John Chuckman

COMMENT TO A VIDEO BY PAUL MASON IN THE GUARDIAN

 

Paul Mason makes no sense to any thinking and informed person, at least one who is not under the influence of some undeclared special interest, as I feel absolutely confident Mason must be.

Russia is not a threat, indeed quite the opposite is true, and that’s why the United States is so keen to make trouble between Europe and Russia these days.

Europe is on the wrong side of history in its recent treatment of Russia, and putting Europe in that position is deliberate, undeclared American policy.

Europe’s current group of ineffective leaders are prostrated before a demanding American colossus, one growing uneasy with a sense of its relative decline in the world, a colossus whose interests indeed are anything but Europe’s.

The ugly colossus in recent years has engineered trouble after trouble, contributing to the insecurity and destabilizing of Europe.

There is paid-for coup in Ukraine ($5 billion) with its ensuing pointless civil war and an effort behind the scenes to bring Ukraine – an economically backward state with a poor human rights record and right-wing militias set loose and with a government of almost comic incompetence – into the EU and NATO.

That is an aim incalculably destructive and dangerous for Europe’s future peace and prosperity, and it is tied in with a second destructive aim of heading-off better and healthier economic relations with Russia, especially what had been a growing healthy relationship with Germany.

The US simply saw its current overall, indirect control of Europe slipping slowly away, and it wanted decisive action to put a stop to it.

At the same time in recent years, America has unleashed an unprecedented assault on many of the countries of the Middle East. The horror of Syria is a deliberately calculated effort to destabilize a government and divide a nation, one conducted largely by proxy armies of thugs attracted from all over the world. It has seen hundreds of thousands killed in the effort, resulting in huge destabilizing streams of refugees to Europe.

This ugly march through the Middle East has had nothing to do with democracy or human rights. The US doesn’t touch absolute regimes like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, or the new junta in Egypt. It never even nudges Israel to end its occupations. No, America’s murderous, years-long effort is aimed at the region’s independent-minded governments who do not toe the line on American policy. By comparison, Russia is a well-behaved state which seeks normal and healthy relationships with its neighbors.

Had Europe’s leaders had the courage to say “no” to those American policies, Europe today would be a far better place, peacefully trading with Russia – increased trade being a tonic for Europe’s economic malaise – and not fighting the immense tragedy of floods of refugees from the Middle East, which event of course includes an unholy agreement with the madman running Turkey, a man responsible for much of the tragedy in the first place. But America only sees Turkey as a bulwark against Russia and couldn’t care less that its leader murders both Kurds and Syrians and suppresses freedom of speech.

But in the end, what really matters for Britain with Trident is that you can never own Trident. You can only pay an immense amount of money, an effective vast and long-term rent, to the Pentagon.

And that is so because you cannot ever use Trident. You can decide almost nothing concerning it. You can only ride around in it watching the flag snap in the breeze when it’s on the surface. When the US decides nuclear war is desirable – and that is not at all inconceivable since as late as the early 1960s, the Pentagon drew up serious plans for an all-out first strike against the Soviet Union – you will be directed how to use Trident and just where to aim your missiles. Of course, if you hesitate in such an event to join in the nuclear fun, you will also be in extremely deep trouble.

You can only use Trident with the permission and cooperation of the United States. The deal is much like one with a tech company such as Apple. If you even open or try to replace anything on some Apple products, they simply stop working, telling you very forcefully who really owns the phone or watch you paid good money for.

It is a terrible deal for Britain. Those tens of billions could do a lot of genuine good instead. As for Paul Mason, he’s about as much a genuine liberal as Hillary Clinton, bloody Goddess of War.

John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

Why does The Guardian quote a man like Ash Carter saying absolutely nothing?

This is puke tossed from high places, so much so that it is almost comic but for the deadly serious underlying facts.

All thinking people who keep informed on world affairs know it is America putting the world increasingly at risk.

Good God, America has killed millions in the last half century in many pointless wars and interventions.

And the entire, insane war on terror is largely its responsibility, a result of its arrogant and terribly unjust policies in the Middle East for decades.

Russia is a civilized and relatively peaceful country by comparison.

And all of today’s disasters – Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Palestine – are either America’s direct doing or benefit from America’s cooperation and support.

And virtually every tyrant we see – Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Turkey – has America’s blessings.

