Babies Fed Opium In Afghanistan

Babies Fed Opium In Afghanistan

Posted by TheNEWS on January 31, 2011

In a far flung corner of northern Afghanistan, Aziza reaches into the dark wooden cupboard,  rummages around, and pulls out a small lump of something wrapped in plastic.

An opium field in Afghanistan.

She unwraps it, breaking off a small chunk as if it were chocolate, and feeds it to  four-year-old son, Omaidullah. It’s his breakfast — a lump of pure opium.
“If I don’t give him opium he doesn’t sleep,” she says. “And he doesn’t let me work.” Aziza  comes from a poor family of carpet weavers in Balkh province. She has no education, no idea of  the health risks involved or that opium is addictive.
“We give the children opium whenever they get sick as well,” she says, crouching over her loom.  With no real medical care in these parts and the high cost of medicine, all the families out  here know is opium.
It’s a cycle of addiction passed on through generations.
The adults take opium to work longer hours and ease their pain.
Aziza’s elderly mother-in-law, Rozigul, rolls a small ball in her fingers and pops it into her  mouth with a small smile before passing a piece over to her sister.
“I had to work and raise the children, so I started using drugs,” she says. “We are very poor  people, so I used opium. We don’t have anything to eat. That is why we have to work and use  drugs to keep our kids quiet.”
The entire extended family is addicted.
This part of Afghanistan is famous for its carpets. It’s so remote there are no real roads. The  dirt ones that exist are often blocked by landslides.
“Opium is nothing new to our villages or districts. It’s an old tradition, something of a  religion in some areas,” said Dr. Mohamed Daoud Rated, coordinator of the centre.

The Iraq War—On Drugs -- In These Times

The Iraq War—On Drugs -- In These Times

May 31, 2006

The Iraq War—On Drugs

BY Terry J. Allen

Ready for deployment is not the same as mentally healthy, and the army's long-term interests smack hard against its need for warm bodies, no matter how dangerous continued action may be to an individual's mental health.

Wounded U.S. soldiers are being patched up and returned to battle before they are healed. The wounds in this case are to the psyche, caused by the trauma and horror that are as integral to war as guns and death.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, when “suck it up” fails to snap a soldier out of depression or panic, the Army turns to drugs. “Soldiers I talked to were receiving bags of antidepressants and sleeping meds in Iraq, but not the trauma care they needed,” says Steve Robinson, a Defense Department intelligence analyst during the Clinton administration.

Sometimes sleeping pills, antidepressants and tranquilizers are prescribed by qualified personnel. Sometimes not. Sgt. Georg Anderas Pogany told Salon that after he broke down in Iraq, his team sergeant told him “to pull himself together, gave him two Ambien, a prescription sleep aid, and ordered him to sleep.”

Other soldiers self-medicate. “We were so junked out on Valium, we had no emotions anymore,” Iraq vet John Crawford told “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross. He and others in his unit in Iraq became addicted to Valium.

The issues around mental health and medication are exacerbated for the more than 378,000 troops who have served multiple tours to Iraq and Afghanistan. Post traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) caused by a previous tour are cropping up in later ones.

“It concerns us when we hear military doctors say, ‘It’s wonderful that we have these drugs available to cope with second or third deployments,’” Joyce Raezer of the National Military Family Association told In These Times.

“But that statement makes military spouses cringe,” she continues, “Soldiers are saying ‘we don’t have time to recover.’”

Marine psychiatrist Cmdr. Paul S. Hammer confirmed to San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Rick Rogers that Marines with PTSD are returning to Iraq.

In many cases, their problem is labeled stress. “Army docs have told me that commanders pressured them not to diagnose PTSD because it would cut into combat power—the ability to project men and women into war,” says Robinson. “The docs admit that the decision [to misdiagnose] is unethical, but are unwilling to take the huge career risk of becoming a whistle blower.”

“The military has an obligation to ensure your readiness,” says Raezer. “It is in its long-term benefit to have the person healthy.” But those goals may conflict with themselves and with reality. Ready for deployment is not the same as mentally healthy, and the army’s long-term interests smack hard against its need for warm bodies, no matter how dangerous continued action may be to an individual’s mental health.

All these factors promote that classic American solution: Better living through chemistry. When effective, antidepressants and sleeping pills can enable a soldier to get back in action—either from a huddle of terror and disgust, or increasingly, from back home to serve an additional tour.

