The Mound of Sound

As I write these posts, I go through a process that begins with my morning Globe & Mail and then on to online versions of newspapers and magazines around the world. That gives a pretty broad and, I hope, relatively informed and balanced perspective on the issues I raise on this bolg. I’ve only been at this a few days but that’s been enough to teach me how easy it is to get submerged in the dark side. I’m going to pay that some heed and try to leaven this out with a bit of humour in future posts. There can be no doubt from these writings that I am furious at the way our democratic values and freedoms are being trampled by right-wing extremists and all the innocents around the world, but particularly in the Middle East, who are paying the price for that. I’m now going to post a link to a video that pretty well captures the fury so many of us have come to feel over this brutality. By the way, this video contains graphic images that you will find deeply disturbing. http://news.globalfreepress.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-3431

You’re probably aware that Saddam Hussein and some of his henchmen are now standing trial for attacking Iraq’s Kurds with chemical weapons. If you saw any of the photographs from those Kurdish villages you won’t need to be told just how awful that massacre was.

Trivia Question: Who was the first person to direct the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds?

Most people are stunned to learn that it was Winston Churchill who in 1920, as Britain’s Colonial Secretary, authorized the use of chemical weapons against villages to curb Kurdish rebellion. Here’s a little quote from WSC at the time: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes.”

And that’s a sad bit of trivia.

Today’s Globe and Mail made much about disunity in the Liberal camp over the latest war in Lebanon. Unlike the Tories who are utterly wedded to the Israeli side, a number of Liberals find plenty of fault on the part of Israel. But then again, so does Amnesty International.

In a report just released(www.amnesty.org), Amnesty contends that the aerial bombardment of civilian buildings and structures went far beyond any claim of ‘collateral damage’ and amounted to indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Kate Gilmore, Amnesty spokesperson, is quoted in The Guardian: “Many of the violations identified in our report are war crimes. The pattern, scope and scale of the attacks makes Israel’s claim that this was collateral damage simply not credible.”

In its reduction of the Lebanese civilian infrastructure, Israeli air strikes took out power and water plants, sewage treatment plants and hospitals. Two hospitals are reported to have been completely destroyed, three others severely damaged.

I’m sure Israel would claim that these were all legitimate, military targets. What other choice do they have? Bombing hospitals? I’m sorry, our side doesn’t do that. Israel had better come up with some unequivocal and convincing evidence to prove it had some right to take out hospitals.

Hezbollah started this scrap and Israel had a right to retaliate and to defend its citizens against Heabollah rocket attacks. There’s no question of that. There is, however, a line and when Israel turned away from the Hezbollah fighters to level its weapons on the Lebanese civilian population, Sunni and Christian, in a campaign of aerial terror, it completely crossed that line.

We need to find ways to defang Hezbollah and that is going to take more than military intervention. We also need to recognize that Israel through its own atrocities has made that job much more difficult, perhaps even impossible.

I’m quite understanding of the Liberal disunity because, this time, there are no Good Guys.

Most of us don’t hear a lot of detail about Canada’s NATO force in Kandahar province, Afghanistan. We see the odd clip on TV and occasional newspaper stories about Canadian forces engaging the Taliban insurgents. All in all, we just get glimpses. As Canadians continue to debate our mission in Kandahar we need much more information to weigh just what is being accomplished for the sacrifice of Canadian lives. Here’s a recent account and the news isn’t good:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/082206A.shtml

www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/features/story.jsp?story=703377.

This article was written by Nelofer Paziri who, as a young Afghani woman, fled the country with her family and wound up in Canada. She studied journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa and starred in the movie “Kandahar” that was loosely based on her life.

How is Paziri’s account so at odds with what we hear from our television and newspaper reporters over there? Part of it is that these are her own people. She speaks their language and can travel freely among them. Another part is that Canadian reporters are typically ’embedded.’ They live in the security of the garrison amidst our soldiers where what they get to report on is pretty much what they’re allowed to see.

A lot of people have learned to associate discriminaton with one of several forms of bigotry. That type of discrimination is bad, no argument here. But there are other forms of discrimination that are skills we need to exercise and hone. The discriminating mind, for example, can be a wonderful blessing.

