bigOfeature

IMAGINING A “CLEAN BREAK” WITH ISRAEL… OVER IRAN

February 2, 2012 – 4:37 am

Are people today more susceptible to lies, packaged and organised as truth? That’s the true role of any “nation-building press”.

The world of science acknowledges matter-of-factly that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. There is simply no evidence for one. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, staffed by specialists on nuclear power and maintaining a tight watch on Iran’s civilian facilities, finds no evidence of a military program.

Two successive reports (National Intelligence Estimates) produced in 2007 and 2010 by all 16 US intelligence agencies have declared with confidence that there is no operative weapons program. US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and even Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak have both recently stated or let it slip that Iran is not currently attempting to build nuclear weapons.

But then there is the political world of systematic disinformation. The world of big, bold lies which, as they are constantly repeated, acquire a certain life of their own. Thus the mainstream press and the entire political class in this country refer routinely to “Iran’s nuclear weapons program” as though there obviously were one. As though any questioning of the charge were thoroughly naive. (By the way: try doing an advanced Google search for the exact phrase “Iran’s nuclear weapons program” and you will call up 4,640,000 results. Try “Israel’s nuclear weapons program” - which we know exists - and you’ll get 533,000. What does this tell you?)

The proponents of the lie rest assured that it will resonate, since it pertains to a Muslim country, and people here are largely conditioned to believe the worst about Muslims and see them as all complicit in some sort of anti-US movement. In a poll taken as late as 2007, 41 per cent of US citizens stated their belief that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks!

Similarly, misguided by well-funded and well-placed propagandists, people will believe anything about Iran.

Never mind that Iran has never in modern times attacked another country. Never mind that it had nothing to do with the 9/11 episode, and that thousands of Iranians rallied in solidarity with the people of the US after the attacks. Never mind that the majority of its people and their leaders are Shiites, like the people of Iraq, and that they’re sworn enemies of the Salafists in al-Qaeda as well as the Taliban. To the masters of disinformation they’re purveyors of terror, holding the world hostage to the threat of nuclear attack and Israel to total annihilation.

This view is so patently idiotic than many bright people might just roll their eyes in bewilderment and simply give up trying to challenge the mendacity. It’s tiresome, year after year, to refute the ever-expanding web of lies. But this is serious, dangerous idiocy broadcast from the citadels of power. It has become integral to US political culture.

The mission in 2002 was to persuade the people of this country that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and that it threatened us with weapons of mass destruction. No matter that Iraq had been subject to the most intrusive arms inspections regimen in history, was bleeding from sanctions, and wasn’t regarded by any of its neighbors (including Kuwait and Iran, which it had invaded) as a threat.

Through coordinated statements (”We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”) and leaks of (mis)information to complicit journalists, the Bush administration built a case for a truly criminal war (frankly pronounced “illegal” by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to the outrage of some US diplomats).

If the Bush administration officials weren’t consciously taking their cue from the Nazis, they surely embraced a Nazi-like logic. As Hermann Goering stated before his suicide in 1946, “Naturally the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag people along… This is easy.  All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

Never mind that Iran has never in modern times attacked another country. Never mind that it had nothing to do with the 9/11 episode, and that thousands of Iranians rallied in solidarity with the people of the US after the attacks. Never mind that the majority of its people and their leaders are Shiites, like the people of Iraq, and that they’re sworn enemies of the Salafists in al-Qaeda as well as the Taliban. To the masters of disinformation they’re purveyors of terror, holding the world hostage to the threat of nuclear attack and Israel to total annihilation.

And so we were told to fear an Iraqi nuclear attack on New York City. It worked beautifully. Most of the people were indeed dragged along. Neoconservatives hell-bent on transforming the “Greater Middle East” to advantage Israel concocted their case through the secretive “Office of Special Plans” and scared a large section of the public into rallying for war. And when no weapons of mass destruction were found, and no evidence for Iraqi-al Qaeda links were found, they slunk offstage quietly (Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle) with no apology, embarrassment or explanation (to say nothing of prosecution).

Who is most responsible for this utter lack of responsibility? Barack Obama! He came to power through the support of antiwar voters. His own opposition to the Iraq war was timid and partial; it was, he thought a “strategic blunder” rather than a crime.

The harbinger of Hope and Change was all smiles when he met the outgoing president, and made it clear that there would be no embarrassing Justice Department investigations or prosecutions of Bush-era officials for war crimes. He wasn’t outraged that the highest officials in the land had approved a campaign to hoodwink the people into endorsing a horrific assault on a country that did not threaten us. He just wanted to put that all behind us, be reconciliatory, “unite the country” and move on…

Part of “moving on” meant embracing the neocons’ lies about Iran. In his very first press conference after the 2008 election, Obama signaled his intentions. He was asked about his response to Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s friendly letter congratulating him on his election. He sidestepped the question but used the occasion to grimly declare that the US would not tolerate Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. It was a shameless sop to the Israel Lobby. And just as George W. Bush ignored the 2007 NIE on Iran’s nuclear program, Obama ignores the 2010 NIE and presses on with a policy of vilification and confrontation.

There is some distance between Israel and Washington on the Iranian nuclear question. The Likud Party would happily involve the US in another war (like the Iraq war based on lies) serving Israeli interests. But Obama apparently doesn’t want another war.

Obama can’t say what he must surely know: that the Israeli officials’ repeated references to Iran’s nuclear program as an “existential threat” to their state, echoed by neocons and the Lobby in the US, is sensationalistic fear-mongering of the sort Goering spoke of. The neocons have been bellowing “Bomb Iran!” for years hoping that the Christian Zionists and bought legislators will override “the judicious study of discernable reality.”

Dennis Hill, the leading Iran hawk in the Obama administration, may have left his National Security Council post last November out of chagrin at the fact that Obama had failed to carry out the attack Hill had advocated from at least 2008. (Described by Aaron David Miller, whom he’d served with as a diplomat during the Camp David negotiations of 1999-2000, as “Israel’s lawyer,” Hill had responded to the 2007 NIE by co-authoring a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece declaring that Iran was striving to become “a nuclear state” and that leaders needed to “mobilize the power of a united American public in opposition” and send aircraft carriers into the Persian Gulf. He has long advocated crippling economic sanctions on Iran, precisely to provoke actions that might be used to justify a US-Israeli attack.)

Still, Obama has acceded to the fundamental demand of the war-mongers: he has refused to respect the judgment of his own intelligence apparatus and relentlessly stepped up sanctions against Iran, arm-twisting allies to join in taking actions that many western legal scholars agree constitute acts of war. He does so ostensibly to derail a nuclear weapons program, but that is not the real reason. Nor is it because he believes that Iran truly constitutes an “existential threat” to Israel, which has its own 300 nukes. If he’s done his homework he knows that the Iranian regime is not even an “existential threat” to Iranian Jews.

Doesn’t Iran have the largest population of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel, a community tracing its history back two and a half millennia? And isn’t that community of maybe 35,000 protected by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa of 1979 and by representation in the Majlis far exceeding its numbers? (Jews are fewer than half of one per cent of Iran’s population, but their one constitutionally mandated seat in the Majlis is over three per cent of the total.)

