Articles for July 2006

Cheney – ‘Condi Rice Is Rubbish’

The only black and female member – how very handy – of the Bush administration is about to have an accountability moment not from the public or the opposition, (such as it is) but from her own side, Dick Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s offices to be precise…

Funny how they didn’t notice her incompetence back along when. It was just as bloody obvious as the nose on your face then, as it is now:

April 20, 2004

A Review of Rice’s Uncertain Alliances

Czech Mate for Condi
By JOSEPH KALVODA

Review in American Historical Review (1985):[please note that the reviewer evidently believes Dr. Rice is a man]

CONDOLEEZZA RICE.

The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983: Uncertain Allegiance.

Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1984.

Pp. xiv, 303. $37.50

To write a scholarly study on the relationship of the Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak army without access to relevant Czechoslovak and Soviet documents is difficult. Therefore, much of this book by Condoleezza Rice is based on secondary works. His thesis is that the Soviets directly influence military elites in the satellite countries, in addition to the Soviet Communist party interacting with the domestic party. Rice selects Czechoslovakia as a case study and attempts to show the role of the military as instrument of both national defense and the Soviet-controlled military alliance.

Rice’s selection of sources raises questions, since he [sic] frequently does not sift facts from propaganda and valid information from disinformation or misinformation. He passes judgments and expresses opinions without adequate knowledge of facts. It does not add to his credibility when he uses a source written by Josef Hodic; Rice fails to notice that this “former military scientist” (p. 99) was a communist agent who returned to Czechoslovakia several years ago. Rice based his discussion of the “Sejna affair” (pp. 111, 116, 144) largely on communist propaganda sources and did not consult writings and statements by former General Jan Sejna who had access to Warsaw Pact documents and is the highest military officer from the Soviet bloc to defect to the West since World War II.

Rice’s generalizations reflect his lack of knowledge about history and the nationality problem in Czechoslovakia. For example, in 1955 Czechoslovakia was not yet “the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic” (pp 83, 84). In May 1938 Ludvik Svoboda was serving in the Czech army, not organizing a Czech military unit in Poland. In the fall of 1939 he was captured by the Soviet invading forces in eastern Poland; he did not “[escape] to the USSR” (p. 43). Rice’s discussion of the “Czechoslovak Legion” that was “born during the chaotic period preceding the fall of the Russian empire” (pp. 44-46) is ridiculous. (It was “born” on September 28, 1914.) He is clearly ignorant of the history of the military unit as well as of the geography of the area on which it fought.

[…]

The writing abounds with meaningless phrases, such as is its “last word”: “Thirty-five years after its creation, the Czechoslovak People’s Army stands suspended between the Czechoslovak nation and the socialist world order” (p. 245).

Joseph Kalvoda teaches at Saint Joseph College West Hartford, Connecticut.

Read whole article

Nope, sorry boys, you don’t get out of it that way. Any fool could sea she’s always been totally out of her depth in international diplomacy – but that was what you wanted, wasn’t it?

UPDATE: Tristero has a different theory, one I think may be bang-on.

Harry’s Place, Free Republic for Brits

Guest-posting at Lenin’s Tomb, Justin Horton examines Harry’s Place, the British version of Free Republic, and finds it has very similar rabid wingnut tendencies, although it’s titularly a Labour blog:

[…]

HP’s writers are, briefly, McCarthyites. Their practice and purpose is to support the Iraq War, Israel, and general warmongering, by throwing mud at their opponents: by slandering those who oppose them as terrorists and anti-Semites. Their squalid means of achieving this squalid goal, I’d narrow down to two: a game called We Are Fighting Terrorists, Therefore You Are One and a slightly different one called Links.

In Links, or Two Degrees of Separation, you say this: because X is connected with Y who is connected with Z – who is apparently an anti-Semite – therefore X is an anti-Semite too. It is an easy game, because nearly everybody is connected with nearly everybody else, especially in a broad movement (the movement against the war being, as it goes, pretty broad, encompassing as it does most of the population of the world). Curiously, though, it is never played with the war’s proponents: we do not say, for instance, “Tony Blair is best mates with George Bush whose best mate was Ken Lay who was a prodigious crook”. Nor do we go via Lord Levy, or via Tessa Jowell’s husband, or straight to Silvio Berlusconi.

