Utterly Disgusted With Canada's Defunding of UNRWA

 Can Canada sink any lower?  This blog records my increasing disillusionment with my country, my fellow citizens, with humanity in general, over the years.  And now, with Israeli cabinet ministers openly calling for ethnic cleansing (as they slaughter 30,000 civilians with bombs and are deliberately starving 2,000,000 more) I see the Trudeau government disgracing itself (and us) by defending Israel against charges of genocide and defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).  It does this disgusting act in response to the Apartheid State of Israel's allegations that a handful of Palestinians in Gaza who worked for UNRWA participated in the attacks on October 7th.

So fucking what?  Even if these allegations are true, Hamas is no worse than the IDF.  By any calculation.  And de-funding UNRWA only serves to worsen the catastrophe of starvation and misery being perpetrated by those scumbags in the Netanyahu government.

Trudeau can make all the mewling noises that he wants; whether its voting for a ceasefire at the UN General Assembly or mildly rebuking an openly racist Israeli "Victory Conference" in Jerusalem, where card-carrying members of the Israeli Nazi Party say shit like:

"They [Palestinians] will leave. We don't give them food, we don't give them anything. They have to leave," she said in English. "The world will accept them."

None of these token acts mitigate Trudeau's slavish devotion to Israeli apartheid or blind us to his complete lack of moral integrity.

Sad Comparisons

 

I'd been thinking about this subject before I read Caitlin Johnstone's great essay: "Gaza Is Exposing Western Liberals For The Frauds They Are."

Everything that mainstream liberals claim to oppose is on full display in Israel’s actions in Gaza. Racism. Fascism. Tyranny. Injustice. Genocide. Yet they must necessarily avoid throwing themselves into opposing these things there at all cost, because it would mean acknowledging that their own political allegiances are inseparably interwoven with them. 

It would mean turning against Biden during an election year. It would mean admitting that their entire political posture against Trump all these years has been a phony performance, because they’re tacitly endorsing all the things they claimed to hate about him. It would mean admitting their entire worldview is a lie, and that all their critics to their left have been correct.

The western liberal is therefore in the year 2024 engaged in an exhausting regimen of nonstop mental gymnastics to avoid having an authentic relationship with the reality of what’s happening Gaza. They squirm this way and that, twisting their gaze toward empty nonsense like Barbie movie Oscar snubs and Trump’s latest instance of verbal diarrhea to avoid looking at what’s happening. On those odd occasions when they are forced to confront the reality of Gaza they start spouting gibberish about how “complicated” and “heartbreaking” it is and how they hope there can be peace as soon as possible, while frenetically avoiding saying precisely how that “peace” should be brought about.

Gaza exposes the mainstream western liberal ideology for the kayfabe performance it always has been. The job of the so-called liberal “moderate” has never been to oppose racism, fascism, tyranny, injustice or genocide, their job is to perpetually give the thumbs-up to one head of the two-headed monster that is the murderous western empire. Their job is to help put a positive spin on a globe-spanning power structure that is fueled by human blood. To help elect Bidens and Starmers and Trudeaus and Albaneses who will ensure that the gears of the empire keep on turning completely unhindered while paying lip service to human rights and social justice.

For me, it was watching all my fellow Torontonians out Christmas shopping as this atrocity in Gaza was continuing as it had from October 7th onward.  I wondered to myself how many of these people had gone an entire day without thinking about this deliberate mass-murder campaign going on with Canada's support.

Liberal Foreign Minister's Support for Genocide is a "9 to 5" Thing

 

Canadian MP's are universally pissed-off that protesters rallying against Canada's support for Israel's genocide of the Palestinians went to Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly's home:

thwap's 2024 readings

 

Well, another year.  (Here's last year.  Here's the first book depository.)

2024-01-18

Today I finished Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

One Hundred Years of Solitude can be read and enjoyed as merely a chronological sequence of events in the lives of the Buendia family, but it helps to know something of the underlying meaning. Gabriel García Márquez uses a fantastic fictional story as an expression of reality, with myth and history overlapping. Myth serves as a vehicle to transmit history to the reader. For example, the characters in the novel experience the Liberal political reformation of their colonial way of life, the arrival of the railway, the Thousand Days’ War (1899-1902), the corporate hegemony of the “banana company,” the cinema, the automobile, and the massacre of striking workers.

