John Chuckman

COMMENT ON AMERICA’S ACTIONS AGAINST IRAN AND OTHER STATES

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I can’t imagine better words to describe Trump’s actions against Iran – all of them, from tearing-up the working international nuclear treaty to imposing war-like sanctions, which indeed hurt millions of children and poor people, and  to threatening with warships and nuclear-capable bombers, and now to assassinating the second-most important man in the country, a national hero, a vicious act that demands a response.

Is it even possible to conceive of a more passionately destructive set of actions, unprovoked and without reason except to satisfy an urge to tell others what to do? How on earth can a nation call itself “great,” as America so frequently does, when that is how it behaves?

In what way did any of it make any part of the world’s people better off or safer? It added only pain and suffering and fear to a great many lives and created threats of war that hadn’t existed. And it hugely decreased the future capacity of the world’s nations to trust the word and good faith of the United States.

Of course, that set of acts is only the worst of a bad lot. There was the desperate attempt to topple a twice-elected government in Venezuela, going to such extremes as turning off everyone’s electricity a couple of times, blockading the country including its receipt of medical necessities, working to collapse its major industries, and literally stealing many of the country’s assets abroad.

Almost at the same time, another coup, a successful one, was staged in Bolivia, toppling a popular, elected government, one elected multiple times.

New threats and warnings were issued to Nicaragua and Cuba, both countries which have suffered horribly under past American belligerence.

A number of other horrors from the past decade go right on generating death and misery, too – misery in the broken ruins of Libya, once the best place in Africa to live with all public amenities from good water to education supplied free, misery in the never-recovered catastrophe of Iraq, in poor Yemen, and in the beautiful land of Syria plagued by paid outsiders, mercenaries, supplied with many terrible weapons, who kill and destroy on a large scale.

And everyone in Ukraine and in the rest of Europe pays a price for America’s coup there – a civil war has killed thousands, the country’s economy collapsed under an incompetent installed government, its population has seriously declined as people leave for jobs elsewhere, huge sets of war-like sanctions have cut billions in healthy trade between Europe and Russia, regular threatening military displays and large-scale exercises are conducted right on Russia’s border – these last supposedly over a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine which never occurred.

The press and political speeches are filled with threatening rhetoric and demands for big new spending on the means of destruction – all in the face of no threat and indeed a situation in Russia everyone in the West would have deliriously cheered back in the 1970s, a reasonable, temperate government ready to do business with anyone and call them “partner.” But Europe and Russia can’t do so basic and necessary a thing as buy-and-sell a commodity like natural gas without immense pressures being brought against them by the United States.

We have a vicious trade war with China, predicated on no more principle than that “We think you’ve been far too successful in your stunning rise [the rise of China being the greatest and most important human achievement of our age], and we want different arrangements which take some of that success away from you, and we’ll hit you with every sanction and tariff we can think of until you give them to us.”

That marks greatness being displayed by America?

There is not one of those activities that the world would not be better off without. Safer, more prosperous, more secure, happier, holding more optimism for the future – in other words, virtually all of the activity abroad by the United States for years represents a dead-weight loss for humanity and the community of nations. That’s quite an achievement. And the cost in dollars has been colossal.

Of course, I blame Trump, but, as I’ve said before, it certainly is not the work of just Trump, as hopeless and vicious and ignorant as he is. There have been no efforts by other branches of America’s government to halt or hinder the craziness. They are all complicit.

Please note, the candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination, none of them except one unlikely one, even recognize this terrible problem or how to address it. So, for sure, as is usual in the costly stage shows called American elections, when it’s over, no matter which side wins, you will find the same situation prevailing. Just more rude noise and bellowing with Trump, and less without Trump.

America seeks what is not possible given its relative decline in the face of global growth and change and progress. And it seeks it fired by a burning, fanatical belief that it holds an exceptional place in God’s creation.

