John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ALEX KRAINER IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“I Wrote a Book Exposing Bill Browder’s Deceptions Because He Could Trigger a Major War With Russia

“Having experienced, first-hand, a vicious war in Yugoslavia, caused by the same kind lying Browder engages in, this author felt he had to speak up.”

 

https://russia-insider.com/en/i-wrote-book-exposing-bill-browders-deceptions-because-he-could-trigger-major-war-russia/ri24782

 

This is a well-written piece. I hope it stimulates people to read the book.

“Today most westerners seem ready to believe that Putin is a tyrant, that he routinely has critics and political rivals assassinated, that he amassed a vast personal fortune and that he runs Russia as his own personal fiefdom.”

Yes, and why is that? Our newspapers and broadcasts are larded with negative stuff about Russia all the time. I can’t recall a time recently seeing a good story about Russia, a huge country with all kinds of diverse and interesting things going on. Some of the stories reach frightening levels of paranoia, as this, following, not long ago in The Guardian (I could cite many more from that truly threadbare excuse for a newspaper, but this one marks a peak in their relentless efforts):

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/05/21/john-chuckman-comment-absurd-lengths-to-which-our-press-goes-to-attack-russia-britains-guardian-holds-hate-russia-day-today-some-of-its-stuff-is-so-ham-fisted-it-reads-like-1959-pravda-atta/

When it isn’t actual accusations of some unproved event, such as Theresa May’s weird Skripal Affair, it is just a clear assumption and tone that our press – always following our dishonest politicians as closely as baby ducks imprinted to waddle behind their mothers – is speaking about a country that is somehow “other,” a country that doesn’t operate by the same rules good old America does.

But it really shouldn’t surprise anyone who has a little history and who observes and thinks about things.

First, we must always remember that America waged a 24 hour-a-day internal propaganda war for decades on the subjects of Russia and communism. The FBI worked tirelessly on the subject, as did the CIA, and the press simply was constantly putting attitudes and perspectives “out there” instead of news or facts.

I still remember, as a young man in my home town of Chicago, when Lyndon Johnson first started committing men towards what would literally become an American-created holocaust in Vietnam, seeing a disturbing editorial in one of the more “liberal” papers in the city, the Chicago Sun-Times – liberal, that is, only by comparison with something like the Chicago Tribune, an unrelenting advocate for all things on the extreme Right. The editorial was headlined, I still remember, “The Reds Are at the Gates!”

Well, decades of that kind of stuff does leave some toxic residue, even after the world has changed. That’s why Germany carried on a long and intense campaign against Nazism after the Hitler years. But voraciously anti-Russia, anti-communist America never has made any effort to expunge the memories and results of the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton.

And, today, America’s establishment has new reasons for not doing so and indeed for re-igniting the old fires. It is determined to dominate the globe and force advantages from other nations as a means of avoiding its inevitable relative economic decline and the future change in political influence that that entails. The Neocon Wars in the Middle East have been only one part of an effort in many directions and through many means, including threats and sanctions and coups and attacking international organizations of every description.

Russia and China, naturally enough, are seen as barriers against this intense new effort, but Russia’s geography, touching, as it does, America’s unofficial satrapy of Europe and with proximity to the Middle East containing America’s much-privileged colony of Israel, plus its capacity to literally obliterate the United States, make it the greatest target of establishment hate. Russia today and a number of other states welcome a coming multi-polar world. America’s establishment regards it only with fear and loathing.

America has done nothing now abroad but bomb and kill people for over a decade and a half. I don’t know the actual number of deaths – American sources are very coy about how many people they kill, as we learned in the First Gulf War where the number of Iraqis killed was never offered, although we know it was huge with B-52s dropping full loads on sand forts in the desert – but I’m sure the total comes in at no less than two million.

They’ve destroyed, or attempted to destroy, a number of societies – Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and others. And they work away at threatening and manipulating still others, everywhere from Iran to Venezuela or Nicaragua. They also tolerate atrocities by Saudi Arabia and Israel, and, to somewhat a lesser extent, by Egypt, because those governments serve and support their overall purpose. Browbeaten governments like Britain and France work as willing helpers while constantly misrepresenting to their own people what it is they actually are doing, as with the cutthroats of ISIS or al Nusra in Syria, whom they have supported and assisted.

And then there are the millions of desperate refugees created by all that destruction, so many they nearly destabilized Europe, and discussion of refugees in the United States, in its politics and in some popular culture, has turned into a national festival of hate, as though refugees did nothing but rob and rape and kill. And I am not exaggerating in the least.

Trump has been a keen promoter of these views and attitudes, but his words do not go out to an unreceptive audience. There are large portions of American society very receptive to such stuff, just as they are receptive to crude stuff about Russia.

And, of course, we have a hi-tech state-operated extrajudicial killing machinery that carries on day and night murdering people no one even knows anything about. The victims are selected by the very folks doing the killing, the thugs and psychopaths at the CIA. And when I say “victims” I’m not even referring to the many innocents killed in the explosions of Hellfire missiles, deemed as “collateral damage,” I’m referring to the targets themselves, victims in every sense of the word, people condemned to be burned alive with no charges or lawyer or trial or rights of any kind.

