The Death of Hitchens and Iraq

Most of the commentary arising from the death of Christopher  Hitchens has been highly laudatory regarding  his life and work and that trend accords with my own view.  Here though, I want to  briefly consider two critical pieces, one from the The Economist and another from The Cedar Lounge Revolution, a widely read leftist blog from Ireland.

En Respuesta a un Interlocutor en Facebook

1. Hasta Zaffaroni ha dicho que el sistema político acá es de una monarquía atenuada.
2. El nivel de atenuación  depende mucho de la voluntad y muñeca política del mandatorio de turno.
3. Las palabras y actitudes de CFK indican claramente que ella cree que el estado Argentino  se encarna en ella misma. Me cuesta entender otra cosa a partir de las palabras de ella que citás arriba ["Cuando escucho que no pueden hacerse cargo del subte por esto o por lo otro, les digo: A mí se me murió mi compañero, quedé con mis hijos hechos pelota y tuve que salir a hacerme cargo del país. Muchas veces no me da el cuerpo, tengo que salir y poner la mejor sonrisa. Cuando veo que alguien aduce tendinitis, o cualquier cosa me siento casi una estúpida".]
4. “En Argentina funcionan todos los poderes.” Y, hasta cierto punto, ni un funcionario preso después de 8 años, todo bien con Skanska aún con coimas recontra  probadas, todo bien con Antonini Wilson y sus amigos locales, todo bien con todo. Y no me vengan con Zanola y Pedraza, hay que felicitar al gobierno por meter presos a dos mafiosos así?  Mafiosos que son además, de la CGT, polo de poder, casi el último, con cierta independencia del gob. Are you paying attention, Moyano?
5. “La Corte es independiente” El gob. no le da ni 5 de bola a la corte cuando falla en contra sus intereses: reparto de publicidad oficial + jubilaciones, entre muchas otras.
6. No cuestioné ni la validez ni la limpieza de las elecciones y estoy a favor de las primarias. No son relevantes en lo que discutimos acá.
7. Con respecto al congreso, no tener mayoría propia es, como mucho, un pequeño inconveniente.  Desde hace un año el país no tiene presupuesto, algo lisérgico, digno de un país como Somalia, en guerra civil desde hace 20. (Sí, sí la opo la corpo, yadda yadda)
8. Y ahora  el lema es pegar los sindicalistas y terminar con sus “privilegios”.  Ahora el mensaje para los empleados de  aerolíneas es claro: sos un  soldado de Cristina más y basta de joder con el convenio y demás inventos burgueses y neoliberales.
9. No soy como @quintinLLP, no creo que ya estemos bajo una tiranía estalinista, bastante margen de libertad nos queda, pero está siendo carcomido por la indiferencia de la ciudadanía por un lado y el autoritarismo  gubernamental por el otro. Hay razones para preocuparse.

PD: sí, por ser extranjero no entiendo nada, no entiendo el espíritu de país, el peronismo, la democracia real, no la democracia neoliberal  etc. etc. Es normalmente lo que escucho a esta altura de la conversación.

Atilio Boron: Intelectual de Izquierda

Lamentablemente no hay nada novedoso en leer un intelectual de izquierda reciclar viejos estereotipos antisemitas apenas disfrazados con un poco de maquillaje “anti-sionista”. Atilio Borón es un practicante experto y veterano de este tipo de discurso.  En esta nota logra agregarle un nuevo elemento: un leve toque de racismo anti-negro. Dice que,

… cuando Obama habla no puede decir la verdad. Sus constantes apelaciones morales, propias de un predicador de baratos sermones dominicales, son un taparrabos de lo indecible: la completa supeditación de la magistratura más importante del mundo a las conveniencias e intereses de quienes pagan para ser servidos.

Cuando habla Obama, al menos en sus discursos frente a grades multitudes,  cualquiera con un poco de sensibilidad histórica y cultural escucha ecos de predicadores negros como Martin Luther King. Es un efecto seguramente buscado por Obama mismo, que quiere inscribirse en la gran  tradición de predicador-liberador de su pueblo,  además de ser el resultado de su profesado cristianismo y años de escuchar predicadores mitad políticos, mitad religiosos en la ciudad de Chicago donde se forjó como político.

Pero nada de eso cuenta para Borón. Para nuestro  politólogo marxista  los judíos, perdón quise decir “sionistas”, tienen comprado a Obama.  Y una cosa más, Página/12 es un órgano de propaganda gubernamental, así que pagamos todos para que salga a la luz basura como esta nota.

In Response To An Interlocutor on Facebook

I wrote this:

