John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY RALPH RAICO IN THE UNZ REVIEW

 

“The Taboo Against Truth”

“Speaking truth to power” is not easy when you support that power. Perhaps this is the reason why so few Western historians are willing to tell the whole truth about state crimes during this century.”

“In fact, all great states in this century have been killer states, to a greater or lesser degree.”

 

https://www.unz.com/article/the-taboo-against-truth/#comment-3600137

 

Indeed.

And I wonder how many Americans know the postwar record of their own country in the world?

You know, the bloody work America busied itself with during its golden age of postwar dominance, the period of “the American Dream,” while American families watched “Ozzie and Harriet” and “Mary Tyler Moore” and “Seinfeld” and “Friends”?

One-fifth of the entire population of North Korea exterminated in three years of carpet bombing? That’s a Pentagon number, too.

How many Americans know their country conducted a true holocaust in Vietnam?  3 million Vietnamese killed. Carpet bombing. Napalm. Early cluster bombs.

A huge legacy of landmines and Agent Orange left behind to keep killing and maiming for decades.

At least a million died in the “killing fields” of Cambodia. The United states had an important role in bringing that about. A neutral government was constantly pressured and harassed and secretly bombed and periodically invaded on a small scale until it collapsed and the Khmer Rouge took over.

The US then did not lift a finger to stop the butchery by the Khmer Rouge.

In Iraq, the illegal US invasion killed about a million people and so set back one of the most advanced Arab states that it still has not recovered. Millions lack such basics as clean water and electricity.

Libya was the best-run government on the continent of Africa. Everything from clean water to good education was provided free to its people, and the country was kept at peace. Today it is in ruins, and fighting over its future continues.

The horrors of the proxy war in Syria, the covert work of the US and some allies, has killed over 600,000 people and destroyed great parts of a truly beautiful and historic land.

The millions of refugees that came close to de-stabilizing parts of Europe were the result of people desperately seeking safety from America’s bombing in its destructive series of Mideast wars.

During the coup in Indonesia after President Sukarno, there was a huge bloodbath as anyone even thought to be a communist had his throat cut. The rivers were said to run red with blood from hundreds of thousands of victims thrown in.

During the horror, the US State Department burned up the phone lines submitting the names of communists or communist suspects.

Apart from the big events, there have been just dozens of coups and interventions and dirty wars over the postwar period – from those in Iran and Guatemala to Chile and Ukraine and Bolivia – all democratic governments overthrown, just ones the US didn’t like.

The ugly suppurating wounds of Palestine never stopped leaking over the decades, and America never made the effort to stop what it could have easily stopped.
 

John Chuckman

COMMENT TO A RE-PUBLISHED ARTICLE BY THE LATE ROBERT PARRY IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“More Second Amendment Madness”

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/08/10/more-second-amendment-madness/

 

“… false notion that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution incorporated the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights so an armed population could fight the government that the Framers had just created.”

 

The historical truth in a nutshell.

However, when you are dealing with fanatics and ideologues – literally, adherents of a secular religious cult such as American Patriotism – truth has about the same impact as pointing out the absurdity of Lot’s wife or Noah’s Ark or Jonah and the whale or the loaves and the fishes.

There is a fundamental divide in human beings when it comes to matters of belief, and especially intensely-held and fear-forged beliefs. Rational argument, evidence, and logic all get tossed, rejected vehemently because they conflict with what the adherent wants to believe, the adherent perhaps not even fully conscious about why it is he or she so desperately wants to believe.

It is just a fact that an awful lot of Americans want guns. They have paranoid fears, and guns make them feel more secure. They are conditioned by a national history and mythology literally built around the importance of guns, in everything from the frontier and cowboys and cavalry and Rough Riders to Prohibition and threats of communism and terror. And today’s vast American military and empire only provide a constant reinforcing sense of how important guns are in the affairs of state.

This issue is one of those which mark the limits of human rationality.

Considering that we are descendants of animals related to chimpanzees, it perhaps really should not surprise anyone.

Just think of how charming and appealing a chimpanzee can be with its big eyes and smile and stunts and remarkably human child-like intelligence.

