USA And The Future Of The World -II

[Husky]

The aggressive protagonist is unfailingly the State and as it happens in this particular competition, the US State. Hence, the idea that decent conduct and carefully delineated argument will alter the course of this contest is naïve in the extreme. The USA is a country that inserted live snakes into the private parts of captive Vietcong women and has had no compunction recently presiding over the murder of 1.4 million Iraqis. Hindus are not special in any sense in their scheme of things except that are proving difficult to subjugate, despite determined efforts for over 60 years. If living in the USA makes it difficult to swallow this harsh truth nothing more remains to be discussed.

Full article from which I stole the above follows (This article actually belongs equally in the christianism thread and the anti-Indian nexus thread):

http://voi.org/society/general/thepoliti...duism.html

The Political Implications of HAF on Caste and Hinduism - by Gautam Sen



Any discussion on caste really pertains to India since it is of marginal significance for Hindus in Europe and North America. One must therefore provide an a priori justification as to why Indians should be guided by measures recommended from abroad. This matter of principle does not concern the substance of any recommended policies, which may be good or bad, but the reason why they should be advanced by Hindus from abroad, but adopted by Indians living in India. It is a major issue of principle that cannot be evaded. And the fact that it is easy to find Hindus from within India to offer validation to proposals does not change the essential point because the initiative lies abroad. Indeed garnering support from within India makes the enterprise even more suspect as a consequence. My own concern is that people living away from their homeland are necessarily susceptible to socialisation by local ideological imperatives though it does not mean every single individual succumbs. These ideological certainties are likely to be hostile to the interests of their country of origin and perspectives emanating from a locale like the US, which has harboured incredible enmity towards independent India and continues to do so, are potentially harmful as a result. One must therefore exercise unusual caution although there is no good solution to the issue since people of goodwill cannot be required to stop thinking and writing.



However, I suggest that, as a matter of principle, any such attempt to wade into issues with policy imperatives tagged onto them and which might amount to injunctions or, worse still, diktats are unacceptable. Only Indians living in India are qualified to initiate and make policy for themselves because the outcomes primarily affect them and that is the appropriate democratic procedure. And it is they who have the right to make their own mistakes and experience their own learning process. This is not to suggest that Indians abroad cannot and should not hold opinions on subjects that interest them, but it is beholden to them exercise more than a measure of self-restraint when they take to preaching. And it is absolutely imperative for them not to engage in cavalier fashion with issues of paramount importance to people in India because that really smacks of arrogance that could be regarded as stemming from the wealth and status enjoyed by residing in a wealthy country as a professional. I am one of these very people, who have lived away for nearly 41 years and constantly write on Indian subjects. However, I regard myself as a lowly foot soldier operating from what to me, metaphorically speaking, is enemy territory and with due respect for those whose personal interests are tied to Indian soil.



The issue that remains critical is the political context and the consequences of particular debates and proposals. Nothing undertaken is politically innocent and it is absolutely imperative to retain this reality in mind when engaging with complex issues like Caste and espousing positions and advancing recommendations. The issue of Caste is a profoundly political question and not for the obvious reason that it affects all Hindus in some way or another. Discussions on Caste are, first and foremost, ideological weapons in the wider struggle for political supremacy and domination between white Christian nations, led by the imperialist USA and its victims, Hindus. I do not mention Islam because its enmity towards Hindus is unabashed and repeated in countless Pakistani and Arab publications. The US and India have been at loggerheads since the early 1950s and those unfamiliar with this history should desist from pontificating on intellectual cleavages that are part of the arsenal in the struggle between the Hindus of India and the imperialist USA. The Church is a mere subaltern agent in this deadly contest for domination and subjugation and primarily an instrument of State policy, as it has been since the loss of its ability to dictate to European States several centuries ago. The fact that individual Christian participants in this arena may be morally upright and motivated to spread the word god, though that itself is an expression of sectarian intolerance, is irrelevant. The aggressive protagonist is unfailingly the State and as it happens in this particular competition, the US State. Hence, the idea that decent conduct and carefully delineated argument will alter the course of this contest is naïve in the extreme. The USA is a country that inserted live snakes into the private parts of captive Vietcong women and has had no compunction recently presiding over the murder of 1.4 million Iraqis. Hindus are not special in any sense in their scheme of things except that are [color="#FF0000"]proving difficult to subjugate[/color], despite determined efforts for over 60 years. If living in the USA makes it difficult to swallow this harsh truth nothing more remains to be discussed.



Neither is the issue of who can presume to speak on behalf of the Hindus of India is not an abstract matter of principle alone though I regard the principle involved as paramount. It is a conviction that stems from direct personal experience of the serious problems that arise when Indians abroad seek to act on behalf of their brethren in India. On two separate occasions, during the last decade or so, Hindu activists in the UK sought to sign accords with the Anglican Church concerning what legitimate forms religious conversion could take. I was staggered when the already initialled document was sent to me by a lawyer opposed to it. The document could have been regarded as laughable had it not entailed the potentially serious consequence of politically compromising Hindus [color="#FF0000"]permanently[/color].



