JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE GLOBE AND MAIL BY JOHN MOSCOWITZ

Evil is an out-dated, mumbo-jumbo word.

Indeed, it explains nothing, serving only to consign something to a dark corner of extreme disapproval with zero understanding.

The author in using it makes himself slightly ridiculous.

The truth is that this terrible event is one more brutal proof of how unbalanced the human mind can be.

That most complex of organs can suffer from countless faults and errors in its construction, just as simpler organs – hearts, kidneys, and livers – so often suffer from faults in their make-up.

And just as people sometimes have parts of their bodies missing – a hand or a leg – a portion of humanity have key bits of their brains either missing or mangled.

Such an event has no more “meaning” than does a stroke of lightning or a tidal wave killing innocent people.

It is terrible, but life goes on.

But, yes, a society which actually cares for its children would have effective gun laws, knowing such things are going to happen at intervals.

But where is the concern for children in America?

What of the children slaughtered in Gaza? No chest-beating over them. Indeed, Israel gets resupplied with all the bombs and munitions expended to kill Palestinian children.

What of the thousands of Iraqi children killed and mangled by America’s pointless invasion? Thousands more made refugees?

And what of the tens of thousands more murdered by a decade of horrible American sanctions against Hussein?

How many children have Americans killed in Afghanistan?

In Pakistan?

And now in Syria through the weapons and fighters imported into that country to undo its government?

The countless killed in Vietnam and Cambodia in a war to no point?

Indeed, today, the seas of Agent Orange America left behind go right on killing and crippling babies and children. What of them?

If America, that brutal imperial force, cared one whit about children, none of these questions could be raised.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

So they say.

Prove it.

But even then, what really is the Taleban?

It is not a dark terrorist force.

It had nothing to do with 9/11.

But it was, by Afghan standards, a reform political party with a conservative religious affiliation.

The only crime they are guilty of is fighting the invading Americans.

But from America’s establishment point of view, there is no greater crime.

And you must be regarded as one of Stalin’s “wreckers,” the vague word Stalin used when it was time for a bloody purge, working to oppose the benign work of America’s insanely militaristic government.
_________________________________

Again, NATO strike?

These are always, always American strikes.

But America sure loves to hide under the skirts of NATO while doing its dirty work.

And papers like the Globe sadly go along with the fraud, doing their part for America’s beloved Pentagon.

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

How many reporters has the United States killed in its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan?

We know to a certainty that there were cases which closely resemble deliberate murder, as of certain Al Jazeerah reporters and cameramen.

The United States deliberately bombed Al Jazeerah offices in Baghdad, killing three journalists.

One might also ask how many – and there were many – journalists were murdered by juntas like that in Chile or Argentina, regimes the U. S. tolerated, supplied, and supported for years?

How many – and there have been a great many – people have been murdered by Israeli agents on the pretense that they were “militants,” nothing but a fig-leaf term for those who disagree with Israel. Has the U.S. ever called into question this savage way of treating people?

Mullen is a ridiculous hypocrite. He could care less about journalism or free speech or murder of opposition.

His shooting his mouth off in public is nothing but a way to try to put Pakistan’s government on the defensive at a time when it is finally reacting to America’s savage assassinations by means of CIA murder-squads and America’s constant bombing by the drones, a bombing which has killed literally hundreds of innocent civilians.

The United States has become little better than the world’s most heavily armed bully.

____________________

“A country cannot stand on the fence, or take positions of both extremism and counter extremism, and expect to be respected and supported.”

Truly an uninformed comment.

Pakistan is not “stand[ing] on a fence”  (you do mean sitting, don’t you – standing on a fence is pretty much an impossibility) it is reflecting its own national interests.

The United States cares about no one’s interests but its own. Full stop.

Its interests are not the world’s at large, and it is a rather foolish thing to imply they are.

____________________

“And name one country that does not promote self interest?”

I do believe that is clearly implied in my remarks.

If every country reflects its own interests, there is nothing to condemn or disparage in Pakistan, yet we have endless accusations about this or that in Pakistan, mostly the result of the CIA playing what a former senior agent once called his mighty Wurlitzer organ – that is, a set of willing or duped news outlets skillfully manipulated to create a desired impression on the public awareness.

