IGNATIEFF AND HIS PURPOSE IN RETURNING TO CANADA

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY WILLIAM JOHNSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

"How do we make this place worthy of our dreams? How do we fix what is so obviously wrong? Those questions became my own. It's why I came back. It's why I entered politics. It's why I'm here."

This quote tells us a great deal about Ignatieff.

First, the arrogance comes through in "worthy of our dreams."

Canada is one of the best countries in the world in which to live. To ask for more is arrogant.

Indeed, it is typically American, and just look at how many places America has made worthy of dreams. Vietnam. Cambodia. Afghanistan, Iraq. Chile. Palestine.

Then there is the vast ghetto gulag stretching right across America.

“Obviously wrong?”

I simply do not agree that tensions and pressures from different interests in our society are obviously wrong. We deal with it, and we often become a larger people while dealing with it.

In the society Ignatieff admires so much, the United States, separatists, for example, would have been beaten and thrown into prison. Their party would never have been tolerated in the national legislatures. The secret services would be working overtime on dirty tricks.

I much prefer tolerating an essentially decent man like Duceppe in our Parliament. His movement is unquestionably gradually fading, in part precisely because Canada is a good place to live.

“It’s why I came back.”

Clearly, that is a disingenuous statement. He came back for the opportunity to cap his ambitious career with a prime ministership. And his lack of ideas and his lack of ease with those outside the elite are the clearest evidence for this motive as they are also the clearest evidence of his unsuitability to be leader of the Liberal Party.

ON THE LEGALITY OF BUSH'S TORTURE TECHNIQUES

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Sorry, but this does sound a bit like scholastics arguing over the number of angels accommodated on the head of a pin.

If waterboarding is torture - and it is important to remember that it was not the only technique used by Bush's goons - then it falls under all the prohibitions of international treaties and conventions.

Moreover, it falls under prohibition in America's Constitution.

You do not have to be a lawyer to understand those things.

Yes, I know the fatuous argument that these acts were kept offshore, but surely a free society's best principles do not stop applying as you cross the border. Otherwise, they may well prove meaningless, even at home, as indeed on many occasions they have in the United States over the last two and a quarter centuries.

Still further, there is the profound issue of what kind of a country you want.

The opportunity to prosecute is an opportunity to show the entire world that the country truly does not embrace these methods and attitudes.

But I very much fear that it does rather embrace, at least a very substantial part, this ugliness.

America has a very brutal history, one not well understood by many abroad and many Americans themselves. It has been no enemy of such things.

For example, waterboarding was used in the Philippines uprising against American occupation after the Spanish-American War, itself a dark chapter in greed and deception in American history.

____________


Some clarification.

It is unlikely that we would ever have a precise definition of torture in law, but I do not think this is necessary for a decent society.

Indeed, since human knowledge and technology keep advancing, new tortures are always going to be invented. The law cannot keep up in detail.

But the lack of absolute precision in law should not prevent our taking those to court we believe have violated a concept we all instinctively understand, and there is the spirit as well as letter of the law.

Especially when the implications of our not acting are grave for the future of a free and decent society, a goal which is the object of much of law in the first place.

A great deal of prosecution under certain laws involves judgment.

Indeed all cases going to the Supreme Court - that is, cases claiming a violation of Constitutional rights - involve judgment.

It just is not possible to write something like a Bill of Rights without a high level of generalization.

We expect high-sounding and even inspiring phrases in such documents. The judgment of the Court is an absolutely the sine qua non of making such a document meaningful (despite the opposition of Jefferson and his political gang to that concept, a crowd whose descendants remain a significant American presence).

In everyday law, we see judgment used by the police about just whom to arrest. We see judgment by judges about who receives bail. And of course we see judgment by juries and indeed superior court judges.

THE TWISTED USE OF AHMADINEJAD AS PREPARATION FOR ISRAEL'S ATTACKING IRAN AND THROWING THE WORLD INTO CHAOS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MARCUS GEE IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Marcus Gee asserts in this column what is not proven and likely cannot be proven. This is irresponsible for someone in his position.

I am no admirer of Ahmadinejad, but I have yet to read a statement that he has made - fairly considered in context and not distorted by those who hate him - that could be called anti-Semitism.

Apologists for Israel's bloody excesses - and Marcus Gee is a prompt and regular contributor to that cause - love to pull Ahmadinejad's statements out of context and even distort them because Israel's leaders have built a huge head of steam and want to attack Iran, pitching the world into a serious crisis. They are looking for every excuse to build a case for doing so.

Ahmadinejad does not like Israel: that does not make him a demon or a Nazi. He has never said he would attack Israel. He has never advocated terror against Israel.

He has said Israel will come to an end by the very nature of its circumstances. In fact the CIA in a secret report has said exactly the same thing: Israel, as it is, will dissolve away within 20 years. That may be unpleasant for some, but it is not a crime and it is not even a threat.

