Syria: Paint it Black.

From my cubbyhole at the Ottawa Citizen:

As Syria descends ever deeper into an abyss of barbarism and savagery, just what is it that distinguishes the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from, say, Jabhat al-Nusra or the Omar al-Farouq brigades or any of the faith-based desperadoes rampaging around the Syrian nightmarelands at the moment? By what moral right can Canada or any other NATO country make a claim upon the allegiances of anyone engaged in the Syrian struggle, after what the NATO capitals have done to allow this gory bedlam to emerge in the first place?

I've taken a crack at some answers in my Ottawa Citizen column today, but the question I pay closest attention to is the one a conveniently unnamed senior White House official asked last month for the rhetorical purpose of extricating President Obama from having had his bluff called on Syrian madman Bashar al-Assad's deployment of poison gas as an instrument of state repression. 

“If he (Assad) drops sarin on his own people, what’s that got to do with us?”

I try to give that question a fair hearing, but I can't help but notice the Kissingerian depravity that underpins it. In Syria, the cool and swaggering Obama doctrine has made an apocalyptic horror show out of what began as the most non-violent, pluralistic, democratic and paradoxically pro-American of the all the Arab Spring uprisings. That Syria is now so rotten with the gangrene of jihadism, proxy murder-gangs and revenge killings is a testament to the catastrophic imbecility of Obama's abstentionism, and everybody in NATO has had to go along with it.

Jihadist whackjobbery is exactly what should have been expected to happen, because it is what always happens. Leave the wounds to fester and the jihadist gangrene sets in. It is what happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Chechnya, and Libya. "The longer these things tend to go on," as the author and analyst Michael Totten puts it, "these crazy people from all over the region just descend on the place and they tear it to pieces."

Meanwhile, Canada distinguishes itself among the NATO countries by abstaining even from a recognition of the Syrian National Coalition as Syria's government in waiting (the SNC now holds Syria's seat at the Arab League). Foreign Minister John Baird insists the SNC is insufficiently representative of minorities and women. Curiously, this puts Canada with the Saudis in the same small faction, but even Riyadh is willing to fund the SNC. The Saudis don't even mind that the SNC’s second vice-president is the secular feminist and human rights activist Suheir Atassi.

“There is this talk of minorities, but we do not see this problem. We are Syrians," Faisal Alazem of the Syrian Canadian Council told me. "We are students and women, we are left and right, we are Sunni and Shia and Alawites and Kurds and Druze and Christian. Human rights, democracy, these are the things we have been demanding from the beginning.”

Of course there are sinister jihadist in the fray now. What do you expect? "When you leave things like that, it is bound to happen,” says Alazem. "The Assad regime knows exactly what it’s doing. It is making Syria a magnet for jihadists and Salafists."

Perhaps one third of the the maniacal Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah's Lebanese Hezbollah are now fighting alongside pro-government militias. The Kremlin is arming Assad with everything from handguns to advanced Yakhont cruise missiles. Iran's interventions on Assad's behalf are just as scary as the Kremlin's. And then there's Qatar and freelance oil billionaires from the United Arab Emirates, arming a variety of anti-Assad militias.

“And now the Americans want us to negotiate," Alazem said. "How do you negotiate with a Scud missile? War crimes are being committed every day. How do you negotiate when there are MiG jet fighters bombing our neighbourhoods? It would be like asking the Jews to negotiate with Hitler during the Second World War."

If Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenny comes off looking a little out of sorts in my column I will be fairer here and point out that it's not like he doesn't try. He was the only Canadian minister to have visited Syria in a decade, before the whole place went up, and Kenny has never gotten proper credit for the underground railroad of refugees he's been running out of the region.

But Canada's place in all this has been a bit awkward from the beginning. Initially, Foreign Minister John Baird was one of the Syrian revolution's most fervent friends, but his department got off to a fumbling start, the thing went sideways and it's never been properly sorted out. It isn't as though Baird hasn't tried to figure things out, however.

"The Minister has always welcomed meeting with the Syrian community here in Canada and abroad," Rick Roth, Baird's press secretary, told me last week. And indeed Baird has attended dozens of meetings with Syrian-Canadians in Ottawa and Toronto, and with Syrian opposition leaders in Paris, Doha, Istanbul, Marrakech and Tunis.

"Although there may be some difference of opinion as to how Canada can help the Syrian people, we all remain of the mind that President Assad has lost all credibility. Canada has been a leading contributor to help those Syrians most in need, fleeing Assad's violence," Roth said. "We will continue to listen to Syrians and Syrian-Canadians to determine how Canada can assist in the future."

One can only hope so.

How lucky Bashar al-Assad is with his friends," Alazem said. "How unluckly we are with our friends.”

I Told You So.

Ottawa Citizen blog: 

Contrary to the self-serving opinion coming out of absolutely all of the main news organizations on the subject, I will meekly allow that I don't actually know that the pollsters whose "narrative" formed the big story about the British Columbia election just now come and gone were indeed wrong at all. The pollsters may have badly misinterpreted their own findings, one can suppose. But were they really all wrong from the beginning, as we've been repeatedly bludgeoned into believing? 

In my Ottawa Citizen column today I venture a greater likelihood: For one thing, voter turnout was only 52 per cent, only a percentage point higher than the 2009 election. For another thing, all it would take to produce the kind of discrepancy that shocked everybody Tuesday night is a scenario with poll respondents who claimed an intention to vote NDP not actually voting, for whatever reason, in higher proportions than poll respondents who said they intended to vote Liberal.  

And what do you know, along comes pollster Ipsos with some illuminating election-day poll revelations, the point being: "The long and the short of it was that NDP voters did not get out and fulfill their promise to vote for the party of their choice – they stayed home while Liberal voters showed up. As such, a small number of voters were able to influence the greater outcome."  

It would appear, then, that the key to this entire representative-democracy business, by which I mean to say the trick to winning the game, is to get it into one's silly head that the main thing you have to do is show up. In this particular case, the big lesson for all those NDP enthusiasts who are being so pouty and boring at the moment is this: If you want the NDP to win elections you actually have to vote for the NDP at election time. 

What we're hearing loudest from the NDP camp right now is not self-criticism, although there is some of that, thankfully. There is little sign that the leadership is suitably chastened. It's instead all the rage to blame "vote splitting," which is the passive-aggressive way to spit on the ground and use foul language about the Greens (splittists and wreckers!). I half expect them to bring Opus Dei into it, or Haliburton. 

I am so bored with that particular line of pseudo-argument that I could do some spitting myself, because playing counter-factual with parameters of one's own choosing will always produce the conclusion one prefers. Here's the way that time-killing distraction occurs in the pages of the Vancouver Sun: "Adrian Dix would be premier if Green supporters had voted NDP (with graphics!)" Well, two can play that game:  "Christy Clark would still be premier if Green supporters had voted Liberal." Even three can play that game: "Adrian Dix would be premier if Liberal supporters voted NDP." 

Oh look, the footnote inside the Vancouver Sun story that gives the game way: "Such an analysis assumes, of course, that Green party supporters would all have the NDP as their second choice. That’s almost certainly not the case." 

Thanks for letting us in on that. To kick around the true story about why the B.C. NDP brains trust has never given any indication that it is prepared to contemplate collaborative-voting strategies would be the only way to make these "vote-splitting" preoccupations relevant or interesting. The thing is, they just can't suck it up and get over themselves. Hell, in the last election in the UK even Billy Bragg voted LibDem. On Canada's wild west coast, if it is true that Green voters are in fact not merely the disenchanted but hopelessly naive would-be NDPers we keep hearing about, then maybe the NDP brains trust should admit as much and stop whimpering.

Again: the NDP lost because the NDP didn't get enough votes. Why did the NDP fail to get enough votes? To answer that question with the feint that it was because too many people voted Green is to employ a dodge transparently crafted to avoid addressing the serious questions New Democrats need to be asking themselves, if they actually want to be taken seriously.

The Suicide Letter of Samuel Zygelbojm

[A "guest post," of a kind, from my spot at the Ottawa Citizen op-ed page].

May 11, 1943 

To His Excellency The President of the Republic of Poland Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz

To Prime Minister General Wladyslaw Sikorski.

Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister,

I am taking the liberty of addressing to you, Sirs, these my last words, and through you to the Polish Government and the people of Poland, and to the governments and people of the Allies, and to the conscience of the whole world: 

The latest news that has reached us from Poland makes it clear beyond any doubt that the Germans are now murdering the last remnants of the Jews in Poland with unbridled cruelty. Behind the walls of the ghetto the last act of this tragedy is now being played out.

