The Mad House

Tags

impeachment, Islam, muslim ban, politics, travel ban, trump, USA

 

It is really quite impossible to ignore the situation in Washington, in the vain hope that it gets better, or evens out at least. It appears to get worse by the day, and follows a course that is increasingly erratic and uneven.

 

The Huffington Post today ran a piece quoting an unnamed member of the White House staff who claimed that President Trump is mentally unbalanced and unfit to occupy the executive office – which means unfit to lead the country. The source is anonymous for obvious reasons, but the Post seemed sure of his authenticity, and it has always been a reliable news source. It is deeply worrying. The staffer cited many incidents of Trump’s emotional instability and wild mood swings, saying that it was hard to work for him as a consequence. He is incapable of absorbing the advice from briefings and incorporating them in his decisions. Briefing papers are usually several pages long, but Trump has demanded that they be no more than a page, with bullet-points listing the issues, and no more than nine points on the page. The source said that the President ignored the complexities involved in major issues, yet would fly off the handle over the most trivial things. He issued a bulletin, for example, ordering the hand-towels on Airforce One to be changed for softer versions. His excessive and often explosive reactions to petty criticisms of him, or the ridiculing which is now fresh meat for comedians, was deeply unsettling. All of it, said the staffer, pointed to a malignant narcissist unable to perceive a reality beyond himself. It led to the tortured relationship with the media, still hatching out, and was sure to lead to far more dangerous and disruptive situations. His staff were deeply unhappy, concerned that they would one day be blamed for his enormities – which was why they were now speaking out. This is not anything we have ever seen before. Richard Nixon, at his most deluded and deceitful during Watergate, was a babe in arms compared with what we now hear daily of Trump. The talk-shows and comics can poke fun all they want – and God knows there is so much to poke at – but this is far darker than they seem to appreciate.

 

Perhaps Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, depicted a madman in the White House, but it is not an idea that has really been explored much before. The fact that Trump is portrayed by much media as a characiture is one thing, but the fact that he consistently acts like one without seemingly being aware of it is something else altogether. I have tended not to entirely dismiss his claims of a hostile and biased media – there’s mutual hatred, it’s not surprising – but increasingly I see journalists with integrity uncertain how to deal with an administration that brutalizes the truth. Trump says it is not a Muslim ban, for instance, and yet we find that effectually it is. Two Canadians of Moroccan descent were turned away at the border today. Their cell phones were taken and they were interrogated for several hours before being denied entry. Morocco is not one of the seven nations listed in the allegedly temporary ban. The questions asked them were all about their religious beliefs: Which mosque do you attend? Who’s the Imam? What does he say in his sermons? And, outrageously, What do you think of President Trump? Border guards have clearly been instructed to keep out Muslims. They do not act on their own initiative. The President is therefore lying – and such a ban on religious beliefs is unconstitutional. Courts are now striving to overtuirn it, but we find in these legal hassles that Trump’s officials are trying to insist that a Presidential executive order cannot be denied. This too is unconstitutional. With a President so thin-skinned and reactive to any perceived slight, one wonders what the Republican party is up to. They surely knew what they were getting some time ago, so why is there so little resistance?

 

We must remember that George W. Bush was ridiculed in office before September 11^th, 2001. The War On Terror changed all that in a trice. A TV series lampooning the Bushes was cancelled. Everything became very serious, and the public forgot how they’d scorned George II. They even voted him in for a second term. It will not take that much for the Oval Office Buffoon to become King Donald the Brave. And a war, I suspect, is something very attaractive to him. As Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, a president’s powers are vastly increased, and a wartime populace is far more pliable. Who will it be? Iran? North Korea? Take your pick. It won’t be China, though – too complicated and possibly unwinnable.

 

Since the late sixties, many have been predicting that America would become a totalitarian regime, a police state. Is this what the more nefarious Republicans have in mind? How can we tell? Well, there’s the erosion of civil liberties – we may see that with Jeff Sessions and the new Supreme Court. There’s the stricter control of education and what can and what cannot be taught in schools. Judging by the calibre and record of those now in charge of this area, we may see that too. There’s vastly heightened security everywhere, and we’ve been seeing that for some time. There’s control of the media, and we know Trump would like to have that. Then there is the gradual dismantling of the justice system to allow arbitrary arrests, suspension of habeas corpus, and the imprisonment of dissidents. The US has been accused of trying to achieve these goals for decades, and good people have so far managed to fend off the assaults to some degree. But has the US Constitution got what is needed to avoid a tyranny usurping the government? Alexis de Tocqueville was of the opinion that it did not. Admittedly, his observations were made in the 1830s, yet the Constitution hasn’t changed much substantially since then. It is in fact a sadly atavistic document. The mosr convincing sign of a tyranny in the making is, of course, when the leader decrees his position to be one for life.