But the use of brain-altering medications must be monitored for effectiveness and safety, which is beyond the Army’s capability in Iraq. The medications can take weeks to kick in, dangerously interact with other medications or fail to work at all. Side effects can include organ damage and thoughts of suicide.

But if the problem is bad for the occupying army, it is far worse for the Iraqi civilians, who have few medical resources and no end in sight to the constant fear and deprivation that occupation has brought.

“The [Iraqi] Ministry of Health says since the U.S. invasion there’s been a 35 percent jump in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder [in Iraqis],” reported NPR Baghdad correspondent Jamie Tarabay.

Keith Humphreys of U.S. Veterans Affairs documented a substantial rise in drug use in Iraq resulting from the terrible stress of daily life. Drugs that would require a prescription in the United States are available in drug stores and many Iraqis are turning to them for relief.

Former biology undergraduate Rorla Monere began taking sleeping pills to dull the pain and fear after witnessing the kidnapping of a close friend who was thrown into a car and later raped; a suicide car bomb left another of Monere’s close friends in a wheelchair. Afraid to go out, Monere stays at home, terrified that someone will storm the house.

“The pills don’t have any effect anymore,” she told NPR’s “Morning Edition,” “because I take so many of them. I just want my day to finish. I spend it alone. … My wish is to die, to be free and rest. Better than this slaughter.”

Some U.S. soldiers know how she feels. In a May 2 letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wrote, “Last year’s suicide rate was the highest since 1993. Eighty-three Army soldiers on active duty committed suicide, 25 while deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan—a 24 percent increase over the prior year. I find it simply astonishing that the sheer magnitude of the mental health crisis facing our Armed Forces does not compel you to action.”

ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

Terry J. Allen, an In These Times senior editor, has written the magazine's monthly investigative health and science column since 2006.

Ishtar Rising...: Ethiopia's River of Death

Ishtar Rising...: Ethiopia's River of Death

Ethiopia's River of Death

A handful of tribal Christians are fighting child sacrifice.

Matthew D. LaPlante | posted 8/17/2011 09:08AM

The healthy infant boy's top teeth came in before his bottom teeth. For this, elders of the Kara tribe in Ethiopia's primitive Omo River region determined that the child must die.

The child was mingi—"cursed" according to superstition. With every breath, the elders believed, the boy was beckoning an evil spirit into their village. It was the sacrifice of one child for the good of the entire tribe, a rite that elders had witnessed for untold generations.

Less clear was what to do about the boy's dead twin. After some debate and an examination of goat intestines, the elders decided the dead twin must have been mingi too. They dug up the corpse, bound it to the living boy, paddled a canoe into the center of the swiftly moving Omo River, and threw them both into the cold, brown waters.

That was five years ago. Several years ago, regional officials had begun taking action—threatening prison for those complicit in mingi killings. But at best, officials are equipped to step in only after a child has been murdered. So, in the villages of southern Ethiopia, a region the size of Texas with few roads or infrastructure, a few concerned tribespeople started an orphanage for cursed children. Yet the orphanage is mired in controversy, and meanwhile, few have challenged the underlying fear of mingi.

But one small band of Christians in one tribe, along with other supportive Christians, has pledged to protect these cursed children until mingi is no more. They are determined to show tribal elders that there is something "stronger than mingi"—the power of Jesus Christ. Earlier this year, I traveled to the hard-to-reach Ethiopian river valley to hear their story.

Modern-Day Child Sacrifice

Bona Shapo, a tribal elder, took me to where mingi children are being sacrificed. He steered his dugout canoe through the crocodile-infested waters of the Omo River, guiding the craft beneath a crumbling precipice near the stick-and-thatch village of Korcho. Across the river, Colobus monkeys whooped and howled, stirring Marabou storks from their perches on a stand of acacia.

"This is where they do it," says Bona, who had stood on these muddy banks the day the boys were thrown into the river.

There has been little modern research on mingi. Elders single out for death children who are born out of wedlock, have damaged genitals, or whose top baby teeth emerge before the bottom ones. Kara elders believe keeping this traditional practice is crucial to tribal survival. Allowing a mingi child to live among their people, they fear, will cause the rains to cease and the sun to grow hotter.

"If they have mingi, there will be no water, no food, no cattle," Bona says. "But when they throw the baby away, everything is good again. So yes, it is sad, but we are thinking about the village, the family, all the people."

