Lies or Stupidity?

The tinfoil Rightists of the blogosphere frequently complain about 'left wing bias' in Universities. Supposing this bias to exist - is it any wonder, given the cretinism and dissembling that our Rightard friends exhibit when trying to argue a point?

The example, in this case, is a piece of 'research' by Joan Martin, on behalf of the proto-fascist British National Party, known for their criminal violence, anti-Semitism, and other niceties.

Naturally, this garbage is not only lapped up by the usual credulous bigots, but is then, without shame, passed off as gospel truth. It's not clear to me how this research, an attempted critique of Marxist influence on society, could be taken seriously by anybody, much less grown adults. Are the brazen liars, or merely drooling half-wits? Let's have a look at some of the rotten fruits of this research, and see:

A WORLD COUP d’ ETAT IS PLANNED TO BRING ABOUT WORLD GOVERNMENT
The time-line explained:
KARL MARX.1818-1883
Marx was a German Jew with radical views.

At least they got that bit right.

In 1842 he became a member of the Hegelians an anti-religious, radical group with Satanic interests.

And thus the blithering idiocy begins. Hegel was actually conservative in almost all of his opinions, and was an advocate of Protestantism. He also exhibited the typical conservative subservience to traditional authority figures. Neither Hegel, nor any of his followers whose names are known to history, have any demonstrable link to 'Satanic interests'.
Furthermore, following Hegel's death, there tended to be two groups of students influences by him: the Right Hegelians (conservatives, obviously) and the 'Young' (Left) Hegelians. Marx, in his early days, was associated by the latter. What they took from Hegel was not conservative opinion on Church and State, etc, but rather, Hegel's dialectical method of philosophy. Perhaps this is superfluous, since I see no evidence that our resident rightards have read a page of Marx or Hegel.

In 1843 he left Germany and went to Paris where he met Engels who helped him financially.
In 1845 he was expelled from Paris.
In 1848 went to live in Brussels were he wrote the Communist Manifesto.
In 1849 Marx moved to London and lived there for the rest of his life.

Back on track, but hardly an exposé.

THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO INCLUDES.
The Abolition of Private Property
The Abolition of the Family.
The Abolition of Countries and Nationalities.
The Abolition of all Religions, morality and Religious Liberty, this shows the Hegelians Idealism.
The Abolition of Freedom of conscience. In a Democracy people believe in the freedom to choose.
The word Communist covers anyone who aspires to World Government.
Marxism works towards achieving World Government and World Dictatorship.

The Manifesto includes a few other things, too, such as calls for universal education, and the abolition of child labour. You can see why the free marketeers would oppose it. Fundamentally, however, Marx and Engels used this text to argue in favour of a stateless and classless society, not a 'world dictatorship'. At the time of the Manifesto, only one nation in Continental Europe was a democracy (France), and even that brutalised its citizens, and even that only became democratic through revolutionary force.
Of course, the Manifesto has nothing to do with the abolition of religion or 'freedom of conscience', though Marx did point out the unholy alliances formed between religious powerbrokers and earthly rulers. Still less did this text have anything to do with 'Hegelian idealism', since Marx considered himself to be the precise opposite of an 'idealist' (i.e. he was a 'materialist'). The strident internationalism of the Manifesto cannot be understated, and it is on this point, as on many others, that Marxism is the precise opposite of fascism/Nazism, despite the dissembling of Rightards.

In any case, there is no excuse for the constant black propaganda against Marx, when all of his works are readily available for free.

Marx and his friends Engles and Balunin (sic) received their ideas from Moses Hess the founder of the German Social Democrat Party. Moses Hess taught that to gain a World State it could only be brought about by a revolution using class and racial hatred. He said race struggle is primary, class struggle is secondary.”
Mikhail Balunin said “That what ever the name or label of those who aspire to world government they must be prepared to awake the devil in people and stir their passions for them to act.” Passion as with football hooligans, vandals and various peace groups and the race groups.