Don’t synagogues operate legally (as they did, by the way, in Baathist Iraq)? And aren’t Hebrew schools funded by the Ministry of Education? Doesn’t Article 13 of the Iranian Constitution specifically allow Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians to “perform their religious rites and ceremonies, and to act according to their own canon in matters of personal affairs and religious education”? Didn’t a judge last year determine that Christians drinking wine during Communion were innocent of violating the law banning alcohol citing that article?

The real reason Washington wants regime change in Iran is that, in the most mass-based, genuine revolutionary upheaval in the modern history of the Muslim world, the Iranian people overthrew the brutal US-imposed regime of the Shah in 1979. This deprived the US of the services of the “Gendarme of the Gulf” serving US oil interests.

Obama and his team want to topple the regime in power in Tehran. But not primarily because it oppresses its people; this is the norm in the Middle East (and most places), and Washington (and Israel) have been comfortable enough with dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and now in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain…

Nor because it has allegedly threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” (That was a deliberate mistranslation of Ahmadinejad’s comment to a conference in 2005, indirectly quoting Khomeini, that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” He alluded in the same breath to the vanishing of the USSR and the regime of the Shah. He made no reference to Iran using force to make this happen.)

The real reason Washington wants regime change in Iran is that, in the most mass-based, genuine revolutionary upheaval in the modern history of the Muslim world, the Iranian people overthrew the brutal US-imposed regime of the Shah in 1979. This deprived the US of the services of the “Gendarme of the Gulf” serving US oil interests, and intervening in Yemen (to support royalists against republicans) and Oman (to suppress a secessionist movement). It was a huge blow to Washington’s geopolitical interests, and the US wants to reestablish its lost hegemony.

While there have been moments when the US flirted with the mullahs who replaced the Shah (the Iran-Contra episode under Reagan, Colin Powell’s brief consideration of rapprochement in 2001-2) the neocon advocates of “regime change” have always won out.

Iran under the Shah was a virtual ally of Israel, maintaining diplomatic and military relations and supplying it with oil. Since the Islamic Revolution Iran has maintained close ties with Palestinian resistance groups (notably Hamas) and the Lebanese Shiite-based Hizbullah. These are probably the two most popular political parties in Palestine and Lebanon respectively, but since they challenge the legitimacy of the Israeli settler-state, they are regarded by the US and most of its allies as “terrorists.” Hence Iran is a “supporter of international terrorism” and its government (like those of Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, etc.) should be destroyed - with no option left off the table.

The fact that there’s no evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program is an inconvenient truth. And it would surely be inconvenient for the US administration to state frankly that it’s trying to topple the Iranian regime - to either please the lying Likudists and enhance Israel’s power in the region, or to re-establish Anglo-American control of Iran’s oil production. Hence the ongoing campaign against discernible reality on behalf of another Big Lie.

A lot of people alarmed by the situation have been predicting an attack on Iran since 2002, the year of George W. Bush’s infamous “axis of evil” speech and the year when the neocons huddling around Dick Cheney came to dominate foreign policy. For a couple years I was convinced a strike was imminent, only to learn that during Bush’s second term he had rejected Cheney’s advice to bomb. But the neocons remain a powerful force in policy making; they have helped insure that Obama consistently condemns a program which the experts deny exists, and ratchets up pressure on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment through economic warfare.

The signals are so contradictory. The Bomb Iran advocates including the Israel leaders dearly hope that increasingly crippling sanctions (along with the-apparently-Israeli-sponsored program of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists and sponsoring terrorism in the country) will provoke Iran into moves which will force a reluctant Obama administration to attack the nuclear facilities.

But as Jim Lobe of Inter-Press News observes, many “liberal hawks” who supported the Iraq War, including former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, New York Times columnist Bill Keller, former Pentagon Middle East policy chief Colin Kahl, and former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden have recently warned of dire consequences should either the US or Israel attack. There is opposition within the foreign policy elite. But there was during the lead-up to the attack on Iraq as well.

On the other side are the Congressional leaders urging the stiffest, most provocative sanctions and even (in HR 1905) prohibiting any contact between US diplomats and Iranian representatives without Congressional approval 15 days in advance. Presumably such contacts might derail the drive to war.

On the one hand, you have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff visiting Israel this month to meet his Israeli counterpart, in a mission former Maj.-Gen. Gideon Shefer described as one to stop Israel from attacking Iran. On the other hand you have the Pentagon requesting funding from Congress for a more powerful, bunker-busting bomb. (Having spent $330 million constructing 20 “Massive Ordnance Penetrators” they need another $82 million to make them more destructive.)

Perhaps the best outcome of the unpredictable course of events would be a serious falling out between Israel and the US, such as occurred during the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981. In the first, Israel, Britain and France tried to seize control of the newly nationalized Suez Canal. President Eisenhower, joined with the Soviets to demand an end to this tripartite aggression. In 1981, Ronald Reagan ordered his UN ambassador to vote with the rest of the world in condemning the utterly illegal “preventative strike.”

Since then the power of the Israel Lobby in league with politicized Christian fundamentalism and the neocon cabal have so sharply tilted US policy towards Israel that a president cannot even press for a freeze on illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank without encountering a ferocious political backlash. One can’t be too hopeful about any “clean break” but it’s surely pleasant to imagine one.

Note: Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades. He can be reached at gleupp@granite.tufts.edu. The above article was posted at CounterPunch.

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WORDS THAT MATTER

January 31, 2012 – 4:32 am

A woman’s grandson and his friends have been repeatedly raping a girl so much so that she takes her own life. Add to the woman’s grief - she discovers she is suffering from Alzheimer’s. Lee Chang Dong’s Poetry takes root and emerges from life’s pathos. By Critic After Dark Noel Vera.

Lee Chang Dong’s Poetry (2010) basically follows two storylines: a grandmother’s late-life quest to write a proper poem, and her equally belated attempt to deal with her grandson Wook’s (Lee Da-wit) involvement in a schoolmate’s apparent suicide.

I can recall two scenes that seem to encapsulate Lee’s distinct flavor. The grandmother Mija (Yun Jeong-hie) on a sidewalk bench, trying to force inspiration by sitting under a tree, looking up, and swaying. An elderly neighbor, squat and topped with curly white hair, walks past her, pauses, asks what she’s doing; Mija replies that she’s trying to see the tree well, feel it, “understand its thoughts, listen to what it says to me…”

Poor Mija seems sincere enough - her body’s gentle to-and-fro rocking suggests an openness to new experience. Her words, though, betray the consciousness of a fruitcake, all dried pineapples, candied cherries, and nuts; the neighbor has no choice but to turn her back and walk away, tossing a worried glance over one shoulder. Unspoken statement: the woman is crazy and needs to be brought back down to earth - said downfall to be initiated by the buzz of Mija’s cellphone. The father of one of Wook’s friends has called, and wants her to come to a parents’ meeting.

