Showing posts with label Robert Fisk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Fisk. Show all posts

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Oh, How We Love Our Oriental Rulers!



Now, the West loves brutal dictators - as long as they keep their cruelties secret and as long they play by the rules - OUR rules, or - to be more precise - the rules of big business. We loved when crazy Gaddafi  resided in a tent on Donald Trump's property in New York and was eager to supply oil, we loved when the Trabelsi Clan provided us with cheap labor slaves and hotels to serve us Western tourists on Tunesia's golden beaches; we loved the outsourcing, the money laundering and the weapon deals with the Mubarak Clan in Egypt, we loved Yemen's Saleh and offered him refuge just as we liked the Shah of Persia and Saddam, and we still love the Gulf states - especially Saudi Arabia - because we can make such a good business with them and they really manage to keep their fellow citizens down and torture in the dark. And we all know: Syria is next. Assad was good, but he couldn't keep his people effectively under control. So don't wonder why "Obama authorized covert support for Syrian rebels"! This is just the "Syrian war of lies and hypocrisy" as one of the last remaining journalists said. Don't you worry, we'll find another dictator for Syria and then we apply democracy there!

Monday, November 28, 2011

Fisk on Torturers

Why do torturers really like to film their misdeeds?

"And we must forget, of course, that other American pictures from Abu Ghraib, which Obama the Good has decided we must not see, show the rape of Iraqi women and boys."

Monday, October 10, 2011

"Words of Emptiness and Exclusion, of Elitism and Trend"



Asked to give a talk on the Middle East last week, I read on my invitation: "We want to bring visionaries, innovators, doers, funders, connectors, and their community into one space...With all of these people gathered into one space, it's inevitable that sparks will happen, ideas will find momentum, and positive change will take [sic] birth."
   Now I have not the slightest intention of participating in this particular "space". I won't have anything to do with an invitation written in so clichéd a language, including all the trappings of pseudo-academese psychobabble and happy-clappy optimism. These are words of emptiness and exclusion, of elitism and trend, of a conference held for the sake of holding a conference. Of nothing.
Robert Fisk - The never-ending war against cliché and jargon