But the question that should be asked is why Libya?  Government forces are cracking down on democracy protesters in a number of countries.  Last weekend another dozen or so people were killed by security forces in Yemen and our friend and ally Saudi Arabia has brutally intervened in Bahrain to prop up the monarchy in that country.  Is their suffering any less deserving of our attention and our intervention?

Once more the myth of Western humanitarianism is exposed.  But the media are silent.  Isolated reports dot the media landscape, because it is virtually impossible to keep events totally secret, but no more.  No theme songs and Hollywood graphics to mesmerize the public into a righteous indignation.  No daily interviews with correspondents on the ground.  The general public accepts what the media give it because they want to.  They want the myth to remain.  To step into the black river of truth flowing silently under the mask of civility would shame them.   Not because it is happening but because they don’t want to do anything to stop it.  How could they maintain the facade of moral civility if forced to face the foundation on which our wealth and power stand.

The Great Powers only engage troops in combat when their self-serving national interests are at stake.  In Yemen and Bahrain the existing governments have been friendly and cooperative with American aims in the Arab world.  In Franklin Roosevelt’s words they are “sons of bitches but they are our (America’s) sons of bitches.”  No depravity is too shocking, no slaughter too brazen but they are forgiven.  Those who are not collaborators are struck down to keep the myth alive.

Ribbons and other stickers on cars and in windows enjoin us to support our troops but it is the war they really want us to support.  Before you kill a human being yourself or by proxy step into that black river of truth.

Likewise, Canadian media has never been telling us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  How could they?  Professional journalism, first created in the 1920s in Great Britain in order to undermine the unions and break the general strikes plaguing the country, has always only accepted the truth that serves it.  Schools of journalism from that time to this have taught objectivity based on use of only authoritative sources.  So journalists are to seek the authorities (i.e. the government and its agents) and diligently report whatever truth they fabricate.  This is what is called objectivity.  Anyone who is not sanctioned by these authorities is not to be listened to or given credibility.  Authoritative sources include the government itself, academics and think tanks sanctioned by the government and of course the business community.  Labour unions were considered unreliable and biased as were the academics that worked for them.  Anyone who challenged the government’s definition of the truth was considered a crank, and not to be taken seriously.

It is not that all the news is a lie but neither is it the truth.  Perhaps the greatest myth being propounded here is that there is a Truth.  Truth is contextual, temporal and personal.  Our truth is simply reality filtered through our biases.  Empathy is a better professional ethic for journalism than objectivity.  A celebration of all voices is preferable to one person’s supposed truth.  Insight, something truly valuable, can be found anywhere.  Just as the only person who could ever fully explain Nietzsche to me was a homeless alcoholic in Toronto.  While I reject the neo-con reject of all expertise as suspect, expertise and experts might be found in more places than are dreamt of in the philosophy of professional journalism.

With these current CRTC deliberations a number of petitions are circulating along with calls on all of us concerned with the truth to write the agency and anybody else who will listen.  I have resisted.  Not because I don’t want the truth to be reported but because I would be sanctioning an ongoing fraud.  To demand that the current restrictions remain is to give credence to a lie.  How can I sign a petition or write a letter in support of truth to maintain the chimera of the truth?

Today Remembrance Day has been hijacked by those who would support new unnecessary and counterproductive wars from Iraq to Afghanistan to the amorphous War on Terror.  The poppy is being made the symbol of those who romanticize war as a public good.  I will not join their number.  I will not be a hypocrit.  War is not romantic.  It is not glorious.  It is ugly and wasteful and a cancer upon human society that should be blotted out.  No one should support a war unless they admit the truth behind it.  I suspect that would be very difficult for most people.  How many Canadians would justify the murder of Afghan civilians or even partisan insurgents for the sake of controlling a pipeline route for our southern neighbour?  How many would say those who died to grease the wheels of cross-border trade were heroes?  Parents of the dead and injured must believe the fairy tales to cope with their loss.  But wouldn’t it be better to confront the truth before and have their children and siblings and parents with them still? 

This year I simply mourn.  Not just those whose lives were stolen in wars they were never allowed to fully understand, but those who they killed, who we all have killed.  I mourn the deaths of Afghan civilians and fighters.  I mourn the deaths of the children of Iraq.  I mourn the deaths of Palestinians as they are slowly exterminated in a genocide in which we are compliant.  I mourn the deaths of East Timorese whose killers were in part financed by Canadian taxpayers.  I mourn all those who have died unnecessarily for the greed of others.  And I mourn the poppy.  Murdered at the hand of those who have distorted its simple message and who now make its withered corpse dance to their beat.  If there ever was a death that I would not mourn it would be the deaths of these necromancers of war.  

I know that many out there will think my little choo-choo has finally gone around the bend.  Have I slipped into madness?  To think that the government staged burning police cars and smashing windows is just insane, right?  And that is exactly why governments get away with it.  It is insane.  But let’s look at the most important evidence:  the motive.

The first measure of the veracity of a conspiracy theory is motive.  This is where most conspiracy theories fall apart.  If their is no compelling reason to conspire to do something why go to all the trouble and risk?  Take the Kennedy assassination for instance.  This conspiracy has been around for 47 years now but the problem with every scenario is the why.  Kennedy was in trouble politically.  Why waste a bullet and drawing all that attention on a president that was about to become another one term wonder.  But in the case of the G20 the motives are strong, compelling and multiple.

