John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK COCKBURN IN THE UNZ REVIEW

 

“The West Is Still Buying into Nonsense About Iran’s Regional Influence”

 

I welcome Cockburn’s analysis as a needed corrective to much Western thinking, and I especially like this:

“Much the same nonsense is being uttered today about an Iranian hand being behind anything the west and its allies do not like in the Middle East. When they claim to be targeting Iran, they are in practice targeting the Shia community as a whole – a mistake for which both they and the Shia are likely to pay a high price.”

But I do think many aspects of the Middle East’s religious division are just naturally blurred into politics and geopolitics, and perhaps it is unavoidable.

I regard the Shia-Sunni divide as something akin to the Catholic-Protestant one that dominated Europe from the 16th century.

It permeated all of European politics and generated wars. There was bloodshed for a very long period in Europe, actually a bit of it extending right into the 20th century in places like Northern Ireland.

The division drove all kinds of violence in a number of European countries, including wars of succession and massacres, and it was a key part in Britain’s “Glorious Revolution.”

It played an important role, often now unrecognized, in America’s revolt when Britain put parts of what would become the American Midwest, then regarded as Indian Reserve lands, under the jurisdiction of Quebec Province with the Quebec Act of 1774.

America’s colonials resented the well-intentioned Act deeply, both for cutting off their opportunities to exploit those lands and for putting them under the control of “popery,” a word very much heard then in New England.

So, for Europeans, political and religious matters were largely indistinguishable and remained that way for centuries.

If you understand that history, you do not look at the Muslim world’s situation as anything mysterious or unusual.

It likely reflects a basic division in human psychological make-up when we see vast religious movements divide into factions, just as people divide themselves into political factions. Indeed, in Britain’s early 18^th century Parliament, there were no political parties as we know them, and when they began to emerge, they were called factions.

I think I might identify the Shia a bit with the early Protestants in that some of what they represent is regarded as revolutionary or at least upsetting to the old order.

In any event, a lot of what is said about Muslims in the West is inaccurate and self-serving.

Remember, “the West” is really a global imperial power, the United States, with loyal satraps like Britain or France scurrying along behind.

The primary interest of “the West” in the world at large is control, not understanding or cooperation.

So, the Muslim world’s natural divisions are exploited towards control.

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON TRUMP AND THE EVANGELICALS

 

One of the great political mysteries of our time is the substantial support Trump enjoys among America’s Christian Evangelicals.

Here surely, by almost any measure, is one of the most openly irreligious men ever to be President, and I don’t mean just through the fact that he has no membership in any church. He doesn’t show a flicker of the sometimes-strong personal faith that characterizes some religious people who are not associated with a church, as was very much the case for Abraham Lincoln.

Even more, he has a long public record of deeply offensive language and lying. He is an undependable colleague, having betrayed many in positions of trust and responsibility around him in just a few short years at the White House and even an undependable marriage partner, if we are to believe many witnesses.

His whole approach to world affairs as President might be said to be an extension of the same characteristics. His completely ignoring matters like murder and theft from “friends” like Saudi Arabia and Israel is pretty spectacular testimony. He enthusiastically smiles and shakes hands with the murderous tyrant of Saudi Arabia.

Old friends and allies, to say nothing of others, all over the globe have been upset and even shocked by some of his sudden demands and seeming lack of concern for keeping the good faith of the United States in many matters, especially where important international treaties are concerned.

His has been a record of tearing up or tossing away treaty after treaty in everything from arms control to international trade and regulation. Years of patient work by thousands of conscientious and intelligent people engaged in an effort to construct some necessary architecture for world affairs tossed as though it were toilet paper.

He does seem to believe that if he personally considers a new demand appropriate, then it is, ipso facto, appropriate and even beneficial to the United States, and the rest of the world must simply accept that. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth or more dangerous as an approach to matters affecting earth’s entire seven billion people, all of them being equally in the eyes of traditional Christian faith, God’s children.

Of course, Jesus, as he is portrayed in the New Testament and revered by hundreds of millions of Christians, tells the world that he has come to bring a new law to human affairs, and it is a new law entirely eschewing Trump’s concepts and values. It is, moreover, quite importantly, a law universal in its application with no exceptions for personal or special interests. None.

