If you’re under 75 years old and grew up in a ‘western’ country, chances are you remember from childhood that one of the things that made the Nazis especially wicked was their notion of ‘racial’ supremacy and Hitler’s lunatic ambition to spawn a ‘Master Race’.

Whether via my parents, school education, books, comics, movies or the mass media – from a fairly early age I absorbed the notion that under Adolf Hitler’s leadership, the Nazis – and they alone – sought to promote their ‘race’ to superdude status.

Wicked Uncle Adolf: we learnt at school that he wanted a Master Race, of people like him (with blonde hair)

I can’t recall the number of times I’ve heard reasoning along the following lines:

The Nazis believed the Aryans are a Master Race and wanted to lord it over the rest – didn’t they?

That’s why we had to fight them to the end – wasn’t it?

Sure, the 60 million or so deaths (and tens of millions of refugees) of World War Two were a lot of ‘collateral damage’ – but it was all worth it, wasn’t it?

After all, we can’t take chances with nutcases who want to take over the world – can we? Thank heavens for Winston Churchill! etc. etc.

It’s scary, persuasive stuff that may well have convinced all but the most recalcitrant pacifists to join the military struggle against Nazi Germany.

You just have to feel sorry for the folk who run the Jewish Agency and Israeli Prime Minister’s office.

Tasked with defending the world’s most unpopular nation – a State surrounded by aggrieved and exasperated neighbours, that is despised worldwide for its callous brutality over more than 60 years – they must feel stressed at the best of times.

If they stay in the USA, half of these young people might 'go missing'!

If it was only a matter of hate – something they understand rather well – they’d be laughing!

But life is not that simple. There’s also pesky, insidious thing called love to worry about. Love may be prove to be the most serious existential threat to the millennial fantasies of Zion’s elders. Why, it might undermine the juniors’ respect for protocol!

Love over gold?

Will the mysterious cosmic force of love be the eventual undoing of Jewish Apartheid? Shall admirers of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jesus and Buddha, all share the last laugh?

Too much unrestrained mutual attraction between human beings spells long-term decline for the Zionist project – by denying it a sufficient population base of separatist fanatics.

The hard cases in Tel Aviv know that. And they’re not happy.

Here’s the story from Haaretz (emphasis added):

New ad campaign targets Jews ‘abducted’ by intermarriage

By Dana Weiler-Polak, Haaretz Correspondent

During August, I had a poll running on this website in which I invited visitors to vote for the name they thought best suited to the small nation-state in the Middle East commonly known as ‘Israel’ since its inception in 1948.

Here are the results:

I didn’t ‘push’ the poll by actively urging people to vote. That invites the Hasbara crowd to fly-by in a rage, like a swarm of angry wasps. So I just let nature take its course.

Now, I’ll admit to some bias. I consider this website is visited by a selection of the smartest people on earth. My dog (rumoured to have an IQ of 250+) assures me most material here is crafted, like fabulous tropical flowers, to attract the most discriminating pollinators.

Therefore I shall take heed of this poll-of-the-well-informed and follow the popular will. Personally, I voted for ‘Rothchildistan’ – but in hindsight the democratic process has yet again come up trumps.

What acronym should I use for the ‘Jewish Apartheid State in Palestine’? Is it JASP – or JASIP? Should that be put to the vote as well?

Nelson Mandela was released long ago: FREE MARWAN BARGHOUTI!

On a more serious note, the vote that’s really needed to sort this tangle is the vote that’s never allowed to happen: that’s a one-vote, one-value poll of all people associated with the land of Palestine in recent times, whether by birth, direct descent or immigration.

In early August I blogged The Ingenuity of the Markets – featuring a skit by the brilliant British satirists John Bird and John Fortune.

This is in similar vein about the famous South Sea Bubble (circa 1720).

It was not the Bubble to End All Bubbles as advertised. They never are…

I shall soon be buying a new computer.

I’ve been buying personal computers for a quarter century – on average once every three to five years. I started out with a MacPlus in he mid-1980s. It had no hard-drive – just one drive for 8oo KB floppy discs – and a small, built-in black and white monitor. It cost around $A3,000 in 1980s dollars.

Intel Chips? Just Say NO!

Each time I’ve been back to the shops, buying has been a joy. On every occasion, performance and capability rose dramatically while prices fell. If the entire economy was like this, we’d all be living in cornucopia.

This time I think I may be able to buy a computer that will be fantastic – for less than $A1,000!

That’s something I could only dream about until now. What will happen in 2013?!

It’s great for me that my personal computers have got so much cheaper over time. But they’re cheaper for everyone else too – and that’s even more exciting! Surely it’s now possible to provide internet access to everyone on earth – everyone who wishes to have it – within the next few years? IT is bringing the people of earth together.

I’m facing some purchasing dilemmas, of course – but that’s the fun of buying! Shall I buy local – or via the net? Purchase a package deal – or put the package together myself? There’s a choice of vendors and brands.

