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
EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
‘Russia has been spying on the Skripals for at least five years, Britain claims”
That is hardly any logical person’s idea of proof.
Just one more government spokesperson, in effect, saying the same thing but using some embroidered details to make it interesting for the press.
And, of course, the press happily complies in publicizing it.
By the way, the claim that Russia took an active interest in the Skripals for five years is close to laughable. He was never a truly important spy, and his active service goes back too many years to make him of the least threat to Russia.
Not one of the real and hard questions about this matter has been answered. Not one. Such as how you can touch nerve gas but walk around for a considerable length of time before collapsing? Or why the doctor, who first treated the daughter on an emergency basis where she was discovered collapsed on a bench, was wholly unaffected? Or why Salisbury was not immediately evacuated and cordoned off upon the poison’s “discovery”? Or why no one can speak to the Skripals? All those questions and many more.
This then seems to have become the standard of British justice, at least in all matters involving Russia: accuse and punish before proving anything. And Theresa May and Company have now proved they can get away with doing so.
The same standard was applied to the missile strike in Syria. The international chemical weapons investigators, the OPCW, who are to closely examine the area where it is claimed the Syrian government used poison gas, had not even yet fully deployed to begin their work before the attack. Why the rush?
This is just sick, and anyone supporting such a standard deserves the contempt of all honest thinking people.
What could drive Britain – with the United States and France, as though three bullies somehow made an assertion into hard proof and made their acts just – to behave in this extraordinary way?
The answer is clear for those who follow events closely, but of course most people have neither the time nor inclination to do so, making it easy for governments like Britain’s to behave in such awful ways. The war in Syria is basically lost. A six-year investment in recruitment, training, paying, supplying, and covertly assisting gangs of mercenaries posing as jihadi types is pretty much down the drain.
The goal was the destruction of Syria and its effective Balkanization, exactly the same fate imposed upon Libya and Iraq. All part of a long-term American-Israeli plan for the “birth of a new Middle East,” a “birth” which so far has cost about two million lives and millions of desperate refugees with the promise of yet more ahead.
Only in Iraq, national armies were openly used. Here, in Syria, the effort was to avoid having to do that and yet achieve the same result.
Of course, the use of national armies – U S and British – had many disadvantages in the Iraq War, from being accused of illegal invasion – exactly what Iraq was – to having leaders like Blair and Bush end up publicly disgraced.
Besides, that cost a great deal of money. This phony-jihadi approach has been largely financed by Saudi Arabia’s princes – people, by the way, for whom the presence of large foreign armies in the Middle East becomes a serious domestic political liability. The Saudi princes are also people who have worked for years trying to regain the good will of America after 9/11. They are willing to do almost anything which doesn’t generate instability at home.
So, America teamed up with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Britain, France, and originally Turkey to launch and sustain a six-year work of destruction in Syria. Because the actors employed were “rag-heads,” it was possible to sit back and pooh-pooh the horrors you were in fact assisting.
Britain and America pretended to bomb outfits like ISIS while largely in fact destroying Syrian infrastructure, thus providing ISIS and other ugly mobs like al-Nusrah effectively with an air force. All of the above-named countries supplied weapons to the mercenaries – many caches have been discovered by advancing Syrian forces with the countries of manufacture clearly stamped on them – and they periodically sent in covert special forces to assist them. British and Americans have been spotted there in the past, and, of course, now France openly moves troops illegally into the Kurdish region.
But the effort in Syria has largely failed, and the Israel Lobby is very unhappy about the fact. The evidence for that is seen in a score of little clues – Israel is hardly going to publicly “own” the Syrian horror although it always verbally attacks Assad, even while its own army is busy slaughtering unarmed Palestinians – clues from renewed attacks on Jeremy Corbyn – whose true glaring fault is that he does not support this kind of nasty stuff – to calls by various Israelis and Israeli apologists in the United States openly calling for Assad’s assassination.
Only the other day, an apologist at the American Enterprise Institute, one of America’s privately-endowed “think-tanks” which basically serve as academic-looking propaganda mills, Michael Rubin, openly suggested that it was time to kill Assad.
His call just mimicked the recent words of an Israeli minister, almost like an effort to give a public call for state murder some respectability. That’s sure my idea of a principled approach, but that is just a part of the ugly realities of the Syrian War – so often deliberately misrepresented as a civil war.
After all, with the disappearance of the Syria we know, Israel hoped not only to further legitimize its illegal occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights but to grab still another slice of Syrian property for its Greater Israel project. It also would see a neighbor who did not agree with all its illegal and unethical behavior swept conveniently away.
Well, now with all the missile explosions in Syria – again, all completely illegal under international law – Trump and May and Macron can crow and boast and thump their chests like the apes they imitate. They get to strut around and tell their people what strong leaders they are. Maybe get a little adulation and support, all of them being unpopular in their own countries. After all, it is well-known effect on the psychology of populations that they tend to close ranks in conflicts.
And they want to be seen as leaders of such high principles as that no injured child could possibly go unrevenged. America should try telling that to the parents of the vast pile of child corpses which it left in Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Somalia, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Iraq, and in still other places.
