John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ERIC STRIKER IN UNZ REVIEW

 

“Why Trump’s New Executive Order Matters

“Trump’s executive order is reported to do two things: first, reclassify criticism of Israel and Zionism as anti-Semitism, and two, categorize Jews as a non-white race. This will effectively turn expressing negative sentiments towards Israel on college campuses into a hate crime.”

 

https://www.unz.com/estriker/why-trumps-new-executive-order-matters/

 

The only good thing you can say about such a measure is that it reveals the weakness of the cause it is supposed to defend.

This shows no respect for the rights of others and the rule of law, just as is the case with other Israeli-inspired measures against free speech and peaceful boycott.

Of course, that is in keeping with Israel’s daily treatment of millions of Palestinians.

A strong and vital and fair society wants no such props.

An unfair one applauds them.

And, my God, defining “a race”? Who were the last folks to do that?

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

Truth be told, there’s nothing to reject.

All thinking people with any respect for due process are insulted by a finding of “probably guilty.”

The term is an insult to western traditions of jurisprudence. It’s more than a little like a judge declaring someone a witch.

You are either guilty, or you are innocent. Always and everywhere. And you can only be found guilty in a proper judicial setting with legitimate evidence whose chain of possession is proved, cross examinations by two sides, and a jury of your peers.

That is supposed to be our most cherished tradition in law.

Yet here are high officials with somber faces in Britain pretending they are pronouncing meaningful words in an inquiry lacking every single one of these requirements.

It is shameful people would so compromise themselves and their values just to make a brief propaganda point.

John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

Once again, France’s Hollande demonstrates the pathetic, almost comic, figure he is by awarding France’s highest honor to the American soldiers who stopped a gunman on a train.

The soldiers’ act was unquestionably a brave one, but no braver than a hundred others that must have happened during the year.

Previously Hollande, in an act which resembled parody, awarded the Legion of Honor to four victims of an attack on a Paris grocery store. His response came close to making the award meaningless: find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, get shot by mindless gunmen, and suddenly you are elevated to secular sainthood.

After all, violent acts and murders do happen regularly. I cannot recall another instance in which the corpses of a murderer’s victims were elevated to national heroes. If that were the practice in the United States, with 25,000 murders a year, the factory couldn’t keep up with minting medals.

Of course, in both these instances Hollande is playing up to the ridiculous, deliberately exaggerated fears of terror, relentlessly promoted by the United States, and that is their distinguishing, common feature.

In this last one, the train incident, he also flatters those whom he has served with such cringing, dog-like loyalty, the Americans.

My God, how low France has fallen from the days of de Gaulle.

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Response to a further comment about why there is so much violence:

 

A certain percent of all human beings, everywhere and always, is mentally unbalanced, including such conditions as psychopathy. That’s just a biological fact, much as saying a certain percent of any population is born blind or lame or with various degenerative diseases.

I suspect the proportion of such people is not wildly different over time, although, of course, the world’s ever-increasing population yields an ever-greater absolute number of mentally ill people.

What has changed in the contemporary world for sure are the unbelievable quantities of deadly weapons available. They are everywhere, in the millions. And why is that the case? Because the United States pushes them (yes, including AK-47s and other weapons not of American origin) out like products from an assembly line to destabilize places in dozens of locations where it is unhappy about either a government’s position on American policy or about a people trying to topple a tyrannical government that America just happens to favor. Examples of the former include Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and dozens of others, while examples of the latter include Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt.

Many of these weapons stay around for a lifetime. The most vivid case of this recently was perhaps in Libya. The CIA and others pumped weapons into the place to destabilize Gadhafi. When he was gone, the CIA was back trying to round up some of the vast quantities left in the chaotic country to ship to the madmen they had set up to topple still another government they dislike, that of Syria. It was in that covert operation that an American ambassador was killed at Benghazi, an example of intelligence blowback and an incident never explained because America didn’t want to advertise the facts behind it.

