JOHN CHUCKMAN

YET FURTHER POSTED RESPONSES TO COMMENTS ON DOUG SAUNDERS’ COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“It is clear that western societies have sublimated their culture to accomodate [sic] new ones. Christmas trees and prayer rooms in schools, for example. And it is a powerful argument…”

The writer misses the point.

We are in a new era of massive global migration, but there is nothing new about migration over time changing the norms and practices of a society. It’s just happening more quickly now, just as everything else is happening more quickly with ever-speeding technological (and that driving economic) change.

Take just one example, Britain. We could equally well choose just about any other old European country, but Britain is very familiar.

In the era BCE, Britain was populated by Celtic and other tribes.

Starting with the Emperor Julius Caesar’s expeditions in 55 BCE and extending beyond Emperor Claudius’s invasion of 43 CE, Britain began centuries of becoming a Romanized society.

After the fifth century CE, the Anglo-Saxon tribes – Germanic people began to conquer. Britain became an Anglo-Saxon country then for hundreds of years.

In 1066, as we all learned in school, the Normans conquered Britain, and it became a Norman society for centuries.

There were many other changes of varying importance over the centuries in Britain, but these big steps in each case meant an entirely new culture and language and political norms and even religion being established.

People have gone from speaking Celtic languages to Latin to German to French, and they now speak the true hybrid, English.

The nation state as we know it is a relatively new thing, mainly a product of the 19th century. Most of human history has not even known nation states, but empires and kingdoms which viewed any new people or territory as a fair gain.

Already in many respects, the 19th century concept of nation state is fraying at the edges. Europe once defined its modern states by language and culture, but already we see them becoming migrant states, the kind of states we have always had in the New World.

This is an unavoidable consequence of a globalized world with relatively cheap transportation and communication and huge movements of goods and services around the planet.

Taking a view anything like the writer of this comment, despite the reasonable tone of most of his remarks, is to enter into a debate defined by the Anders Breveiks of this world.

The only response that makes any sense in the Norwegian response, not the response of the United States or that garrison state Israel, which is fighting a pointless and losing battle with the forces of modern society.

Breveik is a kind of modern murderous Luddite – the people who used to smash machines in the Industrial Revolution in order to keep things as they were – only he smashed people hoping to keep things as they were.

Whether violent or not, these are futile, doomed-to-lose battles.

The future we already have glimmers of: A world of multi-cultural states amongst which a great deal of human migration occurs (just as goods and services move now), and it will require more international governance and treaties, all of which will slowly erode the nation state as we’ve known it.

There is no alternative, unless you want to build fortress states and give up the economic potential of globalism, but even if you do that, you will have to surrender in the end because the forces at work are real and simply overwhelming.

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“Therefore, the fiction that they are Muslim therefore they breed is plain WRONG!”

Of course, the notion is garbage.

Promoting that nonsense is just one more aspect of the Islamophobia being vigorously promoted by special interests.

Any decent economist or demographer can refute the nonsense.

Demographic Transition, the phenomenon of falling birth rates in response to falling death rates, is an established fact.

The death rates fall through the growing prosperity of economic development and all that that entails. Then people automatically have fewer babies since almost all will survive.

The theory explains why countries like Canada or France or Britain cannot replace their own population. Migration is essential unless you want economic decline.

And Israel, too, a western implant with western concepts, cannot replace its population, and it is surrounded by poor nations with high birth rates.

Which only goes to prove how much more intelligent would have been a policy of assisting your neighbors instead of attacking them and spending unholy amounts on the military.

The United States, too, acts quite stupidly in this regard. It should have been dropping dollars on places like Afghanistan or Iraq instead of bombs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

FURTHER POSTED RESPONSES TO COMMENTS ON DOUG SAUNDERS’ COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

 

“We have already made huge compromises to accommodate ancient practices [of Muslims]”

Oh please, such ignorance.

How about our allowances for ultra-orthodox Jews’ nasty treatment of women’s rights? Such women cannot divorce their husbands for fear of losing their children in a male-dominated, backward kangaroo court of rabbis. And our law permits this.

How about our allowances for the pathetic state of many traditional Mennonite women? in their ugly baggy black dresses with doilies on their heads?

How about our allowances for Catholic priests who’ve raped and abused children by the thousand? They should all have been arrested and tried to face hard time in prison.

All the special ranting about Islam is just Islamophobioa – in other words, pure unbalanced prejudice.

And much of it serves the interests of Israel – by stoking up unreasonable hatred of Muslims – and helps Israel to continue its terrible abuse of millions of souls.

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“Wake up Canada. Wake up and smell the coffee. No we must not do what happened in Norway. Nip this in the bud right now in the right way. ”

Sounds like a fire-breathing fundamentalist tent-preacher out scaring the flock into leaving big bucks in the offering plate.

This writer sounds as sick as Breveik.

Breveik was directly influenced by the very Islam-hate this person is preaching.

The writer not only displays ignorance and hatred but misses the facts of the Breveik case completely.

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“No, not nearly all, or even a majority – but enough to worry about – much as Iran ended up as a theocracy though previously under the Shah its citizens were moderate and highly secularised”

Yes, and the Shah’s SAVAK secret police pulled out people’s finger nails by the thousands in their torture chambers.

I guess that doesn’t count for much in your set of concerns, just so many apologists for Israel were too happy to see Mubarak go on with his 30-year tyranny and secret police.

