Text 5967, 191 rader
Skriven 2004-12-07 05:46:16 av Stephen Hayes (5:7106/20.0)
Kommentar till text 5592 av LEE LOFASO (1:123/140)
Ärende: Communist Rant
======================
LEE LOFASO wrote in a message to STEPHEN HAYES:
LL> Hello Stephen,
SH>From: family.debate@family-bbs.net (Debate)
SH>From: "Steve Hayes" <khanyab@lantic.net>
LL> Why post such an anti-American diatribe? Or should I say,
LL> "communist" rant? For somebody who claims to be against apartheid,
LL> why support apartheid along ethnic lines? After all, that is what
LL> Russia is doing - supporting a candidate who will act as a puppet
LL> for Russia.
SH>http://globalresearch.ca/articles/LAU411A.html
SH>The Spectator 5 November 2004
SH>How the US and Britain are intervening in Ukraines elections
LL> Definitely a "communist" rant.
But from an impeccable right-wing source.
LL> Are you a communist?
No, are you a fascist?
LL> Is that why you posted this piece of garbage?
SH>by John Laughland
Here's a follow-up, from a well-known leftist source...
PR man to Europe's nastiest regimes
David Aaronovitch
Tuesday November 30, 2004
The Guardian
Whenever, as this past week, eastern Europe is on the news, so too is a man
called John Laughland. Last Sunday he was playing Ukrainian expert on the BBC's
The World This Weekend, the day before he was here in the Guardian defending
the
Ukrainian election "result", and at the beginning of the month he was writing
for the Spectator - also on Ukraine.
Laughland's great strength is that he sees what no one else in the west seems
to. Where reporters in Kiev, including the Guardian's own Nick Paton- Walsh,
encounter a genuine democracy movement, Laughland comes across "neo-Nazis"
(Guardian), or "druggy skinheads from Lvov" (Spectator). And where most
observers report serious and specific instances of electoral fraud and
malpractice on the part of the supporters of the current prime minister,
Laughland complains only of a systematic bias against (the presumably innocent)
Mr Yanukovich.
A quick trawl establishes this to be the Laughland pattern over the past few
years and concerning several countries. Laughland has variously queried the
idea
that human rights are a problem in Belarus, or that the Serbs behaved so very
savagely in Kosovo. He has defended Slobodan Milosevic, criticised the
International Tribunal in the Hague and generally argued that the problem in
countries normally associated with human rights abuses is, in fact, the
intervention of western agencies.
It was the British Helsinki Human Rights Group hat that he was wearing last
Sunday. On its website the BHHRG - of which Laughland is a trustee - describes
itself as a non-governmental organisation which monitors human rights in the 57
member states of the Organisation for Security and Co- operation in Europe.
Laughland is listed as a trustee, the historian Mark Almond (to be found
writing
about the Ukraine in last week's New Statesman) is its chairman.
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Founded in 1992, the BHHRG sends observers to elections and writes reports
which
- along Laughlandish lines - almost invariably dispute the accounts given by
better known human rights organisations. This stance has led to the BHHRG being
criticised by the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights
(established in 1976) as preferring "the role [is to take] PR flak for a new
breed of authoritarian rulers in Europe" to the business of actually monitoring
abuses.
So what on earth is going on here? I know nothing about BHHRG's finances, but
the ideological trail is fascinating. Take the co-founder of the group,
Christine Stone. She was a lawyer before she helped set up BHHRG. Since then
she
has "written for a number of publications including the Spectator and Wall
Street Journal on eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union".
This information comes from a US website called Antiwar.com where, for a while,
Stone had a regular Thursday column. But Antiwar.com was not a leftwing site
opposing the Iraq war. It was a rightwing site set up to oppose the Kosovo
intervention in 1999. Its "editorial director" was a man called Justin Raimondo
who was active in the small US Libertarian party before joining the Republican
party. In the 1992, 1996 and 2000 elections he supported the campaigns of Pat
Buchanan, the far-right isolationist candidate.
