Birnbaum: Obama in the Lion's Den

I was impressed by this insightful essay by Norman Birnbaum in today's El País (in Spanish translation), so I looked for the original in English. Thanks to Snuffy Smith for posting it. Snuffysmith's Blog: Obama In The Lion's Den Norman Birnbaum

If you're concerned about US foreign policy, I urge you to read this in whatever language. If you are not, well, I urge you to find another planet, because this one is in trouble.

Everything really is going to hell...

... if Bush & Cheney carry out the attack on Iran that they've been planning. Since the last two invasions (Iraq & Afghanistan) have proven so disastrous, the only thing that occurs to the Bush Administration is to create another, even more dangerous war. Before that happens, listen to these Iran experts interviewed by Amy Goodman.

Legislating history: Holocaust denial ban

Prison sentences for those who deny the Holocaust of 1939-45 or Armenian genocide, 1915-17, are among the worst imaginable ways to "combat racism and xenophobia," their supposed purpose. For one thing, such laws probably won't work where they are proposed--they go against hard-won conquests of free speech in western Europe, as well as the commercial interests of a lot of mass media delighted to stir up a storm about anything. But the greater threat is that they might work, at least somewhat, not to make people feel more tolerant toward other races, but to shut up about their unofficial, unsanctioned opinions. And then where will we be? In something like Putin's Russia, where only the official story gets expressed, or maybe Iran, with its deep and complex apparatus for control of opinion.

Curiously, last year the then-leading candidate for president of that country (he lost, though) argued that censorship wasn't working. The man who did win, Ahmadinejad, has not dismantled the censorship apparatus, but has come up with imaginative ways to test the West's tolerance for dissent: a cartoon contest lampooning the Israels leaders' supposed Holocaust-complex.

History should be left to the historians, to debate and argue out their interpretations. The evidence for the so-called "Holocaust" (the real event, or series of events, was far worse than any real holocaust) is overwhelming, it appears to me and should appear to most people. So those who claim it didn't happen can be refuted by evidence. Denying those "deniers" a voice is denying ourselves a chance to debate and clarify many details of a very complex history, in which vast parts of European society--not only in Germany--were complicit. As for the Armenians, the debate is not over whether tens of thousands or more died, but over whether (a) their death was deliberate policy by the Ottoman leadership and if so, (b) what responsibility modern Turkey, the secular nation-state created by Attaturk, has for its imperial predecessors. We should do everything we can to get Turkey to acknowledge the issue and join an open search for the historical truth; punishing in France those who denied that it happened is as obnoxious to free speech as punishing in Turkey those who argue that it did.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Push for EU Holocaust denial ban

See also The fight against Holocaust denial by Raffi Berg (BBC)

But most of all, see Index on Censorship

Uh-oh! WW III is not...

... what we need to solve our critical problems. But it's already underway, on many fronts (Iraq, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Gaza, Nepal, Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Chechenia and others), and it appears that Bush, Cheney and Olmert are prepared to make it nuclear. Check out "The U.S.-Iran-Iraq-Israeli-Syrian War" by Robert Parry, at Consortiumnews.com

Wow! It's hard to believe that the world can avoid nuclear war forever, now that so many countries and so many angry people have the capacity. But we sure want to avoid it for as long as possible. And it's especially absurd and even pathetic that a country as powerful as the U.S.A., with so many other resources for influencing world events (we could reduce world hunger, for example), should resort to this one.