The accord amounted to acceptance of conversion as legitimate, provided there was no coercion involved. Of course what amounted to coercion was undefined and it contained choice phrases like 'freedom to share one's religion', which is a standard Church code for legitimating evangelical activity. There was no recognition that it is the legitimacy of evangelical activity (as distinct from religious conversion, per se) that is in insurmountable dispute, closely tied as it is to coercion, when the latter is carefully enumerated. And nor is it an established right under Indian law, though evangelists constantly assert to the contrary. But this was being bartered away by people who did not have command over the English language and could not comprehend the many loaded phrases the document contained. They were all virtually semi-literate, which I state as a matter of fact rather than mere prejudice though I do not deny the latter sensibility when dealing with such nonsense. The signing was vetoed by the late Seshadri-ji of the RSS and I earned the ire of many British Hindu activists. I subsequently learned that an [color="#FF0000"]American Hindu 'convert'[/color] of some considerable public fame had been counselling them to sign the accord. I therefore concluded he was an intelligence infiltrator and that should surprise no one. [color="#FF0000"]Hindus are at war, a reality difficult for many to swallow, and the enemy is engaged in a no-holds barred effort to dis-empower Hindus.[/color] [color="#800080"](disempowerment isn't all - it's only the 1st step)[/color] Caste issues are a handy weapon being deployed by them as it has in the long history of deadly conflict between Hindus and Christian militarism.



Let me add that virtually an identical attempt was made yet again in the recent past by the very same people to sign almost the same accord on religious conversion. This time it was unceremoniously halted by an unambiguous imprimatur from the most senior leader of the VHP. I am therefore led to believe that some of these earnest British Hindus active in official bodies had been compromised by local intelligence services (a good number are engaged in VAT fraud and susceptible to blackmail) and/or in receipt of bribes from Church quarters. Let me remind you once again that [color="#FF0000"]the most prominent Hindu political activist in Europe had once publicly proclaimed that in the event of war between India and the UK, Hindus should fight for their country of adoption, Britain.[/color] I won't repeat my earlier political and sociological analysis of this remarkable statement, but only point out that any invasion of India, resulting from military conflict, would occur with Pakistani help through Karachi and into Gujarat. It is poignant to imagine members of Britain's East African community emerging from barges en route to kill their own kin! [color="#0000FF"]The simple fact of the matter is that there can be no dialogue with any Church denomination or Islamic institutions despite the penchant of so many Hindus for something called interfaith dialogue.[/color] Neither of these two dispensations has officially and formally affirmed the legitimacy of Hinduism and thus all interaction with them is in utter bad faith. They first need to make a grovelling apology for their legion crimes against Hindus and polytheists and amend their founding texts before they dare engage us! And Hindus should acquire spiritual, political self-confidence as well as the coercive means to dispense with the need for certification from their duplicitous sworn enemies, the Church in all its forms [color="#800080"](=christianism)[/color] and Islam.



I regret that the HAF document fails in its basic duty of care (reason enough to be struck off practising medicine for anything analogous) and demonstrates a lack of essential knowledge and elementary logic. The first and most blatant ideological difficulty is that Caste does not define Hinduism, but the critics of Hinduism, both Christian and Muslim antagonists and Hindus dependent on them for their livelihood, have long defined Hinduism in terms of Caste. [color="#0000FF"]It recalls a telling point made by Voltaire that the term Pagan, now an established ascription, was never used by polytheists as a description of themselves, but a term of abuse employed against them by Christians. In this context, despite citing Nicholas R. Dirks' important book you do not highlight his main contention that colonial enumeration of Caste identities to categorise Indians, to better exercise political control over them, hardened its previously fluid boundaries.[/color]



Furthermore, HAF's eagerly announced opposition to Caste-based discrimination, a phrase that recurs constantly in the text, is not defined except to occasionally conflate it with untouchability. This is very important because in all types of discrimination between social groups, some are types of discriminatory conduct are unethical and others illegal, but they are not identical and India has outlawed virtually all conceivable acts of discrimination susceptible to legal remedy. It appears what you might have in mind is more accurately identified as segregation. Paradoxically, in opposing Caste discrimination you are effectively opposing the positive discrimination in favour of Dalits and other supposedly backward groups in Indian society that dates back to the 1930s. All the contemporary legislative discrimination (don't use a term that instantly controverts your fundamental stance) is against the demonised upper Castes, already in itself the counterpart of anti-Semitism because of its egregiously indiscriminate and timeless ascription of alleged crimes of oppression to whole groups of people. No matter how impeccably an individual member of the upper castes may behave in their personal life they are imputed the alleged criminality of their forebears, stretching back to time immemorial. This is how it was for Jews throughout their history, with accusations of cannibalism to poisoning wells that ended in genocide. You also appear to believe such Caste discrimination is widespread in rural India, a typical urban prejudice though actual variations in the prevalence of Caste consciousness are most clearly geographical, least prominent in Bengal, the Punjab and Maharashtra and urban conurbations increasingly.



The mundane and vicious politicisation of India's Caste politics, long promoted by the very evangelists you approvingly credit with mitigating Caste discrimination, has made a mockery of the carefully engineered social change sought on behalf of Dalits by its original protagonists, including the astute B. R. Ambedkar. Perhaps your proposal to end all Caste discrimination is intended to favour disadvantaged children of the fifty or so Brahmin public latrine cleaners in Delhi who might then be treated like human beings and allowed entry into higher education on par with those of wealthy OBC Yadav ministers! [color="#0000FF"]Often their crime is to emerge from modest socio-economic backgrounds to excel in public examinations, of which Muslims complained bitterly even in the late nineteenth century and demanded quotas. The assumption that Brahmins were always privileged oppressors is an evangelist Christian libel that one should absolutely refute without compelling empirical evidence to the contrary. A study by Cambridge historian Anil Seal, a reliable informant in this regard since he holds no brief for India or Hindus, being unscrupulously hostile to them both, found that half the Brahmins of Calcutta in the first decade of the twentieth century were cooks, for reasons that were clearly religious in origin. But hardly the profession of a powerful oppressor group, deserving of the ugly pogroms that targeted Brahmins in Maharashtra after 1948![/color]



But is there such ignorance that it cannot recognised that the same Christian Churches that seek to deploy India's Caste fractures to promote the political goals of their own home governments, had little trouble with lynchings in the America south only forty or so years ago and South African apartheid? Nothing Hindus have done compares with the role of the Catholic Church in the genocide in Rwanda during 1994 and its massive perpetration of paedophilia across the world. And why are Christians not demonstrating outside the White House against the scale of imprisonment of African Americans within their own Christian country instead of shedding crocodile tears about alleged Casteism? The need for Hindus today is to be ruthlessly lucid and politically focused in the way Stalin's generals were as they faced the threat of physical extinction as a people and responded with merciless determination against the Nazis as well as enemies within.



