“Lord of War” may be the best picture of the year

Mozambique coat of arms:

I saw “Lord of War” (2005), last Sunday and it may be one of the best pictures of the year. It would be hard to watch this and not be moved by its imagery and message. Yuri Orlov, (Nicolas Cage) is a Russian immigrant who decided, early in the film, there is big money in selling arms to real armies fighting real wars. He is clever, slick and had managed not to directly confront the morality of his work as he is being chased by an Interpol agent, Jack Valentine, played (Ethan Hawke).
Orlov sells guns to just about anyone, from just about any source. He looks on detached as some children are lined up against a wall in Lebanon and shot by a firing squad.
“This is not our war,” he tells his brother (played by Jared Leto), who also sees this but finds it hard to ignore.
Orlov soon finds that Africa is the place to do business. The Western powers are so wrapped up in the Balkan situation they don’t notice the brutal civil wars going on in Africa. He soon finds himself dealing with Andre Baptiste Sr. (Eamonn Walker), a fictional president of Liberia. Baptiste seems patterned after the real president of that time period Charles Taylor. As with the movie, in real life, rival military gangs threatened to spill over into other neighboring countries, leading to brutal senseless civil war.
Orlov finds himself in an uneasy alliance with Baptiste, a man so ruthless he test a pistol on one of his own soldiers, killing a young teenager. Interpol agent Valentine is one of the few people in the film to show any concern over the blatant murder and waste of human life caused by the gun trade.
The movie makes the point that the largest arms dealers are countries that all sit on the Security Council of the United Nations and that small-times arms dealers, such as Orlov, are just as easily seen as being more useful than a threat.
A scene toward the end shows an army using their fresh arms to wipe out a village, men, women and children. Orlov can only stand in amazement at the evil perpetrated by such people, including himself.

Some background on Africa:
Orlov points out that the AK-47 is such a popular weapon that it appears on the Mozambique flag.

The modern flag of Mozambique

Original flag of Mozambique independence

But Early in the 1970s, revolutionary leaders such as Somora Machel of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frente de Libertação de Mozambique--FRELIMO), President Dos Santos, of Angola, President Robert Mugabe and his ruling Zanu Party, of Zimbabwe and Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) the leader of Ghana, all held out hope of building a new Africa, independent, ending poverty and intertribal violence.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, such ideological hopes have faded and given way to brutal war lords, who use armed thugs to hoard what few resources Africa has to offer. Tribal violence is epidemic, as the movie Hotel Rwanda (2004) also shows. Liberia has been a special problem with armed factions still fighting for power today. There is no evidence that any of the new factions will rule with any more civility than Taylor, or his even more brutal predecessor, Samuel K. Doe.
This may be one of the best movies of the year and a real eye opener.

Pictures of the war: Liberia

Kansas joined the nationally held rallies against the Iraq War

At least 60 people carrying signs and peace flags marched against the Iraq War, here in Wichita Kansas. Sings as simple as “No War” to “The War will end when the occupation ends” were held. Others said “Support the troops, bring them home” and Peace is “Patriotic.” Most were members of the Peace and Social Justice Center of South Central Kansas.Since May, the A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) Coalition has been actively promoting an united antiwar demonstration on September 24, in Washington DC. Many all the major groups have been working together on this effort.A.N.S.W.E.R has also encouraged people in other cities to hold their own marches, so the Peace and Social Justice Center A.N.S.W.E.R.ed the call, here in Wichita. Marchers went from 13th to the Peace and Social Justice Center’s house on 13th and Topeka Street.

According to USATODAY, 9/24/2005:

“They were young people with green hair, nuns whose anti-war activism dates to Vietnam, parents mourning their children in uniform lost in Iraq, and uncountable families motivated for the first time to protest. President Bush himself was out of town, monitoring hurricane recovery efforts from Colorado and Texas. The protesters shouted for his impeachment.”

Memoirs of a Drugged-Up, Sex-Crazed Yippie

Book Review:

Memoirs Of A Drugged-up, Sex-crazed Yippie ---Tales from the 70's Counterculture: Drugs, Sex, Politics and Rock and Roll.

