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 GORDON GIBSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Sorry, Gordon Gibson, as soon as a writer uses a term like “hard power,” I stop reading, knowing full well he has nothing to say.

The phrase is the creation of Pentagon consultants on expense-account lunches.

Bullying and ruthless violence – a million dead in Iraq, two million displaced – may not be summed up as “hard power” except by a person who is not thinking about what he is writing.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

McNamara may be the greatest modern example of the banality of evil. He was, in his heyday, a dry, boring man with the appearance of a corporate executive who taught Baptist Sunday School classes.

He was very bright and energetic, but dry and boring, driven by an insane need for success and with no evident ethical standards beyond those associated with the ferociously ambitious.

The United States, under his advice and that of others like McGeorge Bundy, created the greatest holocaust since that of World War II.

An estimated three million Vietnamese were killed, many of them suffering horrible deaths from napalm and early versions of cluster bombs.

Carpet bombing by B-52s made parts of that poor country resemble the surface of the moon.

Left behind were millions of pounds of the hideous Agent Orange oozing through the ground to cause birth defects for perhaps centuries.

Left behind too were hundreds of thousands of land mines to cripple and kill farmers for decades after.

The reason for this horror? The Vietnamese were fighting a civil war and the side with the wrong economic beliefs was winning.

Of course, it also relates to America’s penchant for obsessions, its Captain Ahab drive to chase and kill the great whale.

In the 1960s, it was communism.

Today it’s Islamic fundamentalism.

In his later years, McNamara was a sad figure. He very much did come to regret his role. He was almost driven by the ghosts of all those dead souls.