German corporate media demand destruction of anti-Hitler memorial for Ukraine war hysteria

Posted on April 18, 2014 by petrel41

This video says about itself:

SS in the Ukraine

In June 1941, German mobile killing squads, known as Einsatzgruppen, were dispatched throughout Eastern Europe. By the spring of 1943, the 3000 members of the Einsatzgruppen, led by highly-educated officers and aided by local collaborators in each country, had systematically murdered over a million Jews and ten thousands of Roma, handicapped, Poles, Russians, partisans and non-combatants.

In the 1960s, a hate campaign by the media of far Right German media baron Axel Caesar Springer brought student activist Rudi Dutschke to the attention of Springer press reader Josef Erwin Bachmann. To Bachmann, Dutschke was a “dirty communist pig”. On April 11, 1968, Bachmann tried to murder Dutschke, firing his gun at him. Dutschke did not die immediately; he died in 1979, after eleven horrible years with a damaged brain.

The Springer media empire, half a century after inciting this slow-motion murder, is now inciting war.

By Christoph Dreier in Germany:

German right-wing press calls for demolition of Soviet memorial

18 April 2014

On Monday, the right-wing Springer newspapers Bild and Berliner Zeitung (BZ) handed in a petition to the German parliament calling for the demolition of the memorial to the Soviet Union in Berlin’s Tiergarten. “At a time when Russian tanks are threatening free, democratic Europe, we don’t want any Russian tanks at the Brandenburg Gate!” the petition states. Two original T-34 tanks form part of the memorial.

Peter Huth, the chief editor of BZ and deputy head of Bild, stated that due to the events in Ukraine, “the fear of Russian tanks, which overthrew Hitler and a few years later moved against German demonstrators,” had returned. “Russian military units have marched to the borders of Ukraine and are threatening the freedom of a sovereign state,” he wrote. “The last Russian tanks in Berlin must leave!”

The memorial was established in Berlin Tiergarten in 1945 in honour of the fallen Red Army soldiers in World War II. It marked in particular the 80,000 soldiers who perished in the liberation of Berlin, some of whom are buried on the site.

Huth’s outrageous argumentation goes beyond the media campaign to date, which has supported the fascist-led coup in Ukraine and NATO’s troop build-up in eastern Europe, while portraying Russia as the aggressor. It is an attempt to rehabilitate German fascism.

With the taking of Berlin on May 2, 1945, the Red Army dealt a death blow to the Nazi dictatorship, which had terrorised the German working class, murdered 6 million Jews, and drowned Europe in blood. It ended a war that had been launched from the outset with the aim of physically liquidating a large section of the Soviet population and all of Europe’s Jews.

It is an incontrovertible historical fact that in the struggle against German imperialism, the Soviet Union bore by far the greatest burden among the allies. The Nazi regime was ultimately defeated by the Red Army and the workers and farmers of the Soviet Union. In heroic struggles, 14 million soldiers lost their lives. At least as many Soviet civilians were victims of the Nazis.

The T-34 tank Huth would like to remove from the memorial played a central role in the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany. In spite of the Stalinist degeneration of the young workers state, the Soviet Union was able to undertake an historically unprecedented programme of industrialisation thanks to the planned economy. From 1942, the T-34 was built by the thousands and surpassed the German tanks of the day by far.

The defamation of the Soviet T-34 tank as a “Russian tank” is a brazen historical lie. The Putin regime in no way represents the former workers state, and the Soviet Union was not limited to the Russia of today. In the battle for Berlin, not only Russians, but also Ukrainians, Belarusians and many other nationalities lost their lives.

Behind the demand for the demolition of an anti-fascist monument is the attempt to rewrite history and rehabilitate National Socialism. Previously, only fascist groups and right-wing radicals defiled Soviet memorials and called for their destruction. Now, the campaign is being led by one of the most powerful media companies in Germany.

In this, Springer Publishers is in good company. In February of this year, Der Spiegel published a lengthy article in which right-wing historians spoke in favour of a fundamental revision of German history. Without comment, Ernst Nolte was allowed to speak out in favour of placing the blame for World War II on Poland and Britain. Historian Jörg Baberowski from Humboldt University in Berlin was cited as saying, “Hitler was not evil.”

Baberowski has been working systematically in recent years to portray the Soviet Union as the real aggressor in the World War II. In his book, Scorched Earth, published in 2012, he claims that Stalin wanted to wage war on Germany. “Stalin enjoyed the war of destruction,” wrote Baberowski, concluding, “Hitler was poorly prepared to lead a war against a regime for which violence was second nature and whose soldiers were fully prepared to use it.”

The revision of history and the downplaying of National Socialism, which has found its sharpest expression to date in the call for the demolition of the Soviet memorial, is directly connected to the revival of German militarism.

To wage war again, the German ruling elite needs to trivialise its crimes in World War II. Since President Gauck, Foreign Minister Steinmeier and Defence Minister Von der Leyen announced the end of “the politics of military restraint” at the beginning of the year, a systematic assault on the anti-fascist and anti-militarist convictions deeply rooted in broad layers of the population has been under way.

To encircle and destabilise Russia, the German government collaborated with Svoboda, the heirs of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, in the coup in Ukraine. Springer Publishers, once one of the strongest advocates of the Cold War, supported this alliance and gave opposition politician Vitaly Klitschko, who is backed by the conservative Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a regular column in the Bild newspaper. BZ, Bild and Die Welt seek to outdo each other in their war propaganda against Russia.

But the war propaganda has had little impact thus far. An overwhelming majority of the German population are opposed to the actions of the German government in Ukraine as well as to foreign interventions by the army.

