THE DAY AFTER THE 'NUKE' ATTACK - WHAT WILL THEY THEN DO?

Gary Leupp (https://www.counterpunch.org/leupp06152007.html) poses the question as the neocon-warmongers in the United States 'hype up' public opinion in preparation for just such an event.

"Let us suppose that the Bush-Cheney administration answers the neocons' prayer and does indeed bomb Iran sometime soon. The plan apparently involves more than the destruction of nuclear facilities, replicating Israel's attack on Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981. (That attack, by the way was condemned by the whole world, including a furious President Ronald Reagan). It includes an all-out assault on the Iranian political and religious leadership. Government buildings and officials' residences will be targeted, guaranteeing collateral damage.

Since Iran is a highly complex society, and its government widely unpopular, (?) there may well be some local support for a "shock and awe" campaign. We know that the administration has cultivated ties with the Mujahadeen Khalq (even though they remain on the State Department's terrorist list) and the Pakistan-based Balochi separatist group Jundallah (the Party of God). These among other organisations will get their marching orders amid the "creative chaos" produced by the attack. There can be no large deployment of U.S. troops in Iran, unless they evacuate from Afghanistan and Iraq which is unlikely.

I doubt that administration plans for the construction of a post-attack Iranian polity are any more sophisticated than their plans for post-Taliban Afghanistan or occupied Iraq. Some have suggested that the neocons' goal is actually to plunge the Muslim Middle East into prolonged pandemonium, insuring that all foes of Israel are off-balance and terrorised by the might of Israel's protector for generations to come.

Paul Craig Roberts says
"Neocons, have convinced themselves that nuking Iran will show the Muslim world that Muslims have no alternative to submitting to the will of the US government."…They are "total Islamophobes" who believe that "Islam must be deracinated and the religion destroyed. . ."

IRANIAN HISTORY IGNORED AT OUR PERIL?

by Peter Ewer
Professor Hamid Algar, professor of Persian and Islamic Studies at Berkeley University, outlined in his book "Roots of the Islamic Revolution" (Open Press, London) the role of the new class of ulama in Shi'ism, which brought about a revolutionary change in Iran in 1979.

Professor Algar wrote that "with the hindsight provided by the Islamic Revolution, it will be more appropriate to write the Iranian history of the past three or four centuries not so much in terms of dynasties as in terms of the development of the Iranian ulama."

He continued: "Dynasties have come and gone… but the class of Shi'i ulama in Iran… has been totally without parallel in the Islamic world."

Two radically different ruling classes
Iran faced a period of anarchy at the time of the end of the Safavid dynasty. Without a centralised monarchy, a class of "intellectuals" took the role of governors, arbitrators and local leaders. They were united by their acceptance of the principle of the inseparability of the religious and the secular: the economic and political systems needed to be in harmony with the spiritual if the religion is to be real.

If Professor Algar is right, then America and Iran clearly represent two radically different kinds of ruling class:
§ One that has managed by whatever means to gain control - and hold on to by fair means or foul - of the machinery of government and
§ the other a leadership class which is socially and historically inseparable from the population.

In the US, the powerful neo-cons could by no stretch of the imagination be called the representatives of the masses, and so must constantly use lies and propaganda to deceive and appease the masses.
§ The first requires for its survival a continual striving for power and control.
§ The other relies for its strength on the preservation of countless strong and close-knit local communities, each one socially and politically organised around the local mosque.

There was a time when the English-speaking peoples enjoyed "countless strong and closely knit communities", centred around the local church. But then there was also a more representative type of government!

TRIVIALISED POLITICS

by Betty Luks
Have you followed the Rudd-Howard tit-for-tat media brawling over the behaviour of some agro-unionists? Rudd's knee-jerk response to these calculated attacks by Howard's heavies is to insist he will see such naughty agro-unionists are thrown out of the Labor party.

Quite frankly - who cares? Neither party is dealing with the real issues concerning the Australian people.If the agro-unionists' behaviour is beyond the law then the court system will deal with them.

I for one, am bored out of my brain with the antics and shallow show-biz theatrics of both groups.

