A Welcome Addition to The Conversation About China.

Now playing at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute's weblog:

Brian Lee Crowley is no fool. He's the managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, the founding president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, and a fine rum lad. A detractor might insinuate something to the effect that if there were a Canadian political party explicitly devoted to the proposition that taxes are carcinogenic and government is cholera, your man Brian would be a ranking member in the politburo of its central committee. But I'm not one of Brian's detractors, so I would never say anything like that.

In today's Ottawa Citizen, Brian enters a conversation I've been lately encouraging sensible Canadians to have about the implications of Prime Minister Harper's unexplained and sudden embrace of a corporate entity run by the Chinese Communist Party that serves as the guarantor of Omar al-Bashir's regime in Khartoum, the bottomless overdraft in Bashar al-Assad's bank account in Damascus, and the specific means by which Tehran's Khomeinists are evading the West's sanctions and double-daring us into a war.

The prime minister would like that entity, Sinopec, to add to its global services the means by which Canada might emancipate itself from its over-reliance on American oil markets, and the stratagem that will allow Mr. Harper himself to look rather more manly in those obligatory White House photo opportunities that put him next to the handsome and swaggering American president with the smirk on his face.

Meanwhile, none of the formerly freedom-loving rednecks who now rally to the prime minister's side in this affair have exhibited so much as a blush as they do so, when everybody knows full well what they'd have done had the New Democrats even hinted favourably in the direction of an arrangement anything like the one the prime minister has embraced. They'd be denouncing the NDP as al Qaida's fifth column in Canada and they'd be busy filling the op-ed pages of the dailies with stout demands that Harper invite a team of US Navy Seals to round up the NDP caucus en masse so they could be executed for high treason in front of city hall in Fort McMurray.

But Brian is not a redneck. He's smart. Unfortunately, in his contribution to this conversation, he's being too smart by half. "All across the political spectrum the cry is heard: process the oilsands here at home. Bank executives, trade unionists, editorialists and others want us to do all the work here." There is very little to disagree with about that, or indeed in anything that follows, until Brian gets around to his point, when he feints to the right.

"We could upgrade and refine some of our production facilities in the east (at the Irving refinery in Saint John, for example), but they are already well supplied by world oil markets, whereas getting large quantities of Alberta crude to them would be costly for little benefit."

For one thing, if Alberta crude really is of "little benefit" to anyone in Canada's mysterious east, then it would be nice if Brian could just come right out and say so. But I don't know anyone proposing to ship bitumen to Saint John anyway.

Shipping bitumen to Ontario for refining, or to Quebec, or upgrading and refining it in Alberta or along the way, would be very profitable if Canada acted like pretty well every other country in the world and encouraged enterprise that added value to its natural resources. This is exactly what Stephen Harper himself was advising, in the form of a promise, in the 2006 election and in the 2008 election and the last election. Heck, we could even invite Chinese capital to invest in infrastructure like that.

In the bargain, we would also emancipate eastern Canadians from the ill luck and unhip circumstance of having to rely upon - dare I say it? - "unethical oil" and "conflict oil" from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Nigeria. They'd have buckets of Alberta's fair-traded and shade-grown variety instead.

"Forcing investments of billions of dollars in unproductive capacity and delaying oilsands development won't improve Canada's standard of living, but the reverse," Brian claims.

Forcing?

That's rich. How well I recall the days when Canada's mere possession of a national energy program and the establishment of our own state-owned oil enterprise, Petro-Canada, was a free-market sin that cried out to heaven for vengeance. Now China is doing the nationalizing of our energy resources, and it's Chinese state-owned corporations intruding into our oilsands wealth. Sinopec revenues last year exceeded the tax revenues of Canada's federal government. We're supposed to behold the glories of the free market in this?

We don't even have a Foreign Investment Review Agency anymore. China's version of FIRA - preferential bank loans to dozens of outfits like Sinopec that are run by Chinese Communist Party politburo appointees; draconian restrictions on foreign investment to favour the government's own enterprises; privileges granted to state-owned corporations at the expense of thousands of Chinese businesses they've driven into bankruptcy in recent years; labour-law exemptions gifted to Beijing's monopolies and their foreign joint-venture buddies; grotesque tariffs and duties imposed on imports to the advantage of the multinational corporations Beijing owns and runs - all this makes us looks very much like the chumps we are.

I mean, please. Why do you think Stockwell Day is now a "distinguished fellow" with the Chinese business lobby known as the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada? Canada's former Minister Responsible for the Asia-Pacific Gateway is not distinguished by a business degree from Harvard or an international relations degree from Georgetown. I don't mean to offend anyone's religious sensitivities here, but as I recall, he is a hayseed who thinks people were eating dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden 6,000 years ago.

As for "delaying" oilsands development, smart people in the oil industry and in the investment banking racket tell me that delaying the sale of the good stuff will only mean fetching a much better price down the road a little ways, but we're giving the easy stuff away to Beijing for pennies, and soon all we'll have left is the nastier stuff that costs almost as much as it's worth just to get it out of the ground. As for the bit about how acting like grownups "won't improve Canada's standard of living," are we supposed to overlook the fact that the number of landed immigrants settling in Alberta has now been eclipsed by the number of "temporary foreign workers" in that province?

I could go on.

It's Not Funny Anymore.

Last August, the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China appointed the ambitious and aggressive Wang Tianpu as president of the Sinopec Group, the seventh-largest corporation on Earth and the absurdly corrupt and ravenous behemoth that is the main money, so far, behind the $6 billion Enbridge Inc. plan to punch a pipeline from Alberta's oilands to the B.C. coast at Kitimat.

Just how Sinopec became co-author of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's new foreign policy and energy strategy isn't a question any of us are supposed to be asking. There are other questions I intend to keep chasing in the coming days, but here's a taste of my Ottawa Citizen column today.

It was Sinopec that spent $2 billion on an outright purchase of the Alberta oil and gas firm Daylight Energy late last year. A direct Beijing foothold - this was a first for Canada's oilfields. But it was an earlier $2-billion Sinopec takeover of Vancouver's Tanganyika Oil that won Beijing its first big piece of Syria's Oudeh oilfields, and that's how Sinopec provides the sanctions-busting revenues that allow the delusional mass murderer Bashar al-Assad to hang on in Damascus.

It's the same game Sinopec has been playing in Sudan, keeping the genocidaire Omar al-Bashir in Khartoum instead of in the prisoner's dock at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. But here's where it gets really ugly. China is now Iran's number one trading partner. Sinopec is now Iran's main buyer of crude oil. Tehran has managed to avoid the bite of Euro-American sanctions aimed at curbing the ayatollahs' nuclear ambitions. Sinopec is the reason why the sanctions are failing. If sanctions fail, it will almost certainly mean war.

Another question.

In the summer of 2010, Richard Fadden, the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, got in big trouble for saying that politicians in at least two provinces were under "foreign influence" and China was funding political activism in Canada. Fadden followed up with a detailed memorandum to his boss, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. He named names. Toews knows who the politicians are that Fadden was talking about. Prime Minister Harper must surely know.

