Real Remembrance

The following is the keynote address I gave at Henry Wisewood's Remembrance Day Assembly today:

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We’ve been told they fought for their country. We’ve been told they fought for duty, for honour, for glory. We’ve been told that they fought for freedom, for justice, for equality, for liberty. At least, that’s what we’ve been told. Over and over again, we’ve been fed the ancient proverb which Wilfred Owen so aptly called “that old and evil lie”: It is sweet and dutiful to die for one’s fatherland. What I’m going to attempt to do today is remind everyone here of the lessons that we need to remember, yet have largely forgotten.
The two world wars that plagued the century before this one were catastrophic. The First World War claimed some 20,000,000 souls, while the Second destroyed an estimated 55,000,000. In both conflicts, the majority of the dead fit into two categories: the young, and the innocent.
In July 2007 I knelt at the grave of the youngest soldier to perish in the First World War, aged fourteen. He was younger than any of us in this building, and yet his life was torn apart in the hellfire of war and conflict. On that same trip – a battlefield tour of northwestern Europe – I stood within the Menin Gate, the colossal war memorial in the town of Ypres. On the Belgium-France border, the town of Ypres was 99% destroyed by the end of the First World War. The town has been impressively rebuilt, and yet the reminders of that terrible conflict are there still. For on the Menin Gate are the names of 60,000 British Commonwealth soldiers whose bodies have no known grave within the Ypres Salient. On the walls of Tyne Cott Cemetary – containing some 12,000 graves – are another 40,000 names from the same sector of the war.
300km to the southwest is the town of Beaumont Hamel, part of the massive offensive that began on 1 July 1916 along the Somme River. It was in Beaumont Hamel that the 800 soldiers of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment assembled in their front lines, with confidence running high. After three months of continual artillery bombardment, it was felt by many that rifles were unnecessary, as the Germans would have died in their trenches.
110 paces from the front lines of the RNR is a marker known as “The Danger Tree”. It marks the farthest that the regiment got. In 110 paces, every single officer and 658 ranked men were killed, most cut down by withering German machine-gun fire. It was but the beginning of one of the bloodiest days in human history, with Anglo-French forces taking a combined 64,000 casualties. In total, the Battle of the Somme would claim 1,100,000 lives. The approximate ratio comes to one man dead for every inch of ground gained.
Between the two sites of Ypres and The Somme lies Vimy Ridge, the site of Canada’s triumph in the First World War. Yet even the colossal Vimy Memorial serves as a sobering reminder of the horror of the First World War. In two attempts to capture the ridge before 1917, the French lost 150,000 men. 10,000 Canadians were killed or wounded in the struggle to capture the ridge. Of Canada’s population of 6,000,000, some 600,000 fought overseas. There are 1500 people in this room at the moment. If this was 1914-1918, 150 of you are going to war. 15 of you will be blown to bits, shot, poisoned, gassed, bombarded, buried alive, or sliced apart by machine-gun fire. Thirty of you will suffer similar fates, only you will survive. None of you will ever forget the horrors that you will witness.
Opposite Vimy Ridge lies Notre Dame de Lorette, one of two French National War Memorials (the other situated at the site of the orgy of death that was Verdun). Within the walls of the site are over 40,000 graves. Of these, only half are marked, since the grave-workers could only find bits of those they were supposed to bury. Standing at the southern end of the basilica on the site, you can see nothing but endless rows of white crosses, stretching outwards for what seems an eternity.
It is often said that war showcases the best and worst of humanity. Two experiences within my travels have put that into focus. This past summer, I toured the extermination camp of Buchenwald, in which nearly 57,000 – ranging from Jews to socialists to Soviet POWs– were mercilessly butchered by the SS. It is impossible to remain emotionally stable as you stand in the basement of the crematorium, staring upwards in horror at the hooks from which some 1,100 were hanged until death. When you close your eyes, you can nearly see the bodies writhing in agony in the last moments of their life, sense the stench of death around you, and feel to your core a silence so appalling that it overwhelms you within seconds. The horrors of the Nazi Holocaust illustrate one of the darkest hours in humanity’s history; where some committed acts that were inhuman and monstrous, and many stood idly by, saying and doing nothing.
Contrast this with an experience I had on the last day of June 2007, standing at the foot of the grave of Noelle Godfrey Chavasse, a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps and the only man in the history of the British Empire and Commonwealth to win two Victoria Crosses – the highest award for bravery in the Commonwealth – in the same war. His first VC was awarded in 1916, when – despite being hit by shell splinters at Mametz – he crawled to within 25 yards of the German front lines, braving sniper fire and artillery the entire time, to rescue three soldiers who had been wounded and trapped there. His second VC was awarded during the Battle of Paschendaele a year later. He is recorded to have been severely wounded while carrying a soldier back to the medical stations. Despite this, he continued for a further two days – largely without food – to go back into no-man’s-land to recover wounded soldiers. He subsequently died of his wounds, and is now buried in a cemetery outside of Ypres.
Yet even this story of incredible courage and bravery has an edge of despair to it. What is sad isn’t that Noelle Chavasse was brave enough to sacrifice his life to save someone else’s, but that it was required of him in the first place. He didn’t start the First World War. Herbert Hoover, the 31st President of the United States, once remarked that “Older men declare war. But it is the young that must fight and die”. The average German before the Second World War likely did not want to slaughter 20% of the Polish population, or bomb London to pieces, or turn the ancient city of Leningrad into one massive graveyard. Yet those in power had an ardent desire to do so, and so those who were poor, or those looking for a direction in which to live their life, or those conscripted into service by their untouchable overlords, were marched into the hellfire of the Eastern Front, to kill and be killed.
The number of men who returned from the First World War shell-shocked and psychologically destroyed numbers in the millions. The lives needlessly thrown away by the power-trips of older tyrants destroyed the flower of two successive generations. Standing in the basement of Buchenwald’s crematorium, or in the necropolis and the ossuary of Notre Dame de Lorrette’s Basilica, or within the Menin Gate brings home the harsh truth about war: That war is not about winning and losing; it is not about victory and it is not about defeat, or about heroism and cowardice. It is about death…and the infliction of death. War represents, in the words of veteran war correspondent Dr. Robert Fisk, “the complete and total failure of humanity and the human spirit”.
Many would argue that war is sometimes a necessary evil. No matter how true that may be, it is still evil. Did we have to fight World War II? Yes, we had to stop Hitler. He was a mass-murdering psychopath who would have killed every racial minority on the planet if given the chance. But…did we have to drop two atomic bombs on the civilian populations of Japan after Hitler’s suicide and the collapse of Nazi Germany to do that? Did we have to firebomb the city of Dresden and kill 100,000 people, most of them non-combatants? Did we have to intern thousands upon thousands of Japanese-Canadians, depriving them of their livelihood, humanity, citizenship and dignity?
Yet these facts are often left out of the narrative. We are told that the First World War was about values and democracy. It didn’t start because of idealism. It began because a young man named Galvo Princip assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in a city called Sarajevo in what is now Bosnia. Most of the pointless slaughter of the next four years was just that: pointless. Those who fought that war figured that out a long time ago. Harry Patch, the last British WWI vet, died this past summer. Yet before he died, he was interviewed on the 90th anniversary of the end of the war, and he was asked whether the deaths of 20,000,000 young men and civilians was worth anything. He responded eloquently: “War is the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings. Too many died. War isn’t worth one life.”
If those who survived the bloodbaths of Passchendaele and The Somme have figured this out, why haven’t we? Why do we repeat the same old mantra of liberty and idealism? It’s not that there aren’t things worth fighting for, it’s that wars are never started for the reasons we’d like to believe. The First was about power and politics, the Second about territory and fanaticism. The proxy-wars of the Cold War were about power and resources; our current wars are about power and resources. War is seen as a means to an end, rather than what it really is: a sickening evil that has plagued humanity for all but about 253 of its 9,000 years of recorded history.
When he was interviewed on 11 November 2008, Harry Patch also revealed that his attendance of Remembrance Day ceremonies was infrequent. He said that he viewed them as “just show business”, as a façade for what has been demonstrated to be our incapability to figure out not so much what we are remembering, but why we are remembering it. We do the memories of those who died no service by kidding ourselves about the nature of their deaths.
The line we most often hear is that those who fought in World War II fought for our freedom. This is true if you grew up in Holland, or France, or Britain, or Poland or Russia. That is not true here. The German Empire never would have reached Canada in 1918; the Nazis would have been eventually crushed by the overwhelming Red Tide of 700 divisions – each 18,000 men strong – pouring out of the Soviet Union. At first glance, it often appears that there is no reason to remember.
But here’s why we have to remember the sacrifice of previous generations: We have to learn from it. If our generation, or our children’s generation, embarks on a bloody – and likely apocalyptic – war with the rest of humanity, then their deaths will have been for nothing. If we simply repeat the mistakes of previous generations over and over again – as history suggests we are doomed to do – then the victims of the first two world wars will have died in a pointless exercise in humanity’s instinctual desire to annihilate itself.
If, on the other hand, we resolve to make the Second World War the Last World War, then we have made the deaths of the nearly 100,000,000 in the two conflicts worth something. To truly make the sacrifice of previous generations for something, we must ensure that our generation and future generations never go through the hell that they did. Thank you.

Obscurity and irrelevance

The last several weeks have been very interesting indeed. But perhaps the most interesting part about it has been watching the United States' Minority Party's reaction to all of it.

