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la vie viennoise

Yesterday the business press was busy lauding IBM's decision to cut back on their pension plan.

IBM said it expects the announced changes, along with 2006 changes under consideration in several other countries, to cut worldwide retirement-related expenses this year by $450 million to $500 million. From 2006 through 2010, the company expects to cut costs by $2.5 billion to $3 billion.

This is absurd. IBM is one of the most successful corporations in the world. Even Bill Gates recently acknowledged (albeit somewhat disingenously as a back-handed swipe at Google) IBM as the company for Microsoft to beat with four times as many employees as Microsoft. If anyone can afford to pay their workers properly and treat their retirees with dignity it is IBM.

The employees getting those good pensions did a lot to create the wealth in which they had expected to share in old age. For decades IBM was able to scoop up many of the best minds in engineering and MBA programs. Those signing on the dotted line might have looked elsewhere if they were to know the ingratitude that awaited them.

Yet another violation of the social contract.

Every time these pension plans gets cut or goes bankrupt after being pillaged by the mother corporation, it is our money (as working people) which is stolen. We worked, we created these pensions funds. Pay us our pensions and stop robbing us.

It is high time that white collar crime is treated with the severity of petty crime. Why are our millions less worthy of protection than the merchandise of the local Walmart?

What really incenses me though is the applause for this behaviour from the press. I suppose most in the press long ago were forced to give up any kind of job security, let alone decent pensions. They are thrilled to see those with join them with nothing. Even better if it is retroactive, so they can point their spindly fingers and shriek to their parents and siblings or anyone else who will listen - I told you there was nothing wrong in becoming a freelance journalist - there is no job security for anybody!

As far as I am concerned this is theft and double-dealing and the rogues who came up with the plan to cheat their fellow workers should be in prison - not collecting triple bonuses this year.

On the up side, enough shenanigans like this at the expense of the middle class (we are not talking about screwing Walmart employees this time) and we will be able to talk about a revolution again.

In the first campaign of 1941, the Germans captured four million Soviet soldiers. Later in the campaign in July 1942, they even managed to capture a very competent and charismatic Soviet general, Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov.

Vlasov knew the horrors of Stalinism first hand and offered to lead a Russian Liberation Army (Russkaya Osvoboditelnaya Armiya) against the Soviets. Many of the POW's were prepared to follow Vlasov into battle against Stalin. Apparently Vlasov's ideology was patriotic, anti-Communist but not particularly democratic. Putin's Russia would be a logical ideological heir. Both men favour close collaboration with German neighbours to strengthen the Russian state.

Hitler instead opted for a policy of oppression and state terrorism and lost the Eastern Front.

With a new Russian civil war raging with German air and mechanical support, one has to believe Stalin would have had a great deal of difficulty holding the Soviet Union together for long.

How different the world would look now if the Soviet Union had come to an end in the forties and had been replaced by a nationalist Russia.

Vlasov and his armies were not put on the Eastern Front until 1945 when it was too late for the Nazis. Shamefully enough, the Allies returned these anti-Communists into the hands of Stalin, where predictably all of the officers were put to death while the soldiers were condemned to life in the Gulags.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

A drab propagandistic page from the Russian-Americans on Vlasov, which gives an emigré perspective on the Russian Liberation Army.

A wonderful picture site with a couple of pages about Vlasov and his defence of Kiev and even more photographs of many of the battlefields and bunkers around Kiev that give a real sense of place to all of these events. Highly recommended to read through the whole site. Serpent's Wall is exactly the kind of work for which the world wide web was created. Many pictures, minimal text, self-published but clean and clear. A chance to see and study something first hand which otherwise would be very difficult to learn about.

In 1942, the Germans own estimate for the number of Russian, Polish and Ukrainian women with child from German soldiers and officers numbered over one million. Such an extraordinary figure is plausible as the invading German army numbered almost three million.

Birth control has always been very primitive from Tsarist Russia to the end of the Soviet Union (abortion was the primary method of birth control at the end of the Soviet Union with an average of four abortions per woman over the course of her life).

