Tag Archives: human rights

Angela Merkel on Huffpost – A warning, or hypocrisy?

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Along with many other news sources, I have more or less stopped watching Huffington Post too, a part of the media trash. Nonetheless, this one came out of it, covering Angela Merkel’s supposed not-so-subtle warning. The title was carefully designed to get you interested and click to read further. I did not get it directly from Huffpost since I stopped looking at it. It nonetheless came to me through Facebook shares.

The main theme of this article, whether Merkel meant it or not – implies that Merkel is ready to work with the new president elect Trump, when and if both leaders share a common belief of equal rights to people of all colour and faith.

The article implies that Merkel suspects Donald Trump might not not allow equal human rights to people of skin colour other than white, or to people of faith other than Christianity etc etc.

In that, Merkel is conveniently mixing two issues and blurring a very important national concern for anybody. The two issues are : is supporting human rights the same thing as allowing unlimited immigration from anywhere?

This to me is one of the key elements to the problems in the global politics relating to the war torn middle east today. The so called immigrant issue, for Merkel and EU, involves people from the middle east. Why are they moving to Europe ? Not necessarily because they want free state support, easy money or a better lifestyle. They are moving primarily because their homes, cities, villages and mode of living have been bombed to smithereens, thanks to western manufactured bombs used on them either directly, or indirectly by the west.

Another way to look at it is – Merkel and the rest of warmongers, Hillary and Obama included, believe, rightly, that accepting all these homeless refugees is a moral responsibility, if they wish to continue to bomb more and more middle eastern towns, villages and cities. Accepting these immigrants is a price that the European and American societies must pay, so that the military industrial complex can continue to its business business as usual and the entering immigrants can then work at wages lower than the locals would accept, thus making it even cheaper for the corporations to make a buck.

It would have been smarter, to wake up to the fact that there is another way to solve this problem:

  • Stop the war
  • Stop the bombing
  • Spend the money to rebuild the devastated towns and cities
  • Make sure that the local people get the jobs
  • Ensure local firms get the contracts like the post war Marshall plan
  • Do not allow western firms and tycoons to milk the system again.

If you do all that and make the middle east great again, the people will not only stop wanting to move to Europe or North America, but those that already came would largely want to go back.

This is the first item that Merkel is mixed and made fuzzy.

The next item that she may be making fuzzy is questioning Donald Trump’s right to want to protect his own nation from endless ingress of refugees from exactly those war torn areas where most have been harmed by western war crimes and will likely to have many that hold a grudge against the west because of it. Trump may or may not follow up on what he stated during his campaigns, but what he did state is not that he denies human rights to brown skinned people or people of the Islamic faith – but that he opposes the US governments policy of bombing the shit out of everybody – and wishes to work WITH other nations and not FIGHT with them, and that he opposes endless influx of immigrants precisely from those areas where terrorists are mushrooming up.

I do not at all see this reasoning as a sign that Trump is either a racist, or that he despises people of colour or other religion.

The only thing I am uncomfortable with about Trump in this particular field, is his open declaration of supporting Israel in what appears to me to be a biased tilt towards it and calling out Iran as a demon. But I suspect he said it because he had to say it, and that, somehow, no American politician can rise to power without blessing of Israel – a strange and incomprehensible situation where a tiny tiny tribe of people can have such an overwhelming influence on the supposedly most powerful nation on the planet.

But, Angela Merkel too has been in the same rut, and will not say a word against Israel.

Other than that Israel angle, I see no real evidence that Donald Trump has been either a virulent racist or a virulent anti-Muslim or any-any other faith.

So, either Angela Merkel is a fraud, or Huffington Post is a fraud, or both of them are.

IF you want to address issues with human rights, racism or religious intolerance, Angela and Huffington post, start with Israel and Palestine first. Then, I am willing to listen to you and might stop considering you anything better than trash.

Wanted to speak with Debal Deb

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What kind of a topic heading is that ?
Well, I don’t know what kind – except that it is what came to mind, with a fresh cup of hot instant coffee Sunday Morning, after having mopped the kitchen table. I do not feel too good this weekend because I did not go outdoors and walk about in the reeds, and did not train my binocular on far off mountains. It does not feel nice if household chores take precedence over nature. But then, nature can survive without me. In fact, nature does survive pretty well without human interference. But the kitchen table had dried stains of old coffee, specks of marmalade, dried butter, crumbs of bread, and other associated tidbits. It needed cleaning. The trouble is, whenever I engage in some household chores, my lower back starts aching after a while. Somehow, when I am carting a heavy lens on a big camera, mounted on a heavier tripod, across uneven grounds and through bushes, for hours on end with very little respite – that same back seems not to be bothering me at all. I wonder if the welfare of my lower vertebrates are somehow linked to the subconscious wishes of my brain. I am not even sure which half of the brain is involved in encouraging me to spend time outdoors with my camera.
Anyhow, mopping done, I started another household chore – converting old DVDs into digital files in hard drives, so the physical disk and its plastic jacket can be retired out of my study and hopefully out of the house. It takes up space and its no more convenient to run a  dvd player to see movies.
Anyone heard of iTunes store and netflix ?
But that’s not a proper chore – you click a few buttons and then the computer does its thing without needing further help from you. You are free to do some more mopping, or finding those dirty trousers that are tucked in this or that corner, and take them downstairs to the laundry bag. Well, I do not take clothes downstairs per se. I toss them from upstairs into the air, and curvature of space does the rest. This curvature is not seen easily, but felt – in the form of gravitational pull between two objects that have mass. The earth pulls my dirty trouser down towards the centre of the planet, and my trouser tries to pull the planet up to meet it in mid air. But since the relative mass of the planet is a tad more than that of the trouser, the earth manages to pull the trouser proportionately more down. The tiny amount of upward motion of the planet, is so small, that folks standing on its surface, and moving up and down with it, do not notice. Folks do notice heavier unplanned motions of the planet, but usually recognize them as earth-quakes or being attacked by enemy bombers and such – most unpleasant turn of events that have little to do with my dirty trousers.
So, the trouser lands on the carpet on the ground floor near the entrance door. I descend through the stairs – because I cannot do what the trouser can, i.e. Meeting planet earth in mid air, without the selfsame lower back vertebrae and other parts of the body facing some serious damage.
I usually pick the dirty clothing off the carpet and move sideways about four meters into the passage where we have the washer and the dryer. We do not share it with our basement tenant – they have their own.
But the point is – the lower spine gives an indirect indication that I should consider sitting down at the dining table with a hot cup of coffee and do something less strenuous and more stimulating, for a short while at least.
And thats when I thought about how to arrange a telephone talk event with Debal Deb, the social activist that I am just beginning to fully appreciate, as I read more about his activity in India, as well as read his book. I should cover those issues properly on future blogs, perhaps. Meanwhile, I was looking for an opportunity to speak with him. I wanted Madhusree Mukherjee to sort of co-ordinate it on the phone, she in Germany, me in Canada and Debal in India.
But, man proposes, woman disposes. Madhusree is on her way to India for a vacation. Debal has been silent on this issue.
And so, here I am, dirty trouser tucked away in the laundry bag, a large cup of hot instant coffee next to me, sitting at the dining table with the mac pro notebook open, writing yet another blog, where the subject heading has only circumstantial reference in an otherwise strange blog.

Tonu