Book review by John J. Mesh, aka, Ohnjaye

First of all as a small-town, semi-poor journalist, I have no shame. If there’s free stuff — food, beer, books, CDs, etc. — I’m there without batting an eyelash. I have few ethics in this regard.
I am also a big suck-up. So when my friend Steve Otto sent me a copy of his book for free — which I will refer to by its first name Memoirs — in the mail, I was euphoric. Then I started to read the book and realized what a deprived, sheltered upbringing I had. So my review — like Steve’s book — should have a sub-title:“I was born a poor, deprived, sheltered, small town, middle-class Catholic white boy.” I had a sister who ran away from home when she was 15 to become a hippie — she’s now the yuppiest of yuppies who owns two homes. But that’s the closest this sheltered child of Hutchinson, Kansas got to the counterculture other than listening to his sister’s Beatles records. However, I am trying to make up for lost time and I am living vicariously in the 60s and 70s, and this book is helping me do that. What’s bizarre is Steve Otto is one of my best friends and I knew nothing of this life in the 1970s and early 1980s which is the backbone of the book, which is a realistic but fictional account of Steve through the experiences of Mark Spies — his alter-ego.
The book details the fact that — much to the surprise of many — there was a thriving counterculture in the late 60s to mid 70s in Kansas. Mark Spies was there.Spies started as a casual pot smoker as a 14-year-old high school student to being a habitual user of pharmaceutical narcotics and cocaine. He also becomes a dealer. The book also goes into full-blown detail on all the things associated with drug use such as the “rigs” used and violent confrontations and guns.
Sex also plays a big part in Memoirs — Mark gets laid a lot. The sex and the drugs are interwoven throughout Mark’s experiences. Then we have the rock and roll part. Mark goes from grooving on the best music of the 60’s and early 70’s — John Lennon and Frank Zappa among others are a big part of the soundtrack of Mark’s life — and hooks on to the punk music scene in the late 70’s — bands like the Sex Pistols and Blondie and icons like Patti Smith.
Disco music in the late 70’s and the drug use associated with it — namely cocaine — is also examined. Politics is also front and center in Memoirs — from Nixon, Cambodia and Vietnam to various revolutions that occurred in 1979.
The best thing about Memoirs is that it takes me to places I never really got to experience — that’s what happens when like me, you are born in a vacuum 10 years too late and you miss all the good stuff. Steve Otto is a free-lance writer living in Maize, Kansas. He is the author of War on Drugs/War on People, published by Ide House in 1995. He has also owned and worked for several newspapers and written numerous articles in magazines, journals and newspapers.
He currently runs a political blog: Otto 子's War Room.

The following book stores also have Memoirs:
Amazon.com,
Powell's books,
Abe Books,
Amazon.co.uk,
Amazon.de(GER),
AllDirect.com,
SuperBookDeals,
Sexual Astrology,
Valore Books,
BestPrice.com,
Dungeons & Dragons Books,
Home Equity,
Cosmic Voyage,
A1Books,
Books A Million,
Alibris,
Country Book Shop,UK,
Biblio,
Blackwell.co.uk,
Buy.com,
Losti Pods.com,
BiggerBooks,
eCampus,
Amazon.co.jp,
Barnes & Noble.com,
Direct from the publisher.

Eric Clapton Sings about revolution

Eric Clapton has a video at this site where he plays the song Revolution.

Pol Pot’s Adventures in Wonderland

1979: Pol Pot leads the Khmer Rouge back into the jungle after the Vietnamese invasion

“The debate over Vietnam's occupation of Kampuchea has divided many people on the Left. The Vietnamese position, which many people in the U.S. and Canadian Left support, is that the present Kampuchean government is an independent nation. In a speech to the U.N. General Assembly on October 21, 1981, concerning a ne­gotiated settlement to the Kampuchea problem, the Vietnamese claimed that there was no "Kampuchea problem" and

hence there could be no "comprehensive settlement." With this statement the Vietnamese were trying to ignore the real situation in Kampuchea.
Since that time, the Vietnamese have made a few proposals of their own for a negotiated settlement. These include negotiations with the non-Khmer Rouge members of the Democratic Kam­puchea Coalition, a dialogue with China, and a proposal to allow some Khmer Rouge members to enter the government, provided they come in as individuals and not as a group. They still refuse to negotiate with the Khmer Rouge. This indicates that the Vietnam­ese now realize that the "Kampuchea problem" is no longer a prob­lem they can afford to ignore.”
-Steve Otto, “Kampuchea Today:
A Response to Hoang Tung,”
Contemporary Marxism, no. 12 – 13, Spring 1986, p. 64

