Slaying the Evil Dragon
Like the Loch Ness Monster of Scotland, China has its myths and legends of dragons, some helpful and benevolent, and some not so. Of the evil variety, there’s one that’s been slain on stages around the world during the 2006 NTDTV’s Global Chinese New Year Spectaculars. The performance is called “Nine Swords,” and it obviously was one of the audiences’ favorites as it receiving roaring applause.
I hope NTDTV will bring this performance back in its 2007 shows for it’s a drama worth seeing repeatedly as it is more than a myth or a legend. The evil red dragon symbolizes the specter of communism in China and its brutality of repression and bloodshed. And in a ritual drama nine dancers from the New Tang Dynasty Performing Arts Center, wielding their swords of truth, fight the dragon in a magnificent martial arts performance.
The dancers’ nine swords represent the “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party,” an editorial series published by the Epoch Times which has inspired a huge “Quitting-the-CCP” movement in China. Within two years more than 16 million Chinese have now quit from the party.
As I was watching this battle between good and evil, I felt moved by the courage and dedication to justice and freedom of the people behind the scenes, NTDTV and its over a thousand volunteers worldwide making this show possible.
I flashed back to my childhood in Germany when my country was divided and how we suffered under communism. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was one of the happiest days us. After that, communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and Russia.
But it didn’t all happen by itself. It took the effort of tens of thousands of activists. At the time the Berlin Wall came down, there was the same spirit of freedom in China. Students were protesting. However, they were not able to ending the tyranny of communism, as the CCP brought in the army and tanks and massacred the unarmed students.
The communist elite in China made use of the Chinese people’s ancient value systems, in particular their obedience to authority, to enslave and exploit them. During its 57 years of one-party dictatorship 80 million Chinese have died violent, unnatural deaths.
Many people in the free world think that things are getting better in China, but economic and human rights conditions for the masses of Chinese is getting worse and worse. As the CCP has adopted more and more capitalist money making strategies, it has also faced more and more difficulties keeping the Chinese people under its absolute control. Instead of moving toward democracy and improving human rights, as it has been promising, it has actually done the opposite. Afraid of losing power if people were allowed to freely speak, vote, assemble and worship, the CCP has chosen to suppress even more tightly all independent thought and belief by putting up the internet blockade, censoring all media, incarcerating anyone with a grudge about the government, including human rights lawyers.
Now Chinese are trying again to get basic human rights and democracy, and they are hoping for a peaceful fall of communism by quitting from the party. They are also calling it, “wiping away the mark of the beast.” This “Quitting-the CCP” movement has become the biggest headache for the CCP, as the “Nine Commentaries,” the swords of truth, tell the true history of the CCP, not the state controlled propaganda version.
I hope you will watch the NTDTV Global New Year Spectacular. And take your family. It’s a great magical show that also supports an important human cause.
The 2007 New Year Spectacular will be touring Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, DC, plus major cities in Canada, Europe and Asia.
Gisela Sommer
http://www.articlesbase.com/art-and-entertainment-articles/slaying-the-evil-dragon-86542.html
Arundhati Roy: Mumbai Was not India’s 9/11
Arundhati Roy: Mumbai was not India’s 9/11
http://www.guardian .co.uk/world/ 2008/dec/ 12/mumbai- arundhati- roy
The Mumbai attacks have been dubbed ‘India’s 9/11′, and there are calls for a 9/11-style response, including an attack on Pakistan. Instead, the country must fight terrorism with justice, or face civil war.
We’ve forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching "India’s 9/11". Like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we’re expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it’s all been said and done before.
As tension in the region builds, US Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that if it didn’t act fast to arrest the "Bad Guys" he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on "terrorist camps" in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India’s 9/11.
But November isn’t September, 2008 isn’t 2001, Pakistan isn’t Afghanistan and India isn’t America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.
It’s odd how in the last week of November thousands of people in Kashmir supervised by thousands of Indian troops lined up to cast their vote, while the richest quarters of India’s richest city ended up looking like war-torn Kupwara – one of Kashmir’s most ravaged districts.
The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If the police are right about the people they have arrested as suspects, both Hindu and Muslim, all Indian nationals, it obviously indicates that something’s going very badly wrong in this country.
