From Gaza to Cold Lake AB

A tip o the blog to lazylafargue who had excerpts of this article up on their website. It was recently published in the December issue of Briarpatch magazine and is posted on-line here.

Out of two hundred warplanes that took part in Exercise Maple Flag 2005 in Cold Lake, Alberta in May, only ten were Israeli F-16s. It would be easy to miss their significance. Yet, when Canadian forces extended an invitation to the Israeli Air Force for the first time in thirty-eight meetings of the Maple Flag war games, it signalled, according to military planners, a marked shift in Canadian military and political policy in the twenty-first century: good night Battle of Britain, good morning Gaza.

What is also significant is that once again First Nations people were displaced under the Federal Government, to expand the use of this 'empty frontier' by the Department of Defense. It was the Cold War and the era of the Dew Line, and the expansion of NATO literally cold war excercises in Northern Canada, both in Goosebay Labrador and Cold Lake, Alberta. Lands of the Dene and Cree.

The dense forest and running streams tamed by this feat of engineering were the prodigious trapping, hunting and fishing lands of the Dene Suline, now known under the federal government's band council system as the Cold Lake First Nations. In 1952, the Dene were cut off from their traditional lands and the population ultimately expelled. The nearby Canoe Lake Cree Nation faired little better, losing seventy-five percent of their homelands to the weapons range.

Some fifty years after the land grab, the Canadian government settled claim with the Cold Lake First Nations, paying out a total of $2500 to each band member and $7000 to each elder, with an additional twenty million dollars put in a development trust fund. That settlement amounts to about nine dollars per acre (roughly $22 a hectare), and not more than $150 per person for each year of their displacement. Such is the stage for Exercise Maple Flag, a six-week set of war games designed to provide training in the context of hyper-realistic simulations of aerial combat operations abroad.

What is ironic is that our treatment of First Nations peoples historically is the model used by South Africa for its Aparthied regime and that Israel uses for its model for Occupied Palistine. So I guess the Isreali airforce felt right at home at Cold Lake.

Bring on the Clones

Found this interesting left blog from South Korea (what did you think there could be a blog from North Korea let alone a left wing one?) covering the news reporters as well as the news about the cloning scandal in South Korea. Do I need to point out that this project between Americans and South Korea is another example of the failure of P3's and the privatization of university R&D who are in a rush to patent lifeforms. Science in the service of capital.

Liberals Want Your Handguns

Collectors of antique and rare handguns will have to surrender their weapons in buy-back programs under the Liberal plan.

In a related story the Liberals are looking for more gun collectors who have had their collections stolen so they can continue to blame them for the increase in gun crimes in Canada.

"Many gun crimes are being committed with stolen guns that are registered," Liberal spokesman Ken Polk told the Citizen last week. "If we eliminate that class of weapons, it will naturally help resolve that category of violent crime."

If you have had handguns stolen from your private collection please contact the boy at the back of the bus; Scott Reid.

Ed Sez: Gun Ban Useless

NDP Candidate and former GG, Ed Schreyer laughed out loud over the suggestion that the Liberals ban on handguns will solve crime in Canada. "They have been banned since 1934, its not a solution to a complex problem like crime." He told Craig Oliver on CTV's Question Period.

Nice to know that another Western Canadian NDP candidate running in a rural riding recognizes how out of touch the gun control lobby and the Toronto Liberals are. He actually said the Liberals had blown it over the Firearms registry and gun control. "I have represented Selkirk before you know, and I know what I am talking about."

I was waiting for him to pull a Charlton Heston though. Would love to see that. Ed Schreyer brandishing a long rifle belonging to Gabriel Dumont from the Riel Rebellion quoting him; "That we have a fair and full representation in the Canadian Parliament". See the Dippers support legal responsible gun ownership, now back off Blogging Torys.

Note To Bill Blaikie :)

CTV Question Period today had a mini debate between the three party Deputy Leaders, Peter McKay of the Conservatives, Anne McLellan of the Liberals and Bill Blaikie of the NDP. You can watch it Here Bill its ok to smile. Really. You look dour, like you lost the race for party Leader...oh ya you did. And boy why so glum chum....certainly doesn't give the party a winning look. So smile damn ya smile. :)

After Montreal A View From the Past

The Montreal Climate Change Conference is over. In a certain sense it is the completion of a cycle that began in Montreal over a decade ago. The Original Rio Conference on the Environment which led to the Kyoto Accord, and this Kyoto 2 conference was the brain child of Canadian Maurice Strong.

