JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY A YOUNG WOMAN NAMED ALAINA PODMOROW IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Alaina,

I’m sure you are a idealistic and well-intentioned young woman, but the hard truth is that what you write is not well informed.

The world is so full of injustice that injustice is far easier to find than justice.

And just one of those many injustices is the treatment of women in so very many parts of the world.

There is nothing special about Afghanistan in this regard.

The talk of women in Afghanistan was a stroke of propaganda by George Bush, and sadly so many in the world have bought into it – as you have – because, of course, there is some truth in it, but all good propaganda has truth in it to make it more effective.

The issue around women has been used as trick to gain sympathy for American troops busy killing people around the clock, including many women both in Afghanistan and Pakistan with their terrible bombing.

The truth is that you cannot change a people’s old ways and customs until the conditions that formed them are solved.

In Afghanistan, there is extreme poverty, and people live hardscrabble lives in the mountains and deserts, and they are filled with ancient superstitions. You cannot just butt your way in and tell them how they should be living and what their customs should be.

Imagine someone going to 15th century Spain – the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, monarchs who created the Inquisition – and telling people that girls should be sent to school, and that nuns shouldn’t wear habits, and that young women should be able to go out on their own, and that wives shouldn’t be locked in iron chastity belts for years when their men go off to war. It is preposterous, and anyone attempting it would likely find himself fighting a duel or simply be stabbed in the back.

I picked Spain, but pretty much the same could be said of Italy, France, or indeed England.

As a country’s economy grows and flourishes over many years, old superstitions and prejudices begin to melt away. Everything in society gradually changes, including the status of women, and that is what has happened in all advanced countries.

But that has not happened in Afghanistan yet, and in a lot of other places.

If the United States, when it invaded Afghanistan (killing how many women and children? You will never know) had wanted to genuinely help, it would have dropped dollar bills, not bombs, to make lives better.

There are more than billion women in the world under oppressive conditions. We don’t, and we can’t interfere in every country involved. It’s impossible. So what is special about the roughly 15 million women of Afghanistan? Nothing.

Did you know that in India they have “bride burning” for unacceptable wives? Did you know poor peasants there marry off their 12 year old daughters to rich old men who are attracted to them and offer the girl’s family a bribe? And when the old husband dies, perhaps at an age no older than you, his wife does not get to keep all his wealth? And she is banned from marrying ever again and must go the rest of her life in ugly clothes, only eating certain foods?

In Pakistan, they have “honor killings” of young women suspected of infidelity by members of their own families.

Did you know that in Mexico women are brutally murdered by the hundreds, their bodies left lying in the desert like so much trash?

Did you know that in Thailand poor families often sell young girls, no older than you and often younger, to horrible men who offer them to sex tourists?

Did you know that the United States killed about a million and a half women, and many children, in its lunatic crusade in Vietnam? It killed another maybe half a million women in Iraq during its invasion. Or that in ten years of terrible American blockade before the invasion, tens of thousand children perished in Iraq?

What do you think is the condition of women’s lives in Gaza where they have endured more than three years of illegal blockade, allowing them only just-above-starvation level food stuff?

Did you know that an ultra-orthodox woman in Israel cannot divorce her husband even if he beats her, and that if he chooses to divorces her, he gets to keep her children? She is left without meaningful status.

I could make a very long list of these horrors, but my point is made, there is nothing special about the women of Afghanistan, as you have incorrectly been told.

So dedicate yourself, as we all should, to helping women everywhere, but not by invading someone’s country on the coattails of the United States, or anyone else, who has killed tens of thousands with its military horrors.
______________________________
From another reader:

“You can’t rely on Canadians to do the heavy lifting in Afganistan [sic]. We will leave that work, as usual, to the U.S. Hopefully they will help you.”

What a terrible comment, echoing, as it does, George Orwell.

For “heavy lifting” read mass killing.

For “We leave that work, as usual, to the U.S. .” read Canada is not in the mass murder business, with, by the way, a twinge of regret that it is not.