I fear that deadly combination of American delusions has the potential to do far greater harm than it already has.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ANNE PERKINS IN THE GUARDIAN

 

“When terror strikes, do something useful…”

I am sorry, Anne Perkins, but your words are meaningless because we live surrounded with almost constant terror today.

And I do not mean (the still comparatively rare) events such as Brussels.

Look at what the poor people in beautiful Syria have endured for five years.

That is terror on a scale which dwarfs Brussels or Paris, yet I don’t read writers such as you saying anything about it.

Perhaps non-Europeans don’t count?

That serious terror in Syria is the work of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and America, with Britain and France sitting on the sidelines applauding.

How about the horrors in Libya? A decent society smashed for no good reason and never a tear shed.

There’s the grotesque situation now in Ukraine, induced entirely by the United States.

How about the horrors in Yemen as David Cameron’s friends in Saudi Arabia bomb women and children?

And there’s the absolutely pitiless situation in Gaza?

Terror is everywhere, but the mainline press only describes as terror those relatively few and smaller-sized events in Europe or America.

I believe that our quiet acceptance of what is taking place in the world on a grand scale actually makes our journalists morally unfit to comment upon such events as Brussels. At any rate, it leaves them totally lacking in crucial facts around such events, and writing without facts is a perilous business indeed.

So long as our governments either engage in, or tolerate, the terrible things now going on in half a dozen places, there is likely to be no end to what are essentially “blowback” events like Brussels.

You stop terror by stopping your own share of it.

Are you listening, David Cameron, friend and supplier to King Salman for instance?

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE THE TORONTO STAR

Sorry, but your calling Putin a bully is mighty shabby stuff, Justin Trudeau.

It truly makes you sound like Stephen Harper, likely the most dishonest and disliked politician in Canadian history, a true bully, if you will.

I do not see how there’s really anything you must tell Putin, unless you count repeating some boilerplate phrases borrowed from America’s sprawling junkyard of needless attacks and propaganda.

If there is a legitimate bully on the world’s stage today, it is, without question, America, responsible as it is for the deaths, destruction, and refugees of Syria.

It is America also that is responsible for the mess in Ukraine, putting an illegitimate government in place by coup and then supporting its awful policies of intolerance and war.

And even in the case of Flight MH-17, it is America who has kept things hidden. It never released data from its radars and spy satellite – which was overhead at the time – and that is mighty suspicious. Likely it was afraid of seeing its coup-induced government in Ukraine embarrassed. So we’ve had long delays and much evidence never used and a useless report.

Putin is the most able leader on the international scene today, a totally reasonable man, and a far more honest one than Obama or Harper or Cameron, all of whom lie regularly about matters like Syria. Putin’s country, too, is certainly destined to be a great one in future, given its endowments of natural resources and human ingenuity. It is extremely short-sighted to use American trash-talk about a leader Russians embrace as strongly as they do Putin.

We should welcome working with a reasonable man like Putin for many reasons, but if some chose not to do so, they can at least avoid bellowing undiplomatic nonsense for a few cheap votes, as you did with your campaign statement.

That’s not how your much-respected father would have acted in these circumstances – witness his independent-minded judgment and policies about Castro’s Cuba – and in the case of Russia today, Pierre Trudeau’s way would be far more productive than bellowing.

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

COMMENT POSTED TO ARTICLES IN BOTH THE GUARDIAN AND RUSSIA TODAY

The fact is that most of the solid information we have and many suggestive bits point directly to Ukraine as responsible for downing the airliner. We do know to a certainty that some very important evidence has been suppressed.

Clearly, we all knew from day one that some form of anti-aircraft missile was used, so this discovery, vaguely described in the press, is not much of a discovery.

We need to know which kind of missile was used and from which source it came. The Russians have some pretty good leads suggesting a Ukrainian fighter was near the airliner. They also have the statement of a ground serviceman that a fighter took off loaded with air-to-air missiles – not an everyday event – and returned without them. We even have the name and a photo of the pilot said to be involved.

The Russian BUK ground-to-air missile system, an older version of it, was in the hands of the Ukrainian armed forces, and the design is significantly different to the design of the current BUK system.

