Archive for February 1st, 2010
Fascism And The Iphone
Over the years there has been the occasional debate as to when some idiots might try to revive the Fascism of old. Those strains of this odious ideology straight from the 1930s.
Obviously, we are more accustomed to the jazzed up version nowadays, modern day neofascism.
Smart suits, toned down rhetoric and ambiguous soundbites have largely replaced the stomping boots of yesteryear, as neofascism tries to have a makeover.
It is not terribly successful and most historically literate adults can see through the façade and paperthin arguments advanced by contemporary neofascists. It is still worrying, but not in the same way that the 1930s was, not just yet.
So it is all the more surprising that the hardcore fascist philosophies of yesteryear are finding resonance amongst modern Italians, young Italians with a flair for the iPhone.
The popularity of Benito Mussolini’s speeches amongst modern Italians is incredibly depressing, Spiegel Online has more:
”An iPhone application offering the speeches of the World War II dictator Benito Mussolini has become a bestseller in Italy. While the app’s creator defends it as a valuable historical tool, others claim it is glorifying fascism.
It’s just a simple iPhone application. But it has proven enough to trigger a raging debate in Italy. After all, the app happens to offer the full text of over 100 speeches by the country’s Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
After having been released on Jan. 21, the application, known as iMussolini, has rocketed to the second-place spot — behind a wallpaper application — on the Italian version of iTunes.
“This is really a flabbergasting phenomenon,” wrote one commentator Wednesday on the online version of the daily La Reppublica, “especially when you consider the fact that the iPhone has gained cult status for the Facebook and Web 2.0 generation. These aren’t nostalgic old people and historians of the fascist era but kids and young adults that spend time and money on the Internet and get their information from it.” ”
Bin Laden Tries To Exploit Climate Change.
Left Foot Forward has a piece on how Bin laden is trying to exploit the debate over climate change and blame the Americans for everything.
But if we are honest that is to be expected, not that many, hopefully, pay attention to Bin Laden’s rantings. I would expect soon enough that the Israelis will be blamed for Climate Change, earthquakes and any number of unrelated natural disasters, that’s where this line of reasoning goes, utter idiocy.
Execute Prisoners Later.
This makes horrendous reading:
“According to Human Rights and Democracy Activists in Iran (HRDAI), the night before the execution of Arash Rahmanipour and Mohamd Reza Ali Zamani, security agents played [a video that aired] their false confessions in an attempt to justify the crime [of executing the two prisoners]. In the video, four other political prisoners under torture were forced to confess.
The four prisoners were arrested late October 2009. Their names are: Mahmoud Dolatabadi, Mehdi Saeedi, Abbas Vali Khani, and Borzu Kamrani.
The prisoners have been kept in solitary confinement cells since late October. They have endured physical and mental torture by security agents who had promised to set the prisoners free after their false confessions and a payment of $30,000 USD.
According to reports, the agents forced the prisoners to practice their false confessions. They were made to concentrate on each word and be conscious of their facial expressions while uttering them. To make the confessions look as natural as possible, the agents applied makeup to the prisoners.
The purpose of the false confessions is to create a reason to accuse political prisoners of Moharebeh (waging war against God) so they can be executed later. The purpose of the executions is to create fear among Iran’s civil society.”
Update 1: The trial of three Bahia’s in Iran.
(H/T: Trish)
Nicely Put.
“It concerns the issue of liberty: the liberty to publish well-argued opinions without fearing that the local police will drop by for a “friendly chat” aimed at nudging you towards removing posts from your own blog which may have offended someone else’s cherished self-image. For one thing, finding the police at you door on a Sunday morning is not exactly an image of friendliness conjured up by law-abiding conscientious citizens. For another, the preservation of another person’s cherished self-image should not really be the business of our law-enforcement personnel.
I think this is a very simple principle to grasp and to agree with.”
“Never Have Married Into A German Family.”
I never fully understood the British fascination with Princess Diana, but her comment that “she should never have married into a German family.” reminded me of what the old English aristocracy in Britain call the Royal Family, ‘The Germans’.
A fairly innocuous but typically sneering reproach so common amongst the upper English classes, nevertheless somewhat lacking in a sense of English history. Forgetting the role of the Saxons and the Angles in early Britain, long before the House of Hanover was even founded.
Thankfully this article doesn’t dwell too much on Diana or the Royals, but has some insights from Anthony Julius. It is better than it seems, once you get past Diana and Co:
“Most Anglo-Jews today infer the existence of English anti-Semitism from a bias they perceive in reporting on the Middle East. The bias dismays them; it is an intrusive presence in their lives; they take it to derive from a hostility to the Jewish state of Israel; they relate this hostility to a broader animus towards Jews.
Yet they would not maintain that the hostility they sense, however demoralising, is directed at them. They would probably regard as exceptional, for example, a newspaper columnist’s statement, a few years ago, that he ignores letters about Israel written by correspondents with Jewish names. The animus is instead an ambience. And this is consistent with a more general sense of how English anti-Semitism operates — by stealth, by tacit understandings and limited exclusions. “