He was and is a significant mover and shaker in both Montreal and Ottawa, Strong was head of the Power Corporation, and he was the original conference chair for Rio. It was appropriate that it ended in Mr. Strongs home province from whence it began. Mr. Strong pushed the environmental issue for business purposes, his is the environmentalism of the Hydro business, which includes the promotion of clean energy from nuclear power. And as a former head of Power Corp he was well connected with the Liberal Party. One of the reasons that Kyoto has been pushed by the Liberals is Strong.

It was also appropriate that given the current situation of crisis in the UN, that Mr. Strong was absent from the conference since he has been linked to the UN Food for Oil scandal in Iraq.

Mr. Strong's many accomplishments as a member of the Canadian ruling class are too detailed to go into here now, but he represents the rising ruling class of Trudeau Liberals in Quebec who foreswore seperatism for integration in the corridors of power, and in so doing strengthened both the Quebec and Canadian State in the 20th Century.

But the Climate Conference in Montreal, led to nothing new, Kyoto 2 is business as usual. The US didn't asign on, no big deal, they are still developing their own asymetrical approach to climate change. Capitalism can adjust to increased production and sharing of green credits, of carbon sinks, of new adapatable technologies, of capitalist business offering alternative green energy like wind power, (the wind power associations of Canada say No Government hand outs Please, we are businessmen).

Has the revolutionary potential of the ecology movement come and gone, despite the stuffed bears, and dancing flowers in the mass protests in the streets of Montreal outside the confernce, the tear gas did not choke or gag these protestors. Theirs was the quiet concern of millions of us, about our future. They were well behaved as were the police and the State. It was all very serious. Very scientific, very political.

But what has changed since Rio, since Kyoto 1? Capitalism has adapted. Has it come to the self recognition that its continued existance threatens our very home world? I think not.

For capitalism is us, and we have yet to put the wrench in the wheels that drive the marketplace. And this goes beyond the liberal ideology that we need to consume less. The very fact is that the contradiction of advanced capitalism is that it now is holding back a technology and productive capacity to provide abundance for all, because it is chanelling production into profit.

And in doing so it has failed to recognize the use value of recycling, reusing, and reduction. Instead we are producing more and more throw away items. The revolutionary idea of ecology so prevelant in the 1970's is not the Green Party or green conciousness, never was, never will be. Join the Audboun Society if you want that.

Nope as Murray Bookchin has pointed out Radical Ecology is part and parcel of the Anarchist understanding of the crisis of advanced capitalism. His works on Social Ecology and the Limits of the City were breakthrough works that have yet to be matched by many modern writers, for their far flung critique.

Several other European Leftists such as Andre Gorz also noted the signifigance and importance of an ecological critique of political economy for the Left. His most poular essay online is; Social Ideology of the Motorcar

But one of the Leftists to predate both Gorz and Bookchin was Pierre Cardin, one of many psuedonyms for Cornelius Castoriadis one of founders of the French ultra-left groups Socialism or Barbarism, which in England was known as Solidarity. They have published numerous works during the sixties that were staples for Left Wing Anarchist reading.

Notes From the Underground

Mr. Castoriadis's life combined high intellectual seriousness with intense political infighting. When he arrived in France from Greece in 1945, at the age of 23, he had already translated the work of Max Weber into Greek. He was also a veteran of the Trotskyist movement, which both the fascists and the communists were seeking to "liquidate," to use their polite term for "exterminate."

In 1948 Mr. Castoriadis found work at what would later become known as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, while also leading a small post-Trotskyist group called "Socialism or Barbarism," which published a journal by the same name. (Thus, Mr. Castoriadis was conducting statistical analyses of capitalism while preparing at night and on weekends to overthrow it.) "S. ou B.," as its comrades called it, never had more than a hundred members. It published a newspaper, Workers' Power, that circulated in some factories, but much of the group's energy was devoted to theoretical debates. As Mr. Castoriadis grew critical of Marxism itself, for example, he was opposed within the organization by a young philosophy professor named Jean-François Lyotard. (Ironically, Mr. Lyotard would later become prominent as a postmodernist who rejected Marx's "grand narrative" of history.)

The group's impact on radical students and activists around the world was disproportionate to its size. And its influence continued to grow even after S. ou B. dissolved in 1965. In the late 1970s, it became fashionable in some circles to claim to have once been a member. It was a development that amused Mr. Castoriadis. "If all these people had been with us at the time," he said, "we would have taken power in France sometime around 1957."

Emerging from the political underground, Mr. Castoriadis became a psychoanalyst, and also began teaching a seminar on philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris. He published numerous books reflecting an encyclopedic range of interests and an unblinking skepticism toward the "generalized conformism" of contemporary society. After decades of denouncing the Soviet Union as a monstrosity, he never became enthusiastic about the existing Western order. At a 1997 conference organized in Prague by President Václav Havel of the Czech Republic and the writer Elie Wiesel, Mr. Castoriadis described capitalism's "expectation of an unlimited expansion of material so-called well-being" as "obviously the most absurd of all Utopias ever formulated by the most sanguine Utopians." He also urged the adoption of a "new type of human life ... a frugal life, as the only means to avoid ecological catastrophe and a definitive zombification of human beings, endlessly masturbating in front of their television screens."

