Editor’s Notebook © by John Arkelian
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John Howe — Canadian artist and co-conceptual designer on all three “The Lord of the Rings” motion pictures.
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On April 15, 2014
Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and the West’s weak response
Vladimir Putin doubtless indulges delusions of imperial grandeur, but the Shirtless Czar is nothing but a KGB thug. And his autocratic regime certainly knows how to act the part. Putin’s interference in neighboring Ukraine crossed the line into naked aggression and lawlessness with his recent seizure of Crimea. How then ought the West to respond to Great Power aggression? Today, it is Russia; in the near future, it is just as apt to be an expansionistic China. Alas, however, the West has thus far confined itself to stern words and vigorous finger wagging – empty gestures which can only embolden Putin to stay his aggressive course. A host of meaningful measures sit idly on the table, awaiting only our resolve to put them into place. Author and international affairs analyst John Arkelian sets out a measured response by the West at: https://artsforum.ca/ideas/the-wide-world
Copyright © 2014 by John Arkelian.
On March 26, 2014
Canada Races to Enter the Ranks of the Third World
© By John Arkelian
In December 2013, Canada Post shocked Canadians by abruptly announcing a perverse plan to end door-to-door delivery for the millions of people who still have it and to practically double the cost of domestic postage. Those destructive policy plans make an insolent mockery of public service – and of Canada Post’s very raison d’être, which is to deliver the mail to all Canadians. It is an unacceptable abdication of the post office’s core responsibility. Canada Post should be extending door-to-door home delivery to everyone, not ending it for those of us who still have it! If fewer people are sending first-class mail, why drive the rest of us away with exorbitant price increases and a unilateral withdrawal of door-to-door service? Canadians would rather pay more and keep door-to-door service; or, if need be, sacrifice one day of mail delivery each week.
Delivering the mail to Canadians’ doors should be regarded as a public service; not a business decision based on profit and loss calculations. It is in the public interest to encourage Canadians to maintain their age-old custom of corresponding and sending greeting cards – keeping in touch with scattered family and acquaintances is the glue that helps bind us together. It makes us more civilized. Group boxes are insecure – they are susceptible to vandalism and mail theft – and they are enormously inconvenient for seniors, for disabled people, and, yes, for everyone else who relies on convenient daily access to incoming mail. People with community boxes often fall out of the habit of checking the boxes every day; some do not bother even checking the boxes every week! Substituting community boxes for delivery at the door thus exacerbates the alleged underlying ‘problem’ (of purported declining reliance on hard-copy mail) by conditioning Canadians to care less about hard-copy mail and to accordingly use it ever less. Far from responding sensibly to a perceived long-term trend, Canada Post has opted to ‘switch sides’ and actively drive mail users to abandon hard-copy mail altogether. It should also be pointed out that having a mail carrier walk a route serves a socially useful purpose: Carriers often greet people on their route and come to know them; in the process, they detect when something is amiss on their route – maybe a shut-in is in trouble or a home has been broken into. And, in a country whose main export in recent years has been its jobs (most of them destined for Asia in the spurious name of “globalization,” more accurately known as maximizing enrichment for the one percent at the expense of everyone else), Canada Post mail carrier positions constitute a much-needed source of good jobs for Canadians.
And Canada Post’s cries of financial hardship are clearly absurd. Canada Post ran a steady stream of full page and three-quarter page color advertisements in big Canadian newspapers, as well as commercials on prime-time television, in December 2013 and January 2014. Such advertising comes at an enormous cost in dollars. How did they find the mountain of money to pay for those pointless advertisements, if they cannot afford to deliver the mail? Even worse, all that advertising did was to state the obvious – that Canada Post delivers parcels. Canada Post may as well run ads telling us that the sky is blue! If funds are so short that Canada Post and the federal government want to cripple existing mail delivery, why waste supposedly scarce resources on redundant advertising?
And then there is the matter of the grossly exorbitant sums with which Canada Post is remunerating its own senior management. Its CEO, Deepak Chopra, “earns” $650,000 per year, including a bonus – a figure that is six times higher than it ought to be. And his fiefdom is positively bursting at the seams with senior subordinates – there is an oversized compliment of 22 vice-presidents. Who needs that many senior managers – particularly when they cannot even do the job they are paid for?