First there was the enormous cost of the security operation.  While it certainly is the least important of the motives it is still compelling.  An election is almost certain within the next 5 to 12 months.  Having spent over a billion dollars on security how could the Conservative party face the electorate if nothing very notable had happened?  This is a variation on the old saying ‘What if they threw a war and nobody showed up?’ In this case what if they spend all this money and the protesters don’t cause enough damage.  With Canadians suffering economically the Conservatives could not afford to be seen to be spending money frivolously.  Especially not after FakeLakeGate.  The only way to be sure that the protest would get out of hand and frighten Canadians was for police agents to physically start the process.  After all you can’t trust a bunch of tree-hugging, hippie, leftist peaceniks to start a decent riot now can you.

This brings us to the second motive:  frightening Canadians.  In the pages of this blog and billions of others around the globe people like me have been warning of the impending security, financial and environmental reckoning.  Even the Pentagon report to the Bush administration stated clearly that this planet will not be able to sustain a population of more than 3 billion people by 2100.  That is less than half of today’s global population and less than a third of the 9.1 billion projected for 2050.  The Pentagon estimate I should add is the most generous of all I have encountered.  Most others estimate a maximum sustainable population of around one billion and a few even less.  The lowest estimated sustainable population for 2100 that I have come across was approximately 100 million.  Today there are a few hundred thousand climate refugees.  Within a few short years there will be millions and then billions.  James Lovelock suggests we built barricades and heighten security if we happen to be among the fortunate to live in a part of the globe that will still support human life.  To do this we must end this dalliance with democracy.  But we may not have to worry about that.  The financial and security reckonings may preempt the ecological.  Spillover from Iraq or Afghanistan or more likely both has the potential to draw in major powers resulting in large fast population reduction with the added turmoil, dislocation, lingering deaths of such a war destabilizing much of what survives.  And the financial meltdown has only begun.  It will play a role in the timing and ferocity of planetary ecological degradation and destabilization of global security.  The unwavering faith of our leaders in the American economic model shows their intellectual inability to conceptualize anything else thanks to a battered and bankrupt education system rather than the strength of the system.  Laissez-faire capitalism is a chimera.  It has failed every time it has been attempted.  But this time it has been pushed farther and the very institutions that society had created over the centuries to protect itself from the worst consequences have been systematically dismantled or undermined by the priesthood of the New Right.

Government officials may deny the inevitability of these events.  They may assist their lackeys in the main stream media to foster confusion.  But at the highest levels they know as well as I do that these events will take place.  Their plan or assumption is that they will be among the survivors and the rest of us be damned.  To do that they must heed Lovelock and end democracy.  To seize power arbitrarily would trigger a backlash.  Too messy and uncertain.  Much more effective to convince Canadians to surrender their rights and freedoms in the name of security.  A quick survey of the letters to the editor in support of the police actions in Toronto should prove beyond a doubt that the tactic is working.  Canadians seem more than willing to surrender everything they say they fought for in the world wars and are supposedly fighting for in Afghanistan.  What irony to send troops half way around the world to fight for a value we do not prize at home.  The G20 events in Toronto had a powerful effect on the unsophisticated and uninformed.  We will see the anti-terrorism laws renewed expanded when they next come up for review and we will see a general and substantial increase in police powers over the next five years.  The G20 protests will be as powerful a symbol in the hands of Canadian elites as 9/11 was to American elites as they stripped the liberty from Land of Liberty.  They needed it and they got it because they did it.  As simple as that.  Any who question rising authoritarianism will be shown pictures of burning police cars as Americans who question are shown the images of 9/11 and in an earlier generation on another continent those who questioned were reminded of the Reichstag fire until the die was cast and they could be silenced more effectively.

The final motive is chaos.  In chaos it is a human tendency to cling to the known rather than fly to things we know not of as Shakespeare might say.  New economic ideas, new ecological initiatives and new diplomatic peace initiatives all take a leap of faith.  It always seems risky to move in a new direction.  And it is risky but better risk swimming for shore than cling to a sinking lifeboat.  Is it a surprise to anyone that those who benefit most from the status quo should want to disparage alternatives.  By painting the protesters as the lunatic fringe, the current elites can assure the support of the timid which is most Canadians who face the challenges of day to day living.  As Otto von Bismarck said  so eloquently ‘A man who relies upon the state for his pension is not likely to rebel against that state.’ By the time most Canadians realize that their comfort is no longer exists it will be too late.  In this way the political and economic elites of this country smear their opponents and solidify their support.  It is a bold stroke.

So there you have it.  The motives for the government to commit insanity.  I suspect that many remain unconvinced.  They will say that this is too Machiavellian.  After all these are good people, good Canadians.  We just don’t do these kind of things or have these kinds of motivations.  To those I say this.  To deny that the above is plausible is to deny:

• that there were no Residential Schools;
• that there have been concentration camps in Canada (1914-18, 1930-36, 1940-46);
• that Canadian POW camps at the end of World War Two allowed Nazi officers to hold courts martial and execute German prisoners under our protection with guns and bullets supplied by the camp administration;
• that over a million Canadians were spied on and blacklisted by the RCMP during the Cold War.  The information gathered shared with the United States.  Many had their lives and / or careers destroyed.   Several committed suicide or died prematurely from stress.  Their crimes included subscription to the wrong journals, activity in their trade union, support for the United Nations, support for peace, etc.;
• that there was no Maher Arar;
• there is no Omar Khadr.

