di Leone Grotti
di Leone Grotti
di Leone Grotti
miércoles, 24 de septiembre de 2014
L’Occident, sortant de sa torpeur, prend tardivement conscience de ce qui est en jeu : sa survie et celle de la civilisation.
L’Occident, s’il refuse de s’incliner devant la barbarie, doit mener une guerre sans merci…
par Dominique Jamet
Journaliste et écrivain, i
l a présidé la Bibliothèque de France
et a publié plus d'une vingtaine de romans et d'essais
Les djihadistes de l’État islamique ont plus d’un point commun avec les nazis. Comme ceux-ci, porteurs d’un message de haine et de mort, ils disent ce qu’ils feront, et ils font comme ils ont dit. Ne s’en étonnent que ceux qui, depuis des années, ne veulent rien entendre, rien voir et rien savoir.
Jeté à la face du monde par le nommé, ou surnommé, Abou Mohammed al-Adnani, l’appel au meurtre, partout où ils se trouvent, et par tous les moyens, des ressortissants des États-Unis et de la France a été immédiatement suivi d’un sinistre commencement d’exécution. À l’heure où ces lignes sont écrites, la vie du malheureux Hervé Gourdel ne tient plus, littéralement, qu’à un fil (1). Et la prise d’otage perpétrée par des tueurs du gang algérien, jusqu’ici inconnu, des Djounoud al-Khalifa, n’est peut-être que la première de la sanglante série que des criminels rêvent d’inscrire dans le Grand Livre de leur Histoire.
Il ne servirait à rien de chercher à biaiser avec la réalité. Regardons les choses en face. L’armée des fous de Dieu n’a pas de problèmes de recrutement et d’effectifs. Elle trouvera sans nul doute, aussi bien parmi ceux qui rêvent de rejoindre ses rangs au Moyen-Orient que parmi ceux qui en reviennent, des volontaires de la mort – la leur et celle des autres. Le pire est devant nous.
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(1) Il est aux alentours de 17 heures lorsque la nouvelle de la mort de l'otage français Hervé Gourdel se propage. (L'otage français Hervé Gourdel décapité par des djihadistes ...)
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Scottish independence: the Nationalists win by losing.
by Theodore Dalrymple
Last week’s referendum on Scottish independence was an excellent illustration of the famous dictum of Frédéric Bastiat, the nineteenth-century French liberal economist, that the state is the means by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else. The defeated leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party, Alex Salmond, offered the Scottish people a vision of a fairer country (fairer than Scotland now, fairer than England ever), by which he meant larger subventions for more people, distributed by him and his party.
Not surprisingly, he did best in those areas where people had most to gain from the promised subventions and where they believed that they were not getting their fair share of Scotland’s heavenly manna—oil and gas from the North Sea. This is not to say that those who voted against him were all sturdy burghers, anxious to stand on their own economic feet; many may have calculated that, with the oil and gas running out, the subventions would be larger and safer in the long run if derived from England rather than from the North Sea. But certainly most of those in the population hoping for some degree of independence from the state would have voted against him.
It was widely reported in the press that fear motivated the “No” vote, as if fear in politics were always an irrational emotion. But Salmond, theChavista of the North, said that he would repudiate Scotland’s share of the British national debt, a pronouncement more than sufficient to sound alarm bells among the better-informed. And those who rejected independence (who turned out to be the majority of voters) were probably fearful, too, of the very enthusiasm of the opposite camp, which often took a mildly intimidating turn, as enthusiasm for political causes is apt to do. There were reports of people opposed to the Nationalists being branded traitors; the majority was, if not silent, distinctly muted.
The majority was also fearful that Salmond had not been specific enough about the many problems that would arise in the breakup of a union that had lasted 307 years.
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Two books by
Theodore Dalrymple
Some of the worst brutality of Communist Czechoslovakia happened in a place most people have never heard of
The Mysterious Crimes of Valdice
-three parts-
(part 1)
This was named the best analytical-investigative article of 2013 in the Czech Republic during the country’s annual journalism competition organized by the Open Society Fund-Prague. It originally appeared in Respekt magazine. Awards were handed out in a ceremony in April. This is the first of three parts. – TOL
By the 1970s and 1980s torture and murder were not routine tools of the Czechoslovak regime. Except in one place, about which even to this day not much is known. No one knows its victims, and the perpetrators live quietly among us. We decided to revive the forgotten story and to bring back to the map of Czech history a place that shows what great power does to people and how difficult it is to find earthly justice: the Third Department in Valdice.