I’m going to confess to the fact that as a boy I was raised an Evangelical Christian, a Baptist. Our church accepted the Bible literally as the Word of God. Indeed, the Bible was often referred to as “God’s Word.” The Church practiced Baptism in the fashion of John the Baptist as a declaration of one’s faith and as a bond to the community of fellow Christians.

One of the characteristics I knew in my then-fellow Christians was a fairly strong bias for demonstrating your faith through deeds rather than just words. It was the bias of the Apostle Paul. I wouldn’t say that it was universal, but it was very common.

And that is what is so mystifying. How can people with that kind of bias – one I tend still to regard as sound whether we are talking of Christianity or any other matter, deeds say more than words – in their views support a man who demonstrates in everything virtually the opposite?

We have the controversy over a recent article in “Christianity Today,” a publication founded by the late Billy Graham, noted Baptist evangelist and one I heard preach as a boy, that called Trump, quite accurately I think, a “grossly immoral character.” Well, the best part of two hundred Evangelical leaders have strongly objected.

What can I say? The editorial in “Christianity Today” itself took long enough coming given Trump’s public behavior. Calling that magazine, as Trump and his faithful do, “far left” is pretty close to ridiculous. The traditional concerns of Christian Evangelicals are concerns about issues of Christianity, not any form of politics. God’s laws always are placed higher than humanity’s laws. The words of Jesus, as we have them in the new Testament, couldn’t be clearer on the subject.

There may be differences on the relative importance of various matters to the Christian community, but there really can be no confusion between matters in general of Christianity and pure visceral politics. The distinctions are blindingly apparent. Christians are enjoined in the New Testament to avoid and ignore the “ungodly,” to avoid being “unequally yoked.”

Yet here we have many leaders in their communities using “Christianity” as a kind of cloak for political bias, and very much political bias in favor of a man of thoroughly amoral character. It actually much resembles the traditional Catholic Church’s efforts, say in the 1950s and 1960s, to protect priests who have grievously harmed parishioners with unacceptable sexual practices.

I am not sure that I understand, although it is clear that these leaders and their communities see in Trump things important enough to simply ignore all traditional Christian values such as honesty and loyalty and decency.

It does seem to be the story of America in general, starting with the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine and arriving at the likes of George Bush and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

It’s a huge journey, but how easily and effortlessly it has been carried out. Of course, many or most Americans deny the journey has taken place, insist that sacred honors and human rights still count uppermost in America, but that’s a little like thinking quill pens and parchment still give force to laws.

While I am no longer a Christian, having left the church in my late teens, I unavoidably carry something of that rather powerful emotional legacy, enough to recognize in Donald Trump a man completely alien to it.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

This is dishonest stuff.

First, it starts with a truism, faith affects politics.

Yes, just as temperament, age, literacy, and a host of characteristics. So what?

So long as the faith part remains just a part of personal motivation, there can be no argument.

But accepting that does not mean that expressions of faith should become part of national politics or have a role in policy or laws.

That is gigantic leap from a feeble truism.

We simply have too many faiths and shades of various faiths to allow that to happen without unpleasant consequences.

Just look at some of the debates and controversies in the United States over the last few decades of the Religious Right entering formally into politics.

Almost all of it has been a vast waste of resources and human effort for no gain, full of hysteria and screaming and even violence.

Freedom of religion absolutely includes freedom from religion in the public sphere.

Any politician who makes an effort to disturb our delicate balance deliberately to make some little political gain – very much what Harper has done – is someone to shame and disapprove of.

Otherwise, we end up with vicious morons like Huckabee or Gingrich making outlandish statements and proposals, getting campaign funds for doing so, and only scattering dragon’s teeth in society.

Harper and Baird and Kent have already started down this damnable path, a path which vitiates democracy and rewards special interests.
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Of course, Jesus said to render unto to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and he condemned the Pharisees for their public pretentious prayers, saying prayer was a private matter between God and God’s creatures.

But that hasn’t stopped so-called Christians from trying to railroad over others time and time again.