JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

The problem certainly is not the crib notes on Sarah Palin’s palm, although it makes a funny anecdote after her blubbering about teleprompters.

The problem is that Sarah Palin has absolutely nothing to say, with or without notes.

Almost every word that comes from her mouth is completely predictable. And all of it is as vacuous as the applause soundtrack from a 1950s television sitcom.

Organizations might just as well buy a DVD of her past appearances and play random selections.

Imagine giving this hare-brain a hundred thousand dollars to come and say nothing?

Ah, that’s America, land of opportunity.

And, of course, when dear Sarah bounces around and waves her hands like a Baptist preacher at a tent meeting, she sees nothing from the podium but real folks in the audience, not beltway insiders.

This, as she works tirelessly to become one of those very beltway insiders.

What a truly tiresome theme, a re-tread of Newt Gingrich and Lamar Alexander and Phil Gramm plus countless other past opportunists devoid of content.

How is it that America has an endless appetite for such regurgitated tripe?

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JOHN IBBITSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

John Ibbitson,

You really do have it entirely wrong.

I’m surprised at how much so. Perhaps it’s your American-wannabe inner-self seeking expression?

There is nothing new, and certainly nothing genuinely anti-status quo, about the goofy Tea Party.

Good Lord, Sarah Palin – George Bush with a sex change – was there, and they were applauding that total airhead as she waved her arms around like a Baptist tent preacher.

And surely, you understand that there is nothing new about Palin except the color of her hair.

In fact, the Tea Party is the same tiresome bunch we’ve heard from dozens of times before in the U.S.

It’s a re-run of a re-run of a re-run there: back to political basics and origins.

It’s almost a hobby amongst the U.S. Right Wing, every once in while, we get a bunch of them with a new set of slogans.

This latest group of clowns reminds me of Lamar Alexander working desperately towards the Republican nomination in 2000, by going around in a red lumberjack shirt and offering the profound suggestion of a part-time government.

Likely it was a custom-made lumberjack shirt since good old Lamar is a multi-millionaire. Of course, in one sense, old Lamar was only talking about formalizing the de facto reality: America does have a part-time government if you count the time spent soliciting money.

Were you aware that one of their speakers at the convention also called for the re-establishment of literacy tests for voting? It’s the old code phrase for eliminating black votes.

Anti-status quo? Yes, if you count going backward a century as being anti-status quo.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ERIN ANDERSSEN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

True merit pay for teachers must cut both ways.

The better teachers should get more than average while the poorer teachers should get less than average.

That is the only intellectually defensible way to do this.

Of course, the truly poor ones – of which there are many – should be let go.

How much chance is there that the teacher’s union – at its heart the cause of most of our educational woes – would support that? None.

As for only paying bonuses, that really is a bribery system. Because the education system is so much larger and complex in the US, it is only natural that bribes would come into being.

After all, American states and cities outbid each other in concessions to keep or receive industries.

In a large American metropolis, typically there are many school boards, ranging from immensely well-financed ones in breathtakingly wealthy suburbs to piteously financed ones in some urban centers (truly rural schools in the US are often terribly poor too).

In a place like Chicago area, there are suburbs with PhDs teaching high school and with facilities comparable to a private quality college. Then there are science labs in some Chicago neighborhoods where the Bunsen burners do not work.

Paying these bribes is just one more mechanism for the well-off to assure themselves all the very best. Poor boards are not able to compete.

It’s just one more form of Social Darwinism in a country which specializes in such arrangements.

Another argument against this idea is a strong one too. The fact is, in Ontario, we have no in authority competent to judge the quality of teachers. Principals are afraid, often rather limp-wristed, and they are just teachers themselves who in many cases sought a way out of the classroom.

Once a graduate lands a permanent job in Ontario, his or her teaching is never examined or assessed. There are no specialist teams competent to do this anyway, as there once were.

Going right up the Ontario hierarchy, we have pretty much nothing but ex-teachers who’ve escaped the classroom. That’s how we get superintendents and even directors with little capacity for management or sound judgment.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY PATRICK MARTIN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
Murder Incorporated has been making all kinds of threatening noises lately.

 

Threats towards Iran.

Threats towards Syria.

Threats towards Southern Lebanon.

And there’s the effort to starve the Palestinians out of Gaza while daily stealing more of the property of others in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

We have a very ugly and threatening situation developing.

Syria is absolutely right to say that if a war starts, Israeli cities would be targets. It is the only way for Israel’s savage leaders to reconsider whatever it is they appear to be planning.

After all, Israel and the U.S. have never hesitated to bomb and shell cities.

Israel used an artillery siege on Beirut in the 1980s. In recent years it has bombed Beirut and dropped ghastly cluster bombs.