Today, up is down and night is day. The extremists have become really adept at sowing confusion and doubt through the use of spin. Most of us either don’t recognize it and fall prey to it or we simply shrug it off. We shouldn’t take it so lightly for spin and the spinmeisters are working very hard to get us to do their bidding.

An article appeared in this morning’s Globe by John O’Sullivan who is described as a “senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington.” Wow, not just any ordinary fellow but a senior fellow and from the Hudson Institute at that. Surely the Hudson Institute must be a really prestigious center of knowledge, right? Maybe, but probably it’s actually a spin mill. Fortunately for O’Sullivan and Hudson, the Globe wasn’t about to tell you that.

In his opinion piece, O’Sullivan contended that Israel is in a fundamentaly weak stragetic situation after the Lebanon fiasco and so “must win the next (war) convincingly and pretty soon.” What’s that? This guy is arguing that Israel ought to get into a war against some unspecified Arab nation(s) or movement(s), win that war convincingly and get the job done soon. When I read that I wanted to know a little more about this impressive-sounding Hudson Institute. Who were the people behind it and did they have a dog in this fight?

Well, the Hudson Institute, like most of these ‘think tanks’, has its own web site and lists its principals and their biographies. As I ran down the list I found myself looking at a pretty focused bunch of luminaries from the pro-Israel camp. A lot of them claimed to have expertise in Arab affairs. Perhaps but, if so, it was from a purely Israeli perspective.

Here’s my point. If you read something from some institute or foundation and you’re curious whether you’re not being fed some pretty pointed propaganda, there are places you can go that will clear the haze. One of my favourites is www.sourcewatch.org which is run by the Center for Media and Democracy. It’s really worth a visit. When you’re there, be sure to click on their subsite PR Watch.

A huge amount of cash is pumped into these spin mills and it’s all for one purpose, to manipulate you. They can’t take the ballot out of your hand but with enough confusion, deception and distraction they have a decent chance of getting you to put your “x” right where they want it. Look at it this way: they wouldn’t be pumping vast millions of dollars into this effort if they weren’t getting a good return on their investment.

Politics has always been about choices. Invariably both sides can come up with good ideas, especially when they have to in order to win your vote. Politics is about debate, arguing and defending one’s position as superior to the other guy’s. Through this process we hope there emerges an informed electorate that can make the best decision for our country.

Spin seeks to corrupt that process and thereby undermine democracy itself. Spin works to create an uninformed, confused, sometimes angry, sometimes fearful electorate that will vote in the way the people who wield this weapon against them want them to vote.

Driving these moneychangers out of the temple is one of the greatest challenges facing our very democracy. If these creeps tried to buy your vote with cash, we’d put them behind bars. If they use more sophisticated techniques to achieve the same end they get away with it.

From globalization to global security and global warming, the spin machine is up and running furiously. Some of the problems that we’re going to have to decide how to deal with in the coming years are enormous and we’re going to need clear heads and informed minds to make the right choices. It’s time we learned to pay more attention to the messenger and a little less to the message.

Scanning these posts you’ll notice that a lot of them focus on the United States and that they tend to be unfavourable toward America. I want to make it clear, I do not hate the United States of America but, like a great many Americans, I have come to loathe what it has turned into and where it apparently is heading.

Time was it was considered extremely rude to pronounce judgments on someone else’s country. That will explain why you see so few references on this blog to the Norwegians and their beastly ways. I won’t even go into the Tongans. But you see, the United States is different and, because of those differences, it directly and dramatically affects each and every one of us and that makes it fair game. Washington knows it affects us, in fact it wants to reach everyone on the planet. Think I’m paranoid or delusional or making this up? If you have any doubt I’d invite you to take a stroll through the pages of The Project for the New American Century which you’ll find at www.newamericancentury.org.

