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For weeks of front-end news, a China-Canada rift has gripped Canada. The story-line is endlessly repeated and runs like this: “Experts from both sides of the border agree that imprisonment of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou is strictly abiding by the rule of law, and China cannot or does not want to understand how the rule of law works”.
The unifying plot is that Canada must continue to hold the CFO of China’s world-leading telecommunications giant in detention on behalf of a US extradition warrant to uphold the rule of law as sacred.
That it is an extra-territorial demand for no offense committed under Canada or international law is not reported. That the offense alleged is against a unilateral US embargo of Iran by its export controls to which Canada is not a party is deleted across the media and all official statements. Anyone who does not join into this ruling story or connects the covered-up facts of its story-line is drowned out and removed from the public eye, including Canada’s own senior statesman and well-liked ambassador to China.
In general, any revealing questions are silenced. All the legal parameters of the case dissolve instead into the empty slogan ‘rule of law’. Background editors of what can be spoken on the public stage ensure at every level that no diversion is allowed.
The Designated Enemy as Syntax of the US-Canada News Cycle
I had no sooner written the above paragraphs when Canada’s Foreign Affairs was also joining the US in endorsing an ongoing coup d’etat in Venezuela to overthrow its elected socialist presidency to install, in newspeak phrase, “the only legitimate government” in its place, the leader of the opposition party.
Rule of law in each reversed as ‘the rule of law’. Venezuela is yet another variation on the story line we have seen play out since 1973 in Chile. The designated socialist enemy is destabilized by financial, market, civil and street-violence means, and reverse-blamed for the orchestrated chaos used to overthrow it. Or the designated enemy is simply a rival power, and a crisis is constructed to destabilize its relations with other nations to gain leverage in undermining it capacity to compete – as with China at same time as the Venezuela coup. Or the long-designated enemy is set up for total financial, market, diplomatic and military isolation and ruin as with Libya, Iraq and the former Yugoslavia in the past, and Iran today, whose internationally lawless US embargo is behind the US-Canada imprisonment of the CFO of China’s rising global telecommunication giant, Huawei.
In short, global domination by the Enemy syntax of the news rules by double-think slogans without factual referents, piling one on top of another in perpetual mutations allowing any claim or action at all as ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘the rule of law’, including imprisonment of the China trade competitor with the US disobeying its unilateral export embargoes.
True to Form: Canada’s Foreign Minister Serving US-led China and Venezuela Attacks
Canada’s Foreign Christina aka ‘Chrystia’ Freeland – a near slogan itself – Christian Free Land – is the speaker of the doublethink endorsement of the attempted Venezuela coup d’etat today by its opposition leader. Minister Freeland is used to legitimating coup d’etats as legitimate, even when they are by mass-murderous means led by avowed Nazis, as in she has done in Ukraine since before its violent coup in 2014. ‘Stopping Putin and Russia’ is her justification, as always the official Enemy since armed Russia resistance against NATO expansion over its traditional borders through Ukraine.
Freeland also knows how to deny hard facts and get away with it – as she has done on in lies and cover-up of her grandfather being the chief newspaper propagandist for the Nazis occupying Ukraine and Poland in the 1939-45 World War. Again the Enemy Russia is the moral baseline of thought that transforms all false news and attacks on it as freedom. .
Minister Freeland also leads the forcible arrest and detention of China’s leading global Telecomunications CFO on behalf of the US prior to her legitimizing the opposition coup of the elected President of Venezuela.
Nonetheless Canada’s senior statesman and Ambassador to China, John McCallum, has bravely cited the justiciable facts of this case. He has observed in diplomatic third-person language that Meng Wanzou the person is able to defend her case of US-led arrest in Canada as extra-territorial, arguably politically motivated, and under no Canadian law. But his observation to a small group of Chinese Canadians on January 23 was instantly denounced as ‘inconceivable’, an ‘outrage’, and ‘dangerous’ by all the media of record, and the official Conservative opposition successfully demanded he be fired immediately with – as always – no fact McCallum reports either denied or allowed into the pervasive denunciations.
Minister Freeland herself demands his firing behind the scenes, and today afterwards publicly chides his “unfortunate incident” as undercutting her “valuable work” in “uniting Canada’s allies” against China’s alleged retaliatory arrests of two non-governmental Canadian agents in China.
Canada’s Foreign Minster paradigmatically expresses the ruling syntax of the Enemy cornerstone of official culture in Canada as well as the US. It is the ‘rule of law’, even with no sovereign law supporting it. Abuse is poured on anyone reporting the facts – including on the NDP leader who has ‘written his political obituary’ for worrying that the US may be leading another coup d’etat in Latin America.
No illegal or criminal act of any kind is alleged under Canada law. Internationally lawless US trade-and-diplomatic war tactics are unspeakable even as they are undeniable facts. Beneath notice, every claim of ‘the rule of law’ refers, in fact, to another attack on a US-designated Enemy that violates international law at every turn.
In the case of the China CFO arrest, it is backed by illegal embargo against Iran that no other country including Canada has agreed to (except Israel), and is in effect an extra-territorial kidnapping of a VPI foreign subject by US warrant executed in Canada by US demand in political misuse of an extradition treaty intended for criminal offenses.