I wrote this in 1986, under the illusion that the Chinese position was the least imperialist of the two other major super-powers, The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. As with the old Lewis Carroll story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, things were not what they appear to be. China had no real international policy other than pure self interest. Deng Xiaoping, China’s leader and an ardent supporter of Pol Pot, was a self absorbed egotists interested in his countries economic development and little else. China supported no outside Marxist groups unless they had something to offer. And Pol Pot was not part of the Chinese international, nor was he a Maoist.

In my book Memoirs Of A Drugged-up, Sex-crazed Yippie ---Tales from the 70's Counterculture: Drugs, Sex, Politics and Rock and Roll, (see review below), I discussed my illusions about Pol Pot’s revolution and what I later found out to be the truth about the four year period of Democratic Kampuchea. It was just a nationalists peasant revolution, badly blundered by its leaders, who believed they would somehow be seen in the future as being more important and greater than Maoism.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 17- “1979 - A changed world”:

The one thing I could always count on with Ian was a good political conversation, when he wasn’t trying to pick up women. On this particular winter day, I walked into the Bier Stube and found Ian and one of his friends talking about the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia, now called Kampuchea.
“I agree with Henry Kissinger,” Ian said. “The Vietnamese did not go into Cambodia for humanitarian reasons. They went in to take advantage of
the instability of Pol Pot’s government and then install a regime that would benefit them.”
“I can agree with that,” I said.
This was one of the few times that I did agree with Ian. It was ironic because I had discussed this matter with Shokrollah (an Iranian student) about a week earlier and he also agreed with Ian and me. Of course we agreed for different reasons.
In December of 1978 Vietnam invaded Democratic Kampuchea and overthrew its leaders. By January of 1979, they installed a new government, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, headed by Heng Samrin. Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea government was over. His organization was pushed out into Thailand. He and his followers formed a guerrilla army of resistance. The Vietnamese kept troops and advisors in Kampuchea to help establish the new government.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

My discussion with Ian reminded me of a conversation I had had with Shokrollah about the Khmer revolution of 1975. We had just left a Friends of the Iranian People’s meeting. “I refused to just believe what a lot of reporters in the main-stream Western press are saying,” He said.
“There may be some truth to those reports, but I won’t just take their word for it. And I don’t believe they are just real vicious as the reports say. That sounds like propaganda to me.”
I finally had to agree with him that the reports deserved some skepticism. The Western press was biased enough that if no one had been killed during that government, I seriously believe the press reports would have been almost the same. I had learned to be skeptical of foreign reporting. Shokrollah was even more so. At first, I took the press reports for their face value; that Pol Pot was really mean. He killed a lot of people and banned just about anything a person, as myself, would like to do, such as listening to rock music. But after talking to Shokrollah, I began realizing that people from third world countries might see things differently. I decided to try to see the other side. I too began to question all the horror stories and noticed that certain leaders were singled out as brutal and evil who just happened to be opponents of US foreign policy. The Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) of Iran and Chile’s (Augusto) Pinochet were rarely, if ever, singled out for their torture and murder of political prisoners. Only opponents of US foreign policy were. Many foreign students told me Uganda’s (Idi ) Amin was brutal, but he also took a stand against imperialism. It was for that stand, they said, that Western journalists and politicians focused on his human rights abuses. After gaining an appreciation for Maoist philosophy, I was intrigued with the idea of a miniature Maoist revolution in Kampuchea. I began to notice the far-left tendencies of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, which the press called the Khmer Rouge. It was the only other Maoist revolution to succeed in the world at that time. Kampuchea’s rulers eliminated money and private property. Democratic Kampuchea seemed fiercely independent, even though it got some military aid from China. For some time, I had mixed feelings about Pol Pot. On one hand, his movement seemed to be far to the left and yet there was no justification for those executions. I was also puzzled. I was so impressed with the philosophy of Mao, I couldn’t understand how a government that tried to imitate it could produce such a disaster. It was during the Cultural Revolution that Mao and Chiang Ching broke with Marx’s view that everything is based on economics. They insisted that ideas are more important than material things. That was a view that I agreed with. How could Kampuchea go so terribly wrong?
What I didn’t realize at the time was that the Kampuchea regime was not Maoist. It had an alliance with China but the CPK considered itself an ideological rival rather than having fraternal ties with the Chinese Communist Party. China simply needed Democratic Kampuchea to counter Vietnam’s expansion. The CPK’s views on Marxism were muddled and poorly developed. Most of the ideological documents of Pol Pot and his CPK were kept secret from all those outside the party, both inside and outside the country. They began leaking out of the country starting in 1979. Most of their ideology was summed up in two documents, Decisions of the Central Committee on a Variety of Questions and The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977 - 1980.