Israel caused the deaths of thousands in just the city of Beirut in the 1980s. The U.S. slaughtered civilians in cities all over Iraq, especially in Baghdad. And it regularly bombs civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Its holocaust of Hanoi was one of the most bloodthirsty events of the second half of the 20th century.

The U.S. is the only power capable of restraining Israel’s aggression, but it refuses to do so. Policy under Obama, just as under Bush, seems virtually set in Tel Aviv.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY TOM VELK IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
 
Tom Velk, this is a remarkably poorly informed piece.

First, you start with a straw-man argument.

The fact is no one on earth thinks the Tea Party represents rebels.

In fact, they are the same tiresome bunch we’ve heard from dozens of times before in the U.S.

Back to political basics and origins.

It’s a fad amongst the U.S. Right Wing, every once in while, we get a new bunch of them with slogans.

It’s been typical for them to use words or phrases like “manifesto” or “revolution” so that they grab attention and sound like something other than the retro-grade folks they are: Patriots with four-car garages.

The Tea Party will disappear within a year or two. It has nothing to offer. Good God, just consider they’re using the brainless Sarah Palin as a keynote speaker. Kind of says it all.

As for Jefferson, you seem unaware of the facts of his life. He said that the country needed some blood shed every twenty years or so to keep the Tree of Liberty nourished, and he wasn’t using poetic language. He supported the bloody French Revolution right through The Terror, leaving behind some pretty awful statements.

Jefferson actually shared qualities with Cambodia’s Pol Pot: he believed in the honest yeoman type and was against industrialization and opposed Hamilton’s sophistication in finances. He was repressive as in the revolt of Haiti and his horrible embargo of England and his Inspector Javert-like pursuit of Arron Burr.

Altogether a confusing and rather unpleasant man.

_______________________

“4. Describing America’s growth in the 19th century: “the giant did not grow by conquest (except of a figurative sort)” The War of 1812 was an attempt to do just that; The Mexican War? the forced death March of natives from Florida; the many ‘Indian Wars’ of conquest.”

Yes, indeed. Don’t forget the Spanish-American War intended to steal Cuba and other properties.

Then there’s the theft of Texas.

The theft of New Mexico and California.

The story of Hawaii is a very sad one. America stole the place after the British were gone and ignored the pleas of natives who even petitioned Congress and were completely ignored.

Don’t forget the many bloody uprisings in the “Empire of Liberty” stretching back to putting down the Whisky rebellion to the ghastly mass slaughters of blacks in the 1920s in Oklahoma and Florida and other places. Bodies by the hundreds dumped into mass graves and their property stolen.

Actually, America’s record, for those who know it, very much resembles Germany’s rise in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.

Only the fact that the places America attacked and pillaged were thinly populated prevents its record from being one of deaths in the many millions like Germany’s.

Of course, its ruthlessness goes right up to the fire bombing and atomic bombing of Japan and its mass murder in Vietnam with perhaps 3 million victims left behind. And a million victims in Iraq.

It ain’t a pretty record.

I really think the editors of the Globe need to do a much better job in selecting the people they print. This piece is uninformed trash.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY KONRAD YAKABUSKI IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Oh, please, any group which can become excited by a certified airhead like Sarah Palin is pathetic.

The Tea Party is just one more in a long list of fad right-wing movements in America, most of them deliberately employing the language of revolution to make themselves sound consequential.

Well, they are all about as revolutionary, and as interesting, as the latest version of dish soap from Procter and Gamble.

And this author, Konrad Yakabuski, too, has a childishly limited understanding of the American “revolution.”

“…driven by the same distrust of the ruling class that inspired the Revolution.”

That statement is simply not true. It represents the American 8th grade civics-class version of the “revolution.”

Americans in the colonies were a pretty privileged group in the world of 1776. Everything we read from foreign observers tells us how good and healthy and free their lives in fact were. From life expectancies, smart people like Franklin calculated how quickly the population would become large.

Britain – in the Seven Years War (aka, French and Indian War) – had even eliminated the worrying threat of the French encroaching into the Ohio Valley.

But when Britain wanted Americans to help pay for that war with some new taxes – a perfectly reasonable expectation – we first saw Americans acting like rude kids being served spinach for dinner, a behavior which has continued down to this day.

Indeed, the financial crisis which just threatened the world comes from the same dark place in the American soul: “I want it all, and I want it now.”

Britain also irritated the colonists by keeping rules about land speculation and against disturbing the natives in the Ohio Valley, an unpleasant get-rich-quick practice in which George Washington was a leader, surveying other people’s land and later selling it to new immigrants from Europe.

