Friday, January 14, 2005

Nazi Costume vs. Nazi Deeds

When I heard all the hoopla about Britain’s Prince Harry and his Nazi costume, of course I found his gesture ignorant and insensitive....and ultimately not worthy of 1/1000th of the news coverage it garnered.



Call me crazy, but I’m less concerned with those dress like Nazis than those who act like Nazis.



Prince Harry is a pampered dolt...but he hasn’t (as far as I know) participated in mass murder. Not to mention, if the U.S. hated Nazis so much, why did they recruit some of Hitler’s worst criminals in the post-war era, e.g. Otto Skorzeny (below)?



For a bit more on that, check out this old article of mine:
http://www.counterpunch.org/mickey04262003.html

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Posted on 01/14 at 04:51 PM
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Cruelty and Privilege

“If work is such a good thing, why don’t the rich grab it all for themselves?”
—Brendan Behan

While reading about New York’s two newest zillionaires—Randy Johnson and Carlos Beltran—I got to thinking about how these two men bring so little to the world...yet earn so much money. I also pondered how they might spend some of that loot.

It’s likely Randy and Carlos will sample many of the Big Apple’s famous restaurants...perhaps opting for that durable status symbol: caviar. “If you thought sturgeon nicely laid their eggs somewhere for divers to harmlessly scoop up, forget it,” says author Russ Kick. Here’s how Simon Cooper described the process in Russ’ excellent book, “50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, Part 2” (http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle6511.html):

“The poacher selects a fat female. She is about four feet long and swollen with eggs. He hits her hard with a plank of wood—not hard enough to kill, but enough to stun. Blood trickles from her eyeballs, mouth, and gills. Quickly, the poacher rolls her over, slits open her belly, reaches inside, and carefully extracts a plump, gray-black sac about the size of a pillow. He puts the egg sac into a large plastic bucket and the throws the eviscerated fish on the ground, where she flaps and thrashes, he abdomen gaping, until she succumbs and dies.”

Yum…



Maybe foie gras is more to a wealthy baseball player’s liking. To produce this alleged delicacy, male ducks are force-fed 6 to 7 pounds of grain three times a day with an air-driven feeder tube for 28 days. At that point, the ducks’ livers, from with the pate is made, will have bloated to 6 to 12 times their normal size. “About 10 percent of the ducks don’t make it to slaughter,” says vegetarian activist, Pamela Rice (http://www.vivavegie.org), “They die when their stomachs burst.” Hey, more feathers for those down jackets, huh?

Speaking of down, it can get awfully cold in NYC...and you know what that means; fur coats all around (it also means more than six million animals per year are murdered so affluent consumers like Johnson and Beltran can pay outlandish prices).

Since so much has been documented about the fur industry, I’ll stick to the odious basics. There are two methods of slaughtering fur-bearing creatures. Almost three million of them (usually minks, foxes, chinchillas, and raccoons) are raised on so-called fur farms where they are imprisoned in cages often as small as 2.5 square feet for four animals. Since no federal law protects the animals on these farms, the conditions are predictably horrifying. The animals display the behavior of any creature under incredible duress: pacing, climbing, self-mutilating, cannibalism. After a life of misery, death does not come swiftly. The preferred method of execution is anal or genital electrocution. Described as experiencing “the intense pain of a heart attack while fully conscious,” the animals literally are burned from the inside out...to prevent damage to the coat, of course. Alternate fur farm approaches include suffocation or neck-breaking however, this often results in the animals only being stunned and therefore skinned alive.

It gets worse (or at least just as despicable but in a different way).



Not all animals can be raised and confined in cages. Raccoons and foxes, for example, are trapped in the wild. The People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) website (http://www.peta.org) describes the practice of trapping: “Animals...caught in steel-jaw leghold trap-the most widely used trap-endure excruciating pain from the steel bars clamped onto their legs, paws, and bodies. Some animals, especially mothers desperate to return to their young, will struggle to get loose, even chewing or twisting off their own legs to escape. Animals suffer for hours or even days in traps before trappers arrive to stomp on their chests or break their necks. The trapped animal is left to suffer blood loss, infection, gangrene, exhaustion, exposure, frostbite, shock, or attack by nonhuman predators. Other animals, such as beavers and muskrats, caught in underwater traps can struggle for up to 20 minutes before drowning.” Not surprisingly, these traps snare many unintentional victims like dogs, cats, and birds. These creatures are designated as “trash kills” because they lack the one characteristic that keeps the entire system alive: economic value.

Check the label on that full-length mink, Randy and Carlos...the hidden ingredient is cruelty.

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Posted on 01/14 at 05:23 AM
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Thursday, January 13, 2005

Coming Soon: Death Squads in Iraq

Your tax dollars at work, part 6,450,372:

The “Salvador option”
Pentagon plans death squad terror in Iraq
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jan2005/salv-j13.shtml


Roberto D’Aubuisson, U.S.-funded terrorist

I sent this article to Sander Hicks...and he promptly declared: “Read this, and you don’t have to read the newspapers for 20 years. This is 20 years of history, telling you what’s going on today.”

As one of my favs, Natalie Merchant sang about Central America:

“Mercy, mercy,” why didn’t we hear it?
“Mercy, mercy,” why didn’t we read it...buried on the last page of our morning papers?
The plan was drafted, drafted in secret.
Gunboats met the red tide, driven to the rum trade for the army that they
created./But the bullets were bought by us, it was dollars that paid them.

Please forgive us, we don’t know what was done in our name.
Could you ever forgive us? I don’t know how you could.
Could you ever believe that we didn’t know?


Natalie

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Posted on 01/13 at 02:46 PM
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