Basra burning,

One thing that has changed for me is i like sadrs voice. That was a surprise.
When he speaks you can hear he has been thinking, and knows what he wants to talk about. Since the endless row of ridiculous events in irak taught me to even consider saddams remarks seriously, i must say i do have my doubts about sadrs actual capacity to coherently organise all the divided iraki's were he president.
But at least most of what he says is true and fair.

Sadr said there could be no surrender to a force that did not cannot and would not oust the occupation, and altho it may appear a bit strange, practically he is right, that a force that doesn't represent the iraki wishes cannot be expected to treat her populace rightly. A great fear in irak were so many more then usual westerners hear daily, have suffered and perished.

The uncensoreds selfcensoring mechanisms are running top time..
I must admit i sympathise with basra and the popular madhi movement. I rili don't like to see this fighting in wich the madhi army may suffer the terrible warmachine that usually aimed at sunnis past years. Not only because i do well realise that the scale of it remains hidden from the (non-iraki) eye, also because i have severe doubts over the methods and routines in such a tool of an occupier as the iraki army.
It's a fact, i think, in history that army's trained to control civilians tend to stick to the methods they are taught and learned, no matter if they are fighting different ppl later.

The whole paranoia of roadblocks and bombs, soldiers that had no option to join an army with no real cause, and the awfull methods needed to fight a monster like that,
will easily escalate this situation. And so it seems to have happened.

In beautifull madhi tradition, the army attacked the greenzone. madhi filosofy knows where the enemy hides.. in the dungeons and palaces of power.

Material for a film. The heroic struggle of ppl of basra likewise reminds of a film.
I cant think otherways but that the personal storys would be bizarre. Basra has been making a very lively impression the past few years. And although not all may be perfect in the eye of a man like maliki who turned policeman before refugee , by now all the world knows the west only loves movies about crime. Isn't war the looser anyhow in this big balance between war and crime?

But it makes me terribly sad. I am to sure that people deing in basra, under attack of an army and the usual airpower etc., are usually braver , better people then the ones that opted for the us sponsored and controlled army...

It painfully reminds the targetted eliminations in gaza (is this a killing off of a shia intellectual elite?). But also it reminds the endless rows of aimless civil wars instigated by occupiers alredi. Even if maliki had not all this intend, how will he explain his shortsighted and seemingly so well prepared actions?

Agreeing with the baghdadi wish for malikis resignation, made me think about elections... 't is about time these guys had them again, why has there been no mention? "the methods of a dictator" sadr's polit-buro said. Karzai is there even longer.

Tibet

The subject of this post is no favourite of mines, however its a lively debate for what lively debates go in politics internationally.
The whole tibet affair as it displays now is very much influenced by foreign factors.
Olympic games and the option to hack into chinese dignity obviously could't be left untried. The usian republicans looking for war and struggle to find yet another excuse for their enduring armstrading is a next. Finally the usians discovered an enemy in china.. the chinese economy.

Makes me wonder how many beautifull words will again be wasted on a hypocrit cause.

20 years ago, or 30 i dont remember exactly, when all the ppl i knew were still living in a haze of only anti commi prop, our governemnts refrained to take actions.
Now my visions have changed for the worse. and still tend to worsen.

apprently there are only 3 million tibetans, apparently their own communists overthrew the old feudal aristocrat system, apparently not only now, but also then the dalai lama was in the evil company of surpressors.. a thing i didnt know.
Well mayb my whole world view changed. i dont anymore buy all the raving against china, and i dont perceive the chinese as as dangerous and agressive as i do other players on the stage.

I concluded for myself that this ridiculous sympathy for tibet westerners feel is unwarranted. Its a part of the colonialist attitude to enjoy you arrived per plane and see these people live in only mud and poverty. That besides i think the chinese claims on tibet are for more legal then the colonialists claims on her pro western status.

That said i don't know.. I know the tibetans are oppressed, and that the chinese like every people that has to assimilate a next tribe put their own interests and position to much forward. Lastly i know the chinese could have respected the vulnerable tibetan ecosystem more. Tho i think the attitude could be improving.

None of these things are unique, all but.., tamils are oppressed with colonialist support, iraki are , afghans are, and each of them there are more then tibetans.