The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking on passively upon this murder of defenseless millions – tortured children, women and men – they have become partners to the responsibility.

I am obliged to state that although the Polish Government contributed largely to the arousing of public opinion in the world, it still did not do enough. It did not do anything that was not routine, that might have been appropriate to the dimensions of the tragedy taking place in Poland.

Of close to 3.5 million Polish Jews and about 700,000 Jews who have been deported to Poland from other countries, there were, according to the official figures of the Bund transmitted by the Representative of the Government, only 300,000 still alive in April of this year. And the murder continues without end. 

I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. 

By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people.

I know that there is no great value to the life of a man, especially today. But since I did not succeed in achieving it in my lifetime, perhaps I shall be able by my death to contribute to the arousing from lethargy of those who could and must act in order that even now, perhaps at the last moment, the handful of Polish Jews who are still alive can be saved from certain destruction.

My life belongs to the Jewish people of Poland, and therefore I hand it over to them now. I yearn that the remnant that has remained of the millions of Polish Jews may live to see liberation together with the Polish masses, and that it shall be permitted to breathe freely in Poland and in a world of freedom and socialistic justice, in compensation for the inhuman suffering and torture inflicted on them. And I believe that such a Poland will arise and such a world will come about.

I am certain that the President and the Prime Minister will send out these words of mine to all those to whom they are addressed, and that the Polish Government will embark immediately on diplomatic action and explanation of the situation, in order to save the living remnant of the Polish Jews from destruction. 

I take leave of you with greetings, from everybody, and from everything that was dear to me and that I loved. 

- S. Zygelbojm

Signed on this day, May 11, 70 years ago. The following day Zygelbojm's body was found in his flat near Paddington Station in London. There is a plaque to his memory at the corner of Porchester Road and Porchester Square. 

Just one small contemporary echo.

Well, we wouldn’t want another Iraq, would we?

That's the cliche that started it. It proceeded to allowing that Syria's Baathist regime might be onto something with its talk about Salafi terrorists in the rebel leadership. Where that led was to a beggaring of the broadly popular and mostly secularist civilian militias that emerged at the outset of Assad’s hyperviolent reaction to the pro-democracy mass uprising in late 2011. 

From my column in today's Ottawa Citizen:

It meant no NATO-patrolled humanitarian corridor inside Syria. It meant pleas for a “no-fly zone” went unheeded. By last December it had meant that the clever “non-interventionists” of the NATO capitals had effectively invited the suicide-bomb artists of Jabhat al-Nusra out of the Iraqi deserts to insinuate themselves at the forefront of the Syrian insurgency. 

Prophecy fulfilled, round and round it goes, and a deeper understanding is emerging, now that Obama’s “red lines” on such weapons of mass destruction as sarin gas are proving not so red after all, and U.S Secretary of State John Kerry is reduced to grovelling at the Kremlin for a commitment to some sort of “peace conference” on Syria down the road. 

It’s an understanding that unites even Syria’s Baathists with the rebels they are slaughtering by the hundreds on an almost daily basis now. It unites Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad with his allies among the Khomeinists in Iran, the Lebanese Hezbollah and with his equally charming enemies in the Sunni ranks of al-Qaida in Iraq, now converging around Aleppo. 

Everybody agrees. Everybody knows. Obama is not a man of his word. The Americans cannot be trusted. The NATO countries are not to be taken seriously. Canada? Are you kidding? Isn’t that a country somewhere near Greenland? 

Here is the Hansard record of last night's debates in the House of Commons.

As for where this is all heading I'd say it may be heading for something like Iraq before the surge, only with no hope of a surge, or it's going to be just like Afghanistan, circa 1994: war to the knife and the knife to the hilt. That's what "non-intervention" gets you. Everybody else intervenes, everybody else picks a proxy, but the secularists and the democrats, the women and the liberals - none of these constituents end up with any militias of their own, and they're the first to get the garrotte.

Everybody in the NATO capitals just sat back and watched.  Here is where the revolution got hijacked. This was the point of no return. Here's Michael Weiss, from back when so much was still possible. Here's Michael from just a couple days ago: surprise!

Weiss has followed the Syrian revolution more closely than anyone I know. That he still thinks much is possible should count for something: "The point is not that they aren't hardcore ideologues fighting in Syria but that not everyone who professes himself to be one is necessarily that. Many so-called 'Salafis,' for instance, could not tell you the first thing about the Salafi doctrine – they just joined Suqoor al-Sham because they wanted comrades with the highest level of discipline and battlefield experience."

La lutte continue.

UPDATE. . . 
The maestro, Leon Wieseltier: "Is the death of scores and even hundreds of thousands, and the displacement of millions, less significant for American policy, and less quickening? The moral dimension must be restored to our deliberations, the moral sting, or else Obama, for all his talk about conscience, will have presided over a terrible mutilation of American discourse: the severance of conscience from action." And comrade Michael Petrou, Homage to Latakia: "Canada is footing the bill for some refugees’ tents. Maybe we’ll speed up the refugee process for Syrians fleeing Assad. It’s not exactly a stirring expression of solidarity: 'Your struggle is our struggle, and after you lose it, we’ll help you find an apartment in Mississauga.' John Baird should print that on a banner and march under it next time he visits the Middle East. . . ."

Meantime, my brief diversion this week into parochial (I mean, provincial) politics, here in British Columbia: What would be so bad about waking up May 15 to find that we’ve elected a few high-calibre MLAs not beholden to either Dix or Clark? We’re not electing an emir or a khan here. We’re electing a legislature.

Memo To Europe: No Seals, No Deals.

It was three years ago this very week that the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to ban the sale of seal products in the European Union. The move had nothing to do with wildlife conservation, marine ecological sustainability, or the prevention of cruelty to animals. The measure was explicitly intended to destroy a centuries-old sustainable industry, central to the economies of dozens of Atlantic and Arctic communities in Canada, all to protect "public morality" in Europe. Yes, you read that correctly.

A few days after the 2009 EU vote, in a touching gesture of solidarity with Canada's Inuit people, Governor-General Michaëlle Jean arrived in the Nunavut town of Rankin Inlet and proceeded immediately to an Inuit community festival where she gutted a freshly-slaughtered seal, pulled out its raw heart, and ate it. It was a graceful and splendid act of righteous defiance against what my friend Madeleine Redfern, an Inuk lawyer, a food-security activist and the former mayor of Iqaluit, properly calls a campaign animated by racism, a twisted form of cultural imperialism, and emotional blackmail.

Last month in Luxembourg the General Court of the European Union rejected a legal challenge against the ban led by the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. In this past weekend's Citizen I disclose the EU's pleadings from another, strangely-overlooked set of hearings that unfolded a few days ago before an adjudication panel of the World Trade Organization in Geneva. In that forum, Canada and Norway (probably in vain) are challenging the 2009 seal ban as a violation of international trade law, and what the EU's pleadings in that case show is that if anything, Redfern and other Inuit leaders have been rather understating the role that European ethnocentric weirdness and bigotry have played in the dispute. 

Specifically, Europe's legal case rests on a pseudo-religious conception of "public morality" articulated by a Church of England theology-of-vegetarianism eccentric by the name of "Professor Andrew Linzey" who holds an honorary divinity degree. Not to be harsh on other people's religions or anything, but the man is a witchdoctor. It is primarily from arguments arising out of Linzey's neo-Christianist mumbo-jumbo that the EU seeks to have the WTO allow its seal ban under the GATT Article XX (a) “public morals” exception. And fair enough. Europe's MEPs should be permitted to frolic in circles around whichever jack-druid they like. But can we at least please be honest with one another about what's really going on here?

Madeline Redfern counts 27 clauses of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that are violated by the coarse and vulgar subsistence-hunt “exception” the EU ban extends to Inuit and other aboriginal peoples. She counts a further 13 clauses of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights offended by the spirit and in the letter of the EU seal regime. Redfern's case is convincing. 

So, what to do about such savage and backward European practices?

Karliin Aariak of Iqaluit, daughter of Nunavut Premier Eva Qamaniq Aariak, has a very good idea, which she sets out in detail here. For starters, Aariak drew up an old-fashioned paper petition that quickly garnered several hundred signatures, mostly from Inuit communities, calling upon Ottawa to oppose any European Union application for observer status in the circumpolar Arctic Council. 

Now, Aariak is circulating an online petition to be presented to the Arctic Council itself, requesting that the Arctic Council refuse all applications for observer status from the European Union and any of its member states, institutions, and organizations, "until such time as the European Union completely terminates and lifts the seal ban it imposed in 2009."

