So that's it then. The Iraq War is at an end. The long awaited conclusion as the final US soldiers leave the country, closing the gate behind them with a kick.
That's it. The end. Forget the lies. Forget the war crimes. Forget mistreating and killing defenceless prisoners. Remember the victory instead. Mr Obama needs the big-up before next year's elections.
But, of course, the war isn't over any more than Vietnam came to an end for the poor American vets who count their days ekeing out an existence.
In Iraq the violence continues, albeit intermittently. And there will be no comfort for the families of those who died, or those dreadfully injured in body and mind.
Media attention has, of course, been on the thousands of western soldiers that will never return. As if anyone from outside can truly grasp losing loved ones in a war so damningly dishonest, purposeless, wasteful and evil.But nowhere is the attention given to the 150,000 Iraqis killed, a number which remains uncertain because nobody from the Alliance counted them. The same for the lack of support for the hundreds of thousands wounded or who will spend the rest of their days suffering from the effects of uranium bullets and other accursed modern war weaponry.
Is the war really at an end when the USA intend to build a gigantic embassy in Iraq with, according to some commentators, up to 13,000 employees, including private sector mercenaries who have shown themselves to be willing to shoot first and ask questions later, in the good old traditions of the Wild West?
Is the war at an end with western dominance eyeing up the loathsome Iran and Syria?
I could write volumes about Iraq, and the criminal acts perpetrated by allied forces there.
Plaid Cymru opposed the war from its first jingoistic origins. Later we tried to impeach Tony Blair before realising that the other parties wouldn't scrutinise the behaviour of a man who, incredibly, is now a peace envoy in the middle east.
George Bush's policy appeared so pointless, filled with black humour from the moment that preparations for war in Iraq began following 9/11, on the same grounds as if after Pearl Harbour the US had begun a war with Mexico.
Was it a pointless war? No chance! The purpose was all too clear, confirming imperial power in an important strategic part of the world already cursed with considerable wealth. Woe is Syria. Woe is Iran.
Tuesday 27 December 2011
Saturday 17 December 2011
no more heroes anymore....
We all know life is little more then a short journey. more shorter for some then others. we try to cram as much as we can into that space of time....some manage to fill it with so much and shine above the crowd so much so that we cant help but notice them and be influenced by them. The mass modern media machine ensures they get noticed by millions across the globe. This man stood out because he wasnt afraid to challenge the rich and powerful...to criticise them and expose what he considered to be wrong or unjust regardless. he was an academic and a deep thinker..he was courageous and stubborn..he was rich and could so easily have lived a quiet cosy safe life going with the flow but...he chose to rattle cages and defend the little man making many enemies in the process, an opinionated loud mouth..a trouble maker..a whistle blower..an angry rebel..a traitor to his class system etc etc oh lord wouldnt this world be a worser place without men of conscience? if such a thing as a hero exists or is a valued thing then he was that to me. I am sad today...I feel an emptiness inside.I feel more alone in this crazy world..why? because one of my heroes just died! CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Journalist/Author/Social Commentator/Academic etc has died aged 62 of cancer...R.I.P. HITCH!
[Obituary]
'Over the course of his career the self-confessed contrarian gleefully picked fights with political opponents, Nobel Peace Prize winners and religious believers of all faiths.
He fired his trademark put-downs and scathing critiques at figures such as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa.
Family ties were no barrier either. He famously fell out with his brother, Mail On Sunday journalist Peter, though the pair were reconciled.
Hitchens published scores of books, thousands of articles and made countless television appearances where he could always be relied upon to provide a stream of serious but witty put-downs.
The publication of his 2007 book God Is Not Great made him a major celebrity in his adopted homeland of the United States, and he happily took on the role of the country's best-known atheist.
He maintained his devout atheism after being diagnosed with cancer in 2010, telling one interviewer: "No evidence or argument has yet been presented which would change my mind. But I like surprises."
The Anglo-American iconoclast – he became a United States citizen in 2007 – had very traditional English beginnings. The son of a naval officer, he was born in Portsmouth and educated at private school and Oxford University.
His student days set the pattern for the rest of his life and he freely admitted living a split existence, spending his days as a campaigning left-wing socialist and his nights wining and dining with the great and the good of Oxford.
Strong drink and political argument would remain among his chief pleasures for the rest of his life.
His early career in journalism saw him write for left-wing weekly The New Statesman where he became associated with a group of young writers including Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.
Those friendships endured but many old comrades turned their back on him when he supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
He famously traded insults with George Galloway who described him as "a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay".
Hitchens was promoting his memoirs, Hitch-22, when he was diagnosed with cancer.
He did not stop working, telling one interviewer: "I was very afraid that it would stop me writing. I was really petrified with fear about that because I thought that would, among other things, diminish my will to live.
"Being a writer is what I am, rather than what I do."
Hitchens is survived by his wife and three children.'