The basques were not allwowed even their own language, but no, the west insists on blaming others, native usians claimed independence, but no, the world pays attention to a munk.

What do i think about the munk.. i am sort of a budhist myself, like the tibetans say, budhism isn't a religion. It is more about adapting your attitudes to human wisdom we were able to collect. So i sympathise with the man, i grew up to not believe he is the so and somanieth incarnation of anyone, but i always remained hoping he was. My sympathy is with the tibetans definitily, becus its with the basques, the kurdes, the scottish, the irish, the native americans, the serbs and mayb even the kossovars. Not with europe, usia or the chinese.

otoh i grew to the knowledge that chinese minority politics is among the ones i admire most, for demographical reasons.
otoh. i sympathise with the chinese goal to feed 1.3 billion people, and the concept that asia should be ruled by asians and not by western machinations is also active.

a state of 3 million or more, presumably armed by us, tibetans, seems no valuable commodity to me, but a source of great future problems and anti chinese rasism.
Even the boykot of china i perceive as utterly injust. Its just economical pressure on an inhumane level, similar to starving 400000 iraki babys before the invasion.

People should use boykots to stop the capitalists from making victims and not to help them. Anyway it was predictable capitalism would try to use and mobilise the peoples tool of boykot for evil doings.
and so they do.

No rili apart from my sympathy for budhism, and tibetans and my love for mountainscapes, i found no single reason to oppose the chinese, When the baskish have local autonomy and a language, we can start doing something multilateral to the same effect.
Now... we should just shut up and stop interfering in continents that are not our own.

It means tibet will only exist as an autonomous chinese department, or even slightly more autonomous then that. And although we would all wish we had an area a 6th the size of china to put only 3 million people in, i think this by now outdated, that it is not anymore a possible thing on this planet, and will never anymore be.

That besides i am quite convinced the usians would sponsor these few tibetans into some sort of deranged capitalism that would be a pain in the ass for decenia to come.

gl with it. I am sorry. I happen to be not antichina just becus i got impregnated with anti chinaness all my life, and i fear their arguments are a 1000 times as reasonable as ours.

kind regards. Lets hope the chinese won't be to rude on the tibetans that were in the protests. They do have things to fight for left, not in the least their right to practice monastic budhism and live according to their own values.

I see a great challenge in turning that into a precedent of budhist jurisdiction , but i doubt very very much the world is even half redi to achieve that. Can't blame china they don't want to fall subject of an improvisation.

hope im helpfull.

taking turns

This is a story about someone i once met on a very special occasion.

Usually I wouldn't relinguish in the memory of this rather straight discourse. It was on an anarchist meeting and i was meeting people i like and whose ideas i love.

However this person is shot and carries a name: Louis Seveke. I didn't really know him, not if i even ever met him before. Somehow our meeting seemed uncoincedentual. I realised i was meeting "someone" and he appeared to realise that our meeting another was special. Of wich we talked. After we reached out, him more friendly then me. I saying rather fairly i hardly ever met people willing to counter a lot of political consequence. We actually conversed on the possibility that someone in netherlands would be eliminated by secret services. I think my opinion was the fear was somewhat legitimate, perhaps he mentioned a few examples, and that he thought the fear was realist. Wich I do but he seemed to be more serious about it. So i said, well they never shot me, and i am rili vocal in nearly all my opinions. Although we sortta excluded others from our experiences on that point he asked me wether i didn't think they would actually pick someone more active within the society. Someone with a more official position or such. I told him maybe, but that i thought not , because exactly when you are active within the limits of officiality , you are usually very limited in your options and scopes.

We talked on a bit about general strategic subjects. I liked him, there was a plenary, he liked me. That wasn't so hard, we tended to agree on intentions.
The last thing we had been talking about was something nijmegen, it got rather specific. I hoped we'd meet again. It was pleasant to meet someone who had thought over so many things in a proper way, and so close to actuality.


Only when he was shot i learned his name. That had indeed appeared in papers in such a way to make a great impression on me about the workings of his person.

