By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
The corporate mass media and the pseudo-corporate CBC have been all aflutter in recent days over the disclosure that four persons have been arrested in Canada on suspicion of terrorism-related activities.
This latest attempt to sow the seeds of fear and xenophobia in the hearts and minds of Canadians would be laughable if its perpetrators were not guilty of making Canada a rational target for terrorism.
For decades, Canada enjoyed the respect of much of the world as a relatively even-handed participant in global affairs, even as a champion of some of the values most of mankind holds dearest.
But in recent years – and under successive Liberal and Conservative federal governments – our country has drifted away from those values most cherished by most Canadians and sought to become nothing more and nothing less than a lapdog for the perverted aspirations of unchallenged global hegemony of the United States of America.
In volunteering to do America’s dirty work in Afghanistan and potentially other defenceless targets for U.S. invasion, they have made Canada a prime target for international so-called “terrorists.”
They have invited the oppressed Third World to target Canada and, as a consequence, some “terrorists” or “freedom fighters” have apparently taken up the invitation.
The United States currently has about 750 foreign military bases spread around almost every country in the world, an aresenal sufficient to obliterate mankind several times over, a miltary budget more than equal to that of the whole rest of the world combined, and an insatiable lust for cheap labour and cheap natural resources.
Its sordid quest to be the Master Of The Universe may sit well with the ignorant majority of Americans who offer blind allegiance to the likes of Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, New Gingrich, Pat Robertson, John Boehner, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party et al, but they are putting the very survival of mankind in peril.
America’s insane obsession with so-called “Manifest Destiny” has inflicted more pain and suffering on mankind than the worst depredations of World War II-era Nazism.
Is it any wonder, then, that international so-called “terrorists” want to exact a measure of vengeance against what they see as the “Great Satan?”
But even with the egregious harm the U.S. daily inflicts upon all mankind, the few who would actually carry out these acts of revenge are very few and far between.
What is far more real is the effort of the powers-that-be – in both the U.S. and Canada – to so paralyze their own populations with fear of “the other” that they will welcome the arrival of a police state that they imagine will at least keep them safe.
And while the U.S. may well be too far along the road to perdition to make a U-turn now, Canada still has the moral option of ceasing to be the Pentagon’s bumboy.
Canada would not be a target of international “terrorists” if it was not climbing into bed each night with the world’s biggest supporter of terrorism – the United States of America.