Now, while all that inhumanity and brutality from their own government goes on, you would be hard put to find large numbers of Americans who know much about it. Their press and politicians never directly speak in such terms. Everything reported is couched in euphemism or they just recite downright lies. And there is the fact that Americans often take very little interest in what is going on abroad – in part because America is itself such a large and noisy and dynamic and time-consuming society. But it is an attitude which very much assists the government in its great volume of dirty work. Surprisingly few people abroad I think appreciate this important fact.

When George Bush was running for president, he once bragged and laughed over telling people he never read the international section of his newspaper. It was the kind of stupid joke you expect from a very stupid man, but the anecdote is notable in that Bush felt very comfortable in making it while appealing for votes. The irony of the presidency now being an office having more to do with events abroad (in the imperial wars and manipulations of others around the world) than events at home is lost on many Americans. Their attitudes are extremely naïve.

There is also the tendency in people – especially people with strong ideological beliefs as many Americans have, which work to insulate the mind against outside influence, exactly the way strong religious beliefs do – to not really see what they are looking at. The best example of many I could cite, is Israel’s current relentless slaughter of unarmed marchers in Gaza. Organized gangs of snipers behind fences, week after week, shoot into crowds of people demonstrating for some rights. Something like 18,000 have been injured and something like 180 killed in cold blood, including women and children and even well-marked medics. Yet, Americans see this atrocity and cling to the narrative that Israel is only defending itself from terror, even showing “restraint,” and their press and politicians faithfully work hard to reassure them of that.

Of course, all of this stresses the importance of the press abroad, Russia’s being extremely important today because the press in American-dominated places like Britain and France reads and sounds a great deal like the press in America, mostly making the same assumptions and promoting the same narratives. It is actually quite a distressing phenomenon to anyone seeking decent information or even a little different perspective on events.

No critically-minded person automatically accepts the truth of everything in the Russian press either. Russia has its own efforts at persuasion and motives for evasion at times, but on many international issues it is clear that some valid information is supplied by Russia. That can be confirmed in many ways, from the voices of truly independent, respectable journalists to the rare authoritative voice speaking out from within a country such as Britain or the United States.

And even where it cannot be confirmed, the time-honored analytical technique of comparing what two very different sources, like the United States and Russia, claim about a story can be quite helpful in revealing roughly where the truth is. After all, that’s precisely what judges and juries in our courts do all the time. It is a valid technique, but you must have that other side of the story to use it.

If you are someone in the United States or Britain, say, who relies, day-in, day-out, on some single news source such as CBS or The Washington Post or the BBC or The Guardian, I can absolutely assure you, at least on the matters discussed here, that you are misinformed.

That’s a sad reflection on our Western society, with its claims to Enlightenment and humanitarian principles, but I can’t think of another broad statement that is any truer. The motives for deception and the size of the stakes for doing so rise tremendously with the dirty work of empire and aggression, the very work in which the American government is now engaged full-time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Terrorism?

What a joke.

The United States just murdered a number of innocent Yemenis with a drone strike.

That is indeed terror, state terror.
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There is not, and never has been, an organization called al Qaeda.

We have the words of several important statesmen, including a former British foreign minister, that the word was only used inside the American government as a catch-all for “bad guys” in certain regions of the world.

The word actually means “hole” or “sewer.” Can you imagine a secret fierce group calling itself “sewer”?

Yet the continued use of the term – repeated over and over in the press – undoubtedly lends weight to vague assertions about threats, and that is precisely why Washington continues to use this ridiculous language.

So why does the press keep repeating the nonsense?

The answer is found in the degree of genuine independence of thought and investigation exhibited by our mainline press, and that is simply not much.

It is not an organization. It does not send e-mails. It does not write press releases. If indeed it were an organization and it did these things from time to time, does any thinking person not understand that NSA and others would locate them quickly, causing the launch of drones in minutes?

But there are some pretty nasty people out there in the world. The United States has cynically used some of them again and again to get something it wants, the latest being the effort to topple the government of Syria.

It used them in Afghanistan – twice: once to fight the Russians in the 1980s, and a second time to defeat the Taleban government and carry out acts of terror like the murder of thousands of Taleban prisoners – and in Libya and in other places.

The United States in using these people and heavily assisting them – aided by its friends Israel and Turkey – is responsible for more terror in Syria alone than any so-called terrorist group could conceive of doing on its own anywhere.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE GLOBE AND MAIL BY JOHN MOSCOWITZ

Evil is an out-dated, mumbo-jumbo word.

Indeed, it explains nothing, serving only to consign something to a dark corner of extreme disapproval with zero understanding.

The author in using it makes himself slightly ridiculous.

The truth is that this terrible event is one more brutal proof of how unbalanced the human mind can be.

That most complex of organs can suffer from countless faults and errors in its construction, just as simpler organs – hearts, kidneys, and livers – so often suffer from faults in their make-up.

And just as people sometimes have parts of their bodies missing – a hand or a leg – a portion of humanity have key bits of their brains either missing or mangled.