And yet we now know from long and careful studies in the wild that part of the chimps’ basic behavior includes clans marching out for surprise attacks on neighboring chimp clans, fracturing skulls and driving the living from their homes and food supply. Sound familiar?

The problem around guns and violence in America is the country’s existing form of government. What the early government, so admirable in high school civics textbooks, began morphing into not many years after its creation.

You have an aristocratic, imperial form of government, itself hostile and belligerent to so many things in the world. It governs an empire built on violence, both inside the continental United States and outside in its possessions abroad.

It is truly incapable of dealing with many domestic matters. It is not really interested or concerned, except for a brief show of mollifying speeches to constituents and meetings after some terrible mass killing. Then it’s back to business as usual.

America’s government responds to money and power, and not to ideas or ideals or human appeals. It pretty much lets “the people” continue in whatever unpleasant social situations they find themselves – violence, injustice, lack of medical care, poor public schools, immense poverty – while it wheels and deals in the lives of still other people living abroad.

Just think about it. What could you actually expect at home from the kind of politicians who created Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and dozens of coups and blockades and interventions, killing and maiming millions? Hurling millions from their homes as desperate refugees? Refugees then often despised and ridiculed by the very same politicians? That, sadly, characterizes the very fabric of American government.

The kind of politicians who tolerate, and even praise as “restrained,” the behavior of Israel at Gaza where it literally ambushes unarmed crowds, week after week after week, demonstrating for rights? And the kind of politicians who continue arming Israel, heavily, even in violation of their own “showcase” laws concerning the use of exported American weapons?

No, you cannot expect much at home from a government displaying that kind of behavior abroad.

And, no, you cannot possibly have rational gun laws in the domestic chaos of jurisdictions that is American society. Where any one local jurisdiction even tries – as in some cities responding to their desperate residents – it is surrounded by a sea of gun-running and legal sales from neighboring jurisdictions. It can achieve nothing, except providing the true Patriot fanatics with yet another example of how gun control fails, something for them to smirk at.

Gun control must be national, but what are the chances of that in America?

_______________________

Response to another comment who used the term ‘snowflake’ to describe the concerns of Consortium News with guns:

 

Truly, for those aware of the realities of history, few expressions are more devoid of meaning than “rights.”

It remains a favorite American refrain, but it is about as meaningful as “privacy” is today with the NSA and intrusive corporate internet monopolies.

Such words resemble those of a child about Santa Claus.

Talk about “snowflake.”

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/04/12/john-chuckman-comment-a-few-observations-on-the-idea-of-rights/

 

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2016/04/22/john-chuckman-essay-the-illusion-of-rights/

 

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

Mark Steel is just a second-rate propagandist.

Of course, China has its flaws, and some serious ones.

But perspective is everything.

After all, let’s not forget that Britain did help mightily in killing about a million people in Iraq, the creation of a couple of million miserable refugees, and the destruction of large parts of an advanced society for generations.

And Britain happily supports America’s horror in Syria, the letting-loose of tens of thousands of well-equipped cutthroats in an effort to destroy a beautiful land.

I haven’t heard any public cries from Downing Street over the Saudi terror campaign in Yemen, including the use of cluster bombs on civilians. Perhaps I missed something?

No, I don’t think I did. There was nothing either about all the Saudi beheadings and a sentence of crucifixion either. But there was a huge secret arms sale and a project for building prisons in one of the world’s great tyrannies.

Please, stuff like this of Mr. Steel’s is just clap-trap. I doubt very much he raised his voice on such other atrocities as Israel’s murderous abuse of several million Palestinians for half a century. This remains the world’s single greatest example of a complete squashing of human rights and decency: the Palestinians have no votes, no rights, no future, and they can’t even enjoy their homes and farms with any security. Again, that is a matter about which we never hear from good old David or Mr. Steel for that matter.

After all, for David to do so, even slightly, would seriously harm relations with Rupert Murdoch, a man, by the way, whose British publishing empire was built in part on hacking the intimate telephone conversations of hundreds of unfortunate people, including victims of violent crime. To say nothing of casting a pall over those delightful country weekends with Rupert’s designated creature in Britain, red-haired bombshell Rebekah Brooks

Interesting, despite China’s shortcomings in human rights, it has pretty well lived in peace with its neighbors for its entire modern existence.