Raimondo is also an "adjunct scholar" with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. This
is a libertarian think-tank in Auburn, Alabama, founded by one Lew Rockwell,
who
describes himself as "an opponent of the central state, its wars and its
socialism". A contributor to Rockwell's own site is Daniel McAdams, who is - in
his own words "honoured to be associated" with the British Helsinki Human
Rights
Group.
Trail 2. Laughland is also European Director of the European Foundation
(patron,
Mrs M Thatcher), which - judging by its website - seems to spend most of its
time and energy sending out pamphlets by arch-Europhobe Bill Cash. A synopsis
of
one of Laughland's own books, however, notes his argument that, "Post-national
structures ... and supranational organisations such as the European Union - are
... corrosive of liberal values (and) the author shows the ideology as a
crucial
core of Nazi economic and political thinking."
Beginning to get the picture now? Trail 3 leads us to Sanders Research
Associates, a "risk consultancy" for which Laughland is, according to their
website, "a regular contributor" and to which companies can subscribe for
information and advice. The "principal" is a Chris Sanders. The kind of steer
Sanders gives his customers can be adduced from this report on the morning of
the US presidential election. "We will be very surprised," he wrote, "if on
Wednesday John Kerry has not won a clear majority of electoral college votes
and
that his supporters are not nursing substantial post vote celebration
hangovers,
if not still drinking the champagne."
Lots of people got that one wrong, and some blamed their own judgment. Not
Sanders. "Our bet," he says following the results, "is that we will soon be
adding an investigation into the biggest vote fraud in history.'"
Sanders, it seems, is not beyond the odd bit of conspiracising. In a bulletin
from June 2002 he also has something to suggest about the Twin Towers atrocity.
"It was obvious then, and it is obvious now," he writes, "that something
besides
the brilliance of a band of terrorists or the incompetence of America's
security
apparatus was responsible for the disaster of 9/11." But he doesn't tell us
what
that "something" was.
Sanders on America and Laughland on Ukraine, however, are not the most amazing
features of Sanders Research Associates. That distinction belongs to the report
on Rwanda written for Sanders by a Canadian lawyer named Chris Black. Black is
the only person I have ever seen putting the word genocide in quotation marks
when applied to Rwanda. Rwanda, you see, was all the US's fault, and wasn't
carried out by Hutus in any case. It was all got up to justify US intervention
in the region. He condemns the "demonising (of) the Hutu leadership".
Since 2000 Black has been the lead counsel representing General Augustin
Ndindiliyimana, chief of staff of the Rwandan gendarmerie, at the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He is also chair of the legal committee for the
international committee for the defence of Slobodan Milosevic. Last year
(though
not for Sanders) Black went on a delegation to North Korea. The report he wrote
on his return is full of references to happy peasants, committed soldiers and
delightful guides. The North Korean system, he suggested, being
"participatory",
was in many ways more democratic than parliamentary systems in the west.
This is weird company. And what we seem to have in Laughland and his associates
is a group of right-wing anti-state libertarians and isolationists, suspicious
of any foreign entanglements, who have somehow morphed into apologists for the
worst regimes and most appalling dictators on the planet.
And where does it all end up? A couple of weeks ago Sanders commended to his
clients "John Laughland's series of articles [showing that] the attack on Iraq
is just the southern offensive of a larger campaign to tighten the noose on
Russia." And he continued, "What is less well understood are the risks that the
unravelling political compact in Israel poses for the United States and Great
Britain, whose political processes, intelligence services, military, media
and financial establishments are so thoroughly enmeshed with Israel's."
Read that last sentence again and then ask yourself: in what way are Britain's
media and financial interests "thoroughly enmeshed" with Israel's?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1362616,00.html
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* Origin: Khanya BBS, Tshwane, South Africa [012] 333-0004 (5:7106/20)
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