The list could go on but I think you get the picture.  So before you judge me mad you must first explain why our government should be trusted given the track record.

Families of nine Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan were shown on the news yesterday visiting Kandahar and the memorial to the Canadians who have fallen in that conflict.  It was a touching moment.  Emotions played on the faces of the family members as they stood before the stone etchings of their son or daughter.  The media followed by interviews with a couple of the pilgrims who unanimously support the mission and support extending it if necessary.

What did the media expect them to say?  What else can they believe but that the mission is important and necessary in order to justify the sacrifice and the grief they have suffered?  The sudden loss of a loved one in a conflict half way around the world must stand for something or their grief would destroy them completely.  All families of fallen soldiers must believe the sacrifice had noble purpose or go mad.

This pilgrimage was a personal journey and should have remained so.  What purpose was served by the media presence?  To the families no purpose whatsoever.  But for the media and for the government the purpose is clear and as petty and self-serving as the reasons that drew us into this conflict in the first place.  Each group, media and government, are attempting to assuage their own guilt by maintaining the myth.  But we don’t need our government giving us myth we need the truth and we need the media to question that truth incessantly.  That is the role of the media.  I can almost forgive the government for lying to us.  In a poll in the United States a couple of years ago the American public admitted they preferred their government to lie to them.  A lie is often easier to deal with than the truth.  Besides governments are by nature secretive little entities.  So it is the media that bears the greatest guilt because it is their job to wake up the public to the truth before it is too late.

The evidence has been there from the beginning concerning our real purpose for deploying to Afghanistan.  Our neighbour, our closest ally and our friend the United States asked us to go so they could free up assets to deploy to their upcoming Iraq invasion.  We said yes because they are our neighbour, friend and ally and because we were in negotiations with them over a  number of cross border issues at the time.  The two most important were softwood lumber and border access following 9/11.  The United States has its own reasons for being there.  Chief among those are access to Kazakh oil and gas without having to ship through Russian territory.  There is also evidence of resources in some of the other Central Asian states as well.  Nothing about this mission has been about human rights or democracy or any of the other catch-phrases that allow us to sleep at night while murdering people half a world away.

But removing the Burka, routing out terrorists, building a modern society (aka. American society) and creating democracy raises pride to console the tears and makes the whole thing a little more bearable.  This war was never about that.  The Soviet backed government of Afghanistan that we worked so hard to topple, which led us to create the Taliban and Al Qaeda was a secular government that had outlawed the burka and encouraged women to engage fully as equals in society.  It was an American tactic to encourage Islamic fundamentalism among the mujaheddin as a way to gain popular support among village elders and traditionalists.  Following the collapse of the Soviet Union the United States and its western allies supported various groups in power in Kabul including the Taliban.  The Taliban were in close negotiations for a pipeline with the U.S. government and private firms such as Haliburton whose envoy to the Taliban was Dick Cheney.

Realpolitik is messy but it, not the spirit of humanity, motivates state actions.  No war has ever been fought for humanitarian reasons and none ever will be under our current international system.  Without a compelling selfish interest no state will risk its assets.  But without a higher moral purpose no democracy will sanction a foreign war.  Hence the lie.  We are manipulated to support something we really don’t understand.  We make it about nationalism just like the Nazis, the ultimate nationalists.  We, like them, take pride in the delusion that we are creating a better world; we, like them, believe we know the mind of god and it is consumerism.

The media knows this.  Instead it pretends as if it is too stupid to be able to assemble diverse evidence into a meaningful package and present a comprehensive report to the public.  That is news and the job of the news organization.  So we don’t have to research raw government documents and expert data on our own; or interview public figures and experts to tease out meaning; the  news media is to bring all this information together, plot its interactions and present us with understandable meaning .  Instead our newsrooms more resemble the Reichsministrie of Propoganda than the movie All the President’s Men.  Much of what is reported is lifted directly from press releases and the rest is assured not to ruffle the feathers of advertisers or their close buddies in government.

It is not just the loss that we experience in the Afghan debacle but where such complicity could lead that is of most concern. We are already experiencing a powerful move toward authoritarianism in our domestic society.  The anti-terrorism laws are only the prominent tip of the iceberg.  Whether police in Ontario charge people with a law that doesn’t exist in the statutes, shoot an innocent man (Dudley George) and then perjure themselves rather than take responsibility or the RCMP taser Robert Dziekanski in British Columbia and again lie in court or  resource companies invade and pollute your land in Alberta without allowing you recourse to protect it, the breakdown in trust between the agents of authority and the citizen continues apace.  Yet the media keeps its silence filling our minds with pleasant snippets and diversions rather than attacking the issues that will impact us most profoundly, if often without our notice until it is too late.  We ourselves must shoulder some of the blame for this.   Where are the crowds outside the major publishers and broadcasters demanding their right to know.

Individual reporters take shelter in their jobs.  They can only report what their editors, publishers and news directors allow.  It is there job.  That was the defence the Nazis used at Nuremburg as well.  We were just following orders.  We had our families to think of.  If not us someone else would have done it.  All true as far as it goes.  But it still boils down to one of two things.  Either they don’t stand up because they agree with maintaining the lie in which case they are complicit.  Or they fear the consequences of standing up and speaking their mind in which case they are cowards.  Those who are complicit I have no words of comfort for you.  May you soon be together in hell with your mentor Josef Goebbels.  To those who shrink from fear I have greater understanding.  But while you might be able to lie to the country you can’t lie to yourself.  You know the truth and you know your neighbours rely on you to make decisions.  Sometimes decisions concerning the life and death of those closest to them.

