[Peace-discuss] Fw: Informed Comment - An esp good post

Tue Dec 10 05:54:57 UTC 2013

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Subject: Informed Comment

Informed Comment 

Informed Comment   
________________________________

	* FBi Laptop Camera Snooping and Orwell’s 1984: Side by Side Comparison 
	* Interview with Jeremy Scahill Questions “War on Terror” 
	* Crystal Night Must not be Repeated versus other European Minorities 
	* Today’s South Africa by the Numbers (with Photos) 
	* Photo of the Day: Apartheid South Africa Sign 
FBi Laptop Camera Snooping and Orwell’s 1984: Side by Side Comparison 
Posted: 07 Dec 2013 10:35 AM PST
Jon Schwartz ( @tinyrevolution ) posted this to Twitter.  It is a side by side comparison of a passage from “1984″ to the news report from a former senior FBI official that the FBI can turn on the laptop cameras of individuals without activating the red light that shows the camera is operating.
The Washington Post broke the story.  If the FBI is doing this without a warrant it is yet another nail in the coffin of the US 4th Amendment, which guarantees people the right not to have government snoop through their personal effects without evidence of wrongdoing and a judge’s permission. 
Interview with Jeremy Scahill Questions “War on Terror” 
Posted: 06 Dec 2013 09:59 PM PST
Euronews asks Jeremy Scahill  about his new film, “Dirty Wars,” which has been nominated for an Academy Award.
Scahill was also recently interviewed at Democracy Now!
“AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, this report that just came out from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that more people have been killed in drone strikes in the six months after President Obama gave his speech—
>JEREMY SCAHILL: Right.
>AMY GOODMAN: —saying they’re reforming or changing drone policy, than the six months before?
>JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. I mean, this—it’s a lot of smoke and mirrors. I mean, you know, the drone czar, or the assassination czar, John Brennan, who now is the head of the CIA, you know, he worked very hard to create something called the “disposition matrix,” which basically is a program that’s going to be used to determine who should be assassinated, who should we try to abduct, who should we try to render, who should we—which terror suspects should we leave it up to local authorities in Yemen or Pakistan to try to deal with. And basically what Obama and his team have done in his second administration is to create an infrastructure for whoever happens to come into office next, whether they’re a Democrat or Republican, and they have ensured that this policy of pre-emptive war—that’s really what we’re talking about here. It’s—these are pre-emptive, pre-crime strikes, where the idea that we should even view terrorism as a law
 enforcement activity or terrorism as a crime is completely thrown away by the constitutional lawyer president. And so, what I think one of the major legacies of Obama is going to be on this front is that he has tried to put a stamp of legitimacy on what most countries around the world would claim—you know, plainly view as a global assassination program run by the empire, run by the most powerful nation on Earth.
>JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about the situation in Afghanistan and the most recent drone strikes there, the impact on the continuing controversy over the status of forces agreement, what’s going to—how the United States will stay in Afghanistan.
>JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. I mean, well, as you know, I mean, the U.S. has propped up corrupt warlords, narcotraffickers, gangsters, for the past 12 years in Afghanistan. And, you know, the Taliban still control a large swath of territory, and they will, in perpetuity. And I think—I mean, the question I think a lot of military families in the U.S. and in NATO countries have to ask is sort of what—what was the purpose of the past, you know, 12 years? I think a lot of nations understand the initial incursion into Afghanistan, under the argument that you’re going to dismantle the al-Qaeda network that was responsible for 9/11. But what do you tell the families of—you know, of soldiers that are going to be killed in the year leading up to the so-called withdrawal? I think what we’re going to see in Afghanistan is an asymmetric war that’s going to continue on, where the United States continues to have special operations teams, there’s going to be a
 very large CIA paramilitary presence, and I think that they’re going to try to present the veneer that it’s an Afghanization of the occupation, but in reality the U.S. strike forces will not be far away.
>There was this recent drone strike in Pakistan on the eve of negotiations between Tehreek-e-Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, and the Pakistani government, and the U.S. killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. And it enraged—I was just speaking to a Pakistani diplomat in London. I mean, they believe that the United States intentionally did that to undermine any kind of a negotiated solution with the Taliban. And it’s counterproductive even to U.S. interests. Even if you take the most conventional interpretation of what American national interests are, to have that kind of instability in that region, especially when Pakistan is a nuclear power, is antithetical to the idea that this is a national security policy. I mean, the only way that this is resolved is by negotiating with the Taliban. And the U.S. seems to be giving—paying lip service to that, while then bumping off the people that they’re supposed to be negotiating with.
