Muammar Al Khadafi

For the first time since 2008, there will be a transperson sitting in their nation's highest legislative body.

57 year old Anna Grodzka is a member of the newly minted liberal party called Pallikot's Support Movement, which stunned the political establishment in Poland by garnering 10 percent of the vote in Sunday's election..

The party was founded by vodka tycoon Janusz Palikot who was a lawmaker in Prime Minister Donald Tusk's center-right Civic Platform until he got exasperated with the party's conservatism on social issues and broke away to form his own party.   Pallikot's Support Movement has attracted younger voters with its support for gay rights, abortion and legalization of soft drugs and with its attacks on the influential Roman Catholic Church

Grodzka is also an example of what can happen if you just step out there, put yourself in the game and get in it to win it. "I decided to be a candidate for Palikot's Movement because I want the voice of people who are excluded and discriminated against in the Polish political system to be heard," she wrote in her blog. "I believe that little by little does the trick."

She garnered 19,541 votes in the Krakow II electoral district to secure her place in the Sejm, Poland's lower house of Parliament.  She is set to become the first transperson in Poland to become an MP and the first in Europe since Vladimir Luxuria lost her seat in the Italian elections in 2008.

Georgina Beyer, the world first transsexual to be elected to their national legislative body, retired from New Zealand's Parliament after serving as a Labour MP from November 27, 1999 until February 14, 2007

Grodzka is the founder and president of NGO Trans-Fuzja, and has her work cut out for her in her stated mission of help Poles understand the problems of people who transition as she did last year.   The Polish anti-discrimination law of 2010 does not include gender identity nor gender expression as possible grounds for discrimination.

Congrats Anna on making some trans history.  May you be wildly successful in your dual missions of representing your constituents and fostering increased understanding of transpeople in a staunchly Catholic Poland.

I wrote about it last year, but today is the 50th anniversary of the day that at midnight East Germany began building what they called their 'Antifascist Protection Barrier'.   The rest of the world came to know it as the Berlin Wall.  



As I wrote last year, that structure was a part of the world I grew up in as a tangible symbol of the Cold War tensions that split a city and a nation in two    

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, will attend the dedication and opening of a memorial and museum to The Wall at Bernauer Strasse, which was cut in two by the construction of the wall that stood for 28 years.   There are disputed claims as to just how many people died trying to cross it.   The count ranges from 138 to the 700 claimed by victim's rights groups.  The first victim is believed to be Guenter Liftin, who was killed on August 24, 1961 and the last was Chris Gueffroy on February 6, 1989.

Two US presidents made speeches in front of it.



JFK's 1963 'Ich Bin Ein Berliner' speech.





Reagan's 1987 'Tear down this wall' speech

 





Indeed, just two years later, that Brandenburg Gate area was filled with deliriously happy people doing precisely that.  

Embattled Colonel Gaddafi, faced with an arrest warrant from the ICC, western backed rebels, and a bombing campaign which is reducing large parts of Libya to rubble, has warned the West that further military action will result in attacks on Europe.

In a recorded message, broadcast on state TV and announced over loudspeakers, Gaddafi threatens that "If you do not stop your military actions and do not leave the Libyan people in peace, it will be a catastrophe for you. We are able to penetrate into Europe like locusts, like bees to respond the aggressors with their own methods. These people will bring the battle into Europe and then your homes, offices and families will become the lawful targets"

In response, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, said that Gaddafi should put the interests of his people first and step down. No shock there.

Gaddafi does have a point, the borders in Europe really aren't up to much. Indeed, would be attackers are probably already lurking in council houses somewhere in the UK, only taking time out from plotting terrorism in order to head down to the DSS and pick up their giros.

Our involvement in bombing parts of Libya back into the stone age, not to mention imposing regime change at gunpoint, really isn't doing a lot to make Britain safer.

What is also interesting to note is that, as recently as 2009, Hillary Clinton met with one of Gaddafis sons in Washington DC, and proclaimed that "We deeply value the relationship between the United States and Libya".

It doesn't take a lot of digging around on the internet to find photographs from the same period showing the usual suspects such as Tony Blair and Barack Obama, all proudly wearing those crocodile smiles and shaking Colonel Gaddafis hand.

Back then he was seemingly a partner in the so called war on terror, someone we could do business with. How quickly things change in the world of politics and warmongering it seems, from feted friend to three quarters of the West doing their best to make sure he ends up dead.

One really might begin to wonder if our intervention in Libya has much more to do with Gaddafis threat to nationalise the Libyan oil industry, and that the whole bringing democracy and protecting civilians rhetoric is nothing more than a smokescreen.

But, whatever the reason, the simple fact is that our involvement in Libya is not going to do us any favours. We're busily making enemies everywhere, the threat of terrorism is ever with us now, and the terrorists are already here.

We are fighting in multiple, endless wars which will see us having to prop up puppet regimes for decades, and we will see blood on our streets as a result. Gaddafis threat may be the hollow words of a leader facing the grave, or they may have substance, but sooner or later the people of Britain will inevitably reap the terrifying harvest of the wars which our politicians have decided to involve us in.