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Alternative newspaper = communist newspaper.

We have the same thing with the Advocate around here. Total liberal/socialist/communist/anarchist bilge. Now you know why they have to give it away!

Some tidbits from our "friend" Mr. Dyer:
http://www.gwynne-dyer.com/

http://www.gwynnedyer.net/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Let's%20Attack%20Iran!.txt
"After 9/11, there was an enormous need in the US to do something big, to smash stuff up and punish people for the hurt that had been done to Americans. Afghanistan was a logical and legitimate target of that anger, but it fell practically without a fight and left the national need for vengeance unassuaged. The invasion of Iraq was an emotional necessity if the rage was to be discharged, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to the United States."

Yeah, we should have simply prosecuted them!

http://www.gwynnedyer.net/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Al-Jazeera.txt
"I think that if al-Jazeera had been there 15 years ago, there would have been no 11 September," said marketing director Ali Mohammad Kamal three months ago. If it is still in business 15 years from now, there will be a lot fewer dictatorships and absolute monarchies in the Arab world.

They are so pro-American, after all!

http://www.gwynnedyer.net/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20Article_%20%20The%20Divided%20States.txt
"Irreconcilable" is the word that springs to mind. Two separate populations have evolved in the United States, and they are increasingly unhappy even about living together. One sub-species, homo canadiensis, thinks medicare is a good idea, would rather send peace-keepers than bombers, and longs for the wimpy, wispy liberalism enjoyed by their Canadian neighbours to the north. The other breed, homo iraniensis, prefers the full-blooded religious certainties and the militant political slogans - "Death to...(fill in the blank)" - that play such a large and fulfilling part in Iranian public life.

snip

At the global level, everybody else would be quite happy with a bigger Canada and a smaller United States. That smaller US would have to pull in its horns a bit, as it would no longer have the resources to maintain military bases in every single country on the planet, but it would retain enough resources to invade a country every year or so, so it wouldn't suffer too badly from withdrawal symptoms. And the new Canadians would be free to have abortions, enter into gay marriages, do stem-cell research and engage in all other wickednesses that flourish in that bastion of corrupt and Godless liberalism. They could even speak French, if they wanted to.

No sarcasm here.

Here is a howler:

http://www.gwynnedyer.net/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Waiting%20for%20Iraq.txt
Most Americans don't realise how much the rest of the world opposed their country's invasion of Iraq, because most US mass media shield them from the knowledge. Watching the domestic service of CNN just after the election, I heard three different newsreaders in the same day explain to their American audience that France and Germany had been "cool" to the American attack on Iraq.

Yeah, I was just telling the wife how "shielded" I felt by the MSM re: Iraq.

Finally, this article was printed in the Teheran Times in addition to other outlets:

Democracy and rhetoric
By Gwynne Dyer

Friday, January 28th 2005

"We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy," said Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of of the organisation that calls itself "al-Qaeda in Iraq." Zarqawi is the bogeyman that the US government currently blames for almost everything that has gone wrong in Iraq, but he does speak essentially the same language as President George W Bush.

For Bush, as for Zarqawi, political principles come from God. In his "God-drenched" inauguration speech (as Ronald Reagan's former speech-writer, Peggy Noonan, described it), President Bush explained that people have inalienable rights because they "bear the image of the Maker of heaven and earth," and that America's mission to spread democracy around the globe comes directly from "the Author of liberty."

Bush speeches are a treasure-trove of innocent fun. His speech-writers took the quote about having "lit a fire in the hearts of men" from Fyodor Dostoevsky, presumably not realising that they were quoting a bunch of terrorists who featured in his novel The Devils, and the "dark corners of the world" phrase pops up in every second Bush speech.

The problem is that George W Bush's belief that Americans basically own the copyright on democracy is widely shared even by Americans who deplore his actions. "Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals," he said in his inauguration speech, and most Americans would probably agree that the United States is not just the "home of the free;" it is the main source of freedom in the world. The US crusade for freedom (aka democracy) is justified, even if it requires cluster-bombs and Guantanamo Bays, because otherwise there will be no freedom.

That is their fundamental mistake. The United States was the first mass democracy in history, but the "Founding Fathers" who carried out that revolution were the heirs of the European enlightenment and of over a hundred years of radical egalitarian thought in England: it was the English Levellers who first declared in 1647 that "all government is in the free consent of the people." And only twelve years after the American Revolution, a far more radical revolution broke out in what was then the biggest nation of the West, France.

America's democratic revolution had a huge impact on the world, but it was both less, and less indispensable, than most Americans suppose.

Democracy was on its way anyway: to European countries first of all (maybe because practically everywhere else was under European imperial rule), but in due course even to the "dark corners of the world." We are living through the final wave of that process in this generation, with non-violent democratic revolutions from Bangkok, Dhaka and Seoul to Berlin, Moscow and Johannesburg, and on to Jakarta, Tbilisi and Kiev. Few of them had American help.

This notion that the United States should "seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," as President Bush put it in his inaugural speech, is profoundly misleading, because it suggests that American support for such transformations is essential. It isn't even relevant, in most cases. People have to do it for themselves, and the most helpful thing that Washington could do would be to stop supporting the oppressors.

Most of the world's countries already are democratic, and the exceptions are mainly in the Middle East and Africa, the two regions world where Western military interventions have been most frequent since the end of the colonial era. Indeed, it's striking that within the Middle East, the primary focus of American anxieties about terrorism, the Islamist terrorists come overwhelmingly from countries that have close links with Washington-Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and now Iraq-and not from places like Syria, Libya and Sudan. This is hardly an argument for further US military interventions.

"Liberty" and "freedom" (words President Bush used 42 times in his speech), are American catch-phrases for what other people call democracy: freedom under the law, and under the presumption that we are all equal before the law. That is the great revolution that has swept over the world in the past couple of centuries, and it is not an American gift to mankind.

It's not necessarily God's gift either, unless you are religious. It's just who we are.

Which is why, in an opinion poll carried out in fifteen of the biggest democratic countries in the week of Bush's inauguration, 58 per cent of the 22,000 people polled said that they expected his reelection to have a negative impact on peace and security, as compared to only 26 per cent who thought it would be positive. In Canada, Britain, Australia and South Africa, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, Mexico, Brazil, China, Indonesia and Japan, the story was the same: deep distrust for the Bush administration's policies and motives.

Mind you, 47 per cent of Americans have the same response.

Thanks a lot, Dyer.....