BBC NEWS - Iraq prepared for Saddam handover. How much do you want to bet he'll be freed by some guerilla group? That should make things interesting...

So, as BBC NEWS | Middle East reports, Iraq captors have freed the 3 Turkish hostages. Supposedly for good conduct by the Muslim brethren in their homeland. What, then of the anti-war movement in the US? Is that not good conduct? Or, will not re-electing Bush count as good conduct in the name of the Muslim or to be more precise Islamist cause also be considered a protest against George Bush? In general, the terrorist vs. hostage cause is a truly ambivalent one. While the whole experience of being taken hostage and being beheaded is by no means a pleasant one, there is a certain extent of understanding in so far as we are dealing with people for whom the democratic process seems to have come to dead end. It's something we in the west probably cannot associate with entirely, but are slowly coming to understand the more democracy comes to mean less and less to us. And, as Arundhati Roy explains in the opening essay of her book "War Talk", we are facing a situation in which nonviolent protest is becoming increasingly ignored by leaders plainly interested in their own economic benefit. The result, predicts Roy in the article entitled '
Ahimsa (Nonviolent Resistance)' is that "Across the world, when governments and the media lavish all their attention and seriousness on war talk and terrorism, the message that goes out is disturbing and dangerous: If you seek to air and redress a public grievance, violence is more effective than nonviolence. Unfortunately, if peaceful change is not given a chance, then violent change becomes inevitable. That violence will be (and already is) random, ugly, and unpredictable." So, while it is understandable that world leaders do not stand for terrorist or freedom fighter acts of cold-blooded insanity, arguing - maybe correctly so - that giving in to acts of violence only spawns new violence, there is also a sense that not giving in to acts of violence somehow spawns new acts of violence, as desparation and disenfranchisement from the decision-making process - as is the case in Iraq where the population was not formally asked if it wished to be "liberated" - abound. Am I condoning the acts of terrorists? No, but I am not going to condone our leaders' behaviour either, as they put up their populations for ransom, as was the case with the Korean hostage who was recently beheaded, because of his government's firm stance on no negotiation. And it has also been the case with the US administration which has so willingly sent its sons out to the slaughter. I may already have mentioned it somewhere else on this blog, but somehow it keeps on ringing true, that wonderful axiom of how the so-called blowback works by the crimethinc crew which so truly states "YOUR LEADERS CAN'T PROTECT YOU, BUT THEY CAN GET YOU KILLED!" Or, as they have more recently stated: "THE SHADOW OF THE PAST HOLDS THE FUTURE HOSTAGE"...

As you can see on the BBC SPORT Euro 2004 Score Predictor, this is one mother of a EURO Championship! If you look at the teams' strengths and weaknesses, it's a complete and utter free-for-all. Anything can and does happen! And that's what makes it so refreshing: you'll rarely find the usual arrogance or loftiness associated with previous international championships. Even the Germans are pretty stumm about their teams' chances (and believe me, even at their worst, they rarely knew how to keep their trap firmly shut!). And the worst is, even if you win, you might end up losing, if the other team playing in the playoffs for the quarter finals happen to win too. Take the Germany-Holand-Latvia-Czech group. Germany theoretically has to win against the mighty Czech to get through, but if they're lucky and the Dutch play a draw against Latvia (depending on whether the Latvians keep their impenetrable wall in front of the goal hardened against any form of siege), they'll only need a draw against the Czechs. But will the Czechs, the only team to be as good as through to the quarter finals, seriously even consider going on with the shame of having lost to a self-admittedly mediocre German side? Hardly! Then again, should the Latvians win and the Czechs too, the quarter finals will be in Slavic and Romanist hands, depending on whether England beats or draws against Croatia. What it means for the German group is that everyone's out for blood and guts (which used to be Germany's domain) and the odds are tight, very, very tight. Now, England, on the other hand could be through to the quarter finals with a comfortable draw, but will Croatia abide? For a team that fought for third or fourth place in the World Championhsip in 1998 and even chucked out the Germans that same year, their state of play is extremely prone to fluctuation. The statistics for this championship don't help much either: a draw against Switzerland, a draw against France. England lost to France, but won against Switzerland. Who's to know? Well, I suppose we are. Tomorrow, we'll be all the wiser!

According to BBC NEWS, US groups want Moore film banned! Thank God for that, I thought Nazi-style censorships tactics had withered away in the current US climate of open, democracy-style criticism! But, oh no, the US has its own style of democracy, which lets you choose who want but it don't count for shit, so in that sense, they really have been quite successful in Iraq. After all, nobody wants them there, but they're still getting a regime they will be able to elect or not, whatever the case my be, sometime in the near future after the end of June. D-Day approacheth! D-Day approacheth!

BBC NEWS: Key states welcome new Iraq draft! That's more like it! That's how you get things done! You sit down, you talk things through, you don't just ram your views down everybody's throats and you certinaly don't say "go to hell if you don't like it!" These are the bare minimums of democracy in motion on an international scale. Of course, we shall yet see what it means in practice. Oh no, this ain't over yet, but it's a damn sight better start than that botched up operation which in some fool's head came to be known as "Mission Accomplished"! Ha, I accomplish more when I go to the toilet than that sad president with his bunch of even sadder cronies around him. Let's just hope that Reagan's death really does hail a new era, a new era in which the values of old - like torture, extortion, mass-murder, complete disregard for human life, and corporate interests - are finally relegated to the exact place where they should have been relegated to years ago: the graveyard! To think that Reagan even for one second believed that revitalising the spirit of the good ol' days of the fifties [by the way, you do know he starred in a film where he punches a woman in the face, so much for good ol' values] would work in the cynical eighties. The problem is it's people like Bush who never cottoned on to the fact that Reagan's ideology was simply perverse. Now that the greatest actor to have ever stood behind the president's pulpit is dead, they'll probably even go and make the guy a martyr to the cause, giving even more rise to more crap like what's been going on in the last year. Well, I suppose, at least Bush & Co. seem to have realised that there is such a thing as a veto and that it doesn't hurt to listen to what others have to say about what you're doing. After all, aren't we supposed to be living in the era of the last, dying phases of the nation state. Interests have to be multinational these days, because everything you do affects everyone around you for quite a large radius! Like the people who might be reading this God knows where!