Sept, 5:The teaching of lies.

The following site was sent to me by a reader. I think it's quite true. It tells us what the U.S. government really is – and it could well have added Britain and Canada as eager puppies running along behind their master.

http://commondreams.org/news/2015/09/04/major-culprit-creating-crisis-us-rebuked-failing-refugees

The U.S., Britain and Canada are moved to compassion by the sight of a child lying dead on a beach.

How come we didn't much notice the story of a Somalian teenager who was tortured and beaten to death by Canadian elite troops? How come nobody even asked why they did it?

I can tell you why.

Soldiers of all armies are trained to hate, to want to kill, to be indifferent to human suffering. They have to be, and the training is quite deliberate because nice guys aren't much use in a battle. It's not just courage that counts. It's also a desire to beat and torture and kill. That's why soldiers of an 'elite' Canadian regiment kidnapped a teenager, and beat him to death for the fun of it.

When we go to war, we brutalize those we send. There's no other way to go to war. The pace of this brutalization was stepped up after World War Two when it was realized that it took some 60,000 shots for each enemy killed. Psychologists said that much of that was deliberate misses by soldiers who didn't want to kill. That's when armies really pumped up their teaching of hatred and even joy in killing. Now the rate of bullet wastage has been dramatically reduced, Praise the Lord.

That's why snipers, especially, are trained to kill with indifference to age or gender. And that's what made a national hero out of a killer whose story was told in American Sniper.

But few people will see it that way. We see wars through the eyes of our news media, and of the history we learned at school. We're good. The other side is bad. Always.

Tell me what was good about the slaughter of native peoples and the destruction of their societies and the theft of their land by our ancestors? The recent Truth and Reconciliation Report for Canada is already dying without so much as a whimper. It's not an election issue. And it won't be – because every politician knows that most Canadians don't give a damn, and don't want to hear about it.

In U.S. history, General Custer is a hero. In fact, at Little Big Horn, he was attacking native people on native territory with the intention of killing them all. Custer loved killing. Then there's the story of the American admiral who forced Japan to open up to American business over a century ago. Yep. He just appeared. And that was it.

Well, actually, he shelled Japan, killing many innocent people.

We feel grief at the sight of a drowned refugee child? Where is the grief for the million and probably more children killed, mostly by the U.S. and Britain (God save the Queen) , in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and Guatemala and many other countries around the world? And George Bush is still welcome as a regular attender of his Christian church. (So is his daddy who was a major figure in the Guatemala massacre of civilians, including babies. And Hitler, bless his heart, was a believing member of the Roman Catholic faith.)

Oh, but when an American platoon murdered a whole village at My Lai in Vietnam, (yes including babies) – well, the good Christians of the U.S. wouldn't tolerate that. They put the lieutenant on trial. And he had to stay in jail for a whole night until he was pardoned.

Isn't it awful the way ISIL cuts heads off?

Will we offer any significant help for those tens of millions of refugees from the middle east? There's no sign of it. Harper won't do it - and he won't do it because he knows 1.Canadians don't care. 2. Canadians are profoundly racist. ( That's why Canada wouldn't let Jews in, even after 1939.) For the same reason, the U.S. won't do it. Heck, the U.S won't even help its own people. It's too busy shovelling all its money into war spending and profound corruption.)

Our history teaches us that we are good. And that goodness strongly implies that we are a superior people. The British Empire murdered and brutalized millions to make a small number very, very rich. But we were taught it was glory - “...make her victorious, happy and glorious...” And, of course, it was linked to the will of God as in God save our gracious – whoever.

The U.S. is a carbon copy of the Britain it rebelled against, but is even more buddies with God – whether they call it Manifest Destiny or American Exceptionalism.

We think we're nice people because that's what our history books and news media tell us. We aren't. As much as any other nation, we killed that three year-old who washed up on a Turkish shore.

And, as always, we're going to put all the blame on somebody else.

Oh, our provincial premier has sent $50,000 to the U.N. for aid. We can't send more because we really need $100,000,000 for our hockey rink.

You might guess from the length of this opening that there isn't much in the Irving press today. And you would be right.

