Politically Correct Starvation (originally published November 2002)

Africans are currently risking starvation because they are refusing to accept thousands of tons of genetically engineered corn. They are refusing to accept the US produced corn because they fear crop contamination. According to BET.com, crop contamination would "render Zimbabwe, which is normally a food exporter, unable to export to nations in Europe and elsewhere in the world where genetically engineered crops are restricted because of environmental and health concerns."

In other words, European fears of genetically modified (GM) food, and its effects on their environment and their health are forcing Africans to risk starvation. Are these Europeans offering any aid to Africa to offset the loss of the corn? If they are, it’s apparently not enough.

Also, apparently, European objections to GM food are not based on its quality and safety. Americans have been eating GM food for years, and we haven’t had any problems. Of course, there was the hoof and mouth disease, and the mad cow outbreaks..oh, sorry, that was Europe (and Britain). Euro-Greens pretend to believe that, by refusing food that they desperately need, Africans are boldly preserving their agricultural heritage.

Unfortunately, Euro-Greens are trying to drown us in metric tonnes of organically certified bullshit. If Europeans and environmentalists weren’t objecting to the existence of GM foods, the Africans would be eating corn right now.

Anti-capitalist Guardian writer George Monbiot openly admits that it isn't due to fears about 'Frankenfoods'. Europeans don’t object to the quality or safety of GM food – they object to the control exercised by American biotech companies. Monbiot says:

The biotech companies know that they will never conquer new markets while activists are able to expose the way their operations damage food security and consumer choice. While working with USAID to open new territory, they also appear to have been fighting covert campaigns against their critics. Their products may not be poisonous, but can we say the same of their techniques?

Europeans are willing to let Africans starve because they don’t agree with the ‘techniques’ used by American capitalists. Europeans are willing to let Africans starve because they want to win a trade war.

Monbiot admits that there are no poisons to expose. There is only the threat of damage to 'food security.' Is that worth the lives of thousands of people?
Monbiot also takes on the evil big biotech companies by exposing the fact that some employees were sending emails under a false name! Horrors. In his mind, stopping that kind of egregious activity is certainly worth risking thousand of lives.

Monbiot also objects to the subsidies paid to farmers. Greenpeace backs him up on this:

America's food aid programme provides a massive hidden subsidy to its farmers. But, as a recent report by Greenpeace shows, they are not the only beneficiaries...

But, according to the Black Activist group CORE:

"To serve its own ideological agenda, [Greenpeace] wants to keep the Third World permanently mired in Third World poverty, disease and death. So far, it has succeeded," said Niger Innis, national spokesperson for CORE

Innis believes that policies advocated by Greenpeace are keeping the developing world's poor from attaining running water, electricity and modern agricultural techniques that would allow more food to be grown on less land.

"It's time to hold these zealots accountable for the misery and death they cause," Innis stated.

Well-fed greens and anti-Globalists offer Africans fear, empty assurances and threats from the warm comfort of their living rooms. Then they tut-tut when people die. Innis is right. It is time to hold zealots like Greenpeace and Monbiot responsible for the misery and death they cause.

[originally published (with some editing) at exit zero]

The Strange World of George Monbiot

I've been spending a few days in the intellectual netherworld of George Monbiot, a regular columnist for the Guardian. In trying to fathom what is going on in his strange befuddled head I needed to rely on some background information. Here are some revealing snippets from the Wikipedia.

George Monbiot (born 1963) is a journalist, author and left-wing campaigner in the United Kingdom. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian newspaper. He has written four political books, (1) Manifesto for a New World Order, (2) Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, (3) Europe Inc.: Regional and Global Restructuring and the Rise of Corporate Power and (4) The Age of Consent. He has also written three investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land.

While researching for his travel books in Indonesia, East Africa and Brazil he ran into problems - Monbiot was shipwrecked, shot at and stung into a coma by hornets. After being declared dead in a Hospital in Kenya he decided to come back to Britain and moved on to the politics of environmentalism and globalisation.

He has also been named by the Evening Standard as one of the 25 most influential people in Britain, and by the Independent on Sunday as one of the 40 international prophets of the 21st Century.

