The September 10th edition of The Globe and Mail, Canada’s “national” newspaper featured a special section entitled “The Flagging Empire”, written by one Paul William Roberts. The piece ran over 5,000 words long and read like the paranoid ravings of Louis Farrakhan mixed with the subtle social comment of Manuel Noriega. Fraught with countless errors of fact, as well as some bizarre claims that I would challenge Mr. Roberts to prove, the article gave the vaunted Globe the cachet of the National Enquirer, except that the Enquirer sometimes checks its facts. after this article, it could be argued that The Globe and Mail should change its name to The Glove and Pail, as it has become a paper much more suited for the cleaning of windows than serious reading.
But enough about the Glove, er Globe. Let’s talk about Mr. Roberts. He started the piece by relating many of the people being rescued from rooftops in New Orleans after the hurricane didn’t even own televisions, much less automobiles, which was the reason they couldn’t escape in the first place. I am wondering how Roberts knew that those being rescued didn’t have televisions; did he visit them at home prior to the hurricane?
Roberts suggested that no one really cared about the poor souls in New Orleans, as the possibility of a disaster had been common knowledge among government officials for over 50 years. He quoted Mark Fischetti, a writer for Scientific american, that Louisiana State University climatologists had run computer models that indicated over 100,000 casualties could occur as the result of a hurricane like Katrina. He went on to say that Washington was adamant in turning down appeals for aid to strengthen the levies.
What Roberts did not say was that opposition by environmental groups and leftists against strengthening the levies was so strong that all efforts to remediate the situation were thwarted by the protesters. additionally, the local authorities in the long tradition of Cajun Bonhomie, felt it necessary that each and every levee in each and every Parish should have its own control board with its own budget and ability to draw on that budget to defer less than legitimate expenses.
One of the most incredible claims in Roberts’s article was that the effects of hurricane Katrina will “bankrupt” the United States because of america’s huge national debt. He claims that no one is brave enough to call their loans from the government of the United States, as it would bring about a financial catastrophe that would affect the entire globe. Really? Having had some experience in financing, I was always under the impression that so long as interest payments were being made, there was no reason for financial institutions to call their loans. I had not heard that the U.S. was in default of any loan payments.
But then, whether or not the americans were paying their bills on time wasn’t really the issue with Roberts. a much larger issue was his theory of the imminent decline of the world’s lone superpower. Roberts has claimed that the only successful wars that america has ever waged were the ones against the environment and against its own people. aside from this being an incredibly stupid and unforgivably ignorant assertion, it also happens to be historically incorrect. He may wish to argue this point with the individuals that were liberated by americans in both Europe and the Pacific in 1945.
In an adolescent gush of wishful thinking, Roberts claims that Russia and China have achieved something in five years that no U.S. government was able to manage in 50 years of Cold War, namely a nuclear-armed alliance between Russia and China.
Then he goes on to quote an obscure former vice president of the World Bank that China will have enough purchasing power to economically surpass the U.S. this year. and pigs will fly next year! Perhaps someone should supply Mr. Roberts with a calculator so he can take the average annual income in China today (approx. $5,700.) and multiply it by the population. The result might be eye opening.
Roberts refers to the Bush administration’s wish to run a pipeline from the Caspian Sea through afghanistan to the Pakistani Port of Karachi as an excuse to attack that country while under Taliban control. Now that the Taliban is something less than an imminent threat where’s the pipeline? Or am I missing it?
He claims the U.S. had no justification for its attack on afghanistan, since the majority of the highjackers were Saudis and Egyptians. Maybe he didn’t read the papers the day they wrote about Osama bin Laden’s terrorist training camps in afghanistan and consequently he didn’t know they were there, or that fact simply doesn’t fit his theory. One would think that the editors at the Globe would have advised him on that.
He purports that the reasons for attacking Iraq have been exposed for some time now as “shameless lies” and laments that the U.S. media was incapable of tackling the issue of their own culpability in the “commission of crimes against humanity. He claims that the modern media is really a propaganda arm of the U.S. government”. I always thought the proper role of the media in the U.S. was to function as a propaganda outlet for the left. Dan Rather, anyone?
In talking about crimes against humanity in the context if Iraq, Roberts seems to conveniently forget that the real crimes against humanity were committed by Saddam against his own people with the tacit approval of the United Nations.
These manic ravings continue with the assertion that al Qaeda isn’t really a terrorist organization with vast resources, but something dreamed up by the CIa who has a database of all the members (Hence the name “al Qaeda”, which in arabic supposedly means “the base”)
Roberts proclaims that Canada and the Scandinavian countries are the few in the world that have achieved anything close to true democracy. If this is so, then “true democracy” must mean “the rule of those who would steal from us”. In the next breath he goes on to warn of “republicanism”, as if it were right up there with Nazism and pederasty.
Robert’s hate-filled screed attacks the very basis on which the United States was established, namely the Constitution. The opening words of the Constitution begin with “We, the people…” and Roberts wonders that in a population of “about 200 million” (sic) “to whom does it actually refer/” His answer is that it refers to only a few educated, land-owning elites, as they are the original signatories to the document and then heads off on a tangent about how only educated (white) men could govern under the terms of the original Constitution, as “education everywhere on Earth was the signal privilege of the few able to afford it.” I would venture to say that Roberts himself is an example of how untrue this statement is, unless Roberts feels guilty about his privileged background. and despite his obvious education (he liberally refers to Rousseau and Noam Chomski) I have yet to read something intelligent in his essay.
His claim that George Washington signed the Constitution while President of the United States is a historical inaccuracy. The constitution was ratified and signed on March 4, 1789 and Washington assumed the office of President on april 30 of the same year.
His claim that China is “not expansionist” is specious in the extreme in that China has plied its share of expansion/aggression even in recent history. There’s Korea, Tibet, its support of the Pol Pot regime in Laos and its designs on Nepal, to name a few.
Roberts appears to believe that somewhere in a secret gulag some 30,000 to 40,000 americans languish in illegal confinement, being tortured and murdered at the will of a sadistic security apparatus, The Patriot act. He believes that al Qaeda “may largely be the creation of the permanent government that lies behind the passing show and pageants of the one that’s elected”. Yes, and black unmarked helicopters rule the sky at night with their brain-o-trons beamed at unsuspecting victims.
This article is not one that one would expect to read in “Canada’s National Newspaper”, as it is disappointing to read something that borders on hate-speech in a paper that has prided itself on more than a century of excellent journalism. This article would have been much more suitable for publications such as NOW or Eye. Trouble is that both of these papers would reject Roberts’s piece on the basis of his gross inaccuracies alone.