Once again, we get a full dose of nothing, this time for two pages, about the AC/DC concert. A full page is photos of people who have come to attend it. There are seven, big photos which are invaluable if you care what people who go to an AC/DC concert look like.

The headline story “'leave us alone,' seniors groups tell premier” is misleading because that's not the central point of the story. (After all, we knew they were going to say that. Maybe that's because the editor wanted to smother the real story.) And the real story is the premier told them to get lost.

The editorial is about – guess what – the AC/DC concert.

There is an excellent letter to the editor - 'Let's see moratorium on 'Heritage demolition'. Moncton has very little sense of its own history and, frankly, Resurgo doesn't do a whole lot to help. If only for the sake of attracting tourists, the city should take a much more organized approach to preserving its history and making it meaningful. Hint to our media – in Montreal I did a broadcast on what our streets were named after ( and when and why they were named and what that told us about history), and it led to such a demand that I had to make it a series that lasted for a year. A city with two universities should be able to find someone who can do that.

Norbert has an excellent column on the failure (or refusal) of many parents to get vaccinations for their children. On my first day in grade one, I would not have been allowed into the school without showing my vaccination. For all of us, a vaccination mark was a thing of awe and pride. I cannot understand a society that would allow a quarter of its public school students not to be vaccinated – and 60% of daycare children???

This would have been considered completely unacceptable even in the middle ages when I went to school. Such children are a danger to our children and to all of us. School boards and parent groups should be raising hell about this.

Brent Mazerolle has a well-told story about the restoration of the Petitcodiac river. It has common sense, sensitivity – and really good writing.

One guest commentary is by our provincial minister of Post-secondary Education, Training and Labour. It's a standard political spiel that says nothing except that your government is doing a wunnerful, wunnerful job. And I strongly suspect it was not written by the honourable member.

The other guest column is by Beverly Barrett. It's about the city's failure to protect historic houses. It's quite good (though if you read it carefully, you will find an unintentional obscenity in there). But it's still a good column and, in any case, I get the feeling I wouldn't want to pick an argument with Beverly Barrett.

Canada&World opens with a headline that our provincial premier is willing to take in refugees from the Middle East. I heartily support that.

I grew up a short walk from my city's Syrian district. I went to school where Syrian children became some of my best friends. Our end of town and poor and violent. But that was us Canadian-borns. The Syrian kids were pretty good. Their parents worked hard, most did well over the years. (The father of one boy became the founder of Dollar stores.) And the children did well, too, many of them entering professions – and this in an end of town where most of us would become cheap labour.

By my late teens, most of my friends were Jews. Most Jews at that time lived in a neighbouring district that was as poor as mine. Like the Syrians, they worked hard, and made sacrifices for their children. Later, as a university teacher, I taught students from all over the world – China, Palestine, South Korea, The Netherlands, Africa…. I even had a student I never really saw. She was a Muslim with a veil that left only a narrow slit for her eyes – and the eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. And, of all things, I taught her military history. She attended every class, and she did good work.

The only difference I ever saw between the Canadian-born and the immigrants was that the immigrants worked harder and were more willing to make sacrifices for their children. New Brunswick should welcome all the immigrants it can get.

There's a whole page on how Clinton didn't understand the email system when she became secretary of state. So who cares?

There are several stories about the refugee crisis, most of them not very helpful. The most active European countries in accepting refugees are Austria and Germany. (Hey! I remember Austrians and Germans. They're the evil people I was taught to hate when I was a kid.)

For the Canadian point of view, we have Mulcair and Trudeau in favour of helping refugees. This, on B5, is a story worth reading. Harper thinks the answer is to kill more people. Of that choice, he says, “Forget about how wrong that is from a humanitarian compassionate sense.” Well, that's honest.

He also says that ISIL is the root cause of the war. Oh? Weren't we killing people in that region long before ISIL existed? And weren't we killing Africans by the tens of millions for centuries before that? And aren't we still killing them?”

It looks to me that the cause of today's scale of killin

g, looting, impoverishing and greed is ---us.

We need refugees who aren't like us. They would give us a bit of class.