When he died at the end of that same year, Mr. Castoriadis left an apartment filled with manuscripts, including an enormous mass of lectures from his seminars on philosophical and psychoanalytic topics -- material indispensable to understanding his thinking on the question of human creativity. He left a widow, two daughters, and a network of comrades and admirers around the world.

Castoradis work included the following interview. It comes from a massive if somewhat controversial work online, THE RISING TIDE OF INSIGNIFICANCY

I originally had looked at copying some quotes from it as I felt that it was as relevant today, as when it was done back in 1993, perhaps moreso in light of the failure or success of the Montreal Conference, depending of course if you think anything actually occured there.

Instead I beleive it is time for us to reassess the NGO/Green/Animal Rights/ movements that claim to be anarchist, because they engage in Direct Action to meet their reformist ends. Castoradis makes many a cogent point especially about Green Politics, which looked far more radical then than now, in light of the Red Tory's that run Canada's Green Party.

One point I believe he is incorrect on, but that has been a common misinterpretation, is that Marx and Engels were anti-environmental pro productionist apologists. This I believe has been significantly challenged of late by John Bellamy Foster in the pages of Monthly Review and has been the focus of one of his recent books. While Castoradis denounced the expansive production of capitalism, I believe that Bookchin hit on the head when he announced the politics of post scarcity anarchism. But that is another debate for another time, as Homes said to Watson about the Giant Rat of Sumatra.

So here is some food for thought, and as usual I look forward to a spirited debate and your comments. Footnotes are at the end. Because of its length I have posted off site here:

THE REVOLUTIONARY FORCE OF ECOLOGY.doc
Interview With Cornelius Castoradis (Pierre Cardin)

Liberal Genocide; The Lubicon

Back in the early 1970's the University of Alberta student newspaper the Gateway was a radical collective of left and right wingers, all opposed to the War in Vietnam and pro-student democracy. This was part of the move to democratize institutions and work places that was the New Left. The university took exception to their publishing the FLQ manifesto during the October Crisis, and offence to their front page picture of Uncle Sam humping a Canadian Beaver with the headline Fighting for Peace is like F***ing for Virginity. This got the paper banned and the collective was disqualified from running the paper.

I was still in high school, and part of the high school student radical movement, we also produced our own underground newspapers, as well as a Radio Program on CKUA and were active in the embryonic Video Guerrilla movement.. We produced an underground paper for the city that was called The Orb, much like the Georgia Straight, and had followed after the demise of the city’s first underground paper, the Rice Street Fish Market.

The Gateway staff did something unheard of and never done before or since, they took the paper, its advertising revenues and its membership in Canadian University Press (CUP), off campus. They killed the Gateway on campus and were reborn as a radical people’s community newspaper called, appropriately; Poundmaker; named after the Cree Chief who fought with Riel. Those of us working on The Orb, who were also doing a Peoples Defence Fund, providing the inner city youth, poor, and druggies with free legal aid, were approached by the Poundmaker folks to join forces in one newspaper. So we did.

One of the people in the collective was Bob Beal, a noted journalist and Prairie Historian, who has co authored one of the best books on the Riel Rebellion; Prairie Fire.

The paper identified a common struggle in Alberta, between workers fighting to unionize the then embryonic Tar Sands, the native peoples struggles in the same region, and the corporate dominance of Alberta under the new Lougheed Government. One of the stories that we broke that made the news was the disaster at Buffalo Lake, the outbreak of TB and the extreme poverty of the Woodland Cree people who belonged to the Lubicon Nation.

Because the paper also had members of the collective working for the Mainstream Press we were able to get national coverage of this disaster. A disaster of the then genocidal policies of the Department of Indian Affairs of the Trudeau Liberals, under the Minister of the day; Jean Chrétien. It was a paper policy of assimilation at all costs and here it was in all its horrible reality Northern Alberta. The independence of the aboriginal peoples was being denied by the Liberal Government of the day, and native resistance was growing to the policies of assimilation or death.

The Lubicon have been without treaty rights and denied a historical and geographical existence because they remained autonomous from Treaty 6. There are other aboriginal groups across Canada who remain autonomous, outside of the treaties, though small in number they actively supported the American Indian Movement, and in Alberta they developed their own schools, and community services, without State funding or regulation. And during the seventies one of these autonomous aboriginal communities gave ‘sanctuary’ to Leonard Peltier who was later illegally kidnapped from this autonomous zone by the RCMP on behalf of the FBI.

