frandroid

I'm reading little print... Despite the three books I have out from the Library.

What Are You Reading?

( From Bloodlands, CW: Holocaust, brutal suicide: )

That was possibly the most, huh, salutory? part of the book so far, so that's how that book goes...

Other than that I'm reading and watching TypeScript tutorials. The joy.

What are you reading?

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

Between the two of them, they intentionally killed 14 million civilians that had nothing to do with fighting, mostly through starvation. Most of the killing happened in Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, the latter which they first split and then fought over. Snyder highlights that we sometimes overlook Eastern Europe to focus on Germany since Nazis were the perpetrators of so much killing, but Germany had 1% Jews in 1933 and 0.25% Jews by the time WWII started. So that's not where Jews were killed. They were mostly killed in the bloodlands of Ukraine and Poland. Along with so many others.

This book is about these mass murders. It has the rhythm of a metronome but the heft of a sledgehammer. Boom. Boom. Boom. It's brutal and relentless.

Right now I'm reading through the Holodomor. CW.

Starvation led not to rebellion but to amorality, to crime, to indifference, to madness, to paralysis, and finally to death. Peasants endured months of indescribable suffering, indescribable because of its duration and pain, but also indescribable because people were too weak, too poor, too illiterate to chronicle what was happening to them. But the survivors did remember. As one of them recalled, no matter what the peasants did, "they went on dying, dying, dying." The death was slow, humiliation, ubiquitous, and generic. To die of starvation with some sort of dignity was beyond the reach of everyone. Petro Veldii showed rare strength when he dragged himself through his village on the day he expected to die. The other villagers asked him where he was going: to the cemetery to lay himself down. He did not want strangers coming and dragging his body away to a pit. So he had dug his own grave, but by the time he reached the cemetery another body had filled it. He dug himself another one, lay down, and waited.

A very few outsiders witnessed and were able to record what happened in these most terrible months. The journalist Gareth Jones had paid his own way to Moscow, and violating a ban on travel to Ukraine, took a train to Kharkiv on 7 March 1933. He disembarked at random at a small station and tramped through the countryside with a backpack full of food. He found "famine on a colossal scale." Everywhere he went he heard the same two phrases: "Everyone is swollen from starvation" and "We are waiting to die." He slept on dirt floors with starving children, and learned the truth. Once, after he had shared his food, a little girl exclaimed: "Now that I have eaten such wonderful things I can die happy."

I want to take this book in small doses but there's a long list of holds for it. Blood must flow.

No fucking wonder Ukrainians are standing up and fighting back like hell.

Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects [nytimes.com]

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.

Words fail me.


Op-Ed: The Torturers’ Manifesto [nytimes.com]

In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.

It sounds like the plot of a mob film, except the lawyers asking how much their clients can get away with are from the C.I.A. and the lawyers coaching them on how to commit the abuses are from the Justice Department. And it all played out with the blessing of the defense secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence director and, most likely, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
[...]
That investigation should start with the lawyers who wrote these sickening memos, including John Yoo, who now teaches law in California; Steven Bradbury, who was job-hunting when we last heard; and Mr. Bybee, who holds the lifetime seat on the federal appeals court that Mr. Bush rewarded him with.

These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him. And if the administration will not conduct a thorough investigation of these issues, then Congress has a constitutional duty to hold the executive branch accountable. If that means putting Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales on the stand, even Dick Cheney, we are sure Americans can handle it.

After eight years without transparency or accountability, Mr. Obama promised the American people both. His decision to release these memos was another sign of his commitment to transparency. We are waiting to see an equal commitment to accountability.

Please put Cheney on the stand. I want to see Fox News implode.

Speaking of which: But Can Obama Make the Trains Run on Time? [nytimes.com]

“Rhetorically, Republicans are having a very hard time finding something that raises the consciousness of the average voter,” said Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party who recently lost a bid to became national party chairman.

So Mr. Anuzis has turned to provocation with a purpose. He calls the president’s domestic agenda “economic fascism.”

“We’ve so overused the word ‘socialism’ that it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago,” Mr. Anuzis said. “Fascism — everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.”