Each journalist must make their self assessment  and decide whether they are collaborators complicit in undermining the ethic of our society or cowards who to save their own skin let their neighbours suffer.  But shame on both for victimizing the families again to use them as a prop in your deceit.

This particular IED image carries a 2 fold message in the reality wars.

Take for instance the glitzy NewSpeak for a bomb.  That little word does not convey the correct message.  Every word, every reference must expose a stark difference between us and our foes in a time of war.  We use bombs and we are the good guys so the public must have a different term for a bomb when it is used by the bad guys, i. e. the enemy.  Solution:  Improvised Explosive Device or IED.  Just rolls off the tongue doesn’t it.  Now you know that anything improvised is not official and is just not the tool to use.  The word improvise carries a subliminal message of inferiority.  A legitimate military organization doesn’t improvise materials.  Only some slipshod mom and pop terrorist cell would do that.  I guess if these people want to be taken seriously they need to raise some money and go out and buy an SBED (Store Bought Explosive Device).  That’s what we use and that’s the ticket to legitimacy.

If these criminals and scumbags, to use the military vernacular, would use legitimate weapons manufactured to precise specification to blow up our troops then we would be able to respect them.  They too would become soldiers and cease being criminals and scumbags.  Maybe we would then celebrate their deaths less and gain a perspective on our own casualties.  As it stands now the subhuman Taliban is gleefully dispatched to Allah and each of our casualties is a fallen hero.

Language is used to persuade, to guide the listener subtly or sometimes not so subtly to the speakers position.  It is the pigment on the canvas of understanding, the colour of reality.  If anything should be painted in the words of reality it is war.  How else will we ever break this sad cycle of carnage.  Even bomb is too kind a word.  And Improvised Explosive Device is so sanitized as to be laughable.  How about we call it what it is, a life and limb shredding horror, whether we buy it from a manufacturer listed on the NYSE or cook it up in the basement.

Right now Iran seems to be coming apart at the seams.  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed a massive victory in the recent presidential elections which led followers of his opponent Mir-Hossein Mousavi to cry foul.  Taking to the streets, opposition protesters alleged massive fraud in the vote count.  A subsequent partial recount increased Ahmadinejad’s lead rather than diminish it which served only to ratchet up emotions on both sides.  The Iranian government, that is the government of Mr. Ahmadinejad, has cracked down fiercely on the protesters.  Several people have been killed and many more injured in street clashes between protesters and riot police.

Barack Obama and the American government deny accusations coming out of Iran that they, along with their ally Great Britain, are behind the protests.  Both the president and vice-president have specifically denied the allegations coming out of Tehran.  Barack Obama went so far as to say the American administration is making a concerted effort not to impact events in Iran even in their comments.  This is a positive change from earlier American administrations who have not hesitated to interfere in the affairs of other states or movements if it benefited American interests.  Barak Obama promised change and look here we have it.  For those of you who believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale you may be interested in.  Obama and Biden dismiss the accusations with a chuckle as if what idiot would believe the United States is behind a popular uprising in a foreign country.  The insinuation is that only a few conspiracy freaks would be dumb enough to believe the accusations coming from Mr Ahmadinejad and Mr. Khamenei. 

The United States has overthrown more than 50 governments since the end of World War II, most of them democracies.  (Dictatorships are more efficient to deal with when it comes to the bidding of great powers.)  The Kennedy administration was active here in Canada in the downfall of John Diefenbaker although Dief didn’t help his own cause any.  (If they are prepared to interfere in the political affairs of their neighbour and one of their closest allies is there any limit to what they might do?)  More than 3500 people have died in terrorist attacks against the island of Cuba since the revolution came to power in 1959, all funded and logistically supported by the government of the United States.  The Bush administration lied in order to violate the United Nations Charter and pursue an aggressive war against a sovereign member of that organization.  The invasions of Nicaraugua, the Dominican Republic, Panama and Granada; the support of the Contras, the Kosovo Liberation Army, and the Mujahadeen; installation of brutal dictators like Mobutu in Congo, the Somozas in Nicaraugua, Marcos in the Phillipines, and the Shah in Iran; fomenting coups in Chile, Guatemala, and Venezuela;  that is the backdrop to the present administration’s denials of involvement in the Iranian protests.  The list goes on.  I have not even scratched the surface of covert and not so covert American interference in the affairs of others around the world.  How can any reasonable person believe that the United States is not involved in the protests given their track record and the obvious benefits to America if Mr. Ahmadinejad were to be swept from power. The question is not whether they are involved but to what degree and when did the involvement begin.  Were they behind Mousavi from the start or are they just being opportunists?  At what level is the United States active in the protests?  These are questions that may never be answered. 