Let us begin with the Olympics. The bids for the 2016 Summer Olympics came in several weeks ago, with four cities in the running: Tokyo, Madrid, Rio de Janiero, and Chicago. The day before the votes were cast by the IOC, Barack Obama decided to go and lobby the IOC on behalf of his city of residence. He delivered the usual rousing speech. Despite another impressive oration from the President of the United States (POTUS), the International Olympic Committee responded by ejecting Chicago from the votes in the first round. In the end, the 2016 Summer Olympics went to Samba City: Rio de Janiero. In the words of Bill Maher, "you should have seen it. They were samba-ing in the streets, their breasts were hanging out; and then they found out they'd won the Olympics bid and oh man..."
The response to all of this from the Republican Party was particularly whinging. In a nutshell: They're glad Obama lost the Olympics bid. They're glad to see him fail, they're glad to see a cut in the flesh of the Democrat's Kronos. At long last, they said to themselves, Obama has been shown to be vulnerable. This is where we can hit home at him. The airwaves were flooded with shouts of jubilation and euphoria. The Republicans finally seemed to believe they had defeated him.

Enter Norway, my favourite country in the world. Besides contributing heavily to the UN's budget, effectively running UNICEF, and providing the ultimate argument in favour of democratic socialism, Norway is also responsible for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee for the remaining awards is Swedish, whereas the committee for the Peace Prize is voted on by the Norwegian government. The current government - headed by the Labour Party's Jens Stoltenberg - has a bit of a leftist hint to it (the governing coalition is aptly termed "The Red-Green Block"). Two weeks ago, the committee - including one former Conservative MP, two former Labour MPs, one former Socialist Left MP, and one former Progress MP - awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Hussein Obama. He was awarded it "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" and his work towards "fostering a new climate" in international relations.
I'm not going to go into whether or not Obama deserved the peace prize; enough people have done so with reasoned arguments both for and against. What I instead want to focus on is the Republican reaction to the awarding of the Peace Prize to Barack Obama. The reaction ranged from amusing to frightening. Here's a sampler of some of the most extreme and the most astute:
Senator John McCain: "I think Americans are always pleased when their president is recognized by something on this order".
Rush Limbaugh: "Something has happened here that we all agree with the Taliban and Iran about and that is he doesn't deserve the award...The Nobel gang just suicide-bombed themselves"
William Kristol: "He's liberalism's Gorbachev. He's destined to lose in 2012...I've done as much for peace"
Glenn Beck suggested the prize should go to the Tea Party protestors. He said "an extraordinarily powerful global progressive movement is behind this"
Erick Erickson: "He was picked to meet the Nobel Committee's Affirmative Action Quota"
John Bolton suggested he should turn it down.
Andy McCarthy: "Barack Obama [won] the Yassir Arafat Prize"
Brian Kilmeade wondered whether Obama had delayed troop increases to get the award.
While several have made remarks that are clearly offensive, perhaps the most insane of the reactions comes from the chairman of the RNC: Michael Steele: "the Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control." Wow. You have to be pretty firmly disconnected from reality in order to blame Obama's win on the Democrats' "international leftist allies". Yes, the Norwegian Nobel Committee leans to the left. Yes, most of the world leans to the left. No, that does not make America the one smart guy in the room. What it means is that the United States has finally started down the long road to catching up with the rest of the world. Yes, the prize may be a little bit premature; but I find Michael Steele's reaction - simply put - to be completely and utterly pathetic.

Indeed, the reaction of the GOP to these two events has shown the increasing disconnect from the rest of the world that the party faces. It is very clear that the world does not side with the criminal policies of George W. Bush and his ilk. It is very clear that most of the world values dialogue and peace, two things that Mr. Bush so utterly lacked and Mr. Obama has demonstrated to possess. But what is perhaps more clear is how completely disconnected from the realities of the United States the Republican Party has become.
To begin, let us take a look at the Tea Party protesters and those like them, the supposed "grass-roots" of the Republican Party. I mentioned several posts ago a frightening set of figures demonstrating how utterly ignorant most Americans are of the rest of the world, and indeed of their own country. Simply through their use of idiocy during their protests ("keep your government hands off my medicare!" comes to mind), we can pretty clearly conclude that most of this ignorant rabble are the ones patrolling the town halls with hitler=obama signs and guns (don't even start me. I've already ranted twice about that, I'm not doing so again).
But even that does not go nearly as far as to simply look at the nature of the Congressional Caucuses within the US Capitol. Let us look first at the Congressional Black Caucus.
Number of Members: 44 (1 Senate, 43 House of Representatives)
Number of Democrats: 44
Number of Republicans: 0

Not a single Republican. Not a single one. All Democrats. There is not a single Black Republican in the entirety of Congress. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is of a similar makeup, with 23 Democrats and 1 Independent. The Republican counterpart - the Congressional Hispanic Conference - has 11 Republicans. In three racial caucuses spanning two large racial minorities, there are 67 Democrats, 11 Republicans, and 1 Independent. Something has happened here; something that is indicative of America as a whole.
Let us look even further. Last week, Al Franken succeeded in passing an amendment that prevents contracted defense companies from having "no lawsuit" clauses for their employees, after a female employee of KBR was gang-raped repeatedly, and then denied the right to sue by a clause in her contract. The vote was 70-30 in the Senate. All thirty against were Republicans. In the words of the outraged Jon Stewart: "I understand we're a divided country, some disagreements on health care. How is ANYONE against this?"
Let's take a look. The pictures of the thirty senators against were posted on a website mocking their stance:
http://www.republicansforrape.org/legislators/

Notice anything?
Relatively monotonous on the skin colour, isn't it? This is because the Republican Party is no longer a party that represents racial minorities, if indeed it ever was. It is a party that is increasingly made up solely of old white men, a party that is increasingly disconnected from the growing racial minorities in America. These minorities will not be so for long. The Hispanic population is growing at an astronomical rate. It is predicted that by 2020, the primary first language of the citizens of Denver (which, ten years ago, was about as white as frightened milk) will be Spanish. The percentage of the vote that is made up by the current Caucasian Republican base will dwindle and dwindle until the GOP fades into obscurity and irrelevance.

Not that that's a bad thing.

Have we fallen this far?

I swore several weeks ago - in relation to the healthcare debate - that American politics couldn't get any worse. How wrong I was! Yesterday, several thousand descended upon Washington DC to protest the Obama administration. Not anything specific, just the administration itself. It was billed by Fox News as "The 9/12 Project", a phantom invention of Glenn Beck's several years ago. Now, the idea of the 9/12 Project sounds noble at first: to recreate the unity and togetherness that all Americans felt with one another the day after 9/11/2001. These days, however, it has become a sick partisan spectacle for anyone who hates Barack HUSSEIN Obama and all that he stands for.
Yesterday, the fury of this lunatic fringe was on full display for the entire world to see. The signs present ranged from amusing ("Now Look! Nice people forced to protest! We came unarmed...this time!) to disgusting. Here's a list of a few of the captions on posters seen at the event:
"Nazi Pelosi: You keep your fascism, I'll keep my Freedom!"
"Impeach the Muslim Marxist"
"Oust the Marxist Usurper...His Czars and thugs! Honduras did it!"
"President Obama's Healthcare Czar"
"Parasite-in-Chief"
"Obama Lies...Grandma Dies"
"Remember 9/11...Impeach the Muslim Terrorist!"
"I've Changed" (Obama with Hitlerstache)
"Joe my Hero! Joe Wilson...Truth Czar"
"Bury Obamacare with Kennedy"
The last one is particularly sickening, because it seeks to turn the death of Ted Kennedy into a partisan attack. How would the Republicans have reacted if we had carried signs saying "Privatization of Soc-Sec dies with Reagan"? They would have lost their collective minds, and rightly so. To turn someone's death into an attack method is inherently wrong.
What is more disturbing, however, is that this hatred of Obama is something uniquely new. The right hated Bill Clinton. They did everything in their power - from sex scandals to land deals - to attempt to throw him out of office. But the vitriol and rhetoric never even came close to the levels now exhibited towards President Obama. No, what is behind this is something inherently deeper, and inherently worse. The call of "marxist" has been used many times, on every president from Theodore Roosevelt onward who wanted to institute healthcare for all citizens. What hasn't been used before are the accusations of being a Muslim. This is something that is inherently unique to President Obama.
The reason for it all is something far worse; something far more disturbing than anything else. It can be attributed to the disgusting caricatures of his opponent, the fact that everyone at the Tea-bagger rallies is uni-ethnic. It has something to do with his middle name, which has something to do with something else.
It is because he is black.
It is because there are some people in the United States who feel that black people don't deserve to drink from the same water fountain as them, much less be the president of their country. It is because half of the American deep south still thinks it's the year 1861, and that slavery should still be legal. A simple glance at the groups and organizations organizing these mob-rallies (Neo-confederate groups, secessionist groups, right-wing blowhards) confirms my suspicion. Those who protest president Obama are - by and large - nothing more than angry, delusional, racist white people.
Some will say "there you go Cam! Playing the race card that democrats love to play". Let me simply say this in response: I don't see any hispanics screaming for the death of the Muslim Marxist. I don't see any Arabs demanding the right to "hunt Obama" on private ranches. I don't see any African-Americans (with the exception of a few delusionals like Michael Steele) accusing him of socialism. I don't see any Asians calling for his birth certificate to be examined. It is all white people. All angry, angry, angry (and very racist) white people.
Have we fallen this far? Have we collapsed so much as a people that this sort of lunacy flies as legitimate? Have we all been so traumatized by the rantings of Bush, Reagan, Beck, and Gingrich that we actually believe this idiocy? Is this what we are?
These lunatics make me ashamed. Thank the Lord that I do not live in the same country or subscribe to the same political ideology as them. I am ashamed enough to have the same skin colour as them, to subscribe to a faith of the same name as theirs. A month ago, Beck said that Obama has "a deep seated hatred of white people". If he does, then so do I. If he does, then so do all who want these nutcases to fail. If Obama hates white people - having watched the last two months of protests - I can't say as I blame him.

