Canadians for Peace and Socialism (CPS)

From the Editors Desk

November 14^th 2010

Box 168 Slocan British Columbia

Canada

V0G 2C0

Phone: 1 250 355 2665

Dear Friends

The item attached to this email by W.C. O’Casey member of the editorial board of Focus on Socialism is a contribution by CPS to the growing world-wide anti-imperialist peace movement for peace represented by the World Peace Council and inspired by the International Movement of Communist and Workers Parties.

The article expresses the standpoint of a worker intellectual determined not to permit the corporate elites of wealth and privilege of Canada to take our people and our country further down the road of imperialist militarism and war. It expresses the standpoint of all those Canadians who believe that Canada and its people have much more to offer the world than the bleak future of militarism and war as represented by the right wing extremist views of Prime Minister Harper, his government, his corporate advisors and closest supporters.

O’Casey denounces the decision of the minority Harper Conservative Government to continue indefinitely Canada’s participation in the US-NATO War in Afghanistan. The Harper decision is in direct opposition to the will of the Afghan and Canadian people who oppose the war and want it to end now.

The Harper edict, underscores the fact that he speaks exclusively for the ruling elites of the G7 and NATO states that have a direct acquisitive interest in war and the promotion of war.

Prime Minister Harper is silent about the maximum profit derived from militarism and gets away with it because none of the leaders of the opposition parties dare ask him about that reality.

If a war is just, designed to free people’s from oppression should it not be gratuitous, free of the profit motive? To state the question is to answer it.

War, it has been said over and again is the extension of politics by other means. Prime Minister Harper is engaged in an effort by the USA and NATO to implant capitalism in Afghanistan by war. In the course of doing so, fabulous private profit is being made each and every day by shareholders that do not want the war to end.

The NDP, Bloc Parliamentary caucuses fall silent when it comes to exposing war profiteers. It is past time that they did and began to identify the major war profiteers that benefit from US-NATO wars. If they fail to do so, the danger of the re-election of the Harper Government in the next federal election is real.

O’Casey points out convincingly that corruption in politics today is the public support provided by capitalist politicians to the bloody imperialist enterprise of war by creating a pseudo-patriotic fog of pro-war propaganda spread by a compliant corporate media that covers up war profiteering while attempting to impose a bogus moral obligation on the people of Canada to support an unjust war.

O’Casey quotes Liberal Leader Ignatieff and we can only add to that the most recent of Bob Rae, Liberal Foreign Affairs critic. Rae is past master at supporting imperialist war by appearing to oppose it.  Speaking on CTV Saturday November 13 2010 Rae was reported as saying:

“Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision to keep Canadian troops in Afghanistan past the end of next summer will not receive hard line opposition from the Liberal opposition”.  Rae states in the CTV interview that Canada must play a vital role in promoting democracy abroad.

“We can’t just leave”, he said, “That doesn’t necessarily mean we should stay in a combat role, but it means staying in some role seems to make a lot of sense to me. It doesn’t make sense just to walk away.”[1]

Rae would have Canadians believe that Afghanistan can be transformed into a democratic state by leaving in power the anti-democratic feudal war lords and foreign and domestic capitalist oppressors who collaborate with them against their own people.

Canadian troops have been ordered to stay in Afghanistan to prop up a corrupt regime.

The liberal democrat Rae does, what the crude neo-con right-wing extremists can’t do, elaborate the opportunist basis for Conservative Liberal collaboration whereby the burdens of war will continued to be imposed on the Canadian and Afghan peoples under the guise of an overriding moral duty to bear those burdens.

The Liberal-Conservative agreement to support continued Canadian participation in US-NATO instigated permanent war does not end with Afghanistan. It will be extended to all regions of the globe.

As O’Casey argues, the specter of perpetual imperialist war, confronts organized labour and the peace movement with a choice.  Organized labour can go along with the business of war and continue to pretend that it does not affect the vital economic interests of all Canadians who work for a living and watch passively as one after another social gains gradually disappear and are sacrificed to finance a bloated arms budget, or organized labour can lead the whole country into a militant and resolute struggle for peace that proclaims its purpose to divert arms spending to people’s needs.

That is what every Canadian who loves peace expects and that is what every left progressive must work to achieve.

Left Turn Canada!

Don Currie, Editor Focus on Socialism

Chair Canadians for Peace and Socialism