We all decry the brutality of the crackdown on the protesters.  No one should have to put their life on the line to speak their mind.  So why was there not the same outrage over the treatment of protesters in Britain during the G20 talks?  After all London police murdered an innocent man who was not even part of the protests.  He was simply a news vendor trying to get home after work.  With the addition of the killing of a beautiful young Iranian women, outrage in the West escalated against Iran.  That in itself should scream to us.  Why were the earlier deaths of protesters mere statistics, a passing reference as the political questions were examined in news reporting?  I guess it only matters when beautiful people die.  They are the only ones who have a real future full of promise.  The less attractive only have disappointment to look forward to in this world of image mongering.  The young woman (Neda Agha Soltan) purportedly uttered an heroic phrase just before leaving that day according to a self-described fiance.   Something about staying home giving victory to the regime.  Real people usually don’t make grandiose statements when parting from a loved one regardless of events happening around them.  I would suspect the real conversation was be careful and avoid the protests and her response was something like I’ll be careful, don’t worry.  But that doesn’t make good copy in a newsroom.  That doesn’t sell papers.  Nor do rather ordinary looking plain people.  When the news of Neda’s death appeared I couldn’t help remembering another beautiful young women, with a voice like a song bird that could melt the hardest heart.  During the first Gulf War daddy Bush was trying to get Congress to appropriate money for his ‘liberation’of Kuwait.  The girl appeared before the Senate Armed Forces Committee to give testimony of the brutality of invading Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait City.  When she had finished telling those grizzled Senators how infants at the hospital had been thrown to the floor so that their incubators could be looted back to Baghdad, there was not a dry eye in the place.  Even old Strom Thurman had a tear glistening at the corner of his eye.  At the time I was skeptical about the popularity of incubators as loot but people just called me cynical.  Several months later the story broke that the young girl had not been in Kuwait City during the invasion and the entire episode about the incubators had been the concoction of Hill and Knowlton, the public relations firm.  In democracies wars and all political events have to be sold like soap powder. 

The question for all of us is what are we being sold today.  We know that the United States government is lying about their involvement in the protests in Iran.  We know that their accomplices in the mass media are selling us a point of view that may or may not have any or some legitimacy.  What apportion of guilt should be born by the Iranian government and what apportion belongs to our governments, that it to say us because we constantly tell the world that we govern ourselves.  All we are left with is our own capacity to reason and analyze, to never believe anything we hear and only half what we see and make our own judgements.  Our society and our leaders discourage us from independent thought and dismiss us as fools if we dare to question them.  Who benefits from that if we comply?  Think about it.  All I can say is ‘Fools of the World, Unite.  You have nothing to lose but your complacency.’  Our age is one of great uncertainty, impregnated with fear and possibility.  Complacency is not an option, nor is falling into the trap of lies which has become our political system.  Don’t let your abhorrence of the crackdown in Iran be used for partisan goals you may not support. 

Five girls from one family were killed over the weekend when a mosque near their home was targeted.  They were sleeping together in one room.  How many Canadian families do you know that talk about five children sleeping in one room as normal?  There were actually seven but two survived, but for how long with an acute shortage of medical supplies.  The other aspect of the story that seems to be taken for granted is the fact that a mosque was a target of an Israeli air strike.  Now I know the rational Israel is using here.  They will argue that radical Imams are calling upon their followers to rise up in Jihad.  Mosques are not just religious centers but centers of resistance and terrorism.  Interesting enough the Germans used similar rationalizations for their destruction of synagogues.  The Israeli government learned a lot of lessons from the Nazis.  There I have done it.  I have stepped over the line.  Now comes the onslaught.  I am an anti-Semite.  I hate Jews.  But is that what I said just now?  No.  I said the Israeli government, not Jews, had learned lessons in repression, not only of Palestinian Arabs but of any Israeli Jew that disagrees with them.  Ask activists with B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group about the harassment they experience because they protest the human rights violations of their government.  They are attacked by official sources as self-hating Jews. 

Israel is not Judaism and Judaism is not Israel.  Judaism is a religion, Israel is a state.  Until that concept is clearly rooted in the international psyche nothing will be done to end the bloodshed until Israel has succeeded in wiping every Palestinian from the face of the earth.  Actually you might say they already have.  One argument advanced by the Israeli government is that there is no such thing as a Palestinian.  Palestine is not a nation.  Arabs in the West Bank are Jordanians.  The Nazis used this tack with certain Slavic groups to justify their murder.  Better yet the late Golda Meir, former prime minister of Israel claimed that when the Jews arrived in Palestine there were not people on the land at all.  It was unoccupied.  So if these non-existent people were to disappear no one would notice.  The path to genocide begins first with an attack on identity. 

The international community sits back and refuses to act perhaps out of some misplaced sense of collective guilt, perhaps from self-interested agendas and perhaps partly out of fear.  Remember that Israel is the sixth largest nuclear power.   Israel continues to officially deny possessing nuclear weapons but their existence is the worst kept secret in the world.  Regardless of the reason, how long can we sit back and allow this atrocity to continue before our eyes.  The mainstream news media is never more biased than with reporting on middle eastern issues.  If one relies on the major American networks or the BBC for information it would be understandable to see Israel as the victim in this.  Again a tactic used by the Nazis against Jews.  Nazi propogandists repeatedly drummed the mantra into the German people that the Jews were controlling the economy and conspiring with foreign powers to destroy Germany.  The justification for Kristallnacht was the assassination of the German ambassador in Paris by a Jew.  Goebbels disseminated the idea that this was part of a greater conspiracy to bring down the German government and cause a war rather than the act of a frustrated individual.  Anyone who blindly believes the press is courting disaster.  Media is ALWAYS controlled by the politically powerful in a society and serves whatever agenda they pursue. 

