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Truth Ninja

11 Responses to “Truth Ninja”

1. on 29 Jan 2008 at 7:47 pm   Steve
   
   

   I bet this guy sits at trafic lights and dares them to go green, then sits back smug when they bend to his almighty will.

   He should dare other things, like my bank balance to rise, and his tiny brain to grow in size.

2. on 29 Jan 2008 at 9:11 pm   arsebanana
   
   

   What sort of person calls himself “potato lord”?

3. on 30 Jan 2008 at 12:28 am   parsnip prince
   
   

   personally, i dont see anything wrong with his name

4. on 30 Jan 2008 at 12:56 am   Dave
   
   

   Let’s all log into HYS, and respond en masse to every question with “publish this one if you dare!” We might want to think about taking it to the next level with superfluous punctuation and INAPPROPRIATE capitalisation.

   On a serious note, the BBC is desperate for pages and pages of inane racist gurgling on its forum, but less keen on being actually challenged about the news. I wrote the following about their brown-tongued obituary for General Suharto:

   In your article on General Suharto’s legacy (link:
   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7183191.stm),
   after a lengthy preamble of superficial observations about his personality, you get around to mentioning some of the appalling crimes by which he seized and maintained power. You also mention that “the United States was desperate for reliable allies in the region and willing to turn a blind eye to his human rights record.”

   In reality, “turning a blind eye” was not the half of it. It would have been inappropriate enough as a description of America’s greenlighting and supply of arms for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor – an invasion which your article fails to mention, despite its remarkable ferocity – but Western complicity in the 1968 coup went far beyond even
   this.

   John Pilger writes:

   In 1965, in Indonesia, the American embassy furnished General Suharto with roughly 5,000 names. These were people
   for assassination, and a senior American diplomat checked off the names as they were killed or captured. Most were
   members of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party. Having already armed and equipped Suharto’s army, Washington
   secretly flew in state-of-the-art communication equipment whose high frequencies were known to the CIA and the National Security Council advising the president, Lyndon B Johnson. Not only did this allow Suharto’s generals to co-ordinate the massacres, it meant that the highest echelons of the US administration were listening in.

   The Americans worked closely with the British…

   (link: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/101305C.shtml)

   Mark Curtis elaborates:

   “I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change,” Sir Andrew Gilchrist, the British
   ambassador in Jakarta, informed the Foreign Office on October 5 1965. The declassified files show that Britain
   wanted the Indonesian army to act and encouraged it to do so.

   British policy was “to encourage the emergence of a general’s regime”, one intelligence official explained.
   Another noted that “it seems pretty clear that the generals are going to need all the help they can get and accept without being tagged as hopelessly pro-western, if they are going to be able to gain ascendancy over the communists”. Therefore, “we can hardly go wrong by tacitly backing the generals”.

   (link:
   http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1585802,00.html)

   In particular, as both articles go on to detail, the UK and US were particularly instrumental in terms of propaganda, including the scaremongering of a communist takeover.

   From the Pilger article:

   British intelligence officers outlined how the British press and the BBC could be manipulated. “Treatment will need to
   be subtle,” they wrote, “eg, a) all activities should be strictly unattributable, b) British [government]
   participation or co-operation should be carefully concealed.” To achieve this, the Foreign Office opened a branch of its Information Research Department (IRD) in Singapore.

   The IRD was a top-secret, cold war propaganda unit headed by Norman Reddaway, one of Her Majesty’s most experienced liars. Reddaway and his colleagues manipulated the “embedded” press and the BBC so expertly that he boasted to Gilchrist in a secret message that the fake story he had promoted – that a communist takeover was imminent in Indonesia – “went all over the world and back again”. He described how an experienced Sunday newspaper journalist
   agreed “to give exactly your angle on events in his article . . . ie, that this was a kid-glove coup without butchery”.

   These lies, bragged Reddaway, could be “put almost instantly back to Indonesia via the BBC”. Prevented from entering Indonesia, Roland Challis, the BBC’s south-east Asia correspondent, was unaware of the slaughter. “My British sources purported not to know what was going on,” Challis told me, “but they knew what the American plan was. There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was
   only later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying names and ticking them off as they were killed.
   There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it . . . Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal.”

   In addition, as the quote from Roland Challis implies, Suharto’s military legacy and his economic legacy were far
   from seperate. The US and UK wished to smash Indonesian democracy and, with it, any burgeoning leftwing movements, not merely for a reliable ally in their warmaking, but also for profitable exploitation of Indonesia’s natural and
   human resources.

   Noam Chomsky writes:

   In 1958 US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles informed the National Security Council that Indonesia was one of three major world crises, along with Algeria and the Middle East. He emphasized that there was no Soviet role in any of these cases, with the “vociferous” agreement of President Eisenhower. The main problem in Indonesia was the Communist party (PKI), which was winning “widespread support not as a revolutionary party but as an organization defending the interests of the poor within the existing system,” developing a “mass base among the peasantry” through its “vigor in defending the interests of
   the…poor (2)”.