It is imperative to note that Christian evangelists never refer to the massive social changes that have overtaken India during the twentieth century and the relentless efforts of Hindu reformers (many of the them upper caste) for the upliftment of the downtrodden in their midst, beginning with Gopal Krishna Gokhale (not Mahatma Gandhi as it happens) and Ram Mohan Roy earlier. But the efforts of Hindus themselves to combat the evil of untouchability and social iniquity and the political empowerment of Dalits in Indian states like UP and the fact of OBC-dominated polities across Indian is studiously ignored. They are an inconvenient reality when the main purpose is to harvest souls because Hinduism is beyond the pale and cannot do anything for itself. And the moment Christians (or Muslims) are in a majority in any part of India (e.g. Nagaland and Mizoram, parts of Bengal) the celebration of Hindu rituals is prevented by armed gangs of Christians and Muslims, their co-conspirators when it comes to shafting Hindus! [color="#FF0000"]As one Mizo Christian woman in Delhi explained to me politely last year: 'they are uncomfortable with the Hindu ethos'.[/color]

[color="#800080"](Yes, all aliens are.)[/color]



Church representatives in the UK and their shameful Hindu/Sikh collaborators have been active since last year, seeking to outlaw, by including 'Caste discrimination' (the very unfortunate phrase HAF employs) within the all-encompassing Equality Bill that will conform to a host of broader EU directives. Outlawing of alleged Caste discrimination in the UK, for which there is no evidence whatsoever, is clearly a conspiratorial prelude to its official repudiation by the UN, a measure being mendaciously thrust forward by the deracine ex-Hindu, South African High Court judge, Navi Pillay of the UNHRC. One particularly malicious Indian member of the British parliament has been mobilising alleged Sikh Dalits (a non sequitur) against mainstream Sikhs, falsely accusing their Gurdwaras of ‘Caste discrimination' though Caste issues are of infinitesimal significance within Sikhism. This vile conspiracy is not an accident or misunderstanding since that is exactly what the Church has been doing for centuries to demoralise Hindus and occupy their country permanently. Ask yourself why Korean Buddhists, who have become a minority in their own home, are up in arms today about the deliberate abandonment of their public rituals in what is now effectively a Christian country? For them it is always, ‘I am the way' and the only way! There is absolutely no point for Christian evangelists to engage in discussion of Caste unless its enables the harvesting of souls and the political subjugation of Hindus to white Christian imperialism, namely the USA. I am waiting to have a Hindu from the US correct me on this score by berating me for not recognising that these vicious evangelists are only trying to reform Hinduism, an underlying implication of the deeply troubling HAF praise for their work in India.



The British and American governments have actively promoted Khalistani terrorists in the past and their leader, Jagjit Singh Chauhan, declared independence from British soil (the city of Birmingham) the day Dhaka fell to Indian forces and the surrender document was extracted from the defeated Pakistani army by General JFR Jacob. Creating lethal divisions within Sikhism would open another devastating front inside the Indian body politic on behalf of Pakistan by its Anglo-American patrons. And I see no compelling evidence of a change in Anglo-American policy despite the expectations of many to the contrary in the aftermath of 9/11. In case you are unaware, the Khalistani bombers who downed Air India's Kanishka over the Irish Sea were sent from Pakistan to the US and trained by the CIA (confirmed on camera by a senior CIA official and the evidence is in the possession of the GoI). As a consequence, the inference of one interlocutor that [color="#0000FF"]this flawed mea culpa on Caste will prompt invitation to the HAF by the US Congress is naïve in the extreme. The US Congress is an organ of a racist, imperial power and their invitation to vicious nonentities like Angana Chatterji (whose hostility towards US institutions does not deter invitations to the US Congress because she is specifically tasked to undermine Hindus) and John Dayal is not the product of ignorance or inadvertence. Such anti-Hindu creatures are chosen with care because they promote an evangelical agenda wholeheartedly supported by most US Congressional members.[/color]



I am elaborating this material at some length because the politicalcontext is vital when the real or imagined ills of a society are publicly scrutinized in conjunction with third parties that are actually your enemies. For the first time in its independent history, the government of India has failed to officially oppose the egregiously deadly proposal floated by the lowly Navi Pillay of the NHRC to condemn Caste as a form of racism, presumably because [color="#FF0000"]India has been seized by a Catholic dynasty from within.[/color] Is this the company HAF has inadvertently ended up joining by virtue of sheer ignorance and political cupidity? [size="4"][color="#FF0000"]Is HAF unable to recognise that at this moment Hindus are fighting for their very survival as a religious dispensation under the shadow of the Nehru dynasty and in a way that had not occurred even under the sword of Aurangzeb because that asuric demon was successfully confronted on the battlefield by Maratha, Jat and Sikh warriors?[/color][/size]

[color="#800080"](Exactly. At last, someone who said it.)[/color]