And it still further irritated the colonists – actually infuriated them – by imposing the Quebec Act, arousing the ugliest anti-Catholic rhetoric you could imagine, truly gutter stuff.

These are the true origins of the American Revolution, an event which is far more accurately called a revolt since it was an effort to overthrow an imperial power, not local government by locals.

None of the rhetoric about liberty and justice had much to do with it, unless you agree that people who trade in slaves make any sense in talking about such concepts.

Selfishness writ large.

And just so now, the clownish Tea Party.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

This isn’t an attack.

Gore Vidal is a crackpot, a rather delightful and entertaining one.

Christopher Hitchens, however, has become something much more unpleasant, and far more dangerous, than a crackpot.

Hitchens is now a relentless defender of the establishment, eloquent and wordy certainly, but serving interests a genuine writer should never serve.

Graham Greene said it so superbly:

“You remember Thomas Paine’s great apothegm, ‘we must take care to guard even our enemies against injustice,’ and it is there – in the establishment of justice – that the writer has greater opportunities and therefore greater obligations than, say, the chemist or the estate agent.”

No matter what you believe about 9/11, it is simply a fact that there are many unanswered questions.

I do not think that that fact means the government was involved, but it could not be clearer that the government is hiding things.

Just the simple facts that structural steel used there required twice the temperature that aviation fuel burns at 3000 versus 1500 degrees), that most of the force of the impact and explosion was depleted by blowing out the other side, and that we have pictures of survivors standing by the entrance hole tell us clearly there was not enough energy to cause those collapses.

The recorded images of the collapse are, almost to a certainty, images of a controlled demolition, not a “pancaking” down of floors. Indeed, the central core was so immensely strong – overbuilt from an engineering point of view – that even if the floors could have “pancaked” down, the core would have been left standing.

And there are so many other questions.

Most of the perpetrators were Saudis, and, crucially important, had legitimate visas for the US. Who issued those? The Israelis knew about them and were curious, following them around with a large gang of agents who were arrested and deported afterward.

What was going on? A CIA training operation gone sour? A much larger plot than the men in the planes, including others who planted explosives at the building bases? Who knows, but we do know we have not been told the truth.

And as for the fourth airliner, there is absolutely no question but it was shot down by an American fighter plane. The debris field was vast and could not possibly have resulted from the official fantasy story of “let’s roll,” a story concocted to save the government from a monstrous set of lawsuits.

Yes, Christopher Hitchens is not a writer in the truest sense of the word, he is the kind of talented scribbler who has always served those with power.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

One of the key facts in understanding American health care and the lack of support for serious reform is not widely understood outside of the United States.

That fact is that under the existing regime, the comfortable middle class almost universally receives very good health care.

Those who work at good corporate or government jobs receive good to superb insurance as a benefit.

This fact effectively removes society’s most vocal and politically influential group of people from the debate. In fact, it actually puts them on the side against any change: “I’ve got mine, and I don’t want it mucked up,” is genuine if unspoken thinking.

The people who suffer most are the underemployed or those consigned to lives with low-level jobs – the great majority of clerks and retail employees and people who work at service work of many descriptions. They receive either no insurance or, often, insurance which is so poor in its coverage and rules that it can be close to useless. In effect, they are hard-working people who cannot afford to buy costly private insurance and have little prospect for a change in their circumstances over their lifetimes.

Of course, there are also the tens of millions who go entirely uninsured, but many of these are young and in a sense their plight isn’t as serious as the underinsured.

So the total American population is highly segmented, as it were, into groups whose political importance also varies greatly. The politically important ones are pretty satisfied with their health care. The politically less important are generally not but tend to be inert.

When politicians are doing their electioneering (even outside of health care), middle class people are pretty consistently their target of first importance. They have the money, they have the voices, and they are statistically the most likely to vote. It’s fundamental part of “the calculus of consent.”

General ethical appeals have limited claim on many of them. America is not run as a society in which ethics, apart from self-interest, play a great role in politics. This is easily observed in many phenomena, but the words used by politicians and political commentators are especially revealing in this regard. People aren’t addressed as citizens or fellows but typically as consumers in America. There is a palpable theme of Social Darwinism that surges through most public affairs.

And, of course, as de Tocqueville observed a long time ago, “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” That characterizes every national election still, and Obama’s was no exception.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GARY MASON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

 

“But if you’re going to suggest, as Olympic critics do, that the Games have cost $6-billion, at least have the decency to say that a good chunk of that amount – $4-billion, in fact – has gone to things that were going to get built anyway.”

This is just a roundabout updating of Mayor Drapeau’s infamous line about Olympics and deficits and having babies.