FUELING TERRORISM

by Peter Ewer
A US State Department report on terrorism has concluded that there has been a 30 per cent increase in terrorist attacks across the world in 2006 to over 14,000 attacks of various degrees. These are almost all a product of escalating violence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Meanwhile an increasing number of engineers and scientists have continued to chip away at the official 9/11 story. Opinion polls in the US show that over half of the respondents think that 9/11 was a set-up job. The "9/11 Truth" is now a world-wide movement which is rapidly growing.
The collapse of the World Trade buildings followed a "uniform demolition style", that many academics argue, hardly can be explained by plane impact and fire. The steel left over from the collapse was quickly hauled off and sold to Asia where it was melted down, destroying any evidence. No crime scene in US history has been so quickly covered up and cleaned up.

If the evidence points to a controlled demolition with explosives, then the US government was and is involved in a criminal conspiracy. Generations of conspiracy theorists will be proven right and respectable establishment academics, shown to be the toadies they are.

FEMINISTS GROW PLUMP, WHILE OTHER WOMEN BLEED

by James Reed
We have commented in this journal about the terrible plight of Aboriginal women and children, facing domestic violence. As is sexual abuse of women and children destroying Aboriginal communities. Louis Nowra in "Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men's Violence Against Women and Children" (Pluto Press) is a small (102 page) book which is an important analysis of a major social problem - and Nowra is a white male.

In the past the claims made by Aboriginal women have been dismissed by the new class elites - and feminists, typically White middle class females. Multiracialism and multiculturalism have papered over the cracks of real social injustices.
Something of a sport has arisen among some Aboriginal men about raping children. Nowra describes how a few years ago he met two Aboriginal men in their early 70s. They were going to town to buy plastic toy dinosaurs to give to a 12-year old girl for having sex with them at the same time. They were not ashamed about this incident. Indeed, it is common to see Aboriginal women in Alice Springs hospital with horrific injuries.
The legal system, until recently, has gone soft on these "tribal rapes," allowing a cultural defence to rape and murder. Yet one-third of Aboriginal girls in the Northern Territory are infected with sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia and gonorrhoea.

The few writers who have dealt with this horrific problem of social decay have typically blamed dispossession by Whites as the cause. This is essentially meaningless because an epidemic of domestic violence did not exist, say, in Aboriginal communities before WW II, or even 20 years ago. The rise corresponds precisely with a general liberalisation of sexual culture.

Nowra does not go down the James Reed road. His explanation is that traditional Aboriginal culture was aggressive and misogynous. Child brides and gang rapes were customs. Once these practices were regulated but the false idealisation of Aboriginal culture since the 1960s has hidden these fundamental misogynous realities, but now alcohol, welfare dependence and drugs have perverted traditional Aboriginal culture.

I agree, but Nowra does not detail the destructive impact that pornography has had on Aboriginal culture. This is the real engine behind Aboriginal domestic violence. I would like to see pornography banned for both Aboriginal and White communities, with severe penalties for black marketeers.

However, this market of misery and social misogyny has become mainstream now, and feminists are major consumers - and defenders. Feminism, as Pamela Bone has pointed out ("Western Sisters Failing the Fight," The Australian 8/3/07, p.12) has let women down, failing to protest against stonings, honour killings and other forms of persecution. Race and cultural for the basically Left feminists, are the new absolutes, not women's rights."

Thus "feminist" Germaine Greer defends the (non-White) practice of female genital mutilation. The example says it all. I have watched intently and observed that none of the feminist champions of human rights, refugees, etc. etc. has taken a stand on the Aboriginal domestic violence issue. No doubt the issue is stored in the "too hard" basket, which is next to their basket of chocolates and cream buns.

A PRESIDENT FOR THE NEW AMERICA

by Brian Simpson
Most US women are single: according to the US Census, 51 per cent of US women in 2005 lived without a spouse. In 1950 the figure was 35 per cent. Married couples are now a minority.

Hilary Clinton, although married, is viewed as a feminist representative of the careerist new women. Her marriage, of course, is something of an "open" one, as it would have to be with Bill Clinton.

Hilary's hopes for the Presidency have taken a turn for the worse with Black Democrat Senator Barak Obama throwing his hat into the ring. Using drugs, cocaine and marijuana in his youth, he as President will bring in the era of post-White America. He is Big on immigration and Big on political correctness - even Bigger than Hilary.