PNAC is the viper’s nest from which the American neoconservative movement slithered. It has, in turn, spawned spin mills like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. PNAC was formed in the wake of Bush I’s decision not to invade Iraq lest America get dragged into a quagmire. What was that old nancy boy thinking? The PNAC’ers believe America must dominate the planet, thwarting, by military force if necessary, any nation that evolves to become its military, political or economic rival. Now I know that sounds insane but it’s there for all to read on their web site. Remember, PNAC is a group founded by such obscure types as Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others, the same group that succeeded in seizing control of the White House. We know where that has taken the world, don’t we?

The bright lights of PNAC are, collectively, the Darth Vader of American democracy and, thanks to the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks, they have brought out the very worst in the United States and transformed it into a genuine, rogue nation that has destabilized the Middle East and endangered the security of the rest of the planet, and that includes you. It’s their America I can’t stomach.

Fact is I love Americans… all the thinking, questioning, decent and honourable Americans and they are a large and growing segment of their population. Among their ranks you’ll find Bill Moyers and Paul Krugman, Jon Stewart, Al Franken and Chris Hedges and many, many more. I hope to introduce you to these people who carry the banner of moderation and, with it, their nation’s promise of progressive reform.

There was a time when the world was in a healthy state of balance, swinging a little bit left for a while and then a little bit right, and somehow becoming a better place through what it learned from both sides. Now we have this perverse force that is dragging our societies, our nations toward the far right and we’re paying an awful price for that. They want to take us to an extreme where thousands of years of history and countless tyrants have shown we cannot live as free men and women. This problem may sound daunting, a hopeless challenge but the truth is that you already have the power to change all this if you’ll only take the time to learn about it and come to understand it.

There is a reason these people are fearmongers and wanton dissemblers. If they can’t keep you confused, frightened and off-balance they can’t prevail. You don’t have to put up with that and, if you don’t, your world will be a much better place for it.

I am no political scientist and don’t pretend to be one. What I know I’ve gleaned from my reporting days and, since then, from what I’ve read and observed. That said, I knew plenty to realize from the outset that Washington’s grandiose plan to bring democracy to Iraq and, from there, to the Middle East was doomed to failure.

Americans have a vision of themselves as exceptional, unique and, frankly, superior. They believe their form of democracy to be the ideal and, if you fervently believed that, how could you not want to share that with other, less fortunate nations?

The approach is both simplistic and naive. Look around the world today and you’ll quickly see that democracy comes in an array of shapes and styles. Think of democracy as a pair of shoes. One person may like size 10 loafers. But what if that person decides that someone with a size 8 or a size 12 foot should also wear size 10 loafers? What if the chosen someone happens to live and work in the arctic?

Abraham Lincoln understood the true meaning of democracy. In his Gettysburg Address he stated it quite succinctly as, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” It must be a government defined by an electorate, controlled by an electorate and which serves the electorate. Nothing else will do.

Where we stumble is in the flawed belief that global democracy will yield a sort of democratic uniformity and that is simply nonsense. Any given people will shape their democratic system and institutions to accommodate their own cultural, religious, social, ethnic and traditional values. American democracy has had more than two centuries to adapt to American values but even there it had to endure major challenges such as civil war, slavery, universal suffrage. How could that model possibly suit some other nation with so many values different than our own?

When a people exercise their democratic franchise, we’re not always happy with the result. The Palestinian people chose Hamas as their leaders and some Shia Lebanese gave Hezbollah a number of seats in the Lebanese government. Washington is furious about those events and has learned to be wary of what democracy might bring to strategic Middle Eastern allies such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

Since the Second World War, America hasn’t always supported democracy. In Iran it toppled the democratically-elected government and installed the Shah and a brutal, police state in its stead. In Chile, America collaborated with the generals to stage a coup and murder the elected President, Salvador Allende. The U.S. has also freely used its power and wealth to manipulate elections in other nations such as Afghanistan and the Ukraine. Imagine if the European Union decided to covertly send massive amounts of money to America to help topple the Republican government.

Democracy is like a living thing. The idea needs to be planted when the conditions are right for it to take hold. It needs to be nurtured and tended. If all the necessary conditions are in place it might grow but it is going to begin as a mere, fragile seedling. With time, and a lot of luck, it may become a tree but, even then, that tree will be a creature of its immediate environment.

