Tartarin wrote:Listen -- before one dismisses Wolf's statements out of hand, look at the amount of stuff which has been dismissed and then reluctantly accepted. I have no idea what happened to Lindt. No axe to grind here. But on the face of it, we'd be idiots to assume "that kind of stuff just doesn't happen."
Lissen - I have no doubts that secret services around the world dabble in in the business of eliminating perceived enemies occasionally. Cold War era has seen enough of that stuff to warrant suspicions.
I dont see why Wolf is so eager to blame it all on the one big bad ... ahem, wolf, though - for one. Surely if there is one secret service we should be eyeing suspiciously when it comes to eliminating bothersome opponents it's the FSB, Putin's machine. Too many daylight shoot-outs targeted at prominent politicians in Russia, and I would be especially wary if I were a Chechen leader.
And there's the rub. Your point is - it happens. Lets not forget it does happen. Fine, sure, whatever. But we dont dismiss Wolf's statements out of hand because we dont believe secret services dont ever eliminate a bothersome opponent. We dismiss his statements because he says stuff like:
wolf wrote:It's clear, if you investigate, that the largest part of political murders around the world coincides with Bush-administrations.
There's nothing remotely sane about that anymore, I'm sorry. Would you care to make a list of political murders around the world, for example in, what, China, Russia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, you name it? And in "the largest part" of these, we have to assume its been the CIA, consistently?
For one thing, Wolf shows an amazing knack for underestimating the capacities of other peoples in the world. What condescendence - to think the Armenians or Iranians - or Dutch, for that matter - arent fully capable of thinking up and executing their own hit-jobs - as if only the CIA could possibly be evil and clever enough to do such stuff and get away with it - its a kind of inverted megalomania, really, the mirror image of the cultural superiority fantasies of American conservatives.
As for over here, we've had one political murder, Pim Fortuyn's, and despite the ravings of the murdered xenophobic politician's supporters, no conspiracy to be found yet. Just a lone perpetrator - an environmental activist who thought he had to save the country from a Dutch Mussolini. Idjut.