 

Both Napoleon and Hitler were voted into office by a reasonably fair ballot. First, Napoleon elevated himself from one of three consuls to the invented position of First Consul. Next he was First Consul for life. Then he was Emperor. Hitler was elected Chancellor, and a year later became Fuhrer, a nebulous term but a lifetime post. In both cases, there were no more real elections, and the countries were effectively dictatorships until the dictator died. But somehow I do not see Trump as Fuhrer material. No one laughed at Napoleon or Hitler – they should have, but they didn’t. So either the American system is hopelessly dysfunctional, allowing the election of a demagogue unwanted really by both parties, or the Republican elites have a plan to turn all this to their own advantage.

 

It is usually a mistake to take the surface events for what is really going on. And it is a fundamental error to forget that the US is really controlled by giant multinational corporations, particularly those in the arms and military supply industry. President Eisenhower warned of it in his farewell address – look it up, it’s chilling – and it was George Bush the First who privatized the military, ensuring that irresistibly vast profits awaited the next war, and the one after that. Since there hasn’t been a lack of small US conflicts since Korea in the fifties, these corporations have become inordinately wealthy. Halliburton, for example, once run by George W’s vice-president, Dick Cheney, is now headquartered in tax-free Dubai, although it is still one of the principal suppliers to the US Military, flogging them everything from meals-in-a-bag to private security personnel, who are not answerable to the Government in Washington. The mass-murder of Iraqi civilians a decade or so ago by men working for the Halliburton division, Blackwater, has never been brought to justice. There are many more examples. But the chief head of this hydra is avarice, the raking in of enormous profits no matter what their cost in human life. Such are the men who control America, and it is hard to think of them perspiring with anxiety over the current Oval Office occupant. Such people do not hesitate to kill – or to pay someone else to do it – when their interests are threatened. One must therefore conclude that their interests are not now being threatened.

 

Paul William Roberts

 

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Banned

Tags

muslim ban, politics, trump, United States of America, US History

 

President Trump’s ban on various people entering the US doesn’t affect me. I have been banned from entering the country since 2006, just after my first-hand account of the Iraq invasion, A War Against Truth, was published. I had been invited to a peace conference at the University of Colorado, Boulder, campus, and was told at US Customs in Toronto that I was inadmissible. No reason given by the Homeland Security official who went off with my passport until the flight I was due to catch had left. Since 1969, I had freely entered the USA, often spending months there. My literary agent was in New York, as was my publisher at that time. These arguments had no effect, although the official refused to state why I was inadmissible, saying he was not obliged to do so. Subsequently, I deduced that there was something in my book that severely aggravated the Pentagon, for neo-conservative cabals in Canada and the US waged a concerted war on my war against truth, eventually coming up with a flimsy argument accusing me of plagiarism. It was just a few sentences that I confessed were merely the result of shoddy note-taking in a war-zone, but it was enough for my gutless – or perhaps complicit – publisher to pulp the book, destroying over two years’ work and much of my career. It is still available on Amazon, however, but the loss of my eyesight prevented me from fighting the issue for many years. It did teach me, though, that there are powers with which one cannot easily contend. What was it that so offended elements of the US Government? I think it was documented evidence given in the book proving that the US Military in Iraq were using cluster-bombs in which the bomblets scattered were disguised as childrens’ toys. It’s not difficult to see that this would be hard to explain to the American public. I am still banned from entering the country, and will probably always be banned – these orders are nearly impossible to get rescinded.

 

America has a long history of banning undesirables, however. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act kept out Chinese nationals for petty reasons. Long considered the harshest act of its kind, it still permitted the admission of students, academics and persons with business commitments. But, as with later bans – the Phillipinos, the east European Jews, the Japanese – there was blowback. In 1905, the Chinese government issued a boycott of all US goods in the country. Similar reactions were caused by other bans, but the real effect was on US global prestige. The nation claiming exceptionalism does not enhance its claim by exclusionalism – not to mention the oxymoronic nature of exceptionalism, which states that we are exceptional and you should be like us.