Comes the second scene: she’s at the meeting, and the fathers (five of them) debate on whether or not to wait for the beer to arrive (they don’t). One of the fathers gives it to her straight: apparently the girl had killed herself because Wook and his five friends had been repeatedly raping her for the past few months. No violent reaction from Mija, but she does slide her hands slightly forward on the desk, to quietly clutch at each other.

As more details follow, each father owns up to his son’s role in the crime (“That’s my son;” “that’ll be mine.”) The accounting of responsibility, done casually by each of the boys’ parents, drives the truth home: this is not some silly boys’ escapade, recounted with exaggeration; this really happened, with the possibility of scandal and jail time to follow.

Mija excuses herself to step out and admire some cockscomb growing outside. One of the fathers joins her to ask what she’s doing, and she tells him that she’s taking down notes: she’s written that the cockscomb she’s looking at is “as red as blood.”

So goes Lee Chang Dong’s latest feature, where gentle comedy commingles with an even gentler serenity, and the horror is all the stronger for being folded into the everyday business (a round of beer, “that’s my son”) of a last-minute parent’s meeting.

Mija’s quest to write a poem is especially ironic because she seems to have so much potential material from her own life to write a half-dozen tragic sonnets: she lives in a tiny apartment, her daughter is divorced and has moved to Busan, she’s afflicted with Alzheimer’s (she learns during a hospital visit), her grandson’s a possible sociopath.

But that’s part of the beauty of Ms. Yun’s character - she seems blind to the drama of her own life, or at least blind to the possibilities of exploiting her life for writing material, or at least hesitant to use it immediately, as a quick fix to meet an academic requirement. If she is to learn how to write poetry, Lee seems to suggest and Mija seems to sense, it will be the hard way, through the patient and thorough digestion of painful, painful material - a skill she has yet to learn, but will.

That’s how the film progresses, basically - the patient and thorough digestion of painful, painful material. It’s told almost exclusively through Mija’s eyes - one can write an entire article about how Lee wields point of view, how information is withheld from his protagonist until the right revelatory moment (when she learns of her grandson’s crime, for one, and when she finally determines her grandson’s attitude to said crime). It is beautifully understated and deliberately, precisely paced; it packs a surprising amount of material into its two-hour plus running time, with what seems like a minimum of dialogue.

By film’s end a poem is recited, and Lee accompanies the poem with a series of images. It’s the familiar trope in many a dramatic film, a retracing of the journey Mija took, from her own world to the victim’s, from sunny ignorance to quiet awareness; but Lee accomplishes this with such elegance, such eloquence - we eventually realize there is more than one journey being taken here, and the passing down of a point of view from one character to another - that the end result is literally a poem: a short piece where every detail carries more than its own weight of meaning.

Korean cinema covers a wide range and offers surprising variety: Kim Ki Duk’s surrealism, Park Chan Wook’s outrageousness, Bong Joon-ho’s genre-bending, Hong Sang Soo’s elliptical storytelling, just to name a handful. Add to this Lee Chang Dong’s straightforward humanity and delicate sensibility (this feature is, I suspect, his response to Bong’s recent Mother (2009), and is in many ways a far more disturbing than all of Park’s ultraviolence), and you just have to admire how wide that range is, how astonishing the variety. One of the best films not just of this year, but of several years.

Note: You can also email Noel Vera at noelbotevera@yahoo.com.

Click here for more movie reviews.

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DROWNING IN HYPOCRISY

January 29, 2012 – 4:33 am

With Iran surrounded and with two of Washington’s fleets in the Persian Gulf, another war of aggression seems inevitable. Why does the prime supporter of “democracy” want yet another war? Paul Craig Roberts explains.

The US government is so full of self-righteousness that it has become a caricature of hypocrisy. Leon Panetta, a former congressman who Obama appointed CIA director and now head of the Pentagon, just told the sailors on the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, that the US is maintaining a fleet of 11 aircraft carriers in order to project sea power against Iran and to convince Iran that “it’s better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy.”

If it requires 11 aircraft carriers to deal with Iran, how many will Panetta need to project power against Russia and China? But to get on with the main point, Iran has been trying “to deal with us through diplomacy.” The response from Washington has been belligerent threats of military attack, unfounded and irresponsible accusations that Iran is making a nuclear weapon, sanctions and an oil embargo.

Washington’s accusations echo Israel’s and are contradicted by Washington’s own intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Why doesn’t Washington respond to Iran in a civilized manner with diplomacy? Really, which of the two countries is the greatest threat to peace?

Washington sends the FBI to raid the homes of peace activists and puts a grand jury to work to create a case against them for aiding a nebulous enemy by protesting Washington’s wars. The Department of Homeland Security unleashes goon cop thugs to brutalize peaceful Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. Washington fabricates cases against Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Tarek Mehanna that negate the First Amendment by equating free speech with terrorism and spying.

Chicago mayor and former Obama White House chief-of-staff, Rahm Israel Emanuel, pushes an ordinance that outlaws public protests in the City of Chicago. The list goes on. And in the midst of it all Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other Washington hypocrites accuse Russia and China of stifling dissent.

Washington’s grotesque hypocrisy goes unremarked by the American “media” and in the debates for the Republican presidential nomination. The corrupt Obama “Justice” Department turns a blind eye while goon cop thugs commit gratuitous violence against the citizens who pay the goon cop thugs’ undeserved salaries.

But it is in the War Crimes Arena where Washington shows the greatest hypocrisy. The self-righteous bigots in Washington are forever rounding up heads of weak states whose countries were afflicted by civil wars and sending them off to be tried as war criminals. All the while Washington indiscriminately kills large numbers of civilians in six or more countries, dismissing its own war crimes as “collateral damage.” Washington violates its own law and international law by torturing people.

On January 13, 2012, Carol Rosenberg of McClatchy Newspapers reported that Spanish judge Pablo Rafael Ruz Gutierrez re-launched an investigation into Washington’s torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Prison. The previous day British authorities opened an investigation into CIA renditions of kidnapped persons to Libya for torture.

Rosenberg reports that although the Obama regime has refused to investigate the obvious crimes of the Bush regime, and one might add its own obvious crimes, “other countries are still interested in determining whether Bush-era anti-terror practices violated international law.”

We have reached the point where nothing that our government says is believable. Not even the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, the GDP growth rate, much less Washington’s reasons for its wars, its police state, and its foreign and domestic policies.

There is no question that Bush/Cheney/Obama have trashed the US Constitution, US statutory law, and international law. But Washington, having overthrown justice, has established that might is right. No foreign government is going to send its forces into the US to drag the war criminals out and place them on trial.

The War Criminal Court at the Hague is reserved for Washington’s show trials. No foreign government is going to pay Washington several hundred millions of dollars to turn Bush, Cheney, Obama and their minions over to them in the way the US bought Milosevic from Serbia in order to create the necessary spectacle at the War Crimes Tribunal to justify Washington’s naked aggression against Serbia.

No government can be perfect, because all governments are composed of humans, especially those humans most attracted by power and profit. Nevertheless, in my lifetime I have witnessed an extraordinary deterioration in the integrity of government in the United States.