This is propaganda so completely twisted from truth, it resembles a bad dream.

______________________

Response to a reader referring to MH-17:

Yes, one of America’s “keyhole” satellites was overhead at the time of MH-17 being shot down.

These satellites have cameras comparable to the Hubble Space Telescope plus many other technologies of observation.

The Russians knew this of course, and they said so very early.

But not one scrap of data was ever submitted to investigators by America.

Clearly, there was a cover-up of MH-17’s downing to protect America’s infant coup-government in Ukraine.

And the pathetic Dutch, under America’s thumb, worked a year to produce a report containing nothing but the bits we already knew.

And in this case in Egypt, after days we have idiots asserting what happened with no evidence.

_____________________

If it was a bomb – and it is very premature to say it was – a strong suspect would be Israel’s secret service.

ISIS has no capacity for doing this on its own. Since ISIS and al-Nusra are very much doing Israel’s (and America’s) work in Syria, Israel’s displeasure with Putin is important.

Israel, as we know from many past events including in Iran, has often used timed explosive devices.

____________________________

 

Response to a comment from another reader:

Your words reveal you as one of the pathetic boys who diligently search internet sites for discussions in which Israel is mentioned, and then post crap like this, being paid so much a line for the work.

I know perfectly well “ISIS” claimed credit. So what?

Indeed, ISIS is in part an Israeli creation.

Ever note how ISIS never attacks Israel in any way, which is exactly what such a wild-eyed bunch would do, were they authentic. They are frauds, mercenaries supplied and paid by America, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to destroy Syria.

Now, Israel has used time bombs countless times, so involvement in the Russian airline downing would be nothing new. It used MEK members in Iran to murder a number of scientists with timed car bombs.

These ugly practices of Israel’s go all the way back to the Lavon Affair in 1954, when it was caught red-handed planting bombs in in Egypt. Even before, in 1946, there was the King David Hotel atrocity killing about a hundred people, the work of a Jewish terror group headed by Menachem Begin, a future prime minister. And need I remind readers yet again of Israel’s deliberate attack on an American surveillance ship, the USS Liberty, to cover up illegal activities in the Sinai during the 1967 War?

Yet another well-known example of deception involved President Reagan’s bombing of Gadhafi. That was the direct result of fake transmissions originating in Israel which succeeded in fooling the U.S. into attacking Gadhafi over his presumed guilt for an attack in Europe against American soldiers, something never proved, by the way, although innocents like Gadhafi’s young son died for it.

Israel also tried this dirty trick around the time of the sarin poison gas use in Syria. There were fake transmissions trying to make the Syrian Army look responsible for the attack in the hope America would bomb Assad, but in this case the truth became known in a timely fashion. It was the very terrorist forces Israel is known to support who used poison gas in Syria, gas perhaps supplied by Israel.

No one who criticizes such dirty work is guilty of hating anyone or anything except a government which behaves very much like that of the old Soviet Union.

People like you have pretty close to succeeded in making the term “anti-Semite” meaningless by using it dozens of times a day against people you don’t even know. For all you know, this writer could be Jewish.

How appallingly ignorant you are, and that is a pure fact and not name-calling.

People such as you are succeeding also in speeding the day when Israel collapses, again much like the Soviet Union, by trying to maintain a state built on endless injustice thickly coated with lies.

__________________________________

FOOTNOTE: A MUCH LATER STATEMENT FROM THE MALAYSIAN PRIME MINISTER AS QUOTED IN “SOUTHFRONT”

 

“WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?”: MALAYSIAN PM SLAMS MH17 INVESTIGATION AS NOT IMPARTIAL AND POLITICALLY MOTIVATED

 

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said that the investigation into the 2014 crash of the Malaysia Airlines-operated Boeing in Ukraine was not conducted in an impartial manner, but was rather focused on simply pinning the blame on Russia for political reasons.

“For some reasons, Malaysia was not allowed to check the black box to see what happened. We don’t know why we are excluded from the examination but from the very beginning, we see too much politics in it and the idea was not to find out how this happened but seems to be concentrated on trying to pin it to the Russians. This is not a neutral kind of examination,“ the prime minister said, as quoted by the Malaysian National News Agency.

