On the 29th of November, Canada once again proved its status as a national non-entity when it followed Washington’s example and orders and applied more “sanctions” against Russia. I put quote marks around the word because it implies that these actions are legal under international law. But they are not. They are flagrant violations of international law and the Charter of the United Nations and so the word “sanctions’ is a euphemism to describe hostile acts, acts preparatory to war.
The excuse given is that Russia is responsible for the crisis in Ukraine and has illegally seized Crimea; the same excuse used for a series of hostile acts that have been perpetrated against the Russian people the past several years, with each excuse given to present a veneer of legality to illegal acts.
This big lie has been repeated so many times in the west that most people believe it, for most people do not, as we would like to think, read the alternative media. They are addicts of the commercialised media controlled by the dominant economic class who create and finance the media for one single purpose, to control the thoughts and more, the actions, or preferably, inactions, of their people.
In this they are largely successful and the atmosphere of hostility against Russia among the general population is thick with the poison of malice to people who have done nothing to them. Yet, the alternative media is growing in numbers and depth and in that there is some hope for us, and fear for them. That they fear it was exposed on November 24th, just days before the Canadian action, as the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning Russian news broadcasters and associated western media and writers, even if associated by point of view alone, as Russian government propaganda designed to destabilise the west, and further, compared Russia to ISIS. The Russians have rightly cited this as clear proof that western civilisation has ceased to have any moral sense, any sense of decency and rightly called it an act against democracy itself.
It is an act against democracy for a small group to try to control the minds of the people, to control what they read, hear, see and think. In fact it is an act of fascists. This European crime against the people was followed, a few days later, by the alarming appearance in the US press of a long list of alternative media that should be considered Russian agents and that anyone who writes for them should be considered so as well. The list includes New Eastern Outlook, as one example. The Washington Post, where the story first appeared, said it was required to keep the real identity of the group that issued the list confidential, but it has American intelligence operation written all over it. The Post was used as a conduit for the dispersal of a black list to the public. The name given the alleged group is NotforProp, a not very clever name for an American intelligence propaganda unit that is intent on dishing out nothing but, what else, propaganda.
This is the warning, the finger pointed at you. Your name is on the list and now red-circled. How long will it be before the document becomes official policy and, in the “name of freedom,” freedom of the press is buried beside the corpse of liberty? All we know is that things are moving quickly. We know they have a list, practically the entire alternative media. We on the list have been warned. More concrete action has to be expected. But we shall keep writing until they pull the plug and break our hands, like they did to Victor Jara, in Chile, when these same people overthrew the socialist government there; because his songs of socialism, of justice for the people, were to them songs of a freedom they deeply feared.
Canadians witnessed another spectacle this week; that of our prime minister, Justin Trudeau, removing his spine and replacing it with an American rubber band as he licked the boots of the US and its 5th column in Canada to beg forgiveness for having forgotten his place and having praised Fidel Castro, as his father once did. Within a day of orchestrated criticism of his words in the US and Canadian media and fake statements of shock from the usual hypocrites in high places, he was telling the people of Canada a lie, to their faces, that Castro, one of the greatest democrats in history, who established a real working class democracy in Cuba, an envy of the world, was a “dictator.”
This, the man whose father imposed martial law in Canada in 1971 and had hundreds of leftists and trade unionists, and Quebec nationalists arrested without charge during what is termed the FLQ crisis in Quebec and who presides over a government that has inflicted genocidal policies on the First Nations peoples since the creation of the country. This, the man, whose predecessors attacked Yugoslavia, overthrew the government of Rwanda, ordered Canadian special forces to assist US marines in their invasion of Haiti in 2004 and their kidnapping and forced exile of Haitian President Aristide, invaded Afghanistan and destroyed Libya. This, the man who continues to support neofascists in Ukraine as they suppress democracy there and conduct cruel siege war against the peoples of the Donbas, who sends military forces to threaten Russia in the Baltic. This, the man, …well, I can go on and on. But he might as well have crawled on his belly down to Washington or directly to the money boys in New York, with the Canadian flag wrapped round him so he could hand over to them that mud covered rag, to throw it into their wastebasket. For that is about all its worth at this point.
Russia has stated that it will react appropriately to these actions but there is little it can do except prepare for more. And any hope that the new American president will be different from the preceding ones is fast vanishing as NATO pressure on Russia and US military pressure on Russia’s eastern flank and China continues to build. Though the war in Syria continues to witness victory after victory for the Syrian and allied forces and though the US proxy forces still in Aleppo appear to be collapsing under the determination and courage of the liberation forces, even so, the US House of Representatives has just passed a resolution calling for a “no fly” zone in Syria which, if adopted and supported by President Trump, would result in direct large-scale war with Russia and Iran. Britain, France and Germany support the idea.
Since we have confirmed what most suspected, that the Canadian leader is another figurehead, another puppet thrown at us by the western anti-democratic system of government, we have to expect that Canadian and NATO policy and actions will continue to be aggressive towards Russia and its allies; and there is nothing we in Canada can do about it, it appears, since the anti-war movement appears to be hijacked by those who support war as a solution to everything, by those who claim to be for “human rights” but are really for their own nation’s imperialism. We are not naïve. No anti-war movement ever stopped a war by itself. Only revolutions have succeeded in that. But a genuine anti-war movement can give birth to something greater when conditions are desperate enough, and they may soon be that.
So it is necessary to at least try to organise a world wide anti-war movement and organisation that can act in a coordinated manner to be able to manifest the desire of the people of the world to live in peace and that can act toward that end so that the most important problem in the world, how humanity is to survive its self destruction, through abrupt climate change and relentless destruction of the environment, can be faced. The world is also facing an economic crisis the western capitalists see no way out of except through war. They ignore the world environmental crisis and, in Trump, deny it even exists. They are bankrupt of ideas and have been for over a century. They don’t know how to live, only to kill. They are passé and we long ago passed them by. Isn’t it about time they stepped aside so that the people, without capital, but with collective power, can forge their own and better future? Of course it is. But they won’t go unless we push them.
Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel “Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
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