Who are they, exactly?

My earlier inquiries and judgments here, here and here.

Meantime, my pal Mark Collins alerts me to this essay in the New York Review of Books on Liu Xiaobo's No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems, edited by Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao, and Liu Xia, with a foreword by (the late) Václav Havel.

Until victory.

Until Victory.

“We have paid a very high price for the revolution. Colleagues of ours are getting tortured and killed. It is a very dangerous situation now. But the revolution is for bread, for freedom, for social justice for all Egyptians, for minorities, for women. Until then, the revolution will continue. This is not the end of it. This is just the start," Mostafa Hussein told me during a telephone conversation from his home in Cairo this week.

I spoke with Hussein while I was assembling my report on the several front lines of the Arab revolutions a year after Tahrir Square, in today's Ottawa Citizen.

When we talked, the the runoff-vote tallies were still being finalized after the first-ever Egyptian parliamentary elections, but it was already clear that the old Islamist order of the Muslim Brotherhood and its more radical allies in the Salafist movement had won a clear parliamentary majority.

“The elections happened in the context of extreme violence and oppression. The record over the past year is just as bad as it was under Hosni Mubarak. The military ruling class still has the guns, and they don’t shy away from beating women in the streets in front of cameras,” Hussein explained. “But these elections weren’t rigged. We can’t do anything but respect the results.”

Still, the outside world would be very wrong to think the Egyptian revolution is over, Hussein told me. There is no going back now.

On a related subject, just as soon as I get a moment I'm going to be updating this page with a response of a sort to some very kind reviews and helpful critiques of my new book, Come From the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan. Some welcome news: The Canadian International Council picked Come From the Shadows as one of the best international books of the year.

I was very humbled by Sohrab Ahmari's beautifully written and generous review in World Affairs Journal, titled "The People Do Not Want To Go Back" (a portion on the free side of a paywall can be found here). I was also heartened by Peter Ryley's review (which is also a very fine essay in its own right), not least because Peter is a writer and a thinker I greatly admire and he has not forgotten what means to be of The Left. Also weighing in with a very generous review is Paula Newberg, director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and a former special adviser to the United Nations in Afghanistan, in the Globe and Mail. And I should thank retired colonel Mike Capstick for the thoughtul consideration he's given the book in this month's Literary Review of Canada.

More later.

A Matter Of Misinterpretation.

Letter to the Editor, Ottawa Citizen:

I believe Terry Glavin misinterpreted my comments in his column on Chinese investment in the oilsands. I called for urgent political leadership not on what he characterizes as "China's deepening influence in the Canadian economy" but on "a Canadian response to the shift in global power towards Asia."

I think Glavin's assault on foreign investment in Canada is as flawed as the vilification of overseas funding for environmental causes that he has taken issue with. Major infrastructure projects such as the Northern Gateway should be assessed in the national interest, and foreign involvement (in all of its forms) should not be considered as a priori negative.

- Yuen Pau Woo, Vancouver, B.C.

Yuen Pau Woo is the president of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. I could have described him as the head of the now-entrenched faction in the foundation that supports Chinese state-owned corporations taking over Canada's natural-resource infrastructure, but I didn't, because I am both charming and gallant.

Mr. Woo objects to the way I characterized the "national debate" we both appear to agree Canada should be having, and fair play to him, but I would point out that I merely characterized the issue more accurately and without his boosterish inflection.

More to the point, Mr. Woo knows very well that it is untrue to assert that my column was "on Chinese investment in the oilsands." It was no such thing. It was a column on Chinese state-owned corporations' investments in the oilsands.

As for "Glavin's assault on foreign investment in Canada," this is more than mere misinterpretation, and Mr. Woo is well aware of that, too. Nowhere, not in that particular column or anywhere else, have I raised even the mildest objections to foreign investment in Canada. I don't object to foreign investment, and I most certainly did not subject foreign investment to an "assault," in that column or anywhere else.

Mr. Woo is engaging in a deliberate and cunning misrepresentation here. He is conflating mere foreign investment in Canada with the Beijing police state's growing ownership and control of Canada's energy sector infrastructure. This is the rhetorical feint that is precisely the means by which Beijing has been able to get away with it, by which anyone who has the cheek to notice is dismissed by misrepresentation approaching slander, and by which we are all made to shut up and behave ourselves.

We do appear to agree on a couple of important points, though: Canada's so-called northern gateway should be "assessed in the national interest," and "foreign involvement (in all of its forms) should not be considered as a priori negative."

It logically follows that Mr. Woo will now write stern letters to newspaper editors to assert that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and B.C. Premier Christy Clark are wrong to be raising mobs with pikes against shadowy "foreign" environmentalists. I await the appearance of these letters, eagerly.

You're welcome,

-TG.

All About Oil: China, Enbridge, & Canada's 'National Interests'.

My piece in today's National Post:

Canada is at the brink of what is probably the most radical shift in energy and foreign policy since Pierre Trudeau and Mitchell Sharp engineered the ultimately doomed "Third Option" 40 years ago, which was all about reducing our economic reliance on the United States. This time around, everything is happening quite suddenly. There has there been no debate of any consequence at all - not in the House of Commons, not in the Senate, not in the proceedings of a Royal Commission. Certainly not in the news media.

Just as the underpinnings of the old order are collapsing, certain Conservatives are summoning the faithful to the far more urgent matter of blanketing the newspapers with purported evidences of a Masonic strategem devised by socialist Hollywood billionaires to activate sleeper cells of Ducks Unlimited agents for the purpose of sapping Canada's will to live as sovereign nation.

Here's what you've been missing.

Ostensibly, it's about the Enbridge project, a plan to pump condensate eastward from the coast to Alberta so that Alberta bitumen can be made fluid enough to be pumped back to the coast at Kitimat, to be put into oil tankers to be sent down Douglas Channel and out into the roaring North Pacific through a tangle of islands you will find on the charts strewn with names like Terror Point and Calamity Bay and Grief Point. A digression: It is not for nothing that such comforting placenames show up along the proposed tanker route, so don't start with me about how I should now find comfort in knowing that the oil spill cleanup contingency plans consist of rushing out with skimmers and booms that work only in low breezes and a light chop. I've fished halibut in those waters, and believe me, there is a reason why heading out there in boats is known as Walking With The King. Nevermind what the "radical environmentalists" say, whoever they are.

As recently as last fall, John Bruk, the founding president of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and as fervent a booster of trade with China as you'll meet in a day's wandering around up and down Howe Street in Vancouver, was cheering Stephen Harper and wishing him all the best with his trade engagements in the Forbidden City. But Bruk's good wishes came with a caution: "Are we going to sell the ownership of our natural resources to pay for consumer goods we can ill afford and thereby speed up the indebtedness of Canada as export revenue from those resources would be lost?" Turns out that's exactly what we're doing.

