The Dominion - colonialism

July Books

Moira Peters — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:19:39 +0000

Non-fiction by Prince, graphic novel by Hill

The Politics of Black Women’s Hair
Althea Prince
Insomniac Press: London, ON, 2009

Black women’s hair has always possessed a certain sort of magnetism that attracts (often unsolicited) pats and tugs, as well as inquiries about its properties and care. However, recently the hair of Black sistas has been drawing unusual attention, and not just on The View. Between Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair, Tyra Banks reveal of the hair that lies beneath her weaves, and general fascination with Michelle Obama’s fashion sense—hairdos included—Black women’s hair has become quite a “hot topic.”

To provide further insight into the phenomenon of “Black women’s hair”, sociologist and novelist Althea Prince presents readers with The Politics of Black Women’s Hair, a brief anthology that analyzes the complex relationship that women of African descent have with their tresses, through the use of the personal essay form, interviews, excerpts from the media, and observations.

Prince begins by tracing the subject back to the negative historical depictions of Black people, as seen in the late nineteenth-century Golliwog and Little Black Sambo storybooks, which caricatured stereotypical “Black” features, such as pitch-black skin, huge red lips, and woolly hair. She argues that the mainstream beauty ideal, reinforced by such imagery, was internalized by Black women and girls and has “dictated” their hairstyle choices ever since. Natural black hair has thus been equated with “political” hair. This notion, which is addressed throughout the book, is highlighted in a chapter dedicated to the significance of the “relaxed,” and therefore relaxing, nature of Michelle Obama’s hair.

Prince also features personal essays by Black mothers and daughters from Canada, the US, the UK, the Caribbean and South America, providing a glimpse into the Black female hair experience from a diasporic perspective. Their stories illustrate the psychological and sociological impact that attempting to measure-up to the “yardstick of mainstream beauty”, namely the European aesthetic, has had on Black women. The essayists speak about how their efforts to attain the beauty ideal (by straightening their hair with chemicals and hot combs), or their lack of desire to do so (by opting to go shaven or wearing it in its natural state), has affected both their personal and professional lives.

The Politics of Black Women’s Hair could have benefited from expanding its scope to include the perspectives of African women and Black men (whose perceived views are mentioned frequently in the text). Given the author's intention to write a "little book," Prince successfully outlines the complexities of a topic that can get rather hairy. The Politics of Black Women’s Hair achieves its purpose: to establish that Black hair is beautiful and assist Black girls and women with learning how to embrace that fact.

—Ndija Anderson

The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book
Gord Hill
Arsenal Pulp Press: Vancouver, 2010

Comics aren't always known for treating serious subjects, but Gord Hill's The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book adds a dose of reality to the genre.

Hill, of the Kwakwaka'wakw nation, has taken the topics of dispossession, genocide, and the colonization of First Nations in the western hemisphere and, surprisingly, pulled off a rendering in comic book form. The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book, published by Arsenal Pulp Press, presents in black-and-white panels the history of the overseas invasion by Europeans and the resistance of Indigenous peoples.

As a medium, comics have many attractions. They engage visually. They give information in bite-sized chunks—ideal for the modern reader's short attention span. They are fun.

Much of colonial history in the Americas has been sanitized—indeed, current Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper denies colonization ever occurred in Canada. Today, the European invasion of Indigenous territories is often depicted in popular culture as the settlement of an untamed wilderness, a terra nullius, not the homeland of sophisticated civilizations who often fiercely contested Europeans' claims to their lands.

Hill seeks to visually combat this narrative. “The story of our ancestors' resistance is minimized, or erased entirely," he writes in the preface. "This strategy has been used to impose capitalist ideology on people, to pacify them, and to portray their struggle as doomed to failure.”

Knowledge is key to fighting an oppressive system. “When we know and understand this history of oppression, we will be better able to fight the system it created,” he writes.

One way to counter the colonial depiction of history is to “always call things by their right name" as enjoined by Philip Deere, a Muskogee-Creek involved with the American Indian Movement. For instance, Hill places British Columbia within quotation marks, thereby questioning the legitimacy and morality of so-naming unceded First Nations territory. 500 Years of Resistance does this unevenly, though; Hill and Ward Churchill in his introduction use inaccurate designations for Indigenous peoples: “American Indian,” “Mohawk” instead of “Kanienkehaka,” “Huron” instead of “Wyandot.”

500 Years of Resistance roots invasion in the voyage of Genovese navigator Christopher Columbus, who encountered the Taino people in the Caribbean during his infamous 1492 voyage from Europe. It continues through to 1890—describing the Incan Mapuche, Pueblo, Pontiac, Seminole, Apache, Lakota, and Pacific Northwest Indigenous resistances to the colonists—and the fight to maintain their lifeways on their territories—at which point Hill signals the end of military Indigenous resistance. Millions of Original Peoples had been wiped out, many by warfare, but mostly by European-introduced diseases. The treaty process then picked up (a process noticeably absent from much of "BC"), and assimilation took over.

Hill tells of colonizers imposing slave labour, of barbarity, of disease epidemics, of greed for gold, of land theft and of the insinuation and imposition of the capitalist system during settling of the "New World." To maintain the dispossession of their land and resources, the invaders tried to assimilate the remaining Original Peoples into European ways of being through religious conversion, the Indian Residential School system, and the imposition of the capitalist economic system.

Despite diligent colonial efforts to break them away from their identities—so closely tied to their land—Indigenous peoples persist in struggles for self-determination. Hill captures this graphically—from war on the Pacific Northwest coast, to the '68 rebellion and Wounded Knee, Oka, Chiapas, Ts'peten, and Aazhoodena. 500 Years of Resistance is a well-drawn comic book that resurrects the history “erased, replaced by the occupying nation.”

—Kim Petersen

Kim Petersen is Original Peoples editor with The Dominion.

Ndija Anderson, a law student at McGill University, was a 2006-2007 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, which allowed her to travel to seven countries to research the practice and aesthetic of hair braiding and locking in various cultures.

The Politics of Black Women's Hair

500 Years

Connecting the Dots with Jason Kenney

Moira Peters — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 06:46:14 +0000

Why food sovereignty can solve the climate crisis and how Canada's immigration policy serves our free trade interests

VANCOUVER—After the Copenhagen Climate Conference failed to produce a legally-binding agreement, Kim Carstensen, Leader of the World Wildlife Fund's Global Climate Initiative, stated in a press release that the Copenhagen Accord translates into “three degrees Celsius of warming or more.” Those three degrees could trigger the migration of millions of impoverished agriculturalists around the globe.

The direction of climate change negotiations concerned 150 small-scale farmers of NGO La Via Campesina for a different reason. “Our farms are not for sale on the climate market,” they protested in Copenhagen on December 15.

Negotiations at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change favoured agro-fuels on large-scale farms as a means of climate change mitigation. However, an underreported result of industrial farming is the millions of poor, landless migrants who are losing their land to large-scale farms.

The international peasant movement La Via Campesina (literally, "the way of the farmer") represents millions of small farmers, landless peoples, and rural men and women from around the world. The group calls for radical changes to the global food system.

“To really change the food system, it is important that all sectors of society work together,” says Josie Riffaud of La Via Campesina.

Food sovereignty, or “the peoples' right to define agricultural and food policy,” is a proposed solution to climate change’s drastic effects on farmers. Via Campensina, which coined the term “food sovereignty,” claim that these radical changes have the potential to achieve reductions of between 50-75 per cent of current global emissions simply by returning organic matter to the soil, developing local markets and reversing intensive livestock production.

A food sovereignty system requires the re-localization of food production, and, perhaps, the re-localization of migrant workers. These farmers are not begging for carbon credits or other trade-based solutions; rather, they are offering a solution to the current crisis: a diverse food system that supports local markets and promotes local labor.

Moreover, food sovereignty is not a new idea; societies have been food-sovereign for most of human history. Only in the last 100 years has industry taken over food production. This de-localization of food supply and labor has contributed to climate change.

****

In Vancouver, No One is Illegal (NOII), a grassroots anti-colonial immigrant and refugee rights collective, aligns its goals with those of La Via Campesina.

Immigration is not a topic often associated with the food system, but Harjap Grewal of NOII says immigration and the food system are “very much linked.” He sees immigration as “the human impact of free trade policy, [and therefore] the reason why [farmers are] migrating.”

Immigration is a growing issue in Canadian politics in the past decade, stemming from an increase in the number of people seeking refugee or migrant worker status in Canada. “We've actually made the politically difficult decision to maintain historically high levels of immigration,” Jason Kenney, Minister of Immigration, said to the Calgary Sun.

On the surface, Kenney seems to be making it easier for migrant workers to stay in Canada. Kenney said migrants are “doing work Canadians are unwilling to perform,” and that his government, despite the recession and rising unemployment, will maintain its practice of encouraging immigration and foreign labour. Tarina White of the Calgary Sun reported, “Calgary newcomers will have access to more language training (to the tune of) almost $9.5 million in funding. ... Kenney said he hopes the investment will boost the percentage of immigrants enrolling in language programs each year, which currently sits at 25 per cent.” According to Bill Kaufman of the Sun, Kenney said his government is stepping up its monitoring of foreign workers' treatment while making it easier for the newcomers to become permanent residents and citizens.

However, a closer look reveals a different agenda. Documented by NOII, Kenney “oversaw the largest immigration raid in recent Canadian history, which went largely unreported. In an illegal move, 41 [migrants] were tricked into signing waivers that removed their right to a hearing and many have now been deported.”

White reported that Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan blames international free trade agreements for “setting up foreign workers to be exploited.” McGowan accuses Kenney's ministry of “washing its hands” of temporary foreign workers once they arrive only for them to be routinely abused by their employers. He noted, “Only three per cent of migrant workers are eligible for permanent residency.”

“We're the ones who set up an advocacy office to help workers who are exploited; we're the ones picking up the pieces. ... I find it galling [that] Kenney's trying to wrap himself in the cloak of virtue.”

****

“How can a self-proclaimed bigot responsibly manage Canada's immigration policy?” This question by a concerned citizen during a Q&A session with Kenney at UBC in November was seen by those overseeing the event as “too impassioned,” and the individual was later detained by UBC campus police.

A similar event had panned out differently at McGill. There, 50 people confronted the minister outside the Arts building, briefly denying him access. The event was canceled. When questioned about his immigration policy, he responded, “I plead guilty, I’m a racist,” with a “hint of sarcasm,” according to NOII Montréal.

Kenney's subsequent visit to UBC was greeted with less animosity, and a police presence.

Campus Conservatives President Robert Sroka, organizer of the UBC event, said, “[It was] an opportunity for anyone who wanted to respectfully participate in interaction between students and government.” But, he admitted, “It's a contentious issue and there is always going to be someone unhappy.”

Fathima Cader, a participant at the UBC event, confirmed the negative reception of the controversial MP. “A majority of the questions were highly critical of the MP's immigration policy, to which he mainly responded by talking around the question,” which, she believes, is because Kenney is aware of the real reason immigration in Canada is increasing.

“The increasing number of migrants and refugees around the world is due to the effects of capitalist exploitation that Canada is complicit in,” says Grewal. A report by the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Report of 2005 states, “Unfair trade policies continue to deny millions of people in the world’s poorest countries an escape route from poverty, and perpetuates obscene inequalities.” In other words, international trade policies result in poverty abroad, thus creating the incentive for foreigners to partake in the jobs that Canadians are “unwilling to perform.”

The rise of capitalist culture has changed the ecology-based farming tactics of farmers in both North and South America. The majority of North America’s arable farmland grows non-diverse industrial crops. In much of South and Latin America, 20 per cent of the population owns 80 per cent of the land. The result of this imbalance—both ecological and economic—is migrant workers: seasonal agricultural employees who are overworked and underpaid. Our culture of respect for farmers as public servants is gone. The industrial food model has degraded our ideas about food.

***

“When culture breaks down, you'll find addictions,” SFU Professor Bruce Alexander recently said at the Four Pillars Drug Strategy Conference in Vancouver.

Culture in Latin and South America has changed drastically since the rise of industrial farming. Subsistence growers are bought off their land by powerful and wealthy people who create industrial farms. The tradition of local, organic and subsistence growing has been nearly wiped out. To cope with this loss, people turn to drugs. Drug addiction is connected to gang activity, causing people to fear for their lives and apply for refugee asylum overseas.

One of the major points of contention during Kenney's visit to Vancouver was that of a particular immigration case. A Mexican woman applied twice for refugee asylum in Canada due to death threats by gangs in the state of Jalisco. Canada denied her asylum twice, and flew her home. She is now dead.