It is important to understand, too, that Ahmadinejad does not have serious power in Iran anyway. His is a weak office. Power in Iran is distributed over several entities, as it is in the United States. Ahmadinejad can not order war.

Yet Israel threatens to attack Iran daily, and the threats have only become more vicious lately. This would be an event to pitch the entire world into a crisis, and Marcus Gee is effectively supporting it.

Israel has done many nasty things in its short life. It holds ten thousand in its jails. It abuses an entire population of millions daily, holding them in virtual bondage.

It viciously killed 430 children in Gaza plus a thousand others for no good reason. Not long before it killed 1,400 in Lebanon for no good reason, leaving behind, for good measure, tens of thousands of cluster bombs to maim and kill for years.

To this day Israel refuses to tell the UN where it dropped these ghastly things which almost make landmines look humane. And to this day, after its savage and cowardly attack on Gaza, it will not allow proper assistance to get into the stricken people.

Israel blubbers about democracy but will not talk to a democratically elected government, treating them as demons or witches which they are not.

Iran has attacked no one in its entire modern history.




THESE YOUNG IRANIANS ARE TERRIBLY THREATENING, AREN'T THEY?




THESE SWEET FACES FROM GAZA WERE NO MORE THREATENING, BUT THEY REPRESENT A SMALL SAMPLE OF ISRAEL'S HANDIWORK

ON PROSECUTING THOSE AMERICANS WHO TORTURED AND MADE IT POSSIBLE TO TORTURE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINCIAL TIMES

The fear of prosecution is the only effective tool we have to prevent repetition of this unholy business.

Even a failed prosecution serves this purpose to some degree. Washington careerists do not like facing the expenses and uncertainty of long trials.

Avoiding prosecution serves only to make the dirty work easily repeatable, no matter what Obama's administration may say about not using such methods again.

God, it was only in the late 1970s that the Church Committee uncovered some of the elaborate efforts to assassinate Castro, efforts in some cases using the mafia. The U.S. was running a Murder Incorporated said one observer.

Yet here we are, roughly three decades later, and the U.S. is busy assassinating and attempting to assassinate people again.

Again, it is only a little more than three decades since the killing fields of Cambodia, a true holocaust in which something like a million perished and countless were tortured and abused.

The U.S. had a major responsibility for the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. It effectively toppled a peaceful, neutral government with heavy illegal secret bombing and armed incursions, allowing the monsters to take over.

But here we are again, the U.S. every week or so uses robot drones and Hellfire missiles to kill people in Pakistan it believes are suspects in Taleban operations in Afghanistan. It not only largely kills innocent people, enraging many, it is irresponsibly weakening the government of Pakistan.

Of course, the U.S. has no more business being in Afghanistan than it had being in Vietnam, its excuse for bombing Cambodia and the scene of the world’s greatest holocaust since World War II with 3 million dead and millions of pounds of hideous Agent Orange and landmines left behind to continue killing for decades.

Clearly the savage blunders of the past do get repeated.

ON THE SENSIBLE NOTION OF TREATING TERROR AS ORDINARY CRIME

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Treating terror as ordinary crime has always been the view of reasonable people.

The United States, after 9/11, could have used diplomacy, international treaties, legal procedures, and intelligence agencies to get justice.

What it got by invading Afghanistan was not justice, but vengeance, rather extreme vengeance in fact, killing tens of thousands needlessly.

My favorite analogy or thought experiment, made soon after 9/11 and near the invasion of Afghanistan, is crime in a big city ghetto. Having grown up on the South Side of Chicago, I was keenly aware of failing neighborhoods, gangs, and crime.

Just imagine, following a violent crime by some gang in an American ghetto, the police getting the cooperation of the local National Guard to send fighter jets over the offending neighborhood, dropping cluster bombs and firing Hellfire missiles.

They would of course kill many innocent people, injure many more, and bring further economic damage to areas already suffering. They may well not even have killed the perpetrators.

Such violent action would make no sense for justice or peace. It would only make sense as vengeance or as a way to intimidate those who would dare think of doing wrong.

But this is precisely what the United States has done in Afghanistan, just as it is precisely what Israel does regularly.

That is why the violent activities of these two states can fairly be characterized as state terror, a form of terror which has badly eroded the very meaning of what we traditionally mean by terror.

You simply cannot have justice and lawful society unless you are prepared to live by it yourself.

We live in a globalized world, and such lawless activity cannot be regarded as internal matters of the state inflicting it.

The point becomes even more acute when you consider matters such as Guantanamo and the CIA International Torture Gulag.

Here is the United States, mouthing words about freedom and rights incessantly and one having those things enshrined in its Constitution, yet it seems to regard it as perfectly fine to ignore every right and freedom one inch outside its border.

