Revisionist History

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation, (a lobby for business not citizens, a private association who appoints its directors does not elect them) is now blogging. Be still my beating heart, another right wing blog.

This one though engages in one of those extreme historical revinisionism, one that should send our pal Warren Kinsella into a paralax of outrage. But will it?

Anyways the CTF blog equates the Holocaust with the Cuban Revolution. Yep. All those Batista Cubans, American mafia types, CIA and ITT folks and hoteliers, the rum runners and pimps, all those nice folks were supposedly executed by Che.

In reality, pre-revolutionary Havana was a brothel and casino for US
playboys, the Mafia and a rich Cuban elite.

Well you wouldn't know it from the CTF article that just over a thousand members of the military and secret police were tried for crimes against the people and executed. Note just over 1000. Armed thugs who oppressed the people. But these twits say this;

Che's slaughter of (bound and gagged) Cubans (Che was himself an Argentine) exceeded Heinrich Himmler's prewar slaughter of Germans – to scale, that is. Nazi Germany became the modern standard for political evil even before World War II.

Clever that, pre war slaughter of Germans, no reference to Jews. Oh wait yes he does.

Political executions up to the time might have reached a couple thousand, and most of these were of renegade Nazis themselves during the indiscriminate butchery known as the "Night of the Long Knives." The famous Kristallnacht that horrified civilized opinion worldwide caused a grand total of 71 deaths. This in a nation of 70 million.

And the point is, Castro and Che are nasty. Well lets see how many Cubans died of malnutrition, starvation, police burtality under Batista and other former dictators working for the United Fruit Company? Lets compare apples and apples not rehtorical attempts to; lessen the horror and impact of the Nazi's, or compare Cuban nationalism with Nationalist Socialism in Germany.

Batista was the U.S. government's "man in Havana," even though U.S. officials knew that he was a brutal, antidemocratic, corrupt tyrant in full partnership with Mafia murderers and drug dealers. None of this mattered to Washington policymakers. What mattered was that as "our man in Havana," when Batista received orders from Washington, he obeyed.A Libertarian Visits Cuba, Part 1

No lets look at Latin America and the the US policy of imperialism in the region.

US Imperialism which began in the region with Monroe Doctrine and the colonization of Cuba, Nicarauga and other countries by the Confederate States as slave economies, became the basis of the sugar plantations and fruit production of the post WWII economies in the region.

How many Guatemalans have been murdered since the CIA and United Fruit company engineered the coup there in 1954, prior to the Cuban Revolution. This set the tone for the struggles of national liberation in the region. The revolutionaries knew that death was certain at the hands of the US and CIA and their front regimes.

Unfortunately, the CIA “success” in Iran, which produced the CIA’s ouster of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, bred a CIA “success” in another part of the world, Latin America. One year after the 1953 coup in Iran, the CIA did it again, this time in Guatemala, where U.S. officials feared the communist threat even more than they did in Iran.An Anti-Democracy Foreign Policy: Guatemala

How many Chileans died at the hands of Pinochet whose coup was organized by the US State Department and the CIA.?

How many Argentinians were 'dissapeared' under the US client regime of the Argentinian Generals?

And how many Cubans have been killed by the Cuban exile community and their links to the fascist movements in Latin America and around the world. Many of those same groups being made up of ex Nazi's and notorious Anti-Semites like the World Anti-Bolshevik League.

Many of our leaders seem to view Florida's Cuban conservatives, including the assassins and terrorists among them, as People Who Vote. - Alice Walker, introduction, The Sweet Abys

And how many CIA attempts were there on Castro from the very begining of the revolution. Enough to make anyone paranoid.

Yep what Che and Castro did was unconsionable, but understandable under the circumstances.

Hundreds of suspected Batista-era agents, policemen and soldiers were put on public trial for human rights abuses and war crimes, including murder and torture. Most of those convicted of murder were executed by firing squad, and the rest received long prison sentences. One of the most notorious examples of “revolutionary justice” being the executions of over 70 captured Batista regime soldiers, directed by Raúl Castro after capturing Santiago. Guevara was appointed supreme prosecutor in La Cabaña Fortress. This was part of a large-scale attempt by Fidel Castro to cleanse the security forces of Batista loyalists that could launch a counter-revolution. Many others were dismissed from the army and police, and some high-ranking officials in the ancien régime were exiled as military attachés.

