Iranian bastardry

While I have great respect for Iranian repudiation of many Western values - Iran after all [being successor to the ancient empire of Persia] has a long and rich history - I find it hard to justify the announcement that five people arrested in the unrest after Iran's disputed presidential election have been condemned to death.

The demonstrations that followed the rigged election were an expression of the peoples' will, pure and simple. Why shouldn't the people be able to express themselves? Because some corrupt theocratic regime threatens so? It is appalling, and the sooner the corrupt leadership of Iran is sent packing, the better.

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Duplicitous Thatcher

The British are a duplicitous lot at the best of times. But the staggering admission last week that the British Prime Minister of the time [Margaret Thatcher] had requested the Soviets to prevent the unification of Germany - apart from revealing how dishonestly her Government behaved in this matter - shows such an ignorance of late 20th Century geopolitical realities as to almost beggar belief.

While the official government position stated otherwise, it has now been revealed that Thatcher urged Soviet Leader Gorbachov to use Soviet power not to allow East and West Germany to re-unite in mid-1989, even though Britain was supposedly a close ally of [West] Germany.

Apart from being totally duplitious, this position on the part of the British PM displayed a frighteningly myopic degree of paranoia - that the totally destroyed [and admittedly rebuilt] Germany was somehow more dangerous than a discredited totalitarian Soviet empire that caused untold suffering on its own people [it is estimated that 12 million people were killed or imprisoned under Stalin's abysmal rule] as well as terrible pain on its vassal nations of Eastern Europe.

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