At the beginning of the month, the deputy editor of Die Welt’s political section, Klaus Christian Malzahn, complained in Welt am Sonntag that NATO was becoming increasingly unpopular. “A majority of 53 percent spoke out against NATO monitoring and securing the airspace of eastern European partners to guard against potential Russian attacks,” Malzahn reported, before launching an attack on this majority. “Obviously, many ordinary Germans believe,” wrote Malzahn, that the federal republic can survive permanently “without out-of-area military interventions and burdensome NATO operations.”

The Springer campaign against the Soviet memorial takes place in this context. The German government’s collaboration with fascist forces in Ukraine, who move from city to city destroying Lenin monuments and terrorising workers, has broken the dam. With the call to demolish the Soviet memorial, the Bild newspaper is attempting to mobilise the most backward elements against the anti-war sentiments of the majority of the population.

‘Hundreds of thousands of birds killed by BP oil’

Posted on April 17, 2014 by petrel41

This video from the USA is called Gulf Oil Spill Birds – Don’t Let Kids Watch.

From The Lens in New Orleans, USA:

Scientists fear BP blowout killed far more birds than officially reported

By Bob Marshall, Staff writer

April 15, 2014 2:43pm

Almost from the start, wildlife advocates described the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as a war on the Gulf ecosystem. Few quibbled with that analogy as a record 210 million gallons spewed into the Gulf just 50 miles from one of the world’s most productive coastal estuaries.

Yet four years later, wildlife workers, especially those concerned about birds, are skeptical of one metric commonly used to assess wars of any kind: the official body count.

For example, the official count of brown pelicans killed by BP’s oil stands at 577, which doesn’t seem like a big hit on a population estimated in the neighborhood of 85,000. Similarly, the total of 6,381 for all birds killed in the Gulf from populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands would seem insignificant.

But wildlife specialists say those numbers are likely low by a factor of at least 10 — and no one should think the worst is over for the pelicans and a host of other less heralded bird species in the northern Gulf.

Accurate counts of wildlife deaths in spills are always difficult because stricken animals frequently crawl away to die or sink to the bottom of a water body, while others make easy targets for predators, said Melanie Driscoll, the National Audubon Society’s director of bird conservation for the Gulf Coast.

To compensate for those factors, spill specialists use multipliers supplied by computer models.

In the Exxon Valdez event — a smaller spill in a smaller area than the Deepwater Horizon — scientists put the number of dead birds at 225,000, a figure arrived at after applying multipliers ranging from 10 to 30 to the total number carcasses of various species that were actually recovered.

“In some cases the multiplier can be 12 or 5 or even 20,” said Driscoll. “I’ve seen a number as high as 50 by one group for dolphins and whales in this spill. So that would mean if 20 dead dolphins were collected, you multiply that number by 50, and you get 1,000 – which would be much closer to the actual damage done.

“In this spill I would expect the multipliers for birds to be huge.”

That’s because recovery operations during the Deepwater Horizon disaster faced additional complications. The spill occurred at the beginning of the five-month nesting season for pelicans and other birds, and it covered a much larger area than the Exxon Valdez — 68,000 square miles compared to 11,000.

“The decision was made not try to recover dead birds from the nesting islands to avoid causing even more deaths,” said Driscoll. “That meant most of those sites were not searched until late August or early September at the earliest” — months after the disaster struck, in April.

The delay meant adult pelicans, their eggs and then their young were being contaminated as long as BP’s oil was in Barataria Bay. Plastic and cloth booms placed around the islands to collect the oil provided only marginal protection because the pelicans’ daily food searches took them into the oil-fouled waters beyond the booms.

Less fortunate adults were completely soaked in oil, and the heart-breaking photos of their struggles soon became iconic images of the disaster.

Pairs returning to their nests with oil on their feathers smeared the toxic substance on porous eggs they were incubating. And when the surviving young were old enough, they walked and swam through the weathered oil around the booms.

Driscoll said by the time search teams entered the islands, many birds that had died from oil contamination likely had decomposed or had been eaten by scavengers. Nor could there ever be an accurate count of the eggs that failed to hatch due to the oil.

She said the real toll on all birds in the northern Gulf could reach six figures because the delay in counting could mean “thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of carcasses just disappeared.”

The location of this spill would only add to the multiplier, she said. In the sub-tropical Gulf, predation takes place 24/7, 365, which means anything of food value doesn’t last long.

“It’s an incredibly productive system so that means there is also an incredible number of predators,” Driscoll said. “And this was spread over a really huge area, which complicated the collection as well.”

The difficulty of coming up with an accurate number has been compounded by the paucity of post-spill research on birds in the impacted area, Driscoll said.

“Of the $500 million BP set aside for research on Deepwater Horizon impacts, dozens and dozens of studies have been done on oysters and fish, and I know of just two that have been started on birds,” she said.

“I understand the studies on oysters and fish; everybody needs to know what’s happening in the food chain. But we are four years removed from the spill, and we don’t have answers to questions like what the long-term impacts could be.”

Research by government agencies as part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment has been kept from the public. That’s because monetizing the damage done to fish, wildlife and habitat plays out like a personal-injury lawsuit, with opposing sides reluctant to tip off the other to their findings.

One study in Minnesota on the breeding success of white pelicans, winter residents of coastal Louisiana, is a cause for concern. October arrivals in Gulf waters, the whites would have missed most of the surface oil, but they spent the next six months feeding on fish in bays polluted by the disaster. The researchers collected 200 eggs that didn’t hatch and looked for evidence of oil contamination.

“The study is still under way, but of the first 30 un-hatched eggs they looked at, 90 percent had the chemical signature of Deepwater Horizon oil,” Driscoll said, “and 80 percent had the signature of the dispersant Corexit, which was widely used during the spill.

“Now there may have been other reasons why these eggs didn’t hatch. But what they found is significant — and it’s the kind of research we should be doing on many other species here in the Gulf, but we aren’t.”

