(no subject)
Long time no update. I hope you all had a peaceful Christmas and got into as few family feuds as was humanly possible. That's certainly what I aimed for, anyway.
Lots of notable people have been dying lately. We have the extremely famous James Brown and Joseph Barbera, but also Mike Dickin, who I doubt many people will have heard of - especially those outside the UK. Mike Dickin was a radio presenter on TalkSport and was often on directly after the George Galloway show, so I caught him a few times and he was a very great man. He was absolutely unafraid to voice his strong viewpoints, which is a valuable trait no matter which side you take. He died in a car crash on the 18th of December.
Gerald Ford died as well, of course. He who's wife founded a clinic I'll probably be a beneficiary of according to my handful of enemies.
I must say that Gerald Ford doesn't rate too highly in my estimation; he was a gullible fool, and for decades was generally considered the dumbest person ever to become President of the United States of America. Good for him, at least, that he lived long enough to see that unfortunate acheivement eclipsed immeasurably.
This death theme leads me nicely into the main subject I've decided to write about today - the imminent execution of the toppled, tin-pot tyrant, Saddam Hussein.
My opinion, which I will expand on, is that this execution is for all the wrong reasons and is being undertaken by all the wrong people.
First let me say that the amount of either self-deluding or self-serving double-talk I've been hearing from the Right-wing on this subject has been appalling. Not surprising, just predictably appalling. Infact, what nailed it for me was a comment from my hunter/fisherman friend, Jeff, who writes for a small, local newspaper in New York State and who has seemingly swallowed the standard Republican propaganda hook, line and sinker. He mentioned he was aghast that Human Rights organisations were condemning the trial and execution of Saddam (even though that's quite predictably what they would be doing, considering there is not a single Human Rights organisation in the world that is in favour of execution!), and he went on to ask of them "Where were they when he [Saddam] was killing thousands of innocent people?!" as though to mock and discredit their stance.
The simple, straight-forward answer to that not-so-rhetorical question is of course that they were marching, protesting and condemning him for killing those thousands of people precisely while that killing was taking place. And to turn that question back on its self, any sensible person could ask of a Republican representative "Where were you when Saddam Hussein was killing thousands of innocent people?", and the answer to that would be that the USA were selling and in some cases just giving him the guns and gas which enabled him to do it.
In the 80s, the United States of America effectively gave Saddam the green light to carry out his invasions of both Iran and Kuwait and the maniacal slaughters of thousands during those attacks, because back then he was considered their friend and those other countries were not.
Now, some may say "Well, that's true, but at least we've now realised what a tyrant he was and we've brought him to justice, and he's now about to hang for doing all that", but they'd be wrong! He's not going to hang for doing any of that. He's not going to hang for the atrocities in Halabja in April 1988 - his conviction isn't about that.
The Iraqi courts were actually persuing two trials of Saddam. The first and most lengthly was indeed inclusive of the massacre of those poor Kurdish people, but a second and comparitively much quicker trial actually prevailed to verdict first, which was with regard to the retaliatory order he gave to his soldiers to slaughter 150 people in the town of Dujail after someone from the Islamic Dawa Party tried to assassinate him as he spoke there.
That, dear friends, is what he is going to be hanged for - and the reason for this, in my opinion, is that the Dujail massacre had no ties to the USA, therefore during that trial there was no chance of any, shall we say, unfortunate or uncomfortable truths about American involvement or support coming to light. And even though he will almost certainly be posthumously tried for every other atrocity comitted in his name, his neck will be far too stretched by then for him to be able to speak too much about that.
It should also be noted that, although this is an Iraqi court, it is a court assembled from the American-approved, puppet regeime that was installed after the toppling of the Hussein government where they forced Iraq at gunpoint to be free and democratic, whether they liked it or not (and just to help them be the right kind of free, vetoed any party they didn't like the look of in the democratic elections that were to follow). Also, the original head judge of this trial, Rizgar Amin, resigned because he objected to America repeatedly telling him how to conduct proceedings, while his replacement, Rauf Rashid, was eventually fired because he refused to conduct proceedings in the way America wanted him to! If that's not a dubious and depressing set of circumstances, I don't know what is.
There is surely no sensible person in this world who is going to miss this vile murderer, but I'm not going to let pious, blatantly false, Bush-kissing cries of "anti-American!" and "anti-freedom!" get in the way of voicing this opinion: This trial is indeed a farce and a pantomime played out by Iraqi puppets controlled by the Bush Administration, and it is in no way going to solve anything - rather it is going to make things much worse. The power of a martyr is a thousand times more great than the power of a broken old man left to wither in a dank jail cell for the rest of his life, and after he's hung, the streets of Iraq are going to run with the blood of those who this execution is really going to punish - the average Iraqi.