If you were watching television you may not have heard that ordinary people too died in Mumbai. They were mowed down in a busy railway station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish between poor and rich. They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness. The Indian media, however, was transfixed by the rising tide of horror that breached the glittering barricades of India Shining and spread its stench in the marbled lobbies and crystal ballrooms of two incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish centre.
We’re told one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That’s absolutely true. It’s an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day. On a day when the newspapers were full of moving obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel rooms they had stayed in, the gourmet restaurants they loved (ironically one was called Kandahar), and the staff who served them, a small box on the top left-hand corner in the inner pages of a national newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company I think) said "Hungry, kya?" (Hungry eh?). It then, with the best of intentions I’m sure, informed its readers that on the international hunger index, India ranked below Sudan and Somalia. But of course this isn’t that war. That one’s still being fought in the Dalit bastis of our villages, on the banks of the Narmada and the Koel Karo rivers; in the rubber estate in Chengara; in the villages of Nandigram, Singur, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Lalgarh in West Bengal and the slums and shantytowns of our gigantic cities.
That war isn’t on TV. Yet. So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with the one that is.
There is a fierce, unforgiving fault-line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let’s call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially "Islamist" terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself.
Side B believes that though nothing can ever excuse or justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm’s way. Which is a crime in itself.
The sayings of Hafiz Saeed, who founded the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) in 1990 and who belongs to the hardline Salafi tradition of Islam, certainly bolsters the case of Side A. Hafiz Saeed approves of suicide bombing, hates Jews, Shias and Democracy and believes that jihad should be waged until Islam, his Islam, rules the world. Among the things he said are: "There cannot be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy."
And: "India has shown us this path. We would like to give India a tit-for-tat response and reciprocate in the same way by killing the Hindus, just like it is killing the Muslims in Kashmir."
But where would Side A accommodate the sayings of Babu Bajrangi of Ahmedabad, India, who sees himself as a democrat, not a terrorist? He was one of the major lynchpins of the 2002 Gujarat genocide and has said (on camera): "We didn’t spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire … we hacked, burned, set on fire … we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don’t want to be cremated, they’re afraid of it … I have just one last wish … let me be sentenced to death … I don’t care if I’m hanged … just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs [seven or eight hundred thousand] of these people stay … I will finish them off … let a few more of them die … at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die."
And where, in Side A’s scheme of things, would we place the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh bible, We, or, Our Nationhood Defined by MS Golwalkar, who became head of the RSS in 1944. It says: "Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening."
Or: "To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races – the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here … a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by."
(Of course Muslims are not the only people in the gun sights of the Hindu right. Dalits have been consistently targeted. Recently in Kandhamal in Orissa, Christians were the target of two and a half months of violence which left more than 40 dead. Forty thousand people have been driven from their homes, half of who now live in refugee camps.)
All these years Hafiz Saeed has lived the life of a respectable man in Lahore as the head of the Jamaat-ud Daawa, which many believe is a front organization for the Lashkar-e-Taiba. He continues to recruit young boys for his own bigoted jehad with his twisted, fiery sermons. On December 11 the UN imposed sanctions on the Jammat-ud-Daawa. The Pakistani government succumbed to international pressure and put Hafiz Saeed under house arrest. Babu Bajrangi, however, is out on bail and lives the life of a respectable man in Gujarat. A couple of years after the genocide he left the VHP to join the Shiv Sena. Narendra Modi, Bajrangi’s former mentor, is still the chief minister of Gujarat. So the man who presided over the Gujarat genocide was re-elected twice, and is deeply respected by India’s biggest corporate houses, Reliance and Tata.
Suhel Seth, a TV impresario and corporate spokesperson, recently said: "Modi is God." The policemen who supervised and sometimes even assisted the rampaging Hindu mobs in Gujarat have been rewarded and promoted. The RSS has 45,000 branches, its own range of charities and 7 million volunteers preaching its doctrine of hate across India. They include Narendra Modi, but also former prime minister AB Vajpayee, current leader of the opposition LK Advani, and a host of other senior politicians, bureaucrats and police and intelligence officers.
If that’s not enough to complicate our picture of secular democracy, we should place on record that there are plenty of Muslim organisations within India preaching their own narrow bigotry.
So, on balance, if I had to choose between Side A and Side B, I’d pick Side B. We need context. Always.