“They are accusing Russia but where is the evidence? We know the missile that brought down the plane is a Russian type missile, but it could also be made in Ukraine. You need strong evidence to show it was fired by the Russians, it could be by the rebels in Ukraine, it could be Ukrainian government because they too have the same missile”.

Both Malaysia and Russia were excluded from partaking in the investigation.

If one translates the recent remarks by the Malaysian prime minister from diplomatic language to direct speech, we see that he stated that Malaysia has little doubts that the MH17 was intentionally shot down by the Ukrainian government. He also points out that the side controlling the JIT and thus the investigation is concealing the criminals, hiding data, and limiting the participation of third parties in the ‘international’ investigation.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

Once again, here is an article of which The Guardian, so long as it pretends to genuine journalism, should be ashamed.

Contrary to the completely uninformed words of the article, Putin does not work to keep “the West off-balance.” He is keen to cooperate and work together with Europe and America, as he has demonstrated many, many times. Do you not see the ugly, needless throwback-to-the-Cold War implications of the language used in this article about Putin versus the West?

Putin is cautious – combined with a keen intelligence and decisiveness – this makes him the likely most superb leader in the world today.

Any reader of character can see that Cameron, Hollande, and Obama are missing some of these qualities in various proportions. Cameron virtually comes off as a Music Hall parody of a Prime Minister making overly-pompous pronouncements and demands while Hollande cannot rise above the role of limp-shouldered provincial school master. Obama is an ambitious blunderer who only plays official spokesperson for the Pentagon and CIA. None of that is Putin’s fault.

Putin waited a long time before entering Syria, and when he did so it was under the invitation of what remains the only legitimate government, no matter what Cameron or Obama assert in strained words. That government is a legitimate ally of Russia’s and is entitled to assistance against terrorist forces introduced and armed by third parties. But even now, Putin’s natural caution sees Russia working only with air and missile forces with the Syrian Army doing the fighting under them.

Now that he has made the decision, he gives it the effort it deserves. And while I hate war, much as Jeremy Corbyn does, I cannot help seeing Putin as a courageous and right-thinking figure. He stands a good chance of bringing the horrors of Syria to an end. He works towards peace and stability while America’s public record for years now is almost non-stop war and deceit.

And all the phony mainline press stories and all the dumb statements from the ridiculous man who heads NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, and all the Pentagon threats and name-calling cannot change that. Newspapers running such propaganda only reduce themselves in the minds of thoughtful people to being the modern equivalents of the old Soviet apparatchiks constantly generating bone-headed propaganda no one could possibly believe.

Putin fights only the same terrorists that The Guardian and every other mainline newspaper have screamed about now for several years, giving great publicity to their beheadings and other atrocities, although your effort now to question Putin’s motives does make me question your previous motives. It was so easy to run stories about the gruesome horrors of ISIS while doing nothing about it, wasn’t it? Indeed, you claimed the satisfaction, along with that silly puff-ball of a Prime Minister, David Cameron, of morally pooh-poohing ISIS while remaining secretly satisfied with the dirty work it did to destroy Syria. And all the publicity and pompous speeches just happened to play comfortably into supporting the shameless and continuous stream of Islamophobia with which we’ve been inundated in Europe and America since 9/11.

Nothing could be more hypocritical and completely dishonest.

Yet again, the horrors of Syria have nothing to do with Assad. He started nothing. And such horrors as use of chemical weapons had nothing to do with him. And they certainly have nothing to do with Mr. Putin. The people responsible for the deaths of a quarter million, countless atrocities, and the piteous streams of refugees are Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar working under the auspices and complete approval of the United States and its brutal Middle East colony, Israel.

That group of nations wants Syria reduced to the same kind of divided, helpless mess as Iraq – a bleeding body left on the ground with its limbs hacked off – but they don’t want to take direct responsibility for the criminal assault, as America and Britain did, often to their regret, in Iraq.

You, The Guardian, only effectively work to continue the horror by publishing dishonest stuff, but I’m sure I waste my breath on senior editors who already know much of what I’ve said. Now, for general readers I’ll only say that if this is what appears in a paper of The Guardian’s traditional liberal and non-corporate reputation, you can only imagine what garbage is regularly strewn over the pages of The Times, The Telegraph, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. It is extremely difficult for ordinary people to get even a glimpse of truth through a phalanx like that defending brutal government deceit. And that is just what is intended.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

Sorry, David, but I do think Jeremy Corbyn likely understands exactly what ISIS represents.

