Patriotism

Tags

Canada, patriotism, politics, trump, United States of America, war

What is it? Well, some – including Bob Dylan and Sam Shepherd – say, “It’s the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings.” I am bound to concur. It’s at the core of currently-floundering Trump’s message (believe me, he won’t go down so easily), just as it was rooted in the barking of Adolf Hitler, whose principal appeal was one of national and ‘racial’ solidarity. The Fuhrer’s ranting demands for lebensraum merely consisted of a call to expand the Fatherland and reintegrate bits that had been carved off by history – German-speaking bits, on the whole. So the hollering for nationalist fervour – which is patriotism, after all is said and done – seems not to be a good thing? If the Nazis are too extreme and polarizing an example, take Napoleon. His vision for a United States of Europe – an idea currently crumbling into dust – was in reality one of an engorged France controlling many servile satellites. Paris was to be the capital of this ‘union’, which was the French Empire under another name. From Frederick the Great all the way back to the Romans, patriotism meant the expansion of a local ideology to incorporate thinking in the most far-flung regions. Rome extended to Persia. Great Britain included China, and still, psychologically, includes Australia and some Pacific islands. But patrimonies, homelands, now seem to feel threatened, insecure. Hence the appeal of patriotic hectoring in various forms.

Is this, one asks, why the Angus Reid organization last week conducted a poll to gauge the level of emotional attachment citizens had to Canada? Putting aside the value and rectitude of polls in general, this one evidently noted that so-called ‘millennials’ – apparently people aged 18 to 35 – showed a marked lack of emotional attachment to their country. This strikes me as a good thing. Ever-jingoistic, the media thought otherwise, with baleful comments about the shortage of national pride. It may just be me, but I keep hearing politicians talking about Canada as, “the best country in the world,” these days. It almost sounds like part of the nation’s name, like “America the Wonderful”, or Alexander the Great. Don’t get me wrong, I have great affection for my adopted country, and certainly consider it a better place to live than most others. But to say it is the greatest country in the world has grimmer implications. If we weren’t such a small place, in terms of population – the tiny British isles have three times as many people – we would be hauling these nationalistic fantasies into a far more dangerous place, and we would be…well, America.

Can a vast country, built by immigrants from everywhere on the backs of a crushed indigenous peoples, ever claim the uniqueness of being, “One nation under God”? We are forced to admit that ‘the West’, wherever it is now located, is largely a product of European economic migrants. With its disgraceful thousand-year history of endless petty wars, Europe can hardly lay claim to the virtues of peaceful coexistence. And thus Europeans have an ingrained tendency to seek hostile solutions, where other erstwhile nationals – the Chinese, for example – look to a more innate rectitude of purpose to overcome problems. China has five thousand years of continuous civilization – the Chi’in state is the world’s oldest political union – where the USA barely has 300 years. While the Chinese have a strong sense of cultural identity, it has never translated itself into imperial designs. The state has merely reclaimed territories lost during periods of internal weakness. The American model, aped now so often by Canada, involves an incapacity to see the world as not, or – God forbid! – even anti-American. Historically, the United States has either been xenophobic and enclosed, or else imperialistic, seeking to impose itself on vulnerable nations or peoples. With the current enthusiasm for world-cop-like missions, I see a danger in Canada pursuing this path. It is logically impossible, however.

The Angus Reid poll, seeking to measure the levels of national idolatry, fails to take into account the increasing number of Canadian citizens who can never claim to love this country more than any other – usually the one of their heritage. Thirty-five years away from it, I would still have to choose England over Canada, if the countries were ever at war. No doubt, the same is true for many if not most immigrants. Culture, heritage, language, whatever it is – they bind us. To hear “God bless America”, or “Canada, the greatest country in the world”, is thus alienating. It implies that some of us are Canadians, and others are not, when, in truth, only the abused First Nations have a right to that claim. The Quebecois have been here four centuries, yet many of them still identify themselves as other than strictly Canadian, or ‘Anglo’. Patriotic fervour – the military, the heroism! – may not be so apparent a disease here as it is in America, yet deadly diseases grow and spread.