That certainly cannot be said of the United States or its colony in the Middle East, the two most dangerous states in the modern world, both of whom get David’s unlimited support and affection.

______________________

America has given us nothing but wars and coups and “interventions” since the end of the Second World War. The toll of their attempts to control the planet, including such glorious episodes as the Vietnam War, has been literally as many people killed – mostly civilian, as is the case in all modern war – as were killed in the Holocaust.

Three million victims just in Vietnam, another million in Iraq, a million in Cambodia, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Chile, Guatemala, and on and on.

Israel, America’s colony in the Middle East, has behaved as a miniature replica of the mother country. It has done nothing but kill and suppress people for 65 years, having invaded every neighbor that it has, many of them two or three times.

I don’t see how anyone can write what Mark Steel writes without being entirely ignorant of modern history or deliberately ignoring it. In either case, the result is not worth publishing.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

While the Klu Klux Klan is a nasty and rather ridiculous organization, as a source of evil in today’s world it is minuscule, almost non-existent.

They were once a true national organization in America, as was the NAZI-like Bund organization, but today they are few in few places and virtually unseen.

It seems to me almost a distraction from our many far more terrible events in the world to spend time on what today is a kind of goofy club for people with various degrees of mental problems.

Actually, it might be said that the modern KKK almost serves a slightly beneficial purpose in bringing such people together into one organization rather than let them all go their various ways, and that organization today is thoroughly penetrated by government agents, a task the creepy FBI of J. Edgar Hoover in his heyday scrupulously avoided. After all, Hoover wouldn’t even employ black agents.

On the measure of threats, the KKK today is close to non-existent.

Hate and twisted minds will never cease to be until science either re-engineers the human brain or replaces it with robots.

You must always take account of perspective in such social phenomena. America’s militarized local police alone kill between 1,000 and 1,500 citizens every year, injuring several times that number.

Americans murdering Americans has ranged over recent decades between 25 and 40 thousand each year. By the way, roughly half of that murder is black-on-black in America’s dreadful ghettos.

The President of the United States signs off regularly now on death-squad killings. Thousands have died this way with no charges, no trial, and no voice, drones and computer operators being the only difference from the old Argentine junta dropping people out of helicopters.

America killed more than a million people in Iraq and pretty much destroyed one of the Mideast’s most advanced and promising lands. It would have become a true democracy before too long under prosperity and a growing middle class. Today it is divided wreck.

America and its friends have created a living hell in Syria by supplying, training, and infiltrating lunatic factions into a beautiful and once relatively peaceful land, killing 200,000 and seeing millions of refugees created, refugees they do not even try to help.

Libya is a flaming wreckage today thanks to America and its spineless European associates.

And only four decades ago, America walked away from a true holocaust it created in Vietnam, 3 million dead from napalm and carpet bombing and fragment bombs and land mines and countless tons of Agent Orange.

Its blundering interference in Cambodia saw a neutral government fall and another million innocents die in the Killing Fields.

America’s quasi-colony in the Middle East just killed 2,200 people including about 500 children using American weapons, and that after a previous slaughter of about 1,200, and still they blockade the poor survivors and make weekly threats.

There are many more statistics I could cite, but truly the KKK is about as important as slipping on a banana peel as a source of genuine danger.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Austere lifestyle tells us very little about the character of a man as leader.

Stalin wore modest uniforms most of the time and worked about 16 hours a day.

Hitler too was a man of fairly modest tastes, wearing a modest uniform, being a vegetarian, and often having a polite tea with his secretaries.

Pope Francis’s behavior around the junta was the ethical question which immediately sprang to mind.

While not definitive, this article makes it clear enough he was not an admirable figure during those horrors.

The issue of his behavior over two arrested members of his Jesuit order seems almost a sideshow.

Many thousands were killed by being illegally arrested, drugged, and thrown out of aircraft over the ocean.

Obama has extra-judicially killed 4700 people with drones without a word of disapproval from Rome.

Any man claiming moral authority who does not speak against that is worthy of neither respect or nor admiration.

But then that has always been the behavior of the Catholic Church.

The popes blubber about peace but never speak to those starting wars or those committing great evils.