The inevitable and inescapable repetition of history is a dominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Márquez reiterates the metaphor of history as a circular phenomenon through the repetition of names and characteristics belonging to the Buendía family. The characters are controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time. Throughout the novel the characters are visited by ghosts that are symbols of the past and the haunting nature that the past has over their lives.

I found the writing to be quite poetic at times.  There was a sense of history and grandeur and folly and farce and wisdom.  At other times I felt like Marquez was a little too in love with his own talent.

Kursk

 

It is January, 2024.  I am, in all seriousness, predicting that the Russia-Ukraine War (aka: Russia's "Special Military Operation") will continue for one more "Friedman Unit."  [A "Friedman Unit" is named after airhead Zionist-imperialist Thomas Friedman who wrote propaganda for the New York Times.  Whenever he was asked for his opinion on that catastrophe, he would invariably pull the words "the next six months" out of his stinking anus, and say that something vague, but good, would happen at the end of that period of time.]

Genocide is as bad as it gets (Jan. 16th completed)

 

Years and years ago I heard about a book with the title Eating People is Wrong.  I got the book from somewhere and started it but the way the white, male, British author used some international student from Africa as a figure of fun soon gave me a bad taste in my mouth and I quickly stopped reading.  I mention it here because the title seemed to be this proud assertion of the obvious attempting to combat an age of moral relativism.  

Some would argue it's not as simple as that.  They would say that settler families trapped in the Sierra-Nevada mountains, or a soccer team on a plane that crash-landed in the Andes were only doing what they had to, to survive, when they ate the bodies of those who were already dead.  Relatedly, through online dating, I met a mousy woman (small, plain, quiet, nervous) who somehow felt compelled to tell me four times during our short acquaintance that she would have no problem resorting to cannibalism in such situations.  We met late on a Saturday afternoon after she'd insisted we could still meet even though she'd been up all night with her suicidal gay friend at CAMH emergency after having spent the day looking after her dying father.  I thought it best to call it an evening when she finished her glass of cola as she looked and sounded exhausted.  That seemed to piss her off and she was quietly hostile to me on the streetcar trip to Yonge Street.

A scene from my life.  I think that was at least five years ago.  I'm fifty-seven.  Thousands upon thousands of Palestinian children will have no future, no more scenes from their lives to look back on, no ability to look back upon anything, as they were murdered by Israeli bombs.  And tens of thousands more will die from starvation and disease, deliberately inflicted upon them by the nazi-brained zionist scum in the Netanyahu coalition of corrupt, murderous racists.  This includes the racist, apartheid-enforcing Israeli Defence Force of cowards and bullies.  And how many tens of thousands of Palestinian children might survive this nightmare with their bodies whole but their minds traumatized by the murders of their parents, their brothers and sisters, their friends, their communities, at the hands of the Israelis?  GENOCIDE IS WRONG.  GENOCIDE IS AS BAD AS IT GETS.  And every single Canadian shit-head from Justin Trudeau, to Pierre Poilievre to Cathie From Canada, who tries to deny this simple fact has lowered themselves beyond redemption.

The Disgraceful Justin Trudeau: Genocide Apologist

 

Well, he did it.  The airhead, former pretty-boy prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, has decided that slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent human beings with bombs and rockets, cutting-off all their access to food, drinking water and medical care, and saying that you are engaging in collective punishment and that you want them all to move somewhere else, doesn't constitute "genocide."

Interesting Times

 

It's apparently not true that the Chinese had a curse: "May you live in interesting times."  Be that as it may, we are living in interesting times.  My reaction to this CounterPunch article about Democratic Party USA activists' disillusionment with Joe Biden is that this is how a civilization collapses.

Neither Trump nor Biden

 

I have long been nauseated by the shameless, soulless psychopathic mediocrity named Antony Blinken.  A few years ago he was yammering about how Iran was a threat to stability in the Middle East.  His next achievement was arrogantly refusing all of Putin's efforts to avoid war in Ukraine, thereby condemning MILLIONS of Ukrainians to death, dismemberment and disapora.  (What probably pisses Blinken off about the way things turned out in Ukraine is that NATO's weakness has been exposed and all of Europe is finding out that the USA's promises are empty, even when they're made to white people.) Russia has handed the USA a gigantic diplomatic and military failure.  And make no mistake about it: Ukraine will collapse just as suddenly as the military of our puppet-government in Afghanistan collapsed.  Just as idiots (like Joe Biden) were babbling stupidly about the numbers and the weapons and the training of the Afghan National Army up to two days before it completely evaporated, there are still lying or deluded shit-heads talking about isolated Ukrainian victories (real or imagined) as that country of 11 million people without money or industry starts to scour everywhere it can to put elderly men, pregnant women and the least-wealthy university students into the line as the fourth wave of cannon-fodder.