It’s often said – and probably true – that Australia has become more secular over the last couple of generations. Yet while the influence of Church Christianity may have waned – that doesn’t say much about Australians’ changing beliefs on social issues.

Scott Steel’s well-researched blog Pollytics.com carries a very informative article entitled: Our Changing Views on the Death Penalty.

Scott summaries the results of a recently-published opinion poll by Roy Morgan Research: Australians say penalty for murder should be Imprisonment (64%) rather than the Death Penalty (23%)

Changing views on the death penalty in Australia since 1947

Roy Morgan has been conducting the same poll within Australia since 1947. Scott has turned the results of polling over the last sixty years – presented in tabular form by Roy Morgan Research – into graphs that show the long term trends very clearly.

The results of more questions related to this topic – and other graphs displaying comparable trends – are available in the Pollytics.com article.

It’s a fascinating piece of research.

I have an antipathy to institutionalized murder and find these results a welcome indication that support for more humane polices continues to grow.

While our political elites have been seduced and cajoled into supporting the war mongering, liberty-restricting policies of Australia’s misguided ‘allies’, Australians as a whole are much less keen on violent solutions to complex problems.

Private Eye’s end of August front cover explains why, if our current crop of politicians don’t stop authorizing this monstrous war in Afghanistan, we’ll need replacements who will.

A view from the British Army's OPTIMISTS

I live in a very pleasant location on the north east coast of Queensland, an hour’s drive from Cairns. I’m fortunate. It’s a beautiful part of the world.

There’s only one place close to city-size around here (that’s Cairns), but there’s plenty of reef and rainforest, great beaches and lots of nice things to do.

Not surprisingly, plenty of visitors come every year to Cairns and the surrounding region. Tourism is big business – and while it’s going through a relatively depressed period at present Cairns is always busy.

Pacific Islands Forum

This week – starting from today (Tuesday 4th August 2009) – Cairns will be busier than usual. It’s the venue for this year’s Pacific Islands Forum. As well as politicians, their entourages, NGOs and media, there will doubtless be lots of security, police and ’secret police’. The Pacific Islands Forum is not quite the G-20, but it’s the closest Cairns is likely to get for a while.

I shall NOT be visiting Cairns during the week, unless under duress or in dire emergency. Meeting up with some of the social justice and environmental NGOs – which include Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and Greenpeace – would be interesting. I strongly support what these fine people are trying to achieve at this Forum. Good luck to them! But I’d rather not push my own luck. I think I’ll leave a respectable distance between myself and the melee in Cairns.

Womens’ liberation in Afghanistan has been a cause célèbre in western countries for some time.

Conveniently absent from the discussion, in most cases, is the rather significant fact that the ascendancy of “Islamic fundamentalism’ in Afghanistan, to the detriment of human rights for women, has been largely the consequence of deliberate western policy over three decades.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: has enjoyed playing chess with other countries

The left-leaning Afghan Government of the late 1970s that initially invited the Soviet Union to assist with military support, actually included significant female participation. The regime in Kabul asked the USSR for help in response to destabilization by Islamic fundamentalists, who were trained and financed by the USA and its proxies. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a US policy-maker responsible for developing this strategy back in the 1970s, gleefully admitted it in an interview 20 years later. He’s proud he played a key role in entrapping the USSR into an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan.

It’s true that by the time the Taliban consolidated its power in the late 1990s, organisations such as RAWA (the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which had also opposed Soviet occupation) were deeply engaged in opposing heightened oppression of women under the zealous new Government’s policies. In 2000 and 2001, as invasion hysteria was brewed up by the western mass media, it often quoted RAWA to highlight the backwardness of the Taliban. But anyone imagining that RAWA supports current US/UK/Australian policy in Afghanistan needs to check the facts.

In Israeli-South African Relations : On the Mend?, written in 2004, Kristin Nelson discussed some of the historical background to lingering tensions between the South Africa’s Australian National Congress (now in Government, once a hunted organization) and the Israeli regime.

Here’s an extract (emphasis added):

At the height of Apartheid Israel ignored international sanctions against South Africa, citing its own vulnerability to such tactics. It continued to sell roughly (US$) 600 million worth of arms per year to the white minority government before eventually banning further military contracts in 1987.

Nelson Mandela: when he was younger, Israel collaborated with his jailers

Before the early 1990s and the release of Mandela, mutual aid between the two governments evolved out of a natural fraternity: both were technologically advanced, militarily powerful nations that felt surrounded by hostile neighbours. During the 1970s this affiliation extended into the field of nuclear weaponry when Israeli experts helped South African to develop at least six nuclear warheads.

Although the extent of their covert collaboration is not entirely clear, Israel is known to have supplied technical assistance to South Africa in exchange for no less than 300 tons of uranium. Several Israeli nuclear scientists, including Ernst David Bergmann (the “Oppenheimer of Israel”), visited South Africa in 1967, and evidence of increasingly close relations accumulated throughout the 1970s.

Collaboration between South Africa and Israel over nuclear weapons was well-known 20 years ago – and strongly opposed by the world community as a whole.