John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK COCKBURN

 

“The US Has Faced Decline Before – But Nothing Like What’s to Come”

 

I regard this as one of Mr. Cockburn’s more perceptive columns.

He has definitely captured some important truths here.

They are hard ones for Americans to accept.

I find it remarkable how well China is handling matters like information and assistance to the world.

It comes at a time of tireless misinformation and blundering from American leadership.

And the whole world can plainly see that.

Also, despite all the pain and suffering now and in the coming months, the US busies itself still with pointless, unnecessary hostilities in Venezuela, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and many other locations, making yet more people more miserable.

By contrast, there’s China offering cooperation, partnership, and help.

Xi’s intelligence and mild manner couldn’t be in more contrast to the grimaces and stream of noisy errors from Trump.

Putin very much also is making an effort abroad but Russia’s resources are considerably less than China’s.

We are fortunate to have two such gifted leaders to help offset some of the chaotic rumblings of Washington.

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

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ALEX KRAINER IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“I Wrote a Book Exposing Bill Browder’s Deceptions Because He Could Trigger a Major War With Russia

“Having experienced, first-hand, a vicious war in Yugoslavia, caused by the same kind lying Browder engages in, this author felt he had to speak up.”

 

https://russia-insider.com/en/i-wrote-book-exposing-bill-browders-deceptions-because-he-could-trigger-major-war-russia/ri24782

 

This is a well-written piece. I hope it stimulates people to read the book.

“Today most westerners seem ready to believe that Putin is a tyrant, that he routinely has critics and political rivals assassinated, that he amassed a vast personal fortune and that he runs Russia as his own personal fiefdom.”

Yes, and why is that? Our newspapers and broadcasts are larded with negative stuff about Russia all the time. I can’t recall a time recently seeing a good story about Russia, a huge country with all kinds of diverse and interesting things going on. Some of the stories reach frightening levels of paranoia, as this, following, not long ago in The Guardian (I could cite many more from that truly threadbare excuse for a newspaper, but this one marks a peak in their relentless efforts):

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/05/21/john-chuckman-comment-absurd-lengths-to-which-our-press-goes-to-attack-russia-britains-guardian-holds-hate-russia-day-today-some-of-its-stuff-is-so-ham-fisted-it-reads-like-1959-pravda-atta/

When it isn’t actual accusations of some unproved event, such as Theresa May’s weird Skripal Affair, it is just a clear assumption and tone that our press – always following our dishonest politicians as closely as baby ducks imprinted to waddle behind their mothers – is speaking about a country that is somehow “other,” a country that doesn’t operate by the same rules good old America does.

But it really shouldn’t surprise anyone who has a little history and who observes and thinks about things.

First, we must always remember that America waged a 24 hour-a-day internal propaganda war for decades on the subjects of Russia and communism. The FBI worked tirelessly on the subject, as did the CIA, and the press simply was constantly putting attitudes and perspectives “out there” instead of news or facts.

I still remember, as a young man in my home town of Chicago, when Lyndon Johnson first started committing men towards what would literally become an American-created holocaust in Vietnam, seeing a disturbing editorial in one of the more “liberal” papers in the city, the Chicago Sun-Times – liberal, that is, only by comparison with something like the Chicago Tribune, an unrelenting advocate for all things on the extreme Right. The editorial was headlined, I still remember, “The Reds Are at the Gates!”

Well, decades of that kind of stuff does leave some toxic residue, even after the world has changed. That’s why Germany carried on a long and intense campaign against Nazism after the Hitler years. But voraciously anti-Russia, anti-communist America never has made any effort to expunge the memories and results of the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton.

And, today, America’s establishment has new reasons for not doing so and indeed for re-igniting the old fires. It is determined to dominate the globe and force advantages from other nations as a means of avoiding its inevitable relative economic decline and the future change in political influence that that entails. The Neocon Wars in the Middle East have been only one part of an effort in many directions and through many means, including threats and sanctions and coups and attacking international organizations of every description.

Russia and China, naturally enough, are seen as barriers against this intense new effort, but Russia’s geography, touching, as it does, America’s unofficial satrapy of Europe and with proximity to the Middle East containing America’s much-privileged colony of Israel, plus its capacity to literally obliterate the United States, make it the greatest target of establishment hate. Russia today and a number of other states welcome a coming multi-polar world. America’s establishment regards it only with fear and loathing.

America has done nothing now abroad but bomb and kill people for over a decade and a half. I don’t know the actual number of deaths – American sources are very coy about how many people they kill, as we learned in the First Gulf War where the number of Iraqis killed was never offered, although we know it was huge with B-52s dropping full loads on sand forts in the desert – but I’m sure the total comes in at no less than two million.

