Irish Time

Thursday, April 25, 2013

DANCE ON THATCHER'S GRAVE Laughter of Our Children





Dance on Thatcher's Grave, but Remember, There Has Been a Coup in Britain
By John Pilger 
April 25, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - In the wake of Thatcher’s departure, I remember her victims. Patrick Warby’s daughter, Marie, was one of them. Marie, aged five, suffered from a bowel deformity and needed a special diet. Without it, the pain was excruciating. Her father was a Durham miner and had used all his savings. It was winter 1985, the Great Strike was almost a year old and the family was destitute. Although her eligibility was not disputed, Marie was denied help by the Department of Social Security. Later, I obtained records of the case that showed Marie had been turned down because her father was “affected by a Trade dispute”.

The corruption and inhumanity under Thatcher knew no borders. When she came to power in 1979, Thatcher demanded a total ban on exports of milk to Vietnam. The American invasion had left a third of Vietnamese children malnourished.
I witnessed many distressing sights, including infants going blind from a lack of vitamins. “I cannot tolerate this,” said an anguished doctor in a Saigon paediatric hospital, as we looked at a dying boy. Oxfam and Save the Children had made clear to the British government the gravity of the emergency. An embargo led by the US had forced up the local price of a kilo of milk up to ten times that of a kilo of meat. Many children could have been restored with milk. Thatcher’s ban held.

In neighbouring Cambodia, Thatcher left a trail of blood, secretly. In 1980, she demanded that the defunct Pol Pot regime – the killers of 1.7 million people – retain its “right” to represent their victims at the UN. Her policy was vengeance on Cambodia’s liberator, Vietnam. The British representative was instructed to vote with Pol Pot at the World Health Organisation, thereby preventing it from providing help to where it was needed more than anywhere on earth.

To conceal this outrage, the US, Britain and China, Pol Pot’s main backer, invented a “resistance coalition” dominated by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces and supplied by the CIA at bases along the Thai border. There was a hitch. In the wake of the Irangate arms-for-hostages debacle, the US Congress had banned clandestine foreign adventures. “In one of those deals the two of them liked to make,” a senior Whitehall official told the Sunday Telegraph, “President Reagan put it to Thatcher that the SAS should take over the Cambodia show. She readily agreed.”

In 1983, Thatcher sent the SAS to train the “coalition” in its own distinctive brand of terrorism. Seven-man SAS teams arrived from Hong Kong, and British soldiers set about training “resistance fighters” in laying minefields in a country devastated by genocide and the world’s highest rate of death and injury as a result of landmines.

I reported this at the time, and more than 16,000 people wrote to Thatcher in protest. “I confirm,” she replied to opposition leader Neil Kinnock, “that there is no British government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with the Khmer Rouge or those allied to them.” The lie was breathtaking. In 1991, the government of John Major admitted to parliament that the SAS had indeed trained the “coalition”. “We liked the British,” a Khmer Rouge fighter later told me. “They were very good at teaching us to set booby traps. Unsuspecting people, like children in paddy fields, were the main victims.”

When the journalists and producers of ITV’s landmark documentary, Death on the Rock, exposed how the SAS had run Thatcher’s other death squads in Ireland and Gibraltar, they were hounded by Rupert Murdoch’s “journalists”, then cowering behind the razor wire at Wapping. Although exonerated, Thames TV lost its ITV franchise.

In 1982, the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, was steaming outside the Falklands exclusion zone. The ship offered no threat, yet Thatcher gave orders for it to be sunk. Her victims were 323 sailors, including conscripted teenagers. The crime had a certain logic. Among Thatcher’s closest allies were mass murderers – Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, responsible for “many more than one million deaths” (Amnesty International). Although the British state had long armed the world’s leading tyrannies, it was Thatcher who brought a crusading zeal to the deals, talking up the finer points of fighter aircraft engines, hard-bargaining with bribe-demanding Saudi princes. I filmed her at an arms fair, stroking a gleaming missile. “I’ll have one of those!” she said.

In his arms-to-Iraq enquiry, Lord Richard Scott heard evidence that an entire tier of the Thatcher government, from senior civil servants to ministers, had lied and broken the law in selling weapons to Saddam Hussein. These were her “boys”. Thumb through old copies of the Baghdad Observer, and there are pictures of her boys, mostly cabinet ministers, on the front page sitting with Saddam on his famous white couch. There is Douglas Hurd and there is a grinning David Mellor, also of the Foreign Office, around the time his host was ordering the gassing of 5,000 Kurds. Following this atrocity, the Thatcher government doubled trade credits to Saddam.

Perhaps it is too easy to dance on her grave. Her funeral was a propaganda stunt, fit for a dictator: an absurd show of militarism, as if a coup had taken place. And it has. “Her real triumph”, said another of her boys, Geoffrey Howe, a Thatcher minister, “was to have transformed not just oneparty but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible.”