It really is you, David, who pretends not to understand.

After all, you support American policy in the region, don’t you, David, even though, if I may be permitted to say, you do so with just a trifle too much groveling?

American policy is about using filth like ISIS and al Qaeda to destroy the beautiful land of Syria. America helped round up this collection of human trash from many places, including Benghazi, and along with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, it armed, trained, and supported them in their murderous rampage.

Of course, the Americans do not say that openly, David, but anyone who does just a little thinking can see the pattern. Those who do not see it, choose not to see it.

The U.S. drops bombs in the desert and on Syrian infrastructure, pretending to attack ISIS. The bombing of so-called terrorists you want to do, David, is clearly of the “Me too, Mr. Obama, Sir!” kind.

You really are so transparent, David, quite an ineffective puff-ball of a Prime Minister trying to sound stern and heroic. But then you have no one to answer to, do you, with a “majority” government representing 35% of British voters? Not your fault, is it, that Britain’s election system has such a built-in democratic deficit?

By all accounts, that horrible tyrant Assad is somehow strangely supported by a substantial majority of Syrians owing to his policies of secularism and protection of religious minorities. Then there’s the fact that he accepted at least a million refugees fleeing the American-British invasion of Iraq which killed about a million people, but he’s not fooling you, is he, David? He’s a heartless tyrant who must go. After all, he didn’t listen to you about getting out of town.

I’m just waiting to see how you’ll wiggle your little trotters and oink (sorry for the reference, David, but I couldn’t resist) after Putin’s air force has sent the American-organized cutthroats running for home. There are already reports of some fleeing. Maybe you’ll take them in, David? But I understand you’re not that fond of refugees.

Putin just proves what amazing things can happen when you actually aim for the enemy you claim you are aiming at. In their first 60 sorties, Putin’s boys did more damage to ISIS than America’s claimed 6,000 or so. But then that could be because Americans spend so much effort bombing things like hospitals, or don’t you agree, David?

David, there is one thing I wish you’d clear up for all us lowly, ordinary citizens. What do Rebekah and Rupert think about ISIS? Surely, you discuss the subject on your country weekends?

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE NATIONAL POST

No one writing for The National Post ever gets the situation in Syria correctly.

All of our national press, like that in the United States, deliberately obscures these matters.

America and Russia both talk about stopping terror, but they each mean completely different things.

Not being at all the aggressive leader America never stops yapping about, Putin has not made up his mind about entering Syria, but if he does go to Syria to fight ISIS, among other terror groups working there, it will be precisely because he is supporting the government of Syria and genuinely fighting terror.

Obama doesn’t want Putin in Syria to fight ISIS because the United States is only making a show of fighting ISIS. You don’t fight the people you set up to do a job you want done. ISIS is doing America’s dirty work trying to topple the Syrian government.

When America talks of bombing, it means bombing which can help ISIS, and the other terrorists, complete their dirty work. America bombs Syrian infrastructure, as does Canada in Harper’s stupid effort to join in the American cause.

Sure, sometimes America actually kills some of their recruited ISIS members, but that is for show or because they have somehow exceeded their mandate. Quite possibly, once the government of Syria has been destroyed, America will go after ISIS, but that would only come after.

For Putin to talk of bombing means genuinely bombing ISIS and hampering its efforts to destroy Syria.

It’s all a filthy business, and the sponsors of all the killing and destruction and homelessness are the United States, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. They do everything from training, arming, equipping, and even giving refuge and medical help.

The terrible refugee crisis in Europe is ultimately the complete fault of these parties, none of which even has the decency to take the refugees they create. Harper’s Canada actually takes a token amount of refugees and at the same time joins in the bombing to create more.

The truth is, were Harper to genuinely fight ISIS, Israel would become extremely angry with him, and that could only mean some of Harper’s generous donors of campaign funds – the special interests for Israel he has groomed for years – would also become angry with him.

In this, as in so many things, Harper joins the United States in telling lies to us daily.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO A COLUMN IN THE NATIONAL POST

It is crap to say Harper can’t be blamed for the horror of a dead Syrian child lying face down in the sand, Christie Blatchford.

Harper comes across in this emotional public event as the dried husk of a human being he truly is.