George Bush happily killed a million people with no disapproval from the pope.

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon killed some 3 million in Vietnam without any opposition from the pope.

Hitler had a concordat with the pope.

Fascist Italy did too.

As did Napoleon.

When Catherine de’ Medici began an orgy of murder of Huguenots (protestants) in France – an event called the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre – the pope honored her “achievement” with the striking of a gold medal.

It is a long and quite shameful history, without even touching on Rome’s behavior over countless years of sexual abuse of children.

Anyone who sees the pope as a moral force in the world is just reciting meaningless words.

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 RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY PAUL KORING IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

America’s establishment is working hard to repeat the scenario of WWII in the Pacific.

Japan was never going to attack the U.S. but after a long period of harassment, trade restrictions, and threats, Japan decided it had no choice.

This is going to become the most dangerous and fearful effort facing Canada’s current younger generation’s time.

And it is completely unnecessary, just as was America’s holocaust in Vietnam where about 3 million people were slaughtered to maintain America’s presence in Asia.

Obama is just as much a creature of America’s military-industrial complex as George Bush or Ronald Reagan.
______________________________________________

“Our US friends should understand that military outreach costs money, and today the US has little of it.”

Yes, but you forget that the United States, having the privilege of the world’s reserve currency, is in a unique position financially.

It has abused, and will continue to abuse, the nations around the world holding its currency.

It will continue inflating gradually or it may at some point devalue.

In either case, America will leave dollar holders around the world “holding the bag,” no different in any respect than a conscienceless fraudster like Bernard Madoff.

So not only does it promote war and violence, it cheats everyone to pay for its stupidity.

That is precisely how the immensely costly and pointless war in Vietnam was paid for.

I am only sorry that most people do not have a grasp of this reality which allows America to behave as an unlimited fool in world affairs.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

“The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is a classic case of doing bad by trying to do good. We can’t rescue people from themselves.”

Another thoughtless piece, packed with frightful ethical concepts, from Ms Wente, the Globe’s reigning champion in churning out such stuff.

“Liberal interventionism” is a created term to make America’s unacceptable behavior seem more appropriate.

There can never be anything “liberal” – in the truest historic meaning of the word – about dropping cluster bombs on people or using white phosphorus on people or torturing prisoners.

You cannot bomb people into democracy. Just steady economic growth and a growing middle class are the requirements for democracy as centuries of history clearly demonstrate, and Iraq was on that path with one of the most prosperous and advanced economies in the Arab world. Now, instead, it is a shambles.

America’s intention never was to “rescue” Iraqis.

Iraq was invaded to eliminate Israel’s most implacable foe, hardly the business of the United States. The invasion decision was unquestionably influenced too by Bush Junior’s psychological need to top what Bush pere had done – a lifelong theme for the pathetic Bush and the kind of motivation that all serious readers of history know plays a role in events.

There was the matchless opportunity of the cover provided by the invasion of Afghanistan too, offering an opportunity to blur facts and operate in public confusion. After all, Hitler used the chaos of the invasion of Russia to begin the Holocaust.

The invasion was covered also by the Nazi-like ideas of Condi Rice with her “We’re hearing the birth pangs of a new Middle East,” amidst the screams of hundreds of thousands dying and their country and culture being destroyed.

An entire generation of Iraqis are doomed to live with no jobs, little electricity, and poor water plus a million pounds of depleted uranium dust.

All thoughtful people knew they were being lied to at the time.

Ms. Wente herself was very much a booster for the bloody effort, a big booster, and you’d be hard put to find any columnist who like her is a regular apologist for Israel’s excesses who didn’t sing hymns to America’s blood bath.

All as pointless as the three million murdered in Vietnam.

Again, for readers who’ve nor seen it, here is the reality of Ms. Wente at the time of the mass murder in Iraq:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/the-iraq-wars-trashiest-piece-of-propaganda/

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

“Omar Khadr is a lucky young man. He is lucky to be entitled to Western justice…”

Even for Margaret Wente, this is perhaps a new low.

Lucky young man?

Ideologue parents push him into war at fifteen?

Shot twice, in the back, by Americans?

Taken to Guantanamo against all international conventions?