Or perhaps 'passion' as seen by today's bigots, such as the BNP, or the Cronulla rioters, or some of our rightard bloggers.
Notably, no attempt is made to cite a single instance of 'racial hatred' by Marx, let alone demonstrate that is was 'primary' in his struggle. For what it's worth, Marx was influenced by Hess only in the relatively early days of his career, and he later disagreed with much of his work. In any case, Hess was a proto-Zionist, and therefore hardly an enemy of the rightards (must bring on the Rapture!).

Marx wrote three requirements for those who wished to join the fight for World Government.
1 To read the Communist and Revolutionary teachings of Marx and associates and work accordingly.
2 To work to destabilise nations both morally and financially.
3 To work to gain political control of the MONEY supply and the ASSETS of each Nation and put them BEYOND the REACH and CONTROL of each Government by ensuring that nations become INTER-DEPENDANT on each other for FOOD, MACHINERY and through LOANS.

Marx didn't actually set up a school or club of 'Marxists'. Naturally, one would expect anybody calling themselves Marxist to have read at least some of his works, just as we would with a Freudian, Newtonian, or whatever.
Point 2 is most interesting - it allows our conspiracy-minded tinfoilers the opportunity to interpret any perceived 'instability', new fad, crisis, or change in the wind as a MARXIST PLOY FOR WORLD DOMINATION!!!

Marx also said, “Steps should be taken to provide a master race to produce Leaders and Dictators”

Did he now? This slanderous claim is rather easily proven false. Significantly, the scum who produced this libel did not bother to attribute the quote, perhaps knowing that their half-witted audience would devour it anyway.

Based on this inauspicious beginnings, the rightards purport to demonstrate that a Marxist world government is about to take over any day now:

Capitalism was infiltrated and attacked from within in order to destroy its reputation and Hollywood was implemented to break down the image of the man who financially supports his family and to help create the romantic image of the ‘activist’ (who, when stripped of this fallacious image, is nothing more than an instrument to destroy what we had).
As globalist Marxists reach the zenith of their power, we small band of resisters face the prospect of seeing the true face of this beast unleash its vengeance upon us. It will have its day, the Bible predicts this. But that day will be cut short. We will need to be salt and light to this planet while we can. When we are gone, there will be nothing left.

How embarrassing. This is real fish-in-a-barrel stuff, and easily dismissed. Woe unto the next generation of half-educated youngsters, who may be so unfortunate as to take the above claims seriously, or to think that Hitler was really a socialist, or that Hillary Clinton is a communist and Obama a fascist. The ideas of Marx are there to be discussed and debated, but I can't see any attempt to do that in the above passage, which is being circulated as holy writ by our holy fools. As long as such flagrant smear tactics and peddling of untruths passes for Rightist 'research', we can expect, much to the chagrin of bigots, that genuine scholarship and academia will remain firmly outside of their grasp. But what can one expect from clowns whose highest philosophical achievement is (snicker) reading Ayn Rand?

Why the Frankfurt School is Hated

1. A cartel of German professors (and one Italian) are responsible, according to Pat Buchanan, William S. Lind, and other members of the dribbling idiot-right, for the 'cultural Marxism' that has infected the American mind. '[T]hose who love freedom should consider these besieged institutions — the family, traditional religion, [Helleno-Christian] morality — as “layers of strength” that have remarkable resiliency and must be restored. But the work of restoration cannot be effective unless a sufficient number of (people who care) come to understand the conspiratorial origins of our culture war.'

2. 'Frankfurt school' is an anti-Semite codeword for 'Jew'.

3. 'Newspapers and magazines of the radical Right constantly stir up indignation against what is unnatural, over-intellectual, morbid and decadent: they know their readers. The insights of social psychology into the authoritarian personality confirm them. The basic features of this type include conformism, respect for a petrified facade of opinion and society, and resistance to impulses that disturb its order or evoke inner elements of the unconscious that cannot be admitted...The Nazis were already using the term 'cultural bolshevism' under the Weimar Republic, and hatred of what it refers to has survived the epoch of Hitler, when it was institutionalised.' - Adorno, 'Commitment'.