We have reached the point where nothing that our government says is believable. Not even the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, the GDP growth rate, much less Washington’s reasons for its wars, its police state, and its foreign and domestic policies.

Washington has kept America at war for ten years while millions of Americans lost their jobs and their homes. War and a faltering economy have exploded the national debt, and a looming bankruptcy is being blamed on Social Security and Medicare.

The pursuit of war continues. On January 23 Washington’s servile puppets - the EU member states - did Washington’s bidding and imposed an oil embargo on Iran, despite the pleas of Greece, a member of the EU. Greece’s final ruin will come from the higher oil prices from the embargo, as the Greek government realizes.

The embargo is a reckless act. If the US navy tries to intercept oil tankers carrying Iranian oil, large scale war could break out. This, many believe, is Washington’s aim.

It is easy for an embargo to become a blockade, which is an act of war. Remember how easily the UN Security Council’s “no-fly zone” over Libya was turned by the US and its NATO puppets into a military attack on Libya’s armed forces and population centers supportive of Gaddafi.

As the western “democracies” become increasingly lawless, the mask of law that imperialism wears is stripped away and with it the sheen of morality that has been used to cloak hegemonic ambitions. With Iran surrounded and with two of Washington’s fleets in the Persian Gulf, another war of aggression seems inevitable.

Experts say that an attack on Iran by the US and NATO will disrupt the flow of oil that the world needs. The crazed drive for hegemony is so compelling that Washington and its EU puppets show no hesitation in putting their own struggling economies at risk of sharply rising energy costs.

War abroad and austerity at home is the policy that is being imposed on the western “democracies.”

Note: Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. Visit www.paulcraigroberts.org. The above article was also posted at Information Clearing House.

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IT’S TIME TO GO ON THE OFFENSIVE FOR FREEDOM OF SPEECH

January 25, 2012 – 4:45 am

Last week’s collective action against the PIPA (Protect IP Act) and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) bills in the United States was unprecedented and mighty. But have you noticed that we’re always on the defensive? We cannot win or even maintain our rights to free speech that way. By Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party.

The copyright industry is tenacious and effective in using the “Daddy, I want a pony” tactics in legislation. They go at it again, and again, and again, and again. The result is a continuous erosion of our civil rights and an entrenchment of their entitlement to taxpayer funds.

The “Daddy, I want a pony” tactic goes roughly like this:

Little girl: Daddy, I want a pony! Want pony! Want want want pony!
Dad: Uhm, no, uhm, uhm, no, how about a dog?
Little girl: No no no NO! Want pony! PONY! …Dog? Well, ok then.

At this point the dad thinks, “Phew, that was a close call!” The little girl on the other hand thinks “Wow, that’s the easiest dog I ever got.” That’s the “Daddy, I want a pony” tactic.

You saw it with the DMCA in the United States, which severely restricted our rights to our own property, and the corresponding InfoSoc directive in the European Union. You see it right now with ACTA, which again shows this “the most offensive, repugnant may be gone” attitude, despite still being a giant leap backwards for human rights. You’ve seen it with the Data Retention Directive.

And each time, we defend and defeat the worst parts, burning our activist reserves way into the red, and then there’s another assault three years later. Plus the fact that while we’re fighting one of these evils, another 11 pass in the background.

The point is, as long as we’re just defending, we will always be on the retreat, and we will always lose. The copyright industry has the initiative and the best we can do is to delay or reduce the damages done. That’s not good enough.

It gets worse. The copyright industry has also gotten the rights to collect levies from trade with unrelated items, notably blank media but as unrelated as game consoles, because they can theoretically be used to copy in legal ways. Did you get that? It does not break the copyright monopoly to copy in these ways, and just therefore the copyright industry is compensated.

Let’s take that again.

The copyright monopoly, as wet a blanket as it may seem, does not cover every conceivable act of copying. There are many acts of copying that are fully legal and not covered. But in the industry’s sense of entitlement, they have demanded - and received - compensation for the areas where their monopoly does not extend. Compensation from taxpayer money to a private industry. For not having a monopoly. Really, can you believe this?

In this compensation scheme, they collect ridiculous amounts of money every year for doing absolutely nothing. A lot of the money goes straight towards the war on our civil rights and to collect yet more taxpayer money in new “Daddy, I want a pony” schemes. For us, it’s a vicious circle. Anybody familiar with incentives knows that it’s an absolutely terrible way of optimizing production to give money to an industry regardless of whether they’re doing the right thing, the wrong thing, or no thing at all.

So, to summarize, the copyright industry has put itself in a position where they get insane amounts of money for doing absolutely nothing, and use that money to buy laws that give them even more money and restrict our freedoms of speech. That is not just unacceptable. That is repulsive.

It comes as no surprise that I think the copyright monopoly is harmful (or at best useless) as a whole, and that creativity, business, and civil liberties would be much better off without it. Having studied the topic for six years straight, I discover more and more arrows that point in this direction.

But I’m also pragmatic enough to realize that if you shoot for the moon and insist on not doing any steps in between, you’re not only never going to the moon, but you’re also never taking a single step forward. Besides, getting a small way to the moon may be enough to give you that great view you really wanted. In the same vein, 99 per cent of the problems with today’s copyright monopoly can be solved with a much smaller reform that is both reasonable, achievable and doable.

While I don’t agree with patent monopolies, it’s a good talking point here that if pharma companies can do with a 20-year commercial monopoly (patents), then that term should certainly suffice for Disney and Elvis, too.

When it comes to large matters, after all, you can’t change all of the rules of the game overnight. So let’s shoot for a balanced, reasonable proposal that restores our civil liberties while retaining some of today’s investment incentives in culture.

I’m borrowing this blueprint from the Green group in the European Parliament (where, in turn, it came from the Pirate delegation). Let’s try this for a legislation package in Europe, the United States, Australia, and everywhere else we can:

- It must be made absolutely clear that the copyright monopoly does not extend to what an ordinary person can do with ordinary equipment in their home and spare time; it regulates commercial, intent-to-profit activity only. Specifically, file sharing is always legal.

- Free sampling. There must be exceptions that make it legal to create mashups and remixes. Quotation rights, like those that exist for text, must be extended to sound and video.

- Digital Restrictions Management should preferably be outlawed, as it is a type of fraud nullifying consumer and citizen rights, but at least, it must always be legal to circumvent.

- The baseline commercial copyright monopoly is shortened to a reasonable five years from publication, extendable to twenty years through registration of the work in a copyright monopoly database.

- The public domain must be strengthened.

- Net neutrality must be guaranteed.

- Levies on blank media are outlawed.

- Overall, it must always be clear where the line goes; “the courts will sort it out” areas are not acceptable and tantamount to outlawing.

This reasonable, balanced, achievable, and doable proposal would solve 99 per cent of today’s problems, while still maintaining all four aspects of the copyright monopoly. It solves the witch-hunt on teenagers sharing TV series. It solves the problem with orphan works and restores our access to the cultural heritage of the 20th century. It solves the problem with the copyright industry getting taxpayer money for nothing. On the other hand it still maintains a 20-year commercial monopoly (at the most) for investments in cultural productions, defeating every argument from the copyright industry lobby that the monopoly is needed for more culture to be created.