Lots of notable people have been dying lately. We have the extremely famous James Brown and Joseph Barbera, but also Mike Dickin, who I doubt many people will have heard of - especially those outside the UK. Mike Dickin was a radio presenter on TalkSport and was often on directly after the George Galloway show, so I caught him a few times and he was a very great man. He was absolutely unafraid to voice his strong viewpoints, which is a valuable trait no matter which side you take. He died in a car crash on the 18th of December.
Gerald Ford died as well, of course. He who's wife founded a clinic I'll probably be a beneficiary of according to my handful of enemies.
I must say that Gerald Ford doesn't rate too highly in my estimation; he was a gullible fool, and for decades was generally considered the dumbest person ever to become President of the United States of America. Good for him, at least, that he lived long enough to see that unfortunate acheivement eclipsed immeasurably.
This death theme leads me nicely into the main subject I've decided to write about today - the imminent execution of the toppled, tin-pot tyrant, Saddam Hussein.
My opinion, which I will expand on, is that this execution is for all the wrong reasons and is being undertaken by all the wrong people.
First let me say that the amount of either self-deluding or self-serving double-talk I've been hearing from the Right-wing on this subject has been appalling. Not surprising, just predictably appalling. Infact, what nailed it for me was a comment from my hunter/fisherman friend, Jeff, who writes for a small, local newspaper in New York State and who has seemingly swallowed the standard Republican propaganda hook, line and sinker. He mentioned he was aghast that Human Rights organisations were condemning the trial and execution of Saddam (even though that's quite predictably what they would be doing, considering there is not a single Human Rights organisation in the world that is in favour of execution!), and he went on to ask of them "Where were they when he [Saddam] was killing thousands of innocent people?!" as though to mock and discredit their stance.
The simple, straight-forward answer to that not-so-rhetorical question is of course that they were marching, protesting and condemning him for killing those thousands of people precisely while that killing was taking place. And to turn that question back on its self, any sensible person could ask of a Republican representative "Where were you when Saddam Hussein was killing thousands of innocent people?", and the answer to that would be that the USA were selling and in some cases just giving him the guns and gas which enabled him to do it.
In the 80s, the United States of America effectively gave Saddam the green light to carry out his invasions of both Iran and Kuwait and the maniacal slaughters of thousands during those attacks, because back then he was considered their friend and those other countries were not.
Now, some may say "Well, that's true, but at least we've now realised what a tyrant he was and we've brought him to justice, and he's now about to hang for doing all that", but they'd be wrong! He's not going to hang for doing any of that. He's not going to hang for the atrocities in Halabja in April 1988 - his conviction isn't about that.
The Iraqi courts were actually persuing two trials of Saddam. The first and most lengthly was indeed inclusive of the massacre of those poor Kurdish people, but a second and comparitively much quicker trial actually prevailed to verdict first, which was with regard to the retaliatory order he gave to his soldiers to slaughter 150 people in the town of Dujail after someone from the Islamic Dawa Party tried to assassinate him as he spoke there.
That, dear friends, is what he is going to be hanged for - and the reason for this, in my opinion, is that the Dujail massacre had no ties to the USA, therefore during that trial there was no chance of any, shall we say, unfortunate or uncomfortable truths about American involvement or support coming to light. And even though he will almost certainly be posthumously tried for every other atrocity comitted in his name, his neck will be far too stretched by then for him to be able to speak too much about that.
It should also be noted that, although this is an Iraqi court, it is a court assembled from the American-approved, puppet regeime that was installed after the toppling of the Hussein government where they forced Iraq at gunpoint to be free and democratic, whether they liked it or not (and just to help them be the right kind of free, vetoed any party they didn't like the look of in the democratic elections that were to follow). Also, the original head judge of this trial, Rizgar Amin, resigned because he objected to America repeatedly telling him how to conduct proceedings, while his replacement, Rauf Rashid, was eventually fired because he refused to conduct proceedings in the way America wanted him to! If that's not a dubious and depressing set of circumstances, I don't know what is.
There is surely no sensible person in this world who is going to miss this vile murderer, but I'm not going to let pious, blatantly false, Bush-kissing cries of "anti-American!" and "anti-freedom!" get in the way of voicing this opinion: This trial is indeed a farce and a pantomime played out by Iraqi puppets controlled by the Bush Administration, and it is in no way going to solve anything - rather it is going to make things much worse. The power of a martyr is a thousand times more great than the power of a broken old man left to wither in a dank jail cell for the rest of his life, and after he's hung, the streets of Iraq are going to run with the blood of those who this execution is really going to punish - the average Iraqi.