And it never stops pompously preaching to others, such as China, about rights and freedom. And just so Israel whose government never fails to mention its being the only democracy while holding ten thousand prisoners illegally and millions more in a form of bondage.

___________________________


The word "terror" has been deliberately worked and abused so that it has a special quality for the bulk of people.

There has been, effectively, a long and relentless advertising campaign to make people react to that word the way people in the sixteenth century reacted to "witches."

The situation reminds me very much of one of Stalin's most feared words, "wreckers."

Every time Stalin started talking about wreckers, it was the signal for a new round of arrests, murders, and horrors.

Crimes are crimes, and we are only civilized when we use our legal institutions properly to treat all crimes.

When the claim is made that there is a special class of criminals - called terrorists - it is a signal for far worse crimes to be committed by the very authorities uttering the claim.




PEOPLE SHUDDERED WHEN HE UTTERED THE WORD "WRECKERS"

ON OBAMA'S RELEASE OF BUSH TORTURE PAPERS AND HIS REFUSAL TO SEE CIA TORTURERS CHARGED AS THEY SHOULD BE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CON COUGHLIN THE TELEGRAPH

What is security, Mr.Coughlin?

Is it the security of a healthy, free society or is it the security of a system of Stalags?

The choice truly is that stark.

Words like yours flirt with fascism. Indeed, "flirt" might be a generous word to use.

The only defense for these obnoxious CIA torturers is that they were just following orders.

Haven't we come then nearly full circle since the Nuremberg trials?

Although I must say that punishing the CIA in a serious fashion is impossible.

The CIA is a law unto itself with the president often not even aware of some of the things they are doing towards longer-term goals.

Please remember that the only president who actually threatened the CIA - out of anger over the Bay of Pigs - was assassinated.

Legality is not even an issue here.

The invasion of Iraq broke every international law on the books.

Abu Ghraib, the same.

Guantanamo, the same.

The assassinations in Pakistan, the same.

The mass killing of Taleban captives in the early days of the Afghan invasion - 3000 disappeared and their bodies are buried in the desert - the same.

The shooting, imprisonment, and torture of a boy - Omar Khadr - the same.

Israel's savage, cowardly attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, using American weapons and having tacit American permission, the same.

The U.S. is now so beyond such niceties as law and international conventions that Obama's election cannot possibly turn it around greatly.

It is a brutal imperial power with no consideration for anyone standing in what it considers its way.

THE ABSURD NOTION OF MICHAEL IGNATIEFF AS "A TRUE PATRIOT SON"

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL VALPY IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Ignatieff is as much a patriot as he is a defender of human rights.

Which is to say, not at all.

He is a repulsive opportunist.

After spending his days speaking on behalf of America's brutal imperialism, he just returns to the land of his youth to have a go at a second career as prime minister.

Note I didn't say "returns home" because his past words and actions make it abundantly clear he does not regard Canada with warm feelings.

As much as I dislike Harper, and that is a great deal, Ignatieff is the worst possible alternative to be found on the planet.

He is actually a surprisingly small-minded thinker in many respects, he is overwhelmingly an admirer of American hegemony, he is a defender of torture and bloodshed, and he is putridly smug about himself.

His is a genuinely poisonous presence in our political life, much like having a mole from the CIA running a national party. Indeed, one suspects that that is exactly what he is.

_______________________


The stuff above about Canadians rejecting an intellectual is uninformed rubbish.

As to Ignatieff's being better able to succeed in Europe, again rubbish. He has a wide-spread reputation there as "neo-con lite."

The writer must never have heard Ignatieff at any length.

Ignatieff truly is the equivalent of the Walt Disney organization's notion of an intellectual.

That is undoubtedly why he served a stint as a BBC presenter, that broadcast organization in recent years having been reduced to a mere shadow of itself while serving the aims of the likes of Tony Blair’s government.

There is no fierce independence of thought in Ignatieff, the indispensable requirement to wear the laurels of intellectual.

Indeed, quite the opposite.

There are no striking views or original ideas associated with his name. None.

There is no great defense of the little guys of this world, the downtrodden, the abused, the victims, the underdogs of any circumstances that is associated with great intellectuals and with great writers, the kind of thing Graham Greene considered indispensable to the title of writer.

There is a great deal of wordiness, much of it rather mannered, stylized, dry, much like a costly garment wrapping around nothing.

BELIEF THAT THE EARTH WAS FLAT: THE OLDEST NONSENSE TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS

RESPONSE TO A POSTED COMMENT IN THE INDEPENDENT

Belief that the earth was flat?

Sorry, no educated person believed that in Henry VIII's time or even long before.

That is a loose notion from six-grade geography teachers.

Eratosthenes calculated an fairly accurate diameter for the earth in about the third century BCE.