Such an event has no more “meaning” than does a stroke of lightning or a tidal wave killing innocent people.

It is terrible, but life goes on.

But, yes, a society which actually cares for its children would have effective gun laws, knowing such things are going to happen at intervals.

But where is the concern for children in America?

What of the children slaughtered in Gaza? No chest-beating over them. Indeed, Israel gets resupplied with all the bombs and munitions expended to kill Palestinian children.

What of the thousands of Iraqi children killed and mangled by America’s pointless invasion? Thousands more made refugees?

And what of the tens of thousands more murdered by a decade of horrible American sanctions against Hussein?

How many children have Americans killed in Afghanistan?

In Pakistan?

And now in Syria through the weapons and fighters imported into that country to undo its government?

The countless killed in Vietnam and Cambodia in a war to no point?

Indeed, today, the seas of Agent Orange America left behind go right on killing and crippling babies and children. What of them?

If America, that brutal imperial force, cared one whit about children, none of these questions could be raised.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

A little kindness I would hope.

Having been a child-soldier is only a small part of what happened to this bright and brave young man.

He was shot in the back by American soldiers.

Then he was treated in prison for a long period with no appreciation for his horrible wounds, wounds that would take a long time to heal.

Indeed, his early American military interviewer deliberately used the pain and discomfort of his wounds as a form of torture, making him sit up for his sessions.

He was held in Guantanamo with no access to lawyers or family or the Red Cross, a place which in those days resembled outdoor zoo cages with men in orange suits chained on their knees.

And we know terrible things were done, a number of prisoners having died from their abuse.

Every day would be smirking American torturers who did everything they could to make their prisoners uncomfortable, including sleep-deprivation and ugly acts like the desecration of the Koran.

It would be hard to imagine the terror a 15- or 16-year old experienced under such circumstances.

And in all of this, the basic fact remains that Omar Khadr did not kill that American soldier for which he has been found guilty. We have independent testimony to that fact.

But Khadr was finally reduced to pleading guilty to the charge since it was clear it was his only hope for any kind of future.

However, even supposing he had killed the soldier, Americans just overlook the fact that they were themselves the invaders of the country, and invading soldiers get killed all the time.

Khadr and others in volunteering over there only did what tens of thousands have done in the past, including in emotional events like the Spanish Civil War which drew volunteers from many lands.

And Americans have a long history of being soldiers of fortune, going over to distant lands to kill just for adventure and pay.

There is no tradition of treating such volunteers the way Khadr was treated.

And there is an international convention on the treatment of child soldiers to which the United States is a signatory and which the United States deliberately ignored in all of its dealings with Khadr.

On top of everything else, this is a boy of superior intelligence who has been deprived of any kind of proper education.

In God’s name, one hopes that Harper does not display his worst instincts with this young man, playing to the ugly crowd of witch-burners and anti-humanitarians, but I am not hopeful and feel sure comments will be posted here by the hate-filled extremists to whom Harper regularly caters.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

So they say.

Prove it.

But even then, what really is the Taleban?

It is not a dark terrorist force.

It had nothing to do with 9/11.

But it was, by Afghan standards, a reform political party with a conservative religious affiliation.

The only crime they are guilty of is fighting the invading Americans.

But from America’s establishment point of view, there is no greater crime.

And you must be regarded as one of Stalin’s “wreckers,” the vague word Stalin used when it was time for a bloody purge, working to oppose the benign work of America’s insanely militaristic government.
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Again, NATO strike?

These are always, always American strikes.

But America sure loves to hide under the skirts of NATO while doing its dirty work.

And papers like the Globe sadly go along with the fraud, doing their part for America’s beloved Pentagon.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

We have never even heard before of such an animal as a “major non-NATO ally.”

But now that the harridan Hillary has decided to bestow the never-before-heard-of honor, the press, including the Globe, seems to think it’s worth reporting as an event.

Her words are just one more cheap gimmick to keep some American troops in Afghanistan as long as possible.

Perhaps there’ll be some troops there, just as there are in Germany, three-quarters of a century after the war.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

There simply is no doubt that this terrible set of events was “engineered” by the United States, and blame for the bloodshed belongs ultimately to Americans.

Much of what the press blithely calls “Arab Spring” started with Dick Cheney and the Neocons and the CIA, with Israel cheering while looking on, laying out an ambitious long-term program to disturb all the balance in the Middle East.

There was a huge budget appropriation created, hundreds of millions of dollars, at the time, and likely more secret funds provided.

Naturally, the aim was to disturb things in Israel’s favor, although, in many details as things have played through, it has not always gone that way.

The Syrian situation is especially flagrant with Israel and the U.S. having supplied arms to discontented groups – what country does not have these to one degree or another? – and Turkey agreeing to provide the same kind of safe refuge for rebels that parts of Pakistan supply to Afghan fighters.

The Russians are right to oppose this kind of massive covert effort to overturn the governments with which they are friendly.

The U.S. and Israel are total hypocrites here, yapping about democracy when they couldn’t care less about democracy so long as the next government is without Assad.

