tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-168732762024-03-13T10:05:27.733-07:00Terry GlavinChronicles & DissentTerry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.comBlogger1296125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-90832846204021216932015-04-12T10:14:00.001-07:002015-04-12T10:14:35.898-07:00NEW DIGS.I've absconded to Wordpress. I've reverted, abdicated, and capitulated to Wordpress. I've hit the road, Jack, and I won't be around here no more, no more, but I happily leave this joint up and worthy as a repository of incriminating evidence against me.Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-52570033983567312542014-01-06T18:53:00.001-08:002014-01-07T10:28:33.944-08:00On the Crucifixion of the Syrian Nation
[Must be a dozen columns between my last post on this blog in June and my November series from the Syrian front, and probably close to a dozen again since the series. I really must get a proper website to keep track. And I really must post at the Ottawa Citizen's op-ed weblog from time to time as well. There. New Year's resolutions. For some in-depth background, read Michael Weiss on the Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-48042032772188625642013-06-21T14:13:00.001-07:002013-06-21T14:15:32.519-07:00Canada's Big Foreign-Policy Shift Under Harper? No More Mister Nice Guy.
Can you picture Stephen Harper in the wee hours of the night in a tent in the Libyan desert putting on a veil-swishing dance performance for Moammar Gadhafi, as Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau once did? Of course not. And it’s not just because Harper doesn’t quite have the figure for it, either.
That's my contribution to the Ottawa Citizen's overview of where Prime Minister Harper is at, Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-78371753152655468462013-06-21T14:08:00.001-07:002013-06-21T14:10:27.970-07:00This week, I managed to get away.
Camping in Pacheedaht country in the healing rain, the whole world lush and green, quarreling ravens, a herd of elk on a saltmarsh, the roaring sea and a crackling campfire and then my daughter Zoe reading me to sleep from The Dalkey Archive, all about as close to paradise as it is possible to get in this quarter of the planet and with someone as close to the seraphim as I have ever known, plus Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-16442727124203121792013-06-20T22:51:00.003-07:002013-06-20T22:51:53.127-07:00The Syria Consensus: As Fake As Those Shop Fronts In Enniskillen"We have a genuine G8 statement,” the prime minister declared. And this is true, as far as it goes. There was indeed a statement to which the leaders of all eight countries — the United States, Russia, Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Japan and Canada — agreed to affix their signatures. “I think we’re all on the same page now,” Harper said. This is also technically true. It’s just that the air ofTerry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-22304747422930628392013-06-17T06:20:00.001-07:002013-06-17T06:20:06.548-07:00Sorry, No. You Are Not Living In Oceania Airstrip One.
From my Ottawa Citizen perch:
If we are to turn to the great George Orwell in this hour of our NSA Deep-State Surveillance Machine disorientation – is it even possible that the Washington Post and the Guardian could have mucked things up this badly? - the overwhelming evidence is against the claim that it should be Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. I set out my case in the Ottawa Citizen today: Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-34010368947919728012013-06-13T11:38:00.005-07:002013-06-13T12:30:03.770-07:00The Things We Cannot Admit About Syria.
From my Ottawa Citizen op-ed spot:
Two years into the catastrophe of the Obama doctrine in Syria and already, circumstances are far, far worse than they were two years into the Bush doctrine in Iraq. This is the penny that simply hasn't dropped. It is what "the culture" cannot bring itself to admit. As humanitarian crises go, the Syrian catastrophe is worse than Kosovo '98 and Haiti 2010 Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-19618993632108507922013-06-05T22:06:00.001-07:002013-06-05T22:12:53.025-07:00Jafar Behkish is a 53-year-old Iranian-Canadian activist who works as an engineer with SNC Lavalin in Toronto. Behkish emigrated from Iran 10 years ago. Beekhish figures into my Ottawa Citizen column today about the Massacre88 Campaign and the House f Commons' unanimous adoption of a resolution declaring the Khomeinist massacres of political prisoners to be a crime against humanity.
One dayTerry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-10961495621502606662013-06-04T08:34:00.001-07:002013-06-04T08:35:54.957-07:00Congregation Emanu-El: Making Us Proud for 150 Years.
A small tribute to my Hebrew homies in today's National Post.
. . . Back in 1863, heralding the start of construction on the Emanu-El synagogue, the Victoria Colonist reported: “The Israelites in Victoria are a large and highly respectable body. Many of them have resided in the city from the date of its earliest existence, and their conduct and bearing has invariably been such as to earn for Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-39984847737926674192013-05-28T09:50:00.001-07:002013-05-28T10:43:23.090-07:00Kaveh Shahrooz on Massacre88 - Canada Can Hold Khomeinist Murderers To Account
From my spot at the Ottawa Citizen.
During the Khomeinist counter-revolutionary terror of the 1980s in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini's increasingly deranged regime rounded up and murdered at least 20,000 Iranians - mostly leftists, liberals, the secularist vanguard of the 1979 revolution, Kurds, Baha'i leaders and Ahwazi Arabs. During a specific three-month period in the summer of 1988, roughly 5,000Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-83786634435941243742013-05-23T22:14:00.000-07:002013-05-23T22:46:25.518-07:00On Fibbing About Terrorism And Badgering "The Muslims."
From my Ottawa Citizen page.
Alan Johnson is quite right, of course. It shouldn't take a couple of deranged yobs howling Allahu Akbar and hacking to death the 25-year-old Royal Fusilier Lee Rigby in broad daylight on Wednesday in the South London borough of Woolwich to make it obvious. "We need to discuss the elephant in the room – the radical and sectarian, often violent, and sometimes Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-48002684874259366222013-05-21T21:30:00.000-07:002013-05-21T21:49:48.421-07:00Syria: Paint it Black.
From my cubbyhole at the Ottawa Citizen:
As Syria descends ever deeper into an abyss of barbarism and savagery, just what is it that distinguishes the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from, say, Jabhat al-Nusra or the Omar al-Farouq brigades or any of the faith-based desperadoes rampaging around the Syrian nightmarelands at the moment? By what moral right can Canada or any other NATO Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-26285269779216829812013-05-16T15:53:00.001-07:002013-05-16T16:22:50.030-07:00I Told You So.
Ottawa Citizen blog:
Contrary to the self-serving opinion coming out of absolutely all of the main news organizations on the subject, I will meekly allow that I don't actually know that the pollsters whose "narrative" formed the big story about the British Columbia election just now come and gone were indeed wrong at all. The pollsters may have badly misinterpreted their own findings, oneTerry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-25075126170679242592013-05-11T13:37:00.001-07:002013-05-11T17:21:13.939-07:00The Suicide Letter of Samuel Zygelbojm
[A "guest post," of a kind, from my spot at the Ottawa Citizen op-ed page].
May 11, 1943
To His Excellency
The President of the Republic of Poland
Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz
To Prime Minister
General Wladyslaw Sikorski.
Mr. President,
Mr. Prime Minister,
I am taking the liberty of addressing to you, Sirs, these my last words, and through you to the Polish Government and the peopleTerry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-41457407347704661982013-05-08T18:41:00.003-07:002013-05-09T12:14:01.367-07:00Well, we wouldn’t want another Iraq, would we?
That's the cliche that started it. It proceeded to allowing that Syria's Baathist regime might be onto something with its talk about Salafi terrorists in the rebel leadership. Where that led was to a beggaring of the broadly popular and mostly secularist civilian militias that emerged at the outset of Assad’s hyperviolent reaction to the pro-democracy mass uprising in late 2011.
From Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-987738383886973522013-05-06T15:07:00.002-07:002013-05-06T15:11:11.575-07:00Memo To Europe: No Seals, No Deals.
It was three years ago this very week that the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to ban the sale of seal products in the European Union. The move had nothing to do with wildlife conservation, marine ecological sustainability, or the prevention of cruelty to animals. The measure was explicitly intended to destroy a centuries-old sustainable industry, central to the economies of dozens of Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-85264007313801639962013-05-05T17:09:00.000-07:002013-05-05T17:10:45.022-07:00A Long Time Coming: Making Another World Possible.
Peter Ryley, Associate Lecturer in History at Manchester Metropolitan University, diarist at Fat Man on a Keyboard, mensch-in-residence as much of the time as he can manage in Greece, at Milina, a village in the green and bucholic Pelion Peninsula, has at long last put the writing of this book behind him: Making Another World Possible: Anarchism, Anti-capitalism and Ecology in Late 19th andTerry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-32819258838300015612013-04-25T16:12:00.002-07:002013-04-25T17:09:54.628-07:00Canada is not serious about terrorism.
From my Ottawa Citizen blog.
This is the front page of tomorrow's Times. This is the BBC eight minutes ago: we have "varying degrees of confidence" about the use of poison gas on a "small scale" in Syria. Oh, well then. With confidence only varying and the scale being so small it makes all the difference in the world, then, does it?
How many dead so far? Is it 60,000 or 70,000? "We Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-10175263122919663012013-04-17T16:25:00.002-07:002013-04-17T16:27:23.795-07:00Do The Good People of Boston Really Need Mister Fred McFeeley Rogers Right Now?
I doubt it. From my Ottawa Citizen column today:
In place of actual acts of journalism related to Monday’s barbarism, was it really necessary for the Globe and Mail, Time Magazine, Slate and the Washington Post to gang up on everybody with pieties out of the cardigan-wearing Presbyterian host of a 1960s-era television babysitting service titled Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood?
Seriously. The Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-48699570845378332822013-04-09T17:42:00.002-07:002013-04-09T17:44:02.048-07:00At best, a slightly lunatic mediocrity.
At her worst, Margaret Thatcher was bloody-minded, incompetent, sadistic and vindictive, as I point out in the Ottawa Citizen today. And nowhere was her brutishness more a menace to decency and peace than in Ireland.
I admit, it's kind of personal. My late dad was a leading figure in the Irish Prisoner of War Committee here in Canada during the 1980-81 hunger strikes over which Maggie so Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-38848631987353515572013-04-08T17:40:00.002-07:002013-04-08T17:40:35.034-07:00A Melancholy Air from Declan McManus. Who takes all the glory, and none of the shame?
Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-91039239885884381902013-04-04T10:16:00.001-07:002013-04-04T10:22:25.120-07:00Canada's Journey to Energy Superpowerhood: Voyage of the Damned.
Pity poor Calamity Joe. He just can't get a break. Or so I attempt to show in my Ottawa Citizen column today. In sum: Out west, where Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were born, all you can hear these days is the sound of weeping and gnashing of teeth in Alberta, and in British Columbia it’s mostly just the sound of people laughing at Joe Oliver.
A year ago, Joe was on such a roll. Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-76244336853812184402013-04-02T16:23:00.000-07:002013-04-02T16:23:27.561-07:00It's Not Complicated. Bigotry Simply Lowers The Tone.
Low, stupid, cheap and wrong, small-minded, sub-literate, vulgar, bigoted, moronic, retrograde - any one of these is sufficient reason for a newspaper editor to pass on publishing a letter. A self-evidently racist letter simply lowers the tone. It is not an infringement upon anyone's free speech rights to refuse publication of such letters; it is indeed the healthy exercise of free speech to Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-80790441047180326032013-03-27T20:03:00.001-07:002013-03-27T20:07:18.466-07:00The Occupy Movement: Destroyed by a Conspiracy of Infiltration and Sabotage?
So says the Yankee celebrity hipster Chris Hedges, co-author with Joe Sacco of Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, about which I cannot comment because I haven't read so much as a page of it, but also author of the wildly popular Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, which I found so excruciating in its silliness that I couldn't get past the first third or so. Terry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16873276.post-29997127096640075712013-03-25T23:07:00.000-07:002013-03-25T23:09:31.499-07:00About These Bloody Pandas.
They're not even proper bears. They're actually some class of raccoon. Lounging around all day at the taxpayers' expense, eating bamboo,
defecating and sleeping and eating again and stinking. It' scandalous and disgusting. Giant bloody rats is what.
They should be harnessed to a water-mill or something to make some bloody use of themselves, the lazy chiselers. In any event I should ratherTerry Glavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888372152979226013noreply@blogger.com2