The wicked thing is i had been feeling bad for like 3 or 4 days, as if something was planning to shoot me, or perhaps someone else. It's a pitty i hadn't hardly seen anyone in a couple of days, i might have told. Anyway when it happened and i got to hear it, i think one day late, I read everything i could find, read it twice sometimes, starting with everything that mentioned anything the police had said. My impression of that at that time was not favourable; starting with a statement of a policewoman in the paper that suggested a somewhat provincial , what if we say we do everything, you will never get to the bottom of it attitude, there was also a soundtape of a policespokesperson (perhaps the same woman) but that made not so much of an impression. The newsstory was rather full of improbabilitys, for example he would be shot with similar gun and the pictured model was an antiquated weapon.
A picture appeared, that resembled.. me, a bit. The news had been suggested that everything bad could be behind and gossip did the rest. The streets were thoroughly scrobbed and after that a search was started. I myself could think of only one obscure possibility, to fit it into a deed of organised fascism outside the services,
he was not a high profile person, it needed to be something sneaky. These had no to do.

Whatever sprung out is that he was killed on the birthday of the presenation of (&his) book on secret services. A period that had left him with some bitter enemys that at times advocated their hate in media. The police also immediatly seized his every computer including recent projects he was working on. They were not returned (if ever) before a long time.

There was so much written about and around him that i started wondering of between all the mess something would turn up after a while and i put on a newsfeed. As a result I witnessed,when the accused was caught how the original spanish article disappeared and only a dutch (i doubt it was the same) could be found after. The spanish article was rather clear he was wanted for armed and violent robbery in and outside netherlands.

All in all it set me to think. The supposed killer left us with a pile of material, none of wich can be checked on authenticity really. Not by me, and in my eyes it is suspect. Once his lawyer published in the papers, she didn't actually believe him,
that his account of the events was contrary to that of the police.

Anyhow they are proceeding very seriously into the case.. with a big fuzz as all the time. The man was regarded psychologically. He didn't want to get 'the' mark of irresponsability , the usual easy dutch way out with great problems of this kind.

So they are charging him lifelong sentence. I think Louis might turn in his grave if he knew. And as a result i saw the few words of his in he papers. Honestly, he is not completely sane i think. I know i could prove it from the 12 or 14 lines of text i read from him. Although an another article on the same managed nothing of the kind.

I see that a lot in this case. Pulling and steering it into directions. "Costly investigations". "Lefty's shoot another" outrage in the right wing "popular" (or yet fake?) voice. "Dirty squatter"...

Some of the articles contain these lines, permit them, purposedly construct associations. Debilitate the thoughts proces on social change.

Today the family decided to ask a complete view of the AIVD dossier on him. The secret services one. The article (not of the goodwilling kind so much) announces it that its probably not goig to happen. I don't think the secret service would show all that dossier really.

In the proces activists, or otherways socially engaged people, have been pressured in questionings. Both in and outside view the case has been used as a way to get a whole lot of information on the Nijmegen, the town where he lived, and beyonds, humanists.

Closer to him even more disturbing storys have been suggested. I do wonder if anyone has really seen him after death. So in fact when the police says something happened like such and such... and someone declares something completely different, yet to have done it only in the interest of investigation also means nobody knows if the scapegoat is a guilty one or an instant story.

Then again the guy appear to swear its his books and his plans, his maps and his every so suitable belonging that the police found, in a way the supposedly his books should proof something. i rather asked it people that know him.

The extra problem is that the period in wich happened what inspired the story's narrator was actually one in wich the relation between activism and police and not in the least undercover police, was really sharp. Activists had discovered that their most each and every move could and was covered with more straightforward dirty methods of blackmail, reward, and humiliation of the informers then commonly expected from an instrument of justice.

A bitter memory actually for most of us. Family members and all sorts of people had been aproached in greater numbers and more bigotted ways then we ever knew.

Often it showed the informer had been manipulated into most every action and daily lives. I never planned to become any sort of informer, but if anything left a bad taste about what one has to allow ones personality to be that way it is the superficiousness of the informer.

The people that manipulate other people so much and severely, can be expected to cook up more then that. A 16k bankrobber (note: before bigger amounts have been mentioned) with a weirdo story not being the last thing, exactly less when it so perfectly fits their intentions. The message being, if you mess with informers and secret services we will kill you either way. I wonder if an unreal informer would lend himself to that.


(This post might make they don't want to wait with the "Wilders(to boring to make a film?) film . So sit back and relax)