Saturday, December 10, 2005
TUDJMAN DID MAKE THESE NAZI STATEMENTS
Back on 20th November I said that I was unable to be sure that the statements attributed to the Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman that "Hitler's new european order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews" & "genocide is commanded by the word of the Almighty" could be proven.
Thanks to my antipodean friend Peter North it has now been proven (it would have been impossible to do this without the web - which is a very hopeful development for humanity). This is a translation provided by a Serbian site & from these exerpts I can see why Tudjman's style is described as turgid. Nonetheless both remarks are there, with a marginal variation in wording but not meaning, which prove this is a separate translation of the same original document.
This is a work of supposed history & Tudjman adopts the stance of merely reporting history particularly the undeniably genocidal history of the old testment Jews (& everybody else of that era). He also scores a number of points about the actions of Germany's enemies with which I would not disagree. Indeed many of the things Hitler did were things very respectable people proposed before him - I have also said elsewhere how the Jewish Holocaust had to be promoted post-war as his biggest crime because Hitler's major crime, the unprovoked extermination of 24 million Soviets was effectively western policy from the late 1940s.
Indeed a disgusting aspect of NATO's genocide in Yugoslavia is how easily the powers that be, using the language of anti-Nazism (calling Milosevic "another Hitler" etc) were able & willing to repeat Hitler's crimes including arming & helping people like Tudjman who they knew to be genocidal Nazis. All the time the media deliberately lied unctuously inventing humanitarian reasons for the genocide our government did & they censored. If ever there was a justified war it was the one against Hitler but in doing this almost every major politician, journalist, newsreader & religious leader is metaphorically pissing on those who died in that war (this also happened literally in Croatia under Tudjman but no western leader objected). Every last one of these bastards should be arrested & (after due process) strung up from the nearest streetlamp.
Tudjman's role as a historian gives the impression that his statement about God's position on genocide is merely a lofty historical judgement, which would apply also to his claim that Jasenovic wasn't a death camp merely a jobseekers transit camp & anyway it was all run by the Jews. However to do this he has to ignore the vast amount of evidence from every other source but his that the WWII Croatian Nazis were publicly committed to the "kill 1/3rd, convert 1/3rd & drive out 1/3rd" of Serbs in precisely the same way & for the same reason that Kohl, Clinton et al ignored the fact that we were employing people similarly publicly committed to genocide.
I should also mention the Simon Wiesenthal Center who, I am told, had a translation of his book & who say they specifically refused to meet Tudjman but, because their search facility goes back to just after the end of the Kosovo war cannot say why. I did email tham but am still awaiting a reply.I know that, while still alive, Wiesenthal personally said that the first ethnic cleansing was of 50,000 Serbs from the bits of Croatia held by Tudjman at the start of the war.
--------------------------------------------------------------
PETER'S COMMENT AGAIN"..the establishment of Hitler's new European order could be justified by the need both to remove the Jews (undesirable more or less in all European countries) and to correct the French-British sin of the Versailles order."
"...genocidal violence is a natural phenomenon, in keeping with the human-social and mythological-divine nature. It is not only allowed, but even recommended. Moreover, it is advised in the words of the Almighty Jehovah whenever it is useful for survival or the renewed establishment of the kingdom of the chosen people, or for the maintenance and spread of His only genuine faith."
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/library/facts/Tudjman.html
"...Remember also that Tudjman has made an indelible mark as a Holocaust denier and revisionist. In his pseudo-historical book Wastelands-Historical Truth, Tudjman ridiculed the notion that 6 million Jews perished in Europe and that the estimates of those murdered at Jasenovac in particular were grossly exaggerated. Incredibly, he argued that the Jews not only ran and "jealously" managed the camp, they actually orchestrated the murder of the Gypsies.
"For good measure, and to leave no doubt about where he stood, Tudjman criticized the efforts to expose Kurt Waldheim (as a matter of full journalistic disclosure, I must state for the record that I take that charge rather personally), while comparing Israeli policy towards the Palestinians to Nazi genocide, going so far as calling Israelis "Judeo-Nazis."