Russia and the Ukraine had been often enough invaded and life was nasty, brutal and short enough that - whether for cultural reasons (historical memory) or genetic (those strongly inclined to resist the Golden Horde left no children at all) - Russian women tend to offer a warm welcome to benevolent foreigners. There was always something mysterious and attractive about the foreigner in Russia. Just as there is something alluring and mysterious about Russian women, who are certainly the most beautiful in the world.

One basis of the attraction of Russian women to foreign men is the different personal habits. Historically, alcoholism in Western European men does not reach the extent that it does in Russian men (with the shameful exception of the Finns who drink enough to be an embarassment to Russians when on binges to Petersburg). Even when alcoholic, the Western European man remains a functional alcoholic, consuming daily cocktails, wines and spirits but at a level which allows him to work a normal day and interact normally with neighbours and even with his own family.

Women don't care much for tea-totalling men (such abstinence hints at an absence of love of life and pleasure), but alcoholics have even less appeal (inability to work or to create or maintain a suitable home, danger to herself and her children via alcholic violence, eventual sexual impotence). So a permanent liason with a foreign man offers much greater hope for a clean and long-lasting home for both her and eventual children. In romantic terms, a marriage free of alcoholism offers hope for a better couple.

Previous German settlers to Russia (especially the Volga Germans) had earned a well deserved reputation for husbandry, sobriety and fidelilty.

No doubt the opportunity to trade sex for food and favour for many offered the same appeal in Russia as it did in conquered France.

In light of the above, it is not surprising that so many Russian and Ukrainian women found themselves pregnant. As long as they entertained the notion that their invaders' intentions were ultimately benevolent they would happily give themeselves up to fate (fatalism is endemic in Russian philosophical and even in practical ethical thought) and see what happens with their new admirers.

The Nazis quickly faced a serious question - how to deal with the consorting of the invading army with the local population. Their response was vile and incredible. Rather than supporting these attachments and gradually assimilating the territories by encouraging marriage or at least permanent ties between the soldiers and the local women, they determined to kidnap the progeny and patriate them to German soil. If the mothers passed certain racial tests, they would be shipped to Germany as well.

Can one imagine a better way to alienate a local population than to remove children from their mothers by force?

What were the Germans intentions in Russia?

It turns out - the Nazis planned an even grimmer fate for the Russians than they initially reserved for the Jews.*

After conquering Russia (at the very least as far as the Urals), the Nazi idea was to abolish higher education in the new Russian territories, stopping school at Grade 4 (ten years old). In a speech to the police, Himmler outlined Nazi policy.

I can only repeat what the Führer has asked. It is enough if, firstly, the children are taught the traffic signs at school so that they won’t run under our cars; secondly, they learn to count to twenty-five; and thirdly, they can write their names as well. No more is necessary.

The goal was that the local inhabitants be bereft of any leadership and made effectively slaves for a new German ruling class. Not only were Russian and Ukrainians not to have their own schools, they were not to have German schools either.

Of course all of this was to be preceded by a campaign of mass executions of the political and cultural elite. In addition, a policy of institutional kidnapping of the many children fathered by the three million German soldiers on Russian and Ukrainian territory.

At the end of June 1941, Hitler thought Moscow would fall into his hands imminently. He planned to eliminate the city altogether and create a lake in its place!

In a few weeks we’ll be in Moscow. Then I’ll raze it to the ground and build a reservoir there. The name Moscow must be expunged.

Fortunately Moscow never fell into Nazi hands and survived - Moscow which is like a third Rome after Constantinople. The destruction of Moscow would have ranked as an historical and cultural loss with the destruction of Carthage and Constantinople itself. Sadly, Stalinism itself has wreaked havoc with the original unique village/church/countryside style of Moscow and has left Moscow a flawed and strange beauty. Very few of the old quarters of town with their stately mansions and soft wintery streets remain intact.