It's not just about the jettisoning of a national consensus that Canada's bitumen should not be sent overseas to be processed. It's not just the $20 billion deluge of takeovers and beachheads Beijing has established almost overnight in Alberta's oilsands. It's about Chinese state-owned corporations moving in. It's about a proper review of Investment Canada Act rules the Conservatives were promising only a year ago, and then quietly scrapped the promise without explanation. It's about recommendations from the federal Competition Policy Review Panel that were ignored. It's about the abdication of Canada's capacity to articulate a national energy strategy, and all to the advantage of the police state in Beijing.

As I noticed (I was hardly alone in this) in my column in last Thursday's Ottawa Citizen: Until now, Beijing's strategy has been to fly under the radar by taking only pieces of oilsands ventures and to murmur occasionally about bringing in Chinese workers or pulling up stakes altogether should they hear too much backchat.

Now, everything's changed. But the very week that the MacKay River deal went down and Petro-China got it all with a final installment of $1.9 billion, Canadians were being called to arms over a disclosure that Alberta's eminently reputable Pembina Institute had taken $60,000 in the king's shilling. Turns out it was merely for some sort of think-paper in which Pembina explained to the British government things it should already know about renewable energy. Meanwhile, when it's up and running in 2014, MacKay will be a full-court Beijing show.

The headline the Vancouver Sun published on a Pembina-smearing opinion essay written by Kathryn Marshall, who I am sure is merely by complete coincidence the wife of Conservative war-room denizen Hamish Marshall, Prime Minister Harper's former strategic planning manager, was: "Why is foreign money fuelling oilsands fight?" Why indeed. We'll come back to that in a moment.

Sure, Rex Murphy is quite right, as far as it goes. All along, Canada should have been fighting back against the slander campaigns waged by so-called environmental activists who have gotten away with destroying the livelihoods of Canadian sealers and fur trappers. And you could say Prime Minister Harper has a point that there is much to be annoyed about in all those rich Americans who would want Canada to be their own giant, private national park. That could be a conversation worth having. But the great Enviroperil Scare of 2012 is a pathetic distraction. Everybody knows it. The headline writers know it. The radio talk-show hosts know it.

The Canadian versions of the Tea Party and Moveon.org should be allowed to get their jollies however they choose, and televised freak shows pitting self-appointed oil industry propagandists against self-appointed radical environmentalists might well boost the ratings in the time slots where the evening news used to be. But grownups will want to notice something else.

Over the past decade, Canadians have sunk more than $20 billion of mostly public money into port, rail and highway infrastructure on the west coast, all to expand Canadian trade into Asian economies. The whole point was to diversify our markets and reduce our reliance on the United States, and fair play to that, too: Stephen Harper didn't exactly invent the idea last month. But none of it has worked out like we were told. We've been hooped.

Ten years and $20 billion later, it's all China, all the time. China plays by its own trade rules, everybody's been letting China get away with it, and the result is that in ten years the annual value of Canadian exports to Japan hasn’t budged, and last year, as a destination for Canadian exports, India, the largest country on earth, was overtaken by – wait for it – Norway. As a Canadian trading partner, Taiwan is now down there with Algeria.

Canada's collective $20 billion Pacfic "gateway" investments have ended up transforming Canada's west coast transportation infrastructure into the portal that has enabled Beijing to flood North American markets with goods manufactured in sweatshops where they'll chuck you in prison if you even wonder aloud what it might be like to belong to an independent labour union. As for free elections or political parties, don't you dare even think about it.

This is what has become of Vancouver's boast to being 58 hours closer than Los Angeles to the big Chinese ports, and to being uniquely linked to three transcontinental railways that run straight into the United States' former industrial heartland. And now Canadians are being expected to provide Beijing with a steady supply of bitumen in a closed loop from Beijing's own oilsands properties in Alberta, through Beijing's own pipeline to oil tankers to its own refineries back in China, so that the black comedy of "world trade" can keep unfolding the way Beijing wants. Not only that, we're all supposed to be bloody grateful for it.

If you think Albertans need to have the Riot Act read to them whenever someone says "National Energy Program" out loud you should hear the way British Columbians talk about raw log exports. Usually about a tenth of the cut gets shipped out of the province unprocessed, taking jobs with it, and that's rage-making enough. Well, wake up: last year, nearly half of all the trees felled on the B.C. coast were shipped out raw. Over the past five years, raw log exports to China have gone through the roof, exploding 12-fold from 94,000 cubic metres to about 1.2 million cubic metres.

For you townies in Ontario, you'll want to get your head around a convoy of fully loaded lucking trucks bumper to bumper between Toronto and Ottawa. Now imagine all those whole logs getting stuffed into containers, trucked down to Prince Rupert every year, then loaded onto ships and sent off to China. And every year, the convoy grows longer. Now you know why more than 70 B.C. wood mills have been shuttered, and it will help to know that Beijing won't even allow us to turn those logs into woodchips. Meanwhile, you're being asked to boycott bananas, because Chiquita has said unflattering things about the oilsands.

The next time some Conservative MP tells you that we should all get down on our hands and knees and thank Enbridge for the $100 million behind its pitch to the National Energy Board for the chance to pour all that Alberta bitumen into China-bound oil-tankers, here's a question you might ask: Just who's paying Enbridge, exactly? Put another way, in the manner of that Vancouver Sun headline that I promised to come back to: "Why is foreign money fueling oilsands fight?"

Six years have passed since Enbridge first announced it had obtained $100 million to fund its planning and lobbying and its studies and surveys for a twinned pipeline through the Rocky Mountains and across British Columbia to saltwater at Kitimat. First it was all Petro-China's money, then we were told Petro-China got spooked, and then it was somebody else's money, but we're not allowed to know whose money it is. Do the Conservatives even know whose money is behind the Enbridge plan? If they don't know, why not? If they do know, why aren't they telling us?

Stop and think about it for a second. After all these years, and after all the recent uproars about sinister American environmentalists, it took filings with the National Energy Board that were turned up only last week to reveal that Beijing's very own Sinopec is accompanied by Suncor, Cenovus, Nexen and MEG among the Enbridge project's big-money backers. That still leaves at least $40 million in boost-and-plan cash that's coming from somewhere, and which is rather a lot more loot than the annual budget of the Skeena Valley Birdwatchers Society, I'm prepared to wager.

Which brings us to another couple of questions for Enbridge-boosting conspiracy mongers: Do you have any idea how stupid you sound? And just how stupid do you think we are? And by the way, do you think you're really doing any favours to Enbridge, which is itself a corporation as reputable, so far, as Pembina, by treating us all like idiots?

But before we even start asking impudent questions about who came up with Enbridge's final $40 million, a closer look at the $60 million stake we already know about reveals not only Sinopec as a Chinese government outfit that's paying Enbridge's bills. MEG is already partly owned by the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation. CNOOC also owns a third of Nexen's Long Lake oilsands project, and only a six weeks ago CNOOC and Nexen formed a joint venture on several deepwater exploration wells in the Gulf of Mexico. The Enbridge-backer Suncor is already also a part-owner, with Sinopec and Nexen, of the huge oilsands Syncrude conglomerate.