What kind of democracy do you see in Iraq? In Afghanistan? In Bahrain? In Yemen” In Saudi Arabia? Or in Libya, where American forces killed hundreds of people directly?

The United States itself is so full of dissidents, unhappy minorities, and far-out kooks, you could find hundreds of thousands, including Aryan Nation folks, Militia types, Millenialists, Separatists, down-at-the-heel minorities, and general discontents.

And if you were so inclined, you could secretly heavily arm these extremists and minorities and unbalanced types with guns and explosives and intelligence and fill them with propaganda.

I’m sure it wouldn’t be that difficult to get riots and revolts going in many places.

But all you have to do is look back to the black urban revolts of the 1960s and later to see what would happen. That’s when the National Guard shot hundreds in the streets, and no one said a word about democracy.

All such killing by governments is unacceptable, but it is even more unacceptable that far-away governments would cynically set such violence in motion and sit smiling contentedly, occasional interrupting their perverse pleasure with histrionic speeches about democracy and human rights.

Recall, please, the United States cynically killed maybe a million people in Iraq, and it had nothing to do with democracy. It gave the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s several billion dollars’ worth of arms to kill Russians. It killed tens of thousands itself in Afghanistan without a sign of democracy. It cynically caused some of the Kurds to revolt in Kissinger’s day, resulting in their mass slaughter. It kills in Pakistan, Yemen, Bahrain, and other places, and democracy has nothing to do with it. And it carried out a holocaust in Vietnam, with 3 million horribly killed, and democracy had nothing to do with it.

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

In case anyone missed the fact, the Taleban need never have been an enemy.

None of them were involved in 9/11.

A bunch of Saudis were.

The Taleban are not the kind of people we like to see ruling anywhere in the world, but they are no worse than the members of the Northern Alliance who fought America’s ground invasion, supported by carpet bombing, and now serve as governors and officials all over Afghanistan.

And they are no worse than various fundamentalist groups which predominate in many corners of the world, including places like India or South America and great parts of Africa in their treatment of women and lack of regard for modern human rights.

The U.S. did not go to war over human rights, it never has done so in all its endless wars since WWII.  It went there for other reasons, not completely clear, and it manipulatively used the plight of women there as truth-based propaganda, the most effective kind, to win over American soccer moms for the war, and the tactic worked beautifully.

It was not even the Taleban who first invited bin Laden to find refuge in Afghanistan, but when they threw out the various warring groups of the Northern Alliance (after the Russians were gone), they allowed him to stay. The Taleban originally was an alliance for the Afghan idea of clean government, and they did end a great deal of corruption and drug business.

After 9/11, the U.S. tried to extradite bin Laden. The Taleban government asked for some evidence of his guilt, a normal procedure in extraditions everywhere in the world. The U.S. refused in a huff.

So the U.S. used its immense leverage at the UN, where half the nations are in its pay and the other half fear its wrath, to get the invasion covered by a UN resolution-fig leaf. Everyone was also motivated to go along emotionally in the wake of 9/11.

All the NATO countries serving as allies have only given relatively token efforts to the U.S. cause. A few thousand troops here and there, many not even in fighting roles, is not a serious commitment. NATO countries have always appeared to know something that the general public does not.

That is not how nations act when there is a genuine threat of world importance, as the U.S. always insists there is. But that is how nations act when avoiding American reprisals and providing it with the fig-leaf fiction of a coalition.

Yet after each horrific bombing – in which thousands of innocents have been killed over ten years – we read “the coalition forces bombed this or that.” In almost all cases, that should read, the U.S. bombed this or that. And now the “this or that” includes Pakistan in a big way. Many hundreds of civilians have been killed in what are, in every respect, high-tech versions of death-squad murders by South American juntas.

I believe the U.S. carried off this murderous enterprise almost solely for vengeance – “We gonna show ya’ll can’t do that to ‘merica!” Never underestimate the reservoir of anger and vindictiveness in America’s belly-over-the-belt, flag-waving crowd – people who are in many cases just generally angry with the way things are going in their lives.

Once in there, America really did not know what to do because the place is a snakepit of tribalism and bloodfeuds and ancient customs.

It has all been a terrible, terrible waste.

I do wish the Nobel Committee could take back its Peace Prize from the charming, intelligent man whose hands are now covered with blood.

One thing Obama has proved is how little elections matter anymore in America. Except for the lack of laughable, stupid statements, you really wouldn’t know Bush wasn’t still president.

The War Machine can work with anyone.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Ridiculous.

How can any Arabic-speaking person have named his organization “the toilet,” which is what Al Qaeda translates?

This name was created by U. S. intelligence some years ago as a collective term for the various “bad guys” roaming around out there. There is no such organization.

We have the testimony of several very prominent people on that fact, including Britain’s Jack Straw.

Remember the supposed picture of Osama watching television released soon after his murder, a picture which still makes the rounds? That picture was positively identified as a neighboring man, as it should have been since it showed “Osama” using the wrong hand.

These “leaks” are, after all coming from the very people who assassinated bin Laden in cold blood with his family in the house, never mind taking him to The Hague for a fair trial.

