John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO THE GUARDIAN ON AN ARTICLE SUGGESTING WHAT GALLIPOLI TEACHES US ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR

Gallipoli was a terrible blunder, a pet project of the same Winston Churchill who gave the world more than his fair share of arrogant ideas and barbarities, including, later, the first mass bombings of German cities, well before Hitler’s bombings.

Churchill was always an advocate of imperialism and plenty of “backbone in war” stuff, and he was fond of referring to Germans as “Huns.”

Yet his is a seemingly benign and heroic figure in history. You can’t help emotionally responding to some of his eloquent speeches and old news photos even now.

Chamberlain, a genuinely decent man in many respects who wanted to avoid a repeat of the Western Front’s unbelievable horror just 20 years later, comes down to us as a somewhat disreputable figure, in no small measure because of the contempt heaped upon him by Churchill.

The word appeasement was used and has since become a favorite insult from the ignorant Right Wing which virtually always wants war and more war.

Of course the entire set of horrors and issues around the Second World War wouldn’t exist had not Britain entered the completely pointless First World War, one its chief cheerleaders for doing so being Churchill. The only outcome of a German victory in 1914 would have been a European Continent dominated by Germany, which is exactly what we have anyway today. But Churchill’s love of British imperialism could not stand the thought of that.

I shouldn’t say “the only outcome” because the other result, an even larger one, of Germany’s success in 1914 would have been no Hitler, no World War II, no invasion of Russia with 27 million killed, and no Holocaust.

People are so easily swayed by emotional words and appealing faces, and they lose the rational aspect of their minds to the rhetoric and backstage lever-pulling of men like Churchill. Democratic politics frequently yields to the superficial charm and secret deadliness of psychopathic personalities. Witness the recent examples of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Tony Blair – all with their smiles and murders and plots possessing varying degrees of psychopathy, to a certainty.

The smarmy Tony Blair years later dedicated all his talents to making an illegal and unnecessary invasion, which we now know killed a million people, seem reasonable and morally right.

He was rewarded afterwards by immense wealth, having served the interests of immensely wealthy people, while the poor people of Iraq were left a disgusting mess of broken infrastructure, no reliable water and power, poisons and explosives everywhere, millions of refugees, no jobs, no hopes, and constant ripples of violence.

Large parts of our people still respond like murderous chimps thumping their chests at the right words put in their ears by the establishment through figures like Churchill and Blair.

I don’t see the author’s suggestions as helpful, and I don’t see any corrective for the foreseeable future. The ugly system we have works for those with power and influence, and it will keep right on working. Only the most fundamental changes in our political institutions offer any hope, and that only far into the future, if ever.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ALEXANDER HIGGINS IN HIS BLOG

No, the true toll is tens of thousands of Afghans, not to mention the Pakistanis now being killed.

One could throw in the million dead Iraqis since the Afghan adventure was used as an excuse for that adventure.

Americans tend always to measure the impact of their wars by the number of Americans killed.

That is neither accurate nor ethical.

How many times did we hear about the 60-odd thousand Americans killed in Vietnam?

And it was the rate of those deaths which ended the war.

But the real toll was 3 million Vietnamese killed, many horribly, millions made homeless, an ancient society torn apart, and a sea of Agent Orange and landmines left to kill and maim for decades.

You could fairly add, too, the horrors of Cambodia, for America’s incursions and secret bombing were responsible for the neutral government’s fall. America is doing much the same today in Pakistan.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED COMMENTS TO A COLUMN BY NEIL REYNOLDS IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

From another reader:

“It [the US] talked Israel into letting Hamas contest Palestinian elections.”

‘The results of which, when Hamas won, were ignored by both Israel and the US, leaving Abbas in power more than two years after his term officially ended.’

Yes, and further, Mark Shore, Israel’s secret service is well known to have helped Hamas in its early days.

It wanted an opponent for Fatah, so that we would end up with the very kind of mess we have.

I am sure in doing so, Israel never once regarded Hamas as a potential dangerous enemy, and it most definitely is not dangerous today.

The “terrorist” bit is a fraud which serves Israel’s larger purpose of keeping the Palestinians divided and politically ineffective while Israel slowly continues to absorb more of other people’s property.
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A number of readers have looked at my article of some years ago, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour.”