One clue to the long-term impact of the spill on Louisiana brown pelicans could arrive this summer as many of the birds born during the disaster enter their first spawning season.

But while Louisiana residents are understandably focused on their state bird — which ironically was taken off the endangered list five months before the spill — Driscoll said the ornithological community has graver concerns about other species.

“Pelicans got a lot of attention, and deservedly so, but the reality is their populations have been doing quite well with all the help they’ve received from humans over the last 40 years,” she said.

“They have a fairly large population with as many as 70,000 to 80,000 in Louisiana alone, and many more in other states. But there are only 6,000 Wilson’s plovers in the entire Gulf, so losing even a small number of that species could be a real problem.”

In fact, the official list of birds killed by the spill shows only two Wilson’s plover carcasses collected. But that doesn’t assure Driscoll that the plover population escaped major damage.

“A body count in these spills is just that — a count of the carcasses that were found, not an accurate picture of how many were really killed,” said Driscoll. “What’s been so frustrating in our community is the lack of information.

“We just don’t know yet, and we might not for a long, long time.”

Author Gabriel García Márquez dies

Posted on April 17, 2014 by petrel41

This video is about Gabriel García Márquez.

From Associated Press:

Gabriel García Márquez Dead: Nobel Prize-Winning Author Dies At 87

Posted: 04/17/2014 4:04 pm EDT Updated: 04/17/2014 4:22 pm EDT

Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez has died at age 87, a source close to the family told the Associated Press. Márquez had been recently hospitalized for infections in his lungs and his urinary tract.

MEXICO CITY — Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel laureate whose novels and short stories exposed tens of millions of readers to Latin America’s passion, superstition, violence and inequality, died at home in Mexico City around midday, according to people close to his family. He was 87.

Widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, Garcia Marquez achieved literary celebrity that spawned comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

His flamboyant and melancholy fictional works — among them “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” ”Love in the Time of Cholera” and “Autumn of the Patriarch” — outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. The epic 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages.

His stories made him literature’s best-known practitioner of magical realism, the fictional blending of the everyday with fantastical elements such as a boy born with a pig’s tail and a man trailed by a swarm of yellow butterflies.

His death was confirmed by two people close to the family who spoke on condition of anonymity out of respect for the family’s privacy.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” was “the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure,” biographer Gerald Martin told The Associated Press.

When he accepted the Nobel prize in 1982, Garcia Marquez described Latin America as a “source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

With writers including Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, Garcia Marquez was also an early practitioner of the literary nonfiction that would become known as New Journalism. He became an elder statesman of Latin American journalism, with magisterial works of narrative non-fiction that included the “Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor,” the tale of a seaman lost on a life raft for 10 days.

Other pieces profiled Venezuela’s larger-than-life president, Hugo Chavez, and vividly portrayed how cocaine traffickers led by Pablo Escobar had shred the social and moral fabric of his native Colombia, kidnapping members of its elite, in “News of a Kidnapping.” In 1994, Garcia Marquez founded the Iberoamerican Foundation for New Journalism, which offers training and competitions to raise the standard of narrative and investigative journalism across Latin America.

Like many Latin American writers, Garcia Marquez transcended the world of letters. The man widely known as “Gabo” became a hero to the Latin American left as an early ally of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and a critic of Washington’s violent interventions from Vietnam to Chile.

Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, a small Colombian town near the Caribbean coast, on March 6, 1927. He was the eldest of the 11 children of Luisa Santiaga Marquez and Gabriel Elijio Garcia, a telegraphist and a wandering homeopathic pharmacist who was also something of a philanderer and fathered at least four children outside of his marriage.

Just after their first son was born, his parents left him with his maternal grandparents and moved to Barranquilla, where Garcia Marquez’s father opened a pharmacy, hoping to become rich.

Garcia Marquez was raised for 10 years by his grandmother and his grandfather, a retired colonel who fought in the devastating 1,000-Day War that hastened Colombia’s loss of the Panamanian isthmus.

His grandparents’ tales would provide grist for Garcia Marquez’s fiction and Aracataca became the model for “Macondo,” the village surrounded by banana plantations at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains where “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is set.

“I have often been told by the family that I started recounting things, stories and so on, almost since I was born,” Garcia Marquez once told an interviewer. “Ever since I could speak.”

Garcia Marquez’s parents continued to have children, and barely made ends meet. Their first-born son was sent to a state-run boarding school just outside Bogota where he became a star student and voracious reader, favoring Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoevsky and Kafka.

Garcia Marquez published his first piece of fiction as a student in 1947, mailing a short story to the newspaper El Espectador after its literary editor wrote that “Colombia’s younger generation has nothing to offer in the way of good literature anymore.”

His father insisted he study law but he dropped out, bored, and dedicated himself to journalism. The pay was atrocious and Garcia Marquez recalled his mother visiting him in Bogota and commenting in horror at his bedraggled appearance that: “I thought you were a beggar.”

Garcia Marquez’s writing was constantly informed by his leftist political views, themselves forged in large part by a 1928 military massacre near Aracataca of banana workers striking against the United Fruit Company, which later became Chiquita. He was also greatly influenced by the assassination two decades later of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a galvanizing leftist presidential candidate.

Garcia Marquez suffered a strong official backlash to his story about how government corruption contributed to the disaster recounted in “Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor.” A dictatorship seized power and Garcia Marquez made a new home in Europe. After touring the Soviet-controlled east, he moved to Rome in 1955 to study cinema, a lifelong love. Then he moved to Paris, where he lived among intellectuals and artists exiled from the many Latin American dictatorships of the day.

Garcia Marquez returned to Colombia in 1958 to marry Mercedes Barcha, a neighbor from childhood days. They had two sons, Rodrigo, a film director, and Gonzalo, a graphic designer.