Deng Xiaoping was the main supporter of Pol Pot and his army

By 1979, both Shokrollah and I began to see that Democratic Kampuchea had some serious problems.
“They made a lot of mistakes,” Shokrollah said one night after our meeting. “They didn’t tolerate any of the nationalist bourgeoisie, which they may have needed in the short run. They should not have arrested (Norodom) Sihanouk, who was progressive and had a popular following. The fact that they fell so fast showed they lacked popular support. But that was no excuse to invade the country and occupy it as Vietnam did.”
Vietnam was clearly in the Soviet camp by now, which he considered “socialist imperialists” and “state capitalists.” Shokrollah was good at analyzing politics. I was surprised to find that he and some of the Marxist Iranians had read Sartre, which they considered important reading. Sartre’s ideas of pleasure had some similarities to that of the Cyrenaics, while other Marxist writers the Iranians read had more puritanical views on sex and drugs.
Ian and Shokrollah were polar opposites when it came to politics. Ian’s politics were also the opposite of mine. However he did like to drink and chase women, which was one thing we had in common.

Democratic Kampuchea

Holiday In Cambodia

The Dead Kennedys were among the many groups to come from the late 1970s punk bands. Here they sing about the Pol Pot government. It is an interesting song. I wrote about punk rock and Pol Pot in my new book Memoirs Of A Drugged-up, Sex-crazed Yippie. This is from the LP,” Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables” (1980).

Holiday In Cambodia

So you've been to school for a year or two
And you know you've seen it all
In daddy's car thinkin' you'll go far
Back East your type don't crawl
Play ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz
On you five grand stereo
Braggin' that you know how the niggers feel the cold
And the slum's got so much soul
It's time to taste what you most fear
Right Guard will not help you here
Brace yourself, my dear
Brace yourself, my dear

It's a holiday in Cambodia
It's tough kid, but it's life
It's a holiday in Cambodia
Don't foget to pack a wife

You're a star-belly sneech you suck like a leech
You want everyone to act like you
Kiss ass while you bitch so you can get rich
But your boss gets richer off you
Well you'll work harder with a gun in your back
For a bowl of rice a day
Slave for soldiers 'til you starve
Then you head is skewered on a stake
Now you can go where people are one
Now you can go where they get things done
What you need, my son...
What you need, my son...

Is a holiday in Cambodia
Where people dress in black
A holiday in Cambodia
Where you'll kiss ass or crack

Pol Pot
Pol Pot
Pol Pot
Pol Pot
Pol Pot
Pol Pot
Pol Pot
Pol Pot

And it's a holiday in Cambodia
Where you'll do what you're told
A holiday in CambodiaWhere the slum's got so much soul
Pol Pot

Pol Pot

North Korea still distrusts President George Bush

It’s not surprising that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) distrusts President George W. Bush. He did include their country as part of what he called the “axis of evil.” That is especially true after invading one of those countries, Iraq, which we still occupy today. Bush has given the DPRK leadership little reason to trust him. Relations were improving with the DPRK before Bush was elected. That may explain the following article:

"Pyongyang again demands U.S. pull its troops from South Korea"
A.P.- Sept. 8, 2005
“SEOUL, South Korea - International talks on North Korea’s nuclear program will resume next week, China’s Foreign Ministry announced Thursday, as Pyongyang renewed its demand Washington withdraw its troops from the South to prove it doesn’t plan to attack.The talks, aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, recessed Aug. 7 after the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia failed to agree on a statement of principles after 13 days of negotiations.
North Korea has insisted on the right to a civilian nuclear program, but Washington says it shouldn’t be allowed any nuclear program at all because of its record of broken promises.”