I encourage others to do so because it convincingly puts the lie to people like Neil Reynolds and their facile, dishonest generalizations.

Since I wrote it, the assessment for the damage to Iraq has only grown. One scientifically-sound study put it at over half a million deaths, and another at about a million.

There have been more than two million refugees (that glorious bastion of democracy, the U. S., having refused to take any of them). Even today, huge numbers are unemployed and the basic services still do not operate dependably. A generation of people has no chance to make a better life in a country which once had great promise.

Quite an achievement, that.

Needless to say the U.S. has always kept quiet, except for the most innocuous remarks. It never reveals the horrors it has created, just as in the First Gulf War, the bodies of tens of thousands of poor Iraqi conscripts who were forced to sit in sand dunes while being carpet-bombed by B-52s were bulldozed into the ground. No numbers were ever given.

You’ll find the essay at:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/hiroshima-mon-amour/

Readers may also enjoy:

“Favorite Contradictions and Absurdities Concerning the War in Iraq”:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/favorite-contradictions-and-absurdities-concerning-war-in-iraq/

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Good God, here is a column delivered directly from Cloudcuckooland.

Indeed, George Bush is a war criminal.

He also was ready to sign off on any repressive measure at home that came along.

His vice-president, another war criminal and on whom he depended heavily, is surely one of blackest characters in modern American history- a man we easily imagine as a henchman for Hitler or Stalin.

Iraq was not about democracy, and truly only a badly uninformed person or a propagandist would say that it was.

I very much suspect Mr Reynolds of being the latter.

Iraq was about dumping Israel’s most implacable enemy, about dumping a former American friend who no longer followed the imperial line and had become quite an inconvenience, and, way down there on the level of the mysteries of human psychology, Iraq was about pathetic George Bush trying to outdo his always more intelligent and successful father.

What Bush did in Iraq was the equivalent of having used a nuclear weapon on civilians.

Please see my piece, Hiroshima, Mon Amour:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/hiroshima-mon-amour/

Neil Reynolds, it actually is rather disgusting that someone living in the freedom and comfort of Canada could write this intellectual filth.
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From another reader:

“Canada…peopled by intellectual midgets…”

My, that certainly is testimony of high intellectual achievement on the writer’s part.

I do believe, when you call names to an entire group of people, it is called prejudice.

It certainly reflects ignorance.

And we may add further, using a pseudonym, adds cowardice to the writer’s list of illustrious qualities.
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From another reader:

“Much is made of Israeli democracy.

“But Israel is only a democracy because its democracy hasn’t been challenged.

“Israelis would not contemplate submitting to an Arab majority, so Israel isn’t really a democracy at all. Its constitution is increasingly interpreted to exclude the possibility.”

Yes, but there’s even more on the issue of democracy.

One likes to believe that a genuine democracy also applies democratic principles abroad.

Yet nothing could be further from that concept than Israel’s practices.

It behaves like a muscle-bound bully towards all its neighbors and is friendly only to tyrants like Mubarak who assist its narrowly-defined interests.

We have countless examples of this anti-democratic behavior, but its ghastly behavior towards Gaza over the last four years is a breathtaking example.

Yes, Israel resembles apartheid South Africa in its “Bantustan” policies. People with sterling credentials on the subject have called Israel’s practices apartheid – Bishop Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and Jimmy Carter.

And while we’re speaking of South Africa, let no one forget Israel’s secret deals with that state concerning atomic weapons. Simply ghastly.

Israel’s apologists are addicted to name-calling when anyone points out these egregious abuses of human rights, decades and decades of them.

But is one to give up all principles, all concern for justice and fair-play for fear of being called names?

I think not. It is precisely in such matters where we can define those who love freedom and those who only mouth empty words.
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The bottom line regarding Israel and democratic values is easily stated, without name-calling and citing only facts.

What kind of democracy kills 1400 people in a giant, fenced-in refugee camp, which is what Gaza is?

What kind of democracy kills between 300 and 400 hundred children as part of that horror?

What kind of democracy carefully calculates the just above-starvation level of calories and then enforces a blockade – illegal to be sure – to keep only that level of sustenance going across the border?

