New revelations about Brazilian military violence offer an opportunity to reflect on Canadian support for that country’s 1964 coup and how Ottawa’s policy towards our South American neighbour is similar today.
Many monuments, memorials and names of institutions across Canada celebrate our colonial and racist past. Calls for renaming buildings or pulling down statues are symbolic ways of reinterpreting that history, acknowledging mistakes and small steps towards reconciling with the victims of this country’s policies.
At its heart this process is about searching for the truth, a guiding principle that should be shared by both journalists and historians.
A half-century and one year ago today Canada helped overthrow a leading pan Africanist president. Ghana’s Canadian-trained army overthrew Kwame Nkrumah, a leader dubbed “Man of the Millennium” in a 2000 poll by BBC listeners in Africa.
Is calling the Prime Minister a “white supremacist terrorist” hate speech or justified?
While coverage of Justin Trudeau’s recent visit to Washington was embarrassingly banal in its emphasis on “bromance” between Obama and the Canadian PM, at least it was accurate (in the limited sense valued by the dominant media), except for the 60 Minutes feature that comically confused a photo of Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall for Margaret Trudeau. However, one aspect of the reporting did stand out as both a lie and dangerous nationalist mythology.
Fifty years ago this month Indonesian Major General Suharto began a wave of terror that left hundreds of thousands of Communist Party members and landless peasants dead. Did Canada try to stop the killing or at least protest the massive human rights violation? No, Lester Pearson’s Liberal government largely backed Suharto’s terror campaign and overthrow of elected president Sukarno.
The Conservatives are trying to rally Canadian Jews to their right wing imperialistic world view.
At the start of last month Stephen Harper spoke to the annual Toronto gala of the Jewish National Fund, which has a long history of dispossessing Palestinians and discriminating against non-Jews. Alluding to Arab/Persian/Muslim barbarians at the gate, Harper told the 4,000 attendees that Israel is a “light of freedom and democracy in what is otherwise a region of darkness.”