In this nuclear subcontinent that context is partition. The Radcliffe Line, which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain’s final, parting kick to us. Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people, Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Each of those people carries and passes down a story of unimaginable pain, hate, horror but yearning too. That wound, those torn but still unsevered muscles, that blood and those splintered bones still lock us together in a close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity but also love. It has left Kashmir trapped in a nightmare from which it can’t seem to emerge, a nightmare that has claimed more than 60,000 lives. Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, became an Islamic Republic, and then, very quickly a corrupt, violent military state, openly intolerant of other faiths. India on the other hand declared herself an inclusive, secular democracy. It was a magnificent undertaking, but Babu Bajrangi’s predecessors had been hard at work since the 1920s, dripping poison into India’s bloodstream, undermining that idea of India even before it was born.
By 1990 they were ready to make a bid for power. In 1992 Hindu mobs exhorted by LK Advani stormed the Babri Masjid and demolished it. By 1998 the BJP was in power at the centre. The US war on terror put the wind in their sails. It allowed them to do exactly as they pleased, even to commit genocide and then present their fascism as a legitimate form of chaotic democracy. This happened at a time when India had opened its huge market to international finance and it was in the interests of international corporations and the media houses they owned to project it as a country that could do no wrong. That gave Hindu nationalists all the impetus and the impunity they needed.
This, then, is the larger historical context of terrorism in the subcontinent and of the Mumbai attacks. It shouldn’t surprise us that Hafiz Saeed of the Lashkar-e-Taiba is from Shimla (India) and LK Advani of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh is from Sindh (Pakistan).
In much the same way as it did after the 2001 parliament attack, the 2002 burning of the Sabarmati Express and the 2007 bombing of the Samjhauta Express, the government of India announced that it has "incontrovertible" evidence that the Lashkar-e-Taiba backed by Pakistan’s ISI was behind the Mumbai strikes. The Lashkar has denied involvement, but remains the prime accused. According to the police and intelligence agencies the Lashkar operates in India through an organisation called the Indian Mujahideen. Two Indian nationals, Sheikh Mukhtar Ahmed, a Special Police Officer working for the Jammu and Kashmir police, and Tausif Rehman, a resident of Kolkata in West Bengal, have been arrested in connection with the Mumbai attacks.
So already the neat accusation against Pakistan is getting a little messy. Almost always, when these stories unspool, they reveal a complicated global network of foot soldiers, trainers, recruiters, middlemen and undercover intelligence and counter-intelligenc e operatives working not just on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, but in several countries simultaneously. In today’s world, trying to pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation state is very much like trying to pin down the provenance of corporate money. It’s almost impossible.
In circumstances like these, air strikes to "take out" terrorist camps may take out the camps, but certainly will not "take out" the terrorists. Neither will war. (Also, in our bid for the moral high ground, let’s try not to forget that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE of neighbouring Sri Lanka, one of the world’s most deadly terrorist groups, were trained by the Indian army.)
Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America’s ally first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan, whose territory is reeling under these contradictions, is careening towards civil war. As recruiting agents for America’s jihad against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistan army and the ISI to nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organizations. Having wired up these Frankensteins and released them into the world, the US expected it could rein them in like pet mastiffs whenever it wanted to.
Certainly it did not expect them to come calling in heart of the Homeland on September 11. So once again, Afghanistan had to be violently remade. Now the debris of a re-ravaged Afghanistan has washed up on Pakistan’s borders. Nobody, least of all the Pakistan government, denies that it is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs and the maniacs who believe that Islam will, or should, rule the world is mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistan government and Pakistani civilians as much, if not more than it does on India.
If at this point India decides to go to war perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India’s shores, endangering us as never before. If Pakistan collapses, we can look forward to having millions of "non-state actors" with an arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal as neighbours. It’s hard to understand why those who steer India’s ship are so keen to replicate Pakistan’s mistakes and call damnation upon this country by inviting the United States to further meddle clumsily and dangerously in our extremely complicated affairs. A superpower never has allies. It only has agents.
On the plus side, the advantage of going to war is that it’s the best way for India to avoid facing up to the serious trouble building on our home front. The Mumbai attacks were broadcast live (and exclusive!) on all or most of our 67 24-hour news channels and god knows how many international ones. TV anchors in their studios and journalists at "ground zero" kept up an endless stream of excited commentary. Over three days and three nights we watched in disbelief as a small group of very young men armed with guns and gadgets exposed the powerlessness of the police, the elite National Security Guard and the marine commandos of this supposedly mighty, nuclear-powered nation.