They’ve destroyed, or attempted to destroy, a number of societies – Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and others. And they work away at threatening and manipulating still others, everywhere from Iran to Venezuela or Nicaragua. They also tolerate atrocities by Saudi Arabia and Israel, and, to somewhat a lesser extent, by Egypt, because those governments serve and support their overall purpose. Browbeaten governments like Britain and France work as willing helpers while constantly misrepresenting to their own people what it is they actually are doing, as with the cutthroats of ISIS or al Nusra in Syria, whom they have supported and assisted.

And then there are the millions of desperate refugees created by all that destruction, so many they nearly destabilized Europe, and discussion of refugees in the United States, in its politics and in some popular culture, has turned into a national festival of hate, as though refugees did nothing but rob and rape and kill. And I am not exaggerating in the least.

Trump has been a keen promoter of these views and attitudes, but his words do not go out to an unreceptive audience. There are large portions of American society very receptive to such stuff, just as they are receptive to crude stuff about Russia.

And, of course, we have a hi-tech state-operated extrajudicial killing machinery that carries on day and night murdering people no one even knows anything about. The victims are selected by the very folks doing the killing, the thugs and psychopaths at the CIA. And when I say “victims” I’m not even referring to the many innocents killed in the explosions of Hellfire missiles, deemed as “collateral damage,” I’m referring to the targets themselves, victims in every sense of the word, people condemned to be burned alive with no charges or lawyer or trial or rights of any kind.

Now, while all that inhumanity and brutality from their own government goes on, you would be hard put to find large numbers of Americans who know much about it. Their press and politicians never directly speak in such terms. Everything reported is couched in euphemism or they just recite downright lies. And there is the fact that Americans often take very little interest in what is going on abroad – in part because America is itself such a large and noisy and dynamic and time-consuming society. But it is an attitude which very much assists the government in its great volume of dirty work. Surprisingly few people abroad I think appreciate this important fact.

When George Bush was running for president, he once bragged and laughed over telling people he never read the international section of his newspaper. It was the kind of stupid joke you expect from a very stupid man, but the anecdote is notable in that Bush felt very comfortable in making it while appealing for votes. The irony of the presidency now being an office having more to do with events abroad (in the imperial wars and manipulations of others around the world) than events at home is lost on many Americans. Their attitudes are extremely naïve.

There is also the tendency in people – especially people with strong ideological beliefs as many Americans have, which work to insulate the mind against outside influence, exactly the way strong religious beliefs do – to not really see what they are looking at. The best example of many I could cite, is Israel’s current relentless slaughter of unarmed marchers in Gaza. Organized gangs of snipers behind fences, week after week, shoot into crowds of people demonstrating for some rights. Something like 18,000 have been injured and something like 180 killed in cold blood, including women and children and even well-marked medics. Yet, Americans see this atrocity and cling to the narrative that Israel is only defending itself from terror, even showing “restraint,” and their press and politicians faithfully work hard to reassure them of that.

Of course, all of this stresses the importance of the press abroad, Russia’s being extremely important today because the press in American-dominated places like Britain and France reads and sounds a great deal like the press in America, mostly making the same assumptions and promoting the same narratives. It is actually quite a distressing phenomenon to anyone seeking decent information or even a little different perspective on events.

No critically-minded person automatically accepts the truth of everything in the Russian press either. Russia has its own efforts at persuasion and motives for evasion at times, but on many international issues it is clear that some valid information is supplied by Russia. That can be confirmed in many ways, from the voices of truly independent, respectable journalists to the rare authoritative voice speaking out from within a country such as Britain or the United States.

And even where it cannot be confirmed, the time-honored analytical technique of comparing what two very different sources, like the United States and Russia, claim about a story can be quite helpful in revealing roughly where the truth is. After all, that’s precisely what judges and juries in our courts do all the time. It is a valid technique, but you must have that other side of the story to use it.

If you are someone in the United States or Britain, say, who relies, day-in, day-out, on some single news source such as CBS or The Washington Post or the BBC or The Guardian, I can absolutely assure you, at least on the matters discussed here, that you are misinformed.

That’s a sad reflection on our Western society, with its claims to Enlightenment and humanitarian principles, but I can’t think of another broad statement that is any truer. The motives for deception and the size of the stakes for doing so rise tremendously with the dirty work of empire and aggression, the very work in which the American government is now engaged full-time.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“… ISIS ideology stretches ‘deep into Muslim society…”

What a complete ass Tony Blair is.

First, he knows nothing about Muslim society, but that fact doesn’t stop him from making sweeping observations.

Second and most important, ISIS itself is an artificial construct, as the duplicitous Blair well knows. It includes many Westerners, even special forces under cover from several nations. It is supported and armed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and America. It is led by people associated with Western powers. It cannot be therefore an accurate representation of anything about Muslims.

Third, it is really important to remember that the Muslim world has been treated horribly in recent years, country after country having been attacked or destabilized by America and smarmy allies like Tony Blair. There is a wealth of abuse and grievances behind the decision of any young man who does join such an organization.

Drones are killing people in half a dozen countries.

Syria is under terrible attack from outside.