These are reasonable measures, and a good start. There are also draft provisions of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Europe that might warrant a look-see. The treaty is expected to be ready for ratification as early as this summer and there are already reasons why the whole thing might be a bad idea anyway.

You're welcome. 

  

A Long Time Coming: Making Another World Possible.

Peter Ryley, Associate Lecturer in History at Manchester Metropolitan University, diarist at Fat Man on a Keyboard, mensch-in-residence as much of the time as he can manage in Greece, at Milina, a village in the green and bucholic Pelion Peninsula, has at long last put the writing of this book behind him: Making Another World Possible: Anarchism, Anti-capitalism and Ecology in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Britain.

I highly recommend it, and by no means because Peter is an old chum. If you want to understand why Idle No More burned up so quickly, morphing from a self-proclaimed revolutionary movement into a tarnished brand, within a few weeks, read this book. If you want to understand the kind of necessary utopianism that Occupy Wall Street asserted, absorbed and eventually smothered to death, this book's for you. There's a lot more to recommend it than this, even, and when the good people at Bloomsbury Publishing asked me whether I'd want to write a pre-publication review and endorsement, I was pleased to do so. I explained my endorsement this way. . . 

Quite apart from the durable purpose this book will surely serve for its long-overdue reconnaissance of some of the most neglected terrain in Victorian-era British radical thought, Peter Ryley’s Making Another World Possible arrives as a work of immediately urgent relevance in the current moment of tear gas, financial implosion, austerity shock, and the preeminent ecological challenge of global climate change. In his resolve to “reassert the importance of history against the arrogance of the present,” Ryley succeeds splendidly in showing that we have been here before, not least in the work of imagining human progress against the contradictions of economic growth and the limits necessarily imposed by environmental sustainability. 

No mere polemic, Making Another World Possible is history of the most serious kind, but it’s told in the most lively and refreshing sort of way. Ryley situates the young hipsters of the Occupy Movement, the direct-action cadres of the Zapatistas and the Indignados and the anti-globalization protesters of the 1990s within the same conversation as the sophisticated politicians of the Green Party and even free-market utopians. This is a conversation with perhaps its deepest roots in the raucous and cosmopolitan radical milieu of 19th century Britain, perhaps most noticeably in the early ecological anarchism of Patrick Geddes and Elisée Reclus. 

To that milieu, Ryley helpfully reclaims the overlooked Victorian individualists Herbert Spencer, Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Joseph Hiam Levy and others as upstanding contributors to schools of thought most closely associated with the likes of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. In the contemporary rediscovery of a broadly-defined anarchism as a “doctrine of hope,” with all its idiosyncrasy and utopianism and its individualist, communist, pragmatic, libertarian, and even Christian variants and foundations, Making Another World Possible serves as both an indispensable resource and a generous and engaging companion.

Canada is not serious about terrorism.

From my Ottawa Citizen blog.

This is the front page of tomorrow's Times. This is the BBC eight minutes ago: we have "varying degrees of confidence" about the use of poison gas on a "small scale" in Syria. Oh, well then. With confidence only varying and the scale being so small it makes all the difference in the world, then, does it?

How many dead so far? Is it 60,000 or 70,000? "We estimate it is actually around 120,000 people," says Rami Abdelrahman, head of Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. More varying degrees of confidence, and then, whoops, a few dozen more dead.

More numbers for you: At least 2,300 people have been tortured to death by the regime since the uprising began last year, including 80 children, 25 women, and 51 people aged over 60. Only 5 percent of all victims were armed rebels. But that's a human rights group doing the research, so there will be, of course, varying degrees of confidence we should attach the precision of the data.

Prime Minister Harper is quite right. It is not a time for sociology. In the matter of the state-terrorist regime of Bashar Al-Assad, it is a time for drones. It is time for the skies above Damascus to be darkened with drones.

Instead, we're all setting ourselves on fire over a bit of trainspotting and congratulating ourselves about how seriously we take this scourge of "terrorism." Here's my Citizen column today, about just that. Yes, I am being disgracefully impertinent to pretty well everyone. Yes, I do find it all quite funny. In a dark sort of way.

Until Canada is prepared to amend the regulations of the Anti-Terrorism Act in a reformed and public "listing" process to ensure that such terrorist scum as, say, Bashar al Assad and all his officials and agents and state lackeys are properly designated as terrorists, we should stop telling ourselves we are serious about terrorism.

Until we are prepared to amend our terror law to allow for the free movement and mobilization in Canada of any and all democratic-revolutionary movements committed to armed struggle for the overthrow of such terrorists as, say, Bashar al Assad - as a matter of law, not just as a matter of ministerial whim - we should stop telling ourselves we are serious about terrorism.

Until section 83.01(1)(b) of the Criminal Code is amended to ensure that acts of legitimate revolutionary violence undertaken for the purpose of regime change in terrorist tyrannies such as Syria are specifically extended the same exemptions as already exist for acts or omissions committed during armed conflicts carried out in accordance with conventional international law, then we should step telling ourselves we are serious about terrorism.

Do The Good People of Boston Really Need Mister Fred McFeeley Rogers Right Now?

I doubt it. From my Ottawa Citizen column today:

In place of actual acts of journalism related to Monday’s barbarism, was it really necessary for the Globe and Mail, Time Magazine, Slate and the Washington Post to gang up on everybody with pieties out of the cardigan-wearing Presbyterian host of a 1960s-era television babysitting service titled Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood?

Seriously. The Globe headline: “How to talk to kids (and especially adults) about the Boston Marathon bombings: Try Mr. Rogers.” Time: “In the Wake of the Boston Marathon Attacks, Mr. Rogers Quote Spreads Hope Across the Internet.” Slate: “The History of Mister Rogers’ Powerful Message.” The Washington Post: “Mr. Rogers gives hope while social media becomes virtual house of prayer for Boston.”

This has the aspect of some strange acid flashback to the 9/11 trauma, with demented insinuations about a “false flag” operation as a backdrop to an obsessive preoccupation with the saccharine insights of an allegedly “much loved” Fred McFeeley Rogers from Televisionland. It is this one that has gone so viral on Facebook and Twitter and such places since Monday: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

It has been like waking up in the middle of some sort of horrible Wellness Seminar. . .

It doesn't sound to me like Bostonians need to be patronized with mummy chatter and footrubs. Not when I turn to Dennis Lehane, anyway. They messed with the wrong city. This wasn’t a macho sentiment. It wasn’t “Bring it on” or a similarly insipid bit of posturing. The point wasn’t how we were going to mass in the coffee shops of the South End to figure out how to retaliate. Law enforcement will take care of that, thank you. No, what a Bostonian means when he or she says “They messed with the wrong city” is “You don’t think this changes anything, do you?”

At best, a slightly lunatic mediocrity.

At her worst, Margaret Thatcher was bloody-minded, incompetent, sadistic and vindictive, as I point out in the Ottawa Citizen today. And nowhere was her brutishness more a menace to decency and peace than in Ireland.

I admit, it's kind of personal. My late dad was a leading figure in the Irish Prisoner of War Committee here in Canada during the 1980-81 hunger strikes over which Maggie so ghoulishly presided. It probably skews things a bit too that I happen to have been named after Terence MacSwiney, who died on the 75th day of his hunger strike in Brixton Prison in 1920. But on the occasion of Baroness Thatcher's death, it seems to me these names should be remembered as well:

Bobby Sands, died May 5 1981, after 66 days on hunger strike. Francis Hughes died May 12, after 59 days. Raymond McCreesh, May 21, 61 days. Patsy O'Hara died May 21, 61 days. Joe McDonnell, July 8, 61 days. Martin Hurson, July 13, 46 days. Kevin Lynch, August 1, 71 days. Kieran Doherty, August 2, 73 days. Thomas McElwee, August 8, 62 days. Michael Devine, August 20, 60 days.

The complete list of names is rather long. This one is only for "our" crowd.

Generally speaking, I'd say Doug Saunders at the Globe and Mail has it pretty well right. 

Timothy Lavin from the Bloomberg View editorial board asks the Irish question directly: So what had Thatcher's 'steely resolve' accomplished?

Most visibly, it boosted Republican terrorism. Violent deaths related to the conflict rose to 101 in 1981 from 76 the year before, including 44 members of the security forces. Injuries rose to 1,350 from 801. Shootings increased to 1,142 from 642, and bombings reached nearly 400 that year. Far from demonstrating that the IRA's struggle was a lost one, Thatcher only intensified its opposition to rule by what it considered an ever more brutal occupying force. The horrific campaign would culminate in the IRA's attempted assassination of Thatcher herself at the Conservative Party Conference in 1984. The prime minister narrowly escaped, but five others were killed. 