The Lubicon and their rights to the land, land they never gave up, land that has been sold by the Federal and Provincial governments to the Oil Companies and to the Logging industry, remains the longest unresolved land deal in Canadian history.

And it belies the current Liberal governments claim to be dealing with Aboriginal rights. The recent Aboriginal round table and the accord, was between federations of treaty Indians, and Métis who the colonialist Department of Indian Affairs approves. Who led these 'first peoples' discussions, who set their agenda, none other than Phil Fontaine, Liberal flack and President of the AFN, a comprador ogranization that is just an extension of the Department of Indian Affairs. Nothing was said, or done for the Lubicon.

Blogger Dr. Dawg has done an exceptional job on documenting this history of injustice, and yes modern day genocide by the Liberal Government in its treatment of the Lubicon. I thought I would end this article and quote his closing comments from his excellent article; Paul Martin: Crossing the Lubicon

It is an issue as important as that of the recent disasters on reserves over the unhealthy living conditions they have been left in. And unless a boycott campaign, such as was launched by the Friends of the Lubicon, draws attention to them, the Federal Government continues to ignore the Lubicon, and continues to perpetuate this injustice.

Dr. Dawg says it’s an issue for this election. I agree. It is a disgrace, and it exposes the real scandal that is the historical role of the Liberal Government and its policies towards Canada’s aboriginal peoples; Assimilation or Death.

Successive federal governments have intervened shamelessly to break the Lubicon resolve. Using its power to create Indian bands under the Indian Act, the Liberal government under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien invented two other bands, hoping to lure away Lubicon; the members of one band, the "Woodland Cree," had been promised $1000 each if they voted for a federal offer of a pitifully inadequate reserve, but they later found out that this would be deducted from their welfare payments.

This brings us almost to the present day, and Paul Martin's shameful continuation of this miserable tradition. He promised to start negotiations with the Lubicon by the end of March 2004, but this never took place, and federal officials claim that they have been given no mandate to negotiate. It's been bad faith all the way with Mr. Dithers.

Amnesty International has denounced Canada for its treatment of the Lubicon; and the UN Committee on Human Rights, which heard the Lubicon complaint and found against Canada in 1990, repeated its concerns only last month.

Decency demands that we make Martin and his Liberal "team" accountable for this outrage during the current campaign campaign. But we ought to be even-handed about it. We should embarrass the Conservatives, whose own record has been nothing to be proud of on aboriginal affairs, and we should force the NDP to put this issue on the front burner. The survival of the Lubicon--those who are left--depends upon it. Let's stand up for them before it's too late."

Summer Flashback

So winter has returned to Redmonton, just in time to be official, next week Dec. 21. Brrrr -14c, but no snow. There is more snow on the ski hills, thanks to snow machines. So looks like a brown winter. Which gets me wishing for Summer again.

So I made a new drink this week, Orange Crush and Papaya juice. The juice is 100% not concentrate. Mix it 1/2 and 1/2 with Crush, not Fanta, not some generic orange pop (yech). And actually to be specific Diet Orange Crush which is made with Splenda (tm) not Aspertame or the other carcinogenic sweetners.



The flavour of the the Diet is like the old time Orange Crush** I grew up with which was produced here localy by Wild Rose Bottleing Co., a company originally owned by Bill Hawerlak, and his ethnic partners, he was the first Non Anglo Mayor of Edmonton, but that is a story for another day.

Anyways, great drink. If you want mix in Vodka, or White Rum, or Tequila, or not, and viola Summer returns in a glass even at -14c.

**And lastly but thankfully, nothing is known of the origins of the name Orange Crush. A truly wonderful name that became a slang term for an infamous defoliant used in the Vietnam War, a nickname for the Denver Bronco’s defense, a song and, sadly, a mixed drink that contains no Orange Crush but rather Vodka, Triple Sec, Orange Juice and yes, 7up.

Clever Canadians

I love this country. Canadians have a great sense of humour, we not only tell it like it is but we often do so with our tongues firmly in our cheeks. Especially when pollsters ask us leading questions like this one;

In terms of style, English-speaking Canadians say Martin (45 per cent) acted and sounded the most like a Prime Minister.

See what I mean, very dry wit. Now the follow up question should have been; Who is the Prime Minister of Canada

a tip o the blog to political staples for this

A Word from the Wobblies

The newest issue of our branch newsletter The Wobbly Dispatch
is available for download now.

If you want to see how the class struggle is doing in Alberta

feel free to download it from our web site at:

http://edmonton.iww.ca/Wob-Dispatch-Iss3.pdf

IWW Edmonton GMB.