Most specifically, it is an extension of US embargo of Iran in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2231 passed unanimously by the Security Council including the US in 2016 (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action lifting sanction on Iran). In this way, a foreign national economic leader of China out-competing the US in the world market of telecommunications – the long-time signature technology of US global hegemony – is imprisoned even as the US and China negotiate a US-initiated trade war.
The Orwellian Master Pattern From China to Venezuela to Iran and Russia
While this politically motivated US extradition is invoked as ‘the rule of law’ above politics, Canada’s Foreign Affairs then jumps on board the latest US coup d’etat of an elected government in Latin America. In fact nowhere mentioned in ‘the free press’, this latest coup d’etat campaign seeks to overthrow an instituted electoral process of presidential election of which US President Jimmy Carter has publicly reported:
“Venezuela has probably the most excellent voting system I have ever known”.
This fact too is now erased from discussion, and reversed in claim. In matters of ‘the rule of law’ and ‘legitimate elections’, stern repetition of false slogans prevail on every public front, but no fake news is even imagined in official culture. Where a US-designated enemy is involved, all parties are entitled to say whatever they want the opposite of fact and law or not. Almost the whole of the country’s corporate media and journalists can be counted on to join in indignant anathema and cries for blood. It is a permanent festival of hate license as freedom.
The US-Enemy grammar of illusion is at the same time predictable in its collective public operation. Communist China is the Enemy. Socialist Venezuela is the Enemy. Islamic Iran is the Enemy. All the while, Russia is the Enemy of all enemies being daily warred upon as NATO armies, transnational Big Oil and company march East. Everything connects, but the dots are not joined
So deep is the Enemy cornerstone of US ideology and politics that even the greatest leader ever in massive de-taxation and de-regulation of the corporate rich, President Trump, is hated most deeply by establishment powers because he does not make war on Russia.
Blaming the Victimin Moral Reversal
Oil-rich but impoverished Venezuela has been the Enemy since Hugo Chavez became president in 1999 to lead a ‘21st century socialism’ based on the country’s oil riches formerly in control of US Big Oil and its local oligarchy – the standard arrangement. .
Post-1999 Venezuela is thus targeted as an Enemy of the Free World. Yet having failed in destabilization and coup attempts in Venezuela over the 20 years since – all supported by the US and its branchplant class in Canada – a long process of financial strangling led by Wall Street behind the scenes has cumulatively succeeded in bleeding Venezuela dry.
While none of this makes its way into ‘the news’, Venezuela has been financially embargoed from all international loans on which almost all governments depend. Its medical and other life-and-death supplies have been cut off from purchase and importation. Its tar-sands oil that grounds it export economy has been systematically shorted in world markets. Its publicly subsidized foods have been stolen and sold in Columbia for huge profits. Its former US-puppet oil-oligarchy and collaborators have been on-and-off raising US-supported havoc in the streets since the last violent armed coup failed against popular uprising.
All the effects up to near starvation of food and medicine imports by suspension of normal credit and other embargoes have been blamed on the evil leadership against US Big Oil and Wall Street control of the nation. The failed strategy of armed overthrow has moved to Orange-style revolution of well-fed mobs in the street to finish the job on the completely destabilized Venezuela economy. US ‘military option’ is increasingly threatened from the top.
As always in these cases of imperial international aggression, a moral reason in which decent people believe is proclaimed with deep gravity and rectitude as the justification for what is forbidden to name – an all-fronts attack for lawless advantage and exploitation by superior power. The ‘rule of law’ is here the pretext for caving in as well as justifying the aggression. One way or the other, the Enemy designation makes all contradictions off-limits to discuss.
Spectacles of Power and Submission as Distractions from the Ruin of the Earth
Superbowl playoffs, Russiagate, China Intertel, Iran Bomb, Venezuela dictator, immigrants storming the gates – – What unites all the war games is distraction from the truly fatal threat of the cumulative pollution and despoliation of the natural and social life support systems of the world by the ruling disorder.
Sudden death sports, trade-wars, coups d’etat, big-news arrests, and so on become an endless spectacle news cycle. Pretentious diversions, whopping falsehoods, and bizarre extremes entertain screen-addicted populations as the world’s common life-ground collapses. Nothing is connected to anything else as life-and-death turning points become who can win next in the frenzy of derailment of the terrestrial life support systems of all.
This is ‘the Free World’. Yet ‘full spectrum dominance’ is the bipartisan US objective no-one calls into question. Reverse-blaming others is the method of attack. “Freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘rule of law’ are the idealized justifications. Trump’s new Space Force for “space as a war-fighting domain” expands the reverse projections into US –led military pollution and control of the earth’s skies.
Who can be opposed to more security for America against the terrorism of its enemies? Adoption of the US-Enemy framework of meaning reverses all reality and facts into their opposite with no end until the dots are publicly connected.
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John McMurtry is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph and elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His work has been translated from Latin America through Europe to Japan, and he is the author/editor of UNESCO’s three-volume Philosophy and World Problems, as well as more recently, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism; From Crisis to Cure. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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