****

In our quest for cheap food, Canadians buy into the industrial farming model every day at the grocery store by purchasing subsidized food from monoculture farms far away. BC residents now pay a lower percentage of their income on food than ever before.

On 31 October 2008, Harold Steves, Chair of Agriculture for Metro Vancouver, said, “California is running out of food. California and Mexico is where we get much of our food supply. It's not a matter of if the trucks stop running but when.” If left alone, the food supply in BC would last three days.

Decreasing subsidies on large-scale farms now and providing incentives for local production is in our best interest. Any catastrophe, such as climate change-related disasters, could leave millions hungry in Metro Vancouver. In addition, a shift toward local food production—food sovereignty—would likely decrease the influx of migrant field laborers to Canada, encouraging sustainability locally and abroad.

Ben Amundson is an undergraduate in Human Ecology at UBC.

Food sovereignty in Cape Breton

Torch Ignites Resistance

Tim McSorley — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 06:27:17 +0000

Opposition to Olympic Torch spreads across Canada

KITCHENER-WATERLOO—Emerging from the October 2007 Indigenous Peoples gathering in Sonora, Mexico, was a call out for an anti-Olympics convergence in Vancouver in 2010, to coincide with the opening days of the Vancouver-Whistler Olympics. In February 2009, the Olympics Resistance Network (ORN) in British Columbia issued a statement: Solidarity and Unity in Opposing the 2010 Olympics.

The call was heard in Ontario, and since then resistance to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in the province has drawn attention to ongoing local colonialism and environmental destruction. Actions undertaken by anti-poverty, Indigenous and solidarity activists have highlighted how the Olympics impact the gentrification of Vancouver and Whistler, the destruction of native lands, and the criminalization of activists—all also occurring in communities across Ontario.

The Olympic torch is to arrive in Ontario on December 12, 2009, after departing from Victoria, BC, on October 30.

In August 2009, headlines were made when residents of Six Nations, in Southern Ontario, started debating the torch relay’s intrusion into their territory. In October 2008, protests followed the Canadian Pacific Olympic Spirit Train through Ontario (including a rail blockade outside of Toronto). In March 2009, activists disrupted the Royal Bank Torch Relay press conference in Toronto and directly confronted the then-Assembly of First Nations chief, Phil Fontaine. In October 2009, the Olympic Resistance Network-Ontario (ORN-O) released a statement calling for autonomous actions to disrupt the torch relay.

Wherever groups have organized against the Olympics, activists have been targeted by policing and intelligence agencies who have visited and interrogated people at their homes and workplaces, and in some cases even pulled them out of university classrooms.

One of these activists is Melissa Elliot, a founding member of Young Onkwehonwe United (YOU) and one of the individuals who confronted Fontaine this past spring. Elliot has been central in the debate about the torch relay at Six Nations, where youth are organizing to stop the torch passing through their territory. They have echoed the slogan that unites much of the Olympic resistance movement nationwide: “No Olympics on Stolen Native Land.”

Elliot says that at Six Nations, “We have land rights and we have treaties that are nation-to-nation.” She emphasizes that the torch relay compromises their assertion of sovereignty: “They’re not coming to us under the Two Row Wampum and asking if they can cross our territory.” She continued, “They are going through band council and asking if it can pass through our Canadian municipality—we’re not a Canadian municipality, we are a nation.”

In Stratford, 100 kilometres northwest of Six Nations, the annual, six-month-long Shakespeare Festival has been targeted by Stratford Action for Equality (SAFE). Comparisons are drawn to the Olympics by showing how the festival committee is an instigator and propagator of local gentrification, which targets low- and no-income communities, and of neoliberal exploitation of art and culture.

While attempts to convince City Hall to block the torch from coming through Stratford have been rejected, SAFE continues to conduct rallies and small actions directed against the city and Olympic sponsors. These actions have ignited debates around gentrification in Stratford and Julian Ichim, one of SAFE’s core organizers, draws connections between his own community and the 2010 Olympics. “Stratford is a town based on tourism,” says Ichim. “We have a lot of social cleansing [...] removing specific undesirable elements to create the image of the town being perfect. And the reality of the situation is that what is happening in BC is happening in Stratford [...] so we have a direct interest and a direct tie to what is going on.”

Elliot and Ichim both think that one major benefit of working on the No 2010 campaign is that it has created new energy for direct action and change in their respective communities despite the negative police and media attention that has been focused on anti-Olympics organizers across the country. Elliot adds that the No 2010 campaign has played a big role in the recent trend towards political engagement and mobilization among youth from Six Nations.

Elliot and Ichim are both also excited about the positive impacts Olympics organizing has made on the activist community in Southern Ontario. Ichim says that anti-Olympics organizing in Stratford has helped to “take things to the next level...It has revealed the inefficacy of the democratic process, it has exposed the city and has exposed the liberals who claim to be the friends of poor people, it has exposed all the hypocrisy.”

Ichim and Elliot both stressed that solidarity between native and non-native activists has been one of the campaign’s strengths. Ichim says, “The Olympics are imperial in nature. In Canada the issue is that the Olympics are taking place on stolen Native land.” For him this equates simply: “As settlers we have to take a stand...while some people think that it is an issue of the past, it is still today stolen land.”

For Elliot, one of the reasons she is enthusiastic about the campaign against the torch relay and the Olympics is that, “We’re all working together, and that is very powerful: non-natives and natives working together, that is a huge step forward in healing.”

Alex Hundert is a founding member of AW@L and the KW Community Centre for Social Justice (kwccsj) in Kitchener. He is a co-host of AW@L Radio on 100.3 SoundFm, and the Rabble Podcast Network.

Dan Kellar is an organizer with AW@L. He recently completed a master’s degree focusing on the application of environmental impact assessment legislation to the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Torch Ignites Resistance

Really, Harper: Canada has No History of Colonialism?

dawn — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:21:14 +0000

At least the PM isn't a history teacher

"We also have no history of colonialism..."
—Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

VANCOUVER—On the heels of a massive exercise of US police repression against G20 protestors, including use of a wartime sonic acoustic weapon also being used in Iraq, Stephen Harper made the above declaration. The comment came during a press conference in Pittsburgh where it was announced that Canada would be hosting the next G20 meeting in 2010.

Perhaps Harper and I are not on the same page—is colonialism not defined as the practice and processes of domination, control, and forced subjugation of one people to another? As most bluntly stated by Duncan Campbell Scott, Head of the Department of Indian Affairs in the 1920s: “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question.”

I expect Harper has read the federal government’s own report on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which explicitly lays out Canada’s imposition of a colonial relationship (indeed, that is the heading of one of the chapters) on Indigenous people. Measures of this relationship include the Indian Act, residential schools, forcible relocation including onto reservations, the imposed Band Council system, institution of a pass system (which was subsequently borrowed by apartheid South Africa), germ warfare, outlawing of ceremonies such as the potlatch and traditional activities such as fishing, failed treaty processes and other forced assimilation polices including the Act for the Gradual Assimilation of Indian Peoples.

Considering that his government has so ardently voted against it, it would be safe to presume that Harper is aware of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. If Canada has no history of colonialism, then what else would explain that Canada—along with other settler states such as Australia—have yet to sign the Declaration? Other than the glaring and painful reality of colonization, what would make the Declaration “unworkable for Canada,” as stated by the Harper government?

This Declaration, endorsed by an overwhelming majority of the 144 UN member states, recognizes that “Indigenous peoples have suffered from historic injustices as a result of, inter alia, their colonization and dispossession” and therefore affirms that “Indigenous peoples have the right of self-determination.” According to the Declaration, this includes: right to autonomy and self government, right to maintain and strengthen political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions, collective right to live in freedom without being subjected to acts of genocide, and right to redress and compensation for the lands, territories and resources confiscated, taken, occupied, used or damaged without free, prior and informed consent.

And was it not Harper’s government that finally issued an official apology for residential schools which separated children from their families, communities, and culture in order to "kill the Indian in the child?" It has been extensively documented that children suffered unimaginable abuses—including sexual violence, physical beatings, emotional and psychological torture, and death—in residential schools. The traumas of this colonial legacy continues today with Indigenous people disproportionately experiencing poverty, poor health, incarceration, youth suicides, unprecedented levels of violence against Indigenous women, child apprehension, and substandard levels of access to basic needs including water and homes.

Indigenous people from Akwesasne, Tyendinaga, Six Nations, Athabasca Chipewyan, Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, and Secwepemc are forced to throw up blockades to halt environmentally devastating mineral exploration, logging practices, and resource extraction that continue to infringe on their lands. Clearly, Harper has not been blind to these public struggles that his government is complicit in criminalizing as Canada becomes notorious for its Indigenous political prisoners—prisoners of Canada’s colonial democracy.

What Harper meant to say was: “Canada has no history of colonialism, except for the ongoing internal colonization of Indigenous people and the external colonization and occupation of, amongst others, the people of Afghanistan. Not one to break with history, my government too has been making strides in asserting greater dominance over Indigenous peoples' lives, lands, and governance.”

At least we can take some comfort in the fact that Harper is just another hypocritical and self-serving politician and not a history teacher.

Harsha Walia is a South Asian organizer and writer based in Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish territory.

A version of this article previously appeared in the Vancouver Sun online, and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

Turtle Island Re-Emergent

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 05:08:33 +0000

KUTENAI TERRITORY, TURTLE ISLAND—The genocide of Indigenous Peoples inside the territories claimed by Canada doesn’t end until Canada de-colonizes. As Jean-Paul Sartre recognized when he focused the intellectual power of european philosophy onto the subject of european colonization, colonialism equals genocide. As long as the fair folk of the Canadian State have a colonial relationship with the territorial Indigenous Peoples, then the genocide continues. Canadians left, right and center do not actively advocate genocide. However, there exists an unconscious denial of what Canadians conveniently do not have to witness at close range, thanks to several centuries of apartheid social organization.

Over the past several months, the media collective that calls itself The Dominion has generously offered me a space in the margins to talk to the few of you who happen by. If you’ve been following me, we’ve crossed the invisible apartheid border, looked at the forms of political economy that require apartheid, and had a brief glance at an indigenous socialism from Turtle Island’s past. The ideas I’ve been sharing with you aren’t my ideas. In cultures with an oral tradition, the great libraries of knowledge are held within the ranks of the living, and I’m grateful to those librarians who have gathered, and then passed on to me, some of the enormous storehouse of indigenous knowledge. Now I, in turn, am passing fragments to you.

The current phase of the genocide of Indigenous Peoples will not end by fiddling with the details and single instances of the mechanics of the genocide, for instance addictions, or suicide, or lateral violence. These are symptoms, not causes. For example, I don’t believe that addictions are a problem of the individual, but are individuals' reactions to the cause of the genocide. Colonialism. The entire relationship between our euro-ancestry sisters and brothers, and the remnants of our own societies, indigenous to Turtle Island, is colonial. The structure of modernity, with a representative democracy funded by and responsible to a capitalist economy, based on an extractive, exploitative, minimalist relationship with the natural environment, is colonial. Colonialism kills Indigenous Peoples.

An indigenous method of problem solving involves moving towards the desired solution, rather than away from the perceived problem. Many indigenous knowledge bases propose that human intention has actuating power in the physical world; we affect whatever we place our intentions on, through our conscious attention. If we place our attention on our problems, because we want to repair those problem areas, we unintentionally increase the level of energy flowing to the problem areas. Over uncounted millennia, this observed pattern has resulted in an indigenous social program of focusing on the desired outcome, a group behavior that some european somewhere called spiritual. In Dios, literally “In God.” However, I believe that euro-centric notions of spirituality are as far off base as euro-centric notions of what addictions are, for the same reasons.

Practicing my indigenous knowledge, I conjure an intention: humans as indigenous to the actual physical place where we each are, right now. I feel this "indigenaiety" as a relationship, signaled by the pull of gravity to my great Mother, the earth. You, reading these words, can feel this pull, too. Don’t let the illusion of cyberspace or printspace throw you off balance; call to your floating mind with your heart and flow into the physical pull. In Dios. Without the human-made confusion about God and Man.

The French called us the "Cris," the cryers, from the ceremonial action of making a specific sound set with voice, a syncopated counter-rhythm heard during many lodge-type ceremonies. In our own language we are known as the four-part beings, referencing the mental, emotional, physical and spiritual aspects of being human.

These four aspects are in motion. When they are balanced, you get a smooth ride. Riding the spinning wheel of these four aspects—call it a four directions medicine wheel—I conjure an intention: indigenizing Canada. Having this torture session stop would be nice. Ending the genocide would be great. But that’s not where to put my good energy, my builder’s energy, my creative energy. So I call with a Cree cry into the space between your heartbeats, the drum beat of Mother Earth, syncopated: let’s build social power, you and I.

