Why is self-determination an inalienable right for the people of the Falklands, but a gross example of Iranian meddling for the people of Bahrain?
Answers on a postcard please with a twenty pound note and framed photo of William Hague to Wars’R’Us, Oil and Armaments Ltd, House of Lords.
Bonifacegoncourt: it’s very insulting to people who live in places like Bermuda and Cayman to say that these places exist for money laundering. I wish that Brits would actually take an interest and learn the facts about the overseas territories. You even say you’ve visited Bermuda, so you should know better.
Bermuda is self-sufficient financially but is too small to be independent. Most Bermudians welcome the ties to the UK because it helps to guarantee rule of law. The Governor appoints judges, oversees the police force and deals with foreign affairs. Bermuda is a very sophisticated jurisdiction for reinsurance. Its reputation would be destroyed if it was complicit in money laundering.
Sandman: Bermuda is self-sufficient financially but is too small to be independent. Most Bermudians welcome the ties to the UK because it helps to guarantee rule of law.
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The UK is only interested in Bermuda’s oil. Everyone knows this.
Boniface: However the Args are terrified of the
efficient Chileans and back off from any dispute. Therefore the best future for the islands would be as an extra province of Chile, next to Magallanes…..Tierra de los Bennios!
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Any future war there would have to be known as the Fray Bentos.
Cheebacow: Your last post seems to ignore that Israel has a long and sordid history of undermining Palestinian non-violent resistance. With that in mind, why is it good that the Palestinians are made even more defenseless? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like violent conflict or random rocket fire, but I am also painfully aware that the strength of Hezbollah does deter Israel from waging further war against Lebanon.
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I don’t think that is true. Why did Israel ever go to Lebanon?
But, what I would say is that the US, the EU and other countries need to get tough with Israel on settlements in the West Bank. My thinking is that Hamas and Hizbollah are counterproductive to this because they couldn’t appear more like a typical bunch of terrorists in the public mind if they tried. They look like they are straight out of central casting; almost a parody of a Hollywood cliche; beards, suicide bombing, dressing in black, goose-stepping around giving Nazi salutes; firing AK47s in the air to celebrate. You may look down on “the general public” but unfortunately for the Palestinians their self-appointed guardians such as Hamas and Hizbollah simply look like foam-flecked nutters. And that’s partly because that is what they are. While lots of commenters here clap themselves on the back for their pleasingly feel-good radical notions that black is white and white is black most other people simply see Hamas and Hizbollah as theocratic terrorists. And ultimately that is why the Palestinians don’t get the sympathy they deserve.
I read in the Mirror on Sunday in a cafe this morning that Bliar is speaking to groups of Labour MPs and is thinking of making a comeback to frontline politics. Milipede Jnr is said to be relaxed about it. God help us all.
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In addition to those items in the Mail I posted earlier about the BBC, I saw in the Mirror that those who work outside 9-5 get £4,000 pa extra to compensate!
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The Mirror did have a good double page spread on the proposed annihilation of the NHS and the opposition to the bill. It is not online except for this article.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/three-key-royal-colleges-prepare-743780
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PS Don’t waste time with Angry. Only here to disrupt and divert.
Angrysoba, I didn’t take much notice of politics at the time of the UK’s war over the Falklands. I have no memory of oil being mentioned in the mainstream media. However, I do remember a word-of-mouth rumour of untapped oil deposits; maybe it was something mentioned in the more in-depth reports.
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The big question at the time seemed to be why so little effort in negotiation was made by the UK, and the generally accepted answer was that Thatcher wanted a war in order to look strong, and thus made no effort to avoid one. Oil, if indeed that was a reason, would provide a more objective and less personal explanation as to why negotiation could have been futile from the start.
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This would further imply that current conflict in the Middle East was anticipated decades ago, and that the failure to develop alternatives… What can I say? Sometimes it feels like fate, like a car crash in slow motion, where it looks like there is time to change things, but that in fact the point of inevitable disaster has long since been passed. I accept that this could just be my own crazed musings, brought up as I was to believe in an immanent Armageddon.
Spot on here Ahmadinejad.
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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says arrogant powers will never achieve their objective of rescuing the “evil and inhumane” Zionist regime of Israel.
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“The goal of arrogant powers is to save the Zionist regime [of Israel], but they will certainly not fulfill this wish of theirs, because the world has changed and their era has come to an end,” Ahmadinejad said in a meeting with Lebanese Defense Minister Fayez Ghusn in Tehran on Sunday.