In the process of so much aggression and destabilization, the press is filled day after day with stories arousing all kinds of powerful emotions in millions of people. Just think of the people of Gaza being slaughtered by hi-tech American weapons supplied to Israel in fleet-loads, or of people of Yemen being slaughtered by the same American weapons supplied to the absolute kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a place where the ISIS scare tactic of public beheading is just the day-in, day-out normal practice of government. Just think of the madman running Turkey who secretly ships the same American weapons to terror groups destroying Syria while offering refuge to the cowardly monsters as may be required.

Just think of the horrors of millions of migrants in the press today – all of them a direct effect of America’s various acts in places from Syria to Libya. Those tidal waves of human suffering are tearing many societies apart as well as individuals.

You cannot expect an international society of laws unless you yourself are willing to respect the rule of law.

Nothing could be clearer than that the United States is not willing to live by the rule of law, although it unfailingly pays lip-service to it. In Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Ukraine, and a dozen other places, America is manufacturing misery and oppression on a gigantic scale. And all of the exaggerated stuff about terror keeps citizens intimidated from raising their voices. And of course some of that “terror” is just the legitimate response of oppressed and frustrated people made to appear mindless by America’s relentless propaganda.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Imagine my surprise to learn that most people in the world don’t accept extrajudicial murder by governments?

And one has to say, the murdering agency here is not just any government, but a government which blubbers and drones day and night about human rights and democracy and freedom. America’s Secretary of State, just for one, has become practically a recording device playing slogans on loudspeakers as the murders go on.

It wasn’t that many years ago that the world was appalled to learn that juntas in some South American countries made thousands “disappear” by rounding them up, drugging them, and throwing their bodies out of planes over the ocean.

What America is doing – and it is doing it in half a dozen places, including Yemen and Somalia – is indistinguishable from the juntas “disappearing” citizens they didn’t like.

The word “terrorist” in this context is meaningless, serving only as an Orwellian excuse to murder those with whom you disagree and to intimidate others by the example.

It is a measure of the sheer arrogance and corruption of power that the government of the United States assumes it has a right to act in this fashion.

Of course, in this, America closely copies the brutal and unethical practices of Israel, a country which cheers them on as at a big sports event. And Israel is such an example of success, isn’t it?

None of the world’s so-called rogue states – places like North Korea or Burma – are known for this level of lawless savagery.

It is estimated recently that American drone-missile strikes, just in Pakistan, have killed 3,000 people in a few years.

The Pentagon says that “only 20%” of the dead were civilians, and that that is an acceptable level of performance.

600 civilians – over and above the 2400 targets, themselves, each and every one, legally innocent – murdered is acceptable?

But, of course, numbers on deaths coming from the Pentagon always have a large element of hazy fantasy. They murdered 3 million souls in Vietnam, and you never heard a word from them on the extent of that holocaust. All for nothing but an insane Ahab-like compulsion to kill communists.

A million or so people were killed in Iraq, America’s compulsion having changed to Muslims, but no mention of numbers there either.

You cannot have a government of laws unless you are yourself willing yourself to obey them.

When we choose not to be governed by laws, it is the powerful and psychotic who inherit the earth.
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“Iran embarks on $1b. cyber-warfare programTehran has embarked on an ambitious plan to boost its defensive cyber-warfare capabilities and is investing $1 billion in developing new technology and hiring new computer experts…”

Idiot, the most dangerous examples of cyber warfare we’ve ever seen are the Stuxnet and Flame pieces of malware.

It is even possible that Stuxnet – which escaped its intended target of Iran to spread – caused part of the nuclear plant horror in Japan by making controls unusable.

We know from analysis that these two pieces of malware were developed by the same people.

The United States and Israel are the authors.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Latest U.S. drone operation in Pakistan should be judged a success”

Surely, the words of an ethical and moral bankrupt.

A target or targets – uncharged and untried – is assassinated by a buzz-cut thug at a computer console.

In the process, a host of others, all innocents for certain, are murdered, and the cretin writing this editorial says it should be judged a success.

Have you lost all sense of values?

If we all nod and accept this absolutely criminal behavior by a great power, we will lose all claims to a free society which has laws and is organized to honor human rights.