Last month, long before the roar of British Columbian's mocking laughter began to cause eardrum damage among certain spin-addicted federal Conservatives, my column in the Ottawa Citizen pointed out something very odd about the Prime Minister's recent slavishness in his posture towards Beijing. I took pains to notice it's not just Stephen Harper, and neither has the fashion for kowtowing afflicted only Conservatives: It’s gotten to the point that not a single politician in Ottawa will muster the impudence to wonder aloud whether, just maybe, this charade has gone on long enough.

Right after Prime Minister Harper declared in his ritual year-end interview,“I am very serious about selling our oil off this continent, selling our energy products off to China,” Beijing's Petro-China spent $1.9 billion on a complete takeover of the MacKay River oilsands project. And right after that, Natural Resources Minister John Oliver allowed himself to be cajoled into making certain intemperate remarks about radical foreign "billionaire socialists," by which he did not mean the unelected billionaires who run the Chinese People's Congress in Beijing, but rather American matinee idols who enjoy heli-skiing vacations in the Kootenay Mountains.

"The servility of Canada's political leaders (municipal, provincial and federal) to the obvious manipulations of Chinese strategists who flaunt world trade and financial market principles and jail democracy-promoting authors for 10-year terms is a national disgrace." I'll say. It wasn't some dweebish umbrage-taker from the Kitsilano Civil Liberties Union who wrote those words. It was Tony Campbell, the former head of the Intelligence Assessment Secretariat for the Privy Council Office.

Remember the Richard Fadden controversy? Seems like only yesterday that everybody was screaming at the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, demanding that he shut up. Fadden almost lost his job. Why? "Among other revelations," Fadden reported that cabinet ministers in two provinces were under the control of a certain foreign government that Fadden thought it too indelicate to name, but he did go on to say that Chinese diplomatic missions are funding and organizing political activism in Canada.

And I haven't even got my boots on yet.

Peter MacKay Marries Up.

RCAF pilot, trilingual, warrant officer first class, very serious human rights activist, some kind of Persian rock star, international relations degree from UBC and an alumnus of the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris, former Miss World Canada, and only 32. . . I hesitate to ask, 'all this and she can cook, too?' but I betcha that Nazanin Afshin-Jam could pinch-hit her groom's day job while landing an F16 in an 80k crosswind.

About China: "Canadians need to talk about what's happening under our noses."

Ten years after Beijing insinuated itself into the World Trade Organization, Chinese corporate monopolies and crony-capitalist empires still enjoy protectionist tariffs and anti-competition laws that have rendered the whole idea of liberalized global trade a sick joke. The racket has engorged Chinese industrial barons with the booty of a sixfold increase in Chinese exports that have cost millions of North American workers their jobs and transformed what was an already fraudulent "socialism with Chinese characteristics" into an increasingly vile regime.

Fully half of China's billion citizens subsist on sub-Saharan incomes of less than $2 a day, and they're growing increasingly impatient with the corruption, oppression and persecution that has accompanied the stuffing of Beijing's foreign-reserves treasury.

But the dozens of unelected billionaires who now dominate the People's Congress that pretends to be a parliament have decided they will not put up with backchat from Chinese patriots and essayists or with "mass incidents" of the kind that broke out in Wukan and Haimen. Over the past five years, Congress deputies have doubled military spending, adding to a vast and growing security, surveillance and prisoncomplex apparatus with an annual budget that now hovers in the neighbourhood of $200 billion.

By all the evidence, this suits Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade just fine.

Well, it doesn't suit my disposition at all. The above is from my column in the Ottawa Citizen.

The situation is more dire than you might think. None other than Anthony Campbell, former head of the Intelligence Assessment Secretariat in the PCO during the 1990s, has this to say about my column: "The servility of Canada's political leaders (municipal, provincial and federal) to the obvious manipulations of Chinese strategists who flaunt world trade and financial market principles and jail democracy-promoting authors for 10-year terms is a national disgrace.Canada is not a parking lot for Chinese (or American) resources and our complicity with what Glavin rightly describes as "a rigged game" orchestrated by this "increasingly vile regime" in Beijing needs to end. Canadians need to talk about what's happening under our noses and Glavin's piece is a very good starting point."

The column is indeed just a starting point. Stay tuned. It will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. We may start with this. We'll see.

Here's an informed view of how the Year of the Dragon will unfold:

Money started to leave the country in October and Beijing's foreign reserves have been shrinking since September. . . there were 280,000 "mass incidents" last year according to one count -- but that they are also increasingly violent as the recent wave of uprisings, insurrections, rampages and bombings suggest. The Communist Party, unable to mediate social discontent, has chosen to step-up repression to levels not seen in two decades. The authorities have, for instance, blanketed the country's cities and villages with police and armed troops and stepped up monitoring of virtually all forms of communication and the media. It's no wonder that, in online surveys, "control" and "restrict" were voted the country's most popular words for 2011. . . the Chinese government could dissolve like the autocracies in Tunisia and Egypt."

Keep an eye on my pal Mark Collins at the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs' Institute's 3D blog. You'll thank me later. Meantime, below is the Chinese human rights activist Ni Yulan, showing up in court after being beaten by police. The trial began with Ni lying on a cot in the courtroom, relying on an oxygen machine. She faces charges of "picking quarrels and making trouble."

The Lights Are On The Dunes, Comrade.

If there were a lament to be sung at his leaving, it would have to be somehow happy and unrepentant. The only one I know that might work is the Song of Mweenish. The concluding stanza: And as I go west by Inse Ghainimh, let the flag be on the mast. Oh, do not bury me in Leitir Calaidh, for it's not where my people are, But bring me west to Muínis, to the place where I will be mourned aloud; The lights will be on the dunes, and I will not be lonely there.

Christopher Hitchens was not lonely when death came to him and he is being mourned aloud and well. "No ululations, no wailing, no shooting in the air, no tossing of the coffin on the shoulders of a mob, no hoarse and brutal cries for revenge and suicide and murder," as he once put it, in a lecture in memory of his friend, the murdered Daniel Pearl. "No, we won't have that." Instead, an astonishing chorus of tributes is being offered up.

I've lent my voice here, in the Ottawa Citizen. I've tried to be cheery, noticing that Hitchens appeared to delight in the calumny the American liberal nomenklatura piled on him in the weeks and months after September 11. It was too early in the day for me to notice the shallow bitterness and churlishness in those same voices in the hours after his death. But I won't pay that any mind now, except to point of that all the Hitchens' critics I've come across today rely on the lowest tone, and all depend on deliberate distortion or outright lie. That should tell you something.

