14-09-2009, 08:10 AM
Alex Jones interviewed the author about a month ago. It's still on the archive page somewhere. I didn't catch much useful information from the interview.
The Baltics are a weird mix. The president of Latvia was for years this Canadian Latvian woman who seemed to be a foundation creature. The leadership structures are mostly filled with Soviet bureaucrats and assets. Then you have the right wing nationalists who think they engineered independence, and their sympathies lie with those brave Nazi collaborators who tried to save the country from Bolshevism in 1941 by killing civilian women and children en masse. This leads to strange contradictions such as Riga, Latvia outright banning any gay pride march, but allowing SS "veterans" to march annually. To be fair Latvia stopped giving official sanction to the SS marches, and did allow a gay pride march once now, after EU accession, but the counter-demonstration against the gays was much larger. And the heiress apparent to Adamkus in Lithuania seems to be a lesbian in hiding, former EU commissioner, former Social Democrat (=Communist) apparatchik etc. Does that mean gays can now march in Vilnius? Very doubtful. Unpolitic. It's not safe for the President to come out, but it didn't matter Adamkus was a Nazi. It probably helped him.
As for the Hopsicker article I quoted above that seems to refer to the 911 "hijackers" and the Family, I can't imagine why two Arabic native speakers would heatedly argue about money iin public in English, unless they wanted everyone to overhear.
The Baltics are a weird mix. The president of Latvia was for years this Canadian Latvian woman who seemed to be a foundation creature. The leadership structures are mostly filled with Soviet bureaucrats and assets. Then you have the right wing nationalists who think they engineered independence, and their sympathies lie with those brave Nazi collaborators who tried to save the country from Bolshevism in 1941 by killing civilian women and children en masse. This leads to strange contradictions such as Riga, Latvia outright banning any gay pride march, but allowing SS "veterans" to march annually. To be fair Latvia stopped giving official sanction to the SS marches, and did allow a gay pride march once now, after EU accession, but the counter-demonstration against the gays was much larger. And the heiress apparent to Adamkus in Lithuania seems to be a lesbian in hiding, former EU commissioner, former Social Democrat (=Communist) apparatchik etc. Does that mean gays can now march in Vilnius? Very doubtful. Unpolitic. It's not safe for the President to come out, but it didn't matter Adamkus was a Nazi. It probably helped him.
As for the Hopsicker article I quoted above that seems to refer to the 911 "hijackers" and the Family, I can't imagine why two Arabic native speakers would heatedly argue about money iin public in English, unless they wanted everyone to overhear.