The facts:

1. In the last seven years only 17 Israelis have been killed by rocket fire.  In the first day of this new pogrom in Gaza approximately 200 Palestinians died.  The number is now around 375 mostly civilians contrary to the CNN report I watched tonight which claims that most of the dead are Hamas fighters.  So five little girls sleeping in their own home are a threat to Israel, I guess. 
2. The initial attacks on Saturday, December 27th were timed to coincidence with schools letting out.  The streets were full of children and the police stations and training facilities that were prime targets were close to schools.  This can only be interpreted as an attempt to kill children.  Again this is reminiscent of the Nazi behaviour.  The Nazis paid special attention to Jewish children in the Holocaust.  The best method to annihilate an entire race or class of people is to destroy their future. 
3. Israel was first to break the ceasefire.  Ehud Barack stating publicly that Israel is no longer interested in a ceasefire leaves me incredulous as the evidence shows they never have been interested in one.  Wanton, unjustified intrusions into Gaza occurred repeatedly without Hamas responding in defense until the murder of six Hamas leaders and the attack on a tunnel complex supplying Gaza.  Israel wanted Hamas to respond for fear if they continued to unilaterally hold to the ceasefire they would achieve a moral victory.  This would further undermine the position of Israel’s puppet, Mahmoud Abbas.  Abbas and his government are equivalent to the Jewish Councils in the Ghettos. 
4. Police stations and training facilities, water wells, mosques and public officials were the prime targets of the Israeli invasion.  Interestingly the Israelis do not seem interested in rocket sites.  But this invasion was never about rockets attacking Israel.  There are many possible reasons for the attack at this time.  One that came immediately to my mind was the Israeli elections.  Kadima, lagging in the polls behind Benyamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, hopes to undermine Likud’s chief criticism that Kadima is soft on the Palestinian issue. 
5. Gaza has been subjected to an inhuman siege which have reduced it to the world’s largest concentration camp.  Everything is in short supply; food, fuel, water, medical supplies.  Those shortages now contribute to the suffering caused by this latest attack.  How many of the wounded will be able to survive is questionable and the death toll will only rise. 

Candidate Obama, now President-Elect Obama, said in his visit to Israel earlier this year:

“If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing,” 

Well what would he do if his daughters were lying in the morgue instead of those five Palestinian girls?  Would he be so quick to condemn Hamas and blame them for the problem?  Hamas acted lawfully in defending the people of Gaza against an aggressor.  The international condemnation of Israel is muted by American support.  But the international community is a paper tiger.  It does not want to confront Israel.  If the United Nations stood for something the following should happen:

1. Israel’s membership in the UN should be immediately suspended as they have flagrantly violated the UN Charter, are currently in violation of some 80 odd Security Council resolutions (for perspective Saddam Hussein was maybe in violation of six or seven before his country was invaded and he was hanged for crimes against humanity), and also in violation of their commitments under the Geneva Conventions.
2. All trade and foreign aid coming into Israel should be immediately halted.  Israel’s assets abroad should be seized and frozen.  Israeli government officials found outside of Israel should be arrested and held for investigation by the International Criminal Court. 
3. Humanitarian aid should be injected into Gaza as quickly as possible, even if this means a military confrontation with Israel.  Along with this an international force should enter Gaza to protect civilians from genocide.
4. All of this will require the courage of the other powers of the world to stand up to the United States. 

 If this all sounds extreme it is.  But we are facing a moral choice.  If we do not act, as we did not in Germany, as we did not in Rwanda, and as we are not in Congo currently, then the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is meaningless.  The Nuremburg and Tokyo trials were a waste of time.  The tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda should be stopped.  The choice is to do something or to do nothing.  So whether I have accomplished anything in my life or not, I will probably never know but since I continue, I must continue to try.

I often remind my students of the ancient curse, may you be born in interesting times.  Well if any times can be considered interesting these can.  We, the great unwashed (mental note need a shower today), in each historic epoch look to the heralds, the troubadours,  the minstrels, of the time, the fourth estate, in short the media to guide and inform us.  Legends in my lifetime like Neil Sheehan, Tom Wolfe, Seymour Hirsch, Woodward and Bernstein, Edward R. Murrow and more too numerous to mention have illuminated the dark underbelly of our society in an effort to help us understand ourselves and our world.  Understanding precedes correcting.  We rely on these heralds to tell us what is happening.  If they are silent then we are ignorant.  If they are biased we are misinformed.  If they are stupid we are in deep do-do.  These three are not mutually exclusive.  The greatest crisis facing our society and our planet today is that most ‘journalists’ are all three.  They are often silent because to report would challenge the underlying  ’truths’ of the ideology they are sworn to uphold.  And they are often too stupid to see their own bias.  To see it they would have to examine themselves and ask some very difficult questions and we live in a world that discourages analysis and critical thinking as dangerous. 