Of course, in the case of Montreal 1976, we were left with a whopper of a deficit, and some of the infrastructure was poorly designed and built in the rush, yielding far less utility in the future than structures carefully done over time.

There’s no reason on earth a city the size of Vancouver, not really a terribly large city, would have been spending $4billion on infrastructure.

And the comment on the immense security cost, above, is on the mark: we are at the point where a public event requiring this much security is not worth it.

The excesses of the modern Olympics are beyond counting, but they may perhaps be best symbolized by the Olympic Torch Relay. It costs a fortune to pull off this meaningless quasi-barbaric ritual in a country the size of Canada.

And what are its origins? The 1936 Olympics in Germany, a country under great international pressure at the time over its suitability to host the Olympics and a country then given to lavish quasi-barbaric rituals.

The infamous Joseph Goebbels put the first Torch Relay into the modern Olympics, and we still mindlessly repeat it.

It has no connection to the origins of the Olympics, and, indeed, the entire modern excess called the Olympics has no relation to the ancient, relatively simple event.

Vancouver, as was China, is a gigantic, immensely expensive Las Vegas show, a glitzy, vacuous temporary temple to sports not even paid for by the people enjoying it.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY LAWRENCE MARTIN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Let Ignatieff be himself?

God, what a treat that will be for voters.

Let him drone on in his drab tone.

Let him display his arrogant and stand-offish attitude.

Let him display his striped trousers and silk stockings while crossing his legs on podiums across the country.

Let him speak about relatively trivial points while the great issues of the sweep past him.

Let him blubber about the democratic values his entire sordid little political career in Canada has worked against.

Let him smile his sardonic smile and be self-satisfied about his changing his mind about past support for torture and mass murder in Iraq.

God, I wish the Liberal Party would come to its senses and dump this political albatross.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

I too have read a number of Galbraith’s books, and there is no doubt that he is an interesting writer, and while I disagree with a good deal of his thought, I welcome the thoughtful views of those who go against the academic establishment.

I have also met Galbraith, briefly, and heard him lecture, and there is equally no doubt that he was one of the most arrogant people I have ever met. He literally dripped arrogance. Not a pleasant experience.

Further thought.

It is not widely appreciated that Galbraith came from rural Ontario. His first academic work was at what was then called the Ontario Agricultural College (since changed into the University of Guelph).

I’ve always thought, in view of Harvard and the top Washington establishment, that he hid his embarrassment at that humble beginning with practiced arrogance.

Perhaps.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Yes, exactly.

Whether in war or foreign affairs or economics or trade, the basic problem is the American attitude of “I want it all, and I want it now.”

Another word for this is entitlement.

I think there really is no cure for this sickness, just as it is virtually impossible to undo the damage to a person raised by parents who behaved as though they were his servants.

The only time we saw some deviation from this obsession was in the Great Depression, a learning experience comparable to repeatedly hitting one’s head into a wall.

But, as we’ve seen, even depressions have been banned in America now. You can buy your way out, and go back to just what you were doing.

____________________

Yes, Wendell Murray, the American military expenditure is actually cancer-like in its growth, and only recently we were assured by the good Mr. Gates that there would be still more coming.

American politicians today sometimes harangue about China’s military expenditure, which at somewhere between 10 and 15% that of America’s (with four times the population), seems almost miniscule.

There is no rational explanation for this.

Consider the countless billions squandered in Vietnam – inflate it to present dollars and the sum is immense – and to what end?

Trillions were spent on the Cold War, almost all of it wasted. The Soviet Union finally collapsed based on the flaws in economics and logic embedded in its very foundation and structure, not owing to America’s military might.

I think the practice reflects a combination of the American entitlement syndrome (we are entitled to make all others fear our might) and the Moby Dick obsession with chasing the white whale.

There always seems to be a white whale for America.

Spain’s remaining North American Empire of the 1890s, Communism for decades going back to the 1920s (when Hoover first showed his obsession with getting rid of anyone who could be regarded as a Communist), to Islam in recent times.

Does that reflect a basic paranoid trait in a good portion of the population, the legacy of the horrible Puritans? I’ve long thought so. I think Australia was lucky to get the convicts rather than the Pilgrims.

I do believe the world needs seriously to start re-thinking the role of the American dollar as reserve currency in light of the county’s proved record of irresponsibility. That role for the currency leaves Americans with an option no one else has in paying for its lack of control. Look what it did after Vietnam.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY NORMAN SPECTOR IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

I have no use for separatism, but I think it more than fair to say that Mr. Duceppe is by a good measure the more statesmanlike of the three, comparing him with Harper and Ignatieff.

Duceppe also has demonstrated a solid concern for the kind of values most Canadians are comfortable with.

