Stop Me Before I Vote Again

An excerpt from a recent article on the idée fixe of "genocide" in the humanitarian outlook:

In recent times, many Western experts and commentators have lost the capacity to analyze and interpret events in Africa and Asia by using conventional political concepts. Instead, conflicts tend to be interpreted through a new political model that was constructed during the post-Cold War upheavals in the Balkans and Rwanda.

This new view of conflicts in the South and the East is based on a disoriented Western imagination, which discusses political violence through dramatic and sensationalist metaphors, such as 'Holocausts', 'Genocides', 'Ethnic Cleansing' and 'Mass Rape Camps'. Consequently, when it comes to violence in Africa or Asia, genocide has become the default diagnosis of events. From the Congo to Darfur to Kenya, bloody conflicts are recast as harbingers of holocaust.

Bandying about of the 'big G-word' might have more to do with 'the mass-consumption need for brands and labels' than reality: '"Genocide" is big because it carries the Nazi label, which sells well'. Speaking of which, many of those crying so loudly (e.g. Alan Dershowitz) about the "genocides" all around us, also happen to be the loudest defenders of those "shooting and crying" their way to an ethnically pure settler state.

Re: The last photo.

Israel is actually one of the few successful socialist countries in the world.

By confiscating private property from the Arab peasants who actually lived there before 1948, the Zionists were able to provide a cradle to the grave welfare state to whomever belonged to the right ethno/religious group.

But Israel, like all socialist experiments eventually ended up building a wall.

That's some breathtaking logic, TKT. I wonder what kind of economic system that makes the United States, which redistributed the land of indigenous people to white inhabitants and used the uncompensated labor of West Africans for 250 years.

Interesting photo of Bill Clinton. He's got that same squinty eyed sincerity LBJ used to put into motion.

mh
ya lbj ...
must by a hill cracker thang
can't imagine ike's wag
had a squint behind it
and jfk was so duane forget about
anything so folkish 'i mean it hoss 'sincere as a squint

nixon???

the whole face squnited aka scowl

Smiff, I'm surprised at you. I cant' believe you couldn't find, anywhere, a frame from that video where President Bubba looks us all right square in the lens, wagging his finger furiously while telling us he did not have sex with that woman. (;^>

I always thought the Lewinsky episode was the high point of Clinton's presidency. I really think he should have done more fucking and less president-ing. So naturally I don't want to show him at his finest hour.

wonder what kind of economic system that makes the United States, which redistributed the land of indigenous people to white inhabitants

Expressly socialist. Do you lefties not read history?

Look up "The Homestead Act."

Read Frederick Jackson Turner.

Jeez. This isn't even controversial among mainstream liberal historians. The genocide of the Plains Indians took place after the Civil War when the West was used as a kind of 19th Century GI Bill.

But Israel (if you'll note) was built as a socialist country from the ground up. Russia and Cuba both had a history before their respective Marxist revolutions.

Israel went from Kibbutzim to Labor Zionism right to the "socialism for Jews" and "Gulags for Palestinians" that you have today.

The reason I refer to Israel as "successful" is that outside of the Gaza Gulag life is pretty good. They've succeded in creating a prosperous social democracy with a free press, good universities, and a high standard of living.

Too bad about that dark little secret behind the wall.

Who's the guy in the second-from-the-bottom image? I fear it's someone quite high-profile. He bears some resemblance to Zbiggy with a few decades shaved off. His facial features remind me of the Klitschko brothers'. So he's of Slavic extraction, whoever he is?

It's disgraced televangelist Ted Haggard, glue man! He does have a little of that look about him, but without the wood-grain texture.

TKT: if you want to cheat by keeping the discussion within certain ideological boundaries, there's no way of talking about any of this "socialism" business with you.