In 1988, Patrick Watson, one of the finest journalists ever to come out of the CBC, crafted an excellent, 10-part series called, “The Struggle for Democracy.” Part of the programme entailed a survey of widely different styles of democracy that had emerged in different corners of the world. I was lucky enough to have watched Watson’s ‘Democracy.’ 28-years later, this would probably be a good time for CBC to air an updated version of the original.

We need to be both realistic and infinitely patient in our expectations and demands for the spread of democracy. Remember, it took Western civilization the better part of two millenia to evolve the democratic institutions we take for granted today and there were many conflicts and setbacks along the way. Introducing and establishing democracy in a place where it has never been is so much more than just changing a form of government or rule. Democracy by its very nature impacts other aspects of society whether that be cultural, ethnic, religious, social or economic. Each must adapt to the others and to a new order. That takes time and a lot of trial and error if it is to succeed. Just as we have learned to accept and respect other religions and cultures, so we need to learn to respect democracy in all its forms and at all its stages even if other democratic states aren’t to our political or economic liking.

21 August, 2006 – This Just In

Word is beginning to circulate in Washington that the Bush administration is having second thoughts about democracy for Iraq. An article in today’s “The Australian” following up an article published last week in “The New York Times” quotes an anonymous military affairs expert who attended a White House briefing and reported, “Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy (for Iraq).”

Sunday Times reporter, Andrew Sullivan notes, “There comes a point at which even Bush’s platinum-strength levels of denial have to bow to reality. That point may be now. …Recently Bush has been wondering why the Shi’ites in southern Iraq have displayed such ingratitude to the man who liberated them from Saddam. It does not seem to have occurred to him that a populace terrorised by invasion, sectarian murder, non-existent government and near anarchy might feel angry at the man who rid them of dictatorship but then refused to provide a minimal level of security for the aftermath. And so, the frustrated born-again neocon in Bush may be ceding to the caucus of those dubbed the “to-hell-with-them” hawks.

So much for the hollow promise of occupying Iraq to plant the seed of democracy in the Muslim world. The flimsy weapons of mass destruction thing slipped through Bush’s fingers a long time ago as did Baghdad as a supporter of international terrorism. They’re down to Saddam, that’s all they have left to justify this fiasco and, if America does move to instal another dictator in Iraq, then this whole business was a hideous, horrid mistake, an utter FUBAR.

This morning’s Globe & Mail has a headline that exults in Canada’s awesome victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan yesterday. I guess it’s supposed to be a bit of good news to wipe away the grief Canadians have felt over the succession of deaths of our own over the past month. It’s even got a body count and it looks as though we killed a few dozen insurgents for no losses of our own. I guess that’s it then. We should probably tell the Taliban where we would like them to line up to surrender.

We’re now using body counts to measure victory. It has come to that. What a powerful instrument of self-delusion. It’s not a matter of how many we kill, it’s a matter of how many will come in to replace them. It isn’t a matter of wiping out a bunch of insurgents at one village, it’s which side will control this village in a few days when we’ve gone back to the safety of our garrison. When it really comes down to it, it’s a matter of which side has the will to outlast the other. In their decade-long war in Vietnam, US forces never lost a battle, not one. They killed their enemies by the hundreds of thousands. The only thing the Americans lost in Vietnam was the war itself.

I guess in politics, timing is everything. Poor Stephen Harper. Canada’s pretend prime minister took over just in time to see those he most wants to emulate, George Bush and Tony Blair, crash and burn in their own countries. We know from an article Harper wrote to an American paper back in 2003 that, back then, he would’ve been delighted to be prime minister and send Canadian soldiers into Iraq. Harper believes Canada should stand “shoulder to shoulder” with this gang of ideological incompetents. Oh, Canada!

I was never enamoured of the Star Spangled Banner. Like most national anthems, it is stilted and awkward and just a bit creepy, like joining strangers in a group hug. I guess I’ve just got too much “true patriot love.”

Ever since the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, I keep coming back to the last line of the American anthem and I’ve come to really appreciate what it says. To me at least, it’s the best, single line of any anthem I’ve ever heard.