In the lock of the cell door, a key rattles and Julius Csanyi looks alert. The tattooed 20-year-old of Slovak-Hungarian origin is no newbie in the division of special surveillance. Originally he was thrown in jail for “bodily harm” – he got into a fight in a pub – but his rebellious nature landed him behind bars for longer than he expected. Twice he attacked a guard and once he tried to escape. So from a regular Slovak prison he worked his way here – to the toughest division within the toughest prison in Czechoslovakia. Within six years he gained enough experience to know that the rattle of keys in the lock after 10 p.m. does not bode well.
It is the end of the 1980s and the situation in the totalitarian country is slowly starting to change. Outside, beyond the walls of the prison there is talk of restructuring and reforms. Not even two whole years remain until the moment when tens of thousands of people openly express disagreement with the ruling regime in the form of “A Few Sentences,” a petition demanding basic freedoms. Shortly after, the communist empire collapses forever. However, here in the Third Department of Valdice, a strange building built on the side of a former monastery complex, nothing is changing. Perforated sheets of metal cover the windows, letting only minimal light into the unheated cells. The prisoners share their scant food rations with rats, and unexpected guard visits usually have a predictable reason.
“The guards came inside. There were three of them, I remember that,” recalls the former criminal in a Prague restaurant a quarter century after the event took place. With his crew cut, leather pants, and tattooed arms, Csanyi still seems menacing, even though he cut ties with the criminal world five years ago and now supports himself honestly. All together he spent 19 years in prison, most of it for fights, shootings, or weapons possession. The day in question, he said, “They sent me outside in the hallway and they stayed in the cell with a boy who shared it with me. They came there like that often. I could hear how they were beating him brutally. I don’t know how long it took, maybe 20 minutes, maybe longer. At times like that you don’t pay attention to time.”
Csanyi sips black coffee and packs a cigarette with cheap tobacco. His memory is poor: after years spent taking drugs and in prison, he does not recall the name of his former cellmate. He was smaller, he says, about “50 kilos [110 pounds], even with his shoes.” He was sent to the special division for harassing the warden’s wife with rude letters. That, too, is why he had the guards’ attention. “Then the guards came out and one of them handed me a cigarette,” Csanyi remembers. “I didn’t take it; smoking was forbidden in the cell. I said to myself, ‘I’ll take one and then they’ll kill me right away.’ ”
Csanyi returned to his cell and searched in the dim light for his cellmate. Then he understood the reason for the unusual generosity. The windows were high above the floor, covered from the inside with massive bars. There, a helpless body with a rag noose around the neck was hanging. Behind Csanyi on the floor a pack of cigarettes hit the floor and a guard told him, “Call us in about three hours.” The steel doors slammed and the sound of walking shoes clicking on the floor slowly faded. “I was hopping mad. I screamed that they must be playing a joke,” he recounts. “Then I sat on the bed and smoked one after another.”
This story, to which we will return again, most likely took place in Valdice in the winter of 1987. The building for disciplinary punishments, where Csanyi spent more than a year, saw many similar scenes in the past. A two-story structure with underground solitary confinement cells and two floors of small cells around a gallery, it was built in the mid-19th century, and from the beginning it served to isolate the most serious criminals. During the Nazi protectorate in World War II, it served as an investigation center for the Gestapo, and in the 1950s the security services tortured Catholic priests here.
Valdice and Leopold in what is now Slovakia were the toughest prisons in Czechoslovakia during normalization. The prison warden, Antonin Kyndl, was a committed communist who in the 1950s served in the Interior Ministry police in a forced labor camp. The ruling regime began sending fewer political prisoners here. Rather, the former monastery near Jicin was becoming the primary depository for violent thieves, sexual deviants, rapists, and murderers. The building of disciplinary punishments, therefore, served as something like a “Valdice within Valdice” – a place where a judge or the prison management placed uncontrollable, dangerous, or otherwise troublesome prisoners. The reasons for being placed here were numerous: here you could find aggressive psychopaths who attacked others and those who tried to escape, but also people who complained too much, talked back to the guards, or did not fulfill their work quotas.
Most of the occupants of the Third Department were repeat criminals. Of course, after their return to freedom, these outcasts living on the fringes of society were not going to rush to write about goings on in the prison for Radio Free Europe. Instead they often fell into the revolving door of more crime and punishment.
So outside the prison walls not much is known about the “House of Horror,” as the Third Department was dubbed by one of the few political prisoners who passed through it from the beginning of the 1970s, Milan Hubl, a historian. But even in the 1970s and 1980s the prevailing conditions here were comparable with the Great Terror of the 1950s: daily beatings, mysterious prisoner suicides, hunger, and cold. When in 1989 a banner was hung out, appearing in photographs from revolutionary-era Valdice and reading “Destroy the Third Division,” only a few citizens of the newly free Czechoslovakia had any idea what it meant. “And that hasn’t changed to this day,” says Ivan Ruzicka, a former prisoner who during the revolution became the main speaker for the inmates. “When I tell people about the former Valdice, they don’t want to believe me.”