While I don’t agree with patent monopolies, it’s a good talking point here that if pharma companies can do with a 20-year commercial monopoly (patents), then that term should certainly suffice for Disney and Elvis, too.

This, or something along these lines, is what we need to do. We need to go on the offensive for our freedom of speech.

Note: Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy. The above article was posted at TorrentFreak.

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THE BigO PLAIN-SPEAKING, STRAIGHT-TALKING NO B.S. CONTEST No. 12

January 24, 2012 – 4:15 pm

THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED

Digital file sharing has fallen like flies. America’s RIAA and MPAA, representing the music and movie industries, have flattened one of the largest digital cloud companies, MEGAUPLOAD, with the arrest of its founder Kim Dotcom and his management.

With the immediate takedown of the file sharing site last week, including dramatic helicopter raid, the domino effect has taken place with Filesonic and Fileserve, two big players, pulling the plug on their digital clouds. No more file sharing by way of “digital clouds”.

Cyberlocker Ecosystem Shocked As Big Players Take Drastic Action
click here

The reaction has been angry. Most blame America’s music and movie industry for the game change. To quote one reader:

“I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that this may well lead to the end of the internet as we know it…”

Well Cassandras, would-be Alvin Tofflers and Madam Maries, please look into your tea cups and crystal balls, and let us know what the future holds for digital music sharing?

Your no B.S. comments will earn you a pass to free music.

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ANGELIC BLISS

January 24, 2012 – 4:39 am

In Mototsugu Watanabe’s Whore Angels (2000), it’s the end of the Hot Lips whorehouse, if not the world, if the Archangel sucks up to the horny Devil. But first she must discover human goodness. Stephen Tan reviews.

Out-of-towner Komasa looks for work at the Hot Lips whore joint. Instead of cubicles for some privacy, the joint has rows of seats where customers are entertained practically where they are seated. There is nothing posh about the place and the girls - Yuki, Lilla and Rena - will cater to their clients’ fantasies, such as dressing up in frilly nightgowns or appearing as nurses, besides getting fondled, fingered and giving blowjobs.

Komasa stops the boss, Dorokin, in the middle of his spiel to the clients and Yuki objects to Komasa’s intrusion. Before Dorokin can usher Komasa to his office, Komasa sticks her hand into Dorokin’s trousers and gives him a demonstration. Jerking off, he says: “You’re hired.”

Later in a deserted alley, Komasa finds Monroe being chased by a man sporting a pair of horns and wielding a pitch fork. Calling himself Rock’n'Roll, he could be the Devil from Hell, and he wants Monroe. Putting up a brave fight, Komasa is certainly no match for Rock’n'Roll - who at one point, teases her: “Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?” - until the beaten-up Komasa squeezes a half-eaten lemon into Rock’n'Roll’s eyes, which allows the two girls to escape.

Back in Komasa’s apartment, Monroe tries to heal Komasa by first kissing her on the mouth. Komasa objects but realising that she is indeed being healed, she relents. Before long, the two girls are buck naked fingering each other - in the process, Komasa discovers that Monroe has a heart-shaped vagina - and that only encourages the two girls to continue pleasuring each other.

Komasa gets Monroe, now called Angel, to work in the whore joint and Monroe proves to be a success right from her first client. An old man, who can’t get it up, gets a boner when Monroe puts her mouth to it. He tells Monroe: “You’re the Goddess of Mercy. Bless you!” Soon, Monroe is making blind men see and lame men walk. The tabloids proclaims her “Angel, the blowjob Messiah?” and “Hospitals are empty as everyone flocks to Hot Lips Salon!”

Even the joint is renamed Hot Lips Hospital with the girls all dressed in nurses uniform. Yuki, jealous of Monroe’s success, trips Monroe and starts a row with Komasa but they are interrupted by the sombrero-wearing Joe from Italy. Komasa later finds Monroe praying on the roof while Yuki, who is keen on the boss, has a wild fling with the manager.

Joe shows up with his book of prophecy looking for Monroe but has to settle for Lilla and Rena. In the office, Dorokin gets down and dirty on Komasa until Yuki barges in. Thinking that Komasa is rustling in on her territory, Yuki challenges Komasa to a fight. Later, Yuki is accosted by Rock’n'Roll. She makes a deal with Rock’n'Roll but finds herself in Hell and getting fucked by a horny Devil.

Going through the book of prophecy that Joe has left behind, Komasa discovers that Monroe is the Archangel who comes to Earth every 1,000 years to negotiate peace on Earth. She explains to Lilla and Rena: “Humans rent Earth from God. The lease is up for renewal every 1,000 years. On that day, if we can’t make rent, God evicts us. Basically it’s the end of the world… When Rock’n'Roll’s venomous fangs pollute Monroe, the Earth will fall and all humans will die.”

Komasa finds Monroe on the roof but as she hugs Monroe, Monroe changes into Komasa’s dead sister, who turns out to be the now-evil Yuki in disguise. Joe, who is actually from the Vatican secret police, shows up and vanquishes Yuki with holy water. Monroe is being held by Rock’n'Roll but Komasa’s cross shows them the way.

Joe is unable to stop Rock’n'Roll and it is up to Komasa who vanquishes Rock’n'Roll with her cross. Peace on Earth is restored, Monroe leaves and Komasa and Joe end up in bed.

This 2000 movie by Mototsugu Watanabe looked like it was timed for the New Millennium. It’s an End Of Days story without the budget or tension, it’s also corny and goofy like Hell but there’s enough to raise a smile. But then, no one would call this irreverent movie a barrel of laughs.

Because it is a pinku eiga (Japanese soft porn), it is the one area where the film delivers. The opening sequence of the brothel girls servicing their clients is a promising start; Komasa giving the boss a handjob may draw a chuckle or two but the scene of Komasa and Monroe together is a money shot. Things do get better with the boss and Yuki and when Joe gets down on Lilla and Rena. For genre fans, with its nudity and sex - either masturbatory, homo- or heterosexual - Whore Angels is not a wasted trip.

Unfortunately, that cannot be said for the film’s stock characters and so-called comic lines. For a start, the film plays up the stereotypical role of the hooker with a heart of gold. None of the girls are bad or evil and the script’s failing is that there is a naivety to the characters that makes it all seem unreal. Sure, what takes place in Whore Angels can never happen, but at least give it some semblance of reality.

The weakest link then is Monroe, with her purple hairdo and her diaphanous white dress, she recalls the real Marilyn Monroe but with none of the latter’s celebrated sass. This Monroe appears virginal all right but one can certainly expect more from an Archangel. For her then, it’s either a blowjob or nothing! And to think that she appears once every 1,000 years - surely she must have picked up something else along the way!

The script (or is that a translator issue) doesn’t help with its mock Name Of The Rose line of enquiry (Heavens forbid but it does look as if the filmmakers have yet to stumble upon The Da Vinci Code when they made this film) and then calling the Devil (or his representative?) Rock’n'Roll - sure, blame all things satanic on rock ‘n’ roll!