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+++“The Zionist regime is an evil and inhumane creature that will massacre all regional nations if it is given the opportunity,” Ahmadinejad said.+++
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The Iranian President further expressed confidence that a “just and humane order” will prevail in the world in future in place of the current rule established by arrogant powers.
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For his part, the Lebanese defense minister hailed the resistance of the Iranian nation against Israeli aggressions saying that today Tel Aviv will think twice before attempting an invasion anywhere in the world for fear of the Islamic Republic.
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http://www.presstv.ir/detail/228736.html
A Question for SUNday. Have you all observed the boycott of the Sunday Sun? I have. However, I not only looked at the front page: I was complicit in agreeing to my wife’s blackleg request that I buy her a copy. Now I understand fully the gravamen of Craig’s charges against Jack Straw, the FCO, the intelligence services and HMG.
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Disappointingly, in my local newsagents the pile of unsold Observers over-topped that of the Sunday Sun tenfold. The best gloss I can provide is that Murdoch’s hybrid will probably prove infertile; and that it was selling like cheap [50p] bags of horse manure.
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Bought a “Top Cat” National Lottery Scratchcard to reward myself for observing the boycott. Won zilch. Condign punishment for complicity. All I can salvage of self-respect is that I can easily top the Sunday Sun’s front-page scoop – “Amanda Holden: My Heart Stopped for 40 Seconds”. When I had a quadruple by-pass on Friday 13 January, my heart was stopped for far longer than that.
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Non-God in his Non-Heaven: Arsenal 0 Spurs 1 (Saha). This cannot now be an empty set, Clark.
Clark: Angrysoba, I didn’t take much notice of politics at the time of the UK’s war over the Falklands. I have no memory of oil being mentioned in the mainstream media. However, I do remember a word-of-mouth rumour of untapped oil deposits; maybe it was something mentioned in the more in-depth reports.
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The big question at the time seemed to be why so little effort in negotiation was made by the UK, and the generally accepted answer was that Thatcher wanted a war in order to look strong, and thus made no effort to avoid one. Oil, if indeed that was a reason, would provide a more objective and less personal explanation as to why negotiation could have been futile from the start.
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This sounds far more qualified than the earlier, bolder statement you made:
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Britain will fight to hold the Falkland Islands for the same reason it did in 1982; there is oil there.
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Don’t get me wrong, I do think you are entitled to your opinions but I find it very confusing when you state them as if they were documented fact. The thing is that I had never heard the oil argument for the Falklands War but if there was one then I would be interested to know of it. Yet, as I said, it seems more likely that an invasion by the Argentinian regime which was itself beset with internal problems and was itself a fascist regime that “executed” its leftist opponents by rounding them up, flinging them naked and screaming from transport planes into the Atlantic Ocean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_flight
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I think the most controversial point at the time was the sinking of the Belgrano which was seen as an unnecessarily provocative escalation of the conflict which, as you say, could arguably have been ceased through a peace plan of some kind. Yet the reason for the UK’s desire to fight the war is far more explicable as an obvious response to not just as act of war but an all-out invasion by an aggressive nation. This combined with the obvious loss of national prestige if the UK had failed to react makes any other explanation superfluous. Though some people naturally thought Margeret Thatcher had engineered something to help her re-election bid.
Mary, I think Angrysoba’s points deserve to be engaged with. He is right about widespread public perception of Hamas and Hizbollah. However, I think that many of the points in his 1:23 comment take complex, convoluted causes and effects, and point them all in one direction: extremism both causes and is caused by oppression and the closing of other avenues, and Hollywood “terrorists” are of course modeled on images from the news, and the “news” media love to dramatise and oversimplify.
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Conflict resolution is so much harder than conflict escalation. As conflict progresses the injustices inflicted upon both sides accumulate. Resentment and its consequence, prejudice, both increase. Any resolution has to address all this accumulated anger and prejudice. That, or one side or the other needs to be utterly annihilated, and I don’t think that has ever been achieved, nor should it be. Or did Britian manage it with the Tasmanians?
Angrysoba, you’re right, I was being very brief. I was really only replying to this by Bonifacegoncourt: “Eventually London will dump the FIs, or at least offer them an identical peat bog in Scotland or Co Tyrone.”
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Sorry, I can’t help with my own oil argument. As I said, I encountered that argument through word of mouth only. There are other readers of this blog who are more knowledgeable about oil reserves and when they were discovered or suspected. Maybe one of them can help.