--Of course, few in the U.S. ever accused Bush of not keeping his promises.—Yeah, right!

Picture by Korean flag girl

The courts are beginning to protect non-believers

According to CNN.com:
"SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) – A federal judge declared Wednesday that the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional, a decision that could potentially put the divisive issue back before the U.S. Supreme Court. The case was brought by the same atheist whose previous battle against the words “under God” was rejected last year by the Supreme Court on procedural grounds. U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge’s reference to one nation “under God” violates school children’s right to be “free from a coercive requirement to affirm God.” Karlton said he was bound by precedent of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2002 ruled in favor of Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow that the pledge is unconstitutional when recited in public schools. The Supreme Court dismissed the case last year, saying Newdow lacked standing because he did not have custody of his elementary school daughter he sued on behalf of. Newdow, an attorney and a medical doctor, filed an identical case on behalf of three unnamed parents and their children. Karlton said those families have the right to sue.
“Imagine every morning if the teachers had the children stand up, place their hands over their hearts, and say, ‘We are one nation that denies God exists,”’ Newdow said in an interview with AP Radio after the ruling. “I think that everybody would not be sitting here saying, ‘Oh, what harm is that.’ They’d be furious. And that’s exactly what goes on against atheists. And it shouldn’t.”




History is full of people who have rejected religious belief in certain religious ideals.
As the Roman writer Titus Lucretius Carus said, about 2,000 years ago:

“One thing I fear now is that you may think
There’s something impious in philosophy
And that you are entering on a path of sin.
Not so. More often has religion itself

Given birth to deeds both impious and criminal:”[1]

And he recounts a story of a human sacrifice:
“At the very age of wedlock, sorrowing,
She should be slaughtered by a father’s blade,
So that a fleet might gain a favoring wind.”[2]

[1] T. Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of the Universe, translated by Ronald Melville, (Oxford University Press, 1997) p. 5.
[2] Lucretius, p. 6.


In more recent times we have rock musicians who have challenged the status of religion.
One such group is Christian Death.
To learn about the rock group Christian Death click here.

High Across The Prairie

Steve Otto's latest novel takes an honest look at 1970's Kansas.
Memoirs Of A Drugged-up, Sex-crazed Yippie ---Tales from the 70's Counterculture: Drugs, Sex, Politics and Rock and Roll.

By Steve Otto
Authorhouse Press/2005

Reviewed by Tim Pouncey

Kansas in the late 1970's was so different from today; the Sunflower State might as well have been located in Holland. Remember what it was like to share drugs with close friends and complete strangers? Remember when casual sex was so casual you didn't even know your partners name? Remember when the political climate of Kansas came down squarely on the side of tolerance?Remember when your personal philosophy of life was defined by rock lyrics and not a mission statement?
You don't?
Well, Steve Otto does. In his latest semi-fictional novel, Memoirs Of A Drugged-Up, Sex Crazed Yippie (Authorhouse Press/2005), Otto excavates 1970's counterculture like an archeologist loving dusting off a Mastodon tusk. In a brisk 349 pages, Otto gives us a lucid look at a Kansas few people remember --- or can't remember due to a plentiful supply of "controlled substances" that were constantly and cheaply available. Characters romp through Wichita, Lawrence and even Sedalia Missouri when a cheap thrill was worth what you paid for it and pleasure was just the flipside of danger.
But to dismiss this book as just another nostalgic stoner reminiscing about the last days of the counter-culture would be a major mistake. Although there is a certain "back-in-the-day" wistfulness about the time before political correctness was a mantra, Otto tempers his dreamy history lesson with brutal honesty.
The narrator of the story --- a composite of just about every old druggie you ever met --- may graphically describe the bliss of mainlining MDA, he also reminds us that brief moment of pleasure most often occurred in a squalid apartment at broken kitchen table next to sink full of dirty dishes.
Like all good storytellers, Otto takes the reader places they've never been before. Like William Burroughs and Charles Bukowsky, Otto sometimes takes you to places you've never really wanted to visit. Yet, Otto makes it worth the trip by including generous portions of political discourse, Cyrenaic philosophy, post-adolescent lust and near-suicidal thrill seeking to keep the narrative moving along like a junkie careening through a police roadblock.
Otto's work is always provocative and this book will undoubtedly draw the wrath of both solid conservatives and neo-feminists. Otto's characters never mask their contempt for the right-wing agenda and Otto's narrator never hides his obsession with female anatomy. However, criticizing Memoirs because it baits conservatives and objectifies women is missing the point. Filtering 1970's Kansas counterculture through the sensibilities of a naive middle-class, catholic school educated, twenty-something is no easy trick but Otto mostly pulls it off. He has a good ear for times-past and tries --- often successfully --- to make his prose read like it would have been written by someone experiencing these situations 30 years ago. Trying to be simultaneously innovative, entertaining and honest is a juggling act on a unicycle, but Otto is generally at his best when everything's up-in-the-air and he's peddling frantically. When the narrator's budding Marxist politics and his discussions with Iranian nationalists clash with his dawning awareness that Kansas politics has taken a sharp turn to the right, Otto makes it work.
Is Otto's look into the rear-view mirror a true reflection on the 70's, or do the objects simply appear bigger than they were? Ultimately, it doesn't matter. Memoirs resonates with characters buckling under the weight of the America Dream with redemption harder to find than next snort of Cocaine.