In 1961 after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the new Cuban government also confiscated all property held by religious organizations without compensation including the Roman Catholic Church. Hundreds of members of the clergy, including a bishop, were permanently expelled from the nation, with the new Cuban government being officially atheist.

• Cuban Revolution

What the vast right wing conspiracy of the CIA and its fascist allies in the Anti-Bolshevik movement during the cold war did was far closer to the tactics and poltics of Himmler and Hitler than anyting the Che or Castro did.

A revolution implies violence, but a coup implies a regime of violence. The former is caused by the State and its military and the ruling class organizing violence against the people. The latter is the States policy in order to repress the freedom of workers, peasants and the middle class.

Yep a little reading can be a dangerous thing. And in this case the anonymous blogger at the CTF blog read one little right wing article and based his falacious argument on it. Well here is some reading for him to correct the stupidity of his article.


A tip o the blog to Calgary Grit for this.



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
CTF, blog, Che, Cuba, CIA, Batista, right, wing, anti-bolshevik, Nazi, Himmler, Jews, death, revolution,

Spam Attack

This is rich.

Blue Security Shifted Attack, Brought Down Blogs

This is a wild tale of a denial-of-service attack, allegedly orchestrated by a big time spammer against an anti-spam security company that brought down a blogging site.

The denial-of-service attack that crashed TypePad and LiveJournal this week was caused by anti-spam company Blue Security, which pinned the target on the blog in an attempt to save its own servers, analysts said Thursday. Blue Security denied that it knew the attack would crash its blog host.

And this is richer.

Spyware pusher shut down and fined $4 million
ZDNet -\
Just released by the FTC - Sanford Wallace (nicknamed Spamford for his history of spamming) and his company Smartbot.net have been ordered to shut down operations and give up $4,089,500 of their ill-gotten gains.

FTC Orders Wallace To Pay $4 Million For Spyware Scam

Users were duped into thinking they needed software being sold by "Spam King" Sanford Wallace because he exploited an Internet Explorer vulnerability to install real spyware on their PCs.

Spam is capitalism unleashed on the internet. Which is why I keep getting those emails about increasing my penis size, nasty russian girls willing to do anything and security updating of my Chase Manhattan bank account.


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
spam, Wallace, spamford, spyware, typepad, livejournal, blue, security, denial, of, service,

Climate Change...On Jupiter

Uh oh this will give Rona Ambrose and the Conservatives another excuse to not deal with climate change here. I can hear the right wing deniers now; "see its natural".

New storm on Jupiter hints at climate change

A storm is brewing half a billion miles away and in a rare event, astronomers get to watch it closely.

Jupiter is growing a new red spot and the Hubble Space Telescope is photographing the scene. Backyard astronomers have been following the action, too.

The global change cycle began when the last of the white oval-shaped storms formed south of the Great Red Spot in 1939. As the storms started to merge between 1998 and 2000, the mixing of heat began to slow down at that latitude and has continued slowing ever since.


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
climate-cahnge, Jupiter, red-spot, Hubble, NASA, Ambrose, Conservatives, Canada, Kyoto

Desert Moon

Titan, the planet Saturn's most mysterious moon, now poses a fresh puzzle: mile upon mile of rippling dunes similar to the desert sand dunes of the Sahara or Arabia have been discovered on its tarry surface -- but what they're made of nobody knows. Dunes gird Saturn moon

Cassini Flies By Saturn's Moon Titan, Sees More Craters

NASA and Partners Release New Movies Of Titan

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
space, saturn, Titan, Cassini, NASA, desert, moon

Grandinite Scoop

Grandinite scoops the MSM with a cellphone photo and on the spot report of IBEW members holding an information picket in Calgary at the offices of CNRL who are wanting to bring in temporary workers into Fort McMurray.


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
IBEW, Alberta, CNRL, Fort, McMurray, TarSands, temp-workers, unions, labour, Canada

Happy Marxmas

Today is Herr Doctor Professor Karl Marx's 188 birthday.

Happy Marxmas.

Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, 1918

"Je ne suis pas Marxiste."
--Karl Marx, 1818-1883

And the good doctor in his Phd Thesis Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy by Karl Marx posits an early theory of quantum mechanics as dialectics.

Betcha didn't know that.

"Just as we have seen that necessity, connection, differentiation, within itself, is transferred to or rather expressed in the atom, that ideality is present here only in this form external to itself, so it is with motion too, the question of which necessarily arises once the motion of the atoms is compared with the motion of the Cata tas sugcriseis [composite] bodies, that is, of the concrete. In comparison with this motion, the motion of the atoms is in principle absolute, that is, all empirical conditions in it are disregarded, it is ideal. In general, in expounding Epicurean philosophy and its immanent dialectics, one has to bear in mind that, while the principle is an imagined one, assuming the form of being in relation to the concrete world, the dialectics, the inner essence of these ontological determinations, as a form, in itself void, of the absolute, can show itself only in such a way that they, being immediate, enter into a necessary confrontation with the concrete world and reveal, in their specific relation to it, that they are only the imagined form of its ideality, external to itself, and not as presupposed, but rather only as ideality of the concrete. Thus its determinations are in themselves untrue and self-negating. The only conception of the world that is expressed is, that its basis is that which has no presuppositions, which is nothing. Epicurean philosophy is important because of the naiveness with which conclusions are expressed without the prejudice of our day."

Also See: Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
quantum, dialectics, Epicurus, Lucritius, Marx, communism, marxism,

Humanitarian War

US Progressives For War have a new Kosovo in their sights; Darfur. While opposed to the war in Iraq and so so about the continuing war in Afghanistan now they want the US , and of course Canada, to enter the conflict in the Sudan, specifically to defend the victims of ethnic cleansing in Darfur.

`It's always in Canada's interests to try to elevate... humanitarian rights.'
Peter MacKay, foreign affairs minister

A conflict that the international community has exasperated by its lack of involvement but its overflowing of crocodile tears. And would the discovery of oil reserves in the region and its neighbour Chad have anything to do with this? Nah.

Sat Apr 29, 1:40 PM ET

Laura Cacho of Working Assets hands a protester a sign during a mass rally against the war in Iraq on Saturday, April 29, 2006 in New York, NY. (AP Photo/Adam Rountree)

The international community has had plenty of opportunity to intervene with armed force, to create a barrier between the refugee camps and the conflicting forces in the region. But like Rawanda the original colonial powers in the region pull the strings behind the scenes, exerting their great power influence over the region. In this case the US and Canada have less to say about this than say oh Britain and France the original Imperialist powers in the region.

The Sudan Wars were a series of conflicts in the Sudan part of Africa in the late 19th Century. The conflicts erupted between the British and the Muslims Africans in the Sudan in 1881 because of religious disputes and the British attempt to end the "new" slavery trade. Muslim fundamentalists instigated a rebellion against the British, driving them and their Egyptian armies from Sudan. Britain atoned for the loss in 1898, militarily reclaiming control of the Sudan. Following this engagement, competition between Britain and France for the south of Sudan led to military conflict, ended by diplomatic avenues which partitioned the disputed area. Both events demonstrate the intensifying struggle to control Africa, and the conflict between the European powers in the race of imperialism. This conflict gave rise to the beginning of World War I. Sudan Wars

French Equatorial Africa (Introduction)
Chad • Congo • Gabon • Central African Republic

French Equatorial Africa was a former administrative grouping of four French territories in west central Africa. It was first formed in 1910 by the federation of three French imperial colonies — Gabon, Middle Congo, and Ubangi-Shari-Chad — comprising a total area of 969,112 square miles (2,500,000 sq km). Chad was separated from Ubangi-Shari in 1920 to form a fourth colony.

In 1934, French Equatorial Africa was transformed into a unified territory of France, but in 1946 it was re-divided into four separate overseas territories (TOM — territoires d'outre-mer).

The federation ended in 1959 after the territories had chosen — in 1958 — to become self-governing republics of the French Community. Middle Congo was renamed Republic of the Congo, and Ubangi-Shari became the Central African Republic. All four republics attained their independence in 1960.

