John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

Kerry says the United States is sending fifty (special forces) troops to fight ISIS?

Fifty stinking troops? That surely is a joke.

But fifty troops to assist and advise ISIS and sister terror organizations such as al-Nusra, that makes some sense.

And since special forces use sabotage and covert operations, it is likely they would be involved in attacking Syrian infrastructure to help make the lives of Syrians still more miserable. After all, America’s jets, supposedly fighting ISIS, have in fact bombed targets such as Syrian power plants. The troops can serve as target spotters. That too makes some sense if you have the kind of twisted goals America has.

Or the fifty troops could form a human shield around some of America’s hardworking terrorist-mercenaries against Russian bombing, that too makes sense.

Of course, there is the overlooked fact that Russia works in cooperation with, and at the invitation of, the government of Syria. The United States does not, conveniently having declared with the wave of the imperial hand that longstanding government, known to be supported by a majority of its people, to be illegitimate.

How convenient, but its troops remain, no matter how small the number, simply invaders, and the United States violates international law putting them there. But international law has never hindered the United States or its Middle East colony (aka, Israel) when either of them wanted to do something.

What is it exactly that these invaders would advise and assist in?

Bringing down the legitimate government of Syria. It can’t be anything else because that is the mission of the very people they are assisting and shielding.

Now, if that isn’t being involved in “the civil war”, what is?

Kerry just keeps going in circles, but that is precisely the path of American foreign policy.

Just using that term, “civil war,” is ridiculous because it is not a civil war.

It is an invasion by terrorists, secretly assisted by Kerry’s government and some of its allies to remove a leader they do not like and reduce yet another peaceful country to what America produced in Libya and Iraq.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Israel plays this prisoner-release game every time the U.S. manages to push it, once again, into negotiations. I’m amazed people don’t yawn en masse at the announcements.

Each time they play the game, mainline news media give Israel endless positive coverage, as though something significant or hopeful were happening.

But Israel holds many thousands of Palestinians in prisons, including some very young people and people guilty of no crime, so the release of a couple of dozen is virtually meaningless.

And since these particular prisoners are ones convicted of crimes but nearing the end of long sentences, a slightly early release is truly meaningless: it is what happens in the prison system of every Western nation.

The amount of publicity garnered by this paltry act – day after day in all the big-name papers – couldn’t be bought for a billion dollars.

So why do we hear endlessly about nothing as though it were something?

It is only one more stark proof of the inordinate influence of Israel and its apologists have over our sources of information.

These “peace talks” will go nowhere, just as countless others in the past have gone nowhere.

Why is that?

The obvious harsh truth is that Israel does not want, and never has wanted, peace as anyone outside Israel understands it.

Israel wants more land, minus its undesirable Arabic people, and it has had a long, slow process of ethnic-cleansing going on for decades. Just look at the announcement of still more settlements in the West Bank and the ugly manipulations underway in East Jerusalem to separate people from property they’ve owned for centuries. None of it anything less than legalized theft of the property of others who are forced to live under Israeli rule with absolutely no rights.

There is a fundamental truth to human history, and that is that tyranny and abuse ultimately fail. They succeed for a while – the Soviet Union had a run of ninety years – but it is impossible to maintain such a repressive regime indefinitely.

Here is Israel going through the motions yet again of negotiating, only this time it negotiates with an unelected Palestinian, Abbas, the U.S. has propped up in office because of his compliant nature, one moreover who does not even pretend to rule the Palestinians of Gaza.

Peace will come only when the U.S. gets tough with Israel and stops subsidizing and protecting its brutality, and I suspect that will never happen.

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Note that a new law has been proposed in Israel. This law would allow Israel to seize the property of all “non-resident” Palestinians who own land in East Jerusalem (Arabic in population for centuries), Palestinians who happen to have their primary residence in the West Bank or Gaza.

It is the equivalent of the state of Florida proposing a law to seize all the condos and vacation properties of people who live in the other forty-nine states. It is actually worse than that because Israel as illegal occupier has no right in international law to legislate such matters over the heads of Palestinians.

Apart from the bitter irony of such a law – after all, Jews are supposed to have left what was Israel two thousand years ago, and you cannot get more “absentee” than that – it is extremely difficult to understand how property-worshipping Americans can stomach such rigged legislation.

Of course, the American mainline press carries virtually no mention of the proposal.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

Mr. Richler,

I am ashamed our government has sent these brave resisters back. What a difference the spineless Harper from Trudeau who stood up to American arrogance, making sure resisters could find a home in Canada.

The sentiment and direction of your article are fine, but there are factual errors and important points to be added.

First, the Vietnam era draft was not fair: the lottery was only put in later in the war after a great deal of bad public feeling. Do you not recall, for example, the line in the powerful Creedence Clearwater Revival song, “I’m not a Senator’s son”?

The local draft boards, appointed political entities, had absolute control over whether someone’s drafting was exempted (as a Senator’s son) or indeed expedited (as a punishment used for certain classes of individuals).

If you were expedited, you could take it to the Supreme Court, so long as you had a few years and a million dollars to do it. Eventually, someone did, and the practice was ruled out, but only after most of the war.

Even under the lottery, privilege counted. A rich guy like Al Gore went and did journalism at headquarters. Do you think they would have sent him to the dark parts of the jungle? A rich guy like John Kerry went, gung-ho for a war reputation, but only for a quick dash of four months on a boat, months spent shooting peasants in the fields from a safe distance and collecting a row of medals as political bona fides.

Another important exemption for the rich and influential – under the pre-lottery draft or after – was the National Guard. Joining the National Guard exempted you from the draft, and your chances of seeing combat in the Guard were close to zero.

The trouble was, you could not possibly get in. I remember trying, and I remember a friend trying. It was impossible.

But a guy like George Bush got right in. Then he didn’t even bother to fulfill his obligation there, being a poor attendee to required meetings and eventually going AWOL. The records for his disappearing – he moved from one state to another and never reported in again – have conveniently disappeared. Money and influence count.

Still another method for the privileged to avoid service was university attendance. Many went to graduate school, often in bird subject like theology, and so long as you were a full time student, you were exempted. A whole generation of prominent Republicans, gung-ho on war, followed this practice. They are called chicken hawks in the U.S.

Poor kids, of course, did not in most cases have the opportunity to go to university for 6 or 7 years. This method also protected the so-called “legacy students” at places like Harvard or Yale: these are mediocrities of well-off families (like Bush) who could never have attended on merit, but who are not only admitted but given an automatic pass in hopes of a big endowment contribution from a grateful family. A disgusting practice indeed, even today, but a fact.

No matter what the system, something on the order of a quarter of the grunts in Vietnam were black, blacks at the time only constituting somewhere between 10 and 12% of general population.

Today, under the volunteer system, America bribes the poor with very substantial promises of education assistance, making college or university possible for those who would otherwise find it difficult. The net effect remains an overwhelming preponderance of poor kids lured in, then trapped in an ugly colonial war like Iraq.