Mary Harney is a BIg Fat FARCin Liar
About two and a half years ago, Henry Kissinger, the architect of the greatest genocide of the last fifty years, visited my home town of Cork, to give a talk in the university.
Thousands of students, staff and other protestors braved the nasty weather to shout as loud as the man who ordered saturation bombing of Cambodia, continued the bombing of Vietnam and Laos, supported the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile, not to mention allowing the Indonesian Government to eviscerate East Timor.
I was one of those shouting.
Normally I'm a mild mannered sort of guy and I get all the anger out of my system by putting it into my writing.
But when one of the people who's most directly responsible for so much of the pain and suffering in the world visits your home town, there's only one thing that you can do, and that's shout.
I shouted so loud that day that I was exhausted. I was hoarse from calling out the names of countries that lost literally millions of people as a result of Kissinger's decisions.
I got really close to Kissinger, so close that I could have spat at him or even hit him, though this would have landed me in jail.
The protest got a lot of media attention, covered on the national news that night.
The following Sunday, an Interview with the "man" was broadcast on TV3. Just after being asked about how some sceptics thought about him, he replied in his gravelly, cement-mixer voice that he didn't want to talk about it, and you could here the noise that me and my friends were making outside.
After the interview was broadcast, oleaginous TV3 presenter David McWilliams asked our beloved Tanasite, who'd been at the lecture, to give her feelings.
She was scornful of the protesters, arguing that if it had been Gerry Adams that was speaking, we wouldn't have been there, went on to accuse us of hypocrisy and then went on to excoriate Sinn Fein in her usual manner, indulged by the slimy McWilliams.
You almost have to admire the chutzpah of a woman who travels 300 miles and pays €300 to listen to one of the great mass murderers of history, lambasts a group responsible for a miniscule fraction of the deaths that Kissinger caused, and then accuses her opponents of hypocrisy, based only on her own fascistic if-you're-not-for-us-you're-against-us logic.
Yet she managed to outdo herself last week by making common cause with two of those freedom-loving groups, the Ulster Loyalists and the Columbian government, when she defended the latter's sentencing to 17 years in prison by labelling the FARC group with which they were associated as "narco-terrorists".
It's hard to get a perspective on how bizarre it is for such a senior member of a country's government to take the side of another against it's own citizens. Fatty Harney is surely aware that her heroes in the White House will go to any lengths to ensure that their citizens get a fair trial anywhere in the world. It says a lot about Harney that she's so ashamed of her national identity that she's willing to accept the verdict of a jury in Columbia, probably the nastiest police state in the Western hemisphere.
Of course, she also accepts the word of the US government when they call the FARC "narco-terrorists" who are trying to overthrow a "democratic" government. Well, why wouldn't she? It's not like they've ever lied before.
Unfortunately for people who share her simplistic, manichean view of the world, the truth is way more complicated.
Columbia is far from being a democracy. In the election before last, all four of the left wing candidates were killed by US-backed right-wing paramilitaries. I'm sure there's a side of Fatty Harney that would like the same privilige, but it doesn't do much to support her belief that Columbia is a democracy. In any case, peasants who want to vote for left wing parties know that if they do come into towns, they're likely to be shot anyway.
The claim that the FARC are narco-terrorists is similarly ill-founded. Like the Maoists in Nepal, the FARC are the effective government in many areas of the country and tax the people in these areas to provide them with services, particularly protection against the army who want to kick them off their oil-rich land.
If they tax coca production it's because coca is a lucrative crop, which it is largely because of the American governments misguided policies on drugs and their people's seemingly limitless appetite for the drug.
If this makes the FARC narco-terrorists, then by the same token, so are the US, which subsidises and taxes the production of one of the most addictive substances on earth (tobacco) and uses some of the tax dollars to pay for arms.
And so, I'm sad to say, are our own government, which also taxes tobbaco and booze, and the incomes of many involved in illegal drug production, and gives massive tax breaks to firms involved in producing weapons for state terror regimes in places like Israel, Turkey and Indonesia, though I pity the person who tries to get Harney to admit this.
Meanwhile, it seems the Columbia Three have escaped to Venezuala, another target of the US "War on terror", and possibly onto Cuba.
It's hard to see what Fatty Harney has gained from all of this. Bertie is already haemmoraging support to Sinn Fein, and this latest outburst will convince many in the nationalist wing of Fianna Fail that he's in with the wrong crowd. After the next election, the maths result in Bertie coalescing with the Shinners.
And Fatty won't be able to appeal to George Bush that democratic norms aren't being respected and ask him to intervene.
