ALEPPO

Maybe We're Racists Alliterate.

I cannot imagine the destruction of Alleppo happening in a White Nation without bringing down the Wrath of the West.

And yet, since it is in Syria ...everyone, including the self claimed pious Progressives are uncharacteristically silent. 

I am going to do a series of a few Blogs on this tragic happening ...beginning with a stellar op piece by Terry Glavin of the National Post daily newspaper.    

Unless one is totally heartless, it would be most difficult to be unmoved by Glavin's account of what has just transpired. 

Aleppo has fallen.

The last and sturdiest bastion of the Syrian uprising is gone. The Battle of Aleppo is over, the revolution is finished, and the Syrian mass murderer Bashar al-Assad has won. Russia has won. Iran has won. Hezbollah has won. The United States has lost. The United Nations has lost, and the bloody war in Syria, already having taken nearly half a million lives, goes on.

Aleppo mattered, it should go without saying, but it’s worthwhile enumerating what did not matter. You can start with Aleppo’s 31,000 dead and proceed from there through each and every statutory war crime codified by the International Criminal Court.

Mass murder by chlorine gas. Massacres of innocents. Bombardments by Russian jet fighters. The deliberate targeting of hospitals and clinics. The firing of mortar rounds into crowded neighbourhoods. The terror of barrel bombs dropped from Syrian army helicopters. The starvation siege that followed the city’s encirclement by Shia death squads and Assadist militias on Sept. 8.

None of that mattered, not the hourly imagery on Instagram and YouTube and Twitter of corpse-strewn streets and decapitated infants, and not the gut-wrenching final goodbyes uploaded to mobile phones or sent by text from the survivors in the rebel-held ruins of the Old City, the al-Shaar district, and the backstreets of Sheikh Saeed.

Leaning against a wall, his tattered Adidas hoodie drawn against the rain, the young English teacher, reporter and activist Abdulkafi Al-Hamdo managed to use his cellphone camera to upload his goodbye to the video-streaming service Periscope on Monday night.

“What I want to say is, Don’t believe anymore in the United Nations. Don’t believe anymore in the international community. Don’t think that they are not satisfied with what’s going on. They are satisfied that we are being killed, that we are facing one of the most difficult, or the most serious, or the most horrible massacres that is in our history. --- We wanted freedom. We didn’t want anything else but freedom. You know, this world doesn’t like freedom, it seems.”

There is no plausible defence any of us can mount against Al-Hambdo’s plainspoken indictment. In the world’s citadels of democracy, there are no popular constituencies sufficient to the task of commanding our elected leaders to put their backs into the emancipation of the Syrian people from their tormentors. After all, you know, quagmire and all that. Broach the subject of NATO enforcing a modicum of order in the Syrian abbatoir by means of, say, a no-fly zone, and you’ll be denounced as a warmonger in the mould of the archvillains George W. Bush and Tony Blair. 

The truth of it is we’d just rather not take the trouble. We aren’t prepared to suffer the sacrifices demanded of the commitments to universal rights we profess, so we absolve ourselves by talking about “the Muslim world” as though it were a distant planet. We talk about Arabs as though they were a different species. It is easier on the conscience that way.  Between the drooling bigotries of the isolationist right and the clever platitudes of the “anti-imperialist” left, the only place left to address the solemn obligations we owe one another as human beings is in negotiations over the codicils of international trade agreements, or in the rituals of deliberately unenforceable resolutions entertained by the United Nations General Assembly.

The UN human rights office later announced that it had received credible reports that hundreds of men who crossed into Aleppo’s regime-controlled districts had gone missing. Young men were being pulled out of the line at the corridor checkpoints. The Consultative Council in the Levant Front, one of Aleppo’s main rebel groups, reported that the men had been taken to “warehouses that look more like internment camps.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reckons that 60,000 Syrians have been starved to death, tortured to death or executed in Assad’s prisons since the non-violent democratic uprising began in February, 2011. Relying on regime defectors and insiders, the Observatory has verified 14,446 deaths at a single facility, Sednaya prison, near Damascus.

And now Aleppo is undergoing what UN humanitarians spokesman Jens Laerke calls “a complete meltdown of humanity.” The still-living lie with dead in the rubble of bombed out buildings. You can hear them screaming. Regime militias are carrying out mass executions of civilians. In one case, 11 women and 13 children were shot “on the spot.” Women are committing suicide rather than face the prospect of rape and murder.

A planned evacuation of perhaps 100,000 civilians and rebel fighters from East Aleppo was heralded as a breakthrough on Tuesday, following the abject surrender by all of Aleppo’s remaining rebels — hardline Islamists and democratic patriots alike. By Wednesday morning, the Russian-Turkish understanding had fallen through, the glimmer of hope had flickered out, the barrel bombs and mortar shells were raining down on Aleppo again, and from the people, those gut-wrenching final goodbyes — “Pray for us,” “I hope you can remember us” — were going out to the world again.
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All the little guy in the White had to do to avoid this slaughter was to impose a no fly zone at the time he was drawing his imaginary red line in the sand.