Traveling the pathway from apartheid modernity to an indigenous socialism for the 21^st century calls for walkers, each walking in our own way, but together, in the same direction. The footprints in the grass are already outlining a pathway, from the Mayan Zapatistas to the Bolivian MAS to the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Even from here I can faintly see the emerging outlines of a communal council system that someday will organically overgrow colonial forms of political economy.

In my ancient culture, the extended family was the core of the regional governance system, with female Elders gently guiding the whole process. A cross-linked communal council system existed inside the extended family structure. One organic possibility for Canada’s future is the re-emergence of extended, family-based, communal councils, where, for instance, Canadian youth, if faced with dysfunctional families of origin, can simply decide to create new extended families of choice.

In the ancient culture, fresh new humans were intentionally created, by adults three generations deep in childcare facility, on an as-needed basis. In other words, the absolute total size of the human population in any one bio-region was controlled by the members of the group acting in concert. Birth control was understood and practiced, sexuality was recognized as the powerful force that it rightfully is, and social systems were evolved to provide safe and complete outlets for all of that extra non-procreative sexual energy for which we humans are renowned.

By using this system, each new child entered an extended family circle where she/he was the center of attention for an adoring circle of adults who defined themselves in relation to her/him. Great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, aunt, cousin, sister were the circle they toddled into. Every effort was made by all of these adults to prevent injury or abuse.

The Cree education system had two childhood phases before one entered adulthood at puberty. Phase one was the above-described building of a central, indestructible core of individual personhood. When children reached a certain age, they were gently moved into stage two, consciously learning how to seek humbleness. By humbleness I mean seeking balance across both human and non-human systems, so that there is no Above or Below.

Cree children had, as companions in search of humbleness, all of their age-peers, and, as role models, all of the adults around them. Within this educational system, fresh new humans matured into adult humans who were fearlessly themselves and knew how to make decisions for individual action based on the best outcome for the whole group.

The entire practice was ritualized into a belief system that relied on the metaphor of ceremony. Each individual carried inside of themselves their own unique understanding of ceremony, while the actual practice of gathering together to perform ceremony created the conditions for the harmonization of individual, society, and Mother Earth. In Dios.

Turtle Island is re-emerging, after a long eclipse under the shadow of the Americas. I see a wonderful opportunity here for Canadian social activists to place intentions on creating an indigenized pluri-national, multi-ethnic space to fit into Turtle Island re-emergent. I ask each reader to consider what this would mean in their personal life.

Thank you for gifting me with this brief space of your attention.

Together, towards Turtle Island.

Gifted with a white privilege suit on his Birth Day, Steinhauer has been slipping back and forth across the invisible boundary between Turtle Island and Canada, since 1952, in his lovely birthday suit. And this is what he saw.

StarWoman

Mohawk Grandmother Challenges Border Jurisdiction

Lia Tarachansky — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:48:31 +0000

Machetes, Ethnic Conflict and Reductionism

dru — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:44:03 +0000

Racist assumptions mar western media coverage of Kenya

Arriving back in Montreal after a brief journey to my home country of Kenya during the December elections there, I went online to get the latest updates. In the days immediately following the election on December 27 the incumbent President Kibaki stole the vote and had himself sworn in before a motley group of dejected government officials. Opposition supporters rose up to protest the rigged result. Ironically, the only source of news in Kenya before I left was the BBC. The government had banned the local media from reporting any conflict, leaving the country in a domestic media blackout.

Reading media reports from Montreal, I found myself more confused and afraid than when I was still in Kenya. According to many of these reports, my country was suddenly in the midst of a "civil war," or even a "genocide," not unlike the stories the media told about Rwanda in 1994. It was as if the situation could be reduced to a few violent images, like those of machete-wielding youth dancing next to burning houses.

Among the mainstream media's favourite words when referring to the current political crisis in Kenya are "ethnic," "chaos" and "tribal." In its report on January 27, the Los Angeles Times carried the title "'Tribal war' spreads in Kenya." The same article provided almost no historical context or explanation for how this "tribal war" was linked to the December elections, save for two paragraphs that clumsily summed up the country's history since its independence in 1963.

The word "tribal" itself is denied specific meaning. Kenya is composed of more than 40 ethnic groups, none of which media reports have attempted to describe with any accuracy. Instead, we get scant descriptions of men from the Kalenjin or Luo ethnic groups "at war" with their Kikuyu neighbours.

Again and again, the corporate media has reduced complex political events to simple binary conflicts. In Rwanda, it is the "Hutu" versus the "Tutsi." In Sudan-- the "Arabs" versus the "Africans" or the "Muslims" versus the "Christians." In the vast territory of the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, the "Hema" fight against the "Lendu."

All these groups do exist on the African continent, but not as rigidly fixed identities dating from time immemorial. Identities are complex and often fluid in nature, sometimes hardening in the crucible of political movements or colonial struggles. Simplifying every violent episode down to an “ethnic conflict” has a familiar effect: making every conflict on the African continent seem irrational, chaotic, and without historical precedent.

The BBC’s reporting is no less culpable for oversimplifications. On one of the broadcaster's news pages, provocative quotes entice readers: “We will start the war. We will divide Kenya.” These are the words selected by the BBC to reflect the views of one Kalenjin "leader," Jackson Kibbur. Readers relying on the BBC to find out about the Kalenjin are likely to assume that he represents the views of all Kalenjin. Elsewhere in the article, snippets that seem to have been cut and pasted from an action film are quoted in isolation. “We will of course kill them,” an interviewee is reported to have said of the Kikuyu.

This variety of sensationalism and oversimplification is not atypical of corporate media reporting from Africa. Their representations perpetuate the racist assumptions that have historically influenced western perceptions of "Africans" as barbaric, primitive and inherently destructive. Such representations also have the advantage of justifying external intervention in the region which in most cases serves to disguise many different kinds of exploitation.

Western journalists reporting on the current situation in Kenya frequently approach their work with an air of adventure and sensationalism mixed with disappointment at the direction in which Kenya is moving. Doug Miller, the host of "Amandla!" -- a radio program on Montreal's CKUT dedicated to political events in Africa -- says this approach does not help readers understand what is going on.

Miller praises the Globe and Mail's Africa correspondent Stephanie Nolen for her "wonderful stuff on AIDS in Southern Africa," but criticized her approach to the political crisis in Kenya. It is, he says, a "cheap thrill kind of journalism."

"The emphasis was on her going into the 'valley of death' and facing these bloodthirsty warriors. It's an awful attraction for a journalist to go out there. But is it giving us any insight into the situation? I don't think so."

In her article, entitled "Into the Valley of Death," Nolen writes, "the Kenya I travelled through this week was not a country I recognized ... the Kenya that was prospering and ambitious and dignified and peaceful." Nolen is echoing a frequent refrain in the media since the conflict: that Kenya was the last remaining "democracy" -- the only hope on a continent ravaged by senseless violence. In the words of one writer and according to the sentiment of many, the situation is a "tragic setback for democracy in Africa."

Missing Colonialism and Class

Celebrated Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o has observed that the current crisis does indeed concern two tribes: not tribes based on ethnic identity, but on the divide between "the haves and the have-nots." It is not accidental that much of the violence has taken place in Kibera, the second largest slum in Africa and also in Mathare, another collection of slums.

Writing for African news publication Pambazuka, Nunu Kidane and Walter Turner remark that the people living in Kibera and Mathare have "nothing to fear and nothing to lose." Running battles between armed police and residents of Kibera were fought in the post-election period, while the middle-classes and elites remained largely unaffected by such conflicts. The media has neglected to report sufficiently on the heavy-handed tactics of repression used by the Kenyan police and the notorious paramilitary General Service Unit in areas like Kibera and Mathare.

Nonetheless, Kibera has attracted international attention; it is becoming increasingly popular as a venue for "slum tourism." Reuters correspondent Andrew Cawthorne recently wrote of Kibera: "Any journalist wanting a quick Africa poverty story can find it there in half an hour."

How, then, to make sense of the situation in Kenya while avoiding the pitfalls of sensationalistic reporting and racist assumptions?

If the media claim this is an ethnic conflict, how did it begin? When did it begin? It is important to first differentiate between the different acts of "violence" that are taking place in Kenya. Security forces are responsible for a large number of the killings. Acting on government orders immediately after the election results were announced, they have largely been operating on a shoot-to-kill policy.

Disturbing scenes of police brutality have been aired on local television. In one case, a young man in western Kisumu -- a region with a large number of opposition supports -- is shown taunting the police by sticking his tongue out and jumping up and down. A police officer runs toward him, shoots him from a few feet away and kicks him in the ribs. Little or none of this makes it into corporate media reports.

As “ethnic violence,” it certainly did not emerge out of nowhere, and not all members of the Kikuyu, Kalenjin and Luo communities are bent on destroying each other. But what other impression would people get when they read headlines like “Rival Kenyan tribes face off with machetes and clubs” next to photographs of black Africans holding weapons, silhouetted by the sun?

Certainly it is not ordinary Kenyans who benefit from the climate of terror stoked by politicians who manipulate ethnic differences to serve their own political agendas. They have mobilized gangs of young men, who are marginalized and cut off from any participation in the country’s economy, to target ethnic groups, thus prompting revenge attacks.

I received an alarming text message from a friend who had to leave home for fear of being targeted by members of the Kikuyu community. "Am ok," it read, "There were revenge attacks from Kikuyus as the place is predominantly Kikuyu. Looking for another house." The same friend was rushing to the Rift Valley three weeks ago to help evacuate members of the Kikuyu community who were being targeted by Kalenjin supporters of the opposition in the elections.

These kinds of stories -- of ordinary Kenyans who are trying to help each other and who are troubled and alarmed by what is happening as the result of a power struggle between two men -- are not covered by the many foreign correspondents visiting Kenya.

A notable exception to the lack of critical and accurate coverage in the corporate media was an article by author Caroline Elkins, who wrote about Kenya's national resistance movement in her book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. Writing in the Washington Post, Elkins explains: "If you're looking for the origins of Kenya's ethnic tensions, look to its colonial past... we are often told that age-old tribal hatreds drive today's conflicts in Africa. In fact, both ethnic conflict and its attendant grievances are colonial phenomena."

In Kenya, says Elkins, the British spent much of their time trying to keep the Kikuyu and Luo divided for fear that if they united, the colonial order in the country would collapse. A Kikuyu-Luo alliance in the 1950s forced the British to release Jomo Kenyatta, who would later become the country's first president, from a colonial detention camp and hastened the removal of the British colonial structure. But the alliance was short-lived, and the imperial "divide-and-rule" policy was applied time and again in Britain's colonies. The policy was strong enough to create the "ethnic units" that are now playing into the hands of elites.

These same elites, carefully cultivated by the British to protect their geopolitical interests in the region, took control of the legal systems left behind that, according to Elkins, "facilitated tyranny, oppression and poverty rather than open, accountable government."

We also have to consider the many other factors that make possible the kind of violence currently taking place. Kenya is a very poor country whose more serious troubles concern low wages, unemployment, structural poverty, lack of social security, poorly funded health and education systems and lack of access to land and resources.

Doug Miller of "Amandla!" says, "It is no wonder that the structural poverty imposed on Africa throughout history has created an underclass of young people who have no hope and no future. Many people are getting an education but there is nowhere to go with it."

"The economies have been undermined by world capitalism. Even if you do what they say and you grow tobacco or something, you get crap prices and you can't live off what you do as a farmer. What this is about is people with no access to resources in a country where they can't do anything and a rich person can come by with any amount of money and mobilize them into what I call 'the army of the unemployed.'"

It is these armies of disenfranchised youth that have been mobilized to set Kenyan against Kenyan. Understanding the origins for their exclusion will bring us closer to transcending the stereotypes that dominate Western media reportage, and perhaps a little closer to envisioning a resolution.

Machete-wielding men

Daily Life

France's Colonial History, Contemporary Conflicts

dru — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:14:37 +0000

A new wave of actions challenges escalating and violent deportation policies

In the early evening outside of Belleville metro in Paris, a crowd gathers for a demonstration demanding citizenship for France's hundreds of thousands of non-status immigrants, locally known as sans papiers (literally "without papers"). As protest chants echo through the Parisian streets, a sound-track to a powerful contemporary social movement is edged into history. Demonstrators embody a critical current of contemporary French politics in this ancient European city.

Protests throughout France have opposed waves of deportations confronting immigrant communities. In 2007, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced an official government target of twenty-five thousand deportations for the year, igniting a storm of state-driven immigration raids across the country.