"Vasa vana plurimum sonant" - The empty pots make the most noise.

The Question we Still can't sk

On 20 August 2009, the man known as "The Lockerbie Bomber" - Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi - was released from his Scottish Prison on compassion grounds. Accused of blowing up Pan-Am Flight 103 in 1988, he was sentenced to life imprisonment before being released in August when determined to be in the final stages of Prostate Cancer. When he returned home to Libya, he received a comparitively warm welcome from the government of Colonel Gadaffi.
Naturally, everyone in the United States and Britain in government has been "outraged" by the treatment shown to Megrahi upon his return. Obama was "disturbed", Jack Straw was "disgusted"; the list of supposed outrages goes on. At first glance, the collective western press's head exploded. There were a few newspapers that did not subscribe to this madness: The Guardian (to a lesser extent), The Independent; to name the two most prominent ones.
Unfortunately, something else happened in what quickly became a reexamination of Pan-Am Flight 103's destruction. We (being the western press) stopped asking the question that has to be asked, yet it seems is not allowed by the British and American governments to be asked. And that, of course, is Why. Why did those who blew up the Pan Am jumbo jet do so? The German police reports in the subsequent investigation (so far not mentioned by every journalist not named Robert Fisk) clearly reveal that the perpetrators of the bombing had more connections to Lebanon, Damascus and Tehran than they did to Tripoli. The bomb-bag was physically put onto the baggage carousel by the Lebanese handler of the passenger whose suitcase it was. Though Gadaffi was almost definitely responsible for the bombing of French UTA flight 772 over Chad in 1989, it is less likely that he was involved in Lockerbie.
In order to truly understand why Lockerbie happened, we need to look to events on the eastern end of the Islamic world the year before. On 3 July 1988, IranAir Flight 655 was shot down by the USS Vincennes while flying from Tehran to Dubai. The Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters at the time, and Flight 655 was within Iranian airspace. When the crew of the vessel returned to the United States, the reaction of the American government was relatively similar to that of Gadaffi's Libya this past month. The air-warfare coordinator of the ship was awarded the Navy Commendation Medal, while the ship's captain was given the Legion of Merit.
The bombing of Lockerbie was not an act of state terrorism by the Libyan government; it was a vengeance operation. It was an act of revenge for the destruction of IranAir 655, in which all 290 passengers and crew on board were killed. Though this does not excuse the appalling nature of the crime of Lockerbie, we need to appreciate history not so much to excuse what happened, as to understand why it happened.
It would be bad enough if Lockerbie was an isolated incident in terms of the Why question. The unfortunate thing, however, is that it is not. We need only look at the first international Crime Against Humanity of this decade: 9/11. On the eighth anniversary of the attack - this Friday - many among us will still assume that those who committed the atrocities hated us for our freedom and wealth. In the aftermath of September 11, all that western media asked was "how?" (box-cutters, aircraft, tall buildings) and "who?" (was it Bin-Laden? were Hussein or Arafat involved?). The question that no one would ask - but the question that has to be asked - is why 9/11 happened. The unfortunate thing is that those in charge do not want those questions asked, because the asking of those questions opens up a door to the discussion of a whole thread of issues that could get very ugly: The nature of America's relationship with Israel and 'Palestine', American war crimes in Iraq and Iran, American military hegemony in the region, support for corrupt despots like Mubarek and Musharref, and the demonization of the world's 1 billion Muslims. These are not issues that those in power want us to ask, because it puts a great deal of blame on those who wield power - or have wielded power in the past.
Last spring, following the Iranian president's remarks about Zionism being "equal to racism", a letter of mine appeared in The Calgary Herald pointing out the same thing: we have refused to ask why people do what they do, or why whole societies do what they do. Until we understand why events like Lockerbie and 9/11 happened, we stand no chance of ever preventing them from happening again. It is unfortunate that those in power (both in government and in media) are too comfortable to realize this and speak honestly about the events of the past. If we don't ask why, we don't learn from it. And if we don't learn from it, we are likely to repeat it. One 9/11 was bad enough. one Lockerbie was bad enough. But unless we understand why they happened, more of them will occur.

Reductio ad Hitlerum: The power of ignorance, idiocy, and fear

WARNING: this post will be very long (sources in brackets)

On Tuesday, 11 August, Democratic Congressman David Scott of Georgia awoke to find the image of a Nazi Swastika spraypainted on the sign outside his office in Smyrna, Georgia. According to The Guardian, this came less than a week after a heated exchange in a "town hall" meeting that he had participated in.
Nor is David Scott the only one. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, William Kostnic paraded outside of the hall in which Obama was due to speak, sporting a 9mm pistol on his thigh, and carrying a placard bearing the words "it is time to water the tree of liberty" (an obvious reference to the Jefferson quote "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants"). One protester was heard to shout at the President of the United States (POTUS) "One day God is going to stand before you and judge you!". A protest placard of the infamous LaRouche Political Action Committee sports a picture of Obama with a Hitler-stache superimposed onto him.
What is the issue? Is it abortion? Is it torture? Is it whether Obama should implement a 100% tax rate? Is it gun control?

Nope. It's an issue that the entirety of the western world (and, indeed, large portions of the developing world) view as being about as controversial as votes for women: universal healthcare. Every other member of the OECD and the G20 has universal, government-funded healthcare policies in place for their citizens. The United States, however, is the exception to this rule. Approximately 45,000,000 American citizens (and that doesn't include illegal immigrants) are without health insurance, either through their employers, the government, or their own private plans. Even worse, those who are covered by the massive health insurance industry often find themselves denied essential care, or forced to hand over their life savings because of health tragedies. The horror stories concerning the American system number in the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. An entire saga exceeding the size and complexity of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire could be written solely about how messed up the American system is. In a 2000 examination of national healthcare systems, the United States ranks 37th, behind France (1st), Italy (2nd), Spain (7th), Japan (10th), Norway (11th), Portugal (12th), Britain (18th), Sweden (23rd), Cyprus (24th!), Germany (25th), Saudi Arabia (26th!!!) Morocco (29th!!), Canada (30th), and Chile (33rd). The United States ranks well below the OECD averages in terms of life-expectancy, infant mortality, and yet ranks well above the averages in terms of per-capita spending on healthcare.

With all that in mind, the need for reform is relatively easy to see. The unfortunate part is that it has been well over thirty years since the formation of Medicare and Medicaid by Lyndon Johnson, and yet still there are people without healthcare coverage, nearly 1/6th of the population of the United States. Why is this? Simply put, the pharmaceutical and health-insurance lobbies have been so effective at putting out endless propaganda - enough to make even Stalin's Pravda envious - sputtering forth all sorts of bullshit arguments against "evil"(Sarah Palin), "Orwellian"(The Independent, The Guardian), socialized medicine and universal healthcare.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Obama's attempt to push through healthcare reform - however feeble it may be - has been an uphill slugging match against the powers that be. We've heard all the familiar arguments from the pharmaceutical lobby and the nuthouse that most people refer to as the Republican Party. We've heard that it will prevent you and your doctor from making healthcare decisions yourselves. Ironic, given that currently their made by insurance-industry bureaucrats whose goal is to finance their fourth 100-foot luxury yacht. We've heard that it will increase wait-times. This may well be true, but you won't be shelling out your entire savings account for retirement in exchange for an "experimental" or "unnecessary" cancer treatment. We've heard that it will decrease the quality of care that you receive. Again, ironic, given that the highest quality healthcare systems in the world (Britain's NHS, France, and Norway) are all heavily socialized. We've heard the same old words of "government control"(The Globe & Mail), "socialism"(The National Post), "costs"(The New York Times), "government debt" (though we seem to have no problem owing $4,000,000,000,000 to China at the moment), and all the other bullshit arguments that have been dragged out by everyone against health-reform from Richard Nixon to Newt Gingrich.

And then we've heard some things we haven't heard before. We've heard about these bizarre "death panels" that are supposedly in place to determine whether you live or die once you hit 65. From Chuck Grassley to Sarah Palin, this myth has been perpetuated by the Republican party and its supporters. We've heard cancer-survivors at the town-hall meeting of former Republican Arlen Specter perpetuate this myth (CNN), only to be verbally beaten down by the ever resolute and cool-headed Specter. We've heard these myths perpetuated by the usual blowhards of right-wing lunacy: Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Rielly, and others like them. The fact of the matter is that the bills in Congress contain no such "death panels". No universal healthcare system in the developed world contains such "death panels". It is - as the British say - bollocks. We've seen signs from the same LaRouche movement that "Hitler approves Obama's healthcare plan"(The Guardian). Last week, Rush Limbaugh commented that Obama's healthcare logo was "right out of Adolf Hitler's playbook" (The Guardian). Apart from the obvious call of Reductio ad Hitlerum, whereby the first side to make a comparison involving Adolf Hitler automatically forfeits the debate; such comparisons are obscene and ludicrous. Every major organization dedicated to monitoring real Neo-Nazism, from the ADL to Southern Poverty Law Center, has condemned the remarks as "[a] frightening display of bigotry and ignorance that should not be tolerated by a democratic society."(ADL Press release).
Why has the debate been allowed to reach such hysterical levels? How has a debate that was supposed to be about healthcare rights morphed into comparisons of Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler? Simple answer: Because the American public is - by and large - ignorant, stupid, and extraordinarily prone to the tactics of fear.