.....................................................................................
[Related article]
'It’s strange to mourn the passing of a person you’ve never met. It feels hollow, just a little unjustifiable, and as though you’re somewhat unequipped for the undertaking. Usually we are left with a myriad of moments to recollect and reconcile, to render into something approaching the complexity of life. Here we are left holding scraps of paper, dog-eared and lovingly wrecked, that we must read again for clues, or even simply the pleasure of a previously overlooked aphorism.
For those of us who only read (and watched and heard) Christopher Hitchens, who were never lucky enough to play spectator to the late night drinking and later night writing, who had to wait until the morning to see in print the fierce disputation and bone-dry wit that marked his life, the hole left by his death is not a dramatic wrench to the heart, but one that will appear more slowly, deepening and widening as his absence is felt more and more with every passing event. Why? Because Hitchens was not a stock figure who could be rolled out to offer controversy. He was a journalist who made himself vital, who – as he tells us in his memoir – was constantly nagged by the feeling of being “found out” at any moment.
For Hitch, it seems to those of us who truly admired him, was not simply an atheist, a polemicist, and least of all a contrarian. Nor was he a poster boy the left, a banner boy for Iraq, or the harbinger of the apocalypse. He was, in a small part, the 21st century’s answer to the enlightenment. He stood, first and formost, for thought. Thought that would always – by definition – question inherited truth and inherited experts.Thought that could break the chain and cull the living flower. In fact, he can be - and often is – mentioned alongside Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, Orwell and Trotsky not for what he thought, but for how he thought. If, as Joseph Conrad wrote, criticism is the fine flower in the garden of letters, Hitch – before a culling of a more brutal kind – was amongst the finest of the season.
It is not exactly true to say that I have had no ‘real’ contact with the man. After being given his e-mail address by a colleague (upon request) I wrote to offer my condolences and thanks. Asking for some reassurance that the itch to scribble is at least worth scratching he replied (in lightning speed):
“Pay heed to Rainer Marie Rilke’s question about whether you could go on living if you were prevented from writing. Once answer “no”, and the lesser problems fall away. This is simply because you have chosen to do what you should and must and are immune from petit-bourgeois regrets about other career-paths not taken. Then it begins, and you have a life and not an ‘occupation’.”
This is the great gift of the hitch. His lust for the living, the documentation and the criticism of life has cut a path that we are implored to follow. Especially those of us who, at the start of our journey, look upon the road less travelled by and notice its general lack of congestion. Even now, in the response to his death, coverage has been painfully predictable. Take the BBC who, in one of the worst mischaracterisations of a career since Darwins deathbed recanting, claimed Hitchen’s “called himself a contrarian.” It wouldn’t be so bad if a 10-minute YouTube spiral didn’t so easily reveal that ‘contrarian’ was a label against which he regularly railed, and for which he lambasted his publishers.
However, stranger still have been the stock responses, which were published with such speed that it would seem they have been written for weeks. And as though confirming the conspiracy, the lines, the conclusions, even the pithy turns of phrase, have been heard before, everyday. From diagnosis to departure, the sycophancy has been shocking. An event hosted by Stephen Fry on South Bank, which saw Hitch replaced with touching camaraderie by his closest friends (and Sean Penn), was so sickeningly fawning that a circle-jerk would have ended more tastefully. It was a memorial service without the casket. And how its subject must have blushed. Hitchens was not Mother Theresa; those of us who loved him should not fall victim to the same candy-coated canonisation as those who loved her. We are better than that.
We must remember him for who he was; one of us. One of a “stupid, poorly-evolved mammalian species, whose pre-frontal lobes are too small, and adrenalin glands too big, whose thumb-finger opposition isn’t all that it might be, who is afraid of the dark, and afraid to die.”
Admittedly, though, a remarkably good example of one.
As of this morning we have lost one of our best. We have been left standing in the dark, holding a candle lit at both ends and arms filled with scraps of paper, dog-eared and lovingly wrecked, the cover of which reads:
“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”
[Obituary]
'Over the course of his career the self-confessed contrarian gleefully picked fights with political opponents, Nobel Peace Prize winners and religious believers of all faiths.
He fired his trademark put-downs and scathing critiques at figures such as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa.
Family ties were no barrier either. He famously fell out with his brother, Mail On Sunday journalist Peter, though the pair were reconciled.
Hitchens published scores of books, thousands of articles and made countless television appearances where he could always be relied upon to provide a stream of serious but witty put-downs.
The publication of his 2007 book God Is Not Great made him a major celebrity in his adopted homeland of the United States, and he happily took on the role of the country's best-known atheist.
He maintained his devout atheism after being diagnosed with cancer in 2010, telling one interviewer: "No evidence or argument has yet been presented which would change my mind. But I like surprises."
The Anglo-American iconoclast – he became a United States citizen in 2007 – had very traditional English beginnings. The son of a naval officer, he was born in Portsmouth and educated at private school and Oxford University.