Tribal parents tolerate the killing. After Erma Ayeli gave birth, elders took her newborn. She was not permitted to nurse him, hold him, or see him. "I think he must have been a beautiful boy," she says. "I wanted to keep him."

Her chin sinks into the colorful beads draped around her neck. Erma still grieves over her son's death—but she does not question it. "There was no other option," she says.

Sex outside of marriage is acceptable among the Kara. But if a woman becomes pregnant before participating in a marriage ceremony, as Erma did, her child is considered kumbaso—a mingi curse that occurs when parents fail to perform the appropriate rites before conceiving.

Palestine Cry: “...deliberate Jewish effort to decimate the Arabs and to destroy Christianity in Palestine."

Palestine Cry: “...deliberate Jewish effort to decimate the Arabs and to destroy Christianity in Palestine."

“...deliberate Jewish effort to decimate the Arabs and to destroy Christianity in Palestine." is a direct quote from Archbishop Hughes decades ago. Nothing has changed.

The Devil is a Murderer, Liar and Thief from the beginning (John 8:[44] You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and he stood not in the truth; because truth is not in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father thereof. John 10:[1] Amen, amen I say to you: He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up another way, the same is a thief and a robber. ). So are those who follow the Devil. Nothing has changed.

From:

• The Holy Land And The Jews (Jewish Destruction Of Christian Shrines)

(April, 1955)

THE REFUGEES

As part of a program to find “accommodations” for its influx of Jewish colonizers, the government of Israel has managed to bring about the dismemberment and evacuation of all Catholic regions in the Holy Land. Before the formation of the Israeli state, Palestine was in no sense a Christian-populated country. And yet, because the chief targets for Jewish aggression have been so consistently the Catholic towns and villages, nearly twenty per cent of the Arabs kicked out of their ancient homes have been Christians.

To date, close to a million Arab refugees have been stripped of everything they possess by way of home, land, savings, business, and, often, even family. Reports from Catholics in Lebanon, just north of the Holy Land, tell of dusty roads choked with the exodus of Galilee Arabs, mothers with breast-fed babies, orphaned children, dazed fathers, many of whom were carrying cherished crucifixes and other holy objects which, at great risk, they had rescued from Jewish desecration as they left their looted homes.

A communique from Brother Anthony Bruya, O. F. M., on the plight of the town of Rameh, bears vivid witness to the special hatred which has been shown to Catholics in the Holy Land. Israeli forces occupied Rameh, a two-thirds Christian community, and while permitting the Muslim Arabs to stay, ordered all Catholics to “leave within half an hour.” To back up the order, the Israeli commander reminded the Christian townspeople of what had happened to the residents of Deir Assin and Tireh — who were massacred in the streets for daring to question the authority of a Jewish army leader.

Similar atrocities have taken place in Haifa, Sheframr, Maslia, Tarshiha, and a hundred other places. But perhaps the most touching and tragic report is the one dated January 15, 1952, in which Archbishop George Hakim of Galilee protested in vain to the Israeli government over the mass destruction of the totally Catholic village of Ikret. Church, schools, rectory, homes — everything was in shambles. And what is more, wrote the Archbishop, the Jews perpetrated all this on Christmas Day itself.

The assault on Ikret, like all the rest of Israel’s anti-Catholic outrages, was in no sense an “unavoidable casualty” of the recent Jewish-Arab warfare. All of the first-hand Catholic observers are quick to make this point. Indeed, in his summary report on the Holy Land situation, the Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Hughes, has very plainly charged that there is now in operation a “deliberate Jewish effort to decimate the Arabs and to destroy Christianity in Palestine.”

Abortion is Murder

From Mary Meehan’s "The Road to Abortion" Copyright © 1998, 1999 & 2002 by Mary Meehan. In 1966 Dr. Alan Guttmacher, apparently trying to be witty, wrote from Africa to a U.S. colleague: "My trip has been great. I believe I converted the Jews in Israel and now I am working on the pigmented savages." This private comment from Guttmacher (who was Jewish, but not observant) came soon after his Planned Parenthood group gave an award to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.(32)
32. William H. Draper, Jr., to P. A. Gorman, [8 or 11] Sept. 1967, Guttmacher Papers; Alan F. Guttmacher to Frank Notestein, 13 June 1966, PPFA (II), box 125; and Congressional Record (10 May 1966), vol. 112, part 8, 10164-10165. In his statement accepting the Margaret Sanger Award, Dr. King praised Sanger and family planning and spoke of "the modern plague of overpopulation." Unfortunately, he seemed unaware of the eugenics connections of Sanger and of population control in general. Ibid.