Ptolemy, centuries later, calculated a much less accurate one.

The issue amongst early explorers was really over whose calculation was right, the differences representing vast distances to Asia.

It is only the views of educated people that counts in matters like this since there will always be people who have odd superstitions and ill-founded ideas.

Even today, I'm sure there are inhabitants of remote Africa, Indonesia, or South America who believe the world is flat.




NO EDUCATED PERSON BELIEVED THIS

HENRY VIII AND THE THEORY THAT HIS WOUNDS CAUSED HIS TYRANT BEHAVIOR

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

It has been a theory for a very long time advanced by some biographers that Henry's leg wound, a suppurating wound for the rest of his life, was responsible for his tyrant behavior.

Certainly in his youth, apart from a handsome athletic appearance, he enjoyed the company of intellectuals and was a fairly impressive scholar himself, as well as a musician and writer.

Elizabeth inherited his intellect with her ability to speak six languages and her love of music.

He apparently had a rather sweet temperament, although he allowed no one to assume any sense of equality in his presence.

It is not impossible there was a genetic strain in Henry - exacerbated by his pain - because Henry VII had a seriously mean streak himself and Elizabeth at times displayed a colossally ugly temper.

As to Anne Boleyn's miscarriage, I don't think that was her downfall.

Anne's strong, rather controlling personality was.

Once the long pursuit and courtship were over, that side of Anne's temperament showed clearly (she was the Great Elizabeth's mother after all), and Henry did not like any sense of competition from women.

AN OBAMA DOCTRINE?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES


The world, thank you very much, will do quite well without an "Obama Doctrine."

What's wrong with the idea of a chief executive who simply does his job without pretense to imperial or papal grandeur?

The pomposity of the various presidential doctrines - many of them rather shabby statements when their fancy wrap and ribbons are removed - indeed, the very use of the word "doctrine" is the surest sign of American's having fully absorbed the concept of empire.

The president is, after all, just an elected official with a limit on his/her time in office.

THE UPCOMING PULITZER PRIZES AND THE GENERAL FOOLISHNESS OF PRIZES

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Prizes generally are foolish business.

Even the most prestigious - the Nobel - often gets it wrong. Just look at the winners in literature. The authors loved and read often are not on the list. Those on the list include those few read. In science even we find things like Einstein having won for one of his lesser contributions, not relativity.

The Peace Prize is compromised beyond meaning with several leaders whose hands are very bloody receiving it, all in the hope one presumes of influencing the course of events.

The Academy Award is just silliness, although people like it for exactly that reason. Goofy gowns, goofier speeches, and Fred Astaire glitter.

Some terrible films have won. Just recall Liz Taylor in Butterfield 8, an unwatchable, bad movie, even in its day. And then there are the fad films – Dances with Wolves - which are heaped with prizes despite being good but not original work.

The Pulitzer is the most hopeless prize of all. It has not only got it wrong many times, it has been hopelessly compromised by crooked journalists and crooked newspapers. A New York Times correspondent in Russia in the early part of the century we now know won for totally created material. And there have been more scandalous examples in recent decades. The prize has a flag-waving agenda that has nothing to do with quality or ideas or even journalism.

Just consider the oleaginous laureate Thomas Friedman, a man whose job is to rewrite Pentagon material and other imperial propaganda into chirpy copy.

With history books, it has often missed great books while giving awards to second-rate or boring work.

Just consider the odd idea that there must be a best each year in anything. It just isn't so. Creativity and genius don’t follow clocks or calendars.

Science for example progresses steadily but often with spectacular work only coming after years or decades.

IT IS ALMOST MEANINGLESS TO APPLY THE WESTERN LANGUAGE OF RIGHTS TO MANY PARTS OF THE WORLD INCLUDING AFGHANISTAN

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

This is a silly leather-armchair-by-the-window editorial.

You are imposing concepts on a place which, in general, has no more grasp of them than they do quantum mechanics.

Afghanistan never has been any thing but a collection of tribes. It is not a country in the sense that we understand. It has no meaningful central government, no bureaucracy, and few roads.

Yes, it is a colored patch on our maps, but even its borders are vague, the main border with Pakistan simply being a line drawn by a British official about a century ago.

For the people living on each side of that border, the so-called Durand Line, it is meaningless. They are tribal people, the same tribe living on both sides of that line.

Afghanistan is nothing but a collection of tribes, many of them living impoverished, hardscrabble lives in an environment of barren mountains and deserts.

They are hard people with ancient, unpleasant customs and attitudes, owing to their harsh circumstances which is precisely why the idea of defeating them is, and always has been, ridiculous.

A place like this only makes progress through steady economic growth, and you don’t get that from guns and bombs, America’s idea of a human-rights mission.

America invaded to kill people, not to help anyone, and Canada has been sadly dragged along for the ride.

