This Commentary is addressed to Daniele Bennett, the blue-eyed girl whose photo is on the front page of today’s (Jan. 5. 2006) International Herald Tribune. The girl, whose father died in a West Virginia coal mine not many hours ago.
In the Tribune article we read: “A grim-faced mining company official told several hundred friends and relatives of the miners , gathered in a small Baptist church near the mine, that all but one of the 12 trapped men had, in fact, died… ‘People who had been praising God a minute before were cursing him’, …” Of course, the word “him” refers to the official. However, as humans with the ability to think rationally we might ask: If the Divine Father loves his children why did he kill Daniele’s father? Naturally, this is the wrong question to ask. It was not any Divine entity that killed Daniele’s father. It was the brutal greed of humans that killed her father. Greed that forced humans to extract coal from thirty-inch thick seams or even sixteen-inch thick seams and who had “to crawl the shaft on their bellies”. (Meade Arble, “The Long Tunnel: A Coal Miner’s Journal”, Atheneum, New York, 1976. It is rather certain that Daniele knows more about this brutality than Meade Arble, the son of a doctor, who tasted a miner’s life for only one year.)
The face of Daniele, full of youth, pain, and anger (mostly anger), urges one to try to console her by sharing with her the pain and anger that was crushing other humans in this part of the world during the same hours or days that she and her father were in extreme agony. Here are the events:
– A few days ago, during the early hours of January 1, 2006, in the town of Rethymnon on the island of Crete, seven people, a 40-year-old Greek father, his 18-year-old son (a Greek army conscript), four young Greeks aged 18 to 21, and a 28-year-old Bulgarian woman (a girlfriend of the father) broke into the home of a family of Albanian migrant workers, beat the middle-aged Albanian father almost to death and killed his 17-year-old son by knifing him 17 times. The beating was done by all of them. The knifing by the 18-year-old Greek army conscript.
This is what caused these humans to beat and kill: The Greek conscript got angry in a bar because an Albanian young man was wearing a T-shirt with the Albanian flag printed on it! A fight ensued. After the fight, the Greeks (plus the Bulgarian girl friend) decided to punish the Albanian with the offensive T-shirt. They could not find him, so they attacked the only Albanian family whose address was known to them. The butchered 17-year-old Albanian had nothing to do with the original incident.
[Parenthesis: The Island of Crete has played a significant role in human history. It was the stepping stone for the transfer of the thousands-of-years long Egyptian civilization to mainland Greece, then to Europe, to the U.S., etc. As a matter of fact the American Youth since the “radical” sixties had chosen Crete, especially the beaches south of Rethymnon, as their “watering hole” and millions upon millions of ordinary Americans have visited Crete. How come then that today, given this background, there are Cretans who can kill a human in the most brutal way for a printed piece of cloth?
There is no mystery here. The murderous Cretan father and son are the products of a wordwide process of creating (nazi-type) “nationalists” out of the populations of certain “usefull” nations. Strangely, this “nationalism” coincides with the interests of the US elites! I myself have gone through this process of (US-made) “nationalist indoctrination” since 1947, in the high school, the university, the army (as a conscript!), etc, etc. Greece (especially Crete) was and is an extremly “usefull” piece of property to the US elites. The most important US military base in the world, the “Souda Base”, lies close to Rethymnon.
The US elites that created monsters, as the above murderous Cretans, are the same elites “from both (US) parties that have long … profited from ties to the coal industry… Steven Griles, a mining lobbyist before being appointed deputy secretary of the interior (by Bush), devoted four years to rolling back mine regulations and then went back to lobbying for the industry.” (This in an editorial in the Jan. 5 issue of the New York Times not in a radical publication!). End of the parenthesis]
A demonstration against this hideously racist act is to take place on January 11 in Rethymnon.
– The same day (Jan. 5, 2006) that Daniele’s picture appeared in the International Herald Tribune, in the front page of a Greek paper (“Eleftherotypia”) there was a large photo of a rather elegant gentleman resembling a typical middle-aged American WASP. That the gentleman was in his shorts (as he was participating in the November ’05 International Marathon in Athens) did not detract from his elegance. It only proved his dedication to the classical Greek ideals. Also, that he is not an American but a Briton (that is a “poodle” of the Americans) does not diminish his effectiveness in his chosen profession, that of a “war criminal” (according to his compatriots’ claims in the Internet) and a torturer. The name of the gentleman: Nicholas Langman. A high ranking officer of the British equivalent (or better the progenitor) of the American CIA, known as the MI6. [Note: The “poodle” relationship holds for the respective elites not for the ordinary people.]
The latest accomplishments of Nicholas Langman, Esq. made even the pages of “Time” magazine. Ten days after four bombs went off in London on July 7 of last summer Langman, his black driver, and assorted Greek pigs (Greek police torturers, Greek Intelligence people, et al, all in the service of the US president for almost half a century) abducted 28 Pakistani migrant workers living in various parts of Greece, drove them to some place close to Athens and tortured them trying to extract information about the London bombing. The “interogation” did not produce any guilt for the Pakistanis and they were released. Three of them testified that “When they let us go they told us not to talk. They said that if we did they would slit our throats.” While the Pakistanis were “interogated” in Greece their families in Pakistan were undergoing a similar treatment.
Langman was driven around Greece by his black driver (who advised those being tortured to speak so that the “interogation” should stop) in a green “Cherokee” SUV . Langman can be a torturer, as he is white and probably very religious, but should a black be a torturer of brown Pakistanis to earn his daily bread?
The “Time” magazine piece mentions (out of the blue) that “Frangiscos Ragoussis, the Greek lawyer representing ” some of the Pakistanis, “also represented a member of the Greek terrorist organization November 17 who is serving multiple life sentences” This way “Time” is trying to implicitly link the Pakistanis with terrorism. Unfortunately for “Time”, that same lawyer represented Eirineos, the deposed Greek Patriarch who “guards” the (supposed) tomb of Christ in Jerusalem, and which Patriarch was accused of selling Palestinian land to the Israelis. Eirineos is still a close friend of the Israelis, therefore the Israelis are implicitly linked to the November 17 terrorists.
As expected, the governments of Britain, Greece, and Pakistan originally denied there was abduction, etc of any Pakistanis. However, little by little they have been changing their tune (or spin) admitting that there is something there. The case is still pending. We shall see.
[Note: Langman is accused of having a lot to do with the death of Diana of England. There is an affidavit, or something, by a former member of the British Intelligence deposited in Switzerland about this. Even if that is true, it is irrelevant. What the elites are doing to one an other is of no concern to honest ordinary people. What is relevant is that a few days ago a Greek lady of humble origin who married a Greek tycoon and which lady, if I am not mistaken, was an an acquaintance of Diana’s bought a US $ 800,000 car for herself. The money of the tycoon have their roots in the money of the US taxpayers given to the Greek elites by the US since 1947. This is what is happening right now in Iraq. The Iraqis, chosen by the son of Barbara to form the future Iraqi elite, are financed even by the coal miners in West Virginia. This has paramount relevance. End of Note.]
– Maxim Zhilin, a tall 23-year-old Russian, left his native Siberia for Greece on a tourist visa last autumn intending to work there as a migrant worker. For a few days he worked as a waiter in a restaurant on the island of Corfu. Then in the first days of October he decided to return to his homeland. He had no money to buy a plane ticket. He went to the local airport hopping to be deported back to Russia as his visa had expired. He was arrested. The same day that Zhilin left his job and went to the airport a local 42-year-old woman was brutally stabbed to death in her car. The police accused Zhilin as the killer. According to the police Zhilin confessed and was imprisoned pending his trial. All the months after his arrest the media painted him as a brutal murderer who confessed that he killed the woman “to feel how it is to kill a human.”
One day before New Year’s Eve he was being transferred from one prison to another in a police van. At some point of the transfer he managed to escape by killing the two policemen that were guarding him. For almost three days he was hiding in the wilderness adjacent to the point of his escape. He managed to survive wearing only a T-shirt in freezing temperatures. Then, according to the police, in the evening of January 1 he commited suicide using the gun he took from his guards.
There are some questionmarks around Zhilin’s suicide. Also, about two days ago doubts surfaced whether Zhilin killed the woman. Thus, the Supreme Court Prosecutor ordered a new investigation about this. It is important to add that now it is revealed that Zhilin never uttered the sentence about killing to get the feeling of it. We are not told who initiated the lie. Finally, it is a fact that Zhilin in his short life before he left for Greece was a nice kid who had no blemish in his behavior.
[Note: A couple of days ago a Greek reporter visited Zhirin’s parents in Siberia. After hearig what they had to say and the way they said it, in the news, my personal feeling is that one should be skeptical about Zhilin’s case. Also, one should take into account that while in prison Zhilin was brutally beaten not only by his guards but also by his Greek fellow-prisoners and possibly sexually abused.]
Of course, this was not a “typical” New Year Season in Greece. However, all three cases are discussed in this society continuously for the last few days, as they should. In all three cases it is the acts of the human elites that caused the suffering: In Crete, the US-created virulent nationalism; with the Pakistanis, the British (and US) torturers; in Zhilin’s case, it is possible that besides the poverty in Siberia the Greek authorities are to blame. But, what are we to do to eliminate all this evil?
The answer can not be found in the small white Babtist church in Sago, West Virginia. The answer is to be found in the Resistance to the barbarous elites, especially those in the US, and in the Solidarity among the ordinary people. Daniele Benett can understand the agony and can feel the solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of survivors in Iraq who lost their kin because the son of Barbara is trying to secure the Iraqi oil for his friends.