To begin, just a
couple of items I found interesting. One is on the conference at
Davos, which, I think, was a big step toward corporate fascism.
Then there's a solid
piece on CBC about Trump and Palin – who are not the harmless
comics that some think they are. And their rise is a sign of the
moral and intellectual collapse of the U.S. What makes it worse is
that most of their opponents, including Hillary Clinton, are no
better. Indeed, Hillary is Obama. And Obama is Bush.
When Britain and
others took control over China some two centuries ago, they did not
just loot and peddle opium, and impoverish and kill. They destroyed
the whole social structure of China. They destroyed the system of
government. They destroyed religion. They destroyed education. They
completely destroyed all those things we call culture. The Chinese
became strangers in their own land, strangers even to their
neighbours. In addition to that, there was looting, starvation,
forced labour, humiliation. A Chinese nation ceased to exist. A
Chinese people ceased to exist. They became people simply of fear,
hunger, starving animals in a pen.
They lost even
reminders of their own history. Britain's much-praised Lord Elgin
looted the summer palace of the emperors just as he had looted the
marbles from the ancient temple in Athens. To see that and other
imperial loot from India, Egypt, Greece, you can visit the British
Museum in London. It's so educational.
The destruction of a
culture left China in a turmoil and confusion and fear that still is
prominent. For over a century, Chinese fought the West and fought
each other over the questions – Who are we? What are we? What
should we be? How do we get there?
That was what led to
the rise of Chiang Kai Sheck, thug, drug dealer, murderer – and the
darling of Britain and the U.S. And that is what led to the rise of
Mao. And then, of course, came the unspeakable brutality of the
Japanese invasion as Japan realized that the path to the future was
to imitate Western capitalism in its murder and plundering.
Mao won that round,
but not the war. So his successors have imitated the western
imitation that Japan had carried out. But China is still a long way
from stable. It remains uncertain about the future, and still has
national nightmares about the century and more of social destruction
and humiliation.
As for building on
the past, that's impossible. The religion of the past barely exists.
As for their history, the Chinese have to visit the British Museum
to see it.
Foreign interference
in a nation creates terrible damage to a culture, destroys its
evolution and, at best, causes lifetimes of fear and confusion and
suffering. We should know that. We did it to our native peoples. We
did it centuries ago. But the damage is still there. People still
suffer, and suffer profoundly, from it.
Afghanistan is still
at a stage in which it is a nation, sort of, but it's more
importantly based on tribal,
religious and
family relationships. It has, at times, made considerable progress
toward becoming a modern state. But Afghanistan's misfortunes
happened because it was an important route for trade and, more
recently, because it is a desirable site for a major oil pipeline. As
a consequence, Afghanistan has been a prime target for a good, two
centuries.
First, it was the
British who saw it as being strategic to the dominance it was
building in India and China. Sometimes it was the Russians.
About the time of
World War Two and after, Afghanistan was making serious progress in
modernizing its society. Then came the Russian invasion. It was a
long and brutal war of an advanced and large war society against a
much simpler and smaller society that was ill-equipped for war. But
the Afghans won.
Not surprisingly,
that war strengthened a return to tribal, family and religious
traditions - including forms of Islam. And some of the latter, not
surprisingly under these conditions, were extreme. (Though I'm not
sure they're so extreme as those of the cardinal who blessed bombs to
be dropped on Cuba, or the chaplains who tell our soldiers they're
doing God's work. I'll bet there was a prayer when the Enola Gay took
off for Hiroshima.)
Then came the
American invasion of Afghanistan, supposedly to capture Osama bin
Laden, though actually an invasion that was planned years before by
people like Jeb Bush.
In 15 years, the
mightiest and most expensive military machine in the world has been
unable to beat this small nation – even though Afghanistan itself
is torn by civil war. And again, the interference has only reinforced
religious, tribal and family ties. And it has reinforced the most
extreme religious elements in Afghanisan.
Ever wonder what
makes extreme Islamic thinking? What makes it is the extreme western
thinking that the rich of the western world have a right to own
everything, And have a right to kill Muslims who don't agree with
them. That is what created the Taliban.
Some day, we should
take a look at the Christian extremism that has led to Muslim
extremism. Our models of Christian (and Judaic) faith are oil
billionaires.