Leaders lead and set a tone and spirit for others.

Harper has led nothing, and the spirit of his time in office is Canada is as a completely indifferent place to human suffering and to threats and chaos at previously peaceful places like Syria.

I am repeatedly surprised by the depths of emptiness he displays in matter after matter.

Imagine the leader of a nation with the reputation Canada used to enjoy just letting people rot while he actually joins in the killing in Syria, albeit on a limited scale owing mainly to our not having enough fighter jets.

Well, I’ve always said he really secretly wanted to be an American, and I think he now has joined the hallowed ranks of Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey and Dick Cheney. They are not conservatives, they are creatures from Madam Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.

One thing is sure, when Harper is swept from office in October, he and Laureen will find a warm welcome in East Texas.

______________________________

ISIS is not responsible for the horror in Syria because it is merely a tool of outside powers, a terror weapon dropped into a beautiful, previously peaceful country.

It is the sponsors, suppliers, and enablers of ISIS – and other terrorist organizations like the al-Nusra Front – who are very much responsible for the horrors.

They are the United States, Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia (with some additional money from Qatar).

These gangs of thugs and cutthroats would not even be gangs and they would not be in Syria without massive outside assistance.

The whole aim of the sponsors and suppliers of these horrors is to destroy the beautiful land of Syria and effectively smash it into pieces. The covert, proxy approach being used in Syria is different than the direct, blundering, and murderous American invasion of Iraq, but its goal is precisely the same in the end.

Who cares about the millions displaced, the hundreds of thousands killed, the historic treasures destroyed? Not America. Not Israel. Not Turkey. Not Saudi Arabia.

The chief beneficiary of all this horror is America’s nasty little colony in the Mideast.

And come to think of it, isn’t that same American colony one of Harper’s most intense and continuing focuses, to the point of having made, and causing some ministers to make, the strangest sudden outbursts of loyalty to it without any seeming context or cause on a subject, arbitrarily selected from the affairs of the world’s two hundred or so nations, and of no special interest to most Canadians?

And aren’t Canadian apologists for the colony’s own many atrocities among Harper’s keenest campaign contributors and supporters?

I suspect there is an unspoken but direct connection between those supporters and the idea of not taking in tens of thousands of Syrians, as we very much should. Of course, making no emergency effort in this regard comes easily to Stephen Harper, a man who has proved himself virtually devoid of humanity.

After all, the word “terror” is used by some in exactly the way the word “witch” was used in 17th century Europe, being repeated and echoed countless times like a superstitious mantra, although the genuine threat of terror in North America is virtually non-existent.

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.

_________________________________

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

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

An organization, such as ISIS, can only rise out of nothing and literally change a region with a great deal of help.

It cannot be otherwise.

ISIS has been assisted, supplied, and, in some cases, trained by Western interests. We have had countless little revelations of these activities, although we never read about them in the corporate press.

ISIS was even supplied some while back by some of these interests with terrible things like small amounts of nerve gas to use on people so that the United States could blame Syrian forces. Acts just do not come any more cynical and evil than that.

ISIS serves the interest of assisting to bring down a legitimate state, Syria, a state, by the way, which attacks no one and which has never threatened legitimate American interests. They already served to eliminate a leader in Iraq, sending him running off in fear, whom the United States and Israel greatly disliked.

ISIS also serves to solidify the planned smashing of Iraq into mini-states. This was particularly clear in the case of the Kurds, who received great assistance in fighting ISIS, effectively defending their own part of the (former) country against those who now run other parts.

The public does not recognize what is happening because news coverage in our major corporate press is selective and always supports government policy, even black operations policy.

If the United States were serious about fighting ISIS, they could eliminate them in very short order, but they are not serious. They display only token efforts, and increasingly, the reality of these efforts is the destruction of Syrian lives and property – in effect, acting as air support for the terrorists.

Also, the United States appears gradually to be working its way towards direct intervention against the Syrian government, blubbering all along the way about the horrors of ISIS.

When ISIS has served its filthy purpose, maybe it will be seriously attacked. Who knows? But, for now, America’s attacks on ISIS are little more than show and perhaps curbing those who’ve exceeded their brief. After all, these terrorist groups – and there are several doing lots of killing in Syria – do contain some genuinely horrible people, even if they were assembled and assisted through American efforts. The American attacks really assist the terrorists in Syria by attacking Syrian infrastructure.

