Every Victory Day, the day Russians celebrate the defeat of Nazism, is not only another defining moment to commemorate the millions of WWII victims and to lay wreaths to the war monuments, scattered all over Europe, vast territory of the former Soviet Union. It is also a time, at which we draw the lessons from the past and try to put a full stop in the decades-long debate on who was on the right side of history and who was on the wrong. And, respectfully, who owes whom (and what, if anything) to finally settle the score and the bills of history.The history of the Second World War still hurts. It explodes in many ways – by creating new dangerous, divisive myths in the relationship between neighbors and reproducing old hatreds in modern societies. Each region of the world has its own set of explosive devices, inherited from the bloodiest war in human history. Therefore, let us roughly identify them as “West European”, “post-Soviet” and Asia-Pacific”.As for Western Europe, Germany, which unequivocally denounced fascism in 1945, is again in the news (don’t get surprised). This time it is over the reincarnation of Aryan supremacy ideas, promoted by the ideologists of the Third Reich and these days manifested by the young followers of classical WWII Nazi, trying to fit into the present-day reality of pacifist Germany.It is highly symbolic, that this year the Victory Day anniversary coincided with the opening of the trial in Munich of a group of ultra-right wing thugs calling themselves the National Socialist Underground (NSU) accused of a hate crime killing spree. The chief defendant, is 38-old Beate Zschape and is one of three charged with the murder of eight ethnic Turks, a Greek immigrant and a German policewoman between 2000 and 2007. It is reported the NSU’s accidental discovery in November 2011 has already forced Germany to reassess the lessons the country has learnt from her Nazi past.However, when it comes to Western Europe the problem of neo-Nazi is not restricted to Germany. It is an open secret that ultra-right forces are on the rise, with their popularity growing, allowing them to contest seats in local and European parliament elections. As during the Second World War there is a high temptation to pin the entire gamut of problems, related to looming economic crisis and eroding European identity on outsiders – immigrants from the troubled Eastern world, “people with dark skin”, “second rate humans.” So, this is a WWII time bomb which is ticking in modern Europe.Meantime, former Soviet countries have to defuse its own explosive devices of the war history. It is not only about annual Waffen-SS veterans marches through Riga the capital of EU member Latvia. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union – the country which once crushed fascism, it turned out that the Great Victory cements newly-independent states no more. Some of the former Soviet republics in their new search for self-identity proved to be the countries with an unpredictable past. Moreover, by depriving their nations of the right to celebrate the victory over fascism, local ruling elites are trying to lay the foundation for new “post-Soviet patriotism”.No surprise, that the mayor of Ukrainian city of Lviv Andrei Sadovy called V-Day a tragedy to commemorate “the victims of Nazi and communist terror”, thus, equalizing the two confronting forces of WWII. It is reported that this year there will be no celebrations in Lviv – one of the most beautiful East European cities. So, this is another mine of history, laid under the foundation of Russian-Ukrainian relations. And I don’t think that anybody has forgotten about a tragedy of Katyn involving Poles, Germans and Soviets, with emotions running and disagreements flaring up again.And finally, the mines of WWII are ticking in the Far East far beyond Russia’s borders. As Japanese politicians are visiting the Yasukuni temple – a controversial Tokyo shrine to commemorate millions of soldiers killed in Japanese wars, Japan’s neighbors – China and South Korea warn of the possible revival of a new Japanese nationalism. This year 168 Japanese ruling and opposition party lawmakers paid tribute at the shrine – it was the largest group of politicians ever to visit the Yasukuni temple. No surprise, that Beijing and Seoul protested, with China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying saying that Japan’s actions “merit vigilance by its Asian neighbors and the international community.”In its clouded relations with South Korea Japan has not yet settled the problem of the compensation for the Korean women, used for Japanese WWII brothels as sex slaves.An in addition to that, Tokyo is still in disagreement with Moscow over Peace Treaty, which is still not signed due to the disagreement over the Kuril Islands.This is another mine of WWII history – this time on the Pacific shore, thousands of miles away from Moscow and Berlin. So it is high time to de-mine the history the way the emergency services in Russia, acting with extreme caution, de-mine corroded WWII bombs and shells, still found during excavation works – sinister parcels from the past.Looking around at the present day war and peace situation one feels an urgent necessity to de-mine the last war’s mines and to be watchful about the new ones being daily planted all around the world right now. … Read More
Why ‘Control’ Is the Wrong Response to Deadly Attacks
There’s a natural desire to “make sure this never
happens again” after some evil bastard or twisted loon goes on a
killing spree. In the age of the regulatory state, such an effort
is too-often assumed to require the passage of laws that will
restrict and monitor us as we stagger our hobbled way down a carpet
of red tape into the warm embrace of a safer tomorrow. But security
can’t be legislated. If horrific recent events, such as the Boston
Marathon bombing, the Sandy Hook shooting, and even the Texas
fertilizer plant explosion, demonstrate anything, it’s that
surrendering to more “control’ is no guarantee of safety, even as
it costs us liberty. In fact, in the absence of any of the controls
that strike some people as oh-so-necessary, we’re less likely than
anybody in decades, at least, to be killed by some murderous son
(or daughter) of a bitch.