Intensity of popular opposition to the government-initiated crackdown has spiked in recent months, in response to violence and tragedy. A Chinese woman in the Belleville district of Paris died after plunging from a window as a police unit entered the apartment building; a Russian boy sustained head injuries after falling from a balcony while trying to escape immigration authorities; and a North African man fractured his leg after slipping from a window ledge in the French capital during a police raid.

Immigration is now a deadly issue in France-- in politics and in reality.

Political mobilization against the state-sponsored flood of deportations is spreading throughout the multiple districts or arrondissements of Paris, and throughout the country. French President Sarkozy stated recently that France is "exasperated by uncontrolled immigration." However any basic investigation illustrates that exasperation is limited to conservative sectors within a politically complex society. Many reject contemporary immigration policy.

Profound political networks have emerged in recent years to respond to the crisis of deportations facing the country, including Réseau Éducation Sans Frontières (RESF), a national network rooted within the French public school system, driven by students and teachers fighting for the regularization of non-status students and their families.

"Our focus is to protect families, also to ensure family unification in France, for all families in all situations, including families without papers," explains Armelle Gardien, a teacher at a French Lycée active within RESF. "As teachers it is critical to address the reality of students in our schools [who] have no papers, students and their families who are illegal in France, often living in terrible conditions, so we formed our network to fight for regularization."

Across Paris and throughout the country organizing committees of RESF have formed in schools and communities, sparking a wave of media attention internationally after the network announced plans to shelter sans papiers students in open opposition to government-backed deportation orders.

"Our battle is to fight against current immigration policy across France," says Gardien. "Also we are struggling from community to community, building support within each school for non-status students, attempting to build awareness on the realities facing sans papiers today in France."

Immigration battles in France

On the streets, in the schools and within the major political institutions of the country, political battles around immigration point to the critical importance of the issue. A growing number of street demonstrations have been occurring in Paris in recent months, often lead by sans papiers.

"I reject living a life of fear in France," says Karim Djebloun of 9ème Collectif des Sans-Papiers, at a demonstration in the Belleville district of Paris. Djebloun is a sans papiers originally from Algeria. "Each time entering the metro should I have to fear being captured by police simply because France has refused to grant me or my family French nationality?"

"I am not a criminal, I want to be treated as a full human being," Djebloun says amidst the chanting crowd in Paris. "I am demanding status for myself and all sans papiers in France, immediately."

"Today, I am attending this demonstration openly, speaking to the media because I refuse to live in fear," he continues. "It is only through a struggle on the streets that we can change government policy; all major political change in history began on the streets, even our struggle against the French in Algeria began on the streets."

In late 2007 the French government introduced a DNA testing program targeted at family members of immigrants applying for visas to the country.

Protests were organized across France in opposition to the DNA testing law that eventually passed with a slim majority in the French parliament. DNA testing for foreign nationals attempting to secure visas isn't compulsory under the new law. However, it is feared that visa applicants who don't submit to the test -- taken at their own expense -- will have their applications rejected by France.

Civil liberties groups across France and internationally – including Amnesty International -- condemned the new DNA testing law, an adaptation of existing practices already established in the US, Canada and other western European countries.

Across Africa, deportation policies adopted by successive French governments, which target non-status immigrants, often define political perception of modern day France.

In May 2007, Sarkozy's visit to Mali sparked large protests and widespread local opposition due to new immigration policies in France that have tightened visa requirements, while eliminating an existing law that allowed migrant workers to apply for citizenship after ten years.

"We are indignant about this visit and we honestly think that the arrival of Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy in our country at this time is purely and simply a provocation," explained a Malian member of parliament at the time of Sarkozy's visit. Activists from the Association of Malians Expelled from France organized a sit-in outside Sarkozy's hotel in Bamako, Mali's capital, in protest of French immigration policy.

France: Immigration and colonial history

As a former colonial power throughout the Middle East, Africa and Asia, contemporary migration to France can be traced to colonial history.

Diaspora communities throughout the country -- currently facing mass deportations -- find roots in southern nations across the globe struggling with the shadows of colonialism, a historical reality indisputably connected to the economic instability, civil conflict and war driving contemporary migration to France.

"France's current policies towards immigrants echo the colonial past," explains Atman Zerkaoui, from the Mouvement des Indigenes de la République. "In colonial times, in Algeria, we were expected to serve the French empire without question, as workers, as soldiers, while today recent laws passed by the French government basically allowing only professionals or the wealthy into France translates to the state reasserting a colonial ideology, in which people from the colonies exist to serve France, the French economy, while France sets the terms of our relationship unilaterally."

As France has moved in recent years to seal borders and stiffen immigration laws, legal moves have been made with regard to colonial history as well. In 2005, the French parliament passed a controversial law on the teaching of French colonial history in public schools, a law that critics argue attempts to erase from history France's numerous colonial crimes through North Africa, specifically in Algeria.

"School programs are to recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas, especially in North Africa," reads the 2005 law, signed on the 60th anniversary of the 1945 Sétif massacre in Algeria, when French soldiers killed thousands of Algerians after celebrations in reaction to Nazi Germany's defeat turned into a massive Algerian independence rally.

"Roots of xenophobia today in France trace back to the Algerian war," explains David Common, CBC's Europe correspondent based in Paris. "Many people have written on this connection, as at the time of the Algerian war, France had a real shock, a loss of international prestige due to victory of the Algerian independence movement."

"Sarkozy has now said everything but sorry in regards to France's role in Algeria, in the former French colonies," continues David Common, "bringing forward instead the idea that the past is the past, without talking about healing, which is a similar position to Canada saying everything but sorry in regards to the history of residential schools for the First Nations."

Uprisings in the suburbs

Today, France stands at a crossroads of national identity, as history funnels into the contemporary debate on immigration, which in recent decades has redefined the nature of major urban centers in the country.

Deportation stands as only one state-backed difficulty within economically marginalized immigrant quarters across the precarious suburbs of Paris, epicenter of massive confrontations between state security forces and local residents that sparked international headlines in 2005.

"History is separated from the contemporary context, which is exactly what we are fighting to change," explains Sonia Barbacha of the Mouvement des Indigenes de la République. "We are struggling to break free of this colonial history that continues to persist until today."

"In Paris we are experiencing a colonial situation; the urban geography is very similar to the colonial situation in Algeria," says Barbacha. "There is essentially a white city center, while people from the former colonies surround the city center, living in the suburbs; it's a racist geography, which translates at times into social uprising as the world saw in 2005."

France remains a nation on edge. As political turmoil in recent years has defined French politics, from the popular explosions in the Paris suburbs driven by socially marginalized immigrant youth, to the growing grassroots rejection of massive deportations to former French colonies and serious prospects of a severe economic downturn, as a result of growing international economic turmoil, resulting in fewer economics opportunities in the country.

"Compound total social alienation with almost no economic opportunity-- you can begin to understand the situation in the suburbs," Common tells me over coffee in Paris. "Violence is compounded when young French police are sent into the suburbs, within the first few years of their service, arriving in a heavy handed fashion in already volatile suburbs and then the existing social violence, mainly due to poverty, feeds into violence against the police."

History etches deep impressions onto the contemporary French political reality, a history, which like the present, is a battlefield defined by opposing sides of a profound conflict which is best understood in colonial terms.

Parmentier: "“conjugaison des liens"

Paris: Parrainage républicain à la Mairie du 14è arrondissement

Bobigny: Journée Nationale de protestation de RESF

Firestorm

hillarybain — Mon, 07 May 2007 23:31:04 +0000

A review of <em>The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia</em>

Across Bolivia, fireworks and blockade fires illuminate a resistance that has been sustained for years, and which is gaining momentum across the South American continent.

Benjamin Dangl’s The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia, recently published by AK Press, is a compilation of anecdotes and political analyses that spans Bolivia’s history of resource-based mobilizations. Written over five years, often from the fray of mass mobilizations or boisterous fiestas, this book offers a glimpse into the rich fabric of Bolivian social movements.

Dangl’s writing also frames his analysis of Bolivia in the broader context of Latin American politics. By drawing on creative and functional examples of community-based, socialist-minded initiatives from across the continent, such as factory takeover co-operatives in Argentina and comedor libres (community-operated soup kitchens) in Caracas, he shows that alternatives to neoliberalism are indeed possible.

In The Price of Fire, Dangl asserts that colonialism of the past has been replaced with economic policies of the present. Since colonization, “the wealth in the rest of the world [has] depended on poverty in Latin America,” he writes.

Despite being a country rich in natural resources, Bolivia is, economically, the poorest country in South America. The dearth of social services and basic infrastructure is crystalline in Dangl’s depictions -- especially of the hyper-urbanized city El Alto on the fringe of La Paz -- but Bolivia’s potent social movements and community organizations are filling these chasms with pro-active articulations for change.

Throughout successive dictatorships and a long stretch of Cold War interventionism in Bolivia, people were not able to express their needs through the political system, and were driven to the streets. In a phone interview, Dangl explains that the impetus for the Bolivian people to mobilize so effectively stems from absolute necessity. “Economic and political policies affect their living rooms, their stomachs.”

Bolivian social movements have become extremely cohesive. In El Alto, “the city that contains a nation,” even the street vendors are unionized -- they attend community meetings and shut down during strikes.

Perhaps The Price of Fire’s most endearing attribute is the conversations Dangl shares with people he meets on his travels, from elderly coca growers and government officials, to street-youth theatre performers and graffiti artists. Abraham Bojorquez, a political hip- hop artist based in El Alto, tells of being in the military during a 2003 uprising in response to IMF-imposed income tax hikes. Thirty-one people -- protestors as well as bystanders -- were killed during the violent repression carried out by the Bolivian military. Bojorquez quickly left the military and joined the other side. He now rhymes in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Quechua and Aymara (two of the principle indigenous languages in Bolivia) and sees this politically charged music as an “instrument of struggle, an instrument of the people.”

The election of Evo Morales to presidency in December 2005 was a victory for Bolivian social movements and marks a stark shift in Bolivian politics. Morales, the former leader of the Six Federations Coca Growers’ Union, made the transition to the Movement Towards Socialism Party (MAS) and was elected on an explicit anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal platform. He is the first indigenous president Bolivia has had, despite the fact that the country’s population is 60 per cent indigenous.

“Morales and Lula [the working class president of Brazil] are two amazing examples of really important social advances that can push Latin America, Bolivia and Brazil out of the intense divisions between rich and poor, indigenous and mestizo [part Spanish descent],” says Dangl on the phone from Minnesota, a stop on his recent book tour. In The Price of Fire, however, Dangl does not idealize Bolivia’s precarious position, situated in a “continent on a tightrope.”

When elected, Morales promised nationalization of gas, improvement of coca policies and a new constitution. However, his promises have not been entirely fulfilled. Morales swiftly introduced a legal quota arrangement for coca growers, but previous contentious laws are still in place; he has improved gas policies immensely, but a full expropriation of the resource has yet to be seen. Finally, the new constitution is still in the works.

Since Morales’ election, Bolivian social movements have shifted from antagonism to collaboration with the new government, explains Dangl, but the cohesive relationship is a delicate one. “I think the danger or the challenge among many of these movements now is to work with their new allies in the government without jeopardizing their own independence or autonomy -- the same independence that empowered them from the beginning, outside of the political sphere…There’s a danger that all the momentum that has built up, particularly over the past six years, could be dispersed and weakened because of this centralization of power with Evo in the government.”

In addition to a healthy criticism of the Morales administration, Dangl does not allow the positive attributes of the MAS to eclipse the salient racism, classism and sexism in Bolivia. He interviews Julieta Ojeda and Maria Galindo of the La Paz-based collective Mujeres Creando, a “small influential group of anarcho-feminists not very well-liked in Bolivian society.” This aversion to progressive feminist groups, Dangl says, is indicative of prevalent sexism throughout the country.

In a corner of the Mujeres Creando’s multi-purpose centre, crowded with pamphlets and books, Galindo tells Dangl that the sexism and repression in Bolivia is not much different from anywhere else in the world. In fact, neither is the colonial history, the impact of structural adjustment policies, or the foreign ownership of resources. What is unique is the Bolivian people’s response and their ability to instigate and implement fundamental paradigm shifts, whether in the streets, the coca fields, or the congress. And, as Mujeres Creando demonstrates, repressive structures within these movements will also be held to the flames.