Land of the free, home of the brave. Even if that was always a blend of myth and reality, the past five years have shown how directly linked are a people’s bravery and their freedom.

In the greater scheme of global conflict, the casualties inflicted in the al-Qaeda attacks were actually pretty modest. Roughly 3,000 killed. You would have to look pretty far down the list of human suffering before you got to that one. But look what it did to the American people, the folks from the Home of the Brave.

The September 11th attacks inflicted real terror on the American people. Who watched the WTC towers collapse, one after the other, and wasn’t profoundly troubled? Outside of bin Laden’s inner circle, those images sent shockwaves around the entire world.

No one can fault Americans for being fearful on that day and in the days immediately after when they had to wonder if there were more attacks looming. What surprised me, however, was how persistent and deep that fear turned out to be. Remember the day when Tom Ridge asked his fellow citizens to lay in supplies of duct tape and plastic sheeting, just in case? Store shelves were torn bare of the stuff and across the U.S. people raced to hermetically seal up their homes in fear of a non-existent danger. It was then that I realized how far America had fallen from being the Home of the Brave.

As I watched Americans being fed a diet of fear by al-Qaeda and then by their own leaders, I saw how ready they were to give up their freedoms in exchange for empty assurances of their safety. The Patriot Act, warrantless wire taps, secret and indefinite detention without charge or benefit of counsel, data mining, illegal warmaking, each marking a surrender of basic freedoms and human rights.

Bravery is only tangible when the brave resist what threatens them. If they capitulate to those who infect them with fear, they just as quickly lose their hold on their freedoms.

Those of us lucky enough to have been spared this defining moment of truth need to profit from this lesson. We need to reflect on our rights and what they really mean to us and our society. We need to recall how each of those rights has been paid for – in blood – and often more than once. We need to understand that, if we fail to defend those rights, there are and have always been those who would strip us of them.

These are fascinating times in which we live. From global warming to global warfare, our world is in the midst of fundamental change. Simply trying to make sense of what is happening can be a challenge. To do my bit to aid understanding I’d like to introduce some of the best books I’ve read recently. I’ll give a brief precis of each and I hope you’ll find it sufficiently interesting to check them out.

1. Future Tense, Gwynne Dyer, McClelland & Stewart.

For anyone unfamiliar with this man, Dyer is a Canadian with a compelling understanding of world conflict. He holds a doctorate in Military and Middle Eastern affairs from the University of London and has lectured at Oxford and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (Britain’s West Point). Dyer is a syndicated columnist although you won’t find his stuff in many Canadian papers. If you’re interested in his columns, a lot of them are available on his web site: www.GwynneDyer.net.

In “Future Tense” Dyer presents an analysis of the Iraq fiasco and American foreign policy on the Middle East. He explains how the Bush administration works to undercut the United Nations and the risk that the U.S. will return the world to strategic blocs of nations suspicious of and threatening to each other, the same situation that brought us to two world wars.

Gwynne Dyer comes to the defence of the United Nations with a skilful analysis of how it has enabled us to change the world that existed prior to 1945. He depicts the UN as a ‘work in progress’ and shows that the evolution of the United Nations and international law is a project that will likely take a century to reach fulfillment. The far right today doesn’t waste any opportunity to criticize and mock the UN as weak, hapless and ineffectual. Dyer takes those arguments apart, one by one, to reveal the dangers facing all nations from the neoconservative agenda.

Here are two passages from the back cover of “Future Tense”:

If you’re like me (and I hope you are) you must be getting really tired of all the terror being bandied about from every direction. Terrorism is a tool of two types: terrorists and unscrupulous politicians. Both of them have the same target in their sights – you.

What is terrorism but the instilling of fear into a people or a society or a nation for the purpose of obtaining a desired result? When it comes to the applied science of fear, who is more masterful: Osama bin Laden or Dick Cheney? I’d pick Cheney, hands down, and I bet so would he.