And what about the ultra-orthodox control of so many of Israel’s laws and policies, even to the great discomfort of many secular Jews?

And what about the very notion of a “Jewish state”?

No different in many respects to Iran.

Of course there’s a pretense of democracy, but you cannot have a “Jews-only” democracy, except if you have a very bad sense of humor.

And, regardless of the form of government, when a vicious-minded majority suppresses the rights of a minority, you have genuine democratic values entirely missing.

Majorities in ostensibly democratic states can easily suppress a minority, and they have done so many times. South Africa was a democracy, if you were white. The American Confederacy was a democracy, if you were white.

To protect against that very situation, Canada has a Charter of Rights and America has a Bill of Rights.

But Israel can never produce such a document because its basic assumptions are inimical to the concept.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED COMMENTS TO A COLUMN BY TIMOTHY GARTON ASH IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Sorry, Breveik fed on a lot of “mainline” writers, people like Mark Steyn.

I do wish we could counteract the flood of Islamophobia and propaganda by apologists for Israel’s brutality, but there are such people writing for every newspaper in the Western world.

It is their thinking – the kind of stuff Margaret Wente periodically expels about the Middle East – that Breveik fed on.

We should not be intimidated by these horrible events into putting all the blame on the Internet – that would be foolish and it would be wrong.

The subtler forms of prejudice and injustice we regularly receive from people like Thomas Friedman or Margaret Wente or Charles Krauthammer or Jeff Jacoby or Mark Steyn is far more dangerous than blogs on the Internet.

Why?

It comes wrapped in the robes of noted newspapers, giving it a sense of weight of authority or importance for the weak-minded or unanalytical, and some of it has far greater circulation than most things on the Internet.

There is no question that a man like Breveik respected symbols of authority – he was totally captivated by things military.

No Joe Blow on a blog would have appealed to him the way a Mark Steyn did.

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A reader quotes:

“All that is required for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing. “

A wonderful quote.

But like all aphorisms, it leaves the details out – a bit like a prescription without all the ingredients.

“Doing something” is not the same thing as “doing the right thing.”

The examples of Norway and the United States are important.

Norway has chosen deliberately to keep its openness, freedoms, and rights. It struck out at no one, not even killing Breveik in capturing him.

The United States – after one terrorist incident, which by the way was actually smaller than Norway’s as a proportion of population – has gone berserk.

It has started two wars, bombed half a dozen countries, killed maybe a million people itself, passed stupid, anti-democratic laws, and turned its borders into those of a fascist state.

I’ll take the Norweigian response any day.

Your response is that of the United States or of that other place which partly inspired Breveik, the garrison state, Israel.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Dangerous fictions?

Which of the hundreds which humans adhere to should we busy ourselves with exposing?

We are chimpanzees with big brains, the big brains only making us more dangerous than our murderous ancestors.

Just as one example, we are inundated with dangerous fictions about the Middle East, and these are fictions which helped motivate Mr Breveik.

Israel murders 400 children in Gaza, but that’s hardly worth commenting upon.

The United Nations’ raporteur for Palestine, Richard Falk, distinguished academic and an American Jew, recently reported that Israel’s forces in their various attacks and punishments and raids have killed 1,335 Palestinian children since the year 2000.

I don’t see you or other columnists getting worked up over that.

And the United States started an illegal war in Iraq – mainly to wipe off the board Israel’s number-one enemy – which ended with the deaths of the best part of a million people, countless cripples, and an entire society set back for a generation.

Indeed, the killing the United States has been doing in recent years makes Mr Breveik look like a piker when it comes to murder.

How about all the crazy religious beliefs and values which motivate so much of the world into terrible injustice? Bride burning in India? Treatment of young widows in India? Selling girls to old rich men in India and Thailand and other places? The fairly routine murder of prostitutes in Mexico? The ghastly ritual murders in parts of Africa? Africa’s brutal female mutilations, 3 million a year? Africa’s common practice of men raping young girls in villages? The Catholic Church’s countless thousands of abused children in all the corners of the world?

One of the dangerous fictions at the Globe is that Doug Saunders thinks before he writes.

The other is that he has anything worth saying.

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I just love one particularly obtuse comment starting with “Let’s be honest.” I love it because after those words everything said is prejudiced, ignorant, and unbalanced.

“There is an inherent incompatibility between the Western culture and the teaching of Islam (Think “slut-walk” or “gay-pride”) “Freedom” and human rights in the West are inimical to Islam.”

Things like “slut walk” are no more acceptable to the Ultra-orthodox Jews who largely determine Israel’s policies and laws.

Only a few years back in Israel, a group of women, known prostitutes, were mysteriously burned alive when their house, near an orthodox neighborhood, was burned down.

It is quite typical for Ultra-orthodox men to drive “loose women” off their streets with violence and vituperation.

And are you trying to tell me that “slut walk” would be acceptable to the millions of American Christian fundamentalists who support Israel and help distort American policies to its benefit? Or gay rights?

Try “slut walk” in strongly Catholic parts of South America? There would be some new murders of women.

Your comments are nothing but unthinking ignorance with no perspective, the same kind of prejudice which clearly motivated Breveik.

You are promoting Islamophobia.

Simply appalling.

You are the perfect example of why Doug Saunders’ column is nonsense.