Turkey, with the blessings of the United States and Saudi Arabia, has given them shelter and border access to Syria, as well as arms shipments. Israel too is involved in surreptitious support, including hospital treatment for wounded fighters in the North and secret arms exports, as is the absolute monarchy of Qatar. And now that proud and fearless defender of American values, David Cameron, has joined the fray in the name of “fighting terror.” My, what a brave fellow he is.

The actual terror that is going on is the destruction of legitimate state, a beautiful and historic land. It is being carved into smaller entities, just as Iraq has been. This comes at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and the creation of millions of refugees, but the states secretly working on this dirty project only cry crocodile tears over all the deliberately-induced horror.

It’s just one part of a savage scheme to “give birth to a new Middle East,” as former Secretary of State Condi Rice expressed it. So far we have seen a million die in Iraq, aerial bombardment of Yemen, Libya torn apart and reduced to chaos, and Egypt’s fledgling democracy destroyed with a return of dictatorship.

Now, all of this destruction does make people like Mr. Netanyahu very happy, but for countless millions, and for a generation to come, human misery is the chief product of the effort.

Of course, it is this very scheme producing the flood of refugees to Europe, refugees the United States refuses even to help and David Cameron treats as rabble and scum.

The whole business is a psychopathic politician’s dream: inflict all the killing and destruction you wish while condemning the hired help and posing as someone horrified at what they have done. Compared to this, the stunts of Hitler’s Germany to cover its bloody trail – as when it dressed prisoners in Polish uniforms and shot them at the border, claiming they were Polish soldiers attacking Germany – seem amateurish.

The face of evil is no longer merely banal, it is slick and sophisticated and leering at all we hold as values.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

There simply is no doubt that this terrible set of events was “engineered” by the United States, and blame for the bloodshed belongs ultimately to Americans.

Much of what the press blithely calls “Arab Spring” started with Dick Cheney and the Neocons and the CIA, with Israel cheering while looking on, laying out an ambitious long-term program to disturb all the balance in the Middle East.

There was a huge budget appropriation created, hundreds of millions of dollars, at the time, and likely more secret funds provided.

Naturally, the aim was to disturb things in Israel’s favor, although, in many details as things have played through, it has not always gone that way.

The Syrian situation is especially flagrant with Israel and the U.S. having supplied arms to discontented groups – what country does not have these to one degree or another? – and Turkey agreeing to provide the same kind of safe refuge for rebels that parts of Pakistan supply to Afghan fighters.

The Russians are right to oppose this kind of massive covert effort to overturn the governments with which they are friendly.

The U.S. and Israel are total hypocrites here, yapping about democracy when they couldn’t care less about democracy so long as the next government is without Assad.

What kind of democracy do you see in Iraq? In Afghanistan? In Bahrain? In Yemen” In Saudi Arabia? Or in Libya, where American forces killed hundreds of people directly?

The United States itself is so full of dissidents, unhappy minorities, and far-out kooks, you could find hundreds of thousands, including Aryan Nation folks, Militia types, Millenialists, Separatists, down-at-the-heel minorities, and general discontents.

And if you were so inclined, you could secretly heavily arm these extremists and minorities and unbalanced types with guns and explosives and intelligence and fill them with propaganda.

I’m sure it wouldn’t be that difficult to get riots and revolts going in many places.

But all you have to do is look back to the black urban revolts of the 1960s and later to see what would happen. That’s when the National Guard shot hundreds in the streets, and no one said a word about democracy.

All such killing by governments is unacceptable, but it is even more unacceptable that far-away governments would cynically set such violence in motion and sit smiling contentedly, occasional interrupting their perverse pleasure with histrionic speeches about democracy and human rights.

Recall, please, the United States cynically killed maybe a million people in Iraq, and it had nothing to do with democracy. It gave the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s several billion dollars’ worth of arms to kill Russians. It killed tens of thousands itself in Afghanistan without a sign of democracy. It cynically caused some of the Kurds to revolt in Kissinger’s day, resulting in their mass slaughter. It kills in Pakistan, Yemen, Bahrain, and other places, and democracy has nothing to do with it. And it carried out a holocaust in Vietnam, with 3 million horribly killed, and democracy had nothing to do with it.