Terrorism is the time-honoured, stock in trade tactic of insurgents. It is normally wielded by them with great brutality. Shock value is everything. Guerrilla Warfare 101 holds that the goal of insurgents is to drive a wedge between the populace and their government by showing the government forces incapable of protecting the citizenry. By undermining public confidence in government, the guerrilla seeks to whittle away at popular support for the existing establishment either to secure the overthrow of the government or to drive the public to compel their leaders to relent to the terrorists’ demands. This is especially potent if sizeable elements of the citizenry harbour latent grievances against the government. Insecurity greatly magnifies smoldering discontent. For the guerrilla or insurgent or ‘freedom fighter’, terrorism is a way to wage war in a situation where they lack other means of combat. Bereft of artillery or strike fighters or tanks, booby traps or suicide bombers may become the poor man’s only weapons of significance. That’s not to excuse or condone, merely to acknowledge reality.

The infliction of terror by one side against the populace of the other isn’t, however, the despicable, exlusive prerogative of the insurgent. As the latest war in Lebanon so clearly shows, terrorism can also and is used by the big guys, the powerful side, against the citizenry of the weaker side. This too is nothing new. Since the dawn of civilization, victorious armies have been putting the innocent civilians of the other side to the sword, “pour encouragez les autres.” The ancient Mesopotamians did it, so did the Romans. It was almost de rigeuer in the Dark and Middle Ages. Hitler used his Luftwaffe and Waffen SS to the same end. Who hasn’t heard of Guernica? The Blitzkrieg entailed driving civilian masses onto the highways to cripple the mobility of the defenders and then relentlessly strafing and bombing the innocents from the air to keep the good times rolling.Some may find it offensive to incorporate references to Nazis and Israelis in the same paragraph. To them I apologize for any hurt feelings but fall back on “res ipsa loquitor.” No nation with the advantage of total air supremacy attacks a residential neighbourhood with aerial bombs and can thereafter claim not to hagve intended massive civilian casualties.

A fundamental principle of the law of all civilized nations is that we are deemed to intend the logical consequences of our acts. The logical, indeed inevitable, consequence of the use of high-explosive, aerial bombs on civilian neighbourhoods is inarguably the deaths of innocent civilians in massive numbers. Israel knows this and yet has rarely refrained from such attacks. The fact that Israel is our ally, our friend, doesn’t alter the monstrosity of their actions. But then again, let’s not judge Israel too harshly given the willingness of our side, at least the United States, to wage similar aerial warfare on Iraqi and Afghan neighbourhoods. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.

The other form of terrorism, the use of fear against us by our own leaders, is, in some respects, even more insidious. In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001 (I hate “9/11”), the Bush administration chose to ruthlessly exploit the misery and fear of that situation to their own, utterly partisan advantage. For five full years they have leveraged this atrocity to their direct benefit. They have made fear an integral part of their electoral politics. Like clockwork, before every critical election they have conjured up terrorist crises to subdue their electorate. Whenever they are faced with exposure or scandal they do a remarkably blatant, “terrorism bait and switch.” They have also unashamedly used the terrorism card to defame their opponents as unpatriotic and weak, even stooges for the insurgents, incapable of protecting the American people.

Contrast this with the advent of World War Two. Churchill delivered a number of stirring speeches in which he prepared the English people for the desperate struggle that lay ahead of them. He didn’t exploit their fear. Instead he summoned up their courage and resolve. His was a nation and people on the ropes, standing alone against a tyrannical juggernaut, in imminent danger of invasion, conquest and enslavement. “We will fight them on the beaches, on the landing places, on the farms and in the cities. We will never surrender.” Likewise, in the aftermath of December 7th, Roosevelt emboldened his people by proclaiming, “We have nothing to fear, except fear itself.” Both of these brilliant leaders recognized that fear was the enemy of their people, their society, their civilization. Would that wisdom, that decency obtained today.

Conjuring up demons and inflicting fear to manipulate one’s own people is craven and cowardly and despicable. Yet it is a favoured tool of Bush and Blair, Howard and Harper. If we cannot find it within ouselves to renounce these people and their grotesque assault, what possible hope have we to defeat those who would terrorize us from the outside?