In 2004 he started working with George Galloway and the Socialist Alliance to form a left-wing alliance to contest the European Parliament elections (the RESPECT Unity Coalition), but resigned after they announced they would stand against already-elected Green Party MEPs.

Important quotes from Monbiot include " you can't phase out nuclear weapons without phasing out nuclear power", published in The Guardian newspaper on 21 September 2004.

After reading over this and other biographies, and after surveying his columns, one has a difficult time not concluding that Mr. Monbiot is an unsullied Luddite of the twenty-first century who wrings his hands over the invention of the electric can opener. He is your quintessential tree-hugger who in column after column whines and complains about the plight of modern man, as he lives a presumably modern existence in some flat in Britain: working as a journalist, writer, and visiting professor to Oxford Brookes University.

Nobody loves technology like Americans, so given Mr. Monbiot's Green and leftest leanings, his writings are consistently anti-American. Predicting where Mr. Monbiot stands on any issue is a simple excercise. If you are modern you are bad. If you are big and modern you are worse. If you are big, modern, and proud of what you have achieved you are beyond redemption.

Last December, there was a big celebration in North Carolina as we celebrated a hundred years of flight. George Monbiot greeted the anniversary with this, entitled "A Weapon with Wings: The centenary of the Wright brothers' flight should be a day of international mourning."

One wonders how Mr. Monbiot got from Kenya back to Britain to recover from his bee stings. Did he cross the Sahara on a camel? Sail across the straits of Gibraltor? Catch a train to Normandy? Swim home across the English channel?

Or did he, perchance, purchase a ticket and climb aboard what he calls in this column, a "doom machine"?

Like a broken clock which tells the correct time twice a day, Mr. Monbiot's column does accurately state that airplanes are major polluters, and that long term aviation will have to either be abandoned (when oil is depleted) or some alternative fuel will need to be used. Personally, I'd much prefer the latter option, but that's probably because I am a self-absorbed American who happens to think that camel transportation smells.

If the Guardian had assigned me to talk about this topic I would have given credit where credit is due. I would write that the airplane is a marvel of the modern world and is the creation of genius and imagination that thankfully didn't die with Orville and Wilbur. I would float some technological directions that would pollute less without throwing away the baby with the bathwater. Hydrogen seems to be a viable long-term alternative. Of course hydrogen needs to be created by some non-fossil fuel alternative, otherwise you are borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. So one direction is to generate hydrogen from nuclear fuel. Whoops. This is on Mr. Monbiot's "no-no" list and would be a non-starter with him. Oh well, time to take camel riding lessons everyone.

Funny thing. Coming up with viable, technological solutions takes faith, perseverance, the courage to make many mistakes, and long hours of hard work.

Criticizing the world from a Guardian soapbox is so much easier.

[Posted by bob at The Breakdown Lane]

A Retraction "Guardian Style"

On Saturday the Guardian pulled the Charlie Brooker column after readers complained about its contents. The Guardian offered the following apology:

The final sentence of a column in The Guide on Saturday caused offence to some readers. The Guardian associates itself with the following statement from the writer.

"Charlie Brooker apologises for any offence caused by his comments relating to President Bush in his TV column, Screen Burn. The views expressed in this column are not those of the Guardian. Although flippant and tasteless, his closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action - an intention he believed regular readers of his humorous column would understand. He deplores violence of any kind."

For citizens of Clark County we preserved the column so they can judge the Guardian's apology in the context of what Mr. Brooker originally wrote:

Charlie Brooker
Saturday October 23, 2004
The Guardian

Heady times. The US election draws ever nearer, and while the rest of the world bangs its head against the floorboards screaming "Please God, not Bush!", the candidates clash head to head in a series of live televised debates. It's a bit like American Idol, but with terrifying global ramifications. You've got to laugh.

Or have you? Have you seen the debates? I urge you to do so. The exemplary BBC News website (www.bbc.co.uk/news) hosts unexpurgated streaming footage of all the recent debates, plus clips from previous encounters, through Reagan and Carter, all the way back to Nixon versus JFK.

