John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

Once again, France’s Hollande demonstrates the pathetic, almost comic, figure he is by awarding France’s highest honor to the American soldiers who stopped a gunman on a train.

The soldiers’ act was unquestionably a brave one, but no braver than a hundred others that must have happened during the year.

Previously Hollande, in an act which resembled parody, awarded the Legion of Honor to four victims of an attack on a Paris grocery store. His response came close to making the award meaningless: find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, get shot by mindless gunmen, and suddenly you are elevated to secular sainthood.

After all, violent acts and murders do happen regularly. I cannot recall another instance in which the corpses of a murderer’s victims were elevated to national heroes. If that were the practice in the United States, with 25,000 murders a year, the factory couldn’t keep up with minting medals.

Of course, in both these instances Hollande is playing up to the ridiculous, deliberately exaggerated fears of terror, relentlessly promoted by the United States, and that is their distinguishing, common feature.

In this last one, the train incident, he also flatters those whom he has served with such cringing, dog-like loyalty, the Americans.

My God, how low France has fallen from the days of de Gaulle.

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Response to a further comment about why there is so much violence:

 

A certain percent of all human beings, everywhere and always, is mentally unbalanced, including such conditions as psychopathy. That’s just a biological fact, much as saying a certain percent of any population is born blind or lame or with various degenerative diseases.

I suspect the proportion of such people is not wildly different over time, although, of course, the world’s ever-increasing population yields an ever-greater absolute number of mentally ill people.

What has changed in the contemporary world for sure are the unbelievable quantities of deadly weapons available. They are everywhere, in the millions. And why is that the case? Because the United States pushes them (yes, including AK-47s and other weapons not of American origin) out like products from an assembly line to destabilize places in dozens of locations where it is unhappy about either a government’s position on American policy or about a people trying to topple a tyrannical government that America just happens to favor. Examples of the former include Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and dozens of others, while examples of the latter include Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt.

Many of these weapons stay around for a lifetime. The most vivid case of this recently was perhaps in Libya. The CIA and others pumped weapons into the place to destabilize Gadhafi. When he was gone, the CIA was back trying to round up some of the vast quantities left in the chaotic country to ship to the madmen they had set up to topple still another government they dislike, that of Syria. It was in that covert operation that an American ambassador was killed at Benghazi, an example of intelligence blowback and an incident never explained because America didn’t want to advertise the facts behind it.

In the process of so much aggression and destabilization, the press is filled day after day with stories arousing all kinds of powerful emotions in millions of people. Just think of the people of Gaza being slaughtered by hi-tech American weapons supplied to Israel in fleet-loads, or of people of Yemen being slaughtered by the same American weapons supplied to the absolute kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a place where the ISIS scare tactic of public beheading is just the day-in, day-out normal practice of government. Just think of the madman running Turkey who secretly ships the same American weapons to terror groups destroying Syria while offering refuge to the cowardly monsters as may be required.

Just think of the horrors of millions of migrants in the press today – all of them a direct effect of America’s various acts in places from Syria to Libya. Those tidal waves of human suffering are tearing many societies apart as well as individuals.

You cannot expect an international society of laws unless you yourself are willing to respect the rule of law.

Nothing could be clearer than that the United States is not willing to live by the rule of law, although it unfailingly pays lip-service to it. In Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Ukraine, and a dozen other places, America is manufacturing misery and oppression on a gigantic scale. And all of the exaggerated stuff about terror keeps citizens intimidated from raising their voices. And of course some of that “terror” is just the legitimate response of oppressed and frustrated people made to appear mindless by America’s relentless propaganda.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Tzipi Livni is a war criminal, plain and simple.

Indeed, she is no different to some of the old Nazis we sometimes see put on trial for killing a thousand people or even a few hundred.

She was instrumental in Israel’s slaughter of 1400 people in Gaza, including about 400 children.

Of course, that horror came only a short time after 1400 were slaughtered in Southern Lebanon, and a ghastly minefield of cluster bombs deposited over a huge area of the country.
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“In 1967 Israel launched a pre-emptive attack only AFTER it became KNOWN that the Arabs were about to launch a war of EXTERMINATION against Israel. I think this fact alone demonstrates the way in which you distort history. Tell me, are you under the impression that the tiny country of Israel provoked a war which wouldn’t have otherwise happened against all its Arab neighbours in the face of their overwhelming military superiority? Did they do this for a laugh do you think?”

No, it is the writer who does not understand history.

Israel engineered the 1967 war. We have that from some world-eminent sources, including the late Charles de Gaulle.

Even Israeli historian Avi Schlaim hints at this in his
monumental history of Israel’s first half century of foreign policy.

And the Arabs most assuredly did not have “overwhelming military superiority.” Israel did, with its front-line American weapons and ferocious training. The Arab countries were pitifully disorganized, and Israel knew this since it has the best intelligence in the Mideast. It really was a low-stakes gamble for a very big prize.

The prize, clearly, was the West Bank and Jerusalem, which more than forty years later Israel still holds in bondage. Indeed, a process of slow-motion ethnic-cleansing of these places has been active for decades.

Israel even tried to embroil the US into the war by the sinking of the USS Liberty, an American spy ship in the Mediterranean, hoping to pass it off as an Egyptian effort.

It has never explained that near-sinking in which dozens of American sailors were slaughtered in an extremely well-marked ship, a ship that the lead Israeli pilot made a low pass over – and was waved at by crew members – just before the relentless two-hour attack.

We also have it on good authority that Israel killed hundreds of Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai after they had surrendered, just so prisoners wouldn’t slow their progress.

Some ally.