As he fades into the woodwork he puffs out his chest and proclaims what a good guy am I ... look at all I have accomplished... he says.

You certainly did sir.

As I see it...

'K.D. Galagher'

STUDENTS OF THE 2000s... Vs THE STUDENTS OF THE 50s & 60s

Hardly a day goes by without an article in the media exposing some atrocity which has devastated the delicate feelings of Today's Student.

One of the most recent examples occurred when a University Teacher dealing with the issue of Ethics mentioned in passing that some people today believe abortion to be morally wrong even though it is legally permitted.

Naturally, the Teacher was immediately fired while several of his students were placed on a combination of smelling salts - oxygen therapy to recover from the trauma caused by his intemperate remarks.

Poor Little Dears.

Before I go further into this piece I want to make it perfectly clear that I have the utmost respect and admiration for our Millennials.

The ones I know and hear about are hardworking and remarkably good-natured despite having to hold down numerous..often menial.. jobs and work long hours.

Rather, my focus today is on our Institutions of Learning which are pedaling nonsense and drivel when it comes to Politically Correct Thought (PCT).

And in doing so, I am going back to my youth in the days before PCT.

We started our school experience in grade 1... that is to say, before the days of daycare schooling, (aka 4 & 5 year old kindergarten). 

The school yard was a battle zone - we kids had to prove our toughness.  Ripped Shirts and Bloody Noses were de-rigueur. 

Even in the lower grades corporal punishment flourished.

I remember our Grade 3 and 4 Teacher who did not hesitate to use her weapon of choice - a yard stick... now known as a metre stick.  

I remember three in particular who were regular recipients of her wrath...Ralphy, Jimmy and Kenny.

The reason they stick out to me all these years later is because each one had a different approach to their pending punishment.

The dastardly deed was administered out of sight of the main class taking place as it did in the cloakroom walled off behind the teacher's desk at the front.

Ralphy would always be crying when he began his perpetrator's walk.  When he came out though, his tears had miraculously changed into a big smile.

Jimmy was the exact opposite - he went in laughing and came out crying.

And finally, Kenny.  Kenny went to his fate with a stone face and came out the other side with that self-same visage.  Kenny was tough which I respected even then. 

Those were the days when the real strap - a version of a Barber's Leather Belt used to sharpen razors - was administered efficiently by our School's Principal.

Although I never did receive whacks from either the yard stick or the Principal's strap... I once came close.  I was caught fighting an older student at recess and the two of us were hauled unceremoniously into the Principal's office. Our Principal had one of those looks that instilled terror in the hearts of the most intrepid so I fully expected that our meeting would not end well ...but it did.

He gave us a dressing down ...but no strap. 

It took a while before my knees stopped shaking.

And what did our parents say about all of this?

Why nothing of course since none of us were dumb enough to let them in on our misadventures.

As we progressed into the higher grades - 6, 7 and 8 the punishment changed... at least by the male teachers.

They would simply grab you by the scruff of the neck and launch you across the room.  Boys only...since I cannot recall a Girl ever being manhandled so. 

And from what I understand, the manhandling was even greater in the previous century if Mr. Hodges was to be believed.  In grade 11 I worked in Donny's Menswear where at the back of the store a partition shielded from sight a number of leather chairs. It was there that retirees like Mr. Hodges - then in his eighties, would wile-away the hours smoking and reminiscing about bygone years.

Some like Mr. Hodges smoked cigars which was probably why business at Donny's was not brisk ... the clothes on sale were all drenched in smoke.

He would recall with humour the discipline meted out by his notorious Principal / Teacher - Smith Langdon. Their's was a one room school house situated north of our village.  Apparently it was not unusual for Langdon to physically throw his students...including Mr. Hodges from time to time... from inside the classroom, out the door and well into the school yard for the slightest transgression. 

Unfortunately for Mr. Hodges, Smith Langdon was one of Donny's regular customers.   Well into his 90's, he stood ramrod straight and towered over 6 feet in height.

On the days that Langdon came into the store I would carefully watch Mr. Hodges' reaction: he would first sit up straight and then extinguish his cigar. The colour would fade from his face with his usual smile long gone. 

I felt sorry for the guy... Mr. Hodges that is.  

His reaction made me thankful for the state of discipline in my own school some 60+ years later.

By the time I reached High School (grades 9 to 13) in the 1960s, the discipline had moved beyond the corporal and had morphed into standing outside the classroom or the ubiquitous detention.  

Again, even with this more humane approach, our parents were given no place in this...at least by us.  Had we included our parents they would have sided with our Teachers and we'd have been in even more trouble. 

Unlike today.  It seems that not only are Professors, Teachers and Students wrapped up in nonsensical Politically Correct Claptrap... but so are Parents. "Our little Jack and Jill are just too sensitive to experience anything other than Progressive Thought."

In the face of this, what continues to encourage me is what I mentioned at the beginning of this Blog...Millennials, when faced with the realities of life, post their education, appear to be adapting quite well.

As such, I believe there is hope for our Society yet.

As I see it...

'K.D. Galagher'