After a 1981 run-in with Colombia’s government in which he was accused of sympathizing with M-19 rebels and sending money to a Venezuelan guerrilla group, Garcia Marquez moved to Mexico City, his main home for the rest of his life.

Despite being denied U.S. visas for years over his politics, he was courted by presidents and kings and counted Bill Clinton and Francois Mitterrand among his friends. He denounced what he considered the unfair political persecution of Clinton for sexual adventures.

Clinton himself recalled in an AP interview in 2007 reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude” while in law school and not being able to put it down, not even during classes.

“I realized this man had imagined something that seemed like a fantasy but was profoundly true and profoundly wise,” he said.

Dirt poor and struggling through much of his adult life, Garcia Marquez was somewhat transformed by his later fame and wealth. A bon vivant with an impish personality, Garcia Marquez was a gracious host who would animatedly recount long stories to guests. Fiercely protective of his image, a trait shared by his wife, he would occasionally unleash a quick temper when he felt slighted or misrepresented by the press.

The author with the bushy grey eyebrows and white mustache spent more time in Colombia in his later years, founding the journalism institute in the walled colonial port city of Cartagena, where he kept a home.

Garcia Marquez turned down offers of diplomatic posts and spurned attempts to draft him to run for Colombia’s presidency, though he did get involved in behind-the-scenes peace mediation efforts between Colombia’s government and leftist rebels.

In 1998, already in his 70s, Garcia Marquez fulfilled a lifelong dream, buying a majority interest in the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio with money from his Nobel. Before falling ill with lymphatic cancer in June 1999, the author contributed prodigiously to the magazine.

“I’m a journalist. I’ve always been a journalist,” he told the AP at the time. “My books couldn’t have been written if I weren’t a journalist because all the material was taken from reality.”

Nobel writer Gabriel García Márquez hospitalized in Mexico

Bioshock Infinite computer game, politics and history

Posted on April 17, 2014 by petrel41

This video is called Bioshock Infinite Gameplay Walkthrough Part 1 – Intro – Chapter 1.

It says about itself:

BioShock Infinite is the third game in the BioShock series. Developed by Irrational Games, BioShock Infinite is not a direct sequel/prequel to any of the previous BioShock games, and it takes place in an entirely different setting, although it shares similar features, gameplay and concepts with the previous games. BioShock Infinite takes place in 1912 in the flying city of Columbia.

The game is set in 1912 and takes place in the airborne city of Columbia, where the player assumes the role of Booker DeWitt, a disgraced Pinkerton agent. Booker has been given the job of finding a woman named Elizabeth in Columbia, who has been confined by a hulking beast called Songbird. Following in the footsteps of previous BioShock games, the world of Infinite explores the chaos that results when strong ideals are taken to the extreme. At the time of DeWitt’s arrival, Columbia is a hotbed of ultra-nationalism, specifically American exceptionalism, as shown by the copious numbers of flags, patriotic music, and propaganda posters that boldfacedly spurn the idea that the Columbia could be a ‘haven’ from the so-called ‘unwanted’ of the world.

By Theo McLean and David Walsh in the USA:

Bioshock Infinite and the video game phenomenon

17 April 2014

About a year ago, the first-person-shooter (FPS) video game Bioshock Infinite was released to wide acclaim and considerable commercial success. The third in the Bioshock series of video games, Infinite follows thematically in the footsteps of its predecessors.

Each game in the series involves a protagonist thrown into a city isolated from the rest of the world, run by the adherent of a specific political or philosophical outlook. In each game, the city falls from its governor’s grand vision into ruin, if not outright dystopia. The first game for example, takes place in a secret, underwater city named Rapture, which was built and governed by an Ayn Rand-type “objectivist” (i.e., right-wing defender of laissez-faire capitalism). As the player travels through Rapture, he or she sees a decaying and decrepit city, peopled in part by what can best be described as drug-addled slaves.

As the player learns the history of Rapture, connections are drawn between the ruling philosophy and the eventual decline of the city. In this manner, the series creators attempt to prove that each philosophy, or at least those they focus on, leads to disaster. The Bioshock series thus presents itself as tackling serious political and philosophical matters.

The latest game envisions Columbia, a city floating in the sky run by a theocratic and nationalistic government. Booker DeWitt, a depressive ex-Pinkerton detective agency operative and the player character, seeks to bring a mysterious girl named Elizabeth back to his creditors in New York City to “wipe away his debt.”

In his endeavor to escort Elizabeth out of the city, DeWitt is confronted by a brutal police state and witnesses gross inequality, extreme violence and the sort of institutional racism that existed prior to the civil rights movement. In fact, the game takes place in 1912 and attempts to evoke the zeitgeist of the period. The bitter labor struggles of the time, the repression carried out by the state and the gulf between the social classes find expression in Infinite. The obviously anachronistic elements are fairly limited and covered by poetic license.

This video is called Bioshock Infinite Gameplay Walkthrough Part 2 – Vigors – Chapter 2.

There is a decided effort in Infinite to create an atmosphere that immerses the player. While navigating the city, he or she stumbles upon audio recordings of everything from the speeches of powerful politicians to the private observations of ordinary citizens, and each contributes in some way to Columbia’s historical or cultural record.

More concretely, there is a concerted attempt, through touring the exhibitions in a museum, through mundane details such as clothing and overheard conversations of people in the streets, through flyers the player sees plastered on walls, to create a picture of Columbian society as an intensely conflicted one.

As DeWitt travels through Columbia, he comes across a factory area known as “Finkton.” As the player moves through the latter, he sees a sort of industrial-dystopian scene: workers standing in a row hammer in perfect time, while police patrol them and “soothing” classical music plays just slightly off key. A man looking for work is told that all the jobs in Finkton are taken and that he should come back tomorrow. Everywhere in Finkton, capitalist interests dominate life, and the game’s portrayal of this is powerful. Elizabeth, by now Booker’s companion, feels hatred for Mr. Fink, and sympathy for the workers. The player feels compelled to do the same.