Before the Last Word...

I know that the recently departed Suharto, like all heroes of free market capitalism, will soon be re-baptised, and his atrocities will be forgotten (by all but the Indonesians). Thus it was for Augusto ('Sure he was a bastard, but he was good for the economy') Pinochet. So too, for Yeltsin - known in the West merely as a drunken buffoon, rather than as the man who foreclosed the possibility of a democratic Russia, all the while selling off his country's resources to KGB stooges, and Party cadres.

Naomi Klein has an excellent site that elaborates upon her equally fine book, The Shock Doctrine. Despite many dismissive reviews, I'm yet to see a serious refutation of her theses.

In any case, some interesting material on Indonesia is to be found there.

Indonesia had the biggest Communist Party in the world, with the exception of China. Ex-CIA operatives tell of the part played by the US in eliminating thousands of 'communists', from the highest offical, to village organisers.

The Indonesian economy was guided by advisors from Berkeley. The advice was unpopular amongst the people but then, I suppose that's what massacres are for.

Finally, a 1965 article from Time discusses how Muslims were armed, incited and trained by the Indonesian army and government to kill suspected communists and their families, 'by the thousands'.

Such are the costs of the 'free' market.

KPI's Missed

Does anybody still remember Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 2006? Ostensibly an invasion to liberate soldiers being held prisoner, the war appeared to have been planned for some time prior to this. In addition, despite worldwide condemnation of the inevitable human rights abuses that would follow an Israeli invasion, the US ensured that any 'peace talks' were delayed long enough for large parts of Lebanon to be destroyed, thus allowing Israel's hawks to meet their KPI's.

When all of this was reported upon by the Western press and blogosphere, we were told that such views were based on propaganda, lies, or worse, anti-Semitism.

I was interested, then, to read the following report recently:

A key report into Israel's 2006 war on Lebanon has listed a series of major failings by the Jewish state but said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert acted in good faith.

"Overall, we regard the second Lebanon war as a serious missed opportunity," the head of a government-appointed commission into the conflict, Eliyahu Winograd, said according to an official English translation of his remarks. (source)

A missed opportunity? One opportunity that wasn't missed was the opportunity to target Lebanon's civilian population with cluster bombs (pictured above), for what is sometimes called 'collective punishment'.

"The army should re-examine the conditions for the use of cluster bombs... especially given the need to reduce losses among the civilian population after a complete halt to fighting," the Winograd Commission said.

"The use of these bombs should be restricted to military objectives that justify their use," it said in the 630-page report which was initially released on Wednesday.

Cluster munitions spread bomblets over a wide area from a single device. The bomblets often do not explode on impact, but can do so later at the slightest touch, making them as deadly as anti-personnel landmines.

At least 38 people have been killed and 217 wounded by cluster bombs in the region since the end of the conflict, according to the United Nations.

During the war which raged from July 12 until August 14, 2006, Hezbollah militants whose capture of two Israeli soldiers sparked the war fired more than 4,000 rockets at northern Israel. (source)

Since cluster bombs function more as less as mine-spreading devices, they are the gift that keeps on giving. I won't link to pictures of the sorts of damage these devices do, but images are readily available on Google.

Of course, Hezbollah did fire 4,000 rockets into Northern Israel, according to the above report. I suppose my critics would suggest that would justify some form of measured retaliation, self-defense and all:

"What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs," the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.

Quoting his battalion commander, the rocket unit head stated that the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets. (source)

This comes from the mainstream Israeli press, I might add, not the Green Left Weekly. A ratio of four thousand bombs to 1.2 million seems reasonable. Can't imagine why anybody might have wished to criticise Israeli foreign policy. A missed opportunity, indeed.

John Ray Redux

Back in October 2007, I wrote this post on AWH blogger John Ray (among others). My contention was primarily that Ray used a range of means to piggyback blatant racism onto more acceptable discourses (such as 'science', mainstream conservatism, libertarianism, 'anarcho-capitalism', and whatever else the guy hides behind).

