Eight years on - HST and 9/11

I'm a week late in posting this, but what the hell.

Eight years of mayhem and carnage have passed since September 11th 2001. Many countries have been made into places where freedoms are lost daily, and justification requires only one excuse: The War on Terror.

Since that terrible day the term has been repeated continuously, and has entered our daily language. Paranoia, and Cold War rhetoric have bolstered support for unbridled military spending, and consequent intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. This sacred cow will be milked until it runs dry; paving the way for nation-building projects throughout the world.

On a recent visit to Britain I was sleeping in Heathrow and woke from my slumber to find a huge black Robocop figure pointing an assault rifle at me. For me, this was highly intimidating and unfortunately, a very common sight these days.

What would have deemed unthinkable ten years ago is now a reality for many around the world.

September 11th, 2009 was a sad day for humanity. When the planes hit you knew in your heart that the world was never going to be the same again.

The late great Hunter Thompson blasted on his typewriter as the events were unfolding.

His prescience is chilling, his anger is subtle, and his ability to make sense out of the chaos is what causes millions of readers around the world to pick up his books when in need of some courage.

Mike

'It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV.

Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were slaughtered in one day.

The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster.

And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four commercial jetliners.

They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines, piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., and Dulles in D.C. and Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with fully-loaded fuel tanks -- which would soon explode on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan's World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that.

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.

Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.

Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.


OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing. The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators.

The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don't say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.'

-- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

A night to remember

September 2006, Bangkok.

The air was thick like a winter duvet, full of leaded bus fumes. Mushroom clouds of black smoke bellowed from speeding Tuk-Tuks, dancing manically between the lanes. There was a conspicuous lack of people on the ground and I began to sense that something was not quite right. Ghost like figures floated past me with an urgency in their stride and a seriousness etched on their facial expressions.

Political riots are common in this city, so concerned; I stopped a commuter to find out the story.

"Is everything OK in the city tonight?” I asked her directly.

"Go back to wherever you are staying, this is not a good night to be walking on the streets” she said with a forceful air.

The ladies tone and lack of explanation left me in a mentally strange place; confusion and perplexity made my mind fizz with thoughts and images of homicidal craziness. I had to make a decision. This was not something that I felt could be made out on the street. The atmosphere was feeling sourer by the minute, like an acidic wind was howling down the intersection.

I needed a drink, so bounced into an adjacent gay bar for deliberation.

The bar was a standard Thai gay bar. Tables of all ages, struggling to connect thought the repetitious din of 4/4 dance music, with a few pouting lady boys roaming the room, making eyes with men in suits. It was a sleazy and dirty sight to behold, but this was no time for moral judgments.

I knocked back a beer and decided to have a large whiskey before I went back to my hotel. As I starred around the bar, men with dresses and eye shadow, chattered incessantly.

I stopped a waiter and spoke in Thai.

"Could you tell me what is going on outside?”

"Bad men fight – you go.” He replied with a cheeky grin; his sparkling eye lashes flashing under the roaming strobe.

I don’t know whether it was the waiter’s nonchalance, or a sudden burst of paranoia, but I knew I had to get out of there quick. A sea of mist descended on my thought process, making coherent evaluation impossible: it was time to go.

Gathering up my belongings I paid and made my way to the exit, passing strange gender benders; some groping at me on my way past. This was not a good place to be, like some weird acid flashback. I had my eyes g-clamped on the finishing line, my vision was blurred and my head spinning with dark thoughts.

Suddenly, the doors of the bar flung open and in marched men in uniforms. The rigid expressions on their faces told me immediately that this was no ‘men in uniform’ night; these monkey men meant business.

As the thoughts of a washroom window escape flashed through my mind, I was startled out of my trance by a megaphone.

"Martial law is in effect. You have thirty minutes to get home. Anyone seen on the streets after this will be shot."

This guy was not playing games, he was serious. My insides felt like a worn out mangle and my head as if a tumor was threatening to hemorrhage.

As the imperious messages were repeated from the megaphone, I composed myself and made my way out onto the street. Scores of anxious people tried to work out how they would make it home before the military asserted themselves.

In front of me the huge highway opened out. To the right were armored tanks with manned turrets and machine guns pointing in my direction. Swarms of military, heavily armed, were marching towards me - impenetrable lines of khaki.

I remember having what felt like a meltdown. Thoughts of capture, torture, hostage videos, and the Bangkok Hilton. (Notorious Thai jail) were flooding my consciousness.
There was only one option available: run very quickly in the opposite direction and hitch a ride on a Tuk-Tuk before martial law took affect.

I ran and didn’t stop for what felt like an hour. My lungs were burning and my eyes stung in the polluted chaos. Luckily, a multi-coloured Tuk-Tuk pulled up, the driver stuck his head out and said, “Where you go?”

I returned to my hotel disheveled and badly shook up. Luckily, the convenience shop was open downstairs and I bought a bottle of gin to unwind in the room.

After pouring a pint of Gin and tonic I laid down on the bed and switched on the television.

All the channels showed the same looped military video.

I had been caught in the middle of a revolution and had narrowly made it out alive.

People were being butchered on the streets as I lay and drank super human strength cocktails.

Gill Scott Heron came to my melting mind.

'The revolution will not be televised.'

And here I was in Bangkok, watching it unfold on the box.

Mike

Here is an ambient mix from the black dog, the 2nd of a 12 part podcast series they're doing. I'm a big fan of mixes like this that show a different side to an artist. In this sense, it reminds me a bit of Cio's 'on clouds' mix. Anyway, it struck me as something worth sharing in blogland.

For all the hardcore audiophiles.