The Price of Fire is available through AK Press

For further reading, check out UpsideDownWorld and Mujeres Creando

The Price of Fire

Russian Riots in Estonia, Estonian Humour in English

dru — Wed, 02 May 2007 22:47:41 +0000

Estonia isn't in the news much, but after the government decided to implement a controversial law to move a Soviet memorial to soldiers who died fighting the Nazis, and unearth the bodies of several soldiers buried near the monument--which is referred to in the Estonian press simply as pronkssõdur, or bronze soldier--an international furor has ensued, with German, US, Russian and other governments weighing in.

Abandoning Hypocrisy

dru — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 14:44:06 +0000

Canada's foreign policy and Afghanistan

The following remarks are based on a talk delivered in September 2006.

Canada is fighting a counternarcotics campaign and a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Afghanistan currently supplies 90 per cent of the world's heroin. The narcotics Canada is fighting are a product of the occupation. They are a product of the alliances the Afghan government has made with the warlords who actually control the country. They are a product of the falsehood that Canada or the US is interested in 'development' in Afghanistan. They are a product of fact that the only hope a farmer has of earning a livelihood is through this crop that can bring a little cash (not a lot of cash, because no peasant ever gets rich from growing poppy in Afghanistan).

The Taliban, who ruled the country before the US and Canadian occupation, had banned the poppy. That's not praise for the Taliban -- they also banned music, sports, television and laughter. That isn't the solution to the problem either –- it can't be a solution to the livelihood of 2.3 million people, the 10 per cent of the Afghan population who rely on the poppy. Solutions to drug problems are clear enough and well-enough known: treatment for addiction; legalization and control; education; and support for the agrarian economy. But the drug war is a useful pretext for other agendas.

As for the counterinsurgency, the question of how Canada came to be involved in it is important. It is part of an evolution in Canadian foreign policy in recent years.

Canadian foreign policy used to be based on hypocrisy. Canada's leaders have always seen themselves, and presented themselves, as men of the West, involved in the wars the West was involved in, including colonial wars. But Canada has also tried to present itself as a country without a colonial history, an honest broker and peacekeeper that has, and deserves, the trust of the world.

From America's war against the Vietnamese and before, Canada has been a supply centre, a diplomatic supporter and a training ground (see Canada, Empire), but it shied away from direct military participation in colonial wars.

That started to change in the 1990s, for various reasons. Canada was in the process of adopting a "free trade" agreement that was integrating the economies of Canada and the US in new ways. Neo-liberalism was locking other countries into weakness and dependency on the US. Everywhere, the segment of the elite that sought a degree of independence was weakened. People who tried to fight back were told they were on the wrong side of history.

There are three stories about Canadian foreign policy during this period that illustrate the drift from hypocrisy.

Back in the 1980s, there was a little 'blip' in Canadian support for Israel against the Palestinians. During the initial expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, Canada followed Britain. During the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Canada followed the US. But in the 1980s, when Israel invaded Lebanon, when Israel was crushing the first Palestinian Intifada, some Canadian leaders -- Trudeau and Clark -- actually criticized Israel. But in the 1990s, when the Oslo Accords brought a phony "peace" to Palestine, Canada was able to return to its hypocritical role; supporting "peace" publicly, while supporting Israel privately -- and moving towards increasingly public support.

In 1990 and 1991, Mulroney rushed to Bush Sr.'s side when Bush ordered the beginning of the destruction of Iraq. Canada made sure that its warplanes and ships were active, involved in bombing the relatively defenceless Iraqi military and the completely defenceless Iraqi population. That campaign killed hundreds of thousands of people and was followed by sanctions against Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands more -- sanctions Canada participated in. The sanctions were followed by another invasion that has killed over a hundred thousand more, according to conservative and not-very-recent estimates.

In 1993, the Canadian Airborne Regiment was sent to Somalia. Here, too, Canada went with the US. The US was there to "Restore Hope," and killed several hundred (or was it several thousand?) Somalis in the process, before leaving ignominiously. Canada went along to support the mission. The story was familiar. Somalia was a "failed state." Canada had a "responsibility to protect" the people from evil. So Canada set up a base in a town called Belet Huen. The armed forces set up a well-supplied base in the middle of a miserably poor country, a country of desperate shortages and starving people. Some of those people started to sneak onto the base and steal supplies. If the Canadians were to lock them up, they'd have to lock up a lot of them. So they came up with a series of humiliating punishments: keeping them out under the sun under armed guard, tying them up, beating them up, shooting them, or torturing them. This culminated in a group of Canadian soldiers torturing a 16-year-old child to death over the course of a whole night. The child's name was Shidane Arone and his murder was recorded in a series of gruesome photographs that came to appear in the Canadian press. Today, Canadian commentators talk about the "Somalia Affair" as a national trauma -- for Canadians. This is narcissism. We focus on ourselves, rather than the victims of our actions. The same is true in Afghanistan.

The last hiccup of hypocrisy in Canadian foreign policy was the second destruction of Iraq in 2003. Canada performed, and continues to perform, its historical services of supply centre, training ground and diplomatic supporter. But the US wanted more from its allies and that meant Canada had to 'mend fences,' and it did so on the bones of Haitians, Palestinians, the Lebanese and Afghans. The primary way Canada helped the US invasion of Iraq was by relieving the US in Afghanistan. It isn't much relief: 2,200 troops in a mission that involves some 36,000 troops, including 20,000 Americans. But it goes some way, presumably, to 'mending fences.'

This 'fence-mending' began the new period of Canadian foreign policy, in which Canada has abandoned hypocrisy outright.

Canada's first move towards abandoning hypocrisy was joining the invasion of Afghanistan; until recently, Canada was pretending that the Afghan mission was of the innocent peacekeeping variety that was done in Somalia.

The second move towards abandoning hypocrisy happened in December 2004, on the heels of Bush Jr.'s visit to Ottawa. Previously, Canada had abstained from several votes requiring Israel to comply with its obligations under international law by withdrawing from the territories it occupied in 1967. Canada's Ambassador to the UN at the time, Allan Rock, said that the "value added" of the committees trying to put Palestinian rights on the agenda at the UN was "questionable" and that the process was biased –- against Israel. So Canada started to vote against Palestinian rights.

Next, six months later, in July 2005, Canada's Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier put the "peacekeeping" and "failed states" story to bed with a rhetorical flourish. Talking about the Afghans on the receiving end of Canada's military, he said: "These are detestable murderers and scumbags. They detest our freedoms, they detest our society, they detest our liberties... We are the Canadian Forces and our job is to be able to kill people." Hillier was concentrating his fire directly on the Canadian myth that we are innocent peacekeepers. He was doing that because he wants to see Canada involved in a counterinsurgency that he knows is going to be bloody and brutal. Like Harper, he hopes that by talking tough he can increase the public's tolerance for blood.

These moves by the Liberals preceding the Tories' rise to power set Harper up nicely. He was the first to cut all aid to the Palestinians earlier this year, to starve them for the election they held shortly after the one that brought him to power. This summer, when Israel destroyed Gaza's power plant and massacred hundreds of Palestinians from the air, Harper called the response "measured." While Israel was massacring civilians in Lebanon, suffering largely military casualties at the hands of Hezbollah, Peter MacKay was calling the resistance "cold-blooded killers" and a "cancer on Lebanon."

The abandonment of hypocrisy led Canada directly into this counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan. The escalation of the war in recent months is probably because the many promises made of development and peace in Afghanistan were demonstrated to be lies. Having demonstrated that its interest in Afghanistan is "to be able to kill people," Canada ought to have been able to anticipate the consequences.

Since 2001, the 'international community' has spent $82.5 billion on military operations and $7.3 billion on aid and development. The Canadian figures are similarly skewed. The CIDA aid figures are in the hundreds of millions and most of it has not actually been spent. The military budgets are in the billions and forever rising. Canada has set up Tim Horton's in its well-equipped camps in the midst of a massive humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. This is an affront and an insult to starving people. Canadian soldiers follow the US Air Force, "mopping up" people who are called "suspected Taliban" when they are killed by the dozen or hundred. Major General Andrew Leslie earlier this year told reporters that, "every time you kill an angry young man overseas, you're creating 15 more who will come after you." Despite demonstrating this understanding, the Major General's military machine continues to kill.

By any decent measure, Canada's mission in Afghanistan is an outrage. By the measures claimed by Canada and the US, the mission is a failure. Canada's counternarcotics have placed Afghanistan at the centre of the world's opium trade. Canada's counterinsurgency has the Taliban controlling half the country and going from strength to strength. Canada's development program has led to massive hunger and starvation, right under the noses of the Canadian military presence in the south and within a distance to smell Tim Horton's coffee and donuts. With Canada guaranteeing security, schools are being burned all over the south.

Canada should leave; should apologize for what it has done and make amends; should stop killing people and calling whoever is killed 'Taliban'; and should stop letting young Canadians who have no idea kill and get killed so that colonial powers can 'mend fences.'

And Canada will leave. For all the bluster of Harper and Hillier, the military realities are stark and there are at least some, even in Canada, who know it. It would be tragic if Canadians come to think of Afghanistan as a 'national trauma' in which we were scarred, forgetting our victims like we did in Somalia. If, instead, Canadians could learn that Canada is not an innocent peacekeeper and never was, that the traumas we cause are worse than the ones we suffer and that our place isn't cheering for slaughter but fighting against it, we could actually make the world safer.

Tim Horton's in Kandahar

M777 artillery gun

Colonialism and Kanehsatake

Wed, 25 Aug 2004 22:09:18 +0000

Are dispossession and forced integration ongoing?

Mohawk community members stand guard after forcing James Gabriel and his police force to leave.

The Mohawk Nation in Kanehsatake in southern Quebec is the site of a long, simmering dispute-a dispute that has deep implications for Mohawk and First Nations sovereignty, and which calls into question the Canadian Government's commitment to ending its legacy of residential schools, forced integration, and dispossession. The Mohawks' ability to determine and control their own economy, security, justice system, and ruling structure is at stake. The focus of the conflict is a stealthy land transfer carried out under the auspices of James Gabriel, Grand Chief of the Mohawk Council of Kanehsatake.

The year following the Oka crisis of 1990, Gabriel began talks with the federal officials to secure lands purchased for Kanehsatake. At this time, Gabriel made concessions, unbeknown to the people of Kanehsatake, which led to Bill S-24, the "Kanehsatake Land Based Governance Act."

Gabriel signed Bill S-24 in secret and called for a referendum to ratify the Act, allegedly without informing the Mohawk community of the details. Under these conditions, the referendum vote passed by a slim margin of 239 to 237.

Mohawk journalist Dan David describes the details: "Chief Gabriel signed the agreement that transferred $14 million worth of land purchased by the federal government to the control of a private corporation–not the band–called Kanesatake Orihwa'shon: a Development Corporation." Mohawk lands would be converted into "fee simple" estates, Mohawks would lose their tax-exempt status, and band by-laws would be harmonized with the by-laws of Oka–a municipalization of Kanehsatake, and an end to meaningful sovereignty.

In January 2004 Canadian authorities began funding a 60-man police militia, under the control of Gabriel. This militia was accused by the Mohawk Council of Kanehsatake of "actively provoking incidences on the Territory," such as attempts "to run community volunteer patrol drivers off the road." The residents of Kanehsatake rebelled, surrounded the police station, and ousted what they called the "invasive" police force. Some of the dissenters, provoked by the police use of tear gas against them, responded by torching Gabriel's house. Warrants were subsequently issued for the arrest of many Kanehsatake dissidents.

Particular members of Gabriel's police force, brought in from outside the community, had incurred the enmity of Kanehsatake residents. Among them was non-Native Richard Walsh, a criminal with a previous conviction for impersonating a police officer. Two other policemen, Terry Isaac and Larry Ross, led a police operation in 1999 that resulted in the shooting and paralysis of Mohawk Warrior Joe David, who has since passed away.

In February of this year, journalist Ross Montour asked Gabriel why he brought Isaac and Ross back into the community despite their checkered past in Kanehsatake. Gabriel's verbatim reply was, "Well Ross, history aside, those people [i.e., what Gabriel calls the "criminal element" in Kanehsatake] know that when those two men were there, they kicked a lot of doors in." Montour considered this a "rather chilling statement for any leader to make."

Concerned community members subsequently assumed responsibility for patrolling the territory of Kanehsatake and remaining vigilant for outside police seeking to enter the community uninvited. On August 9, Kanehsatake Interim Chief of Police David Thompson, much appreciated by the community, resigned in a "last ditch effort to force both the governments of Canada and Quebec to respect their word and provide the safety" of the community.

A twice-elected Grand Chief, Gabriel was removed from office by a non-confidence vote of 207 to 130. A Canadian court overturned this decision. Justice Daniele Tremblay-Lamer found the exclusion of non-resident Mohawks from voting to be discriminatory and the vote to be contrary to the Election Code.