Even More Victories

 

Jacobin has a story about "Canada's New Gilded Age."  Here's some highlights:

Welcome to “Canada’s Gilded Age.” That’s what the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) is calling the era of runaway corporate salaries and bonuses. The name is fitting. In a new report, the think tank finds that 2022 was a smashing success for CEOs, who broke records with an average annual pay of $14.9 million — a surge of $600,000 above their 2021 remuneration. It’s good work, if you can get it.

However, for the rest of us that aren’t corporate executives, the struggle to make ends meet continues. The average CEO salary shakes out to 246 times the earnings of the average worker, which means that by the morning of January 2, chief executives had earned as much as one of their workers does in a year. 

...

The CCPA reveals that CEO salaries grew by 4.4 percent last year — amounting to an average increase of $623,000.  ... Workers, on the other hand, saw a 3 percent pay bump, translating to a meager $1,800 for the year. When put against the inflation rate, this essentially means they took a hefty pay cut, compromising their ability to meet basic needs such as food and housing and transportation.

A fall report from Food Banks Canada found that more people accessed a food bank last year than in any year since it began collecting data in 1989. In March 2023, nearly 2 million people in Canada relied on a food bank, and more than 17 percent of visitors were employed. According to HungerCount 2023, food bank use has surged to 80 percent higher than 2019 levels, with one month witnessing over 640,000 visits by children.

The housing market softened in Canada last year, but the housing crisis is still firmly entrenched, putting tremendous pressure on workers and others struggling to afford shelter. The average home price in Canada in the fall was $757,600, according to RatesDotCa — or 141 percent more than most people can afford.

In cities like Toronto and Vancouver, the situation is even more dire, with home prices at 250 percent and 210 percent of the affordable level, respectively. Renters face an even bleaker scenario. Average rents for a one-bedroom apartment in November 2023 was $2,174 — with units in Vancouver going for $2,866, with Toronto close behind at $2,594.

My reaction to reading stuff like this is to ruefully chuckle at all the times I read other left-wing writers talking about our movement's recent victories.  "We stopped this."  "We achieved this."  "We merely organized around this because even that is to be considered a victory."

Trudeau's Tightrope

 

This article: "Justin Trudeau struggles to walk a very fine line on the Israel-Hamas war" is apparently from November 18th, 2023, but I first saw it when it was offered for my edification by my browser homepage about a week ago.  Here's the subtitle:

PM caught between asserting Israel's right to self-defence and reflecting Canadians' grief and fear

Already we've gone off the rails.  Israel is conducting offensive operations.  Israel has ALWAYS been the offender.  Israel has been abusing the Palestinians and stealing their land for DECADES.  For longer than the USA occupied Afghanistan!

Shooting the low-hanging fruit in the barrel

 

Back to laughing at that right-wing moron ("Bob Bishop" is his name if I remember correctly.)  

The demoralization stage is composed of ideas, structure, and life components. Ideas or brainwashing are constructed in the media, education, and culture, for example, where historical figures are replaced with false heroes (Saint George Floyd). The structure is undermined by discrediting the police, lawfare to deny opponents’ legal rights, destroying family values, and the American last policy. American life has been attacked by erasing national history, inflaming race relations, promoting equity over equality, and promoting victimhood.  

Whaddaya make of this?  While it is true that whoever controls the media you have access to, or the education that you will receive, and those who have contributed to the culture you are immersed in (the values, morals, a sense of the collective's psyche) will all have their agendas, this does not automatically mean "brainwashing" does it?

Certainly it is possible to successfully resist this brainwashing.  Myself and my esteemed colleague Mr. Bishop are living proof of this (albeit from different extremes of the political spectrum).  

All that having been said, I'm not going to deny the propagandistic aspect of much of what passes for media, education and culture in late-oligarchic corporatist neoliberalism.  What I WILL dispute is that a ranting, shit-for-brains, racist imbecile like Bob Bishop has any claims to being an independent thinker of any importance.