FAMILY
When an inmate found himself “behind the metal sheets,” as was the disciplinary building was called for its closed-in windows, becoming acquainted with the rules involved a certain ritual. “The guards welcomed everyone with a beating in the receiving room,” remembers Jiri Wolf, another political prisoner sent there at the end of the 1970s. “The prisoner had to strip naked and bend over into a 45 degree angle. One guard sat astride on his head and other beat him with a strong leather belt across his butt and his back. Gypsies got 20 blows, whites 15. Everyone had to count themselves and if someone messed up, they began again from the beginning. Those who wet themselves from the pain, had to lick everything off of the floor. I also had to lick up my own urine.”
A two-year sentence for robbing a convenience store could be extended to 20 years here.
Beatings with batons and belts were a part of the daily life. Another favorite form of punishment was the so-called “polisher” a heavy bin with a brush attached, normally used for polishing a floor. The guard sat on top of it and the prisoner had to push the load around the floor here and there until he fell from exhaustion.
“They were sadists,” Csanyi says. “You weren’t allowed to sit down in your cell. They would immediately beat you if you did. So all day you walk around and in the evening you drop from exhaustion. You fall asleep immediately and in the night all of a sudden a furious police dog with a muzzle over its mouth jumps on your head. You can’t imagine these kinds of blows.”
Alcohol played a big role in the Third Department. Among the guards it continually flowed and colleagues from other parts of the prison came to join them during shift changes. They considered it a diversion. “They drank a lot and then they beat the inmates for fun,” Ruzicka recalls. “There in the Third everyone acted the worst, even the guards who would not dare to act this way elsewhere.”
The socialist prison system gave convicts the opportunity to complain about the behavior of the members of the Corps of Corrections; the outside had a formal oversight procedure. However, reality was different. The guards of Valdice were like a family. They lived in the same village, went to the same pubs, their families worked in the jail for generations. They would always support one another. Milan Janca, another political prisoner, tried to complain about the superintendent, Vlastimil Michalek. “He sprayed mace into my eyes, he tripped my bound feet when I walked, and to top it off, he often kicked me with all his strength in my coccyx,” recounts the former dissident, who still suffers health problems from his time in Valdice.
The records of the investigation of Janca’s complaints from 28 November 1977 demonstrate how much good it did a prisoner to call for help. “In his complaint he tried to bluntly defame the superintendent – that he beats them with a baton and with his fists, he trips up their legs, which is not based on truth,” the investigator, a Captain Sveda, writes. “It’s a matter of a convicted psychopath who hates the socialist order and the SNV [Corrections] members.” The result of the complaint: 15 days in solitary confinement for the complainers.
During normalization the Third Department became the terror of all Valdice, and not only because of torture. The house of horror hid one more threat: for some there was no path back.
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Read more: www.tol.org
The Mysterious Crimes of Valdice
(part 2)
Tax competition is just another factor of a functioning free market
The unspoken benefits of tax avoidance
by Chris Berg
Chris Berg at ABC reveals that “profit shifting” for tax purposes affects just 2-4% of multinational business profits, and that despite international outcry about tax avoidance, revenue from corporate tax going up. Tax competition is just another factor of a functioning free market, so while governments may denounce it as unfair, the rest of us should be a lot more sceptical.
Few things excite a treasurer more than tax avoidance.
The idea conjures up fantasies of great pots of untaxed money - money the government is morally entitled to but for one reason or another (the weakness of previous administrations, probably) is being denied.
No surprise then, as his budget savings fade away into nothingness, Joe Hockey has turned his mind to the old corporate tax avoidance chestnut.
On the weekend in Cairns the G20 finance ministers agreed to tackle "base erosion and profit shifting ... to make sure companies pay their fair share in tax". Our very own Hockey, as G20 host, is leading the charge.
Profit shifting refers to the fear that multinational firms are structuring themselves to route profits through lower-taxing countries.
Base erosion is the fear that this profit shifting is eroding the tax base, starving governments of funds.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) started focusing on base erosion and profit shifting last year, pushing it to the front of the G20's agenda.
They've been amply backed up by breathless newspaper stories about the complex tax structures of firms like Apple that have divisions in Ireland and the Netherlands.
All very interesting except for one thing. The profit shifting problem isn't that much of a problem.
It's true that in the 1990s, when economists and policymakers first turned their mind to how multinational firms plan their tax liabilities, they looked at aggregate country-level data and concluded (as one of the first major studies said) "companies locate a sizable fraction of their foreign activity in tax havens".