The Trump groan, to “Make America great again” is – besides making one wonder when exactly the USA was ever great – a call to arms. Crush dissent! Muslims and Mexicans out! We’re the global cop and the world will now pay us for the task, whether or not anyone wants it! For people who have nothing or know nothing, it may incite some form of identity or pride. Yet for the rest it’s obnoxious. And patriotism is truly obnoxious. The One God’s on our side – everyone else is wrong, or with Satan. That’s how it works, and it has been the single greatest cause of human misery for all of recorded history. You love your country, you fight for it – no matter how right, wrong, or indifferent the casus belli may be. As studies of the human genome show, we are all the same. Even the idea of races is ill-founded. As the greatest photograph in history shows, we all live on one beautiful little blue planet – and we’ll have to share its bounty equally, ,or else perish, like many incompatible species before us. Old maxims are rarely incorrect: Patriotism? It’s the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings.

 

Paul William Roberts

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Is Thought Dead?

Tags

Canada, egyptology, harper, Iraq, Middle East, oil, shia, sunni, war

I am continually asked if I am anti-American, pro-or-anti Israel, pro-or-anti Muslim, homophobic or pro-gay, pro-life or pro-choice, pro this or anti that. It becomes annoying to find that people need you to subscribe utterly to one cause and all of its beliefs, idiocies, nooks and, often, dark crannies. They become annoyed if you cannot be easily categorized. I have been called, through my writing, everything from a bleeding-heart liberal to a fascist (for suggesting people ought to answer a simple multi-choice questionnaire before they are allowed to vote, just to establish that they know the candidates and the issues upon which they are voting). These labels essentially enable people who prefer not to think to accept or dismiss a writer – or anyone else – without having to fret over troublesome arguments that may not support their own opinions – and I stress ‘opinions’ because, increasingly, people who imagine they have an interest in current affairs merely have opinions on issues which they often cannot defend, except by such gobbledegook as, “I don’t care what you say; that’s what I believe.” The term ‘belief’ is interesting in this context, because, like ‘faith’, it is really saying, “That’s what I want to be true.” There used to be discussions and debates, in public, or on the media. Now there seem to be little more than opinions stated as facts, angry monologues or harangues by TV or radio ‘hosts’ who have forgotten that a host treats his or her ‘guest’ with courtesy – such is the traditional relationship, rather than bully and victim – or merely the brief and dreary interview with a politician skilled in the art of staying ‘on-message’ no matter what the question may be. Debate is where someone states an argument, and someone else opposes it. The person whose case cannot withstand the arguments opposing it loses the debate and, ideally, their point of view along with it. This would seem to be straightforward. Yet where did these discussions and debates go? Where are the public forums? In answer to the pro-anti questions, I have no knee-jerk views on any subject at all. If it interests me, I study everything I can find on a topic, from as many points of view as possible, and then make up my own mind about what strikes me as the truth regarding that issue. I am happy to debate with anyone about anything I feel capable of contributing some rational thought towards; and am equally willing to admit I am wrong when proved so. I do not, of course, mean discussions about such follies as so-called Creationism, where the argument against dinosaur bones and fossils consists of, “Satan placed them there to lead us astray.” An argument must be provable – such as the earth revolves around the sun. Instead of discussions, now we have TV documentaries which all too often present a tautological case for some mysterious phenomenon, setting out to ‘seek’ the evidence for what the producers already ‘know’ to be true. A good example is Egyptology, which, when it failed to refute Dr. Robert Schoch’s argument for a far, far earlier date for the origins of Ancient Egyptian civilization at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, in my view lost its entire science, along with the spurious chronology upon which it is largely based. To adequately counter the Schoch thesis, Egyptologists would have to dig down to far deeper levels, where the evidence of this far earlier civilization – and we are talking 7000 to possibly 30,000 BCE – would be found. In countless irritating Discovery Channel docs, we find the self-styled ‘experts’ rejecting the notion of much deeper digs because they know there is nothing there to be found. This is not science; it is tautological pseudo-science (see my book River in the Desert for a fuller account of this academic travesty). These docs do not even scratch the tautological iceberg’s tip when it comes to such risible irrelevancies as Noah’s Ark: Found! Being blind, I’m no great TV watcher; but I can still hear the torrent of nonsense, and am possibly more attuned to the verbal balderdash