“I am the world crier, & this is my dangerous career… I am the one to call your bluff, & this is my climate.” —Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)
![//www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/sixties/images/pisan.jpeg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/sixties/images/pisan.jpeg "'The Pisan Cantos' of Pound")
… Ezra Pound met with Benito Mussolini. This was a brief, one-time talk, but it would bring out the worst in Pound’s personality and lead to personal disaster. It would also inspire some of the best of modern poetry — the Bollingen Prize-winning Pisan Cantos, written while Pound was in detention, charged with treason.” Today in Literature
“The United States would try to help find a haven for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, his family and close aides if he would agree to leave Baghdad, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday.” Salon
Surely we must realize that US bellicosity has united Iraqis behind Saddam and increased his resolve to previously unheard-of levels?
Sneaky Toolbar Hijacks Browsers:
‘When I find the bastards who programmed this thing I’d be happy to castrate them with a pair of dull pinking shears,” fumed one of Xupiter’s many unhappy victims in a newsgroup posting.
Xupiter is an Internet Explorer toolbar program. Once active in a system, it periodically changes users’ designated homepages to xupiter.com, redirects all searches to Xupiter’s site, and blocks any attempts to restore the original browser settings.
(…) “When Xupiter first appeared, we spent a week trying to figure it out,” said Mike Healan, of SpywareInfo. “There’s a monstrous thread with over 26,000 page views where a couple dozen of us tested it until we figured what it did and how to deal with it.”
But Healan said that every time people sort out what Xupiter is doing, Xupiter’s programmers tweak its code. It also appears that Xupiter may be selling its “service” to other websites. ‘ Wired News
“African governments’ nomination of Libya as chair of the next United Nations Commission on Human Rights undercuts their new commitment to promote human rights and good governance, Human Rights Watch said today.
Africa is due to chair the next session of the commission on a rotational basis, and Libya was nominated by the African regional group. Libya’s nomination was confirmed at the recently concluded inaugural summit of the new African Union. The commission will begin its annual session in March 2003.”
Related Material:
HRW Letter to President Thabo Mbeki
Libya Confirms Why It is Wrong for UN Human Rights Chair: ‘Libya’s claim that its “security and stability” prove respect for human rights demonstrates why Libya is the wrong choice to chair the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch reiterated its call on the African Union to abandon plans to nominate Libya as next chair for the Commission.’
The statement was announced on the day of President George W Bush’s annual State of the Nation address. In his speech, Bush pressed the case for military action to remove the weapons of mass destruction the US says Iraq holds.” New Scientist
“When columnists and cartoonists comment about a possible U.S. strike against Iraq, there seems to be room for more diversity of opinion than when these creators tried to express themselves in the months immediately following 9/11.” Editor & Publisher
Thank heaven the country has gotten beyond the post-9/11 view that any questioning is unpatriotic, to which it seemed the press, with few notable exceptions, caved sickeningly. Which is not to say, as this article indicates, that antiwar columnists or cartoonists don’t get angry recriminations from readers, but they’re not taking it personally. But is the press leading the move to question the wisdom or legitimacy of the administration’s war plans? I think not; it seems rather a response to the burgeoning misgivings in the public at large, bless their hearts. Now, the biggest question: will disapproval from the press, or the commonweal, make a whit of difference in the madmen’s prosecution of their war plans? A Canadian observes: “The foreign policies of the U.S government, however, have failed to a large extent to reflect the American people’s values. Many Americans find it hard to relate to those policies. In fact, the harshest critics of U.S. foreign policies come from American citizens.” Dr Ali Mekky, a member of the Toronto Star editorial board, pleads for peace and wonders, Are We Heading into a New Dark Age?
Ominous as the likelihood of impending war is in itself is the dawning awareness that the US war plan embraces the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Iraq. Courtesy of wood s lot come these links:
The US Has Lowered the Bar for Using the Ultimate Weapon , says military affairs analyst William Arkin at CommonDreams, either against hardened Iraqi targets (e.g. underground facilities) impervious to conventional armaments, or to thwart any Iraqi moves to use weapons of mass destruction. Arkin lays out several ominous aspects of current nuclear posture — the move away from accepted no-first-use assurances (which may encourage other nuclear nations to consider their heretofore unthinkable preemptive use, just at a time that nonproliferation is breaking down and many more nations are lining up to join the nuclear club); the lumping of nuclear armaments with all other options for war-fighting, and the reflections of these policy changes in a change of command structure controlling the decision to go nuclear. Arkin, from Johns Hopkins, dubbed by ABC News “one of the most respected nuclear weapons analysts in the United States”, says he has been shown documents confirming the dysadministration’s policy shift.
To my way of thinking, the longterm impact of these nuclear posture changes on the fate of the earth far outweighs the immoral obscenity of provoking a war with Iraq. As much of an incipient outcry as there is against the latter, there ought to be ten times the outraged rabid outpouring of opposition if the war plans erode the barriers against the nuclear option, bringing the entire world that much closer to the brink from which we have been painstakingly edging away for the past decade. Time for new Days of Rage? It behooves us all to wrap our heads around these unthinkable prospects rather than continue to live in blissful denial. Then go gather a thousand of your friends and sit down in front of some government building, or block a troop train or something. Many of us were doing it thirty-five or forty years ago; it isn’t hard and, if anything, is more urgent now than it was during that obscene little war in Indochina. Evidence is that antiwar sentiment now may be ahead of its progression during the Vietnam War, when it took the arrival of American body bags to build beyond the early, principled, opposition.
Follow Me Here... 