I should warn you that it is unfortunately only 128kbps.

http://www.theblackdogma.com/tbd/download-manager.php?id=26

01. Intrusion - Under The Ocean - Echospace [detroit]
02. Intrusion - Static Waves - Echospace [detroit]
03. Louderbach - Autumn - Minus
04. Terry Riley - Poppy No Good - Rough Trade
05. Robin Rimbaud - Sans Soleil - Bine
06. Peter Broderick - Music for Falling from Trees, Pt. 3_ Pill Induced Slumber - Erased Tapes
07. Peter Broderick - Music for Falling from Trees, Pt. 6_ Electroconvulsive Shock - Erased Tapes
08. Stars Of The Lid - Hiberner Toujours - Kranky
09. Robin Rimbaud - Anna Livia Plurabelle - Bine
10. Peter Broderick - A Glacier - Erased Tapes
11. White Rainbow - April 25th 11.14PM - Kranky
12. The Black Dog - Plinth (Tones) - Soma
13. The Black Dog - Plinth (Beatless) - Soma

have a good sunday people.

Mike

George Carlin - Saving the Planet

George Carlin - Religion is bullshit.

Telling the Truth About the Armenian Genocide

We must resist Turkish pressure to distort history.

Fighting Words

By Christopher Hitchens


Even before President Barack Obama set off on his visit to Turkey this week, there were the usual voices urging him to dilute the principled position that he has so far taken on the Armenian genocide. April is the month in which the Armenian diaspora commemorates the bloody initiation, in 1915, of the Ottoman Empire's campaign to erase its Armenian population. The marking of the occasion takes two forms: Armenian Remembrance Day, on April 24, and the annual attempt to persuade Congress to name that day as one that abandons weasel wording and officially calls the episode by its right name, which is the word I used above.

Genocide had not been coined in 1915, but the U.S. ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, employed a term that was in some ways more graphic. In his urgent reports to the State Department, conveying on-the-spot dispatches from his consuls, especially in the provinces of Van and Harput, he described the systematic slaughter of the Armenians as "race murder." A vast archive of evidence exists to support this claim. But every year, the deniers and euphemists set to work again, and there are usually enough military-industrial votes to tip the scale in favor of our Turkish client. (Of late, Turkey's opportunist military alliance with Israel has also been good for a few shame-faced Jewish votes as well.)

President Obama comes to this issue with an unusually clear and unambivalent record. In 2006, for example, the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, was recalled for employing the word genocide. Then-Sen. Obama wrote a letter of complaint to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, deploring the State Department's cowardice and roundly stating that the occurrence of the Armenian genocide in 1915 "is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence." On the campaign trail last year, he amplified this position, saying that "America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that president."

For any who might entertain doubt on this score, I would recommend two recent books of exceptional interest and scholarship that both add a good deal of depth and texture to this drama. The first is Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, by Grigoris Balakian, and the second is Rebel Land: Travels Among Turkey's Forgotten Peoples, a contemporary account by Christopher de Bellaigue. In addition, we have just learned of shattering corroborative evidence from within the archives of the Turkish state. The Ottoman politician who began the campaign of deportation and extermination, Talat Pasha, left enormous documentation behind him. His family has now given the papers to a Turkish author named Murat Bardakci, who has published a book with the somewhat dry title The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha. One of these "remaining documents" is a cold estimate that during the years 1915 and 1916 alone, a total of 972,000 Armenians simply vanished from the officially kept records of population. (See Sabrina Tavernise's report in the New York Times of March 8, 2009.)

There are those who try to say that the Armenian catastrophe was a regrettable byproduct of the fog of war and of imperial collapse, and this might be partly true of the many more Armenians who were slaughtered at the war's end and after the implosion of Ottomanism. But this is an archive maintained by the government of the day and its chief anti-Armenian politician, and it records in the very early days of World War I a population decline from 1,256,000 to 284,157. It is very seldom that a regime in its private correspondence confirms almost to an exactitude the claims of its victims.

So what will the deniers say now? The usual routine has been to insinuate that if Congress votes to assert the historic truth, then Turkey will inconvenience the NATO alliance by making trouble on the Iraqi border, denying the use of bases to the U.S. Air Force, or in other unspecified ways. This same kind of unchecked arrogance was on view at the NATO summit last weekend, where the Ankara government had the nerve to try to hold up the appointment of a serious Danish politician, Anders Rasmussen, as the next secretary-general of the alliance, on the grounds that as Denmark's prime minister he had refused to censor Danish newspapers to Muslim satisfaction! It is now being hinted that if either President Obama or the Congress goes ahead with the endorsement of the genocide resolution, Turkey will prove uncooperative on a range of issues, including the normalization of the frontier between Turkey and Armenia and the transit of oil and gas pipelines across the Caucasus.

When the question is phrased in this thuggish way, it can be slyly suggested that Armenia's own best interests are served by joining in the agreement to muddy and distort its own history. Yet how could any state, or any people, agree to abolish their pride and dignity in this way? And the question is not only for Armenians, who are economically hard-pressed by the Turkish closure of the common border. It is for the Turks, whose bravest cultural spokesmen and writers take genuine risks to break the taboo on discussion of the Armenian question. And it is also for Americans, who, having elected a supposedly brave new president, are being told that he—and our Congress too—must agree to collude in a gigantic historical lie. A lie, furthermore, that courageous U.S. diplomacy helped to expose in the first place. This falsification has already gone on long enough and has been justified for reasons of state. It is, among other things, precisely "for reasons of state," in other words for the clear and vital announcement that we can't be bought or intimidated, that April 24, 2009, should become remembered as the date when we affirmed the truth and accepted, as truth-telling does, all the consequences.


Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.