>The last thing I’ll say about this, when I met with Mullah Zaeef, who was in the Taliban government and actually wrote a fascinating autobiography called My Life with the Taliban—he was put in Guantánamo for six years, and then he was released, and he now lives sort of in a default form of house arrest in Kabul. When Rick Rowley and I met with him, he was saying to us, “When I was in Guantánamo, the Americans kept telling me, ‘The Taliban is finished. There’s no more Taliban. All of you—all of your people have been killed or are in prison.” And then he’s like, “Then I come back to Afghanistan, and I find that there are actually more people in the Taliban than when I was originally snatched and taken to Guantánamo.” And the point he made is, “If you kill those of us who grew up, you know, in the ’60s and ’70s, who speak English and understand the outside world, if you kill all of us, you’re not going to have anyone to
 negotiate with, because this younger generation, that you’ve produced as a result of your global war, are far more militant than we were, and they don’t care about diplomacy at all.” And I actually think he has a really valid point there . . .” 
See the whole interview 
Crystal Night Must not be Repeated versus other European Minorities 
Posted: 06 Dec 2013 09:20 PM PST
By Anne-Ruth Wertheim, Amsterdam
Crystal Night took place on the night between 9 and 10 November 1938. Across the whole of Nazi Germany and parts of Austria, a pogrom was held against Jews. Jewish synagogues, shops, homes and businesses were ransacked which led to the atrocity becoming known as Chrystal Night after the shards of broken glass. It marked the intensification of the persecution of the Jews in the run up to World War II.
We never want to allow one part of the population to be attacked again because another part of the population has started thinking that there is something wrong with them. 
The violence that took place on Crystal Night did not happen by chance, it broke out after people’s minds had been primed for many years. The time had come in which the delusion that Jews were the cause of all society’s ills had been planted in the minds of enough people. 
Today you can see something similar happening once again in Europe. The mechanism is identical. Racist prejudices about certain groups are brought into circulation, preferably about groups, which are recognizable, by their appearance one way or another. Many of the prejudices are suspiciously similar to what was said about the Jews, in particular allegations which put fear into people: that they have a scary religion, are unreliable and dangerous, want to take our jobs, are criminals and want to take over the world. 
Fear is often the ultimate incentive to kill. Nevertheless, a far too large number of bystanders nowadays believe – many of them well-meaning people – that it won’t go that far. They insist that the people should be allowed to express all those negative qualifications, in the interests of freedom of speech. They are not aware that the spread of hate and fear always takes place surreptitiously. Hate and fear nestle bit-by-bit in the minds of people on the quiet and once this has been done, it is difficult to remove them. 
There is no doubt that the processes of exclusion are in motion in Europe and here in the Netherlands and that a mass explosion of violence has become a possibility. 
But we shouldn’t wait passively until that happens. There is still time to break down the dividing lines!
Exclusion does not always affect minorities. Majorities can also be excluded and discriminated against. That is what happened under Apartheid in South Africa and also in the colonial Dutch East Indies, where I was born. There, it was the large majority of Indonesians and Chinese who were excluded.
At my white primary school, there were no Indonesian children. And they were not to be found in the swimming pool either. I thought that was quite normal. And what is worse: I am quite certain that snippets of racist stereotypes, which justified their exclusion, had already settled in my mind: Indonesians just were stupid and lazy. 
When I was seven years old, my colonial luxury life was literally turned upside down from one day to the next and I found myself belonging to an excluded minority over which negative ideas circulated. The Japanese occupied the Dutch East Indies and put all whites behind barbed wire for many years. We suffered hunger, were covered with lice, there was no medicine and people died every day – children too. To keep us under control, the Japanese beat up the women and mothers while we were made to watch. 
But it gradually dawned on me that there was no point in escaping: it was not just the visible dividing line of barbed wire that kept us captive; there was also an invisible one. The white color of our skin would betray us outside the Japanese internment camp straight away, among the Indonesians, Chinese and Japanese. 
Ever since, I have been able to imagine vividly what that is like to be conspicuous in a majority, which holds prejudices against the minority you, are assigned to. 
To all people here in Europe with a dark or so-called ‘colored’ skin, this feeling is a daily reality. They are asked where they come from whether the question is relevant or not. And in today’s deteriorating climate in which they are blamed for many social problems, it soon seems like they have to justify themselves. 
People who have never experienced how it feels to belong to a visible minority have the greatest difficulty empathizing with them. That became painfully clear in the recent Black Pete debate, in which this blackface character that accompanies Saint Nicolas, (the Dutch Santa Claus) was accused of being an expression of racism. 