It must be said, and this speaks to the contradictions of the video game phenomenon as a whole, that Infinite’s seriousness is marred by the extreme violence so prevalent in the genre. Although violence has some justification given the society and era the game depicts, at times it seems present only for the sake of adding content to the game as an FPS. Beyond that, it is something of an accommodation to the social confusion and backwardness of portions of the game’s audience, who are angry and frustrated with things as they are, but unaware at this point of a socially progressive alternative. While fighting in the game, one almost wants the shooting to end just to get back to the story.

For a time, the game does well in conveying the social and political realities of its world. However, at a certain point, Infinite loses its way, under the gravitational pull of contemporary events and confusions rather than in response to the world of 1912.

About halfway through the game, its creators have an anarchist group known as the Vox Populi [“voice of the people” in Latin], who have been fighting the Columbian state, take power. The group’s followers promptly turn violent, taking up where the old rulers left off. The workers, previously portrayed in a sympathetic light, turn into murderers and plunderers, entirely obedient to Daisy Fitzroy, the leader of the anarchists.

As soon as the Vox group takes power, the consistency of Infinite’s narrative vanishes. One moment the humble workers are starving and want little more than to survive, and the next they feel an insatiable bloodlust. In an attempt to explain it, DeWitt says in passing, “Once people get their blood up, it ain’t easy to settle it again.”

It is equally telling that after the Vox takeover the story takes a sharp turn away from any serious interest in social questions. Infinite ’s focus abruptly shifts to Booker’s relationship with Elizabeth and the game’s concerns move largely from the social to the individual realm. The game begins to ask questions about fate and free will and relies more and more on a quasi-mysticism to drive the story.

The game also turns its attention to the amusing but vacuous possibilities of time travel, teleportation and such. Even the new themes are treated as entirely personal matters. The end result is incredibly disappointing: Infinite has taken a genuinely interesting and worthwhile premise, and essentially junked it.

As is the norm among contemporary popular artists, the game’s creators indicate a general nervousness and defensiveness about expressing oppositional social views, or any social views at all. According to Shawn Robertson, the lead artist for the game, the story is “about the player and Elizabeth… We like to keep the ‘opera-sized’ story, the political turmoil, in the background.”

Ken Levine, Infinite’s creative director, explains, “I think Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite are more a reflection of my own ambivalence about people’s certainties. I don’t feel very certain about a lot of things, particularly in the political spectrum. The older I get the less I know and the less certainty I have.”

That’s all very well, but the game itself, at least for a while, concerns itself almost exclusively with political and social matters. Why the shamefaced comments?

It is notable that a mainstream game from a large studio took on the topics it did. The serious interest in social history, workers’ struggles and class divisions speaks to the impact of the present circumstances on Infinite’s producers. The malignant concentration of wealth at the top of society and the police-state measures the ruling elite has pursued to protect its riches have not passed unnoticed. Popular films such as Elysium and the Hunger Games series, among others, speak to the influence of these phenomena.

The approach to these subjects is almost inevitably contradictory and murky given the prevailing level of political and historical understanding. On the one hand, a relatively sophisticated cultural consciousness (not to say extraordinary technological ability) is at work, indicated by the references to the notorious New York City guardian of Victorian morality Anthony Comstock, to Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (whose protagonist in a story about a city divided by rival gangs is a Pinkerton agent) and so forth.

On the other hand, the artist-technicians bring to their game perhaps inevitable but unfortunate ideological prejudices and errors. First of all, to project a version of contemporary middle-class anarchism (suggestive of the trends active in the leadership of the Occupy Wall Street protests) back into history as a dominant tendency in the American working class is inaccurate and misleading.

If Vox Populi and Daisy Fitzroy obliquely refer to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, matters are not thereby improved. The IWW led major workers’ strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 and Paterson, New Jersey in 1913, and at its best represented a revolutionary political party in embryo form. …

If Infinite’s designers are responding to the reactionary antics of anarchist groups, riddled with police provocateurs, in recent global demonstrations, they have a point. But there is a left-wing and a right-wing critique of anarchism. The game’s implication that any movement or ideology proposing the revolutionary reorganization of society, when taken to its logical conclusion, results in nothing but barbarism is simply one more expression of garden variety, liberal anticommunism.

Ultimately then, Bioshock Infinite attempts—rather unconvincingly—to discredit radical social change, but in the course of doing so the game has been forced to raise the issue, which is otherwise scarcely referred to in contemporary video games. In its own peculiar manner, the game speaks to the growing social tensions and the inevitability of upheavals, whether those are seen as a threat or a reassuring possibility.

There are of course many other questions, technological, aesthetic and social, bound up with the massively popular video games phenomenon. These will need to be examined in future articles.

No rehabilitation for Tony Blair

Posted on April 17, 2014 by petrel41

This video from Britain says about itself:

Blair rakes in money from Iraqi oil while Middle East peace envoy

19 March 2010

Daily Mail- Blair’s fight to keep his oil cash secret: Former PM’s deals are revealed as his earnings since 2007 reach £20million

Tony Blair waged an extraordinary two-year battle to keep secret a lucrative deal with a multinational oil giant which has extensive interests in Iraq.

The former Prime Minister tried to keep the public in the dark over his dealings with South Korean oil firm UI Energy Corporation.

Mr Blair – who has made at least £20million since leaving Downing Street in June 2007 – also went to great efforts to keep hidden a £1million deal advising the ruling royal family in Iraq’s neighbour Kuwait.

In an unprecedented move, he persuaded the committee which vets the jobs of former ministers to keep details of both deals from the public for 20 months, claiming it was commercially sensitive. The deals emerged yesterday when the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments finally lost patience with Mr Blair and decided to ignore his objections and publish the details.

