The anniversary solemnly marked on a rocky hilltop last week by the residents of Orania is not observed by many South Africans. Bittereinderdag (Bitter-ender Day) commemorates those among the Boers who refused to abide by the peace agreement concluded by their leaders more than a century ago, and fought to the bitter end against the advancing British Empire. But the townsfolk of Orania, a privately owned community populated by some 600 white Afrikaners who, like their forebears, never accepted the peace deal made by their own leaders that brought black majority rule to South Africa, use the day to rededicate themselves to the fading ideal of a separate Afrikaner nation state.
During the transition from apartheid to democracy in the early 1990s, Orania's founding fathers envisaged the town as the center of a new Volkstaat (People's State) that would emerge as a refuge for the country's 2.5 million Afrikaners who were expected to flee the post-apartheid society. And although only 600 Afrikaners followed them, they remain undeterred.
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#1
The Afrikaner made a bad mistake a long time ago when they didn't do everything in their power to bring endless numbers of Dutch and Fleming to fill South Africa.
Instead the British soon overwhelmed them. And while they would have probably still been heavily populated with British, it would have been far harder for them to have been muscled around to the point of extermination.
#2
The Brits didn't just overwhelm them with immigrant numbers. They waged a war of conquest and partial extermination, herding captured Boer women and children into concentration camps (where some 50% of the children, and 25% of the camps' population overall, died of overexposure, disease and starvation), while the Boer POWs were exiled overseas. Death rates for the Boer-territory native Africans, herded into separate concentration camps, are not known because records weren't kept, but are thought to be similar, if not worse.
All this because gold was found in the Transvaal, and the Brits wanted it. Wikipedia
The Bush administration is eager to believe that Kim Jong Il will -- for the first time -- fulfill his promises.
One hundred thirty-one days ago North Korea committed itself to shutting down the plutonium-producing Yongbyon nuclear reactor within 60 days, readmitting international inspectors and discussing "a list of all its nuclear programs" in exchange for 50,000 tons of fuel oil and the beginning of a normalization of relations with the United States. Since then the Bush administration has made a string of concessions to Pyongyang, most of them unmentioned in the Feb. 13 accord. The regime of Kim Jong Il has done nothing, other than skillfully extract those favors.
Friday in Pyongyang, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill predicted that the payoff for the United States and its negotiating partners was imminent. United Nations inspectors, he said, would visit the North this week, and the reactor would be shut down "the week after that, or two weeks after that." If so -- and we won't be holding our breath -- that will be good news. But the means of getting there ought to prompt more caution about a process that, even with a Yongbyon shutdown, will not have reached the point where North Korea's seriousness about denuclearization could be confirmed.
Mr. Hill's presence in Pyongyang was one of those extra concessions obtained by the North. In the past the Bush administration has resisted such one-on-one talks in favor of the six-party format; his was the first visit by a senior U.S. official in almost five years. While he was there, administration officials were anxiously awaiting confirmation of the return of $25 million in North Korean funds that had been frozen in a Macao bank because of a U.S. Treasury investigation. The United States promised a "resolution" of the investigation at the time of the Feb. 13 agreement; since then it has caved to the North's demands that it return all of the money -- not just that unconnected to criminal activities -- and transfer it through the U.S. Federal Reserve, thereby signaling Mr. Kim's restored access to the international banking system.
Though still waiting for the North's first step, Mr. Hill sounded almost euphoric on Friday. "I come away . . . buoyed by a sense that we are going to be able to achieve our full objectives, that is, complete denuclearization," he said in Seoul. As for the turning point defined by his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- North Korean action to permanently disable Yongbyon, along with a complete disclosure of its nuclear programs -- "that's a few months down the road," Mr. Hill said.
Yongbyon's dismantlement would indeed be a breakthrough. But months already have passed since the North missed the initial deadline for suspending operations at the reactor, with no consequence other than additional U.S. sweeteners. Mr. Kim seems adept at exploiting American impatience for a breakthrough. During its last weeks the Clinton administration was drawn in by North Korean hints about a deal on its missile program, and it dispatched Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang for what became a grotesque propaganda windfall for Mr. Kim. The missile deal never came close to materializing.
Given the threat posed by a loathsome dictatorship apparently armed with nuclear weapons, the Bush administration is right to explore whether Mr. Kim's promises of disarmament are serious this time. But it should stop making one-sided concessions to a regime that has, as yet, not shown it will do more than pocket them.
#1
Someone tell me again why MacArthur was stopped at the Yalu? We have been kowtowing to the Norks for almost 60 years. They've seized our ships and killed our soldiers and they are still able to maintain the largest prison in the world. They couldn't do this without our help. Where is someone like Teddy Roosevelt? enuf, already.
Ejaz Haider Prologue: What will Pakistan look like after General Pervez Musharraf is gone?
