The fallujah massacre
The massacre at Fallujah will backfire on the US whatever the outcome.

A hundred years from now there will still be revenge attacks against American targets to commemorate the massacre at Fallujah.

Unlike Vietnam the insurgents do not have the backing of the Soviet Union and there is far less sympathy for the aims of the resistance in the West than there was for the NLF. Nevertheless the comparison with Vietnam is not unreasonable. The dilemma is the same. What Gore Vidal christened "American imperialism" can neither withdraw (and admit defeat?) nor stay (and count the body bags coming home?). To use a phrase used at the time of the Vietnam conflict they can "declare victory and come home."

Even filtered through the "embedded correspondents" the viewing public are seeing homes not so different from their own homes being destroyed. It takes a little imagination to realise that the people in those houses are without water, without food and forbidden on pain of death to go outside. What must it be like for them. Yes they sympathise with the resistance. Wouldn't you in the same circumstances?

Democracy Now
Democracy Now is a beacon of hope in a dark world! http://www.democracynow.org has been dispassionately telling the story of Fallujah this morning.

The soldiers hired by the richest people in the world and going in with guns blazing against some of the poorest people on this planet. They don't have much but what little they have is to be taken from them.

The first target was the hospitals, one was bombed into oblivion and another occupied because "they have been the source of rumours about civilian casualties."

Many of the soldiers - little more than children themselves - have zero combat experience. One marine sergeant was quoted as estimating 95 percent of the men under his command had no such experience.

I do not believe violence solves anything but if we had been invaded and some pal gave me a rocket launcher and pointed out, "these are the people who are imprisoning and raping our women, torturing our men, killing our children - now they are coming to destroy the town you live in." I might just respond, "how do you fire this thing?" What would you do?

Fallujah.
This was murder.

"Lesser Evil" in Fallujah?
Now Playing: tainted love
The Democrats are talking about "learning the lessons" of their defeat. Yet all their deliberations boil down to making themselves more like the Republicans because "ooh look the Republicans won."

Another view is that the Republicans won because there was no alternative. People correctly saw that there was no serious difference between the two candidates.

Right now our government and the Americans are preparing to commit cold-blooded murder in Fallujah. It is necessary to destroy the place in order to save it. The Blair government is a direct result of the "lesser evil" strategy. Do you think the women and children of Fallujah will feel any difference?

I have been receiving emails all day from Americans virtually apologising for being American. If they retreat into self-guilt and helplessness and pursue another "anything is better than Bush" strategy...well we already know what the outcome will be....either the Democrats suffer another humiliating defeat or it makes no damned difference if they win.

If on the other hand Americans break from the two party (in reality ONE party) system then there is hope for the future. This does not have to be the nadir of democracy.
Nader next time.

Good news Kerry lost
The race between tweedledum and tweedledumber is over. Admittedly Bush will now be looking very smug - but how will we be able to tell? In reality, one millionaire backed by the corporations was thrashed by another millionaire also backed by the corporations. If Kerry had won it would have been a repeat of the situation in the UK when Blair won and people thought "things can only get better." In fact they got a lot worse.

If Kerry had won we would have been out on the streets protesting his Iraq policy within weeks, as soon as people realised no he wasn't withdrawing from Iraq - he never said he was!

As American socialists traditionally said:

"Dump the elephant
Dump the ass
build a party of the working class :)"

http://socialistparty.org.uk

Halloween
The shops in Forest Row are full of Halloween displays. I can just imagine Mr and Mrs Satanist shaking their heads and complaining about the commercialisation of their festival.

100000 dead nothing said!
If the entire population of Cambridge were wiped out, I imagine even the Tabloids would find space on the front page to mention it. Clearly if the same number of people die as a result of the war in Iraq that is "not news".
The Americans and the Quisling government in Iraq have not bothered to count the civilian casualties in the war. However Dr Gil Burnham and his team from John Hopkins University in the US compared mortality rates in Iraq before and after the March 2003 invasion. The results published in the Lancet in the UK revealed the figure of 100000 casualties.

GIL BURNHAM(quoted on ABC): "And what we found was that mortality rates or death rates had increased substantially, and the thing that accounted for the increase in the death rates was violence."

"Much of this violence was - in fact most of it - related to the coalition forces being present, and the increased deaths were almost exclusively related to - not exclusively - but very heavily related to aerial bombardments of urban populations."

The headline in the pro-war Sun newspaper on this day? "Chelsea Sack Mutu"

Computers and Flutes
I sorted out a problem with a friend's computer today and she used the now time-honoured phrase "This stupid computer."
Reflexively I repeated the mantra "Computers are stupid so we have to be clever." which is one of those "things teachers say."

My daughter plays the flute. Imagine a recalcitrant pupil picking up a flute and finding he or she can't get a beautiful tune out of it immediately. "'ere this flute don't work" "this flute is crap!"

Another "thing teachers say" (or at least this teacher) is "imagine you are playing a computer game. You would not sit waiting for a teacher to come and show you what to do, you would experiment. Treat Mozilla the same way, try things out, experiment, see what happens. There is an "undo" button if it goes wrong. You cannot damage the program or the computer unless you are a total pilchard."

Yesterday was a good day at work. Two unpromising classes responded very well and got stuck in with Mozilla. The "learned helplessness" was in abayance. It will be interesting to see if the same thing happens with spreadsheets after half term :)

A question of language
Reading through my father's wartime diaries I find him opposing the ban on coloured soldiers being in the cinema at the same time as white soldiers ("they are good enough to die with or for the British but not good enough to share a cinema") and supporting the Egyptian workers fight against exploitation and colonialism. He also talks about chatting with Italian prisoners "with all racial prejudice put aside, as it should be."

Yet he uses the same racist terminology as the other soldiers, except that he puts it in inverted commas.

FR McMillan's wartime diaries
I didn't know my father. He died when I was seven so I only ever saw him through the eyes of an adoring child. My brother and sisters knew him much better. So it was a delight to me to get the transliteration of his wartime diaries from my sister. It shows the war from the point of view of a common soldier and it gives me an insight into how he thought and felt.

He was 27 when he began the diary and it is such a strange experience to read his words and try to imagine what it must have been like to go off to war. The diaries were written for us with the knowledge that he might not survive. What a casually brave man he was.

New York Times on "ghost detainees"
The BBC continues to states confidently that the Americans have "only two women prisoners", yet the New York Times reveals that the military authorities conceal prisoners at the behest of the CIA. If they don't even acknowledge the existence of these prisoners one wonders how they confidently determine their gender!

"The Central Intelligence Agency kept dozens of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and other detention facilities in Iraq off official rosters to hide them from Red Cross inspections, far more than has been previously reported, two senior Army generals said today.

"An inquiry by three generals issued last month found eight documented cases of so-called "ghost detainees," but two of the officers said in congressional testimony and interviews later that depositions with military personnel at the prison suggested the number was far higher.

"The number is in the dozens , and perhaps up to 100," Gen. Paul J. Kern, the senior officer who oversaw the inquiry into the role of military intelligence personnel in the prisoner-abuse scandal, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. He added that a precise number would never be known because there were no records kept on most of the C.I.A. detainees. "

Posted by derekmcmillan at 4:34 PM BST

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