Tuesday, February 7, 2006

Translating "Desaparecido" into Arabic


/ vassals / collaborating /
From the always interesting, Greekworks, a poignant look at Europe's collaborationist regimes and the betrayal of "western values" - might I add much more significantly, though much less spectacularly than in the current bruhaha over "free speech". Excerpts:

"Last week, the Swiss senator Dick Marty, chairman of the Council of Europe'’s committee on legal affairs and human rights, issued his interim report on the allegations that the CIA had operated secret prisons in Europe into which it deposited human beings detained through the now-notorious US policy of "extraordinary rendition," the Orwellian term for what is, very simply stated, state-sponsored kidnapping. The Council has appointed Mr. Marty to investigate the unusually credible reports that European countries have implicitly -—and, more often than not, explicitly- collaborated with the US in this systematic and gross violation of the most elemental rule of law. All "suspects" who are "“extraordinarily rendered" are, in every sense of Anglo-American law, and the entire history and precedential weight of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, completely innocent, as their "crimes" have neither been publicly (let alone legally) catalogued by any prosecutorial organ or proven by any judicial procedure - —which, of course, is what makes this grotesque "rendition" of justice so "extraordinary"...
"...Europe today stands at a crossroads. While it claims to represent another way forward for the West, distinct from that of the last remaining hyperpower, the world has a right to its increasing skepticism. In the last few years, Europe seems to have become an effete, almost apologetic, minion of the presumptive hegemon. It is distressing, to say the least, particularly because it is so reminiscent of Europe'’s own recent past. Quisling, of course, was a European, and it was in the last global slaughter that the word "collaborator" ceased denoting innocent association and came to mean nothing less than complicity in the most monstrous guilt."

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