Sandy Hook brought us calls for ever-more gun control —
restrictions on firearms — even though
none of the proposed federal laws (or the
ones passed at the state level) would have prevented the crime.
Both Adam Lanza and his mother had clean records, so they would
have passed expanded background checks. The guns and magazines he
used would have been grandfathered under proposed federal laws and
even under the restrictive laws Connecticut passed. Even if banned
and surrendered, those guns could have been swapped for still-legal
firearms.
But even if you magically disappeared Lanza’s firearms, the
Tsarnaev brothers demonstrated with the Boston Marathon bombing
that people can be killed, maimed and terrorized without guns, In
their case, a
pressure cooker, a bit of hardware and some explosives —
apparently gunpowder — were all it took to kill, maim, and utterly
disrupt a major metropolitan area.
The Boston bombing immediately led to more calls for control, in
particular a
demand by Sen. Frank Lautenberg that background checks be
required to purchase gunpowder. Again, there’s no reason to believe
that the Tsarnaevs would have been inconvenienced by background
checks. Tamerlan was arrested for domestic violence in 2009, but
it’s not clear he had a criminal conviction on his record to be
detected by a background check, and his brother had a clean record.
In any event, the
Texas fertilizer plant explosion reminded us quickly that
explosives don’t just come purpose-made in small containers. They
exist in gardening supply shops, hardware stores and under the
kitchen sink. It doesn’t take very much to make common ingredients
go bang — even to the point of bringing down the Alfred P.
Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City.
In Norway, a society with more “control” than our own, Anders
Behring Breivik used both a
fertilizer bomb and firearms to kill 77 people and injure many
more. Breivik did so by studying the restrictive laws of his
country, complying with them (until the day of his crime) and
working around them.
Remember that retrictive laws are fixed and knowable things. The
Breiviks of the world can work with them,
criminals will ignore them and turn to black markets — and
principled people offended by creeping legal constraints and
intrusive governments will
defy them and so be criminalized, for no gain in safety.
In fact, despite headline-grabbing events like Sandy Hook and
the Boston bombing, we’re safer by far from the threat of violence
than were our parents or grandparents. Violent crime has been
steadily
declining for ; 40 years.
According to the FBI, “[w]hen considering 5- and 10-year
trends, the 2011 estimated violent crime total was 15.4 percent
below the 2007 level and 15.5 percent below the 2002 level.”
Specifically, “[c]ompared with the 2007 rate, the murder rate
declined 17.4 percent, and compared with the 2002 rate, the murder
rate decreased 16.8 percent.”
If you want a safer world, you already have it. But it comes
along with occasional acts of mass violence that don’t seem easily
preventable.