Also see: http://www.angelfire.com/mo/baha/king.html

It is about the baby's right to life! It is not about reproductive choices.

Alan Guttmacher is the biggest murdering liar there is. All he wanted to do is destroy innocent babies by murder - abortion.

Alan Guttmacher Institute Mission: "The Institute's mission is to protect the reproductive choices of all women and men in the United States and throughout the world. It is to support their ability to obtain the information and services needed to achieve their full human rights, safeguard their health and exercise their individual responsibilities in regard to sexual behavior and relationships, reproduction and family formation."

Maurice Pinay Blog: "Operation Mermaid Dawn"

Maurice Pinay Blog: "Operation Mermaid Dawn"

Miko said...

"Like "Operation Desert Storm" with its 'Shock and Awe' doctrine, a phonetic allusion to the 'Shekinah' of rabbinic Judaism,..."

More than that, the Cabalistic paradigm according to Ari Luria and via the pretended pacifist Einstein of nuclear poisoning, in this case, of Baghdad and Iraq at large that was encompassed at the same time and by some of the warheads used in "shock and awe" is in keeping completely with Likkudnik total disregard for God and His law and our fellow human beings, as they so amply demonstrated upon Palestinian infants and children in Gaza.

Traditional Catholic Prayers: The Prayer of St. Francis and his order

This is a prayer to the true God, I love this. The true God created the sun and forbade worship of it. The true God forbade hatred and wills peace and mercy and forgiveness. So be it.

Traditional Catholic Prayers: The Prayer of St. Francis and his order

Friday, August 26, 2011
The Prayer of St. Francis and his order

Holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty, Who is and Who was and Who is to come

Let us praise and glorify Him forever.

Lord our God, You are worthy to receive praise and glory and honor and blessing

Let us praise and glorify Him forever.

The Lamb Who was slain is worthy to receive power and divinity and wisdom and strength, and honor and glory and blessing

Let us praise and glorify Him forever.

Let us bless the Father and the Son with the Holy Spirit:

Let us praise and glorify Him forever.

Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord

Let us praise and glorify Him forever.

Sing praise to our God, all you His servants and you who fear God, the small and the great.

Let us praise and glorify Him forever.

Let heaven and earth praise Him Who is glorious

Let us praise and glorify Him forever.

And every creature that is in heaven and on earth and under earth and in the sea and those which are in them.

Let us praise and glorify Him forever.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit:

Let us praise and glorify Him forever.

As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.

Let us praise and glorify Him forever.


Let us pray:

All-powerful, most holy, most high, and supreme God:

all good,

supreme good,

totally good,

You Who alone are good; may we give You all praise, all glory, all thanks, all honor:

all blessing,

and all good things.

So be it.

So be it.

Amen.



O OUR most holy FATHER,

Our Creator, Redeemer, Consoler, and Savior


WHO ARE IN HEAVEN:

In the angels and in the saints,

Enlightening them to love, because You, Lord, are light

Inflaming them to love, because You, Lord, are love

Indwelling and filling them with happiness, because You, Lord, are the Supreme Good,

the Eternal Good

from Whom comes all good

without Whom there is no good.


HALLOWED BE YOUR NAME:

Mav our knowledge of You become ever clearer that we may know the breadth of Your blessings

the length of Your promises

the height of Your majesty

the depth of Your judgments.


YOUR KINGDOM COME:

So that You may rule in us through Your grace

and enable us to come to Your kingdom

where there is an unclouded vision of You

a perfect love of You

a blessed campanionship with You

an eternal enjoyment of You.


YOUR WILL BE DONE ON EARTH AS IT IS IN

HEAVEN:

That we may love You with our whole heart by always thinking

of You


with our whole soul by always desiring You


with our whole mind by directing all our

intentions to You and by seeking Your

glory in everything


and with our whole strength by spending all our energies and affections

of soul and body

in the service of Your love

and of nothing else


and may we love our neighbors as ourselves

by drawing them all with our whole strength to Your love

by rejoicing in the good fortunes of others as well as our

own

and by sympathizing with the misfortunes of others

and by giving offense to no one.


GIVE US THIS DAY:

in memory and understanding and reverence

of the love which You in our Lord Jesus Christ had for us

and of those things which He said and did and suffered for us.