Strip off all the silliness and you must admit Whore Angels has an interesting premise. What if the angel of God comes as a simple mouth-watering whore and not in the full glory as everyone is taught or expects? Yes, with her blowjobs, the blind sees and the lame walks. Only the Japanese - with their sex fetishes, experimental take on sex, coupled with the ability to think out of a box and to make a buck - can come up with such a notion. Heaven must surely be missing this angel.

Note: The Whore Angels DVD (Pink Eiga) is banned in $ingapore.

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RESIST U.S. IMPERIALIST WAR THREATS ON IRAN

January 23, 2012 – 4:43 am

Sara Flounders explains why America’s elite want a new war. They have to protect their own.

There is growing apprehension that through miscalculation, deliberate provocation or a staged false flag operation, a US war with Iran is imminent.

The dangerous combination of top US officials’ public threats, the Pentagon’s massive military deployment, continued drone flights and industrial sabotage against Iran provides an ominous warning. The corporate media have been more than willing to cheer industrial sabotage, computer viruses and targeted assassinations. War maneuvers with Israel scheduled for mid-January were suddenly postponed Jan. 15 until May or later.

The US Congress overwhelmingly voted to include binding provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act, and President Obama signed the legislation Dec. 31 ordering Iran’s economic strangulation. These NDAA provisions demand that every other country in the world joins this economic blockade of Iran or face US sanctions themselves. This itself is an act of war.

Iran has directly charged the CIA for the Jan. 11 assassination of physicist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, which has outraged Iranians. Roshan is the fourth scientist killed in five targeted assassination in two years.

Whether or not a war will actually erupt, it is essential to look at the powerful forces that lay the groundwork for such a conflagration.

A US war would kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians and create regionwide destabilization. It would cause a wild, speculative hike in oil and gas prices, devastating fragile economies of the poorest countries and unhinging the increasingly shaky eurozone.

Revolutionary Marxists like Fidel Castro, political leaders in China and Russia, and even a hardened Israeli general have joined many political commentators to warn that a US or US-supported Israeli attack on Iran could quickly become a far wider war.

While defending its sovereign right to develop energy self-sufficiency, Tehran has made every effort to deflect US threats and charges. Iran has submitted to years of intrusive inspections of its research and industrial facilities to confirm its compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

But Washington insists on stopping Iran’s development - and not only its nuclear energy development to assure its future as oil production declines. For decades Iran was forced to import refined oil. Washington has tried to stop Iran from importing parts to build oil refineries, as it has tried to stop all Iran’s development since the 1979 revolution.

The myth of stimulus from war

David Broder, Washington Post political correspondent for 40 years and news show pundit, described in an Oct. 31, 2010, article how Obama could deal with his weakened situation when the Republicans swept Congress. He argued that to fix the economy and regain popularity, the solution is obvious and unavoidable: “War with Iran.”

Broder had more than 400 appearances on “Meet the Press.” He even won a Pulitzer Prize. Broder could be counted on to reflect political thinking and planning in Washington. Only the war machine can pull the US out of economic stagnation, Broder argued.

“Look back at FDR and the Great Depression,” wrote Broder. “What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II. [A showdown with the mullahs] will help [Obama] politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.”

Upon Broder’s death in March, Obama called him “the most respected and incisive political commentator of his generation.” (New York Times, March 9)

Broder’s statement shows an absolutely criminal mindset. It also shows a dangerous illusion. Broder calmly proposed the murder of tens of thousands of people, the devastation of entire cities, the destruction of a whole culture as a temporary economic fix to win a US election.

The danger is that US corporate power, seeing on every side its declining ability to ram through its dictates, is increasingly driven to military solutions.

Others commentators just as coldly argued with Broder that war with Iran would not be large enough, because all the weapons needed already exist and are in place. So no surge of military orders would follow. A larger war would be needed to give a big enough push!

In 1939 reviving shuttered US steel, rubber and textile clothing plants with government orders for tanks, ships, jeeps, helmets, uniforms and life vests for sale to Europe was a big stimulus. The entry of the US into World War II in 1941 provided an enormous surge of productive capacity that pulled the US economy out of a 10-year economic depression. What worked as an economic stimulus 70 years ago, before the existence of the gargantuan, bloated, high-tech military-industrial complex, is long past.

Today the US has a military machine and a military budget larger than that of the rest of the world combined, exceeding US$1 trillion a year in stated and hidden costs, even without another war. It is guaranteed to grow at a rate of 5 per cent to 10 per cent a year. This is built into the Pentagon’s budget projections even without cost overruns.

World won’t bow to US dictates

Washington’s plans to easily conquer Afghanistan and Iraq and set up stable puppet regimes were frustrated. The US plan for economic war on Iran has also exposed US weaknesses.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner launched a tour of East Asian nations in early January to convince south Korea, China, India and Japan to cut their massive Iranian oil imports and abide by the sanctions.

China and India - both major economies - refused directly. China buys a third of Iran’s oil exports.

The Obama administration said that the US would offer countries that applied for a temporary waiver to continue oil purchases from Iran while they made other arrangements. An Indian cabinet minister said India will continue to do business with Iran. South Korea said it would apply for a US waiver because it planned to increase oil purchases from Iran.

Japanese officials, when meeting with Geithner, seemed to agree. But after his departure Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba backtracked, saying, “The United States would like to impose sanctions. We believe it is necessary to be extremely circumspect about this matter.” (AFP, Jan. 13)

Russia announced its refusal to comply with sanctions. So did NATO member Turkey. The European Union insisted on a six-month delay, due to fears of the economic consequences to debt-ridden Italy, Spain and Greece. The Greek government said it needs at least a year.

Saudi Arabia’s crude oil contains more sulfur than lighter Iranian oil and requires substantially higher refining costs. In a time of global capitalist recession, this added cost is no easy sell.

Even outright US collaborators are refusing Washington’s demands. Pakistan, for example, refused to abandon a pipeline to transport Iranian natural gas into Pakistan and in the future even into India.

All of this would be good news. But the danger is that US corporate power, seeing on every side its declining ability to ram through its dictates, is increasingly driven to military solutions.

This is exacerbated by US setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan that have weakened the US superpower’s dominance of Southwest Asia relative to Iran. The more the US loses its grip on the region, the more desperate imperialism may become to risk all in a mad adventure to recoup its past position.

Every voice must be raised at this urgent hour against sanctions and war.

Note: The above article was posted at Information Clearing House. It is also posted at iacenter.org.

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WASHINGTON MOVES THE WORLD CLOSER TO WAR

January 20, 2012 – 4:33 am

By Paul Craig Roberts

Since my January 11 column and the news alert posted on January 14, more confirmation that Washington is moving the world toward a dangerous war has appeared. The Obama regime is using its Ministry of Propaganda, a.k.a., the American media, to spread the story that President Barack Obama, Pentagon chief Leon Panetta, and other high US officials are delivering strong warnings to Israel not to attack Iran.

