"Soon come, soon come the day this tinderbox is gonna blow in your face"

punditman says...

Scanning the news lately, punditman is beginning to wonder if things aren't starting to come apart at the seams. It's not quite 1968,[1]  but you never know where things are going to end up, especially in Europe. Government austerity packages being implemented across the board in Europe should be viewed for what they are: class warfare aimed at making the middle and lower classes pay for the unpunished corruption and incompetence of an unregulated financial class.

Thanks to the meltdown of 2008, and the criminal greed of Wall Street and their cohorts and minions abroad, citizens of the world have been left with a sputtering "recovery" whose salient features include massive unemployment, deep cuts to pensions, and social services—all overseen by the same political class who oversaw the disaster in the first place. Apparently they have no proper ideas of how to fix things. Time for a change.

Moving on to free speech and government transparency, the so-called hallmarks of democracy; those freedoms we are told that our soldiers are fighting and dying to uphold in Afghanistan, it's now official: the emperors truly have no clothes. Thanks to Wikileaks, and the dumping of just a fraction of 250,000 diplomatic cables and the earlier spilling of  hundreds of thousands of files from the Iraq and Afghan Wars, the world is being exposed to a good sampling of some of official duplicity, hypocrisy and state crimes behind American diplomacy and warcraft. To list just a smidgen: the unaffordable, depressing Iraq and Afghan wars with their massive collateral killings and the actual thoughts of cynical state apologists and propagandists who often know a war is hopeless but pretend otherwise; gossipy diplomatic spats between so-called mature nations; and, of course, the attempt to kill the messenger Julian Assange (figuratively in some quarters, literally in others) and those who do business with Wikileaks. Assange, for his part, recently wrote the following:

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

Do governments have a legitimate concern to protect sensitive diplomatic information and lives, when it comes to matters of diplomacy and security? As a general principle, most would say of course they do. But what we have seen from Wikileaks ranges from bland and embarassing to revealing and disturbing, rather than endangering. Indeed Assange recently pointed out the following:

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn't find a single person who needed protecting...

Punditman says going after Assange rather looks and feels like it is part of the more generalized trend to intimidate citizens and squash free speech by going after the messenger, rather than genuine concern for safety and security. Punditman reserves judgement regarding the allegations of sex crimes against Assange.

It comes as no surprise that we are being lied to or misled, but the extent of manipulation, intrigue, and "things not being as they appear" is startling. They would have us all played for fools. But a pox on all their houses, because it matters not what country we cite, be it "free" or unfree. Saudi Arabia asked the US to attack Iran; Sweden is a secret NATO member and US intelligence sharing is kept from their Parliament; Britain's so-called Iraq War inquiry was fixed to protect US interests. Fifteen thousand more Iraqis have been killed than was publicly acknowledged. The list goes on and on.

As for US foreign policy, with its murderous drone strikes, torture chambers, secret prisons, and GIs who shoot innocent civilians from helicopters like fish in a barrel, we can now add to these the fact that the US "asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties." The descending superpower's paranoia astounds. Decades of supposed multilateralism and this is what we get?

Modern statecraft laid bare. Time for a change.

And what of Canada? Well, as revealed by the Wikileaks diplomatic cables, back in 2009, Jim Judd, the former director of the CSIS, met with senior advisor to US Secretary of State Secretary Condoleezza Rice, Eliot Cohen and discussed security matters. He said that Canadians had an "Alice in Wonderland" worldview and Canadian judges, "have tied CSIS in knots, making it ever more difficult to detect and prevent terror attacks in Canada and abroad." Judd doesn't seem to have much time for civil rights. Nor did the Toronto police force or the Ontario government during the G20 back in June.

Actually, the civil liberties file is in deep trouble across the Western world, with routine violations of basic human rights, police brutality, and taser deaths occurring on a regular basis. With repression on the rise, there's bound to be some payback from those with nothing left to lose.

As punditman says, things may take a turn off the rails hither and yon. At the core of all this is a profound distrust of the will of the people on the part of elites.

Precient lyrics come to punditman's mind as we see the massive injustices that dominate our age:

"One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast, 
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast, 
They call the revolution."[2]

Hear, hear, Bruce Cockburn. Now there's a great Canadian. Or this portentous passage from the American singer-song writer Natalie Merchant:

"Soon come, soon come the day, this tinderbox 
Is gonna blow in your face, 
I don't have the gift of the prophecy, 
Telling everybody how it's gonna be, 
But you go passing wrong for right and right for wrong, 
People only stand for that for just so long."[3]

Indeed. Indications are that people will only stand for this for "just so long." For students in London facing a tripling in tuition fees (see video below), the pot has officially boiled over. Where it all goes from here is anybody's guess. Time for a change.

1. At around 3:04 of the video, Professor Chris Knight of the University of East London is introduced. He says it's just like 1968, noting that back then it started with the students. Time will tell.
2. Bruce Cockburn. "Call it Democracy." World of Wonders. True North Records, 1986.
3. Natalie Merchant. "This House is on Fire." Motherland. Elektra, 2001.