OUR DAILY BREAD:

Your own Beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.


AND FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES:

Through Your ineffable mercy

through the power of the Passion of Your Beloved Son together with the merits and intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all Your chosen ones.


AS WE FORGIVE THOSE WHO TRESPASS AGAINST

US:

And whatever we do not forgive perfectly, do you, Lord, enable us to forgive to the full so that we may truly love our enemies and fervently intercede for them before You returning no one evil for evil

and striving to help everyone in You.


AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION

Hidden or obvious

Sudden or persistent.


BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL

Past, present and to come.


Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit

As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.

The Sun Religion of the Nazis and Its Purpose

The Sun Religion of the Nazis and Its Purpose

---

Professor Heinar Schilling specialized from 1923 in the Pre-history of the Germanen.

In December 1935, Schwarze Korps, the official journal of the SS, commissioned Professor Schilling to write a series of articles under the title Germanisches Leben. The result was published in 1937 under the same title in a book from Koehler & Amelang, Leipzig.

I have the book before me. Nobody in Hitler's Germany attributed anything falsely to the National Socialist Movement or the SS, and so one may rest assured that what Professor Schilling writes is the real Jacob.

The chapter of interest is at page 37: Die Sonnenreligion der Bronzezeit und ihr Ausdruck in Kultur und Brauchtum.

Professor Schilling tells us that the cultural symbol for the Northern peoples from time immemorial had been the wheel of four spokes representing the sun, which gradually evolved "into the modern swastika".

During the period of Bronze Age expansionism, the Northern peoples followed their victorious symbol, the swastika, everywhere. Bronze Age culture and the Nordic sun religion are closely related, and the latter "remains deeply entrenched in the fibres of our being", he avers.

Few of the actual rites had been retained to modern times, he went on, although the custom still seen in many German Gaue of rolling burning wheels down mountainsides on days of the solstice was a clear vestige.

Professor Schilling concluded that the Sun was therefore the highest Godhead of the Ancient Germanen...and from the enormous mass of sun symbols and similar artefacts he allows us to draw the inference that "just as in the epoch of the original Eddas when the Sun was the basis of the religious belief of the Nordic race, it has the same validity today: "The Sun is the All-Highest for the Children of the Earth."

The extent to which the National Socialist Movement had turned away from Christianity to Sun-worship is shown by some examples of Sonnenwendfeir ceremonies in Argentina prewar(1):

"...On 17 December 1933 in the Buenos Aires suburb of Vicente L�pez, an NSDAP torchlit Sonnenwendfeir celebration, a neo-pagan event, was held in the presence of the new Minister to Argentina, Baron SS-Sturmf�hrer von Thermann, who wore his SS uniform..."

"...The first major event promoted by the Nazis in the province of Chaco was the Sonnenwendfeir ceremony at Charata on 21 December 1935, when portentous fiery speeches alternated with choral recitals..."

"...In December 1937, 500 German boy-scouts and BDM girls were taken to a natural amphitheatre overlooking the South Atlantic at Comodoro Rivadavia. Two great pillars of wood were set alight, and by the flickering flames diverse Nazi orators spoke on the origins and meaning of the ceremony while songs of praise were sung for the Fallen for Nazi Freedom.."

"...In March 1939, students from the German school at Rosario were the Sonnenwendfeir celebrants on an island in the River Paran� opposite the city: Hitler Youth flags and banners, trumpets, a rustic altar straight from Germanic myth, young leaders enthroned to incantations...the onlookers from the local population shook their heads in incredulity."

And despite the catastrophe of the capitulation in 1945, the Sonnenwendfeir ceremonies went on postwar(2):

"...Professor Jacques de Mahieu, a former SS officer with 33.Waffen-SS Grenadier-Division recruited from French volunteers was a regular speaker at the pagan solar solstice celebrations held by fugitive Nazis in Argentina.."

Sources:
(1) Profesor Ronald Newton: El Cuarto Lado del Tri�ngulo, Buenos Aires, 1995, p. 70, 105, 113:
(2) Uki Go�i: The Real Odessa, Granta Books London, 2003, p.110.


What was all this really for? Everything done by the Nazis had a definite aim. Why did they want to convince a 20th century industrialized society to return to the Sun religion of their Bronze Age ancestors? What had they discovered to make them believe it was more efficacious than Christianity?