   The US embassy in Jakarta reported that it might not be possible to overcome the PKI “by ordinary democratic means”, so that “elimination” by police and military might be undertaken. The Joint Chiefs of Staff urged that “action must be taken, including overt measures as
   required, to ensure either the success of the dissidents or the suppression of the pro-communist elements of the Sukarno government.”

   The “dissidents” were the leaders of a rebellion in the outer islands, the site of most of Indonesia’s oil and US
   investments. US support for the secessionist movement was “by far the largest, and to this day the least known, of the Eisenhower administration’s covert militarized
   interventions,” two leading Southeast Asia specialists conclude in a revealing study (3). When the rebellion collapsed, after bringing down the last residue of
   parliamentary institutions, the US turned to other means to “eliminate” the country’s major political force.

   That goal was achieved when Suharto took power in 1965, with Washington’s strong support and assistance. Army-led
   massacres wiped out the PKI and devastated its mass base in “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century,”
   comparable to the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, the CIA reported, judging “the Indonesian coup” to be
   “certainly one of the most significant events of the 20th century (4)”. Perhaps half a million or more were killed
   within a few months.

   The events were greeted undisguised euphoria. The New York Times described the “staggering mass slaughter” as “a
   gleam of light in Asia,” praising Washington for keeping its own role quiet so as not to embarrass the “Indonesian moderates” who were cleansing their society, then
   rewarding them with generous aid (5). Time praised the “quietly determined” leader Suharto with his “scrupulously constitutional” procedures “based on
   law, not on mere power” as he presided over a “boiling bloodbath” that was “the West’s best news for years in Asia” (6).

   The reaction was near uniform. The World Bank restored Indonesia to favour. Western governments and corporations
   flocked to Suharto’s “paradise for investors,” impeded only by the rapacity of the ruling family. For more than 20
   years, Suharto was hailed as a “moderate” who is “at heart benign” (The Economist) as he compiled a record of
   slaughter, terror, and corruption that has few counterparts in postwar history.

   (link: ttp://mondediplo.com/1998/06/02chomsky)

   This Paradise for investors was, of course, no accident; the bloody suppression of the Indonesians to the benefit of Western investors fit the pattern of US interventions in Latin America around the same period. Whatever benefits trickled down to the Indonesian people were incidental and, indeed, less substantial than implied in your piece. Chomsky goes on to document how Indonesian growth was exaggerated by
   a tiny, corrupt elite which reaped most of its benefits, while John Perkins’ book “Confessions Of An Economic Hitman” documents how American institutions actively colluded in this corruption to gain economic and political influence.

   Small wonder that your description of Suharto’s economic legacy sits so ill with the popular conception of Indonesia
   as a land of sweatshop slaves working long hours in poor conditions for low pay to make trainers they will never
   afford. This phenomenon, too, is so well-documented as to be uncontroversial; try Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” for a start.

   I frequently have issues with the BBC’s reporting, but the omission and distortion in this article were such that I could not let them pass without comment. There can be no justification for this kind of misrepresentation from a media institution of the BBC’s standing. Please correct the imbalance in this article, and the similarly flawed “Indonesia ex-leader Suharto dies” (link:
   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7211565.stm).

   Yours sincerely,

   Dave Sewell, Manchester

   In return, I got fobbed off with…

   Thank you very much for your email.

   The piece you refer to has been written by one of the BBC correspondents living in the area, and we would therefore defer to his judgement on the situation as he sees it.

   Regards
   BBC News Website

   … or, to put it another way, “Fuck off and leave it to the experts.” Small wonder only morons bother talking back to the BBC.

5. on 30 Jan 2008 at 2:58 am   awesom-o-4000
   
   

   Enough of your sarcasm. As V-P (Old Pals Act) at Ministry of The Man (‘MinMan’), I have noticed my part of The System getting a little flaky around the edge near the ‘One of the Boys’ department. Near the pantry, where we keep the oppression scones and the decaff coffee.

6. on 30 Jan 2008 at 12:14 pm   marv
   
   

   dave..you wrote too much.

   they got confused by all the long words.

   you could try something more simple.

   ‘dear sir/madam/cocksmoker,

   suharto was a murderous cunt and you know it. i suggest you change you article to :

   US Backed Genocidal Madman Dies. World Becomes Marginally Better Place’

   yours, dave.

   they’ll be impressed by the caps.

7. on 30 Jan 2008 at 9:12 pm   Gilbert Wham
   
   

   Well, I only read one post all the way through…

8. on 31 Jan 2008 at 12:40 pm   Neil M
   
   

   Right. Got you. Interesting. Oh look at the time – Job done, I’m off home – cheers Dave!

9. on 01 Feb 2008 at 12:46 pm   Mog
   
   

   Surely this “local correspondent” would gain most of his information from the westernised section of society and could arguably be associated with the “rich elite”, thereby distorting his “professional” view in the first place? Or may it be down to what Jeremy Paxman claimed was the “old boys network” that was rife in the structure of the BBC? Either way you were pissing up a fucking wall from the start Dave. You care too much. Honourable and impressive, but ultimately bloody useless.

10. on 19 May 2008 at 9:39 pm   nebapneb
    
    

    i know him, tee hee

11. on 03 Jun 2008 at 1:55 am   GREG COOK
    
    

    So, let me get this right. Suharto was a cunt,then?