Replacing door to door mail delivery with community boxes is another step in Canada’s headlong decline from a respected member of the developed world to a Third World has-been. Henceforth, we will be the only country in the G-7 group of leading economic nations to be without door-to-door mail delivery. One suspects that we may be the only country in the much larger OECD group of developed countries to have that pathetic distinction. Canada Post has raised postal rates by a few cents every year for years on end; apparently those endless increases have not been sufficient to keep paying its top executives like kings. Now, they intend to dispense with small increases and to instead nearly double the cost of domestic mail. An increase of that magnitude is nothing short of highway robbery.
Canada Post’s plans are wrong-headed and an insupportable affront to its customers – the Canadian taxpayers who rely on Canada Post to maintain (and even improve upon) its longstanding level of excellent door-to-door delivery and affordable rates. Instead of endorsing this embarrassing race to the bottom, our inept federal government should immediately direct Canada Post to abandon its reckless plans – and insist that they fight to keep its loyal customers instead of driving them away! The moment Canada Post announced its scandalous plans, its entire cadre of senior management should have been fired, without severance compensation, for their abject, miserable failure to do the job for which they have been so handsomely overpaid. Otherwise, if the government continues to acquiesce in the shameless reduction of Canada to the postal equivalent of a Third World country, why not go the extra mile and close Canada Post entirely? If it refuses to provide its core service to Canadian taxpayers, Canada Post no longer serves any useful purpose by existing at all.
Copyright © March 2014 by John Arkelian.
On November 20, 2013
In the wake of this summer’s revelations about the unprecedented scope of the United States government’s massive covert surveillance of Americans (and countless others), the nation’s purportedly ‘liberal’ president, Barack Obama, had the shameless temerity to say that the state apparatus over which he presides is showing commendable “restraint” in wielding its unconstitutional police-state powers and that we should therefore simply ‘trust’ its countless (and nameless) minions not to abuse those unwarranted powers. Those nefarious powers include the power to intercept all of the telephone calls and emails of every person on the continent — without a search warrant, let alone any ‘reasonable and probable grounds’ to believe that those being indiscriminately eavesdropped upon have committed any criminal offense whatsoever. And, lest we forget, there’s the power to hold prisoners without charge or trial (in flagrant violation of our most basic legal guarantees); to implement assassination by aerial drone as a routine part of state practice; and to ignore the law (and common decency) by torturing prisoners.
The post-9/11 world is one of all-pervading state surveillance of its own law-abiding citizens and an ill-conceived, open-ended ‘war on terrorism’ that is being used to justify every manner of lawless encroachment on fundamental human rights. Sadly, in that world of egregious state misconduct, most of us have chosen to ignore the relentless attack on our supposedly cherished rights and freedoms. Into that moral and legal vacuum come the few who still feel inclined to act on their conscience — people like whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning and freedom of information advocates Julian Assange and Birgitta Jonsdottir.
For his part, Snowden did the world an immense favor by revealing the clear and present danger posed by security state apparatus in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere in the supposedly free West, an apparatus that began, soon after 9/11, to intercept our telephone calls and emails at the alarming rate of 60,000 per second, turning every citizen into a potential suspect and crushing any semblance of privacy or due process. We have shamefully allowed ourselves to be cowed by the threat of terrorism into accepting the relentless erosion of the very freedoms and rights and sacred principles upon which our very civilization is founded. In much the same way, we accepted untold oppression and war abroad in years gone by on the equally flimsy basis of our struggle against the malign ideology of communism.
There’s courage, heroism even, in those who seek, often at considerable risk to themselves, to inform the public of what every free people has an absolute right to know. For, surely, a free people has the right to know the real costs of the wars being waged in our name — witness the infamous “Collateral Murder” video of an Apache helicopter gunship mowing down innocent civilians in error in Iraq. And, if we are to vouchsafe our precious liberty, it is imperative that a bold, unflinching light be shone upon the deliberate efforts to spawn nascent police-states in the very heart of the free world.
Whistleblowers and truth-tellers, like those named above, are nothing more or less than men and women of conscience. They are too few in number. But they serve a vital public interest. Only an informed public can make informed decisions. Only an informed public can hope to hold its own government (and private sector power brokers) accountable. By their determined undermining of fundamental rights, our own governments have rendered themselves untrustworthy. So, “Shame on you, Mr. President,” we say to President Obama, and far too many other, like-minded leaders of the increasingly less ‘Free World.’ It is not their so-called “restraint” that we must rely upon, but rather our own zealous, ever-vigilant scrutiny of their covert actions that will safeguard our liberty and our battered democratic way of life. As George Orwell said, “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
Copyright © 2013 by John Arkelian.
