Prince Charles is calling on the world to wage war against climate change, likening it to Britain's battle against Nazi Germany.SEE:
Disorganized Labour: Unions and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms - Part One
Disorganized Labour: Unions and the Chater of Rights and Freedoms - Part Two
Disorganized Labour: Unions and the Chater of Rights and Freedoms - Part Three
As I predicted;Police had trouble piecing together Air India clues, inquiry told
Canadian Cops Laughed At Air India Warning
CSIS had Air India warning
Police ignored Air India warnings
Police learned of Air India plot months before bombing
Police had hint 11 days before 1985 disaster, inquiry on Air India.
The circuitous travels of the Fischer-Tropsch process, a chemical technique to convert natural gas and coal into liquid fuels, provide an object lesson in historical irony. Used by the Nazis to make oil from coal during World War II, it was commercialized by the century's second-most-odious racial supremacist regime in the 1950s through South Africa's state energy company. Now, that privatized company, Sasol, may help liberate Western democracies (and non-Western ones, like India) from the grip of crude oil produced largely by loathsome authoritarian regime.
Not to forget this;
Can you be progressive and a Green Nazi?The Nazi story in Germany was a story of biophilia gone bad. A confused and desperate people--suffering from the Versailles Treaty, the loss of World War I, and economic depression--seized, for pride and identity, the imagery of their own blood and soil. It was impossible to spice up "superiority" with architecture (the Greeks and Romans were not Germans) or literature and art (the French and Italians were not Germans). So "blood" (the Teutonic tribes of yesteryear) and "soil" (the plants within the Germanic provenance) became the hooks on which to hang nativism, racism, and self-confidence. The future Germany was to be a pure landscape inhabitated by an untainted race.
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, a major historian of the native plant movement in Germany, claims that native plants "became the landscape architect's swastika." He quotes Alwyn Seifert (a leading German landscape architect during the Nazi period) as saying "nothing foreign should be added, and nothing native should be left out." The ideological attention to pure bloodlines led Nazitime botanists to advocate a "war of extermination" against a foreign impatiens felt to be out-competing the "native" impatiens. With the invasion of Poland, Heinrich Himmler pressed Nazi policy-makers to complete the Reich's Landscape Law to force the exclusive use of native plants within its empire. Nature had been nationalized and became totalitarian and violently enforced. You are as your plants.
Anarcho-Green NazisAs long ago as 1989 Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine, was running front cover features on what it described as 'the greening of the brownshirts.' For many years former National Front activists have been setting up quasi-green organisations as recruiting fronts for their vile activities, but it is only more recently that the anarchist movement has been targeted as a potential vehicle for Nazi propaganda. Former National Front boss Patrick Harrington has even managed to get a letter published in the latest issue of the American journal Anarchy, in which he writes 'as a life-long vegetarian and pagan, I am genuinely interested in green issues... I do not see any contradiction between this and my other views , indeed I regard them as interlinked.'
A number of anarchists have been won over by this claim and it is these individuals who are most likely to succeed in getting it across to a wider public. The most notorious anarchist convert to National Front style racism is Richard Hunt, the founder of Green Anarchist and the driving force behind the magazine Alternative Green. Hunt vents his racism in anti-Irish rants with headlines such as Off Our Patch Paddy. Alternative Green has also run articles supporting the 'red and brown' united front fighting against democracy in Russia, and currently argues for tough immigration and deportation laws. More sinister still is Richard Hunt's claim that the population must be reduced by 75% if we are to have an ecologically sustainable society. Hunt doesn't make it clear whether he wishes to set up death camps or if people will simply be left to starve to death.
"We recognise that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."
That was Ernst Lehmann, a leading biologist under the Nazi regime, in 1934, and he wasn't alone. Hitler, for one, was an avid vegetarian and green, addicted to homeopathic cures. His regime sponsored the creation of organic farming, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler even grew herbs on his own organic farm with which to treat his beloved troops. HITLER also banned medical experiments on animals, but not, as we know to our grief, on Jewish children. And he created many national parks, particularly for Germany's "sacred" forests.
This isn't a coincidence. The Nazis drew heavily on a romantic, anti-science, nature worshipping, communal and anti-capitalist movement that tied German identity to German forests. In fact, Professor Raymond Dominick notes in his book, The Environmental Movement in Germany, two-thirds of the members of Germany's main nature clubs had joined the Nazi Party by 1939, compared with just 10 per cent of all men. The Nazis also absorbed the German Youth Movement, the Wandervogel, which talked of our mystical relationship with the earth.
Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, says it was for the Wandervogel that the philosopher Ludwig Klages wrote his influential essay Man and Earth in 1913. In it, Klages warned of the growing extinction of species, the destruction of forests, the genocide of aboriginal peoples, the disruption of the ecosystem and the killing of whales. People were losing their relationship with nature, he warned. Heard all that recently? I'm not surprised. This essay by this notorious anti-Semite was republished in 1980 to mark the birth of the German Greens -- the party that inspired the creation of our own Greens party. Its message is much as Hitler's own in Mein Kampf: "When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall."
Why does this matter now? Because we must learn that people who want animals to be treated like humans really want humans to be treated like animals. We must realise a movement that stresses "natural order" and the low place of man in a fragile world, is more likely to think man is too insignificant to stand in the way of Mother Earth, or the Fatherland, or some other man-hating god. We see it already. A Greenpeace co-founder, Paul Watson, called humans the "AIDS of the earth", and one of the three key founders of the German Greens, Herbert Gruhl, said the environmental crisis was so acute the state needed perhaps "dictatorial powers".
As the Conservatives set out to focus on crime this week in Parliament, Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered a kickoff speech on Thursday arguing that crime rates are high by historic standards and there is now a trend to more serious crime.But does the Prime Minister's message match the statistics?
Reported crime rates have generally fallen over the past 15 years.
"Even if Canada's crime rates are low by international standards, they are still very high by our own historical standards," Mr. Harper told an awards dinner for the York Regional Police Force.While it's true that reported crime rates are far higher than when Mr. Harper, born in 1959, was a child, he didn't mention that they have been declining relatively steadily since 1992.
There was a dramatic increase in the 1960s and 1970s in most of the Western world, which may be partly ascribed to a younger population because of the baby boomers, but it has never been adequately explained, University of Toronto criminologist Anthony Doob said.
"They peaked in the early 1990s, and then drifted downward," he said.
That's especially true of the overall crime rate, which fell almost 25 per cent from 10,342 crime incidents per 100,000 people in 1991 to 7,761 in 2005, the last year reported by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics.
The rate of violent crime fell less dramatically, by 7.6 per cent, since 1992.
In the 1970s, the activists, their views vindicated on Vietnam, were in the vanguard. In this decade, the activists, their views vindicated on Iraq, not to mention global warming, have no such standing.
Speak out back then and you were cool. Speak out today and some fount of wisdom with a Fox News mentality will come down on you -- to borrow a phrase from Hunter S. Thompson -- "like a million pound sh-thammer."
Speak out today and, as silly as it sounds, you'll be accused of Bush-bashing -- as if it isn't warranted. In the last election campaign, Paul Martin's Liberals found out what the atmosphere was like when they underwent a media pounding for taking on the United States on certain questions.
That campaign has had a lingering effect, silencing Liberal voices, who kept Canada out of Iraq, on the big American questions of today. The Conservatives, former supporters of that war, are more inclined to join hands with the administration than pursue what Andrew Caddell, one of our United Nations officials, calls innovative multilateralism.
Among the few who challenge Washington are the NDP's Jack Layton and groups such as the Council of Canadians and the Centre for Policy Alternatives. They stick their necks out, only to get either ignored or berated by conservative media elites who would be more convincing if their track record on such matters as Iraq and the green file wasn't so dismal by comparison.
The venture may prove to be a lot less ambitious than advertised. The three unions said they would engage in co-ordinated campaigning on issues such as human and labour rights in Colombia, China and elsewhere, as well as common approaches to contract negotiations with multinational companies.
The barriers to more fundamental transatlantic co-operation are substantial, including different labour laws, political systems and employers.
Nor is it clear how the merger would help overcome the greatest challenge facing organized labour - dwindling membership. The vast majority of workers in all three countries aren't union members. In Canada, just a quarter of the civilian labour force belonged to a union last year, down from nearly 30 per cent at the beginning of the 1990s. The comparable numbers for the United States and Britain are 12 per cent and 28.4 per cent, respectively, and the shares continue to fall every year.
The Steelworkers have bucked the trend, but mainly by swallowing other unions, rather than internal growth. And like many unions, nearly a third of its members are retirees, whose ranks are unlikely to be replenished with new union members.
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