White [color="#0000FF"]Church representatives are in Iraq and Afghanistan at this very moment, supporting their own governments, engaged in something akin to genocide in the case of Iraq, with a 1.4 million dead (John Hopkins study, using US DOD methodology) owing to the Anglo-American invasion.[/color] It is worth recalling that the Archbishop of Canterbury's envoy to the Lebanon in 1987 turned out to have been hand in glove with Anglo-American intelligence services, held hostage himself when the kidnappers of the journalist whose release he was sent to negotiate, found a tracking device in his matted hair! The various Church denominations are all pretty much integral to the Western state system and their imperialist activities (is this something HAF declines to recognise as a historical phenomenon?) and have been from the time of Emperor Constantine. The Vatican was and remains a state that had armies, participated in wars throughout its long and ugly history and illegitimate heirs of supposedly celibate Popes often succeeded to rule. Their great thinkers, including both Thomas Aquinas and the dissident Martin Luther, approved torture and brutal murder of apostates and pagans and that is exactly what the Portuguese followers of the former practised with blood thirsty enthusiasm on invading Goa, burning, flaying and spearing alive Brahmins and their families with abandon. They were extinguishing the leaders of Hindu society and then quickly enslaved the supposed victims of Caste oppression once the conquest had succeeded. Condemnation of alleged Caste oppression by a basically powerless group, the Brahmins, living under the shadow of brutal Islamic rule, was a handy ideological weapon. Today, the dominant political forces in India are OBCs, Dalits and Muslims, for whom communists are quite openly surrogates (Maoists praised the 26/11 massacre and only regretted that Muslims also died) and the real nerves of political power at the Centre reside with covert representatives of the Vatican. The ideological ruse of denouncing Upper Caste oppression remains alive and well though it is now couched in drawing room politesse, but on the entry of imperial soldiery into a conquered country old-fashioned mass murder, rape and mayhem will resurface.



[color="#0000FF"]To return to what appears to me to be the essence of the HAF's apologetic mea culpa on Caste, which in the way it is articulated seems not-so subliminally addressed to a racist Christian audience.[/color] I use the term racist very consciously because I wish to counter pose it ideologically to Caste though the latter is not its Hindu counterpart as the repository of a virulent creed. White races still wield most instruments of political, military and ideological power in the world that imposes their hierarchic racist vision of social and economic organisation. Although racism has gone underground somewhat in the past two decades, supremacist racist ideology absolutely defines Western European culture regardless of its geographical locale and is always ready to reassert its inhuman prerogatives. The reach of this self-serving ideological perspective of a racially defined Western human architecture is almost universal and not merely confined to white societies, which means that even small town India has been penetrated by its pervasive distorted ideological consciousness. Non Europeans unthinkingly echo and repeat the dominant white ethos that affirms their own subalternity. Indeed both Caste consciousness as well as the resistance to it derives from the profound impact of colonisation itself. [color="#0000FF"]And virtually every Indian social science academic in Anglo-American universities constantly reiterates a critique of India and all things Hindu prompted by the writings of British colonialists or American Cold warriors. It is not so very complicated at all. [/color]



[color="#0000FF"]In this context it should be recognised that many of the documents on Caste to be found on the Internet, adorning innocuous institutional affiliations and titled academic respectability, seem to be generated from the same evangelist database. I sense an echo of their calculated machinations in the HAF report[/color] since they are easily picked up by scribes looking for quotes and information with which they are unfamiliar themselves. In addition, the paradox of the HAF plea on Caste is that it espouses a set secular sentiments and prejudices unconsciously inspired by socialisation within the instrumental Western political paradigm of domination and its associated intellectual milieu. And it seeks to validate them through an extremely superficial reading of Hinduism and without any serious grounding in the complex secular intellectual discourse on Caste and practice that it wants to influence. Since others have pointed out the gross intellectual failings of the HAF exegesis on Caste I reserve myself to expressing surprise that the august experts, who have supposedly examined it thoroughly, have made a multiplicity of faux pas in their scholarship. Mention is made of M. S. Srinivas and Nicholas R. Dirks on Caste, though why not the theorist G. S. Ghurye is unclear, but nothing is said of their central contentions on Caste, suggesting they have been cited to insinuate intellectual legitimacy without really bothering with what they have had to say. For example, Srinivas highlighted the fluid and dynamic essence of caste as a social institution and also rejected the notion of a rigid, pan-Indian caste system and these aspects of his analysis are pertinent to the idea of Caste discrimination. The most elementary blunder has been the failure to consult more widely, which suggests both ignorance and over confidence. In passing it might be noted that the literature on the phenomenon of white Christian domination I refer to is vast and need not detain us here. However, anyone interested might wish to consult Franz Fanon's writings and the Afro American civil rights literature of the 1960s, all of which remains imperative for contextualising the cynical discourse on Caste.



Dr. Gautam Sen is President, World Association of Hindu Academics and Special Representative, HDAS, UK.

Good writer. Well written. But what's he doing in HDAS....?

[Guest]

Just days after launching Twitter feeds in Arabic and Farsi to communicate directly with people in the Middle East, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, .. announced Tuesday that t[size="5"]he State Department would begin sending messages in Chinese, Russian and [color="#FF0000"]Hindi[/color].[/size]



--



We're gonna TWEET our enemies into 'submission' and major reform.

[HareKrishna]

F-35 engine battle breaks out on GOP spending bill

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110216/ap_o...s_spending

[Guest]

[url="http://www.examiner.com/social-media-in-national/us-gov-software-creates-fake-people-on-social-networks-to-promote-propoganda#ixzz1ER3OSJMQ"]US Gov. Software Creates 'Fake People' on Social Networks to Promote Propoganda [/url]

The US government is offering private intelligence companies contracts to create software to manage "fake people" on social media sites and create the illusion of consensus on controversial issues.