The same people who never provided the public or other authorities with one shred of authentic evidence for bin Laden’s guilt of anything but disliking the United States.

The same people who invaded Afghanistan and still occupy it on flimsy excuses.

The same people who invaded Iraq, falsely making assertions about Hussein’s complicity, destroying a prosperous country and starting a terror that would see a million die.

They are the same people sending scores of drones into Pakistan killing hundreds of innocent people with their missiles.

They are the same people who have totally distorted a UN Resolution for a no-fly zone in Libya into an all-out effort to kill Qaddafi and his chief assistants.

This rubbish is just stuff to reinforce public acceptance of the moral filth of war without end, assassinations, and death squads.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

“…its members’ penny-pinching and lack of political will…”

Oh we sure know the United States isn’t “penny-pinching” when it comes to war.

It is fighting more wars than you can count, all on borrowed money, surely providing the example of the most mindless spend-thrift of all time.

What a ridiculous statement Gates makes, considering the mess – sorry, that is, messes – into which the United States has put itself.

 As for “political will,” of course, what Gates really means is the will to do what the United States wants done.

 No one else thinks it makes any sense to stay in Afghanistan.

 No one else – except the great idiot Tony Blair – thought it made any sense to invade Iraq.

 Already, the mandate for a no-fly zone in Libya has been distorted beyond recognition into a get-Gaddafi campaign.

 America’s drones in Pakistan are criminal hi-tech mass murder.

 And there are reportedly secret air operations in Yemen.

 Not only does all of this murderous activity reflect no ethics or human values, it all costs unbelievable amounts of money – money the United States simply does not have.

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NATO’s prime function, from America’s point of view, is that it serves as a way to maintain its hegemony in Europe under the pretense of cooperation and alliance.

NATO also is used by America as a convenient fig leaf for some of its ghastly behavior, as in “NATO planes bombed targets…” when we know they were American planes exclusively or overwhelmingly.

Eisenhower wisely warned us of the military-industrial complex more than half a century ago.

But things over that time have gone from bad to worse, worse than anything he could have imagined.

America has become a world-scale bully, a rather nightmarish quasi-police state, armed to the teeth, and, with no money, it is always sour when others neglect picking up the bill for its self-declared necessary tasks.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JANET DALEY IN THE TELEGRAPH

“David Cameron’s repudiation of George Bush’s policy on waterboarding is logically flawed, argues Janet Daley. “

Pure logic does not apply to such matters, rather they intimately involve democratic and human values and just plain human decency.

Western society has struggled for centuries to reach the point where we even question such acts. We endured inquisitions and terrors and the rack and countless other ingenious and malevolent engines of human cruelty to reach our enlightened state. Overcoming our nasty chimpanzee origins and creating societies of just laws have been no small feats and represent our greatest achievements.

Crude people like George Bush or sophists like Janet Daley willingly cast aside this advance of immense importance for no good reason.

I remind readers of just a few details Bush’s background. He happily sent scores of prisoners to their deaths by execution in Texas, including a woman whom he mocked in public over her plea for mercy. He said in Chicago, shortly after 9/11, that he had “won the trifecta,” knowing how polls soared for his administration which had been quite unpopular. A boyhood friend told us of one of young George’s great pleasures in life: stuffing lighted firecrackers into frogs and watching them blow up.

George Bush demonstrated in countless ways his lack of genuine regard for ethics, from his drunken abuse of family to his disappearing from his obligations in the Air National Guard, the institution which was his ticket in avoiding Vietnam, a ticket paid for through family influence.

Bush was in the driver’s seat for Abu Ghraib, and readers may not know that the worst excesses there have been suppressed. One of the world’s foremost investigative reporters, Seymour Hersh, told us that events included the raping of children and killing. Bush also gave us Guantanamo and the entire CIA international torture gulag which includes God-knows–what to this day in places like the secret facilities at Bagram Air Base and the unapproachable Diego Garcia.

Bush thought nothing of the Northern Alliance’s General Dostum taking 3,000 Taleban prisoners in the early days of the conflict in batches out to the dessert in sealed trucks to suffocate while American soldiers stood around picking their noses. He thought nothing of a child soldier of fifteen, who had been shot twice in the back by Americans, being sent to Guantanamo, contrary to all international agreements, to be tortured and kept out of contact with family or lawyers for years.

I remind readers too that George Bush gained office by vote fraud in Florida. He is a man of about as poor a set of ethics as you will find on the planet outside of some police states or prisons.

No, Janet Daley, you support what no decent person can support, an example of almost unparalleled creepiness in the leader of a modern democratic state.

Shame on you: there can never be a defense for torture.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CORY ANDERSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Over the past decade, the international community has invested billions of dollars and sacrificed hundreds of men and women in a fragmented effort to stem an increasingly downward tide that has been evident for years.”

Cory Anderson, this is complete rubbish.

First, Afghanistan has been torn apart for decades, going back to America’s secret war against the Soviet Union in which a couple of billion dollars were spent on destruction.

Indeed, under the Soviet Union, many Afghans, especially women, did better than under the Northern Alliance which came afterward and which is again in charge thanks to America.

