Right, Left And Centre; The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Part One

    Right, Left and Center by Dave Jaffe - Part One.


       A man I'll call John is a political junkie. Ask John, a 40ish person about any country's politics and ethnic groups, and he'll come up with the right answer. "Now in Afghanistan," he told one person who inquired about that country, "there's Pashtuns and Uzbecks." Then he named all the other Afghani ethnic groups and their politics,. John was right on all counts.
   This resident of Vancouver Island has been in the federal Liberal Party since his teenage years. "My mother and father were both Liberals," Jon says. Although John -which isn't his real name- votes now for the provincial New Democratic Party he always votes Liberal in federal elections.
    So John is a conservative on many issues. One political atrocity he always mentions was the shooting by East German police of over 700  East German people who were trying to escape communists-ruled East Germany. Communists ruled East Germany from 1945 to 1989 when communism started to collapse. The East German state put up a wall in Berlin in the early 1960's when thousands of East Germans fled their country for West Germany.
     "Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev," U.S. president Ronald Reagan proclaimed when he visited West Germany and West Berlin in the 1980"s. Back then, Mikhail Gorbachev headed up the Soviet Union which Reagan and tens of millions of Americans and Canadians despised. John can't forget the deaths at the Berlin Wall and he is right to do so. Yet on the other hand, John says nothing about the U.S.-driven war in Indochina.
    From 1954 to 1975, U.S. armed forces killed over 2 million Vietnamese, 300,000 Laotians and 650,000 Cambodians. The United States was trying to prevent all of Indochina from going communist. The U.S. failed but the damage it inflicted on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos was huge.
    John also leaves out the other U.S. wars. In 2003 U.S. troops led a NATO force that invaded Iraq to overthrow Iraq's vicious dictator Saddam Hussein. "He's like Hitler," some people claimed about Hussein, who was indeed a bad man. Still, the U.S. government and its president George W. Bush invaded on the excuse that Husein was behind '9/11'.
   '9/11' let's remember was the killing of over 3,000 Americans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania on September 9, 2001. On that day less than 20 young men, all from Saudi Arabia or  Morocco hijacked a series of planes and crashed them into the World Trade Centre towers in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington and a field in Pennsylvania.
    Soon after 9/11 U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, who supposedly was the mastermind behind '9/11'. Bin Laden escaped to Pakistan where years later U.S. armed forces tracked him down and killed him. This invasion of Afghanistan could be justified on the grounds that Bin Laden was a mass murderer. Yet what came later was wrong. And James was in favour of what happened next.
      (End of Part One).