Don't believe me? Let me throw some numbers out there for you. Today, 34% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks. 1/3rd of the Republican Party believes that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States, a majority of American citizens cannot name a single branch of government, explain what the Bill of Rights. 24% cannot name the country that America fought in 1776. 60% don't know what the FDA (Food & Drug Administration) does. 42% think that Christianity is older than Judaism. 20% of American schoolchildren are incapable of finding the United States on a map. The ignorance within the United States is astounding.
It is this ignorance and stupidity that the propagandists of the far-right prey upon with their comparisons to Hitler, their mentioning of the "death panels", their attacks on the NHS, their bashing of France and Norway, the use of the word "socialism" and "socialized medicine" to terrify the population. The numbers of far-right militias and terrorist groups are on the rise, the ridiculous "tea parties" choke the airwaves with insane pronouncements, and the propaganda campaign against Barack Obama goes on.

It is time America rose above this fear. It is time they rose above their ignorance, their apathy, their idiocy, and their ability to be easily duped by flashy tv ads run by Humana and the US Chamber of Commerce. It's time to make sure that no country in the western world does not have universal healthcare. More importantly, it's time to see the Glenn Becks and Sarah Palins for what they really are in the scheme of this debate: lunatics and liars.

Though I walk through the valley and shadow of death

We in Canada are a complacent people. We avoid any sort of civil disobedience, we dislike protests, rallies, and all forms of politically-motivated unrest in general. As a result, we tend to gravitate towards the lower forms of political discussion: Bitching and whining about the most pathetic issues that can spring into your mind (blue bins, road construction, pithy remarks made by MLAs and MPs).
To make matters worse, the political climate over the last month has been one of brutal unpleasantness. Fascists and ultranationalists made huge gains in the EU elections, Geert Wilders - that ever racist and paranoid Dutch politician - looks set to gain huge ground in The Netherlands, the Israel-Palestine peace process continues to stall under the hawkish regime of Netenyahu and Lieberman, while Canada looks set for another election soon, with equal amounts of apathy and ignorance on all sides.
Living amid such a climate as a politically active individual is often depressing, to the point where you begin to believe that the entire world is like this. It begins to look as if complacency will reign supreme.
Enter the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Long noted as the most powerful and influential of the Islamic theocracies, Iran has long been ruled by despots and tyrants, from the British Empire to the Shah to Ayatollah Khomenei. A string of corrupt, cruel, and extraordinarily well-organized torture groups - from the Shah's Savak to the post-1979 Revolutionary Guards to today's Basij Militia - have supressed dissent, crushed opposition, and turned Iran into one of the longest-standing one-party-states in the world (alongside Cuba): Since 1956, absolute power has rested in the hands of only three individuals.
As a result, I went into watching last Friday's Iranian elections with - I must confess - a great deal of cynicism. Though - on paper - Mir-Hossein Mousavi looks thousands of times better than the crackpot Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the fact that the control of foreign policy and the military rests with Ali Khamenei still prevents major reforms from happening in terms of Iranian policy towards the west - particularly the United States and Israel.
The result was predictable: The counted result and the polled result were almost polar opposites of one another. Ahmadinejad claimed 64% of the vote, Mousavi a mere 33%. All told, it looked like the psychopaths were set to take power in the Middle East once again.
But the events of the last week have played out very, very differently.
Almost as soon as the results had been announced, Mousavi's infuriated supporters took to the streets in Tehran to protest the result. Khamenei's response: Send in the police and the Basij militia. Dozens were arrested on the 13th"public demonstrations against the result don't appear to be that big... reformers have always backed down in Iran when challenged by hardliners". How wrong he would prove to be.
By the 14th, the throngs of protesters had grown considerably, both in size and violence. Buses, government buildings, and stores were burned. In the evening, Basij and police killed or wounded fifteen students at Tehran university. Khamenei likely hoped that such intimidation would stem the protests, and ensure that the results went ahead as he planned.
That, however, didn't happen. On the 15th, Khamenei and the Guardian Council issued a warning that further protests were illegal. That didn't stop hundreds of thousands from gathering in Tehran, with seven protesters killed by Basij militia. The police, however, largely looked on, likely struck by the sheer magnitude of the crowd, which formed a nine-kilometer march to Freedom Square. The significance of this has not been lost on those covering the protests. The last time the police refused to fire on demonstrators, the year was 1979, and The Shah's brutal regime was about to fall.
The protests on the 16th were even larger, with some estimating over one million people in the streets of Tehran, including 120 Tehran University professors who resigned over the results and the treatment of students by the Basij. For the first time, police were called in to ensure that the Basij and the protesters did not have contact with one another.
On the 17th, the Iranian National soccer team - one of Ahmadinejad's pet joys - joined the protest, with seven of their members (the captain included) sporting green armbands - now the symbol of Mousavi's supporters. An estimated 500,000 protested in Tehran again, for the fifth consecutive day. Today, over 100,000 protested for the sixth consecutive day.
As someone who has been so suffocated by political despair and complacency over the last months, the last week has been a ray of light through the dark clouds. It proves that not all of us are so complacent, that we can choose to ignore the truncheon, ignore the tear-gas and assault rifles, ignore the remarks that you are "like dust and dirt" that will "be brushed from the river of Iran" (both by Ahmadinejad), and continue to fight anyways.
The citizens of Tehran have finally come to the realization that is so aptly put by V (from the film of the same name), that "while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning and, for those who will listen, the annunciation of truth; and the truth is that there is something terribly wrong in this country." The words have been spoken, the truth has been annunciated and - more importantly - translated into action. Not even the threats of Iran's Supreme Leader have turned back the green tides that have flooded Tehran's streets over the last week.
There were those who said this day would never come, when democracy would trump theocracy, where the voice of the Supreme Leader would be ignored and openly defied. that day has finally come, let us hope that there are many more like it.

Orwellian, isn't it?

In 1949, George Orwell published his masterwork of fiction - Nineteen Eighty-Four, portraying a dystopian future in which every aspect of public - and private - life is controlled by the government, to the point where dangerous thoughts are considered a crime punishable by death, dishonour, exile, or at the least a lengthy prison sentence. Often viewed as an allegory for ultrafascism, the "thought police" of Orwell have always been viewed as a metaphor.
Today, that changed; in Israel.

Supposedly the "shining democracy" of the Middle East, three bills before the Israeli Knesset aim to change all of that. It was hoped that the inclusion of the ultra-right Fascist - Avigdor Lieberman - would blunt the edge of his extremist party. It appears that those hopes were short-sighted and naive.

The first bill, which was approved by the Knesset ministerial committee on legislation this week, would make the marking of Naqba punishable by 3 years in prison.
What exactly is Naqba? Falling on the same day as Israeli Independence Day, it is a day of mourning among Israeli Arabs and Palestinians, as a means of honouring the some 700,000 Palestinians driven from their homes in the Arab-Israeli War by groups such as Irgun and the Stern Gang (both of which are now considered terrorist organizations by the United States, Britain, and Israel).
At this point, I feel it necessary to dispel certain myths surrounding the Israeli War of Independence
Myth: Israel declared independence, and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria attacked for no reason other than they hated Jews
Fact: Egypt, Jordan, and Syria came to the aid of the Palestinians, who were - in the words of Israeli historian Benny Morris - "ethnically cleansed" from much of the mandate given to them by the British. The original mandate for the state of Israel divided British Palestine into two sections - 48% Israel, 52% Palestine. By the time Israel was attacked on 1 May 1948, Morris estimates that between 200,000 and 300,000 Palestinians had been killed, with another 700,000 fleeing their homes. The day Israel declared its independence is considered a day of mourning by those Palestinians and Israeli Arabs left, and rightly so. When close to one million people are either killed or forced to leave their homes, it is indeed cause for mourning.
The bill, put forward by none other than Lieberman, aims to make it a national crime to commemorate Naqba. To quote Tal Nahum, the party spokesman for Yisrael Beitenu, "The draft law is intended to strengthen unity in the state of Israel". Strength through unity; we've heard that one before.

You'd think, having chosen to criminalize the remembrance of the 700,000 who fled their homes, that Lieberman's party would have done enough, but it gets worse. The second bill, which went through its first reading in the Knesset this week, would make it a crime to call into question the legitimacy of the state of Israel as a Jewish State. All of this, while 20% of its population is Arab Muslim and Christian. In a democracy, there is this thing called Freedom of Speech. You cannot control what people thing. Haim Oron, leader of the leftist Meretz Party, exclaimed in the Knesset last wednesday "Have you lost all faith in Israel as a Jewish and democratic state? This crazy government, what on earth are you doing? A thought police? Have you all lost it?". Roni Bar-On, the finance minister in the previous Kadima government, asked "You want to punish people for talking? Soon, will you want to punish for thoughts?" The controlling of thought and speech is something that is inherently undemocratic. If Israel wants to keep its status as the "shining democracy" in the Middle East, it cannot let this bill pass.

But it gets even worse. A third bill, which is expected to come before the ministerial legislative committee tomorrow, enforces a "loyalty oath" on those seeking Israeli citizenship. A central tenant of Lieberman's election policy, it has been condemned by the entire Arab League, as well as the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, have condemned the proposals, calling them "racist" and "fascist". The bill would also force Israeli Arabs - who are currently exempt from service - to serve in the IDF, despite the fact that they would inevitably end up taking up arms against their brethren on the other side of the the prison-wall that western journalism calls the "security barrier".

Not only have Israeli Palestinians and Arabs been excluded from their homeland, which has now been claimed and colonized by emigrants from Europe who have proclaimed it "a Jewish state"; not only have they been often treated as enemies by their own state, relegated to a "second class citizen" position; but now they are forced to accept it. The natural yearning for justice that the descendants of the 700,000 feel are now criminal in the State of Israel. Express loyalty, voice no opposition, and do not mourn your loss in public; that is the message being sent.