Now why couldn't the new world order have made it easier on themselves and mixed the two candidates: a feminist person of colour. Make her a lesbian and disabled to boot! The elites of the new world order must be slipping or getting soft! Surely we deserve a better quality of oppression from our oppressors!

GLOBALISATION AND MULTICULTURALISM

by James Reed
Professor Anthony Elliott, professor of sociology at Flinders University, South Australia, claims that cultural diversity will enable us to meet the "challenges posed by gobalisation." ("Community Spirit Not a Thing of the Past," The Australian 6/12/06 p.28.) Indeed, according to the professor's interviews of people in Britain and the US, "[hardly] any mentioned multiculturalism as a source of anxiety," but most were concerned about the effects of globalisation and its erosion of community values. But, for Elliott, there are still "flourishing global communal loyalties," such as globalist leftist-style protest movements. Some "community."

Elliott does not appreciate the world that has been lost because of immigration and multiculturalism because sociology itself has, as it has come to be practised, something of an anti-Anglo bias. Sociology is a product of Leftist thought and its very foundations and research programme is tainted with this.

Matters are perhaps even worse because since the 1980s the Leftist elites have dropped their concern with working people and championed the cause of ethnic minorities with full force. Before that time, there was something of a division of labour in the study and ideological support of "cool groups". The working class is no longer championed. The White working class is "roundly despised" as journalist Andrew Gimson has put it. ("Why is the White Working Class so Roundly Despised?" The Weekly Telegraph 18-24/10/06 p.20).

As he says:
"Our rulers do not think of themselves as being in the slightest bit prejudiced. They know they are the most open-minded people since records began. That is part of their armour of self-righteousness, which enables them to believe that the world would be perfect if everyone was exactly the same as themselves. The white working class is an inconvenient relic, and the sooner it ceases to exist, the better. That is the underlying assumption of our political establishment."
"Any sense of a common nationhood which transcends class has disappeared… [are] we one nation, or has that nation dissolved?"

Professor Robert Putnam of Harvard University has shown that cultural diversity/ multiculturalism is also corrosive of community values such as trust - even for ethnic communities. Thus the more diverse a community, the less likely people in that community are to trust anyone. This research knocks Professor Anthony Elliott's work for a six.
But Putnam believes that such ill-effects are only short-term: in the long-term migration benefits everybody and trends that "have been socially constructed,… can be socially reconstructed."

Better yet, Putnam has said in reference to Jack Straw, leader of the UK House of Commons who said that he prefers Muslim women not to wear a full veil: "What we shouldn't do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us."

But supposing that the ill-effects of multiculturalism are only short-term is not science but religious faith, something common to the weird discipline of sociology. A society which breaks down and dies, is dead.

Professor Elliott is concerned about the effects that electronic off-shoring will have on jobs, with 30-40 million service jobs in the US alone becoming susceptible to off-shoring in the future. Well if that is the road the elites intend to take us down, and if we can't stop the globalist disease in the short-term, the thing to do may be to ripen the boil so that the infection can ultimately be lanced. So let's "bring it on".

Start with closing down most of the arts/social sciences departments in all Australian universities. Electronically off-shore education. Instead of bringing in students by the crate load, simply close down the universities! Use them as shopping centres and offices and sell off the land for residential developments. Keep stream-lined science/medicine/IT faculties, but run them as science parks. Hello internet, goodbye university.

The cure to the diseases of our civilisation will have to be, bringing them to a head. Maybe in the world to come, our race's social immune system will be more resistant to new infections - and the old ones.

THE CHURCH OF REVEREND FLANNERY

by James Reed:
The Weekend Australian 19-20/5/07 had as its cover story an article on Tim Flannery, now climate change guru. The cover story page has Flannery in a nice black suit and blue shirt, hands held grasped together as if in deep prayer.

He is very much the priest; indeed a priest of the globalist religion of environmentalism. Flannery has become Mr. Climate Change on the basis of a popular book on climate change, "The Weather Makers". He previously published "The Future Eaters" which made an ecological case for immigration restriction to Australia, but Flannery seems to have gone a bit quiet on the "Australia is over-populated" line.