His first years in isolation without any contact or representation?

Tortured many times?

Part of his torture consisted of making him sit in uncomfortable positions with raw wounds?

Being forced to appear before a kangaroo court, which has no proper jurisdiction?

Being forced into confessing to something he did not do?

More than one-third of his life in that hellhole?

A bright boy deprived of education?

His country’s government too afraid of Washington to insist on his rights?

Ms Wente has a very odd idea of lucky.

I should remind readers of how bizarre Ms Wente’s thoughts about children have been in the past, just so long as they were Islamic children:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/the-iraq-wars-trashiest-piece-of-propaganda/

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

Gee, I do think recalling what the term “carpet bombing” actually means, this use of language is utterly stupid and brutal.

BP has “carpet bombed” an oil slick with oil dispersants.

America has carpet bombed several million people to their deaths in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, sending countless thousands of others to lives without limbs.

Oh, it also left a toxic sea of Agent Orange – millions of pounds of the horrible stuff – oozing in the soil of Vietnam to cripple newborns for generations.

No daily headlines and melodramatic language was used by the press during those utter savageries.

I really think this use of words tells us something not very pleasant about Americans.

If you kill so much as some American shrimp or soil a beach, it is terrible, unforgivable crime, but America reserves the right to barbeque, blow-up, and poison all the people it wants anywhere it pleases.

And does anyone doubt the fact that because BP is a “foreign” company, it is so savagely attacked? BP certainly recognizes this: their new CEO is an American.

Of course, the final irony in all of this is that this kind of industrial accident could happen any day to any operator in the Gulf, a certain level of risk and danger being inherent in deep-water drilling.

But Americans suck up energy the same way they do drugs. If Americans stopped buying lumbering trucks and SUVs and stopped buying houses on the desert with three-car garages, you wouldn’t need these operations.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMESYes, exactly.

Whether in war or foreign affairs or economics or trade, the basic problem is the American attitude of “I want it all, and I want it now.”

Another word for this is entitlement.

I think there really is no cure for this sickness, just as it is virtually impossible to undo the damage to a person raised by parents who behaved as though they were his servants.

The only time we saw some deviation from this obsession was in the Great Depression, a learning experience comparable to repeatedly hitting one’s head into a wall.

But, as we’ve seen, even depressions have been banned in America now. You can buy your way out, and go back to just what you were doing.

____________________

Yes, Wendell Murray, the American military expenditure is actually cancer-like in its growth, and only recently we were assured by the good Mr. Gates that there would be still more coming.

American politicians today sometimes harangue about China’s military expenditure, which at somewhere between 10 and 15% that of America’s (with four times the population), seems almost miniscule.

There is no rational explanation for this.

Consider the countless billions squandered in Vietnam – inflate it to present dollars and the sum is immense – and to what end?

Trillions were spent on the Cold War, almost all of it wasted. The Soviet Union finally collapsed based on the flaws in economics and logic embedded in its very foundation and structure, not owing to America’s military might.

I think the practice reflects a combination of the American entitlement syndrome (we are entitled to make all others fear our might) and the Moby Dick obsession with chasing the white whale.

There always seems to be a white whale for America.

Spain’s remaining North American Empire of the 1890s, Communism for decades going back to the 1920s (when Hoover first showed his obsession with getting rid of anyone who could be regarded as a Communist), to Islam in recent times.

Does that reflect a basic paranoid trait in a good portion of the population, the legacy of the horrible Puritans? I’ve long thought so. I think Australia was lucky to get the convicts rather than the Pilgrims.

I do believe the world needs seriously to start re-thinking the role of the American dollar as reserve currency in light of the county’s proved record of irresponsibility. That role for the currency leaves Americans with an option no one else has in paying for its lack of control. Look what it did after Vietnam.

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 TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Richard Colvin is a genuine Canadian hero.

How rare it is to find an honest man in government, and rarer still to find one who puts his career at risk for hard truth.

What Colvin’s words say for the characters of the people who surround Harper is very unpleasant.

But what else would you expect?

Harper always supported America’s ghastly war crime of invading Iraq, and we know from countless examples in recent years that Harper’s idea of ethics almost define the banality of evil.

