Oh shit…

The political situation/catastrophe of contemporary Italian politics is apparently well on its way to becoming an ongoing series of coverage here at Paulitics.

Earlier in the week, I reported that Rome’s new (self-proclaimed) neo-fascist mayor Gianni Alemanno was proudly greeted with straight-arm fascist salutes and cries of “Duce! Duce!” (the Italian equivalent of the German “Führer”).

If that wasn’t enough to make you say “Oh shit…”, how about this one: Rome’s new fascist mayor makes his first policy pledge:

Rome’s new mayor promises purge of migrants:

“Gianni Alemanno, 50, a firebrand neo-fascist and the first Right-wing mayor of the city since the Second World War, vowed to make Rome ‘secure’ as he was sworn into office after his election at the weekend.

[…]

In a sign of things to come, after Mr Alemanno’s election Mr Berlusconi declared: ‘We are the new Falange.’

The original Falange (or Phalanx) was the Spanish fascist party, founded in the 1930s, whose doctrine was adopted by General Franco.

[…]

The new mayor said that his first action would be to begin “immediate expulsions” of the 20,000 immigrants in the city with criminal records.

[…]

Mr Alemanno was the youth leader of the fascist Italian Social Movement and wears a Celtic cross, a symbol of the extreme Right. However, he said he wore the cross only as a religious symbol, and in tribute to Paolo di Nella, a far-Right activist who was stoned to death in a Rome street protest 25 years ago.

Mr Alemanno said he was sick of the ‘continuing search for [my] dark side’, adding: ‘I am bitterly upset from a personal point of view at this demonisation.’

[…]

Graziano Halilovic, a spokesman for one of Rome’s biggest settlements of Roma gipsies, said: ‘We fear there will be night-time raids on the camps. We want a safe city too. Some of our members have heard their parents’ stories of fascism.’

Mr Bossi said on Wednesday that immigrants had to be hunted out, and that if reforms were not forthcoming, his followers would take up arms.

“We have no fear of taking things to the piazzas. We have 300,000 martyrs ready to come down from the mountains. Our rifles are always smoking,” he said.

Mr Alemanno has promised to tear down a £12 million museum around the Ara Pacis, an altar to the Emperor Augustus.”

Two more now confirmed war crimes to add to Bush’s tally

Despite a complete media blackout on the story in Canada, the U.K. and the United States, the dean of the U.S. White House Press Corps, Hellen Thomas, recently received a great deal of online attention for daring to state the obvious.  By most accounts, the attention began on the popular social networking site reddit.com, which managed to raise several thousand dollars to send Ms. Thomas flowers for what was seen as her daring question for White House Press Secretary Dana Perino.

The ‘obvious’ thing that Thomas pointed out is, of course, that revelations of evidence (both photographic and otherwise) of the use of WWII-era torture techniques as well as evidence that U.S. President George W. Bush personally signed off on approving torture, necessarily means that President Bush lied when he said the U.S. does not torture.

However, even this somewhat subdued (yet obviously true) fact, has been met with a virtually complete media blackout.  One could even push the envelope even further in this matter though, and if North America had a critical press, Ms. Thomas’s question would not have been seen as either particularly extreme or controversial.  Rather, on the contrary, if Ms. Thomas wanted to be even more accurate, she could have also pointed out — with equal confidence — that these recent revelations on torture means that George W. Bush is, by definition, a war criminal and that this is but merely one of two items which came to light in the past two weeks which constitute war crimes on the part of the U.S. President.

The other revelation, which was covered somewhat in the mainstream press, was the revelation that U.S. President Bush blessed (and assisted through military aid) the expansion of the illegal Jewish settlements in Palestinian occupied territory.  Of course, acquiring lands through conquest constitutes not only a war crime but constitutes what Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Trials, claimed was the “supreme” war crime.  This latter fact, yet again, was not mentioned in the mainstream media in North America or the U.K..

So, if you’re keeping track:  that’s two war crimes revealed in as many weeks.  The press has not only glossed over both revelations, but to the extent that Helen Thomas’s rather subdued and tame question about lying (rather than war crimes) has been addressed online or elsewhere, it has been treated as somehow radical.  Don’t get me wrong: Thomas deserves the utmost credit for posing her question in a forceful manner, but let’s not kid ourselves here — the lying is nowhere near as bad as the war crimes.

Irony… sweet, sweet irony.

So, it turns out that Orwell, author of the futuristic dystopic novel “1984” about a government which spies on its citizens, was himself spied upon for long periods of time by his own government’s MI5 division.

Irony, thy name is politics.

Naomi Wolf on the end of America and the rise of fascism (audio)

Episode #4 of the Paulitics Podcast has now been released.

This latest episode features a talk by Naomi Wolf on the topic of her new book entitled “The End of America”.

In it, Wolf discusses the historical evidence for 10 steps which are universally recognizable as benchmarks that a democracy is moving towards fascism or totalitarianism and how each of these ten steps is now being seen in one form or another in the United States under the Bush Administration.

To listen to Wolf’s talk or to download the episode, click here.

To find out how to subscribe to the podcast and have episodes brought to you automatically, click here.

