Zeinab Merai, Sada al-Mashrek
Earlier, lawyer and Professor of International Human Rights Daniel Kovalik has highlighted reasons that are feeding the current anti-Russian mania, noting that the anti-Russia alliance doesn’t represent the greater portion of the world. Kovalik has as well countered mainstream media narratives, explaining where the aglomeration of real culture and freedom in the world is.
Now he says the bread-and-circuses effect won’t last long among Americans and Canadians. Kovalik and other observers say a huge deal of flaws in the US and Canadian interior necessitates that resources be allocated to the people rather than to pointless wars.
Militarisation in Canada
On April 5th, 1949, NATO was founded “as a military alliance for aggression against the USSR. Canada pushed hard for creating NATO, which has terrorised the world ever since, with its victims including Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Libya and more,” The Canada Files news organisation states.
Additionally, lawyer Daniel Kovailk says during his and his fellows’ visit to Syria, they learnt that passports from 84 different countries were found with the so-called ‘jihadists.’
Those passports included at least 180 that belonged to Canadians, who had joined ISIL and other so-called ‘jihadist’ groups – that’s publicly. And it has been reported that only a few of those terrorists have come back home, but all of them should have been brought and tried in court, not left to be someone else’s problem. This, however, hasn’t made the news the same way scores of Canadians are showing their infatuation for Ukraine.
And today, “on behalf of the Trudeau government, Canadian Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland has committed to regime change against the Russian government led by Vladimir Putin in the name of ‘peace.’ Despite the lack of an independent investigation requested by Russia regarding claimed war crimes in the region around Kiev, Freeland used unverified Ukrainian government war-crime claims to claim that regime change is necessary to achieve peace,” adds The Canada Files.
Even the Canadian interior has been exploited for militarisation purposes, with citizens being now recruited to join the fight in Ukraine. Canadian grounds have as well been being used to recruit soldiers for the Israeli military. Despite complaints by several activists and a petition to the House of Commons (https://petitions.ourcommons.ca/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-3810) initiated by Hamilton’s Rabbi David Mivasair, no clear official action has been taken.
“A religion of fantasy”
“The US is really a society built on so little, and it’s a fantasy. It’s built on this Hollywood image, of course. Look at the Oscars and what happened [when actor Will Smith slapped comedian and actor Chris Rock on the face after the latter had made a joke about the disease of Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.] (Russell Brand Reacts To Will Smith Slap - YouTube). It was a circus, and I think that is not an isolated issue; it’s a sign of something,” states author Kovalik.
He says he agrees “with British comedian Russell Brand, who said the Oscars are kind of this religious ceremony for the US, and the event has an incantation that works on not just the American public but the world, at least up till now. Millions of people around the world watch this religious pageant, which isn’t a religion of God. It is a religion of fantasy, wealth and beauty that’s meant to distract you from real world issues and problems. What happened was some of the magicians and high priests of that ceremony fell apart and couldn’t even keep it together to get through the ceremony. So the incantation was broken. You had a guy get up on stage and slap another guy. No one stopped him; they cheered for him.”
Kovalik’s viewpoint is that “the curtain is now aside, and the rot in American culture and society is being exposed, and this is just an example of it. There’s nothing particularly special about this country. We tried to claim that, and the world has believed it for a long time. They really have. I know this because I go to different countries, and when you are American, you are treated kind of special, that’s the truth of it.”
Kovalik notes here that the US tops the world in terms of the highest COVID-19 numbers and deaths, in addition to the number of prisoners as an absolute number and as per capita. He also delineates that “in the developed world, the US has the highest poverty rate and numbers of homelessness. It has areas and places like Alabama and West Virginia that don’t have sewage or running water. But the ‘Disneyland’ the people thought existed doesn’t exist. Everyone sees this, particularly Americans, whom I think are going to have to come to grips with this façade and seek to build or rebuild – for the first time – a real country with a real culture and infrastructure and stop wagging our finger in everyone else’s face.”
A replica of the US, Canada shows a lot of failings in terms of social welfare and infrastructure.
