LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: 12/18/06

Monday, December 18, 2006

Man Of The Year

Hugo Chavez.

Singer, Popular TV Show host, revolutionary, socialist,Anti-Imperialist, heir of Castro, and democratically re-elected President of Venezuela, for a third time!

Hugo Chavez who was in the lead and the WINNER of Time Online Poll for Person of the Year 2006. He did not even win as their newsmaker of the year.

Even if he had the best performance at the UN.

He did make it as a runner up in the US edition though, unlike our PM Stephen Harper.

Who Should Be Person of the Year?

TIME's Person of the Year is the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year. Who do you think fits the bill this year?

35% Hugo Chavez

21% Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

11% Nancy Pelosi

11% The YouTube Guys

8% George W. Bush

7% Al Gore

5% Condoleezza Rice

2% Kim Jong Il

Note on Poll Results

A tip o' the blog to Canadian Observer

See:

Chavez

Latin America

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Hugo Chavez, Venezuela, Time Magazine Person Of The Year, Time Magazine, Person of the year

Paranoia and the Security State

So why did the Arar affair happen?

Because the State is paranoid, and the most paranoid of the State's apparatchicks are the police, especially the 'secret police', or official 'state police'. Those who protect secrets and weed out secret conspiracies opposed to the the state.

IDENTIFYING THE TRAITOR AMONG US: THE RHETORIC OF ESPIONAGE

The Paranoid Style, indeed, lends itself to a worldview that has more in common with tragedy than comedy. Belief in conspiracy requires an interpretation of events as sinister and significant, and the vigilance needed to avoid being manipulated demands a constant looking beneath the surface and assumption of dishonesty on the part of others. As with Classical tragedy, in which the will of the gods was the unpredictable and inevitable mover of events, in the modern Paranoid Style the machinations of government (or the secret powers behind the state bureaucracy) are unpredictable (because individuals cannot understand that which is carefully hidden) and inevitable, with layers upon layers of secrecy and manipulation entrapping the individual (even the individual spy working in service of the government). This layering makes possible the twists and turns of plot line in a typical spy novel. This layering also creates a relationship between man and state that is alienating and disempowering. Man’s quests for freedom, rationality, and justice are hubris, doomed to disappointment and a tragic ending, according to the shared logic of the Paranoid Style and the generic spy novel.

In point of fact, however, the post-Cold War spy story seems to be more an example of comedy than of tragedy. This was perhaps predictable. Writing in 1988, Ed Black noted that “The disclosure of secret agents and agencies is not terminal; it concludes nothing beyond itself. It is ad hoc, a transient skirmish in a prolonged conflict; it functions merely to confirm the ideological position that generated it. Such a disclosure is, in sum, not purgative. It leaves the fundamental affliction in place and extirpates only one of its local manifestations.” (p. 60 in Rhetorical Questions) The crucial key to understanding tragedy is the moment of catharsis, which alone can signify the necessary closure. In espionage, there is no moment at which everything becomes clear and all the secrets are revealed. For the paranoid, there is always the suspicion that where there was one double-agent, there might be more who are better hidden.

For the individual onlookers, there is always the suspicion that what the state bureaucracy (CIA, FBI, or KGB, it doesn’t matter) is not revealing is greater than what is revealed by the limited disclosure of the spy case, and that context might very well alter our understanding of the case at hand.

Such was the case with the Liberals who after 9/11 joined other States around the world implementing anti-democratic, authoritarian, Bonapartist security legislation that stripped 'some' Canadians of their rights.

Yep we have heard this before its called the War Measures Act used to intern foreign aliens like Ukrainians in WWI and then 'foreign nationals' the Japanese Canadians in WWII. Of course then there was the 'apprehended insurrection' declared by PET over the FLQ Crisis in Quebec and that was the last time the WMA was used. However it resulted in the RCMP become an internal spy and agent provcatour against the percieved Enemies of the State; the left, unions, the anti-war movement, the PQ etc.

RCMP Spied on Tommy Douglas For Three Decades

It is the criminalization of dissent, of democracy. And the Canadian state and its private army of the right, the RCMP have along history of anti-democratic paranoid politics.

Scandal ensued which exposed the RCMP as engaging in illegal activities, burning barns, illegal wiretapping, agent provacatuers planted in movements, etc.
The result was the Macdonald Commission identified the problem with Canada's Military State Police when they were exposed for spying and dirty tricks on Canadians back through the sixties and seventies. Its recommendation was to sever espionage/spying/intelligence from the RCMP. Thus was CSIS created.
But the RCMP remained the same para-military secret police force it always had been.

Quote: The need for this civilian review is beyond debate. Endquote.

It would seem so. In 1981, the MacDonald Commission, echoing the conclusions of the earlier Marin Commission, concluded that an independent civilian review mechanism for the RCMP was necessary to ensure proper accountability.

It took a while - five separate bills were tabled in the House of Commons - but in 1986 Parliament confirmed the need for civilian review of RCMP conduct was beyond debate.

It's now 17 years later and, quite frankly, I shouldn't have to be addressing the need for effective civilian review of RCMP conduct and, more particularly, civilian review of the national security activities of the RCMP.

However come 9/11 and the Democratic Governments of the World use it as an excuse to bring in draconian anti-libertarian laws against their citizens. All were potential enemies of the State but none more so than those who are Muslim or from the Middle East, who have swarthy looks, funny last names. It's called profiling and it was done on Arar and others by the RCMP.

The Liberals again unleashed their personal police force, to do their dirty work. Given carte blanche the RCMP did the internal spy search while CSIS coordinated international connections. And in between these two came a dangerous disconnect, one that ended up with Maher Arar being sent to Syria to be torutured by the Syrians on behalf of Homeland Security and CSIS.

Given their past practice I believeCSIS was looking for usable double agents, agent provacatuers, its usual modus operandi. When embarassed through internal misinformation and not being able to turn Arar or use him they abandoned him to be dealt with by the US Homeland Security and the CIA.

Once again the RCMP have engaged in domestic spying and espionage in the name of the Liberal Government of the day.

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Karl Marx