So much stuff happens and it's awful and then we just move on to the next atrocity and we don't seem to remember anything. Some people (gawd blessum!) appear to be born anew every day. There's nothing to learn from the past because they hardly remember the past. [That link doesn't actually validate the point I was trying to make. But fuck it. It's interesting and I'm leaving it in.]
I know that a lot of my former readers in the ageing and shrinking blogosphere now regard me as a hopeless Putin-puppet (because they're stupid) but I'm going to refer to a conversation that I had with two meat-space acquaintances about Putin's invasion of the Ukraine to illustrate a point.
Along with everyone else brainwashed by the corporate/imperialist mainstream media they'd decided that Putin invaded Ukraine because he's a megalomaniacal madman bent on reconquering the Russian Empire. He's a thug for whom declaring war and slaughtering thousands of people is of no consequence in comparison with his vast ego.
Neither of these gentlemen had even heard of Minsk 1 and Minsk 2. And, of course, neither of them were aware of Putin's offer to sign a joint-USA-Russian agreement wherein Russia would respect Ukraine's sovereignty in return for US guarantees of the Ukraine's neutrality. [By the by; I don't know much about that last link. It's just that it's almost impossible with current search engine algorithms to find something that's not from some pro-Western propaganda site arguing that Putin is the new Hitler and all his promises are false. (Unlike the USA's promises.)]
I asked my buddies: "Why would Putin submit a promise not to invade Ukraine if he was going to invade the country anyway?" They said they couldn't explain it. BUT HERE'S THE THING: I know it's very easy for people to say "I don't know" in response to a question that undermines their view of the world but to then dismiss that momentary discomfort and continue to blithely believe what they already believe after the moment has passed. So I asked them the same question again to re-establish that it makes absolutely no sense to believe that Putin would voluntarily enter into an agreement not to invade the Ukraine if the USA guaranteed its neutrality if he was hell-bent on invading the country anyway. Having to admit this reinforced the absurdity of the proposition.
Here's a quote from Chomsky:
Soon after the war, “the United States Department acknowledged that they had not taken Russian security concerns into consideration in any discussions with Russia. The question of NATO, they would not discuss. Well, all of that is provocation. Not a justification but a provocation and it’s quite interesting that in American discourse, it is almost obligatory to refer to the invasion as the ‘unprovoked invasion of Ukraine’. Look it up on Google, you will find hundreds of thousands of hits.”
Chomsky continued, “Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion. By now, censorship in the United States has reached such a level beyond anything in my lifetime. Such a level that you are not permitted to read the Russian position. Literally. Americans are not allowed to know what the Russians are saying. Except, selected things. So, if Putin makes a speech to Russians with all kinds of outlandish claims about Peter the Great and so on, then, you see it on the front pages. If the Russians make an offer for a negotiation, you can’t find it. That’s suppressed. You’re not allowed to know what they are saying. I have never seen a level of censorship like this.”
Caitlin Johnstone expands upon this thusly;
People don’t go adding the same gratuitous adjectives and modifiers to something over and over again unless they’re trying to manipulate how it’s perceived. If your neighbor always referred to his wife as “my wife who I definitely never beat,” you’d immediately become suspicious because that’s not how normal people talk about normal things. We don’t say “round Earth” or “the Holocaust that totally happened,” we just say the words, because their basic nature is not seriously in dispute and we’ve got nothing invested in manipulating or obfuscating people’s understanding about them.
The need of the political/media class to continually bleat this phrase “unprovoked invasion” over and over again is itself a confession that they know they’re not telling the whole truth.
...
None of this is to say that Russia is blameless in this war; if I provoke someone into punching somebody they are still morally responsible for having thrown the punch, but I am also responsible for having provoked it. Russia is responsible for its actions, and the US/NATO/Ukraine power structure is responsible for its actions. Putin is responsible for invading, the western empire is responsible for provoking that invasion. Not complicated.
So, anyway, that's out of the way. Now come with me on a trip down Memory Lane! First stop is the failure of the USA's project in Afghanistan (despite all of the "winning" and the mutiple times that the Canadian Armed Forces "saved" the country).
I know! I know! A lot has happened since August 2021. But isn't it still important that Canada spent over ten BILLION dollars to support a government in Afghanistan and wounded and killed many CAF men and women in the effort and that it all went to shit? How did this failure happen? Shouldn't it be important that we think about this and take steps to ensure that a similar debacle isn't repeated in the future? And we were there for what? THIRTEEN YEARS??? And didn't we debase ourselves by handing prisoners (often innocent farmers) to be tortured by the Afghanistan government? And didn't stephen harper defecate all over our parliamentary traditions to cover-up the multiple abuses going on in Afghanistan?
