John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MIKE WHITNEY IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“There Is No Russian-Saudi Oil War, it’s a US-Saudi War Because the US Can’t/Won’t Cut Production”

“Everyone else cuts production, everyone else sees their revenues shrink, and everyone else pitches-in to put a floor under prices. Everyone except the “exceptional” American oil producers from the exceptional United States. They don’t have to do a damn thing.”

 

Sharing the cuts is indeed a reasonable expectation to have, but when was the last time anyone observed the US doing anything reasonable?

“They don’t care about anyone but themselves.” That could readily serve as the official motto for the country.

The irony is Americans act the same way internally towards their own people in many matters. Outside observers perhaps don’t see that so much, but it is a reality of America.

That’s why there is no healthcare system. That’s why there are so many appalling slums and ghettos. That’s why American primary public education is so weak that in tests, kids in poor little Cuba beat American scores. That’s why American police kill an average of three Americans per day. And that’s why the political system is totally corrupt and serves only the interests of the wealthy.

This is not a nation which cooperates. It is not a nation which shares. And, the truth is, it is not a nation that gives a damn about almost anything.

Part of the true spirit of America was captured in the often-repeated angry words, “Love it or leave it!” yelled at peace demonstrators during the long bloody, pointless Vietnam War.

We have seen many examples of that spirit in the current crises. Everything from keeping sick people in poor countries under severe sanctions to literally seizing medical supplies belonging to other countries. Delaying crucial decisions and arguing with everyone, blundering and lying, America’s leadership has shown no leadership, even to its own people. And no cooperation with others, more concerned about the dark factions that will play a role in its re-election than doing the right things for hundreds of millions of people.

The current crises put America on show as never before for all the world to see. The new perceptions will get built into future global arrangements.

Old Hollywood fantasy notions about America are drying up and blowing away like so much topsoil in the 1930s Dust Bowl.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN TRUTHNEWS

 

“The disturbing truth about the UK’s special relationship with Israel [Theresa May’s insipid effort to mention Israel’s extreme Gaza violence to a visiting Netanyahu]”

 

This cozy, ethics-free British relationship with Israel has been a fact at least since Tony Blair’s day. It actually goes back further – Churchill was a great promoter of Israeli interests, Churchill, the great pretender on democratic values, was always ready to do any dirty deal he thought would help secure Britain’s Empire – but Blair gave the whole business new life and impulse in our time.

One of the chief aspects of Blair’s “New Labour” rebranding of the old Labour Party was just such a relationship with Britain’s Israel lobby, although you will never find that openly discussed in the press. But you could see it clearly in Blair’s actions.

Just as in the United States – a place where the practices are even more flagrant, perhaps because politics there is so openly and completely steeped in money – the rewards for politicians coming to such arrangements are generous. There is generous campaign funding, favorable mainline press treatment (plus the avoidance of its opposite, embarrassing or demeaning treatment), and the assistance of talented individuals associated with the lobby on various political problems and projects over time.

It’s a pretty attractive package which finds a lot of takers, the only price being that you leave behind any sense of fairness concerning the people of the Middle East and that you simply ignore endless brutality and oppression by the state of Israel. You must have a tough hide, as they say.

Since it is simply a fact that high-level politics, as a career, tends to attract narcissistic personalities and even sociopathic ones – and there is no better, clearer example than Tony Blair – the more normal range of human emotions and sympathies and moral concerns play very little role.

Blair joined the illegal and highly destructive Iraq invasion because the Israel lobby strongly favored it. He simply ignored the rest of the world, including the UN where the matter had been debated and rejected, and made a compact with the devil in the form of the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush presidency to launch an illegal invasion.

He accepted the fraudulent American-produced “evidence” about weapons of mass destruction, added still more of his own by pressuring security services to do what it is security services do, lie and cheat for an end, and ignored what all the experts in weapons inspection were telling us in public, that there were no such weapons. The invasion was effectively for the direct benefit of Israel, never mind all the disinformation at the time about oil.

Afterwards, Blair was rewarded, for his help in killing a million people and destroying a modern society for at least a generation, with the Israel “Peace” Prize of a million dollars plus a number of lucrative sinecures and favors.

And Blair remains at the forefront of the attack against Jeremy Corbyn’s current leadership of the Labour Party, a massive attack which has tended to center on totally specious grounds of accommodating anti-Semitism in the Party’s ranks. There’s been a genuine Joe McCarthy-style witch hunt in Britain, and at length, around that subject.

The truth is, I believe, Corbyn is much disliked by Israel and its lobby in Britain because, one, he is a genuine liberal, something always mistrusted and even hated in Israel, and, two, he is fair-minded about the Israel-Palestine horror.

You really aren’t allowed to be “fair-minded” where Israel is concerned. The undercurrent on that subject always reminds of the brutal ugliness in the United States at the time of its Vietnam holocaust, that last a word well justified by the fact that the United States killed, often in the most horrible fashion, about three million people there, was further instrumental in the killing of another million in Cambodia, and left behind a truly hellish legacy of landmines and soil drenched with agent Orange.

But “Love it or leave it!” “My country, right or wrong!” “The Reds are at the gates!” was what you heard shouted in the streets of America as all that got underway.

David Cameron and Theresa May certainly have never even pretended to be fair-minded about the Middle East or ever raised any difficulties over the most destructive American policies and practices there.

By the way, Britain, under these last two national leaders, has been covertly and deeply involved in yet another Israel-related project, the destruction of Syria by mercenary armies posing as jihadis, the use of disguised mercenaries being a lot cheaper and less risky than mounting a massive traditional invasion as was done in Iraq.

The inaccurately-described Syrian Civil War has been, from the beginning, a covert project of the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Britain, France, and, originally, Turkey.

Again, the war’s purpose has been to destroy a country whose leadership did not toe the line of American policy in the Middle East, especially where it concerns Israel. You are not allowed to be independent-minded, and you are not allowed to say that your own country has interests which American policy takes no account of. Never mind the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the millions of refugees created, the destabilization of Europe by refugee floods, and the vast destruction in a truly beautiful and historic land.

Britain has lied steadily for half a dozen years about what it has been doing in Syria, and May maintains the same line.

France, too, has always lied about its role in Syria. Macron and Hollande both have displayed almost embarrassing deference towards Israel’s brutal thug, Netanyahu, while they cooperate in efforts to destroy or dismember Syria.

The various “terror attacks” in Paris were simply “blowback” as a result of France’s destructive participation in Syria, Libya, etc. Such attacks only represent young men trying to get back at a powerful state for its secret organized destruction of their places and relatives and friends. They bear no resemblance to the stories we are fed constantly by our mainline press about terror out of fanatical hatred for Western values and religious intolerance.

Our entire popular concept of terror is a deliberately-promoted construct to support America’s rampage through the Middle East, its Neocon Wars of the last fifteen years, and its unblinking support for an Israel which everyone with eyes can see treats millions of people as less-than-human and with unending brutality.

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Response to a comment, ‘Amazing — Israel can murder people with illegal dumdum bullets and that is just “securing their borders:”’

We literally live in a kind of Twilight Zone where foreign policy and Israel are concerned.

I don’t think there has ever in memory been such gross hypocrisy and open lying.

Standards have hit bottom as the concept of “might makes right” is pretty well openly embraced in the West under American pressure.