The contract calls for the development of "Persona Management Software" which would help the user create and manage a variety of distinct fake profiles online. The job listing was discussed in recently leaked emails from the private security firm HBGary after an attack by internet activist last week.



According to the contract, the software would "protect the identity of government agencies" by employing a number of false signals to convince users that the poster is in fact a real person. A single user could manage unique background information and status updates for up to 10 fake people from a single computer....

[Guest]

[url="http://www.theusreport.com/the-us-report/2011/2/22/islamist-rally-calling-for-sharia-law-in-us-should-go-forwar.html"]ISLAMIST RALLY CALLING FOR SHARIA LAW IN U.S. SHOULD GO FORWARD [/url]

A U.S. Muslim group is planning a demonstration featuring controversial British imams who are advocating for the implementation of Sharia law in the United States.



The Islamic Thinker's Society has scheduled the event for March 3 and organizers claim it will be held in front of the White House.



“The event is a rally, a call for the Sharia, a call for the Muslims to rise up and establish the Islamic state in America,” Anjem Choudary – one of the proposed speakers – told the UK's Daily Star. <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />



Choudary's organization, Islam4UK, was banned in 2010 under British counterterrorism laws. Islam4UK is a spinoff of the Islamist group al Muhajiroun, which is an offshoot of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), a group seeking to install a global Islamic caliphate. HT also seeks to destroy democracy and states that Sharia has supremacy over the Constitution in the United States......

[Guest]

[url="http://www.nysun.com/foreign/palin-will-draw-a-contrast-with-obama-in-her/87248/"]Palin Will Draw a Contrast With Obama in Her Visit Next Month to India [/url]

Sarah Palin’s choice of an international venue to deliver an address on “My Vision of America” is canny. She will speak in March before India’s business, political, diplomatic, academic and media elite at the annual India Today Conclave. The gathering arguably possesses the biggest private-sector megaphone in the world’s largest democracy. And while the delegates may not be a microcosm of the country’s 1.2 billion mostly poor people, they certainly make decisions that matter.

....

[Guest]

[url="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/feb/28/financial-terrorism-suspected-in-08-economic-crash/"]Financial terrorism suspected in 2008 economic crash[/url]

Suspects include financial enemies in Middle Eastern states, Islamic terrorists, hostile members of the Chinese military, or government and organized crime groups in Russia, Venezuela or Iran. Chinese military officials publicly have suggested using economic warfare against the U.S

[HareKrishna]

Never Fight a Land War in Asia



http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110228-...9a4e02164b



U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking at West Point, said last week that “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.” In saying this, Gates was repeating a dictum laid down by Douglas MacArthur after the Korean War, who urged the United States to avoid land wars in Asia. Given that the United States has fought four major land wars in Asia since World War II — Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq — none of which had ideal outcomes, it is useful to ask three questions: First, why is fighting a land war in Asia a bad idea? Second, why does the United States seem compelled to fight these wars? And third, what is the alternative that protects U.S. interests in Asia without large-scale military land wars?



The Hindrances of Overseas Wars



Let’s begin with the first question, the answer to which is rooted in demographics and space. The population of Iraq is currently about 32 million. Afghanistan has a population of less than 30 million. The U.S. military, all told, consists of about 1.5 million active-duty personnel (plus 980,000 in the reserves), of whom more than 550,000 belong to the Army and about 200,000 are part of the Marine Corps. Given this, it is important to note that the United States strains to deploy about 200,000 troops at any one time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that many of these troops are in support rather than combat roles. The same was true in Vietnam, where the United States was challenged to field a maximum of about 550,000 troops (in a country much more populous than Iraq or Afghanistan) despite conscription and a larger standing army. Indeed, the same problem existed in World War II.



When the United States fights in the Eastern Hemisphere, it fights at great distances, and the greater the distance, the greater the logistical cost. More ships are needed to deliver the same amount of materiel, for example. That absorbs many troops. The logistical cost of fighting at a distance is that it diverts numbers of troops (or requires numbers of civilian personnel) disproportionate to the size of the combat force.



Regardless of the number of troops deployed, the U.S. military is always vastly outnumbered by the populations of the countries to which it is deployed. If parts of these populations resist as light-infantry guerrilla forces or employ terrorist tactics, the enemy rapidly swells to a size that can outnumber U.S. forces, as in Vietnam and Korea. At the same time, the enemy adopts strategies to take advantage of the core weakness of the United States — tactical intelligence. The resistance is fighting at home. It understands the terrain and the culture. The United States is fighting in an alien environment. It is constantly at an intelligence disadvantage. That means that the effectiveness of the native forces is multiplied by excellent intelligence, while the effectiveness of U.S. forces is divided by lack of intelligence.



The United States compensates with technology, from space-based reconnaissance and air power to counter-battery systems and advanced communications. This can make up the deficit but only by massive diversions of manpower from ground-combat operations. Maintaining a helicopter requires dozens of ground-crew personnel. Where the enemy operates with minimal technology multiplied by intelligence, the United States compensates for lack of intelligence with massive technology that further reduces available combat personnel. Between logistics and technological force multipliers, the U.S. “point of the spear” shrinks. If you add the need to train, relieve, rest and recuperate the ground-combat forces, you are left with a small percentage available to fight.



The paradox of this is that American forces will win the engagements but may still lose the war. Having identified the enemy, the United States can overwhelm it with firepower. The problem the United States has is finding the enemy and distinguishing it from the general population. As a result, the United States is well-suited for the initial phases of combat, when the task is to defeat a conventional force. But after the conventional force has been defeated, the resistance can switch to methods difficult for American intelligence to deal with. The enemy can then control the tempo of operations by declining combat where it is at a disadvantage and initiating combat when it chooses.