The author is an international law and international relations analyst, a former diplomat, and a public interest journalist.
On July 9, 2013
“The Cabot Trail is an organic thing – playful, daring, and exuberant as it
 Cap Rouge, Cape Breton Island — Copyright © 2013 by Warren Gordon swoops and turns, plunges and climbs, clinging to looming mountainsides, lingering by rocky shores, darting into immense woods, and boldly descending at break-neck angles toward the glistening sea. To traverse the trail is to ride the whale’s back, thrilling all the while at its wild life coursing beneath you…. Can a place, as well as a person, be a kindred spirit? I find such a place near Ingonish. There, the Middle Head Peninsula points like an impossibly long, rocky finger into the deep blue heart of the sea. Buttressed by steep cliffs, with the pounding surf as its moat, this fortress of rock and forest is my heart’s true home – a sanctuary of beauty and tranquility that befits the idylls of a king.”
Our acclaimed travel feature on Nova Scotia, compellingly illustrated with the breathtaking photography of Cape Breton Island’s own Warren Gordon, can be found at: https://artsforum.ca/travel
On February 5, 2013
If we stoop to the vile, deplorable methods of our basest enemies, how is our cause any worthier than theirs? We in the West stand for liberty, justice, and the rule of law. Inalienable human rights and human dignity are at the very heart of what we are as a civilization. And yet… And yet, we are all too quick to embrace the opportunity (and convenient excuse) offered by the bête noire du jour (once communism, now terrorism) to throw our most cherished principles — the very values for which our forbears fought and died — into the foulest muck by indulging in the dark ‘arts’ of torture and assassination.. And make no mistake about it: In the wake of 9/11, torture and assassination (in the form of lethal drone strikes) have become routine implements of state policy and practice in the West. The extent to which torture was used in tracking down the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Ladin, is a disputed matter. What is clear is that the Hollywood film “Zero Dark Thirty” posits that torture was instrumental in locating America’s most wanted mass murderer. What is noxious about the film (which has garnered considered box office and critical success) is its complete dearth of moral qualms about such repellant abuse of prisoners. Nor is the film at all reticent about showing us horrors like waterboarding with its camera’s unblinking (and unjudging) eye. Stephen Bede Scharper takes the film to task for these failings in “In Torture We Trust?” at: https://artsforum.ca/ideas/the-wide-world
On October 15, 2012
“Cannon to right of them; cannon to left of them… Into the valley of Death floated the six hundred.”*
*With apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in 1854.
One fine day this summer, the sky above Minsk, in the former Soviet republic
 The arsenal of freedom includes laughter! Illustration © 2012 by Linda Arkelian. of Belarus, was filled with aerial invaders intent on attacking the despotic regime of Alexander Lukashenko. Scores of paratroops descended on the city bearing messages in support of free speech. Unarmed, save for the pointed barbs of the words printed on the placards they carried, these airborne protestors proved that no tyrant is too powerful or too feared to be denounced as an enemy of freedom. It was done with panache, and it was done with humor: For the paratroops were small teddy bears, transported across international boundaries by a single-engine airplane. The great teddy bear escapade was the brainchild of two Swedish advertising executives, Tomas Mazetti and Hannah Frey. Correctly reasoning that a tyrant’s power is founded in its appearance of strength, ruthlessness, and the ability to crush dissent, these creative protestors concluded that the best way to undermine a dictator is to make him an object of laughter. The tyrant can muster brute force; the dissenter need only muster the courage and resolve to speak truth to power to expose its illegitimacy. The airborne assault on the undeserved dignity of the tyrant of Belarus was a daring one: Mazetti and Frey risked interception (or worse) by the country’s air defenses. And their aim of embarrassing Lukashenko was clearly successful: He pulled his embassy staff out of Sweden and expelled Swedish diplomats from Belarus in angry reaction to the furry paratroops. Best of all, this audacious example of how to stage a peaceful invasion, and thereby discomfit a tyrant, is a sterling template for creative protest in action. It’s an example the rest of us should emulate whenever and wherever we encounter injustice, oppression, or the abuse of human rights.
Text © October 2012 by John Arkelian.
Illustration © 2012 by Linda Arkelian.
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