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This discussion has reminded me of an e-mail I received from an acquaintance, mostly concerning a different subject; I quote one paragraph:
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Urban terror & super-injunction news:
What’s all this about, then??
http://tinyurl.com/7bdnh9z
Angry said: “My thinking is that Hamas and Hizbollah are counterproductive to this because they couldn’t appear more like a typical bunch of terrorists in the public mind if they tried.”
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Like I said earlier, Israel has made a point of brutally putting down non-violent Palestinian resistance. When non-violent resistance is continuously ignored by the West, and crushed by Israel, it’s no wonder groups like Hamas become so extreme. I would argue that this is the intended consequence of Israeli government actions. The Israeli government does not desire peace, it wants to expand its territory (as made plainly evident by refusing to define borders, torpedoing peace talks with impossible demands). Is it a good thing that the entire Palestinian population is so weak that they are forced to accept any Israeli demand? Sounds like ‘creating a desert and calling it peace’ to me.
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It is also highly dependent on your point of view. Your above quote could easily reflect the views of the global ‘South’ on America. Which public mind do you speak of?
More studious scandal-seekers will find that Jersey resident Mark Burby’s highly astonishing but strangely under-publicised evidence starts on page 50 of this document:
http://tinyurl.com/7axcygk
The Zionist plan for the Middle East. Fragment, divide, etc.
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/The%20Zionist%20Plan%20for%20the%20Middle%20East.pdf
“they couldn’t appear more like a typical bunch of terrorists in the public mind if they tried”
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Is that right? You learn something every day. I thought Hamas was elected and was mostly concerned with trying to rebuild Gaza. I thought that without Hizbollah Lebanon would not exist and was the only military force with the ability to resist Israeli attack. Tut tut!
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Neither seem like terrorists to me. Kind of bureaucratised governmental/resistance group hybrids in my view but I admit that “terrorist” is more emotive and slips off the tongue easier.
From Dennis Thatcher’s obituary. My bet is that Burmah Oil knew something about the oil reserves in the Falklands.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/1434154/Sir-Denis-Thatcher-Bt.html.
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‘For the next quarter of a century, while his wife advanced politically (entering Parliament as MP for Finchley and Friern Barnet in 1959; the government in 1961; and the cabinet in 1970), he kept a low profile, successfully developing his business.
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Under his guidance, its paints, wood preservatives and other coatings were sold across the world. By 1957 the Atlas factory had expanded to 60,000 sq ft and the company employed some 200 people. Thatcher himself worked long hours, and had to spend much of his time abroad on sales drives. In 1964, suffering from what appeared to be exhaustion, he had to take a sabbatical in South Africa.
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On his return, he decided to sell up and, in 1965, Atlas was taken over by Castrol, who paid £530,000 (earning Thatcher himself £10,000). The new owners appointed him a director and, when Castrol was taken over by Burmah Oil, he was appointed divisional director of planning and control and joined its board. Burmah’s headquarters was at Swindon, 83 miles from London; Thatcher drove there and back every day.’
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Burmah was eventually taken over by BP Amoco, now BP.
Some recent posts on the Falklands War are wide of the mark. I’m in a good position to say so: at the time I had security clearance up to Top Secret and was in charge of information work in the British Embassy in Dublin. Our main task was to get the UK position across to the Fianna Fail government and the Irish media. Above all, we had to keep Charlie Haughey tied in to the generally helpful but precarious EU consensus. He was finally able to take up the anti-British position that came naturally to him when the Dublin newsagents were full of the Sun’s “Gotcha!” headline. Ironically, this was long after the headline had been changed in later editions of the Sun in the UK, as recounted by the then editor some years ago at a British Library debate on the best 20th century headlines.
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Accounts at the time and immediately after the 1982 war were often less than accurate; nor were they free from bias, in various directions. Some fresh information was circulated in the 2 January 2012 issue of a newsletter on the Argentine media which I find well-informed and reliable in its facts and judgements. These concern both Mrs Thatcher’s role in developments before the Argentine invasion and the circumstances surrounding the decision to sink the Belgrano when it was outside the unilateral UK “exclusion zone”. Here are some extracts:
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“There have been three minor Falklands related stories recently in the Argentine media.
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“Last Wednesday Clarin published a short account of the new information regarding the sinking of the General Belgrano in 1982 – that it was not returning to Ushuaia when it was torpedoed and sunk but had orders to proceed inside the Falklands exclusion zone. Clarin says it was going to a port in the Islands (although the British accounts just say to a pre-arranged rendez-vous there). The story was taken from the Daily Telegraph review of David Thorp’s book “Silent Listener”, and records that Thorp was part of a group decoding Argentine signals on board HMS Intrepid during the1982 war.
