By Volodymyr Kish.
This was the kind of week that saw so many different events cross my critical field of view, that I found it hard to restrict my weekly commentary to just one subject or theme. As a result, my column this week spans a number of issues which I suspect I may deal with in more detail in future writings.
From a news perspective, probably the most impressive happening was the massive protest march by young people in Washington, calling for effective gun control in the wake of the mass high school shooting in Parkland Florida some weeks ago where seventeen people, mostly students, were killed by a deranged teenager wielding an automatic weapon. At least half a million if not more people jammed the streets of the American capital demanding that the politicians stop dithering and take gun control seriously.
I have never understood why Americans have for so long tolerated the easy sale of automatic weapons to virtually anyone desiring to buy one, regardless of age, mental condition or motivation. Such weapons have no legitimate hunting, personal defense or sporting purpose. Their sole reason for existence is to kill people quickly and in large numbers. They are a military weapon that rationally should be restricted to the military and police forces.
The sad thing is that a large majority of the American citizenry agree that the sale of such weapons should be restricted and stringently controlled, yet a small powerful lobby group in the form of the National Rifle Association (NRA) has, through lavish political donations, managed to pressure the nation’s lawmakers to forego enacting even the most basic gun control laws. The result has been a horrific and escalating series of mass murders that could have been easily prevented.This has been borne out by countless examples of other countries that have strict gun control laws and where such mass shootings are extremely rare if non-existent.
Since the Parkland shooting, there has finally been a genuine outcry, spurred primarily by the activism of American high school students, that the current situation is intolerable and needs to change. The NRA, together with America’s congressmen and senators, are finally being held to account for their culpable inaction. Gun control is at last emerging as an issue that could finally topple the entrenched politicians who have been doing the NRA’s bidding for far too long.
Another noteworthy event that emerged last week was the arrest in Ukraine of Nadia Savchenko on charges of plotting a terrorist attack on the Ukrainian Parliament. I recall vividly how she was once hailed as a Ukrainian hero, a veritable Ukrainian Joan of Arc, for her patriotic defiance and hunger strikes while she was imprisoned and subjected to show trials by the Russians. Since her release in a prisoner swap, she has demonstrated increasingly bizarre behavior, leading most observers to believe that she was and is not exactly of sound mind. This past week she was stripped of her parliamentary immunity and charged with smuggling in arms and explosives and plotting a violent coup to overthrow the current government, a charge she has not really denied. This of course begs the question of whether her behavior is really the result of mental issues or is she part of a bizarre Russian secret service operation meant to destabilize the Ukrainian government. It could also be that both scenarios have some element of truth in them. As I stated almost two years ago when she was freed from captivity – “perhaps that is what Putin had in mind when he freed Savchenko, figuring that the odds were good that her return would serve to further destabilize Ukraine at a critical time.”
The last issue that made me take pause and reflect, was the growing issue of how Facebook and the voluminous personal data it collects was being used by political forces of all kinds, both domestic and foreign to manipulate political opinion and especially elections. I am becoming increasingly disturbed by how powerful Facebook and similar digital media apps have become in shaping political opinions. Various organizations with questionable ethical standards have become quite adept at using these tools to push their political agendas through lies, distortions, spin-mastering and populist misinformation.
One such example that arose last week originated with a loosely worded directive from Service Canada to its employees, asking them that when they engage with their clients, they should first ask how they would like to be addressed, as the standard Mr., Mrs, or Ms, no longer covers all the options by which our diverse community might identify themselves. It was not long before various self-righteous anti-Liberal groups started flooding Facebook and the Internet with polemical accusations that Trudeau had unilaterally banned the use of those standard honorific titles and was trying to impose some form of radical linguistic control on the language we use. What disappointed me immensely was how many friends and acquaintances that I know personally, fell for this deliberate distortion of the facts, and were prepared to believe such dubious propaganda. We have become far too accepting of what we read on Facebook and the Internet and forget to engage our rational critical faculties in dealing with what passes as “news” in the digital mass media. Don’t immediately believe everything you see on the Internet.Take the trouble to research questionable claims through multiple, varied and hopefully trusted sources. Do not assume anything without definitive proof.
We live in a world where the truth is often under attack by well-funded and powerful forces. Make the effort to not fall prey to those who would manipulate us for devious purposes.
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