While campaigning for the Presidency, Tudjman fanned the flames of xenophobia and anti-Semitism by proclaiming on Croatian television that he thanked God that his wife was neither a Jew nor a Serb. How's that for subtlety.
"And he didn't get better after taking office. In a move which was both reprehensible and revealing as to how far he would go to rehabilitate the fascists, several years ago Tudjman attempted to turn the Jasenovac site into a burial ground for all those who were, in his words, "Croatian war victims."
"This obscene plan would have buried Ustashe criminals side by side with the very people they killed. There was to be no distinction between murderer and true victim. All were equally deserving of remembrance."
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sher052098.html
Thanks to my antipodean friend Peter North it has now been proven (it would have been impossible to do this without the web - which is a very hopeful development for humanity). This is a translation provided by a Serbian site & from these exerpts I can see why Tudjman's style is described as turgid. Nonetheless both remarks are there, with a marginal variation in wording but not meaning, which prove this is a separate translation of the same original document.
This is a work of supposed history & Tudjman adopts the stance of merely reporting history particularly the undeniably genocidal history of the old testment Jews (& everybody else of that era). He also scores a number of points about the actions of Germany's enemies with which I would not disagree. Indeed many of the things Hitler did were things very respectable people proposed before him - I have also said elsewhere how the Jewish Holocaust had to be promoted post-war as his biggest crime because Hitler's major crime, the unprovoked extermination of 24 million Soviets was effectively western policy from the late 1940s.
Indeed a disgusting aspect of NATO's genocide in Yugoslavia is how easily the powers that be, using the language of anti-Nazism (calling Milosevic "another Hitler" etc) were able & willing to repeat Hitler's crimes including arming & helping people like Tudjman who they knew to be genocidal Nazis. All the time the media deliberately lied unctuously inventing humanitarian reasons for the genocide our government did & they censored. If ever there was a justified war it was the one against Hitler but in doing this almost every major politician, journalist, newsreader & religious leader is metaphorically pissing on those who died in that war (this also happened literally in Croatia under Tudjman but no western leader objected). Every last one of these bastards should be arrested & (after due process) strung up from the nearest streetlamp.
Tudjman's role as a historian gives the impression that his statement about God's position on genocide is merely a lofty historical judgement, which would apply also to his claim that Jasenovic wasn't a death camp merely a jobseekers transit camp & anyway it was all run by the Jews. However to do this he has to ignore the vast amount of evidence from every other source but his that the WWII Croatian Nazis were publicly committed to the "kill 1/3rd, convert 1/3rd & drive out 1/3rd" of Serbs in precisely the same way & for the same reason that Kohl, Clinton et al ignored the fact that we were employing people similarly publicly committed to genocide.
I should also mention the Simon Wiesenthal Center who, I am told, had a translation of his book & who say they specifically refused to meet Tudjman but, because their search facility goes back to just after the end of the Kosovo war cannot say why. I did email tham but am still awaiting a reply.I know that, while still alive, Wiesenthal personally said that the first ethnic cleansing was of 50,000 Serbs from the bits of Croatia held by Tudjman at the start of the war.
--------------------------------------------------------------
PETER'S COMMENT AGAIN"..the establishment of Hitler's new European order could be justified by the need both to remove the Jews (undesirable more or less in all European countries) and to correct the French-British sin of the Versailles order."
"...genocidal violence is a natural phenomenon, in keeping with the human-social and mythological-divine nature. It is not only allowed, but even recommended. Moreover, it is advised in the words of the Almighty Jehovah whenever it is useful for survival or the renewed establishment of the kingdom of the chosen people, or for the maintenance and spread of His only genuine faith."
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/library/facts/Tudjman.html
"...Remember also that Tudjman has made an indelible mark as a Holocaust denier and revisionist. In his pseudo-historical book Wastelands-Historical Truth, Tudjman ridiculed the notion that 6 million Jews perished in Europe and that the estimates of those murdered at Jasenovac in particular were grossly exaggerated. Incredibly, he argued that the Jews not only ran and "jealously" managed the camp, they actually orchestrated the murder of the Gypsies.
