Time to get shot of Nato

Is it wrong for the authorities to gun down protesters? It depends, apparently, on who is protesting and where.

Nato's warped world view

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary-general, was asked today about the killing of four Albanian protesters, shot with live rounds, during anti-government demonstrations on Jan 21.

Albania is a Nato member and the Alliance can be pretty preachy about human rights when it suits, usually when talking about Afghanistan*, so it was a fair question.

The Albanian journalist asked Rasmussen, Denmark’s former PM, how he would have reacted if Danish police/security forces had gunned down Nordic protesters.

“It could never happen in Denmark,” sniffed the Nato chief. He then added sagely: “Danish people are much more calm than those further south.”

In the Nato worldview, Albania’s authorities, members of the free world’s alliance, are not in the wrong. In fact, self-evidently for the bureaucratic-military mind, Albanians, unlike the Aryan Nordic Danes, are the wrong type of people.

Clearly, for Rasmussen, using live ammunition on calm and rational Danes would be deeply shocking, unthinkable in fact. Gunning down turbulent and irrational Albanians is another matter altogether, much more understandable.

There used to be a word for these kinds of double standards – the word was racism. And, this man is in charge of the world’s most powerful military structure…

* What is Nato for anyway?

An Alliance set up by the US for post-WW2 Europe in the Cold War claims it is, through its disastrous and appalling war in Afghanistan, to be building a nation state on the other side of the world.

The idea that Nato, or any other power, should, or can, build nation states for “subject peoples” is one that, like the Alliance, should be thrown into the dustbin of history.

http://blogs.euobserver.com/waterfield/2011/02/07/time-to-get-shot-of-nato/