While they did this they indiscriminately massacred unarmed people, in railway stations, hospitals and luxury hotels, unmindful of their class, caste, religion or nationality. (Part of the helplessness of the security forces had to do with having to worry about hostages. In other situations, in Kashmir for example, their tactics are not so sensitive. Whole buildings are blown up. Human shields are used. The U.S and Israeli armies don’t hesitate to send cruise missiles into buildings and drop daisy cutters on wedding parties in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. ) But this was different. And it was on TV.
The boy-terrorists’ nonchalant willingness to kill – and be killed – mesmerised their international audience. They delivered something different from the usual diet of suicide bombings and missile attacks that people have grown inured to on the news. Here was something new. Die Hard 25. The gruesome performance went on and on. TV ratings soared. Ask any television magnate or corporate advertiser who measures broadcast time in seconds, not minutes, what that’s worth.
Eventually the killers died and died hard, all but one. (Perhaps, in the chaos, some escaped. We may never know.) Throughout the standoff the terrorists made no demands and expressed no desire to negotiate. Their purpose was to kill people and inflict as much damage as they could before they were killed themselves. They left us completely bewildered. When we say "nothing can justify terrorism", what most of us mean is that nothing can justify the taking of human life. We say this because we respect life, because we think it’s precious. So what are we to make of those who care nothing for life, not even their own? The truth is that we have no idea what to make of them, because we can sense that even before they’ve died, they’ve journeyed to another world where we cannot reach them.
One TV channel (India TV) broadcast a phone conversation with one of the attackers, who called himself Imran Babar. I cannot vouch for the veracity of the conversation, but the things he talked about were the things contained in the "terror emails" that were sent out before several other bomb attacks in India. Things we don’t want to talk about any more: the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the genocidal slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, the brutal repression in Kashmir. "You’re surrounded," the anchor told him. "You are definitely going to die. Why don’t you surrender?"
"We die every day," he replied in a strange, mechanical way. "It’s better to live one day as a lion and then die this way." He didn’t seem to want to change the world. He just seemed to want to take it down with him.
If the men were indeed members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, why didn’t it matter to them that a large number of their victims were Muslim, or that their action was likely to result in a severe backlash against the Muslim community in India whose rights they claim to be fighting for? Terrorism is a heartless ideology, and like most ideologies that have their eye on the Big Picture, individuals don’t figure in their calculations except as collateral damage. It has always been a part of and often even the aim of terrorist strategy to exacerbate a bad situation in order to expose hidden faultlines. The blood of "martyrs" irrigates terrorism. Hindu terrorists need dead Hindus, Communist terrorists need dead proletarians, Islamist terrorists need dead Muslims. The dead become the demonstration, the proof of victimhood, which is central to the project. A single act of terrorism is not in itself meant to achieve military victory; at best it is meant to be a catalyst that triggers something else, something much larger than itself, a tectonic shift, a realignment. The act itself is theatre, spectacle and symbolism, and today, the stage on which it pirouettes and performs its acts of bestiality is Live TV. Even as the attack was being condemned by TV anchors, the effectiveness of the terror strikes were being magnified a thousandfold by TV broadcasts.
Through the endless hours of analysis and the endless op-ed essays, in India at least there has been very little mention of the elephants in the room: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Instead we had retired diplomats and strategic experts debate the pros and cons of a war against Pakistan. We had the rich threatening not to pay their taxes unless their security was guaranteed (is it alright for the poor to remain unprotected? ). We had people suggest that the government step down and each state in India be handed over to a separate corporation. We had the death of former prime minster VP Singh, the hero of Dalits and lower castes and villain of Upper caste Hindus pass without a mention.
We had Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City and co-writer of the Bollywood film Mission Kashmir, give us his version of George Bush’s famous "Why they hate us" speech. His analysis of why religious bigots, both Hindu and Muslim hate Mumbai: "Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness." His prescription: "The best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever." Didn’t George Bush ask Americans to go out and shop after 9/11? Ah yes. 9/11, the day we can’t seem to get away from.
Though one chapter of horror in Mumbai has ended, another might have just begun. Day after day, a powerful, vociferous section of the Indian elite, goaded by marauding TV anchors who make Fox News look almost radical and leftwing, have taken to mindlessly attacking politicians, all politicians, glorifying the police and the army and virtually asking for a police state. It isn’t surprising that those who have grown plump on the pickings of democracy (such as it is) should now be calling for a police state. The era of "pickings" is long gone. We’re now in the era of Grabbing by Force, and democracy has a terrible habit of getting in the way.
