Ethnic self-determination has been theme in conflict and general politics throughout the ages as no child is born without legacy, and it seems no legacy goes uncontested in the wilds of history.
The Declaration comprises four sections. The first section declares the Independent State of the United Tribes of New Zealand. The second proclaims all sovereign power to reside in the hereditary chiefs and heads of tribes and states that no other legislative power will be allowed to exist. The third section outlines the Chiefs’ intentions to meet every year to make laws for the peace and good order of the country. The final section requests the King of England to be the parent of their infant state and its protector from all attempts upon its independence.
God bless the Queen, for the history of empire has not only its twists but its revelations too. The Crown System has turned out politically progressive, protective of minority interests, and able to accommodate and respond to contemporary indigenous and minority complaint.
Over coffee and on the other side of the global fence, the morning horror . . .
“Khaled Sharrouf reportedly posted the picture of his son with the decapitated head on Twitter with the comment: “That’s my boy!” The image was reportedly taken in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, which fell to the Islamist fighters earlier this year and shows Sharrouf’s seven-year old son, who was raised in Sydney, dressed in blue-checked trousers, a blue shirt and a baseball cap, while struggling to hold up the severed head of a slain Syrian soldier.”
The clip has been viewed more than 12 million times as of this sharing of it.
In my previous post, I suggested “Money shouldn’t be everything.” Here I may add that image shouldn’t be everything either.
The telecommunications company True Move H may have to rise to the challenge of doing business with the humanity — in essence, the compassion and charity — it preaches in its video.
Japanese clients and customers will have to fill me in on how that’s going.
For pathos — the emotional content of the argument — the numbers tell how well the message has worked.
For the blubbering, call it advertising’s Spielberg moment of 2013.
Will the clip encourage global political effects?
Perhaps as with chicken soup, a little bit of what it’s got couldn’t hurt.
So somebody overheard something — purely circumstantial guff is what that comes to.
So we’ll go on but with something like ‘preponderance of the evidence” for guidance.
* * *
With Maher al Assad well known and with a peerless reputation, some media have dragged out an old familiar (to policy wonks): Bandar bin Sultan.
Beneath the banner, “Saudi Arabia’s ‘Chemical Bandar’ behind the Syrian chemical attacks?”, RT came out shouting, “Nothing the US claims about what happened in Syria adds up. We are being asked to believe an illogical story, when it is much more likely that it was Israel and Saudi Arabia who enabled the Obama Administration to threaten Syria with war” about half a day ago.
Of course, those who may lie know it’s the first one that counts, so going on to say, “The Obama Administration’s intelligence report on Syria was a rehash of Iraq,” seems only fair.
This finger pointing at the Saudi prince has been joined by, among others DigitalJournal, CounterPunch, OpEd News (from the video on the page and within its first 11 seconds, “It is growing increasingly possible that public outcry might make the imperial force of American exceptionalism with its humanitarian war sites set on Syria back down or at the very least delay”), PressTV, MintPress News, Larouche Pac, InfoWars, etc.
For InfoWars, Paul Joseph Watson wraps up with something between a disclaimer and validation:
UPDATE: Associated Press contacted us to confirm that Dale Gavlak is an AP correspondent, but that her story was not published under the banner of the Associated Press. We didn’t claim this was the case, we merely pointed to Gavlak’s credentials to stress that she is a credible source, being not only an AP correspondent, but also having written for PBS, BBC and Salon.com.
Proving integrity may be as difficult — it certainly is a sensitive issue — as proving dishonesty in a dimension or region in behavior in which plans, good or evil, rife with brutality, deflection, dishonesty, and disingenuous speech or listening, searching, defensive, and protective — are put together out of range of public sight and oversight.
* * *
If rebel forces suffered a mortal oops, it would seem more characteristic in Arab language culture to point the finger at someone else.
If a brigade under Maher al Assad’s command done it, it would be mafia cool to do it — record it, leak it, plaster it across the web — as rebels.
According to Iran’s PressTV, Bandar was under house arrest for an attempted coup,[35][36] while opposition sources said he was in Dhaban Prison.[34] Some rumors alleged that his coup was exposed by Russian intelligence services because of his frequent trips to Moscow to encourage cooperation against Iran.[34]
A month ago rebels fired rockets at Bashar’s motorcade as he headed for a Mosque in the centre of Damascus. The attempt to kill the President failed but one of his bodyguards, said to have been a particular favourite of his children Hafez, Karim and Zein was killed.
Many inside and outside Syria believe this may have been the last straw for the hot-headed Maher. No assassination attempt of Bashar al-Assad could go unpunished, especially not one in the heart of the capital.
The answer to “Syria’s CW Whodunit” may come to light if one intelligence industry or another turns up its cards and reveals its methods, capabilities, and limitations.