In addition to this argument, there were, on my part, some ad hom attacks. These occurred in the context of Ray using mostly slurs to prop up his otherwise sloppy reasoning and impoverished arguments. They also occurred in the context of AWH being one of the most personally abusive sites on the Oz blogosphere, a site whose muppets call for violence against any who dare to disagree with their outlandish views.

I was therefore surprised, therefore, to find our sensitive soul, poor old Ray, engaged in special pleading. He makes virtually no attempt to refute any substantive points about his racism, preferring instead to focus solely on the ad hom remarks, as if they disqualified the broader thesis. Let us have a look at his pathetic attempts at rebuttal.

Within the last couple of days, I have been attacked by TWO Leftist bloggers! And note that they attacked ME, not any of the facts and arguments that I have put forward...They hate the truths that I have highlighted but they were so unable to refute those truths that all they could manage was an attempt to shoot the messenger.

Ray is not in possession of facts, much less 'truths'. As we shall see, he is hardly averse to 'shooting the messenger' himself.

And it is therefore MOST amusing that one of my recent Leftist critics had obviously trawled at great length through my autobiographical data looking for "dirt" and was able to come up with? Can you guess? Can you guess what he found to criticize? He criticized my POETRY!! What a good laugh I had about that! I doubt that any of my readers here would have been aware that in my long-lost teens I did write a bit of poetry. I put the poetry concerned online with the note that "I don't think much of it now" so criticisms of it leave me supremely unmoved.

If the poetry was trivial, and merely a byproduct of adolescent indulgence, why publish it in the first place? In any case, criticism of the poetry was not conducted on the basis of Ray's literary technique (which, incidentally, is poor), but rather, on his flabby and pompous self-importance, on the one hand, and his preoccupation with (ahem) racial purity on the other.

Ray then attempts to critique my original post. He commences inauspiciously, confining himself to picking up a spelling error. He goes on:

He then goes on to talk about my "hilariously unpublishable articles"! Wow! So how come over 200 of them did get published in mainstream academic journals? He is however not short of mental "agility". He then goes on to QUOTE from some of my published academic journal articles!

Frankly, I am surprised that anyone, anywhere, would publish Ray's rubbish. In any case, Ray is trying here to use the corollary of the ad hom argument, namely, the argument form authority. Furthermore, Ray's posts are hilariously unpublishable - his screeds on the 'psychopathy' of leftists, for instance, would not be admitted into scientific literature, and not, as Ray claims, because of some global communist conspiracy.

Ray, like a fat asthmatic boy trying to outrun a doberman, subsequently attempts to refute the charge of racism:

I DO quite happily make statements about race and racism that are of a kind that would have been regarded as perfectly normal thoughout all of human history -- but which have just in the last few decades become furiously excoriated.

Lot's of things in the 'last few decades' have become 'furiously excoriated'. Smallpox is one. Racism is another. That Ray assures us that his comments would have been perfectly acceptable in 19th Century Alabama, or 18th Century England, does not, in fact, mean that they are not racist.

The only reasonable definition of racism that I can see is something along the lines of "harming a person solely because of his race" but to a modern-day Leftist, just discussing race is "racism".

Constructing arguments along the lines of racial purity, condemning whole swathes of people for the supposedly 'racial' basis of their purported inferiority, and calling for violence against other races all look like 'harming a person' to me. Plenty of people discuss 'race' and 'racism', as well as genetics - few object to this. If anything, it is Ray's fellow-travellers who deride attempts to discuss race and racism. We have long seen how the rightist media attack the humanities departments in which these topics are given scholarly consideration. Obviously, Ray's ludicrous generalisations here are not substantiated.

And in the simple-minded theology of the Left, a racist would definitely have to be an antisemite so how to explain my unwavering support for Israel? Most of my blogs actually display an Israeli flag -- yet I am not Jewish.

