John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CRAIG MURRAY IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 
“The Most Unpopular Government in UK Political History

“The disillusionment will be on the same scale as Boris Johnson’s bombastic promises”

 
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/14/the-most-unpopular-government-in-uk-political-history/?unapproved=391014&moderation-hash=f0686a8bd6f9945f044d0711f33dc1ea#comment-391014

This is a good summary of forces set in motion by Britain’s election of Boris Johnson, a summary coming from Craig Murray, a writer worth reading.

It seems almost beyond understanding that a man like Boris Johnson, caught various times recently lying and misrepresenting things – a man even with an instance of a police call concerning domestic violence at his girlfriend’s flat not long before the election – and a man with a long record of schoolboy crassness and name-calling, should be given a mandate.

But you have only to look at the United States to see a comparable example in Donald Trump, a man who should actually embarrass America with his bellowing crassness.

Our Western “democracies” are so feeble.

With 43.6 % of the people’s votes, Johnson is said to have a “landslide” victory. Donald Trump actually received a minority of 46.4 % of the people’s votes.

Such are the outcomes of our custom-tailored democratic institutions.

In Johnson’s case, I believe two major circumstances worked for his “landslide.”

First, Britain was bone-achingly tired of more than three years of previous government leaders’ words and schemes over BREXIT. For all that time, you could not look at a newspaper without seeing articles and reports on the subject.

It was an extremely complex, technical subject demanding more time and effort to grasp than most people could possibly give, the very reason the earlier Conservative leader, David Cameron, should never have held such a referendum.

Tiresome, to say the least. Johnson simply threatened to be done with it all, one way or another.

Second, over much the same period – although four years instead of three – Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party has been under almost constant assault by special interests.

Another very long, wearying effort. Corbyn, essentially a decent man of traditional liberal and progressive values, was called names and challenged regularly by outlandish accusations. Libelous at times. We saw even the direct interference in British politics of several political leaders from another state, Israel.

Corbyn’s sense fairness and balance were not wanted in that part of the world. Intensely so.

He survived the assault but was weakened, and many would say he failed to stand up to accusers as forcefully as he should have. Even supporters do tire of that kind of response.

Both men – Trump and Johnson – have set their attention to major, society-changing efforts, destructive efforts in the view of many observers, yet they do so without even that fundamental democratic concept of clean and fair support from a majority.

Donald Trump literally threatens the stability of the much of the world’s trade and economy with tariffs and a massive sanction regime and telling both friend and opponents how they should be conducting their affairs. And that is all apart from his many military threats and open support for coups and the theft of other countries’ resources.

Boris Johnson displays many similar views and attitudes. He is Donald Trump with an Eton accent and a boyish smile instead of a grimly-set jaw. The traditional “special relationship” between Britain and the United States is about to be given a whole new meaning.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY BORIS JOHNSON IN THE TELEGRAPH

These are pathetic arguments, Boris Johnson.

Using every bit of logic you have – and that’s not much when you cut out the unwarranted assumptions and unproved assertions you make – it could be used to defend almost any act against an accused where the public had been pre-disposed by a barrage of publicity against him to utterly dislike him.

That is not how a free society works.

Nor is it how we have an international community bound by standards of human decency and democratic values.

Yours are the arguments of a 16th century tyrant.

You either have laws and obey them or you do not, in which case anything is possible.

What these events represent is nothing other than the principles of might makes right and to the victor belongs the spoils.

I regard it is barbaric and irresponsible that a man in your position, Mayor of London, in the great nation which gave the world most of its concepts of democratic government and justice through centuries of struggle, speaks as you do.
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Response to another reader:

No, my friend, you are the one being ridiculous, actually rather more than ridiculous. Yours are the statements of a member of a raving lynch-mob.

And your numbers of bin Laden’s supposed crimes, too, are beyond ridiculous. Did you get them from the Paranoids’ Guide to the Internet Site?

There is not one shred of proof we have ever been given that bin Laden is responsible for anything but intensely disliking the United States and the House of Saud.

We do not know bin Laden’s connection with 9/11.

I don’t say there is none. I simply don’t know whether there is, and you, whether you recognize the fact or not, also do not know.

And if we had proof, it belonged before the Court in The Hague. Full stop.

But the United States has never recognized the International court for War Crimes.

And why not?

Because George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would face the Court themselves on the gravest charges.

We certainly don’t need paranoid speculation about what those gentlemen did. We know they destroyed an advanced society for a generation, inflicting or contributing to the deaths of about a million souls.

By the way, the number of people killed in 9/11 ten years ago was almost exactly equal to the number of innocent people Israel has killed in just the last few years of its activities in Gaza and Lebanon and on the high seas.

And only recently, we have had a report from Prof. Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, saying that Israeli forces killed 1,335 children in direct military operations and arbitrary shootings over the last decade.

But, of course, Israel only has contempt for the U.N., just as it has for every other international organization dealing with justice or human values.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY BORIS JOHNSON IN THE TELEGRAPH

Boris Johnson, your speaking of “betrayal of the fallen” is simply the cheapest, shabbiest old politician’s trick there is in times of war.

No logic, no facts, only an appeal to misplaced emotions. Wrapping yourself with a bloody flag is not an argument: it is the kind of thing we expect from the likes of America’s Sarah Palin, an utterly uninformed airhead.

Just because a dishonest politician like Tony Blair commits people to their deaths in a pointless cause does not mean that the nation must continue in it after people have begun to understand what has been done to them.

Imagine applying Boris Johnson’s non-thinking, emotion-laden principle to past wars. The evil Lyndon Johnson committed the United States to the most destructive and utterly pointless colonial war of the 20th century in Vietnam: his only real reason being fear that Nixon would “out-Commie” him in the next election. The United States would still be slaughtering people if governed by Johnson’s principle.

Johnson’s thinking reminds me of General Earl Haig, the incompetent, strutting commander who sent half a million men to their deaths in the summer of 1917, achieving nothing.