JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

The son of evangelist Billy Graham, Franklin, who has now taken over the giant ministry, is well known for his gifts of good pistols to people.

Franklin, charmer that he is, also is known once to have shot down a tree with a machine gun.

I guess that’s South Carolina values.
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“The US Constitution is an alien document that is distorting American society severely. It needs to be torn up, but I know this will never happen.”

A few points.

The Constitution is indeed distorting American society, as you say. After all it is an 18th century document, and its writers had not the least idea of the troubles they were creating in many of its provisions.

They also, of course, had no anticipation of how the world and technology would change, as, for example the very nature of weapons from the muskets they knew.

The trouble is that many Americans look at it almost as they would look at the Bible.

It is “perfect,” just as the Bible is the “perfect Word of God.”

Lunatic Right Wingers actually carry copies of it folded in their wallets or shirt pockets
to produce in arguments.

Yes, the Supreme Court may interpret it, but for most of American history the Supreme Court has been an unbelievably conservative institution. It much resembles at times Scholastic philosophers counting angels on the head of a pin.

It is only a Court interpretation of the “well ordered militia” amendment that turns it into a complete right to own unlimited personal weapons.

It is almost a matter for bitter laughter when right-wingers and survivalist-types and militia-types – the “gun nut” mob – believe they are guarding the freedoms of Americans with their weapons.

Their weapons are powerful enough to create a lot of personal havoc in American society but can only be regarded as puny and ridiculous when you begin speaking of Jefferson’s ideal of overturning a bad government.

America’s Frankenstein military and its internationally notorious brutal police forces, all armed to the teeth with the most modern and terrifying weapons, would sweep aside any Jeffersonian effort to overturn a government deemed tyrannous in very short order.

Indeed, there can be no serious argument against the idea that the American government today has many aspects of a police state.

There is a government within the government, and it consists of the military and intelligence services working on behalf of immensely rich and powerful special interests.

Who becomes president makes no notable difference anymore, Romney and Obama being almost indistinguishable from each other. Right now, Obama and Romney are out there talking up guns.

Anyway, any person becoming president who was foolish enough to believe he or she could seriously change the direction of American policy would likely find themselves repeating the experience of John Kennedy at Dallas.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MATT BLUNT AND MARK NANTAIS IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Notice the careful use of the word “efficient” here applied to a border.

It is plainly dishonest.

Borders are, by definition, barriers.

They may be well run or poorly run, but they cannot be efficient.

An efficient barrier?

The ugly truth is that Harper’s efforts are about getting rid of the border, and if that means nothing to you in terms of future consequences, you are hopeless.

Harper is in almost all things an American wannabe, the most servile to American interests of any prime minister surely.

All done while making big phony noises about arctic sovereignty and new trade routes.

Implementing such a scheme is the ultimate expression of that fact.

Imagine, armed American law enforcement agents being able to enter at will?

I think , not without exaggeration, it will mark the beginning of the end of our National Dream.

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/nightmare-vision-of-north-america/
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And readers should ask themselves: would Americans ever even think of permitting such a relationship, one in which they would make the same concessions as Canada is being asked to make here?

The answer is obvious.

A last thought: this nasty project comes at a time in which the United States has become a quasi-police state.

Its TSA agents now run up and down American highways with the authority to stop and scrutinize anyone.

Its President claims the Constitutional right to murder Americans abroad who may be regarded as threats, without any legal process.

Its drones murder innocent people in half a dozen countries regularly.

Unarmed drones now fly the border.

Soon, unarmed drones will fly over the United States.

Police Departments are in line to buy the technology for their own purposes.

The United States’ local police and prison guards have a world reputation for brutality: they have been cited by Amnesty International a number of times.

The United States imprisons more of its own people than any other Western country.

Its Super-max prisons have been cited as barbaric throwbacks to medieval dungeons.

Guantanamo and the other far-flung parts of the CIA’s torture gulag still flourish under Obama.

TWO POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN THE GUARDIAN BY OLIVER KAMM

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

Safer for whom, Oliver Kamm?

For the more than 600,000 murdered by Bush in Iraq?

For the tens of thousands murdered in Afghanistan, including the 3,000 prisoners who were driven out to the desert in vans to be suffocated?

For the thousands of prisoners of the CIA’s International Torture Gulag?

For the abused and tortured of Abu Ghraib?

For the abused and tortured of Guantanamo?

For the millions of lives shattered in Iraq, a place that once was on the cusp of modernity and prosperity?

This has to be the most breathtakingly dumb piece of writing I’ve seen in years
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Apart from my question of safer for whom, citing the piles of Bush victims, the world is not a safer place for many other reasons, Oliver Kamm.

First, suppression of human rights all over the Western world is no light thing. There is nothing ‘safe’ about living in a police state or a quasi-police state the U.S. has become under Bush. The Bill of Rights has virtually been suspended.

Second, people of Arabic origin or of Muslim beliefs are now routinely abused and insulted in many Western countries, especially in the United States.

Third, a wave of hatred and injustice is rippling through the Muslim world. That isn’t just going to go away. Bush’s approach has been the approach of Israel, which today remains a garrison state with no peace and defended by walls and brutality, a long-term untenable position, besides being a shining example of ethically-hollow behavior.

Fourth, Bush’s oppression and killing abroad have been closely paralleled by an almost unprecedented grant of license to Israel to behave as brutally and ruthlessly as it wishes towards Palestinians and other neighbors.

A genuinely horrible situation has grown up, and no open-minded person can possibly look at Israel’s wretched behavior in Gaza and in Lebanon and towards Syria without some revulsion. Nothing, absolutely nothing, Apartheid South Africa did has not been repeated by Israel towards its neighbors, and, of course, that includes infamous mass killings of poor blacks by South African troops and mass imprisonments with no rights or justice.

Fifth, Bush has also set aside the Geneva Conventions and other important international treaties, including that safeguarding the rights of child soldiers. No meaningful sense of safety comes from this arrogance.

He has practiced new bizarre doctrines, giving the example to other states to do the same in future, as, for example, pre-emptive strikes on suspects and high-tech assassinations. These provide another measure of the ‘Israelization’ of American policy. Imagine a world in which every state claims this philosophy?

What has happened overall in the world under Bush is a series of steps away from democratic principles. Even if America had the most vigorous and fair democracy, something that is demonstrably not the case, when its leaders decide the fates of so many others, its tiny group of electors (maybe 1% or less of the world’s people, taking into account many Americans do not even vote) effectively acts like an aristocracy vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

You cannot claim democratic values and behave this way. After all, the Communist Party of China rules more than a billion people with almost the same percentage of representation.

The United States and Israel have given democracy a bad name in much of the emerging world. After all, in the special limited sense they claim to be democratic, so was Apartheid South Africa or the American Confederacy or the Britain of George III.