But Hitchens relished his enemies, which made him all the more galling. A couple of things I had to say:

When the wildly popular demagogue and so-called “anti-war” figure George Galloway called Hitchens “a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay,” Hitchens noted the insult, “some of which was unfair.” In the weeks following September 11, reporting from Pakistan’s borderlands while American bombers were raining guided missiles down on Taliban strongholds, Hitchens learned that at least two American F-16 pilots were women, and that he could barely contain the urge to proceed immediately to the Taliban embassy with the news: "It's your worst nightmare, you bastards. She's pissed,she's packing, and she's headed for you.”

I didn't want to draw George Orwell into it too deeply, settling for the case that Orwell's hopes that political writing might be made an art are fulfilled in Hitchens' work, but there's serendipity involved that bears some mention.

I happen to be spending most of my time these days wrapping up the lecture course I've been teaching at the University of Victoria, Orwell and Everything After. The one textbook for the course was Hitchens' Why Orwell Matters.

One of my guest lecturers this fall was Sohrab Ahmari, who writes a moving tribute to Hitchens today in Huffington Post, explaining how he came to be hooked on Hitch: "Here was an Anglo-American journalist drinking Persian moonshine and trading verses from the 11th-century poet Omar Khayyam with his local fixer - all while walking the streets of Neyshabur!"

Another guest lecturer I brought in (also by Skype; technology is our friend) was Michael Weiss, and here's his warm and funny tribute in today's Telegraph, Friendship was Hitch's only real ideology. Mike also wins hands down for best lede of all the tributes and obituaries I've come across: "Well, that’s another Christmas he’ll have enjoyed ruining."

This is funny: Back in the day, Conrad Black considered Hitchens' work "the demented ravings of an unspeakable poseur." This one, from our pal Fred Litwin, is quite sweet, a good point he makes about the necessity of rehabilitating the virtues of male companionship. But funniest is this remembrance from David Frum:

. . .A friend of theirs once took Christopher Hitchens and his wife Carol Blue to dinner at Palm Beach’s Everglades Club, notorious for its exclusion of Jews. “You will behave, won’t you?” Carol anxiously asked Christopher on the way into the club. No dice. When the headwaiter approached, Christopher demanded: “Do you have a kosher menu?”

. . . He especially liked gallows humor. When the nurses asked him, in that insinuatingly cheerful way they have, how he was feeling, he’d answer, “I seem to have a little touch of cancer.” If he was late to emerge from his living room to see you because of the exhaustion and nausea of chemotherapy, he’d excuse himself with, “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I was brushing my hair”– of which of course there were only a few wisps left. . .

From Chris Buckley I was surprised to learn - I shouldn't have been - that the Hitch took pains to attend the funeral mass of Buckley's father, the indomitable conservative mastermind William F., and at Saint Patrick's Cathedral, no less, and also belted out “He Who Would Valiant Be” with the best of them. He did however duck out for a smoke when Kissinger took the lectern.

The lovely tribute from the Iranian-American poet Roya Hakakian that I mentioned in passing in my Ottawa Citizen piece can be read in full here. I would have cited more of it but for space, and there was lot more I would like to have covered but for space, and time. There's never enough time. But I have some space here. So here goes the home stretch.

In 2007, during a question and answer session following his address to a 2007 Freedom From Religion Foundation conference, a self-proclaimed atheist and Marxist upbraided Hitchens for his argument for “the need to stand up and fight this Muslim jihad.” That jihad was “the response to US and European imperialism,” the questioner insisted. The response that poured out of Hitchens was a withering, crushing and unscripted rebuke.

“Well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. There you have it," he began. "You see how far the termites have spread and how long and well they’ve dined.” Nearly five minutes later, Hitchens concluded with what can be considered a succinct précis of his personal rebellions against the intellectual slovenliness of the Anglo-American liberal-left intelligentsia: “You surrender in your own name. Leave me out of it. I’m going to fight these people and every other theocrat all the way.”

Hitchens' summary serves as a kind of manifesto of the principles that had come to animate his life and work, and stands as a testament to the moral clarity that distinguished him from that shabby thing that had come to thrive in all the places where the the "left" used to be:

“For free expression, for women’s rights, for self-determination of small peoples, for the right of Iraqis to federate and have their own show, for the right of the Lebanese not to be bullied by Hezbollah and to have a multicultural democracy, yes, I’ll fight for this, and I think the 82nd Airborne Division is brave to be fighting for it too. And I think you should be ashamed, sneering at people who guard you while you sleep. Thanks.”

No. Thank you, Christopher. Your life's work lives on. Marg Bar Diktator. Death to Tyrants the World Round.

Domo Arigato, Kyoto, and Sayonara.

From my column in today's Ottawa Citizen:

“On Kyoto, I agree wholeheartedly, as would almost anyone in the scientific community, that it will have zero effect on global warming.” Those are not the words of Lord Monckton, 3rd Viscount of Brenchley and archdruid of the climate-change denial cult. That’s Andrew Weaver talking, back in 2008. Weaver is one of the world’s eminent climate scientists, author of the indispensable and clear-eyed Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World, and the scourge of cranks and eccentrics who like to pretend that global warming isn’t happening.

There’s no denying that humanity’s contribution to the planet’s surfeit of greenhouse gases has rather a lot to do with the ominous and already observable weirdness affecting the world’s climate. There’s no point in pretending that the consequences of doing nothing about this will not be catastrophic. We should stop pretending about Kyoto, too.

Long before Environment Minister Peter Kent was obliged to subject himself to the degradation ceremony those apprentice raging grannies staged for the cameras in Durban last week, the Kyoto Protocol had failed even in its limited usefulness.

Kyoto could have been an instrument to force technological innovation inhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif the world’s advanced economies in such a way as to clear a path for eventual and meaningful global reductions in greenhouse gases. But it didn’t turn out that way, and since nobody’s being especially parsimonious in the apportionment of blame for this, while we’re at it, there’s no good reason to ignore the pathological unseriousness that routinely attends to environmentalism, either. . . .

Meawhile, closely related, I see my collaboration with Maywa Montenegro, In Defense of Difference, is making the rounds again. It's based largely on some of the research that went into my 2007 book, The Sixth Extinction. I see Andrew Sullivan likes it.

Afghanistan: "Graveyard of Empiricism"

I went with "Absurdistan" for the first chapter of my book, but I like Graveyard of Empiricism. I covered the same points that Javid Ahmad and Dhruva Jaishankar cover in this essay in Foreign Policy. They just scratch the surface, and it's an excellent essay. Their main observation is that the "western" understanding of Afghanistan is enfeebled because "a number of questionable assumptions about the Afghan people -- concerning their attitudes to foreigners, their history, their society, and their values - go unchallenged." As in the rubbish that a majority of Afghans are inherently hostile to the United States. As in the "graveyard of empires" nonsense.

Note:

1. "In this year's edition of the reasonably reliable Asia Foundation survey of Afghanistan -- which polled 6,348 Afghans from all 34 provinces -- an overwhelming 69 percent of Afghans polled say they are satisfied with the way democracy works in Afghanistan."