Bias in the media is not necessarily, although it can be in a small number of individual cases, a conscious behaviour.  Most journalists believe they report in an objective and unbiased manner, always sure to verify their information with ‘official sources’ and ‘recognized experts’.  What they don’t see is that these ‘official’ and ‘recognized’ people are just that, official and recognized, but by whom.  The ideology of liberalism has been accepted in our society today as natural.  It is the ideology that is not ideological.  In some ways this is true of every society in every epoch.  We believe that the way we live is the correct, most natural, most rational form of living.  Our thoughts and understanding become the hard truths by which everything is measured.  But how is this conditioned reached?  In other words, who made up these norms and enforces them, to different degrees punishing any who might think or act a little differently.  In Western society in the early 21st century the truth is a liberal truth, having firmly grasped European and most particularly American society in the 17th and 18th centuries, rising though the 19th to cult status and vanquishing its greatest challenger in the industrialized world with the fall of communism and the discrediting of socialism in general.  What is has displaced, vanquished and rejected is not necessarily wrong because it has lost a battle.  If losing a battle were all that were necessary to discredit an adversary then we should reinstitute trial by combat for all disputes for clearly might makes right.  I wish that those who so fondly recall John Kennedy’s remarks in his inaugural speech, Ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country,would actually read the rest of the speech and see the suffering and pain Kennedy expected the American people to endure just to defeat, not the Soviet Union, but just the idea of communism/socialism.  This is the objectivity that journalists are trained to see.  Liberal perspective becomes truth.  Official sources are trusted and left unchallenged.  As John Pilger remarked, speaking at a conference about his new book, ‘Freedom Next Time’,  the bits of true investagative and reflective journalism that find their way into the pages of major papers or onto mainstream networks both radio and television, are honourable exceptions rather than the rule of modern journalism.  Can we blame the journalist for seeing the world as those around them see it?  Can we blame the journalism program at university and college for putting out people that will blindly follow those who preceded them in the industry?  The question is a little unfair, I admit.  What I am really asking is can ordinary people be blamed for being ordinary?  How can we expect journalists to all be great people?  People of high conscience, principle, and great courage.  For it takes great courage to go through life uncertain of every thought you hold.  For the great person knows she/he  may be proven wrong at any moment.  Even when forcefully and vigorously asserting a position or argument, a little voice, like the slave in the chariot during a Roman triumph, constantly whispers ‘remember, you are only human’.  That is a lot to ask of anyone, to go through life in uncertainty.  But that is the human condition.  It doesn’t mean that you must always relinquish the field to your opponent or preface every remark with ‘I could be wrong but’.  You still forcefully assert your arguments because you believe them to be provably correct.  And you believe this because you have questioned them in the first place.  Accepting that we all have an inculcated perspective based on our lifetime experience means digging deeper and challenging that perspective constantly so that when we opine we do so with the confidence that that opinion will stand up to scrutiny.   That is the mark of great character and that is what I demand of journalists.  To do otherwise would be to condemn myself and you to purgatory of totalitarianism.  Such character is not encouraged by our education system or our social institutions as a whole.  The password for smoothly sailing through life is acceptance.  Accept the world as presented.  Don’t rock the boat.  But while courage won’t make you popular, it will make you honourable.   The choice is always up to the individual  So I implore those who proceed into journalism, if you don’t have the intestinal fortitude to ask the hard questions and examine your own failing then at least become a sports reporter where even basic intelligence is optional. 

In politics the first question that should always be asked is ‘In whose benefit?’   Who benefits from seeing things this way rather than that?  Who benefits when ideas are defined this way rather than that.  If the same people who are defining the events and ideas are the same people who benefit from those particular definitions, we need to be skeptical.  Maybe they are being honest and it is just coincidence that they also benefit but to accept that as the usual is to be stupid.  And that is the situation with the media today and for most of the past 100 years.  Accepting the views or their ‘official’ and ‘recognized’ sources is doing just that.  These sources benefit by the way they define the world and these are the only sources journalists must use. 

And how do journalists deal with their inability to really question the power brokers in our society?  Look at the questions they are asking.  Recently I was reminded of a question asked right after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.  I remember it being asked and at the time just shook my head in disbelief.  It has become part of the conspiracy theory industry that has grown up around that tragic day.  (The attacks have spawned several industries actually.  Only America could market tragedy like soap suds.)  The question was “Mr. President.  Where were you when you first saw pictures of the first plane hitting the towers?”  I have paraphrased as it was asked more than once directly to the president and to his media representatives.  The initial answer that he was at the school when he saw a picture of the first plane hitting which is incorrect as images of that plane hitting had not been uncovered at that point is why the conspiracy theorists are all over it.  Most likely it was the second plane hitting that he saw and the answer a result of miscommunication.  But for all the attention that the question has received because of its answer, no one has questioned the question itself.  Why would anyone, let alone someone who must by virtue of covering the White House be at an upper level of his/her profession, ask such a stupid question ?  Who the hell cares where he was when someone first showed him a picture.  What critical information is uncovered by this?  The question of when was also asked several times.  When did you know this?  When did you hear that?  When did that zit on your nose pop?  Maybe George was having a dump when his aids first showed him the pictures or told him about the collapse.  Maybe Laura wheeled a TV over to the hall and he kept the door open to watch the coverage.  If he is like me he probably got her to bring him a cup of coffee as well.  How much of this crap (pardon the pun) do we need or want to know.  Personally I have no interest in any of this.  I don’t care who told him what, when.  I would be interested in deeper questioning of his plans for dealing with the situation.  That is news! 