Second, it is an occupied country still, and every week bombs fall on civilians somewhere and destroy buildings somewhere.

Third, it is, and was, a poor place, and like all poor places in the world it features backwardness and low levels of education.

Fourth, if by some magic you educated every child to a high level starting tomorrow, the economy would have no place to absorb them. They would virtually all become candidates for emigration, effectively taking with them a costly investment somewhere else.

Fifth, in order to both educate and absorb educated people, an economy needs economic growth and plenty of it.

Sixth, if America had really wanted to assist Afghanistan, it would have dropped dollar bills, not bombs.

Seventh, may I suggest that you avoid writing about matters in which you have almost no knowledge?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CRISPIN BLACK IN THE TELEGRAPH

“The brave and honourable spirit of Britain’s soldiers will benefit us all.”

 

I cannot believe that an informed person in the early 21st century writes such stuff.

Crispin Black sounds very much like a throwback to 1914.

I’m sorry, armies are sometimes necessary, but to speak of “the brave and honourable spirit” of professional soldiers simply doing their jobs rings hollow.

And that would be true even if what they were doing were not totally pointless, a political war to serve America’s paranoia.

But Crispin insists on getting even more ridiculous:

“The daily exercise in Afghanistan of will-power and leadership serves the best human instincts.”

“Will power” was a favorite of the late Mr. Hitler. It’s also popular in junk diet books.

The best human instincts are served by killing people in their own land for no good reason?

I don’t know which is worse, the author for writing such words or The Telegraph for giving them space.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

Why would the Americans meet organized resistance from the Taleban?

First, the Taleban are poorly-fed peasants in sandals and turbans, carrying WW11-vintage weapons like AK-47s.

The Americans, and their assistants, are beef-fed monsters in Kevlar armor and high-tech combat boots, carrying costly weapons and supported by satellites and radars and communication systems and missiles.

It isn’t a war in any sense, unless you count Hitler’s Wehrmacht in 1939 rolling over Polish horse cavalry with Panzer Divisions supported by dive bombers and powerful artillery by Krupp, but even that infamous event was less lopsided than this kind of unleashing of hell.

I do think by now, the Taleban have learned a few things, too, over the years of facing such forces. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong didn’t defeat America by going at it in conventional battles.

Only Americans believe that fleets of helicopters and Hellfire missiles and thousands of armored men and armored vehicles can genuinely change anything anywhere.

Of course, they can kill plenty of people, in many cases innocent civilians, as they killed eight just the other day.

The people being killed are native Afghans, although the press likes to blur that truth by using the phony word “insurgents.”

The people doing the killing are occupiers.

There’s nothing to cheer for here.

It’s all simply naive and stupid and pointless.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMESYes, 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 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 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.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

I guess this is one group of CIA thugs who have tortured their last prisoner and guided their last Hellfire missile into some poor village in Pakistan.

This reminds me of reading a report about some group of Mafia guys killed during an internecine struggle for power and ill-gotten gains.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

It truly is dishonest to always write about “drone attacks.”

Drones don’t attack anyone. Gum-chewing thugs sitting in an office chair at a computer terminal do.

These drones are armed with American Hellfire missiles, the same ones Israel uses when it typically kills a dozen innocent people in a bloody horror trying to get one target, some man who has never been charged or tried or condemned.

The guy at the terminal somewhere in a locked room in the Pentagon basement undoubtedly pumps his arm as the missile explodes, killing God knows who.

Then he goes out for some lunch in Georgetown.

Disgusting.

An absolute lack of ethics, only praised by the apologists for Israel’s bloody excesses.

Misery likes company, and the same goes for miserable criminal behavior.

_________________

Carrying the Olympic Torch would sure be a suitable suggestion, although I doubt the writer making this suggestion even understands why.

Few Canadians seem aware that the Olympic Torch relay was invented for the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, invented by no less a figure than Doctor Joseph Goebbels to distract world attention in a very controversial Olympics from the stuff going on in Germany.

Yet we blindly carry on this stupid marketing scheme as though it were a hallowed tradition.

And we get brainless suggestions like this one concerning it.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

I believe in this case, as in so many others, Harper’s government has demonstrated sheer incompetence.

I doubt they set out to give men – mostly innocent farmers – over to torture. But as we’ve seen time and time again, the cabinet functions like a gang of Keystone Cops, from dropping top secrets in various places to sending body bags to native people’s reservations as preparation for the flu.

That tendency towards incompetence is exacerbated in its practical effects by a truly slavish admiration, almost a boy-scout devotion, to American government policy, something which of course induces very little use of independent thought. And we all know America has not been the least squeamish about human rights and filthy torture.

Some of the evil involved here is in Peter MacKay’s preacherly waving of hands and ranting when he knows perfectly well that he is lying through his teeth to protect his incompetent party.

But of course, Peter MacKay’s entire national career in politics has exhibited dishonesty, from his affair with a party subordinate to his lying about calling her a dog in Parliament and to his original broken word to a competitor for the leadership of the former Conservative party.

Peter MacKay is a proven ethical nullity.