The quest to transform Israel from a Jewish democracy to a democracy is about to be criminalized. If apartheid did not already exist in Israel, it is about to. The actions of these ultranationalists are so absurd that they could have been in dystopian fiction, the Handmaid's tale to V for Vendetta to Nineteen Eighty-Four. The unfortunate part is that it is not fiction, but a sickening and horrifying reality.

Acquiris quodcumque rapis

Ken Saro-Wiwa was the founding member and president of MOSOP, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, a grassroots organization committed to recovering the rights of the Niger Delta's Ogoni People, rights continuously overlooked by the Nigerian government and foreign oil companies in the rush for the oil and gas reserves of the Niger River Delta. In 1994, Wiwa - along with eight other members of MOSOP - was arrested by the Nigerian government following a protest against an oil pipeline. By 1995, he had been sentenced to death by a government tribunal. The tribunal was one of the most corrupt the western world has ever watched unfold: "witnesses" were bribed and threatened into falsely testifying against Saro-Wiwa, his defense lawyers - before they resigned in protest of the court's erroneous breaches of justice - were denied access to Saro-Wiwa. On 10 November 1995, "The Ogoni Nine" were executed by hanging. The following day, Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth of Nations.

What had Saro-Wiwa and his activists been protesting? the construction of a colossal oil pipeline by Royal Dutch Shell across Ogoni land. In a previous protest, Nigerian forces - called in by RDS - had killed two women as they protested the destruction of their farmland by the construction groups. In another protest in January 1993 - where RDS again called in military support - 80 people were killed and 500 homes destroyed. The history of Royal Dutch Shell's involvement in the region is one of blood-soaked corruption and brutality.

For those of us who value human rights over profits, the news on Monday that Royal Dutch Shell will be brought to trial in New York for complicity in the death of Saro-Wiwa was a welcome announcement. For many, this is the final vindication of what has been a long and violent struggle to bring justice to Ken Saro-Wiwa. In his final statement before his execution, he condemned the company's actions and foretold that they would eventually be punished.

"I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial... its day will surely come and the lessons learned here may prove useful to it, for there is no doubt in my mind that the ecological war that the company has waged in the Delta will be called to question sooner than later, and the crimes of that war be duly punished. The crime of the company's dirty wars against the Ogoni people will also be punished."

Shell now faces charged of conspiring with the Nigerian government to kill the Ogoni Nine, of financing, arming and transporting the Nigerian military, torture, crimes against humanity, inhumane treatment, and arbitrary arrest and detention. Were these crimes being brought against a person, they would be facing an extraordinarily lengthy prison sentence in The Hague. People have died for doing less than the charges brought against Royal Dutch Shell, which is why the trial - scheduled to start within the next week - is so important.

Shell has spent hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of dollars trying to make people forget about its complicity. It has tried to run from its blood-soaked past for too long. Even now, it denies involvement in a regime that it financed, armed, economically bribed and controlled, and unleashed upon the Ogoni people - most of whom live on less than a dollar a day. You cannot deny the audacity of Shell's executives, who even now attempt to run from the justice that has been coming to them for so long. In 1997 and 2002, Saro-Wiwa's son and brother attempted to sue Royal Dutch Shell for their hand in his death. Though some minor payouts were given to his family, Shell eluded justice not once, but twice.

At long last, the dreams of so many have been realized. For decades, the multinationals that dominate our economy claimed the judicial and economic rights of individuals when it was convenient, yet fled and escaped from the justice that should have been meted upon them. This trial is important because of that, because it proves that to claim the rights of a person is to claim the responsibilities of a person. If you - individually - kill, maim, and oppress a group of people, then finance someone else to kill their activists, you would spend the rest of your life in prison. Many have thus maintained that the same should be true of multinationals like Royal Dutch Shell. This trial finally accomplishes that.

Why Bin Laden won

Robert Fisk's story is a superb illustration of the point I will attempt to make in this post. On September 11, 2001, the illustrious academic and Middle-East correspondent for The London Independent was on a plane crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Before he boarded the plane, he already had heard that some sort of aircraft - at the time it was believed to be a single-engined propeller plane - had crashed into the World Trade Center. No one panicked, and he boarded the flight, which then took off for the Eastern Seaboard. As the plane crossed over Ireland, a second aircraft was suddenly involved, smashing into the side of the other World Trade Center skyscraper. By the time they reached the Irish west coast and the Cliffs of Moher, The Pentagon had been hit. At that point, Fisk went up to the crew of the flight - most of whom he knew from his numerous previous flights across the Atlantic - and informed them that the United States would likely close its airspace. At that time, they were unsure of where the planes had come from, and him and the chief purser began discussing it, saying that the planes could have come from Latin America, or the west coast...or Europe.
At that moment, the two of them looked at one another, and immediately walked through the plane, picking out passengers they didn't like. Fisk found 13 - three in business class alone - while the purser found 14. Of course, they were all Muslims, who happened to be praying, or looking suspiciously at Fisk because he was looking suspiciously at them, or reading the Q'ran, or anything else that looked remotely 'suspicious' in their eyes. It was at that moment that Fisk realized that Bin Laden - whom he interviewed three times in the 1990's, and whom he was almost certain was behind the attacks - had gotten the better of him. In a fraction of a second, he had changed the incredibly liberal, tolerant, and open-minded Robert Fisk into a racist.

Fisk's story - conveyed at a lecture on Middle East geopolitics he gave at MIT in April 2006 - represents but a part of the larger picture. Following 9/11, our entire liberal-democrat society began to collapse, replaced by the PATRIOT Act, phone and email surveillance, random extraditions of often innocent people to countries notorious for their torture practices - such as the case of Maher Arar, waterboarding and other forms of torture, the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, the deaths of nearly one million civilians between those two conflicts, military tribunals, and a host of other ills that have no place in a free and democratic society. George W. Gump told us that "they hate us for our freedom", and yet if that is the case, would it not make more sense to defy them, to carry on with our freedoms anyways? Nope, at least not to them. To them, it made more sense to begin turning America - and indeed many other western nations - into shadows of police states. In the words of Ben Franklin, we gave up a lot of freedom for a little security. In the end, we lost both, and have earned neither.

Fisk vowed - on several occasions - that he would not allow 19 murderers to change his world. I will not allow them to change mine. It is time that the rest of us did the same. Do not allow 19 murderers - for that is all they really are - to change your world. If you do, then Bin Laden wins. Looking at the headlines on Guantanamo, sorting through pages and pages of internet documents released concerning the military tribunals, reading of the extradition of innocent men to Egypt and Syria - where they were tortured for months on end, it is beginning to look as though he already has.

Why New Labour needs to die

If you haven't been reading the British newspapers, then this bit of news likely sneaked into the back page. If you're been reading The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, or any of the other major British papers, then the British MP Expenses Scandal has been the front page every day for the last two weeks. In April, someone - they're still not sure who - leaked the files containing the government-credit-filed expenses of the Members of the British House of Commons. The outrage has been overwhelming, and this likely marks the end of Gordon Brown's labour government.
Ironically enough, I couldn't be happier with it that way. To those who know me, this will come as a shock; I shouldn't be celebrating the defeat of a social democrat party that is a member of Socialist International, and yet I am.
Quite simply, the labour party that rules Britain today is not the same one that ruled Britain before the left's nightmare that everyone else calls 'the 1980's'. In order to understand why Gordon Brown's government has to be destroyed by this scandal, we need to wind the clock back to the 1970's.
In the late 1970's, a centre-left Labour Party ruled Britain, and had almost continously since 1964. James Callaghan's government had instituted a number of socialist reforms to the country, under the matchless leadership of his Minister of Industry - Tony Benn - who pushed for social and labour reform throughout Britain.
Then, came 1979.
In 1979, not only did Iran's fanatic mullahs overthrow the corrupt dictatorship of The Shah, but an equally fanatical government came to power in Britain, under the rule of Margaret Thatcher. By the end of her first term, Thatcher had effectively demolished the Social Democracy that Britain had been, replacing it with a kleptocratic regime, in which the ultra-rich trampled over workers rights, colonial possession's rights. Britain invaded The Falkland Islands, got into bed with Pinochet (and I don't even have to go into how much I loathe the man), and introduced the dangerous position of moral absolutism.
Had this only happened in Britain, the Labour Party could have weathered this storm, reorganized, and fought back according to its principles. The difficulty was that the Democratic Party and the Liberal Party of Canada were suffering the same problem. The Big Three of Reagan, Mulroney and Thatcher ruled supreme throughout the 1980's, demolishing the state apparatus that had been established by Carter, Callaghan, and Trudeau before them.
At the same time, the Labour Party was engaged in a brutal 'civil war', between the left factions and the centre-right factions. By the time the Labour Party finally got its act together and overthrew the conservative oligarchy in 1997, "New Labour" had been born. In Thatcher's own words, it was the greatest achievement of her entire political career.
Why? Because even though Blair's Labour Party defeated the conservative government that had ruled since 1979, the Labour Party that had endorsed democratic socialism was gone; replacing it was a centre-right neoliberal party led by a man with close personal relationships to the business elite and the every horrific Rupert Murdoch. Many of the reforms started by Thatcher's government - rampant defense spending, support of American projects in Iraq, unrestricted free trade agreements, Afghanistan, or wherever - were continued under Blair.
In 2003, we saw just how far the Labour Party had fallen, when it joined the war criminal in marching to war in Iraq, ignoring the calls of the UNSC, its own people, its own former ministers, its own MPs, and its own supporters, and dragging Britain into the bloodbath of Iraq.
Though things have gotten slightly better with Gordon Brown, the difficulties remain largely the same: Workers rights are gone, the power of the Trade Unions is gone, the power of the business elite has grown tremendously.
New Labour has to die at the end of this expenses scandal. It has to because it cannot continue to claim to represent democratic socialism if it does not reform. If it even wants to consider itself socialist - or even 'labour' - it needs to reform, and it will not do so unless New Labour is first eliminated. It's time for New Labour to die, it's time for socialist Labour to return. To do that, Gordon Brown's government has to fall, and it has to fall hard.

