Sex Ed - Ignorance is Strength
I have been reading today's Observer which has a whole article about the American sex education program for kids - which just tells them not to have sex. Apparently there is a survey by Yale which shows that 80 percent of them go ahead and have pre-marital sex anyway and they are more likely to get sexually transmitted diseases because they don't know about safe sex. Oh well.

Also Bush is giving 5 million dollars of the 15 million dollars allocated to fighting AIDS in Africa to fundamentalist campaigns against sex.

It sounds a bit like the junior anti-sex league in Orwell's 1984.
Still "Ignorance is Strength" goes along with "War is Peace" and "Freedom is Slavery".

Phone taps
"Good morning, how are you? It's Osama Bin Laden here, we have a list of places we would like you to bomb this week, have you got a pencil?"
Is it likely that terrorists operate in this way? Or is it more likely that cells operate without direct communication with the centre so that phone tapping is of no use?
If so I wonder why the police are so keen to use them. Could it be that although terrorists may not be easily caught by phonetapping, peace activists or trade unionists - any legitimate protester or whistle-blower - may be less canny?
The state has blatantly used anti-terrorist legislation to target anti-capitalist and peace protestors who could not be described as terrorists by any sane person.
If they take away our rights, there will be nobody to protest when they take away yours!

Racism Ignorance Prejudice
Howard has caught the BNP in the shower and nicked their clothes. Realistically, if they want to deport all the immigrants they would have to wade through blood to do it. The holocaust worked because people (except at Treblinka) stood in line to be killed. They will never make that mistake again.
Howard knows full well that the BNP agenda cannot be carried out. He does not want to carry it out. He just wants their votes.
And I repeat the question which has been raised before. Where are the rivers of blood Enoch promised us all those years ago? Were they just lies to cultivate fear?

People fear "the number" of immigrants. This may be because they estimate between 18 and 28 percent of the population are immigrants. These are the "facts" these are the "common sense numbers" they are working from. In fact the figure is a bit less than five percent.

Racism
Ignorance
Prejudice

RIP

Auschwitz
The BBC correspondent at the memorial service at Auschwitz was visibly moved. The whole idea of the death camps is just so hard to get your head round and words seem inadequate.

Men don't cry but what else are they supposed to do?

The world leaders gathered to commemorate Auschwitz but there has to be a pinch of hypocrisy in everything they do. They wage war. They spend billions on weapons while people still starve..

I would rather listen to the voices of ordinary people. The survivors with their complex human emotions, the ordinary German civilians who honestly didn't know what was being done in their name.

I also remember the Nazis hated disabled people, gay people, trade unionists, Roma people...the list goes on. Asylum seekers would be on the list these days.

Debate on TES website
A perfectly serious debate on the TES website included the following light-hearted contribution:

"What is it with you guys?
You drive German cars,
You eat South African or Israeli oranges,
You drink tea or coffee which is really hard to grow in the Home Counties
Half of your TV is made in America
....yet as soon as you see an immigrant you hide under the table. Grow up FFS"

Michael Howard you bastard!
Michael Howard you bastard! I swore blind nothing could make me vote Labour
and then you go and do this!
In France people held their noses and voted for Chirac under the inspiring
slogan, "Vote for the Crook not the Nazi."
So in England are we stuck with "Vote for the lying warmonger not the racist lying warmonger."?
What a glorious prospect. We deserve a better choice. (I will still vote socialist if there is a candidate.)

However a lot depends on how Labour reacts. If they respond by trying to prove they are every bit as "tough on immigrants" as the Tories we will end up with a kind of dutch auction...with both sides parroting Heinrich Himmler's notorious phrase "This is not racism it is common sense."

Is anybody going to stand up and say the issue of immigration is irrelevant? It is one world. We have to help each other. - and back that up with policies to spend more on public services so the shortages which the racists blame on immigrants no longer exist. (That is not very New Labour is it?)

Condoleeza's Invasion List
Condoleeza Rice seemed to be giving out an invasion list when she appeared before the senate. The aim is to "spread democracy" throughout the world by bombing it into submission.
In particular the idea of spreading democracy to Venezuela is interesting. Venezuela is a democracy but like Chile the people elect "the wrong man" so Uncle Sam is ready to help the military to "restore order."

Chavez was elected president in 1998. He has condemned the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and threatened to cut off oil sales to the United States. Since then, more than $1 million in U.S. government money has been given to Venezuelan opposition groups for democracy-training programs under the auspices of the National Endowment for Democracy - a private agency funded entirely by the U.S. government.

Last August, Chavez survived a referendum to recall him. The vote marked the eighth time Chavez's mandate as leader has been approved since 1998, after two presidential elections and six referendums. Chavez supporters criticize the U.S. for supporting a failed coup attempt against the president in April 2002. Chavez was removed from power by a coalition of military officials and business leaders but returned to office two days later.

More torture photos
The photographs which have appeared in the media today showing torture by British soldiers of alleged looters in Iraq are really sickening. Is this the way they expect to get people to vote in the election? Is it some new kind of canvassing: standing on top of prisoners and asking them if they want to vote for Allawi?

And what kind of dipstick takes photos like that in the first place and then takes them to the chemist to be developed?