This is, however, a Canadian court ruling on a Mohawk Nation matter. As Kanehsatake Chief John Harding points out: "To begin to have an understanding of the current situation in Kanehsatake, one must first appreciate the two fundamental differences between governance in a Mohawk Community, and governance in non-native society."

"Primarily, what is important to understand about governance in Kanehsatake is that the people, not the Chiefs, are the final authority on all matters relating to ourselves and our territory."

"Secondly, decisions taken by the community on important issues must be exercised with responsibility. Decisions must be reached by consensus, not by a slight majority vote."

Nonetheless, at a subsequent election Gabriel gained three more supporters on the council. Montour: "This gave him [Gabriel] both quorum and a superior voting bloc, one which has enabled him to move forward his agenda as he pleases."

Montour cites the opposition argument that Gabriel possesses a mailing list of all off-territory members, which he exploits by manipulating the image of Kanehsatake for his own ends.

According to Montour, two issues make this possible:

One is the failure of the Council to draft and adopt a membership code defining who is and is not a member of the Mohawks of Kanehsatake. The other is modifying the electoral code, which, among other things, defines who may and may not vote in the community's elections. The two are tied together. Those who live in the community and oppose Gabriel argue that only those people who live in the community and know the issues should be allowed to vote.

The conditions and date of the next election are currently the subject of a court battle.

Some also contend that their sovereignty has been undermined by an enforced reliance on federal money. Many Mohawks have sought to establish economic independence by building their own businesses, including the growing and selling of their own tax-free tobacco, staunchly opposed by the federal government. Under Gabriel, the band budget had accumulated a deficit of over $1 million by 2003. The Department of Indian Affairs seized upon this to unilaterally place Kanehsatake under financial trusteeship of PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The PriceWaterhouseCoopers trusteeship saw Kanehsatake plunge deeper into the red with the deficit reaching $3.1 million. Ongoing legal battles continue to be an economic drain on the resources of the Mohawk community.

The corporate media is accused by some Natives of collaborating with the government agenda by demonizing Mohawks as a narcotics-smuggling and otherwise criminal society. Media coverage, they say, has allowed the conflict to be framed as a battle between law and order and a criminal element, ignoring efforts to undermine sovereignty and place land under the control of private interests.

Policing has also been a flashpoint in Kahnesatake. The Quebec government refuses to continue financing Gabriel's police force. A joint police force of Kahnawake-Akwesasne oversees security in Kanehsatake. Gabriel, whose power in Kanehsatake rests on the backing of federal and provincial politicians, has been stymieing attempts at negotiating an end to the issue. Said Gabriel, "You don't mediate law and order. You respect it."

With law in mind, three Kanehsatake women brought the issue of Mohawk sovereignty and human rights before the UN. Canada took the extraordinary step of walking out of the forum. Article 1 of the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states, "All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development." Canada, as a signatory and having ratified the Covenant "shall promote the realization of the right of self-determination, and shall respect that right, in conformity with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations." Chapter 1, Article 1 of the UN Charter moreover binds Canada. It states that among its purposes and principles is "respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples."

Mohawks are demanding a full investigation into the Gabriel affair. In respect of Mohawk sovereignty, there are calls for the matter to be settled within the Mohawk community.

Gabriel and his police remain exiled from Kanehsatake, and are staying in a hotel at the government's expense. Gabriel threatens Mohawk sovereignty by working secretly towards assimilation into Canadian governance. With memories of the federal government's 1994 plan for a 6,000-troop invasion of Mohawk Nation still lingering, Mohawks stand ready for the continued possibility of an armed invasion.

The people of Kanehsatake are in an ongoing battle with the federal government. The government says it's about crime; Mohawks explain that their land and sovereignty are at stake. Kim Petersen takes a critical look.

Canada, Empire

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 17:48:47 +0000

Humanitarianism, peacekeeping, and other myths

The United States is engaging in a bloody occupation in Iraq; it overthrew the democratically elected government in Haiti, enforced by the Marines; it sowed already devastated Afghanistan with cluster bombs and replaced the Taliban with warlords; it is engaging in ongoing efforts to oust Cuban and Venezuelan governments; it is supporting repression in Colombia; it is constantly threatening Iran, Syria, and North Korea; it offers unconditional support to Israel's bloody occupation of Palestine.

These actions are part of a very deliberate agenda to deny self-determination to the peoples of the world, keeping the world 'safe' for investors, corporations and militarists. This agenda undermines democracy on behalf of elites in the rich countries and their clients in the poor countries.

In most of these ventures, Canada has been openly supportive; in others, its support has been behind the scenes. What is the historical pattern of Canadian foreign policy? What is Canada doing today and why? Opposing imperial depredations is something everyone of conscience must do, but in order to change Canada's policies it is important to know what that entails. The record is mainly one of complicity and hypocrisy, with the occasional open crime.

Justin Podur is a writer and activist living in Toronto. He has written for Dollars and Sense, Frontline India, New Politics and Z Magazine, where he serves as a editor. An earlier version of this essay originally appeared on ZNet. A previous version of the article, complete with footnotes and references, is available here.

Canada's real role in the world is covered by a lot of mythology. There are a variety of narratives about Canada-what it is, how it works. Canada is seen as an 'honest broker', a moderating influence on the United States. It is said that Canada doesn't have the power or will to have imperial aspirations, and if there is a division between the US and the rest of the world, Canada stands with the world. These are myths a lot of people subscribe to.

Yet, there are a lot of people who know better. The Council of Canadians held a series of events across the country called: "Canada: Country or Colony?" They point to free trade pacts, defence sharing agreements, US investment in Canada, US encroachments into Canada's public sector, the majority of Canadian trade going to the US...and conclude that Canada is in a colonial relationship with the US. What the US says goes. Canada imports manufactured goods and exports natural resources. It's colonialism.

I have a lot of respect for the Council of Canadians, and for that Canadian 'nationalist' sentiment. I recently read a book by David Orchard, who twice ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party. David Orchard is not an ordinary conservative. In his view, the Conservative Party is the force that built the national railway system, that built up the public sector, that defended Canadian sovereignty against US encroachment, and only recently betrayed its noble traditions with Mulroney and the North American free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

For Orchard, the entire history of Canada is one of resistance to US attempts to take it over: alliances of indigenous-French and indigenous-French-British repelled repeated military invasions. Visionary politicians realized that unity alone could create a state and economy that could be independent. Those visionaries passed and were replaced by venal men who don't care for independence or sovereignty and who want to sell the country to the US. Those colonial collaborators, Orchard points out, have always existed in Canadian history: for every invasion there were those in Canada eager to be absorbed.

John Ralston Saul, the husband of Canada's Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson, not a conservative, someone who would probably call himself a 'humanist', makes similar assertions about Canada. To Saul, the defining characteristic is the intertwining of British, French, and indigenous that created something unique and worth preserving here in this northern country. He always goes back to the alliance between Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine in Lower Canada (Quebec) and Robert Baldwin in Upper Canada (Ontario), an alliance that enabled these politicians to outflank those who wanted union with the US and bring about 'responsible government' in Canada.

This, too, is an interesting story, but I'm not sure that it is true. Struggles between elites are rarely between those with vision and those who lack it. They are, instead, based on different interpretations of how elite interests are best served. The men who built the railway (and it is interesting that when people talk about "the men who built the railway" they are referring to the capitalists and government officials here, and not the people who actually laboured on it, sweating and dying in terrible conditions for terrible wages), the men who sought tariff protections for Canadian manufactures, they had their own reasons for doing so. And in recent years, even the most 'nationalist' parts of the Canadian elite dared not assert too much independence.

Years ago in Mexico a friend lamented her country's problem: "We are too far from heaven and too close to the US." Canadian nationalists would say the same-but for Canada there is another aspect. On the one hand, there is a question about how independent Canada could be even if it wanted to be. On the other, there is a question about whether Canada wants to be independent. In other words, the Council of Canadians question: "Canada, Country or Colony?", should be expanded to: "Canada: country, colony, or colonizer?" And the answer isn't pretty.

Gwynne Dyer, in his foreword to Victor Levant's excellent history of Canadian involvement in the Vietnam war, puts this issue very clearly:

The fact is that Canada did have choices about its behaviour in Vietnam in the 1950s, and chose to behave badly. The same is true of the 1960s. We have choices in the 1980s too, although every choice involves a potential price.
We cannot know how high the price would have been if we had...refused to serve US interests in Vietnam. Nobody in Ottawa even considered the question seriously until the very end...Nobody knows what the cost to Canada of serious dissent from US policy would be today, either, though the United States could clearly hurt us a lot if it chose to do so. But always behind the lines...looms the vast misery and suffering that Canada's complicity helped to perpetuate in Vietnam, and that is a kind of cost too. In many cases Canada does have the ability to choose, and it has a duty to itself and to others to make the right choices.

I want to look here at just a few of Canada's choices. Why does Canada make these choices? What are the effects of these choices? How could we change things?

Vietnam

Some might think of Paul Martin as a liar and a gangster. Unsurprisingly, it is a family tradition. Paul Martin Sr.'s own words are some of the most eloquent on why Canada got involved in the US war on Vietnam. What follows comes mostly from Victor Levant's fine book, 'Quiet Complicity'.

We know Canada is an economic power of some consequence. There was just a G8 summit in Georgia, where protesters couldn't get anywhere close. Canada was there, making decisions about the rest of the world as part of this elite club. Canada is a major exporter both of raw materials and of manufactured goods.

Subject to US Power?

A lot of Canada's manufacturing is automotive. Before Canada had NAFTA, it had the Auto Pact of 1965, which created a continental auto industry and thus made the main part of Canada's civilian manufacturing base subordinate to US capital. The alternative was to develop an indigenous auto industry: "insistence on high domestic content for vehicle assembly operations, high tariffs, quotas, and licences. Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Britain, and Europe had gone this route." But Canada under Pearson opted for integration with the US.

Some of Canada's manufacturing is military. The Defence Production Sharing Agreement of 1959 turned Canada into a major exporter of military goods-really, a subcontractor-to the United States. US procurement in Canada between 1959-1973 totalled $3.2 billion. Today, "Canadian Defence Industries Association figures show that Canadian 'defence' industry revenues grew 35% between 1998 and 2000, far outpacing growth of the rest of the economy, which grew at approximately 3%. Canada's 'defence' market grew from $3.7 billion in 1998 to $4.08 billion in 2000, up 22.6%. Exports to the USA grew by 17% from just under a billion to $1.25 billion. And our arms exports to the rest of the world grew a staggering 75% in the same period from $798 million to $1.5 billion" (quoting Stephen Kerr). Canada's arms industry does $5 billion in business annually, with 650 firms and 57,000 direct jobs. The business is handled through the Crown Commercial Corporation.

Most of the Canadian manufacturing economy is owned by the US, and the final destination of the goods - and most of the resources - is the US. This was true during the US war on Vietnam and it is true today. During that period US interests controlled 47% of the manufacturing, 61% in petroleum and natural gas, 59% in mining and smelting (figures cited by Levant). After NAFTA, US control has grown further.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, who the mythology treats as a peacekeeping hero (and who we will be hearing more from), said at the time: "[N]o country in the world has less chance of isolating itself from the effect of American policies and decisions than Canada. If Washington 'went alone' where would Ottawa go?"

The prime minister who preceded Pearson, Diefenbaker, himself no anti-imperialist (he established his anti-communist credentials by saying he had "no ear for the lullabies of the neutralist"), showed a slight inclination for an independent foreign policy for Canada. He criticized US tactics in Laos. He kept Canada out of the Organization of American States, which the US used to isolate Cuba's revolution and which Che Guevara called the 'Department of Colonies'. Diefenbaker was unenthusiastic about posting US nuclear missiles in Canada. He tried to establish greater trade ties with Britain.

How did the US react? With regime change, of course! According to Levant, "In the 1962 Canadian election, US action played a role in the Conservatives' decline from a 208 seat majority to a 116 seat minority. President Kennedy received Opposition Leader Pearson for a forty-minute conversation three days after the election was called, and the Kennedys lent their polling expert, Louis Harris, to the Liberals. One billion dollars in US funds left Canada in the first quarter of the year." The next election saw even more blatant US intervention. Levant cites a US columnist who commented on the event: "Adroit statecraft by the American State Department brought down the bumbling crypto-anti-Yankee government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, and replaced it with a regime which promised to be faithful to the concept of Canadian-American interdependence."

"The lesson," Levant notes, "was not lost on succeeding governments in Ottawa."