One argument can be that projecting a post-Musharraf scenario is difficult for two reasons. One, there are too many variables (given the multiplicity of threats to his rule and the diversity of opposition to him) in the run-up to the D-day itself, making it very hard to determine the probability of any one outcome.
Two, any post-Musharraf scenario itself will, quite obviously, depend on how the situation finally unfolds up to the point of his leaving the scene. In other words, any predictions on a post-Musharraf scenario, to be accurate, would need to ascertain how exactly he was ultimately pushed out and who did it.
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06/24/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Since the US has been a strong guiding hand to Perv during his reign, no doubt we have also been keeping a very sharp eye on his peers and subordinates, with a mind to helping him retain power, avoid assassination, create regime stability, and prepare for a reasonable successor.
Along with "plan B", "plan C", etc., through "plan Z".
To a great extent, the CIA would be tasked with heavily monitoring everyone in his inner circle and with power in the opposition, and ever so rarely to give Perv a heads up when somebody turns on him.
On top of that, we give Perv lots of strategic advice on how to gradually weaken his enemies and strengthen his own position.
Khaled Ahmed
Everybody is pushing for the big change in Pakistan. It is not like anything in the past. It didnt happen when General Zia-ul Haq fired the government of Mohammad Khan Junejo. The politicians who took over after Zias death were the fruit of his loins. The army slid into the background. It did not rule through martial law, but acted as arbiter under Article 58/2/B. In this role, it was actually more lethal.
That was the democratic phase of the 1990s. Are we preparing to go back to it? Or has the final cut-off happened this time? In the past there was always somebody who was not against the army. That meant that the party that took on the army was stabbed in the back by another party. The phrase security risk was common currency in the civilian discourse. This time no one is on the side of the army, strangely not even the ruling PMLQ.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/24/2007 00:00 ||
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The army and its nuclear arsenal will be made safe only by changing the nature of the Pakistani state. Pakistan doesnt have the intellectual resources needed to make this transition. But action taken exclusively on the basis of economic self-interest can lead us to the same result.
I am sorry to have to break this to you but when the choice comes down to Islamist culture or rational self-interest, Islamist culture consistently wins out. If these people were rational to begin with, Islamic fundamentalism would not even exist there.
#2
I'll tell you what will happen to Pakistan, Khaled. Eventually you'll push India too far and will be broken into a bunch of smaller, less dangerous, states.
#4
What if we discover on a closer scrutiny of the past that the army becomes interfering or intervening if it is ideological? Can we agree on getting rid of the armys dominance by agreeing to get rid of its ideology? We suddenly come across our first intellectual challenge. We think that we have put all challenges to rest by agitating for the freedom of the judiciary, but the real challenge lies in rethinking the ideology of the state.
What is Pakistans ideology? What moves the state to act the way it does? When we think of Pakistans ideology what do we mean by it? Most of us think it is religion. At least the religious parties think like that. The rightwing non-clerics and the clerics find in the two-nation doctrine their common point: the treatment of non-Muslims as the second nation in Pakistan. But the rightwing non-cleric in some cases is exclusively thinking of India when he talks of the two-nation doctrine.
Some people have made the mistake of seeing Musharraf's work as a load of rubbish about countering terrorist insurgencies, but clever people like me, who talk loudly in restaurants, see this as a deliberate ambiguity, a plea for understanding in a miltarized world. The points are frozen, the beast is dead. What is the difference? What indeed is the point? The point is frozen, the beast is late out of Peshwar. The point is taken. If Osama's goat would spurn Ahmadinejad the engine must be our head, the troop carrier our oesophagus, the border guard's our left lung, the petrol truck our shins, the artillery the piece of skin at the nape of the neck and the security checkpoint an electric goat called Fatima. The clarity is devastating. But where is the ambiguity? It's over there in a box. Musharraf is saying the 8.15 from Karachi when in reality he means the 8.13 from Karachi. The train is the same only the time is altered. Ecce homo, ergo goat. Osama knew his sister and knew her bloody well. The point is taken, the beast is moulting, the fluff gets up your nose. The illusion is complete; it is reality, the reality is illusion and the ambiguity is the only truth. But is the truth, as al-Maliki observes, in the box? No there isn't room, the ambiguity has put on weight. The point is taken, the goat is dead, the beast stops at Islamabad, Kahn stops at nothing, I'm having treatment and Osama can get knotted.
#4
Sadr doesn't want to be a puppet, he wants to be a dictator. He has to break the connectino at some point and now, after they withdrew him and made him look like a coward, and now that htey are likely to push into conflict with America is as good a time as any to split.
Lay low, wait for the yanks to leave, and then he can work a better deal by appealing to the Shia population as a hero of the revoltion and non-Iranian puppet.
Will someone rid the world of this meddlesome priest?