usually hidden behind flash-cuts and mosaic images designed to keep the short attention span on life support. It is such irresponsible programming that has afflicted the contemporary mind with a widespread inability to think for itself. For every newspaper headline or media lead-story there are at least 100 books which could be regarded as essential reading to provide a context for the 700 word story. Some of these may alter that story entirely; some may explain why an event, tragic or otherwise, actually occurred; others may explain a history of multitudinous causes leading up to what appears to be an isolated event. Admittedly, some newspapers and journals – never the most widely-read ones, it would appear – do still take pains to provide in-depth context; but you cannot read it in a minute, and no politician would dream of plumbing such depths, even if he or she were aware of them. I have discussed Iraq here too often, but only because I have written two books on the subject and become infuriated by politicians who still appear to view public ignorance of the issues involved as mandatory – or else share that ignorance. Listening to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s lies and evasions on the question of Canadian involvement in a war today – and no doubt we shall hear the same from Obama tomorrow – is simply maddening, As I speculated here a few days ago, our ‘advisers’ will in fact be Special Forces troops, and they will be armed, boots on the ground, after all. Let us call ISIS, ISOS, and IS, SS instead – for ‘Sunni State (and for a certain historical resonance), since ‘Islamist State’ misleads people into imagining the enterprise involves Shia, Sufi, or any other branch of Islam. Ruled for decades by the nominally Sunni tyranny of Saddam Hussein, Iraq was suddenly turned by the US invasion into an allegedly democratic Shia state – under the misguided impression that the long-oppressed Shia majority would be undyingly grateful to their saviour, not to mention obey Washington’s dictates whenever required to. Let’s be honest: the US was solely interested in controlling the vast wealth of high-grade oil. It certainly was not thinking of how the dispossessed Sunnis would feel about their new situation under a government dominated by Shia. Since the Sunni used to wield all the power, controlled the army, and had most of the money, besides being better educated, it must surely have occurred to someone in a so-called Think Tank that, if the Sunni were unhappy with their lot they would be far more able to organize and start a civil war. This is in fact that civil war, aided by more radical factions funded, as I have tirelessly stated, by the fabulously rich Saudi Arabian Wahhabite theocrats, who have no wish to find a Iranian-Iraqi Shia block on their doorstep. They also view the Shia as heretical infidels. These grievances go back two hundred years, and involve many complexities as well as unresolved territorial disputes (remember, it was mainly the British who created nations in Arabia, which is why the boundaries are all straight lines, and still ignored by the nomadic Bedu tribes). Thus, many boots, and even shoes, will be on the ground for a very long time, unless someone makes a deal with the SS moderates to turn over the more barbaric radical elements – few of them probably Iraqis anyway – in exchange for a government in which they have proportional representation. This fantasy government is unlikely given the deep-rooted Shia-Sunni hatred. Alternatives? None really, since creating an autonomous Sunni State would place it where it currently is, in the north, where the oil is not. The Kurds have their own area, to the north-west, but they also have oil there. Would the Shia divide equally the oil cash? On paper perhaps, but not in reality. This leaves the US share of Iraq oil – exact figures unknowable, because private companies are involved. Is it possible that the US would oblige those companies to compensate the SS for a peaceful resolution to what could otherwise escalate into a pan-Arabian war? Hardly likely, since these companies essentially own America, started the war, and have fingers in every American pie – especially Military-Industrial Pie. There may be big money in keeping this chaos running, as long as it can be contained. Special Forces from three countries specialising in such forces could, with a few hundred men, and some fancy weaponry and air cover, contain such a situation indefinitely, while generating enough global fright to jack up the price of oil very nicely. Is this the plan? If so, no wonder we, the people, aren’t allowed to know about it. Mr. Harper spouted the usual national security crap – the all-purpose excuse for every abomination – but can he seriously believe that violent meddling in Muslim Arab disputes will help make Canada safer? The consequences faced by other meddlers – notably the one to our south and its English crony – would seem to refute that theory. A maple leaf lapel button used to guarantee safe passage through the hell-holes of this world; now it does not. This looming fiasco in Iraq is going to make Canadians less safe everywhere, Mr. Harper. Do you want that as your legacy, or will the lucrative sinecures on oil company boards be more than satisfying enough?   With love, as always, Paul William Roberts.