This early work implied profit shifting was both real and substantial.
But now economists are working with more fine-grained data specifying how firms structure their internal debt around global affiliates. And as they look closer at those affiliates, the evidence is telling a very different story.
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READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE www.abc.net.au
READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE www.abc.net.au
Venezuela: there is a 50% chance that the government defaults on its sovereign debt in the next two years
Maduro is leading Venezuela to economic ruin
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro made his debut at the UN General Assembly this morning, taking a brief break from his passion project back home, which is overseeing the economic collapse of an oil-rich country.
On September 16th, following months of deteriorating economic conditions, ratings agency Standard & Poor downgraded Venezuela’s credit rating into junk territory from B-minus to triple-C-plus. S&P warned investors there is a 50% chance that the government defaults on its sovereign debt in the next two years, stating, “We expect political polarization, erratic economic policy-making that exacerbates both the economy’s oil dependence and the prevailing macroeconomic inconsistencies, and weakening external liquidity to remain the main constraints to the ratings on Venezuela.” The credit rating agency also expects Venezuelan GDP to decline by as much as 3.5% this year, with inflation rising by up to 65% by the end of the year—one of the highest rates in the world.
Earlier this month, some hoped that a cabinet shuffle by Maduro might portend policy changes to back away from an economic precipice. Instead, Maduro doubled-down on socialist policies that are unsustainable due to the 40% decrease in oil production since his mentor Hugo Chávez took power in 1998. The only change was the demotion of minister of energy Rafael Ramírez, who was adept at calming the nerves of international financiers.
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Read more: www.aei-ideas.org
The contemporary urge to separate knowledge from belief overlooks the essentially collaborative nature of human inquiry.
Astrophysicist: Students Must Be Encouraged to Intellectually Engage with Faith
Hincks’ article, “Justified Reason,” confronts the cultural tendency to separate knowledge and belief, explaining that the separation “does not comport with the Catholic tradition… nor [does it] accurately reflect the way our minds actually work.” Through the piece, Hincks details the “intimately interlocking” relationship between knowledge and belief and how their “interplay” has aided scientific inquiry and research throughout human history, as well as laid the foundation for philosophy and Catholic thought.
This tendency to separate belief and knowledge is a problem that can be solved by acknowledging that both are “constitutive to human rationality” and both are an integral part of education, Hincks explained.
“In a school or college people come together to share knowledge, and often the content of that knowledge is transmitted by belief,” Hincks said. He provided an example of this relationship:
When I learnt my times tables as a child, I didn’t really know them, but rather believed them. I memorized a set of numbers and believed my teacher that they represented real mathematical relationships. Later on, as I used the times tables more and more, I saw the pattern in them and realized what it really means that five times six equals thirty. I saw the intelligibility in the times tables and came to know them. So there was an interplay of knowledge and belief that occurred in the context of my education.
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- See more at: www.cardinalnewmansociety.org
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(1) Justified Reason - by Adam D. Hincks
The collaboration of knowledge, belief and faith
She would have to leave her intellect behind, my friend assumed, if she followed up on a profound experience of God that had led her to Mass. Eventually she decided to enroll in the catechumenate in order to become a member of the Catholic Church. Taking this step, she explained to me, would require her to check her brain at the classroom door, but she felt her newfound religion was so important to her that she was willing to sacrifice reason for faith.
Happily, my friend soon discovered that the Catholic faith in fact encourages the use of reason. But her story reminds us that we live in a culture that tends to segregate knowledge, faith and belief. On the one hand, knowledge is seen as scientific, objective and part of a common fund. On the other, faith and belief (which are not usually distinguished) are considered unscientific, subjective and private. At best, the two categories are allowed to coexist if kept at arms’ length from each other; at worst, they are treated as mutually opposed, whether by strident atheists or religious fundamentalists.
Such attitudes toward knowledge and belief do not comport with the Catholic tradition. Nor do they accurately reflect the way our minds actually work. St. Augustine was correct when he wrote, “To believe is nothing other than to think with assent.... Believers are also thinkers: in believing, they think and in thinking, they believe.” Perhaps surprisingly, the clearest evidence for this claim can be found in the world of scientific research.
Collaboration in Science
William Wordsworth, whose college bedroom window overlooked a statue of Sir Isaac Newton, characterized this great scientist as “a mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.” The image of a solitary scientist arriving at pure knowledge through the unbridled powers of his own ratiocination remains in force today, but this is out of touch with how real science is accomplished. Science is in fact a deeply collaborative effort.
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Readmore: americamagazine.org
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