The following book stores also have Memoirs:
Amazon.com,
Powell's books,
Abe Books,
Amazon.co.uk,
Amazon.de(GER),
AllDirect.com,
SuperBookDeals,
Sexual Astrology,
Valore Books,
A1Books,
Books A Million,
Alibris,
Country Book Shop,UK,
Biblio,
Blackwell.co.uk,
Buy.com,
BiggerBooks,
eCampus,
Amazon.co.jp,
Direct from the publisher.

Listen to Shine sing for Not In Our Name

Soundtrack for Peace ProjectPresented by Unity Network and Relentless Pursuit Records. When purchasing the CD, you can choose to donate the proceeds to Not In Our Name. Excerpt from the song Not In Our Name by Shine MP3.

Image

Chile had its own 9/11

I gave extensive attention to the late Salvador Allende in my new book Memoirs Of A Drugged-up, Sex-crazed Yippie. I was highly influenced by him in my high school days. He was an elected Marxist, overthrown by a CIA backed General Augusto Pinochet, who set up military rule and banned all political parties.

In Commemoration:
Salvador Allende's Last Speech (English translation)

Santiago de Chile, 11 September 1973, 9:10 A.M.
This will surely be my last opportunity to address you. The Air Force has bombed the antennas of Radio Magallanes. My words have neither bitterness nor deception. They should stand as a moral castigation of those who have been traitors to their oaths: Chilean soldiers, titular commanders-in-chief, Admiral Merino, who has designated himself commander of the Navy, even more señor Mendoza, the cringing general who only yesterday manifested his fidelity and loyalty to the Government, and who also has named himself Director General of the Carabineros. In the face of these deeds it only falls to me to say to the workers: I shall not resign!
Standing at a historic point, I will repay with my life the loyalty of the people. And I say to you that I am certain that the seed we have surrendered into the worthy conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans, will not be able to be reaped at one stroke. They have the power, they can make us their vassals, but not stop the social processes, neither by crime nor by force. History is ours and is made by the people.
Workers of my Nation: I want to thank you for the loyalty you have always had, the confidence you placed in a man who only was the interperter of great yearnings for justice, who pledged his word to respect the Constitution and the law, and who did so. In this final moment, the last in which I will be able to address myself to you, I want you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, united with reaction, created the climate for the Armed Forces to break their tradition, that which they were taught by general Schneider which was reaffirmed by commander Araya, victims of the same social sector that today will be be expecting with an alien hand to reconquer the power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.
I address myself to you, above all to the modest woman of our land, to the campesina who believed in us, the mother who knew of our concern for the children. I address myself to the professionals of the Nation, to the patriotic professionals who continued working against the sedition overseen by their professional academies, classist academies that also defended the advantages of a capitalist society.
I address myself to the youth, to those who sang and who brought their happiness and their spirit to the fight. I address myself to the man of Chile, to the worker, to the campesino, to the intellectual, to those who will be percecuted, because in our country fascism has now been present for several hours; in the terrorist assassinations, blowing up the bridges, cutting the railways, destroying the oil and gas pipelines, in the face of the silence of those who had the obligation to behave.
They are in jeopardy. History will judge them.
Radio Magallanes will surely be silenced and the tranquil metal of my voice will no longer reach you. It is not important. You will continue to hear it. I will always be together with you. At least my memory will be that of an upright man who was loyal to the Nation.
The people ought to defend themselves, but not sacrifice themselves. The people ought not let themselves be subdued or persecuted, but neither should they humble themselves.
Workers of my Nation, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will go beyond this gray and bitter moment when treason tries to impose itself upon us. Continue to know that, much sooner than later, we will reopen the great promenades down which free men pass, to construct a better society.
Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!
These are my last words and I have certainty that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I have certainty that, at the least, I will be a moral lesson to castigate felony, cowardice, and treason.

