The Sand Creek Massacre

Educational Apartheid.
Will we ever again have a Prime Minister who hasn’t had a private education?
The fact that David Cameron went to Eton and Nick Clegg went to Westminster says a lot about social mobility in our country today – there isn’t any.
Social mobility is dead and the evidence is on the door-step of No.10 in the shape of our privately-educated PM and his privately-educated deputy.
If Clegg or Cameron had gone to a comprehensive then we would never have heard of them.
Should that bother us?
Only because of what it says about this country.
If you want to get ahead, get a private education.
It isn’t the “poshness” of Cameron or Clegg that should trouble us but the fact the educational apartheid in this country is now so deeply ingrained that you can no longer get to 10 Downing Street unless your parents paid a fortune for your education.
Such is the depth of our educational apartheid that a thick rich kid will now always do better than a bright poor kid.
And that should break our hearts.
( Tony Parsons )

Princess Diana Was Not Meant To Die Says Former MI5 Intelligence Officer.
Anne Machon has claimed Britain’s security services planned to injure ‘not assassinate’ Princess Diana to try to break up her relationship with her lover, Dodi Al Fayed.
The former MI5 intelligence officer, who worked for the service between 1991 and 1995, claimed that MI6 did not want Diana dead because it was worried she would become a martyr.
The plan ended up going tragically wrong.
Guernsey-born Ms Machon is the partner of David Shayler, the former MI5 officer jailed under the Official Secrets Act for disclosing information obtained while in service.
( Guernsey Press, 31.05.2005 )  ..  guernseypress.com

Have Labour Been Perfect?
Have Labour been perfect?
Of course not.
Have there been things I disagree with?
Yes, from time to time.
But I know where the Labour Party’s heart is and it is in the right place.
It makes me laugh – well, no, it annoys me actually.
The way some people think if you get lots of success, you ought to be a Tory.
It’s rubbish.
You can be well off and still believe the same things as when you were growing up in a working class family.
I believe Labour has always been the party of the working man and always will be.
I believe the Tories have always been about looking after their own rich types and always will be.
My loyalty to Labour is a part of who I am because I know what they do for people.
Ever since it was founded, Labour has fought for ordinary working people and it does that just as much today.
And I tell you, this country is miles better for having had a Labour government these past years.
A lot better.
( Sir Alex Ferguson, April 2010 )

Israel has admitted pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians, and others, without the consent of their families, a practice it said ended in the 1990s.
The admission, by the former head of the country’s forensic institute, followed a furious row prompted by a Swedish newspaper reporting that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to use their organs, a charge that Israel denied and called “antisemitic”.
Iran’s state-run Press TV reported the story, illustrated with photographs of dead or badly injured Palestinians.
Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab MP, said the report incriminated the Israeli army.
The story emerged in an interview with Dr Yehuda Hiss, former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv.
The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic who released it because of the row between Israel and Sweden over a report in the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet.
Aftonbladet quoted Palestinians as saying young men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israeli forces and their bodies returned to their families with missing organs.
Israel demanded that Sweden condemn the Aftonbladet article, calling it an antisemitic “blood libel”.
Stockholm refused, saying that to do so would violate freedom of speech in the country.
Israel’s health ministry said all harvesting was now done with permission.
( Ian Black, 21.12.2009 )  ..  theguardian.com

Superstar Is A Hypocrite.
He is a superstar lauded for his commitment to human rights and passionate defence of Brazil’s rainforests.
But Sting, former frontman and singer with Police, has been labelled ‘a hypocrite’ after playing a concert in Uzbekistan organised by the brutal regime of Islam Karimov, in October 2009.
Sting, 58, is reported to have been paid £2 million to sing for Gulnara Karimova, the despot’s daughter.
Enemies of the 72 year-old dictator have been shot in the street and a former British Ambassador to the ex-soviet state even accused him of boiling alive his political opponents.
Ex-communist official Karimov, who came to power in 1989, has locked up 6,000 people who have dared to question his rule.
In 2005, the army slaughtered hundreds who protested against poverty and corruption in the city of Andizhan.
And thousands of children are used as slave labour in huge state cotton plantations.
Sting’s human rights and environmental activism seem to have flown out the window.