The same destruction was planned for Petersburg (Leningrad) - the Venice of the North. Martin Bormann writes on 16 July 1941:

The Leningrad area is being claimed by the Finns. The Führer wants to raze Leningrad to the ground – then he’ll give it to the Finns.

Instead of giving the land back to the peasants (which would have brought the Nazis eternal loyalty from the Ukrainians and the Cossacks, still reeling from collectivisation in the early thirties), the Nazis planned to continue to exploit the huge state farms with virtually slave labour.

On 23 September 1941, Hitler told his commanders over dinner of plans to liquidate the Slavs up to and beyond the Urals.

The frontier between Europe and Asia is not the Ural Mountains but there where the settlements of Germanically inclined people end and unadulterated Slav settlements begin. It is our task to push this frontier as far east as possible, and if need be far beyond the Urals. It is the eternal law of nature that gives Germany as the stronger power the right before history to subjugate these peoples of inferior race, to dominate them and to coerce them into performing useful labours.

Given the brutality of Stalinism, I had always wondered why the Russians and Ukrainians resisted the Nazis so determinedly. Wouldn't it have been better to live in comparative prosperity under National Socialism (i.e. occupied France) than under the misery of Stalinism. In the end, I ascribed it as a propaganda victory.

But in fact, the Nazis own conduct is almost wholly responsible for Soviet patriotism and partisan activity. After a year under the Nazi whip, the Russians and Ukrainians understood they were fighting for their very existence against the Nazis. It was that knowledge which made them capable of the tremendous sacrifices necessary to defeat the Nazi armies.

Next to the Nazis, Stalin seems almost benevolent. His plans for Germany in the case of victory were to take and use the German intellgentsia both immediately in a practical sense as engineers and workers to strengthen Bolshevism. In the long run, apparently Stalin intended to mix Russian and German blood to improve the Russian population. Albeit after much bloodshed, Stalin did allow the Poles a country and even left his old foes Rumania and Bulgaria and Hungary more or less intact.

To learn of German intentions for Russia is a real shock for me. Russian culture is the midnight flower of the world. A culture of deep despair and grand emotions and overwhelming hope, Russian art offers more emotional and philosophical depth than any other on this earth. In music, in literature, in ballet, in visual arts, Russians are the great tragic geniuses of this world.

The Russian language is the deepest and most flexible and most beautiful language I have ever heard. Russian poetry is the most sonorous and powerful ever written. Next to Russian, German is a nasty, broken tongue, emotionless and flat, with nothing to recommend it apart from a certain useful precision for the issuing of detailed instructions.

And this fopling and wretched painter aspired to annihilate Russian culture and language from this world while razing the two citadels of Russian culture and architecture?

Both Germans and the Austrians cooperated and prosecuted this project with abandon. What were they thinking about?

With this knowledge, I feel very strange living in Austria now.

* Initial Nazi plans were to ship all European Jews to Madagascar. Curiously, Hitler had significantly more respect for Jews and Jewish culture than for Slavs. Apparently he feared to expulse Jews to Siberia as the difficult living conditions would just make the Jews stronger while the natural riches there, they could learn to exploit. In the end, the project to liquidate Jews and Gypsies was only an opening note in a much greater campaign to eliminate Poles, Ukrainians and Russians as independent peoples. More than a million Catholic Poles fell victim. Many tens of millions more Slavs were slated for work camps, starvation and death - the rest for selective racial merging.

Citations above are from David Irving's bestselling and meticulously researched biography Hitler's War. Hitler's War is an incredible piece of military history, regardless of Mr. Irving's more recent untoward dalliances with the extreme right. Hitler's War may be the best written book in copyright freely available on the web. For an understanding of the difficulties with which writing modern history is fraught and of exactly where and how Mr. Irving errs, the full trial judgement of Mr. Justice Gray against David Irving in April 2000 is essential reading.

A great website for serious left wing commentary and news is ZDnet. They have a print edition available in the United States by subscription for just $19/year. As I much prefer reading things offline, I would subscribe were I physically able to receive the magazine.