You Are A Terrorist bids us trace a similar connection: because some of the people fighting the US in Iraq are terrorists, you are one with them. (It has a corollary, roughly stated “because the enemy are bad, that means that we are good”: it is the same Certificate of Perpetual Immunity that Israel is awarded by its admirers and which is currently being used to justify the slaughter of civilians in Beirut.) It is, quite simply, traitor-hunting. It sniffs out and identifies fifth columnists, complicit with the enemy and acting on the enemy’s behalf. And this is, pretty much, what Harry’s Place is there to do. It smears the opponents of the war. To read, takes a strong stomach: to agree, takes an absent sense of right and wrong. Its arguments could not be more ad hominem: except that the objects of their attack are imaginary, devils of their own devise.

[…]

But nobody is listening. Which is, I understand – I finally understand – the whole reason why they have such a hysterical tone. What tone do you adopt when people believe you and your cause appears to be prevailing? Dismissive, perhaps. Triumphant. Perhaps most common, smug. But this sort of hysteria? It’s true, it can belong to triumph, or at least to the temporary triumph of the witch-hunt, the search for traitors, Joe McCarthy’s America, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Torquemada’s Spain. But this is not the hysteria of those who persecute the Unbelievers. This is the hysteria of the Unbelieved.

[…]

A bit overwrought, perhaps, but he makes a valid point. The rump of Blair’s supporters are growing increasingly shrill as the public’s credulity drops away with each new horror.

What I think Justin underestimates though is the actual, physical danger these people could conceivably pose to those they consider ‘traitors’. They aren’t on the political fringe – these are the core supporters of a government that doesn’t think twice about suppressing dissent, that has already colluded in rendition and torture and that wants to lock people up indefinitely without charge or trial, for trumped up crimes like the ‘glorification of terrorism.

The New York Times had a hoax anthrax attack from people who called the paper traitorous, and HP’s writers and commenters are those attackers’ spiritual kin. But it’s unlikely that something similar’d happen to a UK journalist or publication, in my opinion. Too crude. Labourites are a little more subtle than that, though there are some in Labour Friends of Israel that can be particularly vicious when it comes to those they consider traitors to the zionist cause.

Actual physical violence is unlikely, as I said, but if it does occur it’s much more likely to happen by proxy – one phone call could be all it would take to turn someone’s life into a Kafkaesque hell or even end it, and the putative HPer would have clean hands.

Remember Forest Gate and Stockwell?

Comment Of The Day

On winger Cliff May‘s equating punditry with frontline war service:

“When an intellectual/electronic IED from Osama bin Laden or somebody else blows up some winger’s laptop in a Starbucks and he has to get fitted for robotic hands at Walter Reed or Johns Hopkins, I will begin to listen.

Bruce Homepage 07.25.06 – 2:02 pm # “

How Cute Is This?

“Blowing bubbles : “Cess,” a short-beaked Echidna, blows a mucus bubble through his nose as he recovers from injuries at Taronga Zoo’s wildlife clinic in Sydney.
(AFP/Greg Wood) “

H/T Norbizness

Progress, Of A Sort

The BBC reports that parents of British soldiers killed in Iraq have won the right to have the decision to go to war judicially reviewed. Finally a crack in the facade?

It’s progress, at least – and not only there, but also in the Stephen Lawrence investigation, where there’s finally to be an investigation of the coverup of corruption between a senior officer closely involved in the original enquiry, and the gangster father of one of the accused.

I remember marching with thousands of others to shut down the BNP bookshop in Welling, close to where Stephen Lawrence was murdered, and to protest the subsequent police coverup.

Riot police, anti-fascist march, Welling 1993

If the savagery with which the riot squads penned the protestors in a cul-de-sac, then had baton-wielding mounted police ride them down is any guide, the Met’s desire to hide their own corrupt complicity ( not just in the racist Lawrence murder but in criminal gang and far-right activity in London and the South East generally) was pretty damned strong.

The corruption of the investigation has been an open secret ( see Private Eyes passim) ever since the murder – so why investigate now? Maybe certain as yet unknown sensitive individuals have retired, or died, or the political winds have shifted within the Met and the knives are out for someone.

Maybe some on- the-square officer offended the senior master at a Lodge dinner or cut him up on the fairway at the golf club – who knows? Whatever the reason and for what it’s worth , the police have opened an incident room.