"For good measure, and to leave no doubt about where he stood, Tudjman criticized the efforts to expose Kurt Waldheim (as a matter of full journalistic disclosure, I must state for the record that I take that charge rather personally), while comparing Israeli policy towards the Palestinians to Nazi genocide, going so far as calling Israelis "Judeo-Nazis."
While campaigning for the Presidency, Tudjman fanned the flames of xenophobia and anti-Semitism by proclaiming on Croatian television that he thanked God that his wife was neither a Jew nor a Serb. How's that for subtlety.
"And he didn't get better after taking office. In a move which was both reprehensible and revealing as to how far he would go to rehabilitate the fascists, several years ago Tudjman attempted to turn the Jasenovac site into a burial ground for all those who were, in his words, "Croatian war victims."
"This obscene plan would have buried Ustashe criminals side by side with the very people they killed. There was to be no distinction between murderer and true victim. All were equally deserving of remembrance."
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sher052098.html
Monday, December 05, 2005
ANOTHER HERALD NUCLEAR LETTER
Why Britain will need nuclear power
It is gratifying to find that nobody disputes the facts in my recent letter explaining why, without more nuclear, we are going to lose two-thirds of our electricity. Regrettably I cannot return the favour to correspondents who now oppose nuclear on other grounds.
David Purves (December 1) objects to nuclear firstly on the grounds that Mr Blair supports it and secondly because since the world has a high population and high living standards it is all our fault and we should just accept Gaia's will.
In fact, Mr Blair's conversion is very much of the eleventh-hour variety and "haven't made up my mind yet and anyway there is still a need for windmills" variety. For eight years he has opposed nuclear power and, indeed, was reported as personally responsible for insisting that his last review described nuclear as "unattractive". Labour bankrupted our nuclear industry by administrative fiat, thus making it enormously difficult to persuade investors to put their wallets on the chopping block again. That he belatedly recognises the urgency with which blackouts are approaching merely proves how obvious it is.
The second point is a matter of philosophy and I would only point out that we are all descended from thousands of generations of humans who did not accept catastrophes.
Your columnist, Iain Macwhirter (November 30), starts off as a "nuclear agnostic" but within a few paragraphs has transformed into believing that the nuclear case has already "come apart" on "scientific, moral and economic grounds". The reason he gives for this damascene conversion is that rising sea levels will cover many current reactors (and most of the world's great cities but this seems less worrying). In fact, current measurements show sea level rising at 2mm a year, twice the historical rate to be sure, but nonetheless sufficiently slowly that to rise by 10 feet will take 1400 years. Since reactors have a design life of about 50 years, even were the rate to increase somewhat, this is hardly reason for panic.
Neil Craig, 27 Woodlands Drive, Glasgow.
Another letter in the Herald. I noticed on Saturday that in their round up of the week they listed electricity supply as the number one topic of letter writers last week - since there were only 4 letters published, including mine, this suggests they have had a number which were unpublishable. I think it is worth making the point about Blair because there is a risk that he will be able to monopolise it.
It is really rather good of the Herald to have published this when it implicitly accuses their columnist of lying about his nuclear agnosticism.
References
Blair's responsibility for the description on the last review - see the FT 25th Feb 03 p3
2mm sea level rise http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/Key_Topics/IceSheet_SeaLevel/
It is gratifying to find that nobody disputes the facts in my recent letter explaining why, without more nuclear, we are going to lose two-thirds of our electricity. Regrettably I cannot return the favour to correspondents who now oppose nuclear on other grounds.
David Purves (December 1) objects to nuclear firstly on the grounds that Mr Blair supports it and secondly because since the world has a high population and high living standards it is all our fault and we should just accept Gaia's will.