Harper is a nasty political accident, an extremist who has managed to enjoy power only owing to a set of circumstances beyond his control.

Ignatieff is not worth discussing. The man represents no values whatsoever. His voice is never even heard on important matters. And his past is a disgrace, whether speaking of his support for torture and mass murder or his receiving his position through anti-democratic manoeuvering. And to put the cap on it, he isn’t even interesting to listen to, rather drab in fact.

The press, and columnists like Norman Spector, actually make far more out of the separatist affiliation of Duceppe than is warranted. He has no chance ever of achieving separation, the majority of Quebec’s people not supporting that end. But he has been a more respectable and, in my view, responsible member of Parliament than Ignatieff or Harper.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MELANIE MCDONAGH IN THE TELEGRAPH

Melanie McDonagh, you have captured perfectly a sense of Anthony Julius’s piece.

The tone of Julius’s piece actually struck me as a bit bizarre and off-the-wall.

Why, of all the things you could discuss would you choose this insignificant little remark?

Especially, when you consider the fact we understand today that the charming Diana was a very disturbed person. Are the little confidences of disturbed people to a professional the stuff of publicity? Of course, they are not.

His anecdote just touches the filth which floats around today like stuff on a waste pond: the endless shrill accusations that every critic of Israel is anti-Semitic.

It represents an obsession and a desperately unpleasant effort to cover Israel’s atrocities.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Andy Barrie certainly is a man of intelligence and some talents, but I think this very interview reveals why it is a good thing that he is leaving the morning show.

This interview focuses on personal matters, and that is precisely what Mr Barrie does on his show.

I know more about Andy Barrie’s personal life and personal views than I do about anyone else on CBC Radio, indeed likely more than all the other people on CBC Radio together.

I know almost nothing personal about such outstanding CBC talents as Anna Marie Tremonti, Eleanor Wachtel, Bob McDonald, or Michael Enright.

But I know about Andy’s religious views, I know about Andy’s late brother, about his history in Montreal, about his history in the U.S., about Andy’s mother, about Andy’s late wife, about Andy’s health, and a good many other things.

I know too much about Andy, and especially his views. He cannot conduct a serious interview without making it almost as much about views or comments of his as the person being interviewed.

He inserts his views into almost everything, and I regard that as something of an abuse of listeners. I believe it was the third or fourth time he started in with the “I’m an atheist” stuff that I wrote in saying if I heard it once more, I’d puke. Not because I care in the least about atheism, but simply too much of the self-indulgent boy doing his adolescent bravado act

There is too much in Andy of the old Larry Solway days, the aggressive, opinionated telephone-in show host.

I like to hear the morning show for events, but I think it can only improve without the really huge ego.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ROLAND PARIS IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The final chapter of our Afghan mission?

And just what was our “mission”?

I doubt anyone in Canada can give a coherent definition of that so-called mission.

The government has blubbered again and again, as have some of its supporters, about making the purpose clearer to people, but they never have.

That is simply because there is no purpose, at least in the conventional meaning of the word.

The United States went there for vengeance and to kill as many people it regards as hostile as it can. It dragged along all the “help” its vast resources of finance, aid, and military could extract from the world, hoping to make the business look like something other than it is.

Even then, most countries, except for Tony Blair’s Britain, sent only token help to this supposedly world-important “mission.”

There never has been any other meaning, except in the columns of propagandists.

Canada’s only purpose was to placate a mindlessly angry and paranoid United States with the knowledge that we’ll help hold your overcoat while you’re busy doing all that killing. We accidentally got assigned to a place where our troops suffered disproportionately

No other definition of our “mission” fits the facts. It is a dark and brutal and pointless chapter in our history.

________________

“…should have realized that the mission since the German Conference was to rebuilt Afghanistan and provide the necessary security for its people.”

It doesn’t get more unthinking and uninformed than that.

Afghanistan is not being “rebuilt.”

The place was never a country in the sense that we understand it. It is simply a remote place which is the home to a number of tribes. There is traditionally no central government – and there effectively still is not – and there are no roads to speak of, and relationships are governed by a set of ancient tribal rules.

You cannot undo that in even a lifetime.

Because the economy is so primitive, it is little more than window dressing to build a lot more schools too. There is no employment for more educated people in a tribal society like that.

If we could by a wave of the hand, suddenly educate all the people of Afghanistan, all we would achieve is producing a lot of people who want to go somewhere else. The primitive economy cannot absorb them.

The “German Conference” was just one more in a long line of American tools to manipulate world opinion.

Had America cared the least about developing Afghanistan, it would have dropped dollar bills, not bombs.

How few people are even aware that the Taleban originally was created to provide clean government, at a time when the country was under the warlords of the Northern Alliance, who in their internecine fights were killing tens of thousands of people after the Russians left.