I can't think of any 'leftist' who equates racism solely with anti-Semitism. Ray's retort here is of almost unbelievable stupidity. It is entirely possible to be pro-Israel, and nonetheless violently oppose the emancipation of other racial, religious and national groups. It is obvious that many members of the radical right have, ostensibly, a pro-Jewish, pro-Israel attitude - this in no way diminishes their contempt for Muslims, Africans, inter alia. If anything, the radical rightists and lunatic Christian Zionists like Ray are bigots precisely in their attitude to Israel, insofar as Jews as a category escape vilification only when they can be instrumentalised to the rightist's cause. This is a topic I shall expand upon at some later date.

Ray continues to ramble, as he slides into senescence, about how Hitler and fascism were 'leftist'. He is not alone in this folly - see the 'Hillary is fascist' crowd - but this proves only that imbecility is often practised in company.


Most amusingly, Ray claims to have 'comprehensively' refuted all allegations of racism, and he links to a rebuttal of an article cited in my original post, be a chap named Mehler. The article rightly points to Ray's love of enjoining others to embrace racism, and notes his obsession with racial categories, his contempt for various racial and religious groups, and his history of joining neo-Nazi groups. Ray attempts to respond:

To a Leftist, just mentioning the word "race" makes you immediately suspect. And I have never hesitated to say that I believe that race is real and that it does make a difference. And that is one reason why I have never bothered to reply to that specific article until now.

Has anybody seriously denied that race is real, or that it makes a difference? And is this what Ray has actually argued, given his posts include praise for Apartheid (based on the latter's 'benefits' for blacks) and endorsements of racism as 'normal' and 'beneficial'?

Ray spends a paragraph trying to use the word 'leftist' as a term of ad hom abuse. The Mehler article noted, correctly, that when radical rightists such as Ray invoke names such as 'Adorno', or the Frankfurt School, this is actually a mere codeword for 'Jewish'. Ray himself draws explicit attention to this. When called on his own racial obsessions, Ray attempts to wriggle free of the net by way of his own laughably inept ad homs:

[Mehler] also seems to find some awful significance in the fact that I referred to the Adorno group as "Jewish". He is perfectly right that one would not normally refer to the ethnicity of an academic author unless it was particularly relevant in some way. But in this case it IS relevant.

Ah, I see. Adorno = Jewish, therefore Adorno, in Ray's words, cannot 'be objective about Nazism'. Nice. Wonderful supporter of Jews.

[Mehler] also says that I write "approvingly" of people who use mocking names for Jews. That tends to suggest that I approve of such names. I do not. But I do find that many of the people who use such names are normal and non-psychopathological.

Ray here employs typical rightist tactics - diversion, obfuscation, and impugning of motives. The 'psychopathology' of those who employ racial slurs was never at issue, at least, not in this discussion. The racism of these epithets, apparently endorsed by Ray, stands, irrespective of where such phenomena sit in the DSM-IV. This is yet another distinction that our great scholar fails to grasp.

Rather charmingly, Ray responds to claims that he joined Nazi groups by conceding them, but adding, 'It was only for research!'. I suspect that Hugh Grant must once have used the same excuse to Liz Hurley, when caught with Divine Brown.

Finally, in his attempted defence of himself, Ray once again reiterates his delusional position on leftism and fascism, and concludes with a series of addenda, almost all of which are mere personal attacks on others:

It will be apparent from what I have written above that I regard Billig's criticisms of me as being no more than cheap shots. I am amused therefore to note that "Billig" is an Ashkenazi name which in fact means "cheap".

And this cretin has the audacity to cry - 'But they pick on me!'.

Ray and many (though not all) of his cronies are thorough-going racists, and they continue to peddle hatred on ethnic and religious grounds. Just the other day, his comrade was linking to a well-known white supremacist site, claiming it as authoritative on the topic of Muslims. Furthermore, Ray and his sycophants continue to sockpuppet me, attributing to me comments on their site that I have not written. I have written to them about this, and have suggested that use my ISP to verify my identity, but they refuse to respond in any way, other than to continue the sockpuppeting.