The other significant consequence of Thatcher's unyielding position was that public sympathy for the hunger strikers quickly morphed into political support for Republicanism. Bobby Sands, one of the strikers, was elected to the British House of Commons for Fermanagh-South Tyrone while imprisoned. His victory "undermined the entire shaky edifice of British policy in Northern Ireland, which had been so painfully constructed on the hypothesis that blame for the 'Troubles' could be placed on a small gang of thugs and hoodlums who enjoyed no community support," wrote David Beresford in "Ten Men Dead."

Here's how stupid Thatcher's Irish policy was.

In 1988, angry about the extent to which the long-suffering British people (whose own island was subjected to a calamitous, grotesque and bloody IRA bombing campaign) were becoming sympathetic to the cause of Irish republicanism in Ulster, Thatcher ordered restrictions on the news media of the most comical kind.

Thatcher couldn't prevented British journalists from interviewing Sinn Fein or IRA leaders, but broadcast laws could be monkeyed with to prevent "terrorist voices" from disturbing the gentle eardrums of the English people. In force until 1994, the media restrictions obliged the BBC to strip the sound tape from television reports and interviews and hire actors to repeat the words of the republican interview subjects, to be overdubbed onto the video tape. Imagine watching that sort of routine absurdity on the nightly news, year in and year out.

While I'm not a Sinn Feiner of any description, it seems a proper tribute to the 1988-94 media restrictions that we link directly to Sinn Fein TV, to let Gerry Adams have the last word:

A Melancholy Air from Declan McManus.

 Who takes all the glory, and none of the shame?

Canada's Journey to Energy Superpowerhood: Voyage of the Damned.

Pity poor Calamity Joe. He just can't get a break. Or so I attempt to show in my Ottawa Citizen column today. In sum: Out west, where Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were born, all you can hear these days is the sound of weeping and gnashing of teeth in Alberta, and in British Columbia it’s mostly just the sound of people laughing at Joe Oliver.

A year ago, Joe was on such a roll. Canada's oil is ethical, organic, locally-raised, fairly-traded and shade-grown! And yet Canada's oil industry is under attack by a network of Ducks Unlimited sleeper cells directed by a cabal of radical billionaires commanded by Leonardo diCaprio from a secret underground bunker in Hollywood!

Then there was the sound of pennies dropping. Hey, wait a minute. If Petro-Canada was so sick and wrong back in the day, how come it's suddenly okay when the outfit Ottawa is inviting in to buy up all the oil sands is Petro-China? Don't the princeling-directors of the Chinese Communist Party's overseas corporate acquisitions arms count as radical billionaires? What's so "ethical" about oil that comes from companies owned by police-state gangsters who order their troops to shoot live rounds into groups of protesting Buddhist monks?

At some point the worm started to turn, and now, it's the sound of everybody laughing at Joe Oliver. And I mean everybody, not just the eco-fruitcakes we're all supposed to mock. I mean British Columbians, for starters, of all political persuasion - the very people whose province is the necessary portal to untold riches in China. Vancouverities across the board, pretty well the entire aboriginal leadership, and even the wicked mainstream media. The Globe's Gary Mason gets it dead right: 

"With so much at stake, both environmentally but also in terms of the enormous wealth contribution energy exports make to the Canadian economy, it’s regrettable that a cogent conversation on this subject isn’t occurring. Instead, any attempts at lucid discourse are being drowned out by overly dramatic, self-serving rhetoric that provides no good purpose at all. And we all lose in the process."

Dramatic self-serving rhetoric of the green sort is not in diminishing supply, either, and I am seriously beginning to wonder whether the Keystone hubbub in Americaland isn't mostly a means by which righteous and upstanding Yankees hope to make Canada pay for their own grotesque volumes of Kyoto-ignoring  greenhouse-gas effluvia.

A good case could be made, especially after that State Department report absolving Keystone of any particular role in apprehended oil sands emission hikes, that anti-Keystone activism in Americaland is largely about catharsis, and is rather an avoidance of the hard work involved in confronting America's own gargantuan Obama-led responsibility for global warming. Just a thought. For now.

In any case, this is right: "There is plenty of room to improve the environmental record of companies in the oilsands which requires more effort from Ottawa and there should be increasing vigilance about the safety of pipelines — especially older ones. But Keystone is not the key to any of that. Turning it down would be a costly, symbolic gesture."

It's Not Complicated. Bigotry Simply Lowers The Tone.

Low, stupid, cheap and wrong, small-minded, sub-literate, vulgar, bigoted, moronic, retrograde - any one of these is sufficient reason for a newspaper editor to pass on publishing a letter. A self-evidently racist letter simply lowers the tone. It is not an infringement upon anyone's free speech rights to refuse publication of such letters; it is indeed the healthy exercise of free speech to make such decisions, to say no, go away, we don't want your rubbish cluttering up the newspaper's letters pages.       

How does one determine what letters are unworthy of publication in a newspaper? A good question, the CBC's Gregor Craigie asks me this morning. Succinctly answered: Exercise the judgment of a sensible grown-up trained in the disciplines of journalism and there should be no great difficulty in determining which sort of "views" are simply deserving of quarantine.

Sorry I can't do better than that. Maybe one question I should have asked aloud was whether this incident is imagined to raise some thorny free speech question only because "racism" is a word that gets chucked around rather willynilly these days, such that when the genuine article presents itself it is not so easily distinguishable in all the flotsam simply disfavoured by the "politically correct" (I do hate that term but it seems to work here well enough).

I would even be prepared to bet that there are idiots abroad who would say that people of Norse ancestry are owed an apology from me owing to my reductio-ad-absurdum 'What have the Norwegians ever done for us?' bit on CBC this morning. No bloody way. Not after what the Scandinavians did to Brian Boru on April 23, 1014. I've been bitter about it ever since.

The Occupy Movement: Destroyed by a Conspiracy of Infiltration and Sabotage?

So says the Yankee celebrity hipster Chris Hedges, co-author with Joe Sacco of Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, about which I cannot comment because I haven't read so much as a page of it, but also author of the wildly popular Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, which I found so excruciating in its silliness that I couldn't get past the first third or so. Anyhow, in this debate with Hedges, moderated by the inestimable Steve Paikin, I do my level best to keep a civil tongue in my head. I don't do a very good job, I'm afraid. I find Hedges to be almost shockingly ridiculous and I can't understand why so many otherwise intelligent people seem to take him seriously.

As for the so-called Occupy "movement," I rest my case on the completely overwhelming evidence that the whole thing merely collapsed into a vanity-heap of its own absurdities and contradictions. I don't claim clairvoyance but it seems to me I had it pretty well right when I suggested very early on that the only thing worth considering was what, if anything, might arise from its ashes, and ashes and garbage are what it would leave behind in the greatest quantity, and indeed for the zombies that brought on Occupism's auto-cannibalism it was the whole point in the first place. This is the same fate I projected, with regret, for Idle No More. No gift of clairvoyance was necessary for that either.

It seems to me that Sam Harris, a proper American intellectual and author of such extremely worthwhile books as The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, has probably said all that needs be said about Chris Hedges: "I don’t think I have ever met anyone so determined to live as a Freudian case study: To read any page of Hedges’ is to witness the full catastrophe of public self-deception. He rages (and rages) about the anger and intolerance of others; he accuses his opponents of being 'immune to critiques based on reason, fact and logic' in prose so bloated with emotion and insult, and so barren of argument, that every essay reads like a hoax text meant to embarrass the humanities."

Meanwhile, in my Ottawa Citizen column today I'm on about some very, very welcome news and wondering aloud why more has not been made of it. It turns out that the “Third World” isn’t there anymore. The Global South has moved north. Those benighted states we’ve all grown accustomed to calling “developing countries” have been developing so much faster than Europe and North America that they’ve pretty well caught up. Released March 14, the 2013 Human Development Report concludes: “Never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast.” Here’s Khalid Malik, the report’s lead author: “The Industrial Revolution was a story of perhaps 100 million people, but this is a story about billions of people.”

This is wonderfully happy-making, and it puts Canada's Conservative government in a unique position to finally get on with honouring a six-year-old promise to put Canada's back into the work of advancing democratic development the world round. Just do it, for mercy's sake.   

About These Bloody Pandas.

They're not even proper bears. They're actually some class of raccoon. Lounging around all day at the taxpayers' expense, eating bamboo, defecating and sleeping and eating again and stinking. It' scandalous and disgusting. Giant bloody rats is what.

They should be harnessed to a water-mill or something to make some bloody use of themselves, the lazy chiselers. In any event I should rather put pins in my eyes than stand around and gawk at these big possum things for so much as a minute. I'd have them quarantined all the way back to Beijing tomorrow morning without so much as a how-do-you-do.