In May 2021, political-science graduate Martina Arcuri reported for The John Howard Society of Canada that “substantial flaws” exist within Canada’s prison system, cautioning that this is “perplexing given the current socio-political context, one that prides itself on its call for criminal justice reform and restorative justice. If substantial changes are not made, prisons will continue to be ridden with crime.” (The Canadian Prison System: A “Broken” Institution - The John Howard Society of Canada : The John Howard Society of Canada).
And according to Statistics Canada, in the autumn of 2020, about 1 in 10 Canadians aged 12 and older reported “some level of food insecurity in their household during the prior 12 months…” The agency explains that “the cost of living in 2022, including higher food prices, may have impacted the financial situation of many Canadian households and, therefore, their risk of food insecurity.” (https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-003-x/2022002/article/00002-eng.htm)
Also in late June, 2021, British Columbia’s 6-month-disater period began: record-breaking heat, then continuous wild fires, followed by floods and landslides. Approximately 600 British Columbians and thousands of livestock were killed. Fire-fighters even had to be brought in from Mexico to help fight hundreds of active fires in the wrecked province.
And that’s just a sample of what the Canadian interior is going through. Yet Canadian officials have found enough resources to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Ukraine and to dispatch RCMP to Ukraine. In this regard, researchers of The Canada Files say, “Mounted Police, the colonial police force that continues to be part of Canda’s genocide against Indigenous nations, was just chosen by the Canadian government to investigate alleged Russian war crimes. The colonial arrogance of Canada knows no limit.”
Will North Americans hold their governments accountable before it’s too late?
Asked whether he sees that Canadians and Americans will begin to detach from mainstream-media narratives that depict their governments as builders of democracy and civilisation and will hold their governments accountable for looting budgets to stage wars instead of allocating them to citizens, Kovalik says, “They’re going to have to question it when it gets to the point; you are going to have a threshold that’s large enough of people who aren’t able to survive in this country, and that’s beginning to happen: People can’t afford housing or healthcare. It’s a worse problem in the US than Canada, but they’re going to start facing that, too. They can’t buy food, and this isn’t a problem that most people in the US have experienced, but they are going to start experiencing it.”
“And they’re going to start to wonder what it is they are being sold by the government and what they’re getting from it. The question is whether this will happen before it’s too late. They used to talk about bread and circuses – these things that distract you from revolution. Now we don’t even have much bread, but we still have the circuses and the smart phones; People, even with not much means, can kind of be distracted all day long from their problems. But soon it’s going to be just impossible to revert your eyes anymore, and that I think people will wake up,” believes the outspoken author.
“The question is: What will they do about it? In what direction will they move? Because there isn’t a very organised left through the US or Canada. It’s largely been dismantled, in part, externally by intelligence forces but also internally, and so they may turn more to right wings, which you know is a bad thing… I think there will be a lot of questions, but I don’t know if there’s going to be a lot of solutions. And that’s really the task of the activist system: to present those solutions. But the time is coming soon that people are going to have to ask very profound questions about their own countries for sure,” says Kovalik.
“The US madness must end. But the problem is it’s going to be an ugly affair. Empires don’t go away quietly, the US is still a major military power, and it may take a lot of people with it as it goes down, which is terrible, you know, but this is what is happening. I think the war in the Ukraine is a dramatic blow against the US empire and against Western hegemony,” the lawyer believes.
In a recent op-ed he wrote for RT, Kovalik states, “It is my assessment that Russia had a right to act in its own self-defence by intervening in Ukraine, which had become a proxy of the US and NATO for an assault – not only on Russian ethnics within Ukraine – but also upon Russia itself. A contrary conclusion would simply ignore the dire realities facing Russia.” (https://www.rt.com/op-ed/authors/daniel-kovalik/)
Zoom Screenshot by Sada al-Mashrek: Daniel Kovalik shows a box he got in Lebanon; carved on top is a picture of the Dome of the Rock and of a map of occupied Palestine
For further exchange on a range of current issues, you can follow me on Twitter: @Zeinab_Merai