The example of the capitulation of Germany and Japan in World War II is frequently cited as a model of U.S. forces defeating and pacifying an opposing nation. But the Germans were not defeated primarily by U.S. ground troops. The back of the Wehrmacht was broken by the Soviets on their own soil with the logistical advantages of short supply lines. And, of course, Britain and numerous other countries were involved. It is doubtful that the Germans would have capitulated to the Americans alone. The force the United States deployed was insufficient to defeat Germany. The Germans had no appetite for continuing a resistance against the Russians and saw surrendering to the Americans and British as sanctuary from the Russians. They weren’t going to resist them. As for Japan, it was not ground forces but air power, submarine warfare and atomic bombs that finished them — and the emperor’s willingness to order a surrender. It was not land power that prevented resistance but air and sea power, plus a political compromise by MacArthur in retaining and using the emperor. Had the Japanese emperor been removed, I suspect that the occupation of Japan would have been much more costly. Neither Germany nor Japan are examples in which U.S. land forces compelled capitulation and suppressed resistance.



The problem the United States has in the Eastern Hemisphere is that the size of the force needed to occupy a country initially is much smaller than the force needed to pacify the country. The force available for pacification is much smaller than needed because the force the United States can deploy demographically without committing to total war is simply too small to do the job — and the size needed to do the job is unknown.



U.S. Global Interests



The deeper problem is this: The United States has global interests. While the Soviet Union was the primary focus of the United States during the Cold War, no power threatens to dominate Eurasia now, and therefore no threat justifies the singular focus of the United States. In time of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States must still retain a strategic reserve for other unanticipated contingencies. This further reduces the available force for combat.



Some people argue that the United States is insufficiently ruthless in prosecuting war, as if it would be more successful without political restraints at home. The Soviets and the Nazis, neither noted for gentleness, were unable to destroy the partisans behind German lines or the Yugoslav resistance, in spite of brutal tactics. The guerrilla has built-in advantages in warfare for which brutality cannot compensate.



Given all this, the question is why the United States has gotten involved in wars in Eurasia four times since World War II. In each case it is obvious: for political reasons. In Korea and Vietnam, it was to demonstrate to doubting allies that the United States had the will to resist the Soviets. In Afghanistan, it was to uproot al Qaeda. In Iraq, the reasons are murkier, more complex and less convincing, but the United States ultimately went in, in my opinion, to convince the Islamic world of American will.



The United States has tried to shape events in the Eastern Hemisphere by the direct application of land power. In Korea and Vietnam, it was trying to demonstrate resolve against Soviet and Chinese power. In Afghanistan and Iraq, it was trying to shape the politics of the Muslim world. The goal was understandable but the amount of ground force available was not. In Korea, it resulted in stalemate; in Vietnam, defeat. We await the outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan, but given Gates’ statement, the situation for the United States is not necessarily hopeful.



In each case, the military was given an ambiguous mission. This was because a clear outcome — defeating the enemy — was unattainable. At the same time, there were political interests in each. Having engaged, simply leaving did not seem an option. Therefore, Korea turned into an extended presence in a near-combat posture, Vietnam ended in defeat for the American side, and Iraq and Afghanistan have turned, for the time being, into an uncertain muddle that no reasonable person expects to end with the declared goals of a freed and democratic pair of countries.



Problems of Strategy



There are two problems with American strategy. The first is using the appropriate force for the political mission. This is not a question so much of the force as it is of the mission. The use of military force requires clarity of purpose; otherwise, a coherent strategy cannot emerge. Moreover, it requires an offensive mission. Defensive missions (such as Vietnam and Korea) by definition have no terminal point or any criteria for victory. Given the limited availability of ground combat forces, defensive missions allow the enemy’s level of effort to determine the size of the force inserted, and if the force is insufficient to achieve the mission, the result is indefinite deployment of scarce forces.



Then there are missions with clear goals initially but without an understanding of how to deal with Act II. Iraq suffered from an offensive intention ill suited to the enemy’s response. Having destroyed the conventional forces of Iraq, the United States was unprepared for the Iraqi response, which was guerrilla resistance on a wide scale. The same was true in Afghanistan. Counterinsurgency is occupation warfare. It is the need to render a population — rather than an army — unwilling and incapable of resisting. It requires vast resources and large numbers of troops that outstrip the interest. Low-cost counter-insurgency with insufficient forces will always fail. Since the United States uses limited forces because it has to, counterinsurgency is the most dangerous kind of war for the United States. The idea has always been that the people prefer the U.S. occupation to the threats posed by their fellow countrymen and that the United States can protect those who genuinely do prefer the former. That may be the idea, but there is never enough U.S. force available.



Another model for dealing with the problem of shaping political realities can be seen in the Iran-Iraq war. In that war, the United States allowed the mutual distrust of the two countries to eliminate the threats posed by both. When the Iraqis responded by invading Kuwait, the United States responded with a massive counter with very limited ends — the reconquest of Kuwait and the withdrawal of forces. It was a land war in Asia designed to defeat a known and finite enemy army without any attempt at occupation.



The problem with all four wars is that they were not wars in a conventional sense and did not use the military as militaries are supposed to be used. The purpose of a military is to defeat enemy conventional forces. As an army of occupation against a hostile population, military forces are relatively weak. The problem for the United States is that such an army must occupy a country for a long time, and the U.S. military simply lacks the ground forces needed to occupy countries and still be available to deal with other threats.



By having an unclear mission, you have an uncertain terminal point. When does it end? You then wind up with a political problem internationally — having engaged in the war, you have allies inside and outside of the country that have fought with you and taken risks with you. Withdrawal leaves them exposed, and potential allies will be cautious in joining with you in another war. The political costs spiral and the decision to disengage is postponed. The United States winds up in the worst of all worlds. It terminates not on its own but when its position becomes untenable, as in Vietnam. This pyramids the political costs dramatically.