News of the secret deals fuelled fresh accusations that Mr Blair is ‘cashing in on his contacts’ from the controversial Iraq war in what one MP called ‘revolving door politics at its worst’.

They will increase concerns that Mr Blair is using his role as the West’s Middle East envoy for personal gain.

The full extent of his income is cloaked in secrecy because he has constructed a complex web of shadowy companies and partnerships which let him avoid publishing full accounts detailing all the money from his commercial ventures.

Critics also point out that a large proportion of his earnings comes from patrons in America and the Middle East – a clear benefit from forging a close alliance with George Bush during his invasion of Iraq.

Last night Tory MP Douglas Carswell said of Mr Blair’s links to UI Energy Corporation: ‘This doesn’t just look bad, it stinks.

‘It seems that the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has been in the pay of a very big foreign oil corporation and we have been kept in the dark about it.

‘Even now we do not know what he was paid or what the company got out of it. We need that information now.

‘This is revolving door politics at its worst. It’s not as if Mr Blair has even stepped back from politics, because he is still politically active in the Middle East.

‘I’m afraid I have no confidence at all in the committee that vets these appointments. It’s no good telling us these deals may be commercially sensitive – we are talking about the appointment of our former Prime Minister and the public interest, rather than any commercial interests, must come first.’

Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker said: ‘These revelations show that our former Prime Minister is for sale – he is driven by making as much money as possible.

‘I think many people will find it deeply insensitive that he is apparently cashing in on his contacts from the Iraq war to make money for himself.’

The committee said yesterday that Mr Blair had taken a paid job advising a consortium of investors led by UI Energy in August 2008. The exact nature of the deal is unknown, but UI Energy is one of the biggest investors in Iraq’s oil-rich Kurdistan region, which became semi-autonomous in the wake of the Iraq war.

Mr Blair’s fee has not been disclosed but is likely to have run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The secrecy is particularly odd because UI Energy is fond of boasting of its foreign political advisers, who include the former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke and several prominent American politicians.

Mr Blair successfully persuaded the committee that the appointment was ‘market sensitive’ and could not be made public.

The committee agreed to suspend its normal practice and keep the deals secret for three months. Mr Blair then asked for a further extension.

When this ran out last year the committee repeatedly ‘chased’ Mr Blair about the issue without hearing anything. Eventually the committee’s chairman, former Tory Cabinet minister Lord Lang, reviewed the papers and ordered the deal to be made public, along with a separate deal with Kuwait which had been kept secret at the request of the Kuwaiti government.

The decision to keep the deals secret will fuel concerns about the effectiveness of the committee, which has been repeatedly criticised for its failure to halt the revolving door between politics and industry.

The committee is supposed to ease public concerns about former public servants using their contacts for private gain.

Gordon Brown has so far refused to answer questions about whether Mr Blair’s arrangements breach his responsibilities under the ministerial code.

FULL STORY here.

This video, from the Kuwaiti state television, says about itself:

1 March 2014

His Highness Sheikh Jaber Al-Mubarak Al-Hamad Al-Sabah, the Prime Minister, received at Bayan Palace former British Prime Minister Tony Blair during his brief visit to the State of Kuwait.

By Julie Hyland in Britain:

Guardian’s Zoe Williams tries to rehabilitate Tony Blair

17 April 2014

“Stop calling Tony Blair a war criminal. The left should be proud of his record”, implored journalist Zoe Williams in the Guardian last week.

“From Northern Ireland to the NHS [National Health Service], Blair left a real progressive blueprint”, she continued, “But the left has allowed it to be obliterated by Iraq”.

The occasion for Williams’ plea was an article by the former Labour prime minister for the Guardian on the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, along with comments Blair made on the Today programme supporting military intervention in Syria.

The man who dismissed the million-plus protest in London in February 2003 against the impending attack on Iraq by claiming that leadership meant ignoring popular will, amplified his hostility to democratic accountability in his article by asserting that if it weren’t for the invasion of Iraq, “you would have had the so-called Arab spring” come to Baghdad.

The overthrow of corrupt, dictatorial regimes in popular uprisings is something Blair is deeply hostile to, not least because he speaks as the bought and paid for agent for many of them.

His Tony Blair Associates (TBA) advises Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who Williams coyly references as a “more controversial figure” than Blair’s Guardian fluff piece for Kagame’s regime lets on–not least for the ruthless repression of political opponents and the gross abuses carried out in Congo by the Rwandan army over the course of two decades.

TBA has also “advised” Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, two of the prime and thoroughly reactionary backers of the Islamist opposition forces in Syria, and Blair recently presented a flattering eulogy to Israel’s former prime minister Ariel Sharon, author of the 1982 massacre of Palestinians.

Blair is also a vocal defender of the military coup in Egypt that saw Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Mursi overthrown and thousands of his supporters murdered or jailed.

Williams couldn’t care less about any of this. “Blair left a blueprint for social democratic government; it wasn’t perfect and some of it was disastrous”, she writes. “But we can’t even see it because it has been obliterated by the bloodshed of the Iraq war”.

This inability to “get over Iraq” is “completely silencing the left”, she continues, and has “strangled” the voice of Labour, preventing it from praising its earlier achievements.

One can imagine the type of article Williams would have turned out had she been writing in Germany in 1944: “Never mind Hitler’s war crimes–look at the autobahns”.

Just as the Anschluss (the incorporation of Austria into Germany in 1938) led inexorably to the annexation of Czechoslovakia, to the invasion of Poland and, finally, to World War II, eleven years on it is now clear that the illegal invasion of Iraq unleashed a wave of imperialist militarism on the part of US and British capitalism that, now in the Ukraine, threatens the world once again with a global conflagration.

