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We all know the United States is looking a bit rocky these days – what with the recession, those fatcat bankers bailed out by the taxpayer, only to continue paying themselves obscene bonuses; two foreign wars draining the US Treasury of the few cents the bankers left behind; Sarah Palin likely to become president in 2012…….

Still, if the worst happened Canada’s only a few hours drive away. We could all scoot across the border and settle there. It’s a lovely country, I believe. A wonderful health service, friendly people, the sort of place where morals matter and human beings are more important than ‘making a quick buck’. Not at all like the old U.S. of A.. Right?

Right. Well, at least, I thought it was right. Then I opened up the British Guardian newspaper’s website, and read this:

Until now I believed that the nation which has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.”

I’m a great fan of George Monbiot. He’s one of the most environmentally active journalists in the world. His research is impeccable. If George writes something, you can be darned sure it’s true. So, has he lost his mind? Canada, an environmental villain?

Sadly, it’s true. The Canadian government, controlled by the oil-tar barons of Alberta, are turning the beautiful nation of Canada into what Monbiot describes as, “……a cruel and thuggish place.”

Why? There’s a simple answer. Canada is developing the world’s second largest reserve of oil. Did I say oil? It’s actually a filthy mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands, most of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted by the biggest opencast mining operation on earth. An area the size of England, of pristine forests and marshes, will be dug up, unless the Canadians can stop this madness. Already it looks like a scene from the end of the world: the strip-miners are creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale.

To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. Three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil. The contaminated water is held in vast tailing ponds, some of which are so toxic that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface. Most are unlined. They leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers. The First Nations people living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases.

Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta’s tar sands operation is the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun.”

Canada was a signatory to the Kyoto Treaty on climate change. As Monbiot points out:

In 2006 the new Canadian government announced that it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%.”

The plain truth is that Canada has been kidnapped by the corporates. Shell and BP (among others) stand to make billions from the Alberta tar sands, but to do so means creating an environmental catastrophe. Just as in America, the oil barons are fighting tooth and nail to prevent climate change legislation, and the Canadian government is the tool they’re using to achieve that end.

Next week, a vital climate summit takes place in Copenhagen. Until I read George Monbiot’s Guardian article, had anyone said to me that Canada was the most likely nation to scupper those talks, I’d have laughed in their face.

George Monbiot has said exactly that. I’m not laughing.

Read Monbiot’s full article HERE, including his comprehensive references, and I’ll bet you won’t be laughing either.

Filed under: Black gold rush

John Demjanjuk is 89 years old and in frail health. Today he was wheeled into court on a gurney to stand trial in Munich for crimes committed sixty years ago.

The evidence is circumstantial. About as circumstantial as the evidence presented to an Israeli court on the last occasion John DemJanjuk was extradited from the U.S. back in 1988.

Then he was charged with being ‘Ivan the Terrible’, a notoriously brutal Nazi death camp guard from Treblinka. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang.

He was on death row in an Israeli jail for five years until further evidence came to light proving his innocence of the charge. He returned to the United States.

Now, at the end of his traumatic life, he’s once again charged with war crimes; this time, as an accessory to murders committed by the Germans at Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Demjanjuk denies he was ever at Sobibor.

Maybe he was; maybe, he wasn’t. Either way, is anything to be gained by dragging this sick old man through more legal proceedings?

The answer is a resounding, “Yes!”

It will prove once and for all what we have become.

Filed under: “As we forgive them….”

One of my regular reads, Vineyard Views, recently drew attention to an article by Stephen Walt in ‘Foreign Policy’. It was entitled, “Why They Hate Us”, and addressed the concept of military occupation.

Walt begins the piece thus:

One of the many barriers to developing a saner U.S. foreign policy is our collective failure to appreciate why military occupations generate so much hatred, resentment, and resistance, and why we should therefore go to enormous lengths to avoid getting mired in them…….We blundered into Somalia in the early 1990s without realizing that we weren’t welcome; we invaded Iraq thinking we would be greeted as liberators, and we still don’t fully understand why many Afghans resent our presence and why some are driven to take up arms against us.”^[1]

Why, I ask myself, is it not obvious? Does anyone truly have to read this before pausing long enough to reach a glaringly blatant conclusion? Or has the populace of the U.S. played the role of the modern Roman Empire for so long that any innate ability to put oneself in the underdog’s position has, over generations, been completely brainwashed away?

Surely a gentleman from Yorkville, Manhatton, or Alcova Heights, Washington, D.C., wouldn’t find it utterly impossible to imagine how he’d react if a foreign army marched into his town and took over? After all, in a sense that’s exactly what happened on 9/11/2001; foreigners invaded part of Manhattan and destroyed it, while similar foreigners attacked the hub of the U.S. military. The resultant backlash from the American nation – the dreadful carnage of revenge – is well documented, begging the question: why, then, is America so mortified when its own army invades a foreign country and the inhabitants retaliate?

Walt continues his essay by likening life under foreign occupation to being caught by an abusive policeman on a U.S highway for speeding, or problems at a border crossing when the customs official doesn’t speak your language, before then suggesting America has itself experienced foreign occupation during the Civil War.

America invaded by Americans? I fail to grasp the similarity.

While Stephen Walt makes a valiant effort to understand the true feelings of those unfortunate enough to feel the jackboot of an invading army on their necks, he fails miserably. His essay only serves to highlight his own failings and those of his fellow Americans unable to grasp the real concept he is trying to portray.

Were one to compare the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan with the German conquests of Poland or Czechoslovakia in 1930’s Europe, American hands would raise in horror, but the end result is exactly similar.

The truth about foreign invasion is that it is never for the benefit of the indigenous populace, only ever in the interests of the aggressor. Walt’s writing is dotted with phrases such as, “benevolent occupation”, and, “acting from more-or-less benevolent motives”. The word ‘benevolent’ is a total antithesis to ‘military occupation’.

Walt’s essay serves only to provide proof that indoctrination of the American people is a total success. Political cover-ups suggest invasion and occupation by U.S. military forces are designed solely to liberate and protect the very people they’re subjugating. Americans lap it up like kittens around a saucer of warm milk.

The truth is much more to do with what is euphemistically called ‘American interests’. Oil is top of the list, ensuring that steady supply of energy vital to maintain the petroleum-based, fat-cat, lifestyles too many Americans have grown used to for too long. Control of a region by military force to advance U.S. markets in developing nations is the other major ‘American interest’, though frequently the two go together, rather like an M16 and an M1A2.

Stephen Walt needs to tell his readers to forget about American military benevolence. It doesn’t exist. Tens of thousands of Iraqis – at least, those still alive – will attest to that.

So long as the U.S. continues to conduct its insane foreign policy at the end of a gun barrel, Americans will find themselves considered by others as the barbarians they still are; content to live a slothful, indulgent, lifestyle at home while their military killing machine benevolently annihilates the innocents of foreign lands in vast numbers.

^{[1] “Why They Hate Us (I): on military occupation” FP, November 23rd 2009}

Filed under: Ignorance is no excuse