They should have lent us Xi Jinping instead. He's the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.Put him in some sort of pit or cage in Toronto and let him eat bamboo shoots. People could throw pennies at him.

Intead we have these pandas, which are dim, pornography-watching, preposterously overpriced propaganda gimmicks. They don't even have proper names. "Er Shun" and "Da Mao" if you please. "Bowel Movement" and "You Have Come To The Attention Of The Authorities" or something. Horrible creatures. Riddled with diseases.

The Harpers are cat fanciers, you realize. It comes from that. 

As you were.

"We will rid the world of the evil-doers," ten years after.

Today's extended play version from my Ottawa Citizen op-ed blog:

I'm of the school of thought that the Evil George Boosh should get some points for at least trying. At least I wouldn't throw a shoe at him, and I allow this publicly in the full knowledge that to do so is to unforgivably dissent from a particular narrative that is enforced by a caste of bien-pensant eunuchs for whom writing the guy's name with a dollar sign where the 's' should go is considered both high art and sufficient credentialing to be called a "progressive."

It's the contested legacy of George Bush that seems to be the real and mostly unmentionable thing at the root of much of the journo-reflection and punditry in Canada marking the tenth anniversary of the Anglo-American adventure in Iraq this week. I wanted to make that point at some point in my Ottawa column today but I didn't get round to it so I'm making it here. But the bits I want to highlight for the moment:

The case against intervention: Direct military costs exceeding $900 billion and an Iraq Body Count death toll in combatants and civilians of 162,000 over a decade, an elected government that always seems on the brink of collapse and resentful jihadist crazies making life miserable for everybody even now, 10 years on, even after the Americans have gone home. Car bombs and suicide bombs killed nearly 60 people on Tuesday.

The case for intervention: Indirect, grudging and ineffective non-lethal aid to the Syrian rebels, a UN Human Rights Council estimate of 70,000 dead in less than two years, a million refugees, two million “internally displaced” people, the vampire Bashar Assad still rampaging around the place, no end in sight and not so much as a drone in the sky above Damascus.

I can't abide that throat-clearing thing that is pretty well a bylaw-requisite prefix to any comment on Shock and Awe and its associated excitements - the way you're meant to precede any remark by making it clear that you were "against" the thing we call the War in Iraq, in order to establish your public-hygiene bona fides. Screw that. It's like no framework for the subject is possible unless it takes the shape of a tennis court. Screw that too.

It's only because a couple of conversations with perfectly intelligent people on both sides of the net today have encouraged me to smack the ball around just a bit that I will clear my throat thus:

It is (and was) quite possible for reasonable people to have (had) quite dramatically opposing views on the "to go to war or not" question viz. Iraq. It's harder to have such conversations viz. Afghanistan, because the decision was never whether "to go to war or not" in Afghanistan - this was and is the core dishonesty of the so-called "anti-war" position. The question was rather merely whether to participate in the NATO-led and UN-sanctioned military component of an ambitiously idealistic failed-state reconstruction exercise. 

So as if it matters (like I'm an important voting bloc at the UN or something), all along it's been my view that invading Iraq as the U.S. administration proposed was a bad and lame idea (and was horrific in the incompetence of its execution), but that once the bombs started falling the "to go to war or not" question was over and done with and moot like stink. This is where I found myself parting irrevocably from the mainline Left position, which was also indistinguishable from the bourgeois liberal establishment position, which I'll return to in just a sec. 

I wante to say first, to be fair to Jean Chretien (I put him in the pillory for a bit in my column) he may have had a point in the "you've already won the war" line of argument he put to George Bush back in 2003. Retroactive clairvoyance is a handy talent to have, but we must still ask out loud: What would have happened had the Yanks chosen to end the corrupt and collapsed Iraq sanctions regime with an effort to increasingly contain and isolate Saddam Hussein within Iraq itself, instead of mounting a hellfire invasion of the country? Hindsight just isn't that good, I'm afraid, because the only honest answer is still: How the hell should I know?

Back to business:

From the minute the first bombs fell in the early hours of March 20 in Baghdad it was the first duty of the Left to put its failed anti-war argument aside and put its shoulders to the wheel of building a properly functioning democratic Iraqi state. Indeed, the Euro-American Left had the benefit of Iraqi trade unionists, secularists, democrats, feminists, socialists and liberals by the hundreds of thousands to work with.

Instead, with minor but proud and gallant exceptions, the Left reconfigured itself into an "anti-war" movement that was a sinister collaboration with establishment factions of the most grotesque sort, and not just the usual roster of celebrity-elite riffraff. It was anti-war only in name, and its mission was to spend the rest of the decade marching around in cul-de-sacs asserting a moral superiority it had no right to claim and uttering demands ("Stop the War!") it knew could not be met.

Throughout it all, the phenomenon we were all supposed to agree to call the "anti-war" movement would continue to fail to answer the first question that would necessarily arise in any honest debate about what to do about Iraq: 'Well, what would YOU do to shift the Baathist filth and the jihadist gargoyles that persist in torturing and persecuting the Iraqi people?' One shouldn't have to be first told that it has been at the feet of that filth and those gargoyles that 90 percent of the Iraqi body count from the last ten years is laid, and to answer the question, one shouldn't require even the beginnings of a fully coherent answer.

All that's reasonably required of a grown-up is the capacity to recognize that it was the first and most necessary of questions on the subject, and this is what brings us to the main thing that actually does connect Iraq with 9-11. It's the same toxic politics that will make fetish objects of questions that go nowhere precisely because they're not intended to go anywhere. The entire "anti-war" paradigm of the past decade was set up that way from the start. It wasn't to offer answers to the most important questions of a generation. It was to avoid them altogether.

Proper questions: 'How do you propose to catch the terrorists?' 'How do you propose to fight Al Qaida?' Don't ask.

And so it has come to pass, ten years on, that it is practically forbidden to recall that "weapons of mass destruction" was a weird term that had almost no life at all prior to or outside the Iraq dilemma, and in any case WMDs were only one of many reasons why overthrowing the Baathist tyranny was broadly held (even by American Democrats and by British and European leftists) to be the only righteous "foreign policy" objective any self-respecting democracy could maintain in the matter of Iraq.

But that was before a certain ill-tutored Texan found himself in the big chair in the Oval Office, and most unforgivable and unmentionable of all, it was a radical faction out of the conservative movement that convinced him to actually do something about Iraq. Thus, ten years later, we are left with the central formula of a rigidly-enforced revisionist narrative of the crudest simplicity - "No WMDs = Bu$h/BLiar lied = millions died" - which is itself a lie, and discernibly so even from a great distance. 

Nowadays we're not even supposed to mention the name of the lie's primary inventor and architect. So I will name him: Scott Ritter. He was the suave but emotionally and intellectually incontinent US Marines ballistics specialist who became a celebrity UN weapons inspector and a Fox News personality before shifting his greasy allegiances to Seymour Hersh and the Code Pink generation. 

Turns out that Ritter's reported enthusiasm for sexual exhibitionism wasn't a Ziocon calumny against his reputation after all. It's merely a matter of the gross record now that Ritter's serving prison time on six counts, including felony unlawful contact with a minor.  Where else are they now? Don't get me started. 

Okay, just this one because I can't resist: Congressional uberdingbat Dennis Kucinich has been lately spotted moneygrubbing around New Age gatherings with a proposal for some sort of semi-judicial proceedings (with the passive-aggressive "Truth and Reconciliation" in the title) to be brought against certain people - and you know who we're talking about here - specifically, “those responsible for misleading us into annihilating innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere." Odd how all UFO-spotters tend to turn out to be, yes, batty after all. 

The legacy of the last decade's "anti-war" politics reaches beyond such now-marginal types as Kucinich, mind you. It is what leaves top-ranking Democrat John Kerry to offer only treacle and mewlings to Syrian rebels who would rather get some actual help to so that their country should be converted back from a human abattoir to an actual country.

As Nick Cohen observes: Even David Cameron is keener on taking practical steps to prevent a catastrophe in the Levant than this, and when Syrians can receive a fairer hearing from a shire Tory than an American 'progressive' you should have the wit to realise that a sickness has taken hold.

Before we leave John Kerry completely, and since this post was supposed to be at least partly about the legacy of George Bush, I wonder whether you could name without peeking the thing that even John Kerry says George Bush did that has so far saved perhaps five million lives. It's something hardly anyone ever talks about, and when it's mentioned it's almost always reluctantly, and it's hidden in thickets of yesbutteries and yesbutwhatabouteries. 