Here are some excerpts from a 9000! word interview with Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's first bon mot provides a vivid image for the current state of intellectual property rights.

Even the free trade agreements, so-called, are highly protectionists, the extra-ordinary intellectual property rights go way beyond anything existed in the past those are purely protectionist. They are designed to maintain monopoly rights for major corporations. If the currently rich countries had ever been faced with such rules, the US would now be exporting fish and fur.

At the end of the interview, there were three or four difficult letters to Noam Chomsky from readers who accused him of just hating the United States and having nothing productive to say. His evaluation of the situation strangely invokes biblical references.

There were people in the biblical period who we would call dissident intellectuals, they're called Prophets. It's a bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word. But if you look at what the Prophets were saying, it's what we would call dissident intellectuals. Geopolitical critique, a call for justice and freedom and so on. Yes, that's dissident intellectuals. How were they treated? Well? No, they were denounced as haters of Israel. They were driven into the desert, they were imprisoned, reviled. Now, there were intellectuals at that time who were very highly respected, namely the flatterers at the court. Hundreds of years later they were called false prophets. That's the way it works. It's the flatterers at the court who are typically the mainstream of the intellectuals.

So Noam Chomsky sees himself as part of a Hebrew tradition stretching back to the beginning of recorded time. Quite a neat end run around the self-hating charge.

It was quite amusing to watch all of the artificial fuss about the colour revolution in Ukraine last year.

None of it really mattered. Which is why the Russians after an initial disappointment stood by and let it happen. Veteran observers knew what was coming. Which has now arrived.

The Ukrainians have been buying gas from the Russians at heavily subsidised prices since their days as part of USSR. How heavily subsidised? Try one-fifth of market price ($50 per 1000 m3).

Russian President Vladimir Putin has told the Ukraine that if they don't pay $230 per 1000 m3, no more gas. He means it.

What are his goals?

Twofold.

1. To destroy his political enemies (rapidly rising energy prices or cold houses don't make a government any friends in winter) political capital.
2. To force the United States to bear the burden of subsidising the Ukraine, further extending the American's own financial problems brought on by their invasion and occupation of Iraq (and the absurd wartime tax cuts).

It's quite a neat move and will cost the Americans money, destroy their puppet government in the Ukraine and put the rest of the region on notice that if they irritate Russia enough, to expect cold comfort.

The Americans deserve it. One can't go around making promises to all the pretty girls, deliver to none of them and not expect fall out.

Neatly done by President Putin.

Sitting in our Western societies with our cafés and police and supermarkets and cars, it is hard to imagine what it is like to be really oppressed. One paragraph from Janina Sulkowska-Gladun's Memoirs really knocked me out of my complacency.

It's so true that a well-fed person cannot understand the starving one. I had been malnourished continuously for a long time, but the hunger which forces every cell to scream only started in Punishment Camp Number 6 in the fall of 1941. For the second time my body began to bloat as prelude to death by starvation. My hunger was so overwhelming that stones looked like loaves of bread, and I wanted to chew bark and leaves. I prepared myself for death.

While we celebrate our holiday seasons - Christmas and Hannukah - people all over the world go hungry. Our armies bear down on innocent people we wish to displace in both Gaza and Iraq. Christmas cheer and commercialism goes out - yet the tanks roll and the airplanes drop their bombs. And in the havoc, people starve.

Starvation has always been the most effective weapon against other peoples. More people starved in the Soviet Union than were murdered by the NKVD. The numbers in Nazi Germany are probably similar. Likely death from overwork and hunger played the same role in the building of pyramids.

Dark stuff. What will wake mankind up and out of this murderous stupor?

We need to make a religion and an obligation of the reading of such war accounts. First to never forget what we have. Second to prevent us acceding to the ongoing oppression of others.

What do we get instead? An ongoing diet of war films and vilification of the Muslim world from Hollywood... The United States on a permanent war footing. Support the troops? Why should we be supporting an invading army? Support the troops means taking them out of other people's countries where they involved in an ongoing war against a civilian population.