The world is so much more complicated than this view. It is not a place entirely to our liking. Ancient, anti-progressive customs and attitudes come with the territory of poverty and economic backwardness, much as malaria or high infant mortality.

Go try enforcing anti-homophobia in Jamaica or rural Africa. Go try teaching women's rights in rural India or South America. In any of these places, you could be killed just for your words.




AFGHAN WOMEN STILL MOSTLY WEARING BURKAS



INTENSE HOMOPHOBIA IN JAMAICA



BRIDE BURNING IN INDIA



BRIDE BURNING IN INDIA

AMERICA'S CRIMINALLY STUPID WAR ON DRUGS IS JUST ONE PART OF A LARGER PATTERN OF BEHAVIOR

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Yes, indeed, a criminally stupid war on drugs.

Intelligent analysts have said this for many years. Milton Friedman wrote on this subject, fearing for the loss of basic freedoms in America with police crashing down doors and waving deadly weapons around in people’s homes on mere suspicion or the tips of others wishing "to get" someone.

But the intelligent analysts’ efforts have been all to no purpose.

Why?

Look at the stomach-turning television shows of a few years back, shows like 'Cops,' showing the clearest police brutality and disregard for human rights. These shows were actually very popular.

Consider the incarceration rate in the United States, the highest in the advanced world by far, although that clearly has not impacted the United States’ claims to the highest murder and violent crime rates in the advanced world.

The United States, with its obsessive/compulsive personality disorder, knows no other way of doing things.

The template for the war on drugs has been applied yet again to the mindless war on terror. Of course, you cannot have a war on methods or beliefs and, of course, the use of terror to strike back for injustices is as old as civilization, but those elemental facts do not in any way affect America's current great crusade.

Oh, and we must not forget the decades-long war against godless communism in which the U.S squandered something on the order of 3 trillion dollars and countless lives in other countries, all while building the careers back home of monsters like J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover broke every rule of decency and human rights and democratic values, yet his name remains in big metal letters on the FBI building in Washington.

What other land speaks at the highest level about democracy and human rights while sending B-52s to carpet-bomb some vaguely threatening people abroad? Who else sends money and warehouses-full of armaments to an abusive state like Israel which uses them to kill children and women while enforcing apartheid and ethnic-cleansing?

But Israel, like the U.S., is a democracy, isn’t it? One, moreover, surrounded by evil too, just the way the U.S. sees itself in the world.

You cannot hope to change America’s insane war on drugs without changing an entire underlying way of thinking, full of lurid delusions, a quite insane way of thinking, actually.




EVERYONE KNOWS BUSH TOOK COCAINE YET THIS SAME SELF-RIGHTEOUS CREATURE NEVER GAVE A PARDON TO THE MANY OFFENDERS FILLING TEXAS'S DEATH ROW AND ITS PRISONS

ON CBC'S LOWERING OF STANDARDS OF EXCELLENCE IN AN EFFORT TO GAIN MASS AUDIENCE: A REGRETTABLE TREND BEST SEEN IN THE EMBARRASSING JIAN GHOMESHI

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

Sorry, you have this matter entirely wrong.

Jian Ghomeshi clearly did not do the required research for an effective interview. He broke the rule every good interviewer knows, that you must know your subject before you meet.

Professionals like Shelagh Rogers or Eleanor Wachtel or Don Newman would never be caught flat-footed as Ghomeshi, something one finds regularly with him. This was only the most embarrassing of many blunders and poor judgments.

He is simply the weakest host ever placed into this once venerable time-slot on CBC Radio.

And it is a very good question as to why he even interviews trashy characters like this guest. The answer is simple: he is the most visible evidence of CBC's lowering its standards and pandering to a mass audience. Who even needs a CBC that tries to compete with trash radio?

Ghomeshi interviewed, some while back, a mother in B.C. whose young daughter was exposed to a raw pornographic magazine (“Butt”) in a store carrying young people’s clothes. It was stupidly used as part of a display.

Ghomeshi literally badgered the mother - mildly, but nevertheless definitely badgered – as though she were the villain in the piece with her complaint, going against free expression.

It wasn’t even a national story, just an embarrassing local business, so why did Ghomeshi feature it? Complete lack of judgment.

What part of children and pornography did Ghomeshi not get I asked? Well, he got his own back, in spades, from this trashy hillbilly, another interview that should never have taken place.

Ghomeshi regularly drags up trashy candidates for interview, as Gene Simmons, the former member of the rock group Kiss, known for his own crude talk.

In another interview, Ghomeshi talked to a pop singer about his girlfriend’s “hot body.” Great, morning public radio is to sound like a locker room?

I simply do not agree that Jian Ghomeshi is "a polite and gracious host." He does not have the skills for his job, and he does not have the wide interests and sharp mind of so many CBC personalities, including other new-generation CBC personalities like the intelligent and talented Matt Galloway.