2. Forget partition. Joe Biden doesn't know what he's talking about. "A cursory look at history tells us that the partition of mixed political entities has almost always been accompanied or preceded by ethnic cleansing or immense sectarian violence: Consider India, Palestine, Bosnia, or Cyprus. Afghanistan's population is heterogeneous, and given the commitment to establishing a pluralistic and democratic state, calls for the country's de facto or de jure partition appear both irresponsible and impractical."

3. But we can't afford it! "According to the Congressional Research Service, the war in Afghanistan will cost the United States an estimated $114 billion this year, a mere 3 percent of the federal budget, and a much smaller fraction of the American economy. This appears to be a small investment relative to the importance to American foreign policy and national security of getting Afghanistan right." They might have added that most of that money never leaves American bank accounts.

4. "A plurality of Afghans (46 percent) believes that the country is headed in the right direction, compared with 35 percent who believe otherwise. What is even more encouraging, only 11 percent of Afghans have sympathy for armed opposition groups, half the proportion who expressed similar sentiments two years ago."

5. "A balanced view of Afghan public opinion, history, culture, and politics -- and, just as importantly, of the United States' ability to shape these factors in advancing its national security interests -- is crucial as Washington debates a decision that will have important regional and international implications for decades to come."

The Work Of The Generals.

Dozens dead this morning in Kabul and Mazar-i Sharif. Lashkar-e-Jhanghvi claims responsibility.

NYT: Lashkar-e-Jhanghvi is a Punjabi group with a long history of cooperation with Pakistani’s intelligence service, as well as close ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It is made up of Sunni extremists who believe in the extermination of Shiites, and has helped drive the rampant sectarian violence between Shiite and Sunni groups in Pakistan.

Stating the obvious: "ISI-backed Lashkar-e-Jhangvi/Sipah-e-Sahaba terrorists exact revenge on Afghan Shias - The attacks on Afghanistan’s Shia Muslims mourning Imam Hussain highlight the terrifying vision of Pakistan’s foreign policy elite who favour a return to Taliban rule in Afghanistan, as per the recommendations of the USIP-Jinnah Institute report."

Here's LeJ's handiwork in Quetta last year: Dozens dead in suicide bomb attack.

We already know which side the "U.S. Institute for Peace" is on. But as I said last week, it's long past time for the NATO countries to put the question directly to President Barack Obama: Whose side are you on?

UPDATE: Pakistan's interior minister, the corrupt thug and business tycoon Rehman Malik, has expressed gratitude to the Taliban for not slaughtering Pakistani Shias during this year's Muharram observances, and the gruesome American congressman Dennis Kucinich advises that America should slobber on the Pakistani generals' boots. Referring to the November 26 shootout on the Mohmand-Kunar frontier that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead, Kucinich said: “We need to apologise to the people of Pakistan."

Banned In Pakistan.

The Pakistani ISI and its parliamentary lapdogs are responsible for tens of thousands of Afghan and ISAF/NATO deaths over the past decade. Everybody knows now. But the depths of duplicity, mendacity and barbarism to which the Pakistani elites have stooped, and the enthusiasm with which they have devoted themselves to the care and feeding of some of the world's most savage and lumpen jihadi gangsters, are not so well known.

As of last Wednesday, the BBC World News has been blocked by Pakistan's cable channels as a "protest" against this two-part BBC documentary, Secret Pakistan. Watch this, and you will see what the Pakistani establishment does not want the people of Pakistan to know. The people of the "west" need to know these things, too, no less.

Part One: Double Cross.

Part Two: Backlash.

This Town's Hockey Team is Called The Smoke Eaters.

Trail, British Columbia, is a smelter town. This is how they ski:

JP Auclair Street Segment (from All.I.Can.) from Sherpas Cinema on Vimeo.

The Obama Administration's Foreign Policy: Inconsistent, Incompetent, Mendacious.

Our friend Sohrab Ahmari, writing in World Affairs Journal:

The birth pangs of Arab democracy thus risk the perverse and paradoxical effect of strengthening Iranian totalitarianism and making ideological and political containment of the Islamic Republic more of an uphill battle than it was prior to the self-immolation of a desperate Tunisian fruit vendor. To point this out is not to suggest that the US should continue risking the moral and strategic hazards associated with propping up Arab dictators. That strategy has borne rotten fruit for far too long. On the contrary, the turbulent era ahead calls for principled, prolonged American engagement in the region. Economic aid and top-down engagement with emerging elites will only go so far. What is needed and desperately lacking in American policy toward the Mideast is a consistent vision of and commitment to a democratic future for the region. In the coming months and years, American policymakers must actively identify and reward liberal voices, while simultaneously undermining and marginalizing Islamist ones.

Obama’s record on this count has been woefully inadequate thus far. Eager to put the Bush freedom agenda to rest in favor of a more “respectful” approach to the world’s least free region, the administration has repeatedly made it clear that the US has little interest in promoting liberalism in the Middle East. The abandonment of Iran’s embattled dissidents in 2009 was merely the most visible symptom of this orientation. Since then, as the desire for individual freedom and popular dignity has lit up the entire region, the administration’s response to each successive Arab revolt has revealed its failure to learn the lesson of the previous one. The routine has become comically familiar: first, an assurance that the regime in question, friend or foe, is stable; next, a half-hearted call for “reform” and a denunciation of generalized “violence”; and finally, once the dictator has fallen, an insistence that the administration had supported the popular will all along and had played an invisible but significant role in its success. (Even in Libya, where NATO acted to prevent genocide, the leader of the free world insisted that the US play a secondary role and barely bothered to articulate the moral dimension of the mission). . .

There are surprisingly few places in Sohrab's magisterial essay where the words "Middle East" could not be replaced by the "Afghanistan" or "Central Asia" and still be perfectly accurate. Meanwhile, here's the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee's recommendations for a Canadian contribution at the upcoming Bonn conference.

The White House is still whimpering about Pakistan's decision to stay away from Bonn and issung preposterous claims about how Pakistan is still America's best buddy. In Islamabad, meanwhile, the creepy prime minister, Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani, has ordered Pakistani troops to take the safety off their guns whenever they notice Americans approaching the frontier, and he's further refusing to allow Pakistani officials to participate in the probe into last weekend's border gong show (in Washington they're still calling the incident a mere "bump in the road" if you can believe it).

That's not what Gilani's calling it. Listen to this clown: “These dastardly attacks in the dead of night cannot but be construed as a grave infringement of Pakistan’s territorial frontiers by NATO/ISAF and definitely compel us to re-visit our National Security paradigm. These attacks also have serious implications for regional peace and security. Under no circumstances, will we allow Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity to be jeopardized by ill-considered and rash actions such as the attacks on our territory by NATO/ISAF. Our patriotic people and valiant armed forces will spare no sacrifice in the defence of their motherland. Instructions have been issued to all units of the Pakistan armed forces to respond, with full force, to any act of aggression and infringement of Pakistan’s territorial frontiers.”

The Pakistani Pantomime.