In 1997, Thatcher was the first former prime minister to visit Tony Blair after he entered Downing Street. There is a photo of them, joined in rictus: the budding war criminal with his mentor. When Ed Milliband, in his unctuous “tribute”, caricatured Thatcher as a “brave” feminist hero whose achievements he personally “honoured”, you knew the old killer had not died at all.

www.johnpilger.com

PROTESTANT COALITION BRITISH OCCUPIED IRELAND






Protestant Coalition

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Protestant Coalition
LeaderJim Dowson
Founded24 April 2013
Headquarters59 The Burn Road
Ballygowan BT23 5RZ
Northern Ireland
IdeologyProtestantism
Unionism
Ulster loyalism
Political positionRight-wing
International affiliationNone
European affiliationNone
European Parliament groupNone
ColoursRedWhite and Blue
Northern Ireland Assembly
0 / 108
Local government in Northern Ireland
0 / 582
Website
http://protestantcoalition.org/
The Protestant Coalition is a loyalist political party in Northern Ireland. It was registered on 23 April 2013,[1] and launched on 24 April at a hotel in Castlereagh, outside Belfast.[2]

Contents

  [hide

[edit]Background

The launch of the Protestant Coalition followed a protracted dispute over the decision byBelfast City Council on 3 December 2012 to cease the practice of flying the Union flagthroughout the year over Belfast City Hall, opting instead to fly it only on up to 20 designated days per year. The council decision had been followed by protests throughout Northern Ireland, some of which became violent.[3] At the time of the launch, both Frazer and Dowson were awaiting trial on charges related to the flag protests.[4]

[edit]Leadership

The party's founders included prominent anti-republican campaigner Willie Frazer; David Nicholl, a former member of the paramilitary-linked Ulster Democratic Party and Ulster Political Research Group, and Jim Dowson, a former fundraiser for the extreme right-wingBritish National Party (BNP).[4] Although Dowson was registered with the Electoral Commission as the Protestant Coalition's leader,[1] he stated at the launch that the Coalition had no one leader.[4] Paul Golding was registered as the Coalition's treasurer.[1]
Dowson's links with the BNP had ended acrimoniously in October 2010 and he then campaigned against its leader, Nick Griffin, through the "British Resistance" website.[5] In May 2011, Dowson, a Scottish Christian fundamentalist, created a new nationalist movement, Britain First, to protect "British and Christian morality" and campaign against Islam, immigration and abortion. Britain First established a short-lived political party in 2011, the National People's Party.[5]
Golding, who co-founded and chaired Britain First, had been a BNP councillor in Sevenoaks in 2009-11.[6] Golding had also been the BNP's Communications Officer,[7] and editor of the BNP's main magazine.[5] He had flown into Belfast in December 2012 to help co-ordinate the protests over the flags issue.[8]

[edit]Policies

The policies of the Coalition, which describes itself as "an anti politics, political party", include opposition to "the whole old rotten farce of the DUP/UUP", while it is "happy to cooperate with the likes of the TUVUKIP and PUP for the greater good of the overall situation". It appealed for those elected for other unionist parties to defect to the Coalition.[9] The party states that it "exists to protect and secure Ulster's British heritage and identity and to represent the Protestant, Unionist and Loyalist people", and to oppose "the Sinn Féin/IRA cultural and political 'war' against the British majority in Northern Ireland".[10]
The party claimed at its launch to have over 500 members, and that would remain in existence for three years, during which time it would contest elections to new local government councils. It also said that it would operate a call centre and use other techniques deployed in American political campaigning.[4] The Coalition aimed to "cascade down to other Loyal parties, groups and organisations the skill-sets and technology to allow the PUL community to professionalise and expand our message".[10] Dowson
 said that "if anyone thinks this is a Mickey Mouse 
thing... they are going to be in for a very rude awakening."

[edit]References

  1. a b c Register of political parties at [electoralcommission.org.uk Electoral Commission] website
  2. ^ http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/flag-protesters-launch-new-antipolitics-unionist-party-29220215.html
  3. ^ "Violence in Belfast after council votes to change Union flag policy" BBC News 3 December 2012 Retrieved 5 December 2012
  4. a b c d e Connla Young, "Union flag protesters launch new party", Irish News, 25 April 2013
  5. a b c Hope not Hate profile of Britain First
  6. ^ Sophie Madden, "Former BNP Councillor Paul Golding heads Britain First nationalist movement"News Shopper, 8 June 2011
  7. ^ BNP website
  8. ^ Deborah McAleese, [http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/former-bnp-man-and-nick-griffin-excrony-paul-golding-flies-to-belfast-for-loyalist-flag-protest-29005554.html "Former BNP man and Nick Griffin ex-crony Paul Golding flies to Belfast for loyalist flag protest", Belfast Telegraph, 15 December 2012
  9. ^ Protestant Unionist Loyalist VOICE magazine, Issue 1, Spring 2013
  10. a b "Policies", Protestant Coalition website

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