HERE ARE EXAMPLES OF THE QUALITY OF GUEST MR. GHOMESHI HAS BROUGHT TO WHAT WAS ONCE CBC RADIO'S MOST VENERABLE TIME-SLOT

IGNATIEFF KEEPING HIS POLICY IDEAS CLOSE TO THE VEST?

POSTED RESPONSE TO COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Well, we know where he stood on the use of torture.

And we know where he stood on the illegal invasion of Iraq which has left more than a million corpses and several million refugees.

And he voted with his feet, for all to see, on proper democratic process for his party's leadership: against it if it is to his personal advancement.

So I know more than enough.

I don't care what policies - or should I say slogans - he has tucked away.

Ignatieff does not deserve our support.

OBAMA GETS A TOKEN 5000 MORE TROOPS FOR AFGHANISTAN FROM NATO: AN IMPRESSIVE NUMBER OF DRIVERS COOKS AND MEDICS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

I am impressed: five thousand more cooks, drivers, and medics.

It just could not be clearer that NATO does not agree with the United States' twisted view that Afghanistan is a serious threat.

You do not have to plea, bribe, and threaten - as the U.S. has done over and over in recent years - to get nations who genuinely feel endangered to help fight.

There is no threat.

Even Obama's charming personality and the world's great wishes for his success in cleaning up the horrors left behind by Bush cannot cause NATO's leaders to take this pontless engagement seriously.

The U.S. made a colossal mistake invading Afghanistan, and once there it did not even know what to do, other than killing a lot of people and committing a number of hideous war crimes.

It has established a government there no one respects. It has established former Northern Alliance warlords in the provinces, people in many cases just as repulsive as the Taleban. Its invasion released a flood of hard drugs on the world. It blubbered about women - as a propaganda ploy, its invasion being about killing, not women's rights - yet today the burka is seen everywhere outside the capital, and even in the capital, it is worn by half of women.

And no one, other than the delusional, can believe you can change the patterns of an ancient, hardscrabble society of 25 million. They will leave the 14th century as they experience sustained economic growth, and no other way.

The five thousand non-combat troops might well be called a politely-offered fig leaf for America's delicate dignity.




OBAMA GETS HIS FIG LEAF FROM NATO

BLAIR AND HIS BLUBBERING ABOUT RELIGION

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

Blair was always a preacher, never a statesman.

Now he is where he belongs, mouthing vapidities and hurting no one.

Unfortunately, he leaves behind about a million dead in Iraq, hundreds of thousands wounded and crippled, millions with no employment, and a couple of million refugees.

I've heard of people who went into the wrong work doing damage before, but surely this is a case for the record books.

Considering what his words actually produced over the last decade, you really have to wonder about religious people paying attention to this hare-brain.

OBAMA'S LETTING GO HIS NATIONAL SECURITY APPOINTEE AND THE ISRAEL LOBBY

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

This is one of the few times the unpleasant truth behind a high-level American decision has been exposed so clearly.

There isn't even a question in this matter.

The Israel Lobby acted here quickly and overwhelmingly to eliminate the appointment of a highly qualified man they happen to regard as too independent in his thinking regarding the Middle East.

It is stunning that a country of 7 million so deeply influences the policies and decisions of the leader of 300 million, a country of 7 million, moreover, with violently paranoid behaviors and an unwillingness to make any sacrifice for peace.

It is a potentially dangerous and de-stabilizing situation when it comes to matters like Iran.

It really is time for Israel to make peace and stop abusing its neighbors, but the only force on earth that can force Israel to do so is the American government.

But the American government seems incapable of exercising the least independent or fair judgment here, even under a strong, intelligent, and popular leader like Obama.




A DISTINGUISHED AND ABLE CHARLES FREEMAN AND HE IS JEWISH - BUT TOO INDEPENDENT-MINDED FOR THE ISRAEL LOBBY

NORTH KOREA'S MISSILE TEST AND THE ASSERTION THAT THE COUNTRY DEFIED THE UNITED STATES

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

Defied?

I was unaware that Washington served in a paternal role in North Korean affairs. It is an independent country, fairly looking to its own defences.

I am certainly no admirer of North Korea, but I understand their fears. When you have nuclear weapons and capable missiles, you don't end up like Iraq.

With all the flap artificially generated by Washington over this event, people lose sight of some real facts.

The U.S. remains the only country ever actually to use nuclear weapons. It used them twice, both times on civilians.

Younger readers may not know that during the Korean Conflict General MacArthur was ready to use nuclear weapons on China. He was more than psychologically ready, he pushed hard and planned the attack out. Thank God, reason prevailed.

And MacArthur's intended use of nuclear weapons followed on his advance to the Yalu River, an act which the Chinese had long before warned they must regard as a threat to the security of China.

