JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED COMMENT TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Stark warning?

Tony Blair, mass murderer and liar, walks freely about, scooping up bags of money from special interests.

George Bush, mass murderer and liar and extraordinary ignoramus, sits peacefully on his porch, swilling beer.

Dick Cheney, mass murderer and vile abuser of his office, shoots his ugly mouth off regularly.

Nothing has happened to mass murderer Donald Rumsfeld.

Benjamin Netanyahu continues bullying and threatening, stealing and murdering.

Ehud Olmert, murderer of 400 children among other accomplishments, is retired in comfort.

Ariel Sharon, who spent a lifetime killing people and launching unwarranted wars, was only felled by natural causes.

Henry Kissinger, a war criminal as great as any tried at Nuremberg, still lurks in the shadows whispering advice to the influential.

The totality of those gentlemen’s handiwork makes Charles Taylor look a piker at murder.

I don’t see Taylor’s trial as anything more than the powers-that-be getting an old enemy.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ALLAN MALLINSON IN THE TELEGRAPH

Allan Mallinson, this is simplistic, uninformed propaganda.

“Undermined at home” smacks of charges of “defeatism” or “stab in the back” or “fifth columnists,” and in using it, you demonstrate a lack of clear thought.

Morale always suffers when you send armies to do the wrong thing, and Iraq and Afghanistan were colossal mistakes.

The British public had overwhelmingly shown its opposition to the invasion of Iraq, but Tony Blair managed to abuse the immense power of a modern prime minister by joining in that pointless mass murder.

Afghanistan cannot be “won” because you are fighting a major part of the population itself, and you are attempting to foist institutions and customs on a people mostly not ready for them.

The invasion of Afghanistan was the product of Bush/Cheney/ Rumsfeld paranoia. The fact that major NATO nations refuse to seriously engage there is owing to the simple fact that they do not perceive a threat there. As well, they do not see how anyone can “win.”

The Bush administration was the most shamefully ignorant and brutal in memory for any Western society. Blair’s having slavishly followed that troika from hell speaks for itself. The man is an ethical nullity.

Given those facts, your words ring oddly uninformed and, indeed, rather dangerous.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MATTHEW NORMAN IN THE INDEPENDENT

Now?

Where has Matthew Norman been the last thirty years or so?

The Republican Party has long been a breeding ground for hate and stupidity.

Spiro Agnew’s many ridiculous and shabby words at a time he was taking brown paper bags of money in his vice-presidential office?

Phil Gramm and all his dumb talk about what his mama used to say about “gettin’ down outta the wagon to he’p push the wagon”?

Nixon and wife Pat’s “Republican” cloth coat and their little dog?

Nixon’s filthy, vicious first Congressional campaign won by insulting an honest and capable woman?

Every word ever uttered by that dense chunk of sod, Bush?

Dick Cheney’s organized programs of murder, hate, and denial of rights?

Rumsfeld’s murder of 3,000 prisoners in Afghanistan?

Dan Quayle and everything he ever said?

The late Senator Roman Hruska and his claim that the Supreme Court should reflect all groups, including mediocrity?

Lamar Alexander and his ridiculous custom-made red lumber-jack shirts and his ideas about having a part-time government?

The absurd former Senator Bob Smith and his claim that Clinton was running a “damned concentration camp” when they rescued that poor Cuban boy Elian from his hateful kidnappers in Miami.

Tom Delay and his name-calling and spitting venom while all the time running a crooked fund-raising scheme?

Pat Robertson’s claims that natural disasters were God’s vengeance on America for immoral ways plus just about everything else ever uttered by Robertson?

Newt Gingrich and his “family values” crap while divorcing a wife dying of cancer?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL NAZIR-ALI IN THE TELEGRAPH

 

Jesus wouldn’t have voted for Blair either.

Or Bush.

Or Sarkozy.

Or a lot of other politicians.

He would have driven the entire American Congress off Capitol Hill just as he drove the moneychangers from the temple.

And now we know he would do the same with the Mother of Parliaments.

Seems to me his recommendation here is not a strong one.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY SOUMAYA GHANNOUSHI IN THE GUARDIAN

The Islamic Threat is the creation of American Neo-cons.

That fact alone should serve to convince any thoughtful person that it is utter nonsense.

But if you are unconvinced, here are a few facts to give some real perspective.

The American annual death rate is roughly today 8.27 per 1000 population. With a population of about 300 million people, roughly 2 1/2 million Americans will die this year.

The top causes of death, according to recent historical statistics, will be approximately as follows:

Tobacco 435,000
Poor Diet and Physical Inactivity 365,000
Alcohol 85,000
Microbial Agents 75,000
Toxic Agents 55,000
Motor Vehicle Crashes 26,347
Adverse Reactions to Prescription Drugs 32,000
Suicide 30,622
Incidents Involving Firearms 29,000
Homicide 20,308
Sexual Behaviors 20,000

There will be dozens killed by such insignificant events as bicycle accidents. The lingering effects of asbestos will take about 10,000. Sheer medical incompetence will kill many thousands.