Canada's own imperialist ideas

But be careful. David McNally points out that "Canadian capitalists are also major players in the world of foreign investment and global takeovers...Between 1994 and 2001, for example, 384 more US businesses were bought up by Canadian corporations than the number of Canadian businesses that US companies managed to purchase. Judged in dollar amounts, Canadian capitalists spent $46 billion more purchasing US businesses than did the latter buying firms in this country."

Levant notes that during the war on Vietnam, Canada exported $21.3 billion to Asia and imported $14.6 billion-a big surplus. Canadian business didn't want to 'lose' Southeast Asia to what they called 'communist aggression' and what we might call 'self-determination' any more than the US did. Canadian elites wanted to make sure Asia was 'safe' for their investments just as US elites did.

Lester B. Pearson himself stood up in the House of Commons in the 1950s and told the parliament that "aggression" by the Vietnamese against France, in Vietnam, was only one element of worldwide communist aggression and that "Soviet colonial authority in Indochina" was stronger than French control!

Now we are ready to meet Paul Martin Sr., who was capable of wielding US President Dwight Eisenhower's "domino" theory with the best of them. Remember that the domino theory is a justification for intervention anywhere, any time, because any place is a domino that, if it is allowed to "fall", may well lead to the collapse of the entire world. As External Affairs Secretary, Martin told the House of Commons in 1965:

Vietnam is a test case. I suggest that if the North Vietnamese aggression with Chinese connivance succeeds, it will only be a matter of time before the next victim is selected...If the US were to leave Vietnam at the present time, what would happen to that country? What would happen to Burma? What would happen to India, a commonwealth country?

Martin helped the US aggression by calling the Vietnamese national liberation movement "Viet Cong aggression". Martin even compared the Vietnamese to Hitler: "If North Vietnam succeeds in taking over the whole of Vietnam by force, if the rest of the world is prepared to sit back and see this happen...we would, in my judgement, be guilty of an error of the same nature as the mistakes at Munich... Aggression is agression, whether it takes place in Europe, Ethiopia, or Vietnam."

But aggression is not agression, according to Martin Sr. and Lester B. Pearson, if the United States is the aggressor.

The US is capable of bullying Canada and has certainly done so. But it is also the case that Canada's elite has its own corporate interests in plundering the poor countries. Canada's elite has the same contempt for self-determination-once called "communism"-as the United States does. Canada jumps to help imperialism. If it didn't, the US has demonstrated that it can push.

Consequences

What did Canada jump to do, in Vietnam? A number of things. In Levant's words:

Canadian food and beverages fed US troops, Canadian war material was used on the battlefields of South Vietnam and flown in sorties over Hanoi and Haiphong, auto parts fabricated in Canada were installed in US army vehicles, and many Canadian raw resources stoked the fires of the US military-industrial complex.

Everything from napalm components to green berets, from gunsights to whiskey, from radio relays to rocket warheads, were provisioned. The Toronto Star's weekly magazine tracked TNT from a plant in Quebec to Crane Indiana where it was poured into bombs. The May 27, 1967 supplement commented that "With luck, the explosive that left [Quebec] could be hailing down on a Vietnamese village six weeks later." These were boom years for the whole Canadian economy, a boom the Vietnamese paid for with their lives, by the million.

To be sure, the Canadian government compensated Vietnam by providing 'humanitarian' aid-but only to the South Vietnamese regime, the US client, whose principal victims were the South Vietnamese people. Canadian aid escalated with American bombing: the more the Americans bombed, the more the Canadians 'aided'. However, the main purpose of these few millions of dollars, according to External Aid Office Advisor Michael Hall, was to "demonstrate publicly that they were on the same side of the war as the US".

Claire Culhane went to Vietnam as a nurse with one of these "aid projects" and became one of the most outspoken activists against the war. She presented the real face of these Canadian aid projects in her book, Why is Canada in Vietnam?, in 1972. She describes a tour of a hospital ward she conducted with a supervisor.

Dr. Mosely was keeping a careful check of the time as she had to meet a friend to play tennis at 12:30, and was getting ready to leave. When I straightened the patient's bedsheets, I found a ghastly condition of disembowelment and shattered limbs, lying in a mixture of crushed bone and blood-altogether an unbearable sight, in need of much more work. When I called this to [Dr. Mosely]'s attention, she stopped long enough to laugh and say: "Don't be silly, why bother, she'll be dead by morning anyway, she will just smell a little sweeter when she dies."

Back in Canada, Culhane wondered about a Canadian project to fund artificial limbs.

I sought out Dr. Claude Gingras of the Montreal Rehabilitation Institute, who had initiated the Qui Nhon Rehabilitation Hospital (he was later decorated by President Thieu) to enquire why he was making no attempt to provide trained surgeons who could save limbs, instead of fitting artificial ones. His reply consisted of a ten minute dissertation on the other-worldliness of the oriental mind and how its attitudes towards death differed from our own!

The medical teams that went over as part of the aid program also helped out the US war effort by denying that US chemical warfare was harmful and that napalm was bad for you.

On the subject of chemical warfare, Canada allowed testing of defoliants in New Brunswick in 1966. From a US Army technical memorandum:

In March 1965, the Canadian Ministry of Defence offered Crops Division large areas of densely forested land for experimental tests of defoliant chemicals...the test site selected contained a mixture of conifers and deciduous broadleaf species in a dense undisturbed forest cover that would provide similar vegetation densities to those of...Southeast Asia.

B-52s practiced bombing runs over Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1968 and 1970.

Canada participated in what was called the International Control Commission (ICC), along with Poland and India. ICC teams travelled in Vietnam and determined whether ceasefires were being violated. Canada used its presence on the ICC not only to help whitewash what the US was doing and deny the facts, but also to spy on the Vietnamese, providing intelligence to the US on what the effects of its weapons were on the population and more.

There is no way of teasing out the damage inflicted by Canada's role specifically, in Vietnam or anywhere else. But one can summarize what the effect of the war was as a whole on the Vietnamese. I like David Orchard's summary:

[O]n April 30, 1975, the last of the US military fled in helicopters from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, abandoning millions of dollars of weapons, helicopters, tanks and other equipment, hundreds of thousands of CIA operatives, more than five hundred thousand prostitutes and drug addicts in Saigon alone, over eight million refugees and orphans, hundreds of thousands of wounded, deformed and chemically damaged Vietnamese, the world's greatest demand for artificial limbs, and 150,000 tons of unexploded bombs in the fields and forests. More than 10,000 Vietnamese, mostly farmers and their families, died in the years following 1975, when their ploughs inadvertently hit these hidden bombs containing delayed-action fuses.
Approximately six million died in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and countless others were maimed and wounded as the result of American military aggression. For its war crimes in Southeast Asia, the United States has never paid.

And neither has Canada.

The use of sanctions

Vietnam is a good demonstration of the myths and their relation to the real patterns of Canada's behaviour in the world. Canada came out of that war smelling like a rose, in spite of everything, and there are still legends that Pearson challenged Johnson over bombing North Vietnam. According to the Pentagon Papers, Pearson actually made a tactical suggestion to Johnson not to use nuclear weapons on Vietnam, but "iron bombs" were just fine. In 1965, Martin and Pearson were engaging in all manner of apologetics for the US assault.

Kim Richard Nossal, a mainstream Canadian foreign policy academic, compiled a brief list of the use of economic sanctions by Canada. Sanctions were used against-guess who?-Vietnam in 1979 for its invasion of Cambodia (one of the only interventions that actually had a humanitarian effect, stopping Pol Pot's murderous regime). Against the USSR for invading Afghanistan in 1979 (though not against the US for doing the same in 2002). Against Iran after seizing the US embassy in 1979. In 1981 against the USSR and Poland after the latter declared martial law. In 1982 against Argentina for the Falklands war with the UK. In 1983 against the USSR after shooting down a Korean airlines plane. In 1984 against South Africa. In 1989 against China after the Tiananmen Square massacre. In 1990 against Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait. In 1991-2 against Yugoslavia. In 1991 against Haiti after the coup against Aristide. Aid was also suspended against Afghanistan, Cuba, El Salvador, Fiji, Guatemala, Indonesia, Libya, Suriname, Sri Lanka, and Uganda, at various times.

But Canada, Nossal himself notes, never considered sanctions against the US for its invasion of Grenada in 1983, or its bombing of Libya in 1986, or its shooting down of an Iranian airliner in 1988, or its invasion of Panama in 1989, or its ignoring of the World Court ruling and Security Council condemnations while it escalated the terrorist war against Nicaragua through the 1980s.

And rather than imposing sanctions on the US for its 1990-91 Iraq slaughter, Canada joined in.

The War on Iraq, 1990-91

Canada sent warplanes and ships to participate in the US attack on Iraq in 1990-91. In an unusual role for Canada, the Canadian military was used directly against Iraq, and thus Canada shares responsibility for the horrors that the Iraqis suffered then and since

Again, quoting David Orchard:

This was a war to give the United States control of Arab oil, from where much of the wealth of the seven major British and American oil companies has come, and which is also the energy source of its major industrial competitors, Europe and Japan.
The price tag...was between 150,000 and 300,000 dead in Iraq-90% civilian. Since the end of the war, more than 100,000 infants have died from malnutrition, dysentery, and other effects of the bombing and ongoing blockade of Iraq...

Canada's minister of external affairs, Joe Clark, said early in the war that the reason Canadian forces were in the Gulf was that Canada would not stand for the invasion of small countries by powerful ones. In the last 200 years, the United States has invaded smaller countries more than 300 times.

From local 'threats' to global 'threats'

Desmond Morton, another mainstream, conventional historian, makes a good point about the implications of Canada's military relationship with the US. The only plausible military threat Canada has ever faced has been the United states, and in Morton's words: "Canadians found that one good way to keep the peace is not to prepare for a hopeless war. Imagine if Canadians had dutifully assumed the old British defence burden...hundreds of thousands of Canadians would have spent their youth drilling and maneouvring for a war they could never win. Ottawa would have spent millions of dollars on defence, but it could never be enough. Alarmed at military threats on their border, Americans would have mobilized armies and matched cannon for cannon."

What does a military do when it is not focusing on plausible external threats? Too often, it becomes an instrument for suppressing the local population.

Many of the major Canadian military mobilizations in recent history have been against the population, especially the indigenous. In 1990 in Mohawk communities at Oka, Quebec, and Akwesasne Ontario, 5,000 soldiers were mobilized. In 1993, the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and the military coordinated another mission against these same communities. 800 RCMP were mobilized, backed by "several thousand soldiers", to "take control of the reserves." The Second Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment "requested seven M113 armoured personnel carriers, 13 heavy machineguns, and large stocks of riot gear...the 5e Groupe Mecanise du Canada... asked for an extra $4.2 million worth of ammunition." Luckily for everyone involved, that operation was called off before massive violence ensued. But the Canadian authorities are confronting these same communities again today.

Not too long afterwards, 400 RCMP officers mobilized in British Columbia against a small group of Secwempec indigenous at Gustafson Lake who were claiming a part of a ranch as an ancestral burial site. The RCMP fired thousands of rounds into the forest. This operation, too, was called off, thankfully, before bloodshed.

These kinds of mobilizations against indigenous people were practice runs for Canadian units to work in other countries. Joint Task Force Two, a secret commando unit (which may or may not have been present at these indigenous assaults), helped train the Haitian police in the mid-1990s: "JTF2's job was to train Haitian police officers in the art of 'door kicking' and building takedowns...SWAT team would be used to hunt down and seize arms caches held by extremists and former army officers intent on overthrowing the Preval government." JTF2 went off to Zaire in the period between the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the genocidal war in the Congo of 1998-2001. JTF2 helped train the Royal Nepalese Army in counterinsurgency techniques, advising that institution on "tactics and the best use of its forces against the guerrillas."

A long tradition of profiteering

War profiteering in Canada went on before the war on Vietnam (WWI and WWII have their own shining examples). The Vietnam War took it to new heights, and Canada has stayed at those heights since, providing arms and other services for human rights violations all over the world. Following are just three instances in a very long list.

Chile

Chile is an interesting historical example. On the University of Toronto campus there is a building called the Munk Centre. Its namesake, Peter Munk, had a remarkable view of the events in Chile.

At a shareholders meeting in Toronto on May 9, 1996, Peter Munk, Chairman of Barrick Gold corporation, praised General Augusto Pinochet for "transforming Chile from a wealth-destroying socialist state to a capital-friendly model that is being copied around the world." Regarding Pinochet's human rights record, Munk said, "they can put people in jail, I have no comment on that, I think that may be true...I think [the end justifies the means] because it brought wealth to an enormous number of people. If you ask somebody who is in jail, he'll say no. But that's the wonderful thing about our world; we can have the freedom to disagree."