If you do not live by the rule of the law, you are not a whit better than the junta generals who used to kidnap people off the streets of South America and fly them out over the ocean to throw out their drugged bodies.

They “disappeared” thousands in that fashion, and it is certain that the horrible governments committing such crimes believed they were every bit as justified as America in getting rid of people working against their interests.

Now, the apologists for Israel’s brutal excesses always support this kind of thing, and indeed Israel is the very model for this behavior. The word “terroriist” is used like a magic word to make any inhuman act perfectly okay.

It is one thing for an irresponsible state like Israel to behave this unacceptable way, but it quite another for the world’s mightiest nation to be reduced to the same behavior.

We are only protected by rule of law from having the violent barbarians and psychopaths of the world governing. If you abandon rule of law, you have abandoned civilization.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

“Almost all the top comments here have unnecessary and ANTI-SEMITIC language.”

People who criticize Israel are not, ipso facto, anti-Semitic.

Nor are the people who apologize for Israel’s bloody excesses necessarily qualified to judge the motives of others who do not accept such behavior: fanatics in any realm of human activity are never people qualified to sit in judgement.

It is an insult to logic and intelligence to have this slur repeated, over and over, yet in every forum of public opinion concerning Israel, we have this name-calling repeated.

It is ad hominem attack which itself reflects clear prejudice and often just plain hatefulness.

If Israel is to be a state like any other state, it is subject to the same criticisms as any other state, full stop.

And today Israel, as a state, breaks almost every international norm and treaty and convention you care to name.

People who care about such things are not to be put off by gratuitous insults.

There are huge issues at stake in Israel’s behaviors and in its demands, and since Israel and her supporters demand of people in Canada, the United States, and Europe, never tire of seeking assistance and support, surely the people of these countries have the right and obligation to speak about very troubling matters.

Israel extra-judicially kills at will regularly. If you want to support that, fine, but there is no argument against the ugly fact.

Israel steals the homes and farms of others regularly. Again, if you want to support that, fine, but it is practice violating every norm of a free society and indeed of a free enterprise economy operating under laws.

Israel keeps millions in oppressive bondage with no genuine rights or application of just laws. You are free to support that, but others are right to observe it is a throwback to societies we all believed were things of the past.

Israel attacks every neighbor that it has, over and over, and it demands military action against countries like Iran who have made no threats. You are free to support that, but others are just as free – in our society at least – to say that the invasion of Iraq, which the U.S. conducted on Israel’s behalf, was a terrible war crime, responsible for deaths of a million souls, and repeating it in Iran is simply unthinkable.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

SERIES OF RESPONSES TO AN ARTICLE BY AUDREY MACKLIN AND LORNE WALDMAN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Yes, this is a very serious matter, and it works to destroy the integrity of our traditional politics.

But Harper and his band of political mediocrities, in almost everything, ape the Republican Party in the U.S.

I don’t know how many readers are aware of it, but for many years this judge-bashing was a favorite theme among Republicans: creepy politicians like Tom Delay (convicted felon), Phil Gram, and Newt (“I divorced my wife while she was dying of cancer”) Gingrich specialized in this.

It is one more way of driving wedges into our politics, changing the nature of our traditionally civil national politics into the kind of hissing and spitting that absolutely characterize America’s national politics.

One has to ask, too, why the Globe keeps publishing representatives of this Appalachian Throwback movement, giving voice to our cultural destruction, especially the nasty Tom Flanagan?
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At the very heart of this American Republican-inspired cheap political tactic is the nature of law in a democratic society.

It is virtually impossible to write any law so precisely that every single possibility and thousands of future cases will be covered to the letter, let alone doing so for the vast body of our laws.

That’s why we have judges, and why we absolutely must have judges.

And that is why when people like Minister Jason Kenney attack judges, they show no respect for law and order.

It does not take a great intellect to understand that if you undermine law and order, you undermine democracy.

There can be no true democracy without law and order.

It’s like saying you can pour concrete without a mold.