What kind of a democracy attacks an unarmed flotilla of humanitarians on the high seas, killing a number of them and terrifying the rest?

What kind of democracy drops countless cluster bombs in civilian areas of Southern Lebanon?

What kind of a democracy targets UN observers bravely doing their jobs and kills them?

What kind of democracy weekly steals more of the property of others in the West Bank and Jerusalem, using the contrived laws to do so?

What kind of democracy assassinates, assassinates, and assassinates – instead of talking to people?

As I’ve written before, we can only be grateful there are not more such democracies in the Middle East.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

This is a celebrity circus, not a debate and certainly not any kind of intellectual event. It is pseudo-intellectual nonsense posing as significant discussion.

Religion is the opposite of logic, and centuries ago philosophers discovered that you cannot argue with logic about religious matters.

The Munk Debates might just as well be an arm of Garth Drabinsky Showboat Enterprises.

The two people involved, while celebrities indeed, are both people who have done no service to humanity.

Blair is a war criminal, pure and simple, and a kind of nasty idiot to boot.

Hitchens is a very clever, eloquent man but one who worked hard to make the criminal invasion of Iraq seem acceptable.

There really is a special place in hell for each of these gentlemen.
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How easily we forget that the history of organized Christianity provides almost certainly the bloodiest tale in all of human history.

The Crusades, that dark saga of Christianity written in blood and terror, continued sporadically over hundreds of years. They served little other purpose than gathering wealth through spoils and sacking cities and easing the periodic domestic political difficulties of the papacy and major princes of Europe.

We hear of the treatment of women under Islam in certain places, not remembering that Christian women were left locked in iron chastity belts for years while their husbands raped their way across the Near East. And the character of Saladin, hard warrior that he was, shines nobly in history compared to the moral shabbiness of Richard Lionheart.

Europe wove a remarkable tapestry of horrors in the name of Christianity from the beginning of the modern era. There was the Holy Inquisition, the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, the English Civil War, the St Bartholomew Massacre, Cromwell’s slaughter in Ireland, the enslavement and widespread extermination of native peoples in the Americas, the Eighty Years’ War in Holland, the expulsion of the Huguenots from France, the pogroms, the burning of witches, and numberless other horrific events right down to The Holocaust itself, which was largely the work of people who considered themselves, as did the slave drivers of America’s South, to be Christians.

Over and above the conflicts motivated by religion, European and American history, a history dominated by people calling themselves Christian, runs with rivers, lakes, and whole seas of blood. Just a sampling includes the Hundred Years’ War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years’ War, the slave trade, the French Revolution, the Vendée, the Napoleonic Wars, the Trail of Tears, the Opium War, African slavery in the American South, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the massacre in the Belgium Congo, the Crimean War, lynchings, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ANDREW MALONE IN THE DAILY MAIL

This is an excellent article, and the witness is totally convincing. Her knowledge of Dr. Kelly’s physical disabilities and the fact that she conveyed what she knew early in the investigation to British police are important tests of her believability.

I have long thought Kelly was murdered, the general nature of the situation in which he was found having only the most superficial plausibility, but the idea that agents of Tony Blair’s government did it always seemed ridiculous.

Cui bono?

It is difficult to imagine a more likely candidate than Israel’s secret service.

First, the Iraq invasion was endangered by Dr. Kelly’s expert knowledge and willingness to talk.

Second, he had demonstrated his willingness to talk in his BBC experience, something which generated frustrating and unsatisfactory results.

Third, we well know Israel assassinates those with whom it strongly disagrees regularly, and this has included other scientific figures, notably Canadian Gerald Bull, a world authority on big guns who had worked for Hussein.

Fourth, the Iraq invasion was not about oil nor was it about tyranny. It was about Israel and the perceived need by the American establishment to eliminate Israel’s most implacable foe.

Israel was the great beneficiary of the invasion.

Fifth, the method likely used resembles methods used by Mossad, as in its recent murder of Mahmoud al Mabhouh in Abu Dhabi, who was heavily restrained while being injected, with his room being set as though nothing out of the ordinary happened. There, great effort was made to make the event look natural. So too in the case of Yasser Arafat, who was likely poisoned by Israeli agents.