Watching Bush v Kerry, two things immediately strike you. First, the opening explanation of the rules makes the whole thing feel like a Radio 4 parlour game. And second, George W Bush is... well, he's... Jesus, where do you start?

The internet's a-buzz with speculation that Bush has been wearing a wire, receiving help from some off-stage lackey. Screen grabs appearing to show a mysterious bulge in the centre of his back are being traded like Top Trumps. Prior to seeing the debate footage, I regarded this with healthy scepticism: the whole "wire" scandal was just wishful thinking on behalf of some amateur Michael Moores, I figured. And then I watched the footage.

Quite frankly, the man's either wired or mad. If it's the former, he should be flung out of office: tarred, feathered and kicked in the nuts. And if it's the latter, his behaviour goes beyond strange, and heads toward terrifying. He looks like he's listening to something we can't hear. He blinks, he mumbles, he lets a sentence trail off, starts a new one, then reverts back to whatever he was saying in the first place. Each time he recalls a statistic (either from memory or the voice in his head), he flashes us a dumb little smile, like a toddler proudly showing off its first bowel movement. Forgive me for employing the language of the playground, but the man's a tool.

So I sit there and I watch this and I start scratching my head, because I'm trying to work out why Bush is afforded any kind of credence or respect whatsoever in his native country. His performance is so transparently bizarre, so feeble and stumbling, it's a miracle he wasn't laughed off the stage. And then I start hunting around the internet, looking to see what the US media made of the whole "wire" debate. And they just let it die. They mentioned it in passing, called it a wacko conspiracy theory and moved on.

Yet whether it turns out to be true or not, right now it's certainly plausible - even if you discount the bulge photos and simply watch the president's ridiculous smirking face. Perhaps he isn't wired. Perhaps he's just gone gaga. If you don't ask the questions, you'll never know the truth.

The silence is all the more troubling since in the past the US news media has had no problem at all covering other wacko conspiracy theories, ones with far less evidence to support them. (For infuriating confirmation of this, watch the second part of the must-see documentary series The Power Of Nightmares (Wed, 9pm, BBC2) and witness the absurd hounding of Bill Clinton over the Whitewater and Vince Foster non-scandals.)

Throughout the debate, John Kerry, for his part, looks and sounds a bit like a haunted tree. But at least he's not a lying, sniggering, drink-driving, selfish, reckless, ignorant, dangerous, backward, drooling, twitching, blinking, mouse-faced little cheat. And besides, in a fight between a tree and a bush, I know who I'd favour.

On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?

Getting back to the Guardian's retraction, does this sound like someone who deplores violence?

"Quite frankly, the man's either wired or mad. If it's the former, he should be flung out of office: tarred, feathered and kicked in the nuts."

For grownups, there is nothing "ironic" or "humorous" about language wishing for a political assassination of an American president. The most generous characterization one can make about Mr. Brooker and his readers is that they live in the comfortable world of perpetual adolescence, detached from the realities of the violent world we really live in.

What should we make of this? Who knows? We can only read and scratch our heads, because we are trying to work out why Brooker is afforded any kind of credence or respect whatsoever in his native country.

[Posted by bob at The Breakdown Lane]

Jacque Chirac: The West's Moral Compass

If you have read the various posts in this blog you have seen that the Guardian has stated that America deserved to be attacked on September 11th, that the country is in a state of political repression where dissent against the war in Iraq is not allowed, and that Al-Jazeera is the preferred choice of media outlets to get uncensored and correct information about the Middle East.

So what does the Guardian say about world leadership? Well, as Betty Davis once said, "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride."

According to this Guardian article, authored by Marc Rouche of Le Monde, the citizens of Clark County need to look no further then Jacque Chirac.

"Crepe suzettes!" you say. "Is this some throwaway gag from an old Jerry Lewis movie?"

Nope. Mr. Rouche claims that when it came to staking out a political position about the war in Iraq, Mr. Chirac owned "the moral high ground". Mr. Rouche goes on to write:

"The French president's desire for a peaceful solution surely gives him the moral high ground against the Anglo-American warmongers. And it must be frustrating for Mr Blair to see that it is Mr Chirac who reflects and represents the large anti-war sentiment in Britain, particularly within his own party.

