JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Latest U.S. drone operation in Pakistan should be judged a success”

Surely, the words of an ethical and moral bankrupt.

A target or targets – uncharged and untried – is assassinated by a buzz-cut thug at a computer console.

In the process, a host of others, all innocents for certain, are murdered, and the cretin writing this editorial says it should be judged a success.

Have you lost all sense of values?

If we all nod and accept this absolutely criminal behavior by a great power, we will lose all claims to a free society which has laws and is organized to honor human rights.

If you do not live by the rule of the law, you are not a whit better than the junta generals who used to kidnap people off the streets of South America and fly them out over the ocean to throw out their drugged bodies.

They “disappeared” thousands in that fashion, and it is certain that the horrible governments committing such crimes believed they were every bit as justified as America in getting rid of people working against their interests.

Now, the apologists for Israel’s brutal excesses always support this kind of thing, and indeed Israel is the very model for this behavior. The word “terroriist” is used like a magic word to make any inhuman act perfectly okay.

It is one thing for an irresponsible state like Israel to behave this unacceptable way, but it quite another for the world’s mightiest nation to be reduced to the same behavior.

We are only protected by rule of law from having the violent barbarians and psychopaths of the world governing. If you abandon rule of law, you have abandoned civilization.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ALASDAIR PALMER IN THE TELEGRAPH

I cannot understand how anyone can even consider the drone-killers legal, and I am ashamed that I ever praised the man, Barack Obama, who is responsible for this reprehensible behavior.

America’s confused and bloody presence in Afghanistan and Iraq seems to have blurred the meaning of all such terms as legality and ethics in international affairs. We condemn China for keeping a peaceful protester in jail while we murder by the hundreds people legally guilty of nothing.

Just like Israel’s assaults and murders and tortures of civilians and political opponents, the drones are nothing but organized murder.

First, the drone attacks have killed hundreds of totally innocent people.

Second, even their intended targets have been charged with nothing in a court of law. They are just summarily executed by a machine run by some buzz-cut thug at a computer monitor who likely pumps his arm when his death machine blows up a house which contains God knows what people, perhaps then going out for lunch and a beer. That is as far from legality and ethics as you can travel.

How is this activity any different to those South American juntas that kidnapped thousands over years and made them “disappear” – the euphemism for flying people out over the ocean and throwing them out of the plane.

This savagery represents the Israelization of American foreign policy – just kill anyone you claim is a threat to you, behavior which represents the absolute lack of ethics and utter lawlessness.

You cannot make a better, law-abiding world through such moral horrors.

Indeed, Israel and the United States have set examples of such outrageous and unacceptable nature that over the long term they have given potential terrorists a new standard for their work, besides producing countless new young people with grudges, keen on future vengeance.

Are we going to continue into the black hole of Stalinism on a world scale where someone’s wrong look or word gets them liquidated?

That really is the logical outcome of these horrors.

Of course, the claim that it is democracies engaged in this bloody work proves only that democracies are just as capable of murder and torture as tyrant states. There is nothing automatically moral or ethical about being a democracy.

And it tells us we should be glad there are not more such democracies.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

It truly is dishonest to always write about “drone attacks.”

Drones don’t attack anyone. Gum-chewing thugs sitting in an office chair at a computer terminal do.

These drones are armed with American Hellfire missiles, the same ones Israel uses when it typically kills a dozen innocent people in a bloody horror trying to get one target, some man who has never been charged or tried or condemned.

The guy at the terminal somewhere in a locked room in the Pentagon basement undoubtedly pumps his arm as the missile explodes, killing God knows who.

Then he goes out for some lunch in Georgetown.

Disgusting.

An absolute lack of ethics, only praised by the apologists for Israel’s bloody excesses.

Misery likes company, and the same goes for miserable criminal behavior.

_________________

Carrying the Olympic Torch would sure be a suitable suggestion, although I doubt the writer making this suggestion even understands why.

Few Canadians seem aware that the Olympic Torch relay was invented for the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, invented by no less a figure than Doctor Joseph Goebbels to distract world attention in a very controversial Olympics from the stuff going on in Germany.

Yet we blindly carry on this stupid marketing scheme as though it were a hallowed tradition.

And we get brainless suggestions like this one concerning it.