kerkko.fi

At the height of the crackdown against the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Albert Camus warned French leftists not to allow political "expediency any precedence over regard for truth." The western left that ignored or, worse, justified the suffocation of Budapest, Camus thundered, "was in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable of merely stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws." Today – with a century of catastrophic lapses in judgment in hindsight – too many western progressives are still trapped by the same "systematic relativism" that threatens the "death of intelligence."

One day, Shin joined his mother at work, planting rice. When she fell behind, a guard made her kneel in the hot sun with her arms in the air until she passed out. Shin did not know what to say to her, so he said nothing. [...] On the morning after he betrayed his mother and brother, uniformed men came to the schoolyard for Shin. He was handcuffed, blindfolded and driven in silence to an underground prison. [...] Shin awoke in his cell, soiled with excrement and urine. His back was blistered and sticky. The flesh around his ankles had been scraped away. As his burns became infected, he grew feverish and lost his appetite. [...] Shin's fever grew worse and the blisters on his back swelled with pus.

"Execute Jang Hye Gyung and Shin He Geun, traitors of the people," the senior officer said. Shin looked at his father. He was weeping silently. When guards dragged her to the gallows, Shin saw that his mother looked bloated. They forced her to stand on a wooden box, gagged her, tied her arms behind her back and a noose around her neck. She scanned the crowd and found Shin. He refused to hold her gaze. When guards pulled away the box, she jerked about desperately. As he watched his mother struggle, Shin thought she deserved to die. Shin's brother looked gaunt as guards tied him to the wooden post. Three guards fired their rifles three times. He thought his brother, too, deserved it.

http://kony2012.com/

The Finnish crane manufacturer, Konecranes, has announced that it would stop selling new equipment and services to Iran. The advocacy organisation, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), urged the company to leave Iran because one of the regime's preferred methods of execution is public hanging from construction cranes.

Konecranes follows four other crane manufacturers, -- Tadano, Terex, UNIC, and Liebherr, -- which ended their business in Iran following public calls from UANI. Another Finnish company, Cargotec, has exported ship cranes to Iran. UANI launched its "Cranes Campaign" in May 2011 to exert pressure on crane manufacturers.

http://t.uani.com/noivr6

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tifinagh

Ghoga met former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi for the first time on 6 February 2011, only eleven days before the popular revolution. Gaddafi had Ghoga and three other lawyers from Benghazi be brought to a meeting with him in his tent in Tripoli.

The meeting lasted for ninety minutes. Also present was Abdullah Senussi, Gaddafi's brother-in-law and head of his secret service. The four human rights lawyers from Benghazi called for freedom of the press, freedom of opinion, and a constitution.

After the discussion with Gaddafi, who, according to Ghoga's words, was clearly irritated at the demands, the four lawyers from Benghazi decided to call for a "Day of Rage" in Benghazi on 17 February 2011. This was the beginning of the Libyan revolution.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Hakim_Ghoga

Tempting as it is to simply turn away, it is important for democrats to understand the pro-tyrant left. It is vastly influential on campuses and its ideas are trickling down into the wider culture. In the short twentieth century, the rise of Stalinism, a reactionary but non-capitalist social system, disorientated the left -- bar some fragments -- more or less completely.

There was a slow scouring out of the habits of mind, the sensibilities and the values of an older left-wing culture that had been rooted in the Enlightenment, the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, and the ethical socialism of the mass European labor movements. In its place was put power-worship, authoritarianism, and a cult of the transformative power of revolutionary violence.

Crucially, in the 1960s and 1970s, while the New Left innovated in the realm of culture and personal relations, when it came to geopolitics it mostly fell into line as cheerleader or apologist for one authoritarian “progressive” after another. As this New Left aged and drifted to the faculties and publishing houses it declared itself to be anti-anti-communist. In practice, it blamed America first.

After the collapse of its global alternative to liberal capitalism, the pro-tyrant left simply refused to rethink. Rather than give up either its Manichean view of a world composed of two camps of progress and reaction, it recreated both by substituting an implacable negativism, centred on a conception of America as the “Great Satan,” in the place of what had been a coherent (if wrong-headed and tyrannical) program for social reconstruction.

After 1989, and especially after 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the old idea that Stalinism (its crimes notwithstanding) was objectively progressive against the West, morphed into the idea that all opposition to "US imperialism" or "Empire" was a "resistance" or "multitude" that must be (its crimes notwithstanding) supported, or at least not opposed energetically.

This pro-tyrant left thinks it holds the key to the entire world in the palm of its hand. If America is opposed to a tyrant, then -- there is some dubious logic here, but this really is the crucial move -- the tyrant must be opposing America. And -- this is the last stretch, stay with me -- therefore the tyrant is an "anti-imperialist" and, objectively, "progressive."

These ideas have been adopted in softer forms throughout the culture. We see it in the refusal of emotional commitment to the West in its battles against dictators and terrorists, the refusal to credit the West with anything but malign intent, the tendency to blame ourselves when we are attacked, and the pathological refusal to see plain the nature of forces such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

Two decades after creating the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee says humans have become so reliant on it that access to the Web should now be considered a basic right. In a speech at an MIT symposium, Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything, Berners-Lee compared access to the Web with access to water. While access to water is a more fundamental right, because people simply cannot survive without it, Web access should be seen as a right, too, because anyone who lacks Web access will fall behind their more connected peers.