My Birthday

Tags

Canada, Islam, journalism, Middle East, politics, Saudi Arabia, stephen harper, syria, war

What better gift could I receive on my birthday than the news that Canada is about to send in ‘advisers’ to assist the Iraqi military in its struggle against the organization whose name varies from ISIS to ISOS, but which we shall call IS, for ‘Islamic State’? Without much elaboration – since I have stated the case so often – I shall keep these comments brief. Firstly, the term ‘advisers’ – which I noticed originally back when the USA was inheriting the Vietnam War from France – actually means highly-trained special forces; the kind of soldiers able to take an entire town or base without assistance. The vagueness of Prime Minister Harper’s description of this advisory unit as “several dozen men” confirms this suspicion, ‘several’ being one of the most meaningless terms in the                                                                                                                                                    language. ‘Advisers’ has always been Pentagon code for Special Forces. I met such people when I was in Iraq in 2003, and they had been there long before the actual invasion itself began, their principal task being to knock out Saddam’s desert bases, thereby immobilizing his most highly-trained forces. So let us dispense with the myth of ‘advisers’. If actual advice were required by Iraq’s military, a couple of men could perform this task; ‘several dozen’ would merely be superfluous, if not confusing. Let us assume that Britain will send in its SAS, and the US its Delta Force. This tells us the problem is troublesome, yet easily contained.

Next arises the issue of why the Canadian public is not consulted about such an action, which will undoubtedly result in Canadian deaths, if not an involvement in another debacle as insolvable and pointless as Afghanistan or Vietnam. Not to mention the cost to taxpayers. Are we really living in a democracy? Does Harper actually comprehend the function of a Parliament? What became of public discussion?

The last issue I can be bothered to raise before my birthday dinner is the one of how to stop IS in its progress, including the execution of men I still deem colleagues. Does no one wonder why these beheaded journalists are all termed ‘independent’? I always reported on war zones as an ‘independent’, but it was only when my reports from Iraq in 2003 were so eagerly received by the Globe and Mail, and the CBC, that I realised why. They had none of their own people on the ground because they could not – or would not – afford the insurance to cover reporters in danger spots. They happily take the reporting of such independents venturing into areas where a story really exists, yet they offer nothing in condolence or compensation to those who have provided the material they would otherwise lack. It seems likely I lost my eyesight from exposure to toxins in Iraq, yet I would no more dream of asking the Globe or CBC for compensation than I would of suing the Pentagon for its war.