For someone as familiar with Washington as I am, I recognize these reports for what they are. They are Br’er Rabbit telling Br’er Fox “please don’t throw me in the briar patch.”

If you don’t know the Uncle Remus stories, you have missed a lot. Br’er Rabbit was born and raised in the briar patch.

What these “leaked” stories of Washington’s warnings and protests to Israel are all about is to avoid Washington’s responsibility for the war Washington has prepared. If the war gets out of hand, and if Russia and China intervene or nukes start flying, Washington wants the blame to rest on Israel, and Israel seems willing to accept the blame.

Nikolai Patrushev, who heads Russia’s Security Council, has apparently been deceived by Washington’s manipulation of the media. According to the Interfax news agency, Patrushev condemned Israel for pushing the US towards war with Iran.

You get the picture. The helpless Americans. They are being bullied by Israel into acquiescing to a dangerous war. Otherwise, no more campaign contributions.

The facts are different. If Washington did not want war with Iran it would not have provided the necessary weapons to Israel. It would not have deployed thousands of US troops to Israel, with a view toward the American soldiers being killed in an Iranian response to Israel’s attack, thus “forcing” the US to enter the war. Washington would not have built a missile defense system for Israel and would not be conducting joint exercises with the Israeli military to make sure it works.

If Washington did not want Israel to start the war, Washington would inform the Israeli government in no uncertain words that an Israeli strike on Iran means that the US will NOT veto the UN’s denunciation of Israel and the sanctions that would be placed on Israel as a war criminal state. Washington would tell Israel that it is good-bye to the billions of dollars that the bilked American taxpayers, foreclosed from their homes by fraudulent mortgages and from jobs by offshoring, hand over by compulsion to Israel to support Israel’’s crimes against humanity.

But, of course, Washington won’t prevent the war that it so fervently desires.

If Washington did not want war with Iran it would not have provided the necessary weapons to Israel. It would not have deployed thousands of US troops to Israel, with a view toward the American soldiers being killed in an Iranian response to Israel’s attack, thus “forcing” the US to enter the war. Washington would not have built a missile defense system for Israel and would not be conducting joint exercises with the Israeli military to make sure it works.

Neither will Washington’s NATO puppets. “Great” Britain does as it is told, subservient and occupied Germany, bankrupt France, Italy occupied with US air bases with a government infiltrated by the CIA, bankrupt Spain and Greece will all, in hopes of an outpouring of US dollars and devoid of any dignity or honor, support the new war that could end life on earth.

Only Russia and China can prevent the war.

Russia took the first step when the newly appointed Deputy Prime Minister for military affairs, Demitry Rogozin, told a press conference in Brussels that Russia would regard an attack on Iran as “a direct threat to our security.”

Washington is counting on subverting Russia’s opposition to Washington’s next war. Washington can time the attack on Iran right after the March elections in Russia. When Putin wins again, the treasonous Russian opposition parties, financed by the CIA, will unleash protests in the streets. The subservient and utterly corrupt Western media will denounce Putin for stealing the election. The orchestrated protests in Russia will turn violent and discredit, if not prevent, any Russian response to the naked aggression against Iran.

For Rogozin’s warning to be effective in preventing war, China needs to enter the fray. Washington is banking on China’s caution. China deliberates and never rushes into anything. China’s deliberation will serve Washington’s war.

It is possible that the crazed neocon Washington government will have one more “victory” before Russia and China comprehend that they are next on the extermination list. As this date cannot be far off, life on earth might expire before the unpayable debts of US and EU countries come due.

Note: Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Visit www.paulcraigroberts.org. The above article was also posted at Information Clearing House.

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WAR ON IRAN: IT’S NOT A MATTER OF ‘IF’

January 18, 2012 – 10:12 am

Real terror is never plotted in dark corners or dimly-lit rooms. The war mongers sit in posh meeting rooms, surrounded by experts. Once again, the world waits for another war in the Middle East. By Alexander Cockburn.

The world’s press is choc-a-bloc with “if” questions about Iran and war. Will Israel attack? Is Obama, coerced by domestic politics in an election year, being dragged into war by the Israel lobby? Will he launch the bombers? Is the strategy to force Iran into a corner, methodically demolishing its economy by embargoes and sanctions so that in the end a desperate Iran strikes back?

As with sanctions and covert military onslaughts on Iraq in the run up to 2003, the first point to underline is that the US is waging war on Iran. But well aware of the US public’s aversion to yet another war in the Middle East, the onslaught is an undeclared one.

The analogy here is the run up to Pearl Harbor. Let me quote from a useful timeline. On October 7, 1940, a US Navy IQ analyst Arthur McCollum wrote an eight-point memo on how to force Japan into war with US. Beginning the next day FDR began to put them into effect and all eight were eventually accomplished.

On February 11, 1941 FDR proposed sacrificing six cruisers and two carriers at Manila to get into war. Navy Chief Stark objected: “I have previously opposed this and you have concurred as to its unwisdom.”

In March 1941 FDR sold arms and convoyed them to belligerents in Europe - both acts of war and both violations of international law - the Lend-Lease Act. On June 23, 1941 Advisor Harold Ickes wrote FDR a memo the day after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, “There might develop from the embargoing of oil to Japan such a situation as would make it not only possible but easy to get into this war in an effective way.”

FDR was pleased with Admiral Richmond Turner’s report read July 22: “It is generally believed that shutting off the American supply of petroleum will lead promptly to the invasion of Netherland East Indies… it seems certain she would also include military action against the Philippine Islands, which would immediately involve us in a Pacific war.”

We have to hope that the traditional prudence of  Iran’s leadership prompts them not to make some desperate retaliatory lunge, such as mining the Strait of Hormuz, or offering some kindred excuse to the US to up the tempo of the undeclared war it is already waging.

The next day FDR froze all Japanese assets in the US cutting off their main supply of oil. US Intelligence information was withheld from Hawaii from this point forward. Against protests from US naval commanders the West Coast fleet was moved to Hawaii.

John Maynard Keynes once said, “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.” Ronald Reagan used to attribute this insight to the man he loved to call “Nikolai Lenin”, thundering from podium after podium across America, that Lenin had said “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.”

You want a graphic illustration of what US embargoes are doing in the way of debauching Iran’s currency? Here’s a graph of US dollar exchange rates with the Iran rial, from last week:

Imagine if the Iranians had done this to the US dollar? Can you imagine any American politician who would have refrained from calling this an act of war?

To further inflame the leadership in Iran we had last week the murder of Iran nuclear scientist Ahmadi Roshan which came on the one-year anniversary of the murder of two other Iranian nuclear scientists by similar methods. As CounterPuncher Peter Lee writes, “It  came at a time of heightened tensions (anyway, tensions higher than the usual heightened tensions), inviting the inference that somebody, probably somebody in the region, wants to goad the Iranian government into a response that could start the military action ball rolling.”

As for the embargoes of Iranian oil, Obama is most certainly doing the oil industry a big favor. There have been industry-wide fears of recession-fueled falling demand and collapse of oil prices. That has led to industry-wide enthusiasm (aided by heavy pressure from the majors) for strongly cutting total world oil production (and enjoying the bonuses flowing from the subsequent world price rise), with all the cuts to be taken out of the hide of the Iranians.