Wars need to be fought with ends that can be achieved by the forces available. Donald Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding of war. You do not engage in war if the army you have is insufficient. When you understand the foundations of American military capability and its limits in Eurasia, Gates’ view on war in the Eastern Hemisphere is far more sound than Rumsfeld’s.



The Diplomatic Alternative



The alternative is diplomacy, not understood as an alternative to war but as another tool in statecraft alongside war. Diplomacy can find the common ground between nations. It can also be used to identify the hostility of nations and use that hostility to insulate the United States by diverting the attention of other nations from challenging the United States. That is what happened during the Iran-Iraq war. It wasn’t pretty, but neither was the alternative.



Diplomacy for the United States is about maintaining the balance of power and using and diverting conflict to manage the international system. Force is the last resort, and when it is used, it must be devastating. The argument I have made, and which I think Gates is asserting, is that at a distance, the United States cannot be devastating in wars dependent on land power. That is the weakest aspect of American international power and the one the United States has resorted to all too often since World War II, with unacceptable results. Using U.S. land power as part of a combined arms strategy is occasionally effective in defeating conventional forces, as it was with North Korea (and not China) but is inadequate to the demands of occupation warfare. It makes too few troops available for success, and it does not know how many troops might be needed.



This is not a policy failure of any particular U.S. president. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have encountered precisely the same problem, which is that the forces that have existed in Eurasia, from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in Korea to the Taliban in Afghanistan, have either been too numerous or too agile (or both) for U.S. ground forces to deal with. In any war, the primary goal is not to be defeated. An elective war in which the criteria for success are unclear and for which the amount of land force is insufficient must be avoided. That is Gates’ message. It is the same one MacArthur delivered, and the one Dwight Eisenhower exercised when he refused to intervene in Vietnam on France’s behalf. As with the Monroe Doctrine, it should be elevated to a principle of U.S. foreign policy, not because it is a moral principle but because it is a very practical one.

[Guest]

HareKrishna,

please provide link for full article because of copyright issues.

[HareKrishna]

source here



http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110228-...9a4e02164b

[Guest]

[url="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/50714.html"]American idol: India preps for Sarah Palin[/url]

[Guest]

MARCH 19, 2011

OBAMA: 'Today we are part of a broad coalition. We are answering the calls of a threatened people. And we are acting in the interests of the United States and the world'...



MARCH 19, 2003

BUSH: 'American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger'...

[Guest]

Farrakhan to Obama: 'Be Careful, Brother. Who The Hell Do You Think You Are?'

[ramana]

Non Racist History of US

[Guest]

Dow Has Longest Weekly Slump Since '04...

Housing prices fall 'beats Great Depression slide'...

Official unemployment - 9.1%

Actual unemployment - 17%

If you add underemployed - 28%

China Divests 97% of Holdings in US Treasury Bills...



Heading for second dip

[Husky]

Syphilis was by and large eradicated in the west after World War II, owing to penicillin.

And some part of the other side of it:



http://www.nzherald.co.nz/diseases/news/..._id=119034

May 28, 2011



Experiment infects 1500 with syphilis

Between 1946-48, in Guatemala, more than 1,500 soldiers, prisoners, orphans and mentally ill patients were deliberately infected with syphilis in an experiment by American doctors to test the effectiveness of penicillin.

"Oh say can you seeeeeeeeeeee

by the daaawn's early liiiiiiight...."





Comparing apples with apples:

- mentally ill patients. Well, we already knew that Hitler was inspired by and plagiarised AmriKKKa's forced-euthanasia program of people with disabilities. (Infecting them with syphilis first is not something I've heard of in the nazi case. May be an AmeriKKKan innovation?)

- prisoners. The nazi German state treated the Arischen among its Allied POWs according to the Geneva convention apparently, as even wartime (and possibly immediate post-war, but certainly not much later) American movies admitted.

- orphans. That's breaking new ground. :walg: A bit hazy, but I think nazi Germany enlisted their orphans for nazism's Arische purpose. Though I do wonder whether Guatemalan orphans would qualify. In any case, clearly, the kindly AmeriKKKan doctors - missionary perchance? lots of missionaries volunteering for the US govt's Peaceful Purposes in S America since ages -- consider the S American orphans to be streetrats: They infected them with syphilis after all. (Of course, AmeriKKKa also did experiments with African-origin persons concerning syphilis. Tuskegee I think it was called.)



Seems American "ethics" holds its own against those of the nazis.

Just some of the things people in AmriKKKa really ought to bring up when next certain Textbooks are opened in KKKalifornia.

[HareKrishna]

In the fight against communism, USA did suport a large series of extremist christian organizations to fight whit communists.

[HareKrishna]

double post

[dhu]

Another revelation.. Ford Foundation, U.N. Population Fund, etc., funded the "population solution" in both India and China.



[url="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/06/27/where_have_all_the_girls_gone?page=full"]Where Have All the Girls Gone?[/url]

At first the language was gender-neutral. But before long the descriptions grew more blunt, and some proponents talked frankly about selecting for sons. In the years that followed, Population Council President Bernard Berelson endorsed sex selection in the pages of Science, while Paul Ehrlich advocated giving couples the sons they desired in his blockbuster The Population Bomb. "[I]f a simple method could be found to guarantee that first-born children were males," he wrote, "then population control problems in many areas would be somewhat eased." In many countries, he wrote, "couples with only female children 'keep trying' in hope of a son." [color="#0000FF"][No randomness or providential coincidence, this is a quite well-thought out geopolitical strategy -- academia fulfilling its role as nerve center of the Empire][/color]A wide range of population control strategies were on the table at the time, but by the end of the decade, when the NICHD held another workshop on reducing birth rates, sex selection had emerged as an approach that participants deemed "particularly desirable."