The American view is that its own interests are the world’s interests.

Your comments tacitly assume that falsehood as truth.

The issue at hand, as you oddly put it, is an American military man making a charge about another government – something which in the first place is inappropriate under the supposed American system of the military being the servant of government and not making statements about policies or political matters.

And the military man is a gross hypocrite because he and his government have busied themselves with the murder of many, including journalists – not an unimportant consideration.

Any threat of Pakistan’s sinking into chaos – a much exaggerated notion if you understand the history of Pakistan’s military – is owing entirely to American interference.

Bush virtually threatened Musharraf into cooperation, then followed that up with pets on the head by forgiving debts and letting go of America’s firm policy opposing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

Musharraf was a genuine Pakistani patriot, but Bush’s people turned him into a reluctant servant of American interests.

Ever since, and to a growing extent, America has interfered in Pakistan’s affairs, leaving its government looking weak in the face of bullying and violent attacks.

That is what happened in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. A neutral government, not aligned with America’s self-interested policies, was thrown into instability by massive secret bombings and incursions by American troops.

When the Prince fell, the Khmer Rouge took over. America then washed her hands of all responsibility for the horror which followed, and somewhere between 800,000 and 1.5 million souls perished

When the victorious government of Vietnam – victorious against America’s long intervention in which it killed perhaps 3 million people – interceded to stop the horror (and people today often forget or do not know this) America just idiotically sat back, saying, “See, we told you, the domino theory is true.”.

It is repeating the same stupidity in Pakistan.

Anywhere on the globe, a government seen by its people as allowing another government decide whether hundreds of its own citizens should die in assassinations would be viewed with contempt.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

I just love that expression “alleged militants.”

Almost certainly, the deaths in fact were 18 civilians guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And even if one or two were suspects of some kind, this kind of extra-judicial murder is absolutely indistinguishable from the death squads in South American countries which periodically made people “disappear.”

It reminds me of each time Israel kills a batch of poor Palestinians: they are invariably called “militants” in the press.

It’s called demonizing your victim. It also clearly is a ghastly use of euphemism for extra-judicial mass-murder.

George Orwell would have loved this terrible and deliberate abuse of language in the interests of power.

He wrote about just such things in his wonderful essay, “Politics and the English Language,” an indictment of power that remains as true as the day it was written.

And our truth-loving press seems to think it’s perfectly acceptable to kill “militants” and even “alleged militants.”

In one stroke the press both horribly abuses language and ignores completely its responsibility to inform people.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

It truly is dishonest to always write about “drone attacks.”

Drones don’t attack anyone. Gum-chewing thugs sitting in an office chair at a computer terminal do.

These drones are armed with American Hellfire missiles, the same ones Israel uses when it typically kills a dozen innocent people in a bloody horror trying to get one target, some man who has never been charged or tried or condemned.

The guy at the terminal somewhere in a locked room in the Pentagon basement undoubtedly pumps his arm as the missile explodes, killing God knows who.

Then he goes out for some lunch in Georgetown.

Disgusting.

An absolute lack of ethics, only praised by the apologists for Israel’s bloody excesses.

Misery likes company, and the same goes for miserable criminal behavior.

_________________

Carrying the Olympic Torch would sure be a suitable suggestion, although I doubt the writer making this suggestion even understands why.

Few Canadians seem aware that the Olympic Torch relay was invented for the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, invented by no less a figure than Doctor Joseph Goebbels to distract world attention in a very controversial Olympics from the stuff going on in Germany.

Yet we blindly carry on this stupid marketing scheme as though it were a hallowed tradition.

And we get brainless suggestions like this one concerning it.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Nothing is at stake in Afghanistan.

That is, except for American pride in once more having invaded a country, killed a great many people and achieved nothing.

America didn’t know what it was doing from the beginning, and it still does not know.

But it sure knows how to kill people, and the American establishment is always ready to do more killing and bombing rather than be embarrassed at its own foolishness.

It chewed up human beings in Vietnam for ten years to no purpose whatsoever beyond regard for its own violent and stupid pride.

No one else regards Afghanistan as a serious threat, else why are NATO countries constantly browbeaten by American officials into making larger commitments?