“Hopefully they will help you.” Oh, yes, a country threatening to go under from all its economic and financial excesses, a country which is literally burning money on bombing and needless brutality.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A LEAD STORY IN THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Truly, the Pope must be amongst the biggest hypocrites on the planet.

Here is a man dressed in gold and lace and ermine, styled in the patterns of a fifteenth century monarch, blubbering about freedom.

His gold and lace and ermine are paid for out of the contributions of tens of millions of the world’s poor and humble people making their offerings.

And he heads a church in which millions of women are refused the roles they would like to assume in their religious life.

He heads a church, too, where tens of thousands of children have been abused by twisted priests, priests who have always been protected and never treated as the common criminals they in fact are.

Perhaps most hypocritical of all, is the fact that what he is really concerned about is China’s policy of selecting bishops – the man is concerned with the Church’s power, not about people’s religious freedom.

It was, after all, the pretensions and murderous blunders of the papacy which created conditions for the Reformation and all the religious wars that followed.

In Germany and other places, Lutheranism displaced Catholicism.

In England, Henry VIII just took over completely, seizing all the Church’s property and substituting himself for the pope.

In France, the state gradually told the pope who it wanted as bishops: France would not allow the papacy to decide these then-important offices itself.

This last is pretty much all that China has done, and I think we can be confident that average Chinese Catholic could care less whether the CPC or the old unelected crones of the Holy See nominates bishops.

But the Holy See and its chief mouthpiece, Mr. Ratzinger, do very much care, just as the popes of hundreds of years ago very much cared about France taking a role in who gets to be a bishop.

The Pope’s words have absolutely nothing to do with religious freedom.

The ruling members of the CPC actually are subject to a slightly more democratic process than the Pope and his cardinals and bishops are: the CPC membership is roughly one percent of China’s population – interestingly, about the same as early Virginia’s percent of population with the franchise – and they vote for the leadership and policies.

No one but some appointed cardinals votes for the pope, and no one votes for the cardinals, and no ordinary Catholics have even the tiniest say or vote in the Church’s policies.

I think the Globe should be ashamed of running this hypocritical self-serving nonsense as a top story on Christmas. You are serving only elite establishment interests with this, not the interests of ordinary people or the cause of religious freedom.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Oh please.

Neither is India’s common practice of bride burning.

And its common practice of arranged marriages for young girls (sometimes twelve years old) to old well-off men who give money to a poor family.

And there is India’s terrible tradition towards widows, often the same unfortunate young girls who were pushed into an arranged marriage with an old man.

The widows are treated as unwelcome living corpses, having to dress certain ways, live certain ways, and not allowed to remarry, even though they may be in the prime of life. Suicide is a common way out of this hell.

In many countries in South America we have the most horrendous treatment of women. Young migrant women in Mexico have been murdered by the hundreds with no effort to solve the crimes. South America’s machismo culture treats women in the home as virtual slaves and even in some places makes women alone on the street fair game for rape.

In Thailand, dirt-poor families not infrequently sell young girls into prostitution, a practice providing the allure for the West’s thousands of sexual-tourists there.

Women in Ultra Orthodox Jewish communities, a throwback culture to another century, are treated as possessions, not being able to divorce abusive husbands without losing their children plus suffering many more inequities.

The position of women in fundamentalist Christian communities, including the Mennonites, is an example of the same kind of throwback culture, a throwback to a time when women had no real voice in almost anything.

Then there’s the glorious working of the Catholic Church in many poor parts of the world, and even in those not so poor, a long tale of abuse and perversion.

The list goes on and on, especially for third-world countries.

It is a matter of historical record that women only receive fair treatment with sound, long-term economic development. It was only in the 20th century that a Canadian woman could vote, but even more importantly, the banks would not even let a woman have an account without a husband’s approval not that many decades ago.

You seem to have selected out Iran for purely propaganda purposes, Iran being America’s flavor-of-the-month to castigate and threaten.