THINGS MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME
John Chuckman
Despite my title, this is not a memoir, dealing as it does
with some of the most deadly serious subjects on the planet.
I was brought up by a hard-working, fiercely honest woman.
She was brave in the most profound way, not the momentary, over-hyped stuff of
soldiers and sports stars, but the unsung stuff of facing great odds and
painful situations and doing her duty, not for moments or days, but for year
after year. She was unusual for the early 1950s, a time of great social conformity
in America, for having left my father whose drunken abuse she refused to
endure. She set off on her own with two very young boys and never looked back.
She always set an example of high standards, expecting the same from my brother
and me, made us regular church-goers, and generally bestowed a great deal of
love on us.
For the greatest part of my life, I believed in the same
values and precepts she taught although I parted with church-going before I was
a man. I was not without cynicism about many things I observed through life,
but now, in my old age, I realize forcefully how entirely different are the
rules which actually govern human affairs, and especially those pertaining to
international affairs. Virtually everything my mother taught me, and my church
too, was mistaken.
We hear a good deal these days about the problem of bullying
in schools, and my instincts always put me on the side of victims and make me
question teachers and authorities who do not step in to protect the innocent.
But just look at the major political and economic leaders of our time:
virtually every one of them has been an unqualified bully. It appears that
being a bully features prominently on the road to success.
And we all believed that the bad guys never won and that
time would see victims receive justice. The painful truth is though that the
bad guys, at least all the clever and well-connected ones, always win and their
victims almost never receive justice.
My mother had no tolerance for lying, and obvious lies still
try my patience, but lying is in fact one of the chief occupations of those who
govern us. Messrs. Obama, Netanyahu, Cameron, Harper are all the grossest
liars, as were Sharon, Clinton, Blair, Bush, Cheney, and a very long list of
others notable for their positions and the headlines they generated. Most of
these individuals, along with a good many others, likely have never, in their entire
careers, uttered a single truthful sentence, discounting the platitudes and
bromides they are accustomed to delivering.
The issue of lying most comes into prominence in the case of
war. I have seen so many wars in my lifetime, and it is painfully clear that
every one of them was based on lies. The poor citizens of every land are never
told why their lives are being snatched and their wealth squandered. They are
certainly never consulted about whether so terribly serious a measure as war
should be undertaken. Instead they are lied to. The ghastly horror of Vietnam,
all that vast work of death and destruction on a genocidal scale – carpet bombing,
napalm, and poisons dropped - was about nothing which mattered to almost all
ordinary people, it was about blood-drenched lies their leaders told them.
And how can you possibly have meaningful democracy when the
voters are lied to daily by those running for office and those holding office?
You cannot, clearly.
And today, the whole Middle East is either in flames or has
recently passed through war or revolution – Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Egypt,
Yemen, Lebanon, Libya, and still others. We are given many reasons for this
phenomenon, but at the heart of the matter, there really is only one cause, and
that cause is never mentioned in our press.
In all cases, American is found either covertly directing
affairs or at least pouring money and weapons into countries to de-stabilize
them. And why does it do this? It reflects a vast effort to mold the Middle
East into a shape comfortable for the rather unusual requirements of its colony
in the region, Israel. Why unusual requirements? What other small country in
the world seems to need to control and dominate everything around it for at
least a thousand miles? And this is only necessary because Israel refuses to
obey almost any of the laws and customs of nations as we have grown to
understand them in modern times. Israel continues to rule areas conquered in
what itself was a fraudulent war, the Six Day War, nearly fifty years ago, and
it doesn’t just rule these places against all international law and conventions,
it treats their millions of residents as entitled to no law or justice, no
hopes or aspirations, and not even entitled to hold the property they have
because whenever a chunk of it appeals to Israelis, they simply take it.
Such is the behavior of the self-designated “only democracy
in the Middle East,” a glib and meaningless phrase which completely ignores the
fact that half the people ruled by Israel have no votes and no human rights. Actually,
it is a good thing there are not more such “democracies,” or the region would be
total hell on earth. Democracy for some is not democracy at all. Think of
Orwell’s precept in Animal Farm, a
book intended to satirize Stalin’s Soviet Union, “All animals are equal, but
some are more equal.” That could have been just as well written about modern
Israel. Israel’s embrace of neighbors who are virally anti-democratic – from
Egypt to Saudi Arabia – again says something profound about the nature of
Israeli “democracy.”
And the much bigger country which likes to style itself, the
world’s oldest democracy and the land of the free, not only supports Israel in
its disregard for law, customs, and international conventions, it finances a
great deal of the tyrannous behavior. Where is the regard for democracy,
rights, or even due process in that?
The always-tolerated violation of accepted principles by
Israel which seems most remarkable to me is its regular theft of homes and
farms. Americans are comfortable with bombings and assassinations and torture,
at least judging from their national behavior over a good many decades in a
number of countries, but when you consider how Americans revere property rights
above all else in their society, it does seem it should be another matter when
it comes to property being swiped in public. Property and profits are the truest
guiding, long-term principles in American society. So you might think, despite the
shower of lies in which Americans are immersed concerning Israel and its
neighbors, public theft would stir something deep in their hearts. So why don’t
we see American leaders, even if they can’t get worked up over endless
occupation and abuse and killing and apartheid-like laws, at least strenuously
objecting to Israel’s regular, high-handed thefts of property?
America’s politicians always back Israel because America’s
government is constituted on the fallacious and unethical concept that money is
free speech when it comes to political campaign contributions – fixed by a
Supreme Court whose history includes vigorous support of such other glorious
principles as slavery. When you allow such a political financing system to
dominate your politics, it follows, ipso facto, that those able and willing to
give very large sums as campaign contributions (as well as favorable press
coverage, there not being a single major newspaper or network in America which
does not play the game of boosting Israel) receive access and have their voices
heard to the virtual exclusion of others.
What is certainly one of the most efficient and untiring
lobbies, the Israel lobby, understands America’s system perfectly and has adapted
over time to work it perfectly, resulting almost in a custom-designed, industrial-scale
machine for turning out loyal and uncritical politicians in one country
concerning the acts of a foreign country.
Again, there’s very little truth and even less democracy in that way of
conducting politics.