How sad, for one's arguments to be so woefully inept that you need to create opponents simple enough to leave them unscathed. And for ad hom king Ray to bitch and moan about his opponents at all merely ensures that he can add the title of hypocrite to his well-earned moniker of half-wit.


UPDATE: I see that another blogger has come up with a response to Ray, very similar to mine. It's hilarious that Ray and his fellow defenders of Der Vaterland allege, with a straight face, that it is the 'liberals' who are fascist. In addition, I've seen that the AWH bigots continue to call explicitly for genocide against Muslims, and continue to employ the sockpuppet. I guess there's little more than one can expect from these freaks - after all, there are no 'moderate' fascists.

Fact and Fiction in Indonesia

Shameless revisionism and dead, politically rightist, economically neo-liberal dictators seem to go hand in hand.

When Pinochet met his maker a year ago, the likes of Andrew Bolt (in Australia) or the Wall Street Journal (in the US) were falling over themselves to assure readers of Chile's economic prosperity, attributed to Pincohet's bloody rule. The deaths, torture, exile and disappearances of thousands were ignored as the apologists clamoured to give us a 'balanced' account of the tyrant's legacy.

It is difficult to imagine any mainstream media outlet eulogising a Castro or Khomeini in similar terms, despite comparable 'achievements', acquired with considerably less slaughter.

The MSM are not the only culprits when it comes to craven deference to elite opinion. Since at least Whitlam, it is arguably on foreign policy that the ALP is at its most repugnant, and this is particularly true in relation to Indonesia.

In light of the silence across one half of the political blogosphere, let us peruse a few examples:

Australia's Attorney-General Robert McClelland and former prime minister Paul Keating have made a flying visit to Indonesia to pay their respects at the funeral of former Indonesian dictator Suharto...The pair attended the funeral with Australia's Ambassador to Indonesia Bill Farmer.
"It respects the office that he held and effectively confirms the Rudd government commitment to an ongoing, strong and supportive relationship with Indonesia."
"We recognise also his achievements ... he brought Indonesia from a country that was subsistence to one with a developing economy...and a nation of significance in the world."
He said the government also recognised the "issues of controversy" with Suharto's rule. (source)

'Issues of controversy'? So delicately put!

Similar delicacy could be found in Wolfowitz, former US ambassador to Suharto:

"This ambassador didn't speak out about human rights here. He was perceived by the public as being close to the Suharto government," said Abdul Hakim Garuda Nusantara, who headed Indonesia's legal aid foundation and now chairs the National Human Rights Commission.
Nusantara said Wolfowitz appeared to ignore abuses committed by Indonesian security forces, which were fighting separatist insurgencies in the provinces of Aceh and Papua. Nor did he raise public concerns about East Timor, which had been invaded by the Indonesian military a decade earlier. Wolfowitz also remained silent about the mounting corruption within Suharto's family and inner circle, Nusantara asserted. (source)

Downer, Australia's former foreign affairs minister, viewed Suharto in similar terms to Keating and Rudd:
"He certainly took a rather regal and, if you like, patronising view of Australia but on the other hand he did understand it was important to have a constructive relationship with Australia," Mr Downer told ABC Radio.
"He wasn't a bad thing for Australia in a lot of ways." (source)

The WSJ, as might be expected, did not hold back in its praise for the newly departed:
Suharto was guilty of hubris when he styled himself Bapak Pembangunan Indonesia, or father of Indonesia's development, and even had this title printed along with his portrait on the 50,000 rupiah note. But that is a pretty accurate summary of his legacy. Like Deng Xiaoping, he rescued his country from totalitarianism and poverty, and put it on the path to prosperity and a large measure of personal freedoms. For all his flaws, Suharto deserves to be remembered as one of Asia's greatest leaders. (source)

One of Asia's greatest leaders?

