Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
John Stuart Mill
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
Mark Twain
Don't let schooling interfere with your education.
All generalizations are false, including this one.
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
The Public is merely a multiplied "me."
Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we."
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
Winston Churchill
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.
Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.
Otto Von Bismarck
When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.
I have seen three emperors in their nakedness, and the sight was not inspiring.
Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.
Be polite; write diplomatically ;even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.
Voltaire
A witty saying proves nothing.
If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.
Karl Marx
Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.
All I know is I'm not a Marxist.
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
Monday, October 04, 2004
British Gitmo Detainee Says He Witnessed Two Murders
By Mick
A British citizen named Moazzam Begg who is currently imprisoned at Gitmo is claiming in a letter to his lawyers that he was sent there because after being arrested by Pakistani police and turned over to American authorities, he was held at Bagram Airbase where he witnessed two murders of detainees by American soldiers.
Moazzam Begg, 36, who has been detained for 2 years without charge or trial, complains in the first letter from a serving inmate to describe severe mistreatment of having suffered "vindictive torture" and death threats, and implies that he has made a false confession.
His lawyers said yesterday that they believed he had been held in solitary confinement at the US military base in Cuba because he had seen the killing. He has had no contact with fellow prisoners since his arrival almost 600 days ago.
Although former detainees have alleged that they suffered extensive abuse and torture at Bagram in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, mail from the camp is heavily censored.
It is unclear why the Pentagon has cleared a document which makes such strong allegations of abuse.
Mr Begg's letter, which is labelled as a supplement to an earlier statement, was written in July and forwarded to his legal team earlier this week. He wrote it after learning that he would be given access to a lawyer.
The American lawyer who subsequently visited him could be jailed if she disclosed their discussions.
In his letter Mr Begg, who comes from Birmingham, said that he was a law-abiding Briton who had never met Osama bin Laden or joined al-Qaida or other paramilitary organisations.
He was arrested by Pakistani agents at his home in Islamabad and handed over to the Americans, who held him at Bagram in Afghanistan for a year and transferred him to Guantánamo Bay in February last year.
Mr Begg wrote: "During several interviews, particularly - though unexclusively - in Afghanistan, I was subjected to pernicious threats of torture, actual vindictive torture and death threats - amongst other coercively employed interrogation techniques."
He described signing a statement in early February 2003 "under threats of long-term imprisonment, summary trials and execution", and added: "Interviews were conducted in an environment of generated fear, resonant with terrifying screams of fellow detainees facing similar methods ...
"This culminated ... with the deaths of two fellow detainees at the hands of US military personnel, to which I myself was partially witness."
In fact, two deaths at Bagram were due to 'blunt force injuries'. Clive Stafford Smith, one of Begg's US lawyers, wants the Bush Admin to declassify the autopsy report (which is classified--why?) and the British govt to demand his repatriation back to the UK. Begg's English solicitor, Gareth Peirce, was even tougher. "We are requesting that the UK government immediately takes this evidence of torture to the United Nations demanding that the USA is held responsible."
This potential bombshell comes just as Tony Blair has reneged on his promise to retire and stated publicly that he intends to stand for and serve out a third five-year term. Blair successfully negotiated the release of two other British citizens jailed in Gitmo a few months ago after a firestorm erupted in Britain over their illegal detention--the only thing, it must be said, that he's got to show for his slavish devotion to Bush. The last thing he needs is to be put in the middle of a mess like this: another British citizen wrongly interned claiming he was tortured at Gitmo would be bad enough; one who also says he witnessed US soldiers killing two other prisoners is a nightmare escaped from the dark side of Tony's closet.
"Netpolitik is a new style of diplomacy that seeks to exploit the powerful capabilities of the Internet to shape politics, culture, values, and personal identity. But unlike Realpolitik — which seeks to advance a nation’s political interests through amoral coercion — Netpolitik traffics in “softer” issues such as moral legitimacy, culturalidentity, societal values, and public perception." - The Rise of Netpolitik
PUN-DIT (n) : A learned man; a teacher; a source of opinion; a critic: a political pundit.