It's called PEPFAR, and it's about Bush's main "crusade," which was and is the War against AIDS and the cause of creating an AIDS-free generation, globally.

Bush still enjoys high popularity ratings in Africa, where he's widely regarded as one of the continent's great benefactors. (Meanwhile, the Obama administration's proposed PEPFAR cuts have triggered protests around Africa — even in Kenya, where the president's family ties have ensured him plenty of favorable coverage.) "Bush did more to stop AIDS and more to help Africa than any president before or since," says New York Times correspondent Peter Baker, who's writing a history of the Bush-Cheney White House that's due to appear in October. ". . .If it weren't for Iraq, it would be one of the main things history would remember about Bush, and it still should be part of any accounting of his presidency."

It's amazing how mere mention of this aspect of the Bush legacy can cause people you might have thought were perfectly sensible adults to wet their pants and stamp their feet. Well, here's a pencil you big crybaby, write the guy's name with a $ instead of an 's' and maybe that will make you feel better. 

The rest of you: You're welcome. 

As you were.

Well. Look At What The Cat Dragged In.

Okay, six weeks without posting here. I am very bad. I've been very busy. So we'll work backwards from my column today:

Another day, another pogrom in Pakistan: What Canada can do about any of this is a question worth debating, but the criticisms of the Office of Religious Freedom initiative have been mainly parochial, stupidly partisan and churlish, especially the notion that it is likely to show some sort of unseemly favouritism to Christians. The ugliest insinuation along these lines came from the notoriously creepy Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose Amira Elghawaby couldn’t resist sneering that Ambassador Bennett’s Catholicism would make him “biased toward Christian groups.” 

One can only hope that Bennett will not overcompensate to show his even-handedness, given what is now evident to everyone from the Economist magazine to the Vatican, from the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom to the Pew Research Center, and from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Rupert Shortt, the religion editor of the Times Literary Supplement: the overwhelming majority of the religious who suffer persecution throughout the world today happen to be Christians.

But who said the dumbest thing about the Office of Religious Freedom? My vote goes to Liberal MP David McGuinty, who "also criticized the move as a blurring of the time-honoured line that separates church and state. He said Canada already has a safeguard for religious freedom. 'We have a document in this country that does that, it's called the Charter of Rights.'"

(Insert sound of crickets here).

McGuinty appears to have mistaken Pakistan, the Sudan, Tibet and Iran for jurisdictions covered by Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He also appears to be in desperate need of someone to disabuse him of his delusion that Canada is the United States, where there really is a line separating church and state.

Anyway. On the subject of theocratic bullies and crackpots, what to do about the Khomeinists and their ten-year unblemished record of nuclear subterfuge, shell-gaming, lies and defiance of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN Security Council? I don't know, quite frankly.

Nobody wants a war with Iran, but sanctions clearly aren’t working. China — Iran’s main trading partner — adamantly opposes any further sanctions. In Canada’s submission to the IAEA this week, the word “sanctions” doesn’t appear once. “The crisis over Iran’s nuclear program has persisted for ten years and the international community simply cannot allow this impasse to continue,” Canada’s report asserts. “Should Iran continue to refuse to cooperate with the IAEA, against the wishes of the Board of Governors, the Board must consider additional robust action.” 

Whatever that “robust action” might entail, a very safe bet is that it will produce no discernible result unless and until bombs begin falling on Iranian targets. Nobody wants that to happen. But nobody wants a nuclear-armed Iran, either. In any event, the carnival has to be brought to an end. 

Now. How about that Hugo Chavez guy, eh? What's his legacy? I'm not impressed:

He leaves behind a broken and corrupted judiciary, the upper echelons of the country’s armed forces infested with drug lords, millions of Venezuelans living in fear of the knock on the door in the night, a currency worth only a fifth of what it was a decade ago, food shortages, crumbling roads, collapsing bridges, crippling inflation, ballooning deficits, a rigged currency, an epidemic of street crime, and rolling electricity blackouts.

Boy did that one ever get me in trouble with a certain class of person. You know the type. Bernard Henri Levi call it the "posthumous cult of Chavez," and notices that it "swells and grows more toxic" the more putrid el commandante's corpse becomes. James Bloodworth is very much worth reading on the subject, from a proper democratic socialist perspective (James is always worth reading, actually). At the Globe and Mail, Doug Saunders helpfully notices that there has been a revolution of sorts going on in Latin American in recent years, and the poor and dispossessed have been benefiting from it, and Hugo Chavez has had nothing to do with it at all.  

For some reason I can't help but think that Justin Trudeau would have gone just all squishy with excitement to have had the chance to hang out with Hugo and Sean and Naomi and Oliver. Certainly his Castro-fetishizing brother Alexandre would have felt right at ease, but it will not be, c'est dommage, and so I guess I'll just have to settle for pointing out how spectacularly easy it is to invite comparisons between Justin Trudeau and Sarah Palin, and Silvio Berlusconi.

Here's what is not easy: watching this video without laughing yourself sick.Perhaps not so funny: Canada’s very own Liberal Party is on actually the verge of handing its crown to someone it would not be entirely wrong to call a largely talentless and insufferably foppish celebrity drama queen.

You know who's a smart guy and a good egg? Kennedy Stewart. He's an NDP MP. He's got some idea about how to make Canada's democracy work better. Long story short: Kennedy Stewart is no jackass. There are dangerous ideas hovering at the edges of his private member’s bill, but they’re not all stupid ideas. Not by a long shot. Stewart should be allowed to proceed. But he should proceed with extreme caution.

Here we go: everybody gets all angsty and shouty about Canadian history. Odd, the fallout. There was lots of it, for things I didn't write and ideas I don't have. The thing is, my shelves fairly groan and creak with the cultural and social histories certain academic historians decided I don't like. Odd. I think its because so many of them are still furious with Jack Granatstein for having interesting things to say. In any case, if nothing else I will have introduced Christopher Dummit to a wider audience. Here's his take on the subject of my column. 

Er, actually, his ideas were the subject of my column. Oh you know what I mean. Just keep an eye on Christopher Dummitt. He's proper smart.            

For sticking with me this far, a treat. Here's a pack of fine gadgies kicking up a storm in the North Carolina Mountains, I believe 1962, at Old Man Bascom Lunsford's Place:

This doesn’t have the ring of an imperialist adventure about it somehow.

"The tide of war is receding," U.S. President Barack Obama continues to insist, plumbing the depths of the American capacity for self-delusion and finding it, so far, bottomless. Canada, meanwhile, proves no more useful to the French military operation that is kicking jihadist backside in Mali, but it turns out the French and their British and African allies don't need much help anyway. That's the subject of my Ottawa Citizen column this week: Vive la France.

 

Further To The Badgering About Aboriginal "Consent."

Here's some backstory, from my Ottawa Citizen op-ed blog.

In my Ottawa Citizen column this week, "Peering into the abyss of First Nations neglect", I lead off with what you could call a teachable moment that occurred in a testy exchange between Liberal elder Bob Rae and the CBC's Terry Milewski. The back-and-forth occurred at the Ottawa press conference that was called to talk about the terms that ended Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s six-week liquids-only fast - as the Aboriginal People' Television Network called it.

Rae gave Milewski a bit of a tongue-lashing for the tone he took in his question about whether it is realistic to expect fulfillment of the ambitious 13-point fast-ending declaration that Rae himself had played some sort of role in putting together as a means to convince Chief Spence to call it quits and go back home.

In my column I take Rae to task specifically for browbeating Milewski about his question about the commitment by the Assembly of First Nations and the Opposition parties to ensure that “all federal legislation has the free, prior and informed consent of First Nations where inherent and treaty rights are affected or impacted.” Milewski referred to this as an apparent demand for an aboriginal  "veto."

I quote Rae as saying: "That is the law today." Also: "That’s the law of Canada." The full quote: "That is the law today, Terry. That is not unrealistic. That's the law of Canada." A little later: "That is the law of Canada, as it has been expressed and interpreted by the Supreme Court of Canada."

I pointed out that in fact, the law in Canada provides for no such thing, and so long as “inherent and treaty rights” can mean whatever anyone says they mean, the words themselves are meaningless anyway. To the extent that the courts have given the words enforceable meaning in specific cases, the ways that aboriginal rights are merely “affected or impacted” requires no consent at all.

Further: The courts have been quite clear that “consent” is desirable in cases where aboriginal rights will be unavoidably infringed; When provinces enact regulations that, say, restrain aboriginal hunting and fishing rights, consent might even be necessary. But even the leading Canadian case on aboriginal title — the landmark 1997 ruling Delgamuukw Versus the Queen — makes it plain that governments are perfectly entitled to infringe upon aboriginal rights for any number of reasons.