Other than that we are told to interest ourselves in our careers and our bank accounts. Individualism and commercialism. What little we feel should be in self-gratifying and narcissistic love affairs.

Let the people who know take care of political issues. How can you know anything about this? Do you live in Israel? Are you a friend of Sadam Hussein? Or any of the other trite talking points...

No, no and no are the answers. But I do recognise murder and I do understand oppression and I do know lies when I hear them. It is all enough to make one wish for an afterlife and a hell to be certain that those responsible for the depleted uranium shelling and white phospher attacks and the torture chambers will go to their just end.

One comfort of reading so much about the Second World War over the last few days is the knowledge that the Nazis did come to a just end in short period of time. What is more distressing is that Stalin and his henchmen got away with it and managed to stay in power for over thirty years.

Happily, Stalin for his malignant qualities was a lot more talented and charming than anyone in the Bush/Cheney administration, as the initial editor of Pravda and the author of a 16 tome collected works in his second language. British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden had this to say about post-war negotiations with Stalin:

Marshal Stalin as a negotiator was the toughest proposition of all. Indeed, after something like thirty years' experience of international conferences of one kind and another, if I had to pick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice. Of course the man was ruthless and of course he knew his purpose. He never wasted a word. He never stormed, he was seldom even irritated.

The other day I was wondering about the mechanisms of mass murder, particularly of soldiers. Why and how is it that men can be made to dig their own graves or why it is they would go along with their own destruction?

In the immediate, I was thinking of the state terrorism of the Bush/Cheney administration - in many cases, the subjects haven't gone along with their own annihalation, witness the major prison revolt.

But a clearer cut historical example was the massacre of 25,000 Polish officers by the NKVD in Katyn forest?

How was it that the NKVD managed to murder so many military men - men who surely would and could defend themselves if they knew what was to befall them? Twenty-five thousand trained soldiers is a force to be reckoned with.

So I went to do some research. And found myself on quite a dark path.

First, while the Katyn Forest massacre is called that, there were actually three sites: Katyn near Smolensk, another near Tver and another near Moscow. At each of these sites approximately 5000 officers were murdered. Another seven thousand were killed in random locations.

The motivation behind the killings was simple. The Soviet political commissars had tried to politically reeducate these Polish Catholic officers with total failure. A decision was made to execute all of the officers.

While it is certainly easier to control and kill five thousand men than twenty five thousand, the major question remains. How does a small group of guards kill a massively more numerous group?

The solution is quite simple. The Polish officers were told that they were being moved elsewhere and set free. They were taken away in very small groups. Diaries exist from some of the very few Polish officers to escape execution. While the Katyn murders are taking place this is the kind of rumour that the NKVD floated in the camps:

News arrived today that 30 non-commissioned officers are departing for home. Who knows maybe I too will be at home shortly? We got supper late today--and then kipiatok and baked pumpkin suddenly appeared and I really ate my fill.

Of course, when they arrive in a forest and are led in groups of five or ten to the open grave where they are to be shot in the back of the head, there is not much to be done. Some of them were blindfolded, some were handcuffed. Those who struggle are bayoneted.

I read through the rest of the diary of the officer above - Leon Gladun - and discovered what Poland went through. First the division of Poland by the Germans and the Soviets - Poland was attacked simultaneously on both sides. On the Soviet side, there was collectivisation and imposition the Soviet order, total elimination of the Polish intellegentsia and bourgeoisie and mercantile class. On the German side, the Poles were considered untermenschen and scheduled for elimination.

Far from laying down arms and allowing the Germans to roll through Poland (think France), the Polish army fought back valiantly against a vastly overwhelming force and destroying 30% of German armour and inflicting 16,000 casualties on the German invaders.

After the very successful German attack on Russia in June of 1941, the Soviet Union decided to form a Polish army with the remains of the Polish POW's. This Polish army fought valiantly in the Middle East and then in Italy. Many Polish pilots flew in the RAF. When the war was over, to placate Stalin no Polish divisions were allowed to march in any victory parades.