I promised to avoid commenting on the kakristocracy forming down in Washington, so I will restrain myself to one thought. As amusing as Trump and his cohorts’ “alternative facts” may be to the media, we ought not to forget that his base takes them seriously. Such people hear a few times that the media are covering up terrorist attacks, and they believe it. Why they believe the lyging media that tell them this is another question. America has the least-well-educated population in the western world – and herein lies the problem. Propganda only works on those who do not perceive it as propaganda, where a lie repeated becomes the truth. If I were an editor or an executive producer of news programming, I would be very careful about printing or broadcasting any statement issued by the White House before it was thoroughly fact-checked and vetted. To not do so is pouring gasoline on this already-raging fire.

 

Paul William Roberts

The Terror Comes to Quebec

Tags

Canada, Islam, justin trudeau, kevin o'leary, Quebec, quebec city, racism, shooting, terrorism

 

The response of Canada in general and Quebec in particular to the murder of five men and the wounding of many more in a Quebec City mosque has been deeply gratifying, and it defines the difference between this country and the United States. The violence of a self-professed white supremecitst neo-Nazi, along with his guns, is clearly very alien here – and so it should be – shocking the entire nation merely by its appearance, which is a quotidian affair down south. For the first time, Prime Minister Trudeau Le Petit proved he is not the invertebrate he has seemed to be over the past year, delivering a number of impassioned speeches – remarkably free of his usual neurotic gasps and ahs – that hit precisely the right note of unification within diversity, of a common identity despite trivial differences, of neighbourliness, mutual assistance in troubled times, and a common understanding that overrides all the hateful actions of a miniscule minority. This may well be Trudeau’s Winston-Churchill-Moment, his Finest Hour, his Blitz. Despite snide comments from the useless Opposition Party leaders, he has continued to walk the fine line between Canada’s vital trade with the US and the need to uphold and protect our values as an open and welcoming nation for refugees and immigrants, no matter where they come from or what faith they profess. Given the recent and interminable provocations from the White House, this is no easy thing for someone of such avowedly liberal inclinations. As leader of the not-always-so-liberal Liberal Party, it is a balancing-act requiring enormously deft skill. If Trudeau emerges unbloodied from his soon-to-be meeting with the new American President, and if our trading relationship is still intact — $ 2 billion crosses that border daily – then his stature will be increased manifold, the once-concealed titanium backbone visible for all to see. After the gamboling and shilly-shallying of this past year, it is remarkable to find that Le Petit has a much deeper and stronger core in him, and can at times seem to understand truly what he talks about – or maybe it is just a matter of truly caring about that of which he talks?

 

It is fortunate that the Quebec City shooter proved to be a lone wolf. Early reports had stated that there were two assailants, one with a Muslim name – a claim that Fox News was still posting three days later, 72 hours after it had been disavowed by the police here. More kudos to Trudeau for a letter from his office accusing Fox of “playing identity politics” and demanding that the post come down — which it duly did, complete with a rare apology. Trudeau termed the mosque murders “a terrorist attack”, which was true enough, but it may have made the more feeble-minded media fixate upon the usual terrorist act, which to them is so-called Islamist agents mowing down us infidels wherever we gather. It is more complicated than this, of course, but terrorism is also US drone attacks that “inadvertently” slaughter hundreds of innocent civilians. It is the invasion of sovereign states too, and the CIA financing or fomenting of rebellions against democratically-elected governments all over the globe. Since September 11^th 2001, there have been less than 50 citizens killed in the US by identifiable terrorists working on behalf of an “Islamist” organization – and those few killers were all US-born American citizens, who only imagined they were Muslims. Worldwide, the death-toll of innocents as a direct result of US covert operations is unknown – the Pentagon openly states that “we don’t do body-counts” – but it is believed to number, over the past decade, in the high six figures. So the balance of terror is well in Washington’s favour, or to its shame – and this is what principally motivates those we view, rightly or wrongly, as the Enemy. What happened in Quebec City does not therefore easily compute in the minds of all too many journalists, who are now focussing like hungry vultures on all the grief and heartbreak, as well as, with immense satisfaction, on all the national peace and love, all the weeping vigils, the flowers and gift-baskets. The term “lone wolf” equals “homicidal psychopath” – nearly impossible to predict or prevent – which means his motives are not worth seeking out, because insanity is its own impermeable motivation.