Dangerous, stupid television flashcards like the Police are Good Politicians are Bad/Chief Executives are Good Chief Ministers are Bad/Army is Good Government is Bad/ India is Good Pakistan is Bad are being bandied about by TV channels that have already whipped their viewers into a state of almost uncontrollable hysteria.
Tragically, this regression into intellectual infancy comes at a time when people in India were beginning to see that in the business of terrorism, victims and perpetrators sometimes exchange roles. It’s an understanding that the people of Kashmir, given their dreadful experiences of the last 20 years, have honed to an exquisite art. On the mainland we’re still learning. (If Kashmir won’t willingly integrate into India, it’s beginning to look as though India will integrate/disintegr ate into Kashmir.)
It was after the 2001 parliament attack that the first serious questions began to be raised. A campaign by a group of lawyers and activists exposed how innocent people had been framed by the police and the press, how evidence was fabricated, how witnesses lied, how due process had been criminally violated at every stage of the investigation. Eventually the courts acquitted two out of the four accused, including SAR Geelani, the man whom the police claimed was the mastermind of the operation. A third, Showkat Guru, was acquitted of all the charges brought against him but was then convicted for a fresh, comparatively minor offence. The supreme court upheld the death sentence of another of the accused, Mohammad Afzal. In its judgment the court acknowledged there was no proof that Mohammed Afzal belonged to any terrorist group, but went on to say, quite shockingly, "The collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender." Even today we don’t really know who the terrorists that attacked the Indian parliament were and who they worked for.
More recently, on September 19 this year, we had the controversial "encounter" at Batla House in Jamia Nagar, Delhi, where the Special Cell of the Delhi police gunned down two Muslim students in their rented flat under seriously questionable circumstances, claiming that they were responsible for serial bombings in Delhi, Jaipur and Ahmedabad in 2008. An assistant commissioner of Police, Mohan Chand Sharma, who played a key role in the parliament attack investigation, lost his life as well. He was one of India’s many "encounter specialists" known and rewarded for having summarily executed several "terrorists" . There was an outcry against the Special Cell from a spectrum of people, ranging from eyewitnesses in the local community to senior Congress Party leaders, students, journalists, lawyers, academics and activists all of whom demanded a judicial inquiry into the incident. In response, the BJP and LK Advani lauded Mohan Chand Sharma as a "Braveheart" and launched a concerted campaign in which they targeted those who had dared to question the integrity of the police, saying it was "suicidal" and calling them "anti-national" . Of course there has been no inquiry.
Only days after the Batla House event, another story about "terrorists" surfaced in the news. In a report submitted to a sessions court, the CBI said that a team from Delhi’s Special Cell (the same team that led the Batla House encounter, including Mohan Chand Sharma) had abducted two innocent men, Irshad Ali and Moarif Qamar, in December 2005, planted 2kg of RDX and two pistols on them and then arrested them as "terrorists" who belonged to Al Badr (which operates out of Kashmir). Ali and Qamar who have spent years in jail, are only two examples out of hundreds of Muslims who have been similarly jailed, tortured and even killed on false charges.
This pattern changed in October 2008 when Maharashtra’ s Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) that was investigating the September 2008 Malegaon blasts arrested a Hindu preacher Sadhvi Pragya, a self-styled God man Swami Dayanand Pande and Lt Col Purohit, a serving officer of the Indian Army. All the arrested belong to Hindu Nationalist organizations including a Hindu Supremacist group called Abhinav Bharat. The Shiv Sena, the BJP and the RSS condemned the Maharashtra ATS, and vilified its chief, Hemant Karkare, claiming he was part of a political conspiracy and declaring that "Hindus could not be terrorists". LK Advani changed his mind about his policy on the police and made rabble rousing speeches to huge gatherings in which he denounced the ATS for daring to cast aspersions on holy men and women.
On the November 25 newspapers reported that the ATS was investigating the high profile VHP Chief Pravin Togadia’s possible role in the Malegaon blasts. The next day, in an extraordinary twist of fate, Hemant Karkare was killed in the Mumbai Attacks. The chances are that the new chief whoever he is, will find it hard to withstand the political pressure that is bound to be brought on him over the Malegaon investigation.