These reasons include forestry, mining, the construction of hydroelectric dams, agriculture, economic development generally, and “the settlement of foreign populations to support those aims,” as the judges in Delgamuukw put it. Aboriginal rights will be unavoidably affected by these things. Aboriginal consent is not required.

Seven years after Delgamuukw, in 2004, the Supreme Court of Canada elaborated on the matter of aboriginal consent in Haida Nation Vs. British Columbia (Minister of Forests). The judges ruled: "The process of consultation and possible accommodation does not give Aboriginal groups a veto over what can be done with land pending final proof of the claim. The Aboriginal 'consent' spoken of in Delgamuukw is appropriate only in cases of established rights, and then by no means in every case. Rather, what is required is a process of balancing interests, of give and take."

It's important that what's really going on here is right out in the open.

The matter of "consent" has been popping up in Idle No More rhetoric from the beginning, usually by way of reference to the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Specifically, the foundational claim that Idle No More made for itself was that eight statutes introduced and passed by the Conservative government, including its massive omnibus Bill C-48 (which is to say pretty well the entire Conservative legislative agenda for last fall's sitting of the House of Commons) was in violation of the UN Declaration.

 Specifically, Idle No More claimed that all these laws violate the UN Declaration's Article 19: "States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free, prior and informed consent before adopting and implementing legislative or administrative measures that may affect them."

That's a really, really badly written article. Practically any law in Canada could be said to "affect" aboriginal Canadians because aboriginal Canadians are citizens. It would be interesting to know whether the New Democrats and the Liberals understand the implications of their agreement with the substance of Article 19, and further by specifically agreeing with Chief Spence, in her declaration, on "the full implementation of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples." 

In Canadian law - and indeed in U.S. and Australian law - the courts most certainly do not require aboriginal consent even to laws or administrative measures "that may effect them." Bob Rae was wrong to say otherwise - but is he saying this is what he wants? Is this what the NDP proposes? What might this mean, exactly? How would it work? I know Terry Milewski can drone on a bit, but aren't these fair questions?
Ottawa took a bashing for failing to sign on to the UN Declaration back in 2007 (I gave the Conservatives a bit of a bashing about it myself). There was no reason the Conservatives could not sign on, with caveats - besides, the UN declaration is "aspirational" and unenforceable anyway. And indeed, when Ottawa did sign on in November, 2010, Ottawa did so in good faith, and after registering its caveats, not least was the caveat that "free prior and informed consent" should not be construed as agreeing to an aboriginal  "veto."
Here's how Canada explained itself: "These concerns are well known and remain. However, we have since listened to Aboriginal leaders who have urged Canada to endorse the Declaration and we have also learned from the experience of other countries. We are now confident that Canada can interpret the principles expressed in the Declaration in a manner that is consistent with our Constitution and legal framework."

Is Bob Rae now saying we should be interpreting the UN Declaration in some other way? 

Don't get me wrong. I like Bob Rae, and he was being an honest broker and a decent statesman by trying to find a way for Chief Spence to listen to her own band members and most of her fellow chiefs and walk off Victoria Island with some dignity.

But malarky is malarky, all the same. 

I'm Not Your Aromatherapist. It's Not My Job.

From my Ottawa Citizen op-ed page slot:
Two months into Idle No More, this is the sound of the rubber hitting the road: Canadians' overall level of concern about the problems plaguing aboriginal communities is unchanged from two years ago despite the Idle No More movement, Chief Theresa Spence's liquids-only fast, and everything else attending to the disquiet in First Nations communities, a new Ipsos-Reid poll shows.

I draw attention to the poll results not to suggest that the grassroots flash-mob attendees and round-dance goers should be faulted in any way for having failed to "raise the consciousness" of the Canadian public about aboriginal concerns. But I am drawing attention to the important fact that aboriginal concerns are already Canadian concerns, and this has been the case for some while. Nearly two-thirds of us want Ottawa to work to raise the quality of life in aboriginal communities, same as two years ago.  

Undertaken for Postmedia News, the poll was conducted from January 7 to January 14, the zenith of the media focus on Idle No More. The poll's sample size was just over 1,000 people, which is good enough to be reliably accurate to within plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, 95 per cent of the time.

So. If everybody wants forward movement, why no traction?

My Ottawa Citizen column this week is an attempt to explain a major cause of that paralysis. For a lot of perfectly decent people who have found themselves swept up in Idle No More's excitements, I'm afraid it's not going to be very pleasant reading. As for those people who talk about Prime Minister Harper in the same drooling hyperbole as the famous American celebrity crackpot Donald Trump employs when he's talking about President Obama, they will want to go and have a good lie-down.

My column concerns itself with a privileged, bullying minority of reactionary and obstructionist chiefs and "activists" who persist in their grim determination to reject, derail and sabotage every opportunity for real progress opened up by Assembly of First Nations national chief Shawn Atleo. It is the main unwritten story of Idle No More so far.

I see the Macdonald-Laurier Institute's Ken Coates has come at it from a slightly different angle in today's Globe and Mail. Coates refers to "a momentous political and ideological change among first nations," with dishonorable mention going to "those who sense their power ebbing."

Since my first column on the subject of Idle No More appeared two weeks ago, I've been listening very closely to the perspectives of objectively progressive aboriginal leaders who would prefer to be building proper schools in every single First Nation community that needs one, rather than going to meetings where the first order of business is always to find some new and imaginative way to put Prime Minister Harper's name in the same sentence as the word "genocide."

I'm not at all displeased with the results of my labours, and I'm not displeased either with a comical pattern that has been repeating itself. As with that first column, and with the appearance of my column last week, and the impudent appearance of this essay, the pattern is unfolding again in all its satisfying train-schedule regularity this week. It's mainly a "social media' thing. It plays out like this.

One after the other, dizzy white hipsters parade past, calling me a racist, hectoring me about being insufficiently familiar with the history of social movements, expounding upon weighty historical subjects about which they know nothing and harrying me about the sacred contents of treaties they've never read.

It's hilarious, but it provides a perfect opportunity to repeat something serious that cannot be repeated often enough, precisely because it has been airbrushed out of all the "activist ally" propaganda attending to Idle No More. It's largely ignored by the arch-villains of the mainstream press, too. It concerns what happened the last time the "activist" Left mobilized so broadly around First Nations issues. That was in 1992, when the "social movements" worked in combination with the populist Right to defeat the Charlottetown Accord, destroying its provisions for a constitutionally-entrenched third order of aboriginal government.

No matter how you deconstruct that shameful bit of history you just can't make it fit the argument that the emancipation of aboriginal people from their shackles as wards of the state will come only after ordinary Canadians have been obliged to troop in their millions through cultural-sensitivity training programs. As the polls consistently show, the average Canadian might not understand a lot of this stuff, but nobody needs a wake-up call. We've all been awake for some long while now. Ordinary Canadians are not the problem. 

If the more degenerate outliers of the Canadian bourgeoisie want to sit around cross-legged playing pass-the-feather at teach-ins organized to examine the discursive constructions unpacked in the interrogation of heteronormativity in decolonized spaces, let them go right ahead. The rest of us need nothing of the kind.

For those of that warped disposition and temperament who have been so predictably and laughably recoiling at my trivializations of the past couple weeks, all I can say is this: You seem to have mistaken me for your wine steward.

 It's actually not my job to make you feel good about yourselves. It's certainly not my job to help you dupe angry young aboriginal people into believing the ugly and deliberately divisive pseudo-histories you've concocted. It's not my job to write things that will help you justify your Intifada-envy complex.

It's just not my job. 

Censored No More: Julie Burchill.

It all started when Suzanne Moore was browbeaten and bullied and hounded to the ends of the earth for an essay she wrote. Courtesy of New Statesman, here is the offending essay, and here is the offending paragraph: 

"The cliché is that female anger is always turned inwards rather than outwards into despair. We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual. We are angry that men do not do enough. We are angry at work where we are underpaid and overlooked. This anger can be neatly channelled and outsourced to make someone a fat profit. Are your hormones okay? Do you need a nice bath? Some sex tips and an internet date? What if, contrary to Sex and the City, new shoes do not fill the hole in your soul? What if you aspire to another model of womanhood than the mute but beautifully groomed Kate Middleton? What if your anguish is not illogical but actually bloody spot on?"

She's a bit sick of the cliché, is the point, a point not a few idiots failed to get. Julie Burchill, the Observer's delightfully cantankerous resident genius, decided to have a go at all the precious offence-taking. For her trouble, she had her column pulled by the Observer's cowardly editor. On my Ottawa Citizen page, you can read Julie's censored essay, in its entirety.