. . .Pakistan’s distemper is supposed to be about last weekend’s shootout between NATO helicopters and what turned out to be a Pakistani border post on the Kunar-Mohmand frontier. Afghan military sources say the Pakistanis shot first. Pakistani generals say it was an unprovoked American attack on Pakistan’s unblemished honour and integrity. In any event, 24 Pakistani soldiers ended up dead, and we’re supposed to believe that it’s because everyone’s so sensitive that Pakistan is shutting its border crossings to NATO supply convoys, banning the BBC from Pakistani airwaves, setting American flags on fire and snubbing the Bonn summit.

Don’t believe a word of it.

That's from my column in today's Ottawa Citizen.

What I find most astonishing about the coverage of this latest volcanic eruption of umbrage spewing out of the Pakistani elites and their legions of lumpen chauvinist effigy-burners is the nearly complete absence of context. You'd think that the New York Times and the Washington Post were being run by State Department advertising-agency contractors or something. The straight facts would be nice. And even the tiniest bit of background would expose Pakistan's shouted proclamations of wounded feeling for the play-acting that's really going on here.

An offence to Pakistani sovereignty? Please.

Let's set aside for the moment the crushing weight of unimpeachable evidence that the Pakistani military leadership is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e Taiba and the rest of those bloodthirsty terror networks. Set aside the fact that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) was only recently caught red-handed in its planning and communications role in the recent attacks on the US embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul. Never mind for the moment the testimony of US Commander Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff: "The Haqqani network, for one, acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan's Internal Services Intelligence agency."

How soon we have forgotten - only two months ago the Pakistanis fired 340 rockets into villages in the Afghan province of Kunar, only a short hike from last weekend's ruckus. The barrage lasted several days, killed a child and forced hundreds of Afghan farmers to flee the area. Here's what Kunar governor Fazilullah Wahidy had to say at the time: “The shells were fired directly from Pakistani military posts and garrisons on that side of the border.” Got that? The shells were fired directly from Pakistani military posts and garrisons.

Only four months ago, after reports that dozens of Afghans had been killed by rockets fired from Pakistani border posts, there was a modest demonstration in the streets of Kabul to protest the incidents. The protesters carried banners with slogans such as: “We condemn the invasion on our soil” and slamming Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

Only seven months ago, at least 12 Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers were killed in a "border clash" involving Pakistani forces firing from the Waziristan side of the frontier. A couple of months before that, in Khost, an Afghan border police officer reported: “At around 11 am today, Pakistani troops in Waziristan started firing heavy and light weapons towards police posts in Gurbuz district. Our soldiers returned fire. Their attack was completely unprovoked and without reason."

After last weekend's incident, Americans are nevertheless being treated to the grotesquely humiliating spectacle of their own leaders sucking up to Pakistani generals and offering condolences and begging the best-dressed and most dedicated tormentors of Afghanistan to keep playing along. Are American voters really that stupid? Afghan sure aren't.

“Pakistan shows its two-face policy all the time. In the open they are saying that they want prosperity in Afghanistan, but they are also sending people to destroy Afghanistan,” says Younas Fakor, an independent political analyst in Kabul.

Here's Kabuli journalist and analyst Abbas Daiyar for the last word on the subject:

The ‘peace plan’ suggested by Pakistani military for the endgame in Afghanistan is simply not acceptable for Afghans and the international community. They want a big share in power for Haqqanis and Quetta Shura saying militants represent Pashtuns. Pakistan’s main objective is full withdrawal of US troops. They are against the US-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership agreement that allows presence of US troops long beyond 2014. Pakistani military has its reasons. They fear US military intervention from Afghanistan against their nuclear capabilities. It’s time for both countries to stop lies and deceit and decide they are allies or not.

Reasons to be cheery and weary, from near and far.

Pleased to see Ms. Magazine has flagged my book Come From The Shadows in its "Great Reads for Fall" thus: "[Glavin] provides an alternative to the usual Western media portrait, particularly of Afghan women, who rely on foreigners for security while boldly rebuilding their society." The British blog Harry's Place has been running a series of excerpts - my thanks to Gene for getting it going. Thanks as well to the more sensible people who have offered their commentary and joined in the debates. Roundups of reviews and so on here.

From the La Lutte Continue file (it's thick and overflowing): In 2009, 18-year old Gulnaz was raped by her cousin’s husband. Pregnant, she was sent to prison for adultery, and her baby daughter was born in jail. Gulnaz and her child have been in prison ever since, and she's been told the way only way to get out of jail is to marry the man who raped her. Gulnaz has since been sentenced to three years for not reporting her attack early enough. Please sign this petition to President Hamid Karzai: Free Gulnaz now.

Of the 47 different ISAF countries with soldiers in Afghanistan, Canada is uniquely burdened by an overbearing caste of dainty "troops out" elitists. "Not the right mission for Canada," they drone on. For some reason, it's the right mission for plucky little Tonga, faraway Mongolia, tiny Bosnia - Herzegovina and of course that global hyperpower Latvia. But Canada? Don't be silly. We're peacemakers, not war-making lackeys of American imperialism!

The troops-out & peace-talks lobby will not not want you to know this: "Amid interviews with women that included police officers, surgeons, soap opera stars, cleaning ladies, frustrated widows, and hopeful wives, the greatest surprise, Danziger says, was that these women wanted foreign troops to stay. Every single one of them. 'We criticize Afghanistan’s treatment of women, but we don’t listen to Afghan women,' he laments."

Or this: Afghanistan will be unable to fight Taliban after Western withdrawal.

Or this: "We don't think anybody should be negotiating with the Taliban," says Esther Hyneman of Women for Afghan Women, which runs family centers and safe homes for abused women across Afghanistan. "If the Taliban wanted a role in the government, why don't they run for parliament in a democratic election? They don't want a role in the Afghan government -- they want the Afghan government."

Not good: Senior Pakistani officials say NATO helicopters attacked a Pakistani Army post in the Mohmand agency area along the Afghan border late Friday night, killing 26 Pakistani troops. They say the attack was "unprovoked and without reason." My pal Zack Baddorf is in the area. Noting the Pakistani foreign ministry official's comment,"There will still be demands from different segments of Pakistan to seek immediate revenge," Zack wonders out loud: "Like what? Sending militants with arms, money, and explosives into Afghanistan to kill Afghan civilians and American troops?"

From the Arab revolutionary front, Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer notices that Arab revolutionaries look to Israel for inspiration, while the Islamist threat of counter-revolution and reactionary chauvinism is never far away: At a Cairo rally, 'One day we'll kill all Jews.' In Syria, meanwhile, Robert Fisk, Nir Rosen and Andrew Gilligan do the dirty work of disinformation for the dictator Assad, Amal Hanano reports in Jadaliyya.

Heartbreaking news: In Azerbaijan, the journalist Rafiq Tagi has died of his wounds. Meanwhile, more out of me on Occumania, about 8':30" into this CBC All Points West program. Days later, shall I say 'I told you so'? Just asking, because here, Occupist ringmaster Kelle Lasn blasts "loony left" for enfeebling his movement, blames the evil MSM for it.