We gave a traitor to the general
He put him in a sack
Bright and early next morning
He was branded on the back
We wrote upon him
Return to sender, address Tehran
Hes such a traitor, hes no imam
His teeth are crooked, his ass is fat
You say youre sorry but we just have to send him back
So we dropped him at the checkpoint
Threw him from a fast Humvee
Bright and early next morning
He waddled back for tea
We wrote upon him
Return to sender, address Tehran
Hes such a traitor, hes no imam
This time were gonna take it to them
Were gonna go and make a stand
And if he comes back the very next day
Then well bomb Iran, we wrote upon him
Return to sender, address Tehran
Hes such a traitor, hes no imam
In Bushzarro world, and its concurrent manifestation in the world of Zionism, up is down, black is white, and cave-dwelling terrorists have their paws on nanotechnology and biochip brain implants.
According to Dr Yair Sharan, director of Tel Aviv Universitys Interdisciplinary Centre for Technology Analysis and Forecasting, terroristsnot the NWO type, mind you, but the Muslim sortwill in 20 short years utilize "suicide bombers remote-controlled by brain-chip implants" and unleash "nano-technology cluster bombs, or biological compounds for which there is no antidote."
Such horrors will not be devised in Iran or "al-Qaeda" controlled areas of Iraq or hopelessly backward Afghanistan but right here in the good old USA. Of course, our spooks and military men would never use such things on innocents, never mind the CIA will supposedly come clean, according to Michael Hayden, and detail how the spook and world mayhem organization conducted "a series of 'unwitting tests on US civilians, including the use of drugs," the Los Angeles Times reports.
It is well-known the CIA used swine and dengue fever viruses against Cuba, and the Pentagon conducted radiation experiments on U.S. soldiers and even Eskimos, unwitting patients at university hospitals were injected with plutonium and uranium, mycoplasma was used in research on private citizens by the University of Maryland, and there are countless less documented cases of anthrax, tularemia, yellow and Q fever, botulinum toxin, wheat rust, rice blast, etc., ad nauseam, used against people and plants in Asia, South and Central America, and the Caribbean.
Dr Yair Sharan makes no mention of the terrorists who sprayed Agent Orangeand Agent White, Agent Blue, Agent Purple, Agent Pink and Agent Greenover Southeast Asia, resulting in countless cases of peripheral neuropathy, spina bifida, Type 2 diabetes, acute myelogenous leukemia, renal cancer, testicular cancer, spontaneous abortion, birth defects, neonatal or infant death and stillbirths, low birth weight, childhood cancers, abnormal sperm parameters, cognitive neuropsychiatric disorders, ataxia, peripheral nervous system disorders, circulatory disorders, respiratory disorders, skin cancers, urinary and bladder cancer, on and on.
No mention, as well, of the terrorists who dispensed tons and tons of depleted uranium in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Serbia, a process, according to Leuren Moret, that "will slowly annihilate all species on earth including the human species . Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those regions, where there are resources which the US must control, in order to establish and maintain American primacy." As we now know, depleted uranium particles are responsible for chronic myeloid leukemia, lymphoma, melanoma, pancreas carcinoma, Gulf war-syndrome, fibromyalgia, auto-immune deficiencies, lung-, liver-, kidney failure, on and on.
Before frightening the little ones with Brothers Grimm stories about future terrorists unleashing nanotech cluster bombs, Dr Yair Sharan may want to take a look at his own government, responsible for "a new type of explosive" used in the Gaza Strip last year. "These explosives contain toxics and radioactive materials which burn and tear the victims body from the inside and leave long term deformations," the Electronic Intifada reported.
"Allegations that Israeli forces have used chemical and biological weapons date back to the War of 1948," notes Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel. "In March 2003, the highly-respected BBC television network presented Israels Secret Weapon, an investigation of Israels development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The BBC reported: 'The Israeli army has used new unidentified weapons. In February 2001 a new gas was used in Gaza. A hundred and eighty patients were admitted to hospitals with severe convulsions .Israel is outside chemical and biological weapons treaties and still refuses to say what the new gas was."
And then there was Israels attack against Lebanon last summer. "Blackened bodies have been showing up at hospitals in southern Lebanon two weeks into the war between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas," the Sydney Morning Herald reported. "Bachir Cham, a Belgian-Lebanese doctor at the Southern Medical Centre in Sidon . said the bodies of some victims were 'black as shoes, so they are definitely using chemical weapons. They are all black but their hair and skin is intact so they are not really burnt."
Im supposed to worry about "terrorists armed with powerful new explosives delivered by robot" and "remote controlled toys [that] might be used to deliver dangerous payloads into crowded places like supermarkets" at some destination in the future?
In 20 years, when Sharans alarmist and politically skewered predictions come true, many of us will likely be at deaths door from the deadly effects of depleted uranium and other industrial and military toxins increasingly polluting the biosphere. If Leuren Moret is correct, there will be precious few Muslims and Arabs remaining in the Middle East to receive brain chip implants and sneak "radical nanotechnology that could produce something called the MOAB, or Mother of All Bombs" into the United States.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