While the Sangh Parivar does not seem to have come to a final decision over whether or not it is anti-national and suicidal to question the police, Arnab Goswami, anchorperson of Times Now television, has stepped up to the plate. He has taken to naming, demonising and openly heckling people who have dared to question the integrity of the police and armed forces. My name and the name of the well-known lawyer Prashant Bhushan have come up several times. At one point, while interviewing a former police officer, Arnab Goswami turned to camera: "Arundhati Roy and Prashant Bhushan," he said, "I hope you are watching this. We think you are disgusting." For a TV anchor to do this in an atmosphere as charged and as frenzied as the one that prevails today, amounts to incitement as well as threat, and would probably in different circumstances have cost a journalist his or her job.
So according to a man aspiring to be the next prime minister of India, and another who is the public face of a mainstream TV channel, citizens have no right to raise questions about the police. This in a country with a shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks, murky investigations, and fake "encounters" . This in a country that boasts of the highest number of custodial deaths in the world and yet refuses to ratify the International Covenant on Torture. A country where the ones who make it to torture chambers are the lucky ones because at least they’ve escaped being "encountered" by our Encounter Specialists. A country where the line between the Underworld and the Encounter Specialists virtually does not exist.
How should those of us whose hearts have been sickened by the knowledge of all of this view the Mumbai attacks, and what are we to do about them? There are those who point out that US strategy has been successful inasmuch as the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since 9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering now is far worse. If the idea behind the 9/11 terror attacks was to goad America into showing its true colors, what greater success could the terrorists have asked for? The US army is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which have made the United States the most hated country in the world. Those wars have contributed greatly to the unraveling of the American economy and who knows, perhaps eventually the American empire. (Could it be that battered, bombed Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Soviet Union, will be the undoing of this one too?) Hundreds of thousands people including thousands of American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The frequency of terrorist strikes on U.S allies/agents (including India) and U.S interests in the rest of the world has increased dramatically since 9/11. George Bush, the man who led the US response to 9/11 is a despised figure not just internationally, but also by his own people. Who can possibly claim that the United States is winning the war on terror?
Homeland Security has cost the US government billions of dollars. Few countries, certainly not India, can afford that sort of price tag. But even if we could, the fact is that this vast homeland of ours cannot be secured or policed in the way the United States has been. It’s not that kind of homeland. We have a hostile nuclear weapons state that is slowly spinning out of control as a neighbour, we have a military occupation in Kashmir and a shamefully persecuted, impoverished minority of more than 150 million Muslims who are being targeted as a community and pushed to the wall, whose young see no justice on the horizon, and who, were they to totally lose hope and radicalise, end up as a threat not just to India, but to the whole world. If ten men can hold off the NSG commandos, and the police for three days, and if it takes half a million soldiers to hold down the Kashmir valley, do the math. What kind of Homeland Security can secure India?
Nor for that matter will any other quick fix. Anti-terrorism laws are not meant for terrorists; they’re for people that governments don’t like. That’s why they have a conviction rate of less than 2%. They’re just a means of putting inconvenient people away without bail for a long time and eventually letting them go. Terrorists like those who attacked Mumbai are hardly likely to be deterred by the prospect of being refused bail or being sentenced to death. It’s what they want.
What we’re experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet’s squelching under our feet.
The only way to contain (it would be naïve to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We’re standing at a fork in the road. One sign says Justice, the other Civil War. There’s no third sign and there’s no going back. Choose.
MUHAMMAD SHAKEER KS
http://www.articlesbase.com/news-and-society-articles/arundhati-roy-mumbai-was-not-indias-911-711720.html
How far does the corruption in Illinois goes?
I am a resident of Illinois and I believe that the corruption goes much further than just the governors. I was just watching the movie that is based on a true story "Gone in the Night" makes me think that this corruption goes all through the state.
The better question is, how old is it, and it goes back before the 1950′s. There is clearly a political machine there.
Alternative news magazine?
I’m getting tired of most of the mainstream news magazines, like Newsweek and National Review. It seems like everything is catered to either big-government liberals or theocratic conservatives. I suppose it’s fine to get your news from one of those sources if that’s your thing, but it really isn’t mine. I also dislike how it seems that all the magazines are about catchy slogans and big pictures, and focus so much on those that they lack substancial content.