Israeli Soldiers Accused Of Raping An 11-Year-Old Girl.
At least 17 soldiers and five civilians are under investigation for the rape of an 11-year-old girl at an Israeli air base.
According to reports in the Israeli media, the girl – whose father is a non-commissioned officer in the army – was living with her family at an air base in the south of Israel.
She began to have sex with soldiers and workers at the base from the age of 11 until the age of 14.
( Conal Urquhart, 02.05.2006 )  ..  theguardian.com

A Green Myth Is On The March Again.
It wants to blame the world’s over-breeding poor people for the planets peril.
Actor Jeremy Irons, who famously has seven homes, including a castle in Ireland says, “There are just too many of us, overpopulation is driving global warming, mass starvation and accumulating pollution, making the planet uninhabitable”.
Irons thinks a new plague, such as the black death 700 years ago, will be nature’s way of solving the problem.
Environmentalists Jonathon Porritt and David Attenborough both agree with Irons.
Today’s women have an average of 2.6 children.
Not just in the rich world, but almost everywhere.
Half the world now has fewer than the replacement level of children.
That includes Europe, North America, The Caribbean, most of the Far East and the Middle East, including Iran.
Yes, Iran.
Women in Tehran today have fewer children than their sisters in New York – and a quarter as many as their mothers had.
Bangladesh is one of the poorest nations.
Its girls are among the least educated in the world, and mostly marry as teenagers.
Yet they have on average just three children each now.
India’s average is even lower at 2.8.
The carbon emissions of one American today are equivalent to those of around four Chinese, 20 Indians, 40 Nigerians or 250 Ethiopians.
How dare rich world greens blame the poor for the planet’s perils?
How dare a man with seven homes point the finger at poor over-breeders?
Some greens need to take a long hard look at themselves.

Suicides At Chinese iPad Factory.
Foxconn, in Southern China, employs 400,000 young people at a huge factory complex where Apple’s world-beating electronics are made.
During the first 5 months of this year (2010), twelve of the young workers have all tried to kill themselves by jumping from factory buildings.. Ten have succeeded.
Is something rotten at Apple’s manufacturing core?
Foxconn is operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to try to keep up with orders.
Foxconn make most of Apple’s computers, ipods, iphones and ipads as well as items for other leading brands including Sony, IBM, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.
With security guards constantly watching them, most workers earn a basic salary equivalent to £2.90 a day.

We Shot Them Like Dogs.
The Creek War, 1813-1814, also known as the Red Stick War, was an inter-tribal conflict among Creek Indian factions.
The war also engaged U.S. militias, along with the British and Spanish, who backed the Indians to help keep Americans from encroaching on their interests.
Early Creek victories inspired General Andrew Jackson to retaliate with 2,500 men, mostly Tennessee militia, in early November 1814.
To avenge the Creek-led massacre at Fort Mims, Jackson and his men slaughtered 186 Creeks at Tallushatchee.
“We shot them like dogs!” said Davy Crockett.
In desperation, Mvskoke Creek women killed their children so they would not see the soldiers butcher them.

The Sand Creek Massacre.
Indians fighting back to defend their people and protect their homelands provided ample justification for American forces to kill any Indians on the frontier, even peaceful ones.
On November 29, 1864, a former Methodist minister, John Chivington, led a surprise attack on peaceful Cheyennes and Arapahos on their reservation at Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado.
His force consisted of 700 men, mainly volunteers in the First and Third Colorado Regiments.
Plied with too much liquor the night before, Chivington and his men boasted that they were going to kill Indians.
Once a missionary to Wyandot Indians in Kansas, Chivington declared, “Damn any man who sympathises with Indians, I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honourable to use any means under God’s heavens to kill Indians”.
That fateful cold morning, Chivington led his men against 200 Cheyennes and Arapahos.
Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle had tied an American flag to his lodge pole as he was instructed, to indicate his village was at peace.
When Chivington ordered the attack, Black Kettle tied a white flag beneath the American flag, calling to his people that the soldiers would not kill them.
As many as 160 were massacred, mostly women and children.

The Moors Murders.
When Myra Hindley died in a Suffolk prison in 2002, no undertaker in the county would handle her body and several crematoria refused to incinerate her corpse.
The hospital in which the 60 year-old spent her last days insisted on destroying her bedding.
During 1963 – 1965, Myra Hindley and her lover Ian Brady went on their ghastly killing spree.
Over that two-year period, the couple snatched five young people off streets of Greater Manchester and subjected them to rape and torture, before shoving their bodies into crude graves on the South Pennines.
Acres of print have been spent in trying to analyse just how a bright typist from a working-class suburb of Manchester turned into a sadistic killer.
The ‘Moors Murders’ became a symbol for the terrible evil of which men, and women, are capable of.

I Was A Racketeer, A Gangster For Capitalism.
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers
In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914.
I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.
I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.
I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912.
I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916.
I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903.
In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.
Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.
The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts.
I operated on three continents.
( Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, 1881 – 1940 )