This according to a new study to be published in The Lancet this week, by the same team who did the much maligned 2004 study also published there, which was the first scientific study to the effects of the War on Iraq. The news this time is much worse:
WASHINGTON — More than 600,000 Iraqis have died violently since the U.S.-led invasion, according to a new estimate that is far higher than any other to date.
The report, by a team of researchers criticized for its death estimates two years ago, says that 601,027 Iraqis have suffered violent deaths since the March 2003 invasion. It also suggests that the country has become more violent in the last year.
“This clearly is a much higher number than many people have been thinking about,” said Gilbert Burnham, the report’s lead author and a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “It shows the violence has spread across the country.”
Iraq’s violent death rate rose from 3.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the year after the invasion to 12 per 1,000 from June 2005 to June 2006, according to the researchers, whose findings are being published this week in the British medical journal Lancet.
The article tries its best to throw mud on the study, dragging in all kinds of irrelevancies like the Iraqi Bodycount Project, all of which is still familiar from the 2004 study and all of which fails to conceal the magnitude of this disaster. It’s so much more than expected that I don’t know what to say about it, only to note that none of this was necessary.
Have you heard about the terrorism case coming before Burnley Crown Court later this month? No? That might be because there were no big raids, no special press conferences by the Home Secretary, no well-timed police leaks and yet not only where various chemical components found at the two subjects’ houses (the largest ever haul from a private home ever, according to the police) but also a rocket launcher and an NBC suit! So why does Google News only find eight articles about this?
Might it be because the subjects here were not Muslims, but white (ex-)British National Party members? The story does not fit in the government’s and media’s narrative about terrorism, so it’s ignored.
It’s seventy years ago that the Battle of Cable Street against Mosley’s fascists was fought and won by a broad coalition of Jews, trade unionists, Labour Party members, Communists and residents. It showed that anti-fascists forces could win these battles, despite police interference, despite unwillingness on the part of the then Communist Party leadership to commit themselves to the battle. Ordinary people could defeat fascists as long as they were united against it. Even though, as this this eyewitness report shows, the police was largely on the fascists side and was busy protecting their march.
That’s the other lesson of Cable Street of course, that the police is far more willing to use violence to protect fascist’ demonstrations against leftwingers than it is to do the opposite. You still see this whenever the modern equivalent of Mosley’s fascists march like recently in Amsterdam, when under the guise of an anti-pedophile march skinheads marched through Amsterdam-zuid, a neighbourhood with a large Jewish presence…
Of course you can have some sympathy for the view that in a democracy any group, no matter how odious their views, should be allowed to air them, as long as they stay within the law while doing so. But even when they don’t stay within the law, the police has a remarkable reluctance to take the fascists on, as the case of Redwatch shows:
Alec McFadden was dozing in his armchair when a loud bang on his front door brought him to his senses with a jolt. Looking out of the window of his Wallasey home, he saw a young man half slumped in the driveway. “I couldn’t see his face but he looked like he was in some sort of trouble, like he needed help,” says McFadden. “I opened the door just a bit to ask if he was OK and he threw himself at me and started hitting me around the head.”
What McFadden did not realise at the time was that he was not being punched but stabbed. “I think it went on for a couple of minutes before I managed to get the door closed. I turned round and my daughter was screaming. It was only then, as I put my hand to my face and felt the blood, that I realised what had happened.”
The attack, which left the long-time union activist with serious injuries, was the latest and most violent incident in a campaign of intimidation that has been waged against opponents of the far right in the UK over the past five years. Like hundreds of people who have spoken out against the rise of the British National Party and other extremist groups, McFadden’s picture and home address have been collected by far right activists and posted on a website called Redwatch.
The site, which has links with the neo-Nazi organisation Combat 18 and a host of European fascist organisations, is hosted in the US but registered and run from the UK. It lists the personal details and shows the photographs of anti-racists – many taken during protests against the British National Party – alongside the slogan: “Remember places, traitors’ faces, they’ll all pay for their crimes.” This month a delegation of MPs and union activists will visit the Home Office to call for the site to be closed down. It is a familiar refrain and in the past officials have argued that because the site is hosted abroad, there is nothing they can do. However, Redwatch’s sister site in Poland, which was also hosted in the US, was recently closed down after collaboration between authorities in the the two countries, and Home Office minister Vernon Coaker has agreed to champion the campaign within government.
So seventy years after the police attempted to let Mosley march through the Jewish area of Cable Street, the Home Office protects the right of Mosley’s spiritual heirs to intimidate and attack leftwingers and antifascists.
Up until the eighties Marvel used to publish comics that weren’t superheroes, all sorts from romance to western and from kung fu to horror. Many of these were instantly forgetable or cheap attempts to cash in on whatever genre became briefly popular, but they nevertheless managed to produce some classic comics. One example is Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy’s Master of Kung Fu, which made that most seventies of genres, the kung fu comic, actually worth reading, another was Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan’s Tomb of Dracula, an elegant seventies continuation of Bram stoker’s classic vampire novel. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s where Blade came from, later to star in three suprisingly good blockbuster movies. Tomb of Dracula was aimed at a somewhat older audience than your average Marvel superhero comic, especially in its shortlived magazine incarnation, which didn’t have to content with the Comics Code Authority.
Recently, Marvel has been reprinting the series in its Essential format: cheap, black and white trade paperbacks. These are ideal for fans who would like to read the series, but unable or unwilling to seek out the back issues themselves. Unfortunately however, Marvel has decided to tamper with the reprints, covering up the nudity that was present in some of the original issues, as Groovy Age of Horror reveals, which also has the scans shown here, as well as more examples of what’s been censored.
Now I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand, I dislike reprints that tamper with the original, especially when it’s not done by the original creators. On the other hand, this is not like covering up Lady Justice bare breasts: it wasn’t great art, just cheap tittilation and little is lost by the alterations. On the gripping hand, it is indictive of the current climate in the US, that things that could be sold with no trouble at newsstands in 1979 now need to be censored to sell in bookstores.
First, for the obsessive compulsives amongst y’all, Google has finally put their fingers out and updated their Google Earth photos for the Netherlands. It may not mean much to you but it means endless hours of fun looking for my house, my old house, my parent’s house, the office I currently work at, the previous offices I’ve worked at and so on und so weiter, all to get pictures like this:
My home town Middelburg.
Meanwhile, with slightly more relevance to people not called Martin Wisse, minister of Justice Piet Hein Donner has called the wrath of the entire Dutch right wing upon him, by explaining in an interview that of course, if two-thirds of Dutch voters want to introduce Sharia law to the country, that’s democracy and the vote of the majority counts. Cue all the usual anti-islamofascist white knights to wax indignantly and ask for his resignation, while his own party has made use of the opportunity to reiterate that they want a general ban on any party that wants to introduce sharia law (not that there is any) or might threaten to do so and oh yes, pedo parties should be banned as well. Not that this isn’t as big a threat to our democracy as having sharia law introduced here would be, of course not, no…
It’s all fairly childish as all people involved should know that a) few if any sane people want sharia law here b) the chance that at any point there will be enough people to vote it in is non-existent and c) even if a two-thirds majority could be found it would immediately run afoul of not just the Dutch constitution but also European law. The whole debate is just another snow job, a bit of posturing before the elections start. It would work too, if the Dutch voters weren’t sick and tired of Islamophobic fearmongering!
But mabye there is something to worry about, as Dutch protestant fundies found out their children think one fundie religion is as good as the other, by allegedly switching in their masses from Christianity to Islam. The big draw apparantly being the clear and simple moral guidelines Islam offers…