Pinochet's protection of the "freedom to disagree" went as follows, in Asad Ismi's words:

In the year after the coup, the armed forces and police murdered 5,000-30,000 Chileans for their beliefs and associations. A quarter of the organized work force were dismissed for political reasons. Every labor right was suspended and most labor federations were dissolved. The regime's opponents were tortured, kidnapped, exiled, jailed and sent to concentration camps. During 1975-79, between 1,600 and 2,500 Chileans disappeared after detention by Pinochet's secret police.

With his opponents killed, jailed, or in exile and the union movement crushed, the general reversed 35 years of economic development. Pinochet's monetarist model was supervised by Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago. Starting in 1975, the "Chicago Boys" reduced import duties, deregulated industry, eliminated limits on foreign investment, sold public enterprises at low prices, freed the prices of basic necessities and privatized such government services as parks, prisons, utilities, schools, health care, and pensions.

Despite Munk's admiration, Pinochet did not help Chile's economy by doing all this killing and deregulation, instead bringing about the worst economic crisis in Chile's history. By 1982, after all the 'privatization', the state controlled more of the economy than it had under Allende, after bailing out investors and Chile's own elite. Even today, Chile's economy relies on the nationalized copper company, CODELCO.

Pinochet did, however, help set the stage for Canadian mining to make handsome profits. Canadian investment in Chile was $4 billion in 1997, making Canada the biggest foreign investor there. At Barrick Gold's mines, workers are paid $500-1000 a month, while Canadians at the same mines make $5000. Gold mining company Placer Dome and gas company Nova Corporation also cleaned up in Chile.

Indonesia and East Timor

Indonesia was taken over by brutal dictator Suharto in 1967. Suharto's first act was to kill several hundred thousand people: communists, independent nationalists, and any others who might have been rivals to his dictatorship. The United States helped Suharto out because of his anti-communist credentials. So did Canada. Prime Minister Trudeau visited Suharto in 1971 and announced a $4 million interest free loan.

Suharto visited Canada in July of 1975, while Indonesia was planning the invasion of East Timor. Canada offered him a $200 million line of credit. Sharon Scharfe's book Complicity: East Timor and Canadian Foreign Policy quotes a Prime Minister's Office memorandum as saying: "[A] successful Canadian aid program in Indonesia...will contribute to a range of Canadian...interests including economic growth and quality of life...the commercial spinoff is proving to be a not insignificant benefit."

East Timor was set to become an independent country when it was invaded by Indonesia in 1975. The Indonesian military killed some 200,000 people in the conquest, one of the worst slaughters ever relative to population (the inhabitants numbered about 600,000) and occupied the country for 24 years until it was forced out in 1999.

In August of 1976 , Allan McEachen, Secretary of State for External Affairs, visited Indonesia. By that time, Indonesia had already admitted to killing 60,000 Timorese in the course of the invasion. Two UN Security Council and one General Assembly resolutions had condemned Indonesia (Canada abstained from the General Assembly resolution). McEachen signed for the $200 million line of credit promised the year before.

Glen Shortliffe, Canadian Ambassador to Indonesia, visited occupied East Timor in September of 1978, and provided useful propaganda service to the Indonesian occupation in the process. His insights included: "East Timor is not self-sufficient in food" (he was unable to figure out that the invasion's mass destruction of crops and animals might have something to do with it); "[I]t is impossible to consider that the bulk of the population is even capable of being politicized in any sophisticated sense"; and "[M]any, if not a majority of Timorese, live in rugged mountain areas connected only by footpaths" (he was unable to figure out that these people might be living in the mountains because they were escaping the Indonesian military). He also provided figures on displacement and hinted that perhaps no one had been killed in the invasion. Jack Whittleton, ambassador in 1987, went even further, helping the government party candidate, Golkar, during his campaign tour for the sham elections of that year, during which some districts had voter turnouts of 327.6% and more than 100% of registered voters elected Golkar with 93.7% of the vote.

Prime Minister Jean Chretien visited Indonesia in 1994, announcing $1 billion in new trade deals and pledging $30 million in new aid projects. Between 1988-1994, Canada's total exports to Indonesia amounted to $2.66 billion. Military exports were at least $22.26 million. When the Canadian government was asked why at least these military exports couldn't be cut off, an anonymous foreign affairs official said: "If Canada decided unilaterally not to sell to Indonesia, it could be removing market opportunities for Canadian companies and creating a gap which other countries would run to fill." Again, quoting Asad Ismi:

As the Indonesian army and its militias set fire to Dili and killed thousands of East Timorese in September 1999, the Canadian government refused to stop the export of military goods to Indonesia. This at a time when even the United States, Jakarta's main backer, had suspended military sales to Indonesia, as had the European Union and Australia.

According to documents obtained from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) through the Access to Information Act, six military export permits for the Indonesian Air Force and Ministry of Defence, worth a total of $119.3 million, were granted by the Canadian government during 1998-1999 to unidentified companies. The permits were for aircraft engines, navigation systems and training simulators or parts.

Israel/Palestine

The Canadian Highways Infrastructure Corporation calls itself a "world renowned, full service, toll highway development company specializing in public-private partnerships with capabilities in finance, design and engineering, operation and maintenance of large-scale toll highway projects". CHIC helped build the infamous 407 toll highway in Ontario, courtesy of the neoconservative government there.

Now they are building settler-only highways in Israel/Palestine: "The Derech Eretz Consortium (DEC), led by CHIC, is the State of Israel's private sector partner in the development of the all-electronic Cross Israel Highway...DEC won a two-year international competition to finance, design, build and operate the 86km toll road, which will run north-south through the heart of Israel near Tel Aviv." You would think that this $1.2 billion road was just an innocuous path. The only hint that something might be amiss is this little line: "Instead of adding roads and interchanges in already densely populated areas, the Cross Israel Highway is diverting traffic to the central region of the country, thus reducing vehicle density and pollution in the greater Tel Aviv region."

Israel's network of bypass roads is designed very deliberately to reach from the core areas of Israel itself into settlements in the West Bank without allowing traffic or communication between West Bank towns. These bypass roads are an integral component of what Israeli activist Jeff Halper calls the "matrix of control", by which Palestinians are isolated, surrounded, and disconnected from each other, made wholly dependent on the whims of the Israeli regime. It is an appalling program of imprisoning an entire population. It is also good business for the Canadian Highways Infrastructure Corporation.

Canada's place today

Afghanistan/Iraq

A good researcher on Canada today is Stephen Kerr who, in addition to his written investigative reports, does a weekly radio show called "Newspeak" on CIUT-FM in Toronto. Last year, Kerr wrote a piece on Canada's role in the current Iraq war that was very valuable. He noted that three Canadian warships escorted the US fleet in 'Operation Apollo'. The US fleet was firing Tomahawk missiles at Iraqi targets at the time. Canadian aviators manned AWACS aircraft to direct missiles at their targets. Canadian officers worked at Central Command in Qatar, helping with logistics. US troop transport planes used over-flight and refueling privileges in Canadian aerospace. Quoting Kerr: "US military doctrine describes refueling as the 'key' to US global airpower. This reporter's request for a full accounting of these over-flights was refused by the Canadian Department of National Defence." US troops were relieved by Canadian troops in Afghanistan and Canada took command of the Afghan occupation. 35 Canadian soldiers served on 'exchange' with the Iraq invasion forces.

Haiti

Despite Canada's rather extensive assistance to the US's aggression in Iraq, there was a widespread line in Canadian media that Canada had to "mend a fence" for its defiance of the US on Iraq. Canada's politicians duly complied, "mending the fence" on the bones of Haitians, acquiescing in the coup against democratically elected President Aristide, and sending troops to occupy that country.

Relying on Stephen Kerr again:

Prime Minister Paul Martin first committed approximately 180 troops from the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment, as well as the Joint Operations Group from Kingston, to provide "security" for the criminal Haitian thugs. When on Thursday it became apparent that the political facade created for the coup was crumbling, Martin scaled back Canada's commitment to 60 soldiers. Martin claims he is keen to get Haiti "on the right track."

Aristide, Kerr notes, "had Haiti on the wrong track...feebly trying to deliver what Haitians have been demanding for years"-an agenda made almost impossible by the embargo against Haiti by the US, an embargo Canada participated in. Kerr quotes from Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), which provides various services to corporations doing business in countries like Haiti: "[S]ome Canadian companies are looking to shift garment production to Haiti." Kerr notes that "Montreal based Gildan Activewear is already subcontracting work to Haitian owned sweatshops, and they have opened a new factory in Port au Prince which employs 400 to 500 people." Gildan is one of the largest T shirt makers in the world. It pays its Montreal workers 10 times the wages it pays Haitians, who get less than they need to live on and not enough to keep up with inflation.

The above, from Kerr, does not come close to describing Canada's full role in the coup. Aristide's attempts at changing Haiti's pattern of poverty were so "feeble" because Haiti was denied development loans by the InterAmerican Development Bank. Those loans were vetoed by the US (no one in Haiti even knew the US could veto IADB loans) after the US decided to oust Aristide some time around 2000. There was an election that year, in which some senate results were contested-all international observers concluded that all irregularities aside, Aristide would have won the election handily. But this was "contested", and so the US cut off aid to the starving country. So did Canada.

After the coup, Canada led the way in repressing Aristide's supporters. The RCMP picked up Oriel Jean, Aristide's security chief, at the Toronto airport, and handed him over to the US, who gave him some bogus drug charges, and sent him off to a Miami jail, where he now sits. This while real drug traffickers and paramilitaries were released from prisons all over Haiti and are now terrorizing the population-while US and Canadian soldiers look on. (Similarly, Canadian security services probably handed bogus information on Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar over to the US immigration authorities who sent him off to Syria for 10 months of torture. No one twisted Canada's arm to do this either.)

The details of a meeting in Ottawa a year before the coup, called the "Ottawa Initiative", at which the future of Haiti was discussed by countries all over the Americas except for Haiti, have yet to be revealed. But a special representative of the OAS secretary-general, Luigi Einaudi, told a crowd at Hotel Oloffson on New Year's Eve 2003, "The real problem with Haiti is that the international community is so screwed up that they're actually letting Haitians run the place." That contempt for self-determination, going back through Pearson and Martin Sr.'s "anti-communism" to the 19th century and Canada's Indian Act-which was a model for the South African apartheid regime-and continuously throughout Canada's history, is something Canada's elites share with the British and French imperialists who founded colonies here, and with the US imperialists who are colonizing the world today.

Even Diefenbaker, who got "regime-changed", shared this contempt for the people of the Third World. This contempt, this racism, coupled with the many corporate and capitalist interests, would be enough to make Canada somewhat imperialist even if it wasn't so vulnerable to US power. The integration of the economies, the integration of the elites, and the innumerable opportunities the US has to retaliate against a show of independence only make Canada's elites even more eager to do the wrong thing.

Conclusions

I've tried to present some of the realities behind the various myths about Canada and its role in the world. First, there is the myth about Canada's benevolence: that one is handily shattered by the evidence. The other one is the myth about Canada's helplessness before US power: that's almost like a Nuremberg defence: Canada was only following orders-there was no scope for a moral decision. Well, it's worth remembering that that defence didn't work at Nuremberg. There are always choices; some are costly. But how could Canadians morally argue against choosing not to profit from murderous policies because such choices were too costly?

If we don't opt for such a sleazy way out, what's left? A country like Venezuela, much weaker, more subject to US power if less interdependent, is paying the costs of an independent course. That isn't the Chavez regime alone that is doing that-it is a result of powerful social movements, and of class struggle in that country. Because of those pressures from below, Venezuela was able to condemn the war in Afghanistan while Canada participated. Venezuela condemned the war in Iraq while Canada applauded. Venezuela refused to recognize the paramilitary criminals who replaced Aristide in Haiti, while Canada joined the forces guaranteeing their power. Venezuela puts Canada to shame, and is facing regime change, violence, and coups because of it.

Borrowing a page from Paul Martin Sr., Venezuela's elite, along with various US political authorities, accuse Chavez of wanting to implement "communism" in Venezuela. But all Venezuelans want is self-determination, a chance to develop their own way, according to their own choices. Instead they are getting a well-funded, orchestrated destabilization campaign. It is only self-determination that Iraqis want, and they are getting an occupation. It's all Haitians want, and they got a coup. If Canadians decided they wanted that, instead of a thin slice of imperial profits and power and all the nightmares and hatred that come with it, there would be a price to pay as well. But, as Dyer noted, empire has a price, too.

Humanitarianism, peacekeeping, and other myths