Yemen is under attack by the absolute monarch of Saudi Arabia.

Libya is in a shambles.

Iraq is a broken rump state.

Egypt is back to a dictatorship.

Israel, as usual, abuses millions with no one even taking serious notice.

And the religion of more than a billion people is almost daily maligned in our press, as you have done in publishing Tony Blair’s malign musings.

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

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

Terrorism?

What a joke.

The United States just murdered a number of innocent Yemenis with a drone strike.

That is indeed terror, state terror.
______________________________

There is not, and never has been, an organization called al Qaeda.

We have the words of several important statesmen, including a former British foreign minister, that the word was only used inside the American government as a catch-all for “bad guys” in certain regions of the world.

The word actually means “hole” or “sewer.” Can you imagine a secret fierce group calling itself “sewer”?

Yet the continued use of the term – repeated over and over in the press – undoubtedly lends weight to vague assertions about threats, and that is precisely why Washington continues to use this ridiculous language.

So why does the press keep repeating the nonsense?

The answer is found in the degree of genuine independence of thought and investigation exhibited by our mainline press, and that is simply not much.

It is not an organization. It does not send e-mails. It does not write press releases. If indeed it were an organization and it did these things from time to time, does any thinking person not understand that NSA and others would locate them quickly, causing the launch of drones in minutes?

But there are some pretty nasty people out there in the world. The United States has cynically used some of them again and again to get something it wants, the latest being the effort to topple the government of Syria.

It used them in Afghanistan – twice: once to fight the Russians in the 1980s, and a second time to defeat the Taleban government and carry out acts of terror like the murder of thousands of Taleban prisoners – and in Libya and in other places.

The United States in using these people and heavily assisting them – aided by its friends Israel and Turkey – is responsible for more terror in Syria alone than any so-called terrorist group could conceive of doing on its own anywhere.

 

 

 

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.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Not too many targets left, in other words.

What a bloody world-class stupidity this operation has been.

America kills and destroys for “anti-Gaddafi” in Libya while it also kills and destroys anti-tyrants themselves in Yemen and Bahrain.

(I wonder how many readers know that the government of Bahrain is actually charging doctors for treating patients because the patients were rebels? Some friend of democracy and human rights that is.)

The only thing which matters in deciding which side to bomb is whether the tyrants toe the American line or not.

And, oh, having substantial oil reserves helps.
_________________________

“Again, Congratulations to the Canadian Airforce and Navy. Their contribution was outstanding in imposing an embargo by sea and air as this conflict took place.”

Oh boy, let’s hear it for a useless contribution to American blood-drenched global imperialism.

I’d say the boys and girls deserve medals.

American medals, that is.
__________________________

“…you ignore the obvious fact that Libyans liberated themselves in this conflict.

“It is all about who has the most ground forces.”

Why do you insist on advertising your ignorance?

The bombardment has been horrific.

At one point Britain actually was running short of Tomahawk cruise missiles.

America used fleets of cruise missiles, B-52s, fighter-jets, and B-2 stealth bombers sent from the United States.

America has destroyed gigantic amounts of infrastructure from airfields to roads to portions of cities.

America has killed thousands of civilians with the bombardment.

Every concentration of the government’s troops was subject to fierce assault plus any civilians nearby.

America has also surreptitiously supplied the rebels with substantial weaponry, and significant special forces – hundreds of murderous thugs – were secreted in to do as many dirty deeds as they could.

The rebels – whatever it is they represent, about which we literally know nothing – basically followed a wall of fire and destruction to claim their prizes.

Even then, the rebels clearly are such a minority they have often failed and close to failed.

I simply cannot conceive how any thinking person can describe the whole ugly effort as the work of the rebels.

Indeed, it is precisely the pattern adopted in Afghanistan where America blew the crap out of anything in doubt while the Northern Alliance advanced on the ground.

Does any sane person doubt that America conquered Afghanistan, or much of it, in this fashion? Or that the existing government figures in Afghanistan serve at America’s pleasure?

What you mistake for arrogance is in fact despair over the lying and cheating and ugliness which dominate world affairs, always pasted over with cheap slogans about freedom and democracy.

Neither of which exists in dozens of places the United States supports and embraces – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Bahrain, and occupied Palestine just for starters.

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY RICHARD SPENCER IN THE TELEGRAPH

Richard Spencer,

Anyone who uses seriously the phrase “war on terror” immediately loses my attention as being someone with little worth saying.

You cannot have a war on ideas or techniques.

But you can very much have a war on a group of people whose religion or politics you do not like.

If people like you spent your time combing through the local mutterings of politicians and others in various countries, you could make just as superficially extreme-sounding a case.

Every day in the backward parts of that vast sprawl called America, you can find the most appalling things being said by local political or religious leaders.

In the backwoods of India or Africa, some of the statements made and practices done daily would curl your hair.

And in Israel, orthodox rabbis regularly say and do the most horrific things by the standards of the 21st century.