The only country in the world literally to take over another country in recent years, again, is the United States.

The only country in the world that maintains a large and secret nuclear arsenal is America's subsidized client, Israel, and it maintains this arsenal in perhaps the most sensitive part of our planet, casting a threatening shadow for a thousand miles around and inciting others to follow its example for their own safety.

MORE TIRESOME CRAP ON THE WAR ON TERROR

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY WESLEY WARK IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Wesley Wark's piece is just intellectual Jello.

The very idea of a war on terror was an absurdity from the beginning.

You cannot have a war on a method.

Terror is the vengeance taken by the suppressed and voiceless as it is sometimes also the work of psychopaths with an ideal.

Terror is as old as organized warfare.

Indeed, today the word "terror" is pretty much become meaningless owing to the work of organized warfare.

Since WWII organized warfare always and everywhere kills more civilians than soldiers, and it uses ever more terrible weapons to do so.

I don't know of any terror organization with a record one-tenth as appalling as, for example, the United States.

Two atomic bombs dropped on civilian targets. Terrible fire-bombings of civilian cities. Three million slaughtered in Vietnam and a legacy of Agent Orange and land mines left to kill and cripple for a century. A million killed in Iraq and a modern society reduced to poverty. Prisoners of war by thousands exterminated in Afghanistan.

Any thoughtful person might well say, what the hell is Mr. Wark talking about?

Well, he is in a business that makes its living through fear.




I SEE A DEAD HUMAN BEING, A RESIDENT OF AFGHANISTAN, AND AN AMERICAN THUG POSING AS A BIG-GAME HUNTER, BUT I DON'T SEE ANY WAR ON TERROR




OH, HERE IT IS: THE WAR ON TERROR

HORRIBLE NEW LAWS IN AFGHANISTAN IN ONE ODD WAY DO REPRESENT PROGRESS

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

Well, we have made progress of a sort in Afghanistan.

We've come full circle from Bush's propaganda of years ago about women in Afghanistan, propaganda intended to win over soccer moms to an invasion that had nothing to do with human rights.

The place we've come to is to realize that you cannot change the culture and habits of an ancient, backward society in a few years, and especially with the use of armies.

Trying to alter the society of Afghanistan is like stepping back in time to fourteenth century France and trying to get women out of the convents and nuns out of their habits.

Ridiculous. And you'd only have made yourself an enemy to attempt doing so.

Only time and economic growth will change things in Afghanistan.

And surely it is clear to most that you do not get economic growth by bombs and invasion.

As I've said before, the U.S. would have achieved more dropping dollar bills on the countryside from its planes.





AN AMERICAN HUMAN-RIGHTS MISSION




GEE, SHE'S NOT FROM THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY - MORE LIKE THE EARLY 20TH

MORE ON GEORGE GALLOWAY'S NOT BEING ADMITTED TO CANADA

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

This is a shameful episode for Canada.

George Galloway is an honest and outspoken man, and it is only for being honest and outspoken that he was excluded from Canada.

What are the apologists for Israel's bloody deeds so afraid of that they must try to stop those who disagree with them from speaking?

The answer of course is always the same nonsense: Hamas is a terrorist organization.

In fact, Hamas is a democratic and honest organization, perfectly willing to come to a modus vivendi with Israel, but not willing to do whatever Israel demands before there even are talks. Perfectly sensible.

It is all so bitterly ironic. Israel was founded with the ugly terror of the Irgun and the Stern and other murderous groups, but now it is everyone else who is a terrorist.

And we must never forget Israel just killed 400 children and a 1000 others for nothing.

All Galloway did was bring some emergency supplies and turn them over to the people who are the government in Gaza.

_______________________

"I would argue that Galloway's message (whatever it is), has become lost in his own self-importance..."

Self importance? Bringing emergency supplies to people Israel just decimated and still keeps penned up like livestock?

It was, anyway, David Hume who so rightly pointed out that seeking for the glory of worthy deeds was itself worthy.

People - none of them - ever acts without a component of ego; it just is not possible.

And anyone who claims otherwise is either being dishonest or a fool.

______________________

"A blowhard of a "career politician" of over 20 years in office is hardly credible either Mr. Galloway. Have you had any position of power while in office? What has he done for his local constituents? We don't need any hypocritical politicians here from overseas, we already have enough of our own!"

You, sir, may believe such rubbish, but I do think that in a free country others are entitled to decide for themselves.

That is the very essence of a free society, not the poor judgment and still poorer information of people like yourself and the Conservative government.

_____________________

"This is a lie. Hamas has called for the destruction of Israel. That's very "moderate" of them. Jeez. I'm willing to listen to both sides but I can't recall the Israeli government every publicly calling for the genocide of Palestinians."