Let's be clear: Mr Chirac does not endorse Baghdad, and he finds Saddam's regime as despicable as do Bush and Blair. But he fears the American hawks will ignite Muslim fundamentalism worldwide. The fear of domestic conflagration and terrorism are also ever-present: there are 6 million French Muslims to take into account.

Mr. Chirac is viscerally opposed to the idea of a clash of civilisations. Bush's core support, on the other hand, comes from evangelical Protestantism, with its two faces of intolerance and lack of cultural understanding."

Currently as this post is being written, our nation is divided about the war in Iraq and whether or not it was the correct course of action to take at the time. This is an important national debate that we need to have. It's also vitally important to come to terms with the fact that reasonable citizens can seriously disagree with one another on this very complex subject.

However, we are also sure that you or your neighbors in Clark County who support the war or who have sons and daughters stationed in Iraq are not "Anglo-American warmongers". Neither are they political captives to Protestant evangelism (with maybe the possible exception of a few over-enthusiastic Baptists attending an Ohio State/Michigan game).

Let's move beyond Mr. Roache's tawdry characterization of middle America and take a closer look at his claim that Mr. Chirac owns some moral high ground.

According to a London Times article last week:

"A LEAKED report has exposed the extent of alleged corruption in the United Nations' oil-for-food scheme in Iraq, identifying up to 200 individuals and companies that made profits running into hundreds of millions of pounds from it.

The report largely implicates France and Russia, whom Saddam Hussein targeted as he sought support on the UN Security Council before the Iraq war. Both countries were influential voices against UN-backed action."

It goes on to say:

"The report says oil was given to key countries: "The regime gave priority to Russia, China and France. This was because they were permanent members of, and hence had the ability to influence decisions made by, the UN Security Council. The regime . . . allocated 'private oil' to individuals or political parties that sympathised in some way with the regime.

A French oil company teamed up with the regime to bribe a UN-appointed inspector monitoring exports of Iraqi oil. The inspector, a Portuguese national working for Saybolt, a Dutch firm, was paid a total of £58,000 in cash to forge export documents.

The French firm is linked to a close associate of Jacques Chirac, the country's president. A spokesman for Saybolt said it would be investigating the allegations."

Are we really still talking about a moral high ground? Or are we really mired in a Gaullist sinkhole?

According to Judicial Watch (a Washington based non partisan, non-profit watchdog foundation):

"Mr. Chirac has engaged in a decades-long illicit campaign to violate and subvert international law, European Union (E.U.) and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conventions, as well as U.N. resolutions and sanctions. According to recent press reports, as well as the 1991 book, The Death Lobby; How the West Armed Iraq, by Kenneth R. Timmerman, and the 1992 book, Notre Allie Saddam by French journalists Claude Angeli and Stephanie Mesnier, Mr. Chirac has been engaged in a nearly thirty (30) year conspiratorial relationship with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein - trafficking in arms, military equipment and nuclear technology.

Over the last thirty years Mr. Chirac has facilitated, both in and out of government office, the sale and/or transfer to Iraq of: petrochemical plants, desalinization plants, gas liquefaction complexes, housing projects, telecommunication systems, broadcasting networks, fertilizer plants, defense electronics factories, car assembly plants, a new airport, a subway system, and a navy yard, not to mention Exocet, Milan, HOT, Magic, Martel and Armat missiles; Allouette III, Gazelle, and Super-Puma helicopters; AMX 30-GCT howitzers; Tiger-G radar, and a nuclear reactor capable of making the bomb.[1]

In return for supplying Saddam Hussein with arms and nuclear technology, Mr. Chirac and others have personally benefited through financial support for their political party(ies) and campaigns.[2]"

This is backed by author Kenneth R. Timmerman:

"If you read the French press, or the glowing accounts of Chirac's opposition to the U.S. effort to build an international coalition to oust Saddam Hussein that appeared here in America, you might actually believe that the French were standing on principle.