Not only Polish soldiers were imprisoned by the Soviets. The woman who was to become Leon Gladun's wife, Janina Sulkowska wrote her own memoir covering her arrest and her odyssey through the Soviet gulags. It is worth reading. A lot of the latent Polish anti-semitism is explained in these pages.

The Poles watched the Soviet invaders with a mixture of revulsion and fear. Not a few of us cried. My brother became so distraught that shortly after, his hair began to come out in clumps while my little sister could only ask: "How could they do this?" But as disconcerting was the emergence of a local Jewish militia which was friendly to the Red Army and had made its appearance even before the enemy had marched in. Armed and organized, its first task was to arrest the students and Boy Scouts who had been posted as guards with old carbines in some cases taller than them. The Jews roughed up the shocked youngsters who had considered their captors as friends and classmates, before turning them over to the Soviets from whom they had prior directions. What was the fate of these young Poles? In many cases torture and death. This Jewish militia would help carry out the Soviet's dirty work during their occupation. My family and others would fall victim to them.

In the German occupied territories, some argue that Poles returned the favour. This doesn't seem a fair reflection of circumstance. Poles were the second largest single group of Holocaust victims, over two million Poles perished in concentration camps. The majority of Righteous gentiles honored at Yad Vashem are Poles.

The Polish underground was an ongoing nuisance to the Germans with apparently over 250,000 members. Poles produced their own automatic weapons and munitions underground. Outside of Poland after the fall of France, the Polish constituted was the second largest Allied armed force until the entry of the Americans with up to 250,000 soldiers. One of the Polish air squadrons had the highest number of kills in the battle of Britain. The Polish navy sailed with the British navy.

The contribution of the Poland to the Allied war effort is enormous. The efforts of Poles to trying to save Jews from the Nazis were amazing. The fate of Poland - left to Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union as war spoils - is a huge blot on England, France, Canada and the United States.

Amazingly, the Austrians got off more lightly than the Poles, allowed to finally become part of Western Europe after the partition. Austria who was part of the Third Reich, while Poland contributed to the Allied war effort in the skies, as underground partisans and as soldiers in Europe and North Africa.

Some days it is better not to pose oneself questions. The answers can be too shaking. To think in Canada, we were brought up on Polish jokes. Poland is perhaps the most tragic land in the history of the world. Divided, conquered, liberated, partitioned and decimated.

Considering what proportion of Poland's elite have been lost to German concentration camps, Soviet gulags and emigration just in the last century, it is no wonder that Poland's rebirth is taking some time.

If you have the time, I highly recommend reading the first hand accounts of Poland's war at Poland's Holocaust, both the Katyn diary and the Gulag and Holocaust Memoir.

This is a story I know well from days in Moscow, working as an ABC News assistant and assistant producer: Well-intentioned American journalists giving up their ethics to advance their careers.

At first it starts slowly and then conscience caves away before the career triumphs which follow.

A lot like the beginnings of a hesitant call girl. In two months, you won't know her so clear and hard is she in her new life. Or prostitution isn't for her and she quits. So it is with MSM journalists. I know of only a very few exceptions to this rule.

I remember once going to cover a story for The Moscow Times about some Armenian or Georgian businessmen who were holding a reception with the American Chamber of Commerce.

I'd been living in Russia for five years at this point and knew my way around Moscow pretty well. I had already done big stories on the Moscow bankers and knew how to gauge the business milieu by then.

I returned to the office and explained to the editor that these guys were mobsters and crooks and were about to fleece all of their investors, if they didn't throw them in the Moscow river in winter first.

They bought a big ad this month and have the backing of the American Chamber of Commerce. That's not what our readers want to hear. Write something positive.

How do you write something positive about a situation like this? If you're lucky you'll just lose your money. Or American Chamber of Commerce gives Crooks a Green Light. Or Soviet Minority Groups making huge advances in International Crime.