How did it happen? Well, the puppet-government that we were backing was full of criminals. Criminals who stole from the desperately poor people of Afghanistan. Criminals who raped the women and children of Afghanistan. The Globe & Mail once reported on how the Afghan police were infamous for supplementing their incomes by kidnapping civilians for ransom and leaving their corpses by the roadside if their families couldn't afford to pay. Corruption permeated the economy from top-to-bottom. The economy was a shambles and thousands upon thousands were driven to urban slums to become reliant on international food aid (which was always insufficient).
Idiots and imbeciles would sagely write how these issues made our job difficult. DIFFICULT?!? Obviously (from the result in August 2021) they made it IMPOSSIBLE!!! Imagine you had a brother who felt compelled to say: "I realize that my having molested your children for almost a decade is going to make our relationship difficult for the foreseeable future." The sickening absurdity is unavoidable.
We shouldn't allow inherently moronic and insane statements like that a pass. Our task in Afghanistan wasn't difficult. We backed a government of murderers, rapists and thieves. This government was only sustained from external infusions of money and military resources. It's like we turned Afghanistan over to the gangsters in "Goodfellas." OF COURSE it was doomed to failure. And OF COURSE the Canadian politicians who pursued their policies were shit-heads and assholes and scumbags. And every moron who blindly supported that garbage only revealed their colossal ignorance and stupidity. And we should REMEMBER this travesty and the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the idiots in charge. We should not forget it and then find ourselves stumbling into another disgusting quagmire.
Secondly, I'd like to return to the subject of airhead Justin Trudeau's decision to use Canada's first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation to take his family on a beach vacation. Justin Trudeau was (and is) the goddamned prime minister of Canada. He'd just called a [completely unnecessary] election to run again for the job not long before. As such, he has to take the responsibilities that go with the job. Canada implemented a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation because our past (and present) treatment of the First Nations has been (and remains) evil and abysmal. Horrifyingly, earlier that year, using modern technology, First Nations activists had revealed the existence of a mass grave of 215 Aboriginal children under the grounds of a former residential school in British Columbia. (More discoveries were to follow and will follow. Because the First Nations people who had been children at these schools knew about them and their families and descendents therefore were told about them. Deaths from tuberculosis, disease, starvation and deliberate, outright physical abuse, killed hundreds upon hundreds of First Nations children and they were all dumped into mass graves. The story is one of nauseating cruelty and racist insanity.)
If anything, these discoveries made the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation even more important than it had been when it was first proposed. So what did Justin Trudeau do? Well, as you can read in mainstream news reports, he lied and his office said he was in meetings that day. The truth that he took his family for a beach vacation in Tofino eventually got out. Supposedly, Trudeau meeting with some First Nations Elders for a ceremony the night before, but once that was out of the way it was time to rest and relax at the beach with his family.
Shameless Liberal hacks began mewling and whining about how pointing fingers at Justin Trudeau's racist callousness distracted Canadians from the TRUE MEANING of the day and needlessly "politicized" things.
I rather think that the PM chilling with his family distracted from the meaning of the day. I rather think that it was "political" to decide to ignore the day and take a holiday.
One particularly putrid Liberal hack blathered about how the anniversaries of the deaths of Trudeau's father and brother both fall within 6 months or so from the holiday and blah, blah, blah, ... spending time with their family, ... blah, blah, blah. I wrote at the time:
Do you know who else wanted to be with their families you fucking SHIT-HEAD???? The First Nations' children whose bodies are in those MASS GRAVES!!!!! Do you know who else wants to remember their dead? The FIRST NATIONS!!!!
Here's the thing: It wasn't just some spur of the moment thing. Lots of Trudeau's advisors and staff knew about this decision. That's why they lied about it. Furthermore, if you don't think about it at all you might feel that it's semi-understandable for Trudeau to take advantage of a national holiday to spend some time with his family even if the circumstances/optics were poor. But Justin Trudeau isn't an employee of the federal public service. He's the fucking prime minister. If he really wants to take a few days to spend with his family, it's well within his powers to do so anytime he wants to. Sure, if he has a visit scheduled with the German Chancellor he can't just cancel and be a no-show. Or if there's a big debate or vote in Parliament, he has to be there. But it's well within his power to get out his calendar and schedule a day or two to spend with his family. Instead, being a racist shit-head who loathes the First Nations, he decided to say "FUCK YOU!" to Canada's first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
It says a LOT about the kind of scumbag he is. And the reaction of his drooling fan-boys and fan-girls says a lot about them too.
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