How stupid is Ed Stelmach?

So, last week, the Alberta government finally decided to catch up with the rest of the country in its human rights legislation by passing Bill 44, the Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Amendment Act, with regards to gay rights legislation, legislation that every other province had five years ago at the latest. Now, while gay rights is always a good thing to have, there are several major drawbacks in this bill.

Firstly, there's the opt-out clause, which allows parents to opt their children out of any sexual education that they so choose. If the teachings "conflict with the child's sexuality", then they are capable of being removed from the class. Now, I'm no demographer, but it seems to me that those states with less comprehensive sex education programs...have teen pregnancy rates much higher than those of the rest of the continent (being Canada & the US).

And what's the reason? Is it because of psychological trauma that could come about? Nope, it's because of religious beliefs. Once again, we see a government caving into zealotry simply because it's too weak-kneed to put its foot down and tell the most conservative province in the country that it has to progress beyond the 1980s.

That alone was not enough to get my blood boiling over Bill 44, but the next clause is. When questioned about the bill with regards to the teaching of evolution, Premier Emperor Ed Stelmach indicated that parents could pull their children from classes that taught evolution.
Did I read this right? Did we all move to Oklahoma? With the exception of the crazies to our south, every other developed country in the world has accepted evolution as a hard-and-solid fact...EVEN VATICAN CITY has dismissed the idea that evolution is incompatible with The Roman Catholic Church. We are about to join the United States as being one of the only governments to reject evolution in the western world; putting us in illustrious company alongside...Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Tennessee (yay?).

This isn't cause for cheering, despite the improvement in gay rights legislation that accompanied it. This is cause for disgust, for public outcry. If we are so inept that we can't even accept the basic scientific teachings of evolutionary biology, and are so paranoid and insecure that we can't take a moment away from brainwashing our kids with creationism to allow them to have some cold hard science, then what's next? What happens when scientific evidence is presented for other hard and solid facts, such as global warming? Oh...wait...that explains a lot. Maybe the government could learn a bit of math while it's at it:
Government + Religion = Disaster

To the Alberta government: Get your religion out of my classroom, and your brainwashing out of my head - and those of my colleagues.

The Sickening scent of idealism and the Nuremberg Principles

Last week, Barack Obama walked a step farther than any president before him. He declassified a number of documents pertaining to the illegal, immoral, unjust, and horrific regime of systematic torture that occurred at Guantanamo Bay during the previous administration. In doing so, he began the slow process of healing the deep scars left by the war criminals previous to his administration. Yet, it can often be said that to go halfway is almost worse than not going anywhere at all, and this is quite possibly one of those situations.

As he declassified the documents and issued orders to shut down the prison in Cuba, Mr. Obama also promised that legal action would not be taken against those who perpetrated the torture. To understand why this is wrong, we need to look back to 1946, to a series of principles laid down during the Nuremberg Trials. In particular, Principles I-IV and VIb

I: Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment.

II: The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.

III: The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

IV: The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

VIb: War Crimes: Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war...

It is these principles that make Obama's actions unacceptable. He will tell us that we don't need to waste time exploring the past. What we would do, were we to follow these principles and try the bastards, is not to waste time, but to prove to the world that such awful behavior will never be tolerated.

Principle I states that anyone who commits a war crime must be punished. Those who engaged in torture/interrogation techniques, extraordinary rendition, secret military trials, the violation of habeus corpus laws, and a host of other crimes violated international law in doing so. As stated in II, the fact that internal law doesn't force their punishment is irrelevant, as they are guilty of their crimes under international law.

Principles III and IV are perhaps the most important with regards to this issue. If an act is committed at the bottom level, it is capable of being punished at the top level, even if they were a head of state. The trials of Pinochet in Spain and Britain proved that much; leadership in government does not vindicate you. Principle IV, the one instrumental in the execution of countless Nazi leaders in 1946, says that the excuse "I was only following orders" is meaningless, and you are still liable under international law.

When Obama says that "those who were forced to do so regardless of their better judgment will not be prosecuted", he spits in the face of these principles, he makes a mockery of international law. If you refuse to punish the crimes that were committed, you set a dangerous precedent. The war crimes tribunals of Nuremberg and Tokyo were so successful because they ensured that an example was made of those who committed their crimes. Under Obama's vision, it is only a matter of time before another Cheney or another Wolfowitz or another Tenet comes along and realizes they can get away with torture, with murder, with war crimes, with indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, with conspiracy and Crimes Against Peace. I do not want to see that happen.

What I want to see happen is something entirely different. I want to turn on the TV one morning to behold the sight of George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, George Tenet and Donald Rumsfeld in irons, being led away to The Hague in Holland, to be tried for their crimes and the crimes their administration committed. I want to see those who tortured people who were often in the wrong place at the wrong time - like Maher Arar - and those complicit in their torture properly punished. I want to see justice, not idealism.

Short Reading List

Thought I'd post one of these, as other people have as well. I first compiled this list in late March, and have been steadily ticking off the books on it.

To Read:
Middle East Illusions, Noam Chomsky
Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein (when it arrives)
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
A brief history of Time, Stephen Hawking

Read:
The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens
Chasing a Mirage, Tarek Fatah
Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco (best fiction I have ever read)
I don't believe in atheists, Chris Hedges
Project Censored: 2009, Project Censored
Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky

I spend too much time reading.

On Popes, AIDS, and Abortions

The Holy Roman Catholic Church; an ancient institution with more followers than any other Christian denomination in the world. It's headquarters - Vatican City - is the center of one of the largest archives in the world, with art collections dating from before the birth of the Roman Empire. In the Middle Ages, the HRCC was a massive political force, capable of overruling the decrees of emperors and kings. Yet throughout its history, the Catholic Church has suffered from a crushing burden: it's outdated and (at times) horrific doctrine and dogma.

Take, for example, Pope Adolf II's Benedict XVI's comments while touring Africa in Cameroon last month. He essentially said that "condoms make the problem of HIV worse", and that "abstinence is the key". Wait a second, didn't the Pew Research Center already prove that "abstinence only" is about as effective as powdered water? In studies conducted several years ago, it was discovered that "the pledge" prolonged abstinence by a mere 18 months, while other forms of sexual contact increased during those 18 months. So, let's move to Africa now, where a population is on the verge of total destruction from the overwhelming power of HIV/AIDS. If you teach people how to engage in safe-sex, I can guarantee that the rates of infection will drop. You need only look at the gay community to know that it works. When they figured out that unsafe sex spread HIV like wildfire in southern Australia, they quickly adapted, and now their prevalence rates, though still cause for distress, are much lower than they used to be. When, 18 months after the Catholic doctrine has been stuffed down their throats, it fails, what then becomes of Africa? To make a long and sad story short: It continues to be torn apart by AIDS.

The arrogance and soullesness of the Catholic Church is overwhelming. They are actually willing to condemn an entire continent to destruction because of their ancient doctrine and dogma - a doctrine and dogma that will succeed in doing nothing but kill off a continent. Pope or not, Benedict XVI is not infallible, and he is definitely not correct on this issue.

You'd think that, for one month, the Catholic Church would have done enough damage, but it doesn't stop there. In mid-march, the HRCC excommunicated the mother of a nine-year-old Brazilian girl, along with the doctors who performed her abortion. For those you who don't know, excommunication is the Catholic-equivalent of the "go directly to jail" monopoly card. Why did they excommunicate them? Because a 9-year old had an abortion. Why did she have an abortion? Because her stepfather repeatedly molested and raped her, causing her to become pregnant. Had the pregnancy been carried through, she would have died, no debate or question. Yet again, stupid dogma means that, rather than being congratulated for saving a young life, the doctors are excommunicated and condemned.

Benedict XVI continues to prove that he completely insane, without even mentioning his service in the Hitlerjugend in the 30's and 40's. Since becoming Pope in 2006, he has fought an unnecessary war with Islam, insulted the world's Sunni populations, declared homosexuality to be "a disease and sin akin to burning the rainforests", annulled the excommunication of a Muslim & Jew-hating, Holocaust denying bishop, and then declared condoms and abortions of rape-victims "evil".

It's time to take power away from these psychopaths, for the good of humanity. It's time to realize that, just because an ancient Roman Emperor sanctioned it 1800 years ago doesn't mean it holds any relevance or weight today, that human life is more important than religious doctrine and dogma. Benedict, your time is up, your morals are spent. Something is rotten in the state of the Vatican, and it is time to extract and destroy it.

"Morality is doing what's right, no matter what you're told.
Religious Dogma is doing what you're told, no matter what's right." - Unknown

We needed that like a shotgun blast to the head

The Israel-Palestine conflict; a half-century year old territorial land war, where both sides are steeped in the blood of innocents - Palestinian and Israeli alike. Both sides have committed horrific atrocities; the Palestinian intifada in Hebron, the IDF reservist's massacre of 135 people in the Cave of the Patriarchs, the destruction of civilian equipment by suicide bombers, Israel's horrific foray into the Jenin Refugee Camp. Both sides have committed enough atrocities that an ICC case could be brought against either side with ample evidence to send everyone from Yasser Arafat to Ariel Sharon to prison for the remainder of their lives (if they were still alive).