I reveal that Chirac was defending something quite different when he sent his erstwhile foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, around the world to buy votes against America at the United nations. Chirac was determined to maintain Saddam Hussein in power so that two extraordinarily lucrative oil contracts, negotiated by the French, could go into effect. Very little has been written about this until now.

The deals were negotiated separately by CFP Total and by Elf Aquitaine during the mid to late 1990s. At the time, both companies were state-controlled. They have since been privatized and combined into the world's second largest oil giant, TotalFinalElf.

Through my sources, I obtained a copy of one of these contracts. It spans 154 pages, and grants the French exclusive right to exploit one of Iraq's largest oil fields at Nahr al-Umar for a period of twenty years. Under the deal, the French were given 75% of the revenue from every barril of oil they extracted - 75%! That is absolutely stunning. Not even during the pre-OPEC days were foreign oil operators granted such extravagant terms.

I discussed the contract with an independent oil analyst, Gerald Hillman, who estimated that during the first seven years alone, it would earn the French around $50 billion. Elf-Aquitaine negotiated a virtually identical deal with Saddam to expand the gigantic Majnoon oil field as well. Put together, those two deals were worth $100 billion to the French. That's 100 billion good reasons for Mr. Chirac to keep Saddam in power."

It is worth noting that while these revelations are damning of Mr. Chirac, they are recent. However it's not as if the Guardian should not have been suspect of the cozy personal relationship between Saddam and the French president. The Guardian had to be aware of the deep roots going back to 1975, when Chirac assisted Saddam in the building of a nuclear reactor in Baghdad. This was the Osirak reactor, dubbed "O-Chirac" by the Israelis before they destroyed it in a raid in 1981.

Perhaps Christopher Hitchens characterized Mr. Chirac the best:

"Here is a man who had to run for re-election last year in order to preserve his immunity from prosecution, on charges of corruption that were grave. Here is a man who helped Saddam Hussein build a nuclear reactor and who knew very well what he wanted it for. Here is a man at the head of France who is, in effect, openly for sale. He puts me in mind of the banker in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale: a man so habituated to corruption that he would happily pay for the pleasure of selling himself."

[Posted by bob at The Breakdown Lane]

run away

The Guardian, which participated in the international outpouring of goodwill and compassion that 9/11 supposedly inspired by publishing Charlotte Raven’s hate-filled diatribe, A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully...

..the Guardian, which also published Seamus Milne’s hate-filled screed They can’t see why they are Hated immediately after the attacks...

..and the Guardian, which, six months after the murder of three thousand Americans offered this humor piece, Six months that changed a year, with these quotes:

'We're all dead Americans now'
T. Blair

'Easy, Saladin'
The Pope

'Yessssss!'
First reaction of many British people who subsequently claimed to be appalled

The same Guardian, which said in June, 2000:

With the kind of breath-taking arrogance that you only get from the leaders of world superpowers and 17-year-old public school boys, America actually attempted to make it illegal for European countries to trade with Cuba; the case against America is even greater than the one against its richest citizen. Like Microsoft the US has a variety of operating systems; in the Balkans they used Nato, but the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and even the United Nations itself have all been called into play at various times. This will probably be the last European football championship in which a team from Europe is allowed to win

Any fair-minded judge would have to agree that like Microsoft, the US has abused its monopoly of power and must therefore be broken up. It has refused to operate a level playing field and so must be separated into its constituent parts.

And the Guardian which is now saying:

Now, the On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?

They wanted to dismember the US in June, 2000, they cheered the death and dismemberment of thousands of Americans immediately after 9/11, they hissed with joy at the memory of it six months later and now they dream of assassinating our President.

The Guardian staff is beginning to demonstrate the collective subtlety and wit of a B movie psycho. Do they have photos of Bush, Clinton and Gates hanging up in their closets with eyes scratched out, and the words Die! Die! Smeared over them in lipstick? Do they croak this Talking Heads tune:

I can't seem to face up to the facts
I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax
I can't sleep cause my bed's on fire
Don't touch me I'm a real live wire

Psycho killer, qu'est que c'est
Far better
Run away

..as they lurk the dark streets feverishly dreaming of confronting arrogant Americans with a Kentish-accented ‘you talkin’ to me?’