But the true low note in evil here has been struck by Harper, with his filthy accusations about critics of a human-rights nightmare in Afghanistan blaming the brave soldiers.

Pure Rush Limbaugh. Is that the stuff now of Canada’s national politics, stuff dredged from the intellectual cesspools of American politics?

That is the kind of stuff which surely earns you a special place in hell.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY STEVIE CAMERON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Sorry, this is a bizarre piece.

First, no one has forgotten these horrors, and outfits like CBC spend time every year playing the record again.

Second, the world is so filled with horrors – a million killed in Iraq, two million refugees, tens of thousands killed in Afghanistan, American torture and assassination, Israel’s running an endless gulag for millions of innocent people, Africa a vast continent of brutality and mass murder – that the Canadian cases almost do not stand out.

Third, it is the normal brain’s function to forget savage events and try to resume normal life.

Fourth, we have a lumbering, destructive Harper government owing to the majority not getting its act together. The man slashes and burns on the support of thirty-odd percent of Canadians.

________________________

“Great article. The truth stings for some. Rape as a war crime in Darfur, Congo etc. The subjugation of women in countries around the world (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia to name just a few), the denial of education to girls in some countries – just what are men afraid of in education? Power perhaps?”

The complete ignorance shown in postings like that is itself a serious danger to society.

If we proceed in our affairs out of ignorance, we get nowhere.

Rape in war has been a constant of history. As the Soviets entered Berlin at the end of WW II, there was an orgy of rape, not typically discussed in history texts. Literally hundreds of thousands of German women were raped, often gang-raped.

And what about the “comfort women” for the Imperial Japanese Army in WWII? And the orgies of rape and murder in places like Nanking? Tens of thousands killed and countless rapes.

And just what does the writer of that nonsense think is behind the words, read countless times in ancient history, “and the city was sacked with all the men put to the sword.”

You read of the horrors of Abu Ghraib in Iraq, but we know from the world’s greatest investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, that in fact the worst stuff has been suppressed, pictures and recordings of boys being raped.

Indeed, some of our soldiers in that hellhole of Afghanistan have seen boys being raped, to the point of blood running down their legs, by those assisting us as translators and guides. It is a common practice in such repressive and backward societies, just as it is in prisons.

Such events only tell us that war is stupid and savage beyond telling, for war is just a time when sick people get to carry out whatever twisted and savage dreams they have with impunity.

After all, likely a quarter of us is mentally ill, as clearly M. Levine was. You just need the right conditions to set them off.

Because men are in general physically stronger and loaded with hormones promoting aggression, they are the perpetrators by a ratio of about 10:1 compared to women.

We need to stop promoting war, and we need to treat people in normal society who are unbalanced. Those are the real lessons here.

The denial of education to girls? God, American propaganda for the Afghan War.

Go look at countless millions of boys in India and Africa and other places who get virtually no education. Boys go to work in places like India or Pakistan doing things like sewing soccer balls or working on carpets as young as seven years old.

And in Afghanistan, are you telling me that the men of the Northern Alliance or the Taleban are educated? The entire society is unbelievably backward and poor. Even if you got a good education in Afghanistan, there would likely be no place to use it. You would have to emigrate unless you were very fortunate.

Think before you write, and go seek some knowledge before you even think.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN ARTICLE IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

Clinton is simply out of her mind.

Two dozen countries sending seven thousand troops?

And many or most not for combat?

That’s an average of about 290 troops per country.

290 cooks, guards, and orderlies each.

Some world crisis.

Everyone clearly sees what a mistake Afghanistan is, except the government of the United States.

Of course those eager not to offend American sensibilities, or those whose assistance or favors from America are under threat, send their token contingent.

This whole matter is like one of those slightly absurd British comedies of four or five decades ago.

World crisis, civilization in peril, so we better send 290 troops.

The press should be embarrassed to even report such press-release fantasy as an event.

Clinton should be embarrassed to utter a word about these 24 mice roaring, but this woman is long ago beyond any possible embarrassment, having said countless absurd things in recent years or quickly backtracking what she has previously said, making absolutely no sense in most of what she says.

Were a major business run the way America runs wars and foreign policy, the economy would collapse.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY RICK SALUTIN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

It is in such an ugly struggle that we often see the true characters of people who normally manage to keep a relatively benign face to the world.

Richard Colvin is calm, articulate, brave, and clearly someone who took his responsibilities towards others seriously.

Peter “my word ain’t worth spit” and “my Ex is a dog” Mackay once more displayed his deeply flawed character.

His sputtering, arm-waving attacks on an honest man truly had the tone of accusations from the prosecution at a witch trial.

But we already knew Peter lacked the ethical stuff we teach our children.

A new and unexpected actor in this orchestrated passion play of attack bowed in with an astonishingly nasty performance a couple of days ago.

The high-water mark in sewerage overflow was reached a couple of days ago, on CBC Radio’s show The Current, when Pamela Wallin gave an interview on the subject.

Her words simply dripped with the noxious stuff of obtuse dishonesty serving politics, truly enough to induce nausea, including her much-repeated claim she just simply could not fathom Mr. Colvin’s motives.