To view past episodes of the Paulitics Podcast, click here.

UPDATE in University of Florida tasing scandal: THE COP SMILED! [pic]

I will be posting a detailed documentation of how the corporate news media have distorted or attempted to minimize this story in the next day or so. But as I was looking over one of the many videos on Youtube of the incident where police tasered an unarmed, peaceful student for asking a question, I couldn’t believe what I saw for just a fraction of a second.

I have a simple question for all you right-wingers out there who want to belittle, downplay, obfuscate or otherwise mis-characterize this incident:

If the police weren’t acting out of line, then why was this police officer smiling just after he had sent 50,000 volts running through this kid’s body after the kid begged him repeatedly not to?

“Freedom is the freedom to simply say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows”

-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

 

Proof of Big Brother tactics at SPP protest (pics + vid)

It was easy to miss, but here are three examples of Big Brother tactics at the SPP protests this week in Quebec.  One of which is your standard George W. Bush doublethink, the second of which gives some interesting circumstantial evidence of government conspiracy to crack down on protesters (and has become an internet sensation), and the third of which proves the culpability of the government and police but which hasn’t been reported anywhere that I am aware of.

#1. As many of you know, the leaders of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico (“The Three Amigos”)  met yesterday and the day before to negotiate a backroom, undemocratic deal to harmonize regulations at the behest of North America’s CEOs.

This summit took place, behind closed doors and meetings were carefully arranged to transpire without public scrutinty.  Afterwards, “The Three Amigos” emerged to the only public scrutiny the meetings would receive: namely George W. Bush reassuring the public that nothing offensive to public morals took place while the public was forbidden from listening in.

So, it was a boring, uneventful series of meetings in which nothing which the public would disapprove of took place, but the public was still nevertheless forbidden from seeing these uneventful meetings?

#2. The following video has recently become an internet sensation because of youtube, digg.com and reddit.com.  It shows three very suspicious ‘protestors’ who come to a peaceful protest with stones and rocks in hand seeking to provoke a confrontation.  It shows fairly reasonable circumstantial evidence that they were actually police informants designed to create cause for the police to crack down.  When confronted with the realization that the crowd surrounding them has realized this, they ‘give themselves up’ to the police.

Now, the other part of the story that has been widely reported, is that after these three were handcuffed, a picture was shot which showed that two of the ‘protesters’ had the same boots as a police officer.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

The Toronto Star linked to the youtube video, but their report still suggested that it could have been a coincidence.  They wrote that:

“Late Tuesday, photographs taken by another protester surfaced, showing the trio lying prone on the ground. The photos show the soles of their boots adorned by yellow triangles. A police officer kneeling beside the men has an identical yellow triangle on the sole of his boot.”

Clearly, it takes no time at all to see that the protestors have the same boots as ONE of the police officers.  That hardly qualifies for investigative journalism.  And in and of itself without further investigation, this can still be dismissed as a coincidence by the government or by skeptics.

#3. But the part of the story that hasn’t been reported is also the part of the story which proves that all this circumstantial evidence above is not merely a series of coincidence.  The picture below shows that it’s not a matter of these protestors coincidentally having the same style of boots as one of the police officers, but rather that they have the exact same boots as all of the police officers.

 (Original, hi-rez picture source here — look for yourself)

I made this image when I started to notice something as I was looking over the super-hi rez version of the same image.  If it didn’t take me long to figure this out, no journalist worth his or her salt should have missed it.

Take a look at the way the seam of the leather at the back of everyone’s boots falls in a straight line from the ankle towards the heel.  It doesn’t taper outwards away from or in towards the achilles tendon.  Nor does it curve in any way around the heel and converge towards the achilles tendon.  Rather it runs straight and perpendicular to the sole of the boot.  Notice anything similar between everyone’s boots?

If it wasn’t just one of the officers, then all of the evidence above is not merely circumstantial.  If all of the evidence of police interference in this protest is not circumstantial, then from this everything else, including the media’s complicity in this story, follows.

“But we’ve always been at war with Eurasia” and other truths…

“Always [Big Brother’s] eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or outdoors, in the bath or in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”

 ——————————————-

I recently came across this video clip at Terry’s blog “Message in a Matrix“.  Terry’s a good comrade from the UK, so for all you progressives here in Canada interested in some excellent video selections and commentary from a British perspective, I strongly recommend a visit to his blog.

This clip in particular I felt was haunting especially when paired up with the New York Times’ excellent article (that’s right, I actually praised the New York Times) “City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention.”

In the NY Times piece, it is noted that NYPD (in concert with other US thoughtpolice agencies) spent a year spying on people who were planning to demonstrate against George W. Bush at the Republican convention.  But the real kicker is that they monitored people from across the US as well as Canada and Europe; they shared their intelligence on people who had broken no laws with various other law enforcement agencies; and had such detailed intelligence that they knew of mundane details such as the nature of the performance to be given by a small group of musicians called “Bands against Bush” including how they were planning on getting their political messages out in between musical sets.

Read that NY Times article, then watch this video and then tell me that America has not become a police state.