What the Guardian lacks in imagination, they make up for in bile and whimpering, impotent rage.

[posted by mary of exit zero]

The New CBS?

According to the Guardian we live in a nation that suppresses dissent and freedom of speech. So what are the uninformed citizens from Clark County supposed to do? Where should they go to listen to a balanced, unbiased voice of reason?

Well if you take the Guardian's advice, citizens of Clark County should be tuning into Middle East's most trusted name in unbiased reporting and uncensored beheadings. The only source of news that brings you minute-by-minute news feeds directly from caves of Usama Bin Laden. The news outlet that has become this century's Tokyo Rose of the Persian Gulf.

You guessed it. It's none other than the critic’s choice, Al Jazeera.

The Guardian provides a warm seat and a column for Faisal Bodi, a senior editor for aljazeera.net, so that he can make his case to those repressed in the West. According to Mr. Bodi:

"Al-Jazerra tells the truth about war."

QED, Mr. Bodi.

When confronted with ironclad arguments like that, it's clear that CNN and other Western news outlets need to pack their bags and call it day.

Sarcasm aside, Mr. Bodi's article does try to make a few more points before it fizzles like a bottle of cheap champagne. Basically Bodi makes a reductionist argument, claiming that truth equates to the broadcasting of graphic images of the carnage of war, accompanied by propaganda blurbs from the likes of Bagdad Bob. You know, something like "Fahrenheit 9/11".

Well truth is an illusive thing. We in the West have had freedom of speech for centuries and are still trying to get it right. So before we climb up onto our roofs and redirect our satellite dishes exclusivley towards Mecca, perhaps we should consider the New York Post's Ralph Peter's synopsis of Mr. Bodi's organization:

"Staffed by embittered exiles and pan-Arabist ideologues — the last Nasserites — al-Jazeera is so consumed by hatred of America and the West that the network would rather see Iraq collapse into a bloodbath than permit the emergence of a democracy sponsored by Washington. Despite his slaughter of a million-and-a-half Muslims in wars and campaigns of repression, al-Jazeera cheered for Saddam during Operation Iraqi Freedom, inventing Iraqi victories. Its staff reacted with horror to the fall of Baghdad — and suppressed film clips of celebrating Arabs.

Since then, al-Jazeera has glamorized Islamic terrorists (who, were they ever to come to power, would close al-Jazeera and butcher its staff) while portraying the Baathist campaign of murder and sabotage as a noble freedom struggle.

Al-Jazeera is so bigoted and morally debased that its reporters and producers delight in Coalition casualties, in dead Iraqi doctors and engineers and (above all) in dead Kurds. Al-Jazeera not only encourages the assassination of American soldiers, but pulls out all the stops to excite anti-U.S. hatred throughout the Arabic-speaking world."

H'mmm. Come to think of it. The Guardian and Al-Jazeera are starting to make Dan Rather look pretty damn good.

[Posted by bob at The Breakdown Lane]

Toga!

Despite the miserable failure of the Guardian’s Clark County fiasco, this recent assault is evidence of a weird, current trend in the international community. Apparently many out there believe that, since America ‘dominates’ their lives, they should have a right to influence, even vote in our elections.

Jan Oberg, director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research says:

Could the US then do exactly like we suggest for Iraq: free, fair, open elections for a new president of the United States. If the American people wants George W. Bush that is their privilege, but given that the United States has a global reach, some new mechanisms should be provided that citizens around the world could also vote for him - or some other candidates.

World opinion has set up up a web site to influence our vote, called TheWorldVotes. This site is linked to from the Guardian’s US vote 2004 page.

The philosophy of the world vote idea is explained by Yoichi Funabashi, columnist and chief diplomatic correspondent for the Asahi Shimbu. Yoichi beleives that, since the world is affected by US actions, the world should be able to vote for ‘their’ leader. He says:

Charles Kupchan, professor at Georgetown University and author of The End of the American Era, believes that since September 11 the system of checks and balances has broken down in the US. Internally, opposition parties have almost disappeared, and those expressing a dissenting view are few. Bush critics are condemned as unpatriotic, and only in the past four to five months have opponents of Bush’s foreign policy begun to creep out from behind the rocks.