What is the expected outcome from terror, of any kind? Zero.

What was the outcome from terror last year? Zero.

Going all the way back to 2001, what was the number owing to terror? Less than 3,000, a totally insignificant fraction of American deaths in that year.

Yet that one over-dramatized event catapulted the United States into an insane and meaningless War on Terror. No one even knows just how many hundreds of billions of dollars will be wasted in total, enough at any rate to help destabilize the American economy.

At the same time, the United States has invaded and occupied two countries, and it regularly threatens two more, Iran and Pakistan. It has murdered over half a million just in Iraq and maimed countless thousands, all while destroying the most advanced economy in the Arab world, one which would have soon reached Western modernity.

It started the human-rights disgraces of Guantanano, Abu Ghraib, and the CIA’s Torture Gulag. It passed horribly repressive laws within the United States.

All for what? Because 19 men, all dead in the act, were responsible for 9/11.

The irony is that the men were Saudis, yet no harm has come to Saudi Arabia. Not only no harm to Saudi Arabia, but Bush and Cheney saw to that members of the Saudi Royal Family living in the U.S. were all safely and secretly shipped home.

Not only that, but the brutal injustices of Israel have received encouragement and support as never before. Invade Lebanon and kill 1,500 civilians? No problem. Drop a million cluster-bomb bomblets to cripple and kill for years to come? No problem. Lay siege to Gaza because you don’t like its government? No problem. Kill more than 400 people in Gaza while you do this? No problem.

And the war goes on, a war against, not an army or a regime, but against method and or a set of beliefs. It is a War against Sanity.

TWO POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN THE GUARDIAN BY OLIVER KAMM

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

Safer for whom, Oliver Kamm?

For the more than 600,000 murdered by Bush in Iraq?

For the tens of thousands murdered in Afghanistan, including the 3,000 prisoners who were driven out to the desert in vans to be suffocated?

For the thousands of prisoners of the CIA’s International Torture Gulag?

For the abused and tortured of Abu Ghraib?

For the abused and tortured of Guantanamo?

For the millions of lives shattered in Iraq, a place that once was on the cusp of modernity and prosperity?

This has to be the most breathtakingly dumb piece of writing I’ve seen in years
_______________________

Apart from my question of safer for whom, citing the piles of Bush victims, the world is not a safer place for many other reasons, Oliver Kamm.

First, suppression of human rights all over the Western world is no light thing. There is nothing ‘safe’ about living in a police state or a quasi-police state the U.S. has become under Bush. The Bill of Rights has virtually been suspended.

Second, people of Arabic origin or of Muslim beliefs are now routinely abused and insulted in many Western countries, especially in the United States.

Third, a wave of hatred and injustice is rippling through the Muslim world. That isn’t just going to go away. Bush’s approach has been the approach of Israel, which today remains a garrison state with no peace and defended by walls and brutality, a long-term untenable position, besides being a shining example of ethically-hollow behavior.

Fourth, Bush’s oppression and killing abroad have been closely paralleled by an almost unprecedented grant of license to Israel to behave as brutally and ruthlessly as it wishes towards Palestinians and other neighbors.

A genuinely horrible situation has grown up, and no open-minded person can possibly look at Israel’s wretched behavior in Gaza and in Lebanon and towards Syria without some revulsion. Nothing, absolutely nothing, Apartheid South Africa did has not been repeated by Israel towards its neighbors, and, of course, that includes infamous mass killings of poor blacks by South African troops and mass imprisonments with no rights or justice.

Fifth, Bush has also set aside the Geneva Conventions and other important international treaties, including that safeguarding the rights of child soldiers. No meaningful sense of safety comes from this arrogance.

He has practiced new bizarre doctrines, giving the example to other states to do the same in future, as, for example, pre-emptive strikes on suspects and high-tech assassinations. These provide another measure of the ‘Israelization’ of American policy. Imagine a world in which every state claims this philosophy?

What has happened overall in the world under Bush is a series of steps away from democratic principles. Even if America had the most vigorous and fair democracy, something that is demonstrably not the case, when its leaders decide the fates of so many others, its tiny group of electors (maybe 1% or less of the world’s people, taking into account many Americans do not even vote) effectively acts like an aristocracy vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

You cannot claim democratic values and behave this way. After all, the Communist Party of China rules more than a billion people with almost the same percentage of representation.

The United States and Israel have given democracy a bad name in much of the emerging world. After all, in the special limited sense they claim to be democratic, so was Apartheid South Africa or the American Confederacy or the Britain of George III.