Russia and China,
now that they are capitalist, work on the same principles (or lack of
them) that we do. And those principles have not worked. Every war in
the middle east has been a failure in establishing what it was
supposed to do. Iraq, even if it holds off ISIS, is a mess that's
never going to get better. Same with Libya. Syria, no matter who
wins, has largely ceased to exist. Turkey has become a threat to
world peace. Iran has decided it would be much better to be friends
with China than with the U.S. Yemen? Nobody knows how many are dead
of starvation and disease. It may well be past the point of no
return. ISIS is and always has been a front, a proxy for the U.S. and
Turkey. If it wins in Syria and Libya and Iraq, Then Turkey and the
U.S. will fight it directly ( and seriously this time) – and the
result will be that ISIS and similar groups will continue to grow all
over the world. ISIS is not a product of Islam. It is a product of
the greed of western big business.
And our turn is
coming as western big business puts the final touches on its mastery.
We'll know this year when and if Trudeau agrees to the Pacific and
European trade deals which take power from our elected governments,
and hand it over to major capitalists. These are the deals that make
it possible for capitalists to sue governments for billions if
governments pass laws that protect citizens, but cut into profits
(like banning pesticide sprays).
Worse, the cases
will not be heard in government courts, but in courts owned by big
business. With this, democracy is over. And we can expect our
capitalists (who are really not capitalists at all) to treat us with
the same brutality they have used in the rest of the world.This would
be the final step of fascism – a huge improvement because it makes
the wealthy not just sharers of power (as demonstrated at Davos) but
the only power.
But if the wealth
drive all the rest of us into poverty, won't that be bad for profits?
Yes. But the very wealthy have a long history of not thinking much
about anybody except themselves. At the height of the British Empire
when the wealth of the empire flooded Britain, it stopped in the
pockets the rich. Well into the 20th century, British
cities were vile and filthy, pay was terrible, and the risks of death
high. Social services barely existed. Children worked from the age of
five or six. Orphanages were brutal. This didn't begin to change
until the late 1940s and fifties – but Britain has been going
backward again ever since.
The same thing
happened in the industrial U.S. and Canada. And the U.S. and Canada
have been rolling back progress so that the rich can get richer.
That's what all the fuss about austerity in New Brunswick is about.
The rich know how to
make money. But, so far as I've seen, that's all they know. And it's
all they care.
It's hard to judge
where Trudeau stands on any of this because so far he hasn't done
anything, not even what he promised. But my guess is he'll do what
he's told to do.
But the lesson of it all is that throughout society, the wealthy have seen it to be to their advantage to destroy societies, to destroy cultures, to prevent any evolution that could threaten their power and wealth. It happened in Afghanistan, in China, all over the middle east. And it could well happen here. Well, it is happening here.
_________________________________________________________________
Oh, I can hear
readers saying, “But we have to fight terrorism.”
I agree. But the way
to fight terrorism is to stop doing it. Wars ARE terrorism. They
always have been. And no modern power has been more terrorist than
the U.S. - though Britain and France and Spain and Portugal were all
pretty strong on terrorism in their imperial days.
What we call
terrorism today, random attacks on innocent people, often in their
own countries, are a modern variant on traditional terrorism by mass
murder of civilians – as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Guatemala. (I mean,
really, how do you think Iraqis and Syrians feel when they're killed
by Canadian bombs? How do you think their families and neighbours
feel? I am almost certain they don't all sing, “O Canada” and
send us thank you notes.)
The turning point to
a new kind of terrorism was, I suppose 9/11. I remember the day well.
I was on air with Gord Sinclair (son of the Gord Sinclair of TV fame
in 50s and 60s). Gord and I stared blankly at each other as the news
came in. We both sensed that this was not an accident, that the world
had suddenly changed. We knew it was terrible; and we sensed, without
speaking, it was more terrible than we could imagine.
War has always been
terror. But this was a new kind of terror in a new kind of war. It is
a tactic of the weaker side to overcome the power of the stronger
side. It makes use a small number of fighters to kill people,
anybody, on the other side and far away from any battlefield.
It wasn't entirely
new, really; the U.S. had used it to deliberately kill large numbers
of innocent people by bombing in Cambodia. But it wasn't called
terror in our news. It was called air power.
Unlike conventional
warfare, terror is used to drive a country into hysteria. It doesn't
take many people to carry out an attack. And it's done in a place in
which people feel safe – like a Paris theatre. The number killed is
usually relatively small (though with 9/11 certainly an exception.)
So, with only a few fighters and the killing of, perhaps, two to
fifty people, a tiny and weak group can drive a large and powerful
country of many millions into panic.
It also encourages
more of the hatreds that drive many, many others to join the
terrorists.
In short, it's an
extremely effective way for the weak side to fight the powerful. And
its greatest victory could well be a Republican ticket of Trump and
Palin for 2016.
No comments:
Post a Comment