Based on a translation by Jmabel



Salvador Allende images: www.memoriaviva.com/ Ejecutados/Ejecutados%20A...

"George Bush doesn't care about black people," – Kanye West

“On September 10 Kanye West unleashed an anti-Bush tirade at NBC's A Concert for Hurricane Relief Friday, ignoring the teleprompter and proclaiming, "George Bush doesn't care about black people," According to Rolling Stone.
The Grammy-winning rapper said, "I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says they're looting. See a white family, it says they're looking for food."
He also declared that government authorities are purposefully dragging their feet on aiding the ravaged Gulf Coast. "They've given them permission to go down and shoot us," West said without specifics. The camera cut away to comedian Chris Tucker shortly thereafter.
Also according to Rolling Stone:
“West will take part in "ReAct Now: Music and Relief," a concert to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina, on MTV, VH1 and CMT.”
There has already been criticism in The Wichita Eagle, of Kansas, Sept. 7, 2005, by a letter writer who was “outraged at rapper Kanye West and other critics who have turned the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina into an issue of ethnicity and race.”
Of course they are outraged. Modern racists are subtle and they never want to be reminded of how racist our country still is. The election of President George Bush is proof enough.
West’s music can be found at Danceage. Be careful downloading any of this music, to avoid spy ware.

Wreck two worlds instead of just one –war of the worlds?

War of the Worlds,
Classics illustrated n°124 – 1955

In War of the Worlds, by HG Wells, weird looking creatures, with superior technology come to earth and try to take it over. They see no value in either humanity or the rest of life already here. They try to destroy everything and reshape our planet to suite their own needs.Sounds sinister - But what if we did that? Unthinkable? – Well, there are people planning to do just that. We still don’t know if there is life on Mars or ever was. But if it is there, it may not be for long. “New research suggests that forcing global warming by injecting greenhouse gases may be the best way to terraform Mars, should our governments

decide to do so. The conditions warming Earth could be harnessed to transform Mars, some scientists have determined.Jump-starting global warming in a planet-sized laboratory would be a boon to science in some respects."Bringing life to Mars and studying its growth would contribute to our understanding of evolution, and the ability of life to adapt and proliferate on other worlds," says Margarita Marinova at NASA's Ames Research Center, where the study was done. "Since warming Mars effectively reverts it to its past, more habitable state, this would give any possibly dormant life on Mars the chance to be revived and develop further." - Robert Roy Britt, “Greenhouse effect could make Mars livable,” Feb. 3, 2005, MSNBCBut we’ve already wrecked havoc here on Earth, and by the results of our recent elections, it would seem that most Americans are not bothered by it. Global warming is changing the storm climates, raising temperatures, melting polar ice-caps and melting mountain snow caps. Our urban sprawl is wiping out countless species of animals and few people seem to care that amphibians are disappearing from the planet. So, do we wreck two planets now? Replace any "inferior" species so we can take over Mars? We know only rich people will be able to afford to create homes there. The rest of us would just have to tough it out here, on the old planet we are wrecking. So beware Martians – be very aware. We are coming and we won’t be friendly.
From MSNBC and Choice Changes

From the Hubble