My youngest son was arrested protesting against the war and we all held a vigil at our local war memorial. I will never vote Labour again (well I suppose one should never say never, they might bring back Clause Four, expel Blair, put him on trial and apologise for the war ... but how likely is that?)

The Exception to the Rulers
Now Playing: goldfrapp
The Exception to the Rulers

By Amy and David Goodman
ISBN 1-4013-0131-2
Published by Hyperion

When you think of a journalist do you think of a sleazy individual only interested in pop stars, royalty and sex scandals? Amy Goodman can make you think again.

Amy Goodman is the reporter who faced the Indonesian military in East Timor in 1991 armed only with a microphone. She placed herself in harm's way hoping to help the brave civilians who were marching against the military and to tell their story to the world. The Indonesian military had a reputation for killing Australian journalists. Almost the first question they asked when they attacked her was "Australian?" "They had stripped us of our possessions, but I still had my passport. I threw it at them. When I regained my breath I said again 'We're from America! America!'

"Finally the soldiers lowered their guns from our heads. We think it was because we were from the same country their weapons were from. They would have to pay a price for killing us that they never had to pay for killing Timorese." Her coverage of repression across the globe has been a dangerous battle to bring the truth to the public, hindered rather than helped by the corporate media. Imagine for example putting her coverage of Chevron's blatant support for vicious repression in Nigeria alongside adverts for Chevron!

Amy Goodman and her brother have pioneered independent media in the United States. The hour-long TV program produced in New York and available over the internet at http://democracynow.org is a daily indictment of the war and the attack on civil liberties in the US and worldwide. It is surprising to watch as it has the format of a news program like any other but deliberately includes all the voices which the corporate media excludes.

That includes voices like that of Rita Lasar who lost her brother in the terrorist attack on the twin towers, a few blocks from the studios where Democracy Now! is broadcast. Rita's brother stayed in the building because he would not leave his quadraplegic friend behind. On September 14th Bush used his name and his story in his speech at the National Cathedral in Washington. "Rita quickly understood how her brother's gentle heroism was being used. She wrote a letter that appeared in the New York Times on September 18th 2001. "It is in my brother's name and mine that I pray that we, this country that has been so deeply hurt, do not do something which will unleash forces we will not have the power to call back." and of the fireman who lost four of his squad "As a rescue worker I can't say: we lost so let's kill six thousand more."

It is no accident that when the Democrat witch-hunt against Nader was at its height, when Michael Moore and Naomi Klein had crossed the picket line and supported Kerry, Democracy Now! Interviewed Nader and enabled him to expose the dirty tricks and the lies being used against his campaign.

Her book "The Exception to the Rulers" is a withering and closely argued indictment of "Oily Politicians, War Profiteers and the Media that loves them." If you want chapter and verse on the links between Big Business and the Bush administration; between the corporations and corrupt totalitarian regimes around the world and all of them with the media in the US: this is the book to read.

One example of the power of independent media among the many in the book is the battle of Seattle in 1999 - "My colleagues and I from Democracy Now! Spent long hours in the streets with journalists from the independent media centre, being gassed and harassed by police dressed in black futuristic body armour as we attempted to report what was happening to the world. "While the networks were quoting the police saying that they were not using rubber bullets, independent media reporters were uploading minute-by-minute images as we all picked up the bullets off the street by the handful."

In advocating independent media, Amy Goodman does not ask to be admired. She asks to be emulated.

You can get your local library to get a copy. It is very useful work of reference for socialists and for students of the media.

New torture charges
As I write this, British soldiers Fusilier Gary Bartlam, Lance Corporal Mark Cooley, Corporal Daniel Kenyon and Lance Corporal Darren Larkin are standing trial for involvement in torture. So far the only person to be punished has been Piers Morgan of the Daily Mirror who did not torture anybody but published some pictures which turned out to be fakes.

The fake photos were suspiciously useful both to distract attention from the very real photos being circulated of torture by the US and the photos which they must have known about which are being used as evidence in the trial of four British soldiers.

The real snaps were found on a roll of film handed in at a developers in Tamworth, Staffordshire, by 19-year-old Fusilier Bartlam. Shop assistant Kelly Tilford alerted police.

In one photograph, an Iraqi captive is tightly bound and gagged and clinging to a forklift truck, before being cut loose and falling to the ground.

Photos show what appears to be a soldier aiming a kick at the head of an Iraqi and a soldier standing on top of a man in what looks like a pool of blood.

It is alleged two Iraqis were forced to strip and pose in sexual positions.

Gonzales would not regard any of this as torture as only "trauma similar to the loss of an organ or death" is torture in his book. In the Senate hearing he both agreed and disagreed with this view in the same breath.

ALBERTO GONZALES: If i may, sir, let me try to give you a quick answer, but I'd like to put a little bit of context. There obviously we were interpreting a statute that had never been reviewed in the courts, a statute drafted by Congress. We were trying to interppret the standard set by Congress. There was discussion between the White House and Department of Justice as well as other agencies about what does this statute mean? It was a very, very difficult -- I don't recall today whether or not I was in agreement with all of the analysis, but I don't have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached by the department. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the department to tell us what the law means, Senator.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: And do you agree today that for an act to violate the torture statute, it must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death?

ALBERTO GONZALES: I do not, sir, that does not represent the position of the executive branch, as you know..