The Taleban’s original purpose had absolutely nothing to do with fighting the West.

Yes, they granted Osama’s people a place to stay, but Osama had before that been someone who served American purposes, indeed, someone who visited the United States and received assistance.

After 9/11, the Taleban would have extradited Osama’s people had the US offered one shred of evidence concerning his guilt, something they refused, and to this day, we’ve still not seen any.

America has managed the feat of making an enemy of the Taleban. Pointless because, whether we like it or not, they are part of the fabric of that country.

America’s total achievement, apart from killing tens of thousands more, includes the poppies, which the Taleban had suppressed, now blooming like wildflowers, and the Northern Alliance warlords rule their respective areas with all the corruption and violence and anti-progressive behavior as always.

A total disaster.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY SHEEMA KHAN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Ms. Khan, there is to my mind only one made-in-Canada approach to this matter.

That is, let people do as they wish in their private lives and as they feel their religion directs them.

Anything else is state interference into private lives and religion, an abhorrent concept in which I am sorry to see France becoming involved.

I don’t like burkas, but I didn’t like nun’s heavy habits of only a few decades ago either. Some of them were godawful outfits, covering from head to toe and pinching the face in heavily starched material. I’m not too fond of the grotesquely ugly clothing strict Mennonite women wear too.

But it is all none of my business.

We had no complaints about those excesses. The complaints today reflect raw anti-Muslim prejudice, and we have no business accommodating that.

Over time, as people adjust to a new society, they or at least their children, will give up these ancient customs. It just takes time.

It was only a couple of generations ago that women from Eastern Europe, and actually many others, wore babushkas routinely. In the World War II period, it was stylish for women to wear veils on their hats. In Victorian times, women covered themselves in heavy dark clothing and wore hats with large heavy veils. All just common fashion, and all of it has disappeared.

If people out there are concerned about women’s rights, then look to the world’s many true horrors and do something about them.

Three million women a year undergo sexual mutilation in Africa. It is routine practice also in many parts of Africa for older men in a village to rape young girls.

In India, we have bride-burning and honor killing. We also have a ghastly tradition that marries off little girls to rich old men, so the family can get a little money. This horror is compounded by the fact that when the old man dies, the girl is left a widow, and there are terrible rules which apply to her for the rest of her miserable life, including never marrying again and even the clothes she must wear and the food she must eat. Tens of millions of widows in India live under this tyranny.

The world is full of genuine horrors and abuse, never mind what someone wears by custom.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSES TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Do the right thing?

And just when in his entire career – except for events in Haiti where he would have appeared a fiend had he not responded – has Mr Harper done the right thing?

The Supreme Court had no choice here, and I think their decision a wise one.

The government has been complicit in denying a boy his rights, and in so doing, they assisted the buzz-cut thugs at Guantanamo in torturing a boy. (I remind readers that this poor boy had been shot, twice in the back, by American soldiers. He was tortured while these ghastly wounds slowly healed.)

The ethical and legal issues are clear here. There are no ambiguities.

But legality and ethics mean little to power-driven, compulsive personality like Harper.

Had the Supreme Court attempted to order a remedy, it would have pitched the country into a constitutional crisis.

They have done what they can in making it as clear as it can be that Harper has denied a Canadian the most basic rights.

That’s the kind of man we call our prime minister, a politician who has done more than any other in memory to shame Canada and lower its former fine reputation in the world.

__________________

“Your boy’s buddies DELIBERATELY targeted their own children.”

That is simply ignorant beyond belief.

Since when are the acts of an accused judged by those of anyone else, whether known or unknown?

And, Good Lord, if we’re talking about targeting children, Israel just killed 400 of them. Has any Israeli soldier or general or politician been charged with anything?

This young man was fifteen when he was shot, arrested, and tortured.

And we now have evidence to a certainty that he did not even do what he was accused of.

But even if he had, so what?

America has sent thousands of mercenaries and idealists to various wars over the decades, going back to the Spanish Civil War.

Were they all to be tortured and held indefinitely in prison for their acts?

Moreover, he was a child, one pressed by ideological parents, and the United States and Canada are signatories to international conventions on child soldiers.

Clive G, no wonder you don’t sign your name to your opinions. That’s pretty well what one expects from the cowardly with savage ideas.

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TELEGRAPH

The UK I always so admired seems largely to have faded to a memory.

What we have today – and have had for the last thirty or so years – is a parody of Great Britain.

No country can operate independently of the US, of course, because it is such a great hulking mass.

But that doesn’t mean you have to act as its loyal household servant.

I am sorry, but a loyal household servant is an apt description of contemporary Britain.