Politically, I describe myself as a classical liberal (if you don’t know what that means, the Wikipedia article describes it well enough), but I’m open to anything different from the mainstream. One quirky magazine that a friend of mine has gotten me into is Chronicles. I love how they lack the flashy pictures that most news magazines do, and although I don’t agree with what a lot of the writers say, they offer a well thought-out and refreshing perspective. My only complaints are that all the writers seem to be of the same ideology and that all they seem to talk about is politics–I like politics, but there is other stuff going on in the world.
Before I turned to magazines for news, I settled for the Wall Street Journal and some Fox News (which I’ve stopped watching altogether since they sacked Brit Hume–now I only visit them online), but I wasn’t really a fan of either. It all felt dry and biased to me. Stuff like the local newspaper and NBC makes me want to hurl after watching four seconds of it, which is why I turned to magazines for news in the first place.
I’m subscribed to Chronicles, but since they are a bit one-sided, I’d like another perspective as well. So, does anyone know of any other news magazines I might like?
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What exactly is a police state and why is it so bad?
i was watching youtube and watching the L.A. riots and came across videos about police states, i thought they would be cool to watch but then people were on there complaining about them but never really said what they were exactly
Or, if you want an unbiased answer, read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_state
do you think you could escape the prison planet ?
Are you watching Planet of the Apes…the one with Mark Wahlberg?
ooooh, Mark Wahlberg, I think I need a moment. 
Nancy Grace, any alternative to get the unadulterated news?
I don’t watch 60 minutes anymore, just not the same. an alternative is Nancy Grace, but to stay rational while watching I have to put tobassco in my eyes and pour rubbing alcohol into any open wound I may happen to have. I have to stop! your solution please?!
Nancy Grace? *head explodes and a demon emerges from the hole to hunt for blood* Nancy Grace is so terrible!! go to bbc, its slightly less biased then u.s. news.
A Decade of Corruption Ends With Hartz
In the news: Corporate Germany was in distress last week when news of a former Volkswagen boss was convicted of bribery. Peter Hartz reported from Frankfurt wearing a tailor-made dark blue suit, light blue shirt and a matching tie, and was driven in a black Volkswagen Phaeton limousine which was polished to perfection. Everything about the man exemplifies his status as the man who set Germany on the road to recovery.
Peter Hartz, former personnel director at Volkswagen was once again in the limelight but this time not to the applause of the German government and business leaders but rather to the shouts of an angry crowd present as he made his way across the cobbled yard to the courthouse in Brunswick. He was there to confess to bribery and corruptions which he is being accused of on a grand scale.
It should be noted that the former personnel director of Volkswagen was once a confidant of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder so you can just imagine the influence that he has on the German government. The question now is: will such connection help Peter Hartz surpass the bribery charges he is facing right now?
At the courthouse Harts stood in front of the 9,000 angry shareholders and apologized for another corruption scandal which is to date, the worst in German corporate history.
The Germans who were watching the live television coverage of the trial was enthralled by Hartz’s court appearance together with those from Munich of the humbled Siemens board members, it’s like watching an awesome and tragic Wagnerian touch of the Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). The corruption scandal was not only devastating on the part of Hartz whose reputation has been trumped to the ground but similarly demoralizing to the German people at large.
The corruption scandal became a moment wherein Germans began to question themselves who are the other guilty parties? How deeply embedded is institutionalized corruption in their country? Who protects these corrupt personalities since they could get away with it for so long? After decades of pride of their postwar “economic miracle”, it was only last week that the Germans lost faith in their business leaders and to some extent has become doubtful of the economic miracle that their country has achieved. And all this happen in just a week.
According to Perter von Blomberg of Transparency International – a group that fights corruption around the world, “In the past, cases of corruption in a company were more frequently covered up or played down. Nowadays there is more public awareness and people are more sensitive to the issue.”
Some of the angry protesters at the Hartz’s trial demanded that he be jailed. They were carrying placards with angry messages on them and most of them insisted that Hartz be imprisoned. The cause of the grave public rage on Hartz is brought by the fact that he was the architect of employment-law reforms which produced severe cuts in state benefits.
The public hostile response over Hartz corruption affair has led the members of the German government to consider removing his name from the statute books. A new title was given to the Hartz Labor Reforms. The Hartz case was like a nightmare to the German people. Never did they ever think that the mighty German industrial machine, famous for hitting record-breaking targets for exports year after year would commit the biggest plunder of all time.