With all that in mind, you'd think that people in those two countries would be eager for the bloodshed to stop. One side is, and not the one we think. Unless you've been reading Haaretz for the last year (which I'll just assume most of you have not been doing), you'll likely have been convinced that Hamas is a fanatical group of satanic Arab terrorists eager to annihilate Israel without any negotiation. The reality is quite different. Following the declaration of the June ceasefire, Hamas strove to maintain it, attempting to crack down on splinter-groups continuing to attack Israel. It was, in fact, Israel who broke the ceasefire on 4 November 2008, causing Hamas - who had previously been making attempts to renew the ceasefire - to retaliate. That, of course, blew into the shitstorm of the Gaza conflict, killing 1,400 Palestinians, wounding another 5,000, and - in the words of Norman Finkelstein - "using a Hydrogen Bomb to eliminate an anthill".

Even after that, you'd think that the people of the region would still want peace. What better way, then, to kick-start the peace process than to elect an ultranationalist government to run Israel, one that wants little to nothing to do with Palestine or the peace process.
But wait, this story gets better. As the foreign minister of the new government, Likud appointed Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the ultra-ultranationalist party in Israel. Before becoming the leader of that party, Lieberman was a member of Kach, a now-banned political party identified as a terrorist group by the Israeli and US governments in 1994. Lieberman has advocated a variety of extreme positions, such as "taking care of" Arab MPs who show signs of what he calls "disloyalty to Israel" (read "questioning the government's settlement programs"), or turning Israel into an entirely Jewish state by annexing settlement blocs and turning over Arab-majority territory to Gaza or the West Bank.

Having been sworn in as the new foreign minister, Lieberman wasted no time in continuing to fuck up any attempt to have peace in the region, by declaring the Annapolis conference "not recognized" by the Israeli government. The settlement agreement that was supported even by the followers of Ariel Sharon has now been rejected by a man who is not only a borderline fascist, but an open racist and warmongerer who would - in ages past - have been tried for conspiracy and Crimes Against Peace.
We didn't need this, Mr. Lieberman. We didn't need you to further destroy an already-perilously precarious process (While we're on the subject of alliterations, I have to also note that the persistent power-mad punchups that are the norm with Likud are pissing me off). The peace process needed this like a shotgun blast to the head. The Arab League is ready to negotiate. Hamas and Fatah are even ready to negotiate. The United States is even ready to bend on some issues - despite the overwhelming presence of The Lobby, and yet we have a bunch of fascists running the government in Israel who refuse to even consider a peace process. They continue to divide and splinter where we should be trying to mend and heal. As MLK said, we are either going to live as brothers, or die as fools. It seems that Avigdor Lieberman prefers us to do the latter.

How to alienate your allies

Now, almost all of you will have heard about the disgusting comments by Greg Gutfeld on a red-eye show on Fox Neighborhood Crap-hole News Network concerning Canada's military in Afghanistan. Several days earlier, Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie - Chief of Land Command Staff - commented that our military will need "a year of recovery" following our 2011 withdrawal from the region. Here, word for word, is Gutfeld's response:

"Meaning, the Canadian military wants to take a breather to do some yoga, paint landscapes, run on the beach in gorgeous white Capri pants, and get their manicures and pedicures...I didn't even know they were in the war, I thought that's where you go if you don't want to fight, Go chill in Canada...we should take this opportunity to invade them"

Now, in order:

1: Yes, we have nice landscapes - far better than the ones you gutted under the Bush administration with your colossal strip-mining and land-raping projects. Yes, Capri pants are gorgeous - they fit well, and manicures and pedicures never hurt anyone.

2: Yes, we are at war. In fact, the only reason we have a large-scale troop commitment in the bloodbath called Kandahar is because you, the Excited States, are too busy slaughtering people in the war-crime you call "The Iraq War". Yes, 60,000 draft-dodgers came here during the Vietnam War, which we chose to pass on (despite what Ann Coulter may say). Dozens of deserters from the current imperialist-project (which we also - wisely - chose to sit out) are now trying to seek asylum in Canada. In fact, they're seeking that asylum because their conscience would not allow them to continue to participate in what they were doing - and if they remain in America they will be arrested and jailed; not because they committed atrocious war-crimes and violated almost every article of the Geneva convention not mentioning nuclear and chemical war, but because they refused to go back and keep participating in the slaughter!

The sheer fact that America has any allies left astounds me. This is precisely what Obama and Kucinich and Ron Paul talked about throughout the Primaries, that pissing off your allies doesn't further your cause. France - who supplied 95% of the ammunition and 30% of the troops in 1776 - refused to join in the Iraq lie, and was attacked virulently. Turns out (drum roll please).....they were right about it! There were no nuclear weapons, the chemical weapons had long-since been dismantled and/or removed from the country, and ditto on the biological weapons. Canada sent in 2,800 troops into the most dangerous area of Afghanistan, and has lost 116 soldiers as a result while YOU - the US and A - plunged another country into civil war and sold off its infrastructure to Houston and San-Francisco! Have you never heard of the phrase "the most important criticism comes from your friends"? So while I may criticize the United States' foreign policy, their corporate-controlled media, their self-destructive lifestyle, their horrific apathy and ignorance (i'm not sure which is worse), I do it all in the hope that they will wake up soon and realize that the world is slipping out of their hands.

If they don't, they will wake up to a different reality; one where all of their allies have long since left them, where their friends have been alienated, where they are utterly and completely alone in the world - against a world that hates them. Looking at the arguments of Chavez, Morales and Castro - and then looking at the latest idiocy to spew out of Fox News, I can't say as I blame them.

The Ultimate Misnomer

Unless you've lived with your head buried in the sand for the last eight years, you've probably heard the phrase "The War on Terror". What I'm going to attempt to do in this post is deconstruct the myth surrounding the term, showing how 1) The War on Terror is unwinnable and 2) Why it's really not a War on Terror.

Starting with the first goal: Terror is an idea. How do you fight an idea? Hasn't the Pentagon ever read any history? The first thing you learn very quickly is that you can destroy the person representing an idea, the faction that expresses it, but you cannot destroy the idea, no matter how hard you try and for how long. Take, for example, the idea of greed. In our 40,000 year history, we have yet to defeat that idea/emotion, and it looks to be quite some time before we ever do. If this really is a war on terror, then it is incapable of being won. Even if they manage to kill Bin Laden, vaporize all of Al Quaeda's leaders, kill every last insurgent and liberation fighter in Iraq, destroy the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt, and permanently establish a powerful counterterrorist unit, terror would still exist. With the exception of the first two, I hope none of them ever occur. That said, it is quite clear that the war on terror, if believed to still be winnable, will be going on for a very, very long time.

Yet, maybe that's what the war's planners wanted when they started it. Wars have this way with big business. The CEOs of massive corporations tend to reap massive benefits from the suffering of the world every time a war comes around. Since the beginning of the WOT, the profit margins of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Grumman, General Electric, Halliburton, and various other neocon-run murderers have done nothing but go up, despite the economic recession we now find ourselves in. The truth is, wars are always orchestrated by the powerful and wealthy, without failure, and those wars are always about wealth and power, without fail. To suggest that there is such thing as a "war started with a just cause" is both a fallacy and an absurdity.

With that in mind, let us move onto the second myth. Many will claim that the War on Terror is working, that we are bringing "freedom and democracy" to the Middle East. Really? Freedom? Democracy? Peace? Tell that to Razek al-Kazem al-Khafaji, who lost his mother, two brothers, both his parents, his wife and his six children when a "precision strike" hit his house during the firebombing of Baghdad. When reporters found the gruesome scene, his only comment was "God take our revenge on America" as he struggled to find the bodies of his loved ones. Is that freedom? Is that democracy? For having lost everyone he ever cared for, he shows remarkable restraint. Had that been me, I would have been the first one fighting back against the invader, ensuring that the bastards paid for what they'd done. Or howabout the mother who watched as the severed torso, then the head, of her daughter were pulled from a smoldering crater where four smart bombs had hit a restaurant were Saddam Hussein might have been. It ended up destroying three homes, killing fourteen people. A Research Group in London announched that anywhere from 6,806 to 7,797 Iraqi civilians died during the "precision-bombing" of Baghdad. Is that freedom? Is that democracy? We could also look at the War in Afghanistan, where our so-called noble efforts have resulted in the deaths of 30,000 civilians. Is that freedom?

This is not a war on terror. It is a war of terror.

Thoughts on Israeli Apartheid Week

As we come to the end of what has been deemed "Israeli Apartheid Week" in Canadian and American Post-Secondary Institutions, I feel the urge to comment on the last week's banter back and forth about the ideas behind the organization.

I want to start by sending a very simple request to Bernie Farber and the other members of the Executive Board of the Canadian Jewish Congress: Grow up. For the last three months, each and every one, without fail, has demonstrated some of the most pathetic scare-tactics I have ever seen. Every single time a peep about Israel was mentioned by anyone, be it Mr. Ryan of the CUPE, Dr. Norman Finkelstein (whom I actually heard at a lecture in Calgary a month and a bit ago), Noam Chomsky, the Canadian Arab Federation, or the Palestinian-Canadian Students Society, Farber and Co. immediately began the press campaign of screaming out "antisemitism! antisemitism! Any criticism of Israel turns you into a racist bigot who wants the holocaust to restart!" and various other statements to that effect. Where are we living? Germany in the 30's?

Believe it or not, there are some people in the world, and when I say some I mean 95% of the nations in the UN General Assembly, who do not support Israel's actions towards Gaza and the West Bank. Believe it or not, this disagreement does not make us inherently antisemitic. Yes, there is some antisemitism within the movement against Israeli colonialism. But, anyone who notes this also has to realize that the same is true of the neozionist side of the debate. Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the ultranationalist "Yisrael Beiteinu", has called for the execution or deportation of Arab MKs within Israel's government. His supporters at massive rallies have frequently chanted "Death to the Arabs!" as they awaited his arrival. If that isn't racism, then kindly tell me what is.