as it happens, i don’t support a withdrawal from the West Bank because I think it will “bring peace”. I am almost certain it won’t and may well make the lives of ordinary Palestinians worse, if the record of Palestinian self government in Gaza is anything to go by. The Palestinians however, must have a state whether it brings peace or not, because they want it, deem themselves to be a people and have fought for it. The exact same went for the Jews and goes for them still. With regard to the western activists and their fellow travellers, even if I-P peace comes it won’t be enough for them. Jewish self determination is what bugs them. They won’t be happy while it still exists. Also, by refusing to look at the level of violence in the conflict within a comparitive framework you yourself hypostatize “the brutal Zionist occupation regime” and, nolens volens, hypocritically demonize Israel as a uniquely evil state. A final point, when I argue about politics and my interlocutor and I discover that we agree on the basic measures that need to be taken then we usually set aside relatively minor differences and effectively become allies. I notice that, in spite of the stuff about being glad about me in favor of a peaceful solution, you are still, it seems, not at all happy about my position. You’ll have a long wait to hear the kind of language you are itching to hear from me. Oh and wrt to CiF, they can be a bit (ok, very) dogmatic and I’ve had more than one run in with them myself (though we are now friends again), however, they are excellent at doing what they set out to do, exposing the sewer of Jew hatred that a once great newspaper has become and vindicating the right of Jews to self-determination. As Terry G. himself might say, unconditional support for democracy and self-determination for the Is and Ps. and a knee in the groin to the BDSers, flotillistas, whack job WB rabbis, azzaJews, +972 imbecile hipsters, Hamas (the sooner its brought down the bettter and no it was’t elected to rule gaza by the Pal people) the religious Jews eating away at the rights of the secular in Israel, Israeli Arabs like Hanin Zuabi who are pleased to use Israeli democracy to attempt to destroy democracy etc etc etc sorry bout the long unbroken para. blame FB. Oh and long live the Druze !

Profundizar El Modelo

Centro de jubilados de Plaza Irlanda hace una hora.  Una cola de veinte personas. Una gran bandera de  La Cámpora colgada de las rejas. Me acerqué a curiosear. Jóvenes,  pinta clase media, media alta,  todos con la cara de  Él  en sus remeras, vendiendo bolsones de fruta y verdura, todo mucho más barato que en la verdulería de la esquina. Los compradores con pinta de gente del barrio, no precisamente el más necesitado de la ciudad.

Profundizar el modelo, cagarse en el vecino boliviano que tiene una verdulería y subsidiar todavía  más a la clase media alta porteña.

Two Kinds of Dead Jew Redux

Astiz and his grisly gang were sent down for life on Tuesday.  A disproportionate number of the victims of the dictatorship they fought to defend were Jews. It’s entirely right and  proper that those who exercised state terrorism against their fellow citizens during the 1976 – 1983 dictatorship should now pay the heaviest price for their crimes possible in a democratic country. The current government and the one that preceded it led the way in the reopening of the legal process against these savages and deserve much credit for that.

An Interview With Aleksandr Sokurov

McDonagh: Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed, Aleksandr Nikolayevich, I’d like to ask you…

Sokurov: That’s ok. First I’d like to make it clear that I am Russian.

McDonagh: I’m not in any doubt about that. Your film “And Nothing More”, deals with Russia and the Second World War. Stalin comes pretty well out of it.

Sokurov: But I make it very clear that he was responsible for murdering the cream of the Red Army’s officer corps before the war.

McDonagh: And his other crimes…???

Sokurov: What other crimes?

McDonagh: The extermination of millions of Russian citizens, the persecution of religious and national minorities, the enslavement of millions in Eastern Europe after the war. I could go on..

Sokurov: Look, Stalin was a great leader, all  great leaders make mistakes.

Mc Donagh: And the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact, which made Germany and Russia allies all the way up to June 22^nd 1941 – that’s almost the first two years of the war – and resulted in the division of Poland between the two countries. It’s not even mentioned…

Sokurov: I’m an artist, a Russian artist, not a historian.

McDonagh: The fate of Russia’s Jews isn’t mentioned either

Sokurov: The Jews? How are they relevant in all this? I’m interested in Russia and Russians.

McDonagh: Turning now to your Leningrad Retrospective series, what would your response be if I said that it was  no more than a shameless, uncritical regurgitation of Soviet propaganda.

Sokurov:  There are things to be ashamed or critical about in the history of Russia?

McDonagh: I’m going to see your film about Shostakovich on Thursday.  Anything I should know about it?

Sokurov:   He was a great Russian artist, unlike you.

McDonagh: Aleksandr Sokurov, thank you.

Anti-Manc Prejudice And Premier League Abolitionism

1.  Bill believes that Manchester United is an illegitimate institution and that it has usurped the right of Manchester City to be the only Premier League football club in Manchester. He firmly maintains that he has nothing against either Manchester United players or fans, indeed he claims to be outraged by the idea that he might be suffering from such a prejudice and points to his friends who never missed a United home game when they were younger but who have now come to believe that Old Trafford is a unique temple of footballing iniquity.  Bill takes little or no interest in conflicts of football legitimacy in other great cities.

Cristina Kowtows To The Ayatollahs

 President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is a lawyer, prides herself on her oratory and has sufficient regard for her own intellectual ability to have once described herself as “totally Hegelian”.  We may therefore take her to be a person conscious of the power and meaning of the words with which she chooses to express herself.

In this context I now turn to a detailed examination of those of her remarks to the UN General Assembly in New York yesterday that  concerned Argentina’s attempts to have several Iranian suspects extradited so that the Argentine courts can prosecute them for their role in the 1994 bomb attack on the AMIA Jewish community center, an atrocity which killed dozens and wounded hundreds.

A Comment On The Callanan Inquiry

If you read this Irish Times story on the report of the  Callanan inquiry into the deaths of three Irish soldiers serving with UN in  Lebanon in March 1989 you’d get the impression they died as a result of technical incompetence regarding mine clearing and threat assessment and that’s true,  as far as it goes.

However, if you read the report itself you’ll get a rather more complete picture of why the men died. On page 94, in the section dealing with the question of threat assessment, it lists a series of previous incidents affecting Irish soldiers: