WB: Mental Case + The Hirohito Effect
Billmon:
I. Mental Case
Posted by b on July 21, 2006 at 15:25 UTC | Permalink
Even Hirohito (eventually) had more sense than this scum.
Posted by: biklett | Jul 21 2006 19:48 utc | 4
I have 2 Very Relevant Links following Uncle's on OT. The long & short of it is that the Fascist Twins (Cheney-Rove) are telling boyking that if he attacks Iran they'll win the fall elections. Else they lose, Conyers will open Impeachment Hearings & they face personal indictments for their criminality. Now they've wrapped it into an even tidier pkg. telling him that if he attacks Iran, they'll reverse a losing situation in Iraq...
I carried out a Thought Experiment this week. I asked myself to find anyone to find anyone on the political spectrum to the Right of those in power? Try it. That's how you know that the fascists have taken over & are rolling you down the Slippery Slope...
Posted by: jj | Jul 21 2006 20:05 utc | 5
The history this desire feeds on is one of repeated failures by the ‘Arab world’ to knuckle under to the acceptance of the security of Israel. It is a history that affirms, on the one hand, the military power of Israel, its ingenuity, its independence - and on the other its weakness, its incapacity to use its power to protect its citizens. And it always returns to the desire for the the decisive gesture, generating a pathology that is a hugely dangerous one to fall prey to in politics, and indeed in war. History always continues: slights, real or imagined, are suffered and remembered. The parents of dead children and the children of dead parents nurse their grief, their rage and their shame. No single gesture settles all accounts. But a pathology of desire wants to repeat, above all.
The history that forms the backdrop to the rhetoric of decisive gestures is also, never forget, the history of Israel’s failures - under Shamir, Netanyahu, Sharon - to cease provocations in the name of security, to avoid adding to existing tensions, to escape the temptation to return to open war from out of a state of hidden war. The reliance on the idea of the final strike, the ultimate defeat of all the enemies, is a fantasy that gives birth to the strangest efflorescences: an underground wall to keep out the tunnellers of Hamas; an invasion of Lebanon to destroy ‘terrorist infrastructure’ and ‘remodel’ the politics of the country.
That particular stab at the ‘decisive gesture’ was tried before in 1982, when the enemy was the PLO rather than Hizbollah. Following Israel’s decision to annex the Golan Heights in 1981 and the resulting increase in tension, in 1982 the Israeli ambassador to London was shot and wounded by terrorists led by Abu Nidal, an ememy of the PLO leadership. Blaming this attack on the PLO gave the Israeli government the perfect opportunity to seek to ‘destroy’ the PLO and install a friendly government in Lebanon. This particular ‘release of tension’ took in. amongst other things, Lebanon reduced to political chaos, 600 Israeli troops killed, the massacres at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and the birth of Hizbollah - a movement founded to drive out the Israeli invasion. Another intervention that produced only further chaos, more hatred, more injustice, and more insecurity for Israel.
The conclusion is inescapable. Behind the ceaselessly failing logic of the decisive gesture, there is the desire to maintain that state of tension, of enervating deadlock that Grossman describes. A militarised society, secure in its bomb shelters, suffused with the constant fear of being blown apart in a bar, a nightclub, on a bus.
What Israel wants is to repeat.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jul 21 2006 21:40 utc | 6
Billmon, whenever I don't read your blog for a few days, and I have to play catch-up, I often have to break away before I've finished and return at a later time, because reading several posts at a time gets too intense.
I do that with Juan Cole's blog too; sometimes what he writes in just one day is too much, and I have to break it up. What a shitty world we live in and what a shitty, shitty government we have, a government who makes the world shittier every day.
Posted by: Grandmère Mimi | Jul 21 2006 22:13 utc | 7
cloned p
i feel that world has treated the arab world - wiith one indignity too much & am sure this day they will rue the day that the empire allowed its proxy to do what it is doing in lebanon & what it casually carries out in gaza
Posted by: r'giap | Jul 21 2006 23:35 utc | 8
Rice Seeks `Robust' Lebanon Force to Oust Hezbollah
July 21 (Bloomberg) -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she wants a ``robust'' international military force to try to oust Hezbollah forces from southern Lebanon, as she prepares to leave on a diplomatic mission to the region next week.
The neocons are apparently going to order US troops into Lebanon, putting them directly under the control of the Israelis?
Posted by: John Francis Lee | Jul 22 2006 0:30 utc | 9
And this is before the US/Israeli "coalition of the willing" invades to murder any survivors.
There are some other unbearable pictures on this site that bear scrutiny. Accept what all of the nations of the world except the Anglo-American-Israeli Axis condemns.
Posted by: John Francis Lee | Jul 22 2006 0:48 utc | 10
Former Bolton critic indicates his support
A key critic of Bolton's nomination, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH), wrote an editorial in the Washington Post earlier this week in which he stated that he had changed his mind. Voinovich's vote against Bolton in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee kept Bolton's nomination from being recommended to the full Senate.Democrats blocked Bolton using a filibuster after he was appointed by President Bush last year.
What are the odds of the Demoplicans standing up to the Republicrats this time?
FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL 391
BILL TITLE: Condemning the recent attacks against the State of Israel, holding terrorists and their state-sponsors accountable for such attacks, supporting Israel’s right to defend itself, and for other purposes.
410 "yea" to 8 "nay", 4 cowards "present", 10 "not voting"
Posted by: John Francis Lee | Jul 22 2006 1:03 utc | 11
The comments to this entry are closed.
Why does the Henry Purcell: Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary come to mind? Particulaly, the title song from the sound track of the film "A Clockwork Orange".
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jul 21 2006 16:06 utc | 1