 

I cannot help thinking, however, how different the reactions of Canadians would be had the victims in Quebec been us, the white majority, and the murderers self-alleged Muslims. People forget that western Islamic communities are also much in need of support, comfort and sheer neighbourliness after such events as the Paris attacks or the Brussels bombings, when they feel most unsafe and fearful. What they most fear and feel unsafe about is what just happened in a Quebec mosque. It is good that we are finally hearing this from the lips of Canadian Muslims, many of whom now tell of more minor hate-crimes they’ve experienced, or the random hostility of strangers that makes wives, daughters and mothers afraid to walk the streets in daylight. But we must remember all of this when next we hear of Islamist terror attacks.

 

 

The Islam of 99.999 percent of Muslims is a religion of peace, compassion and fraternity — period. And Muslims are, after all is said and done, only 0.3 of Canada’s population. If we took in a million more refugees – which we could do and should do – they would only amount to 0.6 of the population. Nothing.

 

 

Just as the Torah, Tanakh and the Gospels contain passages of an horrendously bloodthirty or hateful nature, so, unfortunately, does the Holy Koran. But these texts were all written by and for a nomadic and clannishly warlike peoples many hundreds of years ago – yet all orthodox believers contend that they are the words of God, and thus cannot be edited or revised. The Kabbalists, just like the Sufis and Christian mystics, have found an interpretive way around this dilemma, and it is to be hoped that the mainstream of all three monotheisms will eventually follow suit. The Koran (which means “recited verses”) is, as its name suggests, meant to be chanted aloud, not read in silence. The classical Arabic in which it was written makes a good third of the text impossible to understand with any certainty, because, at its earliest stage, the written language more closely resembles a mnemonic device to aid those chanting the suras from memory – as the faithful are urged to do, because the words are, if often opaque in meaning, surpassingly beautiful to hear. This linguistic difficulty also means that all translations are necessarily interpretations, just as all interpretations are not necessarily accurate transmissions of meaning. Any devout Muslim scanning a terrorist website – many of which are funded by the fabulously wealthy and heretical Saudi Arabian Wahhabite sect – will instantly recognize quotations taken out of context, or drawn from writings other than the Koran and posted without any ascription. But the untutored youthful rebel looking for a cause will not know this. We must now remember that the radicalized Muslim kid is no different than Alexandre Bissonette, the 27-year-old Quebec neo-Nazi shooter – except you don’t really have to sift through or take out of context anything in the rantings of Adolf Hitler to find something suitably repulsive, hateful and violent for a causus belli.

 

The Province of Quebec, where I live, seems to be embarrassed or shamed by this horrible act, and she protesteth too much methinks. Such a strong showing of many thousandsturning out in support of the Muslim community, and many politicians, both provincial and federal – including the Prime Minister – joining them, belies the fact that Quebec has a darker and uglier side. You know this is true when the Premier denies it is true – not to mention the revelation that French radio shock-jocks in the province often broadcast racist rants. I don’t listen to French radio, but obviously someone does – and not a few someones, either, if advertising incomes are to be profitable enough to warrant keeping the shouters on air. Mordechai Richler recalled seeing hotel signs in the fifties reading No Jews or Dogs, and we still often hear of defiled mosques, synagogues, religious community centres, and of desecrated Jewish cemetaries. There are no Muslim cenetaries here – yet. The simple truth is that hate-crime stats in Quebec are far higher than those for the rest of this country. As Jean-Paul Sartre observed, the Jew exists only in the mind of the anti-semite – and it follows that the Muslim only exists in the mind of the Islamophobe. This glimpse of real Quebec Muslims that we are now getting, curtesy of their immense tragedy, ought to dispel the fantasy-images based on fear and ignorance. As Premier Cuillard wishfully stated, perhaps this is a turning-point in Quebec history. But, if it is merely hinged upon the nature of another terrorist attack, perhaps it is not.

