JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Austere lifestyle tells us very little about the character of a man as leader.

Stalin wore modest uniforms most of the time and worked about 16 hours a day.

Hitler too was a man of fairly modest tastes, wearing a modest uniform, being a vegetarian, and often having a polite tea with his secretaries.

Pope Francis’s behavior around the junta was the ethical question which immediately sprang to mind.

While not definitive, this article makes it clear enough he was not an admirable figure during those horrors.

The issue of his behavior over two arrested members of his Jesuit order seems almost a sideshow.

Many thousands were killed by being illegally arrested, drugged, and thrown out of aircraft over the ocean.

Obama has extra-judicially killed 4700 people with drones without a word of disapproval from Rome.

Any man claiming moral authority who does not speak against that is worthy of neither respect or nor admiration.

But then that has always been the behavior of the Catholic Church.

The popes blubber about peace but never speak to those starting wars or those committing great evils.

George Bush happily killed a million people with no disapproval from the pope.

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon killed some 3 million in Vietnam without any opposition from the pope.

Hitler had a concordat with the pope.

Fascist Italy did too.

As did Napoleon.

When Catherine de’ Medici began an orgy of murder of Huguenots (protestants) in France – an event called the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre – the pope honored her “achievement” with the striking of a gold medal.

It is a long and quite shameful history, without even touching on Rome’s behavior over countless years of sexual abuse of children.

Anyone who sees the pope as a moral force in the world is just reciting meaningless words.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Imagine my surprise to learn that most people in the world don’t accept extrajudicial murder by governments?

And one has to say, the murdering agency here is not just any government, but a government which blubbers and drones day and night about human rights and democracy and freedom. America’s Secretary of State, just for one, has become practically a recording device playing slogans on loudspeakers as the murders go on.

It wasn’t that many years ago that the world was appalled to learn that juntas in some South American countries made thousands “disappear” by rounding them up, drugging them, and throwing their bodies out of planes over the ocean.

What America is doing – and it is doing it in half a dozen places, including Yemen and Somalia – is indistinguishable from the juntas “disappearing” citizens they didn’t like.

The word “terrorist” in this context is meaningless, serving only as an Orwellian excuse to murder those with whom you disagree and to intimidate others by the example.

It is a measure of the sheer arrogance and corruption of power that the government of the United States assumes it has a right to act in this fashion.

Of course, in this, America closely copies the brutal and unethical practices of Israel, a country which cheers them on as at a big sports event. And Israel is such an example of success, isn’t it?

None of the world’s so-called rogue states – places like North Korea or Burma – are known for this level of lawless savagery.

It is estimated recently that American drone-missile strikes, just in Pakistan, have killed 3,000 people in a few years.

The Pentagon says that “only 20%” of the dead were civilians, and that that is an acceptable level of performance.

600 civilians – over and above the 2400 targets, themselves, each and every one, legally innocent – murdered is acceptable?

But, of course, numbers on deaths coming from the Pentagon always have a large element of hazy fantasy. They murdered 3 million souls in Vietnam, and you never heard a word from them on the extent of that holocaust. All for nothing but an insane Ahab-like compulsion to kill communists.

A million or so people were killed in Iraq, America’s compulsion having changed to Muslims, but no mention of numbers there either.

You cannot have a government of laws unless you are yourself willing yourself to obey them.

When we choose not to be governed by laws, it is the powerful and psychotic who inherit the earth.
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“Iran embarks on $1b. cyber-warfare programTehran has embarked on an ambitious plan to boost its defensive cyber-warfare capabilities and is investing $1 billion in developing new technology and hiring new computer experts…”

Idiot, the most dangerous examples of cyber warfare we’ve ever seen are the Stuxnet and Flame pieces of malware.

It is even possible that Stuxnet – which escaped its intended target of Iran to spread – caused part of the nuclear plant horror in Japan by making controls unusable.

We know from analysis that these two pieces of malware were developed by the same people.

The United States and Israel are the authors.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED COMMENT TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Bin Laden’s killing was simply cold-blooded murder.

A bunch of heavily-armed thugs grabbed an unarmed man and shot him in the head, and with his family in the house.

A disgusting act, no matter what he may have been guilty of.

He could have been taken to The Hague and charged, but that might require some proof of something.

And we have never, never been given one ounce of genuine evidence that bin Laden was guilty of anything except intensely disliking the United States and its good friend, the House of Saud.

But murder and vengeance and abuse have become American passions, with people cheering murderers and Obama sending fleets of drones and “kill-teams” into Pakistan regularly, taking the lives of hundreds of innocent people.

And even when they do kill a suspected “bad guy,” it is done with no legal authority or procedure, no charges or trial. What is the difference from the former Argentinean junta’s death squads making people disappear? None.

And America’s high-handed treatment of Pakistan, demanding the right to enter and kill people at will, has had terrible effects within that poor country. Thousands have died with people in revolt against the government’s quiet acceptance of America’s death machines and “kill-teams” wondering around the land assassinating people as they please.

Our only protection as free societies is in our laws. It has taken centuries to build those laws and treaties and to gain widespread honoring of them.

But the United States has unilaterally decided, since the war criminal Bush and now very much under the savagely unethical Obama, to decide who to bomb and kill in the world regardless of treaties, regardless of laws, regardless of long-term consequences.

You cannot make the world a better place with that kind of vicious descent into lawlessness.

There is the terrible example of Israel’s lawless behavior before us. It has kidnapped, tortured, abused, murdered, committed piracy, and plotted against the legitimate interests of its neighbors for decades. It stands in contempt of the United Nations and international law and humanitarian agreements of every description.

And what is the result of all that horror? A small group of people, armed to the teeth and hiding behind walls, huddled in a garrison state surrounded by people whose customs and very existence it has utter contempt for. Its government has built a future for its people of endless abuse and trampling on the rights of others, a bleak netherworld with no hope for decency, integrity, honesty, or any ideals concerning human rights or meaningful democracy to shine through.

That is what the United States is copying, precisely, and the results will be the same, precisely.

If you want to live in a world of laws, then you must honor the laws. There is no other choice.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

I just love that expression “alleged militants.”

Almost certainly, the deaths in fact were 18 civilians guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And even if one or two were suspects of some kind, this kind of extra-judicial murder is absolutely indistinguishable from the death squads in South American countries which periodically made people “disappear.”

It reminds me of each time Israel kills a batch of poor Palestinians: they are invariably called “militants” in the press.

It’s called demonizing your victim. It also clearly is a ghastly use of euphemism for extra-judicial mass-murder.

George Orwell would have loved this terrible and deliberate abuse of language in the interests of power.

He wrote about just such things in his wonderful essay, “Politics and the English Language,” an indictment of power that remains as true as the day it was written.

And our truth-loving press seems to think it’s perfectly acceptable to kill “militants” and even “alleged militants.”

In one stroke the press both horribly abuses language and ignores completely its responsibility to inform people.