Very interesting read on the Russia/Georgia conflict....

[OwnedByFerrets]

"One of them, a peasant, wounded in the forehead, still dazed and terrified, tells me the story of fleeing his village in Ossetia on foot, three days ago. The Russians arrived, and in their wake, Cossack and Ossetian gangs pillaged, raped and murdered. As they did in Chechnya, they rounded up the young men and drove them away in trucks, to unknown destinations. Fathers were killed in front of their sons. Sons were killed in front of their fathers. In the basement of a house which they blew up with propane cylinders they had collected, they came upon a family and stripped them of everything they had tried to hide and then forced the adults to kneel down and executed them with a single shot to the head."


Firsthand reporting by Bernard-Henri Lévy



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernardhenri-levy/georgia-at-war-what-i-saw_b_120076.html

[Turbineguy]

1. Could be propaganda

on the other hand it sounds like those Cossaks and Ossetians were provoked by those unarmed villagers.

(I promised to say nice things about Putin)

[Junkdrawer]

2. "BERNARD-HENRI LEVY: A French Imposter"

"A philosopher who's never taught the subject in any university, a journalist who creates a cocktail mingling the true, the possible, and the totally false, a patch-work filmmaker, a writer without a real literary oeuvre, he is the icon of a media-mad society in which simple appearance weighs more than the substance of things, BHL is thus first and foremost a great communicator, the p.r. man of the only product he really knows how to sell: himself." That's the lapidary judgement of two French investigative journalists -- Nicolas Beau of Le Canard Enchaine and Olivier Toscer of Le Nouvel Observateur -- in their superb, just-published inquest into how BHL has built his success, "Une Imposture Francaise." They're right. During the near-decade I spent living in France, my numerous wordsmith friends -- intellectuals, writers, journalists -- all considered BHL an intellectual fraud, a poseur, and a frimeur, or show-off."

...

http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2006/02/_bernardhenri_l.html