And there’s a cost to those proposed controls. There’s a loss of
liberty, of course. That’s a huge and unacceptable trade-off for
many of us. Along with that loss of liberty, comes greater power
for those to whom we lose our liberty: police officers,
politicians, bureaucrats and security-state officials. Do we really
need to contemplate the myriad ways in which they abuse their
power? Well … Let’s do so for a moment. There are the school
security officers who
beat the crap out of kids, the cops and bureaucrats who
browse databases for fun and profit, the intelligence officers
who, with approval from above, kidnap
people and send them off to be tortured in foreign dungeons,
the politicians who claim special privilege to
act without scrutiny …
Without making us safer, more control over society always seems
to end up in handing people who shouldn’t necessarily be trusted
lots of control over us. … Read More
PETA wants its own fleet of drones
The animal-rights’ group announced on Monday that they’ve reached out to Australia-based drone manufacturer Aerobot in hopes of acquiring a CineStar Octocopter — an unmanned aerial vehicle that can be affixed with a camera and used to snoop.“Inspired by the increasing use of drones for nonmilitary purposes, such as fighting wildfires and conducting search-and-rescue missions, PETA is planning to acquire a drone of its own to spy on hunters and catch them in the act as they terrorize animals and break game laws,” says Alisa Mullins, senior editor of PETA Foundation.The idea, Mullins adds, could be “a drone program that even Rand Paul might be able to get behind.”PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk explains in a statement of her own this week that the acquisition of a spy drone could actually be used to help living creatures — not hinder them like the missile-equipped UAVs used to target insurgents or the surveillance drones expected to soon be rampant across America.”The talk is usually about drones being used as killing machines, but PETA drones will be used to save lives,” Newkirk says.Currently in the US, hobbyists are allowed to operate drones that hover close to the earth as long as they are not involved for commercial means. If PETA is able to get their hands on one, they say it will be used as more a news gathering tool used to track down unlawful hunters that might be engaged in illegal activity in heavily wooded areas where traditional surveillance is difficult to conduct.“Hunters maim and kill millions of animals every year,” Mullins writes on the group’s website. “With more than five times as many wildlife watchers as there are hunters in the US, we hope to expose further why hunting is a sick and sickening pursuit.”Additionally, PETA says they’d be interested in sending surveillance drones to go over factory farms to monitor operators there as well as in “other areas that are hotbeds of abuse.”As RT reported earlier, journalism schools across the US are teaching new students the ins and outs of drones in hopes of giving them a tool to be used in investigative reporting.”We have a class here of journalism students who are learning to fly J-bots, for journalism robots, or drones,” Bill Allen, a science and journalism professor at the University of Missouri, told ABC News. “So they learn to fly them, and also do what reporters do: brainstorm ideas, go out and do reporting, do drone based photography and video. We’re trying to see if this is going to be useful for journalism.”At a congressional hearing last month, University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo says it’s to be expected that Americans doing legitimate investigative work would want to work with the same types of aircraft capable of putting eyes in places that are usually problematic.”In 2015, when the FAA is set to begin to relax its prohibition on use and integrate civilian use of drones, then I would think the first folks in the door would be media because there’s such an obvious use,” Calo said.Kaitlynn Kelly, a representative for PETA, tells US News & World Report that they have yet to get FAA approval but that they “hope this won’t be an issue.” They intend on beginning their drone flights this fall starting in the northeast United States. … Read More
Sweden enlists llamas to fight sheep-killing wolves
Animal predator experts in southern Sweden are hoping llamas’ natural fighting instincts will help scare off the wolves thought to be responsible for a recent sheep-killing spree in the area. … Read More
5 things you may not know about death penalty
On March 15, 2013 Maryland became the sixth state in the U.S. to either abolish the death penalty or to impose a moratorium upon its use, joining Illinois (2001), New York (2007), New Jersey (2007), New Mexico (2009), and Connecticut (2012). Bills to abolish the death penalty have either been introduced or will be introduced this year in a number of states, including Alabama, California, Florida, Colorado, and others.The tide is clearly turning against state-sanctioned killing in the name of the law. What many Americans do not know is that debates about the death penalty are as old as the nation itself. What follows are five facts that every American should know about capital punishment and its history in the U.S.1. The history of capital punishment is the history of slavery’s attempts to destroy free speech.Continue Reading… … Read More
Catch J.D. Tuccille Discussing the NYPD’s Pre-Crime Youth Tracking on RT at 5pm ET
The New York City Police Department has developed a novel
approach, identifying kids it sees as potential troublemakers and
then essentally stalking them, bunny boiler-style. The cops show up
at their doors, hail them when they’re with their friends in the
street, follow them on Facebook and Twitter through fake profiles,
create dossiers on them and stop just short of actually stealing an
undershirt to keep under the pillow. I hope.
As the New York Times
reports:
“We are coming to find you and monitor every step you take,”
said Joanne Jaffe, the department’s Housing Bureau chief. “And we
are going to learn about every bad friend you have. And you’re
going to get alienated from those friends because we are going to
be all over you.”
I’ll admit to finding this a less than convincing means of
deterring a teenager from a killing rage. And I’m willing
to bet they hired an old girlfriend of mine as a consultant.
Anyway, tune in to RT at 5pm ET to see what I have to say on the
matter. … Read More