His student days set the pattern for the rest of his life and he freely admitted living a split existence, spending his days as a campaigning left-wing socialist and his nights wining and dining with the great and the good of Oxford.
Strong drink and political argument would remain among his chief pleasures for the rest of his life.
His early career in journalism saw him write for left-wing weekly The New Statesman where he became associated with a group of young writers including Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.
Those friendships endured but many old comrades turned their back on him when he supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
He famously traded insults with George Galloway who described him as "a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay".
Hitchens was promoting his memoirs, Hitch-22, when he was diagnosed with cancer.
He did not stop working, telling one interviewer: "I was very afraid that it would stop me writing. I was really petrified with fear about that because I thought that would, among other things, diminish my will to live.
"Being a writer is what I am, rather than what I do."
Hitchens is survived by his wife and three children.'
.....................................................................................
[Related article]
'It’s strange to mourn the passing of a person you’ve never met. It feels hollow, just a little unjustifiable, and as though you’re somewhat unequipped for the undertaking. Usually we are left with a myriad of moments to recollect and reconcile, to render into something approaching the complexity of life. Here we are left holding scraps of paper, dog-eared and lovingly wrecked, that we must read again for clues, or even simply the pleasure of a previously overlooked aphorism.
For those of us who only read (and watched and heard) Christopher Hitchens, who were never lucky enough to play spectator to the late night drinking and later night writing, who had to wait until the morning to see in print the fierce disputation and bone-dry wit that marked his life, the hole left by his death is not a dramatic wrench to the heart, but one that will appear more slowly, deepening and widening as his absence is felt more and more with every passing event. Why? Because Hitchens was not a stock figure who could be rolled out to offer controversy. He was a journalist who made himself vital, who – as he tells us in his memoir – was constantly nagged by the feeling of being “found out” at any moment.
For Hitch, it seems to those of us who truly admired him, was not simply an atheist, a polemicist, and least of all a contrarian. Nor was he a poster boy the left, a banner boy for Iraq, or the harbinger of the apocalypse. He was, in a small part, the 21st century’s answer to the enlightenment. He stood, first and formost, for thought. Thought that would always – by definition – question inherited truth and inherited experts.Thought that could break the chain and cull the living flower. In fact, he can be - and often is – mentioned alongside Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, Orwell and Trotsky not for what he thought, but for how he thought. If, as Joseph Conrad wrote, criticism is the fine flower in the garden of letters, Hitch – before a culling of a more brutal kind – was amongst the finest of the season.
It is not exactly true to say that I have had no ‘real’ contact with the man. After being given his e-mail address by a colleague (upon request) I wrote to offer my condolences and thanks. Asking for some reassurance that the itch to scribble is at least worth scratching he replied (in lightning speed):
“Pay heed to Rainer Marie Rilke’s question about whether you could go on living if you were prevented from writing. Once answer “no”, and the lesser problems fall away. This is simply because you have chosen to do what you should and must and are immune from petit-bourgeois regrets about other career-paths not taken. Then it begins, and you have a life and not an ‘occupation’.”
This is the great gift of the hitch. His lust for the living, the documentation and the criticism of life has cut a path that we are implored to follow. Especially those of us who, at the start of our journey, look upon the road less travelled by and notice its general lack of congestion. Even now, in the response to his death, coverage has been painfully predictable. Take the BBC who, in one of the worst mischaracterisations of a career since Darwins deathbed recanting, claimed Hitchen’s “called himself a contrarian.” It wouldn’t be so bad if a 10-minute YouTube spiral didn’t so easily reveal that ‘contrarian’ was a label against which he regularly railed, and for which he lambasted his publishers.
However, stranger still have been the stock responses, which were published with such speed that it would seem they have been written for weeks. And as though confirming the conspiracy, the lines, the conclusions, even the pithy turns of phrase, have been heard before, everyday. From diagnosis to departure, the sycophancy has been shocking. An event hosted by Stephen Fry on South Bank, which saw Hitch replaced with touching camaraderie by his closest friends (and Sean Penn), was so sickeningly fawning that a circle-jerk would have ended more tastefully. It was a memorial service without the casket. And how its subject must have blushed. Hitchens was not Mother Theresa; those of us who loved him should not fall victim to the same candy-coated canonisation as those who loved her. We are better than that.
We must remember him for who he was; one of us. One of a “stupid, poorly-evolved mammalian species, whose pre-frontal lobes are too small, and adrenalin glands too big, whose thumb-finger opposition isn’t all that it might be, who is afraid of the dark, and afraid to die.”
Admittedly, though, a remarkably good example of one.
As of this morning we have lost one of our best. We have been left standing in the dark, holding a candle lit at both ends and arms filled with scraps of paper, dog-eared and lovingly wrecked, the cover of which reads:
“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”
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