Today's particular story is about Ted Koppel and is written by his trusted stringer from early days in Indochina.

Ted was at that time the State Department correspondent for ABC News, and I decided to call him for lunch to talk about the six-month trip to Indochina I had just returned from -- particularly the new evidence I had amassed that the ongoing Kissinger-led bombing in Cambodia was continuing to murder civilians. Although I realized that Ted had to be circumspect regarding Kissinger's culpability for the war crimes that he had observed on the ground in Laos, I assumed we'd be in as much agreement on the horror as we had been in Indochina, and hoped he might do some stories on my new findings. I still remember the friendliness and warmth of Ted's jovial greeting when I called him up for lunch, and my awe as I entered the beautiful State Department restaurant, filled with important domestic and international dignitaries.

After 15 minutes or so of pleasantries and reminiscences, I brought up the flattering book on Kissinger that had just been published by the brothers Marvin and Bernard Kalb, who worked for NBC and CBS News respectively. Everyone I knew had been outraged by the book, which was a typical establishment journalist suck-up to Kissinger, praising him for his successes and avoiding even a mention of the mass murder that he was even then continuing to conduct. I was particularly annoyed because I had worked with Bernie Kalb as closely as I had with Ted, and Bernie also knew full well of Kissinger's responsibility for what was occurring.

I said something like "Can you believe that garbage by the Kalb brothers?" To my utter amazement, Ted suddenly drew back and said, in what was to be known years later as his full-throated "Nightline" "Voice of God": "I'll have you know that Marvin Kalb is a close personal friend of mine. And so is Dr. Kissinger, for that matter!" Ted was clearly offended, and our luncheon went downhill from there. Shocked, I tried to remind him of Kissinger's war crimes, which he had personally witnessed just a few years ago. He refused to discuss it. I tried to turn the conversation to my new findings on the ongoing bombing of civilians. He wasn't interested. We parted, not to talk again for 30 years.

I realized at the time that it was not Ted who had changed, but his institutional role. In Indochina, on the ground, face-to-face with the refugees, he had been a truth-seeking foreign correspondent. Assigned to cover Kissinger back in Washington, depending upon him for information, susceptible to the secretary’s flattery and manipulations, he had become a card-carrying member of the journalistic establishment.

And Ted Koppel is the one who actually read out the names of the fallen in Iraq, to the fury of the Bush administration and the right-wing pundits. Imagine what some of the others must be like?

In fairness to Ted Koppel, he admits as much:

A young friend of mine...sought his advice about changing careers in Washington, D.C. Ted, in his typically gracious fashion, granted him a private talk. My friend explained that he had had a successful career running a nonprofit group, but was turned off by the lies and deceit he had found. What did Ted think he should do? he asked. Ted answered that he didn't know whether my friend’s ethical concerns were sincere, or if he was just looking for a job in journalism. If the latter, he seemed like a bright young guy, and Ted would consider helping him out. But if he was sincere, Ted advised, he should get out of Washington immediately. Ted then went on a rant for 15 minutes excoriating the officials he dealt with on a daily basis as liars, deceivers and hypocrites. My friend could not have a decent life and remain human so long as he remained in D.C., Ted explained. He should leave.

In Venezuala this weekend, an election took place. All of the principal opposition parties boycotted the election.

Why is this boycott important? It provides an excuse for the US military to intervene Venezuala.

the history of U.S. policy in the region shows that the U.S. has a record of supporting and profiting from electoral boycotts. Also, the U.S. is in a good position to pressure the Venezuelan opposition, given the $20 million of funding it has provided opposition groups over the past five years. The U.S., of course, denies any involvement in the opposition’s decision. Still, it served U.S. interests very well when opposition parties boycotted the 1994 Nicaraguan elections and when opposition parties boycotted the 2000 elections in Haiti. In each case, the boycott set the stage, in international opinion, to de-legitimize and smooth the path for the eventual defeat of left-leaning governments.

There is a lot of more useful information on the election in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela at the site above on Axis/Logic.