In the case of Africa, this human element is seen in the variety of forces that affected or moulded her history and experience. Lydia Polgreen summarized the roots of Africa’s present burden: Africa was a land carved for a colonial feast. For her, “it is a truism of Africa that the borders bequeathed by white colonial powers, drawn in the 19th-century scramble for Africa at the convenience of London, Paris and Brussels, became the Blackman’s burden”. And if the inherited colonial- nation state has been the Blackman’s burden, it has also been the African despot’s best friend, a powerful tool when wielded by crafty hands. In fact, the excesses of African dictators, from Mobutu Sesse Seko to Robert Mugabe, from Sani Abacha to Charles Taylor, were enabled, to a greater or lesser degree, by the inherent conflicts created by artificial state boundaries that allowed a powerful central government to play tribal, ethnic and religious groups against one another. Aligned to that, colonialism destroyed some African cultural values and structures that would have conduced to the emergence of accountability in governance. This is well depicted by the fact that until now as Ali Mazrui argued, “Africa has borrowed Western tastes without Western skills, Western consumption patterns without Western production techniques, urbanization without industrialization, secularization (erosion of religion) without scientification.” African Poverty as Failure of Leadership

Beware of war for humanity or humanitarianism, behind the rehtoric lies the profit motive. And it is the only motive that drives war, whether for good or evil.

What the postcolonial left who oppose intervention and the liberal internationalists who support intervention in Darfur (but oppose it in the Middle East) share is a common concern about the conditions of the Third World. They are likely to agree that the West is fully or partially responsible for the deterioration of those conditions. Unlike those on the right like the current President of the U.S., their foreign policy ideas transcend crass national self interests and are burdened by their moral consciences. Where they disagree however is in what role the West can play in alleviating the global south’s conditions. Where the liberals want the West to intervene to save the poor Africans from killing themselves (which can be understood in a post-Rwanda context as either humanitarianism or on the other extreme, a neo-imperial continuation of the white man’s burden), the postcolonial left want the West out of the third world. Since the West is responsible for the poverty, war and low rates of democratic and human development in places like Africa, the Middle East and beyond – vis-à-vis colonialism and neo-colonialism – they should just butt out. SkarredBlog

Also See: War and the Market State

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
war, genocide, Darfur, Sudan, Canada, US, humanitarianism, France, Britain, colonies, colonialism, Imperialism, oil, uranium, post-colonialism, Africa, UN

Shocking Canadiana

Well Canadian architect and Cape Breton historian, Paul Chiasson has released his book on the Chinese Discovery of Canada; THE ISLAND OF SEVEN CITIES One of several books and documents that have been released in the past year saying that the Zheng He expeditionary force found North America in 1421. While he was Chinese and it was a Chinese armada he led, Zheng He was a Muslim, so one could say a Muslim discovered North America

The map clearly shows the Americas and Africa
Photo:The Economist/PA

Enlarge Image

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Chinese, Canada, North, Amercia, Zheng-He, discovery-of-North-Amercia, Cape, Breton, B.C., muslim, Chinese=Armada, 1421

Bermuda Triangle

Who says there is nothing new under the sun? Or in this case in the ocean where the sun never shines.

Monsters from beneath the Bermuda Triangle
In the permanently dark waters beneath the Bermuda Triangle, scientists have uncovered a remarkably diverse range of extraordinary sea creatures. Retrieving tiny sea animals - zooplankton - at depths of up to three miles, and even reading their genetic codes on a rolling sea, scientists carrying out a census of marine life have revealed new details about the role of these fragile creatures in the climate and food chain, from fish to whales.

And of course food for Cthulu's relatives.



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
species, zooplanketon, Bermuda-Triangle, monsters, sea-monsters, Atlantic, Ocean, ocenography, biology, zoology,
octopi, squid, octopus, whales, Cthulu, Cuthulu

Bear Pickens

Our friend from Peace River, Ursus Major woke up this morning and went for something to eat.

A black bear wandered into a grocery store in Peace River, Alta., late Tuesday, with one thing on his mind. Sweets"He jumped up into the bakery case, he tested a few things out and he really liked the strawberry mousse,'' said store night manager Trevor Allen.

He is still at large. Alberta Wildelife have issued a description of the culprit and his partner.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
ursus, major, bear, Peace-River, Alberta, boo-boo, yogi