..

Before long, sex selection emerged as a favored solution. In the context of '60s and '70s population politics, it had the appeal of being a voluntary strategy that played to individual behavior. In his paper for Science, Berelson ranked sex selection's ethical value as "high."[color="#0000FF"][must be a theologian or a "social theorist"][/color] Postgate pointed out, "Countless millions of people would leap at the opportunity to breed male." And other strategies being tried in Asia at the time entailed coercion, not choice.



In South Korea, Western money enabled the creation of a fleet of mobile clinics -- reconditioned U.S. Army ambulances donated by USAID and staffed by poorly trained workers and volunteers. Fieldworkers employed by the health ministry's Bureau of Public Health were paid based on how many people they brought in for sterilizations and intrauterine device insertions, and some allege Korea's mobile clinics later became the site of abortions as well. By the 1970s, recalls gynecologist Cho Young-youl, who was a medical student at the time, "there were agents going around the countryside to small towns and bringing women into the [mobile] clinics. That counted toward their pay. They brought the women regardless of whether they were pregnant." Non-pregnant women were sterilized. A pregnant woman met a worse fate, Cho says: "The agent would have her abort and then undergo tubal ligation." As Korea's abortion rate skyrocketed, Sung-bong Hong and Christopher Tietze detailed its rise in the Population Council journal Studies in Family Planning. By 1977, they determined, doctors in Seoul were performing 2.75 abortions for every birth -- the highest documented abortion rate in human history. Were it not for this history, Korean sociologist Heeran Chun recently told me, "I don't think sex-selective abortion would have become so popular."



In India, meanwhile, advisors from the World Bank and other organizations pressured the government into adopting a paradigm, as public-health activist Sabu George put it to me, "where the entire problem was population." The Rockefeller Foundation granted $1.5 million to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the country's top medical school, and the Ford Foundation chipped in $63,563 for "research into reproductive biology." And sometime in the mid-1960s, Population Council medical director Sheldon Segal showed the institute's doctors how to test human cells for the sex chromatins that indicated a person was female -- a method that was the precursor to fetal sex determination.



Soon after, the technology matured, and second-trimester fetal sex determination became possible using amniocentesis. In 1975, AIIMS doctors inaugurated sex-selective abortion trials at a government hospital, offering amniocentesis to poor women free of charge and then helping them, should they so choose, to abort on the basis of sex. An estimated 1,000 women carrying female fetuses underwent abortions. The doctors touted the study as a population control experiment, and sex-selective abortion spread throughout India. In his autobiography, Segal professed to being shocked to learn that doctors at AIIMS were using a variation on his instructions to perform sex-selective abortions. But he neglected to mention that shortly after his stay in India he stood before an audience at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and described sex selection as a method of population control. (The minutes from the meeting describe "sex determination at conception" -- now finally available today through advances in assisted reproductive technology -- but in-utero sex determination was the form of sex selection furthest along at that point.)



Sex selection hit China the same year the AIIMS experiments began. The country accepted Western aid belatedly, in 1979. But after years of being kept out of the Middle Kingdom, the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) and IPPF jumped at the opportunity to play a role in the world's most populous country, with UNFPA chipping in $50 million for computers, training, and publicity on the eve of the one-child policy's unveiling. Publicly, officers at both UNFPA and IPPF claimed China's new policy relied on the Chinese people's exceptional knack for communalism. But, according to Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly's account of the population control movement, Fatal Misconception, in January 1980 IPPF information officer Penny Kane privately fretted about local officials' evident interest in meeting the new birth quotas through forced abortions. Accounts of those eventually leaked out, as did reports of sex-selective abortions. In 1982, Associated Press correspondent Victoria Graham warned that those augured a spreading trend. "These are not isolated cases," she wrote, adding: "Demographers are warning that if the balance between the sexes is altered by abortion and infanticide, it could have dire consequences."

[sumishi]

[size="3"] [font="Courier New"]^^^

In resonance with this [/size][/font][size="3"] "population reduction" plan[/size][size="3"], x-posting one of my posts [/size][size="3"](dated 18 Jul 2010)[/size][size="3"] from the "GMO - Entry into India and Consequences" thread of [/size][size="3"]BRF[/size][size="3"].



[/size][indent][size="3"]

We generally associate GMO with genetically modified food crops. But GMO stands for genetically modified organism, whose genes have been altered through genetic engineering.



Here's something new on the horizon, reported in yesterday's edition of The Times of India:

[url="http://http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-07-17/science/28276126_1_stephensi-mosquito-malaria-parasite"]US scientists develop malaria-proof mosquito[/url].



There was an interesting "precursor" article in 2009 in Natural News which asks us to [url="http://www.naturalnews.com/026434_vaccines_vaccination_vaccinations.html"]Watch Out for Flying Syringes, GMO Food Vaccines, and Forced Vaccinations[/url].



Things do seem to be a little hoary, because [url="http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article17644.html"]Bill Gates Talks About Vaccines to Reduce World Population[/url].



What about the track record of UN-linked health organisations like WHO?



Well, as an example, consider that [url="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12346214"]Tetanus vaccine may be laced with anti-fertility drug[/url].



Perhaps the [url="http://www.vaclib.org/basic/trufax/v6.html"]Leading Edge Master Analysis of the Vaccination Paradigm[/url] may throw some more light onto the entire vaccination game.



So, it they release this GMO critter into the environment to replace the natural species, what more will they be doing besides the official aim of combating Malaria?

[/size][/indent]