The facts of Afghanistan are rather simple if you open your mind to them.

It is not a democracy – never was and still is not – and you can never create a democracy at the barrel of a gun. Moreover, America’s own problematic claim to genuine democratic government makes it among the least suitable of instructors.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest regions on earth, affording only a hard-scrabble existence to most of its people – it always has been poor and it remains so. America has done almost nothing to turn around its economy for a brighter future, but it sure has killed a lot of people and created a lot of damage.

Like all poor, backward countries, Afghanistan remains prisoner of ancient customs not understood by modern societies, and nothing, except long-term serious economic growth, America can do will change that.

Consider even a healthily growing third-world country like India. It still has bride burning, forced marriage, and horrid treatment of widows, plus many other ghastly ancient customs it will not shake until after generations of growth.

Imagine going to 17th century Spain and telling the people they must give up the Holy Inquisition, Jews and Arabs must be tolerated as full members of society, and nuns must stop wearing hideous gigantic habits? To pose the question is to know the answer.

How much more so Afghanistan?

The warlords that now are deemed the government of Afghanistan are, most of them, no better than the Taleban in terms of modern values. Horrible acts continue all over the country, and the burka is still worn in most of the country. Some, like General Dostum, are nothing but mass murders.

Rape of boys is common everywhere, often done by translators and other helpers of Americans right in front of the eyes of troops. The Americans and others tolerate these hideous acts, for the sake of keeping allies and helpers, acts which would earn their perpetrators long prison sentences and public hatred anywhere in the West.

Alliance with those warlords is the only thing that allowed America its cheap “victory.” Cheap in American blood, that is, not Afghan blood.

The Taleban never was America’s enemy, the perpetrators of 9/11 were mostly Saudis, and they were mostly in America on legitimate visas, being part of a secret CIA training scheme that backfired badly.

Most of the terrorist incidents since the invasions – like the London underground bombing – are just the work of homegrown men angry and frustrated at the injustice of what has happened, at the tens of thousands of their fellow Muslims killed with no thought or care.

The CIA never took any responsibility for 9/11. America never took any responsibility. But Afghanistan was invaded – according to experts, just the deaths in Kabul from bombing were at least 50,000 – and the Taleban was dispersed. Some achievement.

Now America bombs and kills regularly in Pakistan, claiming, just as it claimed about Cambodia during its bloodbath in Vietnam. People under no charges are regularly assassinated along with any family members and bystanders, a la Israel’s regular extra-judicial killings, activity indistinguishable from that of former South America juntas who regularly made people “disappear.”

America is only making enemies and de-stabilizing still another land.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE ON A COLUMN BY LEWIS MACKENZIE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“NATO’s purpose, now long vanished into history, had been to exist as a counter to the WARSAW pact and the threat of Soviet hegemony.

But now the Soviet Union and the WARSAW are gone – and so should NATO have disappeared”

Absolutely.

But NATO has another important purpose, and it is this other purpose that keeps it going.

The U.S. uses NATO as a kind of theatrical costume for events like Afghanistan. Instead of the world’s seeing America acting as lone bomb-dropping lawgiver to the world, it sees the somewhat more benign face of NATO, benign only because the organization carries the suggestion of plausibility with a number of nations agreeing on some objective.

The reality is, of course, America’s NATO allies do not genuinely regard Afghanistan as a serious threat: their relatively small commitments and refusal to expand them effectively are screaming this truth at us.

NATO is also used by American policy to keep Europe from becoming a genuine competitor on the world stage, a role Europe’s economy, the largest in the world, fully justifies.

American policy uses all kinds of subterfuges towards this goal, as for example keeping alive the many decades out-of-date conception of “a special relationship” with Britain, a game, appealing to the feelings of a declined imperial power, which keeps Britain from fully integrating into the Europe which is clearly its destiny.

As for MacKenzie’s silly way of talking about the Taleban, let’s remember they are a major part of the population, not some foreign invader like the United States. And they never attacked anyone in the past. American policies have made them an enemy. Just as American policies are driving Pakistan towards disaster.

Remember what America achieved in Cambodia during its holocaust in Vietnam.