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 BY LAWRENCE DAVIDSON IN INTIFADA PALESTINE

An accurate assessment, but an unpopular one.

From the beginning I have explained and advocated the same view, the view of relatively powerless people taking violent action against great injustices.

But governments and the large mainline news media which invariably support them have filled the atmosphere with Islamophobic nonsense to such an extent that it is blindly accepted by many.

Being a humanist with loyalty to no religion, I have no special brief for Islam.

But I am a person who has little toleration for injustice, and American policies after WWII are nothing if not one long series of injustices.

A very wise woman once said, in answer to the question of what distinguishes a good, democratic society, that it was whether the people lived with a sense of justice.

I cannot agree more with that profound and simple observation.

But we see very little justice from the foreign policy of the United States. We see, quite to the contrary, the imposition, over and over again, of injustice, on an international scale being much as one would experience in an old society where deliberate injustice is maintained as the ordinary state of affairs.

Global affairs, if we are to support democratic values and humane dealings, must also feature justice. It is no less required.

But so many people recognize that that is not the situation, and they include not only people living in the artificial reality of the Middle East maintained by the United States but people in Europe and North America who find it difficult even to have good public discussions of the matter.

The United States through NATO and its tremendous financial and economic power is remarkably capable of keeping these issues off the public agenda.

Sometimes, as in Egypt, an eruption simply gets too big to suppress, and the U.S. takes great hypocritical noises about democracy and the people’s desires, but it never does this automatically, and at the same time it throws its support to inevitable change (really as a form of emergency measure and damage control) in a place like Egypt, it is bombing people and supporting repression of people with the same kind of demands for freedom in Yemen, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.

And even in Egypt, what do we see now? Basically a military junta taking immense amounts of time to change anything meaningful, hoping to let people’s energy and dreams dissipate. And it is the United States supporting the effort.

So much for the land of the free, a slogan that always has been more slogan than reality. Free people do not enslave others. Genuine democratic states do not do deals with dictators and just wink at gross injustice. But America is a land where all the vaunted assertions of the Constitution end right at the shoreline. The horrors of Guantanamo, 90 miles off shore, are just fine. And increasingly, with terrible invasions of privacy and police-state laws about “terror” even on shore America becomes a less democratic place daily.

Terror has become a word very similar to what the ghastly Joe Stalin meant when he spoke of “wreckers,” one of his signal words for new waves of state terror in the Soviet Union.