The problem exists internationally, too. No one wants to upset the US, which remains the biggest market for exports and largely controls multilateral financial institutions. Many foreign leaders feel obligated to measure their words when discussing US policy. Now, without even the United Nations to keep the US in check, the last hope is international public opinion.

If this is the case, why not give the citizens of the world a voice in the election of the next US president? The idea is to hold a mock election via the Internet at individual discretion, giving everyone around the world with access to the Internet the chance to cast a vote. Voters would be able to choose the candidate they think is best for the world, giving reasons for their choice. The results should then be published before the real election on November 2, allowing US citizens to take world opinion into account when making their own decisions.

There are a few voices of sanity out there, notably Josie Appleton of 'Spiked,' who says:

If only, these people seem to think, we could rein in America's power simply by gathering votes and letters from internet users worldwide and then demanding that US citizens pay attention to them. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for democracy, it's a bit more difficult than that - if you want to make a point, it's up to you to make it convincingly, not up to others to pay rapt attention.

I wish there were more independent, reasonable thinkers like her out there, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. If the international community shares her attitude, they have taken no action to prove it.

Most members of the ‘international community’ do not believe that they should pay for their own defense. They insist that American taxpayers and American lives should provide for their welfare.

Since they’re not willing to take responsibility for the protection of their own nations, since they have made no attempts to change the status quo, and since they are more than willing to accept the role of child in relationship to our ‘adult’, we seem to have conquered them by default. If the world is determined to welcome us as their New Roman overlords, veni vidi vici.

If ‘world opinion’ is determined to vote in our elections they have to accept both the rights and the responsibilities of citizenship. Old Rome extended the rights of citizenship to the people they conquered. That concept was eventually too difficult for them to manage, but as Mr. Funabashi points out, technology can be a big help for New Rome.

Historically, Americans have never wanted to take responsibility for the rest of the world. Unlike motivated empire-builders, we don’t need to travel to foreign lands for a tropical paradise or desert nights – we’ve got Florida and New Mexico. We don’t really need more stuff - as American comedian Stephen Wright says, "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?" We don’t want an empire, and this New Romans role will be uncomfortable to say the least. But if we try, maybe we can get used to it.

We’d have to learn something about geography and world languages, which is a drag, but on the positive side, New Rome means more wine, feasting and song. Toga!

To our new fellow countrymen (Guardian readers, theworldvote.com, et al:) we say: Gloria victis, international dudes and dudettes. Conquering you is, like, an honor we didn’t expect. Thanks and stuff.

[posted by Mary at exit zero]

A Repressed Nation

You would think that a country at war which tolerates the likes of "Fahrenheit 9/11" could be fairly characterized as being an open and robustly pluralistic society. Right?

Wrong. At least according to writer Gary Younge, whose grim byline in the Guardian declared this about America:

"Democracy is under threat in the United States; anyone who objects to the conflict in Iraq is not allowed to say so."

Really? Did you hear that John Kerry? Could someone also please clue in Howard Dean, Michael Moore, the Dixie Chicks, and assorted Hollywood halfwits? For a repressed political crowd, they certainly have been making a lot of noise.

Younge's article entitled "McCarthy's Ghost" describes an America on the verge of constructing political re-education camps and holding book-burning rallies.

"Barry Steinhardt, director of the American civil liberties union programme on technology and liberty, told the New York Times that authorities have been demanding records from internet providers and libraries about what books people are taking out and which websites they're looking at.

The result is a symbiotic relationship between the mob and the legislature, whereby official repression provides the framework for public scapegoating with each gaining momentum from the other."

This from a nation which requires a license to buy a TV. Go figure. One wonders whether or not Mr. Younge was hallucinating while writing this story. Perhaps it was Marley's ghost he really saw after indulging in one too many hot rum toddies.