The researcher must ask himself or herself this question: Knowing what I know of religion, what is the effect on the higher planes in having millions and millions of Nazi followers worldwide offering homage to the Sun four times annually, at the two solstices, and on the longest and shortest days of the year?

Beyond this question, all else pales into insignificance.

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Speigel Online International - The Führer Cult Germans Cringe at Hitler's Popularity in Pakistan

03/17/2010

 

The Führer Cult

Germans Cringe at Hitler's Popularity in Pakistan

By Hasnain Kazim in Islamabad, Pakistan

REUTERS

The swastika is a religious symbol of good luck.

Germans are popular in India and Pakistan, but not always for the right reasons. Many in South Asia have nothing but admiration for Adolf Hitler and still associate Germany with the Third Reich. Everyday encounters with the love of all things Nazi makes German visitors cringe.

Pakistan is the opposite of Germany. The mountains are in the north, the sea is in the south, the economic problems are in the west and the east is doing well. It's not hard for a German living in Pakistan to get used to these differences, but one contrast is hard to stomach: Most people like Hitler.

I was recently at the hairdresser, an elderly man who doesn't resort to electric clippers. All he has is creaky pair of scissors, a comb, an aerosol with water. He did a neat job but I wasn't entirely happy.

I said: "I look like Hitler."

He looked at me in the mirror, gave a satisfied smile and said: "Yes, yes, very nice."

I decided not to challenge him, went home and tried to get rid of the strict parting he'd given me.

Embarrassing Moments

I was glad I avoided the usual Hitler conversation. Pakistanis always hone in on that topic whenever they talk to Germans. "We're Aryans too," they say, because there was an Indo-Germanic race, the Aryas. Besides, Hitler was a military genius, they add.

Sometimes it's better to keep quiet about one's German origins. It's embarrassing because people here think they're doing you a favor by expressing their admiration for the Nazi leader. I suspect most Indians and Pakistanis have no idea what this man did. They see him as the bold Führer who took on the British and Americans.

In the Islamic world, not just in Pakistan but right across from Iran to northern Africa, anti-Semitic sentiment of course plays a role. Conversations with German visitors rapidly turn to the injustice being suffered by the Palestinians who were robbed of their land.

The Desire to be Swallowed up by the Ground

One can try to cut such conversations short, like a German acquaintance of mine did recently. He told a taxi driver in Iran he should stop talking nonsense because he as a dark-skinned person wouldn't have survived long in Nazi Germany. The taxi driver looked at him surprised and said: "But I'm Aryan!"

The alternative is just to wish the ground would swallow you up, like when German friends visited us while we were staying with our Pakistani relatives in London. Out of the blue, one uncle started talking admiringly about Hitler, his supposed military feats and how he led Germany out of economic misery. Our friends just sat there stony-faced and didn't know what to say. Later on my parents apologized to them.

I don't know where this fascination comes from, not just for the Nazis but for all things German. Most people don't realize that today's Germany is very different from the Third Reich. It's not surprising. Many have never even been to the next big city in their own country, so how should they know what things are like in Germany these days?

"I Like Nazi"

As a result, many Pakistanis easily switch from Hitler to Mercedes ("Very excellent car, but a little too expensive"). A few days ago a white Mercedes built in the 1970s was driving ahead of me in the center of Islamabad carrying a family of seven. On the back was a sticker bearing a black swastika in a white circle. Underneath it read: "I like Nazi."

It's not just Muslims who maintain this Nazi cult. A few years ago, a Hindu businessman in India opened a restaurant called "Hitler's Cross," complete with a portrait of the Führer at the entrance. Another Hindu sold bed linen emblazoned with swastikas that had little to do with the Hindu swastika symbol for good luck. The sheets, pillow cases and bed spreads were advertised as being part of "The Nazi Collection." English editions of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" can be found in bookshops even in the most remote parts of India. And Indian schoolbooks have been known to celebrate Hitler as a great leader.

Once my wife and I visited the cafe in the beautiful Hotel Imperial in New Delhi. It has a garden lined with palms, excellent tea and friendly waiters in uniforms that recall the colonial era. A young man served us. The name tag on his uniform attracted my interest so I asked him why he had this rather unusual name for an Indian man. "Oh, my parents named me after a great historic person," he explained.

The name, in black letters on a golden plate, read: Adolf.