The historical analogy goes further. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the German bourgeoisie sought to conceal its crimes, while leading Nazis maintained their positions in the state.

Similarly, Britain’s ruling elite desperately need to erase the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere in order to prepare even greater atrocities.

Consider what it is that Williams wants to move on from.

Iraq was the conflict that introduced new words and images–such as Abu Ghraib and naked human “pyramids”–and new means of torture.

They were just the publicly exposed reality of a war and occupation that has caused the deaths of an estimated one million Iraqis since 2003. As of 2011, nearly three million Iraqis had been displaced by the invasion and the bitter sectarian conflict that it generated. Poverty is widespread, leading to cholera outbreaks, while the use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus by Western forces has led to a significant rise in birth defects.

Because of the Iraq catastrophe, Blair left office in 2007 as officially (and deservedly) the most hated prime minister in recent history, with opinion polls finding that half the population believed he would make his way into the history books as an unindicted war criminal.

Since then Blair has been subject to additional (also deserved) ignominy for amassing more money since leaving office than any other former British prime minister in history, with a personal fortune estimated at £70 million, according to the Daily Telegraph.

A 2011 Channel Four Dispatches documentary, “The Wonderful World of Tony Blair”, revealed how the former prime minister had traded off on his Iraq war credentials, using his extensive dealings in the Middle East, in particular with regimes that had profited hugely from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, to build up his TBA consultancy.

The Guardian has routinely portrayed the Iraq war as Blair’s one “major” failing to prepare the way for the continuation of Labour’s pro-big business agenda under first Gordon Brown and now Ed Miliband. Only a day after Blair announced his resignation, the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee wrote that it was “time to look back with pre-emptive nostalgia”.

In her piece, Williams scrapes the bottom of the barrel to come up with anything that might arouse enthusiasm for the former prime minister.

To the widespread death and destruction caused in Iraq, Williams counterposes Blair’s introduction of the minimum wage in 1998, the supposed decrease in pensioner poverty from three to two million people, “modernised” hospitals and the Northern Ireland Good Friday agreement.

In reality, the Iraq war and related policies were integral to a historically unprecedented shift in wealth away from the working class and into the coffers of the major corporations and a fabulously rich elite, a shift in which social democracy in Britain and internationally played a lead role.

Between 1997 and 2007 the wealth of the top 1,000 richest people in Britain trebled to a combined £360 billion, making the UK one of the most unequal countries in the world.

While the UK was turned into an onshore tax haven for the super-rich, debt became a fact of life for millions of people, with total personal debt exceeding £125 trillion when Blair left office.

The minimum wage of just £6.21 for those aged 21 years and over–“where do you think we’d be without” it, Williams asks triumphantly–was used to force down wages across the board, so that it is now the going rate for many jobs.

Meanwhile, the Blair government sped up the privatisation or “marketisation” of public services–creating a massive boom for the stock markets, consultancy firms and associated parasites, which directly paved the way for the “carving” up of the NHS and the sale of it “to Tory donors” that Williams now bemoans.

As for the Northern Ireland agreement, this had nothing to do with Blair’s “expertise” and everything to do with the fact that Sinn Fein had fully reconciled itself with British imperialism.

This is only the start of the political apologetics that Williams and her ilk are prepare to make. There is no crime that cannot be justified. After all, what the journalist cannot or will not say is that her admiration for Blair is linked intimately to her own prosperity and the prosperity of the upper middle class layer to which she belongs.

The darling of Daniel Hannan, the Conservative European Member of Parliament and Telegraph columnist, who described her as the first on his list of the “top five Leftie columnists”, Williams can easily combine her “leftie” credentials, the product of her columns in the nominally liberal Guardian, with writings for the overtly right-wing Spectator and London Evening Standard.

Williams’ article makes clear that “Blairism” was neither an individual phenomenon nor simply the activity of an especially corrupt individual. No less than her hero, Williams peaks for a privileged petty bourgeois layer that have grotesquely passed themselves off for decades as the “left”, using and abusing the term, to feather their own nests. But, as her recent nauseating article brings out, that political fraud has now run its course.

Rare early medieval coins discovered in the Netherlands

Posted on April 17, 2014 by petrel41

This Dutch video is about archaeological research under the cathedral square in Utrecht in 2011. Then, scientists made several discoveries, like a fourteenth century gold coin and Roman age objects.

Translated from NOS TV in the Netherlands today:

Only rarely coins from the early Middle Ages are excavated. So, there was much joy when archaeologists in Utrecht found gold and silver coins from the end of the seventh century.

“It’s the most special coin collection from that period ever found”, said city archaeologist Herre Wynia. “It’s already unique if you will find one, but these are 44.”

Metal detectors

The discovery was made during excavations under the cathedral square. Earlier, skeletons, a tombstone, and parts of a Roman road had been found there.

Wynia: “We can therefore put the coins into an archaeological context. So, suddenly, we know much more about the history of the cathedral square.”

“In fact this was a re-excavation” says Wynia. “In 1949, an archaeologist also found some coins while digging, but then there were no metal detectors yet. Now we have them, and we found out that there are so many coins.”

Displayed

The excavations have to do with ‘Dom Down Under’, an exhibition on 2000 years of history which will come under the square.

Until that time, the coins will be on display at the Central Museum in Utrecht. Tomorrow they will be shown there for the first time. From the beginning of July, the medieval money will be temporarily in the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden.

Chinese bears, from torture for quackery to sanctuary

Posted on April 17, 2014 by petrel41

This video is about bear bile farms in China.