So long as scare-tactics and fear-mongering are permitted to be used by the fascist-controlled press within Canada, the United States and Britain, there will never be a shred of honest public debate concerning the Israel-Palestine debacle. On one side, you have those in Egypt and North Africa calling for "Jews [to go] back in the ovens" - that's horrific, and I'll be the first to concede that. On the other end of things, you have those calling for the Palestinian populations to be pushed out of Greater Israel in their entirety, or (to again refer to Lieberman) that Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons should be "thrown into the Dead Sea". This sort of polarizing opinion on its own gets us virtually nowhere; and in the background, you have radically pro-Israel organizations screaming "antisemitism!" to the point where there can be no open and honest debate, because you're either a raving anti-Semite or the supporter of a colonial regime.

Throughout the entire debate, there's this whole misconception that antizionism is automatically antisemitism. They are not. True, they have converged on several occasions, but then again - so have capitalism and fascism and totalitarianism, and yet no one would suggest that all capitalist societies are totalitarian by their very nature. To disprove this incredibly absurd theory, I point to three of the harshest critics of Israel. The first of these - and also my favourite political author - is Noam Chomsky. In 1947, his views were considered Zionist. He supported a secular socialist binational Israeli-Palestinian state. Today, he is one of the harshest critics of neozionism to walk the earth. The second of these is Dr. Norman Finkelstein. Both of his parents survived the Holocaust (his entire extended family was annihilated 12 years before his birth), and yet he is perhaps even harsher than Chomsky in his criticism of Israel's government policies towards Palestine - and in particular the Settlement Blocks in the West Bank. The third of these is the Orthodox Jewish communities, the group that ultimately disproves the absurd claims that any and all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. The most Orthodox among Judaism criticize Israel's policies continuously. Are they antisemitic? NO THEY'RE NOT!

Until Farber and Co. realize that the world of Israel/Palestine is not black and white; until they realize that Israel has made a continual series of colossal screwups since it rejected the 1971 Peace Accords that have led it only closer to colonialism and apartheid; until they realize that peace doesn't come by polarizing the debate; and until they realize that open and honest discussion gets the region far closer to peace than the irrational screamfest we're subjected to every time the issue comes up, I cannot help but express my support for Israel's courageous critics, those who stand up to Alan Dershowitz and Lieberman and Farber, and expose them for what they are: Fools who only lead us ever further away from Peace in the Near East.

The other 9/11

A date. A single day in a calendar which contains 365 of them. Nearly 10,000 of them have been recorded in human history. Yet when the date "September 11" is mentioned, most of us immediately think of 2001, when the dreadful attacks on the World Trade Centers and Pentagon were carried out. Across the planet, the date of September 11 carries a uniform reaction.

However, there is another meaning, and another infamous historical event that finds its roots in the exact same day, twenty eight years earlier. September 11, 1973.

To most of the world, that particular date in history contains no symbolic meaning. Yet to a medium-sized constitutional republic in South America, it represents the darkest hour in their history, and a stark reality of the depths to which the unholy empire of the world will sink to ensure its dominance is guaranteed.

On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet - trained by the United States, given the green light by Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, initiated a coup against the Socialist government of Chile - led by Salvador Allende. Allende's government had had a difficult time delivering on its promises of reconstruction, mostly due to an American economic blockade of the nation after Allende's nationalization of the mining industry. According to declassified CIA documents, Richard Nixon wanted to "make Chile's economy scream". The plan worked to an extent, causing significant dissidence within the Chilean army, and in particular the economics department of Santiago - mostly filled with Milton Friedman's Chicago Boys. In 1973, Pinochet seized power in a violent coup d'etat, bombing the presidential palace. Rather than face capture, Allende committed suicide.

What followed is perhaps one of the darkest chapters of the cold war - exceeded only by El Salvador, Indonedia and Vietnam in the sheer scale of brutality and mercilessness. Following his seizure of power, Pinochet rounded up Allende supporters, and took them to the national stadium. Over the next two weeks, the bloody spectacle that unfolded within that building led to the torturing of thousands of Allende supporters. The Valech Report, released in 2005, described just some of these processes:
1. Repeated beatings
2. Deliberate corporal lesions
3. Bodily hangings [suspensions]
4. Forced positions
5. Application of electricity
6. Threats
7. Mock execution by firing squad
8. Humiliation
9. Stripping down to nakedness
10. Sexual aggression and violence
11. Witnessing and listening to torture committed on others
12. Russian roulette
13. Witnessing the execution of other detainees
14. Confinement in subhuman conditions
15. Deliberate privation of means of existence
16. Sleep deprivation or interruption
17. Asphyxia
18. Exposure to extreme temperatures

This was not an isolated incident. It is estimated that anywhere from 3,000-5,000 were killed, with anywhere from 28,000-200,000 incarcerated and tortured; all this in a country that even today only possesses a population half that of Canada. All this was done with the full knowledge (and open support of) the US Government. In communiques sent to CIA Field Stations in Chile as early as 1970, Nixon & Kissinger ordered that "Allende be overthrown in a coup as early as possible".

The question that comes back is why? Why did a global superpower actively support such brutality? The answer is twofold, and (despite the accusations of some) had little to do with communism and the KGB. The first of these reasons deals with open defiance. Similar to what Chavez and Morales now do in Venezuela and Bolivia, Allende openly defied American power and corporate wealth, attempting to nationalize the mining and banking industries for the use of his people. If he turned to the KGB, it was only because he had no other option. The United States, in 1970, began an economic blockade designed to "make Chile's economy scream". Deprived of the funds of the standard loan-agencies (the IMF, the World Bank), Chile turned to Russia for help. The second of these reasons deals with the belief that what is good for the most powerful corporate empire is ultimately good for the rest of us. In one of his briefings to Nixon on the issue, Kissinger famously said "The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves". That's right; the issue of who should control Chilean resources was far to important and vital for Chilean people to decide. Kissinger's arrogance is astounding, even to this day, to the point where even Christopher Hitchen's scathing The Trial of Henry Kissinger does not go far enough in its accusations against the man.

The precedent Chile set was clear, and has resonated in American policy throughout Latin America: You must serve our interests first, your own second. If serving our interests is democratic, that's nice. If it isn't, then bring in the fascist coups that continue to serve our interests. This reputation has cost the United States dearly, leading to it being almost universally loathed throughout the developing and underdeveloped worlds. Twenty eight years to the day after the Chilean coup, this would come back to haunt them.

Disinformation and Idiocy: The Final Section

At long last, we come to the end of our little dissection of this steaming heap of an "article"

Accusation 10. Leftists want to tell everybody what to do.
They think governments should tell people what to think and what to say and what to do. Why? It's obvious. Because if government didn't do that, we might all suddenly realise what crap they're spouting!

Coming from a supporter of an administration that told us "you're with us, or you're with Bin Laden", that's a pretty bold statement. Coming from someone who, seven posts back, told everyone in the world to be Christian and uphold "traditional family values", that's EXTREMELY bold.

Again, the confusion between communism and socialism is at the crux of his stupidity. In Communism, yes; the government tells you what to do, and people don't control a government, and that sucks. As a socialist, I will openly and freely agree with that. The fundamental distinction between the two comes over who controls the government. In communism, the government controls the government. I don't care if it claims to be socialist or if it claims to be communist or even libertarian or conservative. If the people have no control over the government, it's not a democracy. The United States in 2000 and 2004 is an excellent example of this. Voting irregularities, outright fraud, and some of the dirtiest politicking seen since the time of Richard III allowed Emperor George II to steal an election not once, but TWICE. Is that any worse than someone like Pol Pot or Lenin? When it comes down to it, Bush and Pol Pot have killed roughly the same number of people. Pol Pot killed 1,400,000 Cambodians. Bush has killed 1,100,000 Iraqis, 8,000 Americans (between Afghanistan, Iraq and Hurricane Katrina) and lead to the deaths of 400,000 for his refusal to get off his ass and do something about Darfur. They're roughly the same, but Bush is an American, and therefore not as bad (at least in some people's eyes)

as i've mentioned earlier, Marxism revolves around the idea that people should control a government. Is that bad? In the eyes of conservatives, yes. Stalin and Milton Friedman had one thing in common: neither of them liked democracy. the late Salvador Allende and Tony Benn have one thing in common: They're both democratic socialists. The fundamental difference between the evils of antidemocracy and the good of democracy is that in a democracy there is always a method of removing the government. The government does what the people want. If it doesn't, it's removed.

The left doesn't want to tell everyone what to do. The left wants to tell the government what to do, and then have the government do it. Remarkable! The left doesn't want the government to tell people exactly what to think (that's the job of neocons like Cheney...murderous bastard), all we want is for people to be a bit smarter about the world around them, stop writing and behaving as if they have a single-digit IQ (yes, I'm talking to you, op-ed contributors for the National Post), and care about someone other than themselves - even if their salary and CEO tell them not to.

And now, "The last ten posts in 10 sentences"
1: American capitalism is overly greedy, and socialist Norway makes more than the average American.
2: Whoever first thought up the phrase "Traditional Family Values" was a moron, and now, not all leftists come from broken homes
3: Christianity and Socialism get along remarkably well, despite what the prosperity gospel may tell you.
4: The right's lies tend to be very destructive, to the point where entire countries (Iraq) descend into anarchy and chaos as a result
5: The left wants people to care about other people.
6: Socialim and Communism are not the same, and the right is really scared of that, because Socialism is coming back.
7: Similar to the self-devouring snake, the poor and outcast are only the first on capitalism's hit list; help them, or you're next.
8: Education is fundamental, and ignorance is a much deadlier sin than lust, idolatry and envy put together.
9: Everyone is equal; thinking to the contrary has led us to bad places.
10: People should be able to control their government.

Thank you