Having read this article I would like to ask a few questions about Flannery's lifestyle which have also been asked of Al Gore. It is fair to do so of people that request us to make personal life-style changes.

How carbon neutral is his lifestyle? Did he "offset" his pretty suit? How much of his personal salary is donated to:
[1] Environmental research;
[2] Programmes to end poverty and save starving African kids?

I am sure if I knew all of this I would be motivated by personal example and stop being selfish and become a good greenie citizen. Sure.

CREEPING REPUBLICANISM DISEASE

by James Reed
The republic will be back on the agenda when Kev the Rudderless takes a grip of the steering wheel. In comments made in an interview ("Unions Won't Rule Us: Rudd") published in The Sydney Morning Herald 27/4/07 Rudd said that "becoming a republic was an important part of the nation's future," but that this "would not be a priority in [the] first term of government."

First a plebiscite:
The republican strategy appears to be for people to cast a vote of "no confidence" in the existing Constitution through a plebiscite.
Then a second plebiscite will choose the republican model.
Then comes the referendum.

Rudd in the great Labor tradition will use the Fabian approach of stealth by gradualism but his ultimate aims are the same as Latham, Beasley and Whitlam. If my blood pressure can take it, prepare for biting pieces from this writer when Kev takes up the Sheriff's star, dropped to the dust of main street by an ageing Johnny the Kid.

SUPER FOR DEBT SWAP - OR DIPPING INTO SUPER TO SURVIVE

Tens of thousands of Australian families are raiding their superannuation savings to pay off personal debts. The amount of money taken from superannuation accounts to pay off debt has quadrupled in five years, going from $35 million in 2001 to $135.3 million last year, Fairfax newspapers reported.

Last year, 16,500 people applied for early access to their super accounts, and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority approved 13,871 applications, more than double the approvals in 2001. Applications for early access to super are approved in cases of severe hardship. Money may also be released to prevent foreclosure of a mortgage or the forced sale of one's home. To qualify for an early release, the individual must have received federal income support for 26 weeks and must satisfy the trustee that the money is essential for living expenses.

"If you satisfy both of the above tests, the trustee/RSA (retirement savings account) provider may, in any 12-month period, release to you one lump sum payment," the guidelines say. And the crisis could deepen as there is a good chance of another interest rate rise. If that eventuates, a voter backlash could dash the re-election hopes of Prime Minister John Howard, who had promised low interest rates at the last election.

Labor's assistant treasury spokesman, Chris Bowen, said the new figures show that cost-of-living expenses and mortgages are hurting families. "These figures match what I'm hearing in my electorate: people are hurting, hurting badly," said the member for Prospect in NSW.
"It also appears that people who have early payments of superannuation approved are getting a larger percentage of their payouts early. This goes against the grain of saving more for retirement. "These figures are more evidence that all is not rosy in the Australian economy."

THE CULTURE WAR CONTINUES

by James Reed
Here is some good news. High school students resent being made to feel guilty about the teaching of Australian history and indigenous relations. ("Students Resent History 'Guilt'" The Australian 18/5/07 p.1)

The History Teachers Association wants a rethink of teaching methods in this subject on the basis of reports showing that teaching "indigenous history" tended to produce "racism". In other words, teaching what Professor Geoffrey Blainey called the "black armband view of history" produced not guilty compliance - but resistance. Students were "not prepared to wear the guilt" as one executive officer put it.

Why should they: compared to the history of all nations, especially Asiatic ones, and the accounts of genocide in the Old Testament, Australian history has been relatively peaceful. Only well-fed academics that care nothing about Aborigines, but everything about their own publication and media status, work to feed the black armband guilt industry.

How much of the profits from the books written about racism/guilt of White Australians, by White Liberals, was donated to help, say, preserve eyesight in remote Aboriginal communities?
A full blood Aboriginal fella once said to me over a glass of wine that these white fellas who write this stuff are like chattering monkeys that would run if an Aborigine came to ask for help.

I continue to redirect poor, disadvantaged and homeless people to the Arts departments of our universities for help. Put your money where your mouths are chatterers!