Stop the Wall

August 19, 2011

LATEST NEWS
Palestinian civil society calls for comprehensive military embargo on Israel
Jul 8, 2011--

• Palestinian civil society calls for comprehensive military embargo on Israel
• Youth movement activists deliver call and proof of military collusion with Israel to UN and consulates
• Organizations representing millions around the globe as well as Nobel Peace Prize winners including Desmond Tutu express support for the Palestinian embargo call

[MORE]

Three Children Injured at Demonstration in al-Ma’asara Village
Aug 14, 2011-- Today, three children were injured during a demonstration in a village near Bethlehem. Israeli Occupation forces repressed the demonstration activity, which was part of the weekly resistance march against the Wall and settlements in the al-Ma'asara village. [MORE]

Scores of Activists Call for Boycott of Israeli Goods in Ramallah
Aug 14, 2011-- More than forty activists, at the invitation of the Palestinian, Grassroots, Anti-apartheid Wall Campaign with the participation of the Independent Youth Movement, sit at al-Manara Square in Ramallah after a field trip to local shops. At the shops, demonstrators called for the participation of the shop owners, traders, and citizens to boycott the goods of the occupation and settlement institutions. [MORE]

Popular Struggle Continues in First Week of Ramadan
Aug 13, 2011-- Ramadan began on the first day of August with Israeli violence in the West Bank. On the first holy Friday of the month, weekly village protests were held in addition even more demonstrations. Seemingly eclipsed in international media by protests in Israel against spending cuts, popular resistance against the Occupation has not paused, despite this holy month of fasting and internal reflection. [MORE]

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

The beginning of the end of the Cold War

By Robert Longley, About.com Guide

On June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan spoke the people of West Berlin at the base of the Brandenburg Gate, near the Berlin wall. Due to the amplification system being used, the President's words could also be heard on the Eastern (Communist-controlled) side of the wall. The address Reagan delivered that day is considered by many to have affirmed the beginning of the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism. On Nov. 9-11, 1989, the people of a free Berlin tore down that wall.

Of all his speeches, Ronald Reagan's "tear down that wall," address may well become the "Great Communicator's" best remembered. The following is an excerpt from President Reagan's address.

"In the 1950s, Khrushchev predicted: 'We will bury you.' But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind--too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.

"And now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control.

"Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.

"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'"

A transcript of the entire address can be found on the Reagan Foundation Website at: http://www.reaganfoundation.org/reagan/speeches/wall.asp


This is what he was referring to - a system of repression so evil that today it is only equaled by what is done to the Palestinians and the Dalits of India.

Introduction: Stalin’s Gulag

The term “GULAG” is an acronym for the Soviet bureaucratic institution, Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh LAGerei (Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps), that operated the Soviet system of forced labor camps in the Stalin era. Since the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, the term has come to represent the entire Soviet forced labor penal system. Concentration camps were created in the Soviet Union shortly after the 1917 revolution, but the system grew to tremendous proportions during the course of Stalin’s campaign to turn the Soviet Union into a modern industrial power and to collectivize agriculture in the early 1930s.

Gulag camps existed throughout the Soviet Union, but the largest camps lay in the most extreme geographical and climatic regions of the country from the Arctic north to the Siberian east and the Central Asian south. Prisoners were engaged in a variety of economic activities, but their work was typically unskilled, manual, and economically inefficient. The combination of endemic violence, extreme climate, hard labor, meager food rations and unsanitary conditions led to extremely high death rates in the camps.

While the Gulag was radically reduced in size following Stalin’s death in 1953, forced labor camps and political prisoners continued to exist in the Soviet Union right up to the Gorbachev era.

End of excerpt from: Introduction: Stalin’s Gulag



AND IT HASN'T CHANGED

Putin's Political Prisoners

In its Soviet heyday, Moscow's dreaded Lefortovo prison served as a way station to the Gulag for political prisoners such as Yevgenia Ginzburg, Vladimir Bukovsky and Natan Sharansky. Under Vladimir Putin, it performs exactly the same function.

In December, Russian scientist Igor Reshetin was sentenced to 11½ years in a "strict regime" prison colony on charges of having sold dual-use technologies to China for its space programs. In 1996, Mr. Reshetin's company, TsNIIMASh-Export, was contracted to supply China with a series of technical reports, mostly dealing with the re-entry of spaceships into earth's atmosphere. The deal, worth about $30 million, represented about half of Russia's space-related exports to China at the time; business was expected to grow to about $100 million a year. In 2002, Mr. Reshetin submitted his reports to two expert government commissions, which certified that they contained no classified information.