At least I hope not.
More info on Columbia here
Thousands of students, staff and other protestors braved the nasty weather to shout as loud as the man who ordered saturation bombing of Cambodia, continued the bombing of Vietnam and Laos, supported the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile, not to mention allowing the Indonesian Government to eviscerate East Timor.
I was one of those shouting.
Normally I'm a mild mannered sort of guy and I get all the anger out of my system by putting it into my writing.
But when one of the people who's most directly responsible for so much of the pain and suffering in the world visits your home town, there's only one thing that you can do, and that's shout.
I shouted so loud that day that I was exhausted. I was hoarse from calling out the names of countries that lost literally millions of people as a result of Kissinger's decisions.
I got really close to Kissinger, so close that I could have spat at him or even hit him, though this would have landed me in jail.
The protest got a lot of media attention, covered on the national news that night.
The following Sunday, an Interview with the "man" was broadcast on TV3. Just after being asked about how some sceptics thought about him, he replied in his gravelly, cement-mixer voice that he didn't want to talk about it, and you could here the noise that me and my friends were making outside.
After the interview was broadcast, oleaginous TV3 presenter David McWilliams asked our beloved Tanasite, who'd been at the lecture, to give her feelings.
She was scornful of the protesters, arguing that if it had been Gerry Adams that was speaking, we wouldn't have been there, went on to accuse us of hypocrisy and then went on to excoriate Sinn Fein in her usual manner, indulged by the slimy McWilliams.
You almost have to admire the chutzpah of a woman who travels 300 miles and pays €300 to listen to one of the great mass murderers of history, lambasts a group responsible for a miniscule fraction of the deaths that Kissinger caused, and then accuses her opponents of hypocrisy, based only on her own fascistic if-you're-not-for-us-you're-against-us logic.
Yet she managed to outdo herself last week by making common cause with two of those freedom-loving groups, the Ulster Loyalists and the Columbian government, when she defended the latter's sentencing to 17 years in prison by labelling the FARC group with which they were associated as "narco-terrorists".
It's hard to get a perspective on how bizarre it is for such a senior member of a country's government to take the side of another against it's own citizens. Fatty Harney is surely aware that her heroes in the White House will go to any lengths to ensure that their citizens get a fair trial anywhere in the world. It says a lot about Harney that she's so ashamed of her national identity that she's willing to accept the verdict of a jury in Columbia, probably the nastiest police state in the Western hemisphere.
Of course, she also accepts the word of the US government when they call the FARC "narco-terrorists" who are trying to overthrow a "democratic" government. Well, why wouldn't she? It's not like they've ever lied before.
Unfortunately for people who share her simplistic, manichean view of the world, the truth is way more complicated.
Columbia is far from being a democracy. In the election before last, all four of the left wing candidates were killed by US-backed right-wing paramilitaries. I'm sure there's a side of Fatty Harney that would like the same privilige, but it doesn't do much to support her belief that Columbia is a democracy. In any case, peasants who want to vote for left wing parties know that if they do come into towns, they're likely to be shot anyway.
The claim that the FARC are narco-terrorists is similarly ill-founded. Like the Maoists in Nepal, the FARC are the effective government in many areas of the country and tax the people in these areas to provide them with services, particularly protection against the army who want to kick them off their oil-rich land.
If they tax coca production it's because coca is a lucrative crop, which it is largely because of the American governments misguided policies on drugs and their people's seemingly limitless appetite for the drug.
If this makes the FARC narco-terrorists, then by the same token, so are the US, which subsidises and taxes the production of one of the most addictive substances on earth (tobacco) and uses some of the tax dollars to pay for arms.
And so, I'm sad to say, are our own government, which also taxes tobbaco and booze, and the incomes of many involved in illegal drug production, and gives massive tax breaks to firms involved in producing weapons for state terror regimes in places like Israel, Turkey and Indonesia, though I pity the person who tries to get Harney to admit this.
Meanwhile, it seems the Columbia Three have escaped to Venezuala, another target of the US "War on terror", and possibly onto Cuba.
It's hard to see what Fatty Harney has gained from all of this. Bertie is already haemmoraging support to Sinn Fein, and this latest outburst will convince many in the nationalist wing of Fianna Fail that he's in with the wrong crowd. After the next election, the maths result in Bertie coalescing with the Shinners.
And Fatty won't be able to appeal to George Bush that democratic norms aren't being respected and ask him to intervene.
At least I hope not.
More info on Columbia here
posted by seamus @ 12:40 am
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