You're welcome.

More Idle Chatter.

(Ottawa Citizen op-ed version is here.)

Here's what we've been missing about the viral phenomenon called "Idle No More," the thing we're all supposed to be dazzled about on account of its radical freshness and its innovations in horizontal leadership and its exciting and unpredictable momentum to who knows where.

But first off, as for all those young aboriginal people who have taken the opportunity of all the media attention to get out there and drum and chant at shopping mall flash mobs and whatnot: Good for them. Fair play to them and all the best to them. There's still a fighting chance that from that new generation there will arise a disciplined vanguard to mobilize all this excitement around some real and achievable goals. Modest goals, maybe, but opportunities like this don't come along every day.

But what such a "movement" will have to arise from is the thing Idle No More is now, which is not a new thing. Its foundational assertions reflect a tedious pow-wow style and a New Age lexicon that depends upon cartoonish historical revisionism and a grave abuse of the legacy of countless brave aboriginal leaders who spent decades in struggle in the courts, on logging road blockades and in fishing-ground confrontations, in order to get aboriginal people where they are today.

And where are aboriginal people today? In terms of recognition and respect, the state of aboriginal rights law, the constitutional position and federal policy. . . aboriginal people have probably never had it this good. This is precisely because of the victories that aboriginal people have won by actually exercising their rights, not just by banging on about them at rallies. Fishing rights, by going fishing. Hunting rights, by going hunting. And in all those vast regions of the country where aboriginal title is still very much alive and enforceable, by getting up and going outside and acting like they owned the place.

Where aboriginal people are today in terms of the social and economic conditions in Indian country, that's another story. It may be as bad as it's ever been, especially in remote reserve communities and in the inner cities.As I noted in my Ottawa Citizen column last week: Aboriginal teenagers in Canada are perhaps six times more likely to kill themselves than non-aboriginal youth. Among the Inuit, youth suicide is 11 times the national average. Between 2005 and 2010, Health Canada spent $65 million on a National Aboriginal Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy. The kids kept on killing themselves, and in 2011 the Ontario Chief Coroner’s Office released a 215-page report on aboriginal suicides in Northern Ontario. One of the report’s key recommendations: the creation of a national suicide prevention strategy.

Don't kid yourself. You can call Prime Minister Stephen Harper all sorts of wicked names - any jackass can do that, including me - but this government is no worse than its predecessors. Here's as close as I'm going to come to giving the new generation of aboriginal activists some advice: You're going to have to take it yourself. Nobody's going to give it to you. You're going to have to sort out your own affairs - no government is going to do it for you. Militancy is all very romantic and thrilling and you'll have legions of earnest white "allies" urging you on. But if your point is to fight, you're headed down a dead end. If you're point is to win, you've got a fighting chance.

The thing that continues to creep me out about Idle No More is the subject of my column today. There are eagle feather rituals and sacred fires to attend to and prophecy-recitations and matriarchal warrior-spirit invocations and shout-outs to the Creator. There are spirit healers and bundle carriers and white people lining up to be smoke-cleansed and it's all so, like, spiritual. But most of this stuff is just pow-wow performance art that doesn't even have the most tenuous connection to any real aboriginal traditions in Canada. 

My point is: enough with the fixations on aboriginal hyper-authenticity and play-acting in period costume already. There's nothing new about this. It's old - but only as old as the traditions that white people began when they first started holding up funhouse mirrors for aboriginal people to see themselves in.

Here's what I mean. See that gadgie with the spear in the photo to the right? The famous photographer Edward S Curtis took that beautiful picture in Clayoquot Sound in 1916, just a stone's throw from Ahousat, the home village of the eminently competent Assembly of First Nations grand chief Shawn Atleo. The photograph is called The Whaler. The handsome geezer in the picture is believed to have gone by the name Kalespiel. The photograph, like pretty well all the Idle No More media imagery, is a set-up job. It's play-acting in period costume. Nuu-Chah-Nuulth people didn't dress anything like that in 1916. But here's what's more important.

In Kalespiel's father's generation, Nuu-Chah-Nuulth sealers were already overwintering in the Sea of Okhotsk and enjoying their shore leave in the Japanese port city of Yokohama. Kalespiel's dad's people owned their own fleet of schooners - in the late 1800s at Ditidaht, Jimmie Nyetom, Charlie Chipps and Jim Nawassum each owned schooners and ran their own ships' crews. The Heiltsuk halibut fisherman Fred Carpenter built his own sealing schooner way up in Bella Bella at a cost of $4000, a fortune at that time. Maquinna John Claphanhoo ran a fleet of three schooners, and down at Makah, Chestoqua Peterson owned the 42-ton brig Columbia and ran his own fur trading post.

 I wrote about all that in this book.

My point here is the proposition that until white people came along, Canada was populated by barefoot spirit-beings called "Indians" who pranced around in loincloths with their pointed sticks in the forest primeval - that's just white people talking, and the "Indians" who talk like this have merely internalized this outwardly benign but nonetheless racist hogwash. I'm bored sick of it. We shouldn't need to point out that there was slavery, oppression, and often almost interminable warfare in much of Canada, back in the day. Not to be indelicate about it, but "Indians" were acting like a bunch of damn Europeans long before Champlain and his crowd showed up.  

I'm also coming at this with some baggage, I confess. My first book was A Death Feast in Dimlahamid, which is a chronicle of the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en "land claim" struggle that led to the landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision known as Delgamuukw Versus the Queen. It was a slam-dunk for the aboriginal-rights cause, happily. I spent much of this past summer back up with my old pals in the Skeena country. I had the great pleasure of going fishing with the Loring family at Gitsegukla and spent some time up at Fort Babine at the fishery there too - a magnificent fishery only lately revived after a century - and it was a glorious thing to behold, let me tell you. Lots of Babine kids working hard and pulling down decent wages, besides.

I spent years covering aboriginal affairs as a reporter for the Vancouver Sun during the darkest and angriest days of British Columbia's aboriginal rights fights, and there were lots of fights. A third of Canada's "Indian bands" are in B.C., and the province is almost all "untreatied," so there we are. My second book, Nemiah, the Unconquered Country, I co-wrote with the Xeni'gwet'in people out in the West Chilcotin. I also co-authored Amongst God's Own, a book about residential schools, with the survivors of Saint Mary's Indian Mission.

I also spent a few months as an analyst with the Native Council of Canada in Ottawa during the aboriginal self-government negotiations in the Charlottetown Accord, and when it went down in flames in a national referendum in 1992 it was in no small part because of the "social movement" activists who campaigned against it because it didn't contain a constitutional amendment for a "social charter," if you can believe it. They are among the same Occupy and anti-globalization and white Idle No More "allies" we're hearing so much from these days, and they've yet to be asked to explain themselves for their complicity in the unresolved self-government and "nation-to-nation" imbroglios the AFN is mired in even now.

I even spent time as an analyst with the B.C. Treaty Commission (a bureaucratic and policy catastrophe if there ever was one) during its first six months of operation, when Chuck Conaghan was the boss (a fine Ulsterman he was, too). Quite sensibly, most B.C. First Nations are just getting on with life as best they can as though the B.C. treaty process isn't even there. They're just acting like they own the place, enforcing Delgamuukw's admonition that the Crown and First Nations must reconcile aboriginal title with Crown sovereignty, and the mining companies and the logging companies are obliged to make a "reasonable accomodation" with aboriginal rights and interests, and for the most part, everybody's muddling through. For now. The rednecks lost the war ages ago, in any case. 

I don't set this out to "credential" myself. My opinions aren't necessarily better than anyone else's and I am only vaguely interested in my opinions anyway. But I thought I'd get this down just to be clear about where I'm "coming from", as they say. There's a bit more of that here, too, in a broadcast of a panel discussion on Steve Paikin's excellent program On The Agenda, with the Mohawk intellectual Russell Diabo (we disagreed about the nature of Idle No More but I really admire that guy), Idle No More personality Pam Palmater, Hayden King, and Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux.
Anyway, here's the thing. Even in those First Nations communities where the culture is flourishing and people are relatively healthy and there's work to be had, it's like this: the old people speak the old language, the working adults speak the old language and English, and the youngsters speak only English. A 6,000-year-old language dies that quickly. The Gitxsan kids who were just being born when I wrote Death Feast, now they're 20.

You can lose an entire generation of kids to suicide, drug abuse, welfare ennui and alcoholism in the span of a single term of an AFN Grand Chief. There's no more time for grand solutions.

There's work to be done.

Now.