The media’s foreign affairs motto often seems to be ignorance is bliss. The Toronto Star, for instance, has devoted significant attention to the Trudeau government’s plan to dispatch 600 soldiers to Africa, but it has largely ignored the most relevant information.
A full two-thirds of the earthquake casualties in Haiti on January 12, 2010 were directly due to policies that the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), World Bank, and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) put in place to create surplus labor for the country’s sweatshops.
Most people who identify as left wing would agree that systems of governance that enable exploitation by the world’s most powerful corporations, governments and individuals should be changed. Most would also agree that militarism and military solutions are best avoided.
Why then do so many people ‘on the left’ support UN missions that claim to be about “peacekeeping” but often serve as little more than fig leafs to cover up imperialism?
Canadian officials have long done as they pleased in Africa, loudly proclaimed this country’s altruism and only faced push back from hard rightists who bemoan sending troops to the “Dark Continent” or “dens of hell”.
Do Black (Haitian) lives matter to Canada’s leading ‘left-wing’ foreign-policy think tank? Apparently not as much as having the corporate media mention their work by getting in bed with militarism disguised as peacekeeping.
