Originally written by John Bunch on July 3, 2009 1:04 AM Or do you think that the better punishment for Iran firing a WMD on Israel would be a stern rebuke from Hillary Clinton and Obama ?

It is no use asking me, I am just as confused as you are. First we are told that they were all peaceful demonstrators who were attacked by brutal paramilitary gangs without provocation and now you want me to believe that they were not peaceful demonstrators at all but brave democratic urban guerillas who would have overthrown the legitimate government of Iran by force if only they had had enough weapons and ammunition, all of which the US Air Force would gladly drop on Tehran residential districts by the crate-load (presumably in the middle of the night) the moment a WMD is launched.

In other reports, I seem to remember being told that the harmless Iraqis would have long ago been at peace if they had not been kept supplied with IEDs by Iran of which Iran appears to have an inexhaustable supply. I have to ask myself then why it is that the fearless unarmed Iranian freedom fighters have not long ago brought the ruthless Iranian dictatorship to its knees with IEDs? They are apparently more effective than assault rifles any day and ought to be readily available in Iran.

Something is missing in all this Western anti-Iranian propaganda that hinders me from accepting it all at face value.

Derek

Originally written by John Bunch on July 3, 2009 3:23 AM When the Jews got guns, they started shooting back at the Nazis (Warsaw Ghetto, 1944).

Poland's capital was the site of not one but two of the major uprisings against German power during World War II: the ghetto uprising of Warsaw Jews in 1943, after which the ghetto was leveled; and the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army in 1944, after which the rest of the city was destroyed. These two central examples of resistance and mass killing were confused in the German mass media in August 1994, 1999, and 2004, on all the recent five-year anniversaries of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and will be again in August 2009. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875

Originally written by Jacek K. on July 3, 2009 8:51 AM These two central examples of resistance and mass killing were confused in the German mass media in August 1994, 1999, and 2004, on all the recent five-year anniversaries of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and will be again in August 2009. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875

The message contained in that article, Jacek, appears to me to be that in any situation in which several crimes against humanity are taking place concurrently, if you are going to get killed in one of them and don't want to be forgotten then arrange to be killed in the worst one because the mass media cannot handle more than one crime against humanity at a time.

It also occurs to me that the Allied strategy of reducing all the major German cities to rubble by bombing them was fatally flawed. If instead of dropping bombs, the Allies had dropped assault rifles, anti-tank weapons and body armor by the crate-load as described in the Bunch Plan then the entire German population, deprived of weapons by the Nazis, would have been able to rise up and sweep Hitler and the Nazis out of power.

So that was the problem then in World War II Germany, there weren't enough weapons available for a popular uprising! Why didn't I see that before?

Derek

Originally written by Derek Thornton on July 3, 2009 10:29 AM the mass media cannot handle more than one crime against humanity at a time.

Which brings us back to Michael Jackson's death, an undoubted God's crime against humanity, which eclipsed what was going on in Iran. Says http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/06/29/how_michael_jackson_answered_the_ayatollahs_prayers:

[Michal Jackson] was no hero. He was certainly no one to be celebrating. Unless of course, you were an ayatollah. Because one of the truly transcendental ironies of recent history has to be the fact that a symbol of the worst sort of Western spiritual and social corruption...celebrity worship, drug culture, financial excess, debauchery...ended up providing just the distraction that the keepers of the Islamic Revolution's flame in Tehran needed to direct the world's attention away from their abuses of their own people. 

In an instant, the really important story of tens of millions struggling to be heard in Iran was swept off the air by the death of a 50 year old accused pedophile in America. CNN, which had been congratulating itself daily for bringing the "green revolution" in Iran to the world as only it could in an instant tossed its news judgment out the window and started offering 24/7 retrospectives on how Michael Jackson chose the red leather jacket he wore in the
">"Thriller" video.  It was an appalling, cheap and cynical programming choice made worse by the fact that other major stories...from the Congress passing the landmark Waxman-Markey climate legislation to the coup in Honduras...were left to play the role only of journalistic spackle, filling in the cracks between paeans to a man who spent the last twenty years shocking the world with his unhinged depravity.

Originally written by John Bunch on July 2, 2009 9:23 PM When the Jews got guns, they started shooting back at the Nazis (Warsaw Ghetto, 1944). Unarmed people who suddenly get guns can suddenly start to fight back, particularly when the army they are fighting is "engaged elsewhere".  A massacre or holocaust, when you give the victims guns, suddenly is no longer a massacre, but a "civil war"

Do you think that civil war is such a great thing? Arent't there other ways to help the nations.
Did the so called help in Warsaw help anybody, except that everybody got killed, all the Warsaw dwellers. 2/3 of the pre-war Warsaw popullation got killed. What a great help, indeed amazing.

Originally written by Jacek K. on July 3, 2009 4:36 AM Originally written by Derek Thornton on July 3, 2009 10:29 AM the mass media cannot handle more than one crime against humanity at a time. _prayers: [Michal Jackson] was no hero. He was certainly no one to be celebrating. Unless of course, you were an ayatollah. Because one of the truly transcendental ironies of recent history has to be the fact that a symbol of the worst sort of Western spiritual and social corruption...

I do not thing Michael Jackson was a symbol of all the worst in the modern culture: I personally think quite the opposite, regardless of his presumed prescription drug use and all the lies attributed to him by dirty minds of the "moral world" and fortune seekers. In this sense he was just a victim, a scape-goat that the society is looking for, always. He was a great artist and mainly a symbol of eliminating all the boundaries and finding something transcendent in us. He was also a very nice person and even the US police does not believe in all the accusations he was subjected to twice, after carefully examining all the evidence and invading his mention. I think that he was bigger than the awaited Iranian revolution, being a revolution himself. A revolution against prejudice, the source of all evil, in my mind.

Originally written by Liliana Boladz-Nekipelov on July 3, 2009 6:01 PM I do not thing Michael Jackson was a symbol of all the worst in the modern culture: I personally think quite the opposite, regardless of  . . He was a great artist and mainly a symbol of eliminating all the boundaries and finding something transcendent in us.  I think that he was bigger than the awaited Iranian revolution, being a revolution himself. A revolution against prejudice, the source of all evil, in my mind.

Transcending the rebellious tendency in us, kids or otherwise, to smash up things the way MJ smashes car windows in his video?

A revolution against the prejudice that we are prone to apt things we watch on the screen, or that nothing is bad enough to watch (which indirectly preempts censorship)?

No, I don't think so, but I do not really know what you have in mind, because it is not clear.

Originally written by Jacek K. on July 3, 2009 10:36 AM Originally written by Derek Thornton on July 3, 2009 10:29 AM the mass media cannot handle more than one crime against humanity at a time. Which brings us back to Michael Jackson's death, an undoubted God's crime against humanity, which eclipsed what was going on in Iran. Says http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/06/29/how_michael_jackson_answered_the_ayatollahs_prayers: [Michal Jackson] was no hero. He was certainly no one to be celebrating.

The mass hysteria relating to MJ's death is out of all proportion. For reasons not entirely clear, or too far reaching to elaborate on, Michael Jackson makes me think of the hugely successful and highly sentimental ´Co** Co** commercial where many different nationalities sang a song that grabbed our heart strings because we wanted to believe that love and peace would always prevail. Seeing what is happening in Iran and around the world - well, have another listen...