The Financial Times made clear the need to shrink world production in the following key paragraph in a report last week: “Oil prices have risen above $110 a barrel since Iran threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil chokepoint, accounting for about a third of all seaborne traded oil. Oil fell to a low of $99 in October amid global economic growth worries.”

As Pierre Sprey remarked to me, “Note also that this is one of those rare but dangerous moments in history when Big Oil and the Israelis are pushing the White House in the same direction. The last such moment was quickly followed by Dubya’s invasion of Iraq.”

It’s somewhat immaterial to ask whether Obama really wants war with Iran, thus interfering with the “strategic pivot” to Asia. Presidents are creatures of circumstances and lobbies, and Obama is certainly no exception. We have to hope that the traditional prudence of Iran’s leadership prompts them not to make some desperate retaliatory lunge, such as mining the Strait of  Hormuz, or offering some kindred excuse to the US to up the tempo of the undeclared war it is already waging.

Note: Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com. The above article was posted at CounterPunch.

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OPEN, O SESAME

January 17, 2012 – 4:29 am

When iconoclastic filmmaker Werner Herzog ventures underground into his Cave Of Forgotten Dreams (2010), the result is engaging, can be bewildering but hardly boring, says Critic After Dark Noel Vera.

Werner Herzog’s first ever 3-D feature begins with the camera gliding down a row of what look like vines; it lifts up in the air to take in the limestone cliffs looming over the Ardeche River, in Southern France. We see Herzog accompanying an expedition of mostly scientists ascending a narrow trail up the face of that cliff, to arrive at a metal door “as massive as a bank vault.”

Inside are treasures as fabulous as anything Aladdin might find - cave paintings of various sizes and subjects, on differing kinds of surfaces, employing many colors and techniques. Some of these paintings may have been drawn some thirty thousand years ago.

Thirty thousand years! The United States, by way of comparison, was established a little over two hundred and thirty years ago; the oldest form of writing found is dated approximately eight thousand years ago; the oldest city (Damascus) has been inhabited for something like eleven thousand years. These drawings, if their dating can be believed (there is some controversy, which Herzog never once mentions), are three times older than any presently existing evidence of human civilization.

But it’s more than just the age; the drawings are complex, lovely, powerful. They leap at the screen in silent agitation - or rather not so silent; the horses’ mouths (as someone points out) are agape, as if whinnying; rhinos lock horns in tremendous head-on collisions, and you can almost hear the sound of  impact; a female lion sits firmly on her haunches, unwilling to mate, her lips peeled back in an irritated growl.

Herzog points out the multiple drawings of a rhino’s horn, and speculate that the artist - and despite the dispute over their age, no one disputes the drawings’ artistry - was attempting to suggest motion, that this was in fact some kind of proto-cinema, the first attempt to capture moving pictures on a flat surface (either that or it’s one of the earliest examples of animation ever).

Part of the pleasure of a Herzog documentary is the presence of Herzog himself. He’s the polar opposite of the invisible, unjudgmental documentary filmmaker; he pokes, prods, asks all kinds of questions, not always the obvious ones. To one archeologist he poses a stumper: “Do they dream at night?”

How is the poor scientist to respond? But Herzog is an impatient, eccentric creature; he wants to delve into mysteries, ponder paradoxes, illuminate the darker, less obvious corners of a mystery. He asks about the soul; one man speculates that the soul might have been an adaptation to the world, one that must have worked (we’ve had them ever since), and that these paintings are their communique, fired like furtive emails into the future (at us, in effect) in the hopes of maybe not making contact but of giving us an impression of their state of mind and being, captured in an image.

Herzog points out a red handprint repeated many times near the cave entrance, and how it stands out because of a crooked little finger. He follows the handprint into the cave, pointing it out in various drawings; the finger seems less like a flaw than a signature, the sign of a unique personality - possibly the world’s first auteur…

For deadpan comic relief Herzog gives us eccentrics like the scientist who through research has managed to assemble a bone flute - the kind of musical instrument he guesses might have been played in the caves, all those millennia ago - and promptly tootles a brief rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

He follows a perfume designer who hikes around the aboveground area, sniffing for ancient air seeping from the ground (the caves were discovered by explorers who felt the updraft); he’s hoping to detect the caves by scent. The designer later confesses an ulterior motive - he’s involved in a theme park to be built nearby, with an exact replica of the caves and their drawings as a feature attraction.

All this narrated in Herzog’s Teutonically accented yet soothing voice, his intensely pinched face gazing at one wonder after another. Herzog over time and through his many documentaries has developed a distinct onscreen persona (you don’t expect the director of Nosferatu (1979) and Aguirre: The Wrath Of God (1972) to be boring do you?), one strong enough to stand up to bizarre characters like Dieter Dengler (Little Dieter Needs To Fly, 1998) or Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man, 2005). On his own his persona throws a probing if quirky light on the wall art; he’s dealing with artists long dead (though their work has a marvelous presence) and he’s free to speculate, endlessly.

The ending is pure Herzog. From thirty thousand years into the past he turns to the future: a nuclear power plant some twenty miles away, the largest in France, has diverted coolant water to create an enclosed tropical environment; hundreds of crocodiles thrive and, unsurprisingly, a number of them are albino mutants. Herzog films these altered baby reptiles and wonders what they might think, if ever they come face-to-face with the Chauvet drawings…

Herzog filmed the documentary in 3-D; he believed that this device (he had previously dismissed it as a gimmick) would bring out the curves and contours of the cavern rock, to better present the drawings. I wouldn’t know if this worked; I only managed to catch a 2-D screening, and the DVD was released the same way.

Watching the film in this imperfect and incomplete mode, I can only speculate: Herzog himself worked in less-than-ideal conditions; he had limited time and resources, and used technology ill-suited to the task at that time (3-D photography in commercial features often meant shooting foreground, midground and background separately, then having them digitally integrated - an impossibility in the cave). The artists (or artist) that did the drawings had even more primitive equipment - shards of rock, charcoal, pigments, their own crook-fingered hand.

And yet the artist managed to suggest movement and sound; he managed to suggest fury and grandeur. Using rock and dye and charcoal he made the first effective stab at creating a 3-D image - and arguably his methods have a proven track record thirty thousand years long. Herzog employs a few tricks of his own: sending his cold lamps slowly across the cave face and fading them on and off, he re-creates the kind of traveling light that must have fallen on these drawings, the way they were meant to be seen (Herzog early in the film notes that the drawings are found at just at the point when the sunlight stops). The music - and Herzog and the archeologists agree, there must have been music - is all strings and woodwinds and voices, the kind of instruments they might have played.

Like that long-ago artist Herzog uses his limitations to his  advantage, evokes his own magic; watching the film [on a cinema screen], on a TV screen, in the poor medium of DVD, can we do any less? It’s just one more link shared, between viewer and filmmaker and artist long gone.

Note: You can also email Noel Vera at noelbotevera@yahoo.com.

Click here for more movie reviews.

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