As I have stated ad nauseam, the way to stop IS is to locate the channels of funding which, I can guarantee, originate from the Wahhabi priesthood of Saudi Arabia. This is not a crew of crazed vicars handing over the collection plate. This is an hereditary priesthood receiving, by law and tradition, half the Saudi oil wealth. The ethnic cleansing being performed by IS alone demonstrates its close Wahhabi ties. Wahhabism is ostensibly a Muslim heresy which, for self-serving purposes, condemns the Shia and other Muslim sects as non-Islamic. It also regards women as subhuman and views music and dancing as satanic. Unfortunately, however, it also has an annual income in the trillions of dollars, which it has used to spread its malicious heretical version of Islam all over the world since the oil boom of the 1970s. It also funds IS, and all the Al Quaeda spin-off factions. Notice how none of these pseudo-Islamic psychopaths ever bother a Sunni-led regime. Read books about the sect, for Christ’s sake, if you don’t believe me. If you want to see more Canadian soldiers die for nothing, then please don’t bother to inform yourself about any issue at all. If, however, you would prefer Canada to engage solely in just wars, ask your MPs and MPPs to raise the issue of Saudi funding for IS in Parliament. Demand to know why the most backward and barbaric state on earth is tolerated simply for its oil wealth. Also ask why Iraq, not Syria, is the cause behind intervention. Could it possibly be that Syria has no oil? If any country deserves to be invaded it is surely Saudi Arabia. If any faith deserves to be prohibited it is surely Wahhabism. If oil is not the issue – as the liars in high places will doubtless assure us – then leave Iraq to sort out its own problems. Interfering in them will solve nothing in the long run but further antagonizing those few deranged Islamist radicals who still believe the Crusades have yet to end. “Whoops,” as George W. Bush said, “I didn’t mean to say ‘crusade’.”

 

With love, as always, Paul William Roberts

The First World War

Tags

war, WWI

I grew up with WWI. Lacking a father, my grandfather was paterfamilias in our house, and he had fought with the cavalry in that appalling war. He was stationed in the Somme, which was not a battle, but rather a series of battles scattered over a wide area. It is hard to imagine horses in a war with such novelties as tanks, poison gas, and cannons the size of sewer pipes. I was only four or five when Granddad told me some of his stories, so the details are dim, but the horror is not. The piles of bodies stacking trenches knee-deep in mud; the confusion and lack of communication with generals, safely ensconced in comfort far behind the front lines; the death-agonies of terrified horses, some floundering wounded in barbed wire. My grandfather went out, like many a young man, convinced that he was saving his country from a dreadful foe. He returned disillusioned, certain the war had been unnecessarily prolonged, and had been about nothing. He loathed the monarchs and politicians responsible for it, and for the fifty million slaughtered, not to mention the millions more crippled, limbless, and terminally shell-shocked (the mot du jour for PTSD). He remembered the Christmas truce, when Germans and British exchanged gifts, like tins of bully-beef, and celebrated together, before returning the next day to the business of killing, all of it to gain a useless hill or copse. He remembered the bitter cold, when, if a horse died, soldiers would slit open its belly and stick their boots inside the steaming guts to warm their frozen feet. He remembered the orders to charge through six-foot gaps in barbed wire, the men in lines of three, and easily mown down by enemy machine-gun fire, as the officers still ordered them on. He remembered how unpopular officers were often shot by their own men during a battle – although he never said whether he had been such a shooter. I remember his scorn for the Treaty of Versailles, which, he said, dealt unfairly with the Germans and caused the rise of Hitler, along with the next war, which he did feel was necessary, and he was even dismayed to find himself too old to serve in. I expect that he spared me the worst of his memories, but, nonetheless, I gathered that this so-called ‘war to end all wars’ was a hell on earth without any justification. He cited the many poets and intellectuals who had openly opposed it, calling for an end as early as 1915, and often imprisoned for their pains. “If you don’t think a war is just,” he often told me, “then you are morally obligated not to fight in it, and to oppose it, no matter what the cost.” I have never forgotten those words, and still feel obliged to separate the just from the unjust wars, and state my case in writing. Just because our technology spares us the muddy Hades of trenches, it still does not mean that war has become sanitized. It destroys worlds and lives on both sides, leaving the labour of ages in rubble, and once-healthy minds shattered. Our soldiers still come home in pieces, mentally and physically. They still often feel their sacrifices were for nothing. The lessons of history are clear: war, and the means to wage it, need to be eradicated from this planet; and anyone opposing such an idea ought to be regarded as an antisocial criminal, in dire need of rehabilitation. It is never too late to build a better world. With love,

Paul William Roberts