JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY DOUG SAUNDERS IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

“Mr. Putin’s Potemkin-village politics…”

Sorry, there’s almost no thought or analysis in this column.

Just how, in any way, do Putin’s photo-ops differ from what we experience?

Virtually every headline in our major news sources is synthetic.

And our leaders turn virtually one-hundred-and-eighty degrees once they’re in office after an election, often doing precisely what they condemned.

The truth is that Putin is exceptionally intelligent and energetic, and that alone marks him out from many of our leaders.

He has flaws, but are you telling me that our PM, who was held in contempt of Parliament and has lied to us countless times about large or small things and is known for a furious private temper, does not?

And if you want photo-ops even more faked up than Putin’s look to Harper in a parka up north.

He puts on periodic shows to earn nationalist credentials even while he’s busy negotiating away a great deal of Canada’s sovereignty to Americans, the only people who are a serious threat to both northern sovereignty and the Great Lakes.

And the stuff about revolutions is utter nonsense.

Genuine revolutions, like the French or the Russian, virtually never succeed over time. The French had the monarchy back in no time, as did the Russians under a different name.

Revolutions like that in America are often successful, but then they aren’t correctly called revolutions at all. The so-called American Revolution was only a revolt of the locals against foreign lordship and indeed a very conservative event, leaving such godawful institutions as slavery a thriving concern. It basically saw a small group of petty American aristocrats – Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, slaveholders all – replace a group of foreign aristocrats.

And it is a fact that America wasn’t anything like a democracy after its “revolution.” The Senate was appointed until 1913. The President was not elected by the popular vote, but by the propertied aristocrats admitted to the Electoral College. The Supreme made no effort at all to enforce the Bill of Rights – for a very long time, it was only a high-sounding and empty statement of principles, what you might call green-wash.

Blacks, of course, could not vote (effectively not until the 1960s). Women could not vote (not until 1921). Most white males could not vote because they did not own enough property to qualify.

America took about two centuries to become something vaguely resembling a democracy, and even now it has a government within the government – the military, intelligence, security establishment serving giant corporate interests.

Look at America’s recent experience to understand the role of the government within a government.

Bush was likely the most ill-informed and bad-intentioned person ever to be president, and he wasn’t even cleanly elected. Then the people elected a man who sometimes wore sandals, didn’t immediately wear an American-flag pin on his lapel, and taught Constitutional law. After less than three years, you would not know in almost any important detail that Bush was not still president.
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All genuine democracies develop slowly – that is a salient fact of European and North American history.

Always, we first have aristocrats or lords or family compacts – always.

Then through the gradual growth of the middle class under steady economic growth, a large class with substantial resources emerges who do not see their interests being represented by the aristocrats or family compact members.

Then we see a gradual change in political institutions to accommodate the new sizable and growing middle class. The process takes different forms in different countries, owing to cultural and historical circumstances, but it always takes this general pattern.

The same is underway in Russia. At least Putin represents a rather enlightened aristocrat to guide the nation through some of its most tender years. Yeltsin, who blubbered about democracy, was a helpless buffoon and a constant drunk.

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

In case anyone missed the fact, the Taleban need never have been an enemy.

None of them were involved in 9/11.

A bunch of Saudis were.

The Taleban are not the kind of people we like to see ruling anywhere in the world, but they are no worse than the members of the Northern Alliance who fought America’s ground invasion, supported by carpet bombing, and now serve as governors and officials all over Afghanistan.

And they are no worse than various fundamentalist groups which predominate in many corners of the world, including places like India or South America and great parts of Africa in their treatment of women and lack of regard for modern human rights.

The U.S. did not go to war over human rights, it never has done so in all its endless wars since WWII.  It went there for other reasons, not completely clear, and it manipulatively used the plight of women there as truth-based propaganda, the most effective kind, to win over American soccer moms for the war, and the tactic worked beautifully.

It was not even the Taleban who first invited bin Laden to find refuge in Afghanistan, but when they threw out the various warring groups of the Northern Alliance (after the Russians were gone), they allowed him to stay. The Taleban originally was an alliance for the Afghan idea of clean government, and they did end a great deal of corruption and drug business.

After 9/11, the U.S. tried to extradite bin Laden. The Taleban government asked for some evidence of his guilt, a normal procedure in extraditions everywhere in the world. The U.S. refused in a huff.

So the U.S. used its immense leverage at the UN, where half the nations are in its pay and the other half fear its wrath, to get the invasion covered by a UN resolution-fig leaf. Everyone was also motivated to go along emotionally in the wake of 9/11.

All the NATO countries serving as allies have only given relatively token efforts to the U.S. cause. A few thousand troops here and there, many not even in fighting roles, is not a serious commitment. NATO countries have always appeared to know something that the general public does not.

That is not how nations act when there is a genuine threat of world importance, as the U.S. always insists there is. But that is how nations act when avoiding American reprisals and providing it with the fig-leaf fiction of a coalition.

Yet after each horrific bombing – in which thousands of innocents have been killed over ten years – we read “the coalition forces bombed this or that.” In almost all cases, that should read, the U.S. bombed this or that. And now the “this or that” includes Pakistan in a big way. Many hundreds of civilians have been killed in what are, in every respect, high-tech versions of death-squad murders by South American juntas.

I believe the U.S. carried off this murderous enterprise almost solely for vengeance – “We gonna show ya’ll can’t do that to ‘merica!” Never underestimate the reservoir of anger and vindictiveness in America’s belly-over-the-belt, flag-waving crowd – people who are in many cases just generally angry with the way things are going in their lives.

Once in there, America really did not know what to do because the place is a snakepit of tribalism and bloodfeuds and ancient customs.

It has all been a terrible, terrible waste.

I do wish the Nobel Committee could take back its Peace Prize from the charming, intelligent man whose hands are now covered with blood.

One thing Obama has proved is how little elections matter anymore in America. Except for the lack of laughable, stupid statements, you really wouldn’t know Bush wasn’t still president.

The War Machine can work with anyone.