Highly recommended mini-documentary: Seamus Murphy's A Darkness Visible. Note well: "Nobody talks about the people of Afghanistan. It's as though we do not exist."

No surrender.

Robert Fisk, Nir Rosen and Andrew Gilligan: Propagandists for The Dictator Assad.

From an important investigative essay by Amal Hanano, in Jadaliyya:

"Bashar al-Assad seemed to realize that no news from his side is not necessarily good news. Perhaps in an effort to generate a more favorable narrative, a selective few have been granted access to Syria. These journalists, like Robert Fisk, Andrew Gilligan, and Nir Rosen, are vaguely not escorted, but not undercover. Their articles are branded as “exclusive,” “unique,” with unlimited access to “all sides,” commissioned to expose a radically different side of the revolution than what currently floods the regional and international media outlets which have been based on the steady stream of daily videos and eye-witness accounts. . .Fisk’s recent reportage reads as if he were speaking directly from the presidential palace, or humble, unguarded, "largeish suburban bungalow," if you are to believe Gilligan. And surprisingly, Nir Rosen’s recent series for Al Jazeera English seems to suffer from the same regime-tainted myopia. . ."

Something seriously stinks about the coverage this trio has offered up as "journalism" about the Syrian uprising. Amal is a fine journalist, and she's spent a great deal of time in Syria lately. Her forensic examination of what Fisk, Rosen and Gilligan have fobbed off on the outside world is a must-read.

Cross-Country Checkup on Afghanistan.

A proper nationwide public conversation about Canada and Afghanistan, for a change, thanks to the generosity and curiosity of the host, Rex Murphy, a fellow tribesman, he of Carbonear, pride of Placentia Bay. The CBC people involved (thanks, Anna-Liza) were kind to me. Grand to hear from the soldiers who called in as well.

You can listen to the whole thing here.

Revolutionary Suicide.

From my column in today's Ottawa Citizen:

. . . The aborted lunacy of Occupism is now descending into merely a Jonestown of the Imbecilities, with eviction notices and standoffs and arrests breaking up Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Toronto, Occupy Halifax, Occupy Vancouver, Occupy Victoria, and on and on. And as usual, there is a celebrity with a conspiracy theory to explain why. Famous pseudo-documentarist Michael Moore fingers the Department of Homeland Security.

"This is not some coincidence," Moore says. "This was planned and I think the question really has to be asked of the federal government and of the Obama administration.

Why? Why?"

Why? It just could be that maybe the Department of Homeland Security doesn't have its agents doing the devil's work in the bylaw-enforcement offices down at 12th and Cambie in Vancouver, and that ordinary working citizens and taxpayers are growing bored with having their public parks expropriated by people who dump buckets of their own urine on parks board workers.

Just a guess, mind you. Maybe the working people who have been made to pay for finance capitalism's recklessness are getting sick and tired of being told things about inequality and powerlessness that they knew all about before the subject started coming up in Occupist chants and slogans shouted around drum-circles. . .

You can't tell the players without a program. In Shift Magazine, Spencer Sunshine (great name) provides a racing-forum guide:

. . . Much has already been said about the Occupy movement’s refusal to elucidate its demands. On one hand, this has been useful in mobilizing a diverse group of people who can project what they want to see in this movement—anarchists, Marxists, liberals, Greens, progressive religious practitioners, etc. On the other hand, this has been useful in mobilizing a diverse group of people who can project what they want to see in this movement—Ron Paulists, libertarians, antisemites, followers of David Icke, Zeitgeist movement folks, Larouchites, Tea Partiers, White Nationalists, and others. The discourse about the “99%” (after all, these Right-wingers and conspiracy mongers are probably a far greater proportion of the actual 99% than are anarchists and Marxists), along with the Occupy movement’s refusal to set itself on a firm political footing and correspondingly to place limitations on involvement by certain political actors, has created a welcoming situation for these noxious political elements to join.

So far, the overwhelmingly progressive nature of many of these Occupations has kept this element at bay. But it is only the weight of the numbers of the progressive participants that has done this. There are neither organizational structures within the Occupy movement, nor are there conceptual approaches that it is based on, that act to ensure this remains the case. So it is not unreasonable to expect that, especially as participation declines, some of the Occupations will be taken over by folks from these far Right and conspiratorial perspectives. All participants might rightly see themselves as part of the 99%. The real divisive question will then be, who do they think the 1% are?

Meanwhile, for instances of the opposite of revolutionary suicide, the latest installments in the Harry's Place snippets from my book are here and here. I'm happy they chose the passages that feature the Rasoul sisters, and Alaina Podmorow and Lauryn Oates. If it's a revolutionary spirit you want, those young women have some for you, and I got a kick out of Gene's comment: "And I think I can add without fear of contradiction that they’ve done more for the cause of human rights and human freedom than the Socialist Workers Party and the Stop the War Coalition have done in their entire histories."

Finally, a not completely hostile and inaccurate account of my lecture at UVic on the subject of my book and how it came to pass that I wrote it, here. There was only one question I didn't bother to answer, by the way, and Brandon Rosario's report, also linked on the page, will let you know which one, right away. Here's a wee clip:

In memoriam.

Terry Glavin is dead.

Not me, the other one. A really, really good man. His death came to my attention only today.

Terence Michael Glavin was a committed, dedicated, hardworking and effective idealist. From his younger days teaching immigrant railroad workers how to speak English to a career in CUSO and then CIDA, his contributions made the world a better place. After his time in Jamaica he found himself, for all intents, the first Canadian High Commissioner to Bangladesh, after that country's independence was recognized when it broke from Pakistan in 1972. He went on from there to serve in Haiti and Guyana / Suriname, and then Africa.

Over the years, our paths crossed - almost. More than once I was mistaken for him, and he for me, in casual introductions. I once got a letter from one of his highschool sweethearts, and I thought it was from one of mine that I had forgotten until I realized she was a heck of a lot older than me and when I read the bit about what a great dancer I was, that clinched it. Must be the other guy.

As far as I can determine he was a very distant relation, the descendant of a branch of the family that had emigrated from Ireland ages ago, and if I'm not mistaken they settled in the Ottawa Valley.

Sleep soundly, Terry.

About "our" culture as much as it is about "their" culture.

My preoccupation with Absurdistan, I mean.

This past week: An except from Come From the Shadows in the National Post on Monday, another excerpt on Tuesday. Elsewhere, the fine British blog Harry's Place is running excerpts/snippets. Here, here, here and here.

Tomorrow, this is going to be amusing.

One of my concerns is the hysterical amnesia that animates the public debates about Afghanistan. I'm in favour of remembering.

The way Canadians will remember Afghanistan years down the road was the subject of a piece I wrote for the Canada's "Metro" dailies, for Remembrance Day. And the way we will remember and honour our soldiers' sacrifices in Afghanistan was the subject of a half-hour conversation I had with Jordi Morgan of the Maritime Morning show out of Halifax, on Remembrance Day.

Eyes right: