It begins with the lies told a supine and disinterested populace; big lies are best, history advises if you are to commit big crimes. From the lie come the policies, rationalized by the lie, and codified by the lie's repetition. Tell a lie often enough and it becomes truth we're informed.
But there comes a point where the lies cannot bear the light of truth, and Canada is coming to just such an unearthing of the ugly truth behind its present masters' ethical bankruptcy.
Monday January 12, 2009 saw Canada's government, as represented by Stephen Harper's minority Tories, stand in defense of the mighty in the form of Israel's military machine, currently chewing up the near defenseless Palestinians trapped in Gaza.
True to form, Canada's monopolist media uttered hardly a word about this disgraceful abrogation of the precepts of human rights, often espoused as the founding principles of Canada. For millions of Canadians, the news of what "their" country has come to represent is yet not known.
The truth of its cowardly refusal to condemn, as did 33 other members of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, Israel's grotesque and wanton slaughter of the innocents of Gaza and the rest of remnant Palestine in their hundreds, maiming thousands more, and rendering tens of thousands shelterless in the teeth of winter brings an end to the comfortable lie: Canada cares about human dignity and the rights accorded to humans as basic principles, as so ceremoniously signed by it in declaration after declaration at the United Nations.
On January 12, 2009, Canada stood alone among the 47 nations of the U.N.H.R.C., 33 of those desperate to see an end to Israel's bombardment of the trapped population of the Gaza Strip, in opposition to that body's resolution of condemnation of Israel's actions these last terrible weeks.
Surrounded by eight meter high walls on three sides, and the deep blue sea on the fourth, Palestinians, civilians and officials of the hated Hamas government alike, have no place of refuge to run to within the oldest refugee camp in the world. Overhead, helicopter gunships, aerial drones, and F-16 fighter jets wheel and turn, spitting fire and steel into the single-most densely peopled area on the planet.
Watching the horror recorded through telephoto lenses from the safety of the Israeli-claimed territory beyond the concrete and razor wire girding Gaza, the Canadian government still assumes the Israeli Defense Force line, which states: Those being slaughtered pose an existential threat to the survival of Israel.
And so, the slaughter must not be halted, nor even criticized for the abomination it clearly is. Is there a single word in the entirety of the english lexicon to describe this craven disregard of humanity and abandonment of morality?
Obscenity hardly describes it fully, but obscene it certainly is.
Standing in for Israel and the United States, neither of which having a seat on the human rights commission, Canada did its yeoman service to the two most profligate abusers of human rights and dignity, as it did during the equally criminal destruction of southern Lebanon in 2006. Like that not prosecuted war crime, Israel is deploying both banned and experimental weapons against the civilians in Gaza. Today, (Jan. 14, 2009) reports coming from the region estimate more than 1,000 dead, with fully a third of those being children.
This despicable and savage campaign, unabashedly supported by Canada's quisling Harper minority government, (as was the outrage in Lebanon in 2006) is a stain on Canada's hard won respect on the world stage as a champion for human rights and justice. It brings this nation down to the sub-moral level of "great friends" Israel, and its primary sponsor and weapons supplier the United States of America; both criminals whose depravity is without historical precedent.
For Canadians, the cowardly and grim distinction Monday's vote represents should serve as a moment of national reflection, a time for we as a people comprised of peoples from the world over to consider what kind of country we wish to create in this already too bloody young 21st Century. It is, as Barak Obama might say, a much needed "teaching moment" for a country that has lost its way, mired in one war of aggression and occupation, and supporting two others.
