"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Friday, October 19, 2012

Awarded for Services Rendered

EU: a 'force for peace'
EXTRACT: Quite Kafkaesquely, last week the European Union bureaucracy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its “advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights”. In fact, according to the prize committee’s citation, the European Union represents the realisation of the “fraternity of nations” and its disappearance would see an ominous return to “extremism and nationalism”. Obviously no stranger to hyperbole, Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, rapturously described the EU as the “biggest peacemaking institution ever created in human history”. You see, the prize proves it. Just look at my halo.
However, the EU’s uniquely peaceful and humanitarian mission came as news to the working class, hammered by wave after wave of austerity. An assault spearheaded by the EC, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank troika - the dreaded men in black and their cruel demands. Putting the record straight, Panos Skourletis - a spokesperson for Syriza, the Greek Coalition of the Radical Left - explained that what we are experiencing in many parts of Europe “really is a war situation on a daily basis, albeit a war that has not been formally declared”. Greece to date having suffered most from the austerity blitzkrieg. There is, he added, “nothing peaceful about it”.
Posted by at 11:59 am

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