Hiding out in the dense, humid jungle, Markus Talam watched Indonesian soldiers herd manacled prisoners from trucks, line them up and mow them down with round after round of automatic weapons fire.
"They gunned them down and dumped their bodies in a mass grave dug by other prisoners. I remember the sound of the guns clearly: tat-tat, tat-tat, tat-tat ... over and over again," said Talam, 68, who was later jailed for 10 years after being named a leftist sympathizer.
Estimates for the number killed during his bloody rise to power — from 1965 to 1968 — range from a government figure of 78,000 to 1 million cited by U.S. historians Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, who have published books on Indonesia's history. It was the worst mass slaughter in Southeast Asia's modern history after the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia.
The CIA provided lists of thousands of leftists, including trade union members, intellectuals and schoolteachers, many of whom were executed or sent to remote prisons. (source)

Score one for the CIA in another Cold War triumph.

Australia's ALP also had no problems in turning a blind eye to the regime's 'issues of controversy':

A political tempest...erupted in Australia over leaked official documents showing that the leaders of the former Labor government covered up casualty figures from the 1991 massacre carried out by Indonesian troops in the East Timorese capital of Dili.
The facts are that more than 200 people, mostly pro-independence demonstrators, were slaughtered in Dili in November 1991. The then Labor government supported claims by an inquiry set up by the Suharto regime that only about 50 were killed and that the deaths were the responsibility of a few individual officers and soldiers.
The truth is that the Labor leaders had compelling reasons of both "national interest" and "party political interest" for whitewashing the Dili massacre, and every other bloody crime carried out by the Suharto regime. For "national interest" read the profit interests of Australian big business.
In the case of East Timor, the Labor leaders backed the regime's repressive grip over the former Portuguese colony in order to provide BHP and other oil companies with guaranteed access to the immense resources of the Timor Gap--estimated to hold up to 1 billion barrels of crude oil. Just two years before the Dili massacre, Evans and his Indonesian counterpart, Ali Alatas, signed the Timor Gap Treaty in a champagne drinking ceremony as they flew over the Timor Sea, making Australia the only country in the world to legally recognise the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. (source)

Naomi Klein, in her latest outing, also spent some time discussing Suharto's Indonesia, and its wonderful economic prosperity:

Since the Second World War, the country [Indonesia] had been led by President Sukarno, the Hugo Chavez of his day (though minus Chavez's appetite for elections). Sukarno enraged the rich countries by protecting Indonesia's economy, redistributing wealth, and throwing out the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank, which he accused of being facades for the interests of Western multinationals. While Sukarno was a nationalist, not a Communist, he worked closely with the Communist Party, which had 3 million active members. The U.S. and British governments were determined to end Sukarno's rule, and declassified documents show that the CIA had received high-level directions to "liquidate President Sukarno, depending upon the situation and available opportunities."
After several false starts, the opportunity came in October 1965, when General Suharto, backed by the CIA, began the process of seizing power and eradicating the left. The CIA had been quietly compiling a list of the country's leading leftists, a document that fell into Suharto's hands, while the Pentagon helped out by supplying extra weapons and field radios so Indonesian forces could communicate in the remotest parts of the archipelago. Suharto then sent out his soldiers to hunt down the four to five thousand leftists on his "shooting lists," as the CIA referred to them; the U.S. embassy received regular reports on t heir progress. As the information came in, the CIA crossed names off their lists until they were satisfied that the Indonesia left had been annihilated. One of the people involved in the operation was Robert J. Martens, who worked for the U.S. embassy in Jakarta. "It really was a big help to the army," he told the journalist Kathy Kadane twenty-five years later. "They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad [my emphasis]. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment." (source)

Indeed, Indonesia's leftists, secular democrats and trade unionists were all 'struck hard', leaving the Islamists, organising through one of the few non-banned institutions (the mosque), to resist. It is an inconvenient truth for the ruling elites that Islamic extremism emerges from the same globalised milieu as 'free trade' corporate rule.

So vale, Suharto. Te futueo et caballum tuum.

Birds of a Feather...

Is anyone actually surprised that, ahem, 'conservative' blogger, the Crusading Rodent, is linking to erm, 'white nationalist' groups? When will we see a shout-out for Stormfront? Or a post claiming that the KKK were simply misunderstood?