“So-and-so said” seems to be working to confuse rather than inform the public.
In addition to the challenge involving “Political Spychology” there is that other political psychology involving the character in personality associated with “malignant narcissism”, the features of which include delusions of grandeur, messianic complexes, paranoia, resistance to criticism, etc. (I’ll lay out a page on the language associated with that subject soon).
Through the lens that looks into dictatorship and across dictatorships, things may look a little different, for the want to control the subjugated by controlling a large information environment (“gaslighting” on a large scale) would seem inseparable from other behaviors having to do with hiding things while deeply controlling others.
This humility about the difficulty of reporting on a covert, invisible attack in the midst of a chaotic civil war actually adds to the credibility of the Mint account. It’s those who are most certain about matters of which they clearly lack firsthand knowledge who should make us most skeptical.
It’s not such a silly question. After all, the Americans are continually attacking everybody, aren’t they?
Then there’s the Israelis always doing a bit of assassinating, phosphorus spraying and creeping genocide in Palestine (although they’re never particular about confining their activities to Palestine).
“Go and ask the people in the streets whether there a liberated town or city anywhere in Syria that is ruled as efficiently as this one,” he boasted. “There is electricity, water and bread and security. Inshallah, this will be the nucleus of a new Syrian Islamic caliphate!”
“Out, out, out, the (Islamic) State (of Iraq and Syria) must get out,” protesters shouted at a rally in the northern town of Manbij this week, referring to an Al-Qaeda front group.
The video of the demonstration is one of many showing how civilians and mainstream rebel fighters alike are turning against the more hardline Islamist factions.
Every story that has appeal, whether fact or fiction, has a moral center, and the writer who can tease it out fast has got a hooked reader.
This is about where we started with the Syrian revolt — a little more than two years ago, a sorry fact reflected in the statement, “1300 people have been killed since the protests began”):
At the moment, thereabouts, Arab and Russian media seem to be playing “hot potato” over who has got the chemical weapons, whose side is more brutal, and whose side is more deserving in regard to winning one for modernity.
Again, come forward on the latest toss of the hot potato:
Moscow now appears to have conclusive evidence that it is the rebels who are guilty of the March chemical attack in Aleppo which killed dozens of Syrians. This comes as the United States continues to put the blame on the Assad government. However, Corbyn says that any such proof may not bring the Syrian conflict any closer to a resolution.
The “moral center” in Syria’s unfolding tragedy revolves around barbarism and cruelty, fascism and totalitarianism, and then among those holding up the cash and sending in the weapons, some effort to prove more likely to be kind when the tide turns their way. While Qatari and NATO interests have pointed their fingers at the Assad regime and its chemical weapons stores, Russia, presumably sided with Assad — but it’s hard to tell with the quiet exit that has left Tartus abandoned — and tolerant about Iran, points back at rebel chemists (see, for example, “Syria rebels made own sarin gas, says Russia,” Al Jazeera, July 10, 2013).
In earlier days, the same would have had a perfect villain in Maher al-Assad — I think there’s still on the web a video of him allegedly shooting across a street into a crowd of passersby (found it) — but his presence has been dimmed in the theater, and in his place one may find grand Syrian defense recruiting videos composed in the old muscular Soviet way (the video that ends this post may say more about that than I will here).
In and around Syria, those who may pretend their hands are clean must know that brutality loses, the tyrannical will not be tolerated, and the cruel will not go unpunished.
Anti-Assad footage published today:
The next opens with a title slate claiming, “Syrian women had no choice but to carry weapons and train on using them to defend themselves and families from the Wahhabi Sex Jihadists, they joined the National Defense Forces.”
Ahmed Nader (@ANaderGretly): “Egyptians, no matter what happens today, we shall be one hand, one voice, and one spirit. Don’t let the beards get you down.”
Aysha (@aysha_nur): “Dear international media! Move your dirty hands from #Egypt! Protesters won’t achieve their goal by creating anarchy!!”
Our total common web communications toolkit would seem to me to have bumped up a big notch today. A few minutes before catching the above on Twitter, I / we — if we were watching live streaming — saw a brief Tahrir Square flyover by helicopters while the crowd cheered beneath them.
What I’m hearing from the live feed: hypnotic in techno disco peak experience rhythm.
We know this crowd is going to move, and watching the live feed (Ustream), the Twitter feed, our Facebook walls, and all of that, whatever world is watching is going to move with it.
The “Second Row Seat to History” has just morphed into its own front-row position, albeit yet removed from the heat and sweat, the smell of the crowd, and, later — because it would have to be a miracle if shouting and stamping and making noise would suffice for the outer boundary of the energy of the event — the running, the battle, the blood, and the tears.
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