Shocking revelations were also exposed during the trial like for instance, who would have thought that the late and unmourned Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha – an unlikely figure to intrude into German domestic politics, was also alleged to have received millions of dollars in backhanders from Siemens? More than seven Siemens executives were arrested on the allegations that the company set up a slush fund to pay bribes just to win billions of euros worth of international contracts. Likewise, a network of front companies and secret bank accounts were discovered by the Munich prosecutors.
In the case of Volkswagen and Hartz the investigation has uncovered the extraordinarily questionable life of German bosses. Furthermore, there are also evidences showing Hartz together with his union chums, along with some prominent politicians and fellow executives from the Volkswagen Empire has amassed millions of euros signed off for the interest of the company and not all of the deals are legitimate. And the amazing thing about all this is that it has been going on for decades already.
The said “for the interest of the company” deals include group visits to brothels in Germany, Spain, and South America. Add to that the money wasted on expensive gifts for girlfriends, VIP treatment at Czech nightclubs and discos plus, don’t forget the luxurious trips around the world. While this fortunate few are having the best times of their lives, the hard-pressed Germans were enduring a long period of economic stagnation and cuts in household spending. So it is not surprising that the German public is angry at both Volkswagen and Siemens executives who with their millions of euros salaries were greasing palms as if it was part of standard business procedures.
The Company that is Volkswagen
Volkswagen is an icon of the 20th century. As a fact only few car manufacturers have been able to produce as many legendary cars as Volkswagen. The Beetle which is considered a trademark of Volkswagen is considered the best-selling car of all time even its Volkswagen Beetle parts is selling quite well due to its remarkable quality.
Other Volkswagen vehicles that have earned great recognitions are the Volkswagen bus which is a symbol of a generation and the golf which is viewed by many as a modern masterpiece. These are just some of the automobiles that have made impact on the cultural and personal lives of millions.
But from among the vehicles manufactured by Volkswagen, the Beetle is considered to be the most prominent. This vehicle is basically Volkswagen’s Type 1and also known in other names such as Fusca, Coccinelle or Cox, Vocho (Spanish), Bug, Volky or Käfer (German), Escarabajo (beetle in Spanish). The Beetle is an economy car built by the German automaker Volkswagen from 1938 until 2003. The names Bug and Beetle were easily adopted by the public but it was not until August of 1967 that VW has officially used the name Beetle in marketing their products.
The Beetle car was the benchmark for both generations of American compact cars such as the Chevrolet Corvair and subcompact cars such as the Ford Pinto and Chevrolet Vega. The Beetle was also awarded fourth place in the international poll for the world’s most influential car of the twentieth century. Other winners include Ford Model T, the Mini and the Citroën DS.
Natalie Anderson
http://www.articlesbase.com/automotive-articles/a-decade-of-corruption-ends-with-hartz-98405.html
What is necessary to rid of the corruption in our government?
To some corruption may be a given to a government, like poverty is to a city. What do you think? Can you come up with any remedies to the lies and corruption in Washington. Both parties are at fault.
To get rid of corruption you’d need:
1) An open government
2) An educated, informed, and active citizenry that’s watching these guys like hawks
3) Reliable media that covers such things
4) Citizens who won’t put up with corruption and will work to run candidates they know and trust to work for the common good.
If you really want to end it personally, get involved in a local grass roots campaign of someone who will work for issues you believe in.
We can take this country over from the bottom up. It’s our right and duty as Americans.
We just got lazy and comfortable, that’s whe we have corrupt government.
Would you know if you were living in a Police State?
What does that term ‘Police State’ mean to you? What images does it conjure? Now think, are any of those things happening now? Is there anything in that image that you’d strongly object to if it DID happen? Would you object on principle, or only if it affected you personally? Are there any rights/freedoms you’d give up to feel safer?
Believe it or not its true, we have more cctv cameras watching us than any other country in the world, yes, the world!! doesnt make anyone feel safe, does allow the authorities to watch us though, we are in a culture now(thanx labour) where you get fined for anything at all, from smoking to putting microchips on your wheelie bin and if youve not moved it you get fined(true) they want to force id cards next and they even have bank details with how much you have on(true) there are many many more "big brother" operations already in place under labour im afraid, Lenin did exactly the same thing by the way? we are already in a police state, wake up!