[Posted by bob at The Breakdown Lane]

Just a Bloody Nose

Charlotte Raven wrote the following article entitled “A Bully with a Bloody Nose is Still a Bully” on September 18, 2001, not more than a week after the attacks in New York City and Washington. At the time firemen and civilian workers were still trying to work out the logistics of sorting through seven stories of debris to find the remains of three thousand innocent civilians. The fallen towers were still smoldering.

Aside from obviously trivializing the ferocity and scale of the attack (equating the mass murder of thousands of civilians to a bloody nose is repugnant), Ms. Raven asserts that Americans had it coming.

"America is the same country it was before September 11. If you didn't like it then, there's no reason why you should have to pretend to now. All those who see its suffering as a kind of absolution should remember how little we've seen that would support this reading. A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully and, weeping apart, everything the US body politic has done in the week since the attacks has confirmed its essential character."

You can read the full article here.

Sidebar:

Pulizer prize winner Anne Applebaum writes about this and other such articles appearing in British left-wing mainstream press immediately after the attacks. Some openly pined for the return of the Soviet Union and imply that the attacks were the result of George Bush’s election. (Begging the question as to why there were attacks on the World Trade Center eight years earlier?)

Ms. Applebaum writes:

"I'll leave aside the fact that these statements are almost blindingly stupid. Anyone who thinks American values do not inspire the Third World has clearly never been to the Third World, and anyone who feels nostalgia for the "alternative" offered by the Soviet Union must also favor the totalitarian terror, the ignorance, and the poverty that the Soviet Union imposed on its own people and exported around the world. I won't even lower myself to discuss the notion that Americans are to blame for last week's tragedy because they voted for George Bush."

Her article is a good starting point in understanding that the rise in anti-Americanism in Europe predates the attacks on September 11th.

[Posted by bob at The Breakdown Lane]

Dear Citizens of Clark County

It has come to the attention of many of us in the Blogosphere that a certain foreign newspaper, The Guardian, is handing out addresses of registered voters in your county and urging their readers to directly communicate by personal mail to tell you how to vote during this very important Presidential election.

Most of us have never been to Clark county, but if it is a microcosm of middle America our guess is that your days are very busy dealing with earning a living, raising families, and getting the kids to the dentist on time for their semi-annual screening.

(Of course since you are knuckle-dragging, gun-totting, NASCAR Americans toiling away in flyover country and are obviously not as nuanced as our friends across the pond, you don't enjoy the benefits of a more advanced society which offers European style national health systems. If you did you could get your semi-annual screenings free, as long as you were willing to put up with a fifteen-month waiting list. But let's put this issue aside for discussion on another day.)

We are certain that the British citizens who are participating in this exercise have nothing but the best of intentions, and go to sleep every night worrying about the security of our homeland. However when you were growing up, your mother at one time or another probably gave you the following admonition when it comes to getting unsolicited advice: “Consider the source. And don’t forget to brush your teeth.”

Well the Blogosphere has been considering “the source” (i.e. Guardian stories and articles) since September 11th and to be blunt, it is not a pretty picture. Is the Guardian objective and balanced when it comes to understanding American security and the mass murder of thousands in New York City? Does the Guardian follow the grand tradition of balanced journalism that we Americans have come to expect from the New York Times, Dan Rather, and Tom Brokaw? Sorry. Let’s strike that question. (When you are a blogger jihadist, criticizing main-stream media is like shooting fish in a barrel. Sometimes it is SO difficult to maintain focus.)

Back to the main point, we think that it is high time that the citizens of Clark County put the young ones to bed, go to the cupboard for a double dose of Pepto-Bismol, and take a serious look at what these moonbats have been saying at the Guardian. (Note that our criticism is directed towards the Guardian and not Britain as a whole. Obviously the UK has been our most steadfast ally in during these difficult times and Tony Blair continues to be the most articulate spokesman on the world stage addressing the war on terrorism.)

So put on your secret decoder rings and wear your tin foil hats as we present Guardian's articles about the War on Terror, September 11th, George W. Bush, and our beloved country.

Regards,

The Guardian Angels of the Blogosphere