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

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.