 

French Canadiens imagine they have a long history of grievances against the English – whom they also imagine dominate federal government and are imposing multiculturalism on them – when in fact the British, after their 1759 consquest, could hardly have treated them more equitably. They kept their language, their legal system and the Catholic faith, when the norms of conquest dictated that English language and law should be imposed. No one in Britain at the time was allowed to practice Catholicism, so the Quebecois were in effect treated more liberally than British citizens. But a conquered people are never allowed to be content – it’s human nature. They complain endlessly, just as the Israelites in the Wilderness complained to Moses about everything. A largely imaginary grudge has now festered here for something short of 300 years, and it views anything deemed alien as an imposition by the despised English, who are believed to run everything with malign intentions – even though no government can be elected without the vast Quebecois vote. Despite the fact that Canada declares itself to be a multicultural country in the Charter of Rights, Quebec, which is even recognized by Ottawa as a “nation”, officially announces that it is proudly not multicultural. Everyone just shrugs: c’est les Francais. Many hardliners here, always seeking referenda to separate from Canada and be a litral sovereign nation, view such things as Indigeneous reservations and rights, as well as the current high immigration stats to be malignant impositions by the English-speaking majority, and designed to undermine or erode Quebecois values. Hardly anyone in the whole country denies their right to speak French, more or less, or pursue a unique and somewhat French-like culture, more or less. I for one find it an oasis of charm and politesse in the North American desert. But the Internet and social media are slowly eroding this from within, and young Quebecois are becoming increasingly bilingual, cognizant of their place in a still largely Anglo continent. This is bound to suffer blowback – and so it is. Just as the advent of Donald Trump is really all about a yearning for simpler, greater, whiter times, so the rise of Quebecois racism is really all about Francophile xenophobia and the pipe-dream of sovereignty – which is rapidly fading in the harsh light of a new day. But much of Quebec remains a backwater of startlingly primitive and ignorant communities, sheltered from North American realities by a media of stunningly narrow and parochial concerns. It is not unlike conditions in rural areas of the southern US states, fed on Fox Opinions and the intemperate tirades of Trump, along with the mad barrage of right-wing radio and fundamentalist Christian televangelists. Education is of course the only answer to this woeful condition, and education in Quebec – as it is in much of the US – has deteriorated into a muddle of confusion and nonsense, depriving first to sixth-graders of the bilingualism they most need and which could be most easily taught as conversation to kids of that age. Not a few here believe that this failure in the school system is designed to prevent the Quebecois from exploring the Big World, and thus retaining their Anglophobia, which will enslave them to atavistic sovereignist values and concerns. It will not and cannot work, for human beings are inevitably drawn to a critical mass – and what happened in that mosque does seem to be forming a new mass-opinion of some considerable size.

 

It is also trashing the vain hopes of Canada’s Francophobic wannabe Trump, Kevin O’Leary – who actually seems to live mostly in America. True to the idiotically insensitive form of his role-model, Kev – wealthy entrepreneur of dubious ethics, and abusive reality-TV co-host – posted online a video of himself laughing maniacally as he fired off a machine-gun in a Florida shooting range. You might say this was somewhat lacking in empathy after the Quebec slaughter – and many did say it. So many indeed that one of his lackies apologetically took down the offending video. But Kev had to lie, saying he took it down “out of respect” for the slain. Well, it was what Trump would have done, wasn’t it? What Trump wouldn’t have done, however, is run for the leadership of a party three years away from any general election. Perhaps Kev miscalculated this? In the unlikely event that he wins, he will have to spend over two years as Opposition Leader in the terminally boring House of Parliament – and show up nearly every day for even more terminally boring and stultifyingly trivial or petty debates. The media will be watching. He can’t return to his Big American Life, can he? Worse still, he can’t be sure of winning the 2019 eklection either – especially if sunny-boy Le Petit retains his backbone. Worse than that is the gambit of modelling himself after Trump, and thus being tied to the Trump fortunes – which even the most flamboyant bookmakers are currently not giving good odds on. The Puritanical dinosaur, Mike Pence, is by far the favourite in this race to avoid a  common doom. No, Kev has not thought this through at all. At what point will he say it’s all rigged? In fact it is rigged in my opinion – rigged to end in preposterous confusion whatever happens. Like the US system, ours is broken beyond repair. It’s an 18^th-century relic that belongs in a museum of governance. But you cannot replace it by running as a candidate who will dismantle government, can you? The only question worth asking is: can it be done peacefully, and then what will replace it? I suggest a look at the Vedic texts on this subject, and a study of the Torah’s social laws. Wise men always knew how best to organize and govern any society. It has been unwise men who’ve fouled the nest.

 

Paul William Roberts