John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

Once again, France’s Hollande demonstrates the pathetic, almost comic, figure he is by awarding France’s highest honor to the American soldiers who stopped a gunman on a train.

The soldiers’ act was unquestionably a brave one, but no braver than a hundred others that must have happened during the year.

Previously Hollande, in an act which resembled parody, awarded the Legion of Honor to four victims of an attack on a Paris grocery store. His response came close to making the award meaningless: find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, get shot by mindless gunmen, and suddenly you are elevated to secular sainthood.

After all, violent acts and murders do happen regularly. I cannot recall another instance in which the corpses of a murderer’s victims were elevated to national heroes. If that were the practice in the United States, with 25,000 murders a year, the factory couldn’t keep up with minting medals.

Of course, in both these instances Hollande is playing up to the ridiculous, deliberately exaggerated fears of terror, relentlessly promoted by the United States, and that is their distinguishing, common feature.

In this last one, the train incident, he also flatters those whom he has served with such cringing, dog-like loyalty, the Americans.

My God, how low France has fallen from the days of de Gaulle.

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Response to a further comment about why there is so much violence:

 

A certain percent of all human beings, everywhere and always, is mentally unbalanced, including such conditions as psychopathy. That’s just a biological fact, much as saying a certain percent of any population is born blind or lame or with various degenerative diseases.

I suspect the proportion of such people is not wildly different over time, although, of course, the world’s ever-increasing population yields an ever-greater absolute number of mentally ill people.

What has changed in the contemporary world for sure are the unbelievable quantities of deadly weapons available. They are everywhere, in the millions. And why is that the case? Because the United States pushes them (yes, including AK-47s and other weapons not of American origin) out like products from an assembly line to destabilize places in dozens of locations where it is unhappy about either a government’s position on American policy or about a people trying to topple a tyrannical government that America just happens to favor. Examples of the former include Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and dozens of others, while examples of the latter include Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt.

Many of these weapons stay around for a lifetime. The most vivid case of this recently was perhaps in Libya. The CIA and others pumped weapons into the place to destabilize Gadhafi. When he was gone, the CIA was back trying to round up some of the vast quantities left in the chaotic country to ship to the madmen they had set up to topple still another government they dislike, that of Syria. It was in that covert operation that an American ambassador was killed at Benghazi, an example of intelligence blowback and an incident never explained because America didn’t want to advertise the facts behind it.

In the process of so much aggression and destabilization, the press is filled day after day with stories arousing all kinds of powerful emotions in millions of people. Just think of the people of Gaza being slaughtered by hi-tech American weapons supplied to Israel in fleet-loads, or of people of Yemen being slaughtered by the same American weapons supplied to the absolute kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a place where the ISIS scare tactic of public beheading is just the day-in, day-out normal practice of government. Just think of the madman running Turkey who secretly ships the same American weapons to terror groups destroying Syria while offering refuge to the cowardly monsters as may be required.

Just think of the horrors of millions of migrants in the press today – all of them a direct effect of America’s various acts in places from Syria to Libya. Those tidal waves of human suffering are tearing many societies apart as well as individuals.

You cannot expect an international society of laws unless you yourself are willing to respect the rule of law.

Nothing could be clearer than that the United States is not willing to live by the rule of law, although it unfailingly pays lip-service to it. In Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Ukraine, and a dozen other places, America is manufacturing misery and oppression on a gigantic scale. And all of the exaggerated stuff about terror keeps citizens intimidated from raising their voices. And of course some of that “terror” is just the legitimate response of oppressed and frustrated people made to appear mindless by America’s relentless propaganda.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 NEW YORK TIMES

America is reduced to brutal savagery, no different to that of any terrorist.
What we have here is the deliberate murder of a family – with no charges, no trial, no defense, no legalities whatsoever.

Indeed, it is worse than that.

This is the work of buzz-cut employees of the Pentagon sitting at computer terminals, over coffee, murdering people on the other side of the planet by joy-stick remote control, as though they were playing a computer game.

I wonder do they go to lunch down in the cafeteria after a morning’s killing?