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“Then last Thursday Clarin and other papers reported the death by drowning of a canoeist near Isla de los Estados in Tierra del Fuego . The drowned man and his companion, who survived, were veterans of the Falklands War. They had intended to canoe all the way to the Falklands! Their motive was a silly plan to “link” Tierra del Fuego with the Falklands .
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“Then last Saturday Clarin and other papers carried reports of the revelation in documents released in the British National Archives under the 30 year rule that Margaret Thatcher had been specifically warned in 1981 that the plan to decommission HMS Endurance could encourage the Argentine Junta to believe that Britain was less interested in the Falklands and their defence. The articles report how Foreign secretary Lord Carrington wrote to Defence Secretary John Nott specifically warning about the danger from Argentina of decommissioning the Endurance and reducing the fleet then. This, I think, is hardly news now, but it’s interesting to see it confirmed.”
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Once the invasion happened, it was trebly likely that Mrs Thatcher would try to recapture lost British “possessions”. First, it was in her character. See, for one of several provocative but closely argued interpretations, pages 80 to 88 of Leo Abse’ s “Margaret, daughter of Beatrice – A Politician’s Psycho-Biography of Margaret Thatcher”, Jonathan Cape, 1989. Second, a military victory would be immensely important for this chippy and proudly lower middle-class Boadicea in her twin battles, electorally against Labour and for the soul of the Conservative party against muttering critics, chauvinists and lukewarm compromisers. Third, only a decisive victory could save her from impeachment for putting support for her Chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, ahead of the defence of the realm. No wonder her “Gotcha!” was: “Rejoice! Rejoice!”
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PS: With the final result Arsenal 5 – Spurs 2, I have to confess to hubris of Blairite proportions. How’s that for humble pie?
There is certainly plenty in the Petrology literature to suggest large deposits of hydrocarbons in the South Atlantic. While at BP Exploration in the 90s I came across some of it. Just about everywhere has been assessed for possible hydrocarbon-bearing formations, but not everywhere has been drilled, or had seismic run on it.
@Clark
I agree with you about the horrors of commercialism. However with all this ‘creativity’ you are begging numerous questions.
“All the Universe is creative, so it is correct to state that God is everywhere.” Who says? What does that even mean? Why should you feel ‘awe’ for the universe, just because it is bigger than you? The universe is an incompetent and wasteful piece of design, all those explosions and collisions and massive wastes of energy giving no clue [unlike other machines] what it is actually for. It is totally absurd, which is what makes cosmology so interesting. Bringing ‘god’ into the frame, as always, just makes it dull. The G-word is meaningless because it is the only word that cannot be defined, explained, illustrated, exemplified, or described, except in terms of itself, eg ‘our own godness’. Eh??? Wassat??? ‘God’ comes from the right hemisphere of the brain, along with fairies, UFOs,
and inability to read maps. Religion is vanity. ‘Look at me, god loves me, I’m special’. Free yourself from the meaningless ‘god’ monosyllable and unclutter the mind. BTW you say “I believe that the creation of the state of Israel was at least in part designed to destabilise the region” – It was designed to provide national sovereignty as a shelter for the
customary dismal crimes of the master race. The poor saps living on stolen land will be left high and dry on Der Tag, when Big Zion moves the money elsewhere.
@Sandman
Why so coy? Bermuda is not too small to be independent [Nauru? Monaco? Andorra?] but people might wonder where all the money came from. Behind Disneyfied Englandland, bright-eyed bonhomie and baby-blue shorts ‘n’ socks, Caliban’s charming isle is indeed “a very sophisticated jurisdiction for reinsurance”. Or, in English, ‘Another Daiquiri, Mr Gambino, old boy?’
@Jives “Scotch is a drink,Scottish is a nationality.” Both Dr Johnson and George Orwell advised that the best way to annoy a Scotchman is to call him a Scotchman….
OT SPOILER! If you’ve been watching the current Iswaili-Amerikan ‘Honey-I-shot-the-president’ yawnmaker ‘Homeland’, [see TV page of the Goydian] know that the ending is a total copout. When our Damian tries to blow up the vice-president his explosive vest doesn’t work. He is in the lavvy trying to rewire it when his missus calls toremind him about dinner. So he goes home for dinner! There is already a second series where he is a talk jockey for Fox News or something. Woteva. There, you no longer have to watch this fascist dross and I have given you back ten hours of your life. You’re welcome.
@guano
@Iain Orr
I’d love to debate, but both you gents are a wee bit too surreal for moi.