In fact, Mr Blair's conversion is very much of the eleventh-hour variety and "haven't made up my mind yet and anyway there is still a need for windmills" variety. For eight years he has opposed nuclear power and, indeed, was reported as personally responsible for insisting that his last review described nuclear as "unattractive". Labour bankrupted our nuclear industry by administrative fiat, thus making it enormously difficult to persuade investors to put their wallets on the chopping block again. That he belatedly recognises the urgency with which blackouts are approaching merely proves how obvious it is.
The second point is a matter of philosophy and I would only point out that we are all descended from thousands of generations of humans who did not accept catastrophes.
Your columnist, Iain Macwhirter (November 30), starts off as a "nuclear agnostic" but within a few paragraphs has transformed into believing that the nuclear case has already "come apart" on "scientific, moral and economic grounds". The reason he gives for this damascene conversion is that rising sea levels will cover many current reactors (and most of the world's great cities but this seems less worrying). In fact, current measurements show sea level rising at 2mm a year, twice the historical rate to be sure, but nonetheless sufficiently slowly that to rise by 10 feet will take 1400 years. Since reactors have a design life of about 50 years, even were the rate to increase somewhat, this is hardly reason for panic.
Neil Craig, 27 Woodlands Drive, Glasgow.
Another letter in the Herald. I noticed on Saturday that in their round up of the week they listed electricity supply as the number one topic of letter writers last week - since there were only 4 letters published, including mine, this suggests they have had a number which were unpublishable. I think it is worth making the point about Blair because there is a risk that he will be able to monopolise it.
It is really rather good of the Herald to have published this when it implicitly accuses their columnist of lying about his nuclear agnosticism.
References
Blair's responsibility for the description on the last review - see the FT 25th Feb 03 p3
2mm sea level rise http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/Key_Topics/IceSheet_SeaLevel/
Sunday, December 04, 2005
DOES 1 1/2% GROWTH MATTER
Since devolution the Scottish economy has grown by 1% annually while the UK averages 2 1/2%. So what does 1 1/2%, equivalent to under 4 day's pay matter?
Firstly growth is a continuing process. Each year's failure adds to the last. Secondly it is a compound function.To double a value you only have to apply a steady rate growth totaling approxiamately 72% (this is known as the rule of 72. Thus to double Scotland's GNP at 1% will take 72 years, the UK at 2 1/2% takes 29 years. However China, at 10% takes 7 years & Ireland at 7%, 10 years. This means that by the time it takes Scotland to double Ireland's GNP will have doubled & doubled & doubled & doubled & doubled & doubled & doubled again. Except that long before that happens the last person in Scotland under 50 will have moved out.
It need not be this way. We know how to achieve growth because we have the Irish example. We need lower business taxes & less regulation, particularly in the housebuilding sector. That is virtually all Ireland has done.
Ultimately the driver of growth is technological innovation. Scotland has a very good history of this but 95% of innovation is adopting technology from other nations. I am going to be sufficiently politically incorrect here as to mention modern nuclear power stations, GM medicines & GM foods as industries we are allowing to pass us by to satisfy an anti-technology lobby which makes it quite clear they will never be satisfied. In the end the technology we develop has done & will do more to help humanity than all the decisions at G8.
For centuries Britain maintained an average growth rate of 2% which was unprecedented in the 1790s & mediocre by the 1970s. Since then the picture of world growth has been more complicated - some Asian countries have continuous growth rates of up to 10% as have some post-Soviet states, while some western countries, particularly those who have adopted so-called Green policies, have fallen back. Singapore, however managed a very successful greening programme in an overcrowded country without opposing technology or losing growth. World growth now seems to be about 5% & we can expect it to at least maintain that level. Moore's Law is the observed fact that for decades computer capacity per pound has doubled every 18 months & should continue for the foreseable future. As computers power an ever growing part of the economy we can expect high growth to continue to be possible.
There are those who say that growth cannot continue because we face environmental & resource collapse. No. High-tech is, virtually by definition, more resource efficient. There is a delightful line in Back to the Future II where Marty suggests landing their (flying) car on the villain's vehicle. Doc Brown says "That is a 1950s saloon & this is a state of the art DeLorean - they'de go through us like tissue paper". Other modern products tend to be similarly lightweight.
