Big fleas

have little fleas

upon their backs to bit 'em.

Little fleas

have lesser fleas,

and so ad infinitum...

 

 

Best non-fiction : The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan

 

Baloney Detection Kit

 

The CIA's  greatest hits  

 

What is Peak Oil? (or is this another conspiracy theory)

 

Generous Support?  and more on the Ford Foundation

 

Disciplinedminds 

 

Academic freedom to be silent?  

 

Link to website of Anand Patwardhan, director of the documentary War and Peace.  This was one of best films screened in SA in 2003 (or ever). It's point of departure is the 1998 nuclear weapons tests of India and Pakistan. It includes coverage of : the BJP, nationalism in India and India's nuclear programme since 1998;  interviews with ordinary people and their  rejection of the divisions between Pakistan and India; a female dance artist who discusses her work and the impact of cultural suppresion in Pakistan; a Japanese memorial to the 1945 bomb and an interview with a survivor; and an interview with a scientist at the Smithsonian Institute on restrictions imposed on the museum display on the 1945 use of the bomb by the USA. War and Peace does not shock, it informs in a  sobering and unsensational way. 

 

Afghanistan, the Taliban and the United States - the Role of Human Rights in Western Foreign Policy by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. This article was first published by Online Center for Afghan Studies, January 12, 2001 and  is also posted on  http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq2.html. It is especially interesting in light of the notorius events which took place a few months after it was written. 

 

[abstract] This paper purports to concisely review the scale and nature of the current crisis in Afghanistan in its historical context, with the view to comprehend whether Western – particularly American – foreign policy toward Afghanistan has been formulated on the basis of humanitarian principles or not. By briefly analysing the extent of the catastrophe that continues to devastate the Afghan people to this day, and by uncovering its historical causes and contemporary geopolitical/strategic context, the paper outlines the responsibility of the international community for the ongoing war in the country. My thesis is that not only has the United States together with the former Soviet Union perpetuated the current catastrophe by having previously supported the armed factions in Afghanistan, but that covert US support of the most prominent faction in the country – the Taliban – continued throughout the 1990s, and may be continuing to this day. The US policy, I argue, is motivated not by humanitarian principles, but by lucrative economic and strategic interests in the region. The case of Afghanistan therefore illustrates the irrelevance of human rights in the formulation of US/Western foreign policy, and highlights the fundamental ongoing cause of the escalating catastrophe in the country in that policy.

 

"War is peace", "Freedom is Slavery", "Ignorance is Strength" , 

slogans from "1984", by George Orwell.

 

 this page was last updated December 2004