Forum Post: Voters Against Keystone
Posted 10 years ago on March 3, 2014, 5:59 p.m. EST by JGriff99mph
(507)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
http://ecowatch.com/2014/03/02/hundreds-arrested-protesting-keystone-xl/
I would have to say that the banner that reads "Obama, we did not vote for Keystone"... Um, yes you did.
Just look up who funded your people. Its all there. To think they wont repay them for that cushy political job is insanity.
Why does society love to be dumped on like this? Props to the people that made some noise today and went to jail for it.
[Removed]
I guess we should all just be oh so happy that its being built slowly instead of quickly.
My goodness, imagine if we used this worst case scenario logic to judge the rest of our lives.
any criticism of our wonderful president makes you a scumbag. the dog may have a point here - Obama might be better than the last group of presidents - bush (mass murderer), Clinton (murderer - maybe mass murderer depending on the head count - no pun intended - he has to get credit for east timor no and then there is the destruction of Yugoslavia - what a criminal act that was!), bush 1 (mass murderer), Reagan (no comment needed), carter (murderer), ford (murderer - didn't have much time to do more), Nixon (well he did propose national health care and a guaranteed income?? mass murderer) and then lbj and the beloved imperialist who brought the world to the brink of war for some macho thing jfk! (of course, we can't forget the insanity of the bombing of the Vietnamese countryside in 1962 - oh, my god for sure mass murderer) Obama has to qualify as a mass murderer no? along with all of his other crimes he may be better than Romney but hard to make that case - unless you are a dog who claims to be some sort of Buddhist mystic. hey isn't that a good idea for a Disney movie - want to start working on a screen play? you seem to be pretty literate - can't be too hard and we have all the really good quotes from the dogboy - can we use them in Disney - maybe finally a Disney for real adults!
Thanks, your posts are not only very informative, they are entertaining too.
I try
[Removed]
if you want to read the whole interview and can't find it because of limited ability I can get it for you - I just thought this would be enogh
Danilo Mandic: Professor Noam Chomsky, in your, if I am not mistaken, first TV media appearance for Serbian media, thank you very much for being with us.
Noam Chomsky: I am glad to be with you.
DM: Last month marked the seventh anniversary of the beginning of the bombing of Yugoslavia. Why did NATO wage that war or I should say why did the United States wage that war?
NC: Actually, we have for the first time a very authoratative comment on that from the highest level of Clinton administration, which is something that one could have surmised before, but now it is asserted. This is from Strobe Talbott who was in charge of the…he ran the Pentagon/State Department intelligence Joint Committee on the diplomacy during the whole affair including the bombing, so that's very top of Clinton administration; he just wrote the forward to a book by his Director of Communications, John Norris, and in the forward he says if you really want to understand what the thinking was of the top of Clinton administration this is the book you should read and take a look on John Norris's book and what he says is that the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for Kosovar Albanians. It was because Serbia was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms, meaning it was the last corner of Europe which had not subordinated itself to the US-run neoliberal programs, so therefore it had to be eliminated. That's from the highest level.
Again, we could have guessed it, but I've never seen it said before. That it wasn't because of the Kosovo Albanians, that we know. And this is a point of religious fanaticism that the West can't talk about for interesting reasons having to do with Western culture, but there is just overwhelming documentation, impeccable documentation. Two big compilations of the State Department trying to justify the war, the OSCE records, NATO records, KIM Monitor records, long British Parliamentary inquiry which led into it. They all showed the same thing - and sort of what we knew, I mean it was an ugly place, there were atrocities there.
DM: Given this clear documentary record I want to ask you about the elite Intellectual opinion, what you call…
NC: In the United States.
DM: …in the United States and in the West in general, because reviewing it you would get the impression - you would be forgiven for imagining that every critic of the NATO intervention was one of two things: either a "Milosevic sympathizer" or someone who doesn't care about genocide. What does this mean?
NC: First of all that's a common feature of intellectual culture. One good U.S. critic, Harold Rosenberg once described intellectuals as the "herd of independent minds." They think they are very independent but they are a stampede in a herd, which is true; when there is a party line, you have to adhere to it and the party line is systematic. The party line is subordination to state power and to state violence. Now you are allowed to criticize it but on a very narrow grounds. You can criticize it because it is not working or for some mistake or benign intentions that went astray or something, like you see right now in Iraq war, the tone of debate about Iraq war but take a look at it - it's very similar to the debate in PRAVDA during the invasion of Afghanistan. Actually I brought this up to a Polish reporter recently and I asked him if he had been reading PRAVDA. He just laughed and said yeah it's the same. Now you read PRAVDA in the nineteen eighties, it's you know: "the travail of the Russian soldiers that are going to get killed and now there are these terrorists who prevent us from bringing justice and peace to the Afghans, we of course did not invade them, we intervened and helped them at the request of the legitimate government, the terrorists are preventing us from doing all good the things we wanted to do etc." I have read Japanese counter-insurgency documents from the second WW, from the ninety thirties - the same, you know: "...we tried to bring them an earthly paradise, but the Chinese bandits are preventing it ..." in fact I don't know of any exception in history. If you want, British imperialism is the same, I mean even people of the highest moral integrity like John Stewart Mill were talking about, well we have to intervene in India and conquer India because the barbarians can't control themselves, there are atrocities, we are to bring them the benefits of the British rule and civilization and so on.
Now in the United States it's the same. Now take bombing of Kosovo; that was an incredibly important event for American intellectuals and the reason it had to do it all was for what was going on during nineties. And the nineties are for the West, not just the U.S. and France and England were the worst - probably the low point in intellectual history for the West, I think. I mean it was like a comic strip mimicking a satire of Stalinism, literally. You take a look at the New York Times or read the French press, the British press, there was all full of talk about how there is a "normative revolution" that has swept through the West, for the first time in history, a state namely the United States, "the leader of the free world" is acting from "pure altruism", ...Clinton's policy has entered into a "noble phase," with a "saintly glow" on and on, I am quoting from the liberals.
DM: Now, this particular humanitarian sharade was...
NC: That's pre Kosovo.
DM: Right. And it was specific in a sense because it was based on the claim that it was preventing genocide.
NC: Now this is, see there are no examples yet.
DM: Let me just read something that you said in an interview around the time of the bombing. You said that "the term "genocide" as applied to Kosovo is an insult to the victims of Hitler. In fact, it's revisionist to an extreme." What did you mean by that?
NC: First of all let me just fix the timing. The things I've been quoting are from the late nineties.
[Removed]
thanks for a reasonable response