Anyway we are not going to run out of resources. With the exception of oil minerals rarely get destroyed they only get moved around. The definition of an ore is anything from which the mineral can be cost effectively extracted. This is a moving target since, as technology improves, extraction get easier & there are now some waste dumps being mined. Oil is a special case because what we want is usually not the hydrocarbon but the energy stored therein. Conventional oil production has been regularly forecast to peak since 1855 & while someday it will prove right there are estimated to be 14,000 billion barrels (500 years supply) of shale oil, more expensive but not impossible to process. Beyond that Professor Bernard Cohen has calculated that there is enough uranium dissolved in seawater to keep our current economy running for 4.5 billion years.
"See what free men can do" said Burt Rhutan when launching Spaceship One. There are no limits to growth, within this universe & to what will be achieved. We should be a full part of it.
(originally written for publication but not taken)
Firstly growth is a continuing process. Each year's failure adds to the last. Secondly it is a compound function.To double a value you only have to apply a steady rate growth totaling approxiamately 72% (this is known as the rule of 72. Thus to double Scotland's GNP at 1% will take 72 years, the UK at 2 1/2% takes 29 years. However China, at 10% takes 7 years & Ireland at 7%, 10 years. This means that by the time it takes Scotland to double Ireland's GNP will have doubled & doubled & doubled & doubled & doubled & doubled & doubled again. Except that long before that happens the last person in Scotland under 50 will have moved out.
It need not be this way. We know how to achieve growth because we have the Irish example. We need lower business taxes & less regulation, particularly in the housebuilding sector. That is virtually all Ireland has done.
Ultimately the driver of growth is technological innovation. Scotland has a very good history of this but 95% of innovation is adopting technology from other nations. I am going to be sufficiently politically incorrect here as to mention modern nuclear power stations, GM medicines & GM foods as industries we are allowing to pass us by to satisfy an anti-technology lobby which makes it quite clear they will never be satisfied. In the end the technology we develop has done & will do more to help humanity than all the decisions at G8.
For centuries Britain maintained an average growth rate of 2% which was unprecedented in the 1790s & mediocre by the 1970s. Since then the picture of world growth has been more complicated - some Asian countries have continuous growth rates of up to 10% as have some post-Soviet states, while some western countries, particularly those who have adopted so-called Green policies, have fallen back. Singapore, however managed a very successful greening programme in an overcrowded country without opposing technology or losing growth. World growth now seems to be about 5% & we can expect it to at least maintain that level. Moore's Law is the observed fact that for decades computer capacity per pound has doubled every 18 months & should continue for the foreseable future. As computers power an ever growing part of the economy we can expect high growth to continue to be possible.
There are those who say that growth cannot continue because we face environmental & resource collapse. No. High-tech is, virtually by definition, more resource efficient. There is a delightful line in Back to the Future II where Marty suggests landing their (flying) car on the villain's vehicle. Doc Brown says "That is a 1950s saloon & this is a state of the art DeLorean - they'de go through us like tissue paper". Other modern products tend to be similarly lightweight.
Anyway we are not going to run out of resources. With the exception of oil minerals rarely get destroyed they only get moved around. The definition of an ore is anything from which the mineral can be cost effectively extracted. This is a moving target since, as technology improves, extraction get easier & there are now some waste dumps being mined. Oil is a special case because what we want is usually not the hydrocarbon but the energy stored therein. Conventional oil production has been regularly forecast to peak since 1855 & while someday it will prove right there are estimated to be 14,000 billion barrels (500 years supply) of shale oil, more expensive but not impossible to process. Beyond that Professor Bernard Cohen has calculated that there is enough uranium dissolved in seawater to keep our current economy running for 4.5 billion years.
"See what free men can do" said Burt Rhutan when launching Spaceship One. There are no limits to growth, within this universe & to what will be achieved. We should be a full part of it.
(originally written for publication but not taken)