And Harper has no qualms about Israel’s several mass murders in Lebanon and Gaza. He’s gung ho for a state openly practicing ethnic-cleansing and apartheid.

Following America into the mire of Afghanistan has been terrible for Canada, squandering our nation’s reputation as well as lives and money while achieving nothing of worth.

As to Mr Peter “My word ain’t worth much” and “I call my ex a dog” Mackay’s attempts to throw dirt, well consider the source.

Apart from all his other accomplishments, MacKay has demonstrated his intellectual weakness in several poorly-handled jobs.

His word carries no weight weight in any balance of arguments.

Particularly when he is aiming to undermine a man of distinguished achievements, substantial intellect, and genuine honor.

Good God, Mackay, is just plain pathetic.

Harper’s crowd has brought us a stinking copy of right-wing Republican shabby politics.

The stuff about the letters to certain constituents deemed Jewish and containing suggestions about opposition of anti-Semitism is right from the gutter. So too any attack on Colvin.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

When I read this piece by Tom Flanagan, I can only wonder at the basis of tenure in our universities, for, truly, here are bits of weak observation, clichés, and half-truths pasted together and offered as analysis. Worse, there is a thread of partisan propaganda holding the bits together like a string of beads.

“Harper announced that his Conservative government would adhere to the national interest in formulating Canada’s foreign policy…”

I am sorry, but anyone who genuinely understands the history and foreign affairs knows that that has, everywhere and always, been the basis of foreign policy. To say anything else is a declaration of just plain ignorance.

Genuine national interests do change over time – after all, your interests are different when you are exporting, say, fighter planes than when you are exporting wheat. But also, and very importantly, yet something Flanagan conveniently leaves out, people’s and government’s perceptions of what are the national interests change, often for no more reason than political ideology.

The authors of the report Flanagan pretends to analyze are “not mushy-headed idealists obsessed with soft power…” so they deserve some attention. Is it usual for a professor intending to be taken seriously in what follows to use the kind of pejorative language and straw-man argument we’d get from Rush Limbaugh?

Yes, if you are a neo-con propagandist.

“These people deserve our attention when they talk about genocide.”
Good God, “genocide” is one of the most over-worked words in our contemporary language, and, far more importantly, concern about it is always used by people like Mr. Flanagan as a tool for other purposes. This is no small point.

No power or great power ever goes to war over perceived genocide.

Most importantly, has the US, a Frankenstein of military power if ever there was one, ever opposed genocide, other than in words? It is the US which holds political and economic sway over international agencies like the UN, and it is the US which has the military power to do something.

We have had several authentic genocides in the modern period.

We had a genocide in Rwanda (around a million killed). The US simply refused to use the word internally so that they could ignore it.

We had a genocide in Cambodia (over a million killed), caused by America’s de-stabilizing of the once peaceful country with its bombing and secret invasion. When tough little Viet Nam went in to do something, the US stood back and said, ‘See, we told you, the domino theory at work!’

We had a genocide in Indonesia with the fall of Sukarno. Five hundred-thousand people, vaguely identified as communists, had their throats cut and their bodies dumped into rivers.

Not only did the US not react, there were officials at state department phones late into the night transmitting names of candidates.

I would argue, too, that America’s slaughter in Vietnam was a genuine genocide. About three million were killed, mostly civilians, for no reason other than embracing the wrong economic system.

Many aspects of Bush’s “war on terror” have assumed aspects of genocide. Ever heard of the three thousand prisoners in U.S. care who were driven out to the desert in sealed vans to suffocate by General Dostum’s men while American soldiers watched, picking their noses? This came after Secretary Rumsfeld publicly declared Taleban prisoners should be killed or walled-away for life.

‘Never again’ is a slogan – we’ve proved that – and, like all slogans, it is selectively applied to sell something, just as Flanagan does here.

Great standing armies have virtually no record of doing worthy things.

They do, very much, have a record of fighting pointless wars, intervening where they do not belong, and even intimidating or overthrowing governments.

Flanagan’s “beyond our power to fulfill” is nothing but a plea for more militarism and closer association with a United States which has overthrown governments in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and a dozen other places as well as killing millions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq for absolutely no good purpose.

Great power like that is something to be very wary of, not to embrace.