From Wildlife Extra:

130 bears to be rescued in China, the largest number ever

April 2014: In an unprecedented move that will be the biggest bear rescue in the world a bear bile farm in China is to be converted into a bear sanctuary by Animals Asia who will then care for its 130 bears, after a plea by the farmer for help. In a bear bile farm bears are kept in captivity to harvest bile, a digestive juice produced by the liver and stored in the gall bladder. Bear bile is used in traditional Chinese medicine with over 10,000 bears believed to be in farms in China suffering daily extractions in tiny cages and horrific conditions.

From May 5, Animals Asia will take 28 of the sickest bears, 1,200km in a multi-vehicle convoy back to our existing sanctuary in Chengdu for urgent veterinary attention. Then Animals Asia will also take over the care of the bears on the Nanning bear farm and start the two-year process of turning it into a sanctuary.

The move was instigated by Mr Yan Shaohong, General Manager of Flower World, which runs the bear farm as part of a wider state-invested horticultural business.

The initiative has been hailed as historic by Animals Asia CEO and founder Jill Robinson MBE, who sees it as a significant step in our ongoing campaign to end bear bile farming.

“China has long been outraged by this cruel practice and our statistics show 87 percent of Chinese are against bear bile farming. This negotiation is a result of years of growing awareness and increased opposition, with the bear farmer showing the moral integrity to do the right thing.” she said. “We believe it can be the start of a wider conversation, with all parties represented, with the aim of finally ending bear bile farming in China. We should never underestimate the importance of rescuing 130 bears, but we believe it can represent so much more than that.”

Mr Yan has described the decision to approach Animals Asia as one fuelled by the desire for the company to get out of the increasingly unpopular and ultimately unprofitable industry. He was also determined that the bears would not be sold onto other farms and continue to suffer cruelty.

He said:

“In the last two years, there has been a lot of discussion about the practice of extracting bear bile. After several rounds of discussion among the management team of Flower World, we reported the idea of conversion to our superiors and received their approval and support. We decided not to invest further in bear farming – it’s time for change.

“We figured out that selling bears directly to farms could return some of our investment but it wouldn’t be satisfying. Some of the bears here are sick, some had bile extracted previously and some are new-born cubs. If we only transfer those bears into another bear farm, the living condition of them still cannot be guaranteed. We had to find a good placement for those bears – a trustworthy partner with professional skills.

“We visited the Animals Asia’s China Bear Rescue Centre in Chengdu. The centre provides comfortable shelters and a living area simulating a natural environment for bears, where they can have abundant and delicious food, and clean and spacious dens. The animal welfare level in the centre for bears has confirmed our plan to work with Animals Asia. We believe the future for our bears would be improved by working with Animals Asia.”

The bears at Nanning Bear farm have not had their bile extracted in over two years since Mr Yan decided to end the practice. However many still suffer health problems as a result of earlier extractions as well as issues due to their confinement in small cages, poor diets and lack of veterinary care.

For more information on how supporters can help click here.

This video is called Rescue the Bears.

The bears in the bear bile industry are mainly Asiatic black bears.

Commonwealth Games in Scotland and LGBTQ rights

Posted on April 17, 2014 by petrel41

This video from Britain says about itself:

12 March 2014

A Message From The Campaign: Asylum For [Nigerian refugee Apata Aderonke Adejumoke].

From daily The Morning Star, about the Scottish Trade Union Congress:

Scottish Trade Union Congress told to take stand for LGBT rights

Thursday 17th April 2014

Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games must see the fight for queer rights across the Commonwealth brought front and centre

Glasgow’s Games must see the fight for queer rights across the Commonwealth brought front and centre, trade unionists in Dundee said yesterday.

STUC LGBT committee member Jenny Douglas told delegates that July’s events were an opportunity to show a society “proud to respect diversity and equality.”

But Scotland’s trade unions cannot afford to miss the opportunity to highlight some competing nations’ grim human rights records.

LGBT Russians’ stories of ordinary people “hounded down like animals” had become a popular cause worldwide alongside the coverage of the Sochi Olympics.

But many Commonwealth nations were just as culpable, she said.

LGBT people face the death penalty in Uganda and years in prison in Nigeria.

Ms Douglas said that even as she spoke, fellow Unite member Apata Aderonke Adejumoke was battling immigration officials seeking to deport her and return her to her homeland, despite the risk of torture and death.

“Let’s not forget that when the Commonwealth Games arrive here,” she said.

Nelson Mandela remembered in Scotland

Posted on April 17, 2014 by petrel41

This video is called Nelson Mandela “I Am Prepared to Die” Speech (with subtitles/transcript); when Nelson Mandela was on trial during the apartheid regime.

By Rory MacKinnon in Scotland, at the Scottish Trade Union Congress:

Anti-apartheid activists share Mandela stories

Thursday 17th April 2014

Trade unionists at the STUC Congress paid tribute yesterday to Nelson Mandela.

South Africa’s honorary consul in Scotland Brian Filling regaled delegates with his memories of Mandela.

Mr Filling, a founding member of Scotland’s anti-apartheid movement, recalled that when Dundee, Glasgow and Aberdeen had awarded Mandela the freedom of their cities in the early 1980s the newspapers had branded their gesture as consorting with a terrorist.

But by 1990 the Establishment press was hailing his release as marking the end of an era of violent state repression.

So when the then-ANC presidential candidate visited Mr Filling and other supporters in 1993 “one of the things he had wanted to do was meet the editors of newspapers and television.”

Mr Filling said Mr Mandela, widely eulogised as a gentle, tranquil figure, had been polite but blunt.

“He said to them: I was released three years ago. We only got this election today following the assassination of (South African Communist Party leader) Chris Hani.

“I want to say to you: this hasn’t been a peaceful or painless transition. And don’t you forget it,” he said.

Nor was the struggle over, with the legacy of centuries of colonialism “still deeply felt.”

The activities of Anglo American and other mining corporations were one such example, he said.

“The people of South Africa are still suffering – that’s why we call for fair trade not free trade,” he said.

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