That silly phrase “special relationship” is literally a
euphemism attempting to lend dignity to a relationship which has none.

Much of the disgust felt towards Tony Blair is owing to his completely obsequious relationship to a mental defective like George Bush.

Obsequious…and profitable. Blair has all the wealth he, and that ghastly fish wife of his, could ever have dreamed of now, most of it showering on his head from Americans or American-created institutions in gratitude for his service.

And what did Britain get? Dead soldiers, depleted finances, and a bad reputation.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The American Supreme Court has always, except for a brief few decades during the 20th century, been an institution for freezing progress.

This view of corporate spending as free speech is, in many ways, comparable to the Dred Scott Decision before the Civil War.

Runaway slaves were still someone’s property and needed to be returned.

So far as this decision goes, it’s back to the political jungle, although, in truth, American politics never quite left it behind since even the spending reform was not that awesome.

Money in America simply overrides democratic process on average.

When America was founded, a privileged local aristocracy ruled. About 1% of people in Virginia could vote (only white males of a certain wealth). The Senate was appointed (till 1913). The President was elected by the Electoral College, an elite of those with money. The “popular” vote – the 1% – did not even matter, the College elites did (they still do, but at least their votes are apportioned).

Well, some of that has changed, but along the way, American politics also has adapted to maintain a political reality not far from that of 1789 in many ways: the way that is done is with money for marketing and advertising and “exposure.” Tons of it.

In economics, with imperfect competition, we know barriers to entry of a market are vital, and barriers include tons of advertising, paying stores “shelf money” to pack the shelves with your line of products, and slightly differentiating your product from someone else’s – all making it near impossible for upstarts.

American national politics, effectively a duopoly between two parties through many rigged local regulations, exploits all of these practices.

Of course, the money also buys “face time” after elections. In any large American state, it is literally impossible to meet a Senator, much less have some time, unless you are a large money-supplier.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY FRANK CHING IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Frank Ching, this piece represents little thought and no analysis.

A waste of your keyboard time, I’d say.

It’s the kind of nonsense one expects to hear from an American Secretary of State blubbering about the behavior of other countries.

China has a per capita income a small fraction of America’s despite its new wealth in limited regions.

It has all the immense headaches of looking after 1.3 billion people, many of them still very poor.

Besides, Haiti, as one comment has noted, is America’s “backyard.”

America has worked for two hundred years in countless ways to keep Haiti at arm’s length. It does not want hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees.

That is the reason for its large assistance, not compassion or caring or anything else. Just power politics.

______________________

Actually, while people seem to be dazzled by the size of American assistance to Haiti, it is not a reaction which could follow from America’s overall level of giving.

On a fair comparison basis with the rest of the world, it is simply a fact that America actually comes out rather stingy.

It gives far less than many others, and much of what it does give has nothing to do with helping people.

It gives its largest single assistance to the relatively advanced state of Israel, about $3 billion a year, mostly for military purchases.

It gives another roughly $2 billion to Egypt to keep it friendly towards Israel and prop up the dictator-president of thirty years there.

And so it is down the list.

Also, much of its foreign assistance to other poor countries is just a subtle way of buying votes in the UN and other international institutions.

Relative to its wealth, American foreign assistance is rather paltry.

__________________________

Further, have readers noted that part of America’s “assistance” is a large landing of heavily armed troops? There are ten thousand the last I read, and this was expected to rise to twenty thousand.

Can you imagine, just in terms of displacement of Haiti’s very capacity for landing supplies and distributing them, what a burden this must be?

How many Haitians did without fresh water or food or beds while this massive operation took place?

Ten thousand troops who expect hot pizza and Budweiser and showers each day, to say nothing of ammunition and technical gear?

The intention is clear to anyone who bothers to think about it.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

It’s about time.

The Taleban need never have been our enemy, regardless of what we think of their religious behavior.

No Taleban were involved in 9/11.

Saudis were. And they had valid U.S. visas.

The Taleban government would have extradited Osama had the U.S. supplied any genuine evidence of his involvement, but, no, the U.S. refused to supply any, in what is a universal practice for extradition requests.

No, America just had to invade and get some vengeance.

Well, you’ve had it. Time to go and let these people get on with their lives.

The Northern Alliance guys you put in place are mostly just as backward as the Taleban.

Only long-term economic growth will change Afghanistan, and you don’t get that from bombs.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

I must say it is a bit delusional to draw conclusions about Harper’s character from the Haiti disaster.

The fact is, and has always been, the United States works hard to keep Haiti at arm’s length from American shores, and there’s no compassion or humane sympathies involved.

Now if Stephen Harper is one thing it the most spineless of leaders towards the United States.