Exclusion and persecution are inextricably connected to drawing dividing lines between different population groups. After all, this is what makes it clear who belongs and who doesn’t.
The Nazis designed complicated regulations to draw a dividing line between whom they would and would not murder. It depended on how many of your four grandparents were Jewish and how many were not. And if you were married to a non-Jew, you could escape persecution for a little while longer.
The Japanese also had difficulty knowing who to put into camps and who not to; people who were half-Indonesian/half-Dutch were usually not interned. But what about those who were quarter-Indonesian? 
It was not just difficult for the German and Japanese fascists to draw a clear dividing line.  It meant that victims were often forced to make desperate personal choices. 
Almost no one knows that it was not just the Germans that differentiated between Jews and non-Jews, the Japanese did it too – encouraged by the Nazis, of course. That is why I am so very incredibly glad that the Jewish Historical Museum is preparing an exhibition over Jews in the Dutch East Indies, which opens next July. 
I was interned with my mother, who was not Jewish and my sister and brother in a women’s camp. My father, who was Jewish, was far away in a men’s camp and we had no idea whether he had been forced to register whether he was Jewish or not. My mother was put before an inhuman choice. If she said that we, her children, were half-Jewish, she ran the risk of us being taken away and sent to a separate camp. I saw the panic in her eyes. But if she kept it secret and someone betrayed us – after all ‘Wertheim’ is a well-known Jewish name – there would be cruel punishments. She lied that she was Jewish herself, so that we were classified “fully Jewish” and were transported with her to the Jewish camp. 
It was worse than the camp we had come from, but not as bad by far as what was happening to Jews, Sinti and Roma, handicapped and homosexuals at that time in Europe. There almost all of my Jewish family on my father’s side was killed. And my grandparents committed suicide the day that the Netherlands capitulated to the German army.
Some people think half-Jewish does not exist, you are either a Jew or you are not one; you have to choose which group you belong to. You automatically do not belong to the other group. But I want to belong with Jews and with non-Jews. I no longer want to be set apart, not by anyone. And I think that applies to many people, because it is not good for anyone to have to cut yourself off from parts of your origin or even to have to hide it. 
Today in Europe, there are large numbers of people who are half-Moroccan, quarter or three-quarters or half-Turkish, or quarter-Roma, Sinti, Indonesian, Mexican, Chinese, Antillean, Surinamese or Polish, or whatever. And we can be sure that their number is going to increase by a lot in the future!
Let’s make sure they all feel as much at home here as all other people. Just as much at home as all the migrants who are fully Moroccans, fully Turks, fully Antillean, Surinamese and Polish etc. And of course just as much at home as all the people who have been here for generations, wherever they came from originally and whenever that was! 
Let’s not play into the hands of those who would have use set parts of the population apart in Europe for the sole purpose of discriminating against them, by drawing dividing lines between them. The more intermediate forms there are which cannot be classified because they are all mixed up together, the more difficult it will be to release racist prejudices on defined population groups. 
And that way there will never be another Crystal Night.
——-
Related video
Attacks on Muslim women on the rise in France  
Today’s South Africa by the Numbers (with Photos) 
Posted: 06 Dec 2013 09:02 PM PST
Population of South Africa: 51 million (slightly larger than South Korea)
Annual Gross Domestic Product (nominal): $384 billion (in neighborhood of Taiwan, Austria, UAE)
Rank among world economies: 29
Rank among African economies: 1
Amount GDP has grown since end of white rule in 1994:  3 times
Number of people added to middle class in past ten years:  10 million
 View of Pretoria from the grounds of the Union Buildings
Annual per capita income: $7500 (like Colombia, Azerbaijan, Romania)
Increase in annual GDP per capita since end of white rule in 1994:  40%

Nicer part of Soweto, 2012
Adult literacy rate:  89%
Percentage of the economy accounted for by industry:  15%
Number of major labor strikes in 2012:  99  (a five-year high)
Projected economic growth 2013:  2.7%
Annual CO2 emissions:  500 million metric tons (5th in world per capita)
Percentage of the population that lives in cities? 62%, almost two-thirds.

Johannesburg, 2012 
Percentage of South Africans below the poverty line? 31%

Poor part of Soweto
Average life expectancy  at birth: 55
Percentage of the population that is white: 9%
Percentage of the population that is Christian: 80%
Number of Muslims in South Africa: 750,000 (mainly from India but with some conversions).
Number of Hindus in South Africa: 650,000
(Photos by Juan Cole, August, 2012)
—–
related video:
Finance News Reports: 9 Challenges Facing the South African Economy: 
Photo of the Day: Apartheid South Africa Sign 
Posted: 06 Dec 2013 09:01 PM PST
This sign is left over from Apartheid days and is preserved under an awning in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa as a reminder of what was.  I photographed it in August, 2012.
——
Related video:
For more context, the BBC has a minute-and-a-half review of the horrible institution of Apartheid in South Africa:  
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