Oh please, Israel just murdered 400 kids plus a thousand others, and it keeps 1,500,000 people penned up like cattle.

And just a little while before that, it killed another 1,400 in Lebanon.

It refuses to tell the UN even where it dropped its godawful cluster bombs by the thousands, so that those horrible things can keep killing.

Only someone with a rather bizarre imagination could possibly believe Hamas could ever do anything serious against Israel. That's a more ridiculous claim than saying Canada threatens the U.S.

And, although I am sure it has escaped your attention, Hamas never used the word genocide. It only refuses to recognize Israel - a common negotiating position - and says Israel will come to an end eventually.

You might check your dictionary, but that last is not the same thing as genocide.

It is indeed something that a secret report of the CIA’s also said recently, saying Israel would likely dissolve into a Palestinian-Jewish state with many settlers returning to the U.S. and Europe. All within twenty years.

My, how dreadful.







IF YOU ARE AGAINST GEORGE GALLOWAY, IT DOES TEND TO MEAN YOU ACCEPT THIS

ON GEORGE GALLOWAY'S BEING REFUSED ENTRY TO CANADA

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY REX MURPHY IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Shame on you, Rex Murphy.

This column is a nasty piece of weasel-work, the kind of thing I thought you were above, even though I disagree with many of your views.

You are calling Galloway names, defending what cannot be defended, and, at the same time, suggesting they find a way out of what is a police-state action.

George Galloway is an honorable man. He stands for principles, which more than you can say for Mr. Harper and yourself in this instance.

He has a piercing intelligence. And his way with words leaves even you, Rex, looking the true "sad sack."

He is a member of the Mother of Parliaments in good standing. There is no legitimate reason on earth to refuse him entry to Canada.

The only reason he is being treated in this police-state fashion is his views on the poor people of Palestine.

Israel's apologists simply hate him.

How shameful of you to speak disparagingly against him, but not a word about Israel's murder of 400 children and a thousand other people.

And to this day Israel will not supply the UN maps of where they dropped the dreaded cluster bombs in Southern Lebanon during another savage attack which killed another 1,400 or so, including a brave Canadian officer doing his duty.

IS OBAMA SIMPLY RE-BRANDING BUSH POLICIES?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

I do think you are drawing conclusions here too early.

In foreign affairs, we have yet to see the essence of Obama's policies.

I agree that words he has used so far are mostly "rebranding" Bush, but it is impossible in a country like the United States to come in and just change course entirely.

Words may be used to ease the way to new policies. After all, American presidents never tell the truth leading into their policies, and the last president was positively a psychopathic liar. He murdered a million people based on lies.

I think clearly Obama’s hope in Afghanistan is to quietly reach a modus Vivendi and get out of that useless, pointless conflict. I think he will quietly deal with Taleban supporters, at least factions of them after his big show of force.

Were he to do things in a different way, in a bold, straightforward way, he would quickly become political road-kill in the United States. The political system is so corrupt and distorted that the real arguments in most great issues are never made.

And we must remember, the gigantic, powerful establishment any new leader faces in the United States: the military establishment, the intelligence colossus, the corporate benefactors of Bush’s years, and the many Borgia-like families who treat the U.S. much like their private playpen.

I never did believe Obama could make remarkable progress against these and other entrenched interests. America is a very conservative country at heart, conservative in the worst sense of that word. It is also a great imperial power whose people believe naively in the quasi-religious tenet that America is a bastion of freedom and human rights.

But I will be pleased with some moderate progress on a few fronts, and I think we must just be grateful we have a reasonable man leading, rather than a cretin.

Imperial Rome will only reduce its arrogance and pretensions and propensity to war when other centers of power have fully emerged.





AMERICA'S LIBERTY





ROME'S ATHENA

THE FRITZEL HORROR AND OTHER DARK TRUTHS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GEORGE PITCHER IN THE TELEGRAPH

We know that in the case of child abuse of various types, parents or close relatives are responsible for something on the order of 80% of cases.

It is rarely a stranger doing such things, despite parents' inordinate fears of children falling into the wrong hands.

I think it is likely true that sexual abuse by parents is far commoner than most believe.

Many of our old dark fairy tales and myths suggest this.

We also see it as quite common in places like parts of Africa where men routinely rape young girls.

And we know from studies that many prostitutes had childhoods with fathers that raped them.

We are a savage species, chimpanzees with bigger brains, but the brains do not overcome our nasty origins.

Remember, in a number of species in the animal world, fathers often kill the children.

We are, as Mark Twain said in his last years, the damned human race.

And just look at our willingness to kill large numbers of children in war. The U.S. and Britain killed thousands in Iraq. Israel just killed four hundred in Gaza.




OUR SOMEWHAT BIGGER BRAIN ONLY MAGNIFIES OUR ABILITY TO INFLICT PAIN AND KILL