But news is what the heralds of these interesting times are trained to ignore.  We hear the lies repeated.  The auto industry is in trouble because it pays its workers too much.  Truth the average pay at assembly plants in the U.S. is $30 an hour.  Given the price of housing and feeding a family in America today that is not exorbitant.  But according to the heralds unless the workers stop being so greedy the Detroit 3 will collapse.  In whose interest?  The self proclaimed best political team on television asks whether President-elect Obama can move forward on health care reform in the midst of this financial crisis.  Read General Motors financial report.  You will discover that health care costs are hurting their competitiveness.  But no mention of this on CNN.  Oh! no! Wolf wouldn’t want to mention that.  In whose interest?  Victory in Iraq and in Afghanistan is necessary to secure the world (read the United States) from further terrorist attacks.  Most Americans still believe that Iraq was involved in the attacks and that the elimination of the Taliban will produce a free and democratic Afghanistan (read my earlier post Team Afghanistan for some insight into the reality).  Bringing death and destruction to those half way around the world will make them love us.  Instead every objective measure shows a more dangerous world today than before the War on Terror.  Even that phrase, war on terror is never questioned but it may tell us more than we want to know.  How can you have a war on an idea, a concept?  What would that look like?  You can’t kill an idea only the holder of the idea.  Then look at how we are proceeding in this so-called war.  In whose interest? 

In whose interest?  Over and over I ask myself that question as I watch events unfold before me.  If only journalists could find the courage to start asking those questions.  Not just of the powers that be but of themselves.  In whose interest is it that they reject information from every alternative source in favour of the ‘official’ and the ‘recognized’?  It is certainly not in mine or in the interest of society as a whole.  But it does seem to be in the interest of those who make the decision of what information the public receives.  The heralds of interesting times have much to answer for.

Remembrance Day is fast approaching.  On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 the guns fell silent across Europe.  The Great War was over.  Later it would be known as the War to End all War and finally after we did it again as just plain World War One.  What does it mean and what should it mean to us today.  Perhaps the best place to start is to look at where it comes from and what it meant in the first place. 

The call to arms that followed the guns of August 1914 came not from the Canadian government but a foreign power, Great Britain.  Most Canadians are unaware that Canada never declared war on Germany in 1914.  The government of Robert Borden did not deem it necessary as we were part of the British Empire and therefore legally if Britain was at war so were we.  I have often wondered what the turn of events would have been had Wilfrid Laurier not lost power in 1911.  Laurier’s career had been marked by his efforts to prevent our entanglement in Britain’s European and colonial problems.  But to war we went and served our King and country faithfully.  Canadians distinguished themselves on the battlefield to such a degree as to shame our ‘Johnny come lately’  southern neighbours (the United States) into backing down when President Wilson attempted to exclude us from the peace talks at Versailles.  It should never be forgotten that ordinary young men ventured into harm’s way and did what was required of them with honour and courage. 

But soldiers do not choose to go to war, they are sent to war.  War is a political activity.  Karl von Clausewitz said that “War is nothing but the continuation of policy with other means.”  That is of course political policy.  I would diverge from Clausewitz and say rather that ‘War is the failure of policy and politicians’.  It is an activity that should be avoided whenever possible and only embarked upon in the most desperate of circumstances, i.e. to avert a humanitarian catastrophe.  But no war to date has ever been fought for a humanitarian reason and with our current international system it is a certainty that none ever will. 

Remembrance day was said to have been created to remind us all of the great sacrifice and tragedy of war and to celebrate the peace.  However early on a controversy began as more and more memorials began to appear to be a celebration of the victory and not the peace.  I am proud to say that the memorial in my home town (photo above) was one that focussed more on the lament of what we had lost rather than our martial prowess.  Many at the time who argued this point were accused of being unpatriotic (sound familiar).  We had won because we were in the right and the evil tyrannical Kaiser had been righteously punished.  God in his wisdom had seen the nobility of our cause and smiled upon it.  Nonsense! 

Let’s set the record straight.  There was no righteous cause in World War One.  The war was nothing more than a family squabble amongst a bunch of inbred crackers (the royal families of Europe).  America entered the war, abeit late, for financial reasons (why they do most things).  As we all know today, or should know, the first casualty of war is the truth.  Our governments regaled us with a steady diet of ‘Democracy vs. Tyranny’ and ‘Freedom vs. Slavery’ and the every favourite ‘Good vs. Evil’.  The fact that the most autocratic ruler involved in the war was our ally ‘Bloody’ Nicholas the Tsar of Russia seemed to escape notice.  Also our governments failed to inform us that the German Reichstag had overwhelmingly voted the appropriations for the war with the support of Karl Kautsky, leader of the largest socialist party in Europe at the time (yes, we socialists have skeletons in our closet too and sometimes we err in judgement).  And thus the imperial chess game of the 19th century was played out with 20th century chess pieces unfolding a scene that would make Dante wince. 

So what does all this mean to us today?  It means several things:

1. We should mourn the useless loss of life in World War One not puff our chests about victory over the Hun. 
2. We should hold the collective feet of our current leaders to the fire ever time they say we must go to war.  Make them prove the necessity of such a horrendous action.  We must not blindly accept them at their word as they have lied so many times before with such great cost. 
3. We should ask ourselves what we can do individually to end war once and for all.  Remember my last axiom on my about page “Anything human beings create; human beings can change.”  Human beings create wars. 

So this Remembrance Day don’t just stand their for a minute thinking about that pain in your back or where you are going for lunch but think what war means to you and whether you want it to some day take your son.