Ms Wallin apparently lacks the moral radar to perceive when other people act bravely out of decency, ethics, and humanitarianism. Either that or she was flat-out lying on national radio to attack a decent man whom she regards as a threat to her party.

Hers was another version of kicking someone who is down, ironically enough put to the service of a matter involving the torture of prisoners.

She convinced me only of one fact, one for which I needed no convincing, and that fact is the banality of evil.

And that phrase, “the banality of evil,” best characterizes the entire matter from the original acts in Afghanistan to the efforts to throw dirt at those revealing them.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DAVID BERCUSSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“The West should set an objective, not seek a way out, which would mean defeat…”

Sorry, but that is an absolutely fatuous statement.

Why are forces in Afghanistan in the first place if they have no objective?

War is a pretty damned serious and costly thing – no project society ever does normally compares to its consumption of resources to say nothing of lives – and you really should have a sound idea of what you are doing before you set off on one.

The United States never understood what it was doing there, and it still does not. Yet it continues to pressure others to commit more resources to its pointless and destructive campaign.

Second, there is nothing wrong in government or world affairs in admitting you’ve made a mistake and correcting it.

Indeed, to do the opposite is sheer lunacy. Lives and treasure are being squandered every day to no purpose. Canada made a ghastly mistake committing to Afghanistan, and I think most ordinary Canadians understand that.

Defeat? That concept is not even relevant in Afghanistan. Emphasizing that blowhard term is just what the brutal pride of the American establishment emphasizes. Keep killing and bombing for pride.

When you undertake a wrong-headed project, “defeat,” as it were, is implicit from the beginning.

Thus was the American holocaust in Vietnam. Thus was the American intrusion into Somalia. And thus was America’s crusade for vengeance in Afghanistan.

By the way, the thought here is so unimaginative, it just makes me wonder about the University of Calgary in any area but the hard sciences. Of course, it’s home too of Tom Flanagan, a tiresomely regular idiot-savant on the Globe’s pages.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

Nothing is at stake in Afghanistan.

That is, except for American pride in once more having invaded a country, killed a great many people and achieved nothing.

America didn’t know what it was doing from the beginning, and it still does not know.

But it sure knows how to kill people, and the American establishment is always ready to do more killing and bombing rather than be embarrassed at its own foolishness.

It chewed up human beings in Vietnam for ten years to no purpose whatsoever beyond regard for its own violent and stupid pride.

No one else regards Afghanistan as a serious threat, else why are NATO countries constantly browbeaten by American officials into making larger commitments?

The facts of Afghanistan are rather simple if you open your mind to them.

It is not a democracy – never was and still is not – and you can never create a democracy at the barrel of a gun. Moreover, America’s own problematic claim to genuine democratic government makes it among the least suitable of instructors.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest regions on earth, affording only a hard-scrabble existence to most of its people – it always has been poor and it remains so. America has done almost nothing to turn around its economy for a brighter future, but it sure has killed a lot of people and created a lot of damage.

Like all poor, backward countries, Afghanistan remains prisoner of ancient customs not understood by modern societies, and nothing, except long-term serious economic growth, America can do will change that.

Consider even a healthily growing third-world country like India. It still has bride burning, forced marriage, and horrid treatment of widows, plus many other ghastly ancient customs it will not shake until after generations of growth.

Imagine going to 17th century Spain and telling the people they must give up the Holy Inquisition, Jews and Arabs must be tolerated as full members of society, and nuns must stop wearing hideous gigantic habits? To pose the question is to know the answer.

How much more so Afghanistan?

The warlords that now are deemed the government of Afghanistan are, most of them, no better than the Taleban in terms of modern values. Horrible acts continue all over the country, and the burka is still worn in most of the country. Some, like General Dostum, are nothing but mass murders.

Rape of boys is common everywhere, often done by translators and other helpers of Americans right in front of the eyes of troops. The Americans and others tolerate these hideous acts, for the sake of keeping allies and helpers, acts which would earn their perpetrators long prison sentences and public hatred anywhere in the West.

Alliance with those warlords is the only thing that allowed America its cheap “victory.” Cheap in American blood, that is, not Afghan blood.

The Taleban never was America’s enemy, the perpetrators of 9/11 were mostly Saudis, and they were mostly in America on legitimate visas, being part of a secret CIA training scheme that backfired badly.

Most of the terrorist incidents since the invasions – like the London underground bombing – are just the work of homegrown men angry and frustrated at the injustice of what has happened, at the tens of thousands of their fellow Muslims killed with no thought or care.

The CIA never took any responsibility for 9/11. America never took any responsibility. But Afghanistan was invaded – according to experts, just the deaths in Kabul from bombing were at least 50,000 – and the Taleban was dispersed. Some achievement.

Now America bombs and kills regularly in Pakistan, claiming, just as it claimed about Cambodia during its bloodbath in Vietnam. People under no charges are regularly assassinated along with any family members and bystanders, a la Israel’s regular extra-judicial killings, activity indistinguishable from that of former South America juntas who regularly made people “disappear.”

America is only making enemies and de-stabilizing still another land.