A million children killed by this wonderful country would be an extremely conservative estimate. You see, in poorer countries, populations are very young with a high proportion of children compared to adults, and when you bomb such places, you absolutely kill vast numbers of children. And, boy, does the United States like bombing such places.
Even were the United States not in fact what it is – the world’s greatest killer of children over the last half century or so – who or what appointed them to revenge events in other places, even were the events genuine, as they very much are not Syria? America completely ignored many genuine mass murders – in Rwanda, in Indonesia, in Cambodia, in the Iraq-Iran War, in Chile, in Palestine. Why? Because there was nothing politically to be gained. America’s self-appointed role as “punisher of injustice” seems limited only to countries where it is politically engaged and has something to gain.
The attack was carefully planned not to affect Russia, who had made it very clear what the consequences of doing so would be, and, in truth, it accomplished little. The dirty foreign-inspired Syrian War is mainly over, and the bad guys lost.
FURTHER THOUGHTS ON AMERICAN AND BRITISH ACCUSATIONS OF SYRIA’S USING CHEMICAL WEAPONS:
The authorities responsible for what is virtually certain to have been a staged false gas attack in Syria have little regard for the intelligence of their citizens.
Why would Syria, which has pretty close to won its war against foreign terrorists, even think of doing this at this time in this place? And for so little advantage to themselves?
If Syria still had chemical weapons, why confine their use to this little patch?
At this moment when a whole renewed public controversy had been raised in Britain with the questionable Skripal affair?
It makes no sense. Syria could have used such weapons in multiple areas, saving some hard street fighting in many instances, but it did not.
Further, even were the attack genuine, using real chemical weapon, why would the cutthroats trying to destroy Syria not be the likely candidates?
Why is Assad automatically accused? And without a bit of evidence?
Absolutely none of our corporate press, despite running story after story with glaring accusatory headlines, has even a single reporter on the spot. They’ve questioned no real authorities either. There is zero journalism behind those headlines, such as we’ve seen in The Guardian for days.
In all such matters, whose word do you give more weight to? Russia, which has destroyed its stocks under the international chemical weapons treaty or the United States, which still has not done so?
Remember, the greatest independent investigative reporter on the planet, Sy Hersh, told us clearly a while back that the United States ran an operation out of Gadhafi’s smashed Libya, an operation supervised by Hillary Clinton, transferring quantities of the murdered Gadhafi’s stocks of nerve agent to the mercenaries in Syria so that a “red-line” event could occur, allowing Obama to freely and self-righteously bomb Syria and reduce it to the chaos that had been made of Libya?
And remember, only a major Russian diplomatic effort prevented the fraud at that time. Syria surrendered, under international supervision, its existing stocks of chemicals for destruction by Russian experts. Syria, like Libya, had maintained such weapons as a counter to Israel’s unacknowledged and totally illegal nuclear arsenal.
Remember also, in the run-up to America’s illegal invasion of Iraq, America and Britain lied day after day about Saddam having such weapons? We had foolish scenes at the UN and foolish dossiers published, all created as part of a stage play to tell the world that Saddam had what he did not have at the time, chemical weapons.
Remember further, in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, a terribly bloody war secretly encouraged by the United States to weaken revolutionary Iran, chemical weapons were used heavily by Iraq to slaughter many thousands of Iranians who seemed about to prevail.
Where did those weapons suddenly come from? And did you hear any great outcry over that genuine atrocity at the time?
No, in these matters, people who follow events understand that the unsubstantiated word of the United States or Britain is proven worthless by recent history.
John Chuckman
COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
Not much to a reader’s observation about Putin and Trump being similar.
In fact, they are almost opposites in many ways.
Putin is soft-spoken, strategic in his thinking, and cunning.
Trump resembles nothing so much as a perpetual drunk shooting his mouth off at whatever crosses his path.
Trump is a walking emotional explosion.
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In response to a reader who thinks big businessmen make good leaders:
Big businessmen and generals virtually always make poor presidents.
They are used to barking out orders, but that does not work in the real political world.
Clever persuasion is what’s needed, a quality Trump lacks utterly.
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To a reader who thinks I don’t realize the importance of the economy in the election:
Oh, I do think I “realize.“
After all, I am a retired chief economist for a large Canadian company.
Anyone who understands classical economics knows that a government leader has very little to do with the performance of the real economy.
They do like to pose and strut around and take credit for what goes right, but it is mostly empty-headed nonsense.
The one way government can assist an economy is doing its basic job of providing essential infrastructure, avoiding wasteful spending like stupid wars, and seeing that the children receive good education. The United States has failed in every one of these essentials for decades, Republicans or Democrats making no difference.
You also fail to really comprehend Clinton`s election slogan. He was reminding himself of the importance of speaking on the campaign trail about what is important to ordinary people. In American politics, speaking about a subject is almost never the same thing as actually doing something about it if elected.
That was certainly true of Clinton, a pretty classless president who had not one admirable achievement.
As for Trump, he is a big-mouthed fraud, a confidence man, not an expert on economics, full stop.
CHUCKMAN'S WORDS ON WORDPRESS: COMMENTS FROM THE WORLD'S PRESS 