But there are many good reasons to believe it was not this kind of missile that was used. There is a very revealing photograph of the pilot’s seat, only the metal frame left, on the ground after the crash. That photo clearly shows a couple of almost precisely round holes in the metal, not the kind that can be made by an exploding missile warhead, but the kind made from the standard cannon on a fighter jet. Importantly, the holes were roughly perpendicular to the seat’s side frame.

Of course, there are also many pictures of missile fragment rips in the plane’s body, so the strong hypothesis emerges of a fighter attack, using both canon and air-to-air missiles. By the way, the Dutch kept the Malaysian pilot’s body an unnecessarily long time, and when it was released to his family for burial, the widow was ordered by Malaysian authorities not to open the coffin. Why? Was the body full of bullet holes?

The Dutch investigators are lax beyond description. There are dozens of pieces from the crash still on the ground today, some being found quite regularly by locals. Yet the Dutch have shown virtually no interest in them when informed of them. Why, you have to ask?

The original site clean-up was positively careless, absolutely nothing like what we’ve come to expect in such investigations. Remember the infinitely patient search for the tiniest bits in Scotland? Remember the recent crash in the French Alps with stuff littered for a huge area, and it was patiently picked up.

The Dutch methods of operation suggest to me perhaps they already knew what happened and knew they had little to investigate. Indeed, this announcement of vague missile parts is highly unprofessional. Are such matters to be settled in the press? A trip to Russia’s manufacturer of BUK systems, a company which indicated its readiness to help, is what was called for. At least one of the things because a visit to Ukraine’s air force is also required and examination of pilot logs and armaments records, but, no, we have none of these.

But the Dutch sure have used an extraordinary amount of time so far, announcing virtually nothing of consequence yet. In such matters typically, especially where the black boxes have been found, it is a matter of a few weeks to come to a conclusion. At most, a few months. Why not in this case which actually seems fairly straightforward?

I am sure the Dutch are deliberately delaying, and they are doing so under the hot breath of the United States which has a lot it is hiding here. The United States is hoping that if enough time passes, people will forget their interest.

The United States has never produced its radar data for the area, radar data which must certainly exist in a region of such intense strategic interest to America. After all, here they are accusing the Russians of aggression and they do not even keep watch on them? Impossible.

Also, the United States has never produced any data from its Keyhole spy satellites, each of which has many sophisticated imaging capabilities, including cameras not unlike the Hubble Space Telescope. We know to a certainty that one of these was overhead at the time since the Russians naturally enough track them all and they have said that was the case.

Finally, Ukraine itself has made public none of its data from its own radars, and the same with recordings of conversations of aircraft control.

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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 RUSSIA INSIDER

Ukrainians should be very careful about any training from American police.

American police forces have a well-earned reputation for violence and abuse.

They kill a large number of innocent Americans every year – estimated at 1,000 to 1,500 – far more than any terrorist dreams of. The statistics are not kept, almost certainly to suppress the shameful reality.

Few if any of them ever are dismissed or charged which means implicitly that American authorities accept the behavior.

But as few abroad, happily watching re-runs of American television situation comedies, will know America is a very brutal society in which to live.

Murder and violent crime rates are high. Police are often brutal. Prisons are extremely brutal. America maintains the world’s largest population of its own citizens behind bars. Some of its “super-max” prisons are an affront to human rights and decency. It embraces the death penalty too.

American police are militarized in their equipment, training, and attitudes, and the trend in militarization has only increased greatly in recent years. With all the meaningless colonial wars America has been fighting, there is a huge pool every year of ex-servicemen of course, all trained to kill, who need to be absorbed back into the civilian population, and police work is one of the typical destinations for them.

On top of those horrors, in recent years many American police forces have undergone training from Israeli forces, and surely there is no nation on earth whose record of killing and brutality on a per capita basis exceeds that of Israel.

It is a rather bleak picture in total, and I think any society which uses training or ideas from American police is desperate or lacks basic understanding.