He is, by all reckoning, a card-carrying affiliate of the Right Wing of the Republican Party, a Gingrichite with a darker, less expansive personality.

So when he speaks about long term commitments to Haiti, he’s just doing what the U.S. State Department expects, just as we’re doing what the Pentagon expects in Afghanistan.

In the sense about which Jeffrey Simpson is talking, he actually is not two-faced. He is absolutely consistent.

Harper is very much two-faced in another sense. His is a deeply flawed character, taking no direction from anything other than his desire for power. That means his ethics in all things remain completely flexible, so much so as to be meaningless. His smiles are all deeply phony as are his compassionate words.

We have seen this quality expressed in him countless times now, and his proroguing Parliament to cover up his human-rights failings in Afghanistan is utterly devoid of ethics. The Sponsorship scandal, involving money misused out of patriotic motives, almost looks good compared to Harper’s disgusting ways with human beings.

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL GOVE IN THE TELEGRAPH

I certainly do not wish to speak against remembering The Holocaust, but I do believe, as with all titanic and ghastly historical events, it is the natural (and proper) human tendency to eventually consign them to our history texts and a few monuments.

You cannot constantly remember horror: doing so works against innate human tendencies. In our private lives, we have, most of us, a built-in capacity to allow horrors to fade gradually. Otherwise, many could simply not function. Perpetual mourning is not the way Nature built us.

Of course, I’m not in the mainstream of thinking about this, being one of those who believe that war remembrance ceremonies in general have outlived their usefulness, and they are associated with events which extinguished twenty million lives in WWI and fifty million in WWII. But some distinguished old veterans have expressed the same sentiment: it is war which causes or induces our greatest horrors and society should start moving beyond glorifying it.

The Holocaust itself was only possible under the cover of the invasion of the Soviet Union, itself the most destructive and murderous event in all of human history.

I do not believe claims that genuine anti-Semitism is on the rise in the world, and I’m not sure what legitimate procedure could even be used to accurately collect statistics saying otherwise. What we have today, however, is a great deal of criticism of the state of Israel, but that is not the same thing as anti-Semitism, and any statistics which support the notion it is must be viewed as spurious.

I wouldn’t want to live in a society where inexcusable brutality such Operation Cast Lead did not produce revulsion: a society not revulsed by such treatment of others provides exactly the set of conditions which allow barbarism like The Holocaust to occur.

Sadly, Israel in its desire to leave the possibilities of a repeat of barbarism has also managed to leave behind a great many other things, including any consideration for its neighbors.

And every time someone dares to criticize, he or she is immediately accused of anti-Semitism, a shabby trick to shut honest people up.

In a roundabout way, Michael Gove joins this unpleasant practice in this piece.

Israel is a state, and if it is to be treated as any other state, then it must behave as we expect other states to behave.

When you start making exceptions to ethics and humanity, you have started down the road to God knows what. After all, Hitler’s early anti-Jewish activities during the 1930s, before the Wannsee Conference, consisted of beating up people in the street, burning down their homes and businesses, depriving them of equal rights, stealing their property, excluding them from many privileges in society, pushing for their emigration, and even declaring who was fit to marry whom.

Does that all not sound familiar to those who follow events in the Middle East?

JOHN CHUCKMAN
 
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Oh, please, Mr Rachman, “too soft” on China?

That’s pure Richard Nixon circa his first run for office in California, a contest he won by suggesting a fine congresswoman was soft-on.

He along with intellectual and ethical giants like J Edgar Hoover built entire careers on this kind of nastiness.

Let China be China. It is the most remarkable phenomenon of our lifetimes, a miracle perhaps short only of the Internet. China will become a democratic state, with democratic values, just as all Western nations became democratic states. The huge growth of the middle class assures that.

You really have no choice anyway, it is too big and important, although many Americans with a tendency to want to control others still think they can say some words and change a fifth of the planet. Delusional.

And I remind you that the Google business is rather trivial stuff compared with matters like invading a nation and killing a million people.

The United States is almost laughable in the words it uses to defend companies like Google, just as when it makes its ridiculous annual pronouncements about the human rights and democratic behaviors in the world’s other countries, as though it were somehow entitled to pass judgment, which, given its record over the last half century abroad, it most certainly is not.

Google needs to be Google too – leave China if you don’t like it. Don’t go whining back to mommy at the State Department about the bad boys in the school yard.

In a hundred places in this world, the United States stands for abuse and its own privileges, not rights or decency or democracy. Guantanamo continues. Diego Garcia continues. Bagram in Afganistan continues. Every week Hellfire missiles kill innocent people in Pakistan, and in Afghanistan for that matter. Now, in Yemen too. Oh the list is too long to place here.