formal apology.

This is not the only such case, at least another at least equally horrific and much more long-lasting one is known to have happened in Tuskagee, Alabama, between 1932 and 1972. There, US Public Health Service recruited 399 black men, and pretended to be providing them with health care when in fact it was not. The purpose of the experiment was to observe the evolution of syphilis in vivo, not to cure it at all.

Of course these two cases are surely just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of people has deep questions about the origin of AIDS and the HIV, specially when this virus is harmless in apes and no other retrovirus is known to have ever caused a disease (they are symbiotic). Yet, suddenly, thousands and then millions of people, mostly homosexuals, drug addicts and Black people of all lifestyles, became victims of the "new plague"... and also of Big Pharma and its proposed but often useless (or maybe even more harmful) "medicines".

Whatever its origins, AIDS scored heavily in favor of the conservative/reactionary agenda, scaring people out of having sex freely like nothing before did. 

Another case that has caused much alarm recently is Morgellons disease (see: Albarelli's articles at Voltaire Net: 1, 2, 3, 4), often dismissed by physicians and authorities as mere paranoia, but that, if real, would mean experiments with artificial nano-organisms, pandemic robots rather than simply modified naturally occurring organisms.

Finally I would say that what is happening in the US Gulf Coast is also an experiment of the worst kind on people. The original motivation may not be to experiment but, given the pandemic proportions of the health problems caused by oil and specially corexit pollution all along the coast, and also the psycho-emotional disaster caused by the economic and environmental disaster at a seldom seen scale, this can also be considered a case of experimentation with human beings.

And they are not the only ones for sure. I was recalling right now the so-called colza oil health scandal in Madrid in the 1980s, which was blamed to contaminated oil but that some physicians, many of the victims and even the secret services believed that it had been originated by some mystery event at nearby US air base (now closed) at Torrejón or because of the use of some pesticides.

Evidence is hard to come but suspicions remain. And if they did that in the past, they are likely to be doing the same right now too.

See also: article at Alexander Higgins Blog and Wikipedia: MKULTRA.