Oh, how many poor people in this world – people like those we just witnessed in Egypt – dream and pray for a society of laws and the democracy that accompanies it.

As another writer has astutely observed, Mr. Kenney is in the privileged position of being able to change the laws he doesn’t like, or at least making an honest effort to do so.

No, instead he takes the low road, the cheap tactic of a felon like Republican Tom Delay, and attacks the learned people whose necessary job is to interpret the law.

In essence, he turns the principles of the relationship between laws and democracy on their head.

Hateful stuff, absolutely, besides introducing divisiveness and vituperation into our politics.
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From another reader:

“If they don’t want criticisms from Cabinet Ministers, then I strongly suggest they refrain from rendering decisions based on their left-wing political idealogy [sic].”

You, like the Minister, have not thought out the full implications of what you advocate.
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From another reader:

“While judges are rightly independent of the Executive…”

This reveals clearly the American origin of these views. Parliamentary systems do not have “an Executive branch”
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From another reader:

“Nonsense. Ministers are democratically elected – judges are not.”

Thirty percent of Canadians support Harper – his claims for democratic support are tenuous and really a technical byproduct of our system.

As long as he keeps to reasonable path, his lack of a mandate can be tolerated.

Just one of the problems you miss here is the inappropriateness of a government without a mandate doing extreme things.

It is a very important matter.
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From another reader:

“If a federal minister does not like the outcome of a court decision he has options available to him that the average critic does not. He can introduce a bill to parliament that amends the law…”

Oh, yes, exactly. What all the advocates of American-style combative divisiveness miss entirely.
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From another reader:

“When judges misrepresent the law or the wishes of the people they don`t represent democracy”

Judges do not misrepresent the law, their very job is to interpret it.

Indeed, if they misrepresent the law, they can be reversed and ultimately removed.

This kind of slur gives us a society of declining civility.

And what my friend are the “wishes of the people”?

The Minister and his boss represent the views of about thirty percent of Canadians.
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From another reader:

“Judges start out as lawyers, can a zebra change it`s stripes!”

“It’s” is the contraction for “it is.”

“Its” is the possessive you intended.

I do think, also, when you ask a question it is usual to use a question mark, not an exclamation point.

And please think about what you’ve written.

All lawyers are useless or evil?

What kind of a society would we have with no laws?

Russia.
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From the same reader:

“Chuckman is a retired school teacher who over estimates his importance, and blathers out his a$$”

I think it not unfair to suggest that the author should know the words to the song before getting up to sing.

Retired school teacher?

Sorry, I am the retired chief economist for one of Canada’s largest oil companies, as he might easily have checked. I’m all over the Internet and even the Globe has a snippet of my background.

But that’s not what silly blubberers do before they blubber, is it?

No, they just type without bothering about facts. That way we can be sure it comes from the heart, or is it from some other organ, like the spleen?
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From another reader:

“There is nothing in our society that says judges are above criticisim.”

You miss the point entirely.

Judges are not above criticism, and no one claimed that.

And you offer the logical fallacy of a straw-man argument in saying so.

But when ministers of the government crititicize judges in public, they are very much doing more than the average citizen’s doing so.

They are introducing a divisive and belligerent quality into our politics, and they undoubtedly serve to diminish respect for judges and the law amongst many citizens.

That is playing with the devil for the sake of a cheap gain.
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From another reader:

“To assert elected members must quietly acquiesce to appointed persons is surely non-sensical and outright anti-democratic.”

No, you are just wrong, it is not.

The judges, if understand the matter at all, are absolutely essential to our system, and when something is necessary, it must be treated with respect.

Judges may be reversed or thrown out, and new judges may be appointed.

But when you do as Mr. Kenney has done, future appointments will only be received with less respect.

We may easily enter a pointless and destructive cycle of ever-lowering respect for law and order.

Eroding respect for the people charged with such a grave and necessary task as interpreting the law moves us down a road that is destructive of our institutions.

It is the Conservatives who make all the noise about law and order.

Yet they kick dirt at judges?

You cannot have it both ways.

Anyone who says so only demonstrates the lack of thought at work here.