Israel did not ‘go’ to lebanaon, buit attacked it, more than once, During its last major attack it cause some 6 billion worth of economic damage, not to speak of the casulties.
To say that Hamas and Hezbollah look like archetypal terrorists proof that cliche’s work and prejudices can be used as propaganda. Israel cannot ignore one UN resolution after another and then hope that the world will side with its fascist policies, violence and land stealing. There are UN violations every day and not a single sanction has been proposed. The UN has been corrupted and used for criminal intent to be caused on others, its business is akin to horse trading, except the latter is open and visible.
Hamas was founded by the intention to create a second power structure, it divided Palestinians who are only now finding common points and israel does not like it, hence the disproportional violence in Ghaza and the Westbank of late.
From one of our Muslim bros on here, I come across;
“nothing touches the Qur’an for totally blasting one’s mind into outer space.” That would explain an awful lot. Alawi, Sunni, Shia, who cares? It’s all primitive fantasy. I’ve actually read the Q, sadistic nonsense for people with a mental age of five. The Beardy One was a certifiable nutjob, who invented the Q when they shut him up in a cave to cure his mad fits. Meanwhile, mutilation, stoning and 100 lashes all round!
Only murderous zionism is more noxious than this islam rubbish. Beware of anything from a desert.
Donald at 4:05, thanks. If you saw it in the ’90s, it was probably already known in 1982; can you pin it down any more accurately? We already know of BP’s connections with the secret services and influence over over British foreign policy. Very useful, therefore, for Britain to have an outpost at the Falkland Islands, eh?
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Bonifacegoncourt, I’ll try to come up with a reply that won’t make too long a comment, but I might be a while; these matters are difficult to put into words. But as a start, remember that according to our best physical theories, everything remains a mere superposition of probabilities until observed. You simply cannot dissociate Universe from Mind. So whose mind would that be, then? Yours? Mine? There’s more to belief in The Creator than superstition and manipulation of the masses, though I agree that religion is widely used for that purpose – but then, that’s just what we should expect, isn’t it? Propaganda is ubiquitous.
Bonifacegoncourt, my above mentioned reply will be for your 4:42 pm comment, not your 5:52 pm one, which I hadn’t seen when I posted mine at 6:34 pm. I don’t know much about Islam, or any religion really, except ’70s Jehovah’s Witlessism.
Oh, I should mention that you shouldn’t be too critical of Islam. It’s considerably younger than Christianity, so to make a fair comparison you have to look at Christianity a few centuries ago. They did a lot of burning people, I think, but they grew out of it eventually.
As far as I remember, the exploratory geology was done in the 70s, including drilling. There are associated formations all the way across into the South American mainland. Some of this stuff was in reports, some of it was in articles on the online databases I had access to; some were old enough to have turned up in monographs by then. Oh to have access to such resources now! Working for Big Oil had many compensations…
Mary, thanks, and Donald, thanks again. Angrysoba, that’s good enough for me. The UK knew the Falklands could be useful for oil extraction. None of which detracts from Iain Orr’s insider knowledge, but Prime Ministers don’t make decisions in a vacuum.
Hope you had the use of one of those long spoons Iain in your dealings with Haughey.
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Haughey is generally regarded as the dominant Irish politician of his generation, as well as the most controversial. Upon entering government in the early 1960s, Haughey became the symbol of a new vanguard of Irish ministers, with a promising future in service to the Republic. As Taoiseach, he is credited by some economists as starting the positive transformation of the economy in the late 1980s. However, his career was also marked by several major scandals. Haughey was implicated in the Arms Crisis of 1970, which nearly destroyed his career. His political reputation revived, his tenure as Taoiseach was then damaged by the sensational GUBU Affair in 1982; his party leadership was challenged four times, each time unsuccessfully, earning Haughey the nickname “The Great Houdini.” Revelations about his role in a phone tapping scandal forced him to resign as Taoiseach and retire from politics in 1992.Further scandals emerged after Haughey’s retirement, when revelations of corruption, embezzlement, tax evasion and a 27-year extra-marital affair destroyed his reputation. Still mired in scandal, he died of prostate cancer in 2006 at the age of eighty.
@Clark
If you don’t know much about religion, why not keep it that way? It just makes people unhappy, and have nervous breakdowns. Avoid the meaningless, eg ‘You simply cannot dissociate Universe from Mind.’ Eh?? ‘The God Delusion’ by Prof Dawkins is an agreeable and non-preachy read. Science answers questions and make things simpler. Religion creates puzzles, and makes things more complicated. BTW I always like Muslim countries and
Muslims generally. It’s the mumbo-jumbo I avoid.