By the next year, however, TsNIIMASh-Export was under investigation by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB's successor. In 2005, Mr. Reshetin, who suffers from heart disease, was remanded to Lefortovo, where he and a colleague spent two years before sentencing. During his trial, 62 publicly available monographs were produced to demonstrate that no secret information had been disclosed. "I have seen all the reports sent to China," Alexander Kraiko, a head of department at a Russian technical institute, told the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. "The information they contain was published in widely accessed print [publications] in Russian and in the U.S.A."

Given current conditions in Russia's penal colonies, which I described in this column last week, Mr. Reshetin's conviction amounts to a death sentence. Convicted with him are business associates Sergei Vizir (11 years), Mikhail Ivanov (five years), and Alexander Rozhkin (five years). Another business associate, Sergei Tverdokhlebov, spent two months in Lefortovo, signed a "voluntary confession," and died of a heart attack shortly thereafter.

Why were the authorities so hell-bent on punishing Mr. Reshetin? One theory is that Mr. Rashetin simply fell afoul a local FSB agent eager to justify his pay and win advancement by taking down a "spy." An almost identical scenario played out against another scientist, Valentin Danilov, who in 2004 was sentenced to 14 years in a penal colony on bogus charges of passing "secret" information to the Chinese -- information that had been declassified years earlier.

Even more strained was the case against Igor Sutyagin, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences' prestigious Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada, who was accused of illicitly disclosing details about Russia's nuclear posture. His "spying," too, amounted to a paper he had written based on open-source information (including speeches by Russia's own defense minister). Yet that didn't prevent a court from handing down a 15-year sentence. Similar convictions for "spying" have been handed down to at least four others: Anatoly Babkin; Oskar Kaibyshev; Vladimir Shchurov and Grigory Pasko.

The second theory about Mr. Reshetin's case is that he fell victim to the Kremlin's habit of criminalizing its (business) competitors: in this case the state-owned arms-maker Rosvoorushenie, which Novaya Gazeta speculates may have wanted a piece of a lucrative market that Mr. Reshetin was inconveniently making his own.

If so, that makes the case similar to that of former energy giant Yukos, whose assets were looted by Gazprom and other Kremlin-connected entities in 2004. While former CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky's indefinite imprisonment in a Siberian penal colony has attracted widespread media notice, less attention is paid to the 41 other Yukos defendants. One of them, lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina, was arrested in 2004 on charges of tax evasion and forbidden from speaking to her two young children for nearly six months. In 2006, her request to have her sentence suspended until her youngest child turns 14 was denied; instead, she was immediately transferred to a penal colony several hundred miles south of Moscow, where she is serving a 6½ year sentence.

Then there is the case of Vasily Aleksanyan, another Yukos lawyer, who was diagnosed with HIV shortly after his 2006 arrest. Russian authorities refused to treat him throughout most of his nearly 700-day pretrial detention; he is now being held in a medical facility, handcuffed to his bed. Drew Holiner, Mr. Aleksanyan's lawyer, says the authorities' motive is to force his client "to give false testimony against former colleagues in return for some form of deal." Their gambit may not succeed, since Mr. Aleksanyan is said to be suffering from an AIDS-related lymphoma and may soon die.

Though smaller in scope and ferocity, the Yukos case shares some of the notorious characteristics of a Soviet purge, particularly the effort to manufacture a "conspiracy" by bringing charges against a wide array of individuals.

The Soviet touch is also in evidence in the case of Larisa Ivanovna Arap. A member of Garry Kasparov's United Civic Front, Ms. Arap had campaigned on behalf of abused children in Russia's psychiatric hospitals. Last July, she herself was involuntarily detained at a psychiatric hospital on account of a critical article she had written, "shot up with psychotropic drugs," according to her husband, and held for over a month. Though she was released after public protest, a local district court issued the opinion that her hospitalization had been perfectly legal. As in the Soviet period, mere criticism of the performance of a state institution may now suffice as evidence of mental derangement.

In her acclaimed history of the Gulag, Anne Applebaum observes that under Stalin one could easily get arrested "for nothing," whereas under his successors arrests usually happened "for something -- if not for a genuine criminal act, then for . . . literary, religious, or political opposition to the Soviet system." Of the many things